JOHN THE BAPTIZER, excerpt 2: "Elizabeth"

music: Arvo Part's "Magnificat."
art: Caravaggio, Raphael, Cariani, Mantegna, Romano.

JOHN THE BAPTIZER, excerpt 1: the head

music: Arvo Pärt, "Silentium" from Tabula Rasa.
art: Caravaggio, Bonnaud, Cranach, Rembrandt, Bida, Guercino, Moreau, Baffier, Chatigny, Bellini.

John the Baptizer: a Q & A

This spring will see the release of my newest book, JOHN THE BAPTIZER. Below is a recent Q & A prepared by W.W.Norton concerning some of the salient issues surrounding John's life, John's legend, and my effort to present it as fully and as coherently as I was able.

For more on the book, and early reactions, the reader can click here.




Q: You suggest in your author note about the origins of JOHN THE BAPTIZER that you are a practicing Catholic. How do you think the Catholic Church would respond to your portrait of John? What about other Christian denominations?

BH: I’m not sure it’s fair to practicing Catholics to call myself a practicing Catholic. Safer to say that I identify with Catholics and Catholicism and probably will to the end of my days. The happiest church-going situation I, or my wife and I, ever found ourselves in was at a Jesuit church in Chelsea with a largely gay congregation. That or a New Church (Swedenborgian) over on 35th and Park. I suspect that either one of those institutions would be quite open to what I’ve done, or tried to do, inasmuch as both are essentially embracing and inclusive institutions, devoted more to the process of questioning than with providing clear-cut, dogmatic answers.

Within the broader community of Catholics, and Christians, I suspect there might be more misgiving, insofar as mine is a portrait that does trouble the orthodox perception of John, as the long-prophesied forerunner of the messiah. I think the simple gesture of moving John to the center of the story, and letting Jesus be a supporting character, is in itself a little disorienting; letting John’s birth be the holy birth; letting his death be the passion play; reminding the reader just how many of the ideas that we normally associate with Jesus were spoken at that same time by John, and that these ideas hardly originated with him either; and that the crew of followers, and listeners, was a motley one, not all of whom were so quick to leave John and embrace Jesus.

It has to make a Christian uncomfortable to ponder such things. All I’d say to those who do find such inquiry troubling is that nearly all of the most radical ideas that I explore in this book – having to do with the doubts that existed about Jesus and his motives, the rivalry that existed between his and John’s followers, the cross-pollination of their ideas and practice -- are drawn directly from the gospel itself.

Q: Is there an “orthodox” view of John that diverges from what you’ve presented here?

BH: I won’t claim to have read any encyclical on the topic, but John is generally understood to be the One Who Comes Before. This was foretold, that before the Savior there would come one to prepare the way, and I think that’s an idea that can be understood both historically – that someone would come to announce the entrance of the Messiah and identify him – but also more personally, that before we can accept the Light of the Saviour, whoever he may be, we first must be opened and purified. And this, by most orthodox reckonings, is who John is. This was the function he performed. That is why one is (or was, back in the old days) supposed to confess before one took communion. You’ve got to visit John before you get to Jesus. Otherwise, it won't take.

I guess the fundamental question that underlies my book is whether that is true, whether that is an adequate explanation of who John was, or whether he was offering something slightly different -- or radically different -- from the faith that evolved from the mission of his most prominent heir, who was Jesus.

This struck me as a rather obvious question, and yet in having sat and talked with a number of different clergymen about John (and having sat through my share of sermons as well), I was more often than not struck by the almost milquetoast quality of their explanations. Setting aside John's function as a “preparer of the way,” they tended to focus on his selflessness, the willingness to see and accept his role, and accept his own diminishment in light of Jesus. That’s all well and good. I don’t even necessarily disagree with that, other than to want to stress how fraught that process must have been, both for him and for his disciples.

And in general I’ve come away with the sense of contemporary preachers and teachers just not being all that comfortable with the topic of John. When confronted with the issues and the questions to which John and John’s mission naturally give rise – why did he doubt, what about Jesus offended John’s followers, to what extent might he have been used by early Christians to legitimize Jesus' claims -- I consistently found their answers to be a little canned. One gets the impression that most priests, reverends and the like would just as soon not discuss John, which is understandable if you take a step back.

Q: Why?

BH: Well, in the first place, the essential feature of his mission – to purify – is one which has largely lost purchase in the Western tradition. We speak of what we believe. We speak of what we might do in support of, or as the exercise of that belief. We don’t talk much about preserving our purity. Purity and purification is frankly a much more potent and living idea within Islam, say, and a largely un-remarked element of the conflict that exists between us and the Muslim world right now.

Moreover, I think that John, or the idea of John, functioned best and most naturally within the more prophetic tradition -- or really the prophetic mindset -- that held sway at the time of his birth and during the time that the New Testament was being assembled. If one is familiar with that tradition, and accepts John as being the last of the prophets, he’s a much easier character to make sense of. He fits.

In, fact, one wouldn't have to be too too cynical to suggest that the only reason we talk about John the Baptist at all these days is because the early Christians, (and even Jesus himself, if the gospel is to be believed) understood that Jesus’ messianic claim depended on there having been a forerunner of some kind -- a prophet to fill Elijah’s shoes – and that John most closely filled the bill. Without John and John’s voucher, Jesus really had no claim to being the Saviour.

Today, I don’t think most Christians are quite so conversant with, or mindful of, the prophetic tradition that assigned John that role. Christians are by definition post-prophetic and have been for two-thousand years. As such, a character like John just doesn’t make as much sense, or serve as clear a purpose. Today we are more liable to approach John as a stand alone figure. When we do, we are more liable to be troubled, or confused, by all the questions that follow.

Q: You say that you tried to harmonize many divergent strands of canonical, historical, Gnostic, arcane, popular and artistic “information” about John. What did you discard and why? As there anything in particular that refused to “harmonize”? Did you intentionally leave in anything you yourself find “discordant”?

BH: What did I discard? Well I’ll just come right out and admit, Mallarme wrote a poem about Herodias that I can’t make heads or tails of. I tried, and maybe I used it on some osmotic level, just don’t ask me how.

More controversially, one could argue that I might have held back on, and elided, certain passages is the gospel of John (the evangelist), but only because I found his gospel to be the most coercive, and therefore the least credible, when it comes to John’s role and significance. That’s a horribly presumptuous thing to say about a document to which I am so indebted, and which obviously transcends anything I could hope to offer. That said, there are moments when its author gets out the shoehorn that I just wasn’t comfortable using.

Otherwise, I’d say I steered clear of the two extremes: Hollywood depictions of John (Charlton Heston, etc) I find for the most part to be embarrassing and laughable, prime examples of just what I’ve been talking about, which is that, as a character, I just don’t think we’ve ever been comfortable with who this man is, or what the point is. John the Baptist is a good time to go buy more popcorn. That’s what I did anyway.

Alternately, if you go on the Internet and get reckless with your mouse, you can run into some pretty extraordinary conspiracy theories about who John was and what actually transpired between him and Jesus. I actually cyber-engaged a guy who believed that John the Baptist was John Hyrcanus. One would have to be a bit of a Josephus wonk to understand just how strange – and kind of pointless -- an idea that is, but trust me, it would be like some insisting to you, two-thousand years from now, that Pete Rose was actually Pete Rozelle. There are other more toxic theories out there, such as that Jesus had John killed in order to overturn the feminine Godhead and install the masculine. Again, I don’t feel that I’m in a position either to dismantle or defend such arguments. If someone out there wants to try, godspeed. But I think at a certain point one has to recognize the line at which one's own brain shuts down. For me, these sorts of theories exist beyond that line.

As for discord, I think there’s a lot of it. Names and angels and cosmologies that draw from different traditions, but as I mention in the author’s note, a large part of my job was to figure out how to incorporate those dissonances into the body of the story itself, how to turn it into dramatic conflict, to let the characters fight it out among each other, and in their own minds.

But even that makes my process sound a little more agenda-driven than it actually was. Frankly, the final arbiter for me in almost all my choices -- and what designates the book as a novel, I suppose -- is personal taste. Aesthetics. As opposed, say, to accuracy, to provability or probability. I assumed there was truth in beauty. On that account I can assure you, if there was anything out there that I found either beautiful or moving – whether it was a painting or a piece of music, a scene in Josephus or the Bible, or Gospel of Levi Dowling -- I tried to find a way to use it. The paintings of the holy family, for instance – of John and Jesus as babies, with Mary and Elizabeth presiding. No one ever claimed that those scenes “happened,” so far as I know. They are not depictions of apocryphal scenes. They are more like heavenly portraits, if you will, but served for me to illustrate and body-out Elizabeth’s “dreams.”

On the other hand, if I found something ugly – by which I mean false, murky, obvious, manipulative, or self-interested – that was really the quickest route to the circular file.

Q: When John is being raised as a young man in the village on the other side of the Jordan – where do you envision him exactly and what inspired your portrait of that community?

BH: I purposefully don’t specify the location because I think part of the point of that chapter of John’s life is that it took place beyond the reach of Israel or Rome or Parthia or Nabataea. Uncounted tribes existed, with their own holy men, their own prayers, their connections to the variety of faiths surrounding them. There is a Gnostic tradition, occupied today exclusively by the Mandeans, which traces back to the time of John, and which can justifiably be connected to the traditions of the Subba and the Sabeans and all the way back to the Zoroastrians. I imagined there being a Babylonian Jewish influence to John’s Subban upbringing as well, but specifically I think I probably leaned most heavily on the portraits of traditional Mandean tribal life that I was able to find.

But again, what I most wanted to depict, in tracing John’s youth and upbringing, was almost a step-by-step progression – one which finds him, as a child, at the furthest possible remove from the tradition of his blood parents (there among the Subba), then moves him closer (with the Essenes, who are patently Jewish but still “set apart”), and then finally introduces him to the Temple of his father, the heart of Israel. I saw him, even despite his lineage, as approaching the Temple as an outsider, and as having to grapple with that same conflict for the rest of his life, as to whether he belonged to the Gnostic, ascetic tradition in which he was raised, or the more orthodox tradition to which he was born, and which he felt “sent” to restore and revive.

Q: Do your consider your view of John ultimately to be iconographic or iconoclastic?

BH: This was a live question for me as I wrote, because I didn’t really know the answer, and I didn’t have a clear desire one way or the other. I suppose, because of my upbringing, I never quite shed the notion that there was something at least renegade about what I was doing, for reasons already stated, for making John the protagonist, for making Jesus (in certain eyes) the “bad guy”; for asserting the legitimacy of the Gnostic approach alongside the more traditional; for pointing out that Jesus really was a student of John’s, etc etc.

However, on finishing, on stepping back and hearing what readers have had to say, it’s my sense that the portrait ultimately ends up being more iconic – again, probably because of my upbringing and because of my approach. I didn’t take this story on because I had some radical agenda, or some alternate theory I was trying to peddle. I took it on because I’m a storyteller, because all the various parts of John’s story struck me as being achingly beautiful, and because I recognized that for whatever reason no one had yet tried to assemble them into a single account. If I wrote the book “in faith,” as they say, it was in faith that the narrative existed, even despite the dispersal of sources, and that it revolved around a single (at least somewhat) comprehensible character.

That this character should turn out to be different than we might have expected is hardly surprising – the closer we look at anyone or anything, the more our estimation is liable to change – but to the extent that what I’ve presented here is a attempted distillation of our collected memories and meditations, it’s hard to see how the result could be called iconoclastic.

Q: What about your view of Jewish history – is that a conventional one? Did you take liberties?

BH: Not so much more than Josephus himself, whose trustworthiness is far from absolute. If there was any other guide I had in mind, or precedent, it would have been the Shakespearean histories, just in terms of the balance they strike between the needs of good drama, and the conscience of history. I’m certainly not saying I’m as good a writer as Shakespeare, but as historians I’d say we’re in the same ballpark. I might even give me the nod, in terms of trustworthiness.

Q: Is Manean an historical character? If so how did you find him?

BH: Absolutely. I found him in Bartlett’s book of unused-but-basically-reliable narrators. The Acts of the Apostles makes mention of Manean as having been a friend of Antipas’ from his childhood. A schoolmate. He is also placed in Antioch as an early teacher of the gospel of Jesus. As such, he is quite likely to have been there at Herod Antipas’s banquet, and as likely as anyone to have been the source of the be-heading story as it was later reflected in the synoptic gospels.

That he was also the son of Menahem the Essene, advisor to Herod the Great (and also a bonafide historical character), is a pretty wild conjecture based, if I’m not mistaken, upon the similarity of the names -- ‘Manean’ being and alternate spelling of ‘Menahem’. But this conjecture did not originate with me. Among those peddling this theory would be the co-historians Comay and Brownrigg. I just took it and ran.

Q: Has anyone else ever taken your view of what Salome’s infamous Dance of the Seven Veils was really about, or how it led to John’s beheading?

BH: Well, first things first: that it was a Dance of Seven Veils is itself a grafting from later history. The Greek word for the dance that Salome performed for her father – this as reflected in Mark’s pericope (or capsule) of the incident – can be translated as romp, as in childish “romp,” as in the sort of thing grandparents happily endure at Thanksgiving.

But to your question, I’m hesitant to say no one has ever taken my view, just because it seems rather obvious once you stare at the pericope of four or five years on end. The gospels themselves differ as to whether Salome asked for the head on her own or at the suggestion of her mother. I went with the latter. To be clear, my contribution, if it is a contribution, is that out of clear recognition that Antipas deep-down feared and revered John, Salome (very much at her mother’s recommendation), asked for the prophet’s head to punish Antipas for having statutorily raped for the last several months.

Again, looking at the Bible passage, I can’t imagine any other plausible explanation.

It should be noted that I avoided like the plague the Rita Hayworth movie, so I have no idea what their explanation was, and that the other most famous interpretation would be the one offered by Oscar Wilde in his play Salome, which is a work that that I deeply love and admire – likewise the Ken Russell movie, Salome’s Last Dance, which is based on the Wilde. (I’m not so keen on the Strauss opera, but that has more to do with the music and casting requirements.) In the Wilde account, Salome demands John’s head as a way of getting back at John for having spurned her sexual advances, which (granted) could have been motivated by the desire to get back at her lascivious step-father. It’s very good and funny and disturbing account. I just don’t think it sheds much light on John. He and his head, are an excellent, excellent prop.

While I’m at it, I should perhaps mention that Flaubert wrote a fairly long short story about the same incident. I don’t at the moment recall what Salome’s motive is there, maybe because the story as a whole is a bit of a mess. The set design is great, though, and I copped it liberally and shamelessly.

Q: Is there a character in the book with whom you most identify?

BH: Probably Manean. He is in the classic narrator seat, and has all the characteristics of a good novelist: aware of all the arguments to be a made, and to that extent sympathetic to every side; willing to play advisor and confidante, but extremely circumspect about revealing his own leanings; possessed of an appalling willingness to watch other people, even friends, make horrible mistakes without intervening. He’s extremely passive aggressive, in other words, like all good writers.

I also have a soft spot for Azharan, John’s brother and most devoted disciple. In a lot of ways, I don’t think anyone in the book suffers quite as much as he does, and all because he’s loyal.

Q: I find your prose style in this book – styles, since there are two distinct strands or narrative voices – unique. Breathtaking, actually. What are your influences and how did you manage to keep both voices so pure, without one approach bleeding into the other? Was there any temptation to unify them more?

BH: Immersion, I’d say, and an adherence to sources. One of the advantages to working so slowly is that over time you actually begin to forget which parts of the story you’ve borrowed and which you’ve made up. Another is that voices just start to grow into you.

That two voices finally emerged in this instance is, as I say, a function of my high regard for the sources I was using. I think this is something all writers struggle with, especially when they’re telling stories derived from outside sources (sources other than their imagination, that is.) On the one hand you have at some point to take control of your story, wherever you found it, to make it your own, to take responsibility for it, if only to discover why you were so drawn to it in the first place.

By that same token, there is a strong impulse to want to honor the source, and to serve it, to find a way to allow the reader to see it and be inspired it by it the same way you were.

This is an issue I’ve dealt with in my last two novels, the former one being about the first eight weeks of Napoleon’s stay on St. Helena. In that book, as with John, I really loved all the material I was drawing from – the diaries and memoirs – and was dogged throughout by the fear that there was something profoundly presumptuous in my thinking that I could do better, or shed more light, than my sources had. Both in the case of that book and John, I had half a mind simply to present the reader with my bibliography and let them follow the same path I did, and make of it what they will.

Obviously I did not do that, but I suspect that any reader who did a running check of text-to-source-material would be surprised at the extent to which the story presented here really is a thinly-veiled collage.

That said, I assume the two voices to which you refer would be the one that recounts the ‘secular’ story – the one about the Herods – and the one that recounts the ‘sacred’ one, about John. In each case, there are characters within the accounts that I regard as being the likely sources. The secular witness is Manean. The sacred witness is Kharsand. Each acquired its voice primarily from the source material. In the case of the Herodian saga, that would be Josephus, who would have been a heckuva novelist had he so chosen. In the case of the John material, the primary sources would be the gospels and the Mandean stories, which in particular possess a kind of music I hadn’t really heard before, but which comes through even in translation because of the essentially oral tradition from which they emerge. The Mandaean accounts are clearly cants, poems, songs, presented in such a way that they can be heard and remembered. Capturing their rhythm and syntax was far less difficult than actually breaking them down, recognizing which parts could serve as incidents, which were allegories, when should first-person passages be switched to third. That sort of thing.

And in the course of doing that work – the “make-it, break it, make it again” nature of all creative activity -- you learn things about the different styles, and you begin apply them. You recognize, for instance, that one characteristic that almost all sacred or scriptural writing shares in common is the fact that it never tries to sell itself – an idea, or an event. In most fiction writing, or literary writing, so much effort is expended on trying to persuade the reader -- of time and place, of the power of a moment, of the significance of an idea or an action. A “literary” writer, faced with the prospect of recounting an angelic visitation, would naturally want to express to the reader just what it felt and looked like, to set the reader there and make her believe that what happened here really happened. A scriptural writer knows better than to try, and usually winds up being more convincing. It’s quite liberating one you get the hang of it, and it extends to all incidents and descriptions. Even dialogue. “Andrew went to him and said, ‘…'” is an unthinkable sentence in a short story. It’s the bread and butter of scriptural writing.

Q: When I first met you, you were writing not about a sacred figure, but a profane one – the 60s comedian Lenny Bruce.

BH: Eton Boone, but I take your point.

Q: Do he and John the Baptizer have more in common than meets the eye? In general, your novels seem to be dominated by a single male character who stands apart from the crowd. Do you see any progression?

BH: I suspect that this is the sort of question that I am incapable of talking about it with any authority or dignity, and that I am better off just following my nose and letting you figure out what I think smells good.

I would say this, however, that every book is a reaction to the last. Every book tends to beak the rules of the last, and that as far as protagonists go, the same holds true. Gus Uyterhoeven, the protagonist of The Chess Garden was a direct response to Eton Boon: the former cultivated the ability to see spirit; the latter, ego. Dr. Perlman (of Perlman’s Ordeal) was a skeptic, a rationalist and a humanist tested by faith, taunted by the unseen. Toby, who was kind of the moral center and conscience of The Monsters of St. Helena represented another swing of the pendulum back in the direction of spiritual sight, or openness.

John the Baptizer, as you’ve noted, is really comprised of two stories: a sacred story about John; a profane story about the Herods. But even within John’s character, there is a contrast between the enlightened vision he possesses, and the anger that overtakes him when he looks back down at the world around him. I think that anger charged him, in a way, and it was derived from a sense of separateness, of strangeness to the world, that likely exceeded that of any character I’ve ever dealt with, and probably ever will. I hope.

Regarding the more general question of my protagonists and the crowds they play to, or the situation they find themselves in, I would last (and inadvisably) say this. Right or wrong, it struck me a while back that the operative idea behind most popular fiction was to put an “ordinary character in an extraordinary situation,” while the directive of literary fiction was to put an “extraordinary character in ordinary situation,” and that my career, such as it is, could be seen as an experiment in doubling down and seeing what happened if you put an extraordinary character in an extraordinary situation. Why not?

Jury’s still out, I guess.

Q: Has writing this book changed your own faith or view of Christianity in any way?

BH: I would suspect. I think for anyone who identifies him- or herself as a Christian, the question comes, does your faith consist in what you do, or in what you believe. John’s life reminds us that a lot of Jesus’ “message” – having to do with the primacy of good acts, of charity, of purity, and of divorcing yourself from the trappings of the world – don’t really belong to Jesus at all. These ideas existed before him, and would likely have existed after him whether or not he had come to give them voice. What the figure of Jesus brings to all these ideas is his own sacrifice, the mystery of faith, if you will, that simple but inscrutable mechanism by which his death and resurrection saves us all provided that we believe in it, and him.

The question all Christians are bound to ask themselves along the way is whether they really need that – to give over to the belief in a savior, a belief in Jesus’sacrifice and resurrection, and a conviction that their own their salvation depends precisely upon this belief -- or whether their salvation could just as well consist in all the sorts of things taught and demonstrated by John: charity, self-sacrifice, independence from the world and so forth. It is a tempting proposition. We can’t pretend that vesting one’s faith in a mere belief – that "God so loved mankind" and so forth… -- isn’t fraught with risk and potential misunderstanding. It clearly is. It breeds false righteousness. Arrogance. Wars, dare I say? Would it not suffice to be a follower of John – to seek purity and light through a simple life of good acts and devotion -- or do we need to go that extra step and marry our actions to a belief in the miracle of Christ’s resurrection.

I certainly don’t think John’s story answers that question, but I do think it asks that question rather forcefully, by exploring the loyalty and the practice of those who did not go on to follow Jesus, by looking at John as a seer and teacher in his own right, and not just a functionary within a Judeo-Christian story of sin and redemption. And by ending where it ends. That was always one of my favorite things about John’s story, in fact, is that it concludes before we come to the crucial “Christian” moment of Jesus’ death and resurrection. By ending where it does, John's life poses questions about the necessity of Jesus' sacrifice. Aside from the fact that John does refer to Jesus as “lamb” – which is definitely fascinating – his story offers no opinion about the truth or the significance of what was to happen on Golgotha or in the tomb. John’s life doesn’t foresee that. I think a great part of the doubt he experienced in prison is attributable to the fact that he did not understand how “Christian” salvation would manifest. He was inheriting thousands of years of conjecture and catastrophic expectation. In absence of that knowledge , he had no choice but to doubt, to wonder. How is the Nazarene going to pull this off? And do I trust him?

As for myself, I suppose that the number of years I've spent with John and his story is in itself an indication of my own desire to do without that particular mystery of faith. To see if I miss it. To see if I feel liberated without it. I don’t really know the answer yet. If I’ve learned anything in this process, it’s that these things take time.

on principles and torture

In recognition of my legal and political laymanship, let me defer to others the discussion of the necessity and likelihood of prosecuting top administration officials for their participation in the war crime of torture – about which I see my feelings are well represented – and confine discussion to semantics (sigh) and human integrity (yay!), specifically regarding the concept of “Principles.”

An old friend and I used to argue about “principles” – he surprisingly in favor of them; me, maybe not so surprisingly, against. For fear of misrepresenting his position, I won’t try, but one can imagine. My position at the time was that more often than not, a person’s “principles” marked the boundary at which they have basically stopped thinking about a given topic, its potential consequences or the emerging contingencies the world might have in store. Having recognized that abortions, say, or raising taxes, or infidelity violates one’s principles, one is freed from having to consider any of the myriad circumstances, evolving technologies, or crises that might naturally cause one to reconsider that position. As such, and according to my argument, a ‘principle’ was a kind of license to be stupid, to be stubborn, to confer to others (the reverend, the judge, the pundit) the burden of having to think a topic through in the real world. (“I subscribe to the principles of the Levin diet” is another way of saying, ‘I have no idea what I’m eating or why, but Dr. Levin seems both smart and slender.”)

I think there’s still something to that. What my formulation lacked, however, was a clear recognition of why principles should have to be invoked in the first place. We don’t invoke principles in order to be stupid, after all. We invoke them first and foremost out of recognition of the temptation to violate them. No one says, “I am principally opposed to eating ear wax,” since it’s hard to imagine a circumstance in which one would ever want to. Rather, the sorts of things to which we find ourselves principally opposed are: the death penalty, infidelity, and torture. Why? Because in each case we can see the temptation. My own “principled” opposition to the death penalty, as such, is founded upon not one, but two essential ingredients: 1. the clear recognition that it is barbaric for a nation to murder its own citizens; and 2. the equally clear recognition that in certain circumstances it would be very tempting to do so. It is only when I recognize 2, the temptation, that I make it a principle never to succumb to it, and I do this for the very reason that I as a younger man so astutely pointed out: so that I don’t have to think about it and further tempt myself with crafty rationalizations; so that when the prospect of the death penalty, or torture, comes up, I can say, ‘No, this one is literally a no-brainer. I get to not have to even consider this one, as it represents a violation of my core principles. I simply do not do that, or sanction that, because I know that if I do, I cease to be myself, or the person I thought I was.’

In that context, we do well to remind ourselves that we are a nation founded not on ancestral property claims, ethnicity, culture, tradition or creed, but on a certain set of non-reducible principles, each one of which stands, like all principles everywhere, as a monument to the temptation to violate its own self.

The fact that so many of these core principles (habeas corpus, protections against warrantless search and seizure, torture, etc) were tossed aside, or redefined, in the wake of 9/11, and all precisely because of the special problem posed by terrorism, demonstrates – if nothing else – that the men and women responsible for such policies are not people of principle, which is only worth pointing out because a) they are Americans and should, as such, be bound by certain principles, and b) because they and their constituency have spent the last generation beating their chests about the inviolability of their values and berating the rest of us for having none, and for having forgotten the difference between right and wrong because we’re such a bunch of “moral relativists.” Ironic, but not surprising, then, to find that Dick “the ticking-time-bomb” Cheney should turn out to be the most powerful overt, practicing, and preaching moral relativist in the history of the country.

Granted, that’s not a newsflash. Pointing out that the champions of American torture also happen to be a bunch of hypocrites is a little bit like saying Hitler smoked cigarettes. More valuable would be recognizing that most of the anti-torture crowd, and those who would like to see the likes of Cheney prosecuted, are in fact standing on principle. True, there are vindictive, self-interested and practical elements to their arguments as well – no one knows for certain whether torture is even a particularly effective means for intelligence gathering, after all, or whether in the long run it does more harm than good, and one should remember that the Geneva Conventions were conceived primarily for the safety and well-being of our troops. Still and for the most part, those who oppose torture as an official policy of state, and who seek accountability for those who crafted such a policy, do so out of recognition of its appeal. We, all of us, know very well the compelling arguments and rationales that exist for torturing a would-be terrorist, just as we recognize that we ourselves might be tempted, in certain carefully crafted scenarios, to engage in such activity -- “for the good of the many.” That is exactly why we are forced to make it a principle to oppose torture, any torture, anywhere, for any reason: because we do not want to be tempted, because we know that if we violate such principles, or allow them to be violated in our name, we immediately cease to be the people, or the nation, we thought we were. Ipso Facto, we have lost the “war.”

Musical suggestion #4 - Byron Janis

This is another which would fall under the category of resolving the problem of glut. Prokofiev’s Third is among the most popular of piano concertos, and is assured of being so for the foreseeable future by dint of the fact that it is, among other things, a competition perennial. It poses challenges that a young pianist would, and should, want to surmount, and so they all have it in their repertoire, and so we hear it a lot. In certain circles, the piece is resented for this very reason, as it is so often treated like a kind of steeplechase, which it is, but the grudgingness of such respect overlooks the fact that in addition to being a challenging piece, it is also chock full of terrifically distinctive lyrical melodies, ideas, jokes and jewels. It just keeps coming at you with ideas and surprises and runs and riffs and gorgeous melodies. Richter referred to Prokofiev’s eighth sonata as being “a tree laden with fruit.” The same could be said of the third.

For all these reasons, there are a ton of serviceable versions out there. (Oddly enough, there is no Richter account.) I get the sense that maybe Martha Argerich is given the edge as an interpreter, but let me cast my vote here for Byron Janis.

Janis is an American pianist who peaked in popularity in the 60s and whose career was curtailed for a time by arthritis. (He is also, for those who might be interested, husband of Gary Cooper’s daughter, but sadly no relation to Conrad Janis, Mindy’s Boss on Mork and Mindy, despite the fact that Conrad Janis apparently plays a pretty mean trombone.) He has in recent years overcome his arthritis, enough at least to mount a comeback, issuing recording of not quite so physically demanding Chopin pieces.

In 1960, Janis made a trip to the Soviet Union of which this album (which includes an account of Rach’s 2nd) is the lasting fruit. The crowds loved him, stormed the stage, and when the dust and flowers all cleared recorded his version there in Moscow, with the Moscow Philharmoic under the direction of Kryril Kondrashin.

There are a couple reasons why I would recommend this above all the rest.

First, Janis. In comparison to most other versions, I’d say his tempi are just a teeny bit on the slow side – or to put another way, every one else’ tempi (such as Argerich, and Prokofiev himself) are wee bit fast for the reason already mentioned: pianists feeling obliged to prove their chops with speed. Janis (like the also highly recommendable Grigory Sokolov) draws down on speed, but only so that he can hit a little harder. If this is not the fleetest Third on record, it winds up being one of the more percussive and clear. It is a full throttle attack. There is no smudging, as result of which there are moment, and passages, that come through with a clarity I’ve never really heard elsewhere.

To name the most outstanding instance. About ten minutes into the second movement, a Theme with Variations, Prokofiev comes to what is probably his fifth crack at the melody in question. What Janis and Kondrashin decide to do, precisely by slowing it down,yields what is without question one of the downright funkiest passages is the classical catalogue. If you don’t find yourself actually bobbing and weaving to the downbeat syncopation of the 30 or so seconds at question, you, my friend, do not have a neck

The other glaring virtue of this particular recording is the quality of sound. This is one of those “Mercury Living Presence” recordings, of which there are a limited number. I’m no engineer. I won’t pretend to know exactly why the Mercury Living Presence Recording sound the way they do. It has something to do with the quality of the microphones, (microphones being one piece of hardware that has apparently gotten worse in the last fifty years, not better) – and with how they were placed around the orchestra, and with the fact that the orchestra was playing, more or less live, not all clipped together like Frankenstein’s monster.

Whatever the cause, the effect is extraordinary. I venture to say that on the basis of sound alone, all MLP recordings are (as they say) self-recommending, but the other one that I would recommend would be the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra. Like the Prokofiev, it positively blooms in your living room. It surrounds you. It sits you in your chair, lights your pipe, and shoves the ottoman underneath your feet. In fact, the vibrancy of these recordings have always suggested a comparison to me, the explanation of which may be as philosophical as technological or psychological, who knows? But think of movies made in the same era, late fifties, early sixties. Think of all the Douglas Sirk. Think of ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. Think of THE RED SHOES, think of the actual palettes of those films, how rich and deep they are, almost like blots on the screen. If those colors could be turned into sounds, the MLP recording is what they would sound like. Again, I leave it to the reader to figure out how contemporaneous technologies of two such different media – sound recording and visual recording – were able to yield such eerily similar emotional and aesthetic effects, but I stand by the impression. The Janis recording sounds like Sirk movies look – which is to say, gorgeous in a way that we may simulate, but never recapture.

The Eighth Biggest Blunder...

Yesterday, Salon today published their list of “the punditocry’s 7 biggest blunders of the 2008 election.”

Quickly, they were, as titled. 1. The cult of Sarah Palin. 2. Steven Schmidt is a genius. 3. the price at the pump will fuel the mood of voters. 4. Obama should have taken the money…and run. 5. Obama was guilty of hubris in trying to expand the map. 6. down ballet dems will try to flee Obama. 7. the Hillary Hold-outs will never come back;

Not a bad list, and I certainly applaud the gesture of calling out the pundits on their chronic myopia.

But Salon missed one very important one.

8. That this was/is Obama’s election to lose.

Back in August, this was a constant refrain of the most sober Gatekeepers: that Obama was clearly in the driver’s seat, but that to the extent that he was still new to most voters, and to the extent that we already knew (and presumably loved) John McCain, this election would end up being a referendum on Obama and his readiness to be president. If he proved himself ready, he would win. If not, he would lose.

I hated this meme at the time, and notwithstanding the likely insistence of its peddlers that they were/are right, I hate it now, mostly because it was based on an assumption that I, like many voters, did not share: namely, that John McCain had already passed the commander-in-chief test, and that the strength of his campaign rested on the idea that he was honorable, vetted, somewhat bi-partisan, and as such, would certainly suffice as a worthy alternative should Obama prove unready.

Now it should be said, I bow to no one in my excitement for the Obama candidacy, and the promise that an Obama Administration holds out. For reasons both practical, practicable, and symbolic, I see it as being a potentially transformative moment in the nation’s history, and one that couldn’t come at a better time, as it may provide the only possible antidote to the poison of the last eight years.

And yet as important as I believe it is that Obama win (and this is the point I wanted to scream at the screens back in August), I considered it equally important that John McCain lose, for reasons that no one seemed quite willing to articulate back then, but which are now commonly held: that he was a manifestly terrible candidate, not an honorable man in the least, and one who represented, both politically and attitudinally, a heartbreaking elaboration of all the worst aspects of the current administration; in short, a disaster for our nation and the world.

It was my feeling that this needed to be said, revealed, and recognized, so that what took place on election day might be viewed not only as a nation’s positive endorsement of what appears to be an exceptional individual, but also a clear and unmistakable repudiation of everything that McCain’s party – and he, as it turns out -- have come to stand for. In that light, the suggestion that the election was a referendum on Obama was not only unfair, undiscerning, and vaguely racist, it risked obscuring a good half of the message that the nation needs to send itself.

Fortunately, the pundits' suggestion was -- in addition to being quite unfair -- also quite wrong, as the last two months have shown. Obama’s campaign has been marked by the same consistency, deliberation, and equanimity that the unprejudiced eye must now recognize as the hallmark of the nominee’s character. There have been no surprises, good or bad. There has been no turning point, no threshold moment when everyone realized that he could assume the mantel. Just a steady recognition of who this man is, as evinced in the manner in which he routinely conducts himself.

It is McCain’s performance, rather, that seems to have been the real eye-opener. He is the one who has been proving himself…unfit. Unsuited. Unready. Unworthy. This has not only been obvious, it has been the driving narrative of campaign coverage, witness the steady drip of crestfallen conservative journalists, one by one conceding the moral, financial, and strategic bankruptcy of the McCain campaign. One need only feel their dejection, and see the polling numbers, which still find McCain with striking distance, to realize just how little he would have had to do to make this a much more competitive race; if he hadn’t picked Palin, if he had behaved with even a modicum of dignity; if he could have treated him opponent with the same; if he could merely have sufficed, the way all the wise heads assumed he would – relied on his biography, looked the part and let others do his dirty work -- then the forces of his party and American conservatism could surely have carried him, and all of us, to a real nail-biter

But no. By running such a grotesquely cynical, juvenile, and vile campaign, by appealing to what’s worst in us, by embracing everything that is wrong with his party and with American conservatism at the moment, McCain has made plain just how mistaken the pundits were, and that we should never approach an election with the idea that one candidate has to prove him- or herself while the other does not.

As inspiring as Obama has been, he has not been alone out there. This was John McCain’s election to lose, too, and by gum, it looks as if he has done it.

Shea's last day, in California

Before the series begins tonight. this, for the record:

I was not at Shea Stadium, or even near it, when the final curtain fell a couple Sundays ago. I was three-thousand miles away, my family having moved out to California a year ago in July. But I watched, as I had watched most games this season, thanks to cable TV and MLB Packages.

For most of the season, I confined myself to the wee-hours, waiting until the kids were asleep before taking to the couch and firing up the day’s game on my DVR. My son is four, my daughter two, and therefore both a little young to subject to the intensity of my interest. But the private viewings are my way of checking in with the place I still in my heart call home, and that includes Shea Stadium. Or it did.


Rooting for the Mets is as ingrained a part of me as there is. My parents weren’t particularly big sports fans back then, so I was only mildly aware of miracle of ’69 – I was four – but by 1973 and the next dash of magic, I was well on-board. That team -- the “You Gotta Believe” team of Seaver and McGraw and Yogi, I knew top-to-bottom, front-to-back, and biblically, stats and batting stances and pitching motions, every one of which I could imitate, and still can. For the thrill of that one late-season stretch-run, ending in a game seven loss at Shea to the Mighty Oakland A’s, I would put in another decade of penance with the Dave Kingmans, the Doug Flynns, the Nino Espinozas, and Lee Mazzillis. It never occurred to me to switch over to the Yankees, even when they got good again in the late 70s. I understood, you’ve got to wear the hair shirt, and that loyalty made it all the more sweet when the Mets revived again in the mid 80s with Strawberry, Gooden, Carter and Hernandez. I was there for the lull that ensued, and the dramatic Piazza vintage that followed that, just as I’ve been there, if in abstentia, for the early part of the Wright/Reyes era.

So I know what it means to follow this team, what it means to “believe,” to accept that disappointment -- and by that token, hope -- are the natural state of things. I know what it means to have to put up with the Yankees and Yankee fans and all the false notions that traffic about the back pages of the local tabloids, where the Mets and their fans are so often portrayed as hapless stragglers. Nonsense peddled by know-nothings. The truest blue in New York has an orange border around it, I know because I’ve been there. The Mets are, and always have been, as beloved as the Yankees, owing in no small part to a core of devotees who, weaned on futility of the early years, understands something about loyalty that Yankees and their fans simply never will.

And I know that much of this wisdom also derives from the stadium the Mets have called home for the last forty-four years, our dear departed Shea, whose manifest ugliness – whether in its early placard-guise or the snazzy neon look of her more recent years -- instilled in all its patrons a tacit understanding that the true measure of a theater isn’t its façade, or the quality of its press box or corporate seats or hot dogs. The true and only measure of a theater is the amount of good theater it provides, and in that regard, Shea needs apologize to no house or cathedral in the business. Her fallow periods only made for more suspense, contributing to the impact and the downright surreality of almost all her finest moment, which aptly testified: a rocking Shea (and those who’ve been there know, I mean that word literally) was as exciting a place as existed in all of sports, and she rocked her fair share, and for a good month longer (I note with no small satisfaction) than her overbearing sister in the Bronx, whose whimper resounded all the way out here.


Still and so, for all of that devotion, and my helplessness to resist the forthcoming chapters at Citifield, I’ve never been sure that my allegiance to the Mets is something I necessarily wanted to pass down to my children. Much like the Catholicism in which both my wife and I were raised (and make no mistake, there is a very real connection between being a Mets fan and being Catholic) there are a lot of good reasons not to burden them with that particular cross – for their sake, to break the chain, spare them the pain, the “trip,” and all those wasted hours.

There is also the fact that my son, Theo, born ten weeks ahead of schedule, still has some tight muscles that may well compromise his enjoyment of organized sports like baseball. It’s a little early to tell, but I remain open to his interest, whatever they may be, and that’s another reason why there has been no indoctrination in the home. He and his sister know I wear the cap. They know I like the game, and that I watch it after they have gone to bed, but even there, their understanding has been vague.

Theo must have heard the phrase “I’m recording a game” a hundred times, but to judge by his usage, he understands it to mean “I am thinking up a game.” When he says to me, “Dad, I just recorded a game,” he will usually follow with the rules of the game, or how it will play out, such as: ‘I will be Batman. You will be the Joker. You will chase me into the Batcave and try to steal the Batmobile . . .”

To his way of thinking, that’s “recording” a game, and I never saw fit to correct him. And that’s the way it worked until this last Sunday, when for the first time since we moved here, I decided to watch the Mets game live – partly because it was do-or-die and I wanted to provide some real-time mojo, but mostly out of respect to the stadium, because I knew this might be the last game she would ever see, or who knew? Maybe she had one last handful of magic dust in her pocket.

So I turned on the game right out there in the open, in the middle the living room, with the kids playing Legos and dragons while I watched. I didn’t mind. It leavened the tension. About four innings in, they went off for their naps and rest time.

I watched the remainder with the sound down low, subdued by common sense and experience. I like this team. It has a lot of virtues and exciting players, but also an Achilles heal that made it impossible to imagine them succeeding in the long run, admonitions to ‘believe ‘ notwithstanding. I watched them fall behind in the seventh. I watched the Brewers pull ahead in Milwaukee in the eighth. I watched another season end in failure, and though I was prepared, I was also sad – for myself, for the fans, for all the old ballplayers who’d come back for maybe one more miracle, and most of all for the stadium.

Moments after the final out fell harmlessly into a spoiler’s glove, my son came in, summoned by the glum silence of the room. I made no spectacle of my disappointment, but I didn’t hide it, either. My wife explained to him that I was sad because the Mets had lost, which he could see. He came over and offered a little consolation. Maybe they would win the next time.

I didn’t explain to him that that wasn’t really going to be a next time, that there were things called ‘seasons’ and that this one was over, and that what I was really most sad about was that a very dear place had just gone out of my life.

I decided to take him to the beach, just the two of us since his sister was still asleep. It isn’t far from where we live, but when we got there, the sky was foggy and raw. The water was cold. We took a quick swim and dug some holes, and the my wife and daughter came and found us. We didn’t stay long.

No mention was made of the game, but I guess I hadn’t completely shaken off the blues, because after we got home Theo started bringing up the Mets again, which up to then was a word I honestly wasn’t even sure he knew. He seemed to have figured it out, though, and he also seemed to have a slightly better idea of what “recording a game” meant. He kept saying that he’d recorded a game and that everyone had won. My wife said that was the sort of game she would like to see, and I agreed that was a nice idea.

He wanted to show me. He went and got a little calculator we have that looks like a robot. He sat in my lap and he did a pretty good imitation of me with the remote control, or at my computer trying to find him something good to watch on YouTube (I’ve taken to showing him old Bugs Bunnies and the Adam West Batmans). He kept punching the keypads and mumbling, “No, that’s not the one. There’s a better one.”

Finally he said, “Here it is. I’ll press these buttons, and that will be the game I recorded.”

I said, “Okay, I can’t wait to see.”

So he went ahead and pressed the numbers, and the first was a six, and the next was a nine, believe it or not. The number that came up on the little screen was actually 69999999999, but that was close enough. I looked at it, and told him he was right. That had been an excellent game and I thanked him for showing it to me. . .

. . . So there is hope, I guess.

Or there will have to be.

Pitchers and catchers report February 19.