Dissent by Durr: The conscience of an American lawyer

Although I recently posted his photo here on the right-hand side of my blog, I have not yet mentioned Clifford Judkins Durr (1899-1975) in any of my posts, and it’s past time I did.  Both he and his wife, Virginia Foster Durr (1903-1999), are heroes of mine – as indeed they should be for anyone who cares about American civil liberties and civil rights.  They were both born and raised in the state of Alabama, and they would eventually return (and become instrumental in the civil rights movement), but for most of their early married life they lived in Alexandria, Virginia, while Cliff, a former Rhodes Scholar and an attorney, worked in the Roosevelt administration, first at the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and then as a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Cliff Durr was that rara avis in Washington: a stalwart, but unpretentious, highly principled servant of the public interest.  And, in the end, his principles prevented him from accepting a reappointment to the FCC from President Truman, in 1948.  A year before, you see, Truman had instituted a federal loyalty program for all federal employees – the anticommunist “witch hunts” were just beginning – and Durr opposed it vigorously.  His written dissent to the imposition of this program at the FCC is described in the excellent biography of Durr written by John A. Salmond (The Conscience of a Lawyer):

He was, he said, strongly opposed in principle to Truman’s executive order and therefore could not, “in good conscience, give approval to rules designed to put it into effect.”  He was convinced that the “evils of the Order far outweigh any possible good that can come from it,” containing within it “such potentialities of injustice, oppression and cruelty” that it would cause alienation rather than “the promotion of loyalty among federal employees.”  Its basic concern was not with wrongful behavior, which the courts already had ample power to litigate, but with attitudes and associations, “with ideas rather than with deeds.”  Yet loyalty could not be measured, for it “is a condition of the mind and emotions.”  There are no objective tests for its determination, so those sitting in judgment will inevitably let their “personal opinions and tastes” be their guide.  “Any attempt to punish men for their state of mind or to force their mental processes by intimidation rather than to persuade them by reason is as futile as it is wrong,” he argued.  A government could punish and reward; it could command obedience – but not loyalty.  Loyalty, it seemed to him, had to be earned.  . . .

The loyalty program was a new departure in the annals of American government, he claimed, challenging principles which all Americans “have been taught since school days to regard as fundamental.”  Its procedures could only be compared to the Alien and Sedition Laws, of which Americans had repented long ago.  Yet the Alien and Sedition Laws did at least provide for trials in duly constituted courts under constitutional safeguards.  The loyalty program did not.  Rather, it ignored the rule of law and tried to control actions and beliefs by “methods outside of the law.”  Thus it was an even greater danger to “our kind of government” than those far off acts of the 1790s.

“Our form of government,” he concluded, “rests on a basis of substantive and procedural laws, the cornerstone of which is the Constitution.”  Any “warping or weakening” of this base endangered the whole structure of government.  This was what, in his opinion, the loyalty program was doing, disregarding and perverting these fundamental laws.  It was truly “subversive activity, of a most effective and dangerous kind,” and he would oppose it with every fiber of his being.  (pp. 118-9)

Despite all this, Truman was ready to reappoint Durr to another seven-year term as a commissioner on the FCC, and even tried to change Durr’s mind about refusing the reappointment during a personal interview on April 22, 1948.  But Durr stood firm, and his career as a public servant, in an official capacity, was over.

In the immediate aftermath, Durr had hopes of securing an academic appointment somewhere and, at least initially, there were a number of feelers for him to follow up on – most promisingly, one from Princeton – but, one by one, the prospects dried up.  An unexpected opportunity, in the form of a month-long, all-expenses-paid trip to an overseas conference, only postponed the inevitable.  Cliff would have to support himself and his family by returning to the private practice of law.

With the foregoing as background and context, I’ll conclude now with another excerpt from Salmond’s biography of Durr.

From The Conscience of a Lawyer : Clifford J. Durr and American Civil Liberties, 1899–1975 by John A. Salmond (pp. 126-9):

The Durrs arrived home [from their overseas trip] on September 13 [1948], still with no prospects of academic work for Cliff.  There was nothing to do but to open a law office in Washington, and this he did the following month, at 1625 K Street, North West.  He shared rooms and a secretary with Nathan David, a former FCC employee, though they were not partners in any formal sense.  It was not what he wanted to do, but he was determined to make the best of it.  As he wrote to Milo Perkins, “The adjustment to private life is going to be painful, but I suppose I will find that there are still lots of things to do once I get underway.”  He was, however, as he told Wayne Coy, missing the FCC very much indeed.

He got his first client the very first day he went to his new office.  His name was Roy Patterson, and his case so typified the type of work Durr was to do over the next two years that it is worth discussing in some detail.  In the first place, Patterson had no money and no job, so Durr’s chances of payment were somewhat remote.  Yet this was not a consideration for him, nor did it ever become so.  “To take a case of this kind was simply part of the responsibility of being a lawyer,” he considered.  To refuse it solely on financial grounds would have been unethical.  Throughout his years of practicing law, he held to this position.  It was one of the reasons he made little money out of the profession.

Patterson was a Department of Labor statistician who had recently been reviewed in accordance with the department’s loyalty procedures and found to be disloyal.  Accordingly he was dismissed.  He had come to Durr, therefore, to ask him to handle his appeal.  As Durr read the various documents connected with the case, they confirmed all that he had feared and warned about over the past two years.  Patterson had an excellent employment history – there was ample evidence of that.  Moreover, he was a genuine war hero, having been decorated for valor in combat.  He had also been severely wounded and left permanently disabled.  However, during the 1930s he had joined two or three peace groups which, respectable enough at the time, now, with the circumstances of the game so drastically changed, were seen as Communist fronts.  Even more seriously, he admitted to membership of the Washington Book Shop, a cooperative to which, coincidentally, Virginia also had belonged.  This was an avowedly Marxist store, which sold a range of left-wing literature as well as more standard literary fare.  Though Patterson said that he went there mainly because the books were cheaper than elsewhere and that it had an excellent record collection, to the Labor Department’s Review Board it seemed to indicate subversive tendencies of a most serious kind.

Furthermore, Patterson had compounded his precarious position by admitting that he had also liked visiting the store because it was one of the few places in Washington where it was possible to have a cup of coffee and a chat with Negroes.  Patterson had come from a small town in Texas and had grown up with racial views similar to those of most Southerners.  These he had progressively shed, to the point that he wanted to meet blacks, to get to know them as human beings.  So he had often visited the Washington Book Shop for that purpose as well.  At this, the chairman of the review board, a Southerner, became most agitated.  “How does it happen that a man born and raised in Texas would think it was a good idea to be a member of an organization where you could come sit down and drink coffee with Negroes,” he asked, in a tone, according to Durr (who did not attend the original hearing but was present at the appeal), which indicated that he, at least, considered such behavior to be obvious proof of disloyalty of the most pernicious variety.  The board’s finding was just that.  Patterson was considered to be disloyal and lost his job.

Given the nature of the evidence against Patterson, Durr fully expected to win the appeal.  He did not, as a department appeals board confirmed the original decision.  Durr then resolved to take it to the Loyalty Review Board itself and, in order to secure some publicity for the case, demanded a public hearing.  Loyalty reviews were normally held in private, ostensibly to protect those being investigated, but in this case Durr thought exposure might draw the public’s attention to the injustices which underpinned the whole procedure.  His request was denied; nevertheless, the publicity which surrounded it may have had some effect.  The Loyalty Review Board reversed the original decision and ordered Patterson’s reinstatement.

Though pleased at the case’s eventual outcome, Durr was appalled at the whole proceedings.  The case, after all, had all the ingredients of what he had warned against.  Patterson had committed no crime, and there was not the slightest suggestion that he had committed any overt act of disloyalty.  On the contrary, he had confirmed his patriotism, his love of country, on the battlefields of Europe.  He had lost his job simply because of his ideas and his associations.  He had belonged to groups, perfectly respectable at the time, which were now considered suspect, and he held views on race which may have conformed to the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, but not to the prejudices of the chairman of his initial review board.  Little wonder that, despite the eventual outcome, Durr’s first loyalty case depressed him profoundly.

It had two other related effects.  Durr had expected to do quite a lot of legal work for broadcasters, and even for the radio networks, using the expertise acquired during his FCC years.  Indeed, he had been promised such business.  It never came – the publicity surrounding the Patterson case saw to that.  However, it did bring him business of another sort.  There were hundreds of people like Patterson, people now in desperate trouble because of associations and ideas, often made or held in the vastly different climate of the 1930s, often subsequently repudiated, but which still had the capacity to wreck their lives.  Few lawyers would defend them, and when it bacame known that Durr was one who would, they sought him out or were sent to him.  There were lawyers, successful lawyers, former New Dealers like the firm of Arnold, Fortas, and Porter (Thurman Arnold, Abe Fortas, and Paul Porter, all friends and former colleagues of Cliff’s), who made a great fuss of defending the civil liberties of people falsely accused of being Communists.  However, according to the Durrs, they had no interest in those of folk who had actually been so or had even associated with Communists.  These people they sent on to Clifford Durr.  Thus he never lacked for business, though it was not exactly of the most prestigious or lucrative kind.

The network of global corporate control

The title of this post is taken from a recent paper by three complex systems theorists from ETH Zurich: Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston.  I learned of this paper from a Twitter post by Glenn Greenwald that linked to an article about it in New Scientist by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie.  I think many of us have long suspected that transnational corporations, which control the global economy, are themselves controlled by a small number of highly-interconnected financial institutions.  The paper appears to go a considerable way towards confirming this.

And justice for all?

I wonder how many Americans who rightly celebrated yesterday Amanda Knox’s release from an Italian jail – in a long-delayed act of justice – will spare a thought today for those detainees who are unjustly accused, denied a trial, and still suffering in Gitmo and elsewhere with no end in sight for them (presumably for the rest of their natural lives).

It seems that we now celebrate justice elsewhere, and by others, but we overlook injustice here, and by ourselves.

And so, my fellow Americans, allow me to get medieval on your asses!

Almost eight hundred years ago, in the country where our language was born, the people first secured themselves against this kind of tyranny, in a famous document, that said, among other things (when rendered in modern English):

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

Tyrants will no doubt keep trying to tread, stomp, and spit on this noble and just idea.  But there’s no turning back.  No idea so good, so potent, can ever be unsaid and unheard, once it has been said and heard.

Resurrection of the larch

A profound meditation by a great Russian writer and Gulag survivor, Varlam Shalamov, can be read here.  Sarah J. Young translated it, and her comments can be read here.

Orm og Tyr (Serpent and Bull)

[Indadvendt stranding, version I, by the Danish sculptor Claus Ørntoft.  "Introverted Stranding lies on the shore of Dødemandsbukten (Skærgård Island, Norway), pent up between life and death.  It is stretched out between two points, the powers of chaos and the cosmos, the conscious and the unconscious, dynamic inertia."  Ørntoft says he has read the book highlighted in this post multiple times and has drawn inspiration from it.]

[One of the books I purchased as part of my annual book splurge this year was Orm og Tyr (Serpent and Bull).  Its author was the Danish writer Martin A. Hansen (1909–55).  In an earlier post I quoted a brief passage from Hansen's best-known work of fiction, Løgneren (The Liar).  The latter was translated into English and I recently read the translation (by John Jepson Egglishaw) and enjoyed it very much.  But Orm og Tyr, which was published in 1952, has not been translated into English, which is too bad, because many consider it Hansen's greatest work.  I am now beginning to read it in Danish.  Orm og Tyr is a nonfictional book but is said to be otherwise unclassifiable.  At its root it attempts to fathom the long, slow transformation of the Danish people from paganism to Christianity, which occurred roughly between the years 800 and 1200, by taking the reader on a tour of the Danish countryside to examine the traces of this long-ago change that are still discoverable.  But it is also said to be a wide-ranging and even metaphysical book.  In this post I translate Hansen's preface to Orm og Tyr.]

Preface

The book tells about the ancestors’ beliefs.

But not about everything.  The religions and outlooks on life of those times can remind us of primeval forest.  There are great trees, and there are twining plants that entwine high up; there are bushes and, down below, a bottom growth of all kinds of seedlings.  At a field boundary not far from here I have seen anemones in bloom, wild.  A patch of woodland was there once – it was a long time ago – but the anemones have remained.  The ground flora of the religions is made up of primitive religious customs and all sorts of magic, and it outlasts the great trees.  Within this low mass the individual customs may change but, imprinted, are alike through millennia, during which relics from changing higher religions are taken up in the magic practices and blunted in the ideas.  Still, in the poor form the cultic customs and mystical ideas have lived here, they have hardly been dominant in any era.

Even though we may occasionally cherry-pick among these herbs, not all of which are as lovely as anemones, here we will generally prefer the great trees, the more characterful sides of the ancestral outlooks.  Our natures have changed like the woods in our past forests, so it is a dramatic story.

The portrayal is, so far as possible, tied to the great ancient monuments that preserve ideas of long ago, from dolmens to Romanesque churches.  The tale would like to brighten up the gray memories so that they both draw the reader closer and become more remarkable.  At times, the narrator must rely entirely on his own vision and go outspokenly forward.

[A passage grave at the Tustrup dolmens, Jutland, Denmark, built ca. 3200 BCE.  Note: the photos in this post are not in Hansen's book which is, however, beautifully illustrated with numerous woodcuts by Sven Havsteen-Mikkelsen.]

[Østerlars Church on the Danish island of Bornholm, built ca. 1160.]

The book begins in the times of the hunter-gatherers and goes up through the following periods.  The first part ends with the skalds’ thoughts about the gods and their visions of Ragnarok.  Poetry from that time is a clearer witness than other memorials and for this reason we linger over it.  The second part tells of the Christianizing and the great work of church-building, in which a new era breaks through.  The account does not go beyond the Romanesque period, which finishes up between 1200 and 1300.  The book concludes with Denmark proper and the pervasive church legend here about the battle between the dragon and the bull.

This legend is related to Ragnarok poetry of pagan times, but when one Old Norse poem is excluded, the most considerable of them, the medieval legend has another meaning.

In the proper sense of the word it is a myth, after all, to suppose that the populace did not become noted and cherished until late in the Romanesque period.  The days of a flourishing life-theme were by then coming to an end, and giving birth to a simple but high wisdom.  It was also perhaps the last time anonymous folk poetry, without borrowing from an ecclesiastical style, raised a magnificent symbol of life.

As well, the dying pagan times had a great vision, more beautifully expressed, in the poem “The Völva’s Prophecy.”  It was created by a pagan genius who was completely solitary.  His dream reaches forward a quarter of a thousand years to unite with the bull myth, which belonged to everybody.  The Christianizing and the great epochal shift lay between them; nevertheless, the pagan poem and the Christian folk legend belong together.  And because the meaning of the myth of serpent and bull, the struggle between life’s powers, was part of Romanesque folk Christianity, the dramatic in this theme reaches further back in time than just to the days of the Völva poet.

§

The subject could have another name: the Romanesque churches and their Nordic Old Testament.  The Christian ideas and traditions, which in their historical garments stood at the North’s doorstep in the run-up to the year 1000, are interesting, and they are important, but more has been very readably written about them, than about what it was people primarily did, why they did it, and what their assumptions were.  Here, this side of the story is told most fully.

The idea to write about the past out of the churches came from abroad, but was only unexpected like a friend who suddenly arrives.  When you think about it in this way, distant past emerges.  But not that of the church house.  This house is so old that it does not age in a person’s lifetime.

By mother’s hand one came there, the first time that is remembered.  Look, look! it said in the church porch.  It was our heels against the stone floor.  A heavy door was straight ahead, it was dim here, and mother took the latch.  It is God’s house we go into, she said.  Is it? I said, although one had been given to know it before.  Then we descended into God’s house, for you know one always steps down into churches.  Familiar people sat in rows and so made for an odd sight.  They turned not their heads at us, but only their eyes.  There was a broad aisle open through.  Above was a large vault.  At the back, the strange beautiful pictures, burning candles, yes it was beautiful.  It was God’s chamber, one understood.  And then came this never forgotten smell of dying chrysanthemums.

It was probably not long thereafter that my grandfather died, it seemed the same afternoon.  His casket was as high as a coach, as it stood among the pews.  There were flowers and white sheets with black borders and many solemn people.  They sang, much happened, and then the six strongest men in the family bore him out.  They lowered grandfather down into the ground, and he disappeared.  He ought to sleep near the church.  So they sang, and afterwards the men put their hats on and left contented.  They went down to the village hall and ate banquet food, all the people.  They were merry, and it was a shame grandfather himself was not along, as he was fond of telling stories when it was full around the table.  One understood, however, that they were not glad, and neither was it an old duty, which many others no longer understood.

A wedding in the family was the big to-do.  In came grand young women with veils down their backs and greenery in their hair, such delightful and pure eyes.  A tall, ugly fellow stood up in the choir.  He’s sweating! was whispered then, always by a woman.  A boy found him ugly on all occasions: You know he stole from his family.  In the wedding house one saw that which was a little crazy in the eyes of all the grown-ups, and since children were in the way, they got tired and came to rest in high, white beds in the quiet end and heard the thundering feast hall sail out into the night’s sea.

Others vanished.  It goes quickly, coffins in and coffins out, great faces were gone forever, the town’s menhirs, which still stand upright in the memory.  Young, strong people disappeared, from the Spanish flu.  A little boy we knew well was lost, but about him only is remembered the sound of weeping once: a plaint from the one who is without destiny. People end up in the church, and there they begin, one saw that.  Infants were carried in in swaddling clothes and old, finely embroidered baptismal shifts, they were baptized, they were questioned, and the godmothers answered for them.  Below that, women took omens from whether they bawled or were silent.  Both portions were auspicious.

My father lifted me up in front of the small blackboard on the nave’s wall, and I spelled aloud the pale, curled letters that made up the names of the parishioners killed in the Schleswig wars.

Surely the church grew old, the one who remembers what others forget.  And I was there with my teacher.  He pointed with his walking stick to an odd change of stone in the choir’s bare limestone wall.  Herringbone stonework, he said, it shows it is very old and lay here before Absalom was born.  It was here in the days when the Wends came in from the bay.  He was himself born here, knew everybody, and he fabulized.  But the stones up there, which stood inclined against each other and bore witness to immensely far-off times, resembled a large ear of corn.

We went to the pastor, who was white-haired, delicate and absentminded.  He showed and explained the church to us, and from there two things were remembered, worth preserving.  He stood by the big, swelling, granite boulder font.  Isn’t it remarkable, remarkable? he said, and forgot to explain it.  It went on being remarkable.  He played for us on the organ, was perhaps not good at it, but then he played something delightful I would willingly hear once again.  It sounded like he had a cold – he sniffled.  He was a delicate and solitary man, who understood little, but among these was the soul heavier and troubled.  After him stands a small stone and an inscription he, after months of pondering, composed to the church.  Grace beyond grace, appears there.

But the intellect increased, it flourished, and the fifteen-year-old asked grandmother: Do you understand what you read?  She sat mumbling and read psalms, for which she really did not need the book, because she knew them by heart.  Father harnessed and drove her to church, and when she came home, she read again.  I believe I understand it, she said.  Can you explain it to me? I asked.  I’m afraid I cannot, she said.  If you understand something, you can also explain it! said the newly sprouted intellect.  Well, my boy, she said, I only know that when I read, then the Holy Spirit turns to me, and then I understand it.

To this shy peasant wisdom, which lies forgotten under glorious hills of recorded folk belief, threads are linked here.  And now we will surely turn from a past that ended with the young skeptic’s dispute with the old house, and keep to the latter’s past.

§

Perhaps brief particulars about the book’s creation can also give its character a certain basis.  It was prepared, written, illustrated and published as a labor of love.  Those who worked together on its preparation needed no other motive for that purpose than the passion for seeing, the cheerful desire for knowing more and catching up with the shadows of the fleeing life.  The things related being quite unexpected, they not infrequently ran counter to something we would have liked confirmed.  Some notions we began with were bleached on the way.

So there were notions, a kind of idea of things.  Underneath the years of debates about our own era and its crises are several concepts that have swelled up and grown tremendously disordered in content.  One of them is “the tradition.”  Rather than a new theoretical discussion, one can surely set one’s heart on describing a vigorous tradition or a vigorous life-theme in flesh and blood, in the life of an era.  Perhaps we can thereby discover something characteristic of our times’ relationship to its heritage.  But description, narrative, must be the main thing.  And it’s probably best to choose a theme that has been prevalent in a time that ours has inherited a great deal from, but which has not been one of the dominant general subjects in more recent times.  Such a past is not as easy to determine as it looks.  But chance came to the rescue, a request to write about our village churches and the popular life at them.  In the churches’ history there is bound to be something that is past in this way, such that guiding views in it are dead for our modern civilization, which nevertheless bears a great number of marks of it.  Some will locate this dividing line of the past at the Reformation, others at Pietism or perhaps the revivals that gathered momentum a century ago.  We have located the deeper dividing line much further back.

The village churches were the opening subject for examination and study.  The large churches we have left alone.  They lead to official church history and political history.  The small churches impel us towards cultural history, more concealed conditions, to the more intimate life in the past.  One is led towards that which was special to an Old Danish and wider Nordic attitude to life.  One is already on the way to pre-Christian times.

There followed many small journeys in this country, most often in the undressed seasons, winter and spring.  Even the monuments are seen most clearly in the landscape then.  The land is sharply defined, has remoteness throughout and room for the wind.  Around the dusky and red plowing patterns that stretch across the hills lie simple fields of color, quickened by cold showers.  Winter journeys give you a new country that seems bigger, nobler than the summer idyll.

The journeys went on through several years.  They stretched from the Eider to Trøndelag, from Jutland to Uppland and Iceland.  Many things had to be seen that were not included.  The studies applied primarily to our own country and the old landscapes it has lost.  But they were obliged to be farther out, went perhaps not far enough, even though each of us could supplement our impressions of the old with longer journeys.  Inevitably, Nordic subject matter was bound to come in.  Wreckage from common cultures is washed ashore richer on one coast than on another.  But it changes.  The book’s center of gravity lies in Danish pasts, but they may often work as Nordic perspectives.

On by far the greatest number of trips artist, writer and publisher went together.  It was fortuitous that others took part because it provided other points of view.  The one notices what the others overlook.  It revolves around things that are obscure, where interpretation can’t be helped, three pairs of eyes can see differently, and that is lastingly productive.  Many impressions are moderated thereby; some are strengthened.  The last, one surely dares better to regard as universal.  A critical and inspiring entourage, a prism in which the past’s weak light is refracted, several temperaments’ collective memories, it is valuable when the universal in bygone life is searched for, and that was the aim.  The latter was not, however, to jointly decide which images should be sketched, and what should be in the text.  Both portions have come into being in the usual isolated way.  The visual artist chose the motifs that said something to him, in particular, and the majority of woodcuts were carved before any finished text existed.  No one wanted the ancient things depicted as museum pieces, either, and an instructive, external drawing, which in detail renders the relic as relic, naturally had to be rejected here for that which looks towards the thing’s soul and, accordingly, also the ancient artist’s intentions.  That is why there are no woodcuts here from Romanesque painting, in which color is decisive for the psychic attitude.  The publisher, one of the travelers, has harmonized images and text from an artistic viewpoint, which could only become effective when the pieces of work were finished.  Images and text will often go together, shall not however be interchangeable with each other, but let the temperaments work freely.

The subject was clarified.  It had to close with the Romanesque period.  The Gothic which follows is not strictly speaking past; traditions from it are still very much alive.  And here there has been a line of demarcation for people: they are newly-brought-up Christian in the Gothic period.  Beforehand lies a singularly fertile folk culture, which may be the Scandinavians’ most original contribution to the early Middle Ages, and a folk Christianity with a different religious life-theme than later times.  It stood up unexpectedly from the grave; the literature has little of it.  The overgrown tracks to it passed first through memories of the villagers’ fatalistic views and unsentimental, shy piety, but the mighty work of church-raising in the Romanesque period is a stronger and more majestic reminder of it than the folklore.

The Middle Ages had an inheritance from the past, which had to be described.  But Nordic late antiquity was a motley, conflict-rich time, as motives of widely different origin clashed.  Some of them must have been immensely old even then.  Out of the monuments of remoter times, then, an account is given of the first flowering of remarkable themes on Nordic ground.

Several scholars have portrayed pre-Christian Nordic religion chiefly by using folklore as the main subject matter, the powerful assemblages that we collectively call “folk belief.”  This is true of works like Gudmund Schütte’s Hjemligt Hedenskab [Domestic Paganism] and Axel Olrik and Hans Ellekilde’s large Nordens Gudeverden [The North's Mythology].  From both we have gratefully borrowed subject matter and references.  The evolutionary viewpoint, which invariably becomes predominant, I dare not share.  The majority of great religious themes must have come to the North from without.  For “folk belief” as a whole – not the sifted features in it that clearly correspond to more distant times’ own relics – one can have mistrust.  It won’t do to describe the people’s beliefs for the last 900 years.  Most material is gathered for a particular purpose: to rescue the “aboriginal,” supposedly dying pagan relics.  The substance of popular Christian tradition we generally left alone.  But it died along with the pagan low-religious practices, which perhaps reveals that these were dependent on the head religion’s shelter.  And apart from the fact that many pagan relics arguably are engendered by the Christian culture or adventive with it, in addition, the material is really missing not only the substance of Christian tradition, but what is particularly important, it illuminates only poorly the villagers’ own rank ordering of faith concepts.

Here, we take for granted that each of the great ancient monuments, the sacred memorials, in its time was a holy concentration of power in the cultural landscape, just like the churches afterwards.  They are not regarded in the same way as natural shrines, hills, lakes, springs, and bogs, places where nature in some inscrutable way collects and discharges its holy force.  They are works that defy nature, and whose powers were of a different kind than those that lived in the green twilight behind the woods’ edge.

After having learned of the works at first hand, knowledge was sought in archaeological and other historical reading, in ethnological and religious studies.  Guided from this we have made selections in the folklore.

The descriptions of the older times are thematic, not developmental-historical.  It is quite possible that the Iron Age’s death cult stems from the Late Stone Age’s, but only the thematic kinship is certain, so little can we here, as in several other matters, follow the inheritance’s secret life, after the theme’s first flowering, through obscure periods in between.  It is also an age’s chief motive that is portrayed, in the Neolithic period’s tomb cult, not the vaguer cultivation of water powers.  But the revival of shifting major themes may well give a fuller understanding of the many contradictions in the life-tradition of Scandinavians in the times up to and after the year 1000, when they tested the strengths of their souls against a vast, unfamiliar world.

Starting points for further peripatetic reading have been Johannes Brøndsted’s Danmarks Oldtid [Denmark's Prehistory] and the ever-growing, gigantic work Danmarks Kirker [Denmark's Churches].  Some of the other books and authors we have used are mentioned throughout the text.  A bibliography and other apparatus from salutary, learned practice were deemed to be inappropriate in this work, but I thank the proprietors of knowledge for glorious reading times.

As a boy I preferred Nordahl Rolfsen’s Verdenshistorie [World History] to everything else printed.  He was a dilettante in the profession, a real storyteller.  Without it diminishing my admiration, I shared it later on between him and another, younger Norwegian, Fredrik Paasche, who was both storyteller and scholar.  But the idea of here using Rolfsen’s method – reading among the scholars and then transposing it into a narrative style – had to be shelved.  The nature of the subject was to blame for it.  This historical material rarely contains essential narrative elements, glimpses of human forms; we have to evoke them ourselves.  And here where the branches of knowledge are crosscut, they often disagree, grope; the scholars must use their intuitions.  Certainly one must also use one’s own, if a storytelling viewpoint is to stamp the book’s text, which is dedicated to my mother and the memory of my father.

Martin A. Hansen

The clean horse of our courage

[NASA Image of the Day Gallery: "The Horsehead Nebula, embedded in the vast and complex Orion Nebula, is seen in this representative-color image from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii.  The dark molecular cloud, roughly 1,500 light years distant, is visible only because its obscuring dust is silhouetted against another, brighter nebula.  The prominent horse head portion of the nebula is really just part of a larger cloud of dust which can be seen extending toward the bottom of the picture.  Credit and Copyright: Jean-Charles Cuillandre (CFHT), Hawaiian Starlight, CFHT."]

The title of my post comes from Richard Wilbur’s poem “Advice to a Prophet.”  It was 1959 (when his poem appeared for the first time, in The New Yorker).  The horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still relatively fresh.  The thermonuclear arms race between the world’s two superpowers was ramping up, fueled in the United States by the Soviet missile technology that launched Sputnik and which showed that (in principle) no place on earth was beyond their reach.  American teachers were drilling their students on how to flash-react to a nuclear blast.  Jimmy Buffett captured the hilarious naïveté of the strategy they were taught in this verse from his song “Waiting for the Next Explosion”:

Back in the fifties they thought it made good sense
To teach all the school children about civil defense.
Don’t be scared, do not cry,
Just dive under your desk and kiss your ass goodbye.

It’s not easy, some fifty years on, with no intervening nuclear detonations (either in anger or by mistake) and with the Cold War ended, for most of us to register the shock that nuclear weapons caused among those who came of age before 1945.  Some idea of the colossal upgrade in destructive power that nuclear weapons represented is provided in the following voice-over from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb:

Each B-52 can deliver a nuclear bomb load of fifty megatons, equal to sixteen times the total explosive force of all the bombs and shells used by all the armies in World War II.

A mere factoid for most of us today.  But for those who lived through World War II, and for whom all those bombs and shells weren’t just abstract or second-hand ideas, it staggered the mind.  Wilbur takes an interesting tack in his poem.  He advises the prophet to warn us not, as one might expect, by directly appealing to our self-preservation, i.e. by imagining the rest of creation without us – something the poet calls “an undreamt thing” that “we cannot conceive of” – but rather by indirect appeal, i.e. by imagining us without the rest of creation:

. . . What should we be without
The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

This poem was a favorite of the theologian Joseph Sittler (whom I have mentioned in some prior posts).  The co-editor of a compilation of Sittler’s work (Evocations of Grace : Writings on Ecology, Theology, and Ethics), Peter Baaken, has written:

Sittler returned to that poem again and again to illuminate the deep interior filaments binding the human spirit to the natural, “nonhuman” world.  [p. 8]

Another poet active in the 1950s whose conscience was shocked by nuclear weapons was the Swede, Harry Martinson (1904–1978).  His long poem (in 103 cantos) titled “Aniara,” published in 1956, contains harrowing descriptions of “how ghastly fission is in mind and body” (canto 29 – the translations here are by Hugh MacDiarmid and Elspeth Harley Schubert).  Here is a description by a witness (the poem’s narrator) to the witness (“the stone-deaf mute”):

And then the blind man started to describe
the appalling fiery glare
that burned out his eyes.
Describe it he couldn’t.
He mentioned but one detail: He saw with his neck.
His whole scalp, flayed open, was an eyeball
which, dazzled beyond the bounds of bursting,
was lifted, whirled away in blinded trust,
in the sleep of death.  But that was not a sleep.  [canto 26]

Perhaps most horrifying of all is what the fiery light does to the very stones:

All that could burn crumbled to ashes.
The stones were glazed
to a depth of four inches.
In some places the glaze went even deeper.
A foot or more
of granite surface boiled.
But humans were spared the sight of this,
they had been whirled ahead, above, around
like shooting cinders.  [canto 67]

The poem chronicles the voyage of a large space ship (Aniara) carrying 8,000 people which has accidentally strayed from its planned course (from a ravaged Earth to an inhospitable Mars) and is now traveling farther and farther into deep space without possibility of return.  The ship has onboard something that resembles a computer, a device that is able to receive signals from elsewhere in the galaxy and present them to the travelers, who are captivated by what the machine allows them to see and hear (the travelers having little else to do to occupy themselves with).  In today’s terminology, think artificial intelligence joined with galactic wi-fi.  This amazing device is known as Mima.  In canto 26 of the poem, Mima shows to the ship’s passengers the final nuclear destruction of Douris (the Earth).  Seeing this, the narrator of the poem, who is chief among Mima’s tenders, reports:

I dash towards the Mima as tho’ I might
arrest the frightful action with my anguish,
but Mima shows it all, uncompromising,
transmits to the last picture, fire and slaughter.
And turning to the passengers I scream
my agony of pain at Douris’ destruction.
There is protection against almost anything,
against fire and damage caused by storm and cold.
Yes, count up everything you can think of,
but there is no protection against man!

Mima, it turns out, is undone by what she has seen (the narrator uses the feminine pronoun when referring to Mima).  Her demise is related in canto 28:

For several days after Douris’ destruction
the Mima showed disturbance from the Phototurb
and the third veben fought as against a cloud
of deepening distant shame.  On the third day
the Mima prayed deliverance from the sight.
On the fourth day she gave me some instructions
about the octopus feelers of the Cantor works,
not till the fifth day was she calm again,
receiving a broadcast from a better world,
and once more her cell-works glowed serenely.
But on the seventh day there came a surging
from Mima’s cell-works I’d never heard before,
the indifferent third veben’s tacis
switched off, then reported itself blind,
and suddenly the Mima called me forward
to the inner barrier, and with apprehension
I went towards her, towards the awful goddess.

And as I stood there, shaking and cold with fear,
and full of anxiety for her condition,
the Mima’s phonoglobe began to speak
suddenly to me, in the dialect
she and I used most, for every-day purposes.

She bade me tell the Leaders here that she
for sometime past had felt as guilty as the very stones
for she had heard them crying out
as stones will do, on distant Douris’ plains
and she had seen the hot white tears of granite
when stones and ores are vaporized,
it wrung her heart to hear these stones lament.

Her cell-works dimmed and damaged by the cruelty
which in his evil only man can show,
she came, as might be expected, to the point
where she at last, as even Mimas must, broke down.
The indifferent third veben’s tacis
sees a thousand things no human eye can see.
Now, in the name of these, the Mima
craved for surcease.  She will not speak again.

Without Mima’s interstellar reach, the “world” of these rootless passengers collapses to the dimensions of their goldonda (spaceship) which though large (16,000 feet in length; 3,000 feet in width) isn’t large enough.  Attempting to ease the ennui in himself and the others, the poem’s narrator demonstrates great ingenuity in his use of illusion and distraction.  From canto 36:

At one time I developed the idea
of so placing a thousand mirrors that they
could give us everything that mirrors can
of bright reflection and seemingly-widened space
which optically magnifies every inch
to an illusory depth of some eight thousand inches,
and when we had furnished twenty halls like this
with mirrors taken from another eighty
the results were so magnificent
that for four long years with mirror glass
I could entrance the soul-distraught.

By canto 61 even greater lengths are gone to, but in the end, the jig is clearly up:

I invented, with the utmost difficulty,
a screen composed of two sorts of rays,
and found a way of hanging this as it were
out in space, some miles from the goldonda,
and towards this space-screen then I could send
a third sort of ray which transmitted pictures.
In this way I contrived to establish
the illusion of a wall in space – a kind of frieze
stretched out there and made up
of pictures of forests and moonlit lakes,
mountains and cities.  Sometimes I introduced
a mighty army of people carrying banners
of victory – all to make a seeming wall
which could shut out the intolerable void.

Later I built up yet another wall
this time on another side, and in between
these two resplendent walls of dense illusion
our space-ship glided – well screened from the immense
and gaping gorges which could no longer
stare in at us, as they’d done for the last nine years
stinging us like lances, pricking us like needles.

But even such tapestries of fantasy
need the support of some human will at least,
the contributions of some secret dreams
from those who only crave but never give us
– anything but emptiness, a void
which must be constantly filled and embellished.
And now this emptiness turned against me,
pursuing me to dark corners of the ship,
threatening my life when I could not
explain at once why emptiness remained.

I saw then how things are and how they were.
No one can hide his inner emptiness.
Mima had been smashed against the waves of time
like Humpty-Dumpty on his famous wall.
No one could mend poor Humpty-Dumpty then.
Still less have I any chance of mending you.
Your emptiness is terrifying indeed.

I keep on conjuring – but at bottom
the effort is hardly worth the trouble,
but you contribute nothing of your souls,
and so the pictures faded clean away.

This reminds me of a similar, but much simpler, illusion that was seen in a less apocalyptic, less dystopic work of art – Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film, Solaris.  In the film, the psychologist Kris Kelvin travels from earth to the space station orbiting a planet called Solaris, in order to investigate the deteriorating mental health of the three remaining scientists working there: Drs. Gibarian, Snaut, and Sartorius.  Upon his arrival at the space station, Kelvin learns that Gibarian has already committed suicide, and that Snaut and Sartorius are not well.  The cause becomes apparent soon enough and need not be discussed here.  The illusion to which I refer involves taking a sheet of paper and, using scissors, making many long, parallel cuts from one side of the paper almost all the way to the other side.  The result is a still intact sheet of paper with lots of long “fingers” that flutter when taped to an air vent hanging down from the ceiling in the space station.  The effect is meant to simulate leaves on trees moving in a breeze.  Snaut shows this trick to Kelvin in the midst of the following dialogue (as translated in the English subtitles):

Kelvin: “The night is a blessed time here.  Somehow it reminds me of the earth.”

Snaut: “You can also tie strips of paper to the air vents.  At night you’ll think you’re hearing leaves rustle in the dark.  Gibarian’s invention.  Like all strokes of genius, it’s so simple.  Sartorius said we were sentimental fools, but he has something like that hidden in his closet.”

What do all of these examples from art foretell?  They foretell that we’d better take care of the rest of creation on earth, and not merely for its sake, but for our sake as well.  Because without substantially all of it we literally are, or soon become, nothing.  The last three cantos (101-103) of Martinson’s poem bear witness to this, our possible, but preventable, fate:

This was our final night in Mima’s hall.
Soul after soul broke down and vanished
but before each ego finally dissolved
the soul’s will made itself quite clearly felt
finding at last the strength to separate
time from the grip of space, and thus to grant
oblivion to the race of Douris.

I had coveted a Paradise for this race
but since we left the one we had destroyed
the Zodiac’s lonely night became our only home,
a gaping chasm in which no god could hear us.

The eternal mystery of Heaven’s stars,
the miracle of the celestial mechanism,
is the law but not the Gospel.
Mercy can only thrive where there is life.

We failed to grasp the true meaning of the Law,
and found an empty death in Mima’s hall.
The God on whom we fixed our final hopes
lay wounded on the plains of Douris.

I turn the lantern low, enjoining stillness.
Our tragedy has ended.  But with the right
of travellers down the ages, I have told
our tale, a vision in galactic night.

With unabated speed towards the Lyra
the goldonda droned for fifteen thousand years,
like a museum filled with bones and artefacts,
and dried herbs and roots, relics from Douris’ woods.

Entombed in our immense sarcophagus
we were borne on across the desolate waves
of space-night, so unlike the day we’d known,
unchallenged silence closing round our grave.

By Mima’s graveside fallen in a circle
transformed once more to blameless dust we lay,
impervious to the sting of bitter stars,
lost and dispersed in oceans of Nirvana.

There are no pure bodies: The monotheistic spiritual naturalism of Anne Conway, part 4

[... continued from last post]

White, Carol Wayne, The Legacy of Anne Conway (1631 – 1679) : Reverberations from a Mystical Naturalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008).  There is no nice way to say it: this is a bad book!  White, like Duran and Nye, brings a strongly feminist point of view to Conway’s work.  But unlike Duran and Nye, who both use feminist theory in an integrative and clarifying way vis-à-vis Conway, White’s use of it is disintegrative and obscuring.  There seems to be no attempt here to understand in their full dimensionality Anne Conway, religion, mysticism, Quakerism, or naturalism.  All of them exist, it would seem, only to serve and forward White’s feminist agenda which is virulently anti-Western and antiscience.  All of them are brought in, it would appear, only insofar as they fit White’s version of ecofeminism that can be characterized, briefly, as Rosemary Radford Ruether’s minus her theism.  And the sides of Conway, religion, et al. that don’t quite fit the agenda?  They are ignored or glossed over.  At first, I was inclined to think that this book was just poorly written.  That, in fact, is true but after reading it fully once, and then rereading significant portions of it again, I am inclined to be less charitable.  The front cover of the paperback version of it (that I have) is suggestively green.  There is a blurry image of leaves on it.  The prominently displayed subtitle has the enticing but rather nebulous catchphrase “mystical naturalism” in it, along with the evocative word “reverberations.”  The verbiage on the back cover sprinkles in all the right keywords – religion, mysticism, Quakerism, and naturalism – and it is only in hindsight, and by reading between the lines, that one can detect something other than what is being openly peddled on the front and back covers of this book.  The phrase on the back cover, “equality within the natural order,” and the characterization of religious naturalism as that “which entail[s] an aesthetic ethical mandate seeking the increase of goodness in the world,” turn out to be more telling than they appear upon first inspection.

Now that I have probably thoroughly disabused you of the idea that White’s book is worth reading, I have to acknowledge that there are degrees of badness, and that not all parts of it are equally bad.  In fact it is the overall trajectory of the book that runs steeply downhill, i.e. the less bad parts occur early on.  For example, although White’s treatment of seventeenth-century Quakerism is one-sided, in that it overemphasizes Quaker defiance of social conventions, this part of the book (in the second chapter) is useful and interesting.  I also think some of the juxtapositions (sadly, they are often little more than this) that White invokes with Conway and certain later thinkers are potentially insightful, e.g. Goethe, Bergson, and Whitehead, even if some are not, e.g. Wieman and Ruether.  But, in the end, White’s feminist agenda obtrudes and overwhelms the germ of a good idea that this book potentially had.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the sixth and final chapter of the book, which is truly execrable.  It is here that the gloves finally come off.  It is here that White’s bombastic rhetoric becomes, at times, embarrassing:

Distinct in its exaltation of demanding nature’s liberation, my religious naturalism functions within the postmodern landscape to help recover the representations and articulations of alternate voices in philosophical, political, scientific, and poetic exchanges because the question of what can be said, when, and by whom, is of crucial significance.  I thus propose a critical religious naturalism, or a certain sustained set of religious reflections on humans as natural organisms – in other words, I propose to conceive humans as evolution that has become aware of itself.  (p. 108) . . .

These ideas emerging from the scientific sphere are not so much prescriptive as they are suggestive in helping me propose an artful construction of humans as value-laden, social organisms in constant search of meaning (cognition), enamored of value (beauty), and instilled with a sense of purpose (telos).  The human species, in my estimation, entails a modality of existence within a sphere of values in which transformation occurs.  In short, I propose a view of humanity as pulsating organisms full of possibilities, desirous of novelty, and aimed toward transformation – all qualities associated with human valuation.  (p. 115) . . .

Those of us interested in advancing the concept of vital love as a human ideal (or an ennobling value, if you will) must take note of the plurality of perspectives that help to shape humans as valuing, social organisms.  As I conceive it, this construction of humanity has a pivotal role to play in liberating and transforming all of nature, a task that is reminiscent of the symbolic power of Ruether’s ecojustice discourse.  I encourage religious humanists and our allies and friends – indeed, all who would listen – to continue creating and participating in various fields of feminist inquiry and activism, and to see without hesitation the interconnectedness of such issues as peace, labor, women’s health care, antinuclear activity, the environment, and animal liberation.  (p. 116) . . .

Furthermore, my feminist consciousness argues that if we wish to avoid the ever-present dangers of modernism’s illusions, we must write in various perspectives, modalities, and voices that have been pushed to the rear, so that we can enact critical standpoints by which to judge the present truths of the ‘naturalized’ world, particularly when they pretend to be the whole and only truth.  (p. 117)

It turns out that White’s “takedown” of Euro-Western modernity is total – a summary judgment for the plaintiffs, i.e. for all the victims of Euro-Western colonialism, racism, sexism, scientism and, yes, even humanism.  In one breath, she approvingly cites these words by Frantz Fanon (whose writings have been considered foundational for anticolonial liberation movements since the 1950s):

Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry.  Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their streets, in all corners of the globe.  For centuries they have stifled almost the whole of humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience.  Look at them swaying between atomic and spiritual disintegration.  . . .  That same Europe where they were never done talking of Man, and where they never stopped proclaiming that they were only anxious for the welfare of Man: today we know what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind.  . . .  Come then, comrades, the European game has finally ended, we must find something different.  (p. 102)

And then in the next breath (literally), White writes:

In the twentieth-first [sic] century, various humanists are also hoping to find something different as we continue challenging impoverished and detrimental constructions of gender and racial differences produced by a modern scientific project enabled by Enlightenment instrumentalism.  I also consider this an opportune moment to pause and consider the full heuristic value of Conway’s work for religious humanists today.  During her time, Conway challenged the dominance of the commonly accepted epistemological sources of scientific reasoning and the consequent methods used to achieve it.  She boldly associated crucial values with created nature in her cosmological constructions, incorporating various forms of knowledge that were not readily accepted by the cultural elites and composers of truth of her era.

Conway’s conceptual audacity invigorates religious naturalists seeking to apply philosophical and religious reflection to natural phenomenon [sic], who are not content to let others simply describe its mechanics or operations.  Her work on nature encourages some of us to engage in “world-formation,” namely, to envision and to help implement new forms of relationality among all natural processes that bring about new inhabited worlds of hope and transformation.  In other words, as I see it, Conway’s historic example evokes a fundamental truth of religious valuing, that is, a tenacious refusal of humans to reduce our various actions to mere determinist forces and mechanistic explanations of cause/effect.  During the early modern period, Conway’s philosophy of vitalism attributed intrinsic value to all that exists, and it featured a vision of humanity’s unique place/role/activity in a complex network of changing processes.  (ibid.)

Besides the bone-jarring juxtaposition, in terms of personalities, of the fiery, anticolonial militant with the quiet, genteel viscountess (“Revolutionary Annie,” spiritual godmother to ecofeminists everywhere?), there is the small problem that Conway was, by virtue of her high station and superior intellect, if not by virtue of her sex, herself one of the “cultural elites and composers of truth of her era” that White derides (history’s subsequent neglect of the ideas propounded at Ragley Hall – Conway’s manorial residence, and a mecca for thinkers in her orbit – is another thing).  Also, the sharp distinction White draws here between Conway and the mechanical philosophers is too extreme.  Thus, although White solidly pegs Conway as a mystical thinker in the tradition of Renaissance Naturalism, in more or less total opposition to Cartesian mechanical philosophy, David Byrne’s view of the matter seems much closer to the mark:

Conway is a mechanical philosopher who sought to augment mechanism with spiritual and active principles.  She accepted the mechanical philosophy, yet rejected the Cartesian notion that matter is dead and passive, replacing it with a vitalism descended from the Naturalists, but she also rejected aspects of Naturalism, specifically that God is directly present in his creation.

Like Newton, her mechanical philosophy defies any convenient classification.  Conway attempted to make the mechanical philosophy more amenable to theology by placing herself in the middle of, on one hand, the Renaissance Naturalist tradition, and on the other hand, the physics of Descartes.  From her perspective, each of these positions had strengths and flaws.  Conway adhered to some basic assumptions of both Naturalism and mechanism, but she modified the details of both movements to ensure conformity to Christianity.  (Anne Conway : An Intellectual Portrait of a Seventeenth Century Viscountess, p. 81)

One of White’s favorite words is “unmasked.”  Everywhere one looks, it seems, there are apparently well-intentioned people who have either been deluded, or who have deluded themselves:

Wieman’s naturalistic framework, on the other hand, demonstrates that what was once viewed as unitary is actually constituted by a plurality; certainties are seen as ambiguities; and univocal simplicities are unmasked as complexities.  (p. 94) . . .

Their works illustrate that, depending on who is speaking, the self-congratulatory proclamations of humanism can be quickly unmasked as fraudulent claims and violent acts of genocide.  (p. 102) . . .

These analyses have unmasked the naïve notion of progress through reason, arguing that rationality has been construed as a male principle, and an undue emphasis placed on it has relegated women and other groups to secondary positions throughout the history of Western civilization.  (p. 104) . . .

With other nonreligious ecofeminists, Ruether has further unmasked the mechanistic constructions of scientific discourse, arguing that solutions to global problems will not be found if contemporary citizens ignore the interconnectedness of all life – humans, and the creatures and plants with whom humans share the earth.  (p. 106)

The grimly strident, antirational tone of White’s voice seems to me very far from Conway’s quietly compassionate, yet altogether rational, voice, and all but cries out for its own unmasking.

My “annotated” Conway bibliography ends here.  I’m sorry to have to end it with such a negative review but, alphabetically, it just worked out this way.