The Discomfort of Empathy

Each fall semester, I anticipate him. I keep open a substantial space in the syllabus for one of his plays. I move through Beowulf and trek through Chaucer until I arrive at that sweet spot – Shakespeare. But however giddy I am about the bard, each year I field the same question that, when pared down to its bare bones, asks – What does dead old Shakespeare have to do with me? What does this centuries old story have to do with my field of biology or law or business?

Like any educator, I welcome the questions. They give me the opportunity to acknowledge the relationship between the words we read and the world we inhabit. Especially, the questions give me the opportunity to talk about empathy, a topic getting a lot of press in education circles and one that has recently and brilliantly been addressed by Leslie Jamison in her book, The Empathy Exams.

 In my classroom, I often find that students struggle to connect the experience of discomfort to the experience of empathy. When my sophomore survey class finished Othello, some students kicked against the merit of a text they found so disturbing, so violently tragic. Despite their reluctance, the presence of their discomfort was the clearest sign that they had read the text with empathizing sensitivity. True empathy is a painstaking, uncomfortable process that resists the cheap comfort of stereotype, prejudice, and self-righteousness.

Writer James Baldwin once said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

Baldwin’s words suggest that we read not only for our own sake but also for the sake of others. We read not to escape from our own pain but to connect that pain to something larger than itself. And that connection occurs when a thoughtful reading snags our senses on the heartbreak or even foolishness of someone else, and we stop in our tracks and walk alongside that struggling character. Empathy does not require the reader’s agreement with a character’s choices, but it does require his understanding of that character’s plight. There is something Christ-like in becoming a reader vulnerable to the pain and hardship of a story’s characters, in extending grace “to the least of these.” Yes, characters in stories are fictional, but perhaps, if a reader can practice the act of empathy in the world of fiction, she can learn to render it even more graciously in the world of the hospital and the law firm and the boardroom.

(Painting by John Edward Marin)

Getting It Wrong

I. The first time I tried Centering Prayer, I did it wrong. The teacher warned us we might hear outside sounds — buses, car horns, construction — and to keep an open heart because life is never quiet in the way we desire. She rang the meditation bell, and I closed my eyes. Within minutes, I heard dishes clanking from the nearby kitchen. I knew it was the white-haired church volunteer. She was preparing our noontime snack. I imagined baby Jesus in the kitchen with her. She gave him a bath in the stainless steel sink. She dried him with white cotton tea towels. She anointed him with olive oil. He got a little older. She opened jars of herbs for him to smell. Each time a plate smacked the table, Jesus giggled. They took water glasses off the shelf and set up an artist corner. Jesus dipped brushes in the glasses and made little paintings. When I opened my eyes, it was time for our snack. I saw the church volunteer in her apron, speckled with water, and I was overcome with gratitude.

II. The second time I tried Centering Prayer, I did it wrong. My husband downloaded the app on my smartphone, so that I could practice anytime, anywhere. I clicked the icon, and the bell rang. I kept my eyes closed for twenty minutes and repeated the word, create, until I saw hundreds of things creating. Petals unfurling, flowers blooming, children emerging from the womb, trees rising skyward, fingers on piano keys, enemies embracing, wounded creatures standing for the first time with their scars. No, no, no, someone said. You are supposed to pick one sacred word, a holy word, and just focus on that.

Oh, I said, No one ever gave me instructions. Is there a list somewhere of sacred words? Besides, it was all so beautiful.

III. The third time I tried Centering Prayer, I did it wrong. By then, I was too captivated by images and words that dance to discipline myself into picking a solitary sacred word. Maybe one day I will have this ability. For now, I am smitten by getting it wrong. Too enamored of surprise. A noisy tableware devotee. Oh, the danger of young love!

The Judgment, Backwards

I have for some time viewed the trial and death of Christ as, in a sense, the Final Judgment, only backwards. Jews of the first century had a deep expectation that the Messiah was going to come in final judgment upon the earth and rescue Israel from its enemies and set up an everlasting kingdom. Indeed, even to the very end, Jesus’ own disciples were arguing over who was to have the higher rank in that kingdom. And the judgment of God did take place, but in a way so far profoundly different from any way anyone expected. God Himself was judged, and declared guilty, and took the curse of death, which man had been long under, into his own body, and thereby broke it utterly.

But the backwardness of the judgment works on many levels in scripture. The means by which this judgment takes place is the darkest act ever committed by men — man’s judgment, condemnation, and execution of God — and yet, in astonishing irony, this is the very means by which God reconciles mankind to Himself. John emphasizes the irony of this backwardness again and again in his gospel, even from the very beginning: “He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him” (1:10-11). Tragically backwards.

Yet, though I had seen the trial and death of Christ in this backwards sense for some time, not until recently did it strike me so forcibly how explicitly and intentionally John cast Christ’s trial and judgment in this backward way. First of all, Jesus is given a mock crown and a mock purple robe (the imperial, royal color) and given mock reverence, “Hail, King of the Jews!” (19:2-3). But John knows, and wants the reader to know, that these things are profoundly, ironically true, in ways far beyond the speakers’ knowledge (in a kind of double reversal: they mean to be ironic, but John points out how ironic is their irony, for they actually reveal the profound truth). But what struck me most forcibly of all was, when Pilate ceases his half-hearted defense of Jesus, he brought the latter before the people and he himself “sat down on the judgment seat” (19:13). No mundane detail; it’s as if the cosmic reversal is complete. Pilate, as the representative of the greatest kingdom of this world (a term which for John has all the moral connotation of the curse of sin), sits in judgment over the true judge of the world (cf. 5:22). God is declared guilty and put to death. But, as has already been mentioned, in the greatest irony of all, this very act was God’s acceptance in Himself of the original judgment upon mankind from the beginning of the human story: the day you eat of the fruit of this tree, you will sever yourself from me, the fountain and source of all life, and you shall surely die. Here, gloriously, astonishingly, this is undone, reversed, destroyed!

Realizations like this — this thread that John has woven throughout his gospel —remind me of the rich literary and theological subtlety of the Scriptures. So often seemingly simple and unadorned, in them are hidden the riches of Christ, if I have the attentiveness and patience to dwell in them and let them seep in, in the midst of the constant rush of our restless world.

(Painting by Antonio Ciseri)

Transcending Reality

I was reading that some of the big wigs in theory development are getting annoyed lately at the success of dystopian fiction. Since I am not a particular fan of such literature, I was thrilled at the possibility of acquiring some new potential stones to throw in that direction. Most annoyingly, however, the points made were not about dystopian fiction so much as about the experts thinking that what the general public really needs is more sunny sounding stories than ones of warning and woe. One of the commentators, Ed Finn, was annoyed that “negative visions of the future perpetuated in pop culture are limiting people's abilities to dream big or think outside the box.” These folks want fewer cautionary tales about the future, and more about the wonderful advances that science offers us. Oh yay!

Okay. I respect that. I questioned it a bit, but then didn't think much past it. After all, how much of a biased slant could be thrown in a story? The reader/watcher isn't that gullible right? I mean, we know that all power corrupts ... And isn't technology a form of power?

Recently, I watched Johnny Depp in Transcendence. The tag that went along with it was Sci-fi. I like sci-fi. At the conclusion of the experience though, I don't know if I was more dumbfounded than utterly horrified. For at the very end, the moral of the story was that unlimited and near immediate technological progress would have saved the world, and that the luddites who thwarted the coming utopia were short sighted philistines. OK, maybe not philistines, but most absolutely lacking in the ability see the potential good. Unlike the hero, they also had no appreciation of aesthetics.

My first thought was that this was a sinister plot against good science fiction everywhere. Where was the warning about the danger of speedily accepting unlimited technology? It seemed to me that Transcendence was anti-science fiction. After all – and while my repertoire may not be immense in this body of literature, it contains a large enough sample to provide a bit of relevance – I am pretty sure that sci-fi generally provides to the reader some cautionary aspect as well as a good story. The plot goes something like: some clever and ingenious cookie creates/finds a powerful technology. This technology is wrongly employed by either the originator or someone else. Horribly bad and nasty things happen. (I have various images of The Outer Limits traipsing through my head right now.) That is sci-fi – at least to me.

One of the great powers of literature is that it can provide us with a realistic landscape where the consequences of things, whether they are political ideologies or technologies, can be imaginatively played out. In our age, like none other, we have a power in technology and science that is mind boggling. Never before has mankind wielded such a force that could be used for either good or bad ends – knowingly or not. So, now more than ever before, we need skilled creators in the imaginative arts who are willing and able to provide us with the potential risks and consequences that technology can bring.

And isn't this just what good science fiction has been used for? To create a space where pronouncing judgment on an idea is easier, because we can imagine the down-the-road consequences. In fact, there are a good many philosophers (Michael Polanyi comes to mind) who have hinted that the human imagination has the uncanny ability to “guess” correctly when it comes to carrying out thought experiments. Again, science fiction seems to be just that – guessing at what happens when such and such technology is employed to the fullest. With that said, if some of the big wigs would have their way, the very thing we need now, caution, would be reduced. Instead they would want to fill our imaginations only with the wonderful march of progress. Eugenics anyone? That was “progress” too. But now I am sounding dystopian. Horrors.

Or Does It Explode?

“What happens to a dream deferred?” Langston Hughes asks in the opening line of his poem, “Harlem.” Taken with the title, the first line ties us up in place and language in just a very few words. A “dream deferred” was one of Hughes’ overriding themes, and “dream” is a hard word to read without hitching it to that adjective “American” or dropping it in place in Martin Luther King’s famous speech. “Deferred,” too, begs for a larger audience with the American dream, especially considering how official-sounding it is, conjuring the authoritative action of a “deferral.” Though the line at first sounds almost speculative and relatively private in tone, “What happens to a dream deferred?” is a very public and enduring question.

In the body of the poem, the speaker attempts to answer his own questions with questions, ushering us through a number of similes that help us consider various responses to or fates of “a dream deferred”:

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

As image-based poems usually do, “Harlem” relies on us to turn its images around in our minds, allowing us to consider the nuances of each.

In “Harlem,” however, the images themselves are a type of encasing, the spinning of language around an absence, since the “dream deferred” remains undefined and abstract. One can read the poem as a congeries of images collected around an abortion, an act of creation in response to abstraction, negation, or even evil itself if we take non-being as evil. “Harlem” itself is the “crust[ing] and sugar[ing] over” of something that was but has been denied. However, if the poem is making something ugly or empty into something beautiful and promising, then it also represents the danger of art: it’s covering over something that, like an infected wound, must be dealt with openly.

But this is where “Harlem,” the title and the community, comes into play. Hughes, the microphone of Harlem, is there to record Harlem, to let the voices of Harlem come through. It’s “Harlem” that prevents the poet from making something beautiful of Harlem at the expense of making something true of Harlem. The last line of the poem, a line of italics, which Hughes often used to represent another voice, interjects a somewhat different answer to the original question:

Or does it explode?

The line is shorter by half than the rest of the poem’s images, notably unpoetic; it as such explodes upon us out of nowhere. And where the first speaker’s images rely on simile, the final line relies on metaphor — instantaneous metaphor: the dream deferred has gone from dream to explosion just that fast.

This year, I asked students to read “Harlem” in light of Ferguson, Missouri, another place that would have us hear something about the conditions of their community. Once again in Ferguson we saw an explosion stemming from a dream deferred: the dream inherent in the life of Michael Brown, and the collective dream of a community whose voices cry out in response to the forces of deferral.

“Harlem,” then, continues to be a helpful lens for American race relations. It is also a reminder of what art can do, what art should do, and what we might do with art —namely, let it interrupt our history, address our wounds, and help us avoid explosions.

The Tracks of My Tears

I was better after I had cried, than before — more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. ― Pip, Great Expectations (Charles Dickens, 1861)

Those who do not weep do not see. ― Les Misérables (Victor Hugo, 1862)

In the end, this round of antidepressants didn’t do me much good. I tried the latest kinds, upped and downed the doses with my doctor, and stuck with the most promising for a year and a half before deciding to ditch them at the end of the summer. Sure, there were days when they evened me out a bit. But ultimately I received a different diagnosis that explains much of the anxiety which has been my lifelong companion. (Stay tuned here for my first efforts at writing about that.)

So my symptoms would not be subdued with meds. A good thing, as I had grown tired of the side effects: weight gain, fatigue, bouts of insomnia. And a more insidious development: I couldn’t cry.

For a year and a half I could not summon a tear. This, though I endured the death of a beloved family member, celebrations of new births, and a hundred small scenes that may otherwise have prompted wet eyes of sorrow, nostalgia, or joy. Though I don’t cry that often, I’ve appreciated the cathartic release when it was deeply necessary. And I’ve noticed that for me, it’s often connected to prayer. As the Dickens line above suggests, tears can be something of a reset button, grounding our next action in a richer compassion. For one who needs all the help he can get, the loss of this gift truly hurt. Since I could not cry, I felt I could no longer see rightly.

But this story has a hopeful ending: I’ve reclaimed the gift of tears. And the way recent weeks have been, I’m thankful — though the tears have shown up much more frequently than ever before, as if making up for their absence. I’m sure it will even out again, but for now, I’ve coveted each one.

I cried in prayer over the open heart surgery performed on the six-month-old daughter of my dear friends — and again when I got the news that she pulled through and is flourishing. I cried alone after a student sat in my office, looked out at the campus water tower, and told me of some personal atrocities endured at the hands of an oppressive administration in the country she came from.

I cried sitting next to a recent cancer survivor at a performance of Margaret Edson’s one-act play Wit. And when my beloved creative writing students came over to watch Anne of Green Gables, I found myself crying (though I’ve read the book and watched the movie many times). I was caught off guard by one of Matthew’s great lines.

Marilla, surprised at the appearance of a girl where a boy was expected, thought immediately of sending Anne away. “What good would she be to us?” she asks her brother.

Matthew quietly turns the tables: “We might be some good to her.”

Yes, I have a sentimental streak. But in that moment, Matthew’s shifting the focus from his own needs to those of someone far worse off came to stand in my mind for every act of selflessness and grace our world desperately needs. So, in the dark room, with salt streams trickling down my face, I prayed for each one of my students hugging pillows on the couches and floor. I prayed that when things got bad, they could find someone who would be some good to them. And I prayed that we’d all decide to be some good to the people around us.

Though I could barely make out the TV screen through blurry eyes, I could see again.

Elegy to the Spanish Republic

The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous....Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead. – Harold Rosenberg

Look at prints of art masterpieces too long and you forget how potent the real pieces are, with the power to wreak havoc on a soul. So I was caught off guard when I rounded a corner at the Denver Art Museum last summer and confronted a dark angel in Robert Motherwell’s perfect visual for evil, one of the more than 150 paintings he titled “Elegy to the Spanish Republic,” a protest against European Fascism.

The stark, absorbing blackness of the huge forms; the slightly arched contours and suggestion of wings bearing tidings of bondage and destruction; the scratchy outlines, hinting at both disintegration and restless movement; the meekness of the sky-white background in contrast: evil at its finest hour in an ever-forward thrust to take center stage. Museums place benches in front of paintings for the kind of undoing moment I had at that point.

Motherwell called his procession of variations on the theme that spanned his entire career, “a funeral song for something one cared about.” He was dogged in his conviction that “the world could, after all, regress,” and he’s right, for though Fascism had been exposed when the artist began painting his Elegies after the war, that spirit that forces arbitrary value on human life is alive and well in its many forms. Do I possess enough of the Original to pray in front of an abortion clinic not just once or twice, but 150 times, sing that radical funeral song for the unborn? What if the musings of bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel in Why I Hope to Die at 75 became the “logical” framework for public policy that restricted life at the far end? We better all sit down on that bench. Without heavy doses of the Original, how easily we can become mere reproductions.

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.