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I continue to make drawings, which makes sense for a Media Studies professor with a background in painting and drawing. The image on the right is of a recent drawing that is part of a series called Intersections. On the other hand I haven't written a story since the fourth grade, so in order to get ready for digital-storytelling I started looking for clues I began where I left off by selecting a site called What Makes a Good Story? Tips for Young Authors, by Aaron Shepard. Part of Aaron's advice is to make sure your story has a plot that includes some kind of conflict --so here it is I guess. The conflict in Meeting Macomber is on a pretty grand scale, so even though the same site says that the conflict needs to be resolved in some way, I'm not sure I can promise to deliver on that aspect.The conflict is nothing less than that between the life of the mind and the life of the spirit. No small potatoes these, not a quiet intersection this.As you already know, Macomber loved the culture of ancient Greece (including Plato, the Symposium, classical Greek art, and all the rest). Beyond this, he also seemed to identify with the culture of ancient Greece --almost as an expatriate might come to eventually identify with their new, adopted country as home. Among other things, I think identifying with ancient Greece provided him (as a gay man who had spent a long time wishing and trying not to be) with a way to establish a more positive personal identity. But he also surely identified with ancient Greek culture in its embrace of the life of the mind. I mean Western Philosophy begins in ancient Greece, and Macomber was by all accounts a precocious prodigy of a young philosopher who grew-into this potential in his adult life. So he celebrated ancient Greece, and also in a relevant sense inhabited ancient Greece. Here is a description in his own words that alludes to this:
"When the talk gets good, you will understand what a "Platonic idea" is, and why it is "more real" and "more true" than anything physical. You'll understand what a "Platonic world of ideas" is—that's the world I live in all the time, as I'm walking down the street or waiting in line in a supermarket, or pounding away at the typewriter, or sitting here talking to you. I'm in "another world."
-William Macomber (1972). Love and Culture. Unpublished: available online.
At the same time, though, he had long history of inhabiting and identifying with Christian --specifically Catholic, more specifically Jesuit-- values and institutions, within which the ancient Greek view of homosexuality and other matters most certainly would not have been prevalent. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy includes a short history of homosexuality as it pertains to ancient Greek culture and philosophy in case you are interested in learning more about it. So, the basic trajectory is this: Macomber attended a Jesuit elementary school in Redlands CA, a Jesuit high school in Los Angeles, a Jesuit college in Santa Clara (the University of Santa Clara), and eventually completed his PhD in Philosophy at none other than The Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Whew!
It is difficult to imagine a stronger dose of Christian religiosity, or a headier dose of intellectual life for that matter (Jesuit education is renowned for its rigor and comprehensiveness). Hence the conflict. Macomber's life intimately and intensely involved BOTH of the two main, and intersecting, strands of Western culture. One is the Indo-European strand of Western culture, which Macomber embraced via his immersion in Plato, the culture of ancient Greece, and the life of the mind (note that the Indo-European strand also includes Indian speculative philosophy and spirituality). The other is the Semitic, monotheistic-religious stand of Western culture, which includes Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the standard Western version of the life of the spirit. So, Macomber was positioned like a very bright light within a very big intersection.When I knew him he was pretty strongly critical of the Christian/Semitic strand of Western culture. I've already noted, however, that even though Macomber was strongly critical of formal education, he was motivated by a genuine desire to make it better. He still believed in it. Similarly, he also critiqued Christianity (and other forms of organized religion) strongly, but again it was I think from a genuine desire to make the tradition better. At one point he said:"I don't want to draw you away from Christianity. I don't want to convert you to or away from anything. I've known two distinguished Christians in my life: Brother Doyle at Loyola High School (who tended the rose-bushes), and Francois Hartmann in Paris. I should never want either of them to be different, and I would be delighted if most people were a little like either of them. I'd love to see some genuine Christianity in the world, although I would still argue that that was not the goal, that we could then begin celebrating life."
--William Macomber (1972). Love and Culture. Unpublished: available online.
I also remember distinctly that he once said something like "the loss of prayer is a real tragedy in the contemporary world." It initially surprised me quite a bit to hear him say this, but later it made a lot of sense to me. I will revisit this in my concluding reflection on Meeting Macomber, but I'll follow it just a bit here anyway.
I'm relatively sure Macomber was working out a resolution to the conflict between the ancient Greek/Indo-European life of the mind and the Christian/Semitic life of the spirit, and that he was actively testing it in his daily life when I knew him. Not surprisingly, he had come up with an amazing formulation to test out. I'm not entirely sure he resolved the conflict, though. It's truly a high-wire act (and in some ways Macomber, like Philippe Petit, performed suspended between the "twin towers" of mind and spirit. The first part of the quotation below --wherein reading, writing, and talking are identified as the signature elements of the life of the mind-- should seem familiar. I've quoted this part elsewhere and earlier. I include it here again because I think it is needed to set the stage properly for the conflict-resolving formulation he presents in the second part of the quotation (which I have put in bold text): "Reading is opening yourself to another mind, writing is exploring the contents of your own mind, and talking is the play and interaction of mind on mind. And they are the three fundamental components of the life of the mind—quite self-evidently. Where any one of the three is lacking, there can scarcely be the full life of the mind, and the life of the mind, as it draws the heart and the genitals into its movement, is what I call the "spiritual life" or the "life of the spirit"—meaning, obviously, something quite different (toto coelo different) from the way those expressions are ordinarily understood in a religious sense. Clearly, modern American education is not promoting the life of the mind in this sense—or, to my mind, in any appreciable sense.
--William Macomber (1972). Love and Culture. Unpublished: available online.
My interpretation of this is that Macomber seemed to think that if emotion and eros were added to the signature activities of reading, writing, and talking, a life of the spirit would result. I honestly don't know how much of this formulation he derived directly from ancient Greek culture, and how much (if any) he created on his own. The inclusion of eros in the life of the spirit, particularly in the way he refers to as drawing the heart and genitals into the movement is interesting to say the least. I read a book recently called Philosophy and the Good Life by John Cottingham, and this author advances a similar kind of thesis, although he uses different language. Cottingham makes the point that philosophy is limited by its insistence on rationality, and would be better if it incorporated the insights of psychoanalytic theory into its mix. Given psychoanalytic theory's ample attention to matters of eros and/or sexuality, the inclusion of its insights and concerns into Philosophy might be seen as similar to Macomber's encouragement to include eros in the life of the spirit. Yet, also in this light, it is clear (to me at least) that Macomber's intriguing comment about the "tragic" loss of prayer can then be interpreted as meaning that Philosophy might also need to integrate aspects of the spiritual life as well as aspects of the erotic, irrational. In any case Macomber seems to have felt that it was in fact impossible to reconcile the ancient Greek (or ancient-Greek-derived) view of the life of the spirit as he was conceiving it, with the Christian view of the life of the spirit that he had inherited. As such I think his resolution at the time I knew him was to go Greek, which again included the acknowledgment of what I would call personal tragedy for him. Although, again, the psychoanalytic turn that Cottingham takes may have helped Macomber as well. The integrated self is a key psychoanalytic concept, particularly in Jung's work, and in Macomber's case it could be argued that he not only needed to integrate eros into his notion of Philosophy but spirit as well.
Well, as you know, thirty-eight years after I heard Macomber deliver the above formulation, and all of the rest, in person, the thank you letter I sent to him missed its mark by a few days. From what I was told in one email from Greg Desilet, and another from Macomber's next-of-kin, W.B. made his peace with God and Jesus in the years and months before he died. So, having just barely missed the opportunity to thank Macomber directly, I will do the next best thing --and given all of the circumstances perhaps the more appropriate thing-- and simply say this: thank God for William Macomber!
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