Monday, December 15, 2008
"Commencing upon St. Lucy's Day"
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University of Southern Indiana Fall 2008 Commencement Address By Dr. Sherry B. Darrell, 2008 Integra Bank Distinguished Professor Along with commencement, today we celebrate St. Lucy′s day, 13 December. Under the new calendar, the Gregorian, we mark 21 December as the shortest day, longest night of our year. But under the old calendar, the Julian, 13 December was the shortest day and longest night of the year, the coldest and darkest of winter. Lucy′s name, however, means light: we celebrate her light during the darkest part of the year, when we most need light. Just think of all the words associated with her name and light: illumine, elucidate, lucent, illustrate, lustrous. Lucy is patron saint of sight and blindness–”she particularly helps those who need better vision, better direction, better light. Paintings of St. Lucy depict her holding in her right hand a sword–”perhaps that which killed her–”and in her left a dish with two eyes lying in it. St. Lucy lived in Syracuse 283-304 CE she was martyred at about your age, age 21, after long persecution for refusing to marry the lord who desired her because she had dedicated her life and body to God. Her would-be husband denounced Lucy and ordered that she burn at the stake but when the fire didn′t kill Lucy, the would-be husband ordered the guards to stab her with swords and daggers until she died. Over the centuries, many writers honored St. Lucy. The great Italian poet Dante Alighieri wrote of St. Lucy in The Divine Comedy,/i> among the three blessed women offering Dante grace. When Dante loses his way in the dark night, the Virgin Mary pities him and calls upon Saint Lucy to guide Dante, to help him find his way physically, morally, spiritually. By the time Vergil leads Dante through Inferno and Purgatorio and his beloved Beatrice steers Dante through Paradiso, Dante sees his way again and stands in awe at the ultimate light of God. Today I celebrate Saint Lucy for two reasons. First, weak vision: literally, I have weak eyes, cannot see farther than the bedcovers until I put in my lenses, and so I always need Lucy′s light figuratively, I have suffered times of blindness like Dante, I have become lost in my life, directionless, blind, lost in the dark. Sometimes my darkness and lostness came from a failure, a betrayal, a death. Some of you will recall Gilgamesh′s dark night of the soul after Enkidu′s death the poet Sin-leqqe-unninni describes Gilgamesh as blind and frozen in the dark tunnel. The second reason I celebrate St. Lucy comes from my 50 years of living, learning, holding in my mind and heart and imagination, hundreds of great, great poems, among them John Donne′s "Nocturnal Upon Saint Lucy′s Day," one of the most moving poems written in our language. Donne himself had suffered considerable darkness during his life he was born a Roman Catholic in an England which outlawed priests and refused university degrees to Roman Catholics at that time, only a noble title or a university degree could secure a man a career in law, medicine, church, or government. After he eloped, his in-laws reviled him and saw to it that he could not find work at all. When he finally gave in to King James I and became an Anglican priest–”one of the greatest preachers in all of our language, Donne′s wife soon died. In this poem about St. Lucy, written early in the 17th century, Donne describes Saint Lucy′s day, the earth, and himself as cold, dark, dead: It is the year′s midnight, and it is the day′s, Lucy′s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks The sun is spent, and now his flasks Send forth light squibs, no constant rays. The world′s whole sap is sunk, The general balm th′hydroptic earth hath drunk, Whither as to the bed′s feet, life is shrunk, Dead and interred, yet all these seem to laugh, Compared with me, who am their epitaph. In this nine-line stanza and four others, Donne speaks at midnight of Saint Lucy′s , describing the dry, dead, cold earth and all things upon it shrinking to the bed′s feet in an attempt to keep warm. But all those cold, dark, dead things seem to laugh in joy compared to him as he suffers in the darkness without his wife. He is a man dead to love, lost to grief, utterly in the dark about how he can live after his wife′s death. I mention the poem as part of our celebration today not to lament St. Lucy or John Donne, but rather to discuss imagination and enlightenment, particularly when we need direction and light. For the past four or five years, your professors have shared, eagerly and generously, their knowledge for you to learn and have stressed critical thinking for you to evaluate that and other knowledge, hoping you will profit from this university education in the lives you begin now. In addition, we asked you to stretch your imaginations, to reach far beyond such clichés such as "thinking outside the box" or reducing the wide, deep realm of imagination to some old saw about "being creative." Like knowledge and critical thinking, imagination offers us ways of seeing and finding direction imagination serves as a light, a way to become illuminated and enlightened. What happens when we mean imagine? At moments, we all engage in wild imagination, a way of eschewing knowledge, critical thinking, typical deduction and induction. Instead, we leap to wild imaginings based in ignorance and desire. After growing up long before the popularity of dinosaur-lore, reading about the ancient reptiles mainly in the context of their contributions to rich Texas oilfields, and seeing that classic film Godzilla, several dozen times on late-night television, at your age I visited the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the first time, prepared for a Tyrannosaurus Rex the height of the Empire State Building and the length of two football fields. With wild imagination and no facts, I was stunned and disappointed that, in a room smaller than this one, I could see the skeletons of six complete dinosaurs. This kind of imagination can lead to grave disappointments. For most of us, the serious danger in wild imagination lies in unfounded romantic hopes and professional ambitions. No matter how much time I spent imagining I would marry a prince, I did, in fact, grow up in Borger, Texas, and dated mainly sweet, smart boys who became not princes, but engineers and ranchers and teachers. Nor, in spite of the myth that we can become anything we want if only we want it badly enough, I did not grow up to be either queen of England or the next Madame Curie. No one from Parliament called to request my services. And, frankly, I comprehended almost nothing of college chemistry–”although I enjoyed plenty of wild imaginings about my studly lab partner, the starting quarterback. Thus, despite imagining what we might be, we need to see the light about our talents and abilities and stations in life. Enjoy your wild imagination delight in it. But don′t confuse it with knowledge or enlightenment. The second kind of imagination I call mindfulness. It engages the mind with other human beings and their lives rather than merely the self. Not everyone attends college, uses a computer, reads by electric light, lives in a temperate zone and still has heating and air conditioning, eats three times a day, owns a pair of shoes. Nevertheless, such persons belong to our world, our planet, our economic systems, our religions. How do they think and feel? Every semester I remind students how privileged we are to sit in warm or cool classrooms fitted with maps and projectors and paper and books, to enjoy the luxury of spending our time reading about the remarkable human beings whose works have shaped our civilization and our individual lives. We read poems, look at paintings, listen to music. Yet, elsewhere, men and women like us spend the day just trying to stay alive. Imagine those others. Be mindful. Being mindful means learning enough about other persons to imagine their lives–”so that we can both grieve with them and rejoice with them. We seek enlightenment so we can feel fully human with others, so that we avoid both labels of "ugly American" and "egotist." At night, make it a habit to be mindful turn out the lamp, and lie in bed imagining another human being, your age, your sex–”in, say, Afghanistan or Somalia or East Timor. Where does she lie in darkness? What does he think about in the last moments before sleep? Does she fear screeching shells that may rip into her house? Does he dread assassins invading his home to slay him or his wife or to kidnap their children? Does she worry about whether her children will starve before morning? Does he wonder if he will find any clean water to drink? Can she read? Has he ever owned a book to read to his children? If we imagine and remain mindful of our own and others′ places in the world, we will grieve and rejoice more humanely with others. Finally, imagination can leap to genius–”genius which all of us profit from. Such imagination assumes we possess knowledge to begin with, wide, profound knowledge. Somehow the genius finds connections, results, ideas that we ordinary minds never imagine. My friend Dr. Marlene Shaw in biology thinks of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur as geniuses. In the 1880s Koch′s extraordinary knowledge and experience allowed him to discover and observe microbes and to see that microbes cause disease, that germs make us sick. Likewise, Pasteur′s knowledge and experience led him to debunk the idea of spontaneous generation, using his swan-neck flasks to catch microbes before they contaminated broth. Subsequently he taught others the importance of boiling to kill most microbes, and he himself created vaccines for anthrax and rabies. Again in the 1880s, while hundreds of clergymen and scientists thought cholera either a curse from God or an air-borne disease, a young physician treating persons living in a small, extremely poor area of London doubted those explanations. Essentially he possessed the same knowledge as other physicians and scientists working on this particularly deadly disease. After talking with a clergyman, Henry Whitehead, who visited the ill and dying there, Dr. John Snow decided to map the deaths as they had occurred in the neighborhood. Using his maps, his knowledge, and his imagination, Dr. Snow discovered a single water pump contaminated with human and animal sewage, the particular pump where most households of the dead and dying drew their water. Closing that pump ended the cholera outbreak. Shifting to literature for a moment, let me now praise famous poets. In our language, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton rank at the top of geniuses. They continue to shape our ideas about hate and love, anarchy and government, ignorance and education, cowardice and heroism, hubris and humility. For example, Shakespeare′s young lovers in the comedies reveal the silliness and self-centeredness of immature love–”they gaze into each other′s eyes only to see themselves reflected in the lover′s eyes. By the play′s end, when they have matured, they look together at the community, to see how together they can improve their world. Macbeth, Shakespeare′s character with the most active conscience, imagines he can and should be king his subsequent murders incarnadine Scotland no matter how much Macbeth agonizes, he sees his guilt and dreads his damnation. King Lear discovers the anguish of living beyond 80 and finding he has nothing left of what he once valued highly, but improvidently. In Shakespeare′s late romances Cymbeline and The Winter′s Tale, the horrors of jealousy–”of wild imaginationdestroy family and marriage and love itself. Fortunately, though, sometimes foolish, jealous men get second chances. Even after Leontes and Posthumus Leonatus believe and do their worst, they can, following years of remorse and misery, receive forgiveness if they seek it. In the tragedies like Macbeth and King Lear, those who make mistakes must die but in the romances, Shakespeare allows liars, betrayers, jealous monsters to see the light–”to find and confess their errors, do penance, and achieve a new, enlightened existence through the agency of forgiveness. Like us, they were blind, but Shakespeare′s genius allows them to see. At the end of Donne′s "Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy′s Day," although he considers himself even less than an ordinary nothing, without shadow, without light, without body, he contemplates both Saint Lucy and his wife, and those lovers who will see the new year and new light: You lovers, for whose sake, the lesser Sun At this time to the goat is run To fetch new lust, and give it you, Enjoy your summer all, Since she [Lucy]] enjoys her long night′s festival, Let me prepare towards her [wife Anne]], and let me call This hour her Vigil, and her eve, since this Both the year′s, and the day′s deep midnight is. And so as you commence to begin your lives after the University and as I do the same, retiring in a week, I urge you to use your wild imaginations for fun, to be always mindful of others, to appreciate and be grateful for imaginative geniuses who improve our physical, emotional, and intellectual lives. And as we need, may Saint Lucy grant us light. |
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