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Education of a Literary Rhetor 

            I have no conscious memory of my biological father, whose brief marriage to his on-again off-again high-school sweetheart was rushed up before graduation and scarcely survived my birth. Whether or not that absence was a factor in the development of my melancholy and reflective personality I can’t say, though until at age twelve I started asking about sexuality it hadn’t even occurred to me that he might have existed – so prior to that there can scarcely have been any conscious feeling of abandonment. In retrospect it occurs to me that I’d thought of my mother – whose accidental pregnancy was the result of a perfectly typical naiveté; a tender and indulgent giving-in to male concupiscence and protestations of eternal love – as a pure being like that immaculate Mary of the Biblical Nativity story, Jesus’s mother who hadn’t known man but conceived by some power of divine insemination. I didn’t know in any case that a father was a necessary part of the equation, and didn’t think it strange that at the age of four I should be attending my mother’s Christmas-Eve marriage to the dapper young graduate of the US Naval Academy who had recently come courting the two of us.

            It must have been during the previous summer or at earliest the one before that – in either 1961 or ’62 – that something did occur that might have made a first strong impression on my moral consciousness. This I remember with some pictorial vividness if not perfect accuracy, more than could likely be summoned from later tellings of the story alone. It occurred at some lake or other in Perry County Indiana where while Mom was lying on a towel, relaxing from her weekly labors at Fischer Chair, I – ever quiet – played with plastic pail and shovel to one side of her. Then, “full of sin and vinegar” as the colloquial expression puts it, a couple of high-school boys stormed the idyllic scene and grabbed me up in their arms, raced with me several feet into the cruel water, swung me back and forth over its yawning depths, tossed me in. Even after Mom had pulled me out of there it took some time for me to stop screaming. And even longer (moved out West by my new adoptive father) to gather the courage to venture – ever so tentatively – toward the even greater depths of the Pacific Ocean.

            If it wasn’t already a part of my nature to “mourn with those who mourn,” as the Book of Mormon counsels; “yea, and comfort those who stand in need of comfort,” that cruel episode with those boys at that lake must have opened my soul to the reality of human suffering. And the truth is I never would feel any lasting joy in observing the sufferings of others – even if years later, after having had my face rearranged by bullies on school buses and on school grounds, I would occasionally wish death upon my nemeses. After one such instance, oddly enough – and this with complete sincerity; without  rancor and without any trace of fear –, I cheerfully offered a pencil to the African American boy who’d beat me up the day before and was asking the class generally if anyone had an extra one. He looked stunned by the Gandhian gesture (I doubt either one of us had at the time heard of Gandhi); I don’t remember if he ever gave me any more grief after that. Also during those pre-adolescent years I remember punishing myself for an unkindness to a really annoying and poorly socialized classmate – by assigning myself (since no one else could abide him) to be his science lab partner and ever after to be kind to him. On yet another occasion, coming back on a bus from Bloomington’s First Christian Church’s Summer-Bible-School excursion to a migrant labor camp, I distinctly remember being troubled that those Mexican children – with whom we’d run and played and eaten the lunches our mothers prepared for us – should live in such cramped and impoverished conditions while I for no apparent merit of my own lacked for nothing. And then there was my junior-high buddy from the wrong side of the tracks, in whose run-down house with an absent father and a working mother I was introduced to more immediate signs of American poverty.

            In high school some time later when the mildly mentally-retarded girl in the lunch line took to conversing with me – and encouraged perhaps by the novelty of my responsiveness joined me and my nerdy friends at our usual table – I felt hurt for her when those friends immediately got up to leave. I made it a point to stay there with her, to make some dismissive remark about my idiot friends and continue companionably chatting – to from then on be a constant friend to her if she would have me. She didn’t sit with us again but we would often talk to each other before or after lunch. I have in mind a picture of her on the day of a performance by the school chorus of which she was a member, all radiant and decked out in a formal dress, her usually oily hair freshly washed, prettier than I’d ever imagined her. For a moment (since no one else was clamoring for the position anyway) I thought that perhaps I should ask her to be my girlfriend. But I was at once a shy kid and predictably mooning after unattainable and more conventionally pretty others, and when someone quite publicly accused us of actually being boyfriend and girlfriend I hardly knew what to say; while she, with startling and mocking vigor, denied all charges and turned her back on me. I understood even then that she must have been motivated by simple insecurity, by the same self-protective instinct that makes adolescents do so many unkind and stupid things, but even so it hurt me no little bit.

            The point of all these examples is simply to show that a moral conscience did assert itself in me early on, although undoubtedly a full accounting of my life must also involve the sorts of unkindness and moral stupidity that in greater or lesser degree seem to be the lot of humanity. On top of that I was raised a rather conservative Republican, the grandchild of hard-working descendants of hard-working German immigrants to southern Indiana, so I learned to distinguish – at least in the abstract – between “worthy” and “unworthy” poor, presuming much about equality of free will and choice among vast majorities of God’s children; and I would learn to lash out (after my immediate family’s conversion to Mormonism when I was almost fifteen) at the forces at war against proper family values as marshalled in the early to mid-70s in radical feminism’s unholy push for an Equal Rights Amendment – whose true nefarious purposes I was told at church and at home were the same as now attributed to the champions of gay marriage, latest minions of Lucifer in the perpetual onslaught against Victorian family values.

            I have since then diverged in many and significant ways from the teachings and admonitions of my parents, though I remain grateful to both of them (and to my grandparents) for the sense they conveyed to me of the importance of integrity of thought and deed and moral action. They taught me – and I still believe – that a job worth doing is worth doing well, and while this didn’t stop me from such minor transgressions as, say, time stolen from a service-industry job when business was slow (in the determined interest of scribbling away at my literary art), it informs me constantly in my continued fervor to produce original work and translations of supreme merit – at the same time as I trouble myself to do right, as much as I seem constitutionally able, by the students that it is my workaday profession to teach. It’s this sense of moral responsibility that prods me, even as reality on the ground compels me to do less than ideally called for, to keep trying to make the greatest difference where I can, which most recently has meant creating a school literary club and working with those kids (for the firsts two years completely gratis) toward the production of an annual literary magazine of student writing and art. In doing so I take comfort in having affected at least a couple of lives in a way that no one else could. Likewise it is this heritage of my parents and their forebears (strengthened by the bond of religious covenant) that in no small part has urged me to make stick – for these more than twenty-five years – a marriage of social and intellectual unequals that to a lesser commitment almost certainly would have long ago collapsed under its own weight. Which is not to say that there hasn’t been a great deal of love and affection in the relationship: otherwise it can’t have prevailed half as well as it has.

            The conversion to Mormonism from a vaguely defined and ecumenical Protestantism has perhaps had an even greater impact on the formation of my character, though again I’ve by now departed from anything resembling orthodoxy of both practice and belief. Its most significant influence may have been simply to bring to my heart – with an immediacy and urgency far beyond what I’d previously experienced – questions of deep metaphysical significance. Before that conversion my encounter with religious questions was passive: I believed that Jesus loved me because the Bible, my mother, and my grandmother told me so; I knew about that “wee little man” named Zacchaeus who climbed up in a sycamore tree so that he could see the Lord; I participated in the annual Nativity program at Christmas and was touched by the wisdom of St. Luke filtered through the innocence of Linus’s voice in the Charlie Brown Christmas. But to say that these things had a deep influence on my thinking, on the way I would consciously live my life, would be to over-state the matter. When those young Mormon elders spoke to me of Joseph Smith’s First Vision, which had occurred when (at fourteen years of age) he was no older than I at that century and a half later, I was overwhelmed with a consciousness of choices and moral responsibility that I hadn’t realized I possessed. The Prophet Joseph’s reading of James 1:5 – that anyone lacking in wisdom should “ask of God, who giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not” – led him to the Sacred Grove where, according to the canonical account of that spring morning in 1820, he saw God the Father and the Son Jesus Christ, who told him to join none of the churches as thus constituted since none of them had a wholeness of truth and all had departed from original principles. The consciousness that St. James’s counsel was directed to me as well as to Joseph Smith, and that if the promise were true for him it must be true for me also, came with life-altering power. And something which spoke to me then and for many years afterward assured me that this latter-day revelation was true; though later my relationship with the Mormon God would metamorphose into Jacob’s stentorian wrestle – and faith emerge broken like Israel’s hip.

            I was equally impressed by the egalitarian doctrine of a Plan of Salvation that embraced past generations of hapless families and individuals who’d not had the chance, in the time and place of their earthly habitation, to hear the true doctrine and receive the authorized ordinances – that we would be punished for our own sins and not Adam’s; that no one would be consigned to Hell because of God’s whim as was the doctrine of one fundamentalist Protestant friend. It made sense that we should be vicariously baptized for those who through no fault of their own couldn’t do it for themselves. I also liked the local congregations’ strictly lay ministry, so that everyone was potentially an actor in the Kingdom of God rather than merely those who’d gone to the Seminary. I owe to the Church my having learned, despite my inordinate adolescent shyness, to speak before a congregation from the time I was fourteen or fifteen, and to do so with fair competence and confidence. I liked the radical notion from one of Joseph Smith’s last sermons – the famous (or infamous) King Follett discourse – that gods existed in an eternal line without beginning or end, that while only one God directly concerned us there were others from whom He was descended and would be others forever afterwards – to which state I was a potential aspirant. Likewise I was fascinated by the tale of the forthcoming of the Book of Mormon, both in its ancient context as an American scripture giving witness of Christ’s New World visitations and in its recovery and “translation” by an unschooled but charismatic youth from New York state – not to mention the facts of archaeology and indigenous mythology that suggested to the book’s apologists, if not incontrovertible proof, at least sufficient grounds for faith.

            I no longer believe in the historicity of that book, though I can accept Joseph Smith’s prophetic gifts so long as those are understood in a more sociological shamanistic sort of context. Nor do I believe literally (as the later white-bearded Mormon prophet Lorenzo Snow put it) that “as we are, God once was; and as God is, we might become,” though my heart does still thrill to the Romantic principle of spiritual potentiality that seems to underlie it. I have no real assurance anymore of a Plan of Salvation that extends backwards to a pre-mortal spirit state in which we were with God and chose to come here and be tested by Him, and at the same time forward to our eventual resurrection to a full-bodied state of acting and laboring in much the same roles as in the religious stewardships we are assigned here. Yet still I believe that if there is to be a true community of fully sentient human beings it must exist (metaphorically at least) under Mormon Enoch’s rainbow in which there exist neither rich nor poor as in this present sorry state of affairs but democratically empowered individuals with the wherewithal to flourish (in full cooperation with – and tolerance of – each other) in the divergent roles that contribute to the continuation of the body of Christ, or of Islam, or of Hinduism or Buddhism or simply Humankind. I continue to believe that if there is truth to be known it cannot be known by passive acquaintance with someone else’s revelation but that we must each one be seers and revelators for ourselves – or rather in conversation and communion with each other. So in many respects I remain a Mormon, though quite out of tune with the hierarchical structures – so to some (a majority I often fear) scarcely a Mormon at all.

            My religious education quickly reached a fairly impressive breadth and depth. After a year or two from my baptism I was clearly more well-read in the standard histories and apologetics of the Church than any of my peers who’d been members all their lives. By age twenty I was serving a full-time mission in Argentina, during which time I read volumes of scripture and literature of the faithful translated into the Spanish language. My experience of St. James’s “practical religion” became many-layered as I worked with poor and seeking souls and truly sought during those two years to bring holiness into their lives and my own. Back at home then I continued to study the scriptures, for the first time (for example) reading the entire King James Bible from beginning to end, not even leaving out the minutiae of the Mosaic code that were no longer pertinent to the restored faith and priesthood of Melchizedek.

            I was deeply influenced during those years by the scholarly apologetics of Hugh Nibley, whose volumes of ancient studies and commentary revolutionized my understanding of both scripture and moral philosophy. His radical blending of Christian-Mormon faith and liberal politics helped me cut my ties to the radical Republicanism of Ronald Reagan and such zealots as Ezra Taft Benson, Mormon Apostle and Secretary of Agriculture to President Eisenhower; for I could no longer reconcile the fatal contradictions between Republican “trickle-down economics” and laissez-faire personal responsibility with the great inequities of both opportunity and wealth that I’d already seen in Argentina and was now coming to recognize at home. I was also instructed by the teachings and examples, in Bloomington where I was soon married and pursuing my undergraduate education, of other spiritual teachers who likewise were able to penetrate deeper than the official utterances and reveal complexities I hadn’t fully contemplated before. And there was also British writer and teacher Arthur Henry King, former Socialist and convert to Mormonism whom I first heard speak at a youth fireside in Bloomington and with whom I later corresponded on matters of faith and literary art.

            Thus while I began to question many aspects of the faith, particularly (at least in the beginning) regarding the inconsistencies of its egalitarian scriptures and its increasingly U.S.-Republican social stances, I was able to do so for some time without totally sacrificing a belief system that had in so many ways come to sustain me.

            At this point I must do some back-tracking and discuss my more strictly secular and internationalist influences. Argentina would of course double as one of those influences, but first and most fortuitous was perhaps the fact a good decade and a half earlier of my adoptive father’s taking his little family on the road. My brother Todd was born in Arizona, where my father (at the Air Force’s expense) took out a Master’s in industrial engineering at Arizona State University. The next four years were spent in California and included travels up and down the Pacific Coast and just across the border with Mexico into Tijuana. In school I researched and wrote about the great King Kamehameha of Hawaii and years later would visit there when Dad went on business and we made a vacation of it. My earliest remembered musical influences, thanks to my mother, were the American folk harmonies of the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and Mary and the more exotic sounds of Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass.

            After four years out West my dad retired from active duty and moved back to Indiana where youngest brother Kirk would be born. On the way we passed through Utah where I caught a first glimpse of the Salt Lake Temple’s spires which by adoption would become a spiritual heritage. Later we spent a year in North Carolina where Dad did some work for the Environmental Protection Agency and where my best schoolmate was a black boy who only smiled (in the manner of one much older and wiser) when I invited him to come home with me on my all-white school bus and spend the night. Years later I would capture that experience in countless drafts of a fictional story – inspired also by earlier memories of Helen Bannerman’s now politically incorrect picture book – called “Little White Sambo,” which is at last published online and archived at River Walk Journal.  My parents in any case, while not free of racial and national stereotypes, were open to such relationships and had inculcated in me a benign faith in the equality of opportunity in this land since Lincoln freed the slaves. At the same time, while excusing Dad’s old Grandma Chapple (for instance) her more beknighted and Antebellum views, they probably agreed with both sets of parents that Martin Luther King Jr.’s charismatic method of address had been prone to incite passions and, hence, racial conflict – and that King was morally suspect anyway given what that closeted cross-dressing puritan J. Edgar Hoover had revealed of his marital infidelities.

            Still, regardless of its shortcomings, my parents’ mildly internationalist outlook on the world (with of course a militarily strong United States at dead center) was undoubtedly instrumental in the gradual opening of my mind outward from its parochial beginnings in Perry County. Together we would yet travel, besides other parts of the continental United States, to English- and French-speaking Canada (I loved Québec above all other cities, even in the constant mist that was falling while we were there) and to southernmost Alaska – Kodiak Island, Anchorage, a glimpse of Mount McKinley. I knew in any case that there was a considerable and varied world beyond Perry County.

            Yet it was back there in the house of my maternal grandparents that I came most vividly to know and to cherish the company of books. There I first became entranced by the comforting scent of the old volumes that Grandma and Grandpa kept (treasures of literary delicacies in both poetry and prose) upstairs in the little alcove where I slept on our visits. There was that ritual, divined without anyone’s ever telling it to me, of  holding each book up to my nose, flipping its pages and breathing in its special aroma, before reading or being read to from it. Not that there were that great a number of books. But they were books that made an impression on me and that are still with me in some way or another. I associate them still with the creak of hardwood floors as I ascend those stairs and duck into the low-ceilinged bedroom where aunts Gayle and Peggy had slept as girls – while the older sister who would be my mom had her own room opposite that one. I don’t remember for sure what was read to me there before I moved out West. The first books that I read by myself, in California, were by Dr. Seuss: for instance The Cat and the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham, of which the second I still particularly love. But back in southern Indiana – always on the sweet lilting voice of my grandma – I was reared toward the priestly ambition of being a writer by (more than any other) the inimitable music of James Whitcomb Riley, Indiana poet of nineteenth-century literary dialect whose “Little Orphant Annie” and “The Raggedy Man” remain among the richest jewels of the rhythmic sing-song oral literature of childhood that I’ve ever loved. And then of course there were also those ridiculous absurdist tales of the Gentleman Rabbit Uncle Wiggly, the quaint endings of whose stories (Now, if the tea kettle doesn’t marry the skillet and run away with the spoon, next time I’ll tell you about Uncle Wiggly and the ...) always left me and then-little brother Todd in stitches.

            Years later with my own children I would encounter other treasures that may or may not have belonged, in some smaller degree, to my own childhood: Longfellow’s “Hiawatha’s Children,” for instance, and the longer Song of Hiawatha that it was a part of; E. B. White’s perfect little book Charlotte’s Web; Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind and the Willows; Kipling’s Jungle Books and C. S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia” ... But it all started for me with Riley and those Uncle Wiggly stories, which with my grandparents themselves remain at the heart of my memories of this house which Grandpa built and Grandma made into a home – and which I now inhabit and my own first grandchild plays in.

            From that humble beginning, in any case, books have become the essential tools of my intellectual if not my moral life. More recently I would read Martin Buber who reminds me that, while books may often make more agreeable companions than a lot of men, in the final analysis it will be with a human hand holding mine that I let go of this life; and hence that the true key to the moral life (while it may sometimes be through books that one discovers and understands this) lies in mindful communion and dialogue with other human beings – with all of nature and sentient existence for that matter. In fact a large part of my adolescence (as probably of most people’s) was taken up with variously healthy and unhealthy obsessions over social relations and, particularly, an awakening sense of heterosexual desire. There were the usual flirtations with pornography and masturbation; there were the long hours of immersion in the particular popular music and artists that channeled my egocentric adolescent longings and popular philosophizing; as for movies they weren’t such a big influence on me at that point, though before my religious conversion I was rather fond of the old black-and-white horror flicks (subsequently, Satan having been made such a real presence in my consciousness, I found them much more unsettling) and I recall with particular vividness the eye-popping female nudity and heroic macho violence in the Billy Jack flicks. But all along I also read, at first the likes of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Brahm Stoker, even a version of the Beowolf epic which I loved for its bone-crunching gore and idealized warrior ethic; also Sterling North (Rascal) – and later, by my final years in high school, I would share my teachers’ passion (if in relatively small doses) for Emerson and Thoreau, Steinbeck and Faulkner, the under-appreciated Southern writer Katherine Anne Porter ... and then on my own for Cervantes’s Don Quixote (which years later, with the essential guidance of Professor Dan Quilter at Indiana University, I would tackle in Spanish) and through a first encounter with Crime and Punishment for Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and (later) Solzhenitsyn.

            I undoubtedly owe it to the Church – and (let’s be truthful!) to my overwhelming shyness with members of the opposite sex – more than to my vaguely puritanical German-American upbringing that, other than my rather standard dalliance with private sexual exploration, I managed for the time-being not to indulge in sexual intercourse and to free myself sufficiently of unchaste deeds and thoughts to sally forth on that quixotic proselyting labor to Argentina. I’d hoped to be called to the Soviet Union and thus to be one of the first to break through that Iron Curtain; with that and my literary passions in mind I enrolled during my first year at university in courses in elementary Russian and (in translation of course) Russian literature. That I should be attracted to both Cervantes and Dostoevsky seems to me fitting since Dostoevsky saw in Don Quixote (as I recall) “a lie that saves the truth.” As for Dostoevsky himself I would also come to love his Notes From Underground and to identify myself somewhat later (in The Brothers Karamazov) with his Christian hero Alyosha. As for Tolstoy, I would come to marvel at both the grandeur of War and Peace and the pious simplicity of his folk tales – not to mention Anna Karenina, which while still in high school I’d seen in the BBC’s representation on Masterpiece Theater, and the tragic loneliness and suicide of whose heroine deeply affected me then.

            I returned from Argentina captivated by the tale (which I’d brought back in the lyrics of a folk song) of a woman – once captive by Indians – who afterwards resisted the Argentine military’s effort to “redeem” her. In a wild-goose-chase of a search for the literary source of that tale, misled by the album-cover blurb’s erroneous attribution, I encountered the conversational and Cervantine prose of Lucio Victorio Mansilla, rough contemporary of Mark Twain and whose Excursión a los indios ranqueles gave me (if not the tale I had sought) a good deal of the background knowledge to imagine that captive’s life as it finally took shape in my novella A Bride Called Freedom – published in 2003 in a bilingual edition by Ediciones Nuevo Espacio. So I’m in no way sorry that I ended up going South rather than East. There was something fortuitous, if not God’s design, that led me in the first place from Cervantes to Mansilla; and in the second place, by means of Mansilla translator and friend Eva Gillies, to contemporary Buenos-Aires writer María Rosa Lojo whose poetry and literary-historical prose I’ve been translating (she would in turn introduce me to Sebastián Bekes who provided the Spanish language translation of my novella). The book Awaiting the Green Morning, my translation of María Rosa’s 1998 poetry collection Esperan la mañana verde, will be published sometime in 2008 in a bilingual edition by Host Publications.

            These encounters, too, constitute important parts of my moral and intellectual education. Back at Indiana University-Bloomington (where perhaps too-early married and soon with three children I was caught up immediately in the confused labyrinth of study and work, family life and frustration, that constitutes the most essential moral education of social man: the Darwinian struggle to find one’s place – to survive and prosper – in the “dark and dreary world” of terrestrial reality), I would major in Spanish and minor in English, and in a course on the Craft of Translation with Professor James Mandrell begin translating an episode from Mansilla’s book. His epistolary and digressive style leant itself well to a moral point of view that I consider wise largely by its openness to divergent human experience and thought which in a reasoned and philosophical interchange of ideas might (better than polemics or bombs) lead to greater shared understandings and cooperative agreements between competing nations and worldviews. Mansilla was pretty much alone in his place and time in defending the humanity of the Argentine Indians – whose culture and way of life (if not every remnant of its people) would be essentially annihilated by 19^th-century’s end, much as our Indians’ in the United States. Mansilla wrote not only of them but of the other forgotten figures in that pampean landscape, the poor gauchos and soldiers who would be discarded by their government which couldn’t be bothered over-much to civilize and raise them up. His “History of Corporal Gómez” – the section I translated for Professor Mandrell – is a profoundly poignant portrait of a soldier whose hasty execution for a crime of passion seems incommensurate with his greater moral qualities: this story, like the larger work in which it stands as an only apparently unpurposeful digression, exemplifies the rhetorical function that literary rhetorician Kenneth Burke calls “persuasion to attitude” – in this case, as in Crime and Punishment, to a questioning of the morality of government-sanctioned capital punishment.

            It would be some years yet before my encounter with the history and philosophy of rhetoric or with the pragmatics of John Dewey and William James. But in retrospect the pieces fit together in the puzzle of an emerging personal philosophy (for convenience I’ll call it “literary rhetorics”) that has gradually supplanted the Platonic view of philosophically-ascertainable Absolute Truths underlying many assumptions of my adopted Mormon faith. Not that the revolutionary Mormon faith didn’t already contain some of the seeds of a more flexible spiritual perspectivism: Joseph Smith’s view of the cosmos, if based in a shamanistic translation of natural law, was ever evolving and ultimately expansive though one would hardly know it from reference to the highly correlated utterances of the Lord’s Anointed today. In any case it was a big part of Joseph Smith’s genius that he never felt locked in by a pre-established perspective, even one that he’d helped construct; and his overarching teaching, while perhaps not without in practice its authoritarian contradictions, was that no one should be castigated for mere “erring in doctrine,” that fellowship and communitarian covenant were of greater importance – that in any case revelation was an ongoing phenomenon and might look different if viewed from the perspective of later insight.

            By this point I risk confusing my own thoughts with the Prophet Joseph’s. Were he alive today, and in order to preserve the spiritual integrity of his original Revelation, he might well be aligned against my particular secularization of his great Law of Consecration, though I don’t believe I’ve misrepresented the radical potentiality of his moral and religious philosophy. In any case that sense of individuals’ responsibility within the larger communitarian context for their own evolving spiritual understanding is not entirely at variance with the Mansillan perspective of multiple moral voices or the Deweyan-Jamesian insistence on the social context of ideas – nor with the humanistic-Christian perspectivism that Professor Quilter would reveal to me through the pages of the Spanish Quixote.

            In that case it takes the mad knight’s idealism and his squire’s earthy pragmatism – mixed promiscuously in the laboratory of the plains of La Mancha; in interaction with every sort of Spanish character from the noblest to the most picaresque – to get at any complete notion of what Dostoevsky would call “the mystery of man.” And in the Cervantine and Mansillan literary-rhetorical model revelation is achieved through narrative and humor, humanity revealed at its often-simultaneous best and worst – not by heavy-handed polemics but by the convergence of lives and perspectives that ends up revealing the paradoxical realities beneath and beyond the bare circumstance of those lives. It is not by accident for instance that Cervantes’s chosen narrator, Cide Hamete Benengeli, belongs to the “lying race” of Moors: by that metafictional contrivance and others the reader is brought quite organically to the surprising poignancy of those almost incidental scenes involving Spain’s expelled Moors and Jews – and the escape of a converted Moorish princess from her “heretical” but grieving father. It seems apparent to me that our present times call  for a great deal more of such rhetorics if we are to summon our more compassionate nature and put an end to the unappeasable rhetorics of competing absolutisms. 

            With Professor Russell Salmon I was soon studying Argentine literature from the early 19^th-century anti-Indian / anti-gaucho polemics of Esteban Echeverría through Mansilla’s contemporary José Hernández’s Gaucho Martín Fierro (with its bitter critique of President Domingo F. Sarmiento’s “civilizing” government) to such late 20^th-century works (in the age of the generals’ “dirty war” against civic society and Communist phantoms) as Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman. On my own I would add Jacobo Timerman’s memoir Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number and other accounts of that covert war on subversives that had been invisible to me when I was there. Everywhere the question of “civilization vs. barbarism” – and, as in Mansilla, the difficulty oftentimes of distinguishing between the two. Meanwhile Ronald Reagan was imposing his view of civilization on Central America and Professor Salmon asked me if I would host an informational meeting at my church in support of the Sanctuary Movement’s quixotic effort to counter the barbaric effects of this campaign on the lives of fleeing Salvadoreans, Nicaraguans, and Guatemalans. While there was no way my conservative church would have allowed such a meeting (this despite its own ample history of dispossessedness!), I regret that I didn’t give it a try – even if by some moral act of deception.

            There are many details of my larger course of undergraduate studies that must be passed over in silence. In English, aside from the writing workshops with Professors John McCluskey Jr. and Melvin Plotinsky, I read and studied a good dozen of Shakespeare’s plays, such medieval works as the allegorical Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, fragments of Chaucer’s paradoxically spiritual and bawdy Canterbury Tales, and (in a hard-won individual study with Professor Brian Caraher) James Joyce’s Ulysses which I prefaced with a re-reading of both Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Only years later on my own would I begin to read Virginia Woolf, whose Mrs. Dalloway is as good and as moral as Joyce’s infinitely less accessible work. I’ve still not had the courage to take on Finnegans Wake, though I hope to someday.

            On my own I continued to read widely and eclectically: from Lady Murasaki’s ancient Japanese classic The Tale of Genji to Thomas Mann’s four-volume World War II-era Biblical saga Joseph and His Brothers; from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (first his wonderful children’s book Haroun and the Sea of Stories) to more of Steinbeck and (to a lesser extent) Faulkner – and the Colombian magical-realist Gabriel García Márquez whose mythical town of Macondo bears the mark of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. During the ‘80s I wrote, in emulation of García Márquez’s Macondo, a collection of stories and a novella (Saint Mary of Magdalene, unpublished) and planted it in a less consistently-imagined mythic locale called Magdalena: of those stories, promising but perhaps irreparably flawed, one was nevertheless published in an undergraduate magazine and another won a prize from the Bloomington chapter of the National Society of Arts and Letters; and a Western publisher briefly flirted with the idea of taking on its maverick Mormon fiction.

            Also during those years I wrote a book (The Red Flamingo: Gaucho Myths and Legends, also unpublished) which consisted of translations, an over-sized introduction, and pedagogical materials: a chapter on the phenomenon of Peronism did land from its pages in Indiana University’s Chicano-Riqueño Studies journal Chiricú. At the same time I was also working on a chapbook of poetic paragraphs or prose poems on the Quixote (Quixotics; self-published in 1997). “Quixotics” as I conceived the term was in essence the Cervantine perspectivism that would eventually merge (in my gradually evolving literary philosophy) with the subjectivist contingency-based rhetorics of Isocrates and Cicero: “more than mere foolishness to be forgotten,” I write in one of those paragraphs, quixotics is “a different way of knowing things, of perceiving the deeper realities that are hidden by their plain surfaces”; or in other words, as in this maxim with which I punctuate the introductory one: “Truth is often concealed beneath the surface of an absurdity.”

            There seems no need within the context of this brief accounting of my moral and intellectual life to go into exhaustive detail regarding what remains to tell of my still-unfinished moral and intellectual education. To sum it up as briefly as possible, I graduated from I.U.-Bloomington in 1988 with a BA in Spanish Languages and Literature and a Minor in English; and after a stint at substitute teaching – and at the promising but ultimately vain pursuit of private-school jobs from Vicksburg Mississippi to a pair of locations in Arizona – I completed Teacher Certification at I.U. and took a first-year ESL position in Houston Texas. The following school year brought me back to Perry County where ever since then I’ve been living and teaching both Spanish and English. During this time, while earlier I’d awakened to a sense of not-knowingness about the truth claims of any religion, I came to a deeper and more intractable agnosticism – by means first of a flirtation with Native American spirituality in the form of the fledgling Indiana Indian Movement and my charismatic and mysterious friend Greywolf (that story is recounted in my memoir “Dancing With Coyote,” published and archived online at Tertulia Magazine). Throughout these years and down to the present I’ve been continuously haunted by the Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno’s heart-shattering tale in “San Manuel bueno, mártir” (Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr) of a disbelieving priest who feigns belief for the consolation of his congregation. I find myself now, with much less success, in a similar position to that priest’s: I remain tied – most ineffectually; by the precarious faith and unrelenting need of my wife Anita – to a church that no longer begins to satisfy either spiritual or intellectual tests. An excerpt from a longer essay on this theme has appeared in print in the “Reader’s Write” section of the Mormon literary magazine Irreantum.

            A particular sore spot for me (and this I can’t pass over too quickly) has become the moral issue of homosexuality which first began to trouble me when on my mission I chanced to participate in the conversion of a homosexual boy – whose intention to be baptized was then met by the hostility of a particular ecclesiastical leader (the story is told in my essay “The Golden Boy of Rosario,” which won second place in the 2006 Eugene England Memorial Personal Essay Contest and was subsequently published in the independent Mormon magazine Sunstone). Since then, with my youngest daughter’s recently coming out as gay, the question has become even more personal. In any case, in the interest of brevity, after first imagining the homosexual’s plight as an unnatural circumstance of the Fall – of chaos emerging thus from primordial and pristine creation – I eventually came (to some extent on my own) to moral arguments not dissimilar to those posited by both James Rachels in The Elements of Moral Philosophy and Garry Wills in What Jesus Meant, both of which I would read in Professor Richard Mussard’s Fall 2006 course on wisdom and moral philosophy at the University of Southern Indiana (USI). Thus have I rejected the religious bias against homosexuality as rooted in isolated passages of scripture and long-standing cultural prejudice – much like my church’s former insistence on some ill-defined curse of Ham (and other such racist folklore) as precluding blacks from holding the Priesthood.

            As daughter Stephanie and her partner Rachel now prepare to “marry” – in a legally non-binding ceremony; close to home in socially conservative and homophobic Perry County – I am saddened that announcements of their love should more likely bring expressions of condolence than of shared joy. It likewise saddens me that they might never enjoy the sanction and benefits of legal marriage that their heterosexual peers take for granted. Rachel, for her part, a moral and at heart even religious person, condemned to hellfire both by parents and the evangelical church in which she was once an active youth leader, is a chief reason that Stephanie – for perhaps the first time since pre-adolescence – seems reasonably centered and happy; and for the past year and longer she’s been a constant anchor in Stephanie’s life: assuming with her the full responsibilities of a working parent; encouraging her to go back to school; devotedly helping to raise her three-year-old child, last and most blessed fruit of reckless adolescent rebellion against her suspected and forbidden nature.

            Yet while any heterosexual couple of much less evident commitment can be married and divorced on a whim – as on the TV comedy Friends, for instance, where a drunken Ross marries a drunken Rachel before a Las Vegas Elvis imitator – these two who with my and Anita’s grandchild already constitute a functional and loving family unit cannot do so without endangering (so a certain stripe of politician and preacher asserts!) the very structure of Western civilization, whose foundations evidently lie not so much in any democratic institution but in the endangered one of Christian marriage – as strictly defined, by the Hebrew God, between a man and a woman. This argument against gay marriage, in the light of growing shared experience, seems at best old and crusty. As Jonathan Rauch argues rather conservatively in his 2004 book Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, it is in fact more likely (over time at least) to both check promiscuity and bolster the social contract of marriage; while civil unions on the other hand, by inviting their extension to co-habiting heterosexuals (a phenomenon that is already occurring through the benefits packages of corporate America), might rather encourage an opposite effect. If marriage has never been an option for homosexuals anyway, small wonder the legendary promiscuity and outrageous acting-out of sectors of the gay community. Yet witness the equally astounding devotion of gay men and women, after the onset in the 1980s of the AIDS epidemic, to their dying partners – and years later the numbers of couples flocking to be married in San Francisco, for instance, in the brief window of opportunity that recently presented itself there! In light of such examples and present science, imprecise as it may be, it seems at best arbitrary (on chiefly the evidence of selectively heeded Biblical injunctions) to deny legal recognition of marriage to a whole class of people who are arguably no better or worse citizens and moral agents than any other.

            As to the presumed offense against the Church, Stephanie opted to withdraw her name from its rolls rather than submit to the formality of excommunication; and in any case excommunicated she is, at least in the eyes of my increasingly devout mother and father – who wouldn’t have her to Thanksgiving dinner in the company of her gender-confused masculine-mannered “friend.” So our immediate family’s little Thanksgiving gathering – for the second year running – took place some two and a half hours away in Tell City Indiana in isolation from all extended family. While saddened by my parents’ ungenerous spiritual determination, in any case, I remain most outraged by the egregious failure over the past many years – as they tirelessly trumpet the values of eternal marriage and eternal loving families – of my church’s highest leaders to publish a single discourse in the spirit of Garry Wills’s more credible and radical Jesus, who without paying sentimental homage to the Victorian family would certainly have sat down to dinner with my daughter and her same-sex lover.

            Of course my personal comfort level with such heterodoxies has been greatly enhanced over the course – at USI in neighboring Evansville – of my at-last nearly completed Master of Arts in Liberal Studies. With Professor Tom Rivers in particular I’ve found my intellectual home in a philosophy of rhetorics. In Rivers’s conception – which at core is once more the conception of the ancient Sophists, their student Isocrates, and the great Roman orator and statesman Cicero – rhetoric is philosophy, albeit a philosophy more grounded in the practical give-and-take of civic life and politics than in the grand and untestable metaphysics of Plato. This evolving understanding – like my rather tentative self-labeling as a literary rhetor – has progressed through countless other readings on my own and in classes with (in particular) Professors Tom Wilhelmus, Mark Krahling, and Robert Boostrom. With Wilhelmus, at the conjunction of the humanities and biological science, I encountered (among others) the great biologist and humanist Darwin himself (The Voyage of the Beagle; On the Origin of Species; Descent of Man), the British metafictionalist John Fowles (The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Darwinian to its core), and sociobiologist and champion of interdisciplinarity Edward O. Wilson (Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge); with Krahling, a further number of challenging and accessible readings more strictly in the sciences and mathematics, among them Bill Bryson’s A Brief History of Nearly Everything, Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, and John Allen Paulos’s A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper; and with Boostrom (among others) a bit of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and a good deal of John Dewey (Education and Democracy). I was greatly impressed with Darwin and Dewey: I was in fact especially anxious, after having first encountered his philosophy on my own in Louis Menand’s brilliant treatment of the American pragmatists (The Metaphysical Club), to read Dewey’s book. At the present of this writing I’m much impressed also with James Rachels’s above-cited book, which strikes me as having been the central and indispensable text to Professor Richard Mussard’s course.

            A good rhetorical practice demands, certainly, a measure of the skepticism of good scientific practice, and thus is not intrinsically hostile to either the positivistic insights of E. O. Wilson or the Platonic / Socratic underpinnings of a universally coherent moral philosophy. In fact, while since reading I. F. Stone (The Trial of Socrates) on the anti-democratic foundations of Platonic dialectics and Socratic method I have firmly sided with the much-maligned Greek Sophists, my life-long love affair with the literary figure of Don Quixote (himself clearly a Platonist) – not to mention my own lingering affinity with a sort of spiritual transcendentalism – has mitigated against total apostasy from Platonic idealism in either its secular or religious dimensions. I can still understand something of that religious impulse, and am still touched by the seemingly impossible utopian dreamings of many honest-hearted crusaders. I only reject outright the falsely pious certainty of those who would impose their own narrow morality as matters of civil or theocratic law, who cultivate little or no tolerance for divergent interpretations or understanding. But a humanistically sound and biologically embodied “quixotics” need not be out of sync with a more critical – wisely skeptical – epistemological method. To that end, after my first course with Professor Rivers and that eye-opening encounter with I. F. Stone, I wrote what after several drafts became “History of the Knight and the Sophist” (since published, in print, in The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies and online at Tertulia Magazine) – in which, somewhat à la Jorge Luis Borges, I imagine Don Quixote and some anonymous champion of the ancient and misunderstood arts of “Sophistry” to engage each other, in the most pleasant and mutually flattering discourse, on Platonic and Sophistic pursuit of truth.

            None of this seems necessarily incompatible with Professor Mussard’s presentation of philosophy – at least to the extent that it recognizes the subjectivity of human knowledge and the unlikelihood of achieving the ideal of perfect wisdom or even an unassailable hierarchy of its innumerable components and gradations. His bold attempt at such a hierarchy does seem (at best) quixotic, bound to come up short in the same way as Linnaeus’s attempt to construct a complete intellectual scaffolding for ever-evolving biological creation. Such a study may have its merits, in other words, but I suspect that its value would be heightened by more explicit acknowledgment of the traditional Platonic error in separating rhetoric from the broad profession of philosophical dialectics. Rhetoric in fact, as both Isocrates and Cicero plainly understood it and as I again assert, is indeed philosophy – not just a skill, dryly learned and practiced (absent a broadly liberal-arts context) in classes on public speaking but a method of discovering and shaping a community’s knowledge by means of the free and considered give-and-take of an ever-changing plurality of ideas.

            This method, it should be said in closing, needn’t preclude high-minded and metaphysical considerations. It is not equivalent, for example, to scientific method and thus doesn’t require a continually skeptical posture. Rhetoric, as Aristotle puts it, consists in applying the full available means of persuasion to the case at hand, which aside from the intellectual rigors of logos must also (to be fully human – and hence, humane) include pathetic and ethical considerations. It might be true, for instance, that E = mc², but in the light of the destructive power unleashed by that formula it remains a matter of persuasion as to whether or not the insight will on the whole have been beneficial to humanity: the science itself cannot argue for the moral considerations surrounding its applications. Likewise, as Professor Rivers likes to point out, to the farmer who doubts the wisdom of turning perfectly good agricultural land into the University of Southern Indiana campus the value of exponentially-increasing liberal educations is by no means self-evident but must ever be argued for.

            And thus it is, as I encounter myself now roughly “midway on life’s journey,” that I embrace the moral and intellectual posture of a literary rhetor. I am after all, by my favored practice of rhetoric, a literary sort, given to communicate most profitably through maxim and story and essay. Even in teaching the practical skills involved in speaking, listening, reading, or writing in Spanish it is toward such as Cervantes that I inevitably point; and in teaching literature and the arts of communication in English, toward the figure of the literate and imaginatively engaged citizen-scribbler as exemplified in Lucio Mansilla. I would point my students in short – and in the face of so many competing and uncompromising absolutes as otherwise lead most promisingly to Armageddon – away from an excessive (or exclusive) focus on the metaphysical questions on which we still cannot agree toward a more pragmatic politics of the arguable – such as Mormon rhetorician Wayne Booth has called a “rhetoric of assent.” The narrowly partisan practice of a truncated rhetoric of insult and accusation, on the other hand, of “mere” talk and sound bites, tends instead toward only an ever-escalating rhetoric of dissent and dysfunction, a fatal devaluation of humankind’s most remarkable achievement which is language itself – a theme on which Professor Rivers elaborates further in “A Defense of Rhetoric,” lately published and archived at Tertulia Magazine. And now given the implications of the scientific revolution in biology and earth sciences which Darwin launched and we can no longer escape – and which the alert metaphysician has sometimes understood by other means – the global stakes couldn’t be higher.