Nelson Algren

Nelson Algren spent a lot of time in homeless shelters in Chicago. This was in the 1940’s and 50’s. He wasn’t homeless, but when you read his novels and stories—especially when you realize the measures he took to get them right—you get the impression he wished that he was. He used to go to Pacific Garden Mission, a giant homeless shelter still in operation in Chicago to this day, and sit down with the drunks and down-and-outers. He’d eat dinner with them, play cards, and shoot the breeze. There’s one picture, taken by Algren’s photographer buddy Art Shay, which depicts a junkie with a hypo showing Algren how he shoots up. All of this produced the world’s first National Book Award-winning novel in 1950—The Man With the Golden Arm. Algren’s protagonist, Frankie Machine, a struggling dope addict, is based on one of the men he used to play poker with. It is, in my opinion, the greatest novel ever written and certainly the most underrated. What makes it so good is what Algren inherently understood and then portrayed so sharply in the book: human civilization can actually only move forward at the pace of its least-of-these. That is to say, the speed of human progress is the speed at which a homeless man shambles down the sidewalk, peeking into garbage cans and begging for change.

Where Algren gets it right—and where I get it wrong time and time again, both as a writer and as a plain old human being—is that he dared to consider how beautiful the ugly things are. There’s a Christian tune I heard with the lyric “beauty from the ashes” but suppose the beauty is actually already in the ashes?

I don’t know if Algren was Christian or not. Probably not. Besides homeless people, he also hung around with existentialists and Marxists, archenemies of the Christians back then. This was at a time when a lot of Christians figured the appropriate approach to those that Christ Himself spent so much time with was to screech the Gospel at them from afar. But judging by the way Nelson Algren lived, not to mention the content of his body of work, he acted like a Christian—the way they’re supposed to act. My prayer for myself is simply, “Dear God, make me as good of a writer and as good of a Christian as Mr. Nelson Algren. Amen.”

Denise Levertov’s Birthday

Very recently, I turned thirty.

It’s a bit of a no-man’s land, emotionally, this turning thirty business. Anyone older, even by a few months, will dismiss all your grumbling (and will probably be strongly tempted to dismiss this post) with a patronizing chuckle and an eye roll. Anyone younger will take your grumbling far too seriously, and will try annoyingly hard to commiserate with and console you.

The morning of my 30th, facing my mortality, I scanned my bookshelves for some appropriately somber reading material and found Denise Levertov. I thumbed through to find one of Levertov’s long poems, “Relearning the Alphabet.”

I love this book. I’ve read it many times. Yet for the last three years or so, it has been gathering dust. As I re-read, I was shocked to discover that certain lines brought up vivid memories. Especially a passage near the end:

Heart breaks but mends like good bone. It’s the vain will wants to have been wounded deeper burned by the cold moon to cinder.

At twenty-three, heartbroken, I scratched my ballpoint pen emphatically beneath those lines and felt the haze of a painful breakup begin to lift. My twenty-five year-old self, devastated by the loss of a teaching job, found the lines again and muttered, “mends like good bone” like a mantra through the difficult end of that year. At twenty-seven, mourning a soured friendship, I circled “the vain will” and swallowed my pride.

I’d like to forget those low points, those past versions of me. They embarrass the cooler, calmer, older me. I hadn’t meant to revisit them on my birthday morning, of all days. But oddly, I drew strength for the coming year from those memories. Strength that I hadn’t been able to find anywhere else.

I once heard Robert Pinsky say that the reason poetry differs from all other writing is its physicality. It’s written to be spoken, so you not only hear it, you feel it—even reading silently, he said, your body imagines the words spoken within you. Perhaps it’s because of this physicality that poetry can carry memory, just the way a scent or a song stores memories.

Here’s my advice, from the crone-ish perch of this third decade (cue the well-deserved eye-roll): Find yourself a few poems that will travel with you, like dear friends. And visit them often.

(Painting by Henry Lamb)

Art is universal

“Art is universal,” wrote James Jackson Jarves. “It unites mankind in common brotherhood. . . . art is the connecting link in the chain of great minds. Through its language, thought appeals to thought, and sympathy echoes feeling.”

Jarves, a 19th century writer and art critic, beautifully captured the sentiments that ran through my mind while I was deep in the halls of the Chicago Art Institute. Of all the amazing works in that museum—works that span hundreds and thousands of years and come from every continent of the globe—I was struck most by a small, green, comparatively unimpressive plate in a hall of Chinese pottery. It was “Foliate Dish with Bovine Gazing at a Crescent Moon,” and my first reaction was to laugh. It’s a strange motif. A cow looking at the moon sounds absurd, like something out of a nursery rhyme.

My second reaction was absolute amazement. That plain, light-green dish seemed suddenly like the most amazing thing in the museum. Think of the implications of that plate! A man—a real man, who lived in real life, in a real house—looked at a farm animal in a field in China hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And he was so inspired by that cow that he went home and made a dish with its picture on it.

Think about it! It’s amazing! A real-life man saw a real-life cow, and that man put that cow on a dish, and now we can see it more than a thousand years later! That man had a name, and a home, and a family, and an appreciation for small, everyday sights like a cow in a field. He could never have fathomed that we would go see his plate in a museum on the other side of the world. He could never have known that a tourist from Lakeland, Florida would ever see his dish and feel a sudden kinship with him. The cow on the plate looks like any one of the cows that loll around the fields around my hometown, and it was captured in clay more than a millennium ago! What a wonderful thing!

Maybe I’m not making my point. Maybe, from your perspective, I sound like a crazy person raving about a weird dish and the fact that it has a cow on it. I don’t know. But I do know that, for a while, I felt a deep friendship with a long-dead Chinese potter whose plate was in a glass case a thousand years after he made it. I knew what Jarves meant when he wrote that “Distinctions of tongue or boundary lines disappear before the power of truths, which, like the rainbow, charm by the beauty of variegated hues, or, combined with light, illumine the universe.” I knew what he meant when he referenced a chain of minds connected by art—in my case, I experienced a chain of gazes. A cow gazed at the moon, a man gazed at the cow, a woman gazed at the man through a window in time opened by a small green plate.

Art is a remarkable thing . . . even when it takes the form of a rather unremarkable dish. The chain of minds Jarves references is accessible everywhere! You just have to look.

(Painting by Jamie Wyeth)

Inheritance

This mad house is my home. ~ Barbara Weston

The film August: Osage County opens in the home of Violet and Beverly Weston. Their decades-long marriage has been an attempt to blend their divergent natures; Beverly’s is poetic, Violet’s is mean. She wreaks emotional violence against anyone who gets too close to her frayed center. Beverly navigates her tumultuous waters by gripping the gunwales. As the film starts, he is bearing the tempest that occurs when Violet learns he has hired “an Indian” (the tragically and recently deceased Misty Upham) to help care for her through her developing stages of oral cancer. Having provided for Violet in this way, Beverly launches a boat on the lake where he is later discovered to have drowned. His family considers it a suicide. His death brings their three daughters back home, as well as Violet’s sister, Mattie Fae; her husband, Charles; and their son, a grown man they call Little Charles.

We see the effect the marriage and Violet’s nature has had on each of the daughters. They are unhappy, resentful, and floundering well into adulthood. We suspect there may be similarities between Barbara and her mom as we see her relate to family members, including her husband Bill (from whom she is separated) and their 14-year-old daughter, Jean. The messes amass as each generation finds they cannot separate themselves from the sins of their fathers.

Philip Larkin’s poem, “This Be The Verse,” talks about the dark side of family heritage and brilliantly complements August:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.

The poem and film share the same black humor and subtlety; they’re not as bleak as they seem. Larkin’s use of Robert Louis Stevenson’s line “this be the verse” from his epitaph is humorous. It asks us to imagine coming upon a headstone with his poem as the inscription, and contrasting it with Stevenson’s tones of contentment and repose.

In August, the family attends Beverly’s funeral and then gathers at home for a meal. Violet and Barbara brawl on the floor as a result of their dinner conversation. The weekend catches Barbara in the convergence of opposing forces: her mother’s will against her own, her own against her husband’s and daughter’s. This is a maelstrom we can relate to. If we suffer the battered heart and ravished soul that Donne expresses, isn’t it often from the emotional dynamics of relationship? And isn’t family one of God’s most effective tools for shaping character? Through the turmoil, Barbara realizes that her nature is wound like a double helix to her mother’s. This revelation leads her to a nuanced turning point where she begins to see a house not built by hands.

The Poetry of Loss and Resurrection

Sometimes, especially when I’m most in need of meeting myself—the actual Jill long lost within the daily, rigid busyness of life—I hunt for myself in the files on my computer.

I look for me between the lines of what I have managed to write down, in words and images that, over time, come together in patterns and threads and whispers. And I try to understand what I believe I have been trying to tell myself. I have discovered that the Jill who has been writing these past few months is one who can’t stop talking about the past, about memory, about loss.

A few months ago, I stood in the cold corner of a funeral home with a twenty-one year-old college student whom I have come to love and admire very much over four years of teaching her. Just a day earlier, she was taking notes in her English literature class. Now, she was standing near the casket of her mother, killed on impact in a tragic car crash. And just like that, the month became not her first month as a college senior, but the month in which her mother died, the month she would forever associate with brutal and unexpected loss.

I know that grief and loss almost always find us when we aren’t looking. And even when we are looking, our God-given human instinct to exist, to expect others to continue to exist along with us still baffles our ability to navigate what we somehow feel was never meant to be—this road of vanishing faces, this road of vanishing moments. We feel we are made to last. We feel those we love were made to last. And yet, like pencil etchings on a growth chart, our human lives can feel so measured by the losses we endure, the grief we live with.

A few weeks after the funeral, I read a poem by Lisel Mueller that stunned me in all the aching and haunting ways the best poems do:

“When I Am Asked” by Lisel Mueller

When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.

It was soon after my mother died, a brilliant June day, everything blooming.

I sat on a gray stone bench in a lovingly planted garden, but the day lilies were as deaf as the ears of drunken sleepers and the roses curved inward. Nothing was black or broken and not a leaf fell and the sun blared endless commercials for summer holidays.

I sat on a gray stone bench ringed with the ingenue faces of pink and white impatiens and placed my grief in the mouth of language, the only thing that would grieve with me.

I think the poem haunted me because of how powerfully Mueller’s images portray a collision of experience—that relatable and agonizing experience of being alone in a cheery, bright world with your own dark grief. The placement of a hard “stone bench” in both the middle of her poem and the middle of a garden communicates something of the hardness and ruttedness one faces in the middle of loss. The flowers bloom beautifully and unsparingly, advertising their wholeness in a season where “nothing is black or broken” except the mourner, sitting on a gray bench, stuck between bloom and loss.

Mueller’s poem helps me understand the self I have discovered in the files of my computer. I think I write about loss and memory and the past because those things never really are lost or past. I think we write poems and read poems because, among other things, poetry becomes the landscape of resurrection. When Mueller finds that language, that poetry will “grieve” with her, she not only resurrects the memory of her mother, but she also raises up her own grief and gives it a safe space to unfold, to exist. In our busy lives, it does seem that there is little room to negotiate loss. But in the world of the poem, there is space, not only for those we mourn but also for those who mourn.

(Photo by Robert Friedus)

How to Swim Naked

“Life can survive in the constant shadow of illness, and even rise to moments of rampant joy, but the shadow remains, and one has to make space for it.” —Diane Ackerman from One Hundred Names for Love

You pull back the curtains shielding you from the ocean view. Rub your eyes. Step back from the window frame. Your body tells your head it is time to visit the water. The child in you remembers this need. You take a walk with your husband to the beach. The sun dips beneath the lagoon. Your husband brings his portable speaker and iPod tucked in one of his vest pockets, the kind of vest that makes him look like an explorer. He plays Yo-Yo Ma Bach sonatas. You wander toward the middle of the beach where there are piles of seashells. You search for the shells that catch your eye. Your husband is drawn to the broken pieces. “It wouldn’t be hard to turn this into a blade,” he says as a curious child. You look for moon shells, even the shattered ones, and you look for tiny shells that are complete except for a hole you can slip thin cord through and make a tiny shell garland. You watch watermelon clouds streak over the lagoon, radiating behind three towering condos. Still beautiful, you think. You turn to your husband and tell him you’re tempted to skinny dip. He wanders toward the surf and stares at the waves. You turn your gaze to the piles of seaweed and shells mixed with a plastic bottle cap and cigarette butts. You soon realize that staring hard at the litter will not make it disappear. You look up in time to see your husband—running—into the water—stark naked—a smile filling his entire face—giddy. You rush toward his crumpled clothes and get stuck on a knot in the leg of your pants. You do not want to miss this moment. You have never been naked in the ocean with your husband. Never. You work the knot as fast as you can. Strip down. Run to the water and into the rolling waves. “Woooo! This is cold,” your husband shouts. You both laugh and shriek and smile and hold each other. The water holds you, and something…leaves your body. In a split second, three worries accidentally slip into the Gulf Stream. The needling fear a cough may be symptomatic of something worse, a splinter in the toe will become infected, a spider bite will make your husband’s beautiful body go septic. The water makes you forget these ghosts for the time being. It’s only a few minutes, and your husband is ready to get out. First, a kiss, you say. You kiss a slippery salty kiss. Your husband walks tall out of the water. You remain and dive into the waves. Feel the shore on your legs, bottom, and back—places normally covered in elastic and polyamide. You love this feeling. You walk out of the water and say a silent thank you for the laughter and dripping. You dress in what is only necessary. Yo-Yo Ma still plays his cello.

You and your husband walk side-by-side, in the gathering darkness, back to the condo. You bob up and down on the white sand. Your bra pokes out of your pocket. Your husband is in his boxers and carries his shorts folded over one arm. He looks good in the straw hat he purchased at the Orange Beach hardware store. You pass the parking attendant who is giving a tour to visitors. “Good evening,” she smiles. “Good evening,” your husband returns. You enter the elevator with your husband, two buoys riding up, hungry for gumbo and music and dance. The light from your kitchen can be seen from the jetty a half-mile away where the beach and the water and the sky are now one inky color. The neighbors must surely wonder about the distant Cajun melodies and the smell of roux drifting down condo corridors. Tonight, the two of you will sleep inside a star.

Founding Mythologies

A place isn’t a place until you tell stories about it, says Wallace Stegner in “The Sense of Place.” In fact, Stegner says, “[N]o place is a place until it has had a poet.” He has Yeats in mind, who claimed about Ireland that “there is no river or mountain that is not associated in the memory with some event or legend.” Stegner goes on to worry about the American “mythless man” who “lives a life of his own, sunk in a subjective mania of his own devising, which he believes to be the newly discovered truth.”

As an undergrad, I had the pleasure of visiting Yeats’ County Sligo. I can hardly imagine a more Romantic place for an aspiring writer to visit. Even the names of the places—Glencar, Thoor Ballylee, Coole Park—were bewitching. Reading “Under Ben Bulben” while looking up at Ben Bulben, I knew what kind of writing I wanted to do, and I knew what my Ben Bulben was: Blue Mounds.

The first piece of writing I ever published was about a regional landmark called Blue Mounds, a place where the rolling prairie swelled into a bluff and caught my imagination. Once caught, I followed the imaginative trail to local species, specifically big bluestem, the prairie grass that gave Blue Mounds its hue. From there, the path led to the novelist Fredrick Manfred, who lived and wrote on the mound, and then to history: I mistook the cliffs at Blue Mounds for a buffalo jump, which they were not, but that imaginative mistake landed me squarely in Native America and in myth.

Arguably, the founding myth of the place originates not from Blue Mounds but from just up the road at Pipestone, Minnesota, and the National Parks site that protects the red stone used to make the pipe sacred to tribal people. Among the founding legends of that place are these: White Buffalo Calf Woman gave the sacred pipe to the Lakota, an act of special revelation; the stone found at Pipestone is the blood of Lakota ancestors who perished in a great flood caused by the water monster, Unktehi.

If Yeats and Stegner are right—and I think they are—and literary art should be tethered to specific places and myths, then we writers in an American context have some work to do. Not only do we have to learn and understand the myths of the places where we live, but we also must handle them with care: the story of White Buffalo Calf Woman is not my story and I cannot appropriate it without doing continued violence to a people group who continues to be underrepresented.

But the call for writers to know our places remains, despite the dangers. Writers going back to at least Washington Irving, who imported European myths, have most often looked past the mythology of the American continent. Even Stegner notes how Americans have been “[p]lunging into a future through a landscape that had no history.” It does have a history—and a mythology—and it’s one we must get to know to do justice to the places we live.

Darkness Rather than Light

It has always seemed strange to me . . . the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egoism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second. – John Steinbeck

What epitomizes the essence of Steinbeck’s ruminations better than the highly successful Netflix TV show House of Cards, a statement on the ruthless spirit of Washington politics (real or somewhat imagined) that even a sophisticated reviewer for the New York Times admits “may be the most joyless show on television.” Nevertheless, I hear it everywhere: emotional downer shows that cash in on human evil are “actually quite literary,” and this type of “finally, something intelligent on television” programming spells the Salvation of Western Civilization.

While admitting the show is joyless, the Times reviewer still considers this drama series “exhilarating and binge-worthy.” She’s right; looking voyeuristically into other people’s soul sickness is a rush, and addictive because we unconsciously recognize it in ourselves. The spirit behind the Machiavellian Frank Underwood and his grim, shifty-eyed ilk appeals to the Black Plague germs lurking in us all, our love of darkness rather than light (John 3:19). Steinbeck needn’t have been surprised by this human tendency.

What’s actually surprising is that we don’t work harder to fill our eyes and ears with kind and wholesome images, stuff that even science has proven beneficial psychologically and physiologically. In an article in Psychology Today, “Elation: The Amazing Effect of Witnessing Acts of Kindness,” “witnessing altruistic acts can be a source of what Abraham Maslow called ‘peak experiences,’ “a warm feeling in the chest, a sensation of expansion in [the] heart . . . increased sense of connection with others . . . a manifestation of humanity’s ‘higher’ or ‘better’ nature.” And to think goodness isn’t cool in our world.

Question for self: Without being overly didactic about it, wouldn’t it be better for my soul, if I must view monsters, just to dial into old episodes of The Munsters instead of keeping company with the monsters in House of Cards?

Ponderings. . . on Verbicide

Can you do me this favor right now and imagine in your mind’s eye an altar. OK. Now put the following title “Progress” on that handsome altar. (No doubt you are chuckling right now, but work with me.) OK, we probably would agree that such a thing is not just connected with a strict religious connotation, right? Altars are used for sacrifice, and that is not always bad. Parents sacrifice time for their children. Couple’s sacrifice their earlier freedoms for—hopefully—the bliss of togetherness. Respectable citizens sacrifice their money for good charity. Forward thinking students sacrifice some frivolities for future degrees, etc., etc. We generally sacrifice something for a reason, and that's good.

Of course, while some sacrifice can also be offered out of good intentions, it can also have lamentable consequences. We make a sacrifice for a perceived good and then it turns out later to make things worse. We have sacrificed our environment for the sake of convenience, our health for the sake of a quick meal, and our leisure for the sake of cheap utilitarianism.

What about words though? And what of that altar of sacrifice? Let’s take another thought test: think of the following words “pure,” “chaste,” “modest,” and “virginal,” (I cringe whilst typing!) and then imagine employing them in an everyday conversation. Better yet, try to remember any modern day movie or play or novel you have heard them in.

Maybe it’s just me—though I don't think so!—but doesn't “purity” have a rather flaccid, weak and wimpish connotation to it? And a “chaste” individual in our time and age is a what? A nun? Probably a modest nun. As far as “virginal”? ... no one even wants to go there. Yet despite the fanciful claim that our age is still sexually repressed, why then have we sacrificed the non-sexual meanings of these words in even our spiritual settings for the most part? Part of it is that we are paranoid of gendering words, I think. (I can't help myself, but when was the last time you heard the word “maiden” used? It’s sexist right? I mean a maidenly CEO is literally an anathema. And understandably so: maidenly is not productive or efficient.) Even words like “innocent” or “wholesome” are little used. What would “innocent” look like? A reaction I have gotten when asking is “oh, probably someone really naive, or young or frigid.” When I asked if “wholesome” could be included with vibrant sexuality, I got a truly odd look; sure, organic food is wholesome, Jersey cow cream is wholesome, but, like, an actual person who partakes in “wholesome” sexuality ... and isn't Amish (AKA boring)? I can't ever see Victoria Secret coming out with a “wholesome” line of undies. I rest my case.

We all know that chaste doesn't just mean abstaining from you-know-what. It also means to be circumspect, restrained from excess, and to be free from indecency or offensiveness. As consumers, that sounds like something we need more of! (Even if nothing else than to rid ourselves of kitsch.) How about being chaste of desire? And not sexual desire either. Yet, since that word has lately been castigated to only its sexual connotation, what has modern culture lost? In his Studies in Words, C.S. Lewis talked of verbicide. He mentioned that morality and immorality have been linked nearly exclusively to chastity and lechery. Yet morality includes more than just the sexual. So do words like “modest” or “chaste” or “pure.” They do, in fact, include large tracts of our life, and we will be better off if we don't sacrifice their use in our diction simply because current culture isn't comfortable with words that carry the whiff of—heavens!—temperance. And there is yet another word we could study!

The Bar Virtue

It's always a long day at work, but today was especially long: a student meeting sandwiched in between two meetings with advancement at the college, and three lectures to prep, and the copier breaking down, and an article to publish. I customarily repair to a pub down the street a few days a week to wrap up my workday, right about when the walls of my small office start to close in on me. I try to go early and leave early, when I can. But today I didn't make it here till almost seven o'clock. I still got a seat.

They know me here. They gave me the WiFi password months ago. They slip me extra food or a pint they accidentally poured for someone else. Today, I got here and started to order, and the bartender immediately leaned in and said, conspiratorially, “You know, we have an Imperial IPA on tap now.” I've been griping about the proliferation of Oktoberfest for weeks. They know what I like.

I started coming here almost a year ago, partly because some sleuthing revealed they pour my favorite Irish microbrew, and partly because it's close to work. Low lights, but not too low. No sports in the side of the bar where I usually sit, though I traded spots briefly during the World Cup. Polite clientele, unlike most of the places near Wall Street. And lots of history—my husband recently looked up from his laptop to tell me that it's the oldest bar in New York City. George Washington bid his troops farewell right here.

I've spent a few late nights here with friends, and a few more alone, cranking through the to-do list. When I ran the New York City Half-Marathon last March, I ran over the finish line and straight here, where they were pouring stouts at ten o'clock in the morning. I've made friends with the bartenders and recommended books and talked about movies and chuckled at antics, and I've written many thousand words perched in the same seat where I am, right now, writing a few hundred more. I've eavesdropped on more awkward conversations than I can count and chatted with (mostly Irish) tourists and tried a few weird beers, and I have always felt safe.

When people ask me how I work while perched at a bar, I point out that many New Yorkers work in coffeeshops—and of course, everyone has their favorite one. Some are loud. Some let you be anonymous. At some, your barista knows your drink; others have free coffee refills. But for me, the bar is the right place: I don't have time to write till evenings, I don't want to drink caffeine late in the day, coffeeshops in New York close by 7pm, and besides, once you figure out that drinking slowly is fine, a nicely poured pint is the perfect thing to make an evening of tasks more tolerable.

Tonight, I'll duck out in an hour or two, after I tick off the final item on my to-do list—it's a work day, after all—and trade some conversation with the bartender. I'll leave feeling like I haven't been “out,” because in some sense, I haven't; I've been at one of my comfortable places. It's a gift to have a place where you are a regular, a place where everybody knows not just your name, but your drink, and your occupation, and the fact that you're married and would rather not deal with unwanted attention from some rando down the bar, and what book you're reading right now.

Rosie Schaap, who wrote the “Drink” column for The New York Times, wrote a book called Drinking with Men, all about the joys of regularhood. And she says this: “Although loyalty is upheld as a virtue, bar regularhood—the practice of drinking in a particular establishment so often that you become known by, and bond with, both the bartenders and your fellow patrons—is often looked down upon in a culture obsessed with health and work. But despite what we are often told, being a regular isn’t synonymous with being a drunk; regularhood is much more about the camaraderie than the alcohol. Sharing the joys of drink and conversation with friends old and new, in a comfortable and familiar setting, is one of life’s most unheralded pleasures.”

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Re-reading the Same Story

A recently divorced friend told me how he and his ex-wife have different stories about how they met. His version is that he approached her at a party. Her version is that she introduced herself in a class. They fought about what actually happened not because they wanted to be right, but because of what the versions meant. Their unique stories portrayed each other in different lights and reflected what they believed about themselves and the other. A different story gave them a different interpretation about their past and that interpretation had influence on their future.

What if we used multiple interpretations of the same story to our advantage? Judaic literature and religion provide a long history of a hermeneutic approach. What if we applied the same hermeneutic approach to our own past? The Midrash, for example, is full of multiple interpretations of texts, each one providing a new perspective and light into the deepness of the text. The stories begin to have more power than they did before; as if a black and white television show suddenly displayed itself in full high-definition, three-dimension color. The psychologist Mordechai Rotenburg terms this a re-composition. It’s a re-reading of one’s past and history that allows a new future to form.

If I can re-read my past, then I can start to write a different future. Christ’s resurrection was a complete re-write of the world’s history. A re-interpretation of what God was perceived to be doing in the world. But where do I start? At the beginning? Somewhere in the middle like a deus ex machina? I have a personal stake in this concept. With my own recently divorced past, I have a story that tells me I’m a good-for-nothing failure. I’m tired of this interpretation and its powerlessness. I need a re-write, but — like sitting down at one’s desk to edit a long manuscript — the task feels overwhelming. The real work isn’t correcting the grammar or the misspellings; it’s finding the new story within the old, the one that gives new life. I need an expert editor to sift through the ashes and bring to life the small burning ember.

(Painting by Neil Simone)

Hamlet, Hipsters, Irony

I credit my students’ ever-active brains with shaping a recent class discussion such that I found myself having to ask, “Do you really think Hamlet’s irony is like a hipster’s?” We had been finding the subtle contrasts between the type of the Shakespearean fool and Hamlet’s foolery under the guise of madness. We had established in a previous class that Hamlet’s wit was highly ironic, like Lear’s fool’s, but that it was perhaps even more ironic in that Hamlet does not require his wit to be effective. He gibes Polonius, who famously suspects, “though this be madness, yet there is method in’t,” but he never confirms what that method might be. He mocks his old school-buddies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern after he comes to distrust them, and when they confess their confusion, he simply shrugs it off: “A knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear.”

It was this indifference to the effect of his methodical madness that seemed to suggest the comparison to the hipster’s aimless irony for the sake of irony. Now, I was torn about this. As a teacher, I appreciated their inventive contemporary connection. But I actually like irony — it suits my temperament — and I had just started to think that I liked Hamlet’s brand of holy foolery.

This may be hard to get in our earnest age of online outrage and self-righteousness, but I actually think irony is a powerful tool for the Christian. When directed back at ourselves, it allows us to participate in a sick society, to hold up to mockery what merits mocking, but also to avoid setting ourselves up as the standards of good or the arbiters of morality. To harangue like Hamlet — or in some gentler fashion — is to offer your audience an alternative explanation to the uncomfortable possibility that you may be speaking truth, i.e., that you’re nuts, or grumpy, or whatever.

In Hamlet’s case, his feigned madness comes off as a plausible way to respond to being called to an act of violent justice in a thoroughly perverse world. His is a nearly pure irony that enjoys its own insight aesthetically, for the beauty of the thing, rather than morally, for its effects.

Nonetheless, we determined as a class that the hipster’s irony is aimless compared with the Dane’s. To the extent that we can talk about “hipsters” as a coherent group, their irony stems not only from a sense that the world is broken but from an unwillingness to actively propose an alternative. They instead form para-cultural pockets of affinity who collectively opt out of all available social options. Hamlet feigns madness, ironically, because he cannot just opt out but must respond to his circumstances as son and heir to a murdered king. His irony stems from a knowledge that he will at last choose some alternative and from a desire to be as disruptive as possible until he can muster up the determination to do so.

But, interestingly, he does not quite get the chance to choose his course of action. Rather, events unfold around him, and he has to respond in the moment. Just before the final scene, his duel with Laertes, he explains to Horatio that he accepts he cannot manipulate events to suit his own ends. Instead, he must be prepared to act on what he knows is right: “the readiness is all.” Some years later Milton would similarly suggest that “they also serve who only stand and wait.” We do not always have the courage bred of conviction, and irony may be a legit stance until we discover it, but Hamlet shows us that irony cannot be an end in itself. There’s no drama to it, and where there’s no drama there’s no story, and certainly we must be a people who believe in story.

On Canons and Saints

It happened during the Q&A portion of Dr. Cairns' poetry reading. When a man at the workshop posed his question, Dr. Scott Cairns prefaced the answer by asking him if he had read The Brothers Karamazov. No, he replied. Suddenly, the bright, amiable room we sat in shuddered and darkened like a rift valley in a quake and descended into an animated, if not fiery, lecture on the essential nature of that book.

“Wow! Was that Socratics?” asked a panicky voice.

“Rhetoric, I think,” said another, catching her breath in the aftershocks.

“No,” said the voices of those who'd read the book. “He was finding the right ground for his answer.”

Of course, nobody outside my silly mind said those things and the ground falling away is a figure. But the initial incident was true and left the man's question, along with its answer, lost in a canonical chasm. And we who were exposed with poorer footing made an orderly bee line for the bookstore.

My habit is to read rather slowly for an hour a day in the early morning. So Brothers, a thick book, will take a while. (Another thick book I read, Centennial, took about a hundred years!) But someone once said that a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies so the amount of time is really no concern. What is, is the quality of choices for the lives and times I read. Dr. Cairns, knowing this, cared enough to risk his Q&A on the seismic question, “Have you read...?”

As Dostoevsky begins telling the story of Alyosha, the book's protagonist who would come to study under an elder, the narrator offers this picture:

What, then, is an elder? An elder is one who takes your soul, your will into his soul and into his will. Having chosen an elder, you renounce your will and give it to him under total obedience and with total self-renunciation. A man who dooms himself to this trial, this terrible school of life, does so voluntarily, in the hope that after the long trial he will achieve self-conquest, self-mastery to such a degree that he will, finally, through a whole life's obedience, attain to perfect freedom – that is, freedom from himself – and avoid the lot of those who live their whole lives without finding themselves in themselves.

* * * * * * * *

All Saints Day has just come. It sits on the liturgical calendar like an outpost in Ordinary Time and readies our journey into Christmastide. The Saints, like great teachers, point the direction, supply the need, and walk a distance alongside. They become fellow travelers from a different time that we do not see except by the light of words and imagination, and yet are there. In this relationship words become light and light becomes time. How small the leap, then, that word might become flesh when we see it so in the courses of other lives?

Thus, I embark on Brothers, which I should finish around Epiphany. I do it so I might ask questions grounded in the prospect of better insight, and as an act of trusting my teachers' admonitions that time spent in good reading is time being redeemed.

What time, by what light, do you read?

A Long Obedience

Balzac drank close to fifty cups of coffee every day. Before he wrote a single word, Steinbeck set twelve, freshly sharpened Blackwings on his desk. Poe made scrolls of narrow sheets and sealing wax: a tiny scroll for every final draft. Hemingway stood; Capote reclined; Dickens paced. 

Tales of rituals about the act of writing abound. They are told and retold, collected and displayed: evidence of eccentricity, or quick-fix jump-starts to propel us into creative space.

What’s rarer, at least to my knowing, are stories in which the whole of a writer’s life is seen to have been brought to an order, as is the way of Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami:

“When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours,” he told The Paris Review in 2004. "In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

To regard each moment of one’s life as essential to induction into the timeless is to take a more integral view of imagination than is often made manifest in popular culture, one that requires rigor, if it is to be acted upon.

“To hold to such repetition for so long requires a good amount of mental and physical strength,” Murakami continued. "In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.”

I tend to forget the link between discipline and creative well-being. How much easier it is to go slack, waiting for inspiration. But when I look back at the times when I was able to contend most fruitfully with what Nietzsche called the “thousand laws” at work within “the free arranging, locating, disposing, and constructing” that composes each moment we later call inspired, I recognize them as times when my days were fully exercised —filled with theory and practice, thinking and running.

The next sentence in Nietzsche’s book is familiar, and deeply challenging: “The essential thing ‘in heaven and in earth’ is […] that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.”

Balzac worked fifteen hours a day. He plumped with ink each margin of every galley proof he ever got. Steinbeck labored over East of Eden for eleven months. He drafted each day’s work on the right-hand pages of a notebook. In the facing space, he wrote letters to his friend, Pascal Covici. “On the third finger of my right hand, I have a great callus just from using a pencil for so many hours every day, ” he wrote on April 3, a Tuesday. "It has become a big lump by now, and it doesn’t ever go away.”

It’s easy enough to co-opt a trapping of a writer’s inner life, to buy a dozen pencils, brew another pot. What’s hard is to submit to the force toward which the rituals point. What’s hard is to work when it seems like nothing’s working. What’s hard, to put it another way, is to work on faith.

Snow Writing

While some deplore it, snow cover attracts many people, writers especially, when it first covers the ground and changes the usual view of things. In the countryside, snow cover might remain untouched and therefore quite appealing for some time. But in the cities, the snowscape gets mucked up quickly by our incessant industry — plowing, shoveling, de-icing, sanding away the inconvenience of it. Still, the snowy scene draws writers not only for its newness, but also for the awe and fear it can stir in the observer.

With little wind behind it, descending snow falls quietly and calmly while it re-creates the landscape. Oncoming snow accompanied by heavy, dark clouds and blowing winds brings on change so suddenly, it stirs fear in the observer. Out in the elements, our instincts tell us to prepare for fight or flight in the most primal conflict, human versus nature. However, a snowstorm can also invoke the sublime, a feeling that arises from yoking beauty and terror, creating a moment of overriding clarity. These circumstances arise in Emily Brontë’s “Spellbound”:

The giant trees are bending, their bare boughs weighed with snow. And the storm is fast descending, and yet I cannot go.

In a seemingly simple poem, Brontë creates the intersection of heightened fear with intense admiration, which causes near-paralysis, or stasis, in the observer. This fixation makes the speaker’s situation all the more precarious, so that in the last stanza we hear

Clouds beyond clouds above me, wastes beyond wastes below; but nothing drear can move me; I will not, cannot go.

At this point, the observer stands riveted to the spot, and “nothing drear” can cause her to do what instinct tells her to do — find shelter from a coming storm. Though she may know this landscape as an old familiar, this time she sees with unusual perspicacity: the snow cover lies eerily in weak light while dark, otherworldly figures of trees fix themselves in her imagination. The poem’s incantatory effects are not lost on us either. Maybe the observer feels the chill weather as an embrace, but the approaching storm threatens to overpower her. And so it does; it dazzles her senses, allowing her to understand in an instant her own frailty and temporality. David Baker, in “The Sublime: Origins and Definitions,” describes the experience as “instruction by means of solitary terror.” The sublime is often invoked through landscape that triggers a “magnified sense of out-of-proportionality.”

The beauty of Brontë’s poem lies also in its paradox: readers can step to the edge of oblivion, but from a safe distance. Jane Hirshfield, in Facing the Lion,” says that plainly “certain distance is required” to face overpowering conditions. She cites the example of The Inferno to explain: “The reason Dante is forbidden pity when he looks upon the damned [is that] to feel their fate too intimately would put his own salvation at risk.” Poets, by virtue of their art, are “acceding to fate while at the same time delaying it”; and readers are brought to withering, yet unshakable knowledge of how it is to be in the presence of superhuman, even divine, forces.

Taizé & The Glass Siblings

The first time I read Franny and Zooey, I was captivated by Franny Glass’s (admittedly unhinged) plan to repeat “The Jesus Prayer” until it became as natural as a heartbeat. I was less impressed by her brother Zooey’s admonishment, later in the story, that Franny should stop using the prayer “as a substitute for doing whatever the hell your duty is in life, or just your daily duty.”

Upon a second reading, it dawned on me the reader’s sympathies ought to lie with Zooey (if the reader was the type of reader who could ever really sympathize with a Salinger character) and that Franny’s approach to the divine was a little precious, a little selfish.

Franny’s been on my mind lately, as I’ve started attending a weekly Taizé service. Taizé is a distinct style of worship, based out of a monastic community in France. The service is a series of repetitive chants interspersed with prayers and readings.

We meet weekly in the front corner of a beautiful, cathedral-like sanctuary. A circle of chairs surrounds a large wooden cross. The chants are simple — one line is sung 15, 20 times. One is even a Kyrie — the same words as Franny’s Jesus Prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”

It is a beautiful, sacred hour. The repetition is soothing and calming. Like all meditation, the chants open a space for mindfulness of my breath, of my heartbeat. Of all my chaotic worries that swirl up to cloud the quiet.

That hour focusing on repetition has made me more aware of the many less-sacred patterns in my weeks. I drive one route to work, morning and evening. I teach the same class to five periods of students. I put on the same make-up in the morning, and take it off every evening. I cook; I do the dishes.

Tallying up the hours I devote to these repetitive tasks gets discouraging. Oppressive, even. Zooey hones in on this feeling, describing a particular moment when the mundane hit him hard:

Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady.

Later, he clarifies this rather bizarre image by telling Franny, “Don’t you know who the Fat Lady is? Ah, Buddy. It’s Christ himself.”

***

My favorite lines from the Taizé prayers come near the end, after most of the chants have been sung:   

Waiting for you, by night and by day, means letting our hearts grow so open to all, that as the years pass, we wish more and more to burn with one and the same love — ours and Yours.

This is followed by a chant:

Bless the Lord, my soul, and bless God’s holy name Bless the Lord my soul, who leads me into life.

The words acknowledge the circular nature of life: “waiting for you by night and by day.” Yet they also give hope of growth and expansion with the lines “so that we may turn to what lies ahead” and “our hearts grow so open.”

As Rilke says in The Book of Hours, “I live my life in widening circles.”

The Taizé service is another circle in my week now. Each Thursday, I sit in the darkened church and quiet my heart and blend my voice with the others and watch the stained glass blaze and fade into evening. And I draw strength from the beauty of it. Then I leave, and I do my best to bring that beauty with me into the less-lovely patterns in my week, that they might also lead me into life.

Both Glass siblings have a point — we should pray unceasingly for mercy, but we should do it while we “polish our shoes.” This, I believe, is how the circles of our lives begin to widen.

Caritas abundat in omnia...

Every newspaper I pick up is awful. The whole world, it seems, is in an uproar. Fear of war stalks families and countries around the globe; Ebola is throwing whole governments into panic; ISIS continues its brutal campaign across the Middle East; politicians stateside and abroad fling insults and petty accusations at each other. Rarely do I ever let myself look away from what’s going on in the world at any given moment, but the temptation to do so can be overwhelming.

Perhaps it is because of that worldwide turmoil that the compositions of German nun and healer Hildegard von Bingen have been such a solace. Her chants are my go-to for nights I cannot sleep and, though I don’t speak a word of Latin, the songs have quickly become my favorite nighttime soundtrack. Out of curiosity, I looked up the lyrics to my favorite of her chants, Caritas Habundat. It runs:

Caritas habundat in omnia, de imis excellentissima super sidera,

Loving tenderness abounds for all from the darkest to the most exalted one beyond the stars.

atque amantissima in omnia, quia summo Regi osculum pacis dedit.                                           

Exquisitely loving all she bequeaths the kiss of peace upon the ultimate King.

Translations differ, but von Bingen’s message stays the same — love abides in even the depths and in the voids beyond the stars. Her chant is a beautiful reminder that, no matter the darkness of the world, that love abides … even when it doesn’t seem so.

The world is in shambles. Bad news flows from every corner of the globe. It’s been like that, though to varying degrees, for as far back as history can recount. My own life is less dark, but it is still full of work and obligations, family illnesses, young friends who die too soon, and other stressors that come with a normal life. Everyone’s life is like that, and has always been that way. But when the world’s problems seem overwhelming, when we learn of bad news and illness and death, may we always be able to hum to ourselves,

“Caritas abundat in omnia…”

Internal Editor

Editing, in itself, is not the problem. Editing is usually necessary if we want to end up with something satisfactory… [But] The habit of compulsive, premature editing doesn’t just make writing hard. It also makes writing dead. — Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers

Last Fall, my wife and I began reading The Artist’s Way together and doing some of the work Cameron prescribes for recovering or nurturing the stunted artist she claims is in each of us. Early in the book, she lays out the importance of free writing exercises and brings up the idea of an internal editor that will invariably try and squash these attempts to just write. The exercises were fun, and the time with my wife was delightful, but I was uncomfortable with really believing that there was some kind of creativity-killing hobgoblin lurking in the shadows of my inner life. A year later, I wonder why: there really is something – someone – there, that fits that bill. Just trying to write a post about it/them is enough to prove Cameron’s idea plausible, if not true. And I remember Spacey’s character in The Usual Suspects, riffing on Baudelaire: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

So I’m trying to understand who this editor is. And what to do with them: try to ignore them or bypass them or shut them up? Or talk to them, get to know them, understand what they want, and find some way to live (and write) with them? There is a false kind of freedom in saying or writing, without filtering, whatever I want that isn’t good or godly, and that’s not what I’m seeking. Instead, I’m searching for the true freedom to speak from my true self without fear. I want this in conversations, in relationships, and in my writing, too. And it’s in prayer that I think I’m beginning to get a clue.

The free writing exercises inspired by The Artist’s Way quickly became a kind of morning prayer journal for me: a happy deviation from what Cameron was actually encouraging. Spending 20 minutes early each morning just trying to tell God what I was thinking and feeling, and trying to listen for Him in response, was a wonderful thing for someone like me who has never had a regular ‘quiet time’ or devotional life. I’m convinced that no time trying to pray is wasted or a bad thing. But I look at those entries now and see how far from free they really are. I pose and filter in every conversation, and none so much as those sacred ones with my Maker. Maybe this says more about my spiritual life and sense of assurance before God than my abilities as a writer, but I think there’s a connection. I have a dim, immature understanding of reverence. The difference between saying, or writing, what I think someone wants to hear, and saying whatever is true may also be as far as the East from the West. Am I willing to believe that? And write, speak, pray, out of that belief?

Today, at least, I am. I will not shame you, little voice inside me, or suffer you to shame my true self. I will not crush you, or be crushed. I will not pretend you are not there, not some part of me. It’s a beautiful, bright autumn morning, and we’re going to let the fig leaves fall where they may.

(Drawing by Escher)

Always Fair

When we have a good memory of our childhood, we shouldn’t visit it after we grow old. — Antonio

In the film Found Memories, Madalena lives in a small Brazilian village. The village’s former vibrance lies forgotten beneath peeling paint and rust. The handful of villagers are old and everything about them seems faded. They walk slowly up the hill to mass. They rarely talk. They eat in silence, the men play ring toss without speaking. The priest has locked the cemetery. Madalena says they have forgotten to die.

Madelena struggles to hold on to her memories. She writes a love letter every evening to Guilherme, her deceased husband. She writes just a few lines then folds the paper and puts it in a basket for safe keeping. “My love, I’d like to keep our memory forever alive, so our love, in the future, doesn’t suffer from the passing of time. We have to go beyond death, this cruel enemy, that didn’t choose day or time. I kiss you tenderly. Yours, Madalena.” She keeps their wedding photo in a closed-off room.

Rita, a young photographer, follows the empty railroad tracks to the village. She comes in like Mnemosyne, unlocking their memories and speech with each click of her camera. “I used to date a girl who looked like you,” says a man as she frames him in her lens. Rita is quick to remember. She watches Madelena make bread for the townspeople and says, “This town reminds me of the stories my dad used to tell.” Rita draws out Madelena’s memories. She retrieves her wedding photo for Rita, caressing it before hanging it back on the wall.

Early one morning, Rita takes a picture of Madalena in kerchief and nightgown. She shows Madalena who says, “Oh Lord.” Later, she carries her fresh baked rolls to Antonio’s shop. Usually they barely speak. Every morning he tells her to let him arrange the rolls in the cabinet. Every morning she insists on placing them herself. He calls her “stubborn old woman,” and she calls him “annoying old man.” But this morning Madalena asks, “Do you think I’m old?” “Old and stubborn,” he says nodding toward the rolls. She looks away and says, “My husband used to tell me, “Madalena, when I look at you, I don’t see you as you are. I see you as you were, when you were 20, and we got married. This is how I see you.”

Sipping their coffee outside, Antonio tells her, “When I was young, I had a girlfriend who died when she was 18. Thank God I never saw her grow old. Because when I remember her, I’m 18 as well.” But when he adds how we shouldn’t revisit childhood memories, Madalena asks, “What’s left then?” “Us!” he says. To which Madalena replies, “Would you mind being quiet for a while.”

Madalena confides to Antonio that she’s afraid to die. But her returning memories are changing her. She smiles, she doesn’t wear a kerchief as often. Her wrinkles seem to fade framed by her thick hair.

The priest had locked the cemetery as if he thought forgetting the past would help his old flock bear the burdens of age. He shared Antonio’s view that the past is best left behind. But Rita develops pictures from the negative of Antonio’s statement. When the villagers remember the old gifts of loved ones and youthfulness, they discover new ones – they talk to each other and become more intimate. They celebrate, dressing up and dancing outside to favorite old songs on the victrola.

In his poem “Former Beauties,” Thomas Hardy writes of middle-aged women in the market and tries to reconcile their present looks with their former beauty: “Are they the ones we loved in years agone, / And courted here?” He wonders if they remember the vows the young men made to them “In nooks on summer Sundays” and dancing on the green until moonlight. He ends the poem with this stanza:

They must forget, forget! They cannot know What once they were, Or memory would transfigure them, and show Them always fair.

In Found Memories, the villagers had locked up the past. It was as if they couldn’t live and they couldn’t die. When they woke to their former joys, they were “transfigured” into people who danced on the green again.

Before Madalena’s death at the end of the movie, Rita takes one more photograph. Madalena’s hair is down, full and wavy. We know by her bare shoulders and a self-conscious look on her face, that she is naked. As she stands before Rita’s camera, her expression transforms, she looks “always fair.” Her smile is expectant like a bride waiting for her bridegroom.

On Laughter

I was saddened like most of the world, when I heard of Robin Williams's death. I was sad not only because he was gone, and I would never be delighted anew by his acting or his comedy or even his smile, but also because of the way he died. To take one’s own life is such an admission of hopelessness. It was hard to take.

Since I write and speak a lot about films, I often think about the various participants in the filmmaking process, and beyond film to the entertainment business in general. It always bothers me when someone from that industry dies. Like their lives, their deaths are so public. They sought fame by being in the film business; I get that, but the point is that their particular job meant that they became a part of our lives, too.

They came into our living rooms and made us laugh or made us weep or entertained us in another of the thousand ways they were so skilled to do, but we chose to see and hear what they did. We are the ones who let them into our lives, often paying money to get them there. And now they are gone.

The week Robin Williams died, Lauren Bacall died, too. That week, Robin Williams was on the cover of every entertainment magazine in the country, and Lauren Bacall wasn’t on any of them. He was even on TIME magazine’s vaunted cover and probably a lot of other covers I didn’t see. Why Williams and not Bacall?

The answer is not obvious. Of course she died a “natural” death, while he died with years left, and that is a tragedy we all mourn more fully for one who still “has something to contribute.” But Williams wasn’t that young; other, much younger, entertainers who have died by their own hand have not been mourned as widely.

While Bacall was a great actress and appeared in many great films, her time with us was largely past, but so was his. He had not been the lead in a successful movie in years, and who knows when he was last on a late night TV show. It was rumored that he was doing another stint as Teddy Roosevelt in the next Night at the Museum sequel because he needed the money.

I think the answer is that he was a comedian, perhaps the best that ever lived, and he made us laugh. Lauren Bacall enthralled us, but everyone knows that happiness is what we live for, and Robin Williams could make us happy. No matter the circumstances, no matter how sad we were, no matter how bored, no matter how despondent, we only had to put on Mrs. Doubtfire or catch a glimpse of an old Mork and Mindy episode, and we were howling in minutes. Yeah, Robin Williams could make us laugh, and nothing could be more important than that, could it?

We so worship feeling good, we simply don’t know how to handle it, when one who brings so much laughter departs this life the way Robin Williams did.