I never enjoy writing a blog post for September 11th, but also don't like letting the day pass with saying anything. Happily, our social calendar last night handed me the perfect topic to share today.

Last night Laura and I attended one of the Art Institute of Chicago's occasional "After Dark" nights. This one turned the Modern Wing into an Indian-themed night club of sorts. We arrived early and slipped away from the festivities just in time to catch a preview of a new art installation, Jitish Kallat's "Public Notice 3," about which we knew nothing. We were fortunate enough to be part, I believe, of the first public group to see it, and had unobstructed access that not many viewers will get when it opens today.

"Public Notice 3" is the first work to be installed directly on the Art Institute's Grand Staircase. You get there from the Modern Wing, as we did, by passing through the Alsdorf Galleries. This space used to be crowded with armor and armaments but is now devoted to religious art from India, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayas. Buddhas from different ends of those regions welcome visitors at each end of the gallery. It's hard not to dawdle with all the gods and demiurges on display. But there, through a portal at the opposite end, you can already see the field of varicolored lights framing one last Buddha.

Past that sculpture, you begin to take in "Public Notice 3." Kallat has gained a reputation for recontextualizing historical texts. In this case, the text is the remarks delivered on September 11, 1893, by Swami Vivekananda to open the first World's Parliament of Religions, which took place in this very building in association with the Columbian Expo. Vivekananda offered a stirring plea for tolerance, which Kallat has set flowing up the staircase in 15,000 tiny electric bulbs reminiscent of a Lite-Brite set. The words are rendered in the five colors of the Homeland Security Threat Advisory System.

It's a stunning journey to slowly climb the stairs, immersing yourself in the text, while following the flow of the words to their final elevation on the upper floor. The text is duplicated on every route you can take to the top, illuminating the swami's contention that "the different streams having their sources in different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."

I wish everyone could experience "Public Notice 3" today, but failing that I wish everyone would take the time read Vivekananda's address in its entirety:

Sisters and Brothers of America,

It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of the mother of religions, and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.

My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: "As the different streams having their sources in different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."

The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita: "Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me." Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.

My first professional story, "From Our Point of View We Had Moved to the Left" (F&SF, February 1993), was set on Inauguration Day, 2009. Thank God the real 1/20/09 is an infinitely more hopeful occasion than the one in my story.

http://www.shunn.net/podcast?sf=4

I'd like to propose a law. My idea is inspired by a technique I proposed for preventing executives from prioritizing the most egregiously idiotic of projects, but admittedly those stakes are small beer compared to the problem my law would address.

The proposal is simple. Before declaring preemptive (i.e., unprovoked) war, the president would be required to sacrifice a finger.

I'm not talking about a clean amputation, either, with anaesthesia and all those modern niceties. I mean the president's finger would be hacked off with a dull saw, preferably rusty, while he watches. In the most appealing scenario, the amputation would be performed by a surgeon with experience in Civil War reenactments. The surgeon could have whisky, but the president could not.

Also, the stump would be cauterized with a red-hot branding iron.

As you can imagine, the president would have to feel pretty strongly about the necessity of a preemptive war in order to start one. And we could be sure that he was feeling at least a portion of the misery, pain, and suffering he was about to unleash.

Oh, yes, and the amputation would be televised, so we could see how long it took the president to pass out. I'd write my senator and suggest this, but my senator is Hillary Clinton.

I left work a little early yesterday to attend a press screening of a film I'll be reviewing next week. The screening room was located in the Brill Building, I was delighted to discover. I had never been to the Brill Building before, or even noticed before it as I walked along Broadway, but this is the famous building where hordes of ambitious songwriters would crank out tunes for hire day in and day out back in the '60s. Burt Bacharach, Hal David, Carole King, Neil Sedaka, Paul Anka, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Gene Pitney, Jim Croce, Kris Kristofferson, Paul Simon ... the list goes on and on, and defines a whole generation of popular song. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker even worked there for a bit.

I didn't see any famous songwriters there yesterday, but I did arrive at the elevators at the same time the movie—two big reels on a handtruck—did.

Happy Bastille Day! Last year on this day, Laura and I were in Paris watching marching bands on the street and fighter jets overhead trailing tricolor smoke. You know, I could do with a nice Armagnac outside a bistro in the 7^ème Arondissement about now.

For the remainder of the hour, Elder Fowler and I wound Buddy Van Rijk in an increasingly constrictive net of dogma, woven from strands—even by Christian standards—of ever more tenuous logic. It was the type of snare that can only constrain a willing captive; one misstatement on our part, one question or concern unsatisfactorily addressed, and the whole careful construct falls away like trick ropes from an escape artist.

Elder Fowler explained the role Jesus Christ plays in the Plan of Salvation, negating through His sacrifice the effects of death and sin that would otherwise prevent us from returning to God's presence. (Being a sports fan, Van Rijk was surely familiar with the supporting New Testament verse—John 3:16, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son"—that Fowler asked him to read aloud from the family Bible.) I described the process by which God makes the Plan known to His children: instructing prophets to pass His words along to all the Earth's inhabitants, which come to us as scripture. Relating an abbreviated version of Joseph Smith's First Vision as anecdotal evidence, Elder Fowler affirmed that God continues to speak to prophets in our modern day and age. Then I put forth the Book of Mormon as one of the premier fruits of Joseph's holy calling, and briefly summarized its premise and contents.

In these latter parts of the discussion, we painted Joseph Smith for our investigator the way weak sunlight paints a stained-glass saint for the parishioners inside a cathedral—we rendered him beatific and blessèd, aglow with a numinous radiance, yet for all that curiously flat, distant, and inscrutable. We applied no brushstroke that might have brought life to that colorful rogue, teased out no overlooked detail that might have shed light on his enormous charisma (a force so powerful that Mormons still love the man fiercely and recklessly more than a century and a half after his death). In our singleminded quest to prove both Joseph and his magnum opus modern witnesses of Christ, we certainly recounted no tale like the one I'm about to tell. But stories like these are as great a part of the appeal of Mormonism as the doctrine of eternal families—to long-standing members, perhaps even more so. Check this out:

It was probably late in 1812 that typhoid fever swept through Joseph Smith's family. The previous year his parents had settled with their six living children in Lebanon, New Hampshire, where, after a series of financial disasters, they had begun at last to regain their footing. Joseph would have been nearly seven when he and his siblings, including the new baby Catherine, took sick. All seven children eventually recovered, though Joseph's older sister Sophronia nearly died and Joseph himself developed a painful abscess (what he called a "fever sore") in one shoulder.

After first misdiagnosing the complaint as a sprain, a local doctor lanced the abscess. This temporarily relieved young Joseph's discomfort, but also admitted the bacterial infection to his bloodstream. The disease soon moved to Joseph's lower left leg, where typhoid osteomyelitis inflamed his tibia. For weeks Joseph suffered unrelenting agony; his only two respites came when the doctor returned to drain the resulting abscess, laying open the flesh of the leg all the way to the bone. But the bone itself was diseased, and the pain returned all too quickly.

Early in 1813, as best historians can reconstruct the date, a council of surgeons (somewhere between seven and eleven in number) determined that Joseph would die unless his leg was removed. Joseph's mother Lucy, weary after weeks and weeks of caring for her sick son, nonetheless refused to give permission for an amputation, demanding that the surgeons to make one more attempt to root out the infection. As the chief surgical consultant, Nathan Smith (no relation to Joseph), had pioneered a difficult technique for removing necrotic bone in 1798, the surgeons relented and reentered Joseph's sickroom to prepare the boy for that very operation.

When they announced their intentions, Joseph's overwrought father burst out sobbing at the side of the bed. Joseph himself remained relatively calm, agreeing to the operation but refusing to allow the surgeons to tie him to the bed. By Lucy's account, Joseph told them, "I can bear the process better unconfined."

The surgeons then insisted that he drink some brandy to dull the pain, but Joseph refused that too, and wine when it was offered instead. "I will not touch one particle of liquor," he said; "neither will I be tied down: but I will tell you what I will do, I will have my Father sit on the bed close by me; and then I will do whatever is necessary to be done, in order to have the bone taken out."

Joseph, knowing she could not bear to witness his suffering, told his mother to leave the room. After bringing fresh linen to place under his leg, she removed herself to a full hundred yards from the house. The operation commenced.

The surgeons opened Joseph's leg with a crude scalpel that was likely a full terrifying foot in length. They bored holes on both sides of the infected area of the tibia, then used forceps to break off pieces of the dead bone between. Twice Joseph's screams drew his frantic mother back into the room. The first time Joseph cried that he could tough it out if only she would leave. The second time, confronted by the sight of Joseph's pale, sweat-drenched face and the seeming gallons of blood that covered the sheets and no doubt the surgeons too, Lucy had to be, in her own words, "forced from the room and detained."

Fourteen pieces of bone were eventually broken from Joseph's tibia, and, miraculous to relate, he recovered from the operation almost fully, retaining only a slight limp in adulthood. (It is not known what injuries may have been sustained by the surgeons at the hands of Joseph's mother during the operation.)

Can you see the stern stuff of which our Prophet was made? Can you see the mettle? With integrity and courage like that, is it any wonder Joseph would not just master his disease but grow to become the greatest religious leader of his time? Is it any wonder we Saints still love him so unreservedly?

Is it any wonder we don't tell this story to the faint of heart?

When I say "faint of heart," I'm only talking about investigators. Mormons have no compunction about telling this inspiring story to their children (the focus, of course, being that Joseph wouldn't touch liquor even when it was the only anesthetic available). I must have heard this story a dozen times before I was Joseph's age, and every time the spectacle thrilled and horrified me to my core. I tried unsuccessfully to imagine what I would have done in his place (today I'm sure the answer is cry, throw up, and pass out), and I grew to idolize the child who would face such agony for the Word of Wisdom's sake.

Of course, the Word of Wisdom wouldn't make its debut for another twenty years, and when you consider his later casual enjoyment of beer and wine it pretty much puts the lie to this image of Joseph as a steadfast teetotaler, and thus to the moral of the story. But there's no reason to doubt the truthfulness of this episode, which both Joseph and his mother recorded and which is circumstantially corroborated by Nathan Smith's descriptions of the surgical technique involved. So how do we explain it?

In his book Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith, psychiatrist Robert D. Anderson argues—persuasively, I might add—that the dysfunction of Joseph's parents had induced what child psychologists call a "reversal of generations." Anderson, noting that Joseph's father unhelpfully sobbed like a baby at a moment of crisis and need, says:

Mormon writers have used this story to suggest how good this future prophet was even as a child, and how much his parents cared. In therapeutic terms, this incident is not a commendable one. Joseph was a young child, possibly five, no more than seven, desperately protecting the emotional state of his parents even while he was undergoing a life-threatening crisis and extreme physical pain. The implication is that they were unstable and that, even at this early age, he has learned that his security depends on providing security for them.

Viewed in this light, Joseph's life story, motivated by an alcoholic father and a depressive mother (another conclusion for which Anderson lays a painstaking foundation), becomes far more tragic and heart-breaking than heroic. In fact, the surgeon's bloody scalpel becomes the controlling image in Joseph's development, appearing in the Book of Mormon time and again in the guise of a great sword, impelling his rise to ever greater religious conquests, and even transforming adult horseplay into revenge on the surgeons who so brutally hacked apart his leg. (Twice as a grown man Joseph broke the legs of wrestling opponents significantly smaller than he.)

That's as may be. Well do I know, after having written a novel in which every major character must work through issues with his father, how easily subconscious symbols can slip into a writer's output. But as the pathology of dysfunctional family interactions has no place in this book, let me return you without further ado to the discussion at the Van Rijk home, already in progress.