I am almost always impressed with the book selection in my town's thrift store. I addition to picking up a spare Greek New Testament I also found an excellent condition copy of Walter Benjamin's Illuminations for $2. Here is a quote from the first essay titled, "Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting."
Of all the ways of acquiring books writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. At this point many of you will remember with pleasure the large library which Jean Paul’s poor little schoolmaster Wutz gradually acquired by writing, himself, all the works whose titles interested him in bookfair catalogues; after all, he could not afford to buy them. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
This is great support for my rationale of why I have written any good fiction. Its because I still find too many great works out there to read! (it helps me sleep better at night)
Monday, January 05, 2009
Finds
Sunday, December 28, 2008
A Note on Notes From The Underground
And then I read the line, “So this is it – this is it at last – a head-on clash with real life!” This was spoken by the Underground Man of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. Having worked through his major and late novels I have been enjoying his earlier shorter works. This is where you see his ideas take a cruder form. It is here that you listen to his dress rehearsals and confirm you inklings about his vision. Dostoevsky will make any turn necessary so that there will be a possibility for the real. The Underground Man both despises and feels despised by his anonymous audience. He attempts to recount his life with brutal honesty which means being honestly deceptive at times. He throws any notion of consistency out into the street for it is being tossed on your head into the street that one might actually learn something about one’s self. The Underground Man concludes spitefully that he was sorry for ever starting this account of his life recognizing that is was a pursuit in vanity and has move away from literature. For, “[a] novel must have a hero, and here I seemed to have deliberately gathered together all the characteristics of an anti-hero, and, above all, all this is certain to produce a most unpleasant impression because we have all lost touch with life, we are all cripples, every one of us – more or less.” He goes to tell us that because of our disability with are left with a disgust for any encounter, any taste with ‘real life.’ In response to any rejections his audience might raise for this view the writer continues by saying that, “for my part, I have merely carried to extremes in my life what you have not dared to carry even half-way, and, in addition, you have mistaken your cowardice for common sense and have found comfort in that, deceiving yourselves.” And even after this the Underground Man is not finished.My opening quotation came about half-way through this short story and immediately guided me the rest of the way. It has crystallized for me what is clear to all of us. As humans we act out and articulate the desire for something ‘real’. I don’t think we do this for all of our life. Realness in childhood is knowing that the world is more than it is. Realness is creative and unstable. Realness becomes in young adulthood more concrete as we begin to pursue tangible goals in love and vocation. Because the real was always more and bigger than ourselves it was never captured or tamed and so in time most of us began to simply give up on the real and sought the comfortable and stable. And so from below the order streets and time-conscious pedestrians the Underground Man emerges not with a challenge but with an assertion and a condemnation. I have followed through and looked around the corners of the dark corridors of the real. I have said yes to all of life. The pitch of the Underground Man rises in its crescendo. In deceiving yourselves “as a matter fact, I seem to be much alive than you. Come, look into it more closely! Why, we do not even know where we are to find real life, or what it is, or what it is called. . . . We even find it hard to be men, men of real flesh and blood, our own flesh and blood. We are ashamed of it. We think it a disgrace.” The Underground Man includes himself in this condemnation.
This short piece also confirmed for me the thought that the dominant two forms of pursuing the real for men are sex and violence. The slogan for The Ultimate Fighting Championship is As Real as it Gets. In these matches two hyper-masculine men enter an intimate and solitary space where they touch and embrace, sweat and grown moving from one position to another until there is climax and exhaustion. There is an overt sexuality to this expression that dangles right in front of the aroused spectator but remains unnamed. Conversely of course sexuality remains the oldest field of battle for position and dominance. And the vast majority do not even go so far as engaging in these expressions but rather we remain passive, insulated observers allowing the barest union between what is happening in front of us and what we are experiencing. These are the only two plotlines in Notes. First it is the author’s confrontation (verging on physical) with his peers. The second is with a woman he meets a hotel where he hopes to confront the men he spoke of the first half of the work. So it would seem that Dostoevsky also acknowledges these two paths of the real for men. I would argue, however, that the difference is Dostoevsky’s willingness to wrestle internally and then to vulnerably articulate externally. It is in his process where there is the possibility of ‘real life’ and not in the story itself. The Underground Man himself warns of the comfort we find living by the ‘book’ (we could substitute television now). Do not assume that this story itself will be of any aid to you. It is simply an account, a testimony, of one who wrestled.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
An Immanent Fiction
[** There are several 'spoilers' here for those who care **]
John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath offers what I would call an immanent fiction. The guiding narrative exists entirely within the sphere of a 'natural order'. The Joad family is forced off there farm during the Great Depression and head west to California in search work. They are accompanied by an ex-preacher named Casey. For much of the story Casey constructs this immanent reality. He is insistent that he is no longer a preacher and throughout their journey gives insight into the world as he now understands it. When first asked if we was going to continue to preach and baptize he responds,
I ain't gonna preach. . . . I ain't gonna baptize. I'm gonna work in the fiel's, in the green fiel's, an' I'm gonna be near folks. I ain't gonna try to teach 'em nothin'. I'm gonna try to learn. Gonna learn why the folks walks in the grass, gonna hear 'em talk, gonna hear 'em sing. Gonna listen to kids eatin' mush. Gonna hear husban' an' wife a-poudnin' the mattress in the night. Gonna eat with 'em an' learn. . . . Gonna cuss an' swear an' hear the poetry of folks talkin'. All that's holy, all that's what I didn' understand'. All them things is good."
The journey of the Joad's across the southwestern U.S. is largely a litany of woe and disappoint as they begin to experience the severity of conditions both for themselves and for so many around them as food become scarce and jobs more so. In Casey' new posture new revelation is received. Casey reflects on this with Tom Joad,
[I] listen all the time. That's why I been thinkin'. Listen to people a-talkin', an purty soon I hear the way folks are feelin'. Goin' on all the time. I hear 'em and feel 'em; an' they're beating their wings like a bird in a attic. Gonna bust their wings on a dusty winda tryin' to get out. . . . They's an army without a harness. . . . All along I seen it. . . . Ever' place we stopped I seen it. Folks hungry for side-mear, an' when they get it, they ain't fed. An' when they'd get do hungry they couldn't stan' it no more, why, they'd ast me to pray for 'em, an sometimes I done it. . . . I used to think that'd cut 'er, used to rip off a prayer an' all the troubles stick to that prayer like like flies on flypaper, an' that prayer'd go a-sailin' off, a-takin' them troubles along. But it don' work no more.
At this point Tom chimes in adding, "Prayer never brought in no side-meat. Takes a shoat to bring in pork." Casey also comes to recognize sin deriving from want, "It's need that makes all the trouble."
It is actually quite early in the book that Casey lays out the framework in which his developing worldview emerges. Tom Joad just got out of prison as was walking back to his family's farm when he encounters Casey under the shade of a tree. They begin to talk and Tom realizes that Casey is no longer the preacher he remembers from his youth. Casey begins to talk about the Holy Spirit as love and says that he honestly can't say that he loves Jesus because he doesn't know anyone names Jesus. He does, however, love people so much that at times he is "fit to bust." Then he admits that he can no longer be a preacher because of "one more thing" that he thought out. And he says, "I can't be a preacher no more because I thought it an' believe it."
"I figgered about the Holy Sperit and the Jesus road. I figgered,'Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,' I figgered, 'maybe it's all men an' all women we love; maybe that's the Holy Sperit- the human sperit- the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever'body's a part of.' Now I sat there thinkin' it, an' all of a suddent- I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it. . . . You can't hold no church with idears like that."
This is quite an unnerving passage . . . as preacher (pastor). There are many ways to 'poke holes' in Casey's theoretical framework. His view of sin as deriving from lack is itself certainly lacking. However, what convicts me is his honesty and fidelity to the reality of his experience. If faith, hope and love are to emerge or exist I suspect they must emerge in intimate relationship with the lived world around us. Steinbeck's work continues to push on my thinking of the relationship between transcendence and immanence and I suspect within my tradition also the notion of the miraculous. In contemporary culture it is Hollywood that has the market on the miraculous. They depend on it to resolve crisis and bring order to conflict. This functions in contrast to Jesus' use of the miraculous. The miraculous was not the resolving of conflict in the human condition. In Hollywood miracles function as an 'invisible hand' that will always stabilize the desired economic balance. In the Gospels the miraculous encouraged the marginalized to know that there is another economy that is not grounded in the injustices of their current situation . . . they did not affirm and stabilize they priorities of health and acquisition of their present context as the Hollywood miracles do.
And so in The Grapes of Wrath there are no miracles. As this narrative began to take shape in my mind I was wondering how this book would end. As the pages in my right hand thinned there fewer and fewer opportunities for a 'happy' ending. The Joads were not finding work or rest in their travels. Towards the end Casey is killed for attempting to organize workers into a type of union. Another plot line is Tom's sister Rose of Sharon who is pregnant during their travels and births a stillborn child near the end. It was after her birth that their shelter in train car is beginning to be flooded out by the rains that finally came. What they waited for back home is now proving to be the final threat to their family's survival. One final act of desperation the remaining family sets out in the rain on foot to find shelter. They eventually come across a barn where the find a boy and his father who is almost dead. They recognize that only something warm and nourishing will possibly sustain him. As the closing the lines of the book unfold Rose of Sharon's mother speaks to her and then ushers everyone out from Rose of Sharon and the dying man. Then the book concludes,
For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort about her. She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. "You got to," she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. "There!" she said. "There." Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.
The possibility of hope and healing lie within the plane of the human body. There is no guarantee of health or happiness but the possibility of those things cannot come from a vending machine in the sky, to do so would be to utterly disrespect the reality of life and humanity as God created them. These final words also unnerve me and I am not entirely sure how to appropriate them . . . or whether I can or should. I do feel like I should respect them and that in them there may be a beauty and truth and I have not fully acknowledged.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
The 'R' Word and the Grapes of Wrath (Update)
(Update - For the most recent comment on the 'R' word see today's post at I Cite)
I experienced an interesting and quite meaningful convergence of readings recently.
First, I am reading The Grapes of Wrath for the first time and have been following the Joad family for some time as they were driven off their farm in Oklahoma during the Depression and head out west to California and the promise of land and work. As they near and reach California they are confronted with the reality that there are scores more people who have flocked here than there is work. These 'immigrants' are not welcomed by the locals as their impromptu tent villages are frequently raided and there wages are lowered as people will fight just to make enough to eat. Tom Joad (who was recently released from prison) catches a whiff of something in this mix,
When you're in jail - you get kinda - sensin' stuff. Guys ain't let to talk a hell of a lot together - two maybe, but not a crowd. An' so you get kinda sensy. If somepin's gonna bust - if say a fella's goin' stir-bugs an' take a crack at a guard with a mop handle - why, you know it 'fore it happens. An' if they's gonna break or a riot, nobody don't have to tell ya. Your sensy about it. You know. . . . Stick aroun'. Stick aroun till tomorra anyways. Somepin's gonna come up.
The next day a young man confronts a contractor trying to take advantage of cheap labour. An accompanying police officer tries to arrest him and struggle ensues among a number of them. After this scene Steinbeck includes one of his shorter interpretive chapters interjected within the narrative. Here is a selection,
The great highways streamed with moving people. There in the Middle- and Southwest had lived simple agrarian folk who had not changed with industry, who had not formed with machines or known the power and danger of machines in private hands. They had not grown up in the paradoxes of industry. Their senses were still sharp to the ridiculousness of industrial life.
And the suddenly the machines pushed them out and they swarmed on the highways. The movement changed them; the highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself, changed them. The children without dinner changed them, the endless moving changed them. They were migrants. And the the hostility changed them, welded them, united them - hostility that that made the little towns group and arm as though to repel an invader, squads with pick handles, clerks and storekeepers with shotguns, guarding the world against their own people.
In the West there was panic when the migrants multiplied on the highways. Men of property were terrified for their property. Men who had never been hungry saw the eyes of the hungry. . . . And the men of the towns and of the soft suburban country gathered to defend themselves; and they reassured themselves that they were good and the invaders bad, as a man must do before he fights.
We can't let these Okies get out of hand. And the men who were armed did not own the land, but thought they did. And clerks who drilled at night owned nothing, and the little storekeepers possessed only a drawful of debts. But even a debt is something, even a job is something. The clerk thought, I get fifteen dollars a week. S'pose a goddamn Okie would work for twelve? And the little storekeeper thought, How could I compete with a debtless man?
And the migrants streamed in on the highways and their hunger was in their eyes, and their need was in their eyes. They had no argument, no system, nothing but their numbers and their needs. When there was work for a man, ten men fought for it - fought with a low wage.
And this was good, for wages went down and prices stayed up. The great owners were glad and they sent out more handbills to bring more people in. And the wages went down and prices stayed up. And pretty soon we'll have serfs again.
And now the great owners and the companies invented a new method. A great owner bought a cannery. And when the peaches and pears were ripe he cut the price of fruit below the cost of raising it. And as cannery owner he paid himself the low price for the fruit and kept the canned goods up and took his profit. And the little farmers who owned n canneries lost their farms, and they were taken by the great owners, the banks and the companies who owned the canneries. As time went on, there were fewer farms. The little farmers moved into town for awhile and exhausted their credit, exhausted their friends, their relatives. And they too went on the highways. And the roads were crowded with men ravenous for work, murderous for work.
And the companies, the banks worked at their own doom and they did not know it. The fields were fruitful, and starving men moved on the roads. The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line. And money that might have gone for wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.
Now compare this to a section from Brian McLaren's new book Everything Must Change. He is responding to those who may still be apathetic towards the growing economic gap between rich and poor.
People who ask such question often haven't seen what I've seen: huge factories where people - mostly women, and often, mostly young girls - work harder than any CEO has ever worked, running sewing machines for eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, earning them pennies an hour. They are glad for these jobs because they are better than having no work and no income at all. But their labor enriches, not them, but already rich people in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, or Hong Kong. This kind of inequity can only lead in one direction: revolution.
Brining up the 'R' word reminds him of an earlier conversation with a man from South Africa who used to be a part of violent revolutionary actions. In jail he later became a Christian and responded to McLaren's visit. Notice also that like Tom Joad he had spent time in prison and begins to sense what is going on.
He had heard my speak on these matters a few days before our dinner. "I was home the other night after you spoke," he said, "and picked up Das Kapital by Marx. I hadn't read it in over twenty years. Your lecture made me realize that we have to think about economics again. Marx's prescription was faulty, but at least he diagnosed a problem: the exploited and excluded poor won't abide their marginalization forever. We escapted a bloody revolution in 1994 when we peacefully dismantled apartheid. But if we can't dismantle the inequity of our current economic system, we will have an explosion of violence that nobody can imagine. The sheets will run red. I feel it. I feel it when I walk in the slums. Its like a volcano, ready to explode - the anger of the poor, the hopelessness of the poor."
Sunday, December 30, 2007
A Miraculous Disincarnation
There is another tremendous scene towards the end of Swann's Way. The young boy of the story begins to anticipate a journey to Italy. His anticipation and wonder of this foreign land begins a process of increasing excitement within him.
During this month - in which I went laboriously over, as over a tune, though never to my satisfaction, these visions of Florence, Venice, Pisa, from which the desire that they excited in me drew and kept something as profoundly personal as if it had been love, love for another person - I never ceased to believe that they corresponded to a reality independent of myself, and they made me conscious of as glorious a hope as could be cherished by a Christian in the primitive age of faith, on the eve of his entry into Paradise.
And in a nod to my own childhood fascination with Atlases.
And for all that the motive force of my exaltation was a longing for aesthetic enjoyments, the guide-books ministered even more to it than books on aesthetics, and, more again then guide-books, the railway time-tables.
I was genuinely becoming excited as his anticipation grew until its climax. This climax was triggered by his father's words for him to be prepared for the weather there. (And in good Proustian style most of the following is all one sentence)
At these words I was raised to a sort of ecstasy; a thing I had until then deemed impossible. I felt myself penetrating indeed between those 'rocks of amethyst, like a reef in the Indian Ocean'; by a supreme muscular effort, a long way in excess of my real strength, stripping myself, as of a shell that served no purpose, of the air in my own room which surrounded me, I replaced it by an equal quantity of Venetian air, that marine atmosphere, indescribable and peculiar as the atmosphere of the dreams which my imagination had secreted in the name of Venice; I could feel at work within me a miraculous disincarnation; it was at once accompanied by that vague desire to vomit which one feels when one has a very sore throat; and they had to put me in bed with a fever so persistent that the Doctor not only assured my parents that a visit, that spring, to Florence and Venice was absolutely out of the question, but warned them that, even when I should have completely recovered, I must, for at least a year, give up all idea of travelling, and be kept from anything that was liable to excite me.
Oh snap! The young boy dissolves so fully into the imagination (his disincarnation) that his body begins to suffer from withdrawal. No further energy to comment at this point.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Proust On Belief
Tis a season for rejoicing. I finally finished Swann's Way. It was not that it is a particularly difficult read but most of my more literary friends have begun and not finished it. In fact the local bookseller had a standing $25 gift certificate for anyone who could prove they read it. The book certainly lends itself to being dropped. It is not a page turner and it does not have what I would call 'flow'. The movement rather is like a type of emerging or organic still frame. The image developing in your mind becomes more nuanced, more unpredictable. And in the end the book is simply beautiful.
The book is an exercise of and a commentary on memory. In returning to a place that held rich and meaningful memories the young boy, nearing the end of the story, becomes disorientated by the present reality.
And seeing all these new elements of the spectacle, I had no longer the faith which, applied to them, would have given them consistency, unity, life; they passed in a scattered sequence before me, at random, without reality, containing in themselves no beauty that my eyes might have endeavoured, as in the old days, to extract from them and to compose in a picture. They were just women, in whose elegance I had no belief, and whose clothes seemed to me unimportant. But when a belief vanishes, there survives it - more and more ardently, so as to cloak the absence of power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new phenomenon - an idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did once animate, as if it was in that belief and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause - the death of the gods.
This appears at least on the surface to indicate a loss of youthful imagination in the possibilities of reality. What it offers more profoundly is a commentary in the work it takes to experience reality. Reality is not a given in its basic thereness. Rather the present reality must be joined with belief and belief is the medium for the imagination required. And if we loose that belief we will suffer the increasing idolatrous attachment to the past which we will attribute divine presence (rather than our present bodies). The book concludes with the young boy's reflection on memory.
How paradoxical it is to seek in reality the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which must inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed. . . . The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are fugitive, alas, as the years.
The book ends, in my mind, in a type of liminal space where belief is the hardest and most necessary of tasks. Belief of the past can be recalled in memory but cannot engage the present. And without belief reality moves about pixalated without any form emerging and in this account the emergence of form signals the emergence of meaning.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Darkness
Roughly ten years ago I had a dream in which someone said to me, "I saw the shadow of the Holy Ghost." Without going into detail of the dream this line has stuck with me since then. And what has occurred to me recently is that the most significant writers who have shaped my thinking since that time have all dwelt heavily on the image of darkness. I am thinking of Fyodor Dostoevsky, St. John of the Cross and Rowan Williams. But before them and before this dream was Johnny Cash who understood that for there to be light in the darkness you must first be present in the darkness.
I See a Darkness
(A cover of Bonnie 'Prince' Billy)
Well, you're my friend, and can you see?
Many times, we've been out drinking;
Many times we shared our thoughts.
But did you ever, ever notice, the kind of thoughts I got?
Well, you know I have a love; a love for everyone I know.
And you know I have a drive, to live I won't let go.
But can you see its opposition, comes rising up sometimes?
That its dreadful imposition, comes blacking in my mind?
And then I see a darkness,
And then I see a darkness,
And then I see a darkness,
And then I see a darkness.
Did you know how much I love you?
Its a hope that somehow you,
Can save me from this darkness.
Well, I hope that someday buddy
We have peace in our lives;
Together or apart,
Alone or with our wives,
And we can stop our whoring,
And pull the smiles inside,
And light it up forever,
And never go to sleep.
My best unbeaten brother,
This isn't all I see.
Oh no, I see a darkness.
Oh no, I see a darkness.
(Oh) no, I see a darkness.
Oh no, I see a darkness.
Did you know how much I love you?
Its a hope that somehow you,
Can save me from this darkness.
I am preaching this Sunday which is the 1st Sunday in Advent. The reading is from Romans 13,
"The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed. The night is nearly over; the day is almost here."
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Proust, Prayer and Memory
In his classic work on Prayer Evagrius of Pontus writes,
"When you are praying the memory brings before you either fantasies of objects from the past, or recent concerns, or the face of one who has caused you hurt."
It is well known (or at least popular history) that the final years of Proust's life were spent largely in a sound proof room in Paris where he wrote at night and slept during the day. Here he completed his metanarrative À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). I am in the final stages of reading the first of the seven volume literary cosmos Swann's Way.
Swann's Way is a meditation on memory and the sublime. Under Proust's pen every instant (every memory) is infinite. In his secluded final years memory dominated him as he wrestled with the faces of love and hurt in his monastic cell. And it was two faces that emerged; one was a young boy's mother in first half of the book and other being M. Swann's lover Odette in the second half.
I read both relationships as exploring the basic human sense of insufficiency. Being alone with your self stands as a terrifying prospect for most individuals. I am not referring to being by yourself but being alone with yourself; to travel inward and commune with what you encounter. This was Proust's journey and as Evagrius points out when you travel inward (typical language for the movement of prayer) you will encounter memory and you will encounter the wound that drives our compulsions. The beauty of Proust's life and work (as I limitedly understand it) is that this movement and intentional uncovering was his healing as his life reflects a solitary communion with self. What Proust offers us is a vision of how attentiveness in life (again typical language of contemplative prayer) opens the gratuitous (infinite?) reality of life. This did not come from fleeing his wound but allowing it to be a generative place in his thought.
Proust entertains only a sort of contemplative memory. As he begins to enter his childhood experience he realizes that he could indeed recall more factual memories of his life in Combray but these came through "an exercise of the will", his "intellectual memory". Here again we hear mystic imagery. St. John of the Cross distinguishes sharply between meditation and contemplation. We can do meditation but not so with contemplation. Contemplation is a state of reception. Proust speaks of 'willful' memory in this way.
"The pictures which that kind of memory shows us of the past preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray. To me it was in reality all dead. Permanently dead? Very possibly."
Proust is interested in living memory. This is not the end of a posture of contemplative prayer but it is the path. I will post shortly exploring Proust's most famous passage on 'living memory'.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Wilde Stuff
My local thrift store has absolute gems when it comes to used books. The money from the store goes to a reputable non-profit agency and so they don't mind asking a little more for their books as it is going to a good cause. I had to pause when I found the complete works of Oscar Wilde in an older hardcover edition, the price was $8. It was a little rich for my blood and so in order to make a sound decision I randomly flipped open the book and came across these lines in A Woman of No Importance
Mrs. Arbuthnot: Don't kiss my hands; they are cold. My heart is cold: something has broken it.
Hester: Ah, don't say that. Hearts live by being wounded. Pleasure may turn a heart to stone, riches make it callous, but sorrow - oh sorrow, cannot break it.
Well spent.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Bearing Life
Having read the recent post at Rough Theory I am offering this for consideration. I tend not to work in the specific arena of gender but I was editing a earlier post and was reflecting on the usefulness or value of gender specific (though perhaps not biologically specific) language in the service of theory and reflection.
Please comment and criticize as needed. I understand that for some of you my initial "religious" context may already be an issue (though I would continue to contend for its conceptual significance).
-
-
Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter traces the movements of conception, gestation and birth. The setting of the story is the seventeenth century in a Puritan community in New England. A newcomer, Hester Prynne has an affair with the local minister Arthur Dimmesdale. Only Hester is charged with adultery because she becomes pregnant before her husband arrives from Europe (the townspeople put two and two together). The identity of her lover, however, remains unknown to the community. In judgment on Hester the community orders that she wear a scarlet letter “A” on her chest.
In Hester Prynne the physical body carries and births their act of passion. In Rev. Dimmesdale, however, their action finds no transformative womb as is found for Hester in the birth of Pearl. In the man all remains buried and cancerous in the heart. Hester continues to live with her act through her child and on her chest. And here too the judgment of the Scarlet Letter ultimately finds fertile soil. She is drawn inward judged by the world and by herself for seven years. In those seven years we read about a “new purity” that replaces what was lost. Hester emerges, made strong by the “stern and wild” teachers of shame, despair and solitude.
Arthur is only weakened. Though he finds greater communion with the sin of the world with no child and no letter Arthur remains the model of fierce righteous preservation. Arthur has no space for conception. Historically men have received or accepted few spaces for their “sin” to be transformed, to conceive new life. Men have worked externally entrenching laws and erecting towers. What women have not already naturally bore in their bodies men have imposed on their bodies. They have carried for many the long road of transformation and new birth. It is perhaps only the monks in their cells who have hoped to find a womb from which to heal their soul.
Is more attention needed towards the historically feminine aspect of bearing?
Mother Mary bore the Messiah within her womb and she also pondered within her heart. Hester and Mary are structurally made with cells that monks seek to reside. Intellectually this carried into a reflective nature which growth and substantive expression. We find the spiritual dimension of this perhaps most fully developed in Teresa of Avila’s exploration of her Interior Castle.
In her opening discourse she writes,
I thought of the soul as resembling a castle, formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions. If we reflect, sisters, we shall see that the soul of the just man is but a paradise, in which, God tells us, He takes His delight.
Let us imagine, as I said, that there are many rooms in this castle, of which some are above, some below, others at the side; in the centre, in the very midst of them all, is the principal chamber in which God and the soul hold their most secret intercourse.
Listen then to how a man, St. John of the Cross in his Ascent of Mount Carmel, sets out on his path of communion with God.
Wherein the soul sings of the happy chance which it had in passing through the dark night of faith, in detachment and purgation of itself, to union with the Beloved.
On a dark night, Kindled in love with yearnings — oh, happy chance! —
I went forth without being observed, My house being now at rest.
In darkness and secure, By the secret ladder, disguised — oh, happy chance! —
In darkness and in concealment, My house being now at rest.
In the happy night, In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught, Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.
There is of course much that overlaps the two writers but the initial images are striking. Teresa understands implicitly that she carries a space to bear communion with God and life. John of the Cross must flee in the night to find his lover. The imagery is darkness, dislocation and passion. Though John experiences this as joy it is often not a well understood and potentially dangerous combination. There is a type of homelessness that many struggle with. This is perhaps a historically masculine experience (though of course unprejudiced in its specific expression). As I just alluded to there remains a volatile and often violent intersection of love and hate in the masculine desire for the feminine (or however one might characterize that communion). This is the rage against not having a home and not knowing how to be received as a guest (or lover). So there remains the siege of borders and staking claims though internally (and existentially) all remains in strife (I am thinking now of my recent viewing of Platoon and the internal vs. external strife explored there). There must first be a peace, and intimate communion apart from (and perhaps sometimes in response to) the judgment of the world. As Hester understood we cannot overcome the world in judgment. There must first be an acknowledgement of the home that is us and acceptance that we may be received as guests. And possibly the hope that new life is possible.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
The Poet of Ordinary
In his Letters to a Young Poet Rainer Maria Rilke rejects any notion that a poet require an "eventful life" to write good poetry.
He writes,
If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses - would you not then still have your childhood, that precious kingly possession, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention thither.
After reading this first letter of a collection of ten I turned to the other book I had with me, Marcel Proust's Swann's Way. The first 50 pages are an expansive and metaphysical/aesthetic account of his anxiety over being with his mother. Towards the end of this account he pours over a childhood experience of eating a piece of cake and tea.
He writes,
No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestions of its origin.
In an attempt to recapture this feeling he continues to eat and drink but realizes that the experience is only weakened and so concludes that,
It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself. The tea has called up in me, but does not itself understand, and can only repeat indefinitely, with a gradual loss of strength, the same testimony.
His reflection continues,
I put down my cup and examine my mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail nothing. Seek? More than that; create. It is face to face to with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.
Proust continues to trace his pursuit for a few more pages before accepting the loss of what he could not retrieve and return to the routine of the everyday at which point he receives the gift he was searching for, the memory triggered by the tea and cake.
I am beginning to recognize the real significance of poetry. There is reckless and abundant meaning in its care. You begin to suspect that every room that you enter whether physically or in mind drips with meaning and possibility and that all that can be known is there to enter into. As the quote in my header suggests,
There is another world, and it is the same as this one.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
The Space of Life II
In Hester Prynne the body carries and births the desire of the soul and act of the flesh. In Rev. Dimmesdale all remains buried and cancerous in the heart. Hester continues to live with her act through her child and on her chest. She is drawn inward judged by world and by herself for seven years. She offers only acts of survival and charity. She is emerging to me as one of the clearest examples of Protestant monasticism. Rev. Dimmesdale remains the model of fierce righteous preservation. He is the priest offering strange fire on the alter.
I am noticing more and more the aspect of feminine bearing.
Mother Mary bore the Messiah within her womb and pondered within her heart. Hester and Mary are structurally made with cells that monks seek to reside. Teresa of Avila is able to explore her Interior Castle.
In her opening discourse she writes,
I thought of the soul as resembling a castle, formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions. If we reflect, sisters, we shall see that the soul of the just man is but a paradise, in which, God tells us, He takes His delight.
Let us imagine, as I said, that there are many rooms in this castle, of which some are above, some below, others at the side; in the centre, in the very midst of them all, is the principal chamber in which God and the soul hold their most secret intercourse.
Listen then to how St. John of the Cross in his Ascent of Mount Carmel sets out on his path of communion with God.
Wherein the soul sings of the happy chance which it had in passing through the dark night of faith, in detachment and purgation of itself, to union with the Beloved.
On a dark night, Kindled in love with yearnings — oh, happy chance! —
I went forth without being observed, My house being now at rest.
In darkness and secure, By the secret ladder, disguised — oh, happy chance! —
In darkness and in concealment, My house being now at rest.
In the happy night, In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught, Without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.
There is of course much that overlaps between the two writers but the initial images are striking. Teresa understands implicitly that she carries a space to bear communion with God. John of the Cross must flee in the night to find his lover. I think these images offer great insight into reflections on gender and homelessness/homecoming.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
The Conversion
In Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis Gregor Samsa awakes from some "unsettling dreams" to find himself "changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." Gregor is now a bug and must now live out this reality. As we gather from the proceeding narrative this change was not unrelated to how he perceived himself before this occurrence both at his work and at home with his sister and parents. However, one morning things were entirely different.
It took some time to realize the similarities with the sermon I preached this past Sunday. It was on three parables (Matthew 13:44-50). The parables are about conversion and judgment. In the first two parables treasure is found. The one who finds the treasure sells all to obtain it. The third parable is about the end of the age when angels are sent out to judge between righteousness and wickedness. Kafka's work was a confirmation of the reality of conversion, a term that is almost entirely unpopular. Kafka reminds us that perhaps conversion is not a one-way street and that there may be a downward conversion or anti-conversion. Our existence is always in movement. Some conversions have been sought and received and perhaps others have been the result of a mid-life realization that one's youth and vision has been utterly replaced. If we do not place ourselves before the transcendent Giver then we will remain subject the forces of existential gravity.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Shine Like Transfiguration
I finished reading Gilead this past week. The novel records the ailing John Ames attempt to pass on a type of biography to his young son whom he conceived late in life. Much of the narrative is proverbial in nature as insights and reflections ebb and flow with little sense of overall plot development. I talked one person who stopped reading it for this reason. However, the "story" begins to emerge in the second half of the book as past reflections and present circumstances overlap. In many ways Gilead represented for me the ability of writing and reflection to bring healing through the gentle exposure of ourself to ourself. Marilynne Robinson hints at this broader image of revelation throughout her work as the pastor John Ames continually muses on the surprise of God in creation. Towards the end of the book we read,
Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing except a willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
The Weight of the Wor(l)d
While this post may be read partially in continuity with the preceding, it is specifically a supplement to Blade's recent post.
From Annie Dillard's Living by Fiction,
The most extreme, cheerful, and fantastic view of art to which I ever subscribe is one in which the art object requires no viewer or listener - no audience whatever - in order to do what it does, which is nothing less than to hold up the universe.
This is a fundamentally insane notion, which developed in my own mind from an idea of Buckminster Fuller's. Every so often I try to encourage other writers by telling them this cheerful set of thoughts; always they gaze at me absolutely appalled. Fuller's assertion was roughly to this affect: the purpose of people on earth is to counteract the tide of entropy described in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Physical things are falling apart at a terrific rate; people, on the other hand, put things together. People build bridges and cities and roads; they write music and novels and constitutions; they have ideas. That is why people are here; the universe as it were needs somebody to keep it from falling apart.
Now, for a long time I have taken this notion of Fuller's to mean something even he probably did not intend: that imaginative acts actually weigh in the balance of physical processes. Imaginative acts - even purely mental combinations, like the thought that a certain cloud represents a top hat - carry real weight in the universe. . . . A completed novel in a trunk in the attic is an order added to to the sum of the universe's order. It remakes its share of undoing. It counteracts the decaying systems, the breakdown of stars and cultures and molecules, the fraying of forms. It works."
I can't remember if that related to your post Blade but I thought it was a good quote anyhow.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Life Imitating Art
I love coming across a book where I become increasingly unconcerned about catching every detail because I realize I will need to read the book again. This realization is no commentary on the reader's inability but is praise for the density and fertile nature of the work in question. I had little to no expectation for Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when I first picked up. However, once I got past the slightly disorientating "stream of consciousness" beginning I quickly began realize that I was reading some of the most dense but accessible literature I had ever come across (which may not be saying too much).
What I have appreciated is what I perceive as Joyce's encounter with the various manifestations of the sacred in the main character Stephen Dedalaus. Stephen encounters this humbling power in his experience with religion, sexuality, and ultimately his embrace of art and beauty. Perhaps this is too much a case of the reader influencing the interpretation but Joyce speaks directly to the issues that have become extremely important to me. This is the question of transcendence and how close we can come to Reality. That is, how close we can experience something or someone without the mediation and limitations of such things as language and space as well as such human boundaries as fear, insecurity, and hatred.
For me this is where beauty and holiness find a union of expression and purpose.
Perhaps there will be more commentary to come or at least some excerpts but I can tell that this book is quickly driving to the top of "best of" literature list.
