Let Them Be Incorruptible

A monk, an abbot, in fact, kneels, alone, and calls to mind those of his brothers who are soon to undertake a monstrously difficult voyage.  He thinks, about these brother monks of his, thusly:

They'd want much praying for; none was more susceptible than the wanderer to the ills that afflict the spirit to torture faith and nag belief, harrowing the mind with doubts.  At home...conscience had its overseers and its exterior taskmasters, but abroad the conscience was alone, torn between Lord and Foe.  Let them be incorruptible, he prayed, let them hold true...

That to which the abbot prays his brothers might hold true, is the way of their fictional Order, the Albertian Order of Leibowitz.  The abbot, of course, is fictional, too, this is from a book, and a rather remarkable one at that, especially considering that it's technically classifiable as a science-fiction book, taking place as it does over the course of nearly two millenia, and ending with a second world-wide nuclear holocaust in the year three-thousand, seven-hundred and some-such.  The book's imagined monks follow the rule of their founder, one Isaac Edward Leibowitz, a one-time nuclear technician who in the 1950s, after a first, incomplete, bout of international nuclear mayhem, undertakes to save what he can of recorded human knowledge from destruction -- the survivors on the North American continent are so traumatized that, in their grief and rage, they seek systematically to eliminate learning from their culture.  It is in defiance of this virulent anti-intellectualism that Blessed (later Saint) Liebowitz is martyred.  It is in defiance of later generations of this suspicious rabble that the brothers collect, preserve, reproduce, defend and study all extant texts from Leibowitz's--our--time.

The book's title is A Cantlicle for Leibowitz.  It was a sensation in its time, some 250,000 copies sold, even though it probably isn't a towering, preeminent achievement of world literature (whatever any designation like that might mean, if anything).  It is probably better described as a serious, often humorous, ultimately powerful engagement with a single question: what price security?  The answer to which comes: there is no security, at any price.  Security is unpurchasable.  Humanity is erratic, and the only protection against eternal doom is the ingenious, heroic surrender that is personal humility.

And, of course, adherence to the pre- and proscriptions of Catholic doctrine and dogma; Leibowitz is an explicit, if relatively nuanced and calm, defense of the doggedly objective universe of the Church (or at least that's the reading of the book that most readily suggests itself to me).  Even so, in its careful tracing of the paths of human confusion the book is unmistakably more literary than evangelical.  It may come down on the side of dogma, but it is not dogmatic.

None of which has anything to do with the quote with which I began, and I admit, the quote itself is not central to the themes or events of the book.  It's just something that caught me, which it would have done in any case, but which it did all the more so as the gentleman who recommended the book to me, a Foreign Service Officer from Nina's class of new recruits, is this week bound for Beijing to begin his first assignment.  Such departures well remind us that we're not to be in Virginia forever, or even for very much longer, and that in fact we're unlikely to be in any one spot for very much longer than a few years over the coming decades.  A fact which none of us much minds, but which can easily fall victim to our all-devouring myopia.  And while it's probably an overripe bit of romanticizing to imagine ourselves the noble, wandering objects of the abbot's prayers, it does not seem to me unreasonable to call out for whatever aid the cosmos might be able to provide to us and to our diplomatic colleagues as we trot off, wearing our various suits and badges of uncertainty -- what do we believe, and whom; who is Lord and who is Foe; what is conscience, where home?

In the service of human certainty, let us be unconvinceable.  That we might be free to believe, let us perfect our doubt.

Leibowitz's author, by the way, Walter M. Miller, Jr., shot himself to death in January, 1996, at the age of 72.

This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine

Says Prospero of savage, tragic and ill-used Caliban.  Of course there has grown up around Shakespeare's wizard and slave a rather intemperate notoriety, most notably of the sort that holds up the pair as a model of colonial oppression.  Which is fair enough so far as it goes.  But what to make of this last line Prospero speaks regarding Caliban?  This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.  It's shattering, no?  Absolutely shattering, heart-breaking, pregnant with aching regret and sorrow.  Or so it seems to me.  I can't get it out of my mind.

And to that end, I've been tinkering with the idea of doing a novel-length reinvention of The Tempest (because nobody's ever had that idea before).  With an ambassador, a woman, (thanks Julie Taymor and Helen Mirren for that inspiration: watch here) playing restlessly at the magic and misdirection of international relations, as the title character.  The following paragraph came to me, the opening:

The Ambassador, the Honorable Helena Whitaker (ne Prospejo) is a woman of incantations.  Also of elaborate, loud curses, prognoses, inducements.  Storms of reminiscence.  Finally, of bindings.  Each day, most often straightaway in the morning, in company of her ice water and mysteriously scented underthings, she is forced to acknowledge anew her connection with all the rigors of attachment and corrective orthodoxy that haunt her so, that define her.  She sees, in her inner projections and outlines, a universe of these bindings, damned bindings, bindings both tender and accursed, exquisite, necessary, destitute and unsustainable.


I don't know.  What do you think?