Bazaar in City Center, Sulaimani, Iraq

Rapperine, a neighborhood of Sulaimani, Iraq

Children accosted me on the street when they saw my camera. I suddenly became very popular.

Soldiers stand guard in the areas where foreign teachers live.

Everywhere you look in Sulaimani, buildings are going up. There are plenty of construction jobs.

3-wheeler motorcycles cruise the neighborhood pulling wagons filled with merchandise.

There are literally thousands of small grocery stores like this one scattered through the city. You usually don't have to walk more than a block or two to get most things you need to eat.

This man owns one of many bread-making shops. Dough the size of a small pizza gets "stuck" to the walls of earthen-like ovens. The bread is always very fresh and tasty.

A typical street.

University teachers get driven to and from work by bus. This man is one of our drivers.

Dancing in Iraq

The students head to the dance floor.

A traditional Kurdish dance involves holding hands in a long line and moving across the floor in a version of the "Two Step." Usually boys dance with boys, and girls with girls.

Sometimes two lines will converge, and a boy will find himself joining hands with a girl. The only time such behavior is acceptable is during a supervised dance like this one.

While the students and teachers ate, we were "entertained" by rappers. It was awful. Here, they are repeating "treat your woman like a lollipop."

The Arab men banded together to perform a dance that is distinctly different from a traditional Kurdish dance.

As the lines of dancers get longer, they either weave into one another or form concentric circles.

An American teacher is pulled into a circle of dancers.


These are my students. They never fail to amaze me by their dedication to learning and their humanity.

Glimpses of Oman: My Neighborhood

I live in Muscat, Oman, in a town called Darsait. It's on the Gulf of Oman and was originally a fishing village. This is my street:

On the way to the beach, I pass this football field where there are games practically every night. The Omanis are quite good at football.

This is a view of old Darsait from the beach:

Here's another view of the same village. Kids play football on the beach nearly everyday.

Kids are launching the boat at sunset.

Dumpster cats are everywhere. Omanis generally don't have cats as pets.

This is my cat. Obviously I'm not Omani.




Won't you be my neighbor?

Nesreen (1984 - 2006)

I lived and worked in Jenin, Palestine for three years and made many friends. Five of the seven young women in the photo are daughters of the man who is my friend but whose face I’ve chosen to blur. He and I no longer maintain contact. I took this photo just outside the door to their home where I dined on average of once per week. Nesreen is the one in black in the top row. She died in July of 2006 after being shot nine times by the males of her extended family.

Nesreen was a senior at the local university where she studied business. She was a good person and her sisters and classmates loved and respected her. She was very cordial towards me when I visited, and I often saw her laughing and chatting in mixed groups of girls and boys on campus. Although traditional Arab culture demands a strict segregation between boys and girls (except inside the classroom), Nesreen was a bit of a rebel and would spend equal time with both genders. This got her in trouble on several occasions, as she would sometimes go off alone with a man (a strict taboo), prompting a phone call to her father by some “concerned” neighbor.

On one such visit, the man she was with decided to film her partially nude body with his mobile phone. He then sent the film via Bluetooth to a friend, who shared it with more friends. Within a week, the images of Nesreen were spread throughout many of the towns and villages of Palestine.

To maintain the “honor” of the family, Nesreen’s nephews decided something had to be done. They pressured her father to take action. He resisted and instead tried to get her out of the country. When that failed, Nesreen’s father finally succumbed to threats and coercion, and he consented to have her killed. He went home and told her to quickly pack her belongings so that he could take her somewhere safe. He then drove her to a field just outside of their village where others were waiting with guns.

I’ve tried to imagine many times the shock and horror she must have felt when she looked down the gun barrels at her own family. I’m told her last words were, “why don’t you go after the guy?”

Nesreen’s body was carried back to the house in the trunk of the car. A mandatory examination of her body showed that she was still a virgin. She was then buried in an unmarked grave apart from the family plot. Her father and one of her nephews did two months in a prison in Jenin, and the ‘filmmaker’ fled the city for a couple of months until things calmed down before coming back to resume his job as a police officer.

Although I recount these events matter-of-factly, I’m still dumbfounded as to why and how it could happen. I’m still groping for answers.

Although most “honor” killings occur in countries that are predominately Muslim, it’s wrong to believe that Islam is to blame. In fact, the Quran strictly forbids killing without legal justification, and it stipulates that the punishment for relationships involving unmarried women is 100 lashes for both the man and woman, and if the women is married the penalty is death by stoning (for both). Furthermore, in each instance there must be four witnesses who can testify that the crime took place to safeguard against false accusations. In pre-Islamic times, honor killings were far more prevalent, and the Prophet Mohammed enacted these new laws to combat the barbarism.

Furthermore, Nesreen was not Muslim; she was Christian, and her family is not what you would call “radical” Christian. Notice the crucifix around one girl’s neck in the photo above, and the shirt promoting atheism on another. Like the entire Catholic community which constitutes roughly 50% of the village’s population, some in the family are devout while others are not. Nesreen’s senseless killing was not done in the name of Christianity, and in fact the village’s Catholic priest condemned the killing during the following Sunday mass.

Another assumption is that Nesreen’s father is a monster. What I know about him is that he was a gentle, affectionate father who doted on his daughters. I witnessed genuine love between them. Nesreen was her father’s soul, his first born, his angel. He treated all his daughters as if they were the best and most beautiful in the world. He became caught up in an atmosphere that involved the wider community and was very much like a witch-hunt. My friend was faced with the ugly choice of sacrificing Nesreen or risking his entire nuclear family to save the honor of the extended family.

Another misconception is that honor killings are perpetrated strictly by males who fear of women’s sexual freedom. While the crimes stem from patriarchal agendas regarding expectations of female behavior, the killings are done by both men and women. Although women will rarely do the actual killing, they often play a key role in setting up and facilitating it. Furthermore, honor killings have more to do with controlling the tribe’s resources and protecting its means to procreate. Honor killings are a survival strategy of pre-Islamic times, a heinous relic that’s defied extinction.

Rapheal Patai writes in his book “The Arab Mind” [taken from http://libertyandculture.blogspot.com/2007/02/arab-honor-and-shame.html] : “…there is a strong correlation between honor and group survival.” In fact, Arabic uses only one word “asabiyya” for both “honor” and “family spirit.” “Honorable behavior, Patai says, “is that which is conducive to group cohesion and group survival.” (p.95) Dishonorable behavior is that which brings physical danger to the family. Since traditional Bedouin tribes needed many children and strong family bonds to insure their protection and perpetuation in the harsh, brutal desert, “virility” and “kindred spirit” were key values.

“Endogamy” (marriage within the family) was also preferred, so that “the child-bearing capacity of its women…[would] take place within it’s own ranks rather than those of another, potentially hostile group. (p.98) In Palestine as well as much of the Arab world, marriage between cousins is still preferred in order to maintain a tribe's strength and standing. Sexual contact outside prescribed arrangements endangers and therefore dishonors the family. Endogamy also safeguards their culture by preventing assimilation into other cultures. But it’s a double-edge sword since it also prevents or retards positive change.

Tied to the notion of “asabiyya” is also the notion of “shame.” According to Patai, shame is distinguished from guilt in that “shame has been defined as a matter between a person and his society, while ‘guilt’ is primarily a matter between a person and his conscience.” He adds that “What pressures the Arab to behave in an honorable manner is not guilt but shame, or, more precisely, the psychological drive to escape or prevent negative judgments by others.” (p.113) Arab society places more value on communal bonds than the “individual,” a hard concept for the West to understand. Another way to look at it is that the reaction to “dishonor” is a communal affair, which helps explain why the publicly distributed images of Nesreen were so damaging.

Despite these various explanations of Nesreen’s senseless death, I believe the two most fundamental reasons for honor killings are poverty and illiteracy. The two often go hand in hand and they are a toxic mix. A family that is wracked by hardship, perhaps due to external factors such as war, may resort to a “siege” mentality and circle the wagons, so to speak. They may resort to desperate means to safeguard what little they have. It’s not surprising that honor killings are more common among the poorer and less educated, and that they're also prevalent in non-Arab countries such as Afghanistan and Pakistan where an oral tradition predominates and where entire villages have been desperately poor and illiterate for generations. It’s also where illiteracy is on the rise.

Without the means to read, one is cut-off from a world of possibility. While the printed word is an alien “abstraction” in an oral culture, it’s a necessary remedy to certain forms of barbarity. For only in a society devoid of abstractions are we left with blunt physicality where a woman’s intact hymen is valued as currency, and someone as decent as Nesreen must die to assuage archaic notions of shame.

I’m clear that I haven’t analyzed or studied this issue deeply enough, so if you have something to add, please leave your comments. Nesreen deserves an answer.

A New Hero

I came across a recent Reuters article that nearly had me cheering out loud. Frank Asbeck of Germany stands with sword drawn facing a fire-breathing dragon. I usually don't post other's articles here, but this one is too good not to.

_______________________________

Published on Thursday, November 20, 2008 by Reuters
Solar Power Magnate’s Bold Bid for Ailing Carmaker
by Erik Kirschbaum

GERMANY - SolarWorld chief executive Frank Asbeck raised eyebrows by announcing plans to bid for the German plants of General Motors' Opel unit.

A technician polishes a solar panel module in a assembly line of the Solarworld factory in Freiberg, Germany, in a Sept. 4, 2006 file photo. SolarWorld chief executive Frank Asbeck raised eyebrows by announcing plans to bid for the German plants of General Motors' Opel unit. (AP photo)Here was a small 10-year-old company specialising in producing photovoltaic systems with 2,000 employees and annual sales of 700 million euros preparing the stage for a seemingly audacious takeover of a legendary 146-year-old German company with 25,000 employees and more than 60 million cars sold since the first vehicle was made in 1899.

What does solar power have to do with the car industry? Not much at this point.

Yet after the initial laughter finally died down, Asbeck explained the vision linking renewable energies to the car industry. The 49-year-old solar power baron told Reuters that he wanted to make Opel the first "green" car company in Europe.

"Opel has truly modern policies on car models," said Asbeck, a maverick in Germany who started the fast-growing company only a decade ago. "It's got the potential to become a truly ‘green' carmaker, switching over from the ‘automotive' sector to the 'sun-motive' or ‘electro-motive'.

"The public and the markets are demanding new products," he said. "No one will be able to negate a 25-percent decline in sales with green, electro cars or hybrids overnight. But the development is extremely interesting. There will be a new cliental and new green market demands that have to be met."

There have been rapid advances in energy storage technologies in recent years. Some believe that millions of battery-driven cars could be a major breakthrough for renewable energies - a vast depot for storing wind and solar power.

While the supply of the wind and sun far exceeds humanity's needs it doesn't necessarily match the time when people need it: the sun may not be shining nor the wind blowing when we need to cook dinner or have a shower - or drive cars. Soaring production of solar panel and wind turbines has been now spurring a race to develop the winning energy storage technologies which will drive the electric cars and appliances of the future.

Asbeck's idea to meld cars and solar together sounds crazy, but his audacious gamble for Opel has put the idea in the spotlight. Let's see where it goes from here.

_______________________________________

[If you cheer for Asbeck's victory as much as I do, I invite you to post this article. This period of political and economic transition may well be an opening for social movements to improve our life on the planet. May Asbeck continue to slay dragons.]

In the Image and Likeness of Galt

Although Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” lends itself to an endless range of discussion in the areas of politics, ethics, and Rand’s Objectivism, I will focus on her treatment of mysticism, showing how she ‘commandeers’ and distorts the Christian Contemplative (Mystic) tradition to portray her protagonists as God-like while discrediting the most powerful threat to her philosophy. In “Atlas Shrugged,” what separates the protagonists from the antagonists, the “men of the mind” from the moochers and looters, are the faculties of reason and logic manifest in the physical world as production and achievement. What I intend to show is how and why Rand employs her version of mysticism to broaden that separation.

1

I’ll start by providing some background of the Christian Contemplative tradition. Some of the contributing authors to this tradition are Plato and Aristotle, Blake, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Merton, Sidney Spencer, W.T. Stace, D.T. Suzuki, Evelyn Underhill, Alan Watts, Irenaeus, St. John of the Cross, D.H. Lawrence, John Donne and many others, all working within and building upon well-established concepts. Rand makes many claims about mysticism and mystics that are untrue, and while many religions or traditions give rise to offshoots or deviations that sometimes become perverse, Rand clearly misrepresents the heart of this tradition. The following summary is extracted from an excellent book by Arthur L. Clements, called “Poetry of Contemplation”:

The essence of mysticism is a desire for union with God, which is attainable now, in this life. The stages leading up to this union, in ascending order, are meditation, prayer, and contemplation, which, since the middle ages correspond with a threefold path of purgation, illumination, and union. Meditation is purgative, prayer illuminative, and contemplation is “an experimental union with God, which no meditation may produce, but for which a soul may pray” (3). Through purgation the senses are cleansed and the self becomes detached from “things of sense.” Illumination is an awakening to knowledge of reality and a sense of divine being, but no union. A stage called “Dark Night of the Soul,” based on the work of St. John of the Cross, is an advanced stage of purgation, where the ego, or I-hood, is killed – a process represented in the myth of Christ’s crucifixion. The final stage, union with God, “…is a state of equilibrium, of purely spiritual life, characterized by peaceful joy, enhanced powers, by intense certitude” (6).

Mystic experience can also be introvertive or extrovertive (or a combination of both). Extrovertive mystics experience God through the senses, perceiving “…the multiplicity of external material objects … mystically transfigured so that the One, or the Unity, shines through them” (6). The introvertive mystic, on the other hand, shuts off the senses and “…oblitera[tes] from consciousness the entire multiplicity of sensations, images and thoughts, to plunge into the depths of his own self” (6). Within both categories, the mystics’ “object” may be one of four kinds: 1) Vision of Dame Kind (Mother Nature), 2) Vision of Eros (Erotic Love), 3) Vision of Philia (Brotherly Love), and 4) Vision of God. The first three are extrovertive while the forth is introvertive.

These stages are referred to as the ‘via-mystica.’ Passage through the via-mystica brings about a “transformation of self, a regeneration or rebirth which, according to tradition, is not “…merely superficial conversion, but rather a deeply realized, radical, and thoroughgoing change in one’s mode of consciousness… a coming forth into consciousness of man’s deeper, spiritual self” (11). One achieves Union when the false self (outward man, psyche, or ego) gives way to the true self (inward man, spirit or pneuma), bringing spirit, soul, and body ‘together.’ The soul, according to this tradition, is midway between the body and the spirit, “… and sometimes it is subservient to the spirit and sometimes it is raised by it: while sometimes it allies itself with the flesh and descends to earthly passions” (12). Irenaeus (a patristic writer and mystic) adds that:

“Soul and spirit can be constituents of man; but they certainly cannot be the whole man. The complete man is a mixture and union, consisting of a soul which takes to itself the Spirit of the Father, to which is united the flesh which was fashioned in the image of God… men are spiritual not by the abolition of flesh… there would then be the spirit of man, or the Spirit of God, not a spiritual man. But when this spirit is mingled with soul and united with created matter, then through the outpouring of the Spirit the complete man is produced; this is man made in the image and likeness of God. A man with soul only, lacking spirit… is carnal, unfinished, incomplete; he has, in his created body, the image of God, but he has not acquired the likeness to God through the spirit.” (12)

For Christian mystics, uniting body, soul, and spirit is to become “Christ-like.”

The bible series (both old and new testament) is the Christian mystics’ “definitive myth extending from Creation to Apocalypse” (13). The old and new testaments unite through a progression of the creation, fall, and redemption through the coming of Christ, whereby man regains “paradise,” and recovers “that divine, creative, and redemptive image which is hidden within” (13). Accordingly:

“As Adam was the son of God, so is Jesus, the last Adam. Since the Fall alienated every man, Adam, from God, every man has to become again the son of God through the redemption of Christ; psyche must become pneuma, the lesser life or false self… must become the greater life or true self: this is the basic meaning of the key mystical idea or overriding archetype of regeneration or rebirth.” (13)

The language of this myth, of every myth, is obviously metaphoric. Metaphor is the only language possible to convey unity, since the essence of a metaphor is that “…two (the many) are one.” Clements says that metaphor “requires the poetic, imaginative, noetic faculty (rather than the rational, logical faculty or dianoia) to perceive the essentially unitive nature of the relationship between self and the universe and God” (231). In fact, the myth of man’s Fall from paradise represents man’s fall into literal language and literal-mindedness. Clements adds that the Fall is into

“…the imbalance of the merely rational, discursive, conceptualizing intellect (the center of the ego), which functions by means of separation and analysis of natura naturata, nature classified, sorted, murdered for dissection into things, substances. Yet just as implicate or deep reality subsists not in things, but in dancing interplay, interactions (subverting, however useful, imposed rational boundaries), so deep meaning is not in the words but between the words, in the Word, in the silence, beyond the reach of literal-minded explication” (239).

The Resurrection is also metaphoric, involving “…imaginative, recreative language, opening the closed ego into cosmic consciousness so the one sees and re-creates the world in sacramental…terms” (239). Specifically, the Fall and Rise deal with what’s going on around us, right now, in this life.

The catalyst for redemption is the incarnation of Christ, the idea that God becomes man so that man might become God. Christ represents, among other things, the union of soul, spirit and body (matter), with a clear emphasis on body. Spirit becomes body so that body might become spirit. (Subatomic physicists employ the terms energy and matter to point to the same thing.) Until the advent of Christianity, the rift between heaven and earth, God and man, mind and body (they’re all the same things) was real and problematic; Plato saw God as wholly transcendent and unknowable, while Aristotle stressed God’s immanence. Clements writes that

“…the Incarnation reconciles the dichotomies of form and matter and of the transcendent and the immanent, and it most vividly symbolizes the fallen self’s potential for regeneration and union with God.” (36)

He adds that “…Christ, pneuma, is the way and the example; the Resurrection is in and of the body as well as the soul.” (36)

The incarnated Christ serves as an intermediary between heaven and earth, form and matter, God and man, deifying the “most low” (i.e. base materials such as flesh and inanimate earthly matter), restoring it to the “most high.” By contemplating the One, man dies to his lower self and is reborn One with God.


2

Ayn Rand interprets mysticism in quite a different way. (For the sake of convenience, I’ll consider anything her protagonists say as Rand’s own words, although this “intentional fallacy” is technically a no-no.) Whether Rand is serious or not, in her book she attributes all the assaults on capitalism, the mess caused by Soviet-style ‘Communism,’ the looting and mooching of incompetent bums looking for a free ride – at the expense of those who produce – to the influence of mysticism. Some critics argue that Rand uses the term “mystic” to refer not just to Contemplative mystics, but also to anyone whose basic beliefs rest on anything but her version of “reason.” I will argue that although Rand does apply the term “mystic” liberally, she specifically targets the Contemplative mystic tradition to which she is diametrically opposed. What’s more, she derives the archetypal framework for her story from that tradition to create its inversion.

According to Rand, the root problem – what she calls the “killer tenet” - is the “breach between… mind and body … that mystics advocate and preach” (786). This rift “divorces” their value system “from matter.” Rand writes that:

“A man whose values are given no expression in material form, whose existence is unrelated to his ideals, whose actions contradict his convictions, is a cheap little hypocrite. [He is a] …man who loves one woman, but sleeps with another – the man who admires the talent of a worker, but hires another – the man who considers one cause to be just, but donates his money to the support of another – the man who holds high standards of craftsmanship, but devotes his effort to the production of trash – these are the men who have renounced matter, the men who believe that the values of their spirit cannot be brought into material reality.” (942)

Mystics, however, believe spirit and matter (mind and body) are One already, although our psyche cannot see it. Whether her error is intentional or not, Rand maintains it throughout the story. Secondly, she subverts “spirit” with “values of the spirit” in order to achieve a sort of coup. These values, although they constitute “integrity,” a connection between thought and action, are rooted in logic and relate to Rand’s principle value: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man nor ask another man to live for mine” (672). Unlike Contemplative language, however, her language is literal, discursive, and dichotomous.

Rand goes on to say that the “…mystics are germs that attack you through a single sore: your fear of relying on your mind, and they tell you that they possess… a mode of consciousness superior to reason” (947). To refute and counter the Mystic’s supposed claim, Rand substitutes Reason for God within the traditional Contemplative framework. She begins by co-opting and inverting the myth of man’s fall from paradise. She writes:

“Observe the persistence, in mankind’s mythology of the legend about a paradise that men had once possessed, the city of Atlantis or the Garden of Eden or some kingdom of perfection, always behind us. The root of that legend exists, not in the past of the race, but in the past of every man. You still retain a sense – not as firm as a memory, but diffused like the pain of hopeless longing – that somewhere in the starting years of your childhood, before you had learned to submit, to absorb the terror of unreason and to doubt the value of your mind, you had known a radiant state of existence, you had known the independence of a rational consciousness facing an open universe. That is the paradise which you have lost, which you seek…” (968-969)

This quote not only deals with the biblical Fall, it also suggests a famous 19th century poem by Wordsworth called “Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood.” As the biblical story goes, when Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, God banished them from paradise. Paradise represents the immutable Oneness, the joy, feeling of blessedness, peace, the sense of sacredness (Contemplation, 7) that is characteristic of a mystical union with God, and their Fall is into a “Place of Unlikeness” (14). It is the knowledge of good and evil that Adam and Eve “ingest,” knowledge of duality, that brings on the fall. Adam and Eve enter a mutable, temporal world, made so by discursive, analytical thinking that grows more acute as we mature and leave our innocence behind. It’s the “verdict” of our minds (816) that has us distinguish polarities, has us see ourselves separate from each other, the earth, and God. There’s nothing wrong with this; it’s natural and inevitable.

That’s what the following excepts from Wordsworth’s poem makes clear, but which Rand misinterprets. “Intimations of Immortality” is a definitive representation of the Fall, something Rand surely would have either read or been exposed to, and to which, I believe, she’s referring to in her above quote. The poem begins:

"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore-
Turn whereso’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more." (ll. 1-9)

Later in the poem:

"We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind." (ll. 181-88)

Notice that the “celestial light” – which the poet remembers shining through every “common sight” of the “earth” has now disappeared with the onset of adulthood and the emergence of the “philosophic mind.” John Keats responds in “Lamia” with “…Do not all charms fly/ At the mere touch of cold philosophy (ll.229-30)? He adds “philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,/ Conquer all mysteries by rule and line…” (ll.234-35). For Rand to say that the “independence of a rational consciousness” is the “paradise” we have lost inverts the archetypal Fall and runs contrary to common sense.

Rand goes on to thoroughly malign mysticism. She makes the distinction between mystics of spirit and mystics of muscle, the former being those “…who longed for irresponsible consciousness and ruled by means that… knowledge comes in blind, causeless fits, blindly to be followed, not doubted,” and the latter “…who ruled by means of claws and muscles, with conquest as their method and looting as their aim, with a club or a gun as sole sanction of their power” (678). Later in the story she unleashes a tirade against mystics; the following is merely a sample:

“Make no mistake about the character of mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages – and power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust.” (956)

“A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others… extorting their unaccountable consent.” (957)

“Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator.” (957)

“Just as the mystic is a parasite in matter… - just as he is a parasite in spirit… - so he falls below the level of a lunatic… to the level of a parasite of lunacy.” (957)

“A mystic relishes the spectacle of suffering, of poverty, subservience and terror; these give him a feeling of triumph… his craving is to kill, his only satisfaction is to torture.” (957)

“Every mystic had always longed for slaves, to protect him from the material reality he dreaded.” (960)

“Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want.” (962)

Not only is this tirade by John Galt inconsistent with his character throughout the rest of the story, Rand offers nothing rational to support any of it. If her point is that man’s refusal to rely on his mind and to exalt reason and logic has caused the problems of the world throughout history, perhaps a more rational spokesperson would make the argument more persuasive.


3

Rand makes full use of Contemplative imagery in her story. For example, Galt is portrayed as God-like, Galt’s Gulch as heaven, and the protagonists’ path toward a “union” with Galt mimics the via-mystica. She rather crudely identifies her protagonists with the mystical triad – body, soul, and spirit in order to simulate a transcendent union based on Reason. Reardon, for example, represents the body. His kingdom is the material world. He was “a man who belonged on earth…” and “a man to whom the earth belonged…” (344). As a metallurgist, he worked for years to develop a lighter, more durable metal that would serve as new rail for the John Galt line. He is Rand’s counterpart of the Contemplative alchemist who transforms lead into gold as a metaphor for the Incarnation of Christ and the Resurrection of man. Alchemists equate God with gold, both symbols of perfection. John Donne, for example, presents the human body as the base element (of the triad) which equates to lead. He compares the body “…to a strengthening alloy rather than to dross, the weakening impurity discarded in the process of refining a metal” (41), i.e. an act of purgation. The alloy’s ascent toward gold equates to man’s ascent toward God.

In “Atlas Shrugged,” Reardon, in effect, becomes an alchemist. He not only perfects the art of refining a metal, he essentially turns it into gold. Not only does he, the man from earth, end up in Galt’s Gulch (heaven), where a gold dollar sign is the defining monument and gold is the currency, Ragnar, an agent of Galt, compensates Reardon with gold bars. Although Rand is clearly employing traditional mystic imagery, her version links Reason rather than Imagination to Gold/Galt/God. What Rand’s missing is the metaphor. Contemplatives know that turning lead into gold is impossible, just as they know the resurrection doesn’t involve a physical ascent. Rand’s literal interpretation reduces mystic Oneness with God to a love for commerce and industry.

Rand employs Contemplative concepts more explicitly as the story progresses, evident in Dagny’s journey toward a pseudo-mystic union with Galt. Galt, whose “…body looked like a statue of ancient Greece…-the statue of a man as god…” (1045) was “the master of reality” (1048) and “the living generator” (1049). The “earthly” protagonists that Galt ‘saves’ constitute the body and soul. While Reardon is body, Francisco tells Dagny, “We are the soul, of which railroads, copper mines, steel mills and oil wells are the body – and they are the living entities that beat day and night, like our hearts in the sacred function” (571). Galt, with the “energy of a single mind who had known how to make connections of wire follow the connections of his thought” (670), proceeds to unify his disciples.

Consistent with the Trinity, Dagny’s love affair with Galt consists of three parts: Francisco, the man who mines copper, Reardon, the man who gives metallic form to it, and Galt, the connecting “idea” which makes an intercontinental railroad possible. Without Galt, Dagny and her two lovers, to differing degrees, “…damned the fact that [the] body responded to the values of [the] mind” (521). With the ‘incarnation’ of Galt’s “values of the spirit,” however, “spirit,” soul, and body unite, recreating the protagonists in the image and likeness of Galt. As Galt “descends” into their material world, they begin – literally - to ‘embody,’ his values.

After knowing Galt, Dagny is ‘saved.’ She says in her radio broadcast, “We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts… those who make steel, railroads and happiness…” (781) Reason, cloaked in the language of Mystics, dethrones Imagination as the defining principle. Dagny’s psyche is validated rather than transformed, and she’s left with an even greater rift between herself and "the hordes of moochers and looters."

Dagny’s erotic love affair is another example. The Contemplatives’ Vision of Eros describes a Union with God through sexual immersion into the body. But Rand would have you believe that the mystics revile the body and promote abstinence. Donne (and Lawrence), however, wrote about union with God via mystical sex. Donne writes “just as humans are a knot of soul and body so must pure lovers imitate [Christ] by becoming incarnate, by descending to their bodies, “Else a great Prince in prison lies” (41). In Rand’s story, Dagny and Reardon struggled with the integrity of their love affair (Reardon loved her yet remained married to someone he didn’t love) for the same reason their businesses were failing. Reardon says later in the story “If some man… had told me, when I started, that by accepting the mystic’s theory of sex I was accepting the looters’ theory of economics, I would have laughed in his face. I would not laugh at him now” (787). Although integrated with Galt, however, they remain mired in psyche.

What Galt represents and what he teaches is that the unifying source of all love is the same: Reason. Upon discovering that Dagny was also in love with Reardon, Galt says,
“No matter what you feel for him, it will not change what you feel for me, and it won’t be treason to either, because it comes from the same root, it’s the same payment in response to the same values… every form of happiness is one, every desire is driven by the same motor – by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence – and every achievement is an expression of it.” (704)

Mystics would agree that divine love in its many incarnations is singular. What they would argue is that the single value Rand worships is divisive, thus it’s not divine love. It’s “achievement” oriented rather than unconditional, and it creates a world in which those who don’t (or can’t) produce are often despised by those who do. The Oneness (love) that mystics enjoy resides in a stillness, beneath ambition. Romantic poet John Keats likens ambition to a “fever” that hastens man’s rise in the world, and thus his Fall from paradise. What Rand describes sounds more like a vehicle for a worldly rise rather than a spiritual one.

Following the Contemplative script, Rand’s God is cleverly ubiquitous. Mystics believe that God is wholly transcendent and unknowable through the senses, yet wholly manifest in everything around us, available to the senses. Rand would argue, logically, that A equals A and can never not equal A, that the paradox of God’s omnipresence is impossible. But mystics reconcile finite matter and its infinite source by way of the incarnation and resurrection. Eckhart, for example, says that “… nothing is as near to [us] than [we] are to [ourselves]. [Our] being depends on God’s intimate presence.” (18) Rand incorporates this theme, literally, into her story. After leaving Galt’s Gulch (Atlantis, heaven), she returns to “earth,” (her world) and she sits in her office contemplating on Galt, waiting for him to show himself. Rand writes:

“…on entering her office, she had been conscious, not of the room around her, but of the tunnels below, under the floors of the building… while her living mind was inactive and still, frozen in contemplation, forbidden to move beyond the sentence: He’s down there.” (917-918)

If you understand the Taggart tunnels beneath her to be her heart and soul, Galt is closer than one might at first imagine. As if an immanent deity, Galt says “I was here all those years… within your reach, inside your own realm, watching your struggle, your loneliness… I was here, hidden by nothing but an error of sight, as Atlantis is hidden from men by nothing but an optical illusion.” Galt goes on to say “…it’s to the darkest bottom of the underground that all things you valued would have to be consigned and that it’s there that you would have to look. I was here. I was waiting for you. I love you” (879)

In true Mystic form, Galt says that the way up is down: the “darkest underground” (body) leads to Galt’s Gulch (heaven/God). But Rand discards the image’s metaphor. Read metaphorically, Galt’s decent into Dagny’s underground would suggest not only sexual union, but also the incarnation that precedes the resurrection. As Dagny’s finite world approaches the nature of it’s infinite source, she becomes One with God. Read literally, as Rand intends, Galt really does reside in Atlantis, behind a mirage that’s mechanically created, and he really is “inside Dagny’s realm” because he actually works for her. Galt’s realms are thoroughly described and understood, leaving nothing to imagination. These are the realms of psyche rather than pneuma. Devoid of metaphor, union with Galt is a material endeavor.

Rand also inverts the mystic archetypes Crucifixion (purgation, death) and Resurrection (rebirth, life). Instead of ‘crucifying’ the barrier, the ego, which stands between them and Union with God, the protagonists do the opposite. They cut their connection with the world, (what Rand equates to an “Atlas-like” support of the world), flee a dying city, and head to the mountains to be reborn apart from the body of humanity.

Here, Rand cleverly adopts Contemplative language. Dagny and Galt fly away from the city in a plane that rises “… like a phoenix from the darkness of the earth, facing a void” (1061). The phoenix is a mythological bird that rises from its own ashes and is another common symbol employed by Contemplative writers to convey Christ’s resurrection (Contemplation, 52). In this sequence, too, the “void” is emphasized. From the plane they watched a train traveling “slowly westward through the void [with] no destination but the void” (1061), and “there was only a void of darkness” (1069). Clearly, Genesis is suggested here.

But the rising, resurrective quality of their flight is from the void, rather than into it – (as God’s Word was spoken), as they escape to Galt’s Gulch where Reason reigns supreme. It is there that “the dream of heaven and greatness” (675) and their “second Renaissance” (587) awaits. As the world dies around them, literally, Dagny says to Galt “It’s the end,” and Galt responds “It’s the beginning” (1061). But their beginning is not one of cosmic Unity; it’s an act of segregation.

The music of Richard Hally’s Fifth Concerto makes the pseudo-resurrection more explicit. Once back at Galt’s Gulch, there was “…a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its nature. [It]…spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.” (1068)

The deliverance that mystics seek is the deliverance from separation and “unlikeness.” Here, Rand’s deliverance is really a celebration of perceived superiority. Rand’s use of the concerto disguises this. E.M.W. Tillyard writes that “Ever since the early Greek philosophers, creation had been figured as an act of music; and the notion appealed powerfully to the poetically or the mystically minded” (228). Sir James Jeans, a great modern physicist and mathematician, writes

“…to my mind, the laws which nature obeys are less suggestive of those which a machine obeys in its motion than of those which a musician obeys in writing a fugue, or a poet in composing a sonnet. The motions of electrons and atoms do not resemble those of the parts of a locomotive so much as those of the dancers in a cotillion” (228).

William Butler Yeats asks the critical question “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (228) Subatomic physicists have been telling us you can’t.

In part, mysticism is about “cleansing the senses” to open up to cosmic unity. Rand’s philosophy is quite the opposite. And, although I strongly disagree with it, I have no problem with her philosophy, other than its conflation with mysticism. I agree, in fact, with some of what she writes. Her description, for example, of the factory that disintegrates after adopting the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is brilliantly detailed and convincing. I have no problem with fair competition that allows those who are capable to receive more compensation than those who are not. I have no problem with ‘obscene’ wealth as long as the playing field is level and open to anyone. Cream should rise to the top, after all.

What I argue is that the wide disparity between those who produce and those who don’t is caused by conditions which are largely circumstantial, that the playing field is far from level. Despite Rand’s black and white portrayal of the good guys versus the bad, inherently we are much more alike than not. The problems we’re facing in the world right now stem from our failure to see all humans as one body.