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Residential
College
Commencement 2007 What
Is The Question? |
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I want to thank the members of the RC community for inviting me, and giving me this opportunity to think through these thoughts and then share them with you. I think that was my father’s vision for you: that a residential college was first and foremost a parlor, a place where people could naturally come together and share what was important to them. So, I’m pleased to stand before you this afternoon in this place, that not only has my father’s name attached to it, but his vision, his legacy, and your lives, as well. However, let me forewarn you that I’m only going to tell you four, short, stories about my father, and therefore the remainder of these remarks will really be about the secret motto that I hope you will soon see inscribed above the door as you enter the parlor here. Dante’s motto for Hades of course was: “Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” but that seems a little discouraging to me, and besides, contrary to perhaps some fleeting momentary feeling you might have had, the Residential College is not hell and so I think we need a motto more in line with the room we’re actually living in. Still, you could have put Dante’s motto above the front door of our family house over on Wright Avenue, for my father, as you will soon see, was a man of many questions and few answers, and therefore a constant challenge to live with. He had two degrees from Yale; a Ph.D. in philosophy, and prior to that a three year Bachelor of Divinity degree. He got that degree so that he could become a Methodist minister, which he was, for most of his life, and which allowed him to preach, perform marriages and funeral services. In fact I often tease my students in New Jersey by telling them that my father married my sister, and I gave her away. And I know they think: how typically Southern, but the truth is, we did. ############################################################################## Part 1: “How do you find the important questions?” On my 9th birthday (and here’s the first story, eh?) after everyone else had left the room, my father and I were sitting alone at the dining room table and he asked me if I wanted another piece of cake, and I said, “of course.” And he cut me a slice, and he put it in front of me, and then he took the knife and cut that slice in half, and put half on his plate, and then cut my half in half again, and put that half on his plate, and then he looked up at me, and asked: “Do you think if I keep cutting each half in half, that eventually I’ll get to nothing, or will there always be a half left to cut? ‘Can we ever get to nothing?’” (Question #1; hereafter: (Q1), (Q2), etc.). And I looked back at him, not quite sure that the 3/4 of my cake on his plate was any longer mine, and I can remember thinking: “Gee dad, this is my birthday. I just want my cake; and I want to eat it too.” But of course, I didn’t say that. I said, “I don’t know,” and he said, “let me know if you do” and then he gave me both plates, and he left the room. Living with my father was frequently like that, an unpredictable challenge, predicated upon an unpredictable question that blind sides you but then lingers like a guest that never leaves. In a similar way Gertrude Stein was a challenging woman. She was constantly trying to jolt people out of their complacency. She was constantly trying, like the cubist painters whose paintings surrounded her in her parlor in Paris, to startle people into a sense of pure being, a form of enlightenment, satori. Her most infamous saying of course was that “A rose is a rose is a rose.” Only, of course, that’s not what she actually said. What she actually said was “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” (Three “is’s”, and not two). And the source of the comment was not a flower but an allusion to the English painter, Sir Francis Rose, who she admired and one of whose paintings hung in her parlor, while her Gauguin was banished to her bathroom. But anyway, in the great semi-hypocritical story of her life, she was on her death bed, dying, and her lifelong companion Alice B. Toklas was there, and sensing that Gertrude might have some insight into the great beyond, she asked her: “Gertrude, Gertrude, what is the answer?” And Gertrude rolled over, looked up at Alice, and said: “Alice, what is the question?” And then she died. And so, now, thank God, I’ve finally gotten to at least the title of my talk: “What is the question?” (Q2). As many, or most, or all of you know, when my father died in 1985 (and this is the second story) he left behind an extensive manuscript, A Comprehensive History of Western Ethics, which my mother asked me to edit and get published, and which I did, and one night the phone rang in my house in Plainfield, NJ, and a woman said, “Are you Allen Ashby?” And I said, “Yes.” And she said, “My name is Sally Roberts, and I was a student in your father’s class in the late 1950s. I just discovered his book, and it is such a delight. I can hear his voice as I read the words, and I am transported back to our seminar room. It was a two semester class on Western ethics, and on the day of the final exam, your father came into the room, handed out the blue books we had to write in, went to the blackboard, and said: ‘Using the people and the ideas we have read about, and anything else you think is honestly relevant, please answer the following question, and when you are done, you can leave.’ And he turned, and wrote on the black board ‘What is important?’ And then he left the room.” (Q3). Are you beginning to get the picture? Because it sure seems to me that whenever you are asked one of these tough unpredictable questions, that you can never be certain if your answer is really right, and if you can’t be sure you are right, then what is the question really for? ############################################################################## Part 2: “What makes a question, a more beautiful question?” In one of the short introductions to a book of his poems, the poet e.e. cummings writes: “Miracles are to come. With you I leave a remembrance of miracles: they are by somebody who can love and who shall be continually reborn, . . .” And then, after a short intervening paragraph, he ends his introduction with a single sentence paragraph: “Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question” (332). So, I guess it is not only “What is the question?” But it is also, “What is the more beautiful question?” (Q4). But let me see if I can make all of this a little more practical for you: ############################################################################## Part 3: “If memory is who we are, then who is creating our memory?” Let me ask you a rhetorical question. And no matter who you are, or when or how long you’ve been here at RC, please feel free to try to answer it in your own mind. Here it is: “Now that you are finally leaving the room, what has been the best experience that you have had at RC?” (Q5). And by “best experience” I don’t want abstractions and ideas. I want a moment we could have video taped like my father cutting my birthday cake. But while you’re looking for that moment, your moment, let me take a quick detour through this idea of a master video tape of our lives, that tape that sometimes reputedly flashes before our eyes, just as our lives fly off the power lines of this life. I’ve been fascinated for years by memory. “Why do we remember something?” (Q6). And also its corollary, “Why do we forget so much?” (Q7). Because if I asked you, “What do you remember from the year you were 9?” (Q8). “What will I get?” “How many memories?” Ten, a hundred? But even a hundred isn’t a memory a day. And so “Who erased all those other lived experiences?” (Q9). And “Who chose to keep the ones we remember?” (Q10). “Why are just those facts in that history book, or in that book of Western Ethics?” (Q11) “Who gets to determine what is important for us to remember, as an individual or a culture?” (Q12). But even more specific than just memories, I’ve been fascinated by first memories. “What is the first thing you can remember?” (Q13). Some people aren’t sure, but most, when you ask them, and wait, can give you one. And it’s almost always a small slice of videotape. It begins, it rolls, it stops. There’s nothing before it, and nothing right after it. It’s an island. But you know, I’ve come to believe that our first memory is our real birth. It is the first time that we have a sense of our self as separate from the world, and I’m convinced, that like our fingerprints or our DNA, that memory is who we are. It is a compressed, beautifully dense poem, waiting for us to read it, and like any great poem, we’ll never know what it fully or finally means. So, it’s actually a question isn’t it? “Why did I enter life here, though this memory, and not any other?” (Q14). And do you suppose that’s what some, or all, of the rest of our memories are? “Are memories just questions, that we mistake for answers?” (Q15). And I ask again: “Who is starting and stopping the tape, and why?” And so, a few minutes ago I asked you about the best experience you’ve had at RC, and let’s say you give me an answer, a slice of videotape, and then I ask you: “OK, but what does your selecting that memory tell us about you?” (Q16). Which then, is the more beautiful question? The first one. Or the second? Or the third that I haven’t asked you yet? And “Is this the secret to life’s important questions, the ability to turn our own answers into more beautiful questions?” (Q17). And “Is this the hidden secret to RC?” (Q18). ############################################################################## Part 4. “What is nothing? And what is the opposite of nothing?” Toward the end of his life my father gave back his Methodist ordination. (This is the third story). He stopped being a Methodist minister, and he couldn’t marry my brother anymore, or me. And I asked him: “Dad, why did you do that?” And he told me, “Son, I just want to be free to ask the important questions now, and I don’t think I can do that, if I believe I already know the answers. So, I need to let go of my faith, in order to be able to find my faith. Does that make sense?” And, of course it did. Only, he didn’t tell me what those important questions were that he wanted to ask, and I forgot to ask him that important question. But as you might have guessed, this time I was already way ahead of him, because when I was nine, he had already taught me to believe in nothing. So, I didn’t have a faith in something that I needed to let go of, because when I was nine my father had asked me a question I couldn’t answer, and then he left the room. But the question stayed in the room, in that parlor of memory in my mind. And I still can’t answer it. But along the way, I have to tell you, I’ve had a real affinity for nothing. Whenever I see the word, my ears prick up the way my dog’s ears used to stand up when he saw the calico cat crossing the back yard. Because when you’re looking, let me tell you, you can find nothing, everywhere. As a boy, from the time I was 5 until I was 12 I was sent to my father’s parents to live for the summer. They had a large and beautiful house on the James River in Newport News, Virginia, and in the summer that I was 12 my grandparents sent me to Vacation Bible Camp for two weeks (and that’s an oxymoron if there ever was one). At the end of the two weeks they came to pick me up and we had a play that we had prepared for all the parents, and my task was to present the commercials during the scene changes. I had three commercials that I had written, but I can only remember one, and I have no other memories from those two weeks, but the commercial I can remember goes like this: “Ladies, have you tried the new perfume called ‘Nothing’? Why it’s odorless, tasteless. You can’t even see it. And so next time, if you really want to impress your date, why don’t you put on, ‘Nothing’?” (I never had to go to Vacation Bible Camp again). But nothing is everywhere. In Plato’s dialogue The Sophist he at first decides that nothing can’t not-exist because when we talk about nothing, we make it something and therefore nothing is always something and never nothing and so nothing can’t exist. He sounds a lot like Gertrude Stein here, doesn’t he? But I don’t know, “Is nothing the silence you hear between musical notes, that makes notes, notes; the empty space between words that makes words, words?” (Q19). “Can you paint nothing?” (Q20). Even though we can’t see it, a black hole is certainly not nothing, but evidently it makes a lot of something into nothing. “Is this what death does?” (Q21). And “Does love do the opposite?” (Q22). In his book, An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger calls nothing “The fundamental question” (1). “Why is there something rather than nothing?” he asks. (Q23). Nothing is ubiquitous in Shakespeare, “Nothing will come of nothing,” Lear says to his favorite daughter, as he is cutting the cake of his country, “speak again” (1.1.90). And yet you know, at the beginning of that play, King Lear has everything, every thing we think we all want: power, money, family, the certainty of his knowledge, health in his old age, and he is surrounded by servants. And then half way through the play, he has become his own opposite. Now, on the barren heath in the midst of a brutal storm, he strips off all his clothes (“robes and furred gowns hide all,” he says (4.6.165)). Clothed in nothing, he has become his own shadow. He is: powerless, poor, hated by his daughters and sons-in-law, ignorant and uncertain, twenty-four hours away from his own death, and his only servants are fools and madmen. And yet, and yet, it’s only when he has nothing, is nothing, that he discovers what it means to be human. It is only then that he discovers his own capacity for compassion, empathy, love, and being vulnerable. And more, when he stops being king, (being clever and always knowing what he knows) when he stops preaching and judging (when he gives the ordination back), he begins to ask the important questions: “Does any here know me?” (1.4.223). “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” (1.4.227). “Is man no more than this?” (3.4.101-102). “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” (3.5.76-77). “Where have I been? Where am I?” (4.7.53). “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all?” (5.3.312-313). At Colonus, bring stripped of everything he held dear, and facing the moment of his own miraculous death, Oedipus asks his daughter: “So, / when I am nothing then am I a man?” (lines 430-431). Carl Jung believes that our goal in life is to “forge an ego that does not break down when incomprehensible things happen” (297). Implicitly he thinks we need something at the center of our lives, at the center of that sense of the self that controls the videotape’s camera. He believes that the important question is: “When the incomprehensible thing happens to you (when you answer the phone and she is dead; when you find yourself serving your country in Iraq; or when the killer comes into your classroom) when the incomprehensive thing happens to you, what will sustain you?” “What is the faith you have found?” (Q24). Buddha, on the other hand, seems to me to want to erase that center, that sense of the self, to get as close to nothing as he can. A Buddhist monk once asked me: “Do you want to know how far you are from your peace, Allen?” (Q25). And I said, “of course,” and he said, draw up a list of everything you own: your socks, your books, your partner, your friends, your ideas, your beliefs, your memories, your mind. And if your list is this long (and he separated his hands) then that’s how far you are from your peace, and if your list is this long (and he narrowed the distance between his hands) then that’s how far you are from your peace. Is Jung right? Or Buddha? Or neither? “Does your best RC experience, your first memory, always have to be about you?” (Q26). “Does everything you know always have to be about you? Is it really impossible to become nothing?” (Q27). ############################################################################## Part 5: “What is it, to live and love the questions?” In February of 1903 Rilke began to write what became a series of 10 letters to a young poet who was seeking his advice on a number of life’s important questions, and in the fourth letter, Rilke writes: You are so young . . . and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. (33-34) Is that what my father was doing at the end of his life, learning how to live and love the questions? And if so, then how do you and I do that? “How do we live and love the questions?” (Q28). Well, I told you at the outset that I was only going to tell you four stories about my father, and I’ve told you three now: the story of cutting the cake; the story of "What is important"; the story of letting go of your faith in order to find your faith; and now, before I give you my final double story about my father’s death, let me give you a test. I mean it’s only fair. I’m still a teacher, you haven’t really graduated from RC, and unlike Elvis none of us have left the parlor, yet. ############################################################################# Part 6: “What are the questions that really test our lives?” I hope it’s obvious that I’ve been trying to postulate that the purpose of an important question isn’t the answer we give, but the next more beautiful question that follows it. Because there are no right or final answers for these tough questions. They are a poem, a memory, a parent asking us to abandon the hope and certainty of something we are sure we are, in order to be at home just wandering in the world. They ask us to trust in nothing because they want to startle us into the miracles that are to come. But still, how do we know what the important questions are? And to help you answer that, let me give you ten examples. But as you hear them, I need you to do two things that are, in some ways, mentally contradictory. Of course, there’s not going to be enough time to really do this now, and so I’ll get the questions to you later, if you want. Or my brother will. RC is, after all, really about a family sharing and caring. But here’s what I want you to do. I want you to answer them, and then I want you to ask yourself, the next more beautiful question. (You can have a friend do this with you, if you want; they ask the questions, and you give the answers; or I guess, you could be the friend and ask them). (And of course, if we had world enough and time, I would want you to continue that process. For every answer, there must be a more beautiful question.) But for now here are the questions. (Q29-38). 1. What is the most important word in the English language? 2. Who has hurt you the most in your life, and what did they do? 3. If you could have everyone in the world spend one hour honestly considering any one question you asked, what would that question be? 4. Is there something that someone has done, or could do to you, that would be truly unforgivable, and if so, what is it? 5. If you could whisper in someone’s ear the one sentence you’ve always wanted to say to them, that would make you feel substantially better, who would that person be, and what would you say? 6. If there were 103 different words for love, then how many do you think you know? 7. If a magic fairy made a tragic mistake and changed your sex for 48 hours, what three things do you think you might learn that you don’t already know? 8. What is the one question that I could ask you that you would be the most afraid to hear and have to answer? 9. Who is the person you can feel the most like yourself with? And how do they do that? 10. What is the most difficult one specific thing, that you could do, that if you would do it, it would benefit you the most? ############################################################################## Part 7: “Where have you seen the birds on the power lines?” My father died in 1985, of what was then a relatively unknown and strange form of cancer. And while, as a man, a father, and a teacher, he would not let you rest in peace, he was at peace. He lived for a couple of weeks in the hospital after the surgery, conscious, conversing, laughing, at ease in the face of death. But lying there in his bed on the 4th floor in Wesley Long Hospital, all he could see were the power lines stretching behind the hospital, although from time to time birds would alight on those wires, rest, remain, and then just as mysteriously, miraculously, fly away again, randomly. I cannot tell you the delight in my father’s eyes as he watched those birds. They were a form of daily enlightenment for him I think, and I know they gave him an infinite miraculous happiness. So, I guess I have to ask you: “Where, in your own life, have you experienced those birds on the power lines?” (Q39). Well, you may not be keeping track, but I am. I have now asked you 39 questions. But “Which ones will you remember, and which ones will you forget, and why?” (Q40). And now that’s 40. And I’m still not done, but I’m almost done. ############################################################################## Part 8: “How can you find a ‘satisfying happiness’?” Before my father died he wrote out some possible suggestions for his Memorial Service, which was held just up the block from here in the Alumni Center on October 6, 1985, and at the end of his remarks to us he wrote: “Do what is right for you. If nothing fine. If something entirely different fine. Above all, make it a satisfying happiness. I have been and am.” And you know that single adjective, satisfying, changes everything, doesn’t it? Because, “What is the difference between ‘happiness,’ and ‘a satisfying happiness’?” (Q41). My Buddhist monk once told me, “Allen, just remember that being thankful doesn’t come from happiness; but happiness comes from being thankful.” Whenever you are thankful, you’ll find that you are, in that moment, genuinely happy. The grace of sunlight as it crosses a room; the sudden scent of lilac in the spring air; the sound of a distant dog barking at night; having your cake and eating it too; birds flying off the power lines. And can I tell you one last secret? RC will be a satisfying happiness for you, because you will be continuously thankful for it, for the family, the community of people who have made it possible, for your time in it, and its ongoing presence in your life, and my Buddhist monk is right because every time you feel that thankfulness for RC, (for all, and not just the best moments) you’ll feel in that moment, a satisfying happiness. And now all you need to do is to understand how this miracle happened to you, so that you can create it again, and again, for yourself and others. And so, let me leave you, with a final 42nd question, which if you know The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is the secret answer to “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.”: So, here, now, one last time, for the meaning of life, the most important, and more beautiful question, is: “What, do you think, is the secret motto that needs to be inscribed above this parlor’s door?” (Q42). And believe me, when I tell you now, thank you, thank you for inviting me. Thank you. ******* Works Cited cummings, e.e. Poems 1923-1954. NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc. 1954. Heidegger, Martin. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Tr. Ralph Manheim. NY: Anchor Books, 1959. Jung, C.G.. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Tr. Richard and Clara Winston. Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe. NY: Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House, 1963. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. Tr. M.D. Herter Norton. NY: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. 1934. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. The Complete Works of Shakespeare 5th Edition. Ed. by David Bevington. NY: Pearson Publishing, 2004. 1207-1254. Sophocles. The Three
Theban Plays. Oedipus at Colonus. Tr. Robert Fagles. NY: Penguin, 1984. |
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