Donald S. Lopez, Jr.'s "Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol": Book Review

Look around an Eastern-themed gift shop or Asian-inspired garden and you may see a benevolent, rotund and inevitably smiling Buddha. Imported into Western culture, the familiar icon enters popular culture as a good luck symbol and a self-satisfied sage. What today's viewers of such images forget is that, less than two centuries ago, whatever was known or rumored about this wisdom teacher emanated more often from demonic or pagan connotations, rather than cheerful or chubby depictions.

This shift in representation has taken nearly two thousand years to spread, far from the homeland near the Himalayan foothills and Indian plains of the historical Buddha. An expert scholar on Buddhist culture at the University of Michigan provides readers with a compendium excerpting over eighty accounts of what the Buddha meant to the forebears of Christians (and, now and then, Muslims and Jews) who attempted to fit this acclaimed personage into their worldviews. Donald S. Lopez, Jr.'s {Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol: An Anthology of Early European Portrayals of the Buddha} takes up the conversion of the Buddha "from stone to flesh." That is, the statues and the portraits of this venerable personage filtered into the imagination of travelers and scholars. They might be mystified or terrified of what they heard or guessed about this fabled or feared entity, and they regarded him or it with "profound suspicion." Simply put, until 1801, the Buddha was not recognized as the founder of what the West invented as Buddhism. For previous tale-tellers, he was known only as an idol.

Lopez records over three hundred names for the Buddha between 200 and 1850. The litany stretches back to Clement of Alexandria around that first date. This Church Father distinguishes the Hindu Brahmin priests from non-Hindu followers of the "Boutta, whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to divine honours." Not bad for the first attempt at defining the change from Gautama to Sakyamuni, from a pampered prince to a wise deity bestowing favors on his worshipers.

The professor's introduction sums up the intricate patterns of information about the Buddha as they were transmitted from the Indian subcontinent into the Middle East and across the many Christian and Islamic empires. Tellingly, for nearly a millennium, few reports of the Buddha found their way west. Marco Polo's celebrated chronicle ranks sixth among eighty-odd entries, for instance. After this report, however, versions multiplied along the trade routes set up by Christian missionaries and traders with China. Emissaries at the Great Khan's court linked with Armenian, Persian and papal contacts visiting Mongol rulers. These East-West ties tightened in the 1600s after the Reformation.

Among these, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci epitomizes the ambition of the Catholic Church to win over the Chinese. Fr. Ricci also speaks for the dismissal of the Buddhist teachings brought to China from India as a "disaster." Neither a "genuine record of the history of this religion" nor "any real principle upon which one can rely" exists within this faith. For it "lacks the arts of civilization and has no standards of moral conduct to bequeath to posterity." Ricci credits the lack of knowledge of Buddhism abroad with a rationale for denigrating its doctrines. The Jesuits may have adapted Chinese customs as their own to win over the rulers, but they persisted, as with Ippolito Desideri in Tibet, to oppose Buddhism

Other Westerners added their own reactions. These tended to be negative. They offered many adaptations of the Buddha, often without recognizing the true roots of the idol in a historical figure. Yet, Lopez cautions, no single Buddha biography is accepted across Asia. No canonical text exists.

Rather than posit a true Asian vs. false Western dichotomy, Lopez asks "whether the Buddha, then and now, here and there, is the product of a more complex and interesting process of influence." Therefore, Lopez allows many texts to nestle and jostle against each other, refusing to rate them. This approach fits into Lopez' career, spent producing learned works demystifying Buddhist tropes. While the collection of polyglot voices may daunt, he offers cogent introductions for each diverse inclusion.

For then as now, knowledge of languages varied. Motivations multiplied. Conversion of the "pagans" led to negative attitudes, such as Ricci articulates. Catholics encountering monasteries eerily like their own recoiled as if they walked into the haunts of devils. Gradually, spurred by archaeological, linguistic and military exponents, interest in what became defined as Buddhism supplanted a terror of its teachings. Ethnographic enthusiasm grew in the 1700s and 1800s. This anthology concludes, fittingly, with the 1844 monograph of Eugène Burnouf. This scholar of Old Persian and Sanskrit pioneered the presentation of a human Buddha, rather than a stone idol. And from that juncture, Western sympathy began for the founding figure of a world religion and/or an appealing philosophy.

"The myriad idols coalesced into a single figure, who then became a historical figure, a founder of a religion, and a superstition became a philosophy." So Lopez sums up the transformation. Textually-based Buddhism remains dominant in the West, parallel to the quest in the 19th century for an historical Jesus. Whether such pursuits have resulted in reform or regression is left up to the adept. (Spectrum Culture 4/4/17; Amazon US with slight changes 4/20/17)

"Silence": Film Review

Back in the early '80s, I bought Shusaku Endo's novel Sílence. Finally issued in paperback, and with me enrolled at a Jesuit university, I rushed to savor it. A harrowing novel (see my linked review), this angered at least on Amazon the likes of sensitive Catholics unable to accept that a priest under pressure after witnessing the torture and death of others who died for one's presence might succumb.

The end of that same decade, Martin Scorsese read it. It was recommended by New York's Episcopal bishop in the wake of the controversy over his adaptation of another controversial work, The Last Temptation of Christ. Marty vowed to make it a movie, if he could figure out how to capture its hold.

He did, and as the scholar of American Catholicism Paul Elie's The Passion of Martin Scorsese in The New York Times Magazine observes: the book and the film join well. For the subject "locates, in the missionary past, so many of the religious matters that vex us in the postsecular present — the claims to universal truths in diverse societies, the conflict between a profession of faith and the expression of it, and the seeming silence of God while believers are drawn into violence on his behalf." Elie locates in the filmmaker's oeuvre a pursuit of the "poisoned arrow of religious conflict" and poison indeed surfaces in the film. I saw it at a premiere in Westwood, a block from the bookstore where I found the novel decades ago. The excitement of seeing this in the Regency, a cavernous 1931 Art Deco palace filled with maybe a thousand people, was palpable, for the director would be there for a panel afterwards. But I was unsure if many there knew what a story they'd face.

Face, as the image of Christ, in the film as Scorsese explained taken from El Greco --for the original work's use of Piero della Francesca did not transfer to the big screen when tested-- confides a human trust in its viewer, that He would accompany its beholder through whatever moral perils lay ahead. The divinity of Jesus is of course in Christian orthodoxy inseparable from his humanity, but for the director, the eyes had it. They convey the distance and the direction proper to a bold Jesuit follower.

The film itself, 2:40, unfolded slowly. It was difficult for me to gain full immersion as a woman two seats down connected as she proclaimed to the producer checked her smartphone regularly, and a man behind me kept chuckling at dramatic moments perhaps taken by the nervous or shallow as comedy. There is a bit of levity, in the tragic Judas-figure of Kichijiro keeps popping up at tense moments begging for the protagonist Fr. Sebastian Rodrigues' confession, Yet that moved me, not to laughter, but to their poignant bond, which gains significance as the narrative turns to the priest's struggles.

That Japanese convert-traitor asks where is the place for a weak man in this world. A common plaint. Scorsese's vision raises up Rodrigues as an alter Christus in Passion Play form, entering twice cities on a donkey while being pelted with stones and abuse. I suppose this fits, on the other hand, any priest. Yet the acting skills and the power of the necessarily didactic script by Jay Cocks and Scorsese project Endo's investigation well. As a child he was baptized, and he questioned here and in The Samurai (set among Franciscans of the Mexican conquest) the ability of a foreign people to truly give in to an invader, or a promise of liberation for the poor within a peaceful and carefree paradise, when the basic tenets of this faith were garbled, as the "Son of God" comes rendered from their native Sun.

As Rodrigues replies, that land is poisoned. Nothing can grow there, the Japanese powers reason, as all rots in this island swamp. The tension between apostasy and martyrdom, fidelity and surrender tightens the energy. Early on, all is painterly fog in the cold and chilly islands where the renegade Christians have gone underground as relentless crackdowns have reduced the 300,000-strong community in the wake of St. Francis Xavier to a remnant, hunted down and all burnt or drowned.

Later, in Nagasaki, clarity returns, amidst the regimented architecture, ranks, and sumptuary distinctions. Rodrigues' predecessor, Ferrara, speaks eloquently for moral compromise, to spare pain. As their translator adds, no man should take away another's spirit. I watched this with engagement. I presume it may not have swayed all (my wife advised cutting twenty minutes and squirmed at the debates I found in jesuitical tutelage as fascinating and stimulating). But as Scorsese mentioned in the after-film panel (joined by production designer Dante Ferretti, actors Liam Neeson, Adam Driver, Andrew Garfield, Issei Ogata, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and producer Irwin Winkler--and a fawning host who called the director "Maestro"), he hoped the film would bring "peace of mind."

I second his ambition. Elie's skillful article locates the film within the inculturation aims of imperialism and religious missions. (But he overlooks as do many that the novel was translated by a Belfast Jesuit, Fr. William Johnston, who taught at Sophia University run by the Society in Tokyo, and who himself embraced Zen.) Do we insist the newcomers to a practice go over to the practices of the faith? Or as the Jesuits did in China, do we accommodate the faith to indigenous folkways and traditions? St. Boniface, when he preached to the Frisians in the 8th century, was told he should not destroy the temples and groves, but make them into centers of worship and pilgrimage for a new generation. Clever, as this supplants rather than terminates the sacred connection. But the fervent and fundamentalists may refuse compromise, and thus this challenging film and novel remain relevant.

As Pope Francis, the first Jesuit installed in the Vatican as such, told Scorsese on the film's first showing in Rome, may the film bear much fruit. That's a message all of us can applaud, this season.

Industry of death

When I was in college, I showed my dad an op-ed column in the L.A. Times. Our cardinal, Timothy Manning, whom I had shaken hands with and exchanged cordialities at my high school graduation, was a soft-spoken emigrant from County Cork. But his editorial castigated, in Reagan's first term, the "industry of death" (or terms like that) which profited off of a Cold or hot war, and which employed hundreds of thousands in the "defense industry" that in that time still dominated much of the regional economy in aerospace and in manufacturing.

My blue-collar, Reagan Democrat dad responded evenly but with a touch of bitterness: those priests never had to support a family with a job. He reminded me, the know-it-all at the Jesuit university that, although full of working-class undergrads (and many middle-class, true), we were removed from the realities of the economy. My dad had worked at many tool-and-die machine shops, many factories, for decades in this industry.

So, when I share such citations from a clergy with whom I otherwise often disagree, what's the point? I have been convinced that war is not the answer since my teens. Somehow, exposure to St. Francis, to Thomas Merton, to a hint of the Catholic Worker movement, drew me away from my childhood fascination with conflict, one so strong it unsettled a second-grade teacher. At the height of the Vietnam War, I kept changing every creative writing opportunity into a little guy's fiery combat tale.

I was the first year to have to register for the Selective Service imposed by Jimmy Carter late in his term. Those males turning 18 had to sign up at the Post Office on a small card, I recall. The Persian Gulf Doctrine mandated a ready force of young men on call. Protecting oil, as we have seen for decades since, became in the wake of OPEC and the embargoes of the Seventies today's key priority.

So, I also sent a letter to Pax Christi in Boston. I went on record as a conscientious objector to such war. Back then, at least then I could admit some use in serving to help people even in the military in a non-combat capacity, but my preference, not that the government cared, was to not support the service, but to do whatever duty I had to do if required in a domestic role, not furthering conflict.

Now I am not sure about that. Finding out in '07 about my murdered Fenian great-grandfather threw me for a loop, given my seemingly inherited bent against the Butcher's Apron and the Crown. It made me wonder if I, the boy with the crayons drawing tanks and fire and soldiers, revealed a violent gene. Or maybe I carry an idealistic one, romantic and impractical, that ordinary people deserve control.

The War of Independence left Ireland a partitioned nation and sparked civil war, and long decades of hatred and political rancor. The guerrillas in the Six Counties did not wrench that province away from Britain. Thousands died, many more wounded in the soul or in the body. Still, as with some revolutions, I can't tell if a peaceful Irish movement against the Empire might have succeeded.

If asked now by my nation, with the anarchist leanings I have discovered I had formulated without knowing earlier in my life those definitions, I'd opt out from aiding war. I have written about J.F. Powers, who was sent to prison for refusing to buy war bonds in WWII, and I have learned recently about those who turned away from even the "good war"; my father mused one day to me--perhaps after reflecting on the Gold Star flag hung in my mother's house for the death of her only sibling, my namesake Uncle Jack, on the shores of Saipan--that nobody really ever won a war. I turn away more than ever from slogans, jingoism, and ribbons. So, I post this with another Jesuit's chastisement, on another Memorial Day. My students from Iraq and Afghanistan still return, still wounded, if hidden.

Holy Anger

I opened FB today to find a headline from Mother Jones: "Bernie Sanders goes biblical on income inequality." The elderly Jewish socialist senator from Vermont hangs with the Democrats mostly, sure. But he critiques Obama, Hillary, and his usual allies as too soft on bankers, and too craven to the rich who control more and more of our present fealty and who limit many of our future prospects.

He tells Josh Harkinson, when asked why we should care: "I think this goes back to the Bible. There is something immoral when so few have so much and so many have so little. I don't come to San Francisco very often, but we've driven around the city and seen people sleeping out on the streets. In my state, you've got people working 40, 50 hours a week and going to emergency food shelves because they don't earn enough money to feed their families adequately. You have millions of young people graduating college deeply in debt. They can't get their lives started, can't get married. So I think the issue of income and wealth inequality is in fact a moral issue." He adds that with the losses since my childhood in unions, cheap college tuition, wage equality, and stable employment, that "It's not a question of have we lost the will; it's that the billionaire class is much more aggressive now than it used to be." So, as I have watched during my adult life and my own career, "in the last 35 or 40 years, there has been an increasingly aggressive effort on the part of the top 1 percent to take it all."

I blogged regarding another resister, Franciscan friar Fr. Louis Vitale, six years ago about Passover, peacemaking and identity. I even wrote the priest, sending him a printout of my thoughts, but I never received a reply. My wife remarked: "Maybe he's in jail." For all the careful diplomacy the new Pope Francis has shown, at least he spent a Holy Thursday washing the feet of inmates in a Roman prison.

How social protest gets allied with or against the religious majority, or is it now a minority, rouses us. There's a lot of contention about the First Amendment, as what in the North of Ireland in a similar situation called the "gay cake debate" gets repeated here in Indiana. I remain mystified why the boycotts accelerated against the Hoosiers when 19 states preceded theirs in protecting businesses to not serve those who the proprietors claimed violated their freedom of belief. Regardless, against this,  progressives fought back and denigrated, trolled, and have shut down already offending enterprises.

Jay Michaelson, a Jewish Buddhist gay rights lawyer-activist weighs in: "On the LGBT side, it’s time to stop calling religious people bigots and homophobes. I oppose the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby, with every fiber of my ideological being. But there is still an enormous gulf between socially conservative believers and homophobic thugs. We need to take these beliefs seriously.

On the conservative side, it’s time to recognize that the vast majority of Americans — three- quarters, according to polls — believe it is wrong to discriminate against gay people. The people have spoken, the courts have (mostly) spoken, and this is the law of the land." As often, he offers a sensible view.

I'm not here to rant on. I've written about my own beliefs and how they shift often. It's easy to take potshots at organizations promising us pie in the sky and fewer worries here, as long as we sign on. I supported last year some entities from within the Catholic Church who do good works, and who need more sponsorship than the Jesuits, Franciscans, or government grants can support. Maybe some see me as hypocritical for that, but firsthand I have witnessed and benefited from their outreach in my own coming of age, so why not pay back a bit to those who gave their lives to help youths like me?

I realize the difficulty as the few friars become a global order, or the reforming clerics turn the pope's  trusted operatives. Yet, today many strive to take in whomever needs a boost, among the poor, and they ask for no surrender of one's mind or identity. However, the bad press generated by others duping the needy in terms of enlightenment and salvation rouses me to what my dad said, in the context of Jesus driving out the moneychangers, as "holy anger." But the continued tension between institutions bent on profit, as the Alex Gibney documentary based on Lawrence Wright's study of my hometown's biggest success story making a concocted "religion" tax-exempt shows, will perpetuate itself no matter if it's the LDS 180 years ago, or the past 60 years creating a relentlessly celebrity-craven and prison-camp supported "church." Lynne Stuart Parramore at Salon concludes: "even if we got rid of" that offender, "somewhere, out there in America, is another young hustler searching for meaning and money. Someone with charisma, stratospheric ambition and a few screws loose. As surely as the sun rises, her religion is just now slouching toward Hollywood waiting to be born."

Cúiseanna fíu

Ar feadh an bhliain seo caite, d'iarr Léna orm a tabhairt airgead eigin do charthanacht. Thúg muid chuid gach airgead. Roghnaigh muid chartanachtaí éagsulaí ar ár chuid féin.

Beidh mé líosta mó chuid féin. Ar dtús, chuimneagh mé faoi an Lakota Scoil Scamall Dearg ina hÁirinthe Iomaire Péine i nDakota Thuas. Léigh mé h-aiste ina hAmannaí Nua-Eabhrac leis mholadh acu le hagaidh a n-oibreachaí maith ag búnadh leis hÍosanachaí--chomh maith le Tionscail Bhuacaill Baile. Tá sé níos áitiúíl mo bhaile féin, i ndáiríre.

Nuair bhí mé óg, bhí maith liom ag dul ar an Leabharlann Huntington in aice leis mo bhaile. Bhí amanna go leor ag foghlaim agus ag léamh ansin, chomh buachaill fadó agus scólaire le déanaí. Is mian liom ag íoc ar ais siad.

Tá suim agam leis Tibéad ó mó óige. Mar sin, chuir mé airgead do Shábhail Tibéad. Ach, thúg siad suim go leor chun airgead a bháiliú; thabharfaidh mé go Tibet Fund an bliain seo.

Is cuimhne liom Proinsiasaigh i gCaipisíneach. Chuidaigh siad liom i gcoláiste. Tháinig go leor bráithre go dtí gCalifoirnea as Éireann ar ais ansin.

Ar deireanagh, thúg mé airgead do Vicipéid. Bím úsaid é an-coitanta ann. Sílím go féidir leat a bheith ag báint úsaid as chomh maith.

Worthy causes.

During the end of the year, Layne asked me to give some money to charity. We took a share of money each. We chose various charities on our own.

I will list my share. At the start, I recall the Lakota Red Cloud School at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. I read an article in the New York Times with a recommendation for their good works started by the Jesuits, as is also Homeboy Industries; it is very local to my own house, in fact.

When I was young, I liked to go to the The Huntington Library near my home. There were many times learning and reading there, as a boy once and a scholar lately. I need to pay them back.

I have had an interest in Tibet since my youth. Therefore, I send money to The International Campaign for Tibet. But, they take a large amount for fundraising; I will give to Tibet Fund this year.

I remember the Capuchin Franciscans. They helped me when I was in college. Many friars came to California from Ireland back then.

Finally, I gave money to Wikipedia. I am using them very commonly. I think you may be doing so as well.

William T. Vollmann's "Fathers and Crows": Book Review

This continues as the second of "Seven Dreams,"++ a septology projecting across North America the past millennium as envisioned by natives and settlers. Here, Vollmann begins to get the hang of his own attempt to present, through the Micmac woman Born Swimming's dream of a dream of a dream, the clash between those now called in Canada the First Nations, in Acadia and along the St. Lawrence, and the French who sailed up those shores eager for furs, riches, and souls. Vollmann in the first segment, "The Ice-Shirt" (1990), had labored, overall successfully, to integrate Norse sagas and modern reporting from Greenland, Baffin Island, and what was Vinland and is now Newfoundland, but certain tonal shifts and thematic leaps made that ambitious start rather uneven. All the same, it marked a talent to watch, and this series to date slowly continues.

"Fathers" triples the length of the first narrative; enriched by glossaries and endnotes, the result repeats Vollmann's prodigious labor. Regarding this novel's impact, earlier at PopMatters I noted how Vollmann analyzed his (partially) released FBI file. This parallels passages in "Imperial" which describe (partially) his detention in 2002 and 2005 while crossing from Mexicali to Calexico. Vollmann cites from these same files, which document a federal inquiry that numbers him among thousands suspected of being the Unabomber, about this novel: "UNABOMBER’s moniker FC may correlate with title of VOLLMANN’s largest work, novel Fathers and Crows. That novel reportedly best exemplifi es VOLLMANN’s anti-progress, anti-industrialist themes/beliefs/value systems and VOLLMANN, himself, has described it as his most difficult work." Vollmann  muses about "reportedly", given this nameless agent might not have finished it, like many readers.

This appeared two years after "Ice," and two years before part five (which appeared out of order in the series as it unfolds according to publication and not strict chronology), returning in "The Rifles" to Lord Franklin's doomed mid-Victorian voyage among the Inuit. These three books burrow into history and contemporary memories along America's northeastern frontiers. They match Vollmann's affection for frozen climates, and varied Canadian cultures and scenes, with his energy and erudition. With so little surviving of indigenous reactions to the contact, and with what we know filtered through the invaders much more than the natives, Vollmann must mix imagination with scholarship.

This novel builds upon that region's own vast origin myth, the Jesuit Relations, 73 volumes sent back starting in 1611 and continuing for two centuries, from New France to the Society of Jesus' French superiors. But whereas "Ice" hovered between recreating the Norse tone from hefty and resounding saga-lore and skipping into a modern vernacular from Vollmann's late-'80s journeys, "Fathers" opts for an omniscient voice. Although early on we aren't exactly sure where it emanates from ("Jean"? A venerable chair where a wise elder once sat?), this projection sustains a more consistent register. Yet blends a filtered antiquated sensibility, drifting in and through both Indian and European perceptions. Furthermore, Vollmann applies Ignatian Spiritual Exercises into a Stream of Time image adapted from his previous novel's icy dreamtime. Readers embark on a bracing, engaging, if daunting portage.

Very early in the 17th century, Champlain works his way up to preferment and command for the Roy. "He gathered the trees into orderly clumps as he mapped them, so that the rivers would be less encumbered." (103) Lusting for mineral riches, he explores those rivers to no avail as for gold or silver, but his navigational obsession earns him grudging acceptance by his social or military betters. His band of similarly restive adventurers hammers out habitations and fattens off the beaver-pelt trade in Montréal and Québec, about seven decades after Jacques Cartier had begun to map Canada. So, while we never figure out clearly at the start who's speaking what to whom, by now a pidgin exchange of French or even some Basque mingled with native languages may have become common.

Contemporaneous with Cartier's exploration, St. Ignatius of Loyola gathered the first companions for what would be known as the Jesuits, the same year of 1534. These Black Gowns or Crows make a neat play off of Black Hands, the dark lord of the native peoples in "Ice"; their coming for the French merchants and scoundrels signals unwelcome change, even if the Iron People trade for furs with a coveted metal for kettles, then arrowheads and weaponry. Poutrincourt, who soon will lose control of his fort to the inexorable priests, lashes out at the first clever missionary sent to block the master's diplomatic path. "Tell me, Père, are all of you Jesuits cunning in this way, to get first a toehold, then a foothold, and then to trample everything down? I ask you: who gave you the right to be here?" (190) 

For the traders, and the priests, this Canadian immensity can prove implacable. Its woods emanate darkness and their depths bewilder. Yet they can cheer. "Autumn fell, and the forest became a chasuble of red velvet with gold flowers down the side, its skinny leaf-arms outstretched in grasping prayer." (203) The observer of this scene is not specified, and in such moments, Vollmann conveys the sheer wonder of the place, filtered a bit through the perception of one raised in the old-new faith.

To win converts for Christ, this ambition impels the Jesuits, as Vollmann paraphrases them, to declare war on the world. A fifty-page immersion into Ignatius' dramatic decision, when wounded by a blunderbuss, to turn from a life of Spanish swashbuckling to one of soul-searching demonstrates the intensity of the Society's founder. Vollmann sums up Ignatius' military strategy, calculated through his Spiritual Exercises to teach his Companions the memory skills, the calm under pressure, and the intricate spiritual and practical classifications to call upon in their apostolate. It neatly nods to the Jesuit balance of action with contemplation. "Their plan was simple: to save every soul on earth. The means were complex, requiring the tense spontaneity of generals, the extravagance of jesters, the indifference to comfort of ascetics, the compromising of merchants, the intriguing of diplomats, the patience of craftsmen--all of which were so many pretty veils drawn over an iron purpose." (277) 

Iron speaks too to the natives' lust for it, for hunting and for killing. The French dispense weapons to Born Swimming's people soon after their first encounter, so as to weaken rivals. The titular protagonist of the fourth (2001) of the Seven Dreams, piratical Samuel Argall, kidnapper of Pocahontas, makes a cameo as he conquers the Jesuits' Acadian outpost. Such enmity between British and French heightens, as does tension for the Huron or Wendat, who will under Jesuit tutelage find themselves weakened in conflict with their southern foes, the Iroquois confederacy. The bulk of this narrative, starting a third of the way in, retells the Jesuit role in the fate of the Huron in the 1630s.

Four hundred pages on, Champlain treks into the Huron heartlands upriver. Captives get roasted alive and scalped. Birds keep singing. Brutality on both sides earns Vollmann's calm scrutiny, as does the fearsome vastness of the forests which dwarf native and settler in a continent of foliage, rivers, and ambush. The omniscient teller quietly hints halfway that he's sometimes Jean de Brébeuf, one of the Black Gowns who will in this leafy domain, in the middle of the 1600s, seek and earn martyrdom. 

One who will find this reward, Jean de Brébeuf, begins to shoulder aside Champlain as the central figure, as the Jesuits deflect the Huron from the traders. Vollmann inserts an aside to Robert de Nobili, a Jesuit who in India by going native balanced conversion with toleration of indigenous customs and beliefs. Returning to the Black Gowns, attempting to sway the Huron, we watch their missionary predicament deepen as epidemics decimate the natives, leaving the surviving priests open to charges of witchcraft by the suspicious Huron, egged on by their bitter shaman against the French. 

As at the end of "The Ice-Shirt," vignettes of those taken by the Europeans back to the Old World, here then brought back to New France, depict the complicity of natives caught between resistance and assimilation. "It was the vast crowds that chastened the boy" Amantacha "and fitted him for his purpose: seeing them, he understood that the Wendat could never begin to contest with these folk on equal terms." (503) Filtered through his eyes, we see the inflexible determination of the newcomers. "The Iron People slouched; they threw themselves down in chairs, as if the chairs would never break or be anything but chairs." (504) A separation of maker from creation contends with the native view.

Reliant on the reluctant interpretative skills of another young man taken to France who, returning to the Huron, renounces his Catholicism, a cold, lonely Jesuit reflects during an icy sojourn among them his own cognitive dissonance from those he despises but must preach to. "The bare trees reached up together like pillars; their branches upcurved together into an arched cathedral ceiling." (561) Among this frigid desolation, mortality increases among those whom he seeks to win over. "They pass their lives in smoke, thought Père Le Jeune sadly, and afterwards they fall into the fire." (562) If they, during the epidemic, die, they will be damned; their lives seem as grim as their smoke-choked tents. 

Recalling for me Brian Moore's 1985 novel through Bruce Beresford's adaptation of "Black Robe", Vollmann, publishing his novel the year after that movie, dramatizes this same Canadian conflict of wills. As Moore's screenplay sums up through the shaman Mestigoit: "There are no gifts given by the French that aren't paid for." Similarly, the sorcerer and (Born Swimming's daughter and later Amantacha's wife, conceived by that Micmac woman's rape by a French trader) Born Underwater, one gifted with "seeing-ahead", glimpse the outcome of the implacable struggle between determined invader and indigenous settler. Pitting shamen against priests, as epidemics weaken more natives beyond the Huron, the hidden powers called upon by both sides corner Catholic converts, who have gone over to the French.  Crows caw, cornfields wither, famine stalks. Those who have turned to Christ among the natives, in the steady judgment of the holdout Born Underwater, seem reduced to the status of children, by Black Gowns bent on baptizing the dying, swooping down upon stiff prey.  

Between 1634 and 1640, as Vollmann relates in his appended chronology, half the Huron died. The remnant, increasingly Christian, sought refuge from disease, famine, and the Iroquois. Those faithful to premonitions and paganism dwindled. "The dream-Captains sought to protest, but the Christians would not listen to them, and so they withdrew from Ossossané with sadness in their eyes, saying than nothing but selfishness and witchcraft held sway there any longer." (822) Vollmann presents both factions with sympathy but detachment, enabling us to witness the Huron struggle for survival. 

Parts around pages seven- or eight-hundred, admittedly, threaten to belabor the point. Vollmann refuses editorial cuts, so even if one may wonder the reason for so much depth, this deep dive into Catholic and native consciousness, four hundred years ago, triumphs from this sustained commitment. Meanwhile, seasons stretch on and dwindle, distant from the human frenzy for control. "The clouds were like lavender puzzle-pieces floating on milk." (808) Vollmann strives for a fresh presentation, and his language floats between 17th-century chronicler and 1989 visitor to Québec and Amerindian sites. He blends research deftly (sometimes by wry footnotes via academia) and his endnotes attest to the immersion by which he created this dense but absorbing book. Its heft, as with all Seven Dreams to date, may dissuade the faint-hearted, but as with many explorers, rogues, natives, and contemporaries in these thick pages, the adventure undertaken will reward the intrepid (Amazon US 12-29-13 without the FBI paragraph) 

++ "My aim in Seven Dreams has been to create a 'Symbolic History' -- that is to say, an account of origins and metamorphoses which is often untrue based on the literal facts as we know them, but whose untruths further a deeper sense of truth. Here one walks the proverbial tightrope, on one side of which lies slavish literalism; on the other, self-indulgence." (939, Author's note)

Matt Taibbi's "The Divide": Book Review

Certainly he's preaching to this choir member, and I'm glad (relatively speaking) to find Attorney General Eric Holder excoriated for his deeply embedded role in an "aggressive" style of prosecuting Wall Street in a "sophisticated" manner that backfired, allowing "banks too big to fail, too big to jail" to go off with negligible fines (often what a few hours' profit for firms accrued) or none at all. Matt Taibbi's simple thesis, over four-hundred pages, remains that "too-big-to-fail, meet small-enough-to-jail." (49)

He uses a small Chinese NYC bank, Abacus, to prove how the one bank that the government pursued suffered far out of proportion, given the time and money expended, to the Wall Street neighbors who, in Chase's case, used their bailout money to buy up WaMu at fire-sale rates, and to grab two jets at $60 million each and a hanger for $18 million as part of TARP's sweet deal. As their ads assure us, we are to assume all's all right simply because they paid back the money "we" were forced to lend.

The book see-saws back and forth between high- and low-profile case studies. It makes for uneven pacing and while Taibbi labors to make transitions and emphasize contrasts in the disparity of how justice is meted out, the details of the financial and governmental manipulations provide for those intrigued or outraged by this collusion plenty of material for study. While the book (this is a galley) needed an index, and an overview might have helped, as some of this feels like a series of related articles rather than a cohesive summation of what is admittedly, no matter the party in power, an ongoing collapse of our legal system.

He critiques the policing strategy of trolling as fishing boats do among the weak and vulnerable in high-crime areas: swooping all up, seeing who has committed and can be held on petty offenses for blocking a sidewalk, public urination, or fare evasion, to juke stats (he alludes as to how NYC's anti-"broken window" methods to increase those arrested and jailed inspired HBO's "The Wire" here). Matt Taibbi argues that crime-as-lifestyle entices many no matter what the offense, if the payoff is great enough for those so driven, and that the mass arrests only anger the innocent, and try to provoke them when detained into fighting back against the corrupt power. In turn, the system wears down the weak, so as with foreclosures, welfare fraud, credit card debt, and many other offenses, the harried give up, pay fines, acknowledge guilt, cop a deal, and therefore please the law-and-order ranks.

This accounts for the dramatic rise in statistics for arrests and jailings even as the crime rate declines. Meanwhile, Taibbi compares the way the powerful and richer among us get off much easier, even though individuals can be taken down no matter their status. The point is that money matters most, more than the clout of any one person, rich or poor, even if richer is better. HSBC bank funnels the Sinaloa drug cartel money and evades sanctions, while the US government and local authorities pursue minor drug offenses far out of proportion to the gains won, considering the massive costs. At least the police and courts are kept busy, so as to justify more federal and local funds coming in, to perpetuate wars on drugs and on crime that keep on giving.

I realize Taibbi has written lively pieces for Rolling Stone for years and made his reputation. This book is more serious than I expected, and while "overcaffeinated Jesuits" as a memorable term for old-school journalists' fashion sense and lack of style sticks, Taibbi in taking the side of the underdog takes some easy potshots when they don't seem necessary. He mocks two elderly public defenders as looking like the Muppets Stadler and Waldorf, while a Barclays CEO is introduced as a "lipless, pale-faced Irish Catholic from Concord, Massachusetts, who wears Coke-bottle glasses and appears in public wearing the pinched, joyless manner of a constipated nun." (154) Memorable again, sure, but it seems a cheap shot given Taibbi's steady championing of the poor and his sympathies for those "without the right papers" whom he classifies as "hardworking immigrants" while choosing not to address the unspoken situation that this contingent has chosen to break laws and overstay visas, too.

Molly Crabapple's illustrations match the tone of this book, distorting those in the system by caricature, but never those fighting it. This plays into a muckraking feel at times that may extend the tradition of advocacy journalism, on the other hand. I found George Packer's The Unwinding, about the aftermath of Chase's foreclosure and debt-driven robo-calls that Taibbi documents, a good match.

Taibbi's on more convincing ground in handling welfare fraud, admitting that abuses happen and acknowledging the need to investigate, even as he shows how much is exerted to trap the offenders vs. how little is done to rein in Wall Street's guilty. He shows how the system targets easy targets to nab among the vulnerable, while it, as people like Timothy Geithner, Lanny Breuer, and Eric Holder connive to go as far as to ask Wall Street what to do and whom to pursue before the Feds move in, tiptoeing about. Taibbi does not bring in all of the context of deregulated banks, for the pressure on the second Bush administration to loosen up loans to minority and low-income communities is not addressed, nor is the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act discussed in the detail I think it merits, in reference to the Glass-Steagall Act's partial repeal in 1999. But there is a lot of financial coverage overall.

The current White House administration encourages despite its rhetoric (as Obama's "60 Minutes' comment on ethics in typically slippery lawyerspeak is parsed by Taibbi to reveal its vacuum) deregulation and submission to the corporate domination of our nation's legal, judicial, law enforcement, and political establishments started with Reagan and sustained by Clinton and the Bushes. Here, Matt Taibbi connects the dots and singles out those who continue, as yet another election looms, to pretend they have the interests of the common people in mind instead of those with whom they consort and plot, to build what's now oligarchy. (Amazon US 5-31-14)

Joseph Boyden's "The Orenda": Book Review

I've enjoyed two stark and harrowing novels about this same subject, the Jesuit-meets-Huron event in Canada in the early 17th century. Both Brian Moore's "Black Robe" (and the Bruce Beresford film) and William T. Vollmann's "Fathers and Crows" treat the Iron People (French) and the native Wendat (Huron) with sensitivity and insight. "The Orenda" balances neatly its similar perspectives, alternating as did Vollmann between indigenous and Christian participants, but at about half the length (see my "Fathers" review) as so much ethnographic detail and personal reflection expanded Vollmann's account. Moore chose a sparer register to filter his Jesuit missionary's travails among the wilderness and privation and torture.

Joseph Boyden captures both the sprawl of a novel delving relentlessly into a harsh land and a brutal mentality, and the precision of a narrative pair who square off, Bird and Christophe. This novel strips down the details so what remains stands out. In the first dozen pages, already you struggle to keep up with the back-and-forth tension as enemies lurk and death arrives suddenly. As a chronicler of two acclaimed novels, inspired by his own family's roots in the First Nations, this Canadian writer applies a steady eye to the realities of culture clash.

"The weight these men give their dreams will be the end of them." The first paragraph of the first chapter closes as the young Frenchman passes judgement on his captors and those he has been sent to convert. How the charcoal-clad newcomers, as well as the ancient people, possess the "orenda" (the life force) provides the mystery for the First Nations. They wonder how to manage the French. As Gosling warns Bird, these "crows" are "very difficult to tame."

The machinations that ensue, as a Jesuit captive proves valuable in the complications that overtake all the Wendat, dramatic as Moore and Vollmann showed well, here deepen as Boyden takes a nuanced perspective, equally careful to tell this story fairly. This novel expects concentration, and like its intent, wary characters, you are pulled into their mindsets in a vernacular that speaks in our own phrasing, but is whittled down meticulously to express a slightly altered time and setting, attesting to Boyden's skill at rendering this distance vividly.

Enriched by his own sensibility, it can be argued that Boyden's advantage in being placed as he is within the meeting of the two nations deepens the accuracy of his aim: to sharpen our wits as those here must, in order to survive the results of what God and country, iron and warfare, demand. I'll leave off plot summary but I'll encourage you to settle into this historical novel with an awareness that your focus will be rewarded, as your investment in this bracing, bewildering landscape, and the mentalities that it cuts open and tears into, pays off movingly. Amazon US 3/30/14

John Thavis' "The Vatican Diaries": Book Review

Nearly three decades of reporting from the Vatican, spanning the reigns of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, enliven this insider’s account. Close enough to introduce us to the intrigues, scandals, and idealism mingled in Rome, distanced enough as a Catholic layman, John Thavis fluently interprets the diplomatic phrases and nuanced customs which characterize its clerisy. The Vatican Diaries, despite its somewhat sensationalist title, provides a thoughtful meditation on recent papal administrations, and the bureaucrats, functionaries, and emissaries who advance or thwart Rome’s global ambitions. 

Very readable, Mr. Thavis’ narrative favors opening vignettes that feel more fictional than factual, as he documents everyday life on 110 crowded and ancient acres. Whether discussing bells rung to signal a new pope’s election which contend against human error and technological snafus, the rowdy camaraderie of the volo papale of the jet-age press corps in an age of Internet competition, or the increasingly sordid sexual and financial abuse by the founder of the controversial Legionaries of Christ, Mexican priest Marciel Maciel, Mr. Thavis relates dissension vividly, with telling quotes and thought-provoking asides. 

For instance, he contrasts the need for the press to “eyeball” the Pope for hints of non-verbal as well as verbal confirmation of a particular Vatican affirmation or denial. Expert in such interpretations, Mr. Thavis reminds readers how in a networked age, the need for physical contact persists—not only among those who flock to an audience with the pontiff, but those skilled in unmasking clerical imposters eager to finagle their way to a hearing with John Paul or Benedict. This aspect enriches the behind-the-scenes detail and it humanizes the teeming crowds, and the watchful employees tasked with keeping an eye on the millions.

“The real Vatican is a place where cardinals crack jokes and lose their tempers, where each agency of the Roman Curia jealously guards its turf, where the little guys and big shots may work at cross-purposes, and where slipups and misunderstandings are common. It’s a place where the pope’s choice of a particular hat can become the raging controversy of the day, and where an American cardinal hell-bent on underground parking can evict a two-thousand-year-old necropolis. It’s a place where the carefully orchestral liturgies and ceremonies sometimes become unglued.” 

Unpredictability, with a new pope, challenges the clerics and staff accustomed to a predecessor’s steady style. John Thavis contrasts the two natures of the last two popes. Benedict XVI prefers a detached, perhaps resigned air, while John Paul hosted folk Masses filled with guitars, Third World adaptations of ritual, and sing-alongs with youth. Determined to “shore up the base” rather than embark on globetrotting, Benedict appears to have “zero interest” in glad-handing. 

Whether the fading European core of the Church can revive appears doubtful. A pair of chapters demonstrates this artfully. Tridentine and traditionalist efforts of the Lefebvrist revanchists who oppose Vatican II’s reforms appear to flounder. The Church tries to lure back the reactionaries, but the recalcitrant faction digs in. As one informant, a Vatican official code-named the “Warbler” chortles: “I’m convinced they’re a sect, and when they do come back they’ll need deprogramming, because otherwise they’re useless. They’re troublemakers.”

Ironically, another troublemaker champions Latin against an ebbing interest in the ancient liturgical and diplomatic language once common to all in the Vatican. Fr. Reginald Foster’s profile provides a case study in how a fat Carmelite friar in overalls, a true iconoclast, can anger both conservatives and liberals.  He’s funny and on-target, but it’s sobering how Latin’s erosion undermines continuity among scholars, clergy, and now hierarchy who come to Rome ignorant of its heritage.

Another priest, Jesuit Fr. Peter Gumpel, emerges in a nuanced portrait of him as an “investigating judge” charged with the debate for the prosecution, against a firm front pushing the cause of Pius XII’s beatification forward. The telling detail stands out, under Mr. Thavis’ careful eye: “His vast wooden desk was a landscape of books and mementos. At its center a small wooden crucifix was laid flat, surrounded by porcelain figurines of dogs that looked sadly upon the crucified Christ, a bizarre and touching little tableau.” The comparison with Gumpel’s German family’s fate under the Nazis and the complicated contexts surrounding Pius and his tenure under fascist rule during the same war in Rome offer valuable reflection on the political and ideological currents swirling around the decisions mortal men must make when confirming the canonization of other men and women, now departed, as saints.

More politics crashes in, as in a deadpan recital of George W. Bush’s meeting with the current pope. Despite the “secret” archives attributed to sinister Catholic plots, the fact is that the records are kept closed except to qualified researchers, and the decorum that perhaps President Bush failed to appreciate in the Vatican persists as a manifestation of those quixotic guardians of Rome’s heritage, jealously guarding a two-thousand year legacy. Poignantly, an intricate chapter on an underground parking lot shoved through a Vatican hill by a bottom-line Michigan cardinal demonstrates the efforts of archeologists to preserve remnants of a truly ancient Roman cemetery, already cut in two by impatient bulldozers. 

Often, one reflects on tension between tradition and progress in the Vatican--as throughout the Church. Mr. Thavis listens to how clerics and popes issue statements, and he masterfully explains how a 2009 “condom study” in its theological suppositions belies the popular, anti-papal caricatures post-Humanae Vitae and its unpopular 1968 ban on artificial birth control. Mr. Thavis finds “wiggle room” in one application of condoms, and he keeps this and related topics lively in a chapter on sexuality. While Mr. Thavis’ own sympathies can be discerned, he fairly presents the practical as well as philosophical reasoning on both sides of hot-button issues. 

He also watches the pope when he strolls down the aisle to a wary press corps, the volo papale, in coach class, mid-flight. “As always in his off-the-cuff comments, Benedict spoke rapidly and without much expression, as if he were taking dictation directly from God.” This moment typifies the care with which this veteran bureau chief for the Catholic News Service (a humbler outfit than his title or placement may suggest), assembles telling moments. This sums up the Church’s leaders and the staff who assists and outwits them. One closes John Thavis’ perceptive study reflecting on the Vatican’s challenge: to persist in a secularizing world sometimes fascinated by the pomp and pageantry of St. Peter’s--but often hostile or increasingly indifferent to the Church’s determined mission to harmonize warring factions and bickering enemies, even if both are on the same Catholic side. (P.S. When I reviewed this for the New York Journal of Books 2-21-13, I cited Benedict's "resigned" attitude towards the papacy. Talk about prescient.)

Laurence Cossé's "A Corner of the Veil": Book Review

Very elusive, fittingly or ironically, about the actual proof of God that floors a few Casuists (read: Jesuits) and a French prime minister during the year before Y2K. The Parisian setting is underused, the characters probably stand ins for politicians or pundits that the original audience might recognize, and the tone's droll as you'd expect. Linda Asher's translation captures the worldly-wise ambiance of the original, I assume, and the results entertain.

Able to be perused (small size, big margins) in a single evening, the plot naturally keeps you guessing. As to the proof, the idea that God the Father is exposing Himself by imposing Himself upon man via Christ and the Spirit so people figure out (presumably) that the divine "becoming" permeates all of God's creation sums up the gist of the daring breakthrough. The difficulty is that Laurence Cossé teases us as she does the characters who try to penetrate the mystery of the document's contents. She, too, lifts up the veil's corner but she refuses to let us peek. We must watch others look inside.

This distancing, while it makes sense for her revelations, or their lack for the reader, may please some who wish like some in the pages not to know it all. The advantages of doubt articulated by prominent figures make for an intriguing meditation. I never thought of the shift that would happen if people could know God and how that might diminish rather than increase goodness.

You get some discussion of this scenario as the advisors in elite clerical and state realms battle over the social impacts of this proof. Cossé appears to believe that people would generally favor frugality and compassion, but she along with certain figures warns that brutality and cynicism could grow as "everything is permitted" in the calculating eye of some determined dissenters. I think she gives people too much credit for the positive aspects of a revelation like this, for in a secularized era, it seems many would not fall for this message from above, if theorized by one from below.

It may be a nod to popular sensibilities, but I am unsure the plot needed the thriller aspects that it enters later on. A Corner of the Veil reminded me in its substance, however coyly, of the Jesuit French maverick Teilhard de Chardin's immanent concept of the Incarnation entering the cosmos and the mentality of all created lives and souls. Curious why nobody among the learned mentioned this vision from a bold predecessor who met with his own censure from the powers that be. (Amazon US 5-20-13)