Agora
THE LIBERAL ARTS AT LUTHER COLLEGE
FALL 2020
LUTHER COLLEGE, DECORAH, IOWA
Hope
THE LIBERAL ARTS AT LUTHER COLLEGE
Martin Klammer, editor
FALL 2020 VOLUME 33 NUMBER 1
Bonnie Tunnicliff Johnson, production editor
Agora, an interdisciplinary journal grounded in the humanities, is a project of the Luther College Paideia Program. The Luther College Paideia Program encompasses many activities and resources for students, faculty members, and the broader community. It includes an annual lecture series, library acquisitions, student writing services, a faculty development program that includes sabbatical grants and summer workshops, and Agora: The Liberal Arts at Luther College. All these activities receive financial support from the Paideia Endowment, originally established through National Endowment for the Humanities grants matched by friends of Luther College. The Paideia owl logo was designed by Professor of Art John Whelan.
The primary Agora contributors are Luther College faculty; writing is also solicited from other college community members and, occasionally, from outside writers. Agora was established in 1988 LUTHER COLLEGE by Paideia Director Wilfred F. Bunge, Professor of Religion and Classics, who edited the journal from 1988-1998. Other editors include: Mark Z. Muggli, Professor of English, 1998-2004; Peter Seeking Wisdom in Community A. Scholl, Professor of English, 2004-2014; and Martin Klammer, Professor of English, editor since 2014. Agora is distributed to on-campus faculty and administrators and to another five hundred off-campus friends of the college. Anyone wishing to be included on the mailing list should contact us at (563) 387-1153 or e-mail: agora@luther.edu.
PAIDEIA
To see the current issue and archival issues online, go to www.luther.edu/paideia/agora.
Contents Essay Lessons from a Pandemic Past Robert J. Christman........................................................................................................ 3
2020-2021 Paideia Texts and Issues Lecture Series: Building Community in a Changing Society Chamber Music at a Distance: How Musical Collaboration Transcends Traditional Spaces Kathy Reed..................................................................................................................... 5
Sabbaticals Researcher Subject of Police Investigation David Faldet................................................................................................................ 10 Building Happiness on Purpose: Teaching Paideia 450 Rebecca Sullivan........................................................................................................... 15 Will the Last Historian Close the Door? Thoughts on Conducting Research after January 2020 Brian Caton................................................................................................................. 18 So Much Time to Write? Amy Weldon.................................................................................................................. 21 Literary Representations of Post-American Intervention in the Dominican Republic Rita Tejada.................................................................................................................. 24 Mechanical, Musical Marvels: an Investigation of North German-style Pipe Organs 1550-1750 Greg Peterson................................................................................................................ 32
Chapel Seeking Hope (October 7, 2020) Eric Baack.................................................................................................................... 36 Finding God in Awe (October 14, 2020) Kalie Debelak ‘21.......................................................................................................... 38 Water, Life, and Mind (October 21, 2020) Thawdar Zin ‘21 .......................................................................................................... 40 Reflections on Being a Christian Biologist (October 28, 2020) Jessi Labenski ‘22 .......................................................................................................... 41 Evolution and Creation—So What’s the Question? (November 4, 2020) Kirk Larsen, Professor of Biology................................................................................... 43 Challenging Racial Bias in the Health Professions (November 11, 2020) Kelao Charmaine Neumbo ‘22....................................................................................... 45 Changing How We View, Treat, and Care for Others (November 11, 2020) Mannuku Pheko, ‘21..................................................................................................... 46 Climate Change and Hope (November 18, 2020) Duc Chu, Steven Conradt, Samantha Dzangare, Alec Eitrheim, Naree King, and Grace Parrott, with Eric Baack............................................................................................... 47
Cover: Students enjoy a walk on the lower campus trails near the Upper Iowa River. Courtesy of Luther College Photo Bureau, Madie Miller ’19
Introduction by MARTIN KLAMMER, Professor of English, Editor of Agora
In this winter of darkness when the pandemic surges on, it may seem odd that we feature “Hope” on this issue’s cover. Yet that is what I am feeling, and I am not alone: hope not only for an effective vaccine and increasing awareness of the precautions we need to take to curb the spread of the virus, but hope in a much broader sense at the end of this painful and vexing year.
the first talk when he emphasized our human capacity to slow the pace of climate change and enable the natural world to live on through the choices we make. Student speakers such as Jessi Labenski picked up this note of hope in her call for faithful stewardship of the earth. She concluded her talk: We are called to preserve this sacredness of the natural world as people of faith. So look closely through the microscope or high into the trees, and use both your scientific and your spiritual wisdom to listen to the earth and strive to make a difference in the beautiful world around us.
The sources of my hope are multiple, but as a professor at Luther College I find hope in the lives and commitments of our students. The most recent example is the Wednesday chapel series of talks in Quarter 1 (October-November) by biology students and professors on questions of ultimate concern at the intersection of science, spirituality, and ethics. I was excited for this series because it seemed to capture the spirit of Luther College’s commitment to faith and learning, while adapting to the diverse spiritualities of our students today. Luther students may seem less traditionally religious than in previous years—chapel attendance had been declining even before the pandemic—but our students today are no less committed to the values of our mission statement: striving to be a community where we are “enlivened and transformed by encounters with one another, by the exchange of ideas, and by the life of faith and learning.” I am Martin Klammer with granddaughter Dory Maxfield happy to feature in this issue of Agora just such an exchange of ideas in the Wednesday chapel series. The series concluded with student Each of the talks was organized along the lines of a traditional chapel: an opening reading from a biologist or environmental writer, a message, and a “sending” in lieu of a closing prayer. Professor Eric Baack, who organized the series, struck the theme of hope in 2
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voices from the Biology 151 class from Quarter 1 one sharing their sources of hope about climate change, from “a number of small daily lifestyle changes” to larger structural change, such as the Paris Climate Agreement. The final sentence of the sending captured the
series’ theme of joyful stewardship of the natural world: “Go forth and cherish.” In its emphasis on hope in our human capacities during times of crisis, the Wednesday chapel series serves as a fitting bookend to this issue of Agora. In the opening essay Professor Robert Christman notes the parallels between how fourteenth-century society responded to the Black Death (bubonic plague) and how we might respond to the coronavirus pandemic today. Robert suggests that we could learn some useful lessons from the experience of medieval Europe. Chief among those lessons is that “pandemic disease offers an unprecedented opportunity to ponder our lives, society, and attitudes, a chance to abandon aspects of ourselves that are harmful, self-centered, and shallow.” Like the Biblical figure of David captured in Michelangelo’s sculpture, we can then embrace “the latent potential within each of us . . . to face whatever is out there, no matter how goliath in proportions it may be.” I take comfort from Robert’s historical perspective, from the thoughtful eloquence of biology students and their professors, and from the good work my colleagues continue to do, as evidenced by their contributions to this issue. I am hopeful, not only for relief from the present pandemic, but for a world in which, to quote student Grace Parrott in her eloquent sending, we live “with the wisdom to weigh today’s desires against tomorrow’s needs, with the vision to see what thrives even as [we] mourn what is lost.”
Lessons from a Pandemic Past by ROBERT J. CHRISTMAN, Professor of History
Editor’s Note: Robert Christman submitted this essay to Agora last spring, just after we went to press. Since that time the coronavirus has not subsided, but in fact will remain a global pandemic well into 2021 (and perhaps beyond). In addition, sharp political divisions within the United States and around the world have escalated beyond incivility to violence. In this context, Robert’s historical example becomes even more compelling, both in how pandemic disease highlights inequities in society and in how we might harness human potential for the common good.
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COURTESY OF THE ROYAL LIBRARY OF THE NETHERLANDS
he Black Death, the outbreak of bubonic plague that occurred in the mid-fourteenth century, killed between 30 and 60 percent of all Europeans. The death rate for those who contracted the disease was somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 percent – 100 percent if the sickness was caught in its respiratory form. Under such
circumstances Europe was shaken to its core. Observing the complete breakdown of society in Florence, Italy, one of Europe’s leading cities at the time, the author Giovanni Boccaccio wrote, “In the face of such affliction and misery, all respect for the laws of God and man had virtually broken down and had extinguished in our city. For like everybody else, those ministers and executors of the laws who were not either dead or ill were left with so few subordinates that they were unable to discharge any of their duties. Hence everyone was free to behave as he pleased.” The catastrophe impacted every aspect of life; no one and nothing was spared. In short, the Black Death brought an end to the civilization of the Middle Ages, forcing Europe to move in new directions. There are many lessons regarding how human populations respond to epidemic disease that we might learn from medieval Europe’s experience, but I will limit my comments here to two.
Boccaccio and other Florentines prepare to flee the plague of 134752. Image from a 1485 version of The Decameron.
The first is rather negative and self-critical. The devastation of their world caused Europeans to become contemplative and introspective, to ask the question, why is this happening? Answers varied. The medical profession thought it was due to bad air that threw the body’s humors out of balance, thereby causing disease. Travelers from faroff lands offered vague references
Robert Christman to some sort of ecological disaster that had occurred in the Far East whence the plague had come – an earthquake or perhaps a volcano. But by far the most common conclusion was that the disease was the result of the wrath of God. But this conclusion raised another question: why was God angry? Again, answers varied, but most commentators agreed that it was because European society had become rich and materialistic; humanity had grown prideful and hubristic; arrogance, greed, and self-gratification dominated, particularly among the nobility; the poor and underprivileged had been left to suffer their fates. Now God was sending his punishment to a bloated, narcissistic, egotistical world. As a result of this realization, when the Europeans rebuilt their world after the plague had subsided, they did so believing that some significant changes were in order—that the goal was not merely to return to the status quo. If we see anything in ourselves of what the fourteenth-century Europeans saw in themselves, hopefully the challenge we are now facing will cause us as individuals and as a society Fall 2020/Agora
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to ponder some our assumptions and ways of life, and as a result, the world we create in the wake of the corona pandemic might be better, more equitable, and less materialistic. The first lesson we can take from the past is that we will have this opportunity.
So the Europeans of the past, ancestors to many of us, can teach us that pandemic disease offers an unprecedented opportunity to ponder our lives, society, and attitudes, a chance to abandon aspects of ourselves that are harmful, self-centered, and shallow. But it can also remind us that humanity is not merely at the whim of forces beyond its control, but that like David, we are endowed with powers and potential to face whatever is out there, no matter how goliath in its proportions it may be.
PHOTO CREDIT: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS BY JÖRG BITTNER UNNA
There is a paradox to the plague, and from it we might learn a second lesson. Historians have long puzzled over the fact that the Black Death and the Renaissance both began c. 1350, and have wondered about the connection between these two events. As the city of Florence was descending into chaos (and would be visited by outbreaks of plague in 1374, 1383, 1400, 1411, 1417, 1430, 1448, 1456, 1478, throughout the 1490s), it was also becoming the capital of the burgeoning Renaissance. The paradox inherent in this pairing of plague and Renaissance is that just as the disease was demonstrating to Europeans the absolute fragility and powerlessness of humanity, the Renaissance (a word that comes from the French for “rebirth”) was arguing for humanity’s capacities. At its core was a celebration
of the potential and ability of humankind. If we take Michelangelo’s statue of David as emblematic of the Renaissance, it offers not only an example of the beauty and perfection of the human form, but a demonstration of the latent potential within each of us. With his sling over his shoulder, David is captured in marble at the precise moment that he spots Goliath. The expression in his eyes suggests that the young hero is considering his strategy and about to embark on bold action. A more overt depiction of human efficacy and ability to act is difficult to imagine.
Closeup of Michelangelo’s David (1501-1504), now in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, Italy 4
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NOTES: 1. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, G.H. McWilliam, trans. (London: Penguin Books, [1972] 2003), 7-8.
Chamber Music at a Distance: How Musical Collaboration Transcends Traditional Spaces by KATHY REED, Instructor in Music, Director of Paideia
Editor’s note: The complete lecture-performance may be viewed on YouTube at the title above. Individual performances described within the text are noted at the time they occur in the video. “In order to play in the cistern environment, we had to learn to listen in a new way.”
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—Pauline Oliveros, TEDxIndianapolis, Nov. 12, 2015
n her first experiment in what she came to call “deep listening,” the great composer, activist, and teacher Pauline Oliveros had three musicians squeeze through a manhole-sized opening into the two-million-gallon concrete cistern lying underneath the north end of the Olympic peninsula. The original purpose of the cistern, built in the 1900s, was to hold water to put out bunker fires if the military fort above it came under attack. Decommissioned in the 1950s, Fort Worden was repurposed by informal gatherings of artists from nearby Port Townsend who found it a creatively inspiring place. In particular, the forty-five-second reverb within the cistern attracted spontaneous sound experimentation. Finally, in 1988, the first formal recording was made in what came to be known as the “Cistern Chapel.” Pauline Oliveros, with composer-performers Stuart Dempster and Peter Ward used accordion, trombone, didgeridoo, the human voice, and found metal objects in the cistern to create the works for the album “Deep Listening” (Evans). We find ourselves today in another kind of non-traditional environment, an environment where musical collaboration in the ways we are used to cannot take place. The work of Oliveros, who died in 2016, came to my mind as I began thinking last spring about what would happen to the music I love the most—Baroque chamber music,
and really, all chamber music—in an environment in which it was no longer safe to bring musicians and audiences close together inside a traditional “chamber” or room to make music. The whole premise of chamber music is that performers and audiences come together in a friendly space to share an intimate, time-honored musical tradition. Kathy Reed Or is it, I wondered? Is there a heart of chamber music that transcends this premise? To explore this idea, I began by recruiting colleagues who have performed together often, musicians who know and trust each other. It would have been extra hard, I reasoned, to try to build new collaborative relationships under strange circumstances. From there, and with input from these colleagues, I began to think about pieces of music that in themselves suggested interesting spatial relationships. I thought about spaces where it would be aesthetically inspiring to play, and where the space and the musical text could interact in creative ways. What could the spaces and settings teach us about the music itself? We might not be going into a cistern, but it felt like a new musical world to explore, and a desperately needed way to ameliorate a lonely world for musicians and audiences during the pandemic. A Canon Across an Atrium One of the first pieces to come to my mind was a piece not for harpsichord, my instrument, but for a treble instrument like flute, the instrument I used to play. Georg Philipp Telemann (16811767) published his Six Canonic Sonatas in 1727 with a title page that indicated
they could be played by two flutes or two violins. The sonatas are composed with a single musical line that two players begin one measure apart. One player begins, and the second player follows a measure later with exactly the same music. The challenge of composing a canon is to write one musical line that fits perfectly against itself. It was a challenge that Telemann and his Baroque contemporary J.S. Bach particularly enjoyed. These are wonderful pieces for a teacher to play with a student, or for two friends to play together reading from the same music stand under normal circumstances. How might distanced spacing take advantage of the composition? I thought of my colleagues Heather Armstrong, oboist, and Carol Hester, flutist—friends whose Jenson studios are next to each other. Both have a strong affinity for Baroque music, and I know from previous collaborations among the three of us that their sounds complement each other beautifully. Why not take this collaboration across the street to the beautiful and resonant atrium of the Center for the Arts, standing nearly empty last summer? Carol and Heather decided on three movements of Telemann and worked Fall 2020/Agora
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on them individually in their respective locations in Georgia and Decorah in July. At the same time, they were busy as all music faculty members were last summer, following the research to try to figure out how to teach and rehearse safely during the pandemic. Wind instruments, along with the human voice, are naturally the biggest culprits for spreading aerosols. Carol and Heather each placed a custom-made sack over the end of her instrument, a means that has been shown to have some mitigating effect. However, the research shows that safety is mainly about good air circulation and adequate distance. When they came together in August, they were separated by a long distance apart from each other on opposite sides of the airy atrium in the CFA. Not surprisingly, they faced challenges. In reflecting on the experience, Carol noted the heat and humidity in the building (it was a hot August), and of struggling to hear in enough detail to respond to the oboe’s “nuanced but rhythmic part.” The unfamiliar ambiance of the empty building also made it harder to focus. Heather made some specific observations about playing this particular composition in this space. She wrote, “The Canonic Sonatas use the canon effect, essentially a musical echo effect, one voice imitating the other. In the cavernous space of the CFA, I felt and heard three layers of echo: 1) Telemann’s literal written-out musical echo (the canon); 2) the echo (reverb) in that huge, open space; and 3) the mirroring/echoing image of Carol across the ‘canyon’ from me. I kept wondering what she was seeing and hearing from over there. We are usually so close in chamber music that playing so far apart this time really did make me wonder what Carol was hearing. Was it the same as how I heard myself? (No!) It was hard to imagine what her experience of hearing and seeing me was like in that space.” Indeed, she was saying, they were listening in a new way. Heather further observed that it felt like “paddling upstream, fighting to do something ‘normally,’” but realizing it wouldn’t work to slip into her “regular” chamber music mode. She recalls, “At first I think I ‘zoomed in’ too much, trying too hard to hear, to play together, 6
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to adjust from so far away. I think I did begin to understand (barely) that ‘zooming out’ was what was needed, letting go, becoming more expansive in my awareness, and learning to trust the space and trust Carol more, not necessarily what I was hearing.” This focus on trusting the other player to feel the music in the same way you do is an instructive and metaphorically valuable lesson from the experience of making music at a distance. My only role in this performance was as a listener, the one designated member of the audience. I sat one level below them on the first floor of the CFA Atrium. How privileged I was to be there. Both Carol and Heather commented on the importance of having someone to play for after five months, someone who was listening, as Heather said, “intentionally and consciously” to what they were creating in real time. Carol summed it up: “While playing, my experience was that of being in one orbit, with Heather in another, but both of us connected to the listener, perhaps more so because of the physical distance and space between each of us. I found it fascinating how incredibly helpful it was to have one solitary, very intentional listener. This created a triangular affect between the performers’ orbs, so to speak, and the quiet listener—in a setting that is visually very beautiful.“Indeed, the pull of this triangle was powerful. Their performance of sonatas in A minor and G minor from The Six Canonic Sonatas by Telemann was video-recorded and edited by Nicholas Bjerke, Luther College Visual Media Manager. Below is the time location on the Youtube video, “Chamber Music at a Distance.” You will see that Nick was also a part of the audience for the performance along with Tom Berger, who happened to emerge from behind Jewell Theatre and thoughtfully removed his shoes. [YouTube video “Chamber Music at a Distance” at 12:15.] One of the things that struck me as an audience member placed where I was and listening to this music, was how well I could separate the two lines in my ear, both because of the contrasting tone
colors of flute and oboe, and, perhaps especially, because of the physical distance between them. It was almost as if I was experiencing a time warp: one ear was hearing the original music, and the other was lagging behind by a measure. The idea of a canon had never been so clear. Emotionally, the effect on me was profound. By August it had been five months since I had been in an audience for live music. The experience brought tears to my eyes, and gave me a sense of profound gratitude for what I have had all of my life, and will never again take for granted. Two Instruments as One: The OrganHarpsichord (“Claviorganum”) Long before the pandemic, Gregory Peterson and I had spoken together about his experience on sabbatical of hearing music for an oddity of a Baroque instrument that combined his instrument and mine—the organ and the harpsichord. That got us to thinking about new kinds of collaborations for us. We have played together in pieces for organ, four hands (duets with both of us on the organ bench at once), and in a duet for organ and harpsichord up in the organ loft in the CFL. We have also played basso continuo together, that is, provided the harmonic foundation for the bass line in Baroque music. Greg and I have formed a continuo section of organ and harpsichord in choral works such as Handel’s Messiah and J.S. Bach’s Mass in B minor. But what if we experimented with existing solo repertoire for one instrument, and divided it between our two instruments, as Greg had heard done in Sweden on his sabbatical? After the pandemic arrived and I began thinking about the question of how musical collaborations could continue to take place, I thought again of this idea. Why not try this project using the CFL organ, with the harpsichord down below on the stage? Well, it turns out that the reason why not was that every minute of time in the CFL this fall was being used for ensemble rehearsals and classes, exactly because of its cavernous space. So we thought of another space, the Sundt organ hall in Jenson-Noble Hall of music. By moving the harpsichord out of the practice room where it normally lives and into Sundt, we created a win-
win situation; another practice room became available for students to practice and have lessons, and we gained a space where Greg and I could safely rehearse and record. Here is Greg’s description of our project: The use of two keyboard instruments for continuo playing during the Baroque era was common. A stringed keyboard instrument such as the harpsichord could alternate with the portative organ, a wind keyboard instrument, depending upon the style and texture of the music. Alternatively, both could play simultaneously, following the same bass line and harmony while allowing for individual applications of chord voicing, arpeggiation, and ornamentation.
ably composed for a single player using a large organ, lends itself well to the application of claviorganum with its easy division by echoes between two players separated by distance, but coming together in a reverberant space. Listeners enjoy the various textures and musical effects, including the song of the cuckoo!
It was a privilege to see and hear this stunning new instrument in several performances last fall while on sabbatical in Sweden. Not only for continuo playing, the idea of claviorganum can be used creatively to present organ and harpsichord literature. In fact, it also highlights a tradition of pedagogy where teacher and student can each sit at a keyboard and work through complex counterpoint by dividing the notes between two players in pieces originally composed for a single player. More than didactic, however, this presents the music in a new way. The listener hears shapes, textures, melodies, and motives differently. The listener can also gain insights into the piece through this enhanced sonic experience. Last fall, I heard music performed in this manner both by one player on the claviorganum, and by two players on two contrasting keyboard instruments. Therefore, in this time of physical distancing because of the pandemic, the idea of claviorganum allows two people to make music, separated by distance. It is truly chamber music, distanced, but in a new way.
One of the most striking aspects of this way of dividing a solo piece between two players was the chance that it gave us to inspire each other to improvise ornamentation. In Baroque music, it was standard practice for performers to add notes to the written music for the purpose of expression and variety. With the “echo effects” in this Sweelinck Fantasy divided between players, one of us could try a decoration or addition and the other would respond from across the room. It felt even more like a conversation than usual in this distanced set up, and was never the same from one time through the piece to the next.
The piece Kathy and I are playing is an Echo Fantasy by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621). Sweelinck served the city of Amsterdam as organist of the Oude Kerk. There were two organs in the church which Sweelinck used for his weekday recitals. The EchoFantasy in A minor, presum-
PHOTO COURTESY OF GREG PETERSON
An oratorio such as Messiah by Georg Frederick Handel with its choruses, recitatives, and arias, is an example of a work where this approach to continuo playing is sometimes applied. In fact, Handel himself designed a prototype instrument for this very purpose, but he never had it built. In 2019, Gothenburg Baroque in Sweden commissioned an instrument maker to build such an instrument according to Handel’s designs. It is called the claviorganum – clavier or keyboard plus organ. A single instrument combines an organ with a harpsichord through long-movement action. One player plays both instruments,
either separately or together, with the aid of a coupling mechanism. It is a clever design.
Claviorganum in Gothenburg, Sweden
The process of preparing for this recording provided an injection of musical exploration and fun during a time in September when we were both buried in the work of preparing classes and trying to get our feet on the ground for teaching this fall. We relished talking about the music, and working out who would play what when, what registration we should use on our instruments, what tempo worked best. We tried it one way, recorded it, and tried something different. We didn’t have a lot of rehearsal time, but we made it count. Those are normal collaborative conditions, but they felt new in an atmosphere that differed in so many other ways. We were fortunate to have the skill of Mick Layden, music department Digital Media Producer to record and film us, and also to provide an audience and a pair of critical ears. [YouTube video “Chamber Music at a Distance” at 27:08.] A Duel Next we will leapfrog over three centuries of music to hear a work composed by Pauline Oliveros, the visionary artist quoted at the beginning of the presentation. It was a coincidence that when I proposed this project, which was inspired by the quotation from OliFall 2020/Agora
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veros, my colleague Andi Beckendorf responded to my call for ideas about musical collaboration across distance with the suggestion of a piece by Oliveros herself. “Double Basses at Twenty Paces” must have been written for the pandemic—except that it was actually composed back in 1978. It is intended as a piece of theatrical humor, which it is, but from our current perspective it also offers a commentary on the trials of operating at a distance. It is, as the title suggests, a duel.
that ‘not being together’ is probably the effect that Oliveros intended. Oliveros also plays on this by having the referee (conductor) conduct different movements of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony while the players do other things. There is only one section in which we play the same thing at the same time, following the conductor.” Professor Baldwin might agree that conducting an orchestra rehearsing in the CFL may sometimes feel like refereeing a duel or even a melee between orchestra members!
This duel was enacted by Beckendorf and her student, senior Zach Mayer. The duelers also need “seconds,” played by Zach’s fellow seniors, Olivia Steffl and Andrew Scheller. Finally, a duel also requires a referee, played by Luther College Orchestra Conductor Daniel Baldwin. The duel is based on a musical score that reads more like a set of stage directions. There are relatively few musical notes on the page; instead, there are a series of stopwatch timings and instructions for each player and the referee. The instructions include a stage diagram and performance cues such as this one: “Attitude: all participants must devote undivided attention, maintaining at all times a serious professional manner.”
Purcell in Nature
Here is the URL for“Double Basses at Twenty Paces: a theater piece for two double basses, their seconds, and a referee (or conductor)” by Pauline Oliveros, recorded in the CFL by Mick Layden.
Returning to the Baroque, and moving from the absurd to the sublime, we’ll end this investigation of music at a distance and in unusual spaces with the music of Henry Purcell, English composer who lived from 1659 to 1695. Baritone Andrew Whitfield and I have performed Purcell together a number of times before. One of my favorite Purcell songs, “An Evening Hymn,” has a text that I have often thought should be sung as a prayer at the end of the day. It begins, “Now, now as the sun has veiled his light, and bid the world goodnight….” As I thought of the possibility of recording some music for this presentation out of doors this summer, I immediately thought of recording the Purcell “Evening Hymn” outside at sunset. Could it happen?
It did, and it was miraculous. We recruited Andi Beckendorf to join us and shore up the bass line, doubling the harpsichord left hand as is common practice for Baroque music. Her presence was especially important in the outdoor acoustic, where it was harder to hear precise attacks and releases. We decided that as long as we were moving a harpsichord and bass outside for music, we might as well do some other Purcell songs as well, so we chose three, two of which you may hear. We kept it simple: one rehearsal, and then, with the help of Spencer Martin and his I-pad, a recording one hot summer evening in July. The campus was officially closed, so the only audience we invited were a family member and a friend who helped carry the harpsichord. A couple happened to be out walking their dog on campus that evening, so they got a surprise concert. And as you will see, in this recording of Purcell’s “Music for a While,” there were some other unexpected guests. The text speaks of the hypnotic effects of music, and it apparently had that effect on the wildlife on campus. A doe with her fawn meandered and lingered behind us as we played. Later, in “An Evening Hymn,” a buck appeared and stopped, apparently transfixed!). [YouTube video “Chamber Music at a Distance” at 47:45.]
As Andi Beckendorf noted, this piece requires no adaptation to be performed at a distance; it is built into the score. One unusual feature required by the performance instructions is that the conductor faces the audience—in our case, the camera—rather than the players. This gives the sense that the (virtual) audience is being conducted as well. The conductor is in a sense more of a theatrical effect than a necessity, since the two players are actually not supposed to be playing the same thing at the same time. Andi commented, “We have noticed that it is harder to play together at a distance in the instances where we have the same music, but also observed 8
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PHOTO COURTESY OF SPENCER MARTIN, LUTHER COLLEGE
[YouTube video “Chamber Music at a Distance” at 33:45.]
Andrew Whitfield, Andi Beckendorf, and Kathy Reed perform the music of Henry Purcell on the Luther College campus, July 3, 2020.
Listening in a new way? Absolutely. Sound is different outdoors, and so is tuning for harpsichord and bass on a hot, humid July night. We could have fussed with it indefinitely, but then we would have missed our window of light. And somehow, it seemed less important. We listened extra hard to match articulation, and to support the meaning of the text—things we do anyway, but that felt even more central in this outdoor setting. We realized that the sounds of the setting—evening bird sounds, dogs barking, a child’s voice in the distance— became part of the music in a way that they can’t in the acoustically engineered and relatively sterile sound environment of the recital hall.
WORKS CITED Evans, Nat. “The Cistern Chapel: Resonance from the Pacific Northwest.” Newmusicbox, April 6, 2016. https:// nmbx.newmusicusa.org/cistern-chapel/ Oliveros, Pauline. “The difference between hearing and listening.” TEDxIndianapolis, Nov 12, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ QHfOuRrJB8
This final experience of playing outdoors at sunset gets at some of my takeaways about the heart of musical collaboration, things that I will carry with me in my life as a musician. You have to listen to the space you are in, and let it become a part of the performance. You need to be able to see each other’s body language. You don’t need a big audience, but you need someone to listen, to become a part of the musical “orb” as Carol called it. Perfection of the details—ensemble, tuning, every single note in its place—is still worth striving for, but it is not central. You need to respond to what happens in the moment. The process is as important as the product. And the opportunity to make music together is a gift, one that musicians will go to all lengths to give and receive. To conclude this lecture essay, I offer Purcell’s “An Evening Hymn,” recorded around 8:30 p.m. on July 3. As Andrew and Andi and I talked about our feelings that evening, we agreed that the peace invoked in this text was aspirational, as if to say, “Please, God, let this peace come over me.” I thought of a friend who was going to bed and waking up in the reality of the recent death of his wife, and we thought of all of the people living in grief and fear. Creating music together on the Luther campus in the quiet of the evening was an act of prayer, hope, and of reverence. That is the heart of musical collaboration, wherever you are. [YouTube video “Chamber Music at a Distance” at 54:33.] Fall 2020/Agora
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Researcher Subject of Police Investigation
S
ure enough, the title of this sabbatical reflection applies to me: the suspect in a possible crime committed on a remote Scottish farm in the name of historical research. When contacted over the phone by a constable in the East Midlands, the first excuse I blurted was: “I’m an academic!” Was that, I later wondered, my way of saying I don’t know any better, am not in the criminal line of work, or, perhaps, am above the laws that govern ordinary criminal offenses? In any case, my sabbatical project was not to commit rural crimes, but rather to research the reactions of over a dozen well-known British writers to earth science as established by the Scotsman, James Hutton. In this report, I’ll discuss adventures in pursuit of Hutton and a handful of those authors: Charles Darwin, Mary Shelley, Beatrix Potter, and H.G. Wells, adventures that took place in spring 2019 while my wife Rachel and I were in England to direct Luther’s Nottingham Program. Though my Paideia grant was meant to let me return for follow-up and to explore the lives of other writers, sadly the Covid pandemic meant these spring 2019 travels in Great Britain were the extent of my on-site learning: up-front reconnaissance before a sabbatical year of reading and writing. Hutton (1726-1797) was the first to assert the reality of deep time: an earth history of not the 6000 years calculated by Bishop Ussher (1581-1656) using the Bible and other ancient writings, but rather time, Hutton said, with “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.”1 Hutton asserted an earth in flux, still hot at its center and relentlessly eroded at its surface: continents in uplift, underlain by churning magma, and hills and fields constantly worn away, only to have their rubble and detritus transformed under heat and pressure 10
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into new rock, sometimes uplifted again to mountain heights, only to be worn slowly down into plains or river outwash. My project was to research how popular writers reacted to this vision of an ancient, unfixed earth, especially in the way they wrote about soil. It took over a century for fiction to invent a way of depicting Hutton’s facts. In the meantime, writers had their eyes to the ground, David Faldet in the bowels of the Birnam oak—an ancient tree and my project was to not far from where Beatrix Potter first drafted Peter Rabbit reflect on what, exactly, they saw. which he penned his observations on My brush with police authority came soil loss, marl, and the effects of yearly in researching Hutton himself. Huttemperature on crop growth. Rachel ton developed his theories of erosion and I snapping photographs from the while farming in Berwickshire, just perimeter fences of the property made north of Scotland’s border with Engthe neighborhood suspicious. Someone land. I wanted to get a few pictures took down my vehicle’s number plate. of the fields whose plowing Hutton When Rachel and I arrived back to our revolutionized, and of the farmhouse in house in Nottingham I found a note, slipped through our mail slot, that told me to contact a detective, “in reference to your case.” My case? Fortunately the officer decided that, as an academic, I truly was harmless, had not committed a crime, and wasn’t likely to return to Scotland to commit a crime. The “harmless” part may or may not have been true.
Slighhouses farm of James Hutton
For example, I also insisted that Rachel accompany me to Siccar Point, a remote coastal promontory east of Edinburgh on the North Sea where Hutton saw the deep age of earth revealed in gray rock, a hardened slurry of ancient eroded sediment, upended by subterranean pressure from horizontal to vertical, and then overlaid with horizontal layers of red sandstone that had been formed in
IMAGES COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
by DAVID FALDET, Professor of English
an entirely separate era of erosion. To view Siccar Point we needed to take a public footpath through a series of pastures. Next to the entrance stile at the car park, a sign warned: “Bull.” I, the academic, was not about to let a farm animal come between me and a foundational moment of scientific history. Rachel had different feelings.
round. Lost in his thoughts, Darwin sometimes changed the length of his daily regime because his children, for their amusement, either subtracted from or added rocks to his pile. I pocketed an almond-sized flint, partly coated in the local chalk, from the gravel path to sit on my desk at home, a reminder of the ground trod by a visionary, though absent-minded, hero.
al rate at which soil rose up around the stone. The work of Darwin’s on which I focused was his lifetime bestseller: The Formation of Vegetable Mould, Through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits (1881). As I stood at the worm stone and looked south across the nearest expanse of closely trimmed grass I could see hundreds of little piles of earth: the sort of worm castings that inspired Darwin’s book. Darwin has been popularly associated with chimpanzees, whose shared ancestry with humans he posited in The Descent of Man, or with Galapagos finches, whose wide range of closely related species correlated with the distinct and varied Galapagos island environmental histories: proof of the theory advanced in On the Origin of Species. Darwin, however, spent very little time observing these species. In contrast, off and on for over thirty years he closely studied earthworms.
Siccar Point bull and cow After suggesting several milder solutions, I maybe suggested divorce, but backed down to proposing a less direct route, which would put us outside the stone pasture wall but along the top of a sea cliff. Rachel steeled herself and tried not to look down. I got to see Siccar Point. No one died. The bull, however, was very real, large, unfriendly, and had planted himself in the wall opening through which Rachel and I would have passed had we taken the pasture footpath. I was glad to gaze at this grim bovine giant and his herd from a distance and on the safe opposite side of a wall rather than eye to eye, with nothing but air and a short expanse of pasture grass between us. It was, after all, his turf. Some men have guardian angels. I have a guardian spouse. Treading the footpaths of intellectual giants other than Hutton proved less dangerous. Nothing, in fact, could be more comforting than, in the English county of Kent, strolling the Sand Walk: a circular path Charles Darwin walked daily, keeping track of his distance with stones deposited at the end of each
Darwin’s revolutionary theory of natural selection was made possible by Hutton’s new vista on time and geological change as accepted and popularized by English geologist Charles Lyell. Darwin, as geologist, turned his attention to the creation and erosion of coral reefs, volcanic islands, and the South American continent, the place where he experienced his first earthquake and witnessed the cataclysmic shifts it made around him in the neighborhood of Concepción, Chile. My key interest in visiting Darwin’s Down House was to see the “worm stone” at the back of his property, created by Darwin and his son to measure the annu-
In his “earthworm book,” Darwin studied the rate at which earthworms cycled soil: bringing it up from below and depositing it at the mouth of their burrow on the ground surface. In the sites in and around Kent where Darwin carried out his studies he discovered that worms bury solid objects at a rate averaging 2 inches per decade. He brought a shovel with him to Stone-
Darwin’s sand walk Fall 2020/Agora
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Darwin’s worm stone henge to gather evidence at that famous ancient place. He enlisted the aid of his friend Thomas Henry Farrar of Abinger Hall to study the burial process of a Roman villa discovered on Farrar’s estate. Using Roman coins found during the dig to date the structure, Darwin calculated the rate at which the site had sunk beneath the soil. Once the site was unearthed and cleaned, Farrar tabulated the rate at which earthworms continued to cast up earth on its mosaic floors: a process that would eventually re-bury the villa. “It appears at first sight a surprising fact,” Darwin mused, “that this field . . . should have been cultivated and ploughed during many years, and that not a vestige of these buildings should have been discovered. No one even suspected that the remains of a Roman villa lay hidden close beneath the surface.”2 The slow, patient work of tiny annelids totally erased even the monumental remains of what had once been a mighty empire.
with the statue of Humphry Davy, a native son of that city. The statue commemorates Davy’s invention of a safety lamp that lessened the likelihood of workplace explosions for Cornish miners. Davy, though diminutive in stature, was a titanic pioneer of electrochemistry. He mapped the interface of chemistry and electrical currents in soil activity. These researches were studied and discussed by the teenaged Mary Shelley (1797-1851) and her poet husband Percy. Mary read Davy’s Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812) as she drafted Frankenstein. In Mary’s novel a spark, intimately connected to the process of decay, enlivens the “clay” of Victor Frankenstein’s creature. It was also a pleasure to trace the footsteps of children’s author Beatrix Potter (1866-1943). Potter had a deep love of the soil, which led her to move to the Lake District and take up farming after spending her first forty years, spent mainly in London, suffocating under the upwardly aspiring middle-class propriety of her parents. Annual family trips to Scotland, and later to the Lake District, where her father could hunt, fish, and pursue amateur photography, gave a young Beatrix a taste of the rural life that made her heart sing and which she was later able to achieve for herself, much to her mother’s horror. Exploring Potter sites in Perthshire, Scotland, Rachel and I walked through Birnam Wood (made famous in Shake-
A pleasant encounter during my research took place much further west in Penzance, Cornwall, where Rachel and I came face to face on Market Jew Street Rachel Faldet beneath a Birnum Wood sycamore 12
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Humphry Davy statue, Penzance speare’s Macbeth) to the River Tay to see Eastwood House, situated in a scenic patch of lawn on the facing shore. At Eastwood House in 1893 Potter drafted her first version of the Peter Rabbit story, which she sent to the ailing son of her former governess. Dalguise, the nearby village Potter’s family visited for many of her childhood summers, is in the heart of an area of Perthshire known for its big trees. Walking the braes of Perthshire’s burns, or its rigs and howes (the banks of its streams, or its ridges and hollows) between the massive trunks of oak and Douglas Fir, it is easy to sense enchantment, such as that invoked by Macbeth’s witches, or that which brought to life in Potter’s imagination a small universe of talking animals who, with mixed success, accommodated their animal obsessions to a British standard of polite behavior (in other words, animals who lived the same sort of life Potter did). Rachel and I had to watch our step for cow manure when we picked our way from Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top farm to a small but scenic impoundment of water: Moss
The first British writer to fully realize Hutton’s deep time vision in a work of fiction was H. G. Wells (1866-1946). In Wells’s breakthrough novel, The Time Machine, an inventor in the posh west London suburb of Richmond invents an apparatus that will allow him to travel through time: a sort of bicycle on the seat of which he can travel into the future or into the past as easily as one might pedal east to the corner shop for a parcel of paper or west to a local pub for a pint of ale.
Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top home Eccles Tarn. Our route began as a paved village street in Near Sawrey morphed into a dirt farm lane and petered out into a narrow footpath. At Moss Eccles Tarn Potter drew inspiration for her fishing story: The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, perhaps my favorite of her children’s books. The steep walk up to the Tarn, situated between Bank Wood and pastured meadows, was damp, and the stone walls on either side of our route, Stones Lane, moss-covered. It was easy to imagine Potter finding there what most absorbed her in the decade leading up to her start as a beloved author: fungi. If Potter had met with success in her main preoccupation of the 1890s, she would have become a mycologist. What began as a few watercolor sketches of mushrooms in the late 1880s, culminated in obsessive study of fungi and presentation of her paper, “On the germination of the spores of Agaricineae,“ at London’s Linnaean Society in 1897. With hit-and-miss collaboration and little instruction Potter read all the most important fungi
work in English and German, became the first person to successfully germinate several species of fungi, recognized before anyone else that the reproductive bodies of fungi are but small extensions of a much larger mycelial mass that constitutes the core body, and, in defiance of the leading authority of the day, became convinced that fungi develop symbiotic (as versus parasitic) relationships in lichens as well as other interspecies pairings. As a woman, however, Potter’s work was rebuffed. She turned, instead, to children’s books. In my study I looked at the way dirt became more central and more celebrated in her stories.
Stones Road to Moss Eccles Tarn
When Wells’s Time Traveller activates his machine, hurtling forward in time, even though he remains stationary in place, he sees: “The whole surface of the earth . . . changed – melting and flowing under my eyes.”3 Near the end of the novel the Time Traveller goes forward thirty million years, and from that perspective sees his Thames-side house lot converted to an ocean beach, and both the planet and sun cooling with age. The contrivance of Wells’s imaginary machine made the normally slow speed of geological change visible. The dangers I faced in tracing the footsteps of H.G. Wells, the science educator turned writer who first depicted Hutton’s geology in fiction, came not from farm animals or muddy tracks but traffic and traffic wardens. I recorded the locations of key scenes in the action of The Time Machine and War of the Worlds. Tracking down these spots, I found out what Wells meant when he wrote to a friend as he penned War of the Worlds: “I completely wreck and destroy Woking – killing my neighbors in painful and eccentric ways – then proceed via Kingston and Richmond to London, which I sack, selecting South Kensington for feats of peculiar atrocity.”4 Woking, in the Surrey suburbs of the capital, was where Wells lived and wrote his novel. South Kensington was where he studied Fall 2020/Agora
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science and later worked as a science teacher and science education journalist. Kingston and Richmond, in between, were affluent suburbs, considered at the time a safe and leafy escape from urban congestion.
up research impossible. The end of my sabbatical year finds me with a draft of a book manuscript in hand: Another One Writes the Dust: The New Earth Consciousness of Two Darwins, Dickens, Victorian Poets, and the authors of Frankenstein, Alice in Wonderland, Dracula, Peter Rabbit, and War of the Worlds.
NOTES 1. James Hutton, “Theory of the Earth,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, v. 1 (1788): 209 – 303, 303.
2. Charles Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits (London: John Murray, 1881): 183.
Wells set his scientific romances in the comforts of suburbia, but through novel 3. H.G. Wells The Time Machine, from twists of science-fueled fantasy turned My thanks to the Paideia program, H.G. Wells: Six Novels (San Diego: these places upside down. To stand not only for funding to carry out my Canterbury Classics, 2012): 1 – 57, 12. at the spots where Martians incinerresearch and writing, but also for 4. H.G. Wells, The Correspondence of H.G. ated Londoners with their heat ray I inspiration. My interest and knowledge Wells ed. David C. Smith 4 vols. double parked or defied residents-only of Frankenstein and the writings of (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998): parking restrictions, and then watched Charles Darwin have been fed by years v. 1, 261. carefully that I didn’t open my car door of teaching these works in Paideia 111: into oncoming traffic. The Tudor revival Enduring Questions. Also, I would not suburban villas that would have still have started reading H. G. Wells had looked raw and new in Wells’s days, I not, in 1990, been asked by colleague now have lichens and rising damp on Linda Shearing to join her and Dentheir foundations and front garden nis Barnaal in teaching what was then spaces bricked over to accommodate called a Paideia Two course: Speculative parking space for Audis and BMWs. As Fiction. Thanks Paideia, for making my for the place of rock and soil in Wells’s education an ongoing one, and one that book about a Martian invasion, he dein true Luther College fashion is both picted his Martians as having intellects interdisciplinary and multicultural. that made humans look like ants, and a human metropolis like London no more than an anthill, disturbed by Martian heat rays. The reason for Martian invasion involved geological history. In the novel, Mars, further out from the sun, is older than earth, and beginning to cool and die. The Martians, who happen to be interested in feasting on human blood, will also buy six million years of time by emigrating from their original planet to our newer (and still more molten) one. The explorations that West London site of Martian landing in H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds preceded my sabbatical year of research and writing neither put me behind bars nor left me trampled by a disgruntled bull, nor run down by congested suburban traffic. Instead, I was inspired. My only disappointment was that the Covid pandemic made my return for follow14
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Building Happiness on Purpose: Teaching Paideia 450 by REBECCA SULLIVAN, Associate Professor In Paideia
While the fields of philosophy and psychology have strongly influenced the study of happiness, American Studies also examines how media, advertising, and popular culture reflect a “happiness imperative” that pervades our national identity. By the end of World War I, as mechanization promised a better future, the search for happiness was amplified. In Happiness in America: A Cultural History, Lawrence Samuel documents the growing interest in the science of psychology during the 1920s and a trend in publishing books about life satisfaction. At mid-century, with the sacrifices of the Great Depression and World Wars in the past, consumer capitalism promised to be the way to achieve happiness. In a critique of this trend, socialist Erich
Fromm observed, “Consumption was a means to an end, that of happiness. It now has become an aim in itself ” (The Sane Society, 1955). Yet as consumer trends continue into the twenty-first century, broader marketing of luxury goods and the constant gaze of social media have only served to increase dissatisfaction. Paradoxically, in a culture that celebrates personal satisfaction, rising levels of anxiety and depression indicate a decline in wellbeing. The 2020 World Happiness Report demonstrates this ongoing decline of happiness in America, as the U.S. dropped to number 18 in the global ranking (from a peak of 11 in 2012, the first year that the United Nations Sustainable Development Network released its annual happiness report). It is interesting to note that Finland is again at the top of the list, followed by the other Scandinavian countries—suggesting that the Nordic values of social connection and solidarity contribute to well-being. While a desire for happiness isn’t unique to any one culture, the national identity of the United States does present the problem of an allusion to happiness in our founding documents. Although the Declaration of Independence was thoroughly edited by the Second Continental Congress in June 1776, Jefferson’s language about the fundamental rights, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” was left unchanged. Jefferson himself attributed the authority of the Declaration to “the harmonizing sentiments of the day,” influenced by “elementary books of public right” by John Locke, Aristotle, and Cicero. For Aristotle, and arguably for Jefferson, the Greek word for happiness—eudaimonia—evoked not only self-actualization but also engaging one’s talents in civic concerns (although neither Aristotle nor Jef-
IMAGES COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR
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riting my sabbatical proposal in 2019 in a context of relative normalcy, I proposed research that would lead to the development of a Paideia 450 course on happiness. Drawing from my research and teaching on the topic of vocation, the arc of the course would be toward the satisfaction that comes from a life of purpose. Like my previous Paideia 450, “Here on Earth,” this new course would be co-taught with my colleague from the Nursing Department, Janna Edrington. Now, as we step through the disruptions brought on by a pandemic, I suspect that I should have developed a course on resilience. Nevertheless, I think that the outcome of my sabbatical served students well in the September 2020 Paideia 450 course: “The Search for Happiness” because Covid-19 punctuated the ethos of the course: the quest never was for happiness, but for meaning. My sometimes unwieldy sabbatical project has primarily involved designing an interdisciplinary course that uses ethical reflection and intensive writing to explore the possibilities of a purposedriven and meaningful life.
Rebecca Sullivan ferson was inclusive in their concept of civic participation). In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote, “The happy man lives well and does well; for we have practically defined happiness as a sort of good life and good action.” In a similar vein, Jefferson was also strongly influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Francis Hutcheson. Jefferson’s letters reflect Hutcheson’s “moral sense” philosophy, almost word for word, when he writes “[Humans are] endowed with a sense of right and wrong . . . as much a part of [their] nature as the sense of hearing, seeing, feeling”; imbued with this moral sense, they take pleasure in acts of benevolence. Hutcheson’s model understood the interests of individuals to be tied to the interests of society as a whole. Such intellectual influences suggest that the phrase “the pursuit of happiness,” which has often been taken to promote personal gratification, may actually reflect traditions that emphasize the benefit of the common good. To trace this intellectual history, I doubled back to revisit Aristotle. To Aristotle, the single ultimate goal of life is happiness, which is realized through virtuous activity in accordance with reason. In Aristotle’s framework, where Fall 2020/Agora
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everything is intended to fulfill the function for which it exists, the highest human function is rationality; and the development of this distinct human capacity for reason leads to a good life. It follows that human happiness involves finding a purpose in order to realize one’s capabilities. Not dissimilar to our current concept of vocation, Aristotle promoted the pursuit of the occupation that best fits an individual’s aptitudes: one that, with practice and advancing skill, would likely bring pleasure. Aristotle’s view of human virtue and excellence became an axis for my reading about happiness and purpose.
psychologist Martin Seligman’s foundational work. For his book Authentic Happiness, Seligman devised a “Values in Action” inventory to measure human strengths, which he argues is the first step in recrafting your life to use your abilities “in the service of something much larger than you are.” In Seligman’s view, when you have work that draws on your signature strengths, “and you see your work as contributing to the greater good, you have a calling. Your job is transformed from a burdensome means into a gratification” (2002). This approach to life satisfaction, along with the concept of “flow”—which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines as complete absorption in an activity that involves one’s creative abilities—revealed to me the strong connection between current happiness theory and vocational discernment.
is the foundation of the Next Steps for Sophomores which, since 2017, has embodied Luther’s commitment to student reflection and vocational discovery: “[to] help students understand and articulate the value of the liberal arts and envision their own contributions to the common good.” My continued motivation for developing vocation-oriented courses is to sustain the study of vocation that began at Luther nearly twenty years ago.
Students are eager to explore their potential contribution to the world. With some guidance, young adults welcome reflection on the callings that have been communicated to them by personal Midway into my sabbatical year, I tranexperiences and the voices of mentors. It sitioned to studying current happiness has also been useful to collaborate with theory by enrolling in the course “The the Career Center to administer the Science of Well-Being.” Taught by Dr. CliftonStrengths Assessment inventory Laurie Santos, this course is the most to students as they consider their talents. popular online course at Yale University Discussion about vocation reinforces and it served me well as an introducIn 2002, Luther College first received a the college’s mission of educating for tion to the field of positive psychology. Lilly grant for Sense of Vocation pro“service for the common good.” For me After studying genetic influences, social gramming. That programming allowed as an instructor, it is a privilege to hear reference points, hedonic adaptation, me to lead a student retreat, develop the students explore their most authentic and the patterns of behavior that afcourse “Here on Earth: Vocation in a selves, looking to discover the thing fect life satisfaction, the class practiced Sustainable Global Community,” and that they “can’t not do.” In the midst research-based strategies to explore the present at conferences sponsored by the of that exploration, students appreciate values of kindthe assurance ness, gratitude, that at any one social connectime we each tion, savoring have multiple experience, vocations and meditation, that there are exercise, and many satisfyeven adequate ing paths to sleep. I spent fulfillment. Our many winter life direction is days readnot a decision ing about we make once the effects of and for all. This income and shared reflececonomic tion helps stusecurity, matedents to make rialism, social the conneccomparison, tion between marriage and their studies Screenshot of students in the September 2020 Paideia 450 class: “The Search for Happiness” family, social and valuable relationships, real-world apmental and physical health, and spirituNetwork for Vocation in Undergraduplications, which is one of the ideals of ality on life satisfaction. I’ve since used ate Education. I served on the Guiding a liberal arts education. In the words of what I learned to develop experiential Coalition of Luther’s Career Center and the Association of American Colleges student activities that explore how these participated in a “learning community” & Universities (AAC&U), “A liberal factors influence subjective well-being. that met in 2016 to reflect on vocation education helps students develop a sense and the liberal arts. These initiatives of social responsibility as well as strong Immersed in this research, I began to supported the conceptualization of the and transferable intellectual and practirealize the goals of my sabbatical plan in four-year planning and reflection that cal skills such as communication, ana16
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lytical and problem-solving skills, and a demonstrated ability to apply knowledge and skills in real-world settings.” Vocation programming and course work is embedded in that conception of liberal education. In my experience, a Paideia 450 course is an ideal vehicle for juniors and seniors to reflect on real-world questions. Since 1978, the Luther curriculum has included this team-taught, interdisciplinary course that studies “an ethical issue that confronts us in our lives as learners and citizens.” Paideia 450s teach approaches to moral reasoning—guiding students to think about how to ask ethical questions—instead of teaching a particular moral framework. Students in these courses are asked to grapple with the tensions between abstract principles and real-life choices, or to examine how values guide the formation of specific policies. They prepare for debates and roundtable discussions, participate in case studies and scenarios, and write ethical assessments—balancing scholarly writings with personal experience— to work to resolve conflicting values. In these ways, the Paideia 450 experience reflects the energy of integrative learning at Luther College. A recent collection of case studies published by the AAC&U celebrated this common capstone experience, citing the way that “Paideia 450 prepares students to work with ‘unscripted questions,’ to address complex societal problems—problems where the right answer is unknown—in their personal lives, communities, and future workplaces” (Rising to the LEAP Challenge: Case Studies of Integrative Pathways to Student Signature Work, 2017). As a Paideia 450, “The Search for Happiness” asks students to weigh well-being with the competing interests of the “American dream,” working with unscripted questions as they look toward the future.
in measuring up or in pleasing God. “We are justified by faith rather than by ‘getting it right’” (“The Work of a Christian: Vocation in Lutheran Perspective,” 2005). We can’t be everything, but our baptism makes us free to act—to do something. This releases Christian students from the demand to somehow find the one unique and perfect purpose for their lives. Instead, it gives them (and me!) the freedom to pursue a life of meaning in any and every circumstance, even in the midst of a pandemic. Hopefully, this freedom extends itself to tackling sabbatical research beyond my area of expertise. With gratitude for the support of the college and all that I learn in my shared work with colleagues, I look back on a year filled with a sense of purpose.
When I teach about vocation, one of my favorite readings is an article by Kathryn Kleinhans, former professor of religion at Wartburg College and now dean of Trinity Lutheran Seminary at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. In her Lutheran theology, where good works follow from faith, Kleinhans reminds us that Christian confidence is not found Fall 2020/Agora
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Will the Last Historian Close the Door? Thoughts on Conducting Research after January 2020 by BRIAN CATON, Professor of History
Students and faculty at Luther have long been familiar with interlibrary loan services. As long as the source one desires is a published work, and is open to circulation, our trusty interlibrary loan staff can get it. Kathy Buzza carried on this work for many years, making her my favorite person on campus, and upon her retirement the work has passed into the capable hands of Luther alumna Emily Mineart. However, since around 2005, the digitization of books published before 1950 has proceeded in earnest, much of the work in my areas of interest being carried out by the Universities of California, Michigan, and Minnesota. Search engines for Google Books and HathiTrust, for example, permit collation and access to material in ways that previously had been earned through more time-consuming processes of assessing the utility of books based on catalog entries, Library of Congress subject headings, and, often, luck. It allows one to see how information, and even prose, written in an 18
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early source could be reproduced often enough to take on the trappings of fact. I read through many published works, both digitized and through interlibrary loan, in order to attempt to reconstruct the medieval and early modern history of the environmental and sociopolitical formations in which the British East India Company’s Army built the Government Cattle Farm. I also hoped to determine the relationship between Lt. Col. James Skinner, the founder of one of the most famous irregular cavalry units of the Company’s Army, and Maj. James Lumsdaine, the Deputy Commissary-General who created the Farm. However, published works frequently abridge significant details, and the discovery and retrieval of those details is the essence of archival work. In Fall 2019, I planned to spend January 2020 working at the Oriental and India Office Collections, housed at the British Library in London. The record-keeping practices of the East India Company, and later the British Government of India, included the creation of two copies of official correspondence handled by the several administrative departments
Brian Caton
NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM, LONDON.
Archival research remains the core of historians’ work. It is true that, over the past forty years or so, historians have begun to experiment or adopt other research methodologies, yet historians seek first the written, printed, or incised word as evidence for what people thought, said, or did in the past. I had hoped to use a year’s sabbatical leave in 2019-20 to pursue archival work at the National Archives of India, New Delhi, in order to form a more complete institutional, intellectual, and social history of the Government Cattle Farm, Hissar.1 Funding and personal considerations required a substantial revision of that plan, resulting in a sabbatical leave in Fall 2019 and January 2020, most of which was spent in Decorah. How can one carry out research thousands of miles away from the archives where the necessary sources are located?
Colonel James Skinner (1778-1841), oil on canvas by an unknown artist 1836
of the Company’s government, with one of those copies retained at Calcutta (later moved to Delhi, and ultimately housed in the National Archives of India) and the other copy sent to Company’s Board of Directors in London (shifted to the India Office after the dissolution of the Company, and ultimately transferred to the Oriental and India Office Collection). These collections now may be searched using the tools available on the British Library’s web site. I happily assembled references to maps and files relevant to Hissar and the Farm, and with great optimism I noted the shelfmark for the “James Skinner papers.” When I arrived at the British Library in January, I was pleasantly stunned to learn that researchers are now permitted, in many cases, to use mobile phones to photograph archival materials. Thus I began my work happily clicking away at the four-inch map of Hissar District carried out by Revenue surveyors in 1832-33 and published from Agra in 1858, to facilitate the transfer of the districts included within the Delhi Division from the province of
PAVANAJA, CC BY-SA 3.0/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
the North-Western Provinces to that of 27. We are glad to find that of contained this reference number. The Punjab.2 I was disappointed to discover the 5,911 Cattle plundered at the Proceedings file itself could be of greater that the Skinner papers were primarily outbreak at Hissar, there remained or lesser value to my research proja draft memoir Skinner made around in November last, only 880 to be ect, which is normal and expected for 1824, in support of his case to be recovered, and that hopes were historical work, but the file is knowable granted permanent commission in place entertained that nearly all would be only by the process of reading the index of his local commission in the British recovered. volumes, which the British Library has Indian Army, and a few letters from not digitized, and is not likely to. There 28. We fully approve of the measures high-ranking members of the governis no glamor in digitizing indices. to be adopted for the discharge of all ment of the Bengal Presidency extolling servants of the Establishment who Such a consideration would be entirely his several virtues; the file was utterly quitted their posts at the outbreak; unworthy of note had not the entire free of any documentation relating to or who had shewn a want of fidelity world of historical research not been any of the estates Skinner owned, which in their conduct on that occasion.5 overturned by the global spread of the might have shed some light on his novel coronavirus by relationship to Lumsdaine or February 2020. Archives, the Farm.3 However, the draft libraries, and other colmemoir compelled me to ask lections closed rapidly, other questions of Skinner’s none of them quite sure personal history, as he was one when they might reopen of the very few Anglo-Indians or at what level of (as they are now called) service. Some countries to gain rank and privilege barred entry to foreignin an era (1789-1833) in ers; others barred entry which mixed-race men were to those traveling from ineligible for positions of the United States, as rank within the East India our country’s case load Company’s civil and military and mortality increased service, and even mixed-race rapidly in the spring. children were excluded from Indian cow breed Hariana, such as is produced today at the GovernAny plans I might have the schools that prepared boys ment Cattle Farm in Hissar had to return to the for such service.4 I put much British Library during In the absence of the report to which of the outcome of this investigation into the summer of 2020 or in January 2021 this letter responded, it is impossible Skinner’s personal history in a draft of evaporated immediately. Since July, the to find out anything more about this a manuscript for Agora this summer, British Library has gradually opened up incident—how many of the Farm’s but as that draft passed 7,000 words, I some reading rooms, but one may book cattle were not plundered, how many decided to publish it elsewhere, in favor only two appointments per week, four of the Farm’s Indian employees were of an essay on research. hours per day, and limited to five items dismissed, and what measures exactly After working through the Skinner for consultation per day. The cost of livwere used to dismiss them. After a day papers at the beginning of January, I ing in London makes these limitations or so spent discovering the limitations shifted over to the other references inefficient in terms of time and money. of the E/4 files, I abandoned the bulk of from my pre-departure searches. Most The British Library’s website gamely those files from my pre-departure list, of these items bore shelfmarks that touts its digitized resources, but not in favor of a more laborious but much began with E or more specifically E/4. I surprisingly these tend to focus on the more fruitful strategy. This involved quickly learned that these files had little, development of (white) British culture requesting the index volumes of the if any, real content to them. They were, in Britain and do not include governBengal Military Proceedings, anywhere in fact, copies of correspondence sent by ment records, much less the index files from one to four volumes per year. Each the Company’s Board of Control from of government records. Until travel volume, until about 1860, consists of London, noting actions and decisions and institutional restrictions change, I handwritten entries, usually sensibly taken by the Governor-General in Benam left with what I brought home in alphabetized, but with no guarantee that gal and usually either giving approval to January. the Military Department of the Bengal these actions or asking further questions government transacted any business Let me be clear: my little research on an issue, which might allow them relating to the Government Cattle Farm problem is infinitesimally small, in the more information by which to make a that they thought worth setting down context of a global tragedy that caused measured decision. For example, one for the record. Once I found something widespread human suffering and death; such letter, in response to a report meninteresting in the index, I made a note however, it has the potential to prompt tioning the plunder of the Government of its reference number and date in the major changes to how historians work. Cattle Farm’s stock in 1857, included Proceedings, and then I could request In the very short term, it may push only the following paragraphs: the volume of the Proceedings files that Fall 2020/Agora
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historians to revisit sources to which they already have access, or to re-read research notes from years gone by, to ask new questions of those sources or to notice connections that may have lain hidden while the historian’s eyes were trained on a different investigation. In a longer run, it may promote collaborative work in a field that has long valued the singular author. Of course historians have read and listened to each other’s work at academic conferences and other venues, but the need to access archival sources and the rapidly increasing familiarity with video call and videoconferencing software may generate intellectual partnerships that do more than provide a sounding board for an individual author’s work. A recent webinar hosted by the American Historical Association advocated for the use of videoconferencing technology to expand scholarly presentation of research beyond the structural frameworks of academic conferences and for historians to engage more intimately with archival staff regarding research projects, so that archivists may provide more efficiently digitized caches of materials necessary to those projects.6 Perhaps these changes are overly optimistic; institutional practices tend to be very slow to change. Narrating the past is too important a proposition to be left to the historian who last left the archive in January 2020; we must find new ways to discover the past and re-present it to the future.
NOTES 1. In the larger project, I use the Government Cattle Farm, Hissar, as a locus for two narratives: one which explains the colonial project of breeding animals for the exclusive or primary use of the military (indeed the Farm’s initial purpose), and the other which explains the nineteenth-century intrusion of veterinary medicine into a vibrantly competitive animal care landscape. Both processes had dramatic effects on animal morphology, nutrition, migration, and other activity, and thus they illustrate the means by which British officials and Indian animal owners and healers used animal bodies as the sites of struggle for power within an evolving colonial structure. Additional discussion of the project may be found in Brian Caton, “The Invisible Animal and the Visible Institution: The Government Cattle Farm, Hissar, 1800-1845,” Agora 26, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 21-4. 2. Captns. J. H. Simmonds and W. Brown, Map of the District of Hissar, 2d ed. (Agra: Office of the Sudder Board of Revenue, N. W. Provinces, 1858), India Office Records [henceforth IOR] Cartographic Items Maps 57540.(16.), British Library, London. The “four-inch map” refers to the scale of four inches to the mile, a relatively common scale for maps related to revenue work in British India.
3. James Skinner Papers, IOR Mss Eur 173, British Library, London. The draft memoir became the basis of a biography published after Skinner’s death in 1841: James Baillie Fraser, Military Memoir of Lieut.-Col. James Skinner, C. B., vol. 2 (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1851). Skinner was ultimately granted a commission as a Lieutenant-Colonel in 1826 and also was made a Companion of the Bath. 4. C. J. Hawes, Poor Relations: the Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773-1833 (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1996).
5. Draft Military India No. 47 of 1858, 2nd June, Reply to Letter dated 1st Feby. 1858, No. 29, IOR E/4/852, British Library, London, 97.
6. American Historical Association, “Doing Research During COVID-19,” October 21, 2020.
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So Much Time to Write?
I
n August 2019, an alarming number clarified my mission in life. “How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born?” asked a New York Times infographic. “As the world warms because of human-induced climate change, most of us can expect to see more days when temperatures hit 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius) or higher. See how your hometown has changed so far and how much hotter it may get.” Plugging in my rural Alabama hometown, then my birth year, I was stunned to find a prediction that by the time I’m 80, my town could experience 110 days per year at or above 90 degrees. That same day, I read another Times article about impending water stress: “A Quarter of Humanity Faces Looming Water Crises,” it warned, as the world gets hotter and drier. Where will that stress fall? Looking at the map, it’s clear: the (global) South. This is the world our students are inheriting from us over40s. (Thanks, us.) In that moment I made a vow: if my writing and teaching do not expand human and nonhuman capacities for survival – in the best and most beautiful ways – in the world that’s coming, I will shift my direction of travel accordingly. Yet, like Greta Thunberg in her windpowered boat, I am sailing against some strong currents. That same August week, as she docked in New York Harbor, only three out of my 19 first-year Paideia students recognized her name. And this is the most smartphone-addicted, marketed-to, ostensibly “informed” generation on earth. With the fiendish self-defending cleverness of any other parasite, those same phones boost the pre-existing epater-les-adults tendency of adolescent brains: ah, you just don’t understand the internet because you’re old. Yet it’s their generation that bears the brunt of everything those smartphones and their corporate, attention-economy
underpinnings are fostering. Climate change. Economic inequality and vanishing job opportunities. And, most of all – sorry, but I’ve been teaching first-year college students for more than 20 years, and I see it happening – the shrinkage of intellectual, social, and critical capacities as “phones” have migrated off the wall, into pockets, Colm Tóibín and Amy Weldon at the offices of A Public Space in and now, literally, Brooklyn under students’ to spend March 16-April 6 in London, pillows when they reach up to shut off researching two books and lecturing at the bedside light. If English professors Highgate Cemetery on two of its residon’t name this problem and activate dents, the nineteenth-century boxingthe most positive-human-capacityworld figures Pierce Egan and Tom preserving-and-expanding devices at Sayers. (My boxing obsession is conour command – books, words, and his/ nected to An Awful Rainbow’s chapter stories – those capacities will dwindle on Byron – long story.) I’d also planned and die. And for low-capacity humans, a couple weeks of research at the Yale the future ahead will only get worse. So Center for British Art. With care, I I sharpened my teaching approach and hoped, I’d be able to travel and avoid my writing projects in this direction, the worrisome but surely-not-that-bad including an historical novel to bring new disease creeping over the world. Mary Shelley to new life, a textbook for After all, supported by the English advanced fiction writers, and a nonficDepartment, I’d just spent February’s tion project called An Awful Rainbow: last weekend in New York City, where Reading the Romantics in a World on Fire. I’d taken a writing class with Colm In January 2020, inside a dying Alpine Toibin, dined with boxing memoirist glacier, students and I contemplated the and all-around inspiration Kate Sekules, change around us, and wept; that scene visited the Strand and the Met and the became the book’s new introduction. Tenement Museum (hurrying past GaWith a spring 2020 sabbatical ahead, I brielle Hamilton’s restaurant Prune in was ready to work. the now-tragic faith I could always go back), went to an NYC Ballet matinee, My plans fell apart in the second week and strode across the Brooklyn Bridge, of March, when the COVID-19 panmy heart swelling with Whitmanesque demic got real. With the support of the pride. People on the subway were not a Paideia sabbatical grant, I’d planned Fall 2020/Agora
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PHOTOS COURTSEY OF THE AUTHOR
by AMY WELDON, Professor of English
yet masked but were hand-sanitizing obsessively and eyeing one another with a wariness not yet that different from traditional New Yorkishness. The CDC wasn’t yet warning against travel to Britain. Surely this impending crisis, like all the other (un)natural shocks the twenty-first century is heir to, could be at least superficially dodged with common sense and care. But that was before – parked on my couch, obsessively toggling among the CDC website, the New York Times, and the Guardian – I watched coronavirus case numbers soar in London as at home. Then airports began to shut and quarantines began to fall into place and what we now know as lockdown took hold. Overnight, I went from being worried but essentially OK with travel to canceling my whole London trip. And I couldn’t deny: I felt relieved. Luckily, Delta Airlines issued a travel voucher. Luckily, my London flat’s owner blocked out a new set of weeks for me to stay in June 2021. Luckily, the Yale Center for British Art isn’t going anywhere. And I did my best to sort out what my sabbatical had become: a series of calendar days, blank except for the scribbles of things crossed out. Of course, I had plenty of writing projects underway. But like many writers, I wondered whether, even with “so much time to write,” I’d be able to get down a single word. For a week or so, I felt like a hiker suddenly unbalanced and falling, snatching for branches and footholds as I careened down the side of a cliff. But I was better off than the waitresses whose jobs had vanished, or the doctors and nurses catatonic with exhaustion and grief, or the parents trying to work at the dining room table with children climbing the walls, or the colleagues pivoting to the then-new medium of Zoom in mid-semester. “What are your Luther College English professors doing during the pandemic?” wrote one student wit on our department’s Facebook page. “Lifelong foe of technology Amy Weldon is giving thanks she’s on sabbatical this semester.” Indeed I was. Having quit social media for good on the eve of my January-term “In Frankenstein’s Footsteps” course through London, Geneva, Venice, Florence, and 22
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Rome, I was, and am, well out of that maelstrom. But alone in my house with Manchester the Cat, the isolation rose deep around me, deceptively clear and silent as water you don’t see until it threatens to stop your breath. It took a month or so to get something like a grip. I spent days reading and walking and gardening and repainting cabinets and rooms and refinancing my mortgage and dreading the inevitable day when I’d have to learn Zoom and retool courses for the fall (not that bad, actually, when it came.) I took online writing seminars and signed onto a weekly Zoom “watch party” hosted by Elena Ferrante’s publisher, Europa Editions, for the HBO adaptation of her Neapolitan novels. I took part in an online group reading War and Peace with the novelist Yiyun Li. I wrote like hell.
Manny (a typical sabbCATticalscape) And, most surprisingly, my week acquired a new element: a regular Skype call with Sam, a former student in Paideia and the 2018 incarnation of my study-abroad course, “In Frankenstein’s Footsteps.” Sam reached out because, nearing the end of his master’s program in divinity at Boston College, he was seeking reading recommendations for himself and his friends. Then we scheduled a Skype call, and just kept scheduling the next one. Over the next months, we talked each week about politics and the latest worries and outrages in the news and Sam’s (by-now-successful) job search. It’s hard to describe the particular bond between a former student and a teacher as both grow older without seeming creepy or sentimental. But it’s no exaggeration to say that in a difficult time, that bond, born of the work
I believe I’ve been put on this earth to do, between myself and a dear human being whose mentor I’ve been blessed to become, sustained me more than I could say. Given how my work at Luther threw me this lifeline from an unexpected direction, and given that vow I made last year, I see one big task ahead: defining the worth of reading, writing, and thinking – especially for students and their families – in a world where change and catastrophe multiply with a Fibonacci-spiral force, destabilizing the solidity of college more than I ever thought possible. Zadie Smith writes in Intimations, “The infinite promise of American youth— a promise elaborately articulated by movies and advertisements and university prospectuses — has been an empty lie for so long that I notice my students joking about it with a black humor more appropriate to old men, to the veterans of wars.” I do too. And I notice some other things. Shifts in society and student demographics (like those on the Beloit College Mindset List) that used to take a decade or so to churn now take two years, or eighteen months, or one semester. Students who once came to my classroom never not having known “the Internet” (sequestered on a computer on a desk, from which you could walk away) now arrive never having not known the web of social media and algorithmically tailored infotainment that sprawls in one omnipresent weltanschaaung into every corner of our public and private lives. The difference only looks insignificant. Because as it spills into our lives and minds like hog waste into groundwater, that inescapable screeniness is stealing intellectual depth and focus from our collective and individual selves even as it steals our data to sell to the billionaires whose wealth-concentration impoverishes, in turn, the very real-time economic lives from which we seek relief in those same screens. Or in self-improvement. Or in college. Or in all three. It’s a Mobiuslike continuum of blithe, destructive irony: the Internet, which has wedged itself into every space of necessity and desire in our lives, is also the force leaching beauty, meaning, economic wherewithal, sanity, safety, and plain old
human decency from our lives, even as its expertly tailored tinctures of brainreward keep us coming right on back for more and do their damnedest to conceal every bit of this process from our critical view so that it can impoverish us even more, with our semi-inadvertent connivance and consent. Each year I define for students and their parents why a college education (particularly ours) is still worth the investment, what exactly we are teaching or training students in beyond “content mastery,” why it matters that I still ask students to read books on paper and write by hand, and why, for actual rather than lip-serviced respect of “diversity,” those books must have been written not just in a student’s own time but also beyond the accustomed reach, in culture, time, and place, of what you might at first consider “relatable.” It’s good intellectual practice to be asked to do this, lest you mold your once-pliable mind, like a snail, to the hard shell of protective cliché. It’s good to articulate, to inquisitive minds beyond one’s traditional college “audience,” how the opportunities of a college education can come within their reach, too. Because it is only in reaching beyond our habitual range – in intellectual, social, and bodily life – that we develop that thing called capacity that will enable us to live into what’s coming next. College and the reading-andwriting-and-thinking life it shelters can build that capacity in a way nothing else does, and we stand up for its value in a way nobody else will. We have to say the words out loud, and keep on pushing. What we do matters. Even when it seems like no one’s listening. Last week I heard the radio announcer say fourteen days till the election and found myself on my knees, clutching my countertop edge, praying without words. Everything has changed since January 1, 2020. And everything has only become more of what it already was. This sabbatical time has given me an eerily clear view of the shell-cratered landscape that now masquerades as public life, where climate change, Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck, and a poison gas of all-caps narcissism hissing from the White House mean that the stakes for the dwindling number of us in high-
Amy Weldon’s view of Brooklyn Bridge in February, 2020 er education are very high. Because we still have to train and graduate our beloved students in this world even as we work for a better one – and help them swim against the tide of screen-enabled wealth-concentration that counters their own chances of entrepreneurship and success. (Did y’all know Jeff Bezos could give every Amazon employee $100,000 and still have more money than he did before the pandemic? Even as independent bookstores are facing their worst holiday season ever?) I wake each day into greater personal and collective anxiety than I can ever remember about our planet’s, our nation’s, and Luther College’s future. I can’t shake the feeling this year isn’t just a breaking point but a turning point, for me and all of us. So, of course, I’ve got to keep on pushing. “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher,” says the prophet Isaiah, “that I may enlighten the weary with a word.” More than ever, in this turning-point year, I feel gripped by the need to write and teach and push on toward a vision of what’s good and true, hoping that the world will heed. And I always ask: is what I’m doing expanding students’ capacities to meet the world ahead? Is it offering them the good companionship of the voices of the past, of the good and nuanced and worthwhile, to walk beside them into the future? Creature: A Novel of Mary Shelley is finished, and in Mary Shelley’s own
words, I am bidding my hideous progeny to go forth and prosper. As you can read on my blog at amyeweldon.com, that Alpine glacier moment is now the focal point of the introduction for An Awful Rainbow: Reading the Romantics in a World on Fire. This summer I signed a contract to deliver a third book, Advanced Fiction Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. An article on the great Southern writer Elizabeth Spencer – my friend, news of whose death reached me in Venice this January with students – is appearing in The Journal of the Short Story in English. Reviews and my essay about my late father, “Gaze Upon This World,” have been released or rereleased in Orion Magazine. My sabbatical has not been unproductive. But I’m hoping it will be useful – now and in the world as it will be ten years from now, twenty, beyond and beyond into shapes we can’t see. In one sense, I had “so much time to write” during a pandemic sabbatical. But in another sense, I don’t have much time at all. As I rebuild my disrupted travel plans and continue to work with my students and to write like hell, I’m also driven to look hard at how we might actually sustain and rebuild ourselves in a world that will never truly “get back to normal” – a world in which we’re learning how shaky the foundations of normal really are. Fall 2020/Agora
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Literary Representations of Post-American Intervention in the Dominican Republic when the sun is taken by dreams where does spring go it founds rosaura over purple waters and a deep howling of flags
T
—Tony Raful, Las bodas de Rosaura con la Primavera
he twentieth century was one of the most turbulent historical periods in the Dominican Republic: It housed the bloody dictatorship of President Rafael Leónidas Trujillo for more than thirty years (1930-1961) and was the subject of two military interventions by the United States. First Intervention Political and economic factors are identified as causes of the first American intervention in 1916. Economic causes include the protection of American financial investments in the island’s sugar mills and payment supervision of Dominican debt that was collected by the United States through the control of Dominican customs (Franco Pichardo, History 430-31; Moya Pons, Manual 444-45). Political causes point to the strategic need of the United States to protect its southern coasts and the Panama Canal from potential European enemies and preserve its hegemonic role over the Caribbean, which began in the late nineteenth century with political control established in Cuba and Puerto Rico (Calder xx). The withdrawal of U.S. troops occurred on September 18, 1924, although U.S. customs control lasted until 1940, when it was transferred to the Dominican government presided by dictator Trujillo. Second Intervention1 In 1965 the second armed American intervention took place. A series of events 24
Agora/Fall 2020
preceded this intervention. The first of these events occurred on May 30, 1961 with the assassination of Trujillo. He had joined the Dominican army during the first American occupation. His rapid ascent on the military’s hierarchical ladder as well as his political prowess put him in a privileged position. General Trujillo took advantage of the coup d’état of then-President Horacio Vázquez, of whom he was a “loyal” servant as head of the National Army. He joined the coup plotters and eventually managed to be proclaimed president in the elections held in 1930. Through political influence, Trujillo united economic power with the establishment of monopolies in all production sectors of the Dominican Republic: The growth of Trujillo’s economic empire became so great that at the end of his life he controlled about 80% of industrial production and his companies employed 45% of the country’s workforce, which together with his absolute control of the state employed 15% of the workforce. This made 60% of Dominican families dependent in one way or another on his will. (Moya Pons, Manual 518). After Trujillo’s death, democratic elections were held in 1962. These elections were won by Juan Bosch. Seven months later, on September 25, 1963, a coup d’etat occurred. Bosch went into exile and his government was succeeded by a civilian triumvirate imposed by the Dominican Armed Forces and Police. This triumvirate was supported by the United States government and the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. On April 24, 1965, two garrisons of the Armed Forces that wanted to restore the constitutional government of Juan Bosch revolted. There were confrontations between two military sides: the one that favored Bosch, called Constitu-
PHOTO COURTSEY OF LUTHER COLLEGE PHOTO BUREAU
by RITA TEJADA, Associate Professor of Spanish
Rita Tejada tionalists or rebels, and the side that had led to the coup d’etat, called “Loyalists.” On April 28th, “violating the principles set out in the Charter of the United Nations, the OAS and International Law, the United States unilaterally intervenes in the country and begins to disembark American troops” (Incháustegui 114). The American arguments for justifying this intervention are summarized in three postulates: “the restoration of law and order, the protection of the lives of Americans, and that the possible triumph of communists be avoided” (Bartlow Martin 617). This last reason was ultimately used by President Johnson to justify the American military presence in the Dominican Republic, as his government wanted to avoid at all costs the emergence of “another Cuba” in the region. During the April Insurrection, two governments coexisted in the Dominican Republic: the Constitutionalists formed the Constitutionalist Government, with Colonel Francisco Alberto Caamaño Deñó as president; and the “Loyalists,” under the auspices of the United States Embassy and
COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
Rebel soldier during the April War of 1965 its representatives in the Dominican Republic, formed the Government of National Reconstruction headed by General Antonio Imbert Barreras. The repression exercised by the “Loyalists” and intervention troops confined the Constitutional Government to nineteen blocks or eight neighborhoods in the city of Santo Domingo where commandos of Constitutionalist civilians and military operated. This intervention ended on September 21st, 1966, when the withdrawal of troops from the so-called Inter-American Peace Force was completed. As a result of the negotiations, the Constitutionalist Government and the Government of National Reconstruction agreed that, as the only way out of the crisis, an interim government should be created. This government was chaired by Héctor García Godoy. Art and literature of the April Revolution The second American intervention generated reactions in all aspects of Dominican life. José Alcántara Almánzar points out that during the intervention there were artistic and cultural manifestations of various kinds in the Constitutionalist side: “Painters made posters
and murals in which they recorded the People’s War’s objectives; poets wrote and read their new poems before crowds . . . Art was produced and basically committed to the revolution and therefore opposed to the American occupation (“Narrativa social dominicana” 27). Alcántara Almánzar named “occupation” literature the literary production of that time, whose characteristics are: “aggression, commitment to political circumstance, spontaneity, chronic character, and the ability to witness to bloody events” (“Abril 65” 138).
Constitutionalist artists integrated the Cultural Front, an organization that published a pamphlet of poems titled Pueblo, sangre y canto (People, Blood and Singing) and also contained a “Declaration of the Artists” where they expressed their support for the Constitutionalist Government. The Cultural Front also published Permanencia del llanto (Permanence of Crying) posthumously, a book of poems written by Jacques Viaud Renaud, a Haitian poet fighting with the Constitutionalists who died in the war. The Constitutionalists also came up with a “Hymn of the Revolution” that the masses learned and sang at rallies. In the years after the April War, much was written about the conflict of 1965, giving rise to the emergence of a postwar literature. In this regard, Pedro Conde says: The new Dominican literature began to gestate in the wake of May’s [1961] tyrannicide, but owes its vital impetus to the 1965 revolution. In many ways, the young generation of authors is a direct potential and lively product resulting from the April Revolution. That is why our literary activity is and will be long influenced, and almost determined, by the events of April, even if its subject is not necessarily bellicose. (10)
After the April Revolution, and according to their political convictions, Dominican writers and intellectuals were grouped into cultural associations as a way to prolong the role the Cultural Front had played during the occupation. Their members published in the cultural supplements of Dominican newspapers and participated in literary contests, had programs on the radio, and offered lectures. Andrés L. Mateo, a member of one of these groups, describes his participation in the following terms: La Isla (The Island) was a group that intended to make literature based on aesthetic considerations related to the social process. After 1965, Dominican society was divided with such depth that all groups were organized around the ideological expression they believed they represented. Before that year, and after Trujillo’s death, there was an ethical simplism because society was divided between Trujillistas and anti-Trujillistas. In appearance this was not an adequate social division and the events seen in 1965, that is, the April War, the American intervention, [and] the emergence of political parties, originated the appearance of groups founded on many ideological traits. Also, cultural and literary groups were organized in a similar way to represent how society had been divided. La Isla was a group that sought to represent, from an aesthetic-political point of view, the most revolutionary side of society. We were almost all from the Dominican political left and had been in the war of ’65 as fighters. We had experienced social struggle and had considered that art and literature were also a vehicle for the transmission of these liberationist ideas and a trench from which we could fight.2 Postwar Period The April War divided the Dominican people into two sides that caused major physical and material wounds to the country. The split was so great that, in many cases, friends and even parents Fall 2020/Agora
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COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC
harassment was about the misfortune of degradation and, of course, there was a lot of success in that.6
Rebel leader speaking to crowd during the April War of 1965. Left of him is Colonel Francisco Alberto Caamaño Deñó, president of the Constitutionalist government during the April War of 1965. clashed against children who joined opposing sides. And even after the ceasefire between the Constitutionalists and the “Loyalists” was enacted, the military that made up the latter group, covered in the veiled impunity granted by the occupying forces, “started a ruthless hunt, falling into it hundreds of Constitutionalist fighters” (Cury 17). Emigration, especially to the United States, became a necessity for many Dominicans during this time (Vega 260). Juan De Frank Canelo indicates one of the factors that motivated the mass emigration of Dominicans as “the hatred and political passions inherited from the April Revolution of 1965, for after the civil war, many of those who participated in it decided to emigrate to preserve life” (49). Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, a novelist and the Dominican ambassador to Mexico during the provisional government of García Godoy, notes that from his diplomatic position he helped channel the exile of many Dominicans on both sides who used Mexican territory as a bridge for other countries.3 The poet Mateo Morrison recalls the holding of elections in 1966, a condi26
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tion established for the departure of intervention troops, as the saddest stage of the postwar period: “After so many deaths, Professor Juan Bosch lost the election to Joaquín Balaguer.”4 According to Morrison, the fear the rest of the country had of bringing the war back, coupled with religious and anti-communist propaganda, and the fact that Joaquín Balaguer remained on the sidelines of the April Conflict, were factors that contributed to the country’s inland provinces and peasants, for the most part, voting against Juan Bosch.5 The novelist Andrés L. Mateo was exiled for fourteen years due to the postrevolution. He also recalls the physical and moral “hunting”: Many people think that repression was only carried out by physical death, but there was a great counterinsurgency on the moral stage, on the spiritual stage, even more effective than physical hunting because physical hunting was limited to locating twenty, thirty, forty revolutionaries who planned to take their ideas into the way of action and make them disappear, kill them. But ideological, moral
The deaths of former members of the Constitutionalist side and young Dominicans identified with the political left continued to occur during the governments of Joaquín Balaguer, who ruled the Dominican Republic for twenty-two years in non-consecutive terms from 1966 until 1996.7 The literary generation of the 60s The April Revolution marks the division between traditional Dominican literature and modern Dominican literature which produced a different way of presenting Dominican reality (Alcántara Almánzar, “Abril 65” 144). Ramón Francisco (Literatura Dominicana 60) insists that, for the first time, Dominican literature of that decade was “up to date” with literature that was being made in other latitudes. According to Francisco, this generation introduced new literary techniques in Dominican literature, such as the use of spatial and temporal overlays, a combination of first, second, and third person in the same narrative, flow of consciousness, and dislocation of syntax. The Latin American Boom greatly influenced Dominican literature written after 1960. In addition, the urban problems practically replaced the previous rural theme, as writers lived in urban centers (Alcántara Almánzar, “Narrativa social” 65). A very important feature that Chilean critic Alberto Baeza Flores attributes to Dominican poets of the 60s, and a common element to all the intellectuals who wrote during and after the April War, is the fact that they wrote without fear of being censored, as had happened during Trujillo’s regime (33). Dominican writers approached the conflict caused by war from their various personal perspectives, which included the distressing note of defeat, nostalgia, frustration, and testimony. The genres they favored were poetry and short stories, but novels and plays were also written. Dominican novels that referred to the second American intervention and specifically to the postwar period of April 1965 are De abril en Adelante (From
April Onwards), Currículum (el síndrome de la visa) (Curriculum (The Visa’s Syndrome)), La otra Penélope (The Other Penelope), Los acorralados (Cornered), Las bodas de Rosaura con la Primavera (Rosaura’s Weddings to the Spring), Vendaval (Gale), and Los amantes de abril (April’s Lovers). These novels’ main topics deal with condemning the second American intervention in the Dominican Republic and questioning of Dominican history. On top of that, none of those who participated in the April Revolution are glorified, and there is plenty of self-criticism about revolutionary participation and the role of the Dominican political left after the post-war period. All these narratives succeed in representing the frustration and pessimism of individuals who fought in the Constitutionalist zone and lost the war, but the analysis of the novels also shows the presence of the various manifestations of Dominican pessimism that go beyond the historical context and correspond to attitudes defined as particulars of Dominican society, such as the intellectual and cultural undervaluation of Dominicans, the underestimation of the environment, mistrust and fear among people, and individualism. Representation of Post-American Intervention in Las bodas de Rosaura con la Primavera Las bodas de Rosaura con la Primavera8 (Rosaura’s Weddings to the Spring) is a novel written by the Dominican author Tony Raful and is described in his prologue by literary critic Pedro Peix as an open genre work which combines photographs and a poetic structure to recount events before, during, and after the April Revolution. The first thing that catches a reader’s attention is the text’s structure: It is written as a long poem without rhyme or rhythm, capitalized only in the first word of some of the long stanzas, and without any type of punctuation. On the book cover there is a black and white photograph taken by the Italian photographer Carlos Sangiovanni. A woman dressed as a bride is depicted with a long white dress, a short veil, and a small crown. She is sitting in a military jeep driven by a soldier. The photo also shows another girl sitting and three young men in military cloth-
ing, one of them sitting and two standing. The driver and the other seated soldier carry weapons of different calibers. As readers, we assume that this first photo in the text serves as inspiration or as a testimonial element of the title and its origin. Rosaura’s name will appear throughout the novel as a connecting thread of stories that cover various historical moments of the Dominican Republic as a nation. The open genre has allowed the writer of this novel to explore different episodes of Dominican history, inserting subjective and stark interpretation of moments in which its protagonists make history. As counterpoints, the stories of common men and women are added where the details and anecdotes indicate that these are experiences of the writer or his acquaintances, inserted in his narration to perpetuate his memories.
Cover of Raful’s 1991 Las bodas de Rosaura con la Primavera (Rosaura’s Weddings to the Spring)
Rosaura is the only leading character: “when she was fifteen years old, she came from school with her hair cut in two halves, she sighed with movie stars and carried candy in her purse” (1314). Her father died and her mother was a seamstress who lived organizing sanes9 to support the family. Although her mother’s dream was for Rosaura to marry a wealthy man, at the age of twenty her daughter’s best friends were all adult women: a prostitute, a spinster, and a divorcee. Rosaura, a believer in fairy tales, witches, and superstitions, is in full youth and sexual maturity when the April Revolution and the second American intervention in the Dominican Republic take place. The details of Rosaura’s life are interrupted by the narration of notable events during the April war: the frustrated siege of the National Palace in which important military personnel from the Constitutionalist side died and the ambushes by the American troops, with realistic descriptions of the deaths in battle: “But the colonel seems asleep now he has a hole behind his head he only had five days in the fight” (22). In historical retrospect, the fifteen-year-old party (quinceañera)
of Angelita, the youngest daughter of dictator Rafael Trujillo, is described and some photos are inserted in the text. In the first photo, Angelita wears a party dress, a cape, a crown and a scepter. In the second photo she appears dressed in gala and dancing with her father, who wears a frock coat with a great decoration. The antithetical contrast cannot be greater, since both Trujillo and his daughter and those around them are dressed like royalty. Angelita Trujillo’s quinceañera party is linked to the death of an Italian, Ilio Capozzi, who was part of the Constitutionalists and died in the April Conflict during the assault on the National Palace. Then, in metaphorical language, other deaths of combatants and the landing of Marines who took the city of Santo Domingo and its inhabitants by surprise are mentioned. The author goes even further back in Dominican history and mentions the assault on the Santo Domingo colony by the pirate Francis Drake in 1586, while narrating the landing of the US Marines in 1965. During the landing of the pirate Drake, Rosaura is kidnapped and raped by the English corsairs. Her kidnapping and rape reaffirm the character of Rosaura as symbol of the homeland: Rosaura represents the Fall 2020/Agora
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Rosaura’s symbology is cemented with short stories that highlight the importance of women and their militant role during the intervention. Monchín, owner of “La Cafetera,” an emblematic place that still exists on Calle El Conde in the capital city of Santo Domingo, recounts the lives of some of these women, highlighting their active participation, wielding long weapons and shooting at American soldiers. Photos of women marching against the intervention with flags and large banners around the city, of uniformed women marching in the constitutional zone, and of a young woman dressed in a military uniform while holding a rifle complement this representation of Dominican women in the war. However, these images are not idealized, quite the contrary. Just as the text recounts the lives of women who fought alongside men against US soldiers and “Loyalists,” stories of prostitutes such as Arascelis, who marries one of the American soldiers, emerge. Arascelis’s mother comes from the countryside to celebrate, dreaming aloud about the positive future that awaits her and her family because everyone will be able to emigrate to the United States and live very well. The marriage is interrupted by a bomb dropped on the brothel and which wounds the soldier. Because of the event, the high command of the occupation forces prohibits soldiers from visiting brothels in their free hours. In the owner of “La Cafetera” narration, he contrasts the current life of the ex-combatants in the revolution with the life of Rosaura, whom the conflict ended up affecting psychologically. The April War inflicted irreversible traumas on Rosaura, in addition to affecting the country’s postwar sociopolitical situation. The postwar discomfort is 28
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Dominican Republic, subjected from its inception to the attacks of political powers whose sole purpose has been to taint the Dominican territory. Despite her limitations, Rosaura assumes her defensive role and is described either as making Molotov cocktails to throw at the invaders (42) or as a poet who exalts the homeland: “if she died she would return as a gull emissary of dawn and sea on the roofs of the rebellious city ”(51).
Rebel women protesters behind barricades, April War of 1965 reflected in the thoughts and day-to-day actions that Rosaura faces. An example of this is her recounting of a gathering of older men in the “Macalé” bookstore, a staple in Santo Domingo. An eightyyear-old man recalls the era of the dictator Trujillo and highlights that “the boss was great” (93) because “before one lived better” (94). He compares the society in the Trujillo era with the society of the moment, which he considers lacking in respect, without moral values or patriotism, while justifying Trujillo’s conduct because during his government order was established. Rosaura goes to the bookstore and becomes a silent witness to the old man’s tirades, which motivates her to leave quickly, disgusted by the justifications of the sinister past of Trujillo and the omission of regime atrocities such as, for example, the murder of the Mirabal sisters (97).10 The narration is located in the city of Santo Domingo. The poetic vision of the battered and raped city arises in the words of the writer, who uses repetitions of words as a cacophony that imitates the sound of machine guns and the shots that fill the environment. As a breath in the heat of the fight, the love poem “La guerra no se olvida” (“The War Is Not Forgotten)” by René del Rico Bermúdez11 appears in its entirety. A photo of this writer accompanies his poem. Artistic expressions, sports and cultural activities that took place in the
Constitutionalist side such as wrestling, shows with singers, dancers, and poets are outlined, giving an air of “normality” that helped unite the inhabitants of the area. However, the sensation of war prevails because on the radio the voice of the Constitutionalists competes with the radio station of the “Loyalists”: Colonel Caamaño orders combatants to fire on the enemy, while the harangue in the radio station of the “Loyalists” broadcasts the following message: A Soviet submarine has been seen in the Ozama River Che Guevara was seen in the streets of the city haranguing rampant mobs and thirsty for blood attention the country will be saved by P-51 planes bombing will start at the exact time of twelve o’clock the head of the bridge that divides the city must be cleaned, positions must be softened so that the infantry entry follows after the communists are raping nuns by assaulting convents and cutting off their heads to the officers of our armed forces forward pilots forward sons of the great country trained and graduated in the Panama Canal Zone God is with us and cannot fail (37-39). Manipulation of information is revealed to justify actions like bombing the “communists,” who were nothing more than soldiers belonging to the same armed forces, but who sought to restore
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U.S. intervention in Santo Domingo, May 5, 1965. A G.I. has pushed a child under the jeep for protection during a firefight. democratic order with the return of the ousted president Juan Bosch. The planes massacre the crowd, made up of civilians and military who gathered on the bridge that connects the east with the west of the city. This sad story is complemented by two versions of the same incident. Through the flow of consciousness, the thoughts of one of the pilots who shot at the crowd appear: he struggles between fulfilling the order that has been imposed on him and his moral conscience while having to shoot his compatriots and his former colleagues. Although this pilot has no name, the first-person narration of these tense moments and internal conflict becomes an effective tool in Raful’s text, as it helps contextualize the trauma suffered by all individuals. Raful humanizes the actors involved in the April War, especially soldiers from all sides who were acting under a superior command who cannot be questioned. Another good example of professional obligation is described in the accounts of two soldiers fighting on opposite sides. First, a twenty-three-
year-old American soldier, Douglas Lucas, relives memories of different stages of his life: from his childhood going to the movies to watch cowboys and Native American movies, playing baseball, and chasing squirrels; from his youth, making love to his girlfriend Jessie, listening to jazz music from his favorite musicians (Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington), and going hunting with his father. All this goes through his mind while he is stationed in one of the tallest buildings in the city of Santo Domingo and tries to justify what he does although he does not understand it: “after all this is my job, I do not know what I am defending but it is a job as worthy as any other… instead of pigeons I hunt little black coconut eaters and I also defend my country” (63). From there he fires at the Dominican combatants, whose casualties he scores through a system of markings on the wall. Next are the thoughts and words of the Dominican who has just been mortally wounded by Lucas: “they shot me they shot me here on the shoulder very close to the
heart the blood gushes I’m dying, comrades” (57). This young man without a name also remembers his childhood playing with homemade toys and round games and searching for fruits in other people’s patios; already in his adulthood, he evokes his admiration for Marilyn Monroe and his encounters with prostitutes. Meanwhile, he begs his comrades to leave because they could also become victims of the sniper and to prohibit the ambulance from picking him up because the driver could be ambushed. Although the contrast between these two lives could not be more surprising, the parallelism makes similarities between the young military men even more striking. Thus, the questioning narrative about the armed conflict takes center stage because even when belonging to opposite sides both men reflect on the moral dilemma of choosing between good and evil. The humanization of this conflict’s participants reaches its climax with the monologue of three corpses, pilots from the “loyal” side who went out to have fun dressed in civilian clothes only to end up being ambushed in the Constitutionalist zone. The three bodies describe their physical characteristics, clothes they were wearing, as well as their personal belongings, perhaps as a last resort so as not to die anonymously. With a resigned tone, the author affirms that “[in] the deadly poison of war at night pain has no flags nor propaganda signs nor patriotic verbiage” (82). The structure of the text, like a long speech that is weaving and unraveling with each return to the past, is the most complicated element for a reader not versed in Dominican history. However, this treatment of history ratifies the structural whirlwind that has constituted the Dominican Republic since the beginning of its foundation. Las bodas de Rosaura con la Primavera does not escape the pessimistic attitude of postwar writings in Dominican literature. The narration goes to the present in which the text was written (1991) to talk about the “appearance” of an angel in an old house in the colonial zone, restored to commemorate five hundred years of the Spaniards’ arrival in the American continent in 1992. The omniscient narrator Fall 2020/Agora
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criticizes the superficiality of these celebrations that won’t take into account the human cost of that endeavor “because the country has become a carnival […] while the dead continue to die again in shame because what was the war for if a participant who was in it nesting hope for the future is now kissing those in power or so and so who was a sniper in the twilight so that the Motherland will not be shrouded has ended trafficking narcotics ...” (108). The previous quote reiterates the pessimistic discourse on the Dominican Republic and its inhabitants, unable to appreciate the human sacrifice of civilians and military in the April Revolution, united with the objective of defending the incipient Dominican democracy. The author laments the effect of the haphazard present on many of April’s former participants, who have strayed from his ideals. Many have joined the governments chaired by Joaquín Balaguer, remnants of the Trujillo era; others have been dazzled by illegal activities, succumbing to crime. The physical escape from the surroundings, pursued by numerous ex-combatants, reaches its realization in Las bodas de Rosaura con la Primavera. In an acid monologue, one fighter recounts his decision to leave the country for the United States after his disenchantment with the status quo and his life as an immigrant in New York. Ignoring everything that happened in the country, he associated himself with the mafia and returned to the Dominican Republic after stealing money from a drug transaction. He now lives as a respectable millionaire, owns a mansion and luxury cars, is protected by bodyguards, and is considered a philanthropist. This ex-combatant symbolizes all the excesses of a society that value richness above the principles and ideals that marked an entire generation of Dominicans. The author associates the pain of losing these former comrades with madness: “ours is a spring that has lost its reason” (129). As it is a tropical climate, spring in the Dominican Republic is not distinguished from the other seasons of the year. Used in a metaphorical sense, spring represents the April War, embod30
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ies the participants in the revolution, and symbolizes its ideals. Children, adolescents, youth, women, and men who participated defending the motherland are personified in Rosaura, the main character of this novel. “When the sun is taken by dreams where does spring go it founds rosaura on violet waters and a deep howling of flags rosaura was not herself before it was an idle image that filled the seasons and grew old” (13). There is no ideological awareness that leads her to expose her life for political ideals and to join a makeshift army without any military experience. However, this was the conduct of more than 5,000 Dominican civilians who joined the Constitutionalists, made up of some 3,000 soldiers. When the author writes that “rosaura entered the spring and the war” (18), Rosaura’s name in lowercase makes a reference to the anonymous people who fought in the conflict and, like the verb founding that begins the narrative, Rosaura merges with the spring: “I think about Rosaura and I fill her with attributes she asks, and I also ask for an extension of hatred to continue fighting and we both see death oppressing the hearts of children crowding women against a skylight of unspeakable crying and pain” (84). The roar of the civil war is followed by regret, disenchantment: “if Rosaura liquidates her memory, spring disappears” (101); “Paul Eluard said that ours is a spring that is right and that is not true ours is a spring that has lost its reason” (129). The symbolic title of the book alludes to Rosaura’s weddings, in plural, because several weddings follow one another throughout the narrative. At Rosaura’s first wedding, she is the niece of the president of the Royal Audience during the colonial period and is kidnapped by the pirate Francis Drake on the day she is to be married. Rosaura is taken hostage, raped by corsairs, and exchanged in time to restart her wedding preparations. There is reference to weddings and the lives of “the other girls of war” (52) who, contrary to Rosaura, did not suffer psychological trauma. The wedding of Arascelis, the prostitute who marries dressed in a white wedding dress, despite being a “cuero,”12 is narrated in detail. With
the exception of the first wedding in colonial times, Rosaura’s other weddings are not mentioned in the text, although many years after the revolution she is described as someone, “Who has spent several days going out at night around the Olympic Center looking like a madwoman in a shabby dirty white wedding dress” (134). Weddings were activities that were carried out regularly during the April Revolution, according to available photos. In the novel, the white wedding dress embodies the plurality of a nation in which virgins and prostitutes use it interchangeably. The wedding celebrations in the contexts referred to in Raful’s book alter and challenge reality, becoming subversive acts in which optimism and hope of renewal prevail even over adversity. The open structure of Las bodas de Rosaura con la Primavera is a logical way to give writing representation to the social and psychological chaos of the postwar period. Raful’s novel uses flow of consciousness, a mixture of historical moments, and characters who move incessantly through the city of Santo Domingo that, as a background, takes life on itself. The repeated connections between the Dominican people, their culture and their history as protagonists, established through paratextual and intertextual resources, represent the best accomplishment of this work. Paratextuality can be found in the title’s interpretation and its connection with Sangiovanni’s photography, as well as photographs that complement narratives and descriptions throughout the text. Recorded in these photos are images of everyday moments and peak events during the April Revolution. A symbolic photo reflects the presence of Gregorio Urbano Gilbert, a Dominican who confronted American soldiers during the first intervention of the United States in the Dominican Republic in 1916 and whose story is referenced in the book. In the photo you can also distinguish Colonel Francisco Alberto Caamaño Deñó. With the figure of Gilbert, the two North American interventions suffered by the Dominican Republic are united. Paradoxically, there are no photographs of the capital Santo Domingo nor of distinctive streets or buildings. The city falls and rises
through the writer’s poetic discourse, which would explain the absence of visual portraits. The poetic and intellectual essence of Tony Raful comes to light through paraphrase or direct quotes from famous poems and works by Sigmund Freud, Calderón de la Barca, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Eluard, Pablo Neruda, Nicolás Guillén, René del Risco Bermúdez, Jacques Viau, and Jorge Luis Borges. Descriptions, narrations, dialogues, and inner monologues abound in this book. In addition to the historical episodes, the author weaves an elegy to the city of Santo Domingo and addresses the protagonist, Rosaura, in the second person, while letting her voice and the ones of other characters tell their stories using a testimonial format. The incorporation of Dominican colloquial language adds naturalness and authenticity to the personal stories. The atmosphere of the text changes progressively and the feelings of anxiety, hope, and fear are well reflected, culminating in a pessimism similar to that displayed in other post-revolution novels about the April Conflict. The testimony of an ex-combatant who emigrates to New York reaffirms the state of demoralization: we lost the war and it’s over we’ve been losing it for five hundred years [...] so the first thing I did when I got to Kennedy Airport was to change my shoes and clothes I discarded a few Dominican pennies that I had carried with me I wanted to clean myself of the country’s ravaging of all that black nightmare (120-121).
Rosaura portrays those who did not physically leave the country and immersed themselves in defeatism and hypochondria, unable to free themselves from the trauma of war: “I am confined to memories, my life has been chaotic for twenty years and I cannot find myself ” (100). Rosaura, at the age of forty-two, resorts to Buddhist mysticism, transcendental meditation, psychiatric consultations, and listens to the advice of family members, leading to a diagnosis of “schizophrenia characterized by chronic psychopathic delusions” (135) that will confine her to a mental
hospital. The madness occurs as a consequence of a reality that cannot be subverted, especially for many of those who fought on the Constitutionalist side, confined in eight neighborhoods of the city of Santo Domingo and subjected to the bullets of the American soldiers by one side of the city and the bullets of former comrades-in-arms on the other. The discomfort of the April War is interpreted as yet another defeat in the institutional life of Dominicans and Las bodas de Rosaura con la Primavera perpetuates that unease in which each wedding or event ends with its shattered spring. Powerless in the face of so much ignominy, death is seen as the best solution: “I hope you die, Rosaura, dementia without spring is impotence” (138).
NOTES 1. This intervention is referred to by different names in the Dominican texts: the Intervention of the 65’s, the April War, the April Revolution, the April Insurrection, the April Conflict, terms that I use interchangeably in this essay. 2. Andrés L. Mateo, interview.
3. Marcio Veloz Maggiolo, interview.
4. Joaquín Balaguer served as Vice-President during Trujillo’s regime from 19571960. When Trujillo’s brother, Hector, a puppet President resigned in 1960, Balaguer became president of the Dominican Republic but left the country after Trujillo’s assassination. 5. Mateo Morrison, interview.
6. Andrés L. Mateo, interview.
7. These twenty-two years were distributed as follows: 1966-1978; 1986-1990; 1990-1994; 1994-1996. 8. Tony Raful, Las bodas de Rosaura con la primavera (Santo Domingo: Taller, 1991). References are taken from this edition. 9. San/Sanes (plural): informal saving modality in the Dominican Republic in which the organizer motivates a group of people to participate.
Works Cited Alcántara Almánzar, José. “Abril del 65 en la literatura dominicana.” Los escritores dominicanos y la cultura. Santo Domingo: INTEC, 1990. 135-61. ______. “Narrativa social dominicana: 1960-1970.” Narrativa y sociedad en Hispanoamérica. Santo Domingo: INTEC, 1984. 61-86.
Baeza Flores, Alberto. Los poetas dominicanos del 1965. Una generación importante y distinta. Santo Domingo: Biblioteca Nacional, 1985. Bartlow Martin, John. El destino dominicano. La crisis dominicana desde la caída de Trujillo hasta la guerra civil. Santo Domingo: Santo Domingo, 1975.
Calder, Bruce J. El impacto de la intervención. La República Dominicana durante la ocupación norteamericana de 1916-1924. Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1989. Conde, Pedro. Antología informal. Santo Domingo: Nacional, [1971].
Cury, Jottin. Prólogo. Caamaño frente a la O.E.A. Santo Domingo: UASD, 1985. 11-19. De Frank Canelo, Juan. Dónde, por qué, de qué, cómo viven los dominicanos en el extranjero. Santo Domingo: Alfa y Omega, 1982.
Francisco, Ramón. Literatura dominicana 60. Santiago, República Dominicana: UCMM, 1969.
Franco Pichardo, Franklin. Historia del pueblo dominicano. Santo Domingo: Sociedad Editorial Dominicana, 1993. Incháustegui, Arístides. “Cronología histórico-política dominicana 19601977.” Eme Eme. Estudios dominicanos May-Jun. 1976: 99-137.
Moya Pons, Frank. Manual de historia dominicana. 11th ed. Santo Domingo: Caribbean Publishers, 1997. Pueblo, sangre y canto. Santo Domingo: Frente Cultural, 1965.
Raful, Tony. Las bodas de Rosaura con la primavera. Santo Domingo: Taller, 1991.
Vega, Bernardo. En la década perdida. Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1991.
10. The sisters fought to overthrow dictator Trujillo and were killed by Trujillo’s men.
11 René del Risco Bermúdez. Cuentos y poemas completos. Santo Domingo: Taller, 1981, pp. 192-93. 12. Prostitute in Dominican Spanish.
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Mechanical, Musical Marvels: an Investigation of North German-style Pipe Organs 1550-1750 by GREGORY PETERSON, Professor of Music and College Organist
I traveled to Hamburg, Leipzig, Lübeck, and Lüneburg, Germany; Gothenburg, Lövstabruk, and Stockholm, Sweden; and Kongsberg, Oslo, and Trondheim, Norway. The Hansa, a German merchant guild dominating commercial activity in northern Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, connected many of these cities. Organ builders were among those merchants benefitting from robust trading and enough economic prosperity to advance their art, which reached its apex in the work of Arp Schnitger (1648-1719). It was particularly beneficial to travel in this region, seeing and playing restored, extant organs by this most influential artist/builder, during the bicentennial of
his death. The occasion elicited scores of conferences, exhibits, and recitals to attend. The study began at the Göteborg International Organ Festival, an annual conference bringing together performers, scholars, teachers, and students at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. The 2019 festival, “The Organ as a Mechanical Musical Marvel,” focused the first week on early music and the experimental world of organs, clavichords, and harpsichords. A unique feature of the conference was the claviorganum, a clavier or keyboard plus organ (see photo on page 7). This prototype instrument, commissioned by the ensemble Gothenburg Baroque in 2019, follows designs by Georg Frideric Greg Peterson at Nidaros Cathedral in TrondHandel (1685-1759) for a continuo heim, Norway instrument that he never built. It is a standalone instrument combining tinuo playing is sometimes applied. A organ and harpsichord through long recent manifestation of this on our cammovement action. A single player plays pus was the performance of Bach’s Mass both instruments, either separately, or in B Minor, during the 500th Annivertogether with the aid of a coupling sary of the Reformation in 2017 with mechanism. A wide array of concerts, Kathryn Reed playing the harpsichord recitals, and lectures inaugurated this while I played the portative organ. unusual instrument.
The use of two keyboard instruments for continuo playing (filling in harmony from the bass line at the keyboard) during the baroque era was common. A stringed keyboard instrument such as the harpsichord could alternate with the portative organ, a wind keyboard instrument, depending upon the style and texture of the music. Alternatively, both could play simultaneously, following the same bass line and harmony while allowing for individual applications of chord voicing, improvised arpeggiation, and ornamentation. An oratorio such as Handel’s Messiah, with its choruses, The organ in St. Jacobi Church, Hamburg, built recitatives and arias, is an example of in 1689-1693 by the renowned organ builder a work where this approach to conArp Schnitger 32
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Not only for continuo playing, the idea of claviorganum can be used creatively to present organ and harpsichord literature, deftly demonstrated in a recital I attended at the Haga Church in Gothenburg. Professors Ulrika Davidsson and Joel Speerstra performed a variety of baroque pieces originally composed for a single instrument with one player in their arrangements for two players on contrasting keyboard instruments. Through this approach, the listener hears musical phrases, textures, melodies, and motives differently. The listener can also gain insights into the piece through this enhanced sonic experience, demonstrated recently at Luther when Kathryn Reed and I collaborated
PHOTOS COURTSEY OF THE AUTHOR
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ast fall I made an investigation of North German-style pipe organs circa 1550 to 1750 to further my interest in these mechanical, musical marvels. I also explored how instruments influence improvisation, composition and pedagogy, both historically and currently.
on an Echo Fantasy by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621) in the Paideia Text and Issues Lecture, “Chamber Music at a Distance: How Musical Collaboration Transcends Traditional Spaces.” Another facet of claviorganum is a tradition of pedagogy where teacher and student each sit at a keyboard and work through complex counterpoint by dividing the notes between two players in pieces originally composed for a single player. This interactive pedagogical idea has many possibilities that I am eager to try in my teaching. In several workshops, various performers and scholars explored ideas about J. S. Bach (1685-1750) and pedagogy. The prevailing philosophy suggests that we spell at the keyboard, rather than write. In other words, Bach’s students learned keyboard technique through improvising – writing music while playing the keyboard. We do the opposite. This has many implications, too numerous and detailed for the scope of this article. Suffice it to say, it peaked my interest and makes me think about new ways to approach teaching, especially beginning students. At the very least, it gives permission to explore and ask questions. It also sheds new light on Bach as performer and pedagogue. He improvised in church and concert playing, only committing these notes to paper for pedagogical and publishing purposes. He always had four students around to undertake this task.
Kongsberg, in the heart of Norway’s silver mining region some 40 miles southwest of Oslo, is the site of the Royal Norwegian Mint. The city church is home to a fully restored 1764 Groger pipe organ. As a guest of the Norwegian National Academy, I attended an organ master class in this large baroque church, featuring student organists of university age under the expert tutelage of Professor Annette Richards, a guest presenter from Cornell University in New York. Professor Richards led an in-depth class, informed by the organ at hand, featuring music of Bach, his oldest son Carl Philipp Emanuel (17141788) and the north German Nicholaus Bruhns (1665-1697). She also performed a spectacular candlelit concert in which the organ was hand-pumped. Featuring the music of Bach and other baroque composers, the audience heard this music as close as possible to the
original aesthetic where the bellows – the organ’s lungs – rather than an electric blower, give the instrument a living, breathing quality. Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim, Norway, is the northernmost medieval cathedral in the world. It is home to two spectacular organs of historical interest. Restored in 1995, and originally on the west-crossing wall, the 1741 organ by Berlin builder Joachim Wagner now sits in the north transept. For the Jubilee Anniversary of St. Olav in 1930, the cathedral commissioned a German-built Steinmeyer organ. This instrument reflects the aesthetic of the industrial age and the need to fill a large space with sound. A 2014 restoration modernized this grand instrument with the latest computer technology. The restoration has inspired a new generation of organ aficionados, garnering large audiences at recitals. After attending high mass on Sunday morning, I heard a beautiful and moving candlelit concert by the Nidarosdomens Jentekor (young women), courageously programmed and boldly sung. As a guest of the cathedral’s organist, Petra Bjørkhaug, I spent several hours on Monday playing the Wagner organ and making recordings. I am grateful to her for arranging uninterrupted time in a space constantly filled with tour groups. It was a special and informative experience, especially feeling the weight of the ancient action, and negotiating the specific layout of the keyboards and stop knobs.
While in Gothenburg, I was the guest musician for a Sunday worship service at the Hjällbo Church, leading the congregation in hymns, accompanying the choir, and performing the Toccata in F by Dieterich Buxtehude (ca. 1637-1707) on the church’s modern, mechanical action organ. I enjoyed the collaboration and learning more about church music and the role of the cantor in the Swedish Harpsichord and fortepiano with portative organ in back at Haga Church. Church recital in Gothenburg
The organ music of Dieterich Buxtehude has captured my imagination since I was a teenager. Buxtehude is widely regarded as the most important German composer of organ in the seventeenth century. He was a brilliant organist and composer. His compositions – most likely born out of improvisation and considered avant-garde in his day – are now standard repertoire for most organists. The Fall 2020/Agora
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by Buxtehude and most likely Bach as well.
Vogelsänger, in a demonstration recital featuring a partita by Bach’s teacher and erstwhile organist of this church, Georg Böhm (1661-1733).
The city of Hamburg and surrounding region contains numerous restored Back in Sweden, I traveled to the old examples of Arp Schnitiron-producing town of Lövstabruk on ger’s work. An organ the seacoast north of Uppsala. Burned committee from the meby the Russians during the reign of Karl dieval cloister church in XII (r. 1697-1718) and rebuilt in the Varnhem, Sweden met up eighteenth century, the village church with me in Lübeck, led by hosts the oldest baroque organ in my friend and colleague Sweden, built by Johan Niclas Cahman Karl Nelson, an American from 1726-28. Organists and aficioexpatriate organ builder nados from around the world come to in Lidköping, Sweden. this resort town, now a cultural heritage The Varnhem congregacenter, to play, hear, and learn from this tion commissioned Karl period instrument. Forty degree inside to build a new organ in temperature aside, it was a thrill to play north German style for and record on this marvelously restored this historic church. It organ. In addition to the church, there was my privilege to travel is a keyboard museum, Klaverens Hus, as their resident organist boasting a collection of 600 historic to demonstrate Schnitger Swedish pianos, clavichords, and harorgans for their discernmoniums in restored playing condition. ment at St. Pankratius, It was a fascinating experience! I also Hamburg-Neuenfelde made a visit to nearby Östhammer Medieval cloister church in Varnhem, Sweden (1688), Schnitger’s home where the Börstil Church has a robust church and where he is single-manual instrument by Olaf young J. S. Bach was so convinced of interred; St. Mauritius, Hollern (1689); Schwam (1782), authentic in its sound Buxtehude’s prowess as an organist that St. Cosmae, Stade (1676); St. Wilhadi, and continued use as a “psalm pumper.” he traveled on foot some 250 miles in Stade (1736); and St. Nicolai order to hear Buxtehude’s compositions and St. Martini, Steinkirchen and improvisations as they were hap(1687). While in Hamburg, I pening in St. Mary’s Church, Lübeck, visited St. Jacobi (Schnitger Germany, November and December 1689-93) and St. Katharinof 1703. Buxtehude’s large-scale organ en, which has a special new works are colorful, multi-section pieces organ by the Dutch builder that exploit the tonal resources of the Flentrop, reconstructed to north German organ. Much of what we represent the instrument know about this music stems from our played by J. S. Bach in 1720, knowledge of the north German organ, when he gave a celebrated highly influential in the development recital in this church. of the instrument, influencing modern organ building that includes the Robert The nearby city of Lüneburg L. Sipe mechanical action organ in the where Bach attended Latin Center for Faith and Life. Visiting St. school is home to a Hendrik Mary’s Church, Lübeck, for an organ Niehoff organ built from recital and a Sunday worship service 1551-53 and enlarged by confirmed my adage about Buxtehude, Matthias Dropa from 1712“big music for a big organ in a big 15. It has some of the oldest space.” The twin-spired, gothic nave pipework in the world. This from the fourteenth century is one of instrument is a compendium the largest non-cathedrals I have ever of organ building style and seen. Unfortunately, there are no extant mechanics during the whole instruments since the air raid on March of the “golden age” of organ 28-29, 1942 by the Royal Air Force building. I enjoyed playing nearly destroyed the building, includthis organ and hearing the Schnitger organ at St. Pankratius Church (1688), ing its famous Totentanzorgel, played resident organist, Joachim Hamburg-Neuenfelde 34
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Finishing in Stockholm allowed me to visit the St. Gertrud, German Church. This is home to a new organ built in 2004 by Grönlunds, a reconstruction of the church’s original seventeenth century organ by Paul Müller. The ornate case in gold leaf is particularly stunning. It was an opportunity to see and hear this tradition come full circle. The organist of St. Gertrud’s in the seventeenth century, Gustav Düben (1629-1690), amassed one of the most important collections of keyboard music in Europe. He was a friend of Buxtehude, who dedicated a cantata to him in 1680. Along the way, I met many friends and colleagues who engaged in spirited conversations about organs, tuning systems, the current state of church music and liturgy, among many other topics including beer and US politics. I also learned more about green Norway, the benefit of trains, Greta Thunberg, and the way in which a broad cross section of the population appreciates culture and history. At the start of my sojourn, I ran the Berlin Marathon with 47,000 of my closest friends! Back at Luther, I continue to think about the takeaways from this sabbatical and ways to share it. I performed a candlelit recital in the Sundt Studio of Jenson-Noble Hall of Music in early March highlighting some of the music I studied and played in North Germany and Scandinavia. I collaborated in a demonstration of claviorganum in October. More importantly, I wonder about the big pedagogical questions pertaining to the teaching of music by Buxtehude and Bach knowing that their students, given a directive, notated the scores we now use. How much of a role should improvisation play in current teaching? How do we entice and engage a broader audience? Mostly, I am inspired to be the strongest advocate possible for this art, and to share it in even more compelling ways and in a wider variety of venues. I am grateful to Luther College for continuing to support faculty sabbatical research and time away from teaching. I am also grateful for the Tomson Family Fellowship that supported this most interesting and enjoyable project.
Greg Peterson playing the single-manual organ by Olaf Schwam (1782) at Börstil Church, Östhammer, Sweden
Oldest baroque organ in Sweden, built by Johan Niclas Cahman (1726-28), Lövstabruk Church Fall 2020/Agora
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Seeking Hope OCTOBER 7, 2020
by ERIC BAACK, Professor of Biology
“It is extraordinary: we are wrecking the earth, as burglars will sometimes wantonly wreck a house. It is a strange and terrible moment in history. We who ourselves depend on it utterly are laying waste to the biosphere . . . rushing to degrade the atmosphere above and the ocean below and the soil at the center and everything it supports . . . Already more than half the rainforests are gone, pesticide use has decimated wild flowers and the insect populations of farmland and rivers, the beds of the seas are deeply degraded and most of the fish stocks are at danger levels, the acidity of the ocean is steadily rising, coral reefs are under multiple assault, 40 billion tons of climate-changing carbon are loading the atmosphere every year and currently one-fifth , and rising, of all vertebrates . . . are threatened with extinction. Loss is everywhere, and the defining characteristic of the natural world in the twenty-first century is no longer beauty, nor riches, nor abundance, nor, if you like, life force, but has become vulnerability.” Michael McCarthy, The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy Editor’s Note: In Quarter 1 this fall, Wednesday chapel featured a series of talks by current and former students of Biology 151, Principles of Biology: Ecology, Evolution, and Biodiversity. The talks focused on “questions of ultimate concern” at the intersection of science, spirituality, and ethics. The entire series is reprinted here.
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t is a dark vision, one that I know well as a scientist.
Earlier this year, I spoke with Pastor Annie (Edison-Albright), suggesting that Luther College needed to find a way to explain how its religious roots could be of value to those who might not identify with any religious tradition. So when she offered an opportunity to explore the intersections of humanism, ethics, spirituality, and biology in a series of chapel talks, I agreed. Over the years, I’ve had amazing conversations with students at these boundaries. This openness to explore religious questions—questions of ultimate concern— deepens our life of learning here. Today, I’ll talk about one set of fears and hopes—ones that are connected to my teaching. But we face others of equal importance. We faculty who teach biology often wonder how to be both truthful and hopeful. As a child, I often wasn’t able to. My head was filled with images from TV public service announcements: cities that appeared to be polluted concrete wastelands and forests desolate after fire. Sometimes, my teachers did not help. I remember watching a film in third grade, show36
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ing the animals around the world going extinct due to human action. I was filled with sadness and anger over what we were doing. I entered high school in the first year of Reagan’s presidency, amidst talk of winning a nuclear war. His administration removed solar hot water panels from the White House roof and pushed the National Forests of the Northwest to “get out the cut.” I remember dreaming in despair of a world freed from humans, healing itself. As I grew older, I began to learn of human actions that were helping the non-human world. Oregon’s republican governor during my childhood, Tom McCall, cleaned up the Willamette River flowing through Portland, threatening to shut down the paper mills upstream unless they cut their waste. My father built solar hot water panels for our house. In college, we collected seeds from a prairie that had never been plowed and helped with prairie burns. After graduation, I taught high school biology. One of my students asked me why biology mattered when she wouldn’t live to be 24. Her brother had been shot and died, and she thought she too would die within a few years. I lacked an adequate answer: all that I was teaching was of no value if she had no hope. I had to teach reasons to hope. As educators, we owe our students and our society the truth. But we must make sure that we don’t lose sight of what is good and the possibilities of what might
Eric Baack be as we lay out the challenges: we, and our students, need hope if we are to serve the common good. So, what do we do in introductory biology? We tell our students that we humans have choices to make, that some of those choices could lead to a world with less climate change and fewer extinctions. That even if the pollution of rivers from Iowa’s farms has gotten worse over the last 15 years, other states have found ways to do better. We tell them that even as global CO2 levels rise, Luther College has cut its carbon footprint by more than half over the past 17 years. We tell students of the animals extinct in Iowa by 1900: otters, beavers, deer, wild turkeys, coyotes—and how many have returned. But some sources of hope I’ve kept to myself. I doubt that most would find my vision comforting. Should I ask my students to imagine a world where
wild places have dwindled, where the species that are left are those that can co-exist with humans: the grasses that sprout in sidewalk cracks; rats, starlings, and carp? Even in this impoverished future, so long as plants still capture the sun and the earth’s waters have oxygen, I imagine life restoring wonders to the world. As terrible and heartless as evolution is, with time it will once more fill the world with “endless forms most beautiful.” Even now we see new species arising in the strange environments we have made: there are mosquitoes that live their entire lives in London’s underground, isolated from their relatives above. Imagine the exuberant novelty that will emerge in the next million years if we allow it. I choose to hope our young species will grow wise, that we will allow life to restore the world, for ourselves and all else that lives. The Sending: Go forth with the courage to look upon the work to be done, with the resolution to begin, with the knowledge that you will not work alone, and with the perspective to see where life thrives as well as where it suffers.
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Finding God in Awe OCTOBER 14, 2020
by KALIE DEBELAK, ‘21
Wherever you are, I want to say to you here at the beginning, “Look again.” Memory works by looking again, as do science and forgiveness. I have learned this by being wrong, being changed. I have learned to slow down to zero, and study what’s in front of my face. A tree spirals as it grows. I turn and look again. Kim Stafford, Entering the Grove
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rom a young age, I have been fascinated with the natural world. I spent most of my childhood outside weaving grass, biking, looking at the trees (even using birch bark as paper for my little drawings) and staring at ants in the wildflowers. In awe of the range of life I saw all around, my adoration of nature informed my decision to study biology here at Luther, and continues to be the foundation of my faith journey. For me, science and faith go hand in hand. The wonderment I feel while hiking through the mountains or looking at the stars affirms my belief in a divine connection between myself, all other living beings, and God. Science is the tool I employ to better understand, and delve into, this feeling of awe. Science has revealed to me the complexity, sameness, and difference between all of us. It shows me how things work, grow, and develop—and it is a miracle. While there are repeated processes and a structure, which some people may believe are aspects not pertinent to their understanding of God, I cannot conceive how all of this is possible without some divine something. In BIO 151, the first biology class I took at Luther, I fell further in love with my choice of study. First with the tree walk in the early fall, where we go into the forest behind Anderson Prairie and learn to identify different trees, then second when studying population genetics. During the tree walk, we learned about the differences in leaves and bark, mostly. Seems simple enough, right? Not exactly. When analyzing a leaf, you have to not only look at its shape, but also the edges (are they smooth or 38
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rigid?), the way the veins are laid out (do they branch out from one common spot, or from various points up the leaf?), and the texture of the leaf itself. For the bark, you have to look at the way it grows on the tree: does it look braided? Shaggy? Does it peel? What color is it? Does the bark grow in small or large chunks? All of these things make for a more complicated process, but what stood out to me most about this walk were the small details. Each tree has a special collection of traits, and we have to look at them all to determine which is which. The uniqueness of each tree reminded me of the complexity of life and sent my mind into questioning. How is it possible to have all of this? I think about this question with genetics, too. How is it possible to have all of these “differences” amidst deep sameness? And further, how is it possible that so much goes right when there is pretty much an infinite opportunity for things to go wrong? In BIO 151, we talked about different alleles, or forms of a gene, becoming more or less present in populations. The ones that tend to help a population will stay, and those that are harmful will be eliminated through natural selection and survival of the fittest. All of this being said, there are exceptions as always, and things do go wrong. Often. This is a part of the duality I see in nature and better understand through science. Nature holds both truths: that things go abundantly right and abundantly wrong. However, when I look outside, what I see is the stuff that looks like it went right. The trees in the forest behind Anderson Prairie are numerous, but those that are full grown were only
Kalie Debelak one seed out of a multitude produced over the parent plant’s lifetime. This one probably had many neighboring “sibling” seeds growing nearby after pollination, who never made it to adulthood. This is thanks to all of the little cellular workers that proofread DNA and alert cells when something is wrong. If it can’t be fixed, development stops. This is indeed a tragedy when it happens to human life, yet when we come into being we have TRILLIONS of cells working in our favor, dividing and growing, keeping our immune systems in check, always on surveillance, and repairing our DNA when it’s damaged. It’s chaos, but chaos with a purpose, and somehow with steps and processes to maintain this beautiful life. If the world naturally gears toward chaos (as we humans have come to define it), then how do we have so many functioning living beings? Healthy humans? How do we have so much diversity in the small woodland behind our campus
prairie? While science gives us answers, it doesn’t give us all the answers; in fact, it’s messy and is constantly under revision. Knowing all of these things doesn’t diminish the sense of mystery and awe in the apparent “rightness” in life. Understanding the processes of mutation and natural selection doesn’t diminish the wonder at the diversity all around me. Nothing is ever fully understood. This fact shows me that curiosity is essential to the human experience. It is a part of us, and the world seems set up in a way that allows us to constantly be discovering new things, pouring out more knowledge on top of knowledge, giving us the grace to revise our understandings and look back and see how far we have come. That, to me, is confirmation of the Divine, always providing us with the opportunity to discover and learn more about the mysteries of this wonderfully messy world. The Sending: Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
Mary Oliver
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Water, Life, and Mind OCTOBER 21, 2020
by THAWDAR ZIN, ‘21
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etween two very dense Ecuadorian rainforests, the water flows tirelessly along the path it’s created. It’s on a journey. The surrounding life force is overwhelming. Where it is from was the answer I was seeking, as I tried to hike up all the way to its origin. The journey of the water coming down from the source and ending up in a bigger water body resonates so much with our life journey. We are travelers, finding answers to our life philosophy and an end, just like the water. We go as far as we can until we become one with life, and our oneness becomes eternal. The river may run through dry deserts, rocky places, caves, and through thick, dense rainforests. Its source may be a spring or a waterfall. But the water flows nonstop, one way aggressively and peacefully, and along its way, life thrives. It ends up in the oceans where the water no longer needs to travel, joining all the other rivers as one. All the travelers’ journeys end there, and we become one.
which I had overlooked, is actually what defines my life goals, my life philosophy, and purpose. I was born by a huge lake and grew up in a place surrounded by mountains and streams. As a child, I loved being outdoors and found myself very delighted and joyful in the forest, up in the mountains, along streams and lakes. These memories were stamped in my brain, waiting to be rediscovered. The connection was lost when my family had to leave my beloved environment in Myanmar and flee to Thailand due to civil wars the military ignited. Since then, I hadn’t been very aware of the significance of my connection with water until my journey on a study abroad course to the Amazon forest in Brazil and Ecuador. I learned that nature resonates so much with our minds once we start paying attention to it. It is nature that is always trying to connect with us, but we humans are not willing to connect back with nature.
My spiritual connection to nature becomes stronger when my knowledge about nature is expanded, thanks to biology classes I never thought I would take. My eagerness to see and admire life and biodiversity comes from the connection I have with water. An unexplainable joy arises when I get to lakes, rivers, mountains, and forests. My mind is at peace, with not a single thought of my problems, my worries, or desires. And happiness follows. Ten Mile Creek at Luther’s Lionberger Environmental Preserve PHOTO BY BONNIE TUNNICLIFF JOHNSON
Sometimes we tend to forget the very thing that forms a big part of our identity, and all the work we produce has at least some part of it, yet we may not notice it. My connection with water,
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Thawdar Zin There is a strong connection between the mind and water. No matter how disturbed the water is, at one point it is going to be settled and become transparent. A human’s mind can be just like water: settled and become transparent at one point, peaceful. And once it is settled, one can see any reflections one wants just like we can see a beautiful reflection of a sunset on a tranquil, undisturbed surface of water. Our mind can become like water, humble, peaceful, and transparent, by simply meditating. Meditation can untangle our thoughts and set them aside. It helps us become free of our worries, desires, and temptation; it smolders our inner fire. Once our thoughts are clear and our mind transparent, we will see something, someone, or an answer we seek by just like looking through transparent water. So go forth, with the will to explore and the purpose of discovering and being discovered. Find a place in your mind where you find happiness and peace. Focus on it, and just like the water, practice your mind to be tranquil, humble, and transparent, and you will find something. An answer, a reflection, a secret or a purpose.
Reflections on Being a Christian Biologist OCTOBER 28, 2020
by JESSI LABENSKI, ‘22
existence of God. The intricacies of life on our planet complicate my ability to believe that the universe was all created in one chance cosmic event. During my time at Luther, I have been a student of biology and I have also been a lab assistant for Biology 151, our introductory biology class. Some of these experiences have shaped this view that I now hold. Being amidst the black walnuts, oaks, sugar maples, and black cherries in Hickory Ridge Woods is a humbling experience. I notice how each majestic tree has different characteristics that help the tree to fill a niche or role in the woods. For example, junipers with stringy dead branches surrounding their trunks grow only in areas with abundant sunlight. And, after examining macroinvertebrates from Dunning Springs, it is incredible that organisms so small can help us determine the health of the spring. Looking into the microscope, we see mini-shrimp that we call scuds, mayflies with their three delicate tails, and caddisflies with their rocky and sandy tubed backs. To me, this is an example of God’s divine hand in creating amazingly complex life at the microscopic level. Finally, we take time to study the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. It is impressive and frightening how quickly these bacteria can evolve to resist the antibiotics that we have created. Evolution is an ingenious process that allows organisms to survive and thrive. The evolution of new traits within a population may lead to a species filling a different role within the ecosystem. But humans have to accept that each species exists LUTHER COLLEGE PHOTO BUREAU IMAGE BY ANNIKA VANDE KROL ‘19
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iology and Religion. Many people believe that these two things are in direct opposition to one another. After all, science and religion determine the truth in different ways. According to Einstein, “science can only ascertain what is, not what should be.” The scientific method is used to uncover facts about the natural world. Religion, on the other hand, sometimes forgoes science in order to explain the world in a spiritual, disembodied way. This is why there has been ongoing conflict between science and religion since the 1600s. Alongside this conflict has been the counter argument that religion and science are instead compatible, and complement each other well. In my own experience as a Christian biologist, I have found this to be true. The more biology that I come to understand, the more difficult it is for me to doubt the
Jessi Labenski for a purpose, even if that purpose does not directly benefit humans. Author Marcus Borg asserts that the character of God is revealed in nature. Admiring nature is the surest way to reveal a glimpse of the divine on earth, since this is God’s creation. This is why Job encourages us to look to nature for the wisdom of God. “Speak to the earth, and it will teach you” ( Job 12:8). Unfortunately, it is all too easy to move away from speaking to the earth when our population continues to grow and we continue to urbanize our living spaces. Now, the earth is trying to speak to us, and we have an obligation to listen. One out of every three species of plants and animals will be extinct within 50 years. Scientific predictions such as this one can help us to understand the consequences of human actions on our planet. These consequences could be rising temperatures, extinctions, rising sea levels, disease, or something entirely different. But along with predicting the consequences of our actions, we can also use science to guide our actions towards a path forward. Science provides an understanding of mechanisms to combat Fall 2020/Agora
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these consequences so that we can do what is best for our planet. Yet, as I mentioned before, Einstein claimed that science is insufficient for telling us what should be. Science cannot tell us the sort of world that we should live in. This is why science and religion make such a remarkable pair. Religion is a means by which we are able to reimagine how the world is meant to be. People of God desire the world to be a place of compassion and love for all living things. To see the world as sacred is to see the nature of God in everything around us. We are called to preserve this sacredness of the natural world as people of faith. So look closely through the microscope or high into the trees, and use both your scientific and your spiritual wisdom to listen to the earth and strive to make a difference in the beautiful world around us. The Sending: The Crooked Tree Prayer May the crooked trees of this world continue to grow. May they continue to harbor wildflowers at their feet. May we learn acceptance and live and let live. May we each be fed in a way that does not cost the earth. May we learn to live gently and lightly, and not sweep away all before us when we are hungry. Let our hearts be filled and our demands slacken and fade away. Let us find the time to sit still and see all the parts of the crooked tree within us and accept it as it is. May all the parts of ourselves and in nature be witnessed and honored. Let us humans with all our crooked ways find a path to beauty that wild flowers might grow at our feet. Let it be so. Amanda C. Vesty
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Evolution and Creation—So What’s the Question? NOVEMBER 4, 2020
by KIRK LARSEN, Professor of Biology
It is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fixed act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Speciese
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o earlier this fall when Eric Baack asked me if I’d be willing to speak in chapel today, he asked specifically if I’d speak on evolution and religion, because none of the other folks he had been talking to were evidently willing to talk about it, especially that today is the morning after the election. “Would you be interested,” he asked? I didn’t tell him this, but to be honest no, I’d much rather be talking about how we are called to care for creation. Some day when I’m standing at the pearly gates, I don’t think the question God will ask me is, “How did I create the world?” Instead I think God will ask me: “What did you do to take care of the garden I placed you in? Did you care for the animals, the plants, and the incredible diversity of people in the world I asked you to take care of?” But since Dr. Baack asked me to focus on evolution and religion, I’ll try to focus my remarks today on how I personally approach this issue from my Christian perspective. In Hebrews 1:10 we read, “In the beginning, Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the works of your hands.” Now I could have read any of numerous passages from the Bible which describe God as the creator, and as a Christian I believe this doctrine of creation is a clear and consistent Biblical principle stretching from Genesis 1 to Revelations. Romans 1:20 says, “Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.” This verse talks about looking at the “things he has made,” that is, the natural world which we often call creation. Who studies the
natural world? That is the realm of us folks in the natural sciences. At Luther we are proud of our beautiful location in the driftless region of northeastern Iowa, and as scientists we study the geology, ecology, and yes, evolution of the diversity of life that inhabits this special corner of the world. We ask questions and test hypotheses to explain our observations of the natural world using methods that focus on natural processes. Does believing a natural process such as evolution created the diversity of life we see mean that God didn’t do it? In Psalm 147 we read, “He covers the heavens with clouds, prepares rain for the earth, makes grass grow on the hills. He gives to the animals their food, and to the young ravens when they cry.” Our meteorologists can explain the natural processes of why clouds form and how it rains. My botanist colleagues can explain the natural processes of how the grasses grow. To me, this is not explaining away God, but simply an indication of how God uses natural processes to accomplish his purposes. If God uses natural processes to accomplish his purposes in these examples, why is there so much opposition to God using the natural processes of evolution to create the diversity of life? The evidences for evolution through the various mechanisms of natural selection, genetic drift, gene flow, and mutation are compelling, and frankly overwhelming.
Kirk Larsen
Many folks think evolution by definition is atheistic, but I think not. Science and faith are simply two ways of examining the same thing, providing complementary answers to different questions about the world we live in. It seems to me that there are questions science can’t
Science and religion are two complementary ways of knowing. They answer different yet complementary questions. One of the most important reasons I see for our current general education categories is for students to be exposed to and wrestle with questions various
answer. Questions like, Why am I here? What is my purpose in life? Is there a God? To most of us, these are important questions, yet these are questions that science is not equipped to answer, and religion offers us ways to answer those questions. Science can answer questions such as, How does this world we live in function? What is this world made of? And how is it structured? How did this incredible diversity of life come to be? and How should we care for the natural world to preserve this diversity of life that God uses to provide for us and all of creation in so many ways?
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disciplines ask, and learn the different ways we try to approach and come to answer those questions. Then students can make interdisciplinary connections that provide for a satisfying understanding of themselves and this world in which we live and in which we are called to serve. As a Christian, I take Jesus and his teachings seriously, and as a scientist, I study the natural world, holding to necessary scientific methodologies and assumptions. Those of you who know me know that I get a little excited about insects. Personally, the reason I study, teach about, and care for the incredible diversity of insects we have here right in northeastern Iowa is because of my faith. I believe I am called to care for all of God’s creatures. My research focuses on how we take care of the insects that live in our natural areas, and the impact our land stewardship actions have on those insects. These insects pollinate our crops, control pests, help cycle nutrients through the environment, provide food for the birds and fish that live here, and allow us to live a more sustainable life in this piece of the garden. To again read from Darwin at the conclusion of his On the Origin of Species: “There is a grandeur in this view of life . . . having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” It is these endless forms that we have been called to steward and care for. So if evolutionary creationism is true, that is, evolution is God’s method of creating, then we can believe both the science of evolution AND the theology of creation. There is no need for the false dichotomy and conflict that seems to have developed on this issue. Christians who are evolutionary creationists propose this view based on their careful examination of God’s Word (in the Bible) and their study of God’s Works (in nature). We can be encouraged and humbly trust that what we see and discover observ44
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ing the natural world through the eyes of science is true, and contains both spiritual and physical truths that we can accept as gifts from our Creator.
Challenging Racial Bias in the Health Professions NOVEMBER 11, 2020
by KELAO CHARMAINE NEUMBO, ‘22
The Human Genome Project, which mapped the entire human genetic code, proved that race could not be identified in our genes. Contrary to popular misconception, we are not naturally divided into genetically identifiable racial groups. Biologically, there is one human race. Race applied to human beings is a political division. . . . Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention
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hat said, humans are diverse, but aren’t we the same at our core? What is our core if we start there? In biology our core comes down to genetics and what we physically are comprised of, and in that we are the same. However, when it comes to our lived experiences we do not treat everyone like we are the same. In my experiences in institutions where equality is the premise I have found that it is not always practiced. Whether it is the name discriminated against on a resume or a research paper, the punishment of a black child over the same behavior of a white child in a classroom, or the excessive use of force by police on black bodies that results in murders such as the ones of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, it is these same biases that lead to the increased likelihood of death in black women during childbirth when in the care of a white doctor. Racism plays a significant role in the formation of health disparities. Of course, one might think that equality is given in the care of a health provider; however, that is not the case. Hundreds of physicians were asked to look over the cases of either black or white patients who likely just suffered a heart attack. Those that scored higher on a racial bias test were less likely to prescribe a drug that would reduce blood clots and prevent heart attacks. In fact, as of 2018, half of white medical students and residents still believe in false biological differences between white and black patients. One myth is that black patients are more pain tolerant than white patients. Fifty percent of
medical students and residents believe black bodies have less sensitive nerve endings and thicker skin. That is more than 25,000 doctors set to enter the medical field. Recently, having had my blood drawn, a nurse said that I had “thick skin” as she spoke right through me to the other nurses while she continued to poke and prod my arms to find a vein. This is the same bias that is held when law enforcement ignores the calls of a man whose neck they have their knees on as he begs for life and screams “I can’t breathe” till he cannot breathe anymore. Very often you hear heart disease is more commonly associated with the black community. But what this fails to address is the lack of access to good food sources in low income communities, heavily policed neighborhoods, and the daily stressors of being a minority. Generations of trauma are encoded in our ancestry. Paraphrasing Megan Ming Francis, we are more eager to solve a problem than we are to understand it. Prescribing education to combat racism is a misdiagnosis. Books and conversation will not stop biases and racism but activism, confrontation of our own complicities, and courage to challenge the status quo will.
Kelao Charmaine Neumbo the molecular level . . . The other road means affirming our shared humanity by working to end the social inequities preserved by the political system of race. Which path we choose to follow is not only a question of scientific evidence. It is a question of moral commitment. There is no neutral scientific position on this question. We have long had scientific confirmation that race is a political and not a biological category. We must choose the path of common humanity and social change.
We are not born racist. We learn it—from our parents and our environments—and challenging it will make us unlearn it. Dorothy Roberts, whom I quoted at the start of this talk, writes in her book Fatal Invention: This nation is at a crossroads. One path is . . . adopting the view that human beings are naturally divided into races at Fall 2020/Agora
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Changing How We View, Treat, and Care for Others by MANNUKU PHEKO, ‘21
Note: Mannuku and Kelao Charmaine Neumbo each spoke on November 11 and reflected on two passages from Dorothy Roberts in her book Fatal Invention, quoted by Charmaine (see previous talk).
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ast semester, I was enrolled in Evolutionary Biology class. In this class we discussed a variety of topics, including the genetic variation among species, natural selection, and the idea of common descent. The nature of common descent establishes that we are all more similar to each other than we may like to admit. In class, we learned that there is no genetic sequence unique to Blacks or whites or Asians. We gained an understanding that even though scientists can use DNA to calculate a person’s geographic ancestry, that information doesn’t reliably correspond to their race, physiological abilities, or intelligence. And as it has been mentioned, the concept of “race” is a socio-political reality, as opposed to a scientific one. However, in the very field of science, this idea of race-as-genetics will not die. The question is, why not? As a student hoping to enter the field of science, I am disappointed to see that professionals in research and medicine, whom we are supposed to look up to, are dealing in bad faith. I say this because I have noticed that professionals in these fields are well aware that race-as-genetics is false science. They are aware of the consequences that this flawed logic has on individuals and on communities. Some professionals, including the doctors who have racial biases, commit intellectual dishonesty by failing to confront the racism and racist history within their practice. To entertain the idea that “race” has some biological evidence automatically perpetuates a deceiving idea that some people are born naturally superior and others naturally inferior. Influential and powerful people in the justice system, in 46
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NOVEMBER 11, 2020 health and medicine and in research, are justifying the mistreatment of others, and this is wrong. That being said, we as the next generation have the freedom and obligation to address our own biases and change the way we view, treat, and care for others. We can learn from the mistakes made by the generations preceding us in order to create a just future for everyone. The Sending : Go forth and make the world a better place through acts of kindness and good faith. Mannuku Pheko
Climate Change and Hope NOVEMBER 18, 2020
by STUDENTS IN BIOLOGY 151, FALL 2020
Opening Reading by Professor Eric Baack: It is illusion to think that there is anything fragile about the life of the earth; surely this is the toughest membrane imaginable in the universe, opaque to probability, impermeable to death. We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia. Nor is it a new thing for humans to invent an existence that we imagine to be above the rest of life; this has been our most consistent intellectual exertion down the millennium. As illusion, it has never worked out to our satisfaction in the past, any more than it does today. Humans are embedded in nature. peakers: Duc Chu, Steven Conradt, Samantha Dzangare, Alec Eitrheim, Naree King, and Grace Parrott.
Steven: When thinking about climate change, the most worrisome thoughts I have are about the human desires at the helm of this colossal, dangerous ship. Money is of the utmost priority to so many people; too often is the environment the lowest priority. If we are cilia, nature is sneezing. Said plainly, humans are both creatures of opportunity, and creatures of habit. Often lacking selfrestraint, our quest for ‘more’ drives us. Grace: What worries me about climate change is that it will start to affect the human population more than scientists’ predictions anticipate. Our government controls the regulations for fossil fuel emissions and a lot of the conservation efforts as well as the general view of the public to a certain extent. At this point in time, our government has not taken drastic enough steps to reduce the US’s impact, and each day the situation gets worse.
cation, loss of habitat, extinction . . . It seems like once human-assisted climate change is set in motion, it will continue to fuel itself. Naree: A good-sized portion of humans still refuse to believe that climate change is real or that humans are a large factor that contributes to climate change, and because of that mindset other species that don’t play a role in the sped-up progression towards climate change will be the ones who are most vulnerable to the effects--that’s what worries me the most. There’s a deep unfairness of having other animals and plants being the major bearers of our mistakes. Evidence of humans being
the main cause for this drastic degree of climate change is all around us and so many ecosystems are being destroyed as a result of that, but it seems like humans are either too stubborn to believe it or that humans do believe it but are too selfish to change habits quickly enough. Duc: As a global citizen, I worry most about the future generations, who will not only be impacted by the negative environmental consequences from climate change but will also never be able to see and appreciate how diverse the earth ecosystem is. Thousands of species have gone extinct, and the number does not seem to stop growing.
Alec: What worries me the most about climate change is how seemingly isolated incidents of climate change are usually never isolated and usually affect countless natural processes in the Top row, from left: Naree King, Steven Conradt, Samantha Dzangare. Secworld such as ocean acidifi- ond row, Alec Eitrheim, Duc Chu, Grace Parrott. Bottom row, Eric Baack
IMAGE COURTESY OF ERIC BAACK
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Lewis Thomas, Lives of a Cell (Language has been modified from the original to be more inclusive.)
Samantha: There are certain communities in the world that are already living in poverty as well as high levels of inequality, and climate change certainly adds more to developmental problems for developing countries. This is such bad news. Agriculture is very important, at least where l come from, because that is how my community survives. And so in the case when droughts occur (which has been the case for the past two years), food security will significantly conFall 2020/Agora
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tinue dropping, requiring communities to rely on aid which oftentimes is never enough. Water scarcity is already an issue in some communities and climate change will certainly make life even harder which again will affect the health of people living in these communities. The fact that conversations around saving the climate have become more common and the efforts by some parts of the world to educate nations on how to preserve our environment gives me hope that life can get better for my people. Steven: It is my firm belief that there are ways to increase our global happiness while at the same time decreasing our footprints. I find consolation in so many things -- too many to list, really: namely, the restoration and subsequent protection of public lands and sites within America’s National Parks system, the incentive-based recyclable fabric initiatives by an increasing number of clothing manufactures, and the evergrowing importance on furthering our understanding of renewable forms of energy. Through these actions I believe that human greed can be maintained but redirected into investments into these emerging sectors and ideas. Alec: It makes me hopeful knowing climate change is not irreversible in the sense that humans as individuals can affect their environment through a number of small daily lifestyle changes. Duc: This goes along with more motivation and commitment to fight climate change from the public. World leaders, although not as in agreement as needed, are meeting together to agree on measurements that can reduce major causes of climate change, especially the burning of fossil fuel. The Paris Climate Agreement, although not yet providing signs of effectiveness, is a start and will not be the last agreement from world leaders to fight climate change as a whole global nation. Grace: There is also evidence that some species are already adapting, as we saw in the reefs that have a greater heat tolerance. I think we need to give more credit to nature and its ability to evolve with the ever-changing environment. These species may not be evolving “quickly enough,” but they are still mak48
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ing changes that are improving their survivability to a certain point in the future. Naree: One thing that gives me hope is seeing that things are being done to preserve species or preserve richness in a rapidly changing climate. We need to learn adaptation -– we may not be able to return nature to its old state. We need to be creative in finding ways to remedy issues, especially if changes in policies to fix climate change are happening slowly. It’s often easy to get tunnel vision in what it looks like to be successful when the only definition of success that is perceived is bringing something back to its original state. There are other ways to be successful in this journey towards combating climate change. Eric Baack: We have learned that what once seemed invulnerable may perish: the rainforests of the Amazon can burn, and the pole’s ice melt. We are right to fear the loss of spruce and fir from northern lakes, the extinction of songbirds, the disappearance of coral reefs. Yet we do not threaten life itself. Bacteria live in rocks a mile below the sea, and seeds can wait centuries before germinating. Despite volcanoes spanning half a continent, life has survived— it will likely survive us. Grace (The Sending): Go forth with love for this world, with the wisdom to weigh today’s desires against tomorrow’s needs, with the vision to see what thrives even as you mourn what is lost, and with an eagerness to live in a way that helps rather than harms the life around you. We send you out to cherish the amazing diversity of the nature you live among, to seek out the ways in which your life impacts your local environment, and to have the eagerness to adapt your routine of life to help—not hurt—the life around you. Go forth and cherish.
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ou can read the current issue of Agora online, and you can also find and search all back issues by going to our webpage: www. luther.edu/paideia/agora.
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