The Texas Dentist and the Mutability of History

In considering questions of philosophy, one must be fully prepared to arrive at no conclusion, to labor to no end. These can be the most edifying questions one can ask, for the nature of things tends to be unfit for a hard and fast answer but it is in this pursuit that we can come to some understanding. When someone says, “good question,” it would be absurd to think that they meant that the question will lead to an easy answer, they mean the opposite.

Often the differences along party lines in American politics are settled, somewhat inconclusively, by calling the issue a “fundamental difference,” or a “philosophical difference.” And it is often the case that conversations concerning the morality of some legislation or the many ambiguities that can arise in politics, are abandoned by stating that the conversation has arrived at an impassable difference in philosophy.

This claim certainly makes sense in certain situations, an evolutionary biologist and a young earth creationist simply will not be able to speak constructively about the diet of the lichen clinging to searing volcanic rock 4.5 billion years ago. An impasse like this has come up in the Texas school system, but it is not confined to pre-history.

The Texas Board of Education recently revamped the social studies curriculum for grades K-12, as the board requires an update every ten years. The controversy surrounding the revisions has been the object of national media attention, because the belief is out there that the textbook contracts in Texas are so large that they influence the content on the national market. Despite consistent media conjecture on the contrary, an executive of the Association of American Publishers, Jay Diskey, called this an “urban myth.”

The revisions are controversial because of the distinctly conservative reading of American history they offer. An annotated list of the proposed additions was released by the Austin based Texas Tribune newspaper. Among the changes made in this round of revision are omissions and insertions that are so departed from an attempt at objective fact that the reader can only laugh at the egregiousness of the revisions, though its truly not funny.

One revision that is an entry into the whole body of them came in section 24, part B, the section on culture. Don McLeroy, a dentist from Bryan, Texas and a vocal member of the State Board of Education (SBOE), moved to cut hip hop from the curriculum and replace it with country and western music. This is not the most serious or, by any means, the most compelling proposed amendment but it offers a glimpse into the nature of the revisions.

McLeroy has been quoted as saying, “[Joseph] McCarthy – he was basically vindicated.” Then, when asked about that quote, he admitted, “I’m not a historian on [McCarthyism]. I’m just a dentist from Bryan.” McLeroy is among a seven member social conservative voting bloc on the fifteen-member board that is deliberating the revisions. This conservative voting bloc makes opposition to their ideals mathematically improbable.

One African Amercian member, Lawrence Allen, had to engage a long debate to veto McLeroy’s suggested deletion of hip hop. McLeroy’s suggestion eventually failed, but he did manage a subtle syntactical victory for this cultural crusade; he put country and western at the end of the sentence, instead of hip hop which had ended the sentence. This by no means relegates hip hop to a lesser position than it was. Also it is largely irrelevant since both genres, being preceded by the phrase “such as,” are only suggestions for teachers to teach or disregard as they see fit.

This almost clandestine attempt to create a history of America with a conservative lean is not something that should be overlooked. These revisions becoming a national issue through textbook dissemination has been called an “urban myth”, and I will assume that it is. Regardless, the education of 4.7 million Texas students, even if inculcated with conservative propaganda in the vast quarantine of that state, is still certainly a national issue.

To better communicate the broader issues raised, here is a laundry list of revisions in no particular order: Emphasizing the role of Christianity in the development of the nation; minimizing the role of feminists, persons of ethnicity and anyone with socialist, Marxist or other non-standard political orientations; dropping Tuskegee airmen commander Benjamin Davis from a list of important WWII leaders; omitting the impact of third party candidates on recent elections; changing “American imperialism” to “American expansionism”; changing “capitalism” to “free enterprise system” and, changing “Soviet expansion” to “Soviet aggression.”

Section 13, part B states that students are expected to, “analyze the causes and effects of changing demographic patterns resulting from legal and illegal immigration to the United States.” The addition, by McLeroy, is the phrase “legal and illegal.” The previous version did not have the phrase “legal and illegal,” and now this section means something considerably different than it had. This is a relevant issue for Texans without a doubt, but is this revision necessary? Does it contribute to an objective understanding of immigration’s impact on America? Is it an overt avenue for jingoistic readings of immigration in America?

This is all rather tragic and in the past. The questions that arise become broader and more intellectually challenging when the implications of this culture war over the minds of the young are analyzed from a remove. The conservative board members largely claim to be balancing out the disproportionate amount of liberal influence in the textbook industry in the past. Is the intellectual community pursuing an agenda of left-wing empowerment or glorification? Or are conservatives anti-intellectualists? A question asked by Bill Ames, a curriculum re-writer appointed by McLeroy, in the title of an article he wrote in November of 2009 wondered, “Have Liberal Activists Hijacked Texas’ Social Studies Curriculum Process?” This is the kind of thinking that has led to the severe polarization and incommunicable split along party lines that has happened to Texas and allowed one side to essentially rewrite American history for the children in its public schools. An article from January, 2010 in The Ellis County Observer, a right-leaning Texas newspaper, stated that,

Social studies is the primary avenue of left-wing propaganda into our

schools. This is where they portray America as an evil country, bowdlerize

our religious heritage and clutter the biographies of George Washington

and Sam Houston with scores of marginal, politically correct token figures

chosen primarily because of their race or gender.

Is the truth aligned with one party line or the other? The social studies books won’t be the last sources the majority of Texas students read about American history. But for some of them, it inevitably will.

This is the national issue: an elected and very powerful board of education is dictating an interpretation of history that is nothing if not highly conservative, and this will be taught to 4.7 million students. Conservatism seems to carry with it a willingness to ignore America transgression, aggression, and mistakes in the interest of emphasizing its importance, beauty, freedom and uniqueness. This is contrary to the purpose of history, which is to learn from the past. The method advocated by Don McLeroy and his collaborators of teaching history uses the past to perpetuate a status quo, to emphasize the nation’s exceptionalism rather than the sometimes horrifying means the nation’s leaders have used to achieve our rather enviable niche in the world. Means for which there exists an expansive historical precedent in the history books McLeroy should probably read before he writes his own. The parts McLeroy would cut out, the feminists, Cesar Chavez, etc., are the parts for which the historical precedent is small. These are the things that make America’s history exceptional in a different sense: as a land of exceptional equality for a number of philosophies and worldviews.

An Article on Death of a Salesman, by Volker Schlondorff

A Death, Darker and Closer: Volker Schlondorff’s Death of a Salesman

The televised production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, directed by Volker Schlondorff, creates an atmosphere that accentuates the frenzy and physicality of Willy Loman’s loosening grip on reality. Schlondorff uses lighting in a theatrical way to indicate the difference between Willy’s idyllic imagined past and the time in which the action of the play takes place. The sets are overtly theatrical and painterly, particularly the city-scenes. This use of “set-like” scenery makes the televised production congruent with the Broadway production from which it was adapted, making the story and actors seem more theatrical, and therefore central to the action. The blocking of the characters is tense and more physically confrontational than Miller’s original blocking specifically indicates. This makes the play frantic and the all of the characters, particularly Willy, when acting in the present, seem harried and inept at responding to their inexplicable victimization by the unseen forces that shape American life: the arbitrary system of winners and losers. The stylistic choices made by Schlondorff make this production replete with violence and fury, one that feels as though it is constantly about to boil over or, as it happens, crash indeterminably into a meaningless ending with a crash of diegetic sound and a fluttering consolation of flute music.

Lighting is one of the most convenient and straightforward tools in a playwright’s repertoire. Seamless lighting transitions from an exposing, clinical white fluorescence, to a soft red-hued glow indicate the onset of one of Willy’s hallucination, an escape to his idealized past. These memories begin to seem cobbled and unreliable interpretations of the past and this lighting technique works well to heighten the illusion, and show the audience the past that Willy sees. The pinkish glow casts perpetual twilight over Willy’s dreamlike memories. The handsome skyline creates a glowing background for Biff and Happy to dart about, professing their endless love for their traveling father, and their loneliness in his absence. The black and white kitchen, however, is lit savagely from above and the action that takes place there is primarily in the misery and confusion of the present. The kitchen, the setting for the most critical confrontations, is drained of all color and the black and white tiles make the characters seem like chess pieces engaged in battle. They maneuver within the rules to accomplish what they feel compelled to; in this room the characters are cold, calculating and, at times, vicious. Schlondorff’s lighting techniques open up the rich narrative, with all its complexities, by indicating moods with shifts in the colors of the scene.

The time the production spends in the city beautifully maintain the theatricality of the production. The windows in Charley’s office are backdrops that create a faintly orange skyline with an imposing industrial complex in the foreground. Howard’s office is similarly artificial, its backdrop windows give the impression of buildings across the street and simulated rain appears to be coming from a garden-hose. The set choices render these two city places demonstrably theatrical. The choice to make Charley and Howard’s respective offices, as well as the restaurant, all seem like stages is a decision to bolster the richness of the lines delivered in these places.

The production opens with cacophonous car sounds and Willy driving through the rain. This immediately seems to exclude the possibility of the production maintaining faithfulness to the Broadway production, but framing only the car in the shot and not showing the car from any appreciable range, Schlondorff keeps a theatrical atmosphere. This is consistently done throughout the production, keeping exterior shots tight, making the props unobtrusive and small, and framing everything with the characters central to the frame. The camera is trained as though it were confined by the same boundaries as the eyes of someone in the audience on Broadway. Both the objective boundaries of a theater and the subjective boundaries created by the compellingly complex characters keep the camera close. And this is to no small effect; the character study is enriched by this proximity, which in many ways enhances the theatrical experience by diminishing further than a theater ever could the distance from audience to actor. The close-ups on Willy and Biff in the final kitchen scene are almost uncomfortably close. The emotion is not conveyed passively – rather, it is thrust upon the viewer, unabated by the distance that can easily move an eye or a mind to stray from the emotions being communicated.

Throughout the play Willy is at the mercy of things he only vaguely grasps. A multitude of questions plague Willy, and they have an increasingly detrimental impact on his psyche because he fails to directly question himself. Instead these crucial questions go unasked, and the resultant confusion borders on insanity. Is Biff throwing his life away out of spite? Is he worth more dead than alive? The most obvious manifestation of this troubling mental deterioration is the confusion of the past and present, calling out to ephemeral visions of his brother, seeing his children at a younger age, and moving freely between New York in the present and New England of two decades prior. This confusion has a draining, and bewildering effect on Willy. Dustin Hoffman uses his body in an interesting way to communicate the bewilderment of Willy. He is shaky and constantly moving. After the confrontation with Bernard in Charley’s office about Biff’s fall from grace, he paces – almost darting – to the door and back to the chair as though he were exercising. His gesticulation is confusing and equally erratic; Bernard extends his hand and Willy grabs his face. Similarly, when Howard is trying to avoid continuing the conversation with Willy and is standing by his office door, Willy communicates with his hands toward the other side of the room as though Howard were sitting at his desk. These are examples of the concretization of the abstract condition of Willy’s psychological degeneration running throughout the play and giving it much of its weight. Willy’s weakening mind is manifested physically in his hands, in his quick turns and pacing, and in his unsure and roaming glances.

Hoffman chooses to emphasize the physicality or violence in Willy Loman. Without the suggestion of Miller’s blocking, Hoffman slaps his knee near the end of Act I when he feels Linda is interrupting. She says, “I’ll make a big breakfast –“ (Act I, 1264), and Hoffman slaps his knee as punctuation to his aggressive response of, “Will you let me finish?” (Act I, 1265). The angle of the camera makes the receiving surface of the slap ambiguous; it could either be Linda’s or Willy’s leg. Willy also gives Linda an assuring or affectionate slap on the face that, given the way they communicate throughout the production, is inappropriately aggressive. He does the same thing to Biff at the restaurant in a very tense moment. Schlondorff puts the camera tightly on Biff’s face, and, in blocking not included in the text, shows him push strongly against Willy’s fist as Willy ridicules Biff. This scene is one of the most brilliant additions to the text. Making physical the issues that exist between Biff and Willy, Hoffman’s small fist on the rather pronounced (and magnified) chin of Malkovich intensifies the emotional and mental conflict that has already ripened at this point in the production. The fist to Biff’s face is the last straw for Biff; the brutal and exasperated father unable to communicate any longer must use his fist to punctuate his sentiment. The instances of Willy being physically violent are all markedly ineffectual in Schlondorff’s production. He is, as Willy confesses to Linda near the beginning of the production, a short man. At one point Biff shoves Willy to the floor and he is seen looking up from the ground terrified, defeated.

One other type of violence is introduced with Hoffman’s portrayal: a sexual violence. Willy gropes Linda’s breast when he tells her, “You’re my foundation” (Act I, 138). He also grabs the breast of Jenny, Charley’s secretary. Both of these sexually aggressive gestures are not written in the original text, but develop a different sense of Willy. The gestures not only expand upon the desperation, but here they develop Willy into a lewd and absurd man who asserts his dominion over women as callously as Happy. This 1984 adaptation perhaps wanted to develop Willy’s misogyny in order to bring a relevant reason for the audience to despise Willy. This understandable contempt for the man eventually blossoms into the sympathy the audience feels by the end of the production. This development of audience emotions is an effective way to make drama profound, actively altering perceptions throughout the course of the production. All of Schlondorff’s production decisions intensify the darkness, the confusion and ineffable sense of defeat that comes to a man like Willy, a dreamer, when he realizes (or fails to realize) illusion is all he has left. He dreamed the wrong dreams and ascribed to the wrong ideals, and so the audience’s contempt is confused and eventually replaced with a more emotionally complex perception of Willy, and a more complex and rewarding understanding of a very provocative piece of art.

Works Cited

Death of a Salesman. Dir. Volker Schlondorff. Perf. Dustin Hoffman, Kate Reid,

John Malkovich, and Stephen Lang. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2002.

DVD.

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. Norton Anthology of Drama. Ed. Gainer, Garner,

Puncher. New York: Norton, 2009, 759 – 824.

The Poetry of Larry Levis

Here is an article I wrote on Elegy, a book of poetry by Larry Levis.

The Brow of the Horse and the Tract House

jonathan phillips

Elegy, a posthumously published book of poetry by Larry Levis, uses animal imagery to write about the ineffable beauty and indifference of the world – and the people within it. Horses in particular appear throughout Elegy, and these horses bring an incomparable psychic weight into the poems in which they appear. A nameless and clandestine import belies the simplicity of their roles and the humor of their names. Theirs is an import that begs to be deciphered. Still and indifferent, incapable of treachery or reason, the animal imagery becomes emblematic of the inexpressible beauty of the natural world and the inexpressible beauty of the human world. The animal image is also a vehicle through which Levis can communicate the things that make the poet feel compelled to remain mute, those slow developments or millions of movements – or the instant when a man is taken by a singularity of vision so complete that he becomes like the horse as it drinks deeply from the trough. The poet occupies and represents the animal in order to achieve the muteness of the animal, the contemplative remove that seems to grace the horse’s brow.

In Levis’ essay, “Some Notes On The Gazer Within,” there is a section entitled “Poetry and Animal Indifference” in which he constructs an explanation of the impetus to include animals in poetry, and the roles animals can play in poetry. He suggests here that the animal is representative of the muteness of the poet, “for what is deepest and sometimes most antisocial in the poet’s nature” (76). Antisocial is an interesting way to think about the animals represented in Elegy, they are the often represented as a force that is contrary to human emotions or behavior, and exist in another world. Horses are “incapable of treachery” in one sense and “worthless” in another. Levis uses animals as distinct from what would largely seem to be the poet’s preoccupations, emotions, actions, words; those things that separate man from the animals. However, humanity largely remains the subject of the poems. The poems are modified by the presence of animals that are separate and representative of the position of the author. For the kulak factory worker in “Anastasia and Sandman,” the horse is real, in fact it is, “More real than any angel,” this claim being made with the presence of an angel in the poem adds to the tension of the claim. Animals are the all-encompassing signifier of time immemorial, and the indifference and unwavering forward march of time, but they also represent some permanence. The opossum in “The Oldest Living Thing in LA,” had “Teeth that went all the way back beyond / The flames of Troy and Carthage.” The animals are the things that defy language, “the slow uninterrupted evolution of the horse” is a subject for pure contemplation and is not something Levis wants to subject to poetics or, God help us, a metaphor – they transcend language. Animals also, as in the example with the kulak, have a concrete presence in the world. They are the potential fodder for the ossuary and the potential meat for a starving man – something no angel and no poem can offer.

The tension is that the poet wants to express this muteness through words, words which are by nature quite noisy. Levis writes, “The Poet wants to speak of, or to, or through, what is essentially so other that it cannot speak” (76). This tension allows for the weight of the mere placement of the animal in the poem, which is consistently done in a detached and observational way. These animals carry with them an inherent calm that the reader must know, before embarking on the poem, is beautiful. This is not problematic, and it does not subtract from the impact of the poem because, as Levis would probably argue, this is a constitutional sensibility. At the beginning of “Anastasia and Sandman” Levis writes,

The brow of a horse in that moment when

The horse is drinking water so deeply from a trough

It seems to inhale the water, is holy.

I refuse to explain.

And indeed he doesn’t need to explain, this an intuitive knowledge of the human psyche, the unconditional and almost religious admiration for the indifference of the animal. I suppose if this is not a condition that can be considered universal among men, then those for whom this does not apply are not the type to find Elegy a gratifying read. Because, for the most part, a reverence for the animal’s stillness and its indifference, is a necessary pre-condition to absorb the full weight of the majority of the poems.

The deep image poets often used animal imagery to communicate ideas that words were insufficient to communicate. James Wright, one the seminal poets of the deep image movement, wrote in his poem “A Blessing” after having encountered two ponies in a field at night that, “They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. / There is no loneliness like theirs.” This is a beautiful summation of the paradox of the horse’s beauty, the incomprehensibility of their simultaneous capacity for love, and the indescribable condition of loneliness that they experience. Theirs is a loneliness that can only be described by Wright as the ultimate loneliness, the loneliness of the mute. Levis uses the mystery of the animal and its emotional capacity and seeming lack of emotion to speak of the nature of people. The young Marxist stable boy in “Elegy With an Angel at Its Gate” is paralleled with the horse in their common indifference. Johnny Dominguez in “Photograph: Migrant Worker, Parlier, California, 1967” possesses this animal indifference and the grace and contradiction that accompanies it, as he reminds us that he is not “to be used as an example of anything… not even… Johnny Dominguez.” Levis writes of, “The hard, pure, furiously indifferent faces of Thieves” in “The Thief in the Painting.” These instances operate to relieve some of the tension between the muteness of animals and the volume of the poet, and they also ground the poems in a reality that is more observable, more effable. The Marxist boy, Johnny Dominguez and the thieves all have a singularity of purpose or a vision, unwavering, of the things that need to be done. As Levis quotes Keats in his essay, “the Creature hath a purpose and his eyes are bright with it” (76). This is the same directness of the horse found this time in the actions and stillness of men.

Another part of the tension and the impetus for the inclusion of this imagery is that this is not part of Levis’ own life – he is the academic among the watered lawns of tract houses, the comfort of which he can neither feel comfortable in nor can he honestly lament without seeming ungrateful or like that uninteresting grouch, the Luddite. Traces of a pastoralist idealism surface in his essays, but it is problematic as subject matter for poetry, yet it is included in a somewhat more oblique fashion: the holiness of the horse, the holiness of the man with a purpose of complete determination.

The most fascinating part of the book, in terms of the issues surrounding horses, comes in the poem “Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand.” Here Levis treats some of the aforementioned issues directly. One of the horses, after the eloquent and surreal images of both, is said to have to liked to watch the traffic pass, “as if it were a thing / Of great interest to him.” Here he introduces the possibility of thought in the horse, as is often evident on an animal’s face, but considers it a foolish notion. Man yearns to understand the horse, and can do so only by thought, which is a trait that immediately excludes the horse, thus the horse remains a mystery because the act of thinking itself enters into a psychic space of which the horse is fundamentally not a participant. He goes on in that same poem to see the horses nudging a sheet of ice on their trough and looking at it, “as if [the horses] were capable of wonder or bewilderment. / They were worthless.” This view, coming late in the book and embodying a character who winds up alone in an empty race-track, is a type of summation of the tension or paradox of animal indifference. This indifference is beautiful, but what is it other than pure ignorance? It is not answerable, they are completely apart from the world of thought; “in the moonlight they were other worlds.”

So what, in the end, can be made of these recurring and indifferent animals throughout this imaginative, beautiful book? The animals operate as that which they signify for Levis, they take the poems and imbue them, by the mere force of their presence, with the inherent mystery and the disappearing landscape. He writes in “Poetry and Animal Indifference” that when the animal is in the poem, the poem benefits from, “the recovery of the landscape. It is no longer a world without imagination, or a world of tract housing beyond time” (76). In Elegy he refers to tract homes as “speechless,” and though horses are speechless too, the muteness they exist within has been distilled throughout the “uninterrupted evolution of the horse.” The horse has grown a muteness so complete that it is, for Levis, a signifier of the indifference that is not ignorance, but is a part of the timeless and ineffable beauty of the natural world. Because the animal is incompatible with an America of tract houses and speechless vinyl siding, the indifference of the animal is the only escape from the unholy life of the suburbs, where nothing is truly revered, where our words linger and pool in perfect irreverence, where we reason and lie and scream and weep. In the poem “Outside Fargo, North Dakota,” James Wright wrote, “Beyond town, three heavy white horses / Wade all the way to their shoulders / In a silo shadow.” It is this animal stillness, this animal indifference that preoccupies both of these poets. To communicate that muteness is to subvert, for an instant, the deception of words when they can suffocate thought or parade falsehoods as truth. The poems in Elegy manage to capture the muteness and composed stillness of horses even in a flurry of words.