As for what it actually had to say about forgiveness, that was pretty trite and unsurprising. I didn't hear a single thing I hadn't encountered several times before in either a Sunday school class, a self-help book, or both. In fact, aside from grisly details about the crimes presented in the movie, the only truly memorable thing it contained was when a woman who had to forgive A) herself for being a drug addict and stealing from her daughter and B) her boyfriend for giving her HIV, told the camera that as a result of learning to forgive, she could sleep very well, and that at night her life was so peaceful "you can hear the ants pissing outside."

Unsuccessful and boring as the movie was, it did make me think that a thorough exploration of the topic is warranted--in some other forum. This project should not have been a movie but a book--a thorough, well-researched, well-documented, well-edited, scholarly exploration of the history of forgiveness and current ideas about it.

I also think that one reason politicians now apologize and ask forgiveness for having sex in airport bathrooms or getting blowjobs from interns and so forth is because we disseminate information well enough that we A) find out about various wrong-doings and then B) hold perpetrators accountable--at least for some things. Wouldn't it be great to get an apology from George Bush and Dick Cheney for the Iraq war? I would LOVE such an apology--but we're certainly not going to get it unless we demand it (and probably not even then).

Still, it would be interesting to see someone discuss and explore these ideas and situations, and consider what it all means. Frankly I thought the movie would try to do something like that--but instead, it just became this "history of a crime" thingy--and not an especially compelling one at that, because interviews went on too long and weren't well edited, and because the observations about forgiveness were trite and preachy.

It would also have been nice to see the movie acknowledge more complexity within the situations it discussed. The Amish were held up as these otherworldly models of forgiveness because they forgave the outsider who shot their children to death, but the film never acknowledged that the Amish are very slow to forgive their own, ostracizing them and forcing them to live as pariahs within the community. That deserves some attention.

Anyway. Only part one of the movie screened last night; the second half will screen in a few weeks, and I'm sure as hell not going to show up for it. I actually recommend that you AVOID THIS FILM. But I do want to mention one really weird pre-movie moment.

Whitney was introduced by one Marlin Jensen, who apparently is a member of the first quorum of the Seventy and serves as LDS Church historian. His remarks were so strange. He began by looking around the audience of about 200 people and saying, "It will be a good long while before I'm part of such a diverse crowd again."

Well. I knew a lot of people in the audience, and it consisted predominantly of middle-aged white Mormons. There were a few people under 30, and a few people of color. There were people whose "diversity" was not quite so obvious: gay people, or people who don't attend church regularly or at all. I couldn't help it: I turned to the friend on one side and said, "That's pathetic." Then I turned to the friend on the other side and said, "That really is pathetic."

Then Marlin Jensen said to Ms. Whitney, "We here in the audience are your friends. You don't have to be afraid of us."

Huh?

First of all, this woman has been making documentaries for years and her work has been nominated for an Oscar (according to the bio read before the movie); she has probably gotten used to attending screenings of her work and is both professional and confident enough to maintain some poise even among an audience of complete strangers.

Second, if we were all her friends, why would anyone have to tell her not to be afraid of us? I can't help thinking that Jensen was trying to reassure himself, not Whitney, that the audience was friendly to him, that he's so unused to being among secular groups that he doesn't even know how to behave in a non-church setting. Which, again, is really pathetic.

Here's a paragraph in the study that really stood out for me:

Possibly to counter these feelings, men who buy sex are often committed to the idea that prostitution is an equal exchange of sex for money or goods. If, as many prostituted women have reported, prostitution is paid rape (Farley, Lynne and Cotton, 2005) then the payment itself (whether cash, food, housing, drugs) functions as the means of coercion to the sex in prostitution (MacKinnon, 2001, 2009). Against much empirical evidence a number of buyers insist that prostitutes truly enjoy the sex of prostitution. This highlights a major contradiction. While the buyer is often aware that it is his money and his purchase of her for sex that gives him the control while removing her autonomy and her dignity, he still seeks to convince himself that she both likes him and is sexually aroused by him. Perhaps this conviction is an attempt to reduce the cognitive dissonance of his sexual use of her under conditions he accurately perceives are not free or equal. Plumridge and colleagues (1997) pointed out buyers' firmly held but contradictory beliefs that on the one hand commercial sex is a mutually pleasurable exchange, and on the other hand that payment of money serves to remove his social and ethical obligations. Most interviewees said they assumed that to a greater or lesser extent, women in prostitution are sexually satisfied by the sex acts purchased by buyers. The interviewees believed that women in prostitution were satisfied by the sex of prostitution 46% of the time. One man argued that women who were "professional prostitutes" all like sex. Another said, "A normal woman is never as highly sexed as a prostitute. It would be wrong." Generally, the literature indicates that women are not sexually aroused by prostitution, and that after extended periods of time servicing hundreds of men, prostitution damages or destroys much of their own sexuality (Barry, 1995; Funari, 1997; Giobbe, 1991; Hoigard and Finstad, 1986; Raymond et al., 2002).

The short answer is that great cities are diverse, and diversity is created, Jacobs maintains, through four primary conditions:

2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.

3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.

4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are there because of residence. (196-197)

(The book is almost 600 pages long. Jacobs is very anxious to establish and support her argument and analysis, and devotes very thorough chapters to each of those points. I'm not even going to try to paraphrase the supporting material here; if you want to understand it, you'll have to read the book yourself.)

Along the way, Jacobs stresses the needs of children, advocating for instance, sidewalks 35 feet wide, because that provides enough room for them to play safely while still in view of adults who live on the street and know them and can take responsibility for them. She offers cogent, interesting analysis of why neglected parks fail to attract users, including the fact that they don't allow for spontaneity and that most people would rather hang out where they can run into other people--they'll choose to walk up and down a crowded downtown sidewalk, for instance, over sitting on a bench in a deserted park. She also says witty, funny things like "A city of almost eight million can support two aquariums and can afford to show off its fish free" (208).

Jacobs hates sprawl, and points out that Americans romanticize nature in ways few other cultures do, at the same time that we are "probably the world's most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside" (580), covering some of the finest farmland on the planet with asphalt and covering some of the most stunning vistas in the world with nasty tract homes.

The book got me thinking about cities I have lived in and enjoyed, and what has made them work. Jacobs stresses that great cities, very large cities, are different organisms than small towns and medium-sized cities. And yet I must admit that many of the things I liked best about Iowa City, for instance, were the ways in which IC met the criteria Jacobs established for what a city should strive for.

For all that, part of what intrigued me most about the book was the larger critique of the human psyche and how we interact with each other and our environment. For instance, discussing Ebenezer Howard, a19th-century idealist, Jacobs writes

His aim was the creation of self-sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged to the planners in charge. (24)

It's a pretty apt statement. I doubt I am the only person to apply that statement to religion: Mormonism, for instance, is a pretty nice religion if you are docile and have no plans or thoughts of your own and don't mind spending your life among others with no plans or thoughts of their own.

Then there was Jacobs' discussion of whether diversity or homogeneity is uglier. Acknowledging that some people dislike diversity because it can appear "messy," she argues that "homogeneity or close similarity among uses, in real life, poses very puzzling esthetic problems":

If the sameness of use is shown candidly for what it is--sameness--it looks monotonous. Superficially, this monotony might be thought of as a sort of order, however dull. But esthetically, it unfortunately also carries with it a deep disorder: the disorder of conveying no direction. in places stamped with the monotony and repetition of sameness you move, but in moving you seem to have gotten nowhere. North is the same as south, or east as west. (291-292)

Jacobs loves diversity, and recommends that cities cultivate it whenever possible. On the issue of esthetic harmony, she notes that

In seeing visual order, cities are able to choose among three broad alternatives, two of which are hopeless and one of which is hopeful. They can aim for areas of homogeneity which look homogeneous, and get results depressing and disorienting. They can aim for areas of homogeneity which try not to look homogeneous, and get results of vulgarity and dishonesty. Or they can aim for areas of great diversity and, because real differences are thereby expressed, can get results which, at worst, are merely interesting, and at best can be delightful. (299)

Which struck me as a fairly apt criticism of the Mormon church, which ALWAYS goes homogeneity, which it only occasionally tries to disguise--and not just in its buildings, for which it devises fairly unremarkable templates, but in its visual art, its music, its discourse--even the intonations and speaking voices of its leaders, who all seem to go to the same vocal coach. Because it eschews diversity and is so anxious to achieve homogeneity, the few areas where it doesn't--its scripture, for instance, which includes tales of death by gang rape (Judges 19) and divine genocide (Noah etc) along with nonsensical professions that "god is love"--become not sites of complexity and diversity, but just chaos and entropy, or the meaningless intermingling of unrecognizable, and therefore worthless, elements.

And that's my assessment for the day: Mormon aesthetics are homogeneous and boring, and Mormon theology is not merely cruel and contradictory; it's chaotic, entropic and worthless. No wonder I chose to give it all up.

I wrote yesterday about reading The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade, and how I didn't like it all that much, except for his discussion of sacred places. Eliade uses the term autochthony to refer to a religious feeling of "belonging to a place, and it is a cosmically structured feeling that goes far beyond family or ancestral solidarity" (140).

I like this because it describes how I feel about the Sonoran desert, an area running through south central Arizona and extending slightly into Sonora, Mexico. It is a particular ecosystem with some of the coolest vegetation in the world--the saguaro cactus, for instance, a plant so iconic and interesting that it has come to symbolize the entire southwest, though it is indigenous only to the Sonoran desert.

Thatcher, the town I grew up in, is not in the Sonoran desert. But Tucson, where my mom was born, where my grandparents lived til they died and where I went to college, is. I was in Tucson last week, and while it's not accurate to say that I ever forget that I love it and think it's beautiful, still, going home and encountering it again always has the force of a revelation.

But the best thing about Tucson is where it is. The valley where it lies is, to me, one of the most manifestly holy places on the face of the earth, a place where I sense the earth as itself, as something with a sort of intelligence, a set of logical, efficacious systems that let it be what it is. I am not talking here about intelligent design or creationism; I'm talking about my awareness of the planet's ultimate indifference to me, the fact that it can get along quite well without me and the rest of humanity, that it does what it does for its own sake and not for ours, and that what it does works--for it, if not for us.

There are so many things that contribute to this awareness I feel here. First of all, there are the mountains, the Rincons to the east, the Tucson mountains to the west, another small range to the south I forget the name of, and most of all, the Catalinas, the range to the north. They are crooked and craggy, with odd bumps and knobs sticking up all over them. They are so strange and stark that they look fake, a cardboard cut-out stuck in front of an overlit backdrop, but they are supremely real. They are at an angle that allows for a fascinating play of light and shadow throughout the day; ever since I was a little girl I've liked to watch the mountain change as the sun traverses the sky.

Then there is the light itself, so intense, so thorough. I have been telling myself lately that the light in northern Utah is the same, but it's not: it's similar quality, but not intensity, and lacks the purifying, transforming quality of the light here. There's the clarity of the sky, both during the day and at night, which means amazing visibility for stargazing, and few things help us sense the sacred and our own small place in the cosmos like a sky abundant with stars. There are the sunsets, some of the most dramatic and lovely in the world: there's no better date in Tucson than watching the sunset with someone you really like. There is also the vegetation, not just saguaros but ocotillo and mesquite and varieties of cactus and all these cool things that I just LOVE.

Now, I realize that in saying that this part of the world is to me manifestly holy and sacred, I'm saying as much about myself as I am about this place and the rest of the world. I understand and recognize its geological and botanical language, which is another way of saying that I belong to it, as Eliade would say, with a cosmincally structured feeling that goes beyond family or ancestral solidarity.

The thing is, this language I understand, I can't speak it myself: words always fail me when I try to talk about what this all means to me, a failure that I value, oddly enough: I like the diffuse, inarticulate yearning and confusion I feel when I look at the Catalinas; it helps me know there is something more, something deep in the world-it is, in fact, the calling card of the sacred.

I recognize that not everyone feels this, either about Tucson or about any place, and that some people feel it not about Tucson but about some other part of the world. I don't expect everyone I value in my life to share my sense of the sacredness of the Sonoran desert. But they must at least respect and value my love for this place: they can't roll their eyes or say, "But it's all brown! How can you find this beautiful? It's SO ugly!" like some people have; that's a deal breaker. And frankly I'm glad that not everyone understands this place's vocabulary, or more people would move here than already have. There are already more people here than the place can comfortably sustain, and someone needs to stay in Minneapolis. So don't misunderstand: I'm not encouraging you to move to Tucson. But if you get a chance to visit, go, and don't forgot to watch the light change across the mountains.