Quest Magazine

Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography

By David S. Reynolds
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. Hardcover, xii + 671 pages.

Among the most enlightening and engaging biographies describing the Brooklyn poet Walt Whitman is David Reynolds's Walt Whitman's America. In it, he penetrates the psychological landscape within the poet's personality and reconstructs Whitman's intellectual world. In this biography describing nineteenth-century America and the author of Leaves of Grass, Reynolds greatly enriches American intellectual history.

-DANIEL ROSS CHANDLER

March/April 1999

 Emerson among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait

By Carlos Baker. New York: Viking, 1996. Paperback, xv + 608 pages.

Emerson: The Mind on Fire.

By Robert D. Rlchardson, Jr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Paperback, xiii + 671 pages.

Two literary giants whose writings enrich American culture live and breathe in these biographies that place the authors within their contexts and establish them properly in American intellectual history.

Princeton University's Carlos Baker, the mentor of several successive student generations who became remarkable scholars, crowned his career with this study in which he pictures nineteenth-century Concord, Massachusetts, as a creative Mecca that fostered a congenial, colorful community composed of unconventional intellectuals. Presenting Emerson as the preeminent resident of Concord, Baker treats such other personalities as Emerson's Aunt Mary Moody, his wife Lidian, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Jones Very, William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and John Brown.

Robert Richardson's Emerson: The Mind on Fire supplements his Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. The biographer pictures Emerson as student, Harvard Divinity School theologian, mystic, nature lover, independent scholar, Transcendentalist philosopher, passionate liver championing intellectual freedom, and a preeminent contributor to the nation's literature and culture. He presents Emerson as a thinker with an unfathomed emotional depth and as a mystic pulsating with enormous intellectual intensity.

-DANIEL ROSS CHANDLER

March/April 1999

The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image

By Leonard Shlain
New York: Viking, 1998. Hardback, xvi + 464 pages.

History, Henry Ford testified in a libel suit against the Chicago Tribune, is bunk. Historians, both professional and amateur, keep trying to prove that the father of the Model T was wrong, their favorite defense being the discovery of causal patterns in historical events. Leonard Shlain, a professional surgeon and amateur historian, is a counsel for the defense.

His brief, The Alphabet versus the Goddess, was bred by Marshall McLuhan out of Marija Gimbutas. A generation ago, McLuhan proposed that the way we say things is actually more important than what we say: the medium is the message. The "same" information conveyed in different ways is in fact different information, for the manner and style of delivery change the import of the information. Within the past" decade, Gimbutas's work has been invoked in support of a new view of prehistoric Europe as a peaceful society devoted to Mother-Goddess worship before the rowdy Father-God-honoring Indo-Europeans swooped down on them and made a mess of things.

Shlain's take on these two ideas focuses on the effect of the development of writing, especially the alphabet. He sees the alphabet as having a powerful influence on how literate people view the world, specifically in promoting left-brain, male orientation over right-brain, feminine perceptions and responses. Although Shlain tries to give the alphabetical devil its due by acknowledging that literacy has its blessings, the tenor of his work is otherwise: the alphabet, by promoting unbalanced male aggressiveness in human behavior, has been the great villain of history through promoting male chauvinism in Europe and other unfortunately literate lands.

Here are some statements of the thesis: "Every society that has acquired alphabet literacy has become violently self-destructive a short time afterward" (77). "A culture's first contact with the alphabet drives it mad. Hunter-killer values thrust to the fore, and nationalism, imperialism, and bloody religious revolution follow" (419).

This alphabetical thesis is set in the context of a kind of Social Darwinism. The story is that, when our hominid ancestors came down from the trees, a variety of anatomical changes evolved, one of whose consequences was to put females at a disadvantage in getting food and making them dependent on the largesse of predatory males, who used their new dominance to their own advantage in breeding. From there it was all downhill. The eventual development of the alphabet was the nail in the coffin of arboreal Eden.

This thesis depends on a series of correspondences. On the one hand, we have left-brain dominance, masculinity, linearity, aggressiveness, alphabetical writing, and so on. On the other hand, we have right-brain dominance, femininity, spatial relations, cooperation, pictorial representation, and so on. The thesis posits that the development of alphabetical writing changed the structure of the brain and accentuated all the left-brain functions. So the decline of human history and what's wrong with the world are due to males and the alphabet. These correspondences form a neat set for which, however, evidence is either thin or nonexistent.

In addition, there is a little problem. The supposedly masculine feature of linearity that Shlain sees in the alphabet is really secondary in writing, being derived from spoken language, which is distinctly linear as well as hierarchical. Sounds come one after another in time, a feature imitated in writing by having letters come one after another in space. Sounds make lip words, which make up sentences, which make up discourses-a distinctly hierarchical structure, imitated in writing. If there is a villain here, it is speech. In fact, a case can be made for speech being more left-brain and masculine-like than written language. Speech happens in time, whereas writing is located in right-brain space. Speech is more abstract than writing, for it is wave impulses in the air, whereas writing is solid material right-brain stuff. Speech is wholly nonpictorial, whereas writing has right-brain pictorial or design potentials, such as Islamic calligraphy or concrete poetry (in which the words of a poem are arranged in the shape of an object or pattern).

If the brain was modified in a masculine, linear way, that modification must have occurred when language evolved, very long before alphabetical or any other writing developed. Hence in our Eden we would have been not just illiterate, but dumb.

The factual errors in the book would take more space to detail than is worth devoting to their listing. A couple of examples must suffice. Purdah (the segregation of women) is said to be a Hindu practice (159); the word is Hindi, but the practice is primarily Muslim. The Aryan invaders are said to have found Sanskrit in India (161)j Sanskrit was the language of the invading Aryans, being sister to the Iranian languages and first cousin to Greek, Latin, and English. The ranks of the Buddha's disciples are said to have excluded women (174); women are reported in Buddhist writings to have been followers of the Buddha during his lifetime.

This effort at rewriting history to show that our ills are the result of male aggression and the alphabet may be politically correct, but it is doctrinaire rather than factual. It proves that Henry Ford was right. History is bunk. But herstory like this is even greater bunkom.

-JOHN ALGEO

March/April 1999

The Best Guide to Meditation

 By Victor N. Davich
Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 1998. Paperback, xxi + 350 pages

Twenty-Five Doors to Meditation: A Handbook for Entering Samadhi

By William Bodri and Lee Shu·Mei
York Beach, ME: Weiser, 1998. Paperback, xxii + 252 pages.

I am biased. I believe that one's time is far better spent in meditation than in accumulating more information about meditation. For the seasoned practitioner who already has chosen a meditative path, reading about all the other options often brings confusion. And for the beginner, all that is required is a one-liner- "Sit, follow your breath, and let's talk again in a year."

So I am not certain who the appropriate audience is for these two new additions to the meditative canon. The Best Guide to Meditation is packaged like a travel guide and indeed takes the reader around the world in such a comprehensive account of meditative traditions that one is left exhausted and overwhelmed. Do we really need to confuse beginning meditators with detailed instructions of the Namibian Bone Meditation, which involves the use of six chicken bones, four stones, and two pieces of tree bark as tools for oracular divination? This from the same author Victor Davich-who wisely states repeatedly in the opening chapters that "the only way to really understand meditation is to meditate" and then adequately provides the very basic instructions required to begin.

The back cover of the Guide is designed to attract readers who I suspect aren't reading this issue of Quest. "Who meditates .. aside from Deepak Chopra, the Dalai Lama and The Beatles? Well, Goldie Hawn… and Howard Stern to name a few." I'm not certain who would be grabbed by such an approach, but it represents a marketing mentality that is attempting to "sell" meditation to the masses. In itself, this is not an ignoble goal. But it gives me the uneasy feeling that the already saturated spiritual supermarket in America is about to become a department store. "Want instant gratification?" the cover blurb asks and answers, "Go directly to chapter 2 and you will start meditating immediately!" As if fast-food motivations- getting what you crave, NOW! -can be applied to meditation, which is a process of letting go of all craving.

But to the author's credit, an unsuspecting reader could randomly flip open the Guide almost anywhere and stumble onto a life-changing idea because virtually all of the great teachings of the world's religions are in there, somewhere. Davich succeeds in providing a thorough, albeit oversimplified, overview of human spiritual traditions and practices, anyone of which pursued with single-minded intention would most certainly yield wonderful fruits. But again, the very structure and vast range of the Guide works against the one-pointed, simple approach necessary for the beginner to cultivate a useful meditation practice.

Twenty-Five Doors to Meditation is a more sophisticated work and derives from a Buddhist Sutra in which twenty-five students respond to the Buddha's request to describe the various "dharma doors" they had used to attain samadhi. Each chapter of the book presents a fairly brief introduction to a practice that is presumably derived from this sutra, although the correlation isn't always clear.

The practices described range from the familiar ones of mindfulness meditations, pranayama, bhakti yoga, and prayer, but also include more obscure approaches including the "Zhunti, Vairocana and Amitofo" mantras, and my personal favorite, the "Dazzling White Skeleton Contemplation," in which "you must imagine you are dead and that all your skin and internal organs soften and putrefy. Using an imaginary knife, you cut up your dead body and offer all your organs, skin, flesh and blood to all the demons and ghosts to eat and drink."

As a "Handbook for Entering Samadhi," as the subtitle asserts, everything one needs is included. Someone committing themselves to any one of these twenty-five dharma doors would find themselves on a legitimate and potentially enlightening spiritual path. But for most of us, particularly beginners, it only takes two words, not two books, to provide all the meditation guidance we need: "Just sit."

-ELIEZER SOBEL

March/April 1999