Djelloul Marbrook

Either we’re overwhelmed by the size of a thing—large institutions have always crushed me—or our minds expand to embrace it. I first thought about this in the Navy as I observed the officers on our ship from ensign to admiral. The ship, an Essex-class aircraft carrier, either operated within the sphere of an officer’s mind or he operated in response to its details and their demands.

It wasn’t just two styles of leadership, it was much more. There were officers from ensign to admiral who functioned acceptably if not well sorting through the various tasks and their demands. And then there were those extraordinary few whose minds grasped the mission of the ship, its place in the fleet, and the fleet’s place in the scheme of things.

You could say that some officers, some enlisted men for that matter, grasped the calculus of the Navy—what it existed for, how its particular parts constituted a whole. And now, late in my life, I recognize that what I was witnessing back then as an awed young man on a huge ship was a version of that very dictum attributed to the mythic Hermes Trismegistus:
the center is everywhere, and the circumference nowhere.

In 1600, unable to wrap its collective and dogmatic mind around the idea that the universe might be infinite and ever-expanding, the church burned Giordano Bruno at the stake. It abhorred the capaciousness of his mind. Sound familiar? Today, wallowing as we are in an ugly and surpassingly silly election campaign, we are grappling with the same issue. Control freaks are trying to limit our universe and to declare those who see its infinite grandeur heretics.

Nothing changes but the facts, and they can be rearranged, like statistcs, to suit the purposes of ideologues. I see, after all these years, that fundamentalism is essentially about control, about setting limits, about punishing others for limitless inquiry, as the church silenced Bruno. The possibilities of inquiry simply scare some people into trying to bully the rest of us.

I would like to say the Navy invariably rewarded those whose minds reached out over oceans and continents, beyond the confines of the ship and the fleet, but the Navy is like the rest of us. Sometimes it sees the grandeur, sometimes it fears it. I certainly did see captains and admirals in whose minds the big picture operated. And I saw younger men with such capacious, open minds. But the closed-minded were also rewarded for dutifulness and sometimes for just playing the system.

It would have been a lovely thing to enjoy these recognitions when I was young. I should have liked to see dogmatism and ideological obstinacy as fear disguised as certitude and integrity. Bruno was seen as a threat to the church. Imagine that, a little Neapolitan priest with a huge mind endangering the great big church. How can the church’s response to him be seen as anything but fear? Fear of inquiry, fear of the infinite.

Either we swim—tread water, really—in the flotsam of things or we embrace the ocean. And if we do the latter our minds become microcosms of the infinite whole. Is there any greater courage than that?—DM