On Reading an Acquaintance's Novel

This week, I started reading Communion of Dreams, a first novel by James T. Downey. This is the third work of fiction that I have read, written by somebody I knew before he published the work. The previous example is Casco by E.R. Beecher, a high-school classmate with whom I reconnected last year for the first time after 45 years since graduation. The third author, I may discuss later.

Casco had several layers of interest for me. The setting for the first part of the novel was a New England summer home, a very WASPish environment that evoked some of my own memories of my grandparent's summer house. The plot, as it developed, was also interesting for what I had learned from Beecher of the course of his life in the last several years. It was not a story I would necessarily have expected from the boy I knew in high school. And while the story was fiction, not a translation of biography into story, it was intriguing to feel that connection with the younger boy, who no doubt had some influence on the characterizations of the children in the work.

Communion of Dreams is a work of speculative or science fiction. My reading and movie-watching in that genre has been somewhat fragmented and eclectic, so I can't place the work in a broad context, but I recognize a basic theme: in a post-crisis Earth, a discovery on another planet leads to the formation of a diverse team of people from various specialties to explore it. Membership includes scientists and geniuses of various stripes, an artist, soldiers, and a child prodigy, of diverse genders, ethnic backgrounds, and temperaments. At this point in the reading, they are en route and discussing the ramifications of what they might find.

My acquaintance with Downey has been on-line only. Our first contacts occurred on a site devoted to a particular point of view; when the organizer of that site decided to close it, I reconnected with Downey on Facebook. Our exchanges have been pretty much confined to the depth and profundity of Facebook exchanges, though of a fair to middling level of intelligence, at least compared to some others I have read.

So I was pretty sure even before getting the book that it would not be the standard cops-and-robbers kind of science fiction, or the innocent-farmer-vs-the-corrupt-monopolistic-rancher that is the essence of Star Wars. Nor, based on my sense of Downey as a pretty down-to-earth guy, did I expect something as complex as Samuel R. Delany's Dahlgren.

By the way, I should note that he had originally posted the novel on his blog for free. I downloaded it, but never got around to reading it. I actually bought the paperback just after he had offered a free Kindle download.

The book has borne out my expectations. There is the clear sense of an intelligence at work developing this story and the characters. He easily introduces a variety of speculative tools and advances, such as the communicators and computer controls placed under the characters' skin, the artificial intelligence beings who serve as experts, the documents that appear before their vision, without launching into long explanations or clever demonstrations. These devices are part of the world in which his characters live, things they take for granted.

While the team is in transit, they discuss the ramifications and the shifting nature of the artifact they are on their way to investigate. This kind of dialogue can sometimes bring the flow of a story to a halt,, particularly when they seem to result from an author's desire to show how clever he can be. Downey doesn't overdo it with the details of the possibilities, he has developed enough differences in characterization and potential tensions between the characters to keep the flow going. The tensions will presumably develop into further conflict, and that keeps me engaged in the story, wanting to find out more. And the ideas that come up in the dialogue remain open enough, so that I can come to my own conclusions about the potential meaning and nature of the artifact.

Downey also has a capacity that I find lacking in the various stabs at fiction that I have taken myself. He can convey landscapes in an engaging level of detail. This is very important in a work that creates a different world; it is important to bring it to life in a way that engages the reader, both the physical landscape and the mental landscape of dreams. The details of where they are, of the futuristic tools that they use, and the dreams -- which promise to be an important part of the story -- are vivid in their imagery, without being overdone. I am jealous of writers who can do that so well. It's one of those signs that I live too much in my head and don't look around enough.

I look forward to the next third of Communion of Dreams, based on the very rich promise of the beginning and the foundation.

I don't know what Justice is . . . or Mercy

This morning, I was part of a presentation at the Baltimore Ethical Society in connection with Chesapeake Shakespeare Company's production of The Merchant of Venice, along with Jill Giles and Michael Boynton. Jill summarized the plot with finger puppets in a way that made it accessible to children, and Michael talked about justice and mercy from a post-modernist perspective, with emphasis on gender and religion. Mine was more of an impressionistic riff on the notions of justice and mercy, as I find them in my reading of the play.

Michael lives and breathes this stuff, so he spoke from the slides he had prepared. I was more comfortable writing mine out, partly so I could see whether or not it made sense, and partly so I wouldn't lose my way.

Here was my offering:

I start with a bare statement: “I don’t know what justice is.”

I soften that with some explanation or elaboration. I don’t know what you mean by justice. Or others. Some people talk about justice as though they’re looking for balance; others, for base, visceral revenge.

In the end, I don’t know what the term “justice” means to me. To my memory, I do not recall ever having demanded justice for myself. Or anybody else.

So I turn to a text – The Merchant of Venice – for enlightenment, at the risk, of course, of further confusion.


What I find after reading and pondering this text is that The Merchant of Venice portrays a world very aware and suspicious of the Other, the Outsider.

As early as the second scene, Nerissa, maid to Portia, lists each of the suitors waiting to take the challenge of the urns, by which they can win Portia’s hand. Each suitor comes from somewhere else: Naples, the County Palatine, France, England, Scotland, Germany. Portia dismisses each with scorn and wit. As soon as she has finished going through the list, Nerissa tells Portia that the suitors are just leaving, having decided against the challenge. We never see them. It’s as though their only purpose in the play was to give Portia a chance to make fun of people different from herself.

When the first suitor, the Prince of Morocco, does appear later to take the challenge, he immediately identifies himself by his difference:

Mislike me not for my complexion
The shadowed livery of the burnished sun.

Essentially saying, “I’m not like you, but don’t hold that against me.”

Into this world of heightened awareness comes the ultimate outsider, the Jew, identified as a member of his tribe, and conscious himself of the contempt in which he is held.

For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,

The gabardine was a long, loose gown or cloak of coarse material, the prescribed garment of Jews in the middle ages, identifying them as clearly as the required Star of David in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Shylock reinforces his separateness by his behavior – “I will not eat with you, drink with you, or pray with you” – and by his desire to keep the dominant Christian influence out of his house. When he leaves for the evening, he tells his daughter,

Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum
And the vile squealing of the wry-neck'd fife,
Clamber not you up to the casements then,
Nor thrust your head into the public street
To gaze on Christian fools with varnish'd faces,
But stop my house's ears, I mean my casements:
Let not the sound of shallow foppery enter
My sober house.

Within this context of otherness, Shylock sets up his absurd transaction, to lend three thousand ducats with the bond of a pound of Antonio’s flesh if the money is not repaid within three months. His purpose is clearly a search for revenge:

If I can catch him once upon the hip,
I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.

“If I can catch him at a disadvantage, I will feed until it is fat the ancient grudge I bear him.” The arrogant Antonio, the merchant of the title, accepts the contract, because he is fully confident that his ships will arrive well before the due date.

Of course, they don’t, so we wind up in the courtroom, where Shylock is seeking the satisfaction of the bond, as provided by the law, even despite the offer of three times the amount he is owed.

The pound of flesh, which I demand of him,
Is dearly bought; 'tis mine and I will have it.
If you deny me, fie upon your law!
There is no force in the decrees of Venice.
I stand for judgment: answer; shall I have it?

Later, he says, “I stand here for law” in response to Gratiano’s “And for thy life let justice be accused.” In fact, Shylock never uses the word “justice” in the courtroom scene. His requests are for the law and judgment. It is Portia who accuses him of seeking justice and who uses the word “justice” against him. In the “quality of mercy” speech, she says, “Therefore, Jew,/ Though justice be thy plea.” No, his plea was for judgment and the execution of the law. “I crave the law,/ The penalty and forfeit of my bond.”

There are some suggestive connections in the history of these words, justice, judgment, law, and mercy.

The noun Justice and the adjective just derive from the Latin Justus, which has roots in jus, with meanings of law and right. Judgment has links to Latin judex, “he who points to or shows the law.” And law derives from many sources, with the meanings of something laid down, established, fixed. Justice, judgment, and law are all connected. Justice can refer to the proper execution of the laws, but it also carries a more abstract meaning, reaching outside the fixed boundaries of the law to something more personal and individually defined.

Separately, mercy derives from the Late Latin merces for pity or mercy and from the Latin merces for hire or reward. It shares roots with words relating to trading, merchandise, business. It is “closely akin to L merces, the price paid for goods, hire, wages and perhaps akin to mercere, to earn, hence to deserve.” Deep in the word, there are notions of exchange, of something earned.

Our most common use and understanding of the word “mercy” lies in the Christian meaning of the reward in heaven, which is “earned by [one’s] kindness to those who have no claim and from whom no requital can be expected.” It is forbearance and compassion by one person to another who is in his power. In other words, mercy is an exchange between people of unequal power.

Now let’s return to the courtroom, where Shylock has come to redeem his bond. Portia, who in a neighboring town had earlier wed Bassanio, the man who borrowed the 3,000 ducats for which Antonio had offered his bond, has come in disguise as a man and a doctor of laws to defend Antonio.

After some preliminaries, she asks if Antonio confesses the bond, acknowledges the contract. There is this shared line:

Antonio: I do.
Portia: Then must the Jew be merciful.

This is not a request or suggestion. This is a demand. The meter of the line places the stress on the word “must.” She is demanding that Shylock show mercy, to which he responds, “On what compulsion must I?”

In her response, she says, “The quality of mercy is not strained,” meaning not forced. Yet, Portia wants to force him to show mercy. She delivers her description of mercy while in her disguise. They are in a court of law, an institution of the dominant power of a state, and the imagery of the speech matches that power: the throned monarch, the dread and fear of kings, an attribute to God himself. In other words, mercy is something that may be granted by the powerful, whether the absolute deity or the court of law. And the terms of that mercy will be dictated by the powers of authority, sometimes, as we shall see, in terms that distort the meaning and heart of the word.

After acknowledging the validity of the contract, Portia boxes Shylock into a quandary by saying he may obtain his pound of flesh, but only without leaking a “jot of blood.” Then she says,

For as thou urgest justice, be assured
Thou shall have justice, more than thou desirest.

Here is the twist of the knife of justice, seen in the contrast between the two uses of the word. In the first use, she falsifies Shylock’s request for judgment and the execution of the law, shifting from his concrete requests to a more abstract concept. In the second use, she foreshadows the judgment that shall fall on Shylock at the end, the loss of his wherewithal, his faith, and essentially his birthright.

After she finagles him out of obtaining his pound of flesh, she charges him with a law that provides for penalties against an alien who seeks the life of any citizen: the loss of his goods to the citizen and the state, and the forfeiture of his life to the power of the duke. To save his life, he must become a Christian. Antonio, Portia, and their friends may feel that their justice has been served, but at the cost of Shylock’s. And mercy, in my view, is hardly to be seen.


I started with a proposition: "I don’t know what justice is." I’m not sure that my reading and consideration of this text has clarified my understanding; if anything, it may have darkened my outlook.

I have no answers, but I will end with three questions.

The first comes from the opening of a twentieth-century novel, A Frolic of His Own, by William Gaddis: “Justice? – You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.” To which I ask, Where does that leave you if you don’t believe in a next world?

Second, depending on how you define them, can mercy and justice co-exist? Does one person’s mercy undermine the other’s justice? Are they mutually exclusive?

Finally, despite my dark view of the notions of mercy and justice expounded in this play, I do find a corner of hope in the closing words of Portia’s speech.

We do pray for mercy,
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy.

To put that in a more secular frame, if we keep the positive, personal notions of mercy and justice ever present in our consciousness, will we learn to bring those notions to life in our daily actions? The answer, I believe, lies not in institutions or definitions, but in our individual choices.

At the diner

Last night, I ate at a diner near me, largely because the other possibilities I had sought out for a Friday night dinner had overstuffed parking lots. I would much rather drive in search of options than sit with a crowd waiting to be called.

I had a cheeseburger with soup to start, no doubt full of ingredients considered unhealthy. I ate and read, undisturbed except for the occasional "Everything all right, hon?" Even that didn't come as often as my previous visit, where the waitress seemed to be ready to set a record for number of times checking on customer, until I wanted coffee, at which point she was concentrated on wrapping silverware in napkins with her back to me.

I get a kic out of reading Montaigne and, in this case, Gaston Leroux on my iPod Touch in a diner. I was glad nobody asked, "Whatcha reading, hon?" Of course, nobody has ever followed up with questions when I say, "a 16th century French philosopher," but I know I feel odder than usual.

When I stood in line to pay my bill, I had a flashback to the two years in Mount Kisco, when I lived in the furnished room and ate most of my meals at the Mount Kisco Diner. Although the Double T in Glen Burnie is much larger than the Mount Kisco Diner of the 1970s, the atmosphere -- the diner culture, I guess I could call it -- has not changed, at least not much, so far as I can tell. The waiters and waitresses have the own culture and community, the customers range in age. There are a lot more old people, it seemed to me, but then I'm a lot older too, though I'm not using crutches or a walker. There are definitely families and recognizable customers, people who've been there a lot. There is somewhat of a family feeling about the place, even though I also feel comfortable in my anonymity. Even at Mount Kisco, when I was definitely recognizable, I don't think anybody every asked me where I worked, what I did, etc. A diner is a comfortable place, unpretentious, despite their efforts to keep up with some trends in food, and welcoming of anonymity. I like that.