Three's Prime

Pastime

2010-07-14T10:35:00.000-07:00

For the past three years, I’ve taken the train to go visit my family in the summer and at Christmas time. It’s a 21-hour long ride. I’ve learnt through bitter experience that it is impossible to sleep until past dawn, and then only because you’re completely knackered. There always seems to be a character on board who compulsively needs a drink of water, the restroom, a visit to the dining car or a chance to stretch their legs, regardless of the hour.

I used to pack heavy reading in my carry-on, thinking that a long ride would afford me all the time I needed to finally get to grips with ____________. But serious reading requires serious concentration, and that person in seat 31 just got up again to stomp past my seat and to open the door leading to the next train car, letting in all the noise of metal wheels clanking over metal rails.

Some time ago I struck upon a different strategy, which is to read a couple of Harlequin novels I’d bought at the grocery store the day before my trip. This plan has worked out brilliantly. I am very pleasantly distracted from my surroundings, so that when the cabin attendant kindly comes by to hand out little pillows, I barely acknowledge him : “Attends un peu, le duc Pressé est en train de foutre Mlle Volontiers….;” By the time the sun is up and we’ve crossed state lines, I am fast asleep with a bemused smile on my face.

While I’ve recycled the novels themselves, I can’t quite do away with the book covers. Instead, I’ve trimmed and pasted them on to my bedside table. Pour vous faire plaisir, j’inclus cette photo:

Proceeding from the top row to the bottom and from left to right in each case, my collection thus far includes: “One Night with a Sweet Talking Man”, “Angelo’s Captive Virgin”, “The Tutor”, “His Mistress, His Terms”, “Mr. Cavendish, I Presume”, “Twelve Gauge Guardian”, ”Unlawful Contact” and “Bedded by Blackmail”. My table is a little less than half full, and I will be traveling again. Lurid covers and amusing titles are welcome if anyone can spare the thought.

Isabel

2010-07-03T14:00:00.000-07:00

Ezra, the question with which you end your post on food reminds me of Natalie Merchant, whom I saw perform two weeks ago on the last night of the West Chester Poetry Conference in Pennsylvania. There was an interview with her in the afternoon, during which she talked about her newest album, the one she sang from. Its lyrics are all poems (mostly all old-ish) and nursery rhymes, and the melodies (she says she can write melodies till the cows come home, but lyrics kill her) are catchy and varied. I bought the CD before the concert, and haven't regretted it; I've been listening to it on repeat for weeks as I prime backings and hang paintings and clean up leftover debris in our house from the art show that I just put up. I have a number of new poems to love from that CD, though they're hard for me to read now (I want to sing them). One of my favorites is this, by Ogden Nash (written for his daughter):

Adventures of Isabel

Isabel met an enormous bear,
Isabel, Isabel, didn't care;
The bear was hungry, the bear was ravenous,
The bear's big mouth was cruel and cavernous.
The bear said, Isabel, glad to meet you,
How do, Isabel, now I'll eat you!
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry.
Isabel didn't scream or scurry.
She washed her hands and she straightened her hair up,
Then Isabel quietly ate the bear up.

Once in a night as black as pitch
Isabel met a wicked old witch.
The witch's face was cross and wrinkled,
The witch's gums with teeth were sprinkled.
Ho, ho, Isabel! the old witch crowed,
I'll turn you into an ugly toad!
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry,
Isabel didn't scream or scurry,
She showed no rage and she showed no rancor,
But she turned the witch into milk and drank her.

Isabel met a hideous giant,
Isabel continued self reliant.
The giant was hairy, the giant was horrid,
He had one eye in the middle of his forhead.
Good morning, Isabel, the giant said,
I'll grind your bones to make my bread.
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry,
Isabel didn't scream or scurry.
She nibbled the zwieback that she always fed off,
And when it was gone, she cut the giant's head off.

Isabel met a troublesome doctor,
He punched and he poked till he really shocked her.
The doctor's talk was of coughs and chills
And the doctor's satchel bulged with pills.
The doctor said unto Isabel,
Swallow this, it will make you well.
Isabel, Isabel, didn't worry,
Isabel didn't scream or scurry.
She took those pills from the pill concocter,
And Isabel calmly cured the doctor.

Merchant's inspiration for this approach to an album came in part from raising her daughter, now seven, and I am delighted with it partly because it is a creativity so rooted in passing something on to someone, for the love of it. I'm asking your question, too, Ezra; who am I going to pass things on to? Maybe partly to memorialize myself -- but also just because the things are good! And there are so many of them, and they are so worth passing on. Maybe I will still have children; but if not, I want to make sure I live a life that is intentional about passing good things on. And for the record: I like your egg-and-cheese sandwich preparation approach. With a patiently unbroken yolk and the cheese melted open-face, it might be nearly perfect.

Food

2010-06-13T22:25:00.001-07:00

One can always talk about food. One can always talk over food. One can always let oneself not-talk when one is eating.

I have just finished reading "Letter from Istanbul: The Memory Kitchen" in the April 19, 2010, New Yorker. Though I work in a restaurant, I have at no point seriously entertained making food my life. I mean that I haven't really thought about becoming a food writer, nor have I thought about pursuing any more formal training in cuisine than my current work. I'm not about to head off to culinary school, and I'm certainly not going to pursue a degree in food sociology. I won't even move to another restaurant to learn another cuisine.

And yet I am moved by the idealism of many chefs. In this case I have in mind Musa Dağdeviren, the subject of the article I've just finished. He argues that good cuisine, interesting cuisine, reflects geography (as opposed to ethnicity, e.g.). He argues that it reflects culture. His three restaurants in Istanbul serve dishes as they are made elsewhere in Turkey; and when he travels to buy gathered herbs or female turkeys, he asks people what they serve at weddings, what they serve at funerals, and so on.

These questions are part of what caught my attention. What is the scope of my own eating? I can answer easily about love for diner food and the ritual breakfasts I have with friends at different establishments, but the more revealing answer would reflect what I do in my own kitchen, even if I don't gather my own ingredients or often bake my own bread.

Tonight I melted butter in a pan and put two slices of (bought) whole wheat bread down to brown. I poured pre-shredded cheese onto the slices of bread, then put them together. I put the sandwich in my toaster oven to melt the cheese through, and in the hot little pan I fried a single egg, which I later put in the sandwich. The whole process was inelegant. I had to pry the sandwich open after melting it shut, and I wasn't patient enough with my fried egg: I accidentally broke the yolk. Yet the result was mine. No one has ever taught me to make and egg and cheese sandwich just that way.

Whom, if anyone, will I teach?

Bad Accent, Good Gag

2010-05-04T12:22:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Theresa. And no, I did not ever think this was actually Werner Herzog...

M. C. Hammer Slide, XKCD

2010-05-04T00:08:00.001-07:00

She Seemed Slightly Unnerved to Discover Me in the Trash

2010-04-29T20:20:00.000-07:00

In Oregon, the lilacs are blooming; in Ithaca it snowed two days ago. My friend Steve Froehlich told me about the snow, and added that he had been dumpster-diving in it. In response to my asking whether he’d converted to freeganism, he told me the story below. Sheryl is his wife; he himself is a Presbyterian minister, six feet tall and broad-shouldered, with a mop of reddish-brown hair and pale blue laughter-filled eyes. And Karl is a mutual friend, the perfect straight man.

“Sheryl stopped by the recycling dumpster at the apartment complex up the street yesterday morning to make a contribution on her way to work. Somehow... somehow... (talk about straining a brain to figger out)... she threw in her Garmin super watch GPS computer exercise calculator that calibrates data from her heart monitor and bicycle to create holographic charts of her workout sessions all to the accompaniment of Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto. Yes, it's expensive. Yes, she's quite attached to her little digital friend. Yes, she was undone. So, she called me from the office to explain her plight, and I immediately set out to retrieve it. It was snowing -- weird wet glooppy snowflakes that had managed to get the contents of the dumpster cold and slackered together. I saw no alternative but to get into the dumpster to look for this lost treasure. I pushed my way through cardboard and lots of other things that are not easily mistaken for paper products but were in there anyway. With the wind blowing proudly, it was like I was trapped in a windtunnel with all the trash sucked up by the wind and swirling all around me.

After an hour of unsuccessful hunting, I gave up, but not before a woman walking her dog came up to make a contribution. She seemed slightly unnerved to discover me in with the trash. When I stood up, doing my best to be cheery and nonchalant, I started to explain that we'd lost something and I was trying... but she turned and walked away before I finished -- clearly she wanted no knowledge of my presence to trouble her consciousness.

[…]

Karl is of the opinion that I now have enough chips to cash in that will last me well into next year.”

[Note to the curious: Steve went back for more systematic diving later, and after fully clearing the second corner of the dumpster, discovered the Garmin.]

Estimation, Courtesy of Monica Roundy, from XKCD

2010-04-17T12:44:00.001-07:00

Awareness and Self Awareness

2010-04-16T01:15:00.000-07:00

In the last few weeks I've engaged in several conversations with a good friend of mine about awareness or "mindfulness." We've used these terms to name one of the goals of meditation, and we might say that we both strive to be more mindful. But one of my brothers pointed out to me that this language can be empty. While we are awake, we are conscious. To be conscious is to be aware. We are only completely unaware (if at all) when we sleep. We are mindful of something all the time.

Does being "mindful" mean being mindful of everything that there is? – or of as much of that as one can be? Or should we perhaps specify the things of which we think we ought to be mindful as often or as continuously as possible?

I am with Stephanie in advocating a greater mindfulness of the pleasures available to us. Today was my birthday, and I took a variety of pleasures: I had a sense of accomplishment; I took pleasure in the company I kept; I took gustatory pleasure (paying special attention to the smells of my food and drink); I noted with pleasure the changing colors of the sky as the sun went away; and I marked a certain freedom that I felt (linked both to the day's accomplishments and to the pleasure I took in my good company) as I walked out into the evening air.

I advocate not only knowing and noting one's pleasures, but identifying and holding onto the pleasures that one imagines, whether one aims ever to achieve them or whether they are fantasy purely. In fact, I have been keeping a kind of journal of my pleasures, specifically erotic ones. This document doesn't seem especially interesting to me now, but if I reread it in a year or more, I expect to learn myself better.

A List of Pleasures

2010-04-15T13:40:00.000-07:00

Lately I have been thinking about pleasure, and have concluded that I do not take it into account enough in my decision-making. In large decisions, like "what should I do with my life?" I have made long strides toward discounting messiah-complex impulses like "I can't do that; it would be too much fun (and therefore selfish, and therefore immoral)." I now want to write and teach, not because I think I can save the world by doing those things (I can't, either that way or any other way) but because I love writing and teaching, and because I think they are worthwhile things to do, and, yes, because I have seen them have positive effects on people's lives.

If the term "gift" is a valid description of a thing I am good at, then being gifted involves a counterpart, a receiver. If no one read books (or blogs, or words) at all, if there were no students, writing would be much-changed, and teaching could not exist. The satisfaction of the gift, the pleasure of it, can't be separated from its being given and received. But in smaller decisions I am not yet wise in the value of pleasure; my lists of things to do for a day rarely make conscious choice for enjoyment. Certainly there are cases when something else supersedes seeking pleasure -- this is called discipline, and it is good. It leads in the end to a greater, deeper pleasure, or even to a good of a higher order than pleasure (say, justice). But in the absence of a legitimate reason to set pleasure aside, pleasure should be sought, I have now concluded, it ought to be sought. For it it is not the highest good there is, but nonetheless it is a real, and legitimate, and wonderful good.

Toward the end of seeking pleasure more intentionally, I propose a list of pleasures on this blog. If you are not a regular contributor and would like to add an item (or many), please drop me an e-mail or leave a comment, and we'll get your pleasures posted.

Today, from me, three pleasures of shape:

1. The fluid concreteness of the hand-carved olivewood elephant I got off a shelf at my grandmother's house, after she died, the night before the estate sale:

2. The two baby cactuses which have been sprouting valiantly ever since I carried them, wrapped in damp paper towels inside a yogurt cup with plastic wrap rubber-banded across its top, from Sarah Widercrantz's kitchen in Ithaca, NY, to my parents' house in Portland, Oregon:

3. The shape of a sunny, cool afternoon in a city full of tall pine trees, when nothing is urgent, and one has time to ride along on peaceful errands with a person one likes, sitting in the passenger seat and not counting minutes.

The Robots, courtesy of Stuart Davis

2010-04-08T17:10:00.001-07:00

Non-genre Writing and Non-Nonfiction

2010-03-18T16:20:00.000-07:00

Hannah’s 2. 22. post continues a thread on genre writing (which is to say, “non-literary” fiction) as not getting fair respect for excellence. That thread began last year in her “Tour de Bookcases,” and is sending me off into all sorts of questions. I'll start with one for today.

The idea of genre writing as inferior was certainly accepted among fiction writers in Cornell’s MFA program—"genre" was a put-down. Or at least whenever I heard it used, it sounded like that.

So the first question is: Why? And I think the fiction writers would have answered, because generally Harlequin is formulaic, and so is mystery, and so is a lot of sci-fi and fantasy. And so is a lot of what is called realism, of course, but realism does not therefore get categorically excluded from "literariness." (Maybe because if it did, there would be little left.) As I've heard the term "literary" used, it seems intended to describe writing that is non-formulaic, that challenges readers, maybe even feeds them; at any rate it does something significantly more than provide the bookish equivalent of sugar candy.

I wonder whether this exclusion of genre writing has a parallel in certain "Do not" rules taught in English classes—"do not end on prepositions" "do not use passive voice" "do not split infinitives." These rules are really about style, not grammar, and they are a shorthand that makes English teachers' lives easier: rather than having to explain "that's not graceful," they can point to the broken rule. But the downfall is that occasionally, ending on a preposition is the graceful thing; occasionally, not splitting the infinitive makes the sentence awkward. And the rule needs breaking in order to fulfill its original intent. Otherwise, to quote Churchill, ending on prepositions becomes something "up with which we will not put."

I also wonder whether the put-downs against genre writing make any interesting parallels to the put-downs against nonfiction (an unfortunate name, defined already as a lack). This article by Richard Nixon (not the president) is an insightful commentary on nonfiction as a literarily under-appreciated form of writing.

Riding Off and All That

2010-03-11T11:46:00.000-08:00

Yo Peeps,

Keats got me a little, though sorry to say, Goodie, he left you out. But tautologies don’t work so well three-way. And don’t go nitpicky, True, lovey; maybe what he said isn’t a tautology at all. But it’s reversible anyhow, so I’m a fan—and also, it takes me seriously. Shame, really, that now almost everyone referring to him makes him measure of wish-that-were-true.

Devils: sure. For being universals and transcendents, my dear family, you’re all a bit dim in the eyes. First of all, you should see his horse. No one riding Night could really be evil, as you would all know if you’d been there, and if you bothered looking animals in the eyes. Which you must—how can you live otherwise? D. has a brother, too, and we go on long walks and he says the most provocative things and can’t keep his eyes off me, but even much too far away for anyone to hear me if I screamed, I always feel safe with him. Well—safe’s the wrong word. He burns my mouth when we kiss.

Where we walk is volcanic, and the volcano is old and has gone back to sleep but the last time she blew she changed the face of this place, miles of ash, mud, miles of force become matter, and the land unable, even thirty years later, to lie still. The rocks are pale green, deep red. Everywhere are rims ready to avalanche. And yet there’s a beaver-pair damming already, there are stunted firs with deep yellow needles, there are patches of turf hanging over the edges of precipices, not letting go.

He’s the caretaker here, though I don’t see how anyone could take care of this, and when he’s with me he’s never actually doing anything other than grabbing me before I vanish over some new ledge. His name’s Justice. I guess it’s working, though: between tremors, in the breathless-smooth pools, you can count stars at night. And if you have patience for it, you can trace bullfrogs by their sound, and see them swell and boom, swell and boom.

Always,
Beauty

Tough Love

2010-03-09T08:11:00.000-08:00

Goodness,

Allow me to channel your sister Truth for a bit and be blunt. I don't want to hurt you, but you need to understand where you came from before I can answer your question.

You say that Truth would tell you that when love is elsewhere, it can't be with you. But that's exactly why I needed you, daughter. There is too much for me to do to be everywhere at once, and so I made you and your sisters with specific aspects of who I am, to try to bring part of my love to the places I am not.

You're going to ask why I left you in that tower if I wanted you to do work for me. But you're my children, darling, not my creations, so I had to let you grow up and figure out what you were supposed to be doing on your own.

Goodness isn't the highest aim. Neither is truth or beauty or joie de vivre. Love is the highest aim. Goodness that grows out of love will be happy; goodness without love can be neither happy or good. I understand you want to rebel against me, daughter, and I'm sorry to give you such a hard truth. I want you to learn to be good, and happy, because you are loving. Being good will not necessarily make you happy, but I hoped that learning to be happy could make you more loving: and therefore more good.

I chose a hard life for you when I gave you the attribute of Goodness, my dear daughter. You have fulfilled the letter of your duty admirably. You say you are crushed that you haven't done enough for me: but there will never be enough for me. I will always want more from you because I want to make you and your sisters perfect. But I will also always give you more of myself.

Love,

your mother

What's Love Got To Do With It?

2010-03-07T00:53:00.000-08:00

Dear Mom,

Of course it falls to me, the virtuous one, to respond first to your letter. But strange as it may sound, I don't have much good to say. Shall I open sarcastically by thanking you for the reminder that love has business elsewhere? That hardly seems charitable. And of course it's Truth's job to say that when love is elsewhere, it isn't here, and when it isn't here, it isn't. I'm sure she'll get around to writing pretty soon.

Will you explain to me once and for all why I've got to enjoy doing good? You foisted goodness on me, you named me, and you stipulated my duty. So I'm good now, or I'm goodness itself, but I needn't pretend to be happy. Plenty of people have imagined that doing good will make a person happy. Of course! But they are all making a big mistake: they want to motivate people to be good by promising a positive personal result; but as I know all too well, being good and being happy needn't go hand in hand. Borrowing rhetoric from the hedonists, or trying to make goodness into it's own form of hedonism ("The real pleasure is in being good...") is worse than just nonsense. It makes me look selfish, and it's degrading.

Mother, you know I do my best. But sometimes I lose track of myself. Are you honestly encouraging me to argue in order to recover my joie de vivre? And if so, are you saying that goodness isn't the highest aim, but that joie de vivre is? Are you saying that some kind of competitiveness is necessary for the good to keep going? If you are, I wish you'd named me Better, or even Best. Being good all the time is hard, and I'm crushed to find that it still isn't enough for you.

Forgive me for speaking so openly. I'm not exactly rebelling, Mother, but it's possible that I've lost my way. I'd by lying if I said that Love didn't have its hooks in me, and we all know just how confusing Love can be, especially when it's your mother.

I am, most devotedly,

Your daughter.

A Maternal Exhortation to Wayward Daughters

2010-03-01T07:08:00.000-08:00

Dearest daughters:

I'm sad to see you fighting among yourselves like this. Didn't I teach you better?

Truth, who told you to stay in that tower? Really, dear, I thought you'd have realized by now that you can't do any good if no one can hear what you have to say. Your sisters have learned that at least. Get out. See the world. Find your sisters, if you don't know what else to do.

Goodness -- it's lovely that you're helping people, but you needn't sound so self-sacrificing about it! You've learned that you need to be a doer, but you mustn't just do: you must let yourself enjoy it. It's in your nature to enjoy the work you're doing, if you'd just stop being uptight and worrying about what Truth tells you. Of course you can't win against nature and time. That's why you're needed.

Beauty, my dearest baby: couldn't you make time to visit your sisters once in a while? You look better with them than you ever could alone, you know. Bring your devilish friend; maybe if Goodness has someone to argue with she'll recover some of her joie de vivre. You were right to go gallivanting off, my dear. You were the first to realize I never meant you to stay in that tower forever, but you need to come home, at least occasionally.

I look forward to seeing you all as soon as I can get free of my business elsewhere.

Your devoted mother,

Love

Goodness To Truth, A Difficult Letter Indeed

2010-03-01T00:14:00.000-08:00

Dear Truth,

I wish I could say it was always pleasant to hear from you. Of course I miss our days together in the tower, but you always knew I couldn't be happy there, sitting around. Now, out on the barricades—why, I could almost be happy, if it weren't for your carping in my ears. This is why I haven't written until now.

Why do you hurt me this way? You tell me that I'm powerless against time and against nature. You remind me that bad will keep on happening even if I root out evil. You tell me how many people like Beauty better than me. But isn't the youngest sister always spoiled? A lot of people don't like you either, and for good reason.

You ruin happy families. You try your hardest to show your sisters up or put us down; and you do it well, with words that cut our clothing into shreds. Naked, Beauty may get by all right. But no one wants to see Goodness in the nude. I'm hard, and I'm emaciated, and I'm so good people get scared that they can never live up to me. But if you would keep quiet and let me do my work in dignity, even in disguise, I could get a lot more done and be a lot happier.

I do need you, Sister; and I do miss you when I plunge this far into battle; it is even a comfort to know that you are there, keeping the tower in order and making the books of use—

But for now, since you won't come out to help me (and I know you probably can't) I wish you would please shut up and not write to me for a while.

I love you, really I do.

Goodness

To Beauty, with Love

2010-02-26T17:08:00.000-08:00

Dear Beauty,

Maybe you never answer my letters because the address I have for you is wrong. That story the townspeople told about you riding off with the devil –- could it be they were lying? Since Goodness left, saying she can’t be herself in an armchair with books only, that she’s a doer, I haven’t heard from her either, though I’ve written to the poorhouse once a week. That’s where they said she went. And it’s not like her to ignore a letter –- you, I never know about; you always took strange fancies. But Goodness -– well, if I can’t trust her, where does that leave me?

So now I’m beginning to wonder whether this tower is the right place even for me. I dearly love these books. But they are coming to feel too small to hold me. Where are you?

Yours quizzically,
Truth

Theresa’s post on truth, beauty, devils, goodness, cookies, and Dangerous Liaisons raised all sorts of interesting questions for me, especially about beauty. If we are going to grant this classic triad of transcendent values (and for now, let’s, though that is a whole other interesting argument to have), then it seems one of the essential things about them is that each one is inherently valuable. Each is in itself worth pursuing, and needs no source outside itself to prove its value.

Another important thing about these three is that they are conceived of as a unity. In order to be ultimately good, something must be propositionally true, morally good, and perceptively beautiful. They are equal, and special, and unified, precisely because each to some extent requires the others. And so our thought-experiment, in splitting them into three persons with separate wills, is misrepresenting them a little from the get-go. Keats said truth is beauty; I’d say real truth must be beautiful, and real beauty must be true. And I’d extend this reciprocity to goodness.

There are all kinds of problems with the little missive I’ve given Truth above. For one, if she’s Truth, shouldn’t she know where Beauty is? My favorite problem, though, is the question of the trustworthiness of beauty. Can beauty lie to us? Can beauty be evil, or at least, can it be subverted and used to further ends that are evil?

This is a question that I have not heard raised in the same way with goodness and truth. Things can be made to look true, certainly, even though they are false; but this is a subversion, if anything, of reason, not a subversion of truth. No matter how it is presented or perceived, a statement is either true or it is a lie. In the same way, things can be made to look good even though they are evil, but this is hypocrisy or self-righteousness or, again, lying; it is not a subversion of goodness. And yet with beauty we think differently; when something appears attractive, or interesting, or entertaining or awe-inspiring, in spite of being unjust or untrue, we say beauty itself has been subverted to the ends of oppression or falsehood. If someone told us Truth and Goodness had run away with a dashing devil, we’d ask What have you been smoking? But when we’re told Beauty took his hand and hopped on the black stallion behind him and rode down into hell, we shake our heads sadly and say What a shame.

I think we’re wrong; I think we don’t know Beauty very well at all.

Story and Message Update

2010-02-22T07:28:00.000-08:00

I just wanted to post a quick update to this post with this link to an interesting post on genre writers and the lack of respect they get. I'm particularly struck by the idea that once a work of science fiction becomes "literature," it is no longer considered science fiction...

Truth, Beauty and the Great Cookie War

2010-02-18T14:08:00.000-08:00

But first, a fairy tale :

A long, long time ago, there were three sisters who lived together in a magnificent castle. Each morning Truth, Goodness and Beauty would ascend the stairs of the castle’s highest tower in order to do their work, away from the noisy bustle of the cooks and maids or the clamour of the townsfolk below. Ensconced in their favourite chairs in one corner of the room were Truth and Goodness, who loved nothing better than writing books, reading them or arguing about them. Sometimes Beauty would attempt to contribute a little something to the discussion, but mostly she sat by herself, delicately illuminating capitals or embroidering the book cover for a finished work. After a number of years spent in this way, she came to regard this division of labour as grossly unfair and very tedious indeed.

One morning, as the sisters climbed up the stairs, heavy manuscripts tucked under their arms, Beauty lagged behind the rest. Since, for some time now, their communal work held little interest for her, she had started to allow herself some delay on the steps so as to recoup some of the enjoyment that would be denied her later. She took great pleasure in the clear ring of her well-made shoes on the stonework, or feeling a kiss of sunlight upon her cheek coming in from the tower windows. And even though her heart was starved for admiration, it was generous enough nonetheless to marvel at the sparkle and dance of dust motes in the air.

It happened one day, while Beauty was caught in a reverie such as this, that she heard a great commotion outside. Taking a peek, she saw a splendid devil riding into town. He was dressed in black, which seemed severe, but around his cloak and boots were such exquisite detail as made him seem quite irresistibly mysterious. His noble features and straight carriage broadcast an allure only enhanced by its aloofness. The townspeople, awestruck at this apparition in their midst, cried and shouted, wailed and shrieked to capture his attention. Beauty, too, was quite enchanted. She dashed out into the street without a thought for her sisters. The crowd made way for her, subdued in an instant by her, a rival for their adoration. Young maidens, idlers, nursemaids, rugged young men, olds maids, the spindly widower and the town shrew all fell silent, watching with bated breath to see what would occur between Beauty and the devil. He, who knows how to seize a prize when he sees one, held out his hand for her. And she, feeling curiously as though she were doing him both a great favour and causing tremendous inconvenience – so tender was his concern and so perfect his solicitude- settled in behind him on his steed. Then they took off in great haste. Some say that the devil’s mount and that of his entourage grew wings and flew up to the sun. All that is certain is that Beauty was never seen in that realm again. Nor has she made any very great effort to remain in touch with her sisters. Sometimes her brief notes to them are scribbled on the devil’s private correspondence. At other times, consorting with one of his minions perhaps, she sends a post card instead. A long silence typically follows, but another letter arrives as soon after a reconciliation has been effected . It’s true, she can last for only so long without his wit and charm, qualities he possesses in such measure as she has been unable to find in anyone else. For their part, Truth and Goodness have over the years compiled a three volume response to their sister’s antics, but the tome continues to languish in a post office, unclaimed.

---------------------------

On a Saturday Tau asks me whether we can bake cookies for Sigma, whose feelings were hurt in a game she lost. If this were any other kid but the tender-hearted Tau making this request, I would see it simply as a poor ruse to score some sweet stuff. We bake the cookies, and to the children’s immense delight, it turns out that the recipe on the back of the chocolate chip packet produces an unusually high yield. At some point, against well-established protocol, Sigma sneaks more than her fair share of the first batch to emerge from the oven. Further temptation is swiftly expelled from our house as we give all but twelve of the remaining cookies away to the neighbours. Sigma will get nothing, but her siblings Ro and Tau, innocent of all wrongdoing, will each receive two cookies for dessert in the evening. Two cookies per kid per day says that this whole debacle will be over in thee days. Not so: On day 2 there is only half a cookie left in the cupboard. The investigation that follows produces depressing results: Ro, as is her way, attempts to convince me of her innocence by assuming an arch tone intended which alone is supposed to brook any disagreement. Unfortunately, her plan is flawed, because she practices, out loud, in front of all us, where to place the stress so as to hit open the most superior-sounding rendition : “ I swear I didn’t take any (ad personam ). I swear I didn’t take any (ad juram). No, I swear I didn’t take any (ad minisculam)“. Tau has nothing to declare, except the holy truth: No, she did not take any cookies. As for Sigma, let the effort to talk a triangle into a square begin: all you have to do is believe ! Her feints may not always adept, but they are delivered swiftly, like a street fighter with his back to the wall. Even as Ro and Sigma continue to irritate me with their fibbing, I find myself admiring, delighting even, in their ingenuity.

I am defending truth, they untruth, yet my stance is less adversarial than competitive. I want to prove to these kids that confessing the truth is better and more pleasing than lying. This takes a great deal of time and craft.

And Tau ? Her “yes” is her “yes” : she has neither stolen the cookies nor lied to me about stealing them. Although she is the only one to have behaved well, Tau is the one who goes to bed without dessert and with only a fraction of the attention that was paid to her sisters.

While it is perfectly possible to love all three kids equally, I am uncertain as to whether I can be equally just in my love for each of them.

-------------------------

Laclos’ Dangerous Liasons is also concerned with the unjust reward of innocent goodness. The brilliant and redoubtable Marquise de Merteuil immediately intrigues. A femme fatale in every sense, she is as dazzling as she is wicked, as wise as she is cruel and simply fascinating to watch. Her letters, and that of her equally depraved and masterful accomplice, the Vicomte de Valmont, are by far the most compelling. And their victim, the pure and virtuous Présidente de Tourvel? Valmont seduces her after an arduous campaign on his part. She loses her mind and dies shortly after in a cloister. Her writing is in no way memorable, except in the most annoying way, that of interrupting our reading about the adventures of Merteuil and Valmont.

However, a recent re-reading has made me reevaluate my stance towards the Présidente. I have been uncharitable: her beauty, that of a pure conscience and a virtuous heart, is subdued and cannot, by nature of its very consistency, appeal in the same way as the restless, spectacular machinations of the Marquise.

----------------------

The truth of a matter (someone dumped me) might be of great interest (because they found someone else) and might even set me free, as the saying goes (I can pursue a new relationship), but this is not to say that it is interesting (this scenario is common enough), or that this knowledge gives any guarantee of my happiness (unless I find someone better than my ex).

As someone who lives for stories, I am naturally allied with artifice. Parables, metaphors, analogies, grey areas, wiggle room, white lies and tales of every kind are needed to filter the Truth so that we can approach it, be puzzled, think about it some more and learn. My complaint against Truth is only this: that is too great. As an absolute, it cannot temper its harsh light, but shines regardless of whether it shrivels us in its glare.

Virtue has exactly the opposite problem: it is far too dull. All great art as well as the arc of science depends on the tension between what we ought to do and what we want to do, what we can do and what cannot do. Who can resist entering the fray and being crowned with glory? Who prefers to languish by the nearer shore, just to be called “good”?

Beauty of course is not painful to look at, nor is it boring. Instead, we want to feast our eyes on what is beautiful. Too often, Beauty is accused of being empty, pretty on the outside but mindless otherwise. The accusation is unfair : Beauty provides the mind with a necessary rest, burdens the heart with nothing else except to enjoy itself while it renews our senses.

------------------------

Truth is harsh and Virtue is monotonous. If this is the case, it hardly seems possible for them to be beautiful. Yet, as is the case in affirming the basic goodness of Man (despite much evidence to the contrary), I would rather first concede, because it is better for my soul to do so, that my palate is blunted by the taste for only one kind of beauty, which makes Truth and Virtue, by comparison, seem not nearly as attractive to me.

--------------------------

I ought to value Tau’s honesty far more greatly than the cleverness of her sisters. I had taken it for granted precisely because I can count on it. A comfort and an obedient child who makes life easier, she is overlooked. Her sisters, by contrast, are impossible to ignore: their blithe cunning is forever keeping me on my toes.

---------------------------

Dangerous Liaisons is a good book about bad people. What makes it a work of genius is the fact that evil (the Marquise, Valmont) is portrayed with such dazzling beauty, charm and a great wisdom of its own. The gentle and true-hearted Mme de Tourvel cannot impress us in the same way. She falls victim to Merteuil and the Vicomte’s vicious designs, and Laclos the author sacrifices her as well in service of the plot. A lamb and a dupe, naïve in the best possible way, the Présidente is at the subtle center of an immensely sophisticated work.

A certain brash sort of Beauty is abroad in the world, splashed across magazine covers, movie screens and television sets. She is immediately pleasing, sinking her hooks into me with simple but catchy songs, or the attraction of a witty person at the table and the lure of more pleasures to follow.

Did Beauty thus leave her sisters behind to whore with the devil? Do they still sit in their tower, with no beauty of their own, except one as stern and plain as they are? Or do they think of their sister, but for all their work, cannot discover how to dazzle as she does? Or has Beauty never absconded, but rather, because she likes nothing better than to delight, will sometimes steal out of the castle by night, to grace a good woman, or a plain-spoken man?

The Soul of Empathy

2010-02-16T20:10:00.000-08:00

Wallace Stevens makes the claim that poetry restores to us a "supreme fiction," giving us back the meaning we lost when we ceased to believe in God or practice religion. Empathy, to me, is not an activity which parallels the belief Stevens calls us to have in necessary fictions; it's not about convincing myself that I am something or someone else, but rather about being willing and able to imagine myself, temporarily, inside the other's experience (which is tricky for me with rocks, but I'm willing to try). In the moment of empathy, that imagination does precisely take the form of "I am that." But believing that I am that arthropod or that person or that machine, permanently, short-circuits empathy -- in order to function, empathy needs me to feel, as me, for another. And if empathy is going to have any ethical function, saying "I am my brother" is not going to help me navigate between my brother's needs and mine.

Though John Donne would seem agree with Ezra: "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." Donne's argument is that we are all part of the same thing, that anyone's death diminishes us because we are inseparably linked. (And he begins his meditation with an empathic experiment: hearing the bells tolling, he imagines a man whose friends have caused the bells to be tolled for him because they know he's too ill to recover, while he himself does not yet know it -- and Donne takes this further, saying, Who knows? I may be that man who is sicker than he knows; the bell may be tolling for me, though I think I am well.)

Progressing further into a dissolution of my own point, here is a poem by Mary Oliver -- who, like Ezra, goes all the way to rocks:

Some Questions You Might Ask

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?
Who has it, and who doesn't?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?

Empathy: A Thought Experiment

2010-02-16T01:05:00.000-08:00

I love the idea of there being "no inherent limits to the gulfs of otherness that empathy can bridge" (see previous post). The following is not intended as a reductio ad absurdum of the claim, but as an ethical nudge, a challenge, or a dare – unless it is simply a poem. It relies the following premise: that to empathize is to be able to say, "I am that..." and to mean it.

I am that child.
I am that man.
I am that woman.
I am that mother.
I am my neighbor.
I am my enemy.

I am that orangutan.
I am that dolphin.
I am that dog, that cat.
I am that lizard. I am that bird.
I am that mollusk.
I am that arthropod.
I am that sponge.

I am that fungus.
I am that bacterium.
I am that cell.

I am that rock.
I am that cloud.
I am that equation.

I am that plate.
I am that key.
I am that tool.
I am that program.
I am that machine.
I am that model.

I am that robot.
I am that replica of myself.

More on Empathy

2010-02-15T18:39:00.000-08:00

Ezra, in “An Empathy Problem” you ask whether we can reconcile empathy’s expansiveness with making decisions about our own survival. It seems to me that this is the central conflict in which anyone finds himself who attempts to behave morally – that identifying with someone else’s needs means setting one’s own needs aside, at least temporarily. The process of empathy in itself is not itself a process of choice; it is part of the ground for making choices. And when one’s own needs conflict with the needs of others, empathy can put one, at the extreme, in the position of having to choose between one’s own survival and the survival of another. But it seems to me that the ability not to see my own survival as a thing to be pursued at all costs is part of what it means to be human. That doesn’t mean that in every situation, others’ needs should automatically supersede mine, but the ability to feel strongly the tension between my needs and theirs is essential to any functioning communal life, and also essential if there is ever to be peace between different communities.

You also assert that “empathy cannot make a bridge to what is alien or radically different.” While it is certainly easier to identify with what is like me, and while likeness often provides an entry point into empathy toward what is other, I see empathy as being, at its core, precisely about bridging to what is alien. At its most basic, empathy is a feeling-with, a feeling-for, someone who is not me. Even those who are in my community are alien at this basic level; it’s a narrower chasm, but just as deep as the one between me and an even more radical other. And if empathy is not wholly learned, it can nonetheless be expanded or shrunk by the choices we make in living. It is a kind of emotional imagination, an ability to say “what if?” While we fail constantly at building empathic bridges, I see no inherent limits to the gulfs of otherness that empathy can bridge, if we are willing to do the imaginative work required.

Story and message

2010-02-12T09:44:00.000-08:00

A long time has passed since this post in response to some of my statements about my bookshelves. And since then, my opinion has changed.

When I wrote the original post, I still thought of myself primarily as a critic - someone who studies books. And the study of books, at least the academic study, is based on secondary characteristics. We ignore the story in order to study what it means and what's going on behind it. So philosophy seems more important than fantasy: fantasy books are based on story, and if there's a message or theme, it's secondary.

And now I will say: this is as it should be in fiction. The story should be most important, and anything else that we see in the book comes through the story.

So what's changed? In the past three months I've started writing stories of my own. I've stopped thinking of myself as a critic and started thinking of myself as a writer. I've tried to learn what makes a good story. And good stories are not driven by theme. Good stories are driven by real, confusing, inconsistent characters, who don't always make the right choices and don't always understand the choices they make. It's not a writer's job to make their characters' choices clear so that they express the 'right' philosophy. Characters take on a life of their own, and express a philosophy as they learn it through their experiences - sort of like we all do, every day.

So: mea culpa, and long live the story!

An Empathy Problem

2010-02-10T17:57:00.000-08:00

I just read Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep for either the second or third time, and I'm beginning to articulate for myself the challenges it raises to the value of empathy. Empathy makes it possible for humans in the novel to remain hopeful and productive on a post-apocalyptic and decaying Earth. Humans distribute their pain (which lessens it) and also share in each other's happiness (which enlivens everyone). As far as this goes, empathy appears as an unqualified good, a non-zero sum game; and in the novel this empathy consists literally of people sharing their emotions through an "empathy box" – a machine that allows collective participation in a religious allegory.

Furthermore empathy appears to be valuable not just for humans, but for animals, too. In the post-apocalyptic environment, with hundreds or thousands of common species very recently extinct, every animal left alive is the subject of human veneration, and empathy. P.K. Dick doesn't literalize this empathy, but he underscores its importance by making its presence a basic method for distinguishing authentic humans from the advanced artificial humanoid servants – androids – who occasionally kill their masters and try to pass as human. Bounty hunters, like the novel's hero, Rick Deckard, ask subjects to imagine and respond to scenarios that involve obvious or implicit harm to animals, and androids always fail to react with the appropriate horror. But the tests are obviously culturally coded: you and I would probably fail, too.

From here things become more complicated, because Deckard, whose job is to "retire" escaped androids, empathizes with some of them; and Deckard detests another bounty hunter, named Resch, for his lack of empathy towards the androids. In fact Deckard becomes convinced by Resch's callousness that Resch is himself an android, and when Resch tests out as human, Deckard is dismayed.

Parts of this novel simply don't cohere, as is common in P.K. Dick's oeuvre. But a generous reading of the novel has it asking this question: Can one reconcile the glorious expansiveness of empathy with making the distinctions upon which one's survival may rest? It seems to me that without a machine that permits a heterogeneous population literally to pool its emotions, people in fact empathize with other, recognizably similar beings. Empathy cannot make a bridge to what is alien or radically different, and in fact in can exacerbate feelings of alienation. When empathy is widespread, anyone left out of the loop becomes suspect, potentially the object of hatred or intense fear. If empathy is what makes "us" human, dare we embrace that humanity? Do we even have the alternative – to know the android, too?

A Video from Noam Osband

2009-12-27T23:45:00.000-08:00

This video by my high school classmate, Noam Osband, finishes with the contention that if you think about the social relations behind your produce, it will tase, "soooo much better." I love this piece. Noam himself is a phenom: his gift – and it's a magical one – is that absolutely anyone will talk to him. Some of his other videos are available here. Comments welcome.

Philly Market from Noam Osband on Vimeo.

Forgetting Who

2009-10-28T21:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was reading a short story – a work in progress by a friend. The passages that impressed me most absolutely blew me out of the water. They were so good that I forgot all about the author; I forgot my friend had written them.

This observation raises two related points about the editing process that I'd like to think about further: The first is that I read a work in progress much differently from how I read a finished or published work – and it's not the material itself, but my readerly attitude. Reading as an editor means that I can hope to influence the work, to shape it somewhat to my own desires. And so I read quite aggressively; and I keep on reworking the thing in my mind as I go. I try to get ahead of the story. I think especially hard about what every line implies, and I catch myself rereading half a sentence that appears not to make sense when if I would just read the sentence's second half, I'd see how clear it really is. How rude of me!

The second thing I'd like to think about is whether losing track of the author really is a measure of quality in the writing of fiction. Is it analogous to the quality of a performance by a famous actor during which the audience forgets who the actor really is? Yes! – say I. But also no. An author's distinctive voice can be an asset. A storyteller needn't disappear in order to tell a story well. A narratorial voice doesn't convey the guts of a story or novel in anything like the way an actor conveys the world in which she plays. It's also problematic to suggest to my writing friends that their work would be better if they didn't appear to be narrating as themselves. I can't think of a good reason this should be the case.

Ultimately (I've hardly begun this sentence, and I already know I'm getting into trouble) a reader wants to forget herself, not the author; her own reality rather than the fact of the story's being written. ("Oh, that sounds pretty good," I say.) And yet the books that have influenced me the most are those that speak to me just as I appear to myself and make me see my own world as though it is deeply tied to the one I'm reading about; a contradiction abides.

The Chinese Cauldron

2009-10-21T16:24:00.000-07:00

SECRETIVE HEART

What’s this? This is an old toolshed.
No, this is a great past love.
[Yehuda Amichai]

Heart falters, stops
before a Chinese cauldron
still good for boiling water.

It is one of a dozen or more,
it is merely iron,
it is merely old,
there is much else to see.

The few raised marks
on its belly
are useful to almost no one.

Heart looks at it a long time.
What do you see? I ask again,
but it does not answer.

Poetry is my loo reading at the moment, and it’s working well; I’m through an anthology of horse poems, Li-Young Lee’s Rose and into Jane Hirshfield’s The Lives of the Heart, where this poem stopped me, got me to re-read, read it aloud, and then hold a monologue to myself about why I love it. The monologue went something like this:

This poem describes, simultaneously, three different experiences that have made me feel isolated. They all take place in museums or places like museums, places where the primary goal is attention.

The first experience is of not being able to lose myself in anything, of feeling overwhelmed by how much there is to see, and maybe also by what I’ve paid to get in. The frustration of bouncing off the surfaces of everything around me, and getting more and more irritable and harried, can be exacerbated by a companion who’s been caught and stopped by something. Then I am like a three-year-old child: Stop looking at that. Look at me. Mommy, let’s go. I want to join in the absorption, but the only questions I can think of are ones that attack the object of absorption, that list all its unremarkablenesses. “It is one of a dozen or more, / it is merely iron, / it is merely old, / there is much else to see.”

The second and third experiences are similar. One is losing myself in something and being asked to explain it, and either growing tongue-tied or sullen, depending on the questioner, or hearing my mouth give out words while an inside part of me says “What in God’s name are you talking about? That isn’t at all what attracts you. And it’s not even true.” Then I am like the heart in Hirshfield’s poem, either unwilling or unable to answer.

The last is losing myself in something and being alone. It is the experience the poem most directly describes, the most mysterious of the three. In that case, I am the absorbed one and the bouncing-off one at once, the heart and its questioner saying “Why this?”

I see the epigraph as an answer to that question: because this thing means more than can be empirically or pragmatically determined. In this case, the toolshed and the cauldron both mean love, mean long years of work and handling, someone’s devotion.

Re: Poets vs. Critics, part II

2009-10-09T08:02:00.000-07:00

I'm going to respond briefly to Ezra's arguments against my poets/critics distinction. I hope to show how our positions differ, but also that we are not in as much disagreement as he suggests.

On the question of what poetry is: as a literary theorist, I first have to insist that poetry, the kind that critics study, is primarily an artifact of language. Poetry is a particular form of language. From a Formalist viewpoint, it is language that is at some level talking about itself, whatever else it may be about.

This description is somewhat disingenuous in the context of my previous post, however, since I was using poetry metaphorically (as I think Ezra does in his response) to describe a number of different actions and expressions. In that wider sense, I agree with Ezra that poetry is "a quality of grace…a kind of victory." This is the more general creative impulse that I group under the name "poetry" in my post.

On to the question of whether poetry is "a mixture of critical and aesthetic focus," whether "every good work of art practices criticism." I want to clarify, first, that I am not using criticism to describe the practice of evaluation, but rather a practice of organization. That said, I appreciate Ezra's argument that poetry practices criticism of the world. Much poetry is undoubtedly a practice of organization of features of the world; an attempt to understand and explain it.

Perhaps the distinction I'm trying to make is more between the particular and the universal. In my experience, creative work explains the world in terms of a particular event, a particular description, a particular instance. The work I would call criticism tries to draw generalities from the works of art. (Works of poetry can perform criticism by expressing generalities as well, but I think it is less common.) I think the difference in focus, on generalizing or explaining creatively by example, is more important to the distinction than whether a work is a "poem" or not.

How Do Seasons Work?

2009-10-08T23:16:00.000-07:00

We all agree that the seasons follow each other: spring comes after winter, summer after spring, then fall, then winter again. We're also familiar with a sense of uncertainty about the transitional periods. After Monday's cold weather I thought, "Fall has definitely begun." But what on earth did I mean? Fall began when the calendar said so, which is also to say with the arrival of autumnal equinox, didn't it? And if it didn't, then I was probably wrong on Monday, because Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday were beautifully warm, even if leaves in striking yellows and reds were everywhere on the ground.

My question is simply whether season transform one into another or replace each other (or both). Are they sets of astronomical conditions? Atmospheric conditions? Subjective human experiences? And again strangely – from the perspective of philosophy of language – they seem to ride a line between proper nouns and common ones.

Autumn, Winter, Spring – Summer subsists on them all then lends back her warmth.

re: Riding Bareback

2009-10-08T22:52:00.000-07:00

I'm surprised by Stephanie's characterization of Julie Brown's view of language ("I don’t believe communication is ultimately possible. But I believe it’s necessary to live as though it were.") as a statement of faith. What faith does the statement evince? It disavows faith in the possibility of communication. A comparable statement that showed faith might read, "I don't believe communication should ultimately be possible: it seems riddled with failure – and yet we do communicate." That would show faith in the existence of communication, whereas if Julie's statement shows faith, it must be in some form of human resilience, in our ability and continued willingness to behave as though we are communicating when really we aren't!

That said, I too am drawn to W. Bynner's "Horses." I'm not sure whether the poem works as a metaphor for words as signs, but it definitely has something interesting to say as a metaphor about words and their meanings. Let's take it apart carefully:

"Words are hoops," and, we as word-users, are like trained dogs or seals, or like anything that leaps through hoops. Pets leap through hoops in order to be rewarded. People leap through figurative hoops in order to get ahead. So catching meaning, or making meaning, is a reward or a success. So far the poem seems encouraging enough: to get ahead and get meaning (perhaps to communicate), we have to leap through the hoops of words. This devalues the word itself (just a hoop to jump through) and puts the weight appropriately enough on the meaning. Great! If I want to mean, now I know what to do.

But it's more complicated than this. Meanings, the metaphor says, "are horses' backs / Bare, moving." Hard not to think at once of the beauty of a barebacked horse in motion. So these valuable things we leap upon are beautiful, too. Excellent. But what is bare is vulnerable; and what is moving is hard to hold. The horse in this metaphor might be unbroken, even wild.

Words may be the way to leap upon such brilliant things as meanings, but we are leaping to a moving target, and the poem doesn't promise that we'll always land on the horse's back. It just tells us that the way there is through words. Meaning becomes beautiful, but very likely alterable and difficult to catch.

None of this addresses Stephanie's insight that this poem has something to say about subjectivity. What it says depends upon how we reading the barebacked, moving horse. If the motion is constant and inevitable, meanings must be somehow temporary – subjective even if we all (all the subjects) agree for the time being and communicate successfully. What if meanings move unpredictably, like bucking broncos? We might catch meanings only for ourselves, and sometimes it certainly feels that way. But then again, we might sometimes catch and bridle meanings once we've jumped onto them through hoops. Maybe we can all ride meanings easily into the sunset, beautifully, certainly, and with no possibility of a hangman's posse on our trail.

re: Poets vs. Critics

2009-10-08T22:23:00.000-07:00

I find a lot to argue with in Hannah's post, "Poets vs. Critics." I suppose one might look at the following comments as an instance of the poet trying to take a critic to task. But in fact I want to attack the distinction, and not the critic at all.

I approach from two angles. First I want to claim that every good poem and every good work of art practices criticism – not of itself (so the poet is not necessarily a literary critic) but of some feature or bug of the world itself: a structure, a pattern, a piece of chaos, a failure. Second, I suggest that poetry is something other than all the things that are poems, taken collectively.

We speak of poetry in physical movement, in the changing of the seasons, and in a thousand other places. Poetry is not poems, though good poems are usually poetry. Think of poetry as a quality of grace; think of poetry as a kind of victory; think of poetry as a lovely mixture of critical and aesthetic focus – critical and aesthetic success.

That is poetry.

Riding Bareback

2009-10-08T14:14:00.000-07:00

HORSES
[Witter Bynner]

Words are hoops
Through which to leap upon meanings,
Which are horses’ backs,
Bare, moving.

I love this poem for several reasons.

One: It is about horses. Or at least, has horses in it, and the writer has captured something of how horses move, and of what it feels like to ride bareback.

Two: It is a wise poem, in its laconic brevity. There is an authority in the description here that has to do with being willing to say one thing, precisely; one thing, not everything.

Three: The lineation. Each line is a simple, compelling statement, which builds on the previous thought but adds something distinctly new. Each line, in fact, has the quality good story endings are supposed to have, of feeling surprising yet inevitable.

Four: I read the whole poem as a metaphor for words as signs, for the relationship between signifier (word) and signified (meaning). Its brevity works for it here, too, in that it shapes the image, in four strokes, and leaves it there. In the debate over whether words have anything like an objective meaning, what I find interesting is the tension. Common sense seems to demand an acceptance, simultaneously, of both extremes: Words clearly do not mean the same thing to each subjective person, and the possible slippage, and failure in transfer of meaning, has no limits; and yet in experience there are moments, both mundane ones and transcendent ones, when words make that leap and land, against all the odds, on meaning. Julie Brown, a poet-critic friend, put another view of the paradox to me once: “I don’t believe communication is ultimately possible. But I believe it’s necessary to live as though it were.” Her faith here reminds me of the two central claims of Christianity, which are both unresolvable paradoxes: God is three, yet one. Christ is fully human, fully God. The orthodox creeds assert both extremes without seeking logical resolution. Similarly, the taut physicality of Bynner’s bareback metaphor, the leap that is at its center, rides the central paradox of what human words are capable and incapable of doing, and being, in the world.

Poets vs. Critics

2009-10-05T12:11:00.000-07:00

When Stephanie asked me to join the conversation on this blog, I was nervous to be writing with two “real writers.” I don’t consider myself a writer, in the creative sense. Through my education, I have focused on analytical writing and criticism. Instead of being a poet, I became a critic.

Let me explain the distinction that I draw between “poets” and “critics,” which I think applies outside of the realm of literature as well. A poet is someone who creates. Writing poetry is an inherently creative process. The poet makes something from nothing. (After all, the words “poet,” “poetry,” and “poem” come from the word for “to make.”)

The critic, on the other hand, describes the work written by the poets. The critic’s job is to categorize: to find similarities between the work of different artists and determine a “school,” or to understand the underlying processes that make the poet’s work “work.” As a critic, I am interested in understanding poetry as a whole, not just the expression of an individual poem. Of course, poetry consists of poems, so in order to generalize about poetry one must carefully study the individual works.

The poet creates; the critic categorizes and explains. I don’t think this distinction is only applicable to the criticism of poetry. Criticism seems like more of a science; poetry, more of an art. Consider the work of mathematicians, however. While the study of math in classes is focused on generalizing, and you understand new mathematical concepts by analogy with concepts you already know (working in a “scientific” manner, like a critic), the practice of research in math is a creative process. The research mathematician chooses a particular area to focus on, and studies that area, trying to understand/invent interesting properties it has. (There is often discussion among mathematicians of whether math research is a process of discovering things that already exist, or of creating them. While I tend to sit on the "discovery" side of the fence, there is no question that the act of discovery can feel a lot like the act of creation, as inspiration often has to strike essentially out of the blue.)

The distinction is not complete: poets benefit from understanding general principles of the form in which they work (by doing critical work), while critics can write poetry (although my poetry, at least, is often more informed by my understanding of poetic form than any essential inspiration). In many studies, however, it seems that the work can be divided up between the creative and the critical. What would it mean to bridge that divide? Is such a synthesis something that would improve our understanding and production of art, or is it better for artists and critics to specialize?

The Tour de Bookcases

2009-09-30T08:01:00.000-07:00

I got married two months ago, and moved into my first home with my husband two weeks later. When we moved, we decided – in our first big step as a married couple! – to combine our books. This act of combination is one of the most visible signs of our married state. Whenever I walk past a bookshelf, I see my books mixed in with his – divided by topic and subject, rather than putative ownership. Of course, the previous sentence shows the unfamiliarity of this state to me: I still refer to “my books” and “his books” rather than simply “ours.” We have kept all the duplicate copies of books that we own – how could we get rid of a copy that one of us feels an attachment to? The books that we brought into this marriage hold memories. The cheap paperback copies of “The Lord of the Rings” are the ones in which I first discovered the magic of Tolkien’s stories. The textbooks each mark an important moment in our college experiences. My books hold memories from my life that my husband cannot share, so they must be in some sense “mine” not “ours.”

But the books are nonetheless combined on the shelves. A brief tour of the books in our (small, one-bedroom) apartment:

Shelves in the living room hold hymnals and books of religion and philosophy. They contain amusing juxtapositions of content: the Qur’an sits by the Marx–Engels Reader; the Bhagavad-Gita two shelves above the Hebrew dictionary.

Elsewhere: books of music theory and history, from my husband’s college coursework, tucked onto a bottom shelf next to the stereo, and a small shelf of cookbooks tucked next to the kitchen. In the hallway, the “work” books (mathematics and literary theory); in the bedroom, the novels (mostly fantasy).

Our books describe us: they expose our studies, our interests, our values. They also expose the values we think we should project: there is a reason the religion and philosophy books are in the living room and the fantasy novels in the bedroom. While I am a great believer in the importance of fantasy and fairy-tales, putting those books in the living room would make me feel a need to explain them to all of our guests: “Yes, these are children’s books. They are ‘easy’ to read; they don’t have the weight of tradition. Yes, they are escapist. But is that so wrong?” I love the novels I read, but I am still somewhat embarrassed by them. I don’t read them to discover fundamental truths about the world, but simply for entertainment. The religion and philosophy books, on the other hand, are in the living room to convey, “We are Christians. We are proud of our faith, and want you to know about it. But we are also thinkers. We read and study and learn. Our faith is intellectual, as well as evangelical.”

The combining of our books mirrors the combining of our lives. Our shared values allow us to combine our books, to decide what image we want to project from our library. I don’t want to sound like a sappy newlywed (although I am one), but one of the joys of marriage is illustrated by the enlightenment that comes from juxtaposing books that come from different homes on a single shelf. These books have more to say together than apart.

On Roses and Poesy

2009-09-28T22:45:00.000-07:00

The third line of “Moses supposes” puzzled me at first. I always imagined that "posies" were themselves a kind of flower, and I’d only encountered the word in another nursery rhyme, "Ring around the rosie, / A pocket full of posies..." A posy is "a small bunch of flowers," as my computer's Oxford American Dictionary tells me.

Imagine my joy in finding, as I kept reading the entry, that an archaic meaning of “posy” is “a short motto or line of verse inscribed inside a ring.” Moved to consult the Oxford English Dictionary online, I found further that “posy” was originally a variant of “poesy,” so that a bunch of flowers and “a poetic composition” (1.a.) or “poetic expression” (1.b.) shared a location in the language.

They shared a word. I was tempted to write that a bunch of flowers and poetic expression were once, somehow, the same thing, but this obviously not the right way to talk about a word with many meanings. I wonder whether the metaphor I’ve chosen – a location in the language – shows any promise at all.

Geniuses and Daemons and TED

2009-09-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Gilbert, of Eat, Pray, Love fame, spoke at TED, which I highly recommend generally; the acronym stands for "Technology, Entertainment, Design," but they interpret these fields loosely and host fascinating, brief (15-20 min.) talks on things ranging from "6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World," (which features biologist Paul Stamets describing how to use fungi to turn oil spills into fertile organic matter, and to kill termites) to Billy Graham on human failure.

Elizabeth Gilbert's talk is about creatively surviving the success of her memoir by going back to the Roman understanding of "genius" as a spirit residing outside humans, rather than as a momentously gifted human. Even if it weren't insightful on other counts, the talk would be worth listening to just for the stories she tells about musician Tom Waits' and poet Ruth Stone's creative processes.

Delightful Errors

2009-09-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

Inaugurating the Weekly Rhyme:

“Moses supposes his toeses are roses
But Moses supposes erroneously;
Nobody’s toeses are posies of roses
As Moses supposes his toeses to be.”

[from The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, assembled by Iona and Peter Opie]

I’m not much for baby talk; usually I find it annoying. This rhyme redeems itself for me at the end of the second line, where “erroneously” plunks down like a full professional architect’s blueprint in the middle of a toddler’s collapsed pile of colored blocks. The word “erroneously” tickles me pink for its spot-on match in rhythm, mostly-match in sound, and its total mismatch in diction: The whole rhyme is in dactyls (stress unstress unstress: MOses supPOses his TOEses), and “erroneously” doesn’t miss a rhythmic beat. The sounds are mostly long “o” vowels and short “eh” sounds, with the occasional “ee” sound. “Erroneously” matches perfectly in vowels, but the most common consonant is “s”; the “r” and “n” in “erroneously” are not repeated anywhere else in the poem, except for the “n” in “Nobody.” But the word really diverges from the rest of the rhyme in diction: “erroneously” does not belong with “toeses.” This contrast is a kind of internal mockery of the rhyme’s own use of baby talk. And with that five-syllable word echoing in my mind, the two last lines, explaining Moses’ error in words that rhyme with “toeses,” are a delightful continuation of the joke.

Art Collector's Doorway

2009-09-18T19:42:00.000-07:00

Santa Fe, July 2009

Another Kind of Day by Day

2009-09-14T22:16:00.000-07:00

I'm in one of those small streaks of writing that makes me a writer. I mean simply that I actually am writing: for each of the past several days I've worked on the script that is my main project, a play called "Ghost." I'm once again thinking about time scales. There's the question of how many minutes of theatre I've so far orchestrated; the question of how much time has passed in the world of the play; there are the days of my composition ("several"), but there are also the minutes and hours I've spent sitting in front of my computer, adding word after word to the document; then, too, there is the time I've devoted to thinking about the play and its characters when I'm not actually writing.

Is there an insight here? Is there something to say about the time scales that fold over themselves as we live? Do writers grapple with these multiple scales more than other artists? more than non-artists? And is sensitivity to time something one should – or can – value?

I suspect I'd rather have a clear sense of timing than a clear sense of time, or of time's complexities. In chess, which I've been playing a lot of in between my bouts with words, the clock often matters, but one can improve one's game much more by thinking clearly through the order of moves in one's plan of attack than by trying, somehow, to think faster. "Think fast," says someone who teases you and then either does or does not throw you something. But the person who says "Think fast" usually tests your reflexes or catches you thinking too much. An alternative imperative, "Think hard!" does not invoke time so explicitly, but if one says it seriously, one usually means, "Slow down; take stock; consider before you act." I find it a little bit frustrating that neither of these injunctions applies to my writing, to my being a writer. To think fast, I'd have to rely on something like a writing reflex – and wouldn't it be nice if I had one; and to think hard I'd have to postpone the work itself. "Write!" I tell myself, "Think!" – compact imperatives that leave the time scales up in the air.

The Joyous Pigeon Man

2009-09-05T15:25:00.001-07:00

Trafalgar Square, June 2009

One Day at a Time

2009-08-30T15:47:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me only in reading the post of 8.13.09 that "journalism," etymologically, is a daily practice. Stephanie writes, "I wonder whether it is possible to practice journalism that is not so much about hunting down stories as about knowing a place and community and cultural reality deeply, so that one can speak intelligently and even wisely about it even if nothing ‘news-worthy’ is happening there." I am inclined to reply, "Yes! Journalism can be precisely itself by knowing and noting the daily life of a people or a place. Journalism isn’t the same as news, and it can go on productively (fruitfully? more on that another time) when there is no news at all.”

But this reply is too simple, or maybe just wrong. It seems to me that “journalism,” used colloquially, includes all of the following: the news, what we call features, human interest, exposé, and opinion. There are probably other subgenres I’m not thinking of. If this is right, then my idea that journalism can be “precisely itself” looks misleading and absurd. At the same time, I think I’ve stumbled on one of the valuable features of the journal, which of course has the same etymology.

For all the difficulty I have defining journalism, it still seems opposed to the journal in one clear way. While the news elements of journalism can operate on the very limited time scale of the day, as in “day after day” – while they should consist primarily of reportage – the other kinds of journalism I’ve mentioned all strive to build coherent and compelling narratives from events that follow one after another without, in fact, being part of a story. It is the news that resembles the journal, while the other forms of journalism represent the powerful human impulse to impose a story pattern (beginning, middle, and end, say) on unpatterned, unauthored occurences. Journals can be compelling because when we reread them, they force us out of the narratives we’ve constructed. They drop us back into what I’ll call the diurnal mode. They call our attention to the facts of a day, and simultaneously they remind us of the fact that we’ve incorporated those facts, fictionally, into a story of a life.

To return to Stephanie's question: we can practice journalism both by hunting down stories that other people have already shaped or rough-hewn, or we can rely on our own immersion in a place, community, or cultural-reality – and write stories that are therefore more totally our own. They may be wiser, but they also may be no more true.

Products and Fruits

2009-08-18T12:56:00.000-07:00

Farmers depend on the sky. Even if irrigation can mitigate the effects of a short drought, hail will ruin a crop of ripe wheat. An early warm spell can trick trees into budding, and the frost that follows can destroy whole years of apples, cherries, pears. In June and July and August and September, when the harvest should be, there will be leaves that look chewed and brown-edged. Apples are hardy and so there will be some apples, but not many, and they’ll be misshapen, with dry brown spots like anti-tumors, where growth seems to have been sucked in, stunted.

Productivity is a machine word; fruitfulness is a plant word. Several years ago I heard a sermon on the difference between them. It is the difference between factory and farm, a difference we’ve been trying to eradicate with pesticides and fertilizers and ever-larger machines. But we can’t get rid of weather. And so farmers either stop farming, or they work hard and develop that horizon-watching squint. You can sow, plow, plant, you can water till the well runs dry. You can do everything right, weed, find tricks to keep crows away from the kernels. And in the end it takes not even a tornado, nothing so dramatic, to kill what was alive, or to render it unharvestable. In Dakota, in a chapter called “Rain,” Kathleen Norris writes that on a hot day, in the afternoon, light rain can burn wheat. Or a long rain at harvest can make cut wheat sprout, and ruin it for sale. It doesn’t even take hail; just wind and a downpour can leave huge swathes clubbed, plastered so flat to the ground no combine can reach them.

Factories are affected by weather too, literally and figuratively: floods and earthquakes, economic swings, consumer fads. And yet their roofs and bright lights, their large paved parking lots, their linoleum or concrete floors and white walls, all block out the sky and the earth, and make horizon-watching difficult at best.

There is an essential humility missing when we call our activity “productivity,” a narrowing of focus that leaves out the scope of the world beyond us, as though this one productive process can be sealed off from the mess and disaster and glory of seasons, oceans, famines, wars, elections, death, birth. “Bearing fruit,” by contrast, is as much something that happens to us as something we do. Bearing children (the most literally, physically fruitful thing a human body can do) is a good example: women are constantly becoming pregnant when they don’t want to, or failing to conceive though they desperately want to. And the changes of pregnancy happen, like the apple blossom turning into fruit. They often include humiliating changes—throwing up, exhaustion, becoming cumbersome, and weepy, and overwhelmed by everything from smells to birdsong. You can practice breathing exercises and birthing techniques, but the contractions will hit when they hit, and you’ll have to take them for as long as they last. You don’t set the time or the duration. It may be like getting hit by a truck. It may be like running five marathons. Or, God help you, both.

Beforehand, we say “she’s having a baby,” but while it’s happening we name the process: pregnancy, giving birth. “Productivity” is a process named after the thing that exists when the assembly line has attached all the parts and sprayed on the last coat of lacquer. The people I know who have worked on assembly lines tell me they are spirit-killing places, that their repetitive action denies what it is to be human at every level, from the body on out. This is true even if no limbs are lost; there is physical, psychic, spiritual danger in making a body do only one action, again and again.

There is also an awkward, machine-y dancing quality to assembly lines in some documentary films. Maybe the “ivity” in “productivity” applies to this dance. There is a mystery in the dance of factory processes that is usually not what I mean when I call something “productive.” It’s the mystery of things-working-together, of whole-that-is-more-than-its-parts. And maybe it is the same mystery that is at work in a hydroponic tomato, grown in a trough of water in a hothouse—which is the same mystery at work in a Sungold cherry tomato bush lovingly tended in a small plot: the wondrous fact of a tomato’s ripening. A plain red-and-green apple (as Chesterton points out in Orthodoxy) has something in common with the golden apple in the fairy tale. And I’d add, with Apple products at their best, elegant in the way of mathematical formulas boiled down to their simple, graceful bones. Even when we can describe the chemical processes (the little machines) that fertilize the bud and let the fruit bulb ripen, producing sugars and juice and a blush on the skin, a fruit (and the part of technology that is usefulness and dance at once) reminds us that we lack the language, the science, the understanding, to explain what makes life alive. And so does technology when it is, at the same time, usefulness and dance.

Standing in the Kitchen

2009-08-17T01:37:00.000-07:00

I work at Maxie’s Supper Club, one of Ithaca, NY’s, fine eating establishments, and I love what I do there. Every step of the way I can see what I’m accomplishing in a way that rivals – and sometimes surpasses – the pleasure of seeing word follow word onto a page. The words need work, are never done. But when we “sell” a crab cake platter (put it up for the servers to deliver to the customer), my part is done, and in a few minutes it’ll be eaten, finished, gone.

I’m new at Maxie’s, and I’m training. At some point during every shift one of my managers will say, “Ezra, you hungry?” By now they’ve heard me say a few times, “Don’t ask me that. I’m always hungry!” But my manager is telling me it’s a good time to take a break and order dinner from the kitchen.

Every time I face the decision of what to eat, I freeze up for a moment unless I’ve planned an order in advance; but I love the menu, and I love the feeling of plenty that comes from standing in the well stocked walk-in cooler, dipping into a five-gallon tub of flour or cornmeal, or watching plate after plate come off the line. Today for the first time I actually fried some of my own dinner, a horseradish potato cake. It sat under a rare tuna steak in a slightly sweet glaze, and the whole thing was delicious.

Late tonight, a couple of hours after I’d helped close and clean the line at Maxie’s, I stood in my own kitchen, thinking about a snack. How could I apply what I’ve learned about cooking at the restaurant to my own space? What could I fix for myself? In a flash I envisioned the whole Maxie's setup that is already becoming familiar to me and will soon be second nature (and second home). “Man, I should fry up some green tomatoes,” I almost thought. But it would require a shopping run. It would take an hour. It would be, let's face it, a project.

My freezer is full and my pantry is overflowing; I have a range of spices, and I have a good stove, a nice pan, pots, and so on. But the feelings of plenty and simplicity that the Maxie’s kitchen now offers elude me at home, because the simplicity and totality of the Maxie’s stock presupposes constant and massive turnover; in a word, volume. (Of course, the simplicity at Maxie's is an illusion that hangs on complex provisions management, but I’m still fairly removed from the stock lists, prep lists, and organizational aspects.) As I stood alone in my kitchen at one in the morning, trying to find a snack I both wanted and could extract from my own ingredients, I felt a gulf open between what I’m learning to do and what it would take to do it on my own.

In this way cooking is like writing. It’s one thing to cook for others in a fully stocked and professionally equipped space, to serve up surprising and tasty hot food, carefully done, in a few minutes. This is like editing, or teaching writing, or even just writing for others: “You want a paper on the symbolism of the green tomato? I’ll have it for you in the morning.” But writing for oneself is like looking in one’s own full, familiar pantry and wondering whether anything there will be good.

Berlin Wall

2009-08-13T13:44:00.000-07:00

Berlin Revisited: Photographs by Brian Harris

Berlin, 1989 to 2009

The Economist has a sister magazine called Intelligent Life. In their web publication, I just found this brief photo essay. Seeing pieces like this makes me want to be a journalist: to have been there in 1989, photographing, and to be back in 2009, following up, with an eyewitness sense of what has happened on the ground under my feet. It also makes me realize, though, that while there's luck involved in being in the right place at the right time, good journalism is a serious commitment involving just being there for a long time, in lots of different theres or in one, patiently, with one's eyes open and often very little payoff. In fact, I wonder whether it is possible to practice journalism that is not so much about hunting down stories as about knowing a place and community and cultural reality deeply, so that one can speak intelligently and even wisely about it even if nothing "news-worthy" is happening there.

Which would make journalism much like writing in general: inspiration can't often be scheduled, but "showing up" (whether at a writing desk or camera, or in front of a book, or just by being present to your surroundings with your eyes and brain and pores open) is like maintaining an address where inspiration will know how to reach you. (This is my re-statement of an observation given by so many writers in so many versions that I don't know whom to cite. Somerset Maugham's: "I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.")

Salem, 1989

I am in the middle of the small living room. It has pale blue carpet and the walls are cluttered with pictures and shelves. In the corner there is a small TV, and the adults are clustered around it. The TV’s colors are like the colors of the room: bland, slightly bluish. It is a crowd: blurred crowd noise, blurred crowd colors. There are so many faces I can’t even make out separate heads and shoulders in the glimpses I get of the TV between the heads of my parents and my aunt and uncle. Something, I know, is happening, a category of thing that has not happened before in my memory. They are riveted, but they are not cheering. They are talking in low voices. My parents watch sports, but not with this kind of attention, and not this quietly. And there is no little yellow ball on this screen; nothing, in fact, seems to be happening.

“And to imagine this is happening now, the first time in years we’ve been out of the country for more than two months…” my dad’s voice is wry, half laughing, but also half embarrassed at the thought. And his tone is abstracted, as though he’s not actually present with the words, as though they are drawn out of him while he’s not paying attention—as though his mind needs his voice to make a foundation of sound, to give it something to stand on.

Gun Hill

2009-08-11T12:03:00.000-07:00

In Ithaca, the hill I walked up in the morning to school, and down in the evening, is called Gun Hill. It’s named that for the enormous hulk of disused factory which sat (until this past spring) across the street from glossy apartment buildings like a transplanted piece of inner-city Detroit. I loved the building since I first saw it for its scarred face. Ithaca Guns were made there, and since production was moved away, the empty building sat on prime real estate, glowering out over Lake Cayuga, untouchable because the lead content in the building and the plot around it were so high there that no one could afford to tear it down and decontaminate the land. They figured something out, apparently, because a developer put up signs for more brick apartments, and a wrecking crew tore the building limb from limb; first the windows, then the walls, then the pillars with their steel supporting cores. When I left town, there were twin heaps of rubble under big tarps, like a massive deformed bikini top. I think the tarps were meant to keep the lead dust down.

It was fall when the building first stopped me dead in my tracks, on the way down the hill in the late afternoon—through the third-floor corner window, I could see all the way down onto the lake, bright as molten metal. The whole top corner of the building was a burning eye. On clear days I began timing my descent in hopes of catching that moment of light. I sat in front of the factory. I photographed it. I painted it. I tried to write it into a poem.

The chain-link fence around the building is (this should all be past tense but it still feels present) too easy to climb to deter anyone able-bodied and curious. The building’s insides are tattooed, painted, crusted with graffiti—stencils of the face of Edgar Allan Poe, “FATE” in black over doorways, huge rainbow bubble-words battling each other in the main ground-floor hall; on the third floor, on a patch of otherwise unmarked drywall, there are three elegant simple cartoons, and in a small side room, a whole wall lettered in hot pink French reminiscent of Rimbaud, about a fish going over a waterfall.

Two years later I’m still working on the poem. It’s nine pages long and counting. The window-eye, I’ve realized, is like the left eye of Christ in the Pantocrator icon from St. Catherine’s in Sinai. Even when I saw it first in grainy photocopy, that icon’s divided face stopped me, unsettled me, just as the factory did. Both the icon and the factory were embodiments, to me, of the connection between beauty and sorrow that Makoto Fujimura describes as the central tenet of the 15th-century Japanese aesthetic movement called mono no aware, “beauty in the pathos of things.”

Knowing What's Coming

2009-08-11T11:13:00.000-07:00

We are familiar with the sensation that an unmentioned event or idea is hanging over a conversation, a movie, or a piece of writing. Perhaps we often feel that omitting the real topic is counterproductive, coy, or simple easy; but I’ve just finished William Styron’s fantastic story, “Rat Beach” (The New Yorker, July 20, 2009), which perfectly uses this tactic of omission.

Set in the Pacific in the late days of WWII, “Rat Beach” explicitly addresses its narrator’s fear, having by luck escaped the carnage of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, of having to lead his men in an amphibious attack on Japan. Styron brings this fear to life and carries us along as the anonymous second lieutenant finds ways of easing his fear temporarily, but finally has recourse to the comfort of planning his own suicide before he would have to face the test of battle.

From the moment that Styron identifies the event that his narrator fears, however, we see that the fear will never come to pass. “But President Truman approved the atomic strikes,” we remind ourselves. “Japan surrendered unconditionally without the amphibious assault that fills this second lieutenant with such dread.” And this is essential to the functioning of “Rat Beach” for two reasons: First, our knowing the resolution to the larger conflict prevents our feeling abandoned when the story ends with the officer’s private resolution, rather than with his finally confronting (or fatally eluding) his fear. Second, that knowledge gives the story a wholly different depth by letting us read it as an account of a life saved by the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don’t mean that the story would be shallow without this content. Rather than calling this a new layer of depth, I suggest the analogy of a second ocean of meaning that “Rat Beach” borders.

The device of relying upon an unmentioned fact, though, also suggests a direction for experimentation (I mean in my own writing and thinking). In a story of a different genre and with different aims—a kind of science fiction, perhaps—Styron might have surprised us by bringing this character, apparently safe from his named fears, into contact with them after all. Perhaps this is part of the work that Philip Roth does in a book like The Plot Against America, but I am envisioning a more tightly honed piece that operates by the realization of an historically averted event, or the narrative deletion of an event that the reader will understand to be on its way.