Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace… (Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”)
The figure of a labourer—some furrows in a ploughed field—a bit of sand, sea and sky—are serious subjects, so difficult, but at the same time so beautiful, that it is indeed worth while to devote one’s life to the task of expressing the poetry hidden in them. (Vincent van Gogh)
I hope you did not notice, last Wednesday, when Lord of Indiscipline failed to make his customary appearance in your inbox. If you did notice, I hope you attributed the failure, not to any un-lordly lack of foresight or fortitude, but to a very-lordly attention to Holy Week devotions and Easter preparations. The true cause of the failure, of course, is neither of these. I lordly lapsed from writing for the plain and simple reason that I did not want to write. In the spirit of full disclosure, I rarely want to write. And yet, in the immortal words of Dorothy Parker, I love having written. And thus do I continue to do, not the thing which I love, but the thing which I customarily and cordially dislike: to write.
In my case, Parker’s words need some modification, or perhaps extension would be the more apt word. I do love having written. Part of that is technical: you make something, you love that something, regardless of its objective quality. In this regard, reading one’s own writing is akin to eating one’s own cooking. This cheeseburger may not be the best cheeseburger ever to grace a dinner table, but the fact that it is the fruit of my own labor imparts to it a peculiar depth of flavor and richness of character which renders it special. This essay, that story—these might not, assuredly do not, even remotely approximate the best that has been thought and said, but I’ll be doggone if they don’t have something that those other essays, those other stories, do not have. And that something makes them extraordinary—at least in the eyes of their maker. Such is the technical aspect, the how of the thing.
The other aspect is the material: the stuff from which you make that something, the what of the thing. To date, Lord of Indiscipline has comprised two kinds of material: ideas and experiences. The “essays” have tackled the ideas, attempting to express something about the ideas that is insightful even if not wholly original (e.g., responsibility and meaning in “Prometheus Shrugged”); to stress particular ideas as the connecting tissue between seemingly disparate mediating realities (e.g., the primacy of the primordial in Raymond Chandler’s stories and Alison Krauss’s music in “My Aim Is True”), or to combat misbegotten evaluations of other ideas before their metastasis places them beyond the reach of treatment (e.g., technocracy and sports in “They Can’t Take That Away from Us” or sentimentality and sacrifice in “Take Sight”).
These ideas and their expressions are important to me, some more urgently than others, some more interestingly than others, but each in its own right a matter of personal concern or curiosity. With varying degrees of success, the essays have brought some aspect of the truth to light (at least for me); they have fortified some convictions and cast doubt over others (again, at least for me); and they have identified and given expression to certain sensibilities, insights, and fears which previously had been but latent (at least, once more, for me). And yet, I have had the dogged sense of something missing, of some piece of the puzzle being out of place, of some pressingly important question being left not only unanswered, but unasked. What is that missing something?
So much for ideas. Now for experience. The unenviable task of charting the lands and seas of experience has fallen to Emil and his little family. Originally developed as an emergency measure against a looming (and self-imposed) deadline, Emil et al. were intended simply to keep the troops entertained during commercial break. After all, my original motivation for Lord of Indiscipline was to offer essays of moderate length on the good life and on the powers of evil that threaten to demolish the same. In my myopia, too (as some of you might recall), I felt the need to note my “relentless preoccupation with books” which would necessitate a constant concern with literature. Seven months and seventeen iterations later, my professional absorption in literary matters has remained just that—professional. The object of my “relentless preoccupation” is not books, but what books seek to do for us—or rather what we seek to make books do for us. Which is this: to make sense of life.
“We are unknown, we knowers, to ourselves,” Nietzsche writes in The Genealogy of Morals. “Of necessity we remain strangers to ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in our selves we are bound to be mistaken…as far as ourselves are concerned we are not knowers.” My life, my world, myself—these are mysteries to me. The world of Emil et al. has its own share of mysteries, but they are not my mysteries; those mysteries have their solutions, or their attempts at solutions, and somehow these become refractions of a previously unseen light in which the solutions to those mysteries which are mine may well appear, suddenly and assuredly.
On the face of it, this may seem a strange assertion. After all, very little, if anything, of dramatic interest or cosmic importance occurs in the stories of “The Tree” or “The Salt.” Even the questions asked therein hardly invite inquiry—lacking, as they do, the explicit indication of interrogation (the question mark). No, these stories are instead the narration of every-day events and interactions in that most basic of dynamics: parent and child. That dynamic is personal, even though (or perhaps in spite of) the fact that the characters themselves are strictly extensions of imagination (“I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they,” as Evelyn Waugh notes at the outset of Brideshead Revisited) and their experiences are extrapolations from individual impressions, not replications of actual events.
Yet because the dynamic is personal, I have been reluctant in each case to write the story and hesitant, subsequently, about the prospect of writing another one. More than once, the caution of Caroline Gordon concerning one of the major faults of amateur story-telling would come to mind:
“The Unwritten Story”: An amateur writer usually puts only half of his story on paper, and this half, made up often of lame sentences and thin incidents, does not make the same impression on him as it makes on other people. The half of the story which remains in his mind unwritten, being ideal and therefore not subject to the vicissitudes of actuality, sheds a glow over the thin written half. In this transfiguring effulgence the two halves unite. He reads the story over and sees, not the story he has written but the story he had hoped to write and had partially conceived…
I would readily believe myself exempt from that fault—my stories hale and vigorous in style and and robust in storyline—were it not for the fact that I am fully aware of my capacity as an “amateur writer.” I happily accept the possibility that stories like “The Garden” and “The Present” possess not actual excellence but simply that “transfiguring effulgence” and it is that effulgence which grants me the confidence to put the stories out into the deep of public visibility. With the essays, literary excellence was (and is) of primary or pretty-damn-close-to-it concern; such was not (is not) the case with the stories.
I say all this now with gusto and great conviction. But in point of fact, it’s a post facto realization. Prior to this past weekend, I had no full-blooded formulation of the intention behind the stories. They came into being simply because they required less planning and drafting and re-writing than did the essays and I have an affinity for things that require less planning, drafting, and re-writing. This past weekend, however, I read Walker Percy’s “Novel-Writing in an Apocalyptic Time” (1986) from Signposts in a Strange Land. Not being a novelist, and having no pretensions to become one, I ignored the “novel” element of the title, focusing instead on the “writing” and “apocalyptic time” aspects in the hope that these might provide some inspiration and perhaps even some material for an essay.
And they did—just not in the way I had anticipated. Throughout the essay, Percy is contending with both the technical and the material aspects of writing: the how or the kind of technician by which a work is written (i.e., a novelist, a poet, a scientist) and the what or the kind of subject matter with which the work is concerned. His formulation of the novelist’s material interest is as follows:
The novelist is interested in…the in-between times, the quality of ordinary Wednesday afternoons, which ought to be the best of times, but are, often as not, times when places, people, things, green leaves seem to be strangely diminished and devalued.
Could it be that this paradoxical diminishment of life in the midst of plenty, its impoverishment in the face of riches, is the peculiar vocation of the novelist to catch a glimpse of, by reason of his very dislocation, but also because none of the experts seem to recognize its existence, let alone explain it? There is something worse than being deprived of life: it is being deprived of life and not knowing it. The poet and the novelist cannot bestow life but they can point to instances of its loss, and then name and record them.
This formulation struck a chord, a deep chord, in me. What is more, it laid the foundation for that aforementioned post facto realization about the motivation and purpose of the stories. Percy’s declaration bears repeating: “There is something worse than being deprived of life: it is being deprived of life and not knowing it.” The other side of that coin, of being deprived of life and not knowing it, is this: of living life and not knowing it. The dominant “problem of life” in Percy’s age was certainly as he described it: men and women going about the task of living in an unwitting, torpid state of deprivation. They live yet they notice it not. Thus are his times the times in which “everybody looks and acts normal, except that they are not—but no one notices.”
I will not—cannot—speak for everyone. I can and will speak for myself. The “problem of life” at present, the danger of today, is of living life and not knowing it. Of being a part of a family but having neither the knowledge nor the means to express the knowledge of what that actually means. Of being a laborer but having no sensibility for the dignity or lack thereof in work. Of being consistently oneself amidst persistently passing things—being in the world but not of the world and then in the world and of the world and then neither in nor of the world. Of being a believer but at the same time one who bears unbelief. Of being someone somewhere but acting like you are no one nowhere: “And the danger is of becoming no one nowhere” as a character in Percy’s novel The Moviegoer remarks.
“They can point to instances of [life’s] loss,” Percy says of the novelist and the poet, and then name and record them. But life is not simply loss. Life is also gain. Can they, the poets and novelists, do the same for instances of life’s gains, of life’s activities, of the presence as much as of the absence inherent in living? Will they? The novelist takes in hand the material of “the in-between times, the quality of ordinary Wednesday afternoons.” These “ought to be the best of times,” Percy insists, and yet they usually are not. Does that mean they necessarily are the worst of times? That they are times of diminishment and devaluation, which is to say of discord and destruction? I think not. Life comprises a great deal of times: some of them are the best and some of them the worst; some of them are bad and some of them are actually quite good. Of those, only some are extraordinary; most are nothing if not ordinary. Does the novelist dare to point to those ordinarily good instances, those goodly ordinary moments, and then name and record them? Do you dare to do that? Do I?
For the painter, the stuff of the ordinary is fair game. Dürer painted the superb Feast of the Rosary; he also painted a simple Piece of Turf and a Young Hare and drew Praying Hands. Munch painted his horrifying Scream; he also painted a healthy Apple Tree and Field of Cabbage. We detect no dissonance there between things great and small. The small things, deftly, strongly portrayed, witness to the truth in the words of the Dutch dreamer: “The figure of a labourer—some furrows in a ploughed field—a bit of sand, sea and sky—are serious subjects, so difficult, but at the same time so beautiful, that it is indeed worth while to devote one’s life to the task of expressing the poetry hidden in them.”
Can stories, like pictures, of small things do likewise? Can we resist the temptation to take the small and force greatness upon it? Can we resist the temptation to take an ordinary Wednesday and make it into something which it was not—even if that something would be really and truly extraordinary? Can we resist the temptation to capture the tree and take the green leaves, leaving them simply green, not glorious Technicolor? Can we accept the humble power of a child’s words as a force that can rouse us from our lethargy, even if that child spoke more crudely and clumsily than we would have liked? Can we recount our agonies and ecstasies, not as what we wish they had been, but as what they truly are—indications of what it means to be free?
We remember Walker Percy as a writer, but his first profession was medicine. After a bout with tuberculosis, he gave up medicine to take up writing. The change was initially an abysmal failure: he wrote two novels in two years and both were roundly rejected by publishers. His third novel, The Moviegoer, was accepted and in short order won the the 1962 National Book Award for Fiction (back when said Award actually meant something). What changed?
When I sat down to write The Moviegoer, I was very much aware of discarding the conventional notions of a plot and set of characters, discarded because the traditional concept of plot-and-character itself reflects a view of reality which has been called into question. Rather I would begin with a man who finds himself in a world, a very concrete man who is located in a very concrete time and place. Such a man might be represented as coming to himself in somewhat the sense as Robinson Crusoe came to himself on his island after his shipwreck, with the same wonder and curiosity.
The success of Percy, in my humble estimation, is attributable to that impetus toward in media res—in the mundane bloody midst of things. For there is where we are, always. The questions perennially on the lips or in the back of the mind or in the recesses of the heart of man—Where do I come from? What am I? Where am I going?—presuppose another question: Where am I? We rarely ask this question because its answer seemingly goes without saying. Life, after all, seemingly goes without its saying. Yet when we give voice to that answer—however ordinary, even heedless, it might be—the pace of life picks up and speeds us on our eternity-bound way. Only now, Crusoe-like, we proceed with wonder and curiosity. And that should give any one of us something to write about.
Credit: Edvard Munch, Apple Tree by the Studio (between 1920 and 1928), courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.