The Russian Soul Rises

Boris Pasternak had worked on it for half of his life. When Boris Pasternak handed a secret copy of his sweeping epic Doctor Zhivago to an agent for an Italian publisher, he said, “You are invited to my execution.” He was not being melodramatic. The novel had been rejected by the authorities in Soviet Russia — writers who sneaked their work out for foreign publication had a habit of waking up dead — and he was looking elsewhere. When the novel was published in Italian in 1957, and in English in 1958, some 1,500 writers had been executed or died in concentration camps since the 1917 revolution.

The nature of the Soviet Union’s persecution of artists and intellectuals is stuff of legend, as is Pasternak’s role, but what was it about the novel that they found so threatening? A fictional character: Zhivago himself.

Yuri Zhivago is born, as was Pasternak, in 1890. When his parents die, he is sent to live with relatives in Moscow. Concerned with social justice and the plight of the poor, Zhivago, like Pasternak, initially supports the revolution, but quickly becomes disillusioned when it becomes clear that the Bolshevik’s rule is based on blood and brutality. His life is circumscribed by the events of the revolution, but he continues to attempt to live meaningfully. Though he is a flawed man, he manages to do some good and love deeply, which under his circumstances could almost be considered success.

Speaking of his own weak heart to two friends, Zhivago tells them that cardiac hemorrhages are becoming more frequent in Russia. He says, “It’s the disease of our time. I think its causes are of a moral order.” He continues, “Our soul takes up room in space and sits inside us like the teeth in our mouth.” He says, “It cannot be endlessly violated with impunity.” He speaks the truth that the Soviet authorities seek to suppress, to deny.

Dr Zhivago’s failure to be heard in the novel is simply, according to a Masterpiece Theater essay, “a sign that he was destined to become an artistic witness to the tragedy of his age.” He was also the Russian everyperson.

“You can make the Russian soul suffer,” Doctor Zhivago shouted to the Soviet authorities, “but it is indomitable — you cannot keep it down.”

Indeed, the threat Zhivago presents to the Soviets was clear from the first lines of the novel. As Frances Stoner Saunders explains, “‘Zhivago’, in the pre-revolutionary genitive case, means ‘the living one’. On the novel’s first page a hearse is being followed to the grave. ‘Whom are you burying?’ the mourners are asked. ‘Zhivago’ is the reply, punningly suggesting ‘him who is living’.”

The Tiresome Gift

For the first text in our creative nonfiction writing class, my students and I read St. Augustine’s Confessions. For the second, we read Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss.

I hadn’t read all of Wiman’s book when I assigned it, but I was pleased that the syllabus fairy saw fit to have me assign them together. Augustine’s book contains the meditations of an ancient church father; Wiman’s is subtitled “Meditations of a Modern Believer.” Augustine’s is addressed largely to God; Wiman’s is addressed mostly to us, and also to himself. When Augustine wrote his meditations, he was ill, run-down, beset by heresies, and in the midst of midlife turmoil, if not a crisis. Wiman’s book wraps around his own struggles with cancer and pain and belief. Augustine wrote to find, narrate, and uncover his faith — and Wiman did, too.

It’s beautiful, then, that two books by two men from opposite ends of history can speak to one another, and to us, so well, in so many ways. Wiman’s book, despite its subtitle, seems sometimes ancient; Augustine’s feels intriguingly modern.

One way they talk to their readers is this: we spend much time delighting in “the little things” these days. Cooking and design blogs and accessible digital photography and real-time updates let us revel out loud in the steam coming off a cup of coffee, a firefly spotted in a backyard, the smell of a new book, the feel of butter on your fingers when you’re making a pie crust.

There is a joy and beauty in the everyday, and yet, it can take over. We can feel not just deprived but despondent and despairing when they go away; we can fixate and acquire, needing more stuff, more experiences, to help us have that feeling. Augustine would say that these earthly pleasures are good, so long as they direct us toward love of God.

Exactly how that works, though, can still be a bit of a mystery. Wiman filled in part of that for me:

God is not absent. He is everywhere in the world we are too dispirited to love. To feel him — to find him — does not usually require that we renounce all worldly possessions and enter a monastery, or give our lives over to some cause of social justice, or create some sort of sacred art, or begin spontaneously speaking in tongues. All to often the task to which we are called is simply to show a kindness to the irritating person in the cubicle next to us, say, or to touch the face of a spouse from whom we ourselves have been long absent, letting grace wake love from our intense, self-enclosed sleep.

That is, the work of directing our experience of the everyday toward God is not just reveling in the coffee and giving thanks — though this is important — but noticing the duller, more tiresome bits, and changing how we respond as an act of worship. The backache. The mosquito bites. The long commute. It’s not just beauty: these small things, too, can be funnels for my attention toward a greater Giver.

(Photo by Fausto Podavini)

The Battle in Public and Heavenly Places

Matthew Fox tells the story in his book Creativity, about a group of fundamentalists who became the majority on a New Hampshire county school board. Their first decree was to not allow the use of the word "imagination" in the classroom. When Mr. Fox inquired what they were afraid of they said, "Satan. Satan lives in the imagination."

I assume much of this spiritual sentiment comes from poor interpretation of verses like Ephesians 6:12, "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."

Ephesians 6:12 aside, what a strange ethereal battle to fight within a school: invisible forces and the thoughts of others. It’s difficult enough fighting battles against enemies we can see, how much more against ones we cannot. Who is to gauge whether we’re winning or not? When is the battle over?

Ephesians 6:12 places this ongoing battle in the heavenly places, epouraniois. A curious word Paul creates out of his imagination just for the purpose of this letter. It’s a place above the sky, a place where Christ sits, but also a place with enemies. Satan is in epouraniois.

The late painter Thomas Kinkade called himself the Painter of Light and preferred to portray the world without the fall, without evil or the possibility of Satan. In speaking of a mural he painted for the Billy Graham Library, he said painting it was "a moment of divine inspiration" and that the painting offers viewers "a glimpse of a heavenly realm."

Should we be creating canvasses full of light without a hint of darkness? Can violence and evil have a purpose in our art, in our imaginations?

As Gregory Wolfe comments about Kinkade's art: “If faith teaches us anything, it should be that our nostalgia is for an ideal we can only find after accepting, and passing through, the brokenness of a fallen world. Any other approach, in art or in life, is a form of denial."

If evil is here to stay, in our high places, in our low places, in our heavenly places, and if imagination is to play a vital role in schools and in our lives, then our fight isn’t against the power of these places — whether heavenly or imaginative — our fight is for unqualified truth. In that truth we begin to see the invisible. Only then do we know what we’re up against.

The Portraits Look Back

Fayum mummy portraits

 Greco-Romans in Egypt during the first few centuries after Christ commissioned artists to paint their portraits, often in encaustic, on wood panels that were then affixed to their mummified bodies. These mummy portraits, though painted after death, depicted living subjects, their closed eyes re-opened (and in some cases, mightily enlarged) by the artist’s brush. Comparative studies suggest that, while the paintings are somewhat stylized, they bore a strong resemblance to the people they represented. The old were depicted as old, the young as young, and a facial reconstruction of at least one mummy is a dead ringer for the man in the portrait. The Fayum mummy portraits, in other words, are fairly accurate pictures of people who lived nearly two millennia ago, painted in a style that could pass for contemporary.

The most striking thing about them? They look like us.

There’s only so much enthusiasm I can muster for landscapes and still life, though I realize some people can stare for hours at a lovely field or some artfully posed pieces of fruit. Only portraits hold my attention that way, and I think I know why. When you gaze at a portrait, the portrait looks back at you.

The most haunting artifacts of the ancient world are the human forms cast from hollows in Pompeii’s volcanic rock. The victims of Vesuvius, trapped in molten amber, emerge as rounded fetal abstractions, anthropomorphic depictions of raw emotion. Those hunched, cocooning forms preserve not just a horrific moment in time but also a universal feeling of helplessness in the face of death.

If the death portraits of Pompeii speak through abstraction, the power of the mummy portraits of Fayum comes from their particularity. They didn’t catch their subjects unaware in a moment of time. They depict people as they were in life, a host of individuals making eye contact over the span of centuries. These paintings preserve not just the form of the ancient men and women, but also their gaze.

When I put myself into the place of the Fayum artists, it’s hard to imagine them thinking in terms of “doing art for the ages.” Their work seems to have been part of the ritual surrounding funeral preparation. They were craftsmen adjusting set visual rubrics to resemble as closely as possible the features of the deceased. Like the embalmers and the makers of death masks, they had more in common with today’s mortuary cosmetician than with a painter exhibiting work in a gallery. And yet, uncannily preserved by the dry Egyptian climate, their work turned out to be for the ages after all. We do not know their names, yet they gave their subjects a kind of immortality.

Federico Fellini's 8½: Child's Play

Federico Fellini's epic semi-autobiographical film, 8 1/2, explores the complex interrelationship between the process of making art and the very human attempt to re-narrate and make sense of our lives. Guido, the film’s protagonist, is a director wrestling with his own limitations and the demands of his fans, critics, and producers as he experiences an artistic stalemate.

Of course, his story was Fellini’s own story before he made 8 1/2; he had recently experienced great success with La Dolce Vita, and the artistic community was anticipating the next masterpiece. Fellini, however, was stuck. And that supposed blip in his creative stream actually became the next great masterpiece, a film about filmmaking, asking poignant questions about how an artist might make art that is both well received and truthful.

The film’s somewhat stream-of-conscious narrative is both non-linear and non-objective as it moves smoothly from present day “reality,” to Guido’s memories, to Guido’s subconscious mind. It is often hard to distinguish one from the other as both Guido’s memories (of boyhood, of his parents, of the rigid Catholic priests that shamed him, etc.) and his present relationships and projects become blurred.

Guido, the artist, seeks a sort of revelation through the making of his art; he hopes his films will both create and uncover meaning. But we become increasingly aware that a splintered, chaotic self — a mess of memories, desires, and circumstances — will struggle to present a coherent truth to his audience. How can the artist disentangle himself from the confused, knotty strands of his internal reality enough to produce something clear and true?

A critic character in the film, perhaps speaking as the voice of Guido’s super-ego, tells him: “This life is so full of confusion already, that there’s no need to add chaos to chaos.” He also argues that this messy, disruptive art — any art that is an honest reflection of Guido’s existential struggle — is not marketable because “In the end we need some hygiene, cleanliness, and disinfection.”

But the film continually reminds us that the artist is perhaps a sloppy child who has one foot in a make-believe world, the other tentatively planted on a more concrete reality. After we slip into the Guido’s childhood memories of awkward sexual awakening, mischief, and curiosity, Fellini shows us Guido as a suave, yet silly, middle-aged artist who often “plays” in order to shirk the responsibility of actually creating. But, of course, art is play. And children’s play is the act of creating.

In the film’s ending sequence, Guido embraces this spirit of messy play —and realizes that being honest about his own existential confusion is what will make true art: “Everything’s confused again, but that confusion is me; how I am, not how I’d like to be. And I’m not afraid to tell the truth now, what I don’t know, what I’m seeking.”

Guido and his team of writers, producers, actors and critics drive up to the stark, imposing outline of his half constructed failed movie set. But this realistic scene quickly morphs into something far more surreal as Fellini’s typical circus music begins to play faintly in the background and we see many figures from Guido’s life — his parents, his teachers, the women he has loved — all dressed in white, walking calmly to the beach and the scaffolding for the cancelled film. The camera pans across the bright faces of these individuals as we hear the critic’s questions in a voiceover: “And how do you benefit from stringing together the tattered pieces of your life? Your vague memories, the faces of people that you were never able to love?”

But Guido begins to ignore this criticism (the superego) and give in fully to play (the id) as he grabs a bullhorn and commands the bustling group of people from his conscious and subconscious life to make their way down the stairs. As they parade downward, the circus music wells up, and we recognize that these characters walking down the scaffolding of Guido’s now defunct film set are, in actuality, the scaffolding of Guido’s own fractured but full psyche. After this beautiful revelation, perhaps the moment of clarity that he was longing for, Guido proclaims that life is a celebration. He has the crowds of his past and present life join hands in a joyful circle as he jumps in and joins their dance.

The final moments of the film are delicate and rich as the tiny child Guido, wearing a long white cape and playing a flute, marches in the middle of the circle, followed by a few clowns playing instruments. The circle of Guido’s consciousness then disappears — and the child and his band are alone in a wandering spotlight. As the film ends, the child is completely alone, playing the flute in the spotlight, darkness fallen all around him.

Of an Age

Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.~ Wallace Stegner, Crossing To Safety

There is a grace in the way our bodies are made that lets us avoid looking too often or too long at the evidences of our years. Our parts are arranged so that we look out and reflect on life around us. This may be a comfort lost on younger readers. There are a couple of things about aging that take aging to appreciate: first, all the excitement of first experiences pales in the slow burn of getting it just right; and second, humans are beset with the appearance of age for about twice as long as the appearance of youth. (See other reasons to celebrate aging here.) Still, mirrors become less important and smiles become the essential accessory.

References for age, then, are in how we feel and where we take our cues. And even as hours and days seem to fly and the future seems unsure, the rhythms and reminders of seasons and Nature's reticence to change allows us to see the past in the present and to imagine a life celebrated beyond our small measures of time and being.

One of the memories my wife and I made around our thirtieth anniversary was worshiping at the Congregational Church of Boothbay Harbor, Maine. The church was founded in 1766, decades before the town and ten years before the U.S. This seems remarkable to us from the south, but in the small towns of coastal New England it is ordinary context. Boothbay Harbor is 2,165 people, 1,084 households, and 550 families who put the value of place over the vagaries of economy and life in community as their ring on Time's tree. This ethic is almost absent in the culture of urban centers and is continually eroded by the force of our media-driven lives. And here's a statistic: today, 83 percent of Americans live in urban centers and numbers are increasing.

While in Boothbay Harbor we spent a morning at the lighthouse on Pemaquid Point (banner photo). There, the glaciers of the last ice age have raked the beard of Maine’s southeastern granite chin. Since then, the incessant crashing of the sea has done little to change its storied appearance. I am sure it has everything to do with what it’s made of. What do you see around you that is old, sturdy and slow to change? What is it saying?

A Red Onion

I didn’t know exactly what would come of it: I was washing lettuce under the cold-water tap, separating crisp fans of it from a few shapeless leaves. The fans would soon line a new green bowl. Into that, I would throw cuts of onion, tomato, more lettuce, avocado, and jicama. And all those pieces would make something that had not existed until that moment.

The outer skin of a red onion peeled away easily enough. I cored one end of the onion with a sturdy black-handled knife and cut half into slices. The other half rested on the scarred cutting board like an overturned bowl. From the radio in the next room, a deep voice I strained to hear was calmly announcing the death of a comedian, followed by a recording of some his famous jokes. Then with hardly a break, that same voice turned to some new horrors in the Middle East — missle strikes, a beheading, the slaughter of innocents. An onion slice fell into rings when I poked my finger into its center. My eyes filled with the sting of onion and the images forming in my head of death and carnage, torture and execution, what unimaginable thing might come next.

At that moment, when my daughter arrived home from work, I was grateful for the onion, and for not having to speak of those images in my head. To speak about those, I would also reveal the grief in my voice, the edge of my own powerlessness. Right then, I would need strength I didn’t have. I would appear vulnerable to my daughter.

It takes a leap of faith to feel deeply and then to show one’s powerlessness. Vulnerability can be mistaken for weakness and sentimentality. As a writer, I’ve learned to take that risk on the page. But how do I make sure my voice is heard? It’s more difficult for some of us to speak aloud with worry or sadness, to voice our concerns, especially about events that are out of our hands. A friend once told me that she’d turned to writing because she felt things so deeply — from darkness to joy — and she needed to do something creative with those emotions. She had already accepted her strong feelings. Calmly. The acceptance had made her more certain of how to go on after a recent loss. She made me think about my own deep feelings and about owning those feelings. But as I said, owning up is sometimes easier on the page.

To speak aloud would take heart. Author and professor Brené Brown has written extensively on subjects that seem hard to pin down—whole-heartedness, shame, courage, and vulnerability. In Daring Greatly, she writes of vulnerability that it is “the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, accountability, and creativity. . . . If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.” That’s a startling statement, especially because it is hard to be vulnerable among people who generally prefer us to present ourselves in a can-do, positive way.

A line from Rilke’s “Lament (Whom will you cry to, heart?)” comes to mind at the moment when I want to cry out, when I know who I should cry out to. But can I, when my daughter asks me how my day has gone? If I want to be authentic, if I want to tell her exactly what’s happening, if I want to tell her my urgent sadness about the larger world, that there is little I can do about it, then I need to find the words. I need to peel away the layers of my reticence, form an utterance that hasn’t existed until this moment, and tell her.

The Art of the Commonplace

I’ve been thinking of having my students keep commonplace books. In notebooks of their choosing, they would copy out passages and quotations that they encounter in the year to come that are seen to fit within predetermined topics (what the Greeks called topoi, or “places”) that we will cull from Renaissance-era teachers who popularized the practice (thematic places like “Fidelity," "Beneficence,” or "Gratitude”). They would also be free to write out their own thoughts, and to discover themes of their own naming as they find common places that writers, artists, theologians, and scientists inhabit, such as the ones W.H. Auden came upon in the making his commonplace book, which he later called A Certain World: “Prayer,” “Tyranny,” “Love,” “Friday, Good.” 

The art of the commonplace was once considered essential for the formation of a writer’s sensibility and style; it brought his mind into the same space as the minds he admired; it forced his hand, when copying out others’ sentences, to move the way another’s did, and so taught him, even as he learned stylistic possibilities and alternative turns of thought, that his own sway was not supreme. What’s more — at least to the Renaissance writers who promoted the discipline — it became a storehouse of material for one’s own writing. Or, to liven the metaphor, as Erasmus did, in Latin, in his popular primer on the art of rhetoric, de Copia, “The student, like the industrious bee, will fly about through all the authors’ gardens and light on every small flower of rhetoric, everywhere collecting some honey that he may carry into his own hive.” Montaigne’s industrious work in the essay form retained the topical organization of his commonplace book (“Of Constancy,” “Of Idleness,” “Of Liars”). Milton, too, sought the language of common places. So did John Locke and Thomas Jefferson, Emerson and Thoreau, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy.

The form has largely fallen out of favor in our time. I wonder if the ascendancy of journaling — which tends toward a chronological order and the explicitly autobiographical — has come to eclipse it. If so, I think it all the more reason to bring the commonplace back into view. It is an essential companion to autobiography, for it shows the values and ideas that animate the actions of the daily. In this way, the commonplace book can be as penetrating and revealing as any biography, which is perhaps why Auden —who famously disdained writer’s biographies (“Biographies of writers, whether written by others or by themselves, are always superfluous and usually in bad taste.”) — felt compelled to address the issue in a foreword to A Certain World. After admitting that what follows — a unique anthology of thoughts and images that struck him as worthy of note — forms “a sort of autobiography,” he quickly puts miles between himself and that term: the book, he says, is a “map of my planet.”  The metaphor comes from G. K. Chesterton, whom he quotes:

"There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.”

By deliberately seeking the places that are common — the shared space of minds across distance and time — we come to discover the richness of our own world.  The growth of Chesterton’s garden depends on Erasmus’s bees.

(Painting by Jan Steen)

Columbo and the Melancholy Dane

In a chapter of Works of Love entitled “Love Believes All Things –And Yet is Never Deceived,” Kierkegaard describes two levels of love: the lower level, self-love, which seeks out self-affirmation and is easily deceived, and the higher level, the level he tells us we must reach — a love so strong that it wards off all deception.

I’ve read this chapter many times, but it never quite clicked for me. Until I started binge-watching “Columbo”. God bless Netflix.

Let me tell you a little about Columbo. First of all, I adore him. At this point, I’ve logged so many hours with the old codger that he seems like a dear uncle. He’s a mess: he drives an old beater, he wears a ratty raincoat, and he never combs his hair. He’s stingy, groveling, and usually hungry. And he always gets his man.

As for the plot of the show, the formula never wavers: a murder is committed in the first few minutes, on-camera. Columbo shows up at the scene of the crime. He slinks through the crowd, often being mistaken for a bum or the help. Soon, he’s sniffed out the murderer — usually a vain, powerful and smooth-talking fellow

As Kierkegaard points out, “Do you know any stronger expression for superiority than this, that the superior one also has the appearance of being the weaker? Consider someone who is infinitely superior to others in understanding, and you will see that he has the appearance of an ordinary person.”

The murderer dismisses Columbo because of his clothes, his shoes, his height, his propensity to bring his dog on assignment or to ramble on about his extended family.

Columbo just doesn’t care. He knows where his self-worth lies — not in their opinion, but in unearthing the truth.

Since we, the audience, have witnessed the crime, we side with Columbo, no matter how he appears to bumble. We’re in on the joke. We understand Kierkegaard when he writes, “True superiority can never be deceived.”

As the plot unfolds, the murderer grows more confident, just as Kierkegaard describes those embroiled in self-love: “The cunning deceiver, who moves with the most supple, most ingratiating flexibility of craftiness — he does not perceive how clumsily he proceeds.”

This is the joy of the show — watching the murderer simmer in his pride. It doesn’t hurt that, since the show is 30 years old, the murder’s “slick” persona is often laughably dated.

Kierkegaard claims that once we view love in the right way, not as a currency to be hoarded and stolen, but “precisely in not requiring reciprocity,” we’re freed of the danger of deception. We’re freed into a love that “believes all things — and is never deceived.”

It is when you have this love, this truth, that appearances stop mattering. Love is no longer a currency, something to steal or sell. It is just there, as solid as truth. A constant. Kierkegaard’s point is that those who can’t see this look as foolish as Columbo’s smooth-talking, designer-bell-bottom-sporting, doomed murderers. Those who get it are freed of all fear of deception and of judgment, freed to don wrinkled raincoats and scuffed shoes and the “courage to endure the world’s judgment that it is so indescribably foolish.”

At the end of the chapter, Kierkegaard admits that reaching this higher understanding of love is really, really hard. Even if we can grasp its goodness, we’ll still approach it like “a dog, which can indeed learn to walk upright but still always prefers to walk on all fours.”

Maybe that’s why Columbo did so well — for an hour a week (or, these days, as many hours as you’ve got to plop in front of your computer) you’re automatically on the right side, lifted to the higher level. The natural temptation to be suckered in by vanity, self-deception, and a well-groomed mustache is gone.

When I first read Works of Love, I interpreted this higher view of love as total detachment. But Columbo actually posits something a bit more complicated.

Columbo is not freed of caring. He’s just freed of caring about the wrong thing. Columbo is obsessed with justice. He doesn’t give a rats-ass about what people think of him. And I think that’s the goal — understanding the nature of love frees us to practice that love.

Aimless Love

Billy Collins’ poem “Aimless Love” strikes a special chord with me. The poem, wherein Mr. Collins falls in love with “... a wren/ and later in the day with a mouse/ the cat had dropped under the dining room table,” makes me remember my first love. I was only a child, and it was a brief affair — a deep, fleeting affection that was not reciprocated — but which set the tone for many of my experiences as an adult. My first love, you see, was an ant on a clover in my neighbor’s yard.

My sister and I decided to “go on a safari” outside. So we packed a backpack with some paper, a magnifying glass, and several apples, and solemnly announced to our mother that we were Going Outside to Be In Nature. Off we went, and, through some series of events, I ended up face down in a neighbor’s yard watching an ant on a clover. As I watched it climb, I felt a sudden deep, fierce love for that bug. It was so small, and the flower it climbed was so much larger than it was, and the grass in the yard towered over it like a forest, and I was keenly aware of how large in the world I was, and how clumsy, and how apt I was to overlook small things like ants on clovers.

Such love seems very human. I always tend to roll my eyes when people throw around the phrase “God is love.” It makes me think of awful little Victorian cherubs and vacuous worship songs. I’ve always thought of God more in the Old Testament sense — the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who spoke light out of the darkness, who stopped the sun in the sky while his people fought at Gibeon. God is love, of course, but I have always thought of God’s love in a more terrible, cosmic kind of way, not the kind that’s fussed by everyday details. That’s why the passage wherein God is described as knowing when a sparrow dies always startles me — it’s hard for me to imagine. But it is a beautiful thing to know that God does know when a sparrow dies, or that he cares even for the lilies in the valley, or that he can count the number of hairs on my head.

That ant was a long time ago. But I am now very familiar with that sudden, painfully clear love for small things. Like Collins, who falls in love with steam rising from a bowl of broth, whose heart is “always propped up/ in a field on its tripod/ ready for the next arrow,” I direct my affections at odd, unsuspecting people or objects — my friend’s face, illuminated as she bends over the stove; the shape of my cat on a chair; a particular shade of green. It’s a fleeting, aimless love. But I do like to think that, maybe, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is looking with me and loving the details. Even the ants on clovers.

Where Do You Write?

It's best that I be as clear about this as I can -- I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course). Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in her or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it's enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth.  - Stephen King, On Writing

The metaphor of writers as archeologists King describes it is my favorite part of his book On Writing. The process of discovery and of clearing away everything that isn't connected to the other pieces rings true to my experience as I work at finding words. It helps me focus. It helps me remember to be attentive, gentle, and decisive at my desk. It is a standing invitation to return to the joy-and-labor of finding and bringing home stanzas, paragraphs. I wonder, though, about where one goes to find fossil-stories: about the nature and topography of this ‘undiscovered pre-existing world.’

As I continue to press on in pursuing the craft of writing, I am discovering that where I go internally is more important than where I decide to break open my laptop, or how many cups of coffee might put me in the sweet zone for the day’s writing work. I don’t have a great way to articulate this yet – maybe that’s why I’m still hung up (or hanging!) on King’s metaphor of digging bones.

At this point, maybe it is as much as I can say that I feel I need to go deeper, or underneath, some strictly rational, manageable ‘place’ to get to a ‘place’ with ideas and words that feel most true, most surprising, most like my real voice. Maybe what I’m looking for is a personal metaphor to capture — and driving directions for how to get back to — that mysterious, wonderful, terrifying place where I find the good words. A metaphor for that place, and for my role in it. Am I alone in this search? Or have you quested after this, maybe found a metaphor that helps you?

The Birth of Innocence

This painting is titled The birth of innocence.

It is rich with color. Placed alongside artist Julien Spianti's other paintings, this scene appears expansive and bright. It is part of a series called Memento Vivi, which includes paintings with titles such as sin of repetition and sin of trust. These scenes are close to grayscale, and they don’t reach the edges of the canvas, as if part of each moment has been lost to memory.

But Birth of innocence is a departure in content as well as style: Spianti is showing us two moments in time.

The couple is also the subject of another painting, a dark moment in an unfinished room:

But when the boy comes in, the scene opens up.

Why is he here? And that title: birth of innocence? Innocence is what we lose. We fall. Even the explanation of redemption and rebirth somehow doesn’t explain to me the boy’s posture of tenderness. The gentle dip of his shoulder. If this is some kind of redemption, why has he entered into a past moment?

In an essay titled “The Limit,” Christian Wiman writes, "There are wounds we won’t get over. There are things that happen to us that, no matter how hard we try to forget, no matter with what fortitude we face them, what mix of religion and therapy we swallow, what finished and durable forms of art we turn them into, are going to go on happening inside of us for as long as our brains are alive."

Twelve years later, he wrote in My Bright Abyss, "every intellectual growth [must] remain rooted in that early experience of ultimate insight, ultimate unknowingness.... What sort of understanding could be emptier than one that diminishes or erases the moments that made understanding essential in the first place?"

It is both paintings together that make Birth of innocence so strikingly rich. The couple exists in a moment that remains unchanged except to layer it in time, to be entered into and opened up.

It is not an act of hopelessness to say that we carry our experiences with us always. There are hurts that will go on happening inside of us even while there is healing, too. Redemption is not the same as restoration. Redemption undoes no pain, reduces nothing. It expands us. It is a deepening, opening always more and more.

Notstalgia

You count all your heartaches.  ~ Terry Scott Taylor

You know the experience: hearing a song takes you back to where you were the first time you heard it. Suddenly, I’m not just hearing the song in the car, I’m on a crowded beach with my high school friend, and we’re listening to the song on a transistor radio. Just as quickly, my eyes refocus on the road and the way the trees make a V toward the horizon.

As the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, Janus presides over time. He sees both past and future, which is why the Romans named the first month of the year in his honor. Janus is depicted with two faces, one looking back and one looking forward. I like to think of Janus in terms of nostalgia; he would be the god of the time-travel gateway we enter through nostalgic reverie.

Music transports us back in time but, ironically, sometimes it cautions us against nostalgia. That’s because nostalgia, like Janus, has two faces: it can take us to cheerful reverie, or to the darker side of regret. Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” cautions against dwelling on past mistakes: “Why not think about times to come/And not about the things that you've done.” On their 1983 album Doppelgänger, Daniel Amos in “Memory Lane” chides:

You have gotten much thinner You're lookin' like a shadow It's from dwelling on the might-have-beens Living in a time-warp.

Researchers who have studied nostalgia see its brighter face as they discover it can yield a sense of safe harbor in difficult times. This is why many of our fondest nostalgic moments predate loss: we go back in time to better memories before the death of a loved one; to times of greater independence and less responsibility; before the fire, the hurricane, the accident.

Job time-travelled in this way. Deep in nostalgic reverie, he makes a long list of what was better before his excruciating loss of loved ones, health, and property. We can almost feel the bitter-sweet aspect of his memories, full of love and loss, as we read. We know from context that this reverie has a double benefit for Job. It helps him hold on to memories of those dear to him, and assures him that God is faithful by remembering times when it was easier to see it in external realities.

Sometimes loss accumulates in our lives and becomes what paradoxically holds our life together as W.S. Merwin says in his 3-line poem “Separation.”

Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.

Here the nostalgic past carries into the speaker’s present and we can assume, since it’s now part of the fabric of his being, that it will continue to mark his future. Job longs for the old days but even though he sits in the ashes and scrapes boils with shards, he keeps an eye toward God’s promised good (“I know my Redeemer lives…”).

The dual Janus nature of nostalgia shows us looking to the past, but also, like Job, to a future hope. This is best seen in the word’s origin which meant not just “wistful yearning for the past,” but “severe homesickness.” In its backwards glance, nostalgia can make us long for those times and people dear to us. But nostalgia as homesickness looks forward. It’s the expression of our yearning for our true home.

Introductions

"Joe"? "Just call me Joe"? As if you were one of those stupid 22-year old girls with no last name? "Hi, I'm Kimberly!" "Hi, I'm Janice!" Don't they know you're supposed to have a last name? It's like they're an entire generation of cocktail waitresses.    ~ You've Got Mail by Nora Ephron

I consider myself a practical man, and I know that God knows everyone’s name and that I don’t. I even know that I have forgotten, and will forget, the vast majority of names of the people to whom I have been, and will be, introduced in my life.

That does not change the fact that I am saddened, and even a little offended, every time I meet someone who only gives me their first name. I know they are trying to be nice to me. In my old age especially, they are trying not to load me down with too much information, wanting to help me remember their name so I won’t be embarrassed later in the conversation, when I can’t remember it. I know all that. I get it.

What is lost in that bargain, though, is something of what an “introduction” is supposed to be. The word comes from two Latin words, which, etymologically mean “to lead one inside”, i.e. to bring someone into a place from outside the place they presently occupy. If we pursue that idea to its fullest, an introduction takes the person to whom we are “introducing” ourselves by the hand, leading them into our life, into our house.

When you tell me you are “Clem” and don’t tell me you are “Clem Kadiddlehopper,” you are telling me one of several possible things. The kindest is that you really are open to me as a person, and you are opening yourself up to me as one, too. We are immediately on a “first-name basis”. You are not putting any boundaries on our conversation; you have not pre-judged me or what friendship we might develop. You actually are “introducing” me into your life.

I am sure in the vast majority of cases, this is what is meant by Christian-name-only introductions. But lurking in every introduction of that type, I believe, is a certain distancing, rather than embracing. Perhaps a quick, first-name introduction is part of our modern penchant to get to the point as rapidly as possible. Perhaps it has something to do with our distaste for formality, and the perception that stating the last name is to distance oneself from the other.

I believe a first-name-only introduction performs just the opposite. I believe it says to the other: “I don’t want you to know me too well, to know my history, my family. I just want you to put me in a nice, safe, generic group of Georges or Marys, all undifferentiated, all combined in one great human soup. Please stand back; I don’t want you to get to know me too ‘up close and personal.’”

Or it’s saying something worse. It’s saying, “I am nothing more than a generic, existential George or Mary. I have no past, no future. I am simply me, and I am nothing. Pay no attention to me, and, please, forget me as soon as we separate from one another.” None of us wish to go down that path with anyone.

Please, at least when you meet me for the first time, let me know your full name. We’ll get to a real first-name basis a lot more easily if you do.

The Only Courage We Need

All other creatures in my house are asleep — man, baby, beast. The thought crosses my mind that I am the one deserving an afternoon nap. But what do I really deserve? Do I deserve a handsome and loving husband, a beautiful child, home appliances, books to read, and a pantry full of food? 

My culture tells me I deserve it. I deserve to get my nails done, to buy expensive coffee drinks, and especially, to make my own choices. The cup holder on my expensive coffee drink even proclaims, "The only courage you need is the courage to live the life you want."

How could a thinking person possibly make that statement? Do those refugees watching their children die of starvation need only courage? Does that legless man begging on the street corner need only this courage? Does the orphaned girl left to fend for herself in the street or brothel need only this courage? Do I, faced with challenges and struggles great and small, need only this courage?

I could perhaps live the "life I want" by withdrawing from all relationships and commitments, living alone. But the suffering that flows from this fallen world and my own sin will still find me. However, thankfully, it doesn’t just find me. Suffering takes me out of myself and points me to my need of grace. Without that grace, I would just be more self-centered, more self-absorbed, and more self-focused.

The only courage I need is to enter each day with my sleeves rolled up, ready to get dirty — but not with a "can do" attitude. I can't do it. Someone has to do it for me. Someone has to be my strength and courage, receiving my praise and thanksgiving for choosing the “life I want” and need.

My thoughts drift back to the stillness of the house, and I realize that this quiet moment was a given beat of rest — a chance for a breath before diving back into the open water in which I live, move, and have my being.

(Photo by Martine Franck)

“Try to Praise the Mutilated World”

For me, autumn is the season of association. Perhaps, it’s in its ghostliness, in its smoky, leafy Halloween flavors that remembering becomes important. I’m really not sure. I only know that today, when I inhaled that first crisp earthy hint of autumn in the air, I began to remember.

For most Americans, remembering in autumn means lingering on the autumn of September 11, 2001. I remember, particularly, that I was studying abroad in London, shoving my way toward a better view of Queen Victoria’s portrait in Buckingham Palace when security guards escorted our group out onto the lawn, and my sister and I squeezed clammy hands and waited for news of our family, of our country. I remember riding the Tube to class across the city and feeling shame for fearing everyone, the old man and the teenage boy, the woman whose eyes were cast down on the gritty subway tile. I remember huddling in a hotel lobby on Bedford Square, the smell of taxi exhaust and street vendors roasting chestnuts wafting through the open window, while professors weighed the dangers of our class meeting in a threatened area of the city.

Mostly, I remember not knowing how to reconcile my existence in what seemed like two very disparate worlds. There were the smooth arching corridors of The British Museum through which I walked and gawked each week. And there was the rubble of the World Trade Center blaring across every paper and screen. There were the extremists fleeing London to join the Taliban. There was the kindness of British strangers who, upon hearing an American accent, would draw near to touch our shoulders, tear up, and offer condolences.

As is often the case for me, a poem offered me another way to think about the world:

Try to Praise the Mutiliated World by Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June's long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships; one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You've seen the refugees going nowhere, you've heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to the concert where music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth's scars. Praise the mutilated world and the gray feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns.

Christianity’s most universally recognizable image, the crucifix, embodies how horror and mercy, evil and goodness can be nailed together in the same mind-blowing frame. We live in a world in which “executioners sing joyfully,” a world with exiles and ships that sink into “salty oblivion.” And we live, too, in a world of “wild strawberries”, where we must remember when “we were together / in a white room and the curtain fluttered.” Zagajewski’s poem offers a view of a difficult world, a mutilated world in which violence and beauty often linger near one another, as well as a world which has the capacity to astonish the careful witness with the way the “gentle light … strays and vanishes / and returns.”

Lost in Translation

All my fine things are starting to unravel, and I know why. It’s the Holy Spirit.   Or rather, it’s the vintage Guatemalan Espirito Santo ring I bought in Santa Fe. There’s a dove perched on the silver band, and its beak, wings, and tail deftly pull at my seams.

• My purple lacey bra.
• My favorite powder blue washcloth from Anthropologie, the one I found on sale.
• The lining of my red silk robe. (Okay, actually it’s polyester, but still, it shimmers and feels like cool water.)
• The pocket of my pinstriped “boyfriend” jeans.

I didn’t know the spiritual significance of the ring. I asked the shopkeeper for the ring’s story. The words, Espirito Santo, sounded vaguely familiar, a distant echo of something I knew I’d heard before. Yes, I took Spanish in high school and college, and yes, sometimes things will stare me in the face for hours, days, weeks, and years before I wake up to the plain-as-day meaning. Internet research led to a cornucopia of images – stained glass windows of doves, paintings of doves, sculptures of doves – often linked to the words, Veni Sancte Spiritus, which is what we chant during the Gospel procession on Sunday mornings. (I took Latin the one year I attended an all-girls Catholic high school. Whether it was the itchy uniforms or my own rebellious nature, I think I will ever only know how to conjugate the word for farmer: agricola, agricolae, agricolarum, agricolis, agricolas, agrilcolis. The daily Hail Mary never stuck.) Still, this more recent invitation slipped past. Once a week, I’ve been chanting at the top of my lungs for the Holy Spirit to come into my life, and I had no idea. Now I have a little bird on my finger, plain as day.

Also, I am a cradle-born Episcopalian, yet I somehow forgot that doves are a symbol for the Holy Spirit. It comes upon people in Hebrew scripture. It dwells within those who put their faith in Christ in the New Testament. Personally, I like the stories about the Holy Spirit and fire. Maybe they appeal to my forestry background. I like these stories from a safe distance where I can appreciate the theoretical wonderfulness of God arriving as a fire, perhaps a slow, controlled burn allowing for regeneration. Certain pinecones require fire to open and seed. The best morel mushrooms are found in burned areas. I’ve never lost a home to wildfire. I’ve never witnessed my world reduced to ash and rubble, so perhaps my perspective is a bit romanticized.

Here is what I know. My ring looks beautiful and perfect on my right middle finger, and it is messing with my Feng Shui and fashion sense. My fine things now have dangling, off-kilter strands. And, I can’t take the ring off. I don’t know why exactly, but I’ll take these loose threads over not wearing the ring. Perhaps this is the beginning of the Great Unravel. I remember learning once that the Navajo people often intentionally create a mistake in a weaving. Nothing is perfect, and the mistake, known as a spirit line, allows just enough room for the spirit to move through. I like that.

My fine things are fleeting. Even this ring will someday slip free.

I want more. I want more than correct translation. I want more than the sudden realization that these things do not matter in the grand scheme, though it’s not likely I will ever stop seeking beautiful objects.

Perhaps it’s possible we are enveloped by the Holy Spirit without ever realizing it. Perhaps it sneaks in when we are least aware. Are there Bible stories about this happening without some declaration like, “Hello, this is the Holy Spirit here, and I am entering you” or “I am going to descend upon you in waves of tranquility” or “I’m gonna wipe this forest out”?

Sometimes, I need a mundane reminder for the ridiculously abundant gifts of being alive, for the freedom to be a child of God and to stumble with an open-heart in all my daft and clueless ways.   Perhaps I am even more foolish when I say: the ring can have all the threads it wants, but this is my incomprehensible desire.   Hope is an elixir in the not knowing. There is a slight fearless daring to move forward. Each day, I hope to be born again and again and again.

These Are the Implements of Our Lives

[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyPhsD1vHGk[/embed] You know the sound if you’ve heard it once. In spring, in my small-town housing development, the tree-trimmers come around to tidy up the neighborhood, to make sure it keeps that suburban feel, and the tree-chipper gets tuned to its high pitch, then grinds instantaneously down to a lower key as tree branches turn poof to mulch. It is by definition Leo Marx’s “machine in the garden”: that technological dynamo which disrupts the pastoral of our lives and forces us to a deeper complexity. But does it? Wood chipper, chain saw, lawn mower — these are what the suburban landscapes of our lives are built on. Where’s the rub?

When you hear the wood chipper in Fargo, you know it, and you know it’s not good, even though you laugh.

* * *

The community up the road from where I live — where my wife works and one of the most diverse communities per capita in the state of Minnesota — is built to a great degree on the meat-industry. I live in the heart of the conventional agriculture country, where the daily deaths of thousands of cattle and hogs are the backbone of our communities. We’re not exactly naïve about the death that gives us life in these communities, yet the meat-packing industry happens behind closed doors.

It took Javier Bardem toting a cattle gun through the Texas countryside in No Country for Old Men for me to consider the efficiency of mass-slaughter.

* * *

One might argue that the microphone is the most significant cultural icon of the twentieth-century. Late century musicians and entertainers from U2 to David Letterman fell in love with the old-timey mikes when they came across them. In O Brother, Where Art Thou?, it’s the old-timey mike that saves Everett, Pete and Delmar, as their golden notes get transformed into their popular salvation.

Likewise Inside Llewyn Davis opens with a romantic shot of an old-timey mike, as Llewyn steps up to croon into it. Llewyn’s odyssey, however, leads him near the film’s end to sing for a famous producer — without a mike. When the producer gives Davis the thumbs down, it’s clear that the Soggy Bottom Boys are the exception that proves the rule. The cultural gatekeepers weed out many more Llewyns than they let through. The only instrument of mass production that will preserve the song for us is the Coens’ movie camera.

* * *

We live in a world with weapons of mass destruction; we live in a world with drones, and they’re coming to better our lives. We live in a world with so many ingenious devices, and these devices insulate us, keep blood off our hands, flatten and filter our experience. What helps us to see them anew but art? What else reminds us of our humanity, of the place we inhabit between beauty and utility and complexity? What have you seen or read recently that’s given you new eyes for the implements of our lives?

Landscape

About a month ago I was back in New Mexico finishing my MFA. I drove out to Taos while I was there. I took the high road, through towns slumped in the valleys and perched on peaks.

I was the only visitor to the San Francisco de Asis Mission Church, made iconic in Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings and Ansel Adam’s photograph. The heavy-hipped adobe church was silent. The mud and hay exterior held the heat at bay so the sanctuary was cool and rich with the smell of carved wood and old incense. I thought that I would write inside, or draw the elaborate altarpieces I wasn’t allowed to photograph. But I couldn’t bring myself to do either. I just wanted to sit. To be inside a building that seemed to breathe.

I have visited Cathedrals in Europe, with soaring buttresses opening the nave up to the sky. Rooms filled with colored light and air. But the Mission Church is not like that. It is made of mud. It is close to the earth. It is raw and its beauty is in the baseness of its materials. Sitting inside the church is like being inside a turtle shell.

Every spring, parishioners and community members gather together to add a fresh coat of mud and hay to the exterior of the church. This annual ritual is called enjarre or remudding. It takes two weeks to shore up the walls; to strengthen the adobe that has shrunk and expanded over the course of the last year. With each addition, the building is stronger.

--

On my drive back home from New Mexico to Jackson I detoured through Hondo, New Mexico. This small town is not famous. Built in the narrow seam between two mountains, its best feature is that it has the only gas station between Ruidoso and Roswell.

But to me, driving through Hondo was worth the extra two hours added to my already 19-hour drive. From my desk in Jackson I had written about Hondo, had researched its history and geology and agriculture. Each poem was just another layer painted on the mythos of the town. It had become larger than itself. With each layer it grew and came alive.

In a letter Willa Cather wrote of Death Comes for the Archbishop: “I did not expect to write a book about the Southwest. It was too big and too various…You see, the story of the Southwest involved too many individuals—little related to each other.”

But it was in two priests working to found the church in Santa Fe, two French missionaries in the act of uniting disparate parts, that Cather found the common ground for her novel. These priests began a tradition that continues to unite communities every spring, to add another layer to the church.

In the sparseness of the landscape, rituals are extraordinary.

Clouds build mountains that crumble as soon as they reach their peak. The century plant blooms, shooting a firecracker of white petals into the sky. When it rains, the desert erupts in green, frogs hum in the night, the cholla speckled in burnt red pepper the landscape. Another layer.

(Photo by Ansel Adams)

The Space Between

"In his 1951 essay ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,’ British psychologist D. W. Winnicott wrote, ‘It is in the space between inner and outer worlds, which is also the space between people — the transitional space — that intimate relationships and creativity occur.’” - quoted by Alexandra Enders in “The Importance of Place: Where Writers Write and Why” (“The Literary Life,” Poets and Writers, March/April 2008)

The routines of writers seem to be of perpetual interest to us bookish types. Stories abound about where and when and how (and with precisely what type of instrument) famous writers have done their work. I’ve always been intrigued by those stories, in part as they helped me think about my own habits and preferences.

I’m one who prefers to be in a public space. Even when I have a nice office, I find I’m more productive when I leave it. When I worked in the private sector, this made more sense: I kept shop in a mind-numbing gray cubicle under mind-numbing fluorescent lights, with the nearest window way down at the end of my row.

So I wrote most of the early drafts of my forthcoming novel at a Tim Horton’s just around the corner from that office. I always took the same table when I could get it, next to a giant window that let in every bit of the cloudy daylight afforded by the long winters of Rochester, NY. I’d hurry through a bowl of soup and nurse my black coffee for the duration of lunch hour. And I would enter that space between the inner and outer worlds.

I remained partly aware of my surroundings: the blasé music, the retirees who met every Wednesday and sat at the large round table in the back, the business crowd wiping slush and sticky rock salt off their polished shoes as they yapped into their phones. At the same time, I was entirely absorbed in the world of my story. I could see and hear my characters clearly, follow them where they went, imagine what might happen next, fashion careful words to represent that universe.

And now I’m finishing the final work a world away at a small coffee shop in Hartford City, Indiana called Common Grounds. I chat with Katie, who knows my routine: after I order, she lets me get to work, then quietly brings my food and coffee over when it’s ready, for which I’m deeply grateful. Each table contains a tablecloth with a hearty thread count, a small lamp, and a centerpiece of several antique books or a milk bottle from farm days past. The music is good: Neil Young or Dylan or Louis Armstrong. A small television mounted to the wall plays Turner Classic Movies in glorious black and white, set to mute. I like to sit where I can see it out of the corner of my eye. Then I enter into the world of a story that, by now, I’m very tired of and will be pleased to leave behind soon.

Floating over the top, I’ll hear someone yell out the day’s headline from The Hartford City News Times or start yet another conversation with, “Hey, remember [so-and-so]? Well, did you hear what happened?” But I’m into my book, sometimes immersed in the vivid and continuous dream of the story, sometimes taking a cold, critical look at a darling phrase and dragging it by the neck to the chopping block.

I can’t seem to do without either; it’s that space between the exterior and interior worlds where I feel most able to write. I don’t know exactly why this is, and I don’t know if the why matters. It’s what works for me.

What works for you?