Lessons Minimalism Has Taught Me
Taking Back Time and Experience
Minimalism isn’t for everyone. But don’t wait until feeling ready. There’s no such thing as feeling ready.
Any straws you grasp onto are just straws.
By releasing 90% of space and belongings, citizenship in the broader world increases by 90%. The less we own, the richer we become. The less we cling, the more we grow.
Sometimes the choice is to let go of possessions or let our souls die working jobs we hate merely to try to make enough money for more space than we actually need for nothing more than to house all the possessions we don’t need. Time and experience are the true precious commodities, which everyone realizes by the end. If possessions and space are eating up all of one’s time and preventing the joy of life, then the right choice is likely to give up some, most, or all, of the possessions and space.
We can look for different, higher-paying jobs to purchase larger space and more possessions – but upon enough reflection, it may prove that we’re already doing what we’re best at and what we will be happiest doing. Even if we remain materially poorer, we may find ourselves and also our families experientially and emotionally richer.
For some, minimalism is an epiphany of eastern spirituality. For others, it’s a non-choice, a result of tumultuous losses, a forced step to preserve the best of what is left of life. In other words, the possessions don’t all release in some mystical puff of eastern spirituality and New Age joy. It may be agony and freeing at the same time.
Choice or not at the start, how one reacts is negotiable, along with what one does with the freed-up time and experience.
We all travel at times on long tracks of inaction or mistake-making. The moment to let go comes at a different juncture for everyone. Don’t self-blame for not arriving at the decision sooner; don’t regret years wasted – they weren’t wasted. We can only take action when things get clear, however long that takes.
The moment things get clear is not the same thing as feeling ready. The time of feeling ready never comes. Letting go is hard at first anyway, and the culture bears too many messages saying not to do it, that we can only be happy purchasing infinite possessions, that we need the latest and best possession, that we must constantly try to escape the present moment to some future moment that will be “better.” Extraordinary power and many billions of dollars go into this, and it is very, very convincing. But all of that is not more powerful than a single soul. Anyone can opt out of the seduction and let the gaslighting go on without them, reclaiming the present moment; reclaiming time and experience.
Life leads to minimalism anyway as the final whistle stop. The sooner the arrival at this truth, the sooner the rendezvous with acceptance and peace.
Goodbye little ship in dusty frame
Economy
What is needed is radically less than the loads people bear. For some of us, the years spent pursuing the American Dream were years full of lies and dead ends, a kind of scam. Letting go of possessions and space, even in the face of towering loss and parallel tracks of grief, finally gives way to peace.
Some of us have stalled out on the far stretched-out ends of a budget and a breakdown, living paycheck to paycheck. Relinquishing possessions and space relieves this suffering, makes it possible to create a plentiful buffer of savings, and even still be able to afford small expenses that contribute to real happiness – all the more appreciated because of not being enslaved to worry at all times.
The resulting calm and tranquil mind leads to better mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical health.
Confidence also arrives with cutting back; knowing how to do it leads to certainty that expenses and lifestyle could be cut back even further if required or desired.
Many strive for large amounts of space and possessions for the sake of their children, which is admirable motivation; however, possessions do not make children happy any more than possessions make adults happy. Children are happiest when experientially and emotionally rich just as adults are happiest when experientially and emotionally rich.
While it might have felt at first like we were giving up something, progress on life goals accelerates, and the progress becomes easier, not harder. With life simplified, clarity increases around deep-seated values.
Not only is time freed by working less, but by letting go of the possessions, we free up the time we used to spend moving the possessions around, trying to polish and clean and maintain the possessions; and we free up the emotional energy we used to go waste by constantly fretting over the fact that we didn’t have adequate time to properly move, polish, clean, and maintain the great number of possessions.
Goodbye dusty childhood jewelry box
Possessions
Minimalism looks different for everyone. Deciding what to keep is a very individual choice. Even if it’s large, if it’s something you use and love, keep it. Some decisions on what to keep are best made by logic; others by the heart; others by the gut.
Some small precious keepsakes should also be kept. Deciding which ones is difficult. If it is an item that also has any utility (for example, a box), this helps. Size is also a factor (tiny is easier to justify, medium-size harder), along with whether the item brings happiness or insightful contemplation of personal values.
If it brings bad memories or inner criticisms, let it go.
When hesitating on items, take photos of them before you send them away. Or don’t. When you see the photos later on your phone, you may shrink away. But one day you can also delete the photos.
Some may want to sell their possessions, and this can be the right choice. However, others will want to let go largely and all at once to charities, so that the possessions are not sitting around staring them in the face while they contemplate asking prices.
Yes, at first there is sharp pain and grief with every carload of possessions released. But there is also a freeing catharsis. Now you can go anywhere and be anything.
Later there will be random stabs of grief or guilt over just a few particular released possessions. However, the stab is temporary and fleeting while the time to do what you love is ongoing and permanent.
Later it will prove that it was in fact a mistake to let go of a few of the possessions. This is inevitable. However, there is a degree of acceptable collateral damage that is justified for the rewards gained. For the few releases that were a mistake, there were hundreds more that were right.
Much more frequently, you will find yourself with no regrets.
Goodbye kitchen witch. Thank you for the luck in making tasty dishes.
The Ancestors
Some of us may look back wondering why we didn’t do this sooner – it might even seem embarrassing because the answer was so simple. But this is unfair. For many, there is some generational distance necessary – a gap of death – since parents, grandparents, great-parents (the Greatest Generation, the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers) so fully set a certain example by embodying and embracing the American Dream (that is, voluminous space and possessions); it is still hard for some of us to come to terms with the Dream being far more difficult to attain now, the economic realities (and many other realities of our present world) being utterly different than the Ancestors’ circumstances.
Don’t hold on to possessions thinking it is somehow for the Ancestors’ sake, whether land, house, general possessions, or even heirlooms. If clinging to any of these is undermining your joy and fulfillment, the Ancestors would not want this for you. They have gone on to something else. Honoring the Ancestors does not require clinging to any of their space or possessions; honoring the Ancestors is living our own lives to the fullest. The Ancestors didn’t make their noble sacrifices to deliver us here only to be unhappy and unfulfilled.
There will be times that you believe you were temporarily mad to have let go of some particular possession. In some cases, this will have been a practical thing, and you can purchase or borrow another; in other cases, it will have been because of a connection to some person, usually an Ancestor. Remind yourself that you are now living your best life to honor them.
Goodbye graduation hood
If You Have Already Been Unfairly Forced to Let Go of Too Much
If you have had a great deal of grief and loss: You may be afraid to let go of many little possessions because you feel they are all you have left. But letting go even more deeply may help you in honoring the one you lost by freeing yourself to move on. The heart always remembers; the heart does not depend on one of the lost one’s possessions, let alone many of their possessions. Keeping around one or two of the loved one’s precious belongings is usually enough for gentle contemplation and honoring.
Some of us built up possessions in connection with nesting: the notion that we would have progeny. For those of us who then ended up childless, once that acceptance sets in, so too can the acceptance that there is no need for the space or possessions – that the greatest gift to oneself would be letting go. Making room for greater love and care of self is wise since there will not be others.
Nevertheless, parents, too, can embrace minimalism; having too many possessions can later be a burden on a child – we have all had parents, grandparents, great aunts or uncles, who passed away and left behind mountains of possessions with very little instruction of what to do with any of it.
If you are beyond the middle stage of life, if the truth for you so far has been a sunken cost fallacy - an investment in many possessions associated with a life that didn’t happen - stop holding on against all logic. Holding on is also what is keeping the pain fixed in place. Though grieving sometimes in the hugeness of it and the ongoing need for forgiveness of it all, on the other side there’s a soft and open-ended joy and peace.
Goodbye music box that played “The Long and Winding Road.” Thank you for the bittersweetness.
Monty Python Owns a Fifth of My Soul
Monty Python All The Words Volumes One and Two.
Monty Python owns a fifth of my soul (or thereabouts). I was hooked in the late 1980s when MTV aired the original series as part of their Sunday night British comedy line-up. I was twelve. And a girl. And American. My fandom was alleged to be impossible, but against the odds I had been born with a fully intact and functioning British sense of humor, and so Python became a weekly event with me and several of my friends gathering around the TV. We never missed it. I don’t think my friends really got it or were into it as much as I was. When I truly love something, I am gifted or cursed with an enthusiasm that can bring others along in its wake.
Many loves are quick and intense, hanging out for a year or two and then fading, but Python has traveled with me year in and year out throughout an entire lifetime (this year marks 35 years). I’ve watched the complete original series many times, but after my mom died in 2019, I watched ONLY Python for some weeks and created a list of my top 47 favorite sketches. I’m not sure why. You do strange things.
For no other reason than that I did this, below are the sketches (with extremely random commentary).
First, some disclaimers:
Rankings are of course bogus. Every experience ranks number one while you’re experiencing it; and I can’t, for example, really decide between Cheese Shop or Spanish Inquisition as being “number one.”
Some of these may not properly be sketches (more like vignettes or segues).
I gave some sketches their “correct” names while others are only the names by which I happen to think of them.
If I performed the same exercise today (i.e., not in a haze of post-caregiver exhaustion), I’d likely come up with a totally different list.
No parrot sketch – I recognize its brilliance (Cleese’s performance of it is like music), but I think I simply became tired of it because it was so over-played on “best of” shows, Python documentaries, etc. Told so many times that the sketch was brilliant and funny, I was never allowed to discover it on my own terms and form my own convictions about its brilliance and funniness.
The list:
Cheese Shop. I understand that Graham Chapman saved this sketch, bless him. Cleese was contemplating throwing it out, unsure whether it was funny. Chapman explained to him that it was.
Spanish Inquisition. This is my whole life, from the point of view of any of the parties in the sketch – the Spanish Inquisition, having the wrong words, showing up with the wrong torture accoutrements; or the victims being accosted by the totally expected Inquisition, confusion on their faces, not really sure what they’re supposed to be doing.
Johann Gombolputty. I somehow overlooked this sketch until later in my life. Once I had discovered my error (during grad school), I began pulling my NC State friends back to my bedroom to watch it (that’s where my TV was).
Lumberjack Song. The segue from the butchering barber to the song came about because Palin and Jones were tired after a long writing session and wanted to stop and get a bite to eat, so this was the link they decided on. It makes one want to be tired and hungry more often.
Twit of the Year. This is the sketch that should be shown to aliens to explain the extinction of the human race.
Court Scene with Inspector Dim (witness in coffin/Cardinal Richelieu). I believe this is the first real “ensemble” scene of Pythons (well, minus Gilliam) in the first season. I’m not sure why I like it except that I think there’s something special about seeing the chemistry of all the Pythons together in a single scene. There is also something special about the sight of John Cleese singing and dancing while everyone else just stares at him.
Confuse-a-Cat. “For one ghastly moment I thought I was…too late.” And, “Your cat is suffering from what we vets haven’t found a word for.”
Close Order Swanning About.
Poet Reader. There’s something that seems right about every home having a poet tucked away in a funny little access closet and needing a repairman to come and do adjustments.
Restaurant Sketch. A few times, I’ve tried showing this to business writing students as an example of the incorrect way of responding to a customer complaint. None of them laugh. They just stare at me – much as everyone stares at John Cleese in the court scene when he’s singing, “If I were not in the CIB, an engine driver, me.”
Terry Jones stripping. There are two different notable sketches where Jones strips. He just goes for it. Just absolutely goes for it despite the fact that he’s this little average-looking dude. It’s the absolute height of commitment.
Management Training Course. This represents my understanding of jobs. To the degree that I understand what is going on with that (i.e., nothing), someone may as well be ringing a bell in my face and singing various nonsense words. Early in my career, I did a teaching demo for a prospective job where I was laughed at in much the same manner that everyone laughs at the poor applicant at the end of this sketch – holding up the signs “scoring” him, falling on the floor in paroxysms of glee that the whole thing was just a cruel hoax.
David Frost parody (the Timmy Williams Show). I loved this sketch long before having any idea who David Frost was. This is just a lovely and perfect skewering of someone being narcissistic; you don’t need to know specifically who it was skewering.
Gangs of Old Ladies
Village Idiot (The Idiot in Society)
Election Night Special (Silly/Sensible Parties)
Beethoven’s Mynah Bird
Woody and Tinny Words
It just came off the wall (accidents sketch)
Silly Walks
Bicycle Repair Man
Travel Agent sketch
Summarize Proust
Argument Clinic
Spam
Déjà vu
Archaeology Today
Royal Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things
I Wish to Report a Burglary (police station silly voices)
The Poet McTeagle
Mosquito Hunter
Gay Judges
Filling out paperwork while bleeding to death
Queen Victoria Handicap
Father-in-law sleeping with them
Room of Captured Milkmen
Stolen News Reader
Awards Show parody
Dueling Documentaries
Dennis Moore
Olympic Hide-and-Seek Final
Homoerotic soccer players
Money Programme (“There is nothing quite so wonderful as money”)
Fish Slapping Dance
Sinking ship. For some reason, this “abandon ship” sketch kept coming into mind for me at the height of the pandemic: “There is no need for panic. Do not rush for the lifeboats…women, children, spacemen, and a sort of idealized version of complete Renaissance men first!”
Hospital for Overacting
Buying a Bed
On Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven
Fire and Brimstone: Clint Eastwood Goes to Hell in Unforgiven
In a review of Unforgiven, Harry Brod argues that Eastwood himself should remain “unforgiven” by the public and the film industry because of his past transgressions of making violent films (30). Brod essentially argues that we should refrain from admiring Unforgiven because of stains on the soul of Eastwood himself. I have several problems with this particular form of passing judgment. First is the fact that if we demand sainthood from our artists before accepting their work, we’d have to discount the great majority of the literature, art, etc. produced throughout the history of the world. Second, if we insist on assuming a moralistic attitude, it’s rather hypocritical to deny forgiveness to someone genuinely seeking it. Third, it’s a bit silly to take Unforgiven as a literal quest for atonement anyway. Eastwood was not stepping up to the confessional to request absolution, but making a film. Obviously the film references his own career, but it’s not so much a literal bid for forgiveness as it is an artistic work exploring particular themes. It’s called Unforgiven, not Forgiven. Fourth, since film and culture are interdependent in ways that are so complicated that it would be far too maddening to ever try to figure it out entirely, it’s a bit simplistic to blame film for real world violence. Brod suggests that we should do a “poll of all the surviving victims of male violence during the years Eastwood was one of the top box-office stars in the world, with those closest to deceased victims empowered to cast their votes. Then we’d know if Eastwood should be forgiven or unforgiven” (30). Well, if we really did ask all those individuals, I doubt very many of them would think Clint Eastwood had much to do with it one way or the other. Most people are aware that violence has enormously complicated causes. And anyway, what about all the other violent stars and films in Hollywood? Eastwood certainly hasn’t been the only one in that particular line of work. And what about socio-economic factors in violence? And so on. Though it would be nice to have a whipping boy, Eastwood didn’t invent violence. He’s just a film actor/director who ended up early in his career filling a role within representations of violence that were already well on their way of being perpetuated by others.
My point (if a bit sarcastically stated) is just that I think it’s entirely appropriate to look at Eastwood exceptionally, and grant him “forgiveness” or “respect” or whatever it is that he’s looking for in his films of recent times. The truth is, very few stars who end up as masculine icons closely associated with violence (as Eastwood did) ever question it or veer from it. It’s quite unusual for someone to have built a career on that particular base, and then to have both the guts and the brains to question it. Further, Eastwood is in a particularly effective position to be able to make people look at violence more thoughtfully. Very often, reformed criminals and addicts make the best and most convincing advocates for change. So if some people are going to consider Eastwood a kind of “film criminal,” then we should grant him an opportunity to tell us how he’s changed. With luck, he might change the minds of some other “film criminals.” In any case, I personally find it inappropriate to decide whether or not to condemn Clint Eastwood to eternal damnation. I’ll leave that to some higher power and focus on the subject of damnation in his film instead.
In “Spectacles of Death: Clint Eastwood and Violence in Unforgiven,” Carl Plantinga offers a summary of Unforgiven which seems to represent the general consensus about the film: Unforgiven “represents a violence that leads to a cycle of senseless revenge and retribution,” and “follows the descending trail of an old gunfighter whose journey offers the possibility of redemption but ends in the life of drunkenness and murder he thought he had left behind” (71). Divergence of opinion about the film, where it exists, seems mostly to focus on the climactic confrontation in Greeley’s saloon, along with the final graveside scene of the film. The arguments say that in various ways these final scenes undermine the careful condemnation of violence of the earlier parts of the film, and therefore diminish the overall power of the film. I will argue that these final scenes are in fact entirely consistent with the rest of the film, and do a very effective job of conveying the damnation of violence through the depiction of William Munny’s “damnation.”
Since there is little debate that the violence up until the climax is presented in a manner meant to condemn it, I won’t dwell on it too much. Of all the sources I looked at, only Paul Smith condemns the entirety of Unforgiven in terms of its depictions of violence, saying “Unforgiven suffers from being unable to criticize convincingly the very violence that it itself is involved in and that it does not shrink from re-representing.” He complains that Munny fails to exhibit conscience and is “given little opportunity to reflect upon such sentiments and consequences” (267). But Allen Redmon (and everyone else who cited Smith) disagrees with him. In “Mechanisms of Violence in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Mystic River” Redmon points out that Eastwood could have more overtly condemned violence in his film, but “explicit denunciations would have come at a price.” That is, “Eastwood would not be able to implicate his audience in the mechanisms of violence in the way that his films can when the violence is loosely veiled in the same fashion that all violence is concealed” (318). In other words, the whole point of the film would have been lost if it had been “preachier.” Platinga also points out that our allegiance toward William Munny and his violence is actually quite conflicted throughout the film, and while Munny “may reflect little upon his actions, the film nonetheless encourages conflicted responses in the spectator and in so doing initiates a questioning process” (74).
However, Platinga then goes on to state his opinion that the film only maintains an effective anti-violence stance up until the climactic shootout at Greeley’s at which point “the film satisfies the spectator’s desire for the dramatic violent purge and emotional release by granting the hero his killing” (79). Many others agree. In “Writing the West: Iconic and Literal Truth in Unforgiven” Catherine Ingrassia says that the film “ultimately affirms rather than resists the conventions of its genre” and that in this climactic scene Munny is “swift and deadly (and consistent with any number of Eastwood vehicles)” (53,57). Brod in his article even sarcastically calls this scene the film’s “final shoot-‘em-up scene, so much like that of Shane that I kept expecting [Beauchamp] to run after Eastwood, yelling “Come back, . . .” (30).
These reactions are all puzzling to me, because every time I’ve seen the film the climactic shootout has been the scene that delivers the full tragedy of the movie to me, and has never failed to bring me to tears. Some of the problems of the interpretation of this scene seem to be connected with the limitations Eastwood’s persona places upon him. As Tim Groves points out in “’We all have it coming, Kid’: Clint Eastwood and the Dying of the Light,” Eastwood’s past films are “inscribed with belligerent, sarcastic, preternatural heroes and cathartic violence.” Many seem to view the climactic scene of Unforgiven in terms of these past Eastwood incarnations. When Richard Corliss reviewed Unforgiven he said, “The movie takes its time letting you watch Clint turn into Clint” (66). That is, many people apparently “see” Clint turn into the “cathartic violence version” of Clint in Unforgiven, as he had in so many movies in the past, rather than “seeing” Clint turn into a vicious murderer, as I seem to.
Ingrassia brings up further problems of expectations, relating not only to persona, but also to genre: “Once in Greeley’s Saloon, Munny (now a fully formed Eastwood character) provides the spectacular explosion of gunfire the genre’s narratological grammar demands” (57). Plantinga also points out that “the western myth assigns a supreme value to the climactic gunfight,” and claims that the shootout is “a compromise and throwback to the conventional western myth, a dissonant chord within an otherwise consistent revisionism” (77). Ingrassia and Plantinga both talk about the end of the film as a “shift” and discuss it as though it exists separately from the rest of the film. But it seems to me that it’s only understood if it’s “felt” in connection to all the other parts of the film and seen as completely organic with everything that has come before it. Ingrassia refers to Ned Logan’s death as the event that causes “the film’s shift into revenge narrative” (57). But as Redmon points out, as Ned is beaten we’re shown the whores’ reaction to the sounds of the whip, reminding the audience “of their responsibility for the violence” and therefore connecting this act to the same stance that has been taken toward all other acts of violence in the film leading up to it (321). If Ned’s death were shown to us explicitly, it would be a more conventionally motivated revenge plot. But what’s shown to us is the senselessness of Ned’s death (i.e. with the emphasis on Little Bill’s sadism), not the death itself. Therefore it does not represent a “shift,” but a continuation of the tragic acts of violence of earlier in the film. Likewise, we are to understand the senselessness of Munny’s subsequent act of vengeance in terms of every act that has preceded it; his actions are as meaningless and pointless as everything that’s come before, including innocent Ned’s own death at the hands of the sadistic sheriff.
Other interrelationships of the film also strongly suggest that the shootout should be read as a condemnation of William Munny, and of violence. As Redmon points out, “In many ways, the final scene is a collection of each of the individual charges that have been brought against the mechanisms of violence throughout the film” (323). Munny’s rivals are unarmed and unprepared, violating the codes of the “good guy” gunfighters of traditional westerns. Unlike all the characters earlier in the film, Munny rejects Beauchamp’s myth-making in regards to violence. And by having established Munny and Little Bill as similar men throughout the film, “Eastwood creates a situation in which the murder that is sure to take place of one of these two characters at the film’s conclusion cannot be entirely celebrated” (320). We’re forced to stare into the shotgun with Little Bill before Munny blows him away. And so, “by working to ensure that each of the acts of violence in the film is portrayed from the perspective of the victim, Eastwood has ensured that the film’s final act of violence is an honest description of the ramifications of the mechanisms of violence” (322).
In regards to genre, no one can argue against the fact that a final confrontation between gunfighters (like the scene in Greeley’s) is an expected convention of the Western genre. But it’s certainly possible to argue about the overall effectiveness of this scene within Unforgiven’s interrelationships. Redmon believes that “critics who have found fault with the final scenes in Big Whiskey have failed to recognize what Eastwood is representing in this final sequence, and that this representation is the only way in which one can ultimately expose the mechanisms of violence for what they are” (322). Since this scene represents our strongest expectations for the genre, it’s the most powerful way possible to show the futility of violence. The ultimate statement of the film - its damnation of Munny - is contained in the very act that we traditionally associate with the gunfighter’s crowning glory, the scene that makes him a hero. I personally can’t imagine a more ironically tragic way to show the culmination of all the acts of violence in Unforgiven than through a carefully revised form of this “traditional” scene. As Platinga points out, ”The complexity of the Greeley’s debacle . . . stems from its combination of dramatic satisfaction with emotional and thematic ambiguity” (79). For him, this is a count against the film, but to me, it’s this complication that makes the scene work. It’s more challenging and asks more questions about our relationship to violence than if the scene were either entirely abhorrent or (obviously) entirely cathartic. And so the scene serves to emphasize the film’s points in a way that little else would have. If, for example, Munny simply walked away as a pacifist after Ned’s murder, the film would have had a very difficult time showing the repercussions of violence for the killer. And Eastwood has made it plain that he wanted to show the “consequences to the violence . . . [for] both the perpetrator as well as the victim” (Plantinga 66).
These consequences of violence for the killer are made plain in the final graveside scene of the film, which shows what happens to William Munny following the shootout. However, Redmon claims that because of this scene, Unforgiven fails to “successfully expose the mechanisms of violence” and capture “the ‘hell’ that exists for those caught in these mechanisms.” His complaint is that the text on the screen tells us that Munny uses the money from his killing to take his kids to San Francisco, where he then prospers in dry goods. Redmon objects that “this advancement comes at the expense of a handful of cowboys, a sheriff, countless unnamed townspeople, and his dear friend,” and refers to this ending as “the promise of a new beginning” (323). But I beg to differ; this text is not meant to be taken literally, and is most certainly not the promise of a new beginning. It is ”a coded summary the viewer recognizes as both true and utterly false” (Ingrassia 59). As Ingrassia writes, “Unforgiven literally and repeatedly imposes a textual account over the cinematic landscape to reveal the gap between sign and signified” (53). Unforgiven explicitly teaches us how to look at this gap between words and reality throughout the course of the film, just as it teaches us how to look at each of its acts of violence. The character of Beauchamp, the Schofield Kid’s confusion between the myth and the reality of death, Little Bill’s debunking of the myth of the “Duke of Death,” and the exaggerating of Delilah’s wounds as the assassins retell her story, are all examples of this. Since this “gap” is emphasized throughout the entire film, there shouldn’t be any real mystery about how to interpret the text at the end. We’re not supposed to believe the words on the screen, but to recognize that they contain a great irony and sadness, and that they have no relation to who William Munny really is or how he really feels.
Among my sources, I was surprised to find how little had been written about the effect of this final scene in relation to the rest of the film. Eastwood has said, “Unforgiven gave me a chance to sum up what I think violence does to the human soul,” and the final scene is rather key to this effect (Jardine 75). Though it’s subtle, to me a great deal of the power and meaning of the movie is contained in this simple ending, as well as the ramifications of the film’s title. Anyone who has ever committed any large act(s) against his or her own conscience knows the great sad irony that life goes on beyond hell, and that this is where most of the pain lies – in a living hell. In fact, the “gap” of the words on the screen point out Munny’s knowledge of living a lie, as it were – knowing that he is “damned,” but that he has to keep putting one foot in front of the other anyway. And just as Mrs. Feathers knows that her daughter “married a known thief and murderer, a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition” without adequate explanation, Munny now knows that the soul is prone to committing evil acts with or without adequate explanation; there is no more explanation of evil than there is of love. When personal ethics go out of control, it usually doesn’t make any sense – to the victim or to the perpetrator. Poetic justice doesn’t necessarily follow, and the jaws of hell don’t open up and swallow “villains.” In short, after some grand and tragic act, life doesn’t end and the curtain doesn’t fall, as much drama and film would sometimes have us believe. I praise Unforgiven’s honesty, and yes, realism (which Eastwood is supposed to be so fond of), in using this simple scene to show that ordinary life continues on beyond the torment and hell of guilty deeds. The scene conveys an ineffable sadness that the film would lack if it were simply to end after Greeley’s. And since Eastwood wanted to show the effects of violence “on the soul,” this scene provides a fuller realization. Not only has he shown the effects of violence on all of the other characters earlier in the film, but with this final scene he also suggests the living horror of it for the murderer, which continues on in the mundane words and actions of daily life long past the deaths of all the victims.
As Tim Groves points out, Eastwood’s recent characters are “often beset by regret and remorse, and seek, but do not always find, redemption in various forms.” Though I’ve been arguing that Unforgiven effectively “damns” William Munny and violence, I also have to conclude that Unforgiven is ultimately about redemption. Not long ago my brother was talking about Mystic River and told me that that in spite of its darkness and cynicism, it had the effect of redemption on him by challenging him to look at the events depicted in the film, and then do something about it in relation to himself and the world. This is precisely how I feel about Unforgiven – that though it’s about damnation (not in the religious sense, but in the purely humanistic sense), it’s ultimately about redemption. The message isn’t one of hopelessness, which would be very depressing indeed. Instead, the intent is to ask questions of its audience and present challenges to masculinity and violence.
In his article “Clint Eastwood Goes PC,” Richard Grenier says he thinks the American public can “forgive Eastwood his feminism,” but not his “going soft on the punishment of evildoers.” At the end of the article he asks, “Who will see [Eastwood’s] pictures?” (53). This, I think, has been answered adequately by the passage of time. Grenier was writing in the wake of A Perfect World, which didn’t seem to connect with audiences. But A Perfect World proved to be the exception, not the rule. The majority of Eastwood’s films, since and including Unforgiven, have performed admirably for films of their type, and have all dealt with issues of feminism, masculinity, and/or violence, to varying degrees. A significant portion of the American population does in fact seem to trust Eastwood to provide them with “revised” messages. And frankly, it would be rather foolish of the critics to damn Eastwood to hell when he has so much to say that can have a strong impact on so many people.
Works Cited
Bingham, Dennis. Acting Male. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
Brod, Harry. “Unforgiven.” Tikkun 8.3 (May/June 1993): 30.
Corliss, Richard. “The Last Roundup.” Time 140:6 (August 10, 1992): 66.
Grenier, Richard. “Clint Eastwood Goes PC.” Commentary 97.3 (March 1994): 51-53.
Groves, Tim. “’We all have it coming, Kid’: Clint Eastwood and the Dying of the
Light.” Senses of Cinema. January 2001. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/12/unforgiven.html
Ingrassia, Catherine. “Writing the West: Iconic and Literal Truth in Unforgiven.”
Literature/Film Quarterly 26.1 (1998): 53-59.
Jardine, Gail. “Clint: Cultural Critic, Cowboy of Cathartic Change.” Art Journal 53.3
(Fall 1994): 74-75.
Plantinga, C. “Spectacles of Death: Clint Eastwood and Violence in Unforgiven.”
Cinema Journal 37.2 (Winter 1998): 65-83.
Redmon, Allen. “Mechanisms of Violence in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and Mystic
River.” The Journal of American Culture 27.3 (Sept. 2004): 315-328.
Schickel, Richard. Clint Eastwood: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1996.
Smith, Paul. Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production. Minneapolis: University of
Minneapolis Press, 1993.
Charles Dickens is Funny
The Bleak Humor in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House
According to James R. Kincaid, Dickens said that “humorous invention was the easiest thing in the world for him and that he had constantly to restrain his preposterous sense of the ridiculous.” Kincaid also quotes John Forster as naming humor Dickens’s “leading quality,…his highest faculty” (“Copperfield” 313). But in a different essay (“Laughter and Oliver Twist”) Kincaid raises the question of how a novel as dark as Oliver Twist can be so funny (63). The same question can certainly be asked in regards to Bleak House: how can “a savage look at England as a wasteland, suffering the moral plague spread by the Court of Chancery….” be so funny (Gold 208)? And why should it be funny? In what ways does the humor deepen the work? In this essay I hope to explore some of the ways that Dickens employs humor to deepen Bleak House and increase its sense of darkness. These ways include: causing us to rethink our assumptions about dominant society and our attitudes toward “outsiders”; causing us to confront the darkness within ourselves; intensifying an ultimately serious or tragic issue; complicating the line between good and evil; and showing the tragedy of an unfeeling environment and the alienation of individuals within it who are trying to use their humor to survive. I want to note that because the critics I’ve cited were usually discussing Dickens novels that I haven’t read, there is a margin for error – I have found what I believe are parallels in the humor of Bleak House to the examples of humor they give in those novels, but it’s possible that I have mistakenly drawn comparisons where comparisons might not be appropriate. Nevertheless, even if that has happened, I feel that the examples of humor I’ve chosen from Bleak House yield fascinating insights in their own right.
Dickens’s humor has been called subversive by many critics, and for good reason. In “The Sources of Dickens’s Comic Art: From American Notes to Martin Chuzzlewit,” J. Hillis Miller argues that Dickens’s comedy is in part his revenge on the world because of his outsider status as a boy and young man. Miller says, “The comic view is in one way like the perspective of the outcast. Both see the world from the outside, from the point of view of someone who is not part of what he sees, who is ignored or ‘overlooked’ by the world” (467). In his fiction, Dickens turns those who had previously disdained him into “a masquerade of innocuous puppets. It was a revenge on the world….”. Miller sees the darkness and terror of Oliver Twist transforming into the essence of the comedy of Dickens’s later novels (468). Kincaid makes a similar point to Miller, saying that certain passages of particularly strident satire in Oliver Twist deserve special attention, because they reveal a sense of maliciousness that underlies the novel’s humor and that ultimately comprises a kind of “sadistic revenge” (64). These are dark words for dark humor, but it is not hard to find a similar viciousness in the humor of Bleak House. In fact, we could almost see the omniscient narrator of Bleak House as a kind of lurking avenger for crimes committed by the dominant society against the outsider or underdog. For example, the narrator’s characterization of Mr. Chadband, the “respected” minister is sarcastically savage: “For Chandband is rather a consuming vessel—the persecutors say a gorging vessel; and can wield such weapons of the flesh as a knife and fork, remarkably well” (234). On the next page Chadband is described as “not unlike a bear who has been taught to walk upright.” We see this sharp savagery also in the omniscient narrator’s indictment of society for casting out Jo. As he describes Londoners going back to work where they will use their skills of reading and writing, he says that “Jo, and the other lower animals, get on in the unintelligible mess as they can.” Further down the page he compares Jo with a dog: “He and Jo listen to the music, probably with much the same amount of animal satisfaction…”, and further down still, “But…how far above the human listener is the brute!” (199). Dickens’s point here, of course, is not to condemn Jo, but to say in vicious terms that Jo has been victimized by a society that has relegated him to a position lower even than that of an animal.
Nevertheless, Dickens is not purely on a search and destroy mission against the establishment, wielding humor as a weapon. Kincaid suggests that Dickens’s humor also has the important function of causing us to rethink many of our most rigid cultural assumptions, as well as warning us against the darkness in ourselves. Through the skillful use of humor, Dickens helps us to sympathize with the outsider, and thus question the social assumptions of the dominant society. We question our own motives and beliefs about what should and should not be laughed at (“Oliver” 69). One way that Dickens accomplishes this is to cause us to laugh at something, then a few beats later or a few pages later show us that what we laughed at was someone (or something) pitiable that deserved our sympathy. Our own meanness is exposed so that there is a discomfort to our laughter (“Oliver” 65). Kincaid points out that sometimes a Dickens passage is funny right up until the last word, which then points us toward the tragedy of the situation. Dickens does this in the opening scene of Bleak House with the sentence, “Eighteen of Mr. Tangle’s learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a piano-forte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity” (9). This is funny up until the last word, “obscurity,” which recalls to us that these men have no identity despite their best efforts, and thus are tragic. Something similar occurs further down the page when Mr. Tangle jumps in prematurely to correct the Chancellor, which is funny. But the Chancellor ignores him and Mr. Tangle is “crushed.” His error is funny, but the result that he is “crushed” is not. We are left not with contempt for the characters who are the butts of these jokes, but with a complex sense of uneasiness on their behalf.
According to Kincaid, another important approach Dickens uses is direct juxtaposition of a heartless society and its “easy jokes” with a tragic situation or the pain of an outcast, sometimes pushing this situation to the point of grotesqueness. Kincaid says that in these situations, humor is set directly against a more serious situation so that the circumstances are revealed really to be “unfeeling and monstrous heartlessness and the total effect of the scene is to underline…loneliness…” (“Copperfield” 318). Though I could think of no exact correlation in Bleak House to the example used by Kincaid from David Copperfield, nevertheless one particular scene is similar in the ways that it utilizes humor, and I think that it has the same effect. It is the scene in which Mrs. Snagsby arranges for Mr. Chadband to meet with Jo for his “improvement” (318). The “jollity” in this scene is not displayed by Mr. Chadband or Mrs. Snagsby who in fact are both overly austere; rather, the comedy is in Dickens’s tone as he ridicules their ignorant cruelty through caricature. The humor of these two characters is contrasted with two “victims” or outcasts in this scene (or three if one counts Guster): Mr. Snagsby, who understands neither the poisonous suspicions of his wife, nor the “Nemo” mystery in which he has gotten himself entangled; and Jo, who “don’t know nothink” about much of anything. Mr. Snagsby’s agony and Jo’s severe discomfort (and hunger) are juxtaposed with Mr. Chadband’s long, lugubrious, and hilarious sermonizing and Mrs. Snagsby’s outrageous and equally hilarious suspicions (that Jo is Mr. Snagsby’s son, and so on). The effect of the scene is certainly to cause us to “enter much more fully into the world of the terrified and alienated individual” (Kincaid “Oliver” 66). Dickens again undermines our assumptions and forces us beyond the complacent laughter behind which we have taken refuge.
Dickens uses humor in other ways to question our assumptions about character; Kincaid argues that Dickens often subtly expands flat, comic situations or characters beyond the point we would expect, and involves them in serious issues, sometimes even culminating in a tragic event. The result is that laughter veers again toward darkness, and our assumptions about a character or situation are once again challenged (“Copperfield” 316). Citing Henri Bergson, Kincaid says that humor comes from a character’s rigid insistence on repeating some line or action without regard to reality. To be funny, the character must be unconscious about his or her behavior, and our sympathies must not be aroused too keenly, because emotional distance from the character is a necessary condition of laughter (“Copperfield” 317). Kincaid argues that Dickens’s comic characters often start out as outrageous caricatures that are easy to laugh at according to Bergsen’s rules, but later some of them “prove to be not unconscious, so their comedy is after all not so easy” (“Oliver” 69). They expand beyond the rigid boundaries of the “comic” and become progressively more real and self-conscious throughout the novel, often even including an “insistent note of seriousness and darkness” (“Copperfield” 324).
The Jellyby family is a good example of this in Bleak House. At first we might get the impression that every member of the family, more or less, is meant to be seen as flatly comic. After the extraction of Peepy’s head from between the iron railings, it seems that his further incidents are likely to be mere harmless pratfalls. But shortly afterwards he falls down the stairs, and his “head recorded its passage with a bump on every stair—Richard afterwards said he counted seven, besides one for the landing…” (37). This kind of graphic detail accentuates the seriousness of the fall as well as the pain. And when shortly afterwards, Esther takes it upon herself to comfort him, we know that Peepy’s pain is conscious of itself, and is not something so straightforward as a simple laugh. More significantly, Caddy at first seems like a character who will appear on just a few pages as the butt of a joke or two. When we first see her, Esther says, “I suppose nobody ever was in such a state of ink” (38). Caddy is tattered and frayed and awkward, and we laugh. But just a few pages later, we learn that Caddy is a truly miserable girl who bursts into piteous tears and throws herself on Esther’s mercy (44). Mr. Jellyby, in his status as “nonentity,” seems almost certain to retain a very flat and comical status. But later in the novel we end up with a situation like, “…poor Mr. Jellyby breaking away from the dining-table, and making rushes at the window, with the intention of throwing himself into the area, whenever he made any new attempt to understand his affairs,” i.e. his financial ruin (298). While this is presented in an exaggerated manner that we might interpret as comic, it is clearly tragic. David Gervais puts it well when he says that Dickens’s comedy “is all the time on the verge of becoming something else” (138). There is nothing funny about suicide, and we recognize Mr. Jellyby as a truly pathetic and worn down man. Even the union between the two comic families, the Jellybys and the Turveydrops, through the marriage of Caddy and Prince, results later in a sickly baby born with physical challenges. From all of these circumstances (and many others), one thing Dickens wants us to do is to draw the conclusion that Mrs. Jellyby’s lack of charity at home is not funny, and neither is Mr. Turveydrop’s “deportment” to the selfish exclusion of everyone else; these attitudes result in unfortunate consequences for the innocent. In a sense, the humor is almost always “pointing” at something to come, and is a way of fully getting our attention to show us an injustice or a black absurdity. Dickens uses laughter “as a controlled artistic device to make more startling and effective the important and tragic implications later” (“Copperfield” Kincaid 324).
Sometimes Dickens reaches from the comic into the tragic as a structural element in the arc of a chapter or scene. That is, a scene that starts off on a comic note ends in tragedy, and the tragedy is thereby accentuated. Dickens’s consciousness of his own plan can be seen in his own notes for David Copperfield when he says, “First chapter funny – Then on to Em’ly.” That chapter, as described by Kincaid, starts with a scene of wild comedy, which then leads into a kidnapping (“Copperfield” 315). As David Gervais says, by the time of Bleak House, it was characteristic of Dickens to vent “anger, sorrow, and disgust” by beginning with the comic and then transforming it into the tragic (137). Kincaid agrees that when Dickens’s humor precedes melodramatic or tragic scenes, the latter events are made more effective as a result of the contrast (315). Chapter VIII of Bleak House, “Covering a Multitude of Sins” follows this pattern. In this chapter we meet Mrs. Pardiggle, who is comical at first in the way she asserts her superiority and knocks furniture over. She does seem sadistic and cruel as it is revealed that she takes her children’s money away from them, but here we can still laugh, as Dickens presents the situation to us in a comical manner. But the apparently comical chapter then turns very dark and tragic when Mrs. Pardiggle takes Esther and Ada to the brickmaker’s house. Mrs. Pardiggle’s total lack of empathy and understanding becomes harshly apparent as we encounter the squalid living conditions, Jenny’s black eye, the dying baby, and the brickmaker’s harsh (but realistic) words. The scene culminates in the baby’s death, and Mrs. Pardiggle’s cold hypocrisy is shown to be not funny, but monstrous. It would be hard to imagine a scene of more pathos than the death of a baby and the resulting pain of its mother. And so, “ultimately, humor is deceptive in Dickens; used not only for laughter, but as a foundation out of which serious and tragic incidents grow, and few ordinarily comic characters or situations are allowed to stay within the bounds of the purely entertaining” (“Copperfield” Kincaid 328).
Dickens also uses humor to interesting (and dark) effect when he blurs the lines between good and evil through comic means. Kincaid says that one way he does this is by injecting “playfulness” into a villain’s role, “that makes the horror of his subject both more ghastly and more supportable.” The villain is “neither totally repulsive nor totally funny, but something of both.” Some of these villains display “a fancy which eludes the furthest extension of logic, and it is precisely this flight from the confines of rationality which is usually a trait of funny characters, not villains” (324). This may be why readers from the nineteenth century all the way up to present times have experienced some confusion about how to “take” Harold Skimpole. No doubt Skimpole’s relentless pursuit of his own cracked and irresponsible logic is often very funny, and it would be hard at first not to become confused over whether he is a dastardly villain or a harmless comic character as he launches into his long, complicated speeches with their hilarious flights of fancy. Nevertheless, Kincaid points out that Dickens tends to abruptly recall us from this kind of fantasy or fancy in the middle of a sentence or a page, reminding us that there is something dark beneath (“Copperfield” 326). For example, Child becomes a key word in Skimpole’s characterization, and as it’s thrown often into the narrative we soon learn to regard it with some degree of suspicion (Fogle 9). Often as we begin to get lost in one of Skimpole’s eccentric flights, his (or Jarndyce’s) refrain of his being a “child” will be repeated, reminding us to distrust him. Certainly once he has betrayed Jo’s location, and the worldly-wise Mr. Bucket reveals him for what he is, we’ve learned better. And if we’re still in any doubt at the end of the novel, his ungrateful pronouncement that Mr. Jarndyce is “selfish” seals our opinion of him. Gervais, calling Skimpole a “weaver of language,” points out that the more complicated the outside of a Dickens character, the more corrupt that character may be on the inside (139). Indeed, Skimpole is a perfect example of a Dickens villain who leaves us uncertain when to laugh and when to be chilled, though ultimately we realize that what lies beneath is thoroughly rotten.
Though Kincaid’s claim that the outrageous humor of a character like Skimpole makes him more “supportable” or believable might seem strange at first, Brian Rosenberg points out that Dickens’s characters “re-create the difficulty and indecision with which we apprehend people more than they do the actual contours of the people themselves” (147). Thus, Skimpole is not at all a mimetic representation like we might find in a George Eliot novel, but he is a fairly true portrait of how we might react in real life to such a malevolent charmer: first liking him and finding him funny, then feeling suspicious, then dismissing our suspicions, yet eventually realizing that we’ve been had. Surely this deception, this comic “unknowability” of what intentions lie behind others’ actions, is a dark and sadly funny glimpse of the human condition.
I’ve dwelt a long time on Skimpole because he is so memorable, and so ambiguous. But the other great comic “villain” of Bleak House, Grandfather Smallweed, should also be mentioned. It’s hard to know where to even begin or end discussing the Smallweeds’ comedy. Though there is never any doubt of Grandfather Smallweed’s status as a despicable, sadistic, greedy character, we can see some of the tendency toward “flights of fancy” in his extraordinarily colorful insults toward Mrs. Smallweed – brimstone chatterer, brimstone beast, brimstone scorpion, brimstone poll-parrot, chattering clattering broomstick witch, and so forth – along with his habit of throwing a cushion at her. In this sense, the comedy associated with Grandfather Smallweed is particularly challenging for the reader. We recognize his actions as cruel, but laugh anyway. And though he is thoroughly mean, he is contradictorily imparted with a funny vulnerability, his tendency to slip down in his chair so that he has to be “shaken up” by Judy, and we get something pathetic (and funny) like this: “Grandfather Smallweed has been gradually sliding down in his chair since his last adjustment, and is now a bundle of clothes, with a voice in it calling for Judy” (268). There is in fact a touch of pathos to the Smallweeds, and this perhaps points up another aspect of the sadness in Dickens’s humor. Kincaid quotes Dorothy Van Ghent as saying that a great deal of Dickens’s humor develops from a situation of noncommunication in which “speech is speech to nobody and where human encounter is mere collision.” Van Ghent says that Dickens’s humor often suggests “a world of isolated integers, terrifyingly alone and unrelated” (“Copperfield” 315). In fact, much of the Smallweeds’ humor comes from this loneliness and isolation. Grandmother Smallweed, in her second childhood, chimes up irrelevantly with her lines about money, unable to understand or communicate with anyone around her. Grandfather Smallweed’s insults, despite their vehemence, do not reach her in any way that she can rationally comprehend. Judy clearly cares nothing about her grandfather – her help to him comes not out of any abiding love, but out of long, isolated habit. And the younger Smallweeds, because of their sour and isolated upbringing, were unable to interact and communicate with other children normally. Though we may be laughing our heads off rather than thinking consciously about the pathos in this situation, the sadness is nevertheless there, lurking just under the surface. Dickens very directly establishes that tone in the first paragraph in which he introduces the Smallweed family and their dwelling, which is in “a little narrow street, always solitary, shady, and sad, closely bricked in on all sides like a tomb…” (257).
Just as Dickens’s despicable characters edge into comedy or pathos, good comic characters can edge into darkness. As Richard Barickman says, “comedy that comprehends so much of Dickens’ thematic material must often…edge pain and brutality and risk its own transformation into a different mode.” Thus we have a comic character like Boythorn who we know to be good because of his gentleness toward animals and toward Esther, but who still sets mantraps and mines for Jarndyce’s men (141). Esther sums up the contradiction nicely when she says of Boythorn, “To hear him say all this with unimaginable energy, one might have thought him the angriest of mankind. To see him at the very same time, looking at the bird now perched upon his thumb, and softly smoothing its feathers with his forefinger, one might have thought him the gentlest” (109). We might say something similar of Miss Flite who, though driven slightly mad by Jarndyce and Jarndyce, is clearly meant overall to be a good comic character. Nevertheless, there is something sinister in the way that she keeps her symbolically named birds in cages to be released on the “day of judgment,” and the way that she acts as a harbinger of evil tidings in the narrative. Kincaid quotes Humphry House as saying that Dickens’s “gregarious and hearty happiness” represents “a revulsion from the abysses of evil, a strenuous and ardent wish to achieve happiness, rather than the realization of it” (“Copperfield” 316). This seems a good description of some of Dickens’s good comic characters, who are undoubtedly hearty and gregarious, but who nevertheless allow us to see “the abysses of evil” just below the surface.
Dickens’s settings and descriptions in Bleak House also have this characteristic of darkness lurking underneath. In fact, much of this darkness is not even so much below the surface as on the surface. Dickens could not have put the word “bleak” in the very title of his novel by accident. Barickman says that the famous opening of the novel depicts people engaged in “an unremitting struggle” with the environment as they tend to slip into the state of being objects themselves (133). What is maybe more surprising is that, yet again, this darkness is infused with humor. Priscilla Gibson points out “the unrestrained play of personal, obtrusive humor” over the opening passages of the novel despite its depressed mood, and the humor is in no small part related to Dickens’s strange animism of the environment (284). Gibson says that one of the purposes of this humorous animism is to prepare readers for his metaphor of Chancery (as fog) enveloping England (285). But further, it evokes an atmosphere which is actually alive, and which breeds evil, as Dickens speaks of “…the fog, the rain’s language at Chesney Wold, the starved houses in dispute, the self-propagating mud, speaking portraits of the Dedlocks, the ‘dimly-blinking’ lamps of Lincoln’s Inn, the hypnotically drawing lord chancellor’s mace, the pointing Roman on Mr. Tulkinghorn’s ceiling, the stonily staring houses and sulky street lamps on Dedlock Street” (289). The upshot is that the strangely vital environment works in a way that is often funny (or at least odd) and menacing at the same time. Barickman points out that “it is the blurring of that rationalist’s distinction between inner and outer, mind and body, them and me, that provokes much of the terror in the novel’s world, as the object world leaps into life… (132). Not unlike many of Dickens’s characters, his settings are humorous and nightmarish at the same time, often transforming before our eyes in much the same way that we watch Mrs. Pardiggle transform from a harmless comic caricature into an unfeeling monster.
Barickman further points out that what is different about Dickens’s comedy from the new comedy of Austen, Eliot and James “is the absence of any hope that the energies celebrated can flow into a regenerated community”; the setting and action tends to return again and again to the more squalid conditions of London and away from the more idyllic (and less poisonous) settings (142). It is an unpredictable and strangely menacing world that Dickens’s characters must live in and contend with; they are in a struggle for survival “against all the nameless social forces that have made [their] spirit[s] and environment so wretched,” and they have to use their humor in that struggle (Barickman 136). Kincaid touches on this when he suggests that the Dodger in Oliver Twist reveals that he consciously uses his humor as a way to survive (“Oliver” 69). And Barickman argues that Dickens’s comic (and even noncomic) characters form isolated, bizarre enclaves that are unique to each character, and which help them to humorously assert self-identity against rigid nineteenth century social boundaries and moral codes (134). What is humorous about this is the way that these eccentrics “thwart and burlesque mechanistic social forms with ostentatious routines that have the unmistakable mark of individuality” (135). Sometimes characters seem aware of their own eccentric humor and the way that they must use it to defend or assert themselves; sometimes they are “unconscious” and are only funny to us in their struggle. In any case, examples abound in Bleak House. In fact, nearly every character in the novel could be mentioned as fitting the description. Barickman cites Phil Squod sidling along the wall creating “Phil’s mark,” and even Vholes with his idiosyncratic tendencies (135). Also fitting the pattern are the Badgers, with their arrangement of mutually admiring Mrs. Badger’s previous husbands; John Jarndyce in Bleak House with his “Growlery”; the Turveydrops at the dancing school; Krook and others at the Rag and Bottle shop; the Jellybys in their topsy-turvy household; the Smallweeds, in their tomb-like home; and even Harold Skimpole, when we finally get a glimpse of his tatty abode. Barickman’s argument is a somewhat optimistic one: “The late novels expose shrewdly, relentlessly, even cynically the disaster that modern urban culture can be, but they still relish the dodges that keep a surprising number of people…alive, responsive, and unreasonably happy” (138). But despite the glee, we nevertheless perhaps glimpse an ultimate futility in their efforts, because we know they’re going against such dark odds. At the opposite extreme from all of these comic individualists are “the Coodles and Doodles of Bleak House…who have all gained a protective anonymity by allowing the self to be submerged in the most mechanistic of social functions”; no matter how funny the Coodles and Doodles are, they have still lapsed into being nothing but Coodles and Doodles (Barickman 131).
Perhaps it can be said that “no comedy is free of some threat” (Barickman 143). There is certainly no doubt that these two elements go together in Dickens, and that his comedy and pathos often work together for the same purpose (Gervais 136). Working together, they cause the reader to participate more fully “in the vital action of the novel, which is at once more complete and much more intense” (Kincaid “Oliver” 69). More importantly, they cause the reader to rethink assumptions, and confront darkness inside and outside the self. Perhaps one of the most efficient representatives in Bleak House of the tragedy in Dickens’s comedy is the very little counsel with the terrific bass voice from the opening scene of the novel: “Leaving [his] address (delivered like a sepulchral message) ringing in the rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the fog knows him no more. Everybody looks for him. Nobody can see him” (10). And as this little counsel drops into obscurity in the comedy of human failure to communicate, we see just how poignant Dickens’s humor can be.
Works Cited
Barickman, Richard. “The Comedy of Survival in Dickens’ Novels.” NOVEL: A Forum
on Fiction 11.2 (Winter 1978): 128-143.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Ed. George Ford and Sylvere Monod. New York:
Norton, 1977.
Fogle, Stephen F. “Skimpole Once More.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 7.1 (Jun., 1952):
1-18.
Gervais, David. “Dickens’s Comic Speech: Inventing the Self.” The Yearbook of
English Studies, Vol. 25, Non-Standard Englishes and the New Media Special Number (1995): 128-140.
Gibson, Priscilla. “Dickens’s Uses of Animism.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 7.4 (Mar.
1953): 283-291.
Gold, Joseph. “Charles Dickens and Today’s Reader.” The English Journal 58.2 (Feb.
1969): 205-211.
Kincaid, James R. “Dickens’s Subversive Humor: David Copperfield.” Nineteenth-
Century Fiction 22.4 (Mar. 1968): 313-329.
--. “Laughter and ‘Oliver Twist.’” PMLA 83.1 (Mar. 1968): 63-70.
Miller, J. Hillis. “The Sources of Dickens’s Comic Art: From American Notes to Martin
Chuzzlewit.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction: The Charles Dickens Centennial 24.4 (Mar. 1970): 467-476.
Rosenberg, Brian. “Character and Contradiction in Dickens.” Nineteenth-Century
Literature 47.2 (Sep., 1992): 145-163.
Herman Melville’s Careful Disorderlieness
A Paper of Careful Disorderliness
My ambition with this essay is to examine broad and relatively superficial elements of structure and plot in Moby-Dick to help me solve a select few of the most pressing problems of my own novel. As with my last paper, I have been entirely arbitrary, choosing elements that I feel will be especially helpful to my own creative process. I don’t purport to solve every problem of my novel here, but to discover some guiding principles, to ask some of the right questions which can be answered later.
To start out, I should define the nature of the problem. I have a project for which I have several notebooks full of material – character sketches, incidents, dialogue, and rough scenes. I’ve been collecting this material off and on for years, and my plan is to form it into a series of novels, perhaps a trilogy. The novel I’m focusing on here would be the first one, and in its most basic aspects, it’s a fantasy story about a man (Doran) and woman (Meredith) locked up in a tower together and tormented by guards and a warden. Its working title is Bastard’s Tower, partly in reference to the setting and main character, and partly in reference to the fact that the project has been such a bastard. The trouble is that it is spontaneous story with no structure and no plot. In 20 Master Plots, Ronald B. Tobias calls pure story “a chronicle of events,” and differentiates plot as not just what happens next, but Why? (12). Looked at in this way, my story is indeed nothing but a very loose “chronicle of events,” with no “why.”
It’s true that a story doesn’t necessarily need a “why” anymore to be successful. It has become more common and acceptable for story to spontaneously erupt in a surreal way, as with the metafiction of Jonathan Lethem or the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Nevertheless, regardless of the degree of rational plot that exists in a story, it cannot be denied that material always requires at least some degree of structure. Also, though some of the trappings of magical realism might not be out of the question for my own story, I certainly have no desire to write surreal metafiction. My own preference is to provide a story with at least some degree of conventionally plotted causality. Though on the surface it may not seem to make much sense for me to look to Moby-Dick to help me with these problems, it has a strange rhyming logic for me; Moby-Dick seems in many ways an “irrational” book with some degree of rationality and structure imposed on it. Since my own material is essentially irrational – pure creation with no form – it doesn’t seem too far off base to look to Melville for a little help on a successful marriage of chaos with form.
J.A. Ward quotes chapter LXXXII of Moby-Dick, “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.” Ward points out that Melville is “a great organic artist who is careful to provide his work of art with the architecture for orderly growth” (162). This is echoed by James Barbour in “The Composition of Moby-Dick.” According to Barbour, Melville’s creative process may have involved three different periods of composition of drafts, which essentially resulted in three different narratives that he assembled together. The first was a fairly straightforward whaling adventure that included many of the scenes involving the humorous and adventurous aspects of whaling, and which can still be found in the completed novel. The second period mainly included the composition of the cetological chapters, whose distinguishing characteristic (for my own purposes) is that they lack any kind of plot whatsoever in its traditional sense. The third period of Melville’s composition of Moby-Dick was influenced by Hawthorne and Shakespeare and was characterized by the addition of Ahab’s quest to the narrative. The most rational response to this procedure is probably, “Don’t try this at home, kids”; it comes with no guarantee of resulting in Moby-Dick every time. Even Melville apparently considered the novel a “hash” and thought the disparate parts had failed to blend (Barbour 352). Later readers have, of course, come to regard it as anything but a hash, and Melville’s process was apparently agreeable to him in terms of creative satisfaction as evidenced by his request for ”fifty fast writing youths” to copy down all of his ideas (350).
I think Melville’s eccentric process is useful as a corrective for the rigid formulas for writing that tend to crop up in writing books as well as universities. Formulas can indeed be quite useful, but only when they remain fluid and adaptable. I found this out the hard way during my senior year of undergraduate, when a professor directed me in a one-on-one writing project that was to be the start of my work on the material that I’m addressing here. Very little writing took place, as the professor insisted that I revise a two-page synopsis over and over for all four months of the semester. For him, this was the one and only way to write a novel – before beginning one had to have a synopsis whittled to absolute perfection and rationality. Though I don’t begrudge him his own method, by the fifth or sixth rejection of my synopsis I had lost all interest in and enthusiasm for my material. He also insisted that I eradicate all the contradictions in my material, which had been the aspects of it that interested me and that I thought worth exploring. For example, one of my main characters, Meredith, had two children by two different men. The professor said that this was not properly motivated, and made me eliminate one of the children (an event that sounds rather sinister when stated like that). However, I’ve often found that a lot of the most rewarding and interesting turns of my own stories come out of exploring such contradictions and finding a synthesis – stumbling across a dynamic answer that leads me in a new and unexpected direction. If one believes Coleridge that “the imagination reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities . . . “ then my professor was doing me no great favor by eliminating any possibility that I should grapple with such qualities! To be sure, by the end of his prescribed process I had plot and structure, but it was useless to me since it had nothing to do with anything I had originally wanted to write. Also, when I did start writing the first chapters of the novel with the synopsis as my source, they came out very flat and uninteresting.
I’m not trying to use Melville to advocate some ridiculous notion that a writer can sit down without any planning and that a novel will somehow magically and organically erupt onto the page. But I am advocating that perhaps for Melville, and for many, there’s a happy medium somewhere in between “magical eruption” and a dull, rigid synopsis honed for months on end. It would seem that some instructive principles in accomplishing a “careful disorderliness” can perhaps be extracted from Melville’s process. For example, it’s interesting to me that what is now considered by most to be the main driving force of the novel in terms of both plot and theme – that is, the Ahab portion of the book – was apparently, in large part, added last. If this is the case, it would mean that Melville actually incorporated much of what is considered the plot (the “why”) of the book as a later step since this is the part of the book that many tend to recognize as the “plot.” Eldridge calls it “the primary unifying force in the novel” (147). And various popular books on the craft of writing tend to dub this aspect of the book a “pursuit plot,” or “revenge plot” (Tobias 81). One possible lesson to be learned from this is that it is in fact possible to play both fast and loose. That is, it may be possible to start a novel with nothing much beyond a rather loose structure, a sketched in story, and a determined intention. Another way to put it is that it may be possible to start out with a weaker plot and discover and add the stronger plot (and other structural elements) later. In my own case, this “inside out” method sounds useful. If I were to follow it, the best course of action would probably be to form some kind of loose structure on which to start hanging the story, and then let other elements of story and plot develop as I go, which would also allow me to grapple with the contradictions that interest me.
One clue to finding this structure perhaps lies with the next element I’m eager to borrow from Moby-Dick, which involves a plot device called the crucible. This is a term of James N. Frey’s that Elizabeth George discusses in her book Write Away. She defines it as “a situation in which your characters are bonded together for one reason or another and thus unable to escape being in conflict with one another … a crucible works as a crucible if the characters either cannot get out or have stronger reasons for staying in than they do for escaping“ (62). George mentions both literal, material crucibles (e.g., a prison) and situational crucibles (e.g., two characters both coveting the same object, but only being able to obtain it by working together).
George does not say much beyond that about crucibles, but for my own purposes it’s useful to extend the concept. Along with material and situational crucibles, I’ll add a third category, which I’ll call “metaphysical.” This is a more intangible, spiritually or mentally binding crucible, which I think often appears in fantasy or romance. Sometimes it will be embodied or tied up with a material object or objective so that it has a more solid presence (which also does a fine job of tying the plot together). For example, in The Lord of the Rings the Ring is a kind of Meta- or Uber-crucible, uniting everything unto itself. It’s a portable material prison, keeping others within its grasp through a kind of addiction wherever it goes; it’s a situational crucible, bringing together the Fellowship of the Ring since it can only be destroyed with all working together; and it’s a metaphysical crucible forcing all characters into contact with power and evil. I might add that I admire plots with less unified, more mimetic crucibles just as much. In Jane Austen’s novels, it would seem that all of the following are crucibles: English provincial life; the fact of being female in a 19th century world; manners; marriage; and love itself.
Undoubtedly, Moby-Dick is made up of a brilliantly conceived series of crucibles. The Pequod is a material crucible, acting like prison walls; the hunt for the whale is a situational crucible; and Ahab’s almost superhuman personality combined with the metaphysical pull of the whale comprise a metaphysical crucible. Melville uses his crucibles to their most extreme end; once he has everyone imprisoned within the ship, within the hunt, and within Ahab’s mania, he destroys the entire (microcosmic) world. Many others have remarked on this phenomenon, though in different terms. Says Ward, “…the quest motif would be dominant and the object of the quest, the white whale, would serve as the object of both physical and metaphysical capture. Never before in Melville’s fiction had there been such a complete union between physical object and spiritual truth …”(167).
Ship, whale, Ahab’s quest: to me, they work as the engine driving the plot of Moby-Dick. All three are crucibles, all three force every character on the ship into conflict on various inner and outer levels. As already noted, some of these elements in Melville’s fiction may have been added late in the revision process, but in terms of their effect on the final draft, it matters very little whether they were added early or late; they’re simple (as most brilliant ideas are), and act as a bedrock force, helping to make the more digressive elements possible. With such a strong foundation to his plot, Melville had tremendous freedom to allow things to remain complicated, “loose,” and more experimental in various other parts of the novel – cetological chapters, characters that appear and disappear, philosophical rambling, and so on. Nevertheless, the degree that one wanders off from the bedrock is, of course, a personal choice for a writer. Melville chooses to play loose, whereas Austen piles on crucibles, but also keeps everything else about her plots very tight and focused.
Crucibles have several other winning qualities in terms of their usefulness to the writing process. One is that they work as a kind of dynamic, multi-dimensional system that ties together a number of different fictional elements all at the same time. Setting, plot, conflict, tension, and character all tend to converge on the crucible, and sometimes other elements do as well. A well-designed crucible can be a kind of fictional plate tectonics in constant motion, keeping the story world dynamic and alive. Depending on how one’s mind works, this can be a much more useful concept than linear plot. Essentially, crucibles are a great way to set up the “game.” Because crucibles will automatically produce conflict, once they are established as structure, one can write whatever comes naturally from them and then go back and revise more analytically later. It’s a way to have one’s cake and eat it, too. For Bastard’s Tower, if I were to set up a crucible, or a series of them, structure will result even if plot doesn’t, and chances are, it will help plot emerge as well. My goal then becomes to develop the three different kinds of crucibles - material, situational, and metaphysical. These crucibles can have a more unified aspect (as in The Lord of the Rings) a less unified aspect (as with Jane Austen), or fall somewhere in the middle (like Moby-Dick), but they must be present as far as I’m concerned.
Though I already have my own material crucible (a tower), I’m jealous of Melville because in many ways a ship is the perfect crucible; it forces people into conflict within itself and yet is mobile so that it has the added advantage of coming into contact and conflict with other lands, ships, people, and so on. (Science fiction has used this concept advantageously in the form of the space ship, e.g., Star Trek.) Nevertheless, my situation does allow some similar ramifications as Melville’s situation, such as exile and isolation, though in one very important sense my goal for this exile and isolation is much different from Melville’s; as John Parke says, “…the absence of women and their influence from the crew and, generally speaking, from the story, may be taken as symbolic …the specific feminine principle of relatedness, of nurturing, of instinctive affection, is implicitly and expressly denied” (325). Melville exiles and isolates masculinity, throws it against itself, within his crucible. My goal, rather, is to exile male and female together, especially my characters of Meredith, Doran, and the Warden. Gender is always important to me as thematic material, and I always feel compelled to explore both masculinity and femininity. What comes of the conflict I set up is something I’ll have to discover in the writing process.
I still lack situational and metaphysical crucibles. That is, what I am missing utterly is a White Whale, an outward goal or object that serves as a crucible. If I were to follow the model of Moby-Dick, I would also need a parallel Ahab character, and in fact I do have a character that would be roughly parallel to Ahab – the warden of my tower. This is related to another interesting point: “within the domain of his own universe, the ship, [Ahab] acts as an all-powerful tyrant” (Heller 55). A material crucible often enables a tyrant. For example, Big Nurse is the all-powerful tyrant in the crucible of the mental hospital in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Not only is Ahab a tyrant, but he is a tyrant with charisma; he possesses a mysterious, almost magical force of personality that the crew cannot escape. Indeed, charisma is another of my favorite, rather strange types of crucibles. People can become “trapped” in the charisma of celebrities or leaders, which can throw them into rather sinister kinds of conflict sometimes. In my tower, the warden would be the all-powerful, and perhaps charismatic tyrant, a character who is, for the moment, woefully underdeveloped. This reveals to me that one of my priorities is to break this character wide open. He can’t be Ahab, but he might turn out to be an important element of my story. If I were to develop this character, he might perhaps lead me to situational and metaphysical crucibles, just as every thought and action of Ahab’s leads toward the whale.
I will move on now from crucibles, and trace out several smaller principles I can extract from Moby-Dick to help my project. The first of these is that the ship and the white whale are not just any general ship or white whale; the ship is specifically the Pequod and the white whale is specifically Moby Dick. The whale and the ship work as archetypes, and Melville developed more specific identities around these archetypes, weaving together his own myth (Ward 173). Whatever the merits or demerits of the working title for my project - Bastard’s Tower - it reflects the vague and abstract level of my thinking at the moment; if I were to fail to advance beyond this level, it would be as though Melville failed to develop his material any further than being able to call his novel White Whale. Just as Melville got hold of natural history volumes and other factual accounts to develop the cetological chapters and other part of his novel, what I need to do is study my archetypes and brainstorm on and borrow from historical accounts. In this way, I can develop a much greater degree of specificity. My tower can gain a name and history, and a specific function; and though Doran is my eponymous bastard, he can be given a much more detailed history.
Related to the need for greater specificity is what I will call a need for greater “groundedness.” As Ward says, “Melville creates a world cosmic in scope and spiritual at its center, but his starting point is earthly and material.” Because of this concrete foundation in fact, “Melville can afford to violate the canon of realism with impunity” (171). And returning again to Coleridge: “The imagination reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities …; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; …the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; …and while it blends and harmonizes the natural with the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter” (170). Unfortunately, in my case, by temperament I’m always trying to skip the concrete, the image, the old and familiar objects, the more than usual state of order, the nature, and the matter. And I simply cannot do that and write effectively. If recognition of my affliction is the first step of recovery, then I’m well on my way. I see now that I must ground my story, develop more powerful descriptive powers in my craft, and do the necessary world building, whether it’s this world or some other.
Speaking of other worlds, J.R.R. Tolkien’s sentiments in “On Fairy Stories” are strikingly similar to Coleridge – so much so that a rather striking link between romanticism and “high fantasy” is evident, at least to my eyes. Tolkien insists on a consistent and concretely developed “Secondary World” so that the more metaphysical aims of Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation are possible (60, 66). The highly structured plot of fantasy certainly fits the bill of “more than usual order,” while Tolkien’s notion of Eucatastrophe, “Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief,” is certainly “a more than usual state of emotion” (81). At any rate, attention to the grounded and concrete is part of Tolkien’s success, too. He creates a world so detailed that he can then take the reader to some very metaphysical, spiritual places. This is relevant to my purposes since what I’m striving to achieve probably borrows elements from both 19th century Romanticism and 20th century fantasy (among other sources). And though the metaphysical elements of my own story are far from being well-developed, I now understand more fully the importance that a strong base be built to support them.
The next principle involves the problem of “nothing happening.” According to Ward, Melville had a need to add some variety to his story, because “he had to face the obvious fact that on a long whaling voyage very little happens.” If Melville were to concentrate too much on Ahab, the narrative would get too intense. But “to concentrate on the trivia, on the day-to-day activity of the seamen or on the capture of every whale, would be both repetitious and monotonous” (168). All of this echoes my own problem that during a long imprisonment very little happens, and that the day-to-day activity of prisoners is both repetitious and monotonous. Trying to address this issue, the professor on my senior project insisted that my story must have some kind of standard plot to drive it forward - specifically an escape plot. But while I wouldn’t mind an escape plot figuring into the narrative in a peripheral way (e.g. as a subplot), it’s not the driving force that I want. To focus on an escape plot would emphasize themes and issues that are not at the heart of things for me. According to Ward, one way Melville chose to solve the problem of monotony was “by punctuating the Ahab scenes and the whaling incidents” with the cetological chapters. In these chapters, “The whale is the common denominator, both object of exposition and object of quest” (168). I’m not suggesting I should write a series of expository chapters related thematically to my material; readers are rather unforgiving about this tactic, and after all, I’m looking to Moby-Dick for techniques and principles, not trying to copy the book. But I can borrow the idea rather generally, and think about adding a third “stream” of some kind into the narrative, perhaps an elaborate sub-plot – perhaps an escape plot, for that matter! It also seems to me that the gams serve a similar purpose in the narrative. In “‘Careful Disorder’: The Structure of Moby-Dick,” Eldridge argues that they have an important function in the structure as they are spaced evenly throughout and counterbalance more “organic” elements (155). Certainly every time they appear, they enliven and spice things up. This may be an idea that I can borrow more or less directly; a group of people comes to the tower to visit Doran and Meredith from time to time, and I should probably develop this as an important structural element. Just like Melville’s “gams,” I could build in a “progression” to these meetings and use them to give some regularity as well as variety to the narrative.
My last, very short, guiding principle gleaned from Moby-Dick involves the notion of the Pequod as a microcosm, as “society, as world-in-itself” (Young 449). If I were to make the population of my tower a microcosm, it would allow me to develop a cast of characters with a wide variety of attitudes and temperaments, just as the characters on the Pequod show “a variety of attitudes toward the white whale, a variety of attitudes toward reality and man’s place in the universe …” (Ward 170).
I will now attempt to sum up what I have learned from Melville to apply to my own project. First, a writing method of “careful disorderliness” can be a very useful corrective for rigid writing formulas. It is quite possible to start out with a weak plot and strengthen it as one goes in order to keep an element of surprise in the creative process. Second, a way to arrive at a dynamic kind of structure, whether early or late in the creative process, involves the use of material, situational, and metaphysical crucibles, which are a handy tool to produce conflict in an “organic” way. The development of my own parallel “Ahab character,” the warden of my tower, may help lead me to satisfactory crucibles. Third, it is important to develop archetypes on both a general and specific level in order to arrive at a fully developed “myth.” Fourth, it is also important to establish a grounded world of convincing detail, because this makes the fantastic or metaphysical details of a story resonate more believably. Fifth, the monotony of “nothing happening” can be enlivened with a subplot or other separate line of chapters, as well as with a series of meetings (similar to gams) with characters from the outside. Sixth, and last, my tower can be designed as a microcosm whose inhabitants exhibit a wide variety of attitudes and attributes.
The ideas I’ve covered here have been helpful to my project, and will continue to be helpful in exactly the ways I’ve stated. Nevertheless, it seems that the most immediate result of my efforts is that I “accidentally” jumpstarted a later book in my series while ruminating on Melville’s style of myth-building (i.e. points three and four above). One of Melville’s wonderfully freeing lessons seems to be that nearly anything can be transformed into a myth. Though I was not looking for that particular lesson, or for a start to that particular later novel, or for a whole new direction of thinking with no time to write a different paper, I won’t complain. After all, I’ve just spent thirteen pages pleading (if not praying) to Melville to help me justify freedom and spontaneity within form.
Works Cited
Barbour, James. “The Composition of Moby-Dick.” American Literature 47.3 (Nov.
1975): 343-360.
Eldridge, Herbert G. “‘Careful Disorder’: The Structure of Moby-Dick.” American
Literature 39.2 (May, 1967): 145-162.
George, Elizabeth. Write Away. New York: Harper Collins, 2004.
Heller, Louis G. “Two Pequot Names in American Literature.” American Speech 36.1
(1961): 54-57.
Parke, John. “Seven Moby-Dicks.” The New England Quarterly 28.3 (Sep. 1955): 319-
338.
Tobias, Ronald B. 20 Master Plots and how to build them. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest,
1993.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Tolkien Reader. New York: Del Rey, 1986.
Ward, J. A. “The Function of the Cetological Chapters in Moby-Dick.” American
Literature 28.2 (May, 1956): 164-183.
Young, James Dean. “The Nine Gams of the Pequod.” American Literature 25.4 (Jan.
1954): 449-463.
Early Loss: John Robert Hegmann (my father)
My favorite photo: the prison chaplain ID.
I’m now years older than you ever got to be. I guess what I remember is that you got me. You brought me Elfquest comic books with their gentle wolf (dog)-loving elves. I have become a kind of gentle dog-loving elf.
One of your friends wrote about you after you died, “John’s sense of humor was unique. I have never met anyone other than John who could make me laugh for a solid 40 minutes to and from Columbus.” In my memories, you are a funny guy, a talented raconteur. I don’t remember specifics of your stories. I remember only the feel of them, the funny sound effects you made, and your laugh, and other people laughing. I do remember some of the John-isms. I still say, “Anybody get the number of that truck?” when I feel lousy. When I teach citation to my students, I use the old aviation saying, “Any landing you walk away from is a good one.” I assign gratitude letters as my students’ first writing project, and I tell them how after you died, people sent letters to my mom about the impact you had them – your intellect, your humor, your desire to do good, and your disillusionment when good failed – and that this is one of the only ways I know you. I tell them so they understand writing as legacy and memory.
I tell about the anxiety I felt at age ten returning to my peers after you died and I’d been out of school for a week; that I can still feel the visceral panic walking toward the classroom door, the weight of the backpack on my shoulders, not knowing how others would act toward me; and that as soon as I entered the room, a classmate, Ty, joked with me about how long I’d been gone, which was the only thing that brought me any normalcy and relief during those weeks. I also tell how later that day, another kid who had mocked and bullied me over the years walked up to me, muttered something insincere, and handed me a small silk flower arrangement – obviously a task forced on him by his mother. I understand that the inauthentic solemnity we all carry out when someone dies is because we don’t know how to deal with death in our culture, and we’re well-meaning, and we’re awkward. But that I experienced that awkward insincerity so early on is partly what drove me to humor for the rest of my life, I think. Humor in absolute darkness. Humor to cut out all the lying bullshit.
I remember you out of the hospital, ravaged by the chemo, in the living room at the farm praying to God with a kind of fervent terror of death in your voice. Out of your mind with the horror of it. How did anyone think it was a good idea to leave me alone with you that day? Or more importantly, to leave you alone with yourself? I hid on the back stairs, not knowing whether to approach or run. Those whole nine months while you were dying were like that, really.
When a parent dies early, it becomes difficult to separate fact from legend. An admiration for Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes – are these apocryphal? There are other things I’m certain of: aquariums, Native American arrowheads, Bruce Springsteen, Star Trek, working on car engines, a subscription to Soldier of Fortune magazine (as a child, I boredly flipped through its pages, not understanding what it was about). I know you were an ordained minister, but almost never had an official church appointment; I know that people ostensibly paid you for piano lessons, but what they really came for and received was professional counseling – a much more affordable version of it with no need for insurance coverage.
When I was 22, I reached out to people on your side of the family to tell me what they knew about you. Your mother put together some photo albums for me, which I pored through, looking for clues. I did find some answers, but they were at the surface, just as photos are at the surface. You had a younger brother, my uncle David, which of course I always knew. But I learned you’d also had a twin brother, Louis Jones, who died in a Brooklyn hospital of a staph infection a few months after you both were born. You went home. He never did. What I couldn’t learn was how you felt about that, if you felt any way about it at all. But how could you not? He was gone very early. Ultimately, you were gone early, too.
The Lord of the Rings, which you re-read once a year, somehow haunted my own psyche from as early as I can remember – especially the scene at Mount Doom with Frodo and Gollum – though I don’t understand how the transference took place since you never read it to me. I only read it years later when you were long gone in some clumsy attempt to try to get to know you. Instead, it showed me that I was a coward in my own writing and needed to get straight with my artistic integrity. Or maybe you did that, in some long reach across space and time, in the way that story and music cancel out those limitations on our short human lives. Reading it when I did was the right time. I sorely needed a father pushing me, even only in such metaphysical forms.
You had grown up in Hialeah, had been a competitive swimmer, and you did teach me to swim before you were gone. Swimming is so natural to me, as natural as walking, that I’m always surprised to learn there are people who can’t swim. On the other hand, no one ever taught me to ride a bike, which is unthinkable to most people. But for the swimming, I’m grateful. It was a more natural fit for me than bike-riding. To hide away under water was some of my only real happiness in childhood.
You were surly with me sometimes and especially wanted me to vanish if there was a Miami Dolphins football game on. I also remember how ashamed of me you looked at times, because my health was not all right and I was often an unhappy child. I disappointed. That left its marks. There was so much freakishly odd about me as a child. I wish you’d lived long enough to see me work much of this out. Not that I have achieved enlightenment – but that I am at least not the self-loathing, anxiety-filled, thumb-sucking, suicidal, encopresis-ridden, obsessive-compulsive wreck of a human being that I was as a ten-year-old, which was the last time you ever saw me. I think all that could be said in my favor as a child is that I got good grades. Alas, no other redeeming qualities presented themselves. I wasn’t beautiful, sociable, caring, friendly, likable, athletic, outgoing, musically or artistically talented, or anything else that people seem to admire in others. I like to think I was a bit of an ugly duckling and that, if no transmogrification into a swan ever took place, I at least became a better-realized duck. Something in me wants to find some way to track you down, flag you to the side, yell out to you, “Wait, look – maybe there is more to be proud of here now: a better-realized duck.”
The rooster. The dog got him, ran off with him in its mouth, and you ran after the dog, yelling and cursing, furious. You wrested the rooster back from the dog, but the dog had mauled its neck. You took the rooster to the tree and tied him there and got your machete from the shed. I was standing at the back door screaming and crying and begging you not to chop his head off. We’d only moved to the farm that year. I was a town kid, not used to the slaughtering of animals; have always been closer to animals than to people. To me, the rooster was a pet, or just some poor soul to be saved, I guess.
You were pure and seething fury as I sobbed. I think it was me that made you rageful as much as what had happened to the rooster. I think you wondered why you couldn’t have had an easier kid, one with better health, one who wasn’t over-sensitive, over-emotional.
I wailed and begged you not to kill the rooster. You relented. You cursed at me but spared the rooster. You were not kind about it, nor gentle, nor comforting, nor understanding, nor empathetic. But you took the rooster back to the enclosure, and for I don’t know how many mornings after that, you got up at 5:30, mixed together water and chicken feed, and fed the rooster through the hole in his torn neck with an eyedropper, plus additional feedings throughout each day. This you did for me, out of love, because I couldn’t stand to see him die.
Impossibly, he recovered. He lived. He always had a limp after that, and you jokingly (and without any hint of political correctness) named him Gimpy.
That rooster outlived you. Mom found new homes for the dogs and the chickens and we moved back into town. I must say I was happier there. Having a farm had been your dream, but everything about it ended up unhappy and ill-fated, as though we’d briefly touched down on cursed land.
When someone important is gone forever from the life of a young child, you later mourn what you never got to have more than what you briefly did have. The mourning is that the relationship continues without the other person there. I think you and I would have had a lot to talk about had you known me as a teen, a young adult, a middle-aged adult. I wonder most of all what you would have thought of my writing, of course – and of the fact that I write fantasy, the deepest touchstone between us. What would you say to me if you knew that what happens in that place is the central core of me? Just after you died, I told Mom, “Now I’ll never have anyone to talk to again.” In many ways, this was wise and true, as the words of children so often are. Robbed of knowing what you think, I never could seem to get the conversations started with others.
I guess as I get on in years what I think of most often is being very small and you singing me to sleep – “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “Turn Around.” From very early, I understood – in fact, preferred – all the ironic sadness in the songs you chose; and I heard that in your voice – the deep sensibility of those things. Maybe even then, I knew my path would look strange, would lack the rites of passage of normal mortals. Searching and searching for my Mount Doom moment instead.
In my head, I sometimes hear Harry Belafonte’s voice on “Turn Around,” and I recall your story about how you once brushed by him in a nightclub in Miami, starstruck. But even in the peace of funny stories and lullabies, in what should be pure and happy memories, I disappoint: I did not go on as “Turn Around” portends to have “babes of my own.” I was going to name my son after you. I had no son. No daughter. I was your only child, the end of your line. I’m sorry. I’m not sure what happened with that. It’s all been like one of those accidents you see coming but you just can’t stop: Anybody get the number of that truck?
I’ll always use Hegmann as my pen name in your honor – but since I never married, it’s moot. I’m married to the writing, to the sensibilities you imparted me with. The writing is all I have left to honor you with. Hegmann, it is. Hegmann, it stays.
What stays: The humor. The irony. The sadness. No, actually – all my sensibilities. Those were from you, though you never got to see them formed. In so many ways, the writing, all of it, is for you. It’s for many, but in some magical way, things can be all for one person, and yet all for another, and another, and another.
A few weeks ago, I did a character trait assessment. Humor was identified as my top strength – a trait the test associated with resilience, transcendence. I imagine you’d be pleased with this about me – but imagining is all I’ve got.
John far right with serious face and outlandish hat.
Birth announcement for Louis Jones and John Robert postmarked from Brooklyn 1946.
How Walter White and Doctor Who Saved My Life
Strange bedfellows, right? Or maybe not, reflected in this article title from Variety: “‘Breaking Bad,’ ‘Doctor Who’ Top Home Media Magazine Awards.” Apparently they share a bed more frequently than would be expected.
They probably also have more of an overlapping fandom than a first glance would suggest. This is not the first time I’ve discussed something of which I am a fan, but I should explain that I am not a proper fan in any sort of modern sense. I am not really interested in knowing every detail of something – if I happen to find out a few details accidentally, I might be mildly interested, but I have never had any interest in buying books and finding out everything there is to know about something. Nor do I belong to any websites or discussion boards. Nor do I ever check social media, nor even look for anything in a search engine to find out what others think. Nor do I listen to DVD commentaries (not these days, anyway). Nor do I ever leave my house to go to a concert, nor to any conventions. Nor do I most of the time have any interest in commenting on anything or even speaking of it. Nor do I have the sort of encyclopedic mind capable of memorizing fictitious languages or recalling fascinating trivia. There are some things of which I am more than a passing fan, based on the impact they’ve had on me. But I’ve never bothered to keep my finger on a pulse. I find the vast glut of opinion and obsessiveness and the need to keep up with it all exhausting and overwhelming. As a woman of limited energies, I have to choose my battles, and that just can’t be one of them. Unlike for most people, for better or for worse, art for me is not a social experience – it’s a personal experience. And speaking of “for better or for worse,” it’s what I happen to be married to, rather than to any flesh and blood social creature. It’s my partner in life, and I’m in bed with it, and not with others. I do not share with other fans, and to end on a particularly rude note, do not really care what they think.
I am content to experience something. My qualifications are that I have been deeply moved by certain things. That’s it.
Forgive me some of my disaffection, which partly comes from isolation. I would probably be friendlier than the current impression I’m making, if I ever had occasion to be.
My friend Rob Stilwell has a quote, which I will set off to make it look as pretty as it should: “Art really only has one great work: to heal the sick and to raise the dead. It has other work to be sure, but that is the one great work.”
Where Rob identifies this business of dead-raising as art’s one great work, for me, it’s a bare minimum necessity. If it doesn’t have the potential to re-animate me, I will just have to stay lifeless in my tomb. I acknowledge that it’s unreasonable to demand work to do nothing less than bring you back to life. But that’s what I have to ask.
For many years, I didn’t watch much TV. People tried to tell me that it was a good medium for me – that if I gave it a chance, its style of storytelling would appeal to me. Still, I resisted and refused to believe them. (Sorry about that. You were right, I was wrong.)
Breaking Bad and Doctor Who are, of course, both TV shows. I used to like movies more than I do now. I’m not making an original observation when I say that structurally and emotionally speaking, movies are commensurate with short stories; meanwhile, TV and novels share a similar kinship. By design, and dictated by temporal factors and spatial factors and other fancy-sound factors, both short stories and movies tend to be a bit intense – they are meant to be a lot of power tucked into a tight space. TV and the novel, in contrast, are forms that you can unpack in and stretch out – move in for a while, waste a little time. I like that and I need that. It takes me a while to process things. I also just really like and need the structure of the longer forms, because it’s something I can trust not to shift out from under me. It’s like praying in a cathedral versus the terror of being on a runaway train hurtling down the tracks.
When I was in undergrad, I wrote a creative nonfiction piece about the fact that I found movies to be a difficult experience, though without much self-insight at the time. I think I was partly talking about the fact that all storytelling media can take us through scary and unexpected emotional experiences. That’s part of its power – and more power to it.
But for me, the complications that come with this are apparently more pronounced. My emotions as well as my senses are hyper-tuned. I have mentioned before that I need my art to come with a buffer, and in general, I find that I am so susceptible, so over-receptive, so responsive, that many modern art forms are too much for me. Furthermore, they just keep getting louder, faster, brighter, flashier, and more invasive. For me, going to a movie is like intentionally choosing to leave a perfect shelter – warm, quiet, and safe from the wind – to walk out into a hurricane.
I recall (with quite some hilarity, actually) trying to watch Christopher Nolan’s first two Batman films in the theatre years ago. I have respect for these films as art, but whatever it is about their aural design, they registered for me as actual physical pain, much as an extended torture session might for another person. I’m going to assume that for the “normal” person, experiences such as these Batman films register as thrilling, interesting, stimulating, pleasant, and exciting, rather than as painful.
I did sit through both films, the first time out of loyalty to a friend, the second time because I was in a completely sold out theatre, was there with a date and, faced with the dilemma of choosing between pain or the humiliation and uncoolness of leaving the theatre because I couldn’t “take it,” I chose the pain. I now kind of wish that I’d had some integrity toward myself and chosen to leave. The date certainly wasn’t worth it. (Heath Ledger’s performance was, though.)
Maybe all of this just sounds like someone “getting old,” except that I am currently in my 30s, which isn’t yet ancient, and I was born this way. In fact, it was even worse for me in childhood than it is now. Back then, I just accepted all the pain of movies and other similar experiences because I thought that’s how it was for everyone. That’s what we do in childhood: accept. For a long time during our first years, we just suppose that this is the way life must be, and if it so for us, then it must be so for others. I thought that was what all people did – endured it. At points when I did break, I just thought that everyone else was very brave while I was a contemptible coward.
When I was 13 years old, my brother and his girlfriend at the time took me to my first rock concert, an experience that most adolescents at that age would exult in – indeed, a great indulgence and luxury that most adolescents would know how to run with and would not waste. But not I. No, I had to be taken out shortly after the concert began because the lights – and especially the sound – were too much. It’s not as though I cried. Not at 13. I just caved in, collapsed in on myself. I cannot recall any moment of my life that I experienced a more terrible shame than that night. I pretended to be asleep in the back seat on the ride home. In many ways, the mortification and depression of this experience (and many others like it) never passed. Even from earliest childhood I understood that I was “no fun” – that I stood as some monumental failure to the values of the rest of the human race.
All modern movies (in the theatre) are like Nolan’s Batman films for me; those films are just the most notable example. One of the things I’ve always most loved are comic book films and the like – but this is exactly the kind of movie that keeps getting bigger, louder, and flashier. And I know that part of the overall strategy and belief of the film industry is that they must keep making their product bigger, louder, and more intense in order to compete with other media and keep people consuming films. But this is the type of strategy, and these are the types of films, that have most effectively excluded me. (I am told they are really only marketed to and intended for 13-year-old boys anyway; my dollar is not the one studios are looking for.) But if I try to go to something fairly harmless-seeming that lacks the bombast of a superhero film, like a comedy, even this sensory experience is too much.
I will still go to a film in the theatre if it is something I desperately want to see, but I know that it will hollow me out, that I will leave the theatre with a headache, and that I will have to plan to be unable to function for the rest of the day – not from the headache, but from a sense of complete exhaustion and overwhelm, as though I had been sucked into the film as one of its characters, forced to actually run through the gauntlet of whatever trials and travails the absurdly over-dramatic plot demanded of them.
I’m not very good at boundaries, so maybe I really have been invaded by the film in these instances. I have trouble locating where the line is between myself and the work, or myself and another person. I’m either too near or too far. I either keep my distance or close in too fast.
So I can only risk all of this when the commensurate gain is going to be a very, very big deal – when there’s a good bet the experience is going to save my very life. And there have been very few movies that have come along to do this for me in recent years – to my knowledge. Buffeted as I am, I haven’t been in theatres much, nor have I even invited movies into my living room – because even there, though not quite as overwhelming to the senses, movies still strive to be as intense as they can in a very short amount of time, and to buffet and punch you emotionally with no intention of being gentle about it. My emotions are already heightened 24/7, and I’m already far too intense without needing any more of this.
So I’m choosy about films because, unlike in childhood, I feel a stronger sense of control over my life and my experiences. There are countless difficult experiences in life that I have no choice but to weather, and I have to choose my battles. It isn’t even a choice, really. If it’s between steeling myself to teach a class or steeling myself to watch a movie, I must steel myself for the class, because that’s my paycheck.
It does make me sad, because there was always much I loved about going to movies, and certainly I love movies very much as a storytelling medium. I’m glad if it is a pleasurable experience for others, but it’s necessary that I stay home with my TV where I’m in control of the sound and the images and everything else. One great benefit to this is that I don’t need the expense of a home theatre system – that would be far more invasive than anything I would ever need. So a simple device that emanates a tiny bit of sound is more than sufficient for me.
Because of these bizarre extenuating circumstances, it is the gentler and more patient medium of TV that saves my life far more often these days than film. But even in that medium, when I am complete seduced by something, it is only because it has done nothing less than save my life. Just because it’s gentler and more patient doesn’t make it easy.
This obviously isn’t really a piece about Breaking Bad or Doctor Who. I don’t know what it’s about, really. Maybe about the intersection between an individual’s inner emotional life and that very private, sacred relationship with what great art can do. About our limitations and what can reach us in our limitations. About isolation. About what in this world has enough compassion and generosity to reach us, like stopping to say a few gentle words to a child alone and crying on the playground.
When you have failed all companions, when all plans have been defeated, when you are alone, when all bridges have washed out and no one will dare an approach, the work is all that is left and willing to come to you.
Now that I’ve reached this point, I’ve realized I don’t want to talk about this. This hasn’t turned out as I thought it would, and I’m not sure what to say below. What heals us and raises us from the dead is a highly personal matter. For some people, it’s Chris Nolan’s Batman films.
I’ve had a couple of dark summers. Circumstances are not important. Dark summer #1 was the summer of 2012. Enter Walter White.
I can’t speak to why the rest of the world found Breaking Bad seductive, but I can say that from my own perspective, it’s probably because the humiliation and underachievement and failure and desperation of Walter White’s life mirror my own life, and the way it plays out is the darkest – and because of that, somehow funniest – possible expression of that. The tone of the show is the tone of my life, if not, obviously, the plot points.
Strangely, I jumped on the bandwagon without knowing I jumped on the bandwagon; apparently, I started binge-watching Breaking Bad around the same time that everyone else started binge-watching it. I had happened on the pilot purely by accident while switching idly through channels, and knew absolutely nothing about others’ preoccupation with it. All I knew was that the pilot knocked me on my ass.
I’m often attracted to work that is entirely unlike my own, and Breaking Bad suited me because it’s my antithesis. My own work is comic in nature, and the inner life and emotions I portray in it are not realistic, nor meant to be. Or rather, those emotions are the “truth” of our inner world and inner desires, rather than those of the outer world. Outside of my own writing, I often yearn for work that feels emotionally tied to the outer world. And in terms of what I consume, sometimes I need unmitigated darkness.
Darkness and seriousness are not the same thing. Breaking Bad spoke to the darkest part of myself because it spoke with the darkest of humor. That pitch black absurdist sensibility never left the show entirely, though the tone definitely developed a more straightforward dramatic or tragic sensibility toward the end of the series. The first half to three-quarters of the show spoke to me more fully because it spoke my language – the language of absurdity.
Much has been said in recent years about the phenomenon of binge-watching. I can say that being able virtually to live inside that tone, hour after hour, gave me solace. My father always used to say that the darkness is our friend. It certainly can be.
Perhaps nothing else in the world other than Breaking Bad in all its blackly disturbing (and entertaining) aspects would have spoken to me at that time in my life. I feel as though it were somehow the only thing left in the world that might have reached me and stirred my interest – in anything. In living, in continuing with my own writing. Whatever night that was that the pilot was re-aired, I’m grateful to AMC for making the scheduling decision. I acknowledge they weren’t thinking about me. They had no intention of saving my life. They were thinking about demographics, and money, and marketing, and who would have the TV on at that time, and new viewers they might hook on the show. I probably wasn’t even the person they wanted to reach. If they knew I was one of the people who had tuned in, they would probably sigh and say, “Well, that was a bad decision.”
Even so.
That was the beginning of Breaking Bad for me, and now I find my thoughts turning to the end of it, perhaps because when a show has ended, there appears to be some customary obligation to obsess on that final episode and to nitpick. A permanent cloud of controversy forms around the final episode and moves with it forever throughout time. Though I understand why this happens, I’m not sure I entirely agree with it. As a storyteller, I know well enough that at any given time, you have a myriad of choices – a myriad of directions in terms of what scenes to execute, what ways to send the plot and the characters. Sometimes perhaps you make the best choices, sometimes perhaps there were better choices. But you make the best choices you can with the time, resources, and faculties you have, and as long as the storytelling is of a high enough overall quality, you will have something meaningful and perhaps even powerful for the right audience. Vince Gilligan and company delivered on that count.
Further, I will always argue that it is the imperfections in any work that are part of what make it truly great – perfection doesn’t exist, and the choices that might have been somehow better are intrinsic to a work just as its greatnesses are, and they give it character; sometimes they are even the most interesting aspects. The reasons those possibly inferior choices were made is something you can love and understand about the work. In all of my favorite stories, there are parts I don’t like quite as well – but without those parts, they would not be that story. If I am to love the story, then I am to love those parts.
Then, too, life has its seasons. I engaged in abundant nitpicking up until my early thirties, and I believe this is part of the process of learning craft. But in my late thirties, my tendency is to regard the gestalt.
That said, something important that I took from the final moments of Breaking Bad, as Walter White caresses all that equipment that represents what he loves, is that when you die, this is the last you will be left with. Even if we are loved and surrounded by people, we all die alone. Our last conscious moments will be spent with whatever was our greatest love affair on an internal, intellectual, or creative level during our life. For Walter White, that was chemistry. For me, it would be, purely, story, and my internal world of story where I spend most of my time and that I started constructing from my first conscious moments. For others, it might be music, or dance, or architecture, or certain memories from the past. But whatever it is, this true lover and companion of our mind and soul is worth thinking about now, while we’re still able. Chances are, it will be our last honest companion at the very end.
I thank Breaking Bad, and I thank it for being so far outside my own sensibilities, which is why it was so kind to me. In truth, I almost never seek out anything that is close to my own sensibilities. Most of the time, I’ve had enough of myself, and the last thing I need is any more of it.
And so, Doctor Who is the great exception to the rule for me. It may be the closest to my own sensibilities of anything I have ever encountered (though it is not my sensibilities entirely). I have somewhat less to say about Doctor Who than about Breaking Bad (at this time, anyway). This may be because I feel slightly ornery towards it. The sort of close relationship I have with Doctor Who, sharing so much creative temperament, can be as fraught with difficulties as it can be rewarding. Inevitably, there will be not only deep respect and affection, but envy and melancholy and other unseemly feelings. The show is actually difficult for me to watch because I wish I had written all of it. I wish it were mine instead of my own work – and Doctor Who is actually the first and only time in my life that I have ever felt that way. Of course, above all, I wish the Doctor would arrive in the Tardis and take me away with him as his companion.
And yet, I guess he sort of did. I think the Doctor came along for me at just the right time. I think that if I had spent another summer immersed in the darkness I’d been immersed in the previous summer…well, I’m not sure what would have happened. Doctor Who came along and reminded me of who I was, as works can sometimes do for us. Dark summer #2 for me was the summer of 2013.
Whereas Breaking Bad was love at first sight, I had for years channel-surfed and come across Doctor Who and flipped immediately onwards. In fact, any time I was watching BBC America and Doctor Who came on, my reaction was deep disappointment, and I would immediately start looking for something else. (This especially breaks my heart now, as these would have been the David Tennant years.) If I did leave it on for a time because I was doing the dishes or some other activity that I couldn’t get to the TV remote right away, my impression was that the show was annoying and alienating and overly arch. Being an Anglophile, I watch BBC America and other Britishy things all the time, and I often seem to understand British sensibilities better than I do American sensibilities (as one might expect from someone who has been a Monty Python fan since the age of 11). But I admit, shame-faced, that I had no luck with Doctor Who for the longest time. I think this can partly be ascribed to the need with this particular show to get a solid grip on its mythology in order to be able to follow it. Others may differ, but I am of the opinion that you need to start from the very beginning (of the modern incarnation) and go straight through chronologically.
I think also that with some shows, you need to be brought in with particular episodes that happen to speak to you. There were two Stephen Moffat/Matt Smith-era episodes that finally brought me to the show just prior to the summer of 2013, when I started my binge-watch proper. I experienced them as reruns on BBC America, probably on some desolate weekday afternoon. One was “The Beast Below.” I just loved the sad, lonely old beast with the weight of the world on its shoulders and the metaphor of the Doctor as a sad, lonely old beast. The other was “The Girl Who Waited,” and specifically the moment when Amy proclaims she will break time apart for Rory. From these episodes, I understood that I had been deeply mistaken in my first impressions of the show. I understood that it was all heart and innocence and everything good in this world and inside of us – the best of us. I started at the beginning and never looked back.
More on the Doctor again one of these days.
The point has been that I need work to do no less of a task than save my life. It isn’t that I don’t care about other work. I have so much gratitude for all that exists out there. But I can’t consume it or it would destroy me. I will crawl out of my hidey-hole for the greatest miracles in all of humanity. Otherwise, I will need to keep myself tidily tucked away in the quiets of Muller’s Mile.
Nothing has come along to save my life in this summer of 2014, and I kind of don’t expect it to. But that’s ok. I’ll save my own life.
Driving, Part Two: Cars Are More Important than Life Itself
When we meet in person, most of us wear social veneer, feigning politeness, using the manners our parents and grandparents taught us. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. A quote from Goethe that I write frequently on the board for my students is: “Kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound together.” We’d all be in a world of hurt if we didn’t use manners and feign kindness even when we don’t feel like it (especially when we don’t feel like it). But the simple truth is that being cut off inside a car removes the necessity for this – or seems to do so. For this reason, I have long felt that driving reveals some greater truth about how humans feel about other humans (as well as non-humans) in this world.
In cars there is an anonymity and an illusion of being isolated from others that leads to a greater emotional truth. People cut each other off, honk angrily, speed senselessly, text dangerously, curse loudly, and often fail to acknowledge or even perceive the existence of others around them. These are behaviors that most people would never exhibit face to face, but I would argue that perhaps our driving selves are closer to our “real” selves. When we drive, no one is faking it. Deep down, despite how we present ourselves in person, once inside a car our real self kicks in, and everyone really is that rude and self-destructive and dangerous and senseless and insensitive to the existence of others. In drivers there is also the occasional kindness or display of intelligence or common sense or consideration of others – but this seems disturbingly rare.
I’ve written about how others sometimes angrily blare horns at me if I don’t pull out fast enough. But probably the person who angrily blares a horn at me would be nice to me in person. The difference is that shut off in our cars, no one sees me as a human being. I’m guilty of it, too. In several “anonymous” driving situations when another driver showed anger toward me, and I had no idea who he or she was, and I knew I would never see that driver again, I will admit to making unmistakably clear hand gestures.
As I drove my long commute back and forth from college every week for several years between 2003 and 2007, it struck me that any particular busy road is a microcosm, a kind of snapshot, of the state of humanity. Cars place us into juxtaposition with each other in the worst possible ways (i.e. in a potential instrument of death), and driving as an act is purely democratic and random, throwing together people of all walks of life, all socioeconomic statuses, all temperaments. The results of this experiment do not seem encouraging to me. There are times when people are kind or are actually paying attention to others. But there seem to be many more times of unmindful and uncaring behavior. This, to me, does not bode well for humanity. If in the simple act of driving a car we cannot show consideration for one another, I see very little chance that we will ultimately pull together for the many different complex solutions that will be necessary for the survival of the human race on this planet – solutions that would require collaboration, tolerance, and consideration of others.
On the other hand, I suppose it is rather miraculous that we don’t have more car crashes than we do, or that we haven’t already managed to obliterate ourselves from this world in a massive nuclear holocaust. Maybe the fact that we are as selfish and unfeeling and uncaring as we are and that things aren’t worse is a marvel worthy of celebration.
Similar to the fact that when I was a teenager I thought I’d drive a Harley Davidson, I actually rather admire the art and beauty and sport and love of cars. And similar to the fact that I love Breaking Bad, a show that could not be further from my own sensibilities, I’m actually quite fascinated with anything to do with cars, a mode of transportation that could not be further from my own sensibilities. For example, I love the British show Top Gear. So, I don’t have a problem with cars per se, and I don’t think the problem is the cars. The problem, as usual, is the people. I’m not a car-hater, but a misanthrope.
For me, as for most people in this world, a car is simply a manner of conveyance from one place to another. The reason for this is that, like most people, I don’t have the purchasing power for it to be anything other than that. I don’t have the option of buying a luxury car or viewing a car as a luxury item. Despite my age, the best car I can afford on what I make is still the car on the very bottom rung – the one typically considered to be a “starter” car. This is the kind of car that better-off people buy for their high school kid, or to be the second car for the wife to pick up some groceries in. At my age, I’d hoped for better, but it’s better than nothing.
But though the car I own (or nearly own if I ever finish the payments) is one of the cheapest cars available, it nevertheless commands the largest part of my income, and is therefore a far more powerful force in my life than I would frankly like for it to be. If you are much richer than me, perhaps you have much more in your life than a car. But I don’t have a place of my own, and my car is by far my largest asset, and my biggest bill is by far my car payment. In my miniscule budget, my car commands quite a lot of my resources. When a car dominates your resources so centrally because your resources are so small, it also exerts great power – indeed, disproportionate and unjustifiable power -- over your life.
Not only can cars kill whatever we hold most dear, but even accidents without loss of life can have a tremendous impact (pun intended, I guess). The one accident I have had in all my adult years totaled my car. I was not at fault, nor could the most masterful defensive driving or quickest reaction time have prevented the accident. The other party was an elderly gentleman in a large pick-up truck and he ran a stop sign, T-boning me on the right. As the old saying goes, fortunately, neither of us was seriously hurt.
However, an accident and the loss of a car can have other major ramifications on our lives. My life at the time of that accident was terribly complicated. I had moved from Raleigh to Aberdeen, North Carolina to teach high school. I had no desire whatsoever to teach at that level, but felt at the time like it was my only option to try to earn a living. I did not yet have my teaching license, but was enrolled in the NC Teach program, doing the parallel entry training. I desperately needed work, and sent my resume out all over North Carolina, landing a job at a rural North Carolina high school. But the entire venture was doomed from the start.
Forced to make a quick decision – the semester started less than two weeks later – I moved to the area not knowing a single soul. Friendless and alone, I started my job and did not gel with my colleagues at all. They banded together with prefect rapport, and I was clearly the outsider. They did not like me. I was teaching in a rough high school with some very challenging students, and the students were crucifying me, too. I was not doing anyone any good – my colleagues, my students, or myself.
When my car was totaled (only two blocks from the high school on my way to work one morning), it took me out of work for a few days for my bruises to heal – but it also put about $17,000 of insurance money in my pocket, covering the combination of my totaled car and my hospital bills. When I tried to return to work, the time I had missed had made me even more the outsider to both the teachers and the students. It was clear by that point that I could not possibly make up the lost ground and the lost time; this high school was not the place for me. It was also clear that $17,000 was more than enough for a ticket out of there. Basically, the accident was the largest and final factor that justified my making a break for it.
In some sense, because my car was totaled, that accident rammed me halfway across the country, from North Carolina all the way back to my hometown of Indiana. It was like the proverbial hand dealt by fate. Though I got a respectable insurance pay-out on my 2004 Toyota Corolla, this is also when I learned that if you had a dependable car that could have gone 200,000 miles, and it only had 40,000 miles on it at the time and had been excellently maintained, and it was paid off to boot, insurance does not even remotely begin to recoup you for your loss. I still think with stinging regret about how I could still be driving that car right now, payment-free. As it is, I got a new car, saddling myself once again with payments, then took the insurance money and used it to move back to Indiana and to renovate a place to live in the old family stead, and was able to find suitable work teaching college. I can still feel the reverberations of that accident; it had a tremendous impact on my living where I do, and in so many ways accounts for where I stand today.
It is difficult to escape our cars and the powerful hold that they have over every aspect of our lives. But it is possible from time to time. I had the pleasure of visiting Mackinac Island in Michigan last summer. This was the first vacation of my entire life that I had ever gotten to choose for myself (another ramification of having very low purchasing power), and one reason I made that choice was because I was fascinated to see what a culture without cars would be like. Granted, I also wanted to be without the stress of dealing with a car while on vacation. I’m not overly fond of the sensation of constantly driving around lost in an unfamiliar location – to me it takes away much of the pleasure of even bothering to go on a trip.
So yes, this car-free vacation was of great interest to me on many levels, and my instincts were spot-on, as on a personal level it was the most enjoyable vacation I ever had. But it wasn’t just that I didn’t have to get behind the wheel of a car and deal with all the stresses of navigating an unfamiliar place. It was that there was something special about being in touch with the full environment of the island during the entire vacation and about never having to shut myself off from other people inside the cage of a car. Dependent on either my own two feet or horses, there was never a moment that I felt physically isolated. This sense of interaction on Mackinac Island is without a doubt one of the main factors that makes the experience unique and pleasurable.
In season, the main drag on Mackinac really bustles. The town itself is sort of multi-layered back into the hills. Visible from afar (from the water) is another level above the buildings along the main street; this level is made up of large houses as well as the fort. When on the island itself, one primarily perceives the main buildings of the town, but in fact the town stretches back for some distance. Along the main drag are major hotels, eateries, and shops, accessible right off of the harbor. At either end of this busy route are quiet inns, private residences, open views of the lake, and sleeping quarters for staff. Here the traffic thins out, as it also does further back in the town in the “inner layers” of specialty shops, businesses, small inns, and more private residences (winding back to the palatial Grand Hotel, sitting high on a peak, visible from far away and from the lake).
There are porches, too, on Mackinac Island. Lots and lots of porches everywhere. Small porches, big porches, long, short, covered, uncovered, stacked one atop another. Porches facing the water, and porches facing the street. And from these porches, people interact with everything that’s going on in the street. And in the street, the traffic is always bustling as soon as you hit the main stretch of town, and you almost can’t move in it. And by traffic, I don’t mean cars. I mean bikes, carriages, horses, and people afoot. People pour in along the throughways coming in from the ferries. Many of the workers on Mackinac come back season after season. Even if they don’t, they quickly become acquainted with one another. And since no one is shut off in cars – workers and residents and visitors to the island alike – there is a lot of interaction. It’s more than interaction. It’s camaraderie, repartee, and rapport. People interact at all social levels and all physical levels – above the street, on the street, even below the street. From every nook and cranny, people interact with each other. They interact with each other even from the many different stories of porches, all the way down to the street below and back up to the tops of the buildings.
I’m sure this sort of culture exists in other parts of the world besides this particular resort culture on Mackinac Island. But Mackinac Island is within my reach since it’s not far from where I live. My life remains circumscribed and provincial, and I haven’t seen most other parts of the world. But in the part of the world where I live, car culture is certainly everything, and if you don’t have a car, you can forget ever getting anywhere.
But evidence seems to suggest that a lack of cars can have the impact of making us all more in touch with each other, more charming and companionable, as on Mackinac. This is common sense, to be sure, and is also backed up by a sizeable amount of sociological research. Consider, for example, the traditional European square, where people interact freely and cars still don’t trespass. More communication with one another and less sitting behind windshields and metal doors means better socialization and less suspicion of one’s neighbors. Some studies have demonstrated lower rates of crime where there are healthy spaces for human interaction and economic activity with no cars present. This makes good sense. If being in contact with one another compels us to behave, and if being behind the glass and metal of a car makes us feel even in some small sense as though we are cut off from others and from the environment, and that the car is an extension of our ego, and that we can do as we please without repercussions, this is a potential recipe for disaster.
Cars are of course legally considered to be weapons since they can quite easily be used to kill people. Hit and runs occur either on purpose or by accident. Either way, little to no responsibility or regard is taken, and the victim(s) is no less dead. Of course, most deaths on the road are unintentional. The loss of life from these countless numbers of automobile accidents doesn’t even bear thinking about.
Even more commonly killed by cars than people are of course animals, both wild and domestic. If there is a dead animal in the road and I am on my way to work, I try to make sure I don’t look at it too directly or focus my vision on it. It takes everything I have just to walk into a classroom, so if I’m also walking into the room upset, it’s not a good way for me to start. I won’t write about most of the times I have observed animals killed by a car. In grad school, my colleagues mocked me (I suppose the more polite term would be “teased,” but really, they were mocking me) because I couldn’t even stand it when animals were harmed in one of their stories being workshopped. They seemed to find my pain over this to be uproariously funny.
I make no secret of the fact that I am far closer to animals than I am to people. If driving along in our cars any of us were to see a human child in the road getting hit, of course we would all stop immediately in horror. In contrast, many people don’t react at all the hitting of a dog or cat. Yet the way that I perceive animals and hold them in my heart, they are like children to me. So to watch while someone else continues to run over an animal, without even slowing down, is an unspeakable horror to me.
One day I was driving on the innocuous roads of my hometown. (Innocuous except for the fact that for some reason in North Vernon we have no left turn lanes anywhere we need them and what left turn lanes we do have tend to be in places that we don’t need them. That’s our thing, I guess.) I was thinking about nothing much. I teach so much freshman comp that I don’t really have to prepare or think about it much ahead.
When teaching freshmen, my major goal is not to teach them anything (though if I’m lucky, I might do a bit of that), but within my small power to do anything I can to help students feel more reassured and less alone. This is probably not due to any resemblance to Mother Theresa on my part, but because so much of the time in my life I have felt alone and have needed reassurance, but there was usually none to be had. I figure that maybe there might be times that others might need this as well. Even the most confident individuals have moments of insecurity and fear and self-doubt, and moments when they are afraid to speak up or to find out if others are feeling the same things.
So I was thinking about nothing much. It was an evening class, and I was on the road a bit after 5:00 p.m. in what passes for thick traffic in my small town. I was several cars back, stopped at a red light when a cat unwisely ventured out into the crosswalk in hopes of making it across the road. The light turned green.
I watched the drivers in front of me and saw their faces. They saw the cat in front of their wheels, but they went anyway.
It’s a human idea to die with dignity, I guess. But surely every form of life wishes to die as painlessly and quickly as possible, and it seems to me that this is a kind of dignity. This death was neither painless nor quick and it was without dignity on the part of anyone involved. It involved convulsions and a face of the purest terror and pain I have ever witnessed, an attempt to escape and cling to life, and the failure at it.
We make scathing comments about people who hurt or kill animals for no reason – but the only difference in this instance that justified these people’s actions in their own minds is that they were in their cars. The human-engineered stoplight turned green, and somehow this superseded compassion for other life forms trying to live in this world with us, or for their right to life. There was a very simple choice presented to these human drivers – the choice was to press the accelerator or keep their foot on the brake. To get out of the car to help the animal or to drive on.
Would people have acted more compassionately if not in cars? It’s almost moot since the cars themselves are the weapons, and so without them, there would have been no death. I think there can be no doubt that cars at their worst act as a kind of armor that keeps in all that is worst in human nature, and keeps out any better influences. But, no – more accurately, this is simply humans acting at their worst while they happen to be inside cars. Cars are just the excuse, the justification. I’m very much afraid that the selves we display when inside a car are our true selves. Feeling protected from other eyes, cut off from better influences, people just don’t care. It is only pressure from society, from peers, from the opinions of others who we know we may see again, or who we are encountering face to face, that keeps us acting decently. If the many different aspects of the modern world that shut us off from others (not just cars, but online classes, Facebook, TVs and so on) are perceived as giving us permission to act badly – if these act as temptations to let our darker natures take over – that’s perhaps a good argument in favor of making sure we maintain face to face contact in this world in all the ways we possibly can and that we don’t let the world get any more impersonal than it already is.
After the drivers had decided the cat’s fate, I pulled around the corner where there was a parking space, stopped, and ran over to see if I could help the cat. But of course by then, it was far too late.
I got back into my car and drove the rest of the way to my teaching gig. I turned the car off and sat there in silence, my mind replaying how people looked as they had driven on. Seeing, but not caring. Isolated in their vehicles. Cut off by glass and metal, and so perhaps feeling less culpable. I thought about how I didn’t ask to be born into a world with as little compassion as this one, and didn’t want to be. I thought about our arrogance and abuse of the idea that we are more important than other life on this planet, and about the human decision that it is more important to make the car go forward because the light is green than to save a small life. I thought about the sheer indolence of what had happened – that it was too much trouble to stop the car and jump out to help another. I wondered how we keep going on despite all the thousands of incidents both big and small that make us lose all faith. I thought about the absurdity that for sheer survival – to earn a paycheck and put food on the table – even if we don’t wish to do so, we’re forced to drive around in loud, metal vehicles of destruction that kill both animals and people. All of this sounds ludicrously like Mad Max. Despite the apparently shiny surface to this world, maybe it is.
I went inside to teach, and before we started the class, I did the only thing I could do – I told my students about what I had seen and what I felt. Some did not care, some pretended to but didn’t, and a few felt as I did. For a few moments, I felt somewhat less isolated and alone. Maybe they did, too.
Driving, Part One: Getting in the Way of the President of the United States
Dear police and secret service: So sorry I was in the way. That one time in Indianapolis when the former President Bush was held up? July 14, 2005? That was me. I was attending summer school at IUPUI that summer, and I was that last car through – the innocuous gray 2003 Toyota Corolla – before you closed the roads for the President to pass through unimpeded. There I was, the lone car on the streets, in a horror show of mortification, like running some custom-made gauntlet for bumbling oafs like me.
After I rolled down my window and asked inane questions about whether I was allowed through, I didn’t know whether to gun it and get out of the President’s way as fast as I could, or go the speed limit since I was surrounded by more police than I had ever seen in my life. I chose something in between, but whatever it was wasn’t good enough. The police officer who waved me on through just stood shaking his head in disgust at my ineptitude as I started my gauntlet run.
I don’t think there is anything that has ever made me feel more apologetic towards the rest of the human race than driving.
The attendant of a parking lot once told me that in twenty years of running the lot, he had never seen anyone park as stupidly as I had. Needless to say, this made me feel terrific about myself, and did wonders to raise my confidence for the next time I chose to venture outside my house. This man’s kind words will stick with me forever. (And in fact I have never been back to that area – not out of anger, but out of fear of further soul-crushing rebukes from lot attendants.)
Just to be perverse, I sometimes wish to add these items to a CV or resume:
Delayed the President of the United States.
Accomplished the stupidest parking feat ever.
And why not? It might at least get someone’s attention. My “serious” accomplishments turn few heads.
Without a doubt, parking is my worst handicap as a driver, and no degree of practice or strategizing has ever made me any better at it. I will never forget a particularly nasty letter left on my windshield at IUPUI.
I’m not going to elaborate on it any further than that. I’ll just never forget it.
Isn’t it remarkable the way we remember nastiness? It’s like mild PTSD. That’s how it is for me, anyway. It shouldn’t be so. The nastiness of people is what should fall away from our memories, and our minds should vividly hold on instead to the kindnesses people perform. But no such luck. You have to fight to force your mind to hold on to the good things; it’s a deliberate act that you have to decide to do. Meanwhile, the bad memories come upon you at all times unwelcome and unbidden. It’s sort of like how that one bad apple in a classroom can ruin the entire experience from the instructor’s perspective, even though the other 98% of students in the class are the most wonderful human beings imaginable. It’s so sad that the 2% wield such power.
But though the person who left the note on my windshield might have been a bad apple, most of the individuals who roll their eyes in disgust at my driving are not bad apples. They are simply individuals pushed to their limits by their jobs. They are stressed out and paid far too little – and then on top of that, who shows up, but me?
Police officers are often furious with me. The very fact that I ever made the trip down the birth canal seems to piss them off. This is unfortunate, because I have such awe and respect for what they do. But I can see why they would have contempt one such as me. It is probably unnecessary for me to observe that navigating the physical world and dealing with real world issues are not my strong suits.
I can’t imagine how stressful it would be to have to direct traffic. I recall about six months ago a policeman directing traffic at the scene of an accident at an intersection. I hesitated, not sure if I was supposed to be going or not. The officer went into a furious dance – it looked sort of like an 80s break dancing move – pointing accusingly toward me to make my damned left turn, already.
Such wild gesticulations, placing an exclamation point upon my idiocy, haunt me for days, even weeks, replaying in my head, making me unsure whether to laugh or cry. But who am I kidding? Though I’d prefer to salvage part of my existence by using it to bring others laughter, there’s no laughing in it for me.
I hasten to add that my incidents of utter bumbling nincompoopery while driving are relatively unusual. It’s not like I’m a hazard on the road. The only times I struggle are when I am in unfamiliar situations, like at the scene of an accident or in a place I’ve never been before. So, I try my hardest to avoid unfamiliar situations and I stick with the regular commute to work, the regular parking spaces, and so on.
But that kind of proscribed existence is a bit of a problem. In the U.S., the car has long been seen as a prime symbol of independence and roving and freedom and having good times. My own relationship with the automobile, having been fraught with difficulties, is no doubt one element that contributes to my reclusiveness. There is no escaping that the car is how we get places in the United States (well, except maybe in NYC), and more to the point, to other people. If you have trouble driving freely and limitlessly, you will have trouble connecting with others. It’s that simple.
When I was in my early teens I listened to a lot of heavy metal, and I was convinced beyond any doubt that my first ever mode of transportation was going to be a motorcycle. Specifically, a Harley Davidson. No joke. It is truly remarkable how little my young mind comprehended how I’m put together; and it is nothing less than astonishing how long it took me to grasp the full extent of it.
So no, there was never a motorcycle in my life, and there never will be. Indeed, I’ve had many a man dump me because I won’t even get on the back of one. However, this is not through any sheer stick-in-the-mud pigheadedness on my part, but rather it is for others’ protection as well as mine. From what the secret service, police, and parking attendants of the world have already conveyed to me, I do things of stupendous, mind-boggling stupidity – feats which cause others’ minds to reel with incredulity. So my avoidance of motorcycles is a considerate move designed to protect others from peril, since in my extreme awkwardness and clumsiness, even just as a passenger, I would perchance do something to cause us to crash.
I have also missed out on a countless number of promising dates by being unable to get up my courage to drive (a car) to a particularly challenging (for me) location.
It was a tremendous struggle for me to ever learn to drive a car at all, let alone a motorcycle. Everything about driving as a sensory experience was overwhelming and nearly impossible for me to overcome. When I was 16, it took months of just approaching a car and touching the door, then walking away, or climbing into the driver’s seat and just sitting there for a while, then going back in the house, to ever get up my courage enough to start it, let alone to cause it to move down a road.
But, after very much persistence, I gradually achieved an uneasy but somewhat bearable ability to convey myself from here to there. Then, after spending four years in New York City, during which time I didn’t drive at all since the need didn’t exist, upon my return to the Midwest I found to my tremendous discouragement and dismay that I had to start over completely from scratch – that I had essentially forgotten how to drive, that it was every bit as intimidating as it had been when I was 16, and that I had to learn how to do it all over again as well as overcome the same set of original anxieties.
Apparently, it is possible to forget how to “ride a bike” -- something that I never did learn how to do (and never will now) since I lacked the coordination as well as the social interaction that might have inspired me to keep trying until I succeeded.
So yes, challenges with manners of conveyance have been no small factor in the circumscribed nature of my life. I was not really designed to ever leave my house. But in the present day, work demands that I do.
So did going to college. When I started commuting to school, first to IUPUC and then to IUPUI (and by that time I was well into my 20s), I had to practice the route numerous times with someone else along, making sure that I knew of a predetermined and guaranteed parking lot or parking garage – an absolutely definite destination so that I could have all lanes, all turns and so on memorized down to the exact parking space.
My anxiety about driving only in very small degree involves fear of getting in an accident. Certainly, that’s part of it. But mainly, it’s that I get overwhelmed in certain situations – confused. It’s the uncertainty, the panic, the seeming lack of control in certain situations, of getting lost, of not knowing where I am or which way to go. Driving is the only situation in life which has given me consistent panic attacks.
I am proud to say, though, that through years of sheer determination and practice, I am a competent driver – probably even a good one. This may be precisely because I’ve had to struggle so much with it. I am excellent at comprehending my own limitations, and I tend to have to overthink everything. (Somehow, I think this is preferable to hurtling down the road completely thoughtless and brainless, which appears to be a much more common phenomenon.) I tend to perceive driving as a grand pattern, almost like a chess game, and I am constantly thinking many miles and moves ahead. If speeding or passing someone is illogical (because I can perceive that it will not actually take me to my destination any faster), I don’t do it. I never tailgate; there is definitely never any logical reason for that. I consistently drive somewhat over the speed limit since going with the flow of traffic is the safest move, but I never speed unduly or dangerously. I have never in my entire life been pulled over, and have never had a single ticket or citation. (Perhaps that is at least a somewhat remarkable fact; I once had a student still in her early twenties say she had been pulled over between 10 and 20 times.) In my adult life, I’ve never had an accident, except one that totaled my car, but for which I was not at fault and could not have prevented through any degree of defensive driving.
In my world, everything about driving must be safe, logical, and involve thinking about my own safety as well as others. I am a sort of caretaker of others on the road. If anything, I am overly concerned about the other drivers around me, looking to see if someone needs to be let into a lane, or, if I see that someone is about to make a potentially dangerous move or mistake, trying accordingly to make adjustment that will ensure their safety. I would argue that it should not be my job to do this – that others should be able to think for themselves and see to their own safety. But typically, on any given drive, I seem to find myself thinking for a large number of other individuals on the road.
Doubtless this consideration for others has little to do with any sort of saintliness on my part, but is attributable to the fact that I have to struggle with everything so much myself, causing me to be more aware of others around me and their potential struggles. I have to think deeply and carefully about everything, and so driving and everyone around me is included in that.
Other than a few parking woes here and there, what seems to annoy others most about my driving is my over-cautiousness in certain situations. I am aware that I am not always the best judge of speed and distance, and so occasionally at a stop sign I fail to pull out when I would actually have had plenty of time; I err on the side of caution. This can greatly annoy the person behind you. Generally if someone is angry with me, it is for being too slow – not for driving too slow, but for failing to turn out quickly enough. I get a lot of horns blared at me, which I take very personally. I go home tucked in fetal position haunted by the blaring of horns.
On the other hand, I’m the fastest person I’ve ever encountered at going once a light has turned green in an intersection. For others, there seems to be some sort of delay for which I don’t quite have an explanation. On my part, the split second it turns green, provided the intersection is safe and clear, I’m long gone, while others appear to be slowly…I don’t know. I have no idea what they’re doing – waking up from a nap? Zipping their pants back up? Completing a Mad Lib? Of course, it is possible that the reason for this delay is that everyone else is on their devices while they’re stopped at intersections, consorting happily in the hive, in the constant social buzz which others exist in and I do not. Unencumbered by devices or conversations, when the light turns green, I’m long gone. Eat my dust.
GPS has been the greatest blessing for me (thank you military-industrial complex for releasing it for civilian use, and more specifically, to me, one who no doubt you would have nothing but contempt for were you to know of my existence and that your technology had fallen into my nervous, fumbling hands). With GPS, I at least know that I will make it into the general vicinity of my destination. Even if I cannot figure out any way to park, or I take a wrong turn, the device will get me back on track. I would have to credit GPS as being the sole reason I am able to drive at all in the present day.
Still, there are limits, and those limits are permanent. I can drive straight down a highway or interstate easily enough (I don’t like being on an interstate one bit, but I will do it), and I can drive within small towns or certain suburban areas where traffic patterns are light and relatively predictable. But I cannot and never will be able to drive in cities. This is quite unfortunate for me since cities are the loci of all productive social activity on this planet. The grief I feel at being unable to experience cities is one of the keenest of my life.
Being for all intents and purposes exiled from cities is one of the main factors that curtails meeting people. I have tried to be as creative as possible over the years, designating locations to meet dates that were places I knew I could handle – “half way” points in suburban areas. But a lot of men aren’t really willing to go to that much trouble. For those that are, it works temporarily – it’s a kind of band-aid or stop-gap solution. Eventually, unless you can reach a city on your own steam, what I’ve learned is that no one is going to bother to mess with you.
In Raleigh, I tried using the public transportation system to get me to some reaches of the city that were otherwise too intimating for me. But one trouble with public transportation is that it is so confounded slow. You waste so much time sitting around to get somewhere that after a time it doesn’t seem worth the bother, and so you decide to just stay home in your apartment. Taxis would be a nice solution, but are prohibitively expensive.
Another strategy I’ve employed over the years is to only visit places at “off-times” in order to avoid the high volumes of traffic that overwhelm me so completely. This includes stores, restaurants, theme parks, tourist towns. But there again, when you visit places only when no one else is around, that doesn’t take you very far toward interaction with others.
Within my circumscribed bounds, I have grown somewhat comfortable driving, and even enjoy it under certain circumstances. Teaching bajillions of sections of college courses every semester for multiple different institutions of higher learning has taught me that the car is a place that no one can reach me. Driving along a familiar highway in the midst of a familiar commute with your phone turned off is temporary peace. No student can explain to me why her paper is late or why she can’t figure out APA formatting and citation. The worst thing that happens during a peaceful drive is that ideas for your book won’t stop coming to you, and you can’t keep them all in your head and you forget some of them before being able to get them all written down at your destination. (A student once asked me why I don’t use some sort of voice recorder to take down ideas while I’m driving; this is because I detest the sound of my own voice so completely. I tried this years ago, and I lost faith in and was instantly horrified by any idea that I heard stated back to me in my own recorded voice; any idea captured in that medium became anathema. So I just have to take my chances with forgetting them instead.)
My dream from the time I was very young and exceedingly romantic was always to have a partner to take me places – someone bold and charming who didn’t mind driving in and navigating the real world. This fairytale prince would whisk me away to magical lands that have been shut off to me my entire life. I would get to explore cities and exotic far-off realms – with his hand in mine, and his special verve and competence, I would get to experience that very distinctive surge of excitement and joy that accompanies being in gatherings of people when all is good and right with the human race. Even if I couldn’t take part, I could feel a part of it. I would never have become shut off and bitter.
Such lovely dreams. As already pointed out, it’s a vicious circle. If you can’t get anywhere to begin with, then you don’t meet anyone. No prince is coming for you.
Some people are lucky enough to have a partner or help-mate or even just a friend in their life who does most of the driving. But I’ve never had any alternative but to put on my big girl pants and deal. What I do is either drive where I need to drive (ain’t no one else gonna do it), or if I just can’t possibly bring myself to face it, I have to try to come up with an alternative creative solution. I do think that being forced to deal with my challenges has made me a stronger and more creative person. That I ever achieved a relative degree of competence and comfort with driving is really pretty miraculous, and at times, I have discovered that by pushing myself I was able to do far more than I thought I could do. However, by this point in my life, I’ve pushed myself to my limitations. I know my precise boundaries and I know what I can do and what I simply cannot. But this is also valuable to know. To know your limitations is to know how to approach problem-solving in your life. It dictates a course of action.
Every time I ever leave the house and have to get between the wheel, without exception, I’m always petrified. This has never changed. It takes a great mustering of willpower for me to ever make it out of my house, out of the driveway, and to any destination.
My first choice would have been to get whisked off on magical adventures in the world with a partner adept at transportation, and with his benign help to spend all kinds of time in cities and other magical places, right in the thick of it all. If this had happened for me, that person would have been the greatest hero ever to have appeared in my life. But without that mythical beast, I’m forced to my own devices, which seem to involve pissing the world off and getting in its way. If I could stay stuffed away inside my house and never leave, I absolutely would at this point. But I have to get to work, people. Just like everyone else.
On the other hand, all kinds of important, fascinating, highly competent, brilliant individuals out there on the road – completely insensible to my particular struggles – would probably be lost without me to curse at. And on my part, I had long suspected that I existed only to be either invisible or a pain in the ass to people more important and interesting than me, and driving has been the one thing that gave me 100% confirmation of it. At least I have no longer to wonder.
Police officers, secret service, President of the United States, motorcyclists, parking lot attendants, Judge, members of the jury, so sorry, but with no other choice on my hands, I will be continuing to annoy you within the foreseeable future.
Homeschooling Does Not Produce Recluses or Ruin Lives
A quarter of a century ago, deeply depressed, bullied, nearly friendless, and having become almost completely mute and unable to look up from my feet, I left public school forever. My 7th grade science teacher, who had confounded me for months with the college-level work he’d given a bunch of us in the “gifted and talented” (ha ha) program, said something that has stuck with me ever since. It’s not really the sort of thing you can ever forget: if I followed through with my decision to leave public school, it would ruin my entire life. That’s some heavy stuff to tell a thirteen-year-old. It still impresses me all these years later that he chose a pronouncement so extreme. He must have felt very strongly about the matter.
Being thirteen, I did not respond respectfully. Rebellious and subversive and disaffected, I was ready to leave the building and wanted to stick it to the man.
No, that’s not accurate. To be fair to myself, if I was rebellious and disaffected at times, I was respectful and rule-abiding a greater majority of the time. I was also an extremely sensitive kid; the slightest word of criticism or the tiniest moment of embarrassment would send me into a depressed tailspin for days. My soon-to-be ex-teacher’s remark crushed me completely. At the time, the reason I didn’t dig deeper into the reasons for his remark probably had very little to do with me walking away and giving him the finger or anything like that, and everything to do with being cut deeply and unable to repair in time to ask questions I might have asked.
Now, in retrospect, I would at least like to acknowledge that even if I did not and still do not agree entirely with his position, I do understand better where he was coming from. My decision to leave school is a matter on which I will always have very mixed feelings.
But my teacher’s prediction (or was it a hex or curse?) poses a few logical, if loaded, questions. Now that I’m nearing forty years old, can it be concluded that my life is ruined? And if so, was leaving public school what ruined it? Or, to put it more mildly, if my life does have room for improvement here and there, was leaving school a negative contributing factor?
My basic thesis, though it may take me a while to arrive at it, is that homeschooling does not produce recluses like me. Being already naturally geared toward being a recluse is what brought about that effect in my case and probably in any similar cases. Though homeschooling has been a significant part of my past, it did not do any damage to me or cause me to be more socially backward than I already was. If anything, homeschooling helped me in significant ways and perhaps even saved my life. In contrast, public school did cause me substantial harm, brought me very little good, and if I had remained in school, was almost certain to do me further harm with very little chance of bringing me any measurable benefits.
Since at least in part I wish to discuss homeschooling on a more general level (not exclusively in relation to my own experiences), I should acknowledge that I could not in any way have been said to be typical or representative of most children. I had abilities that were well outside the curve as well as issues that were well outside the curve. The issues involved serious social challenges and social anxieties, depression and suicidal thoughts starting as young as age six (it is not coincidental, I don’t think, that this age coincided with the start of first grade), as well as certain physical illnesses that made me open to mocking and rejection. With this said, my own view is that public or private school is the right path for almost all children (basically, all children who are socially normal or nearly so, who thus need that interaction and will do just fine in the midst of it all), but that there are some children with extraordinary challenges or unusual temperaments for whom homeschooling is the best or only option for a portion of their schooling, if not all of it. There are many different ways to receive a good education, depending on the individual. Public school and private school can both lead to good outcomes; and so can homeschooling. As with most things in life, there is no easy decision, and there is no such thing as a perfect decision or a perfect environment. Like many issues with a big debate surrounding it, it’s a Scylla and Charybdis kind of thing.
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Homeschooling is a fairly popular argument topic with my freshman comp students, and most write against it – as in, a “pro-public school” stance. However, with my own experience on both sides of it – six and a half years of public school and five and a half years of homeschooling – I have yet to read one of these papers that manages to be fully convincing by taking into consideration all parts of the debate and all significant points of view. The papers tend to be a bit too myopic to successfully convince the reader that they have really seen and considered all sides. Not that I can exactly blame them, can I? Though I do have a large percentage of nontraditional students of all ages in my classes, my students who choose “pro-public school” as a topic tend, for whatever reason, to be more of the traditionally-aged sort. And nineteen-year-olds can definitely be forgiven for still being in the process of widening their points of view of the world. They can’t help it that academia demands that they write argument papers at their tender age. In fact, what continually astonishes me and impresses me is the empathy of the young – how good-hearted they are and how far beyond themselves they can see despite how much there is that they still have to experience. They don’t have the years yet to give them wisdom. But wisdom is deeply present, nonetheless.
I once assigned a fall semester remedial comp class a beginning assignment to write a letter. In this case, I was teaching at a more traditional campus and my class was comprised almost entirely of kids right out of high school, living their first days of independence on a college campus. The assignment was fairly open – they could write a letter to a family member, a former teacher, a politician, a national hero, a film star, an athlete, to their future selves. But with the dazzling array of options open to them, almost every student chose to write a letter of gratitude to a parent, grandparent, or former teacher. I am a relatively grizzled, hardened instructor of comp, reading between two and three thousand student papers every year. Not yet having glanced over any of the results of my assignment, I sat down to mark the papers, procrastinating, grumbling and resistant to doing my work. But what I saw before me would have shattered the most hardened shell of cynicism. I have always said I cried more during that weekend of trying to read those papers than I have ever cried in my life. Never have I been more moved than reading letter after letter expressing love, gratitude, understanding, forgiveness, requests for forgiveness, in words and emotions that were still in many ways those of a child, simple, tender, sweet, innocent, but with the nascent inflections of adulthood.
People are good. Students are good. I am a tireless advocate of all of the miraculous and wonderful qualities of the overwhelming majority of people who fit in well in this world and keep this world going. I am grateful to my students beyond words for teaching me about the world every day, for keeping me grounded, and for constantly forgiving me and trying to support me as much as I try in my bumbling way to support them.
I am also continually taken aback by their kindnesses, because in so many ways the majority of my students strike me as being the same sorts of well-adjusted people who I recall mocking me or shunning me when I was a child in school – the kind of people who, at the same age as me, turned away from me in the hallways. Even though I’m nearing forty now, around every corner I ever turn I still expect people to mock me and bully me. I really do – even when I’m the professor of the class, walking into the classroom on the first day. Of course, students probably only show me kindness because I’m in a position of authority now. It’s unwise to bite the hand that assigns your final grade. But I can’t seem to grow accustomed to being in that position. It still seems to me that I should be the pariah, pushed to the margins of the classroom and the playground.
Of course, at times a few students do still mock me, sometimes perhaps behind my back and sometimes quite noticeably. At those times that I’m aware of it, my memories and feelings go back at once to all the misery of grade school and junior high. Strange how we are always the same person. In the front of a college classroom, I am still an eight-year-old who the other students shrink away from in contempt, the one picked very last for the team.
This was always followed, of course, by your own team groaning in disappointment because they ended up with you. As though you don’t have ears. As though the groan is only for the sake of their own cheerful solidarity and that it somehow won’t reach you. As though the sound won’t come back to you and haunt you and defeat you for the rest of your life.
But most college students are good. Whatever they think of me or of anyone else, what they mainly exhibit is kindness. Again, I am a strong advocate for this well-adjusted majority. I will always have their back. But because of my temperament and experiences, in my own writing I am in the main and by necessity an advocate for the marginalized, the minorities, the forgotten. And in any pro-public school argument, I believe these souls deserve at least some small mention within the refutation – some concession that perhaps for certain individuals, homeschooling may be the best or only choice.
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I am low in many departments, but not in the nerdy likes-to-learn department, so from 7th grade onward I taught myself using an accredited program following syllabuses, much like a college student, and I earned my high school diploma with a 4.0 GPA. I didn’t really need supervision. I loved to learn and very few subjects were difficult for me. I’m an autodidact, but I’m also at least somewhat pragmatic, so though I adapted whatever I studied to what I wanted to get out of it, somehow I managed at the same time to play by the rules enough to produce whatever work teachers and instructors were looking for, and thus picked up along the way all the various diplomas and other pieces of paper that society insists we should have. By age thirteen I knew I wanted to write, so I spent a lot of time doing that (not enough; I also spent a lot of time being a lazy teenager, and in that regard, at least, I was typical), and I was involved with community theatre and my mom’s church choirs, both of which ended up standing in as a social life. During my high school years I also had a couple of different boyfriends and a few close friends. This was probably as much social interaction as I needed, technically speaking. Being a Myers-Briggs 10-0 introvert by temperament, I didn’t exactly need a lot.
Incidentally, I did make an attempt to return to school after my junior high years – I tried to attend private Catholic boarding school as a high school freshman. I lasted around a week, physically ill the entire time with anxiety and depression and general homesickness. It felt like the world had collapsed in on me. I returned home and to homeschooling and never looked back from there.
I was happy in many ways during those high school years -- happier than I had ever been at any other time in my life, and probably happier than I have ever been since. So yes, interestingly enough, as is the case for many people, these were probably the best days of my life – they were just very different from the halcyon high school days of most kids. While they spend those years immersed in groups and social situations, and that’s what gives them the most satisfaction, I spent mine in solitude, studying and writing – which is what happens to give me satisfaction. I was happy because those are precisely the conditions in which I am able to be happy.
However, that is only looking at the situation in terms of short term effects. The initial question – my science teacher’s prediction of a ruined life – has little to do with whether I was happy and in my element at the time. That question is easy to answer: unequivocally, yes. But was homeschooling a wise decision in terms of long term effects? For better or for worse, much of life is about having to adapt to others’ needs and expectations, not just following the beat of your own drummer. So, to address the long term: Did homeschooling ruin my life?
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There are undoubtedly many experiences in high school that benefit a person later in life. First and foremost would be, to put it very generally, the socialization. Recently I wrote about driving being a microcosm of life. Much has always been made, too, of high school being where people experience a microcosm of the competitive pecking order of the rest of the world. It’s a place to learn how various kinds of social connection work in this culture – dating, sex, making friends, etc.
All of this social interaction and experimentation includes going through certain key American rites of passage – prom, sports, band or choir, dating, and so on – which define people more than I think they either admit or perhaps realize. Having missed out on them puts me in a special place to observe how deeply others are formed by those experiences. I’ve heard others be dismissive of these experiences – “Oh, they weren’t really that big of a deal” – but I don’t think some people realize how much having those experiences puts them on the inside track in certain ways, or by extension, how not having those experiences puts me and others like me even further on the outside track.
High school also provides a unique sense of being a part of a larger community that perhaps being involved in smaller groups such as church choirs or community theatre fails to provide. One of the most peculiar things I’ve noted about myself is that I’ve never even been part of so much as an “outsider” group. What I mean is that in high school, even outsiders tend to belong to some sort of fringe group. But I am an outsider of outsiders – I’ve never belonged to anything in any way, any time, anywhere. It’s as though I can’t even locate myself in relation to anything else at all. But even when you’re not really part of something, even if no one includes you, even if you’re unable to laugh and joke with them and you’re just sitting there wondering how they even do it, I find that you can still feel like you’re part of it in some way by at least watching others. But by falling away from others from 7th grade onward, I’ve felt removed even from that extremely marginal and dubious involvement.
Another argument in favor of high school is that it might provide a sense of being grounded in reality for individuals whose heads are otherwise in the clouds. During my teenaged years, I was allowed to indulge in writing as much as I wanted (and yes, I’ve always written fantasy in one form or another) – even though that was not likely to lead to any kind of realistic paycheck or career or means of survival in the world. I was not exposed to very many real world options for survival. My head floated in the ether, and I never formed any practical plan for survival. Further, I did not spend time around other more grounded peers and personality types. I think it can be argued that it took me a longer time than it should have to develop the appreciation I should have always had for those people who fit in better than myself.
I wish now more than ever that I had asked my science teacher specifically why he felt leaving school would ruin my life – whether it was for any of the reasons above, or for other reasons.
Also, did he mean that leaving public school to be homeschooled would ruin all kids’ lives? Was he generalizing? Or did he mean only my life?
I have had many homeschooled kids in my college classes, and I can say that they tend to be my top students academically speaking. They also tend to have the strongest work ethics and are the best in regards to turning work in on time. I know these statements may seem biased on my part, but I promise they’re not. In fact, when I first started teaching, I perversely wanted to see the public school students do better than homeschooled students – I think I wanted to be able to punish myself for my own decision to leave school with proof that homeschooling is a fiasco and that public school students were superior in every way. However, contrary to my hopes and expectations, everything I have observed speaks to the other side of it.
In my opinion, criticism about academics does not tend to be one of the stronger counter-arguments against homeschooling within the general debate. I think that the most credible studies and statistics have consistently shown that as long as a strong curriculum is used, homeschooling does not in general hurt kids academically, and that in fact, homeschooled kids are at least equal to and often stronger academically than public or private school kids.
On my own part, I spent a lot of key years homeschooling, had a 4.0 GPA in high school, then went on to earn a 4.0 GPA in college. I finished college with the highest GPA in my graduating class and was named IUPUI’s Liberal Arts Chancellor’s Scholar along with being granted a number of other awards. My transcripts for any given semester often boasted nothing but A+’s. At my graduation ceremony, I carried one of the two school flags, leading my class onto the floor. Case closed on that.
One objection sometimes raised against homeschooling is that public school somehow teaches kids to be more “competitive” academically. But I don’t see any evidence to support this, or how it is even a valid point. Learning isn’t a sport. My personal experience involves attending college for seven years and now teaching college for several years, and my observation is that the skills needed to get through college are more closely related to the skills that homeschooled kids tend to develop – that is, skills of being self-motivated and driven by high standards and a personal quest for excellence.
At least to me, in public school there was always an outside impetus needed to do assignments, but little inner motivation. I always thought of the entire experience as being continually goaded on with a cattle prod. But in college, to be truly successful, students need to be self-motivated. The reasons for being in college need to come from the student – not from some misguided sense of competition or because teacher said so.
One story I often tell is that when I first left public school to be homeschooled, I actually did nothing at all for many months – I just sat on the sofa dozing or staring into space. At first this sounds like a strong argument against homeschooling. But really, it was that I was so accustomed to teachers telling me what to do in public school that I didn’t even understand that it was possible for me to have an impulse of my own, or that I could decide on my own to do what I was passionate about rather than just following the injunctions of others to fill all my time with activities that bored the shit out of me and that I cared about not one whit. I didn’t know how to do anything except stare apathetically into space, because that’s mainly what I had “learned” in public school. Public school taught me to be spoon fed.
What happened is that one day, after all these months on the sofa, I had an overwhelming breakthrough/epiphany. There simply came a day when I realized, quite out of the blue, that it was possible for me to have impulses of my own and motivations of my own. I could learn for no other reason than because I wanted to and because I chose to – because it was my own impulse and not someone else’s. That was empowering, to say the least. From there, I discovered that I could make learning my own by adapting it to my own passions, needs, and interests. I got out of it what I wanted to get out of it – not what somebody else said I should get out of it. I rapidly caught up with my grade-level work after that, and henceforth and to the present day, I never again had any trouble meeting academic deadlines. I did the work because I wanted to do it and because it fascinated me, and because I understood that deadlines keep us on track to reach our goals. And I excelled.
In my senior year of college when I won Liberal Arts Chancellor’s Scholar, I cared nothing about whether I was better or worse than anyone else. I wasn’t trying to win the award and in fact, I had never heard of it and was completely taken aback when I got the letter telling me that they were giving it to me. (Funny story: Not only had I never heard of the award, but the award had never heard of me. After I was named for it, there was a continual perplexed chorus amongst instructors and administrators of “Who on earth is Elisabeth Hegmann?” Apparently many students are indeed rather noisy about jostling for these sorts of awards – but I never spoke a word, never asked for anything, and knew almost no one on campus because I was so shy. So the whole thing came as a bit of a shock not just to me but to everyone else, too.) I had studied all through college not to competitively one-up others in some sort of “competition,” but because I had developed an extremely strong work ethic, and because I wanted to learn. I enjoyed seeing what other students were working on and hearing their thoughts and being challenged by their points of view during class discussions, but there was never a second that I thought of myself as being in some sort of rat race with them. Rather, I considered that I was collaborating with them, that we were part of the same community together, working toward productive ends. I competed only with myself, but I competed for absolute excellence, and I would settle for nothing less from myself.
I am certainly not suggesting that this is the only way of excelling in school. It was simply my way and probably the way of certain others who have temperaments similar to mine. There are other ways to excel, too, and such excellence could potentially come from a student with any of a number of different schooling backgrounds, as well as from a student with more of a sense of outward competition with others – as evidenced by my story above about students jostling noisily for awards: no doubt these students sometimes or often are the ones to “win out” in such situations. My only point is that this particular argument against homeschooling (that somehow someone with a homeschooling background would not know how to compete academically) is a poor one. It doesn’t hold water.
But indeed, speaking of arguments that notions of “competition” are flawed, there will always be a fundamental problem in pitting public school and homeschooling against each other as though it’s a duel. It isn’t. They should be seen as complementary and working together, and as being the right routes for different kinds of children at different times.
Now, as a college student I was a bit extreme and outside the curve just as I was earlier in my life (and I would not wish my worst enemy to be a perfectionist to the degree that I am), but in all my homeschooled students, I have seen a similar sense of self-motivation, and it serves them very well. They tend to easily see things through to completion, earn high grades, turn all work in on time, and so on. Thus, homeschooling apparently produces similar positive effects in a variety of different types of personalities and intelligences – not just my own oddball configuration.
In recent times I see it continually emphasized in various media that those who excel most in today’s professional environment are those who are creative and self-motivated. So, as another argument in favor of homeschooling, I would suggest that these skills may be better developed for certain individuals outside of a public institution; that perhaps for some, independent critical thinking skills are better developed in an environment other than the test-driven, one-size-fits-all environment of public school. (Of course, in this sense, public school is not to blame so much as the direction that public school has been taken by recent legislation and so on. But that’s a debate beyond the scope of what I’m trying to talk about here.) On my own part, though the degree to which I am a success can be questioned, I am most certainly as outside-the-box as it gets, and most of those aspects of myself did not begin to really shine through until I left school and became an autodidact. Leaving school was the genesis of my ability (and my decision) to see things from my own unique perspective.
The major point of this entire digression is that I don’t think the general academic outcome of students can come under fire in any valid argument against homeschooling, or that somehow “lack of competition” is damaging in any way to homeschooled students. There is just no legitimate evidence to support this since homeschooled kids mainly go on to excel in college and in the professional world.
Rather, the social aspects of homeschooling are the part of the debate that I believe to be most problematic and difficult to parse out – the lack of exposure to peers in certain important and unique ways. Proponents of homeschooling argue that kids can have social experiences in many other ways besides school. That’s very true. I did. But our modern society and culture is built on kids having not just social experiences, but certain kinds of social experiences, and public or private high school plays a large role in that. In my experience, community theatre and church choir did not even remotely stand in for the social experiences I would have had in high school. These other environments did not teach me subtle skills about how to interact with others or how to get ahead in the world socially.
That’s the thing. The real problem isn’t whether homeschooled kids will be able to compete academically – being able to compete socially is the real issue at hand. It’s sad to have to acknowledge the truth and irony of that: Our world is based on the ability of one person to “beat out” another socially. It is. One person who charms or has political savvy will get the coveted position over the person who doesn’t know how to do those things. Life has very little to do with who you are, but it has everything to do with who you know.
So, let’s address this thorny area. Does homeschooling handicap kids from being able to deal with the social realities of the world? Are they denied certain very specific experiences that will benefit them in college and the professional world and life in general? First off, I can say unequivocally that from everything I have observed in my own teaching, homeschooling does not in and of itself produce “recluses” like myself. In fact, all homeschooled kids I’ve had in my classes so far, unlike me, are highly social, happy and healthy people.
I do think, quite honestly, that there is often a sense of touching naivety and idealism about homeschooled kids. They have more of an air of innocence and goodness about them than public schooled kids, who are savvier and more cynical. You do get the sense that the homeschooled kids have been more sheltered and that they have formed some sort of core sense of integrity and values that haven’t had a chance yet to be sullied. However, I don’t believe that these qualities work against them in any way. While it may soon get crushed out of them in this brutal world, naivety alone is not enough to sink a person. The real question is simply: are homeschooled kids’ social skills sufficient to allow them to get them through the door into college and then through the door into the professional world? In this sense, can they compete with public or private schooled kids?
I once worked my fingers to the bone writing letters of recommendation for one homeschooled student I had because I believed in her so strongly. She was one of the top students in my class academically, but she also had one of the highest characters, one of the most admirable senses of integrity, of any student of any age that I’ve ever encountered. This was made even more remarkable by the fact that she was still only 17. She was clearly an introvert by temperament, but she interacted very well with others. All introverts do not have to be as withdrawn as me. To be an introvert simply means that a person carries a certain set of qualities of looking inward and needing a reasonable amount of alone time, but many introverts are quite socially adept and sometimes even charismatic. I do wonder, though, if a great percentage of homeschooled kids are introverts by temperament; extroverts may feel a much stronger sense of needing to be around large numbers of people that the public school environment provides. Even if this is so, having introverted temperaments should not automatically handicap homeschooled kids.
In any case, this particular individual I’m thinking of was likeable and caring and selfless and kind – not in a put-on, performed sort of way, but in a way that sprang from a genuinely good heart. I desperately wanted her to do well in life. In my own state of cynicism and desolation, I wanted the universe to reward someone good – I wanted to see some justice in the world. Since she had been homeschooled and freshman comp with me had been the first college class she’d ever had, I was virtually the only and best chance she had for the required recommendation letters she needed to open further doors for her. I was so afraid I would fail her.
But thank God, the right doors did open. She received the internships, the scholarships, the acceptance letters. She was the one mainly responsible for this, of course. Others also saw all of her good qualities, I reported on them in my letters, and together we recognized an outstanding young woman. Occasionally perhaps there is some justice in this world, and it is gratifying when it happens. I happen to know that my former student was able to take advantage of all the opportunities given to her and has risen to every challenge with grace.
She is just one example, but from all other examples I’ve seen as an instructor, I cannot believe that homeschooling is problematic for most kids on a social level. All the homeschooled students I have ever had in my classes have exhibited the right abilities to go on and compete in the world socially. When I observe them in class, they interact with others just fine and make new connections and friends just like any of the other students. And because many of them do seem to come into college with a strong, intact sense of integrity and values from their homeschooling environment – a strong self-identity, basically – in some cases this may actually work in their favor to make them stand out from the crowd so that they receive scholarships and internships and other opportunities.
My conclusion: Homeschooled kids tend to have a strong sense of self, show a great sense of caring toward others, and interact in socially normal ways. Nothing I have seen suggests that homeschooling itself produces any handicaps.
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This brings it back to the question of just little old me – and after all, my science teacher, in placing his hex, did say that it would ruin my life to leave school. He did not specifically mention anyone else. However, in my own observation, and in what I detailed above, homeschooling is not to blame for how I am. If it does not produce negative results in others, there is no reason to think it would produce negative results in me. Or is there?
Perhaps my science teacher’s point twenty-five years ago was that because I am a 10 and 0 introvert, and on top of that am intrinsically socially handicapped, public or private school might have been my only hope to stay focused on the outer world and develop any social skills instead of just collapsing in on myself like a black hole. Maybe what he meant was that someone like me needed continual, intense exposure to socialization to have a hope in hell of developing into a person who could adapt to the rest of the world, and that my separation from the crowd would only accentuate some of my worst features – self-loathing, self-absorption, low self-esteem, social anxiety, extreme shyness, etc.
I can’t say. I can say certainly that my decision to leave school might have had some of these effects (I can’t prove otherwise), and I can say without any doubt that I was then and still remain a lone wolf. And the fact that I’m a lone wolf has certainly influenced me in a thousand ways, from the fact that I’m a prose writer rather than writing in more collaborative forms (screenwriting, librettos, etc.) to the fact that I teach college – a lone wolf position at the front of a classroom. Everything I do is “lone,” no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
But is the fact that I am a lone wolf a terrible fate? Is this an indicator that my life is “ruined”? And either way, what role did homeschooling play in my becoming a lone wolf? Would public school have somehow prevented that outcome?
We always say that without doing [such and such] in the past, we would not be who we are today. We say that our choices and experiences form us and make us who we are. I believe that sometimes, no matter how proudly we try to utter this, we are really just paying lip service to it as a way to circumvent guilt or regret over questionable decisions. And yet, clichéd as this view is, it’s also very obviously true.
My decision to leave school at age thirteen was a move with titanic repercussions and it did a lot to set me up for where I find myself now. Of course I would not be where I am and who I am today if I hadn’t made that move. Looking back, the decision was also remarkably true to who I am today. That is, the decision fits logically within a pattern of choices I’ve made throughout my life – it definitely sprang from some central core of “self.” It was not an outlier or a freak occurrence, but a very typical expression of my basic personality.
But at age thirteen, I of course still thought that “who you are” matters. At that age, you do. (Or at least you do if you’re a bumbling oaf of an idealist, like me.) But as already mentioned earlier, who you are matters not a whit. What matters is what you do and that you do it “right.” Even more important is who you know.
So, regardless of how “true to myself” my decision to homeschool was, would it have been better to go contrary to that? Would attending high school have set me up for being better “socialized” and grounded in reality? Of course here we get into pure speculation. One thing worth acknowledging is that if I had stayed in school, I can’t even say whether I would still be alive today. I might have committed suicide. I was certainly depressed enough by age thirteen to consider it. If that had taken place, obviously all other considerations would have been moot.
Another thought that has crossed my mind over the years is that had I stayed in school, I very well might have gotten into drugs. My dark thoughts and attitudes could very well have taken me toward some of those crowds, and that might have been disastrous for me. Even shy as I was about approaching others, being in school would have put me in close enough proximity to those kids who might have pushed drugs on me that I might easily have developed some nasty addictions. (I base this speculation on the fact that years later, I’ve discovered that I definitely have an addictive personality; I have to tread extremely carefully around addictive substances.) But schooling at home, I did not have exposure to these people and environments, and so I steered clear of some of these traps for a time. This at least allowed me to keep this early part of my life somewhat on the rails.
Perhaps had I stayed in school, I would have “found myself” in high school and learned all kinds of confidence. That version is the opposite extreme, though, and seems overly optimistic and extremely unrealistic.
The middle ground alternate reality is that had I stayed in school, I might have learned to be a little savvier about the world. Maybe I would have learned better strategies to survive as an outcast. I might even have found a way to fit into some sort of marginalized group.
I read recently about a woman much like me who in high school was lucky enough to find a great defender, a shining knight who came to her rescue in social situations and helped her throughout all of her high school years. This was apparently a boy more socially adept than she was who admired her intellect and became her trusted ally. Sorry to be forever the great cynic (or perhaps just the great realist), but I saw a picture of this woman, and she was more physically attractive than me. Sometimes this is the one element that makes the difference for people. Though by high school I had slimmed down a little, I don’t think it would have been wise for me to count on this great knight riding to my rescue. I’ve been waiting for and looking for that person for my entire life now. He or she ain’t coming.
All things taken into consideration, had I stayed in school, I actually think the darker scenarios would have been the more likely outcomes.
As already established, homeschooling prepared me just fine academically speaking. But by withdrawing into my own little world, I had no preparation later for how to navigate reality – especially how to deal with people on a social level. However, the other alternative available to me – staying in school – very well might have destroyed me completely. Talk about Scylla and Charybdis. Granted that leaving school, a decision that in some ways equated with being true to who I was and following my dreams, did not prepare me well for all aspects of life. But what the hell would have?
What has always held me back the most is my social awkwardness and trouble making friends or acquaintances – or especially keeping them. I can sometimes make a decent first impression on people, but after that, I have no idea how to continue or maintain a connection. I have had many opportunities in my life – I’ve simply blown them.
But if in childhood and throughout adolescence I had a greater need for the learning of social skills, I don’t think that public school was the answer for that. Beyond basic academic skills, all that my first six years of school taught me was non-stop pain, humiliation, misery, and rejection. I did not learn any useful social skills in school during those first six years. Would the next six years really have brought about any different result? If anything, the brutal environment of junior high and high school would only have made things worse.
I posit that homeschooling did not in any way delay or impair or handicap my social skills. My social skills were already delayed, impaired, and handicapped. The first six years of being in public school did not help me socially, and it’s unlikely it would suddenly have started having that effect. In fact, instead of learning how to interact with others during those first years of public school, I developed incredibly low self-esteem and extreme avoidance of other people, which exacerbated all of my already-existing difficulties. In all instances, school always drove me further and deeper into myself rather than bringing me out of myself.
The downsides to a person with my temperament and set of challenges – anxiety, depression, self-loathing, social isolation, insecurity, low self-esteem – were exacerbated by being in school. If I had stayed, what would the Powers That Be have ultimately done with me? Put me on antidepressants, perhaps? Sorry, but that is no real answer. With that hanging over me as a possible option, I’m glad that I left school and stayed away from any chemical attempts to alter me psycho-socially.
I was just lucky enough to have had a mother who did the best she could with a child who was “different” and was open to allowing what was best for me by that time: homeschooling as an autodidact.
I think it can be argued that maybe some different kinds of interventions when I was a child would have brought about some benefits – that homeschooling was not the perfect or only answer. But operating only upon the information and alternatives my family and I had at the time, it was probably the best available choice.
There was no ultimate answer. Sometimes there isn’t one. I don’t think I had any choice about leaving school when I did. I left to save my life. Regardless of how dramatic it sounds, to stay was death. If there had been any way for me to develop into a more complete and fully formed human being, the answer was not public school.
During my years of homeschooling, I needed more help in my life and more people in my life than what I had. But I don’t think that the help or people I needed were to be found in public school. Nor do I think I would have found my confidence there. By that time, low as I had already fallen, I would probably not have found it anywhere – at home, at school, or at the far reaches of the earth. Either the damage had already been done through all the painful years I had already lived, or I was born so damaged that nothing could ever have been done in the first place.
The homeschooling versus public school debate can’t really be “solved” – nor can I be “solved.” Back in the day, I think that’s what my science teacher was probably trying to do – “solve” me. But I’m not that simple. Nothing is that simple. No one is at fault. There was no real answer, and life is like that. Often there isn’t any real solution or answer or alternative at all. All the pieces don’t click into place perfectly. Would that life were that easy.
#
We make decisions according to who we are, how we’re put together. That I left school was, in that sense, inevitable and fateful. I don’t think it had the effect of making me more disaffected, more withdrawn, more on the fringes so much as the fact that I was headed in that direction anyway. In terms of cause and effect, the way I’m put together caused the decision to leave school, not vice versa. Staying in school would not have somehow halted that process. In fact, as already delineated, it’s very possible that it could have made my situation even worse.
After I left school, at least I began to experience moments of happiness again – mainly when I was writing. It’s worth acknowledging for a moment that there are positive aspects to my deeply introverted and withdrawn nature just as there are drawbacks; I do have certain abilities and talents that others do not possess, just as they possess abilities that I do not. Of course the fact that I withdrew from others (in a very accurate sense withdrew from the “real world” by withdrawing from high school) had a major impact on the kind of writer I am (lone wolf) as well as on the rest of my life. But these qualities were innate; they pre-existed and perhaps even pre-determined the decision to leave school.
Staying in public school would probably not have helped, and might have hurt. In the meantime, homeschooling probably didn’t hurt, and perhaps even saved my life.
Therefore, I am going to conclude that leaving public school did not ruin my life. What is responsible for some of the more undesirable aspects of my life? Well, it’s beyond the scope of this essay. It’s much more complicated than simply leaving school, which was just one factor, one event (albeit a major event) in the midst of many.
I can understand the view that leaving school constituted “running away” in some sense – that instead of facing up to my fears and challenges, I just walked away. Perhaps that was yet another implication of my science teacher’s statement. I’ve frequently felt that way myself. School is hell for many. For years, I beat myself up over why I had “failed the test” while others who also found the experience difficult made it through anyway. I thought that I was a wimp and a coward and not tough enough.
And maybe there’s some truth to that. Maybe my nature is more sensitive than others, and maybe I can’t withstand the same levels of emotional pain – or more accurately, because I’m put together as I am, I actually experience greater levels of emotional pain than most people. But that’s not a bad thing. It makes me who I am.
It also means that I am not necessarily suited to the same environments that others are suited for. The survival-of-the-fittest world of high school was not the right place for me.
There are some of us who, in some strange way, transcend competition and survival of the fittest. This way of looking at the world is simply irrelevant to us. The ways in which we “succeed” are not the ways of others. Success for us is not defined as it is for the rest of the world. We march to the beat of our own drummer. We do not need to succeed in the ways that others have defined for us. The very idea of “competition” is meaningless to us. The role that we play in the world is of its own making and the works that we create test their own boundaries.
But many of us are still hounded by the insistences and demands of the rest of the world that we be like them and that we fit their definitions. Insecurity and low self-esteem have dominated my life. The gap between what I really am (and wish that I could be proudly and without any apology) and what the rest of the world thinks I should be is far too wide.
Well, but did I run away from school’s social challenges? Am I a coward? Was my decision to leave controlled only by fear and failure? First, I have to say that this version of events is rather over-simplified and lacks much compassion. With my set of handicaps and challenges, school failed to provide me with an environment in which I could succeed. Second, I have to say that there are many platitudes in the western world about facing up to adversity, not running away, taking on all fears and challenges, never having any regrets, the sky’s the limit if you only reach for it, etcetera ad infinitum. The older I get, the more dubious I find these injunctions. For most of my life, I let these thoughts infect me so that I turned in on myself with nothing but self-loathing and self-blame for all of my millions of “failures.”
In more recent times, though, I have become an advocate for appreciating an individual’s total nature and for any individual to put together a realistic life that works, in order to bring about whatever happiness is possible for him or her – reasonably, within any particular limitations and boundaries that might exist for that individual. This is my approach to students and teaching – an appreciation of the whole person. And it is my approach to myself. Life will never be perfect. And if a particular situation in life becomes untenable, an alternative situation should be developed that is realistically workable. A person should have a form of schooling that he or she can experience with relative happiness and success, as well as a job that he or she can perform with relative happiness and success. This is respecting people and being proactive at finding positive solutions.
To find workable solutions in life within the realm of what is actually possible for any particular individual is not “running away” from challenges. I spent decades beating myself up and hating myself for “running away” and “failing” at so many things in life before I finally came to an understanding that true respect for myself was allowing myself to work within my own capabilities. Trying to take on all of these impossible (for me) challenges was only setting myself up for defeat. It was a form of punishing myself because I was always doomed to failure, with no chance of experiencing life’s little happinesses and successes.
That doesn’t mean that I have reached perfect peace with this. I’ve made progress, but I still spend at least part of every day beating myself up over one thing or another. And I admit that I am in my late thirties and still struggling with how to find my place in the world. But I don’t think staying in school – or much of anything, really – would have helped me to come to that answer any faster. Indeed, school probably hampered my “finding myself,” because my real role to the world is undoubtedly one that is carried out in solitude and isolation. The work I’m capable of producing is produced alone. Most of my happiness is found in solitude, too. I wish it weren’t so.
Even a lone wolf needs someone in his or her life. We need love, as anyone does. Without this, we cannot sustain forever. Maybe this was what my science teacher was trying to convey – that by leaving school, the fate of my life would be forever wandering the earth in search of love and approval and never finding it. Probably not, though.
Love is the last thing I was feeling in 7th grade. There was no love for me in that place. If there is love for one such as me anywhere in this world, I have yet to find it. But certainly, it was not there.
#
The last question inadvertently raised by my science teacher twenty-five years ago was: Is my life ruined? Can I be deemed a failure? I have already posited that even if I am, leaving public school to homeschool was not the reason for it. Still, am I?
It could be successfully argued, I think, that I am a success, or at least that I am not a complete ruin or failure. After all, I teach college. But if being a college English adjunct instructor for a living does not constitute total failure in life – after all, it could be so much worse – neither does it constitute great success. It is not high-paying, to say the least, nor did I ever have any ambition or desire to teach. I did want something different for my life. Especially in regards to my writing, I was considered to have had greater potential than what I have managed to accomplish. But that’s true of many of us.
If I haven’t ever really found a place in the world, nevertheless I have at least carved a niche out of it that works for me. I am able to provide a service that others need and want competently enough to earn a very modest living. In the meantime, in whatever time I can find, I pursue my own aims, marching to the beat of my own drummer – in the main, this means writing whatever I wish to write, whether it’s Muller’s Mile or a piece like this. I’m lonely, but I doubt high school would have solved that for me. I’ve always felt lonelier around others than when I’m alone – despite always yearning for at least one companion in the world and a few close friends.
In short, I can’t complain. If many have it better than I do, many also have it worse. Life is not bad, and often it is good.
The irony that I now teach in a classroom is inescapable. Some say I’m a good instructor. If I am, I believe it is my outsider status and years of pain and struggling with my challenges that have made me that way. Pain can take a person in a lot of different directions. One thing that can happen is that it can turn a person to bitterness. Frankly, in almost all other aspects of my life, it has. But with teaching, I am able to take half a lifetime of pain, of feeling alone and disliked and inferior, and transform it into encouragement and appreciation for my students. I don’t know how or why. I’m just glad that the pain of my past sends me this way instead of in the direction of blowing up subway stations or shooting up movie theatres.
Still, my past hounds me more closely than I ever want to think about or admit; my old junior high sits right beside my house. Here I sit in this very moment writing this, directly adjacent to the pain – less than a block away, visible right outside my window. In twenty-five years, have I gotten anywhere at all? The school itself has perhaps changed more than I have.
At the time that I attended it, the junior high was made up of two buildings, but the older building that stood at the top of the hill was torn down not long after I left. In fact, my class was to be the last class to attend at the old school and the first class to graduate at the newly constructed building out on the west side of town by the current high school. I felt denied at the time – as though it was some epic disappointment that I had missed out on that experience. As years pass, this particular regret has diminished and become meaningless.
But yes, they tore down the older of the two buildings and moved all the kids to the western side of town. This older building had also, before it served as junior high, been the old North Vernon high school. My mother had attended high school there in the 1950s. My grandmother had taught English there in the 1950s and 1960s. And then I attended junior high there briefly and ignominiously in the 1980s and the rest is history.
The lower and newer building still stands and has been used in subsequent years by Jennings County Schools for a variety of different educational purposes. This building also happens to be the one I mainly attended for the brief time I was there – it was predominantly for the seventh graders while the older building was utilized by the eighth graders.
Recently I was hired by the Jennings County Education Center to teach a College Readiness class. The job is just a little summer diversion, a little summer money, and a chance to be useful to some people here in my hometown. The class itself meets at a building on the outskirts of town, but I was told I would need to make my copies for the class at the JCEC’s “new” facilities – the old junior high building.
Though the building sits right beside my house, I had not visited it since the day I left it twenty-five years ago, except in strange dreams. It is too close. Too spectral.
Kids used to walk by my house after school, and if they saw me, they pointed and laughed at me. I feel this pain just as keenly now as on any of the days that it happened. Everywhere I go, I still expect people to point and laugh at me, or to turn their backs on me and walk away. In this sense, I have gotten nowhere. Twenty-five years never passed.
The first time I decided to walk over to make copies for my class was as perfect a July evening as we have ever had in southern Indiana – the weather fair, the temperature mild, the crickets singing, all the trees and flowers in that full flush of life that seems somehow heavy with sadness, ready to make that turn once again toward death even though the fullness only just arrived. I walked through the peaceful neighborhood, let myself in with the key, and set foot inside the building for the first time since I was thirteen years old.
The last time I had been inside was when my science teacher had made his prediction about my life. Now here I was, that kid who had been so unwelcome and so reviled, by peers and teachers alike, trusted to walk through the door all alone with my own key. The hallways were desolate and grim, the walls a sickly pale green, the shadows deep in the evening light, outlines vague around doors and cavities where lockers used to be.
I was a sensitive kid. A conscientious and rule-abiding kid. Yet just inside the door to my left was a room that I remembered being part of the library, a room where I was once called out of class so that I could be accused of stealing a library book. The book I had taken out of the library was rather small – some sort of nonstandard, under-sized format. I had returned the book to the cart before its due date. I still have the mental image of placing that tiny book back on the return cart when I was finished with it. I don’t know what happened to it after that or how it got lost. But I nevertheless stood in that room accused. I explained that the book was very small and I suggested that it might have fallen off the cart or slipped between other books. The adults did not believe me. They told me that I had stolen it. That I was lying. That I had better produce the book soon – or else. As I left, the two librarians frowned and scowled after me, shaking their heads in contempt. My word was not enough for them. Perhaps because I was different than other kids – odd and withdrawn and socially awkward – I was already beginning to feel the repercussions of that. If I had stayed in school, perhaps the prejudices and suspicions that the adults felt toward me would only have gotten worse.
And that memory was only in one glance to my left. Everything from back then was punitive. Being placed in the “Gifted and Talented” program was no gift. It meant being segregated off into separate classes from the rest of the kids, removed from the very few friends I had managed to make in grade school. It also meant a lot of pressure that I did not feel I could live up to. My science teacher gave us college level work without any sort of scaffolding to get us up to it. I still remember going home at night with my homework in the blackest despair, not comprehending even the smallest part of it. I did not feel gifted or smart. I felt like the stupidest girl who had ever lived, incapable of living up to the work or the pressure. I literally shook with tension during school hours in the terror of being called on in class and made to look stupid because I didn’t know the answers. I ached with physical pain almost all the time because stress and panic kept my muscles almost constantly tensed in a state of fight or flight.
It turned out later that none of the kids understood this college level work either – that we were all taking it home to our parents at night in tears, begging them to help us with it, and even the parents couldn’t figure it out. It was a fiasco. A mockery. A punishment. The work was defeating us, not challenging us.
So, here I am, back – an educator myself now by profession; an educator determined to challenge my own students without ever trying to defeat them.
I could not withstand those halls when they were full of kids and teachers mocking me and harassing me. But now, here only to make my copies, no one was asking me to. Back then I arrived on their schedule, trapped inside the walls once I got there, no control over my own fate, adults free to order me about or accuse me. Now I walked alone through the building on my own decision, in complete silence, as suits me best.
One answer to my science teacher is that I have now been entrusted with the keys to the building that I once left in disgrace. I walked away from that building for the last time with my head down twenty-five years ago – not long after he uttered his words to me – and I walked into it this day with my head held high enough, getting paid to be there.
Yet I am still every bit the imposter inside. Aren’t we always.
At age thirteen, I was at least forty pounds overweight. I lived in horror of anyone seeing my body. I’m not sure what word to use other than horror. It is precisely accurate. I used to lie awake at night shaking, knowing that the next day I would have to undress in front of other girls in phys ed. The next morning as I prepared for school, I might as well have been going to the executioner.
I know these things seem funny and petty and over-dramatic to an adult’s perspective. I am one now. But it is not at all funny to children living in a universe of agonies and intense terrors inside their heads. I wished to die. I’d had suicidal thoughts at least from the age of six or seven.
Unfortunately, by the time I was in junior high I still did not have much conception that certain choices I made were socially unacceptable and that I brought much of the derision upon myself. I was a kid with no social sense and very little guidance in my life doing the best I could. So, I took to always wearing a one-piece bathing suit under my clothes – somehow this made me feel less self-conscious than undressing down to just a bra and panties. I suppose this was because since I was so overweight, other girls would at least not see my bare stomach. By then, my belly was already covered with stretch marks from rapid weight gain. After my father died when I was ten, my mother and I ate mostly greasy fast food; coupled with the arrival of adolescence and my own sedentary nature, this diet wreaked havoc on my body. I was horrifically self-conscious.
Of course the bathing suit only made things worse. As I undressed, girls whispered behind their hands and giggled. I kept myself insulated in a kind of mist, a fog, trying to withdraw into myself to escape the pain. Then when I went out and couldn’t hit a ball, couldn’t kick, couldn’t run, didn’t understand any of the rules of the game, they – the girls and the boys, too – just ignored me. Remarks, direct or covert, mainly came in the changing room. Out in front of other eyes in the gym or on the field or in the hallways, I was only invisible. I did not exist. I was an outsider of outsiders. Most of the time, not even outsiders would speak to me in the halls.
The halls are what remind you most keenly of the worst of it all, because they are the passageways to every torture chamber – the changing rooms, the gym, that next classroom that you would rather be stricken down than visit because there you would be humiliated, pressured, called upon, made by an adult to feel as small as possible.
The memories are not always specific. Just to see through a window down the end of the hallway at a specific angle the same that your eyes saw it twenty-five years ago echoes over a bottomless chasm. There is that bizarre disjunction, that increasingly alarming void of years. Too much has changed and not enough. The sights and sounds and smells are identical, but you are much closer to the grave. The building, last time you were here, was once teeming with people and loud voices and lockers slamming and mockery and intense grief and humiliation and anger and pain inside your head. Now there is only silence and dying evening light and sadness and emptiness in the hallways. But it is not peace.
The class I am teaching is almost over, and I will not be haunting the hallways of the old building on late summer evenings much longer. I only attended one semester of junior high. One semester. But measured by the impact it had on my psyche it might as well have been a lifetime. If leaving school ruined my life, I’m more certain than ever that it provided me with no other viable options. Back then, there was not much help for kids like me. I acknowledge that a few did try. I remember the assistant principal at the time calling me into his office and attempting to have some conversations with me. It must have been obvious that I was unraveling. But it was too little too late. Kind as he was (and his is the only kindness I remember in that place), he was not reaching me. As is usually the case in adolescence, I was hard at work forming my particular brand of disaffection. But it wasn’t just that. I could not have said what kind of help I needed if I’d tried. I was as lost in my head as he was in his awkward, fumbling words.
I had been homeschooling for some time and must have been about fourteen or fifteen when they tore down the older building of the school. One night, very late, I walked over and picked around amongst the rubble for a souvenir. I chose a slab of bricks, still held together with mortar, and brought it back home.
For years, it sat in my bedroom. Throughout my teenaged years I was fond of found objects and making amateur postmodern art pieces, so I used the piece of the wall in various sculptures and arrangements. This was some knowing and symbolic form of subversion I guess – taking a piece of my old school and using it to my own artistic ends.
After that, in my fitful, unsuccessful attempts through my twenties and thirties to live in New York and Cincinnati and Raleigh, I lost touch with that piece of the old school. After I made my first recent July evening visit to make my copies, I wondered what had become of that slab of bricks, deciding at last that it must be long gone. I had not thought about it in years, but the visit had brought it back into my mind.
In one of those uncanny instances of synchronicity, that very evening as I ate dinner on the back terrace at my house, my eyes were moving around the yard and found it. It was sitting beside a rose bush with the sleeping figure of a resin angel atop it. Many years ago, before moving away on my misadventures to other cities, I must have deposited the bricks in the backyard, and then my sister-in-law or another family member must have come along and put them beside the rosebush and set the angel on top of them.
I walked over, moved the angel, retrieved the piece, picked it up to look at it. But what do you do with such an object? You don’t move it halfway across the country with you when you’re going to be living in a one-bedroom apartment. And when you’re busy teaching and writing, you don’t spend much time anymore displaying found objects in your bedroom. So I put the bricks back where they were and gently restored the sleeping angel to her place. Heaven knows she’s getting more peace from them than anyone who ever walked inside those walls.
Wish You Were Here
“Wish You Were Here” has been going through my head for around a year now, since last summer when I went to Mackinac Island, looked through the postcards in a gift shop, and realized I was the one who was missing.
I had known “Wish You Were Here” since I was a teenager. Liked the song. Understood and connected with its melancholy. But I never had more than a passing interest in it, and overall, I had much more familiarity with Pink Floyd’s successes The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall than with some of the other slightly less radio-friendly albums, including Wish You Were Here – an album that came out in 1975, the year before I was born. I don’t think I had ever actually learned anything about that album or song’s association with Syd Barrett – and at that time and for many years after I knew only vaguely about Barrett and his early role in Pink Floyd.
But last summer, as the song refused to leave my head, I decided to look it up and learn more about it, only to discover a much more startling relevance to my own life than I had anticipated. It is my experience that sometimes through some strange intuition or collective unconscious – a true sixth sense – songs or other works hunt us down through the years and speak to us of the uncanny.
At present, music is the one art form I have withdrawn from most completely. I am not sure why. Perhaps because I was born into music, raised in a musical family, and so always immersed in music, I associate music most closely with many of the greatest failures and torments in my life. It may also be because music is the art form with the most emotional immediacy, and that immediacy is often too intense for me; I actually need the “buffer” that other art forms allow (words, as symbols, take time to sink in – time that I need). I think also music tends to be the most overwhelming of pop cultural forms in terms of its sheer abundance, with so many artists competing that it is too overwhelming to me and so I just give up trying to find what I like. Finally, I might observe that over the past few decades music was a form that transformed very aggressively into some of the newer media, and at the time it was making that transition, I did not have access to the technology, and I think I just never caught up. As with most things, it is probably a combination of factors.
My failure to keep up with the years may also be because the music of my own generation failed to captivate me, and thus alienated me from having any desire to stay current with the scene and formats. Though I have affinity for at least some of the music of the early to mid-80s, I don’t remember the late 80s and early 90s with any affection. Grunge was supposed to have been “my” music – the music of my late teenaged/early young adult years. But though I had a few friends enamored with it, I was not. I did appreciate that it struck one as being “real” and not like over-produced corn flakes, but I was nevertheless perplexed by its popularity and unable to find any personal emotional resonance. I have nothing against grunge, mind you – just an absence of feelings.
I remember very well when Kurt Cobain committed suicide. My few friends who loved Nirvana were grieved and shocked because of the connection they felt with the music – while all I could do was engage in the helpless hand-wringing following suicide, feeling absurdly chastised, even though the most I’d ever done is heard Kurt Cobain’s name.
Well, the music of my own generation not being of much interest to me, by my late teen years I ended up adopting the 1960s and especially the 1970s as “my” music.
I think that Dark Side of the Moon may be the only album I ever distinctly recall the exact moment of buying.
But no, that’s not right, is it? Buying music used to be an event, back when it had a physicality – a visceral presence. I’m old enough to have been very well acquainted with vinyl, at least in childhood. To hold the cover and liner notes and the record itself in your hands was something inspiring – indeed, it inspired much of the creative dreaming of my childhood that I still keep myself going on today. From childhood, I remember the instance of buying any number of records, because the moment was that visceral and set in time and special.
So for absolute precision (if less poeticism), let me back up: The Dark Side of the Moon is the only CD I distinctly recall the exact moment of buying during my late childhood.
It would have been at the old, long-gone K-Mart store in North Vernon, and I’m going to speculate that it might have been around the summer of 1989. In other words, there was nothing even remotely special about the location or the moment. What was unusual was the fact that I had no idea who Pink Floyd was or the significance of Dark Side of the Moon. It was not even prominently placed – just buried alphabetically, one of many dozens of CDs. I had set myself a goal that day of buying something that I had never heard of, just for fun – just for the sheer surprise. In my sober adult years I would never think of spending hard-won money on any commodity that I’m not already one hundred percent certain about – but back then, it was usually not my money, but money I had begged from my grandmother, and so it seemed disposable. Usually (and predictably) my random CD purchases resulted in disaster, or at least in an entirely unmemorable experience. In this Russian roulette of music purchases, perhaps I was simply due for something significant – the bullet to the head, as it were. Whatever the case, it is as though by fate or some strange pull that I found Dark Side of the Moon – like there really was something mystical about the album and its cover and about Pink Floyd in general.
Ignorant or not about who Pink Floyd was, and about the fact that Dark Side of the Moon was indeed the second best-selling album in the history of the world, once I had started listening to it, it certainly had a resonance for me that other music current at the time did not.
Pink Floyd’s music is interesting to me in that it seems to speak equally well to the angst and existential crisis of the teenaged years, or to the angst and existential crisis of the middle-aged years – but it reads entirely differently in both contexts.
It’s not unusual, of course, for a song to reach you very differently when you are 12 versus 22 or 32 versus 42. Though my brother gave me Sgt. Pepper for my 10th birthday, which kicked off my full exploration of Beatles music, singing happily along through all my years, it took me until my 30s to be reduced so completely to tears driving along in my car that I could no longer sing to “Eleanor Rigby,” or “Here Comes the Sun,” or especially, “In My Life.” So this effect is not unusual. But for some reason, this weird simultaneous symbiotic relationship and yet disjunction between the emotional states of youth and middle-age seem to me particularly pronounced with Pink Floyd.
Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? (from “Wish You Were Here”)
Indeed, sir.
Pink Floyd (and especially Roger Waters) has long been accused of quite a bit of mopey disillusionment. But my thought is that if an artist does one particular thing very well, there is nothing wrong with that. And one thing Pink Floyd did astonishingly well was disillusionment and disaffection and modern alienation. Roger Waters was capable of some very keen lyrics and rage and irony.
Pink Floyd is also one of many aggravating cases where you wish with all your heart that in order to avoid the devastation of break-up, the collaborating parties could have stopped their petty disputes and worked out their differences for the sake of the art that so deeply impacted your life.
But it doesn’t work that way. Many of the world’s great or influential collaborations were rife with contention: Lennon and McCartney, Rodgers and Hart, Gilbert and Sullivan, Gilmour and Waters. The list goes on ad infinitum. In some cases a collaboration is so strained that it barely holds together long enough for fans to blink, let alone for anyone to get any work done. Apparently the conflict and competition and dynamic tension – however you want to think of it – is part of what leads to the production of great things, and so you must simply accept that it will ultimately blow up in their faces and yours and hurt all of you grievously. It’s the price you pay.
It is sometimes remarked that Waters is what gave Pink Floyd a unique voice – its greatness, really – but Gilmour, in addition to being considered a guitarist with a respected and distinctive style, is what made Waters listenable and not just overambitious noise. (Put that way, it would seem that a lot of us could use a Gilmour in our lives.)
Well, Syd Barrett was the collaborator (initially, really the founder/leader of Pink Floyd) who couldn’t even hold it together long enough to do more than haunt the rest of their music ever after.
I’m afraid this will sound rather superficial, but in my desultory research last summer after my mind had latched on to “Wish You Were Here,” one thing that struck me is how beautiful Syd Barrett was – physically, I mean. Just a stunningly beautiful creature. Of course, the soul shines through, and all that – “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” I guess. Beauty is always everything taken together. (Find him for yourself so that you can look at dozens of images. Even in still images, he’s one of those souls who radiates charisma and intelligence. You can see why he became a legend.)
The entire album, Wish You Were Here, can be taken as a kind of eulogy for Syd Barrett and deceased hopes about him, though it signifies other more universal themes as well. It has been noted that these themes can be summed up as absence or “unfulfilled presence” (Storm Thorgerson). The songs “Wish You Were Here,” and “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” are unmistakably about Barrett at their core. Wish You Were Here is a very compassionate album on a more general level, and Rogers Waters has said that "’Shine On’ is not really about Syd—he's just a symbol for all the extremes of absence some people have to indulge in because it's the only way they can cope with how…sad it is, modern life, [and so they have] to withdraw completely.” But it’s not exactly new for art to be about something specific and universal at the same time. So, why don’t we just go ahead and say that the album and the songs in question are about Syd.
The loss of Barrett haunted everything Pink Floyd did subsequently. The irony is that it could be argued that even in his absence he continued to be responsible for the band’s success and artistic merit, as the void he left pervaded everything the band did, either explicitly or more subtly. Thematically, emotionally, the music continued to try to deconstruct the tragedy and complexity and brilliance and beauty and absurdity. Hemingway said that a man can be destroyed without being defeated; and maybe this is ultimately realized in many ways. Waters seems to agree, calling Barrett in “Shine On,” “you winner and loser.”
In a nutshell, the little age-old tale of madness goes like this: Syd Barrett was an original member of Pink Floyd who shattered early on. Though he was still around during the band’s initial success, the others were forced to move on to greater success without him because he became extremely disconnected and erratic in the midst of probable mental illness and definite heavy drug use, most notably acid. Gilmour, and especially Waters, had been close friends with Barrett. One of Waters’ lines from “Shine On,” says, “You wore out your welcome with random precision.” That’s about right. Following Barrett’s unstable activity, the band had no real choice but to go on without him. After Pink Floyd, Barrett passed several years with a few loose-cannon solo albums and other eccentric activity, and then withdrew from the world forever, including from his former friends/bandmates. Over the course of many years, much speculation ensued over Barrett’s mental state as well as the part that acid might have played in his breakdown and withdrawal from the world.
Gilmour has been quoted as saying that he believes Barrett would have had a breakdown with or without the acid. This seems curious to me, knowing what I know about substance abuse on both an objective and personal level. Perhaps even without the acid and other drug abuse, Barrett would have been unable to deal with Pink Floyd’s fame and would have broken down. But it is difficult not to wonder if the acid was a tipping point. It would seem that perhaps if not for this abuse, Barrett would at least have been able to go on making some kind of valuable contributions to the world, perhaps on an individual level, even if unable to deal with the juggernaut Pink Floyd had become.
Probably the most famous story is that seven years after his dissolution from Pink Floyd, and during the making of the Wish You Were Here album, Barrett unexpectedly dropped by the studio, having deteriorated so far mentally and physically that much of the band failed to recognize him at first. Waters, his childhood friend, was so devastated by the transformation that he cried. Others cried, too. They played “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” for Barrett, but he showed no sign of understanding that it had anything to do with him. Poignantly, he offered the band his services on the album. Following this recording session was David Gilmour’s wedding reception; Barrett briefly attended, vanished without saying goodbye, and that was the last any of his band members ever saw of him up to his death in 2006.
Inevitably, after his retreat into seclusion, Barrett became a lot of things to a lot of people. Nature abhors a vacuum, so we all try to fill in the gaps. In some people’s eyes he became a kind of poster child for reclusiveness, for disaffection – sort of the ultimate middle finger to the world.
However, I believe that it’s important not to “romanticize” what happened with Barrett. There is nothing romantic about being unable to make valuable contributions to the world. (The only reason in my own reclusiveness I call myself “fantastic” is to create any way for me to communicate with the world again – by adding the requisite “wink” that this world now requires in every situation.) Tributes to Barrett seem suitable. It’s perfectly appropriate to celebrate his life and the work that he did produce, and also even to celebrate the fact that he made the best of a life that was mostly lived in seclusion. But I don’t see it as appropriate in any way to glorify a withdrawal from the world that was probably not his choice.
Though what speaks to me is the more sincere and disingenuous “Wish You Were Here,” the song “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” is also a thing of beauty. In it, Waters calls Barrett, dubiously, “legend” and “martyr”; these are romanticized labels, if ever there were any. But Waters probably meant these and other words in the song ironically. The song’s tone suggests that the various labels he mentions can be taken however one wants to take them, going along also with the album’s overall themes of the individual being appropriated or manipulated according to other people’s views or for society’s purposes. (And after all, the song that follows the first parts of “Shine On” is “Welcome to the Machine.” Nor is it a coincidence that the beautiful cry of stranded despair and alienation of “Have a Cigar” precedes “Wish You Were Here.”) Maybe hitting closer to home, at one point in “Shine On,” Waters calls Barrett “prisoner.”
I posit that reclusiveness is rarely a choice, but a necessity. It can be more harmful in some cases than others. Sometimes it can lead to legendary creativity – let’s say, in the case of Emily Dickinson. But all of the evidence in Barrett’s case shows that his withdrawal from the world was neither a choice, nor the best outcome for him, nor the best outcome for those who cared about him, including loved ones, friends, and fans. Reclusiveness of Barrett’s type I think it could be argued is a kind of slow death. There is nothing more romantic about it than the suicide of Kurt Cobain – which is to say, nothing romantic at all. It is damaging. Is there anything more soul-killing to those of us left behind than the waste of beauty and brilliance and potential?
Barrett’s sister, who was his main point of contact with the outside world after 1982, has defended him by saying that the view of Barrett as a recluse and as perhaps mentally ill is the perspective of the rest of the world being forced upon him – that the world wanted things from him that he was unwilling to give. She preferred to cast his withdrawal from the world as a kind of “selfishness.” Interestingly, she specifically objected to the label “recluse,” citing that he continued to interact with his family, to leave the house from time to time, and to visit certain museums and gardens. He continued painting, read a lot, wrote a book on art, and enjoyed gardening. I don’t mean to giggle at Barrett’s sister, but this certainly sounds like the typical to-do list of a recluse to me. Most of it is mine, too. I must also say that in my experience, reclusiveness does not preclude visitation upon gardens, limited interaction with family members, or the occasional trip outside of the house. Reclusiveness is more of a state of mind than a literal arrangement of affairs, although the state of mind does end up radically diminishing one’s affairs.
Regarding Barrett’s mental state, the surprising thing would of course be if he were remotely sane and stable. It’s not exactly a well-kept secret that the greatest of artistic sorts have their troubles. Often this can manifest as relatively harmless eccentricity, but even in the most benign individuals, it will generally veer into something more alarming sooner or later. It’s a fine line; some lucky individuals just veer slightly back and forth, while some cross the line and never come back. Rob Stilwell has told me that he had a friend who after much thought resolved that only two great artistic individuals in all of history were sane: Chaucer and Bach. And Rob and I have our doubts about Bach.
I understand that Barrett’s sister’s view is probably the most compassionate of all – it shows a full acceptance of him. Loving any particularly complex, troubled soul means accepting all parts of the person. Attempts at chastisement or “correction” will certainly accomplish nothing (a fact that seems to be vastly misunderstood by many), and showing acceptance and appreciation for the whole person is the kindest and most helpful thing one can do. I’m not sure his sister’s choice to call his withdrawal “selfishness” is any improvement over other alternative “labels”; but in any case, it is understandable how the family member of a person with fame and legacy might have a well-meaning wish to deflect some of the seemingly more damaging comments and labels.
If Barrett should not be romanticized for his withdrawal, neither does he have to be condemned or pathologized. We don’t have to bandy about labels or diagnoses just to acknowledge that an outcome took place that maybe shouldn’t have; and just because Barrett perhaps found happiness and other pursuits and peace in seclusion, which indeed should be respected, does not mean that it was the best outcome for him or for anyone else.
This points to the fact that no matter how compassionate or even “realistic” a view is, that doesn’t make it necessarily accurate; it doesn’t make it the truth. Truth extends beyond reality into the ways things should or could be. Certainly a man can’t be expected to yield to every expectation the world has of him, as his sister pointed out. However, the degree of beauty that Barrett possessed, and the degree that others continued to wish to work with him or to experience new work from him, is surely a part of the truth.
I will cop to imposing my own philosophy on the matter, and if Barrett wanted to withdraw from the world, that can indeed be respected. But the evidence does not fully point to that, either. Barrett’s actions don’t belie a man who chose to withdraw, or who was merely following his own “selfish” will. It’s not as though Barrett left Pink Floyd and went off into some idyllic sunset. The time between Barrett being shut out of Pink Floyd and his withdrawal to Cambridge was no less than ten years (1968-1978). He attempted to return on his own to London in 1982, but lasted only two weeks, then walked the 50 miles back to Cambridge.
You don’t walk 50 miles from London back home to your mother’s house in Cambridge where you subsequently withdraw forever from the rest of the world because you’ve been going through terrific times in your life; you also don’t show up during your former band’s recording sessions and sit sullenly in reception, or go to their shows and glare at them, because life has turned out pleasingly for you. It is not as though Barrett’s break with Pink Floyd was a clean one. Their relationship died a slow, excruciating death – all parties were reluctant to give up on each other. One of Waters’ lines from “Shine On,” says, “Nobody knows where you are, how near or how far.” Though this references Barrett’s mental state, it can just as easily point to this period during which he seemed to almost literally haunt or stalk the band. For a long time, he showed up at the strangest times and the strangest places.
At the time of his dissolution from Pink Floyd, Barrett was in his twenties. We often see our best and truest, even if also clumsy and foolish, impulses in our youth, because we haven’t had time to be beaten yet. That Barrett attempted for many years to be a successful musician, that he continued to try to live in London, that he once crazily followed his former band to Ibiza to ask for their help on his solo album, that as late as 1975 in his visit to the Wish You Were Here sessions he offered his services, even if out of his mind when he did it, shows unmistakable impulses to connect. A man who attempts to make solo albums, no matter how fractured those attempts, was not ready to give up on music or the world. That he then retreated the 50 miles from London back to Cambridge to his mother’s house says to me that his subsequent withdrawal from these things was neither entirely voluntary nor selfish. And that he turned away entirely from music during these later years and didn’t ever want to have to look at it again doesn’t mean that he didn’t want it. Granted, his seclusion might have been the only or most “realistic” move left for him. But that doesn’t make it “right” or “true,” nor does it negate the validity and truth of the wishes of all of those who mourned him, missed him, and wanted to work with him.
Barrett’s sister nor David Gilmour nor anyone at all can be seen as any final authority on the matter. Their words may or may not have something to do with the “truth,” and may be well-meaning attempts to deflect certain damages. The nature of Barrett’s breakdown and withdrawal from the world is something only he would have known. And probably he didn’t know either.
Emerson said, “Music…takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are.” It isn’t always about the “actual.” Sometimes who we are, who we could have been, who we are or were meant to be, is a deeper truth going beyond what is merely “actual.” Rather than trust the place where Barrett ended up in his head, ultimately I find that my heart and intuition most trust Barrett’s childhood friend, Roger Waters, both in his tears at Barrett’s unrecognizable state when he showed up during the recording of “Shine On,” and in his pronouncement “wish you were here.”
We all know how to wish. The problem lies in the words you and here. Many of us spend a lifetime trying to locate either one.
With a Dog on a Hillside
Story, Indiana
“Summer has circled around again, and with it one of my favorite quotes always comes back into mind: "Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace."
— Milan Kundera
Standing brookside in rural, isolated Story, Indiana, on as perfect a spring afternoon as any that has ever existed, I told my friend Rob Stilwell that if I could have a remote place of my own with such a brook, I would never, ever leave. Not for anything. We were there for lunch at the old Inn’s restaurant, and so this property was certainly far from belonging to me. It was just one more beautiful view that I had to leave behind for the rest of the public to enjoy.
He responded, “Yes, but wouldn’t you want a few well-chosen companions?”
And I assented, very honestly, that I would. I’m a recluse; not a hermit. I yearn for a companion all the time.
But isn’t this precisely the trouble – the word “well-chosen”? We don’t get to choose a companion. Not really. Multiple times throughout my life I have chosen companions, but they did not choose me. Conversely, others have chosen me as a companion, but I did not choose them. At other times, even if we mutually chose, the bond was broken far too soon. Or we chose one another for different roles, different purposes, which could not be reconciled. There are never any real reasons for all of this, other than that humans are deeply complicated animals. Also, life puts obstacles in our way that act as fate. Differences in age and distance and obligations all prevent companionship at times.
After Story, at home that evening – an evening as glorious as the afternoon had been – I thought of Milan Kundera’s words, and of my dog, who was with me in that moment. I happen to live on a hillside. It is in borrowed space, though. Most of my life is borrowed currently.
I sat in the backyard, drinking wine, staring beyond the trees and the stately houses down the lane far over the hill into the distance where Highway 50 turns east out of town. When I was a child I used to stand in the very spot I often stand now and would gaze intently out in that direction, dreaming big dreams of leaving home, meeting exciting people, living in vast, far-off cities, loving and being loved.
Small towns are always called “quiet,” but the experience of this is more interesting than the word belies. When I lived in a removed apartment complex beside a park in Raleigh, I had thought it was “quiet.” But in metro areas, the noise works its way into your head and even into your soul. After some time you’re not aware of that constant hum. When I had to move back here to North Vernon, I realized that Raleigh had never been quiet – that this was quiet. It was the first time I had ever really heard the quiet. I’m not sure why – you would think that I would have first noticed the contrast after returning home from living in New York in my early 20s. But, no. I didn’t really hear the quiet until my late 30s. It was unsettling. One does hear dogs barking off in the distance around town, a melancholy sound because it is so removed – you can’t find the dog and reach down to pet him. In spring and summer, there are many songbirds, spring peepers, and the hum of crickets which is, for whatever reason, always so bittersweet. There is also the distant sound of traffic on Highway 50 and the closer sound of traffic on Highways 3 and 7. This sound is haunting, though, not comforting. Rather than being the sound of bustling economic and social activity of a robust city, this is the sound of people moving off to distant places, better places. It is the sound that haunted me as a child when I wanted to join the flow of Highway 50 off to some better fate.
Yet it is with these sights and sounds around me on golden summer days with my dog when I wonder why I ever wish to leave this town. There is really nothing that I need anywhere else in the world. In many ways, I’m well suited for small town life. I don’t like or need excitement or noise.
But I do know very well the reason I have felt compelled to leave this place over and over again. It has been to try to find a partner. Always. I have gone on great expeditions out into the world at tremendous cost, taken part in odysseys over wide swaths of land and water and mountain to find a companion to spend my life with. I’ve driven thousands of miles, moved again and again to different parts of the country, given up months and years of my life to the search, gone bankrupt, exhausted every avenue. The main reason I made the decision to go to grad school was because it would take me to a different area of the country to try to find a partner. In all of the adventures I ever took, whether to New York or Raleigh or Chicago or the southwest, I really expected some sort of Austen-esque fate for myself. I really did. And then always found myself back here, alone and reclusive as always - though always with a dog.
The trouble with humans is that there is no control factor whatsoever. It doesn’t matter how hard you try, how much you care, how much time or money or energy you invest. It doesn’t matter whether you give up or if you don’t ever give up. There is no guarantee that you will ever find companionship or love.
And, at last, this is part of what makes dogs extraordinary and why my heart fills with gratitude even to think of them. This is why they are saints on earth and make life worth living. If you choose, the dog will choose you back. If you have the few dollars needed to adopt him, he will come home with you, and the two of you will take care of each other, and you will have a strong bond that is not subject to the vagaries of bonds between humans. Nothing will break it unless you let it.
With dogs, we have to know ourselves. I know that I want to adopt a slightly older dog from a rescue organization. I definitely do not want a puppy. I’m terrible at training, and that’s important to take into account. This and other factors also dictate that a smaller dog is good for me, rather than a larger dog I might fail to control.
I have had my little dog snarl or snap at people, but I will side with my dog in any dispute like this and let the human leave the premises if he or she prefers. My dog is loyal to me 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and provides a continual supply of love on that same schedule. Humans are incapable of this. I know, because unfortunately, I am one.
Also, humans, often through no fault of their own, are crazy. Dogs usually are not. They are remarkable touchstones of sanity and normality.
Beyond being the ideal friends, and thus very inhuman in that sense, dogs are very human. One has to know a dog. He has his own preferences and quirks, his likes and dislikes, his own personality and temperament. He will pick on cats and develop a strange obsession with the mailman. This must be respected. Just like a human, he will snap or growl if his needs and boundaries are not understood and honored.
With great shame, I admit that as a child, I did not like dogs. I thought they were loud, ugly, smelly and gross. In fact, a dog is loud, ugly, smelly, and gross, but what I came to understand later is that he has many positive attributes that more than make up for this, and that his perfections and imperfections taken together make him beautiful. As a child, I was not yet mature enough to understand this. Humans are also loud, ugly, smelly, and gross, and while still beautiful, have fewer positive attributes to redeem them than the dog does.
Though we usually conceptualize the dog as the extrovert he is, I often think that dogs must be on this earth to bring consolation and companionship to shy, reclusive people. A dog, extroverted as he is, is full of interest and compassion for the shy. Certainly he is often the only or last one in your corner – the one who is with you through all of your deepest despair and who remains your touchstone to life and the world. He will want you to go for a walk with him and he will be able to remind you how beautiful everything can be – how much joy there is in simple things.
Though as with everything in this world, there are times when something can go awry with a dog, in general, there is a guarantee of love and companionship between you. Of course, like humans, dogs can under certain circumstances be awful and cruel – can kill or hurt other dogs, other creatures, or even humans. That’s the nature of most life on this planet.
However, if you treat a dog with all the honor and respect that you do a human, you will rarely have any problems. On my part, I try to treat dogs with greater honor and respect than I do humans. But that’s only my choice. I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I’m closer to animals than I am to people.
When a human and a dog endeavor to bring out the best in each other, this is just about the best arrangement that exists in this world – the best we ever are or have the potential to be. I would argue that it is as good, or better than, when two humans endeavor to bring out the best in each other – that the arrangement with the dog is far more likely to see itself out completely to a good end, with honor and friendly feelings.
But even a good end will break you. In fact, a good end is what breaks you the most. Many have observed that the best things in this world are designed to leave us too soon. When a good dog dies, it is like the passing of a saint. I have actually wished at times that I would die before one of my dogs, because the pain of loss is so intense. The love with a dog is as pure as anything we will ever attain, and so the pain over its loss is equally pure – almost unbearable.
But we find these little islands of tranquility – the hillsides on glorious afternoons – in between the pains of loss. One day will come the pain that will take us out, too, and there is no sense hastening it. There will always be at least some of the hillsides until then, as well as many good walks.
I lost a dog just as I was finishing up my last semester of undergrad. He became very suddenly and intensely ill with acute pancreatitis, and over the span of only six hours descended from perfect health to death. During the first few hours of his illness, I was working on some chapters of a useless novel that was part of my senior project. As typical humans, that professor and I brought out the worst in each other, and the chapters are unusable trash – no part of them able even to be recycled into another project. I’ve always felt it to be one of many terrible jokes of a vengeful god that I was working on these hollow, senseless pages when a very part of my heart dropped dead.
But even when the best companion you will ever have is already right by your side, you must associate with your own kind. It was recently put to me that a man had said that he was happy his wife had left him – that all he needed was his land and his dog. While I can agree with this on some level, I wonder how long such a sentiment can really last.
With human companions, I have had both experiences – complete desolation, as well as periods with the close contact of a friendship or relationship. I can say that it is always better to have people in your life than not – no matter how contentious or difficult or painful. Not only is communion and expression simply nobler and better than nothingness, but I can say with authority that the pain of loss is far less painful than the pain of loneliness – the pain of “void.” Acute pain is terrible, but passes; chronic pain is like the unrelenting power of attrition, and will break you completely.
I said earlier that a partner was something I always greatly needed. I can say that lacking one all these years, I now, without any doubt, have become the worst version of myself. The remarkable thing is that a dog doesn’t care. Even as the worst version of myself, he accepts and forgives me completely.
The search for a partner, though still wanted, seems less and less worth the energy. I don’t know how many more odysseys I can get up either the energy or the resources for in upcoming years. I’ve spent up everything I have. I’ve been on many long journeys, and I’m exhausted.
In the first draft of Muller’s Mile, in my infinite foolishness, I gave the place a Mediterranean climate. Later I asked myself what I was doing, reaching beyond myself to things I don’t know and probably never will know. I’ve never even visited, let alone lived in such a place. I replaced that climate with southern Indiana, which is the climate my soul knows. I am not a nature writer and description is one of my greatest weaknesses, and I decided that if I at least wrote what I have always known, maybe it would somehow populate the pages with a familiarity, a warmth, a comfort. This river country is what I’m from. As the years pass, I acknowledge that to walk out into the woods along the Muscatatuck River with my dog is the closest to anything like peace or happiness that I may ever experience. There are far worse fates than sitting with a dog on a quiet hillside, and there is no better companion for a recluse than a dog.
Dogs are the meaning of life. Nothing can start, or continue, or finish, without one. This is my version of invoking the muses; dogs are my muses. With a dog, I wish to live like a monk and write.
An Apology to Social Media from a Recluse
I would like to thank anyone who is part of my social network for your patience with me. Over the years, much has been made of the benefits of the internet for shy people. But I’m just not seeing it. I acknowledge there must be truth to these benefits for many, but for me, logging into Facebook “feels” exactly the same as walking into a cocktail party and being expected to gracefully mingle – that is, nearly impossible.
I do care about others’ lives and aspirations. I am interested. I appreciate invitations and likes, and so on. But I find myself overwhelmed by it all, and am limited to the occasional status update. It takes a gargantuan effort for me to log in, and once I’m there, I’m the proverbial deer in headlights.
My absence from social media for several years can also be partially explained by the fact that I was waiting for a better version of myself to develop and take over – one that would dazzle and impress. One never did, so I’d best go with what I have.
This is perhaps similar to the phenomenon of being in your twenties and looking forward to the fabulous future that surely will arrive fully formed beyond the next horizon. From what I can tell, for some people, this realization and consummation and actualization happens. But for most of us leading lives of quiet desperation, we content ourselves with inebriation and consolidation. The mid to late thirties are about, if not scaling back, putting bets on our best horses. Ruthless decisions are made. Mortality now awaits. This is the time to look it dead on – or else perish early because your courage fails.
Does this sound extreme? I don’t know. To me, it just sounds like daily life. Then again, as with the questionably-calibrated amp in Spinal Tap, I go to 11. I don’t really have any lower, less intense settings – perhaps another reason social media stymies me.
Some become angry with me, I know, for dwelling on my own experiences and emotions – everyone feels alone or isolated or awkward, they object. For the record, yes, I know that. In fact, I wouldn’t write about myself if I didn’t. At the risk of sounding self-absorbed, I write from my own perspective about things because I find it too presumptuous on my part to think that I know precisely what the insides of others’ heads and lives look like – whereas I do know my own intimately. From there, I always just hope that maybe something I say is relatable or hateable or, even better, odd or funny. So yes, the only reason I write is because I know we all share loneliness at times.
I’ve also lived long enough that I know there are different degrees to these things. It’s all relative. I’ve heard people talk proudly and honestly of rarely having felt a moment of social awkwardness or loneliness in their entire lives. That extreme does therefore exist, and so does the other extreme. Most of us fall, of course, somewhere in the middle. Even in a single lifetime, we are many versions of ourselves, sometimes to the degree that we are like different people in different lifetimes. Some versions of myself have experienced greater degrees of connection than others, and so by comparison, I recognize the times in my life during which I am particularly lonely. But whatever the exact circumstances, most people have the occasional instance of feeling alone – and somehow the increased interaction (and styles of interaction) of the modern world can have the opposite effect of actually making us feel more alone.
I’ve been told that it has become increasingly popular in recent years to bash or reject social media, but that doesn’t seem prudent to me. Social media has both advantages and disadvantages – as does every other mode of communication throughout the history of time and space. I always threaten my students with twenty lashes with a wet noodle if their papers contain even one sentence, thesis statement or not, that claims, “There are both advantages (pros, positives, upsides) and disadvantages (cons, negatives, downsides) to… [blank].” Never has there been an emptier, more senseless statement than that one. (Well, except for the one that claims, “[Blank] and [blank] have both similarities and differences.”)
Within the past few years I briefly dated a man who condemned Facebook and all social media altogether. Over dinner I made the rather inane and innocuous comment that it was, you know, fairly smart stuff. No, Facebook was not a brilliant concept, he insisted. Rather, it was utter stupidity, and every single person involved in social media is an idiot. (A bit of a sweeping pronouncement, in my opinion, and part of the reason we did not go on more dates.) This man also did not own a cell phone, and had no intentions of ever getting one. When we met up, this made finding him quite the challenge. (I don’t even remember: before cell phones, how did we ever find each other? We must have done it through sheer determination and cunning and using our eyesight or something.) I admit that I don’t quite understand what might be so wrong with owning a cell phone just to send the occasional harmless text: “Just pulled in at the restaurant.”
I don’t know. But that’s the example of being a total luddite, and it must be respected.
If this man had a fear of cell phones or social media in general turning into offensive distractions from more “meaningful” contact, I alone am proof of the fact that simply owning particular devices does not cause this to happen. I know how to send a text, but it’s very rare that I do, except to accomplish a particular purpose. Also, I am of a generation and a temperament that I prefer certain etiquette to be followed, so for example, I make a rule of never so much as glancing at any kind of media if I am with a friend or family member in person. I insist that my students show this kind of courtesy with their own devices while in a classroom (though of course a large number ignore me and/or roll their eyes). I feel passionately about the power and value of community, of “face time,” and of placing quality focus on one thing at a time without too many distractions at hand. Perhaps, then, the words for me are “scrupulously sentimental and old-fashioned.”
In any case, simply owning a cell phone did not “corrupt” me, if one wants to see it that way. And the reason I’ve never owned a smart phone is not through any sort of strenuous moral objection, but for the very dull reason that I can’t afford one. I’d love to be able to move fully into the 21st century, but the 21st century is expensive.
It’s perhaps worth adding the observation that we know social media has the potential to be destructive, or even lethal – that individuals have committed suicide based on the ability of social media to overwhelm with a sense of (negative) comparison with others, and with feelings of inferiority and hopelessness. If my erstwhile date sensed the dangerous undercurrent in social media, that aspect can’t be denied, and that undercurrent is as real to me as to anyone.
But at its best, to put it very generically, social media is a valuable tool. I’d give anything to be able to do it “right,” and I do feel I owe a kind of apology for being unable to “fit in” and actively participate. In truth, we’re all just the same old people in different times and circumstances. I felt exactly the same way in grade school as I do now – especially in phys ed when we played kickball and I didn’t even understand what base to run to. I also felt the same way back in kindergarten when I couldn’t explain why I was upset about being forced to take part in making a communal vegetable stew.
I am not even remotely an antisocial creature. I live to secure quality one-on-one time. But we don’t live in a one-on-one world anymore. One-on-one time takes, well, time – time that people don’t have anymore. It also takes a particular form of focus and concentration that appears to be on the wane currently in our culture.
Or maybe there are just too many of us now – too many people in this world, that is. Too much competition. Perhaps I just fail to win the attention of another, while others do.
My best modes of communication are hopelessly old fuddy-duddy – I love intimate conversations and long letters, which has been replaced by the long email (…except, that’s not really a thing, either). I miss the idea that communication is special and exclusive, meant only to happen between two people. It puts me into a hopelessly bad mood that it isn’t. I recently saw it observed (probably in Entertainment Weekly) that the epistolary novel is virtually extinct because people don’t write letters anymore. The epistolary novel has never been my favorite genre, but somehow this still seems significant and even alarming – that we communicate so little with each other in meaningful written verbal depth that we can’t even have a genre based on it any longer. That scares me. I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t scare anyone else.
I create giant wordscapes in a number of different contexts. It’s what I do. What I was born to do. And it’s really the only thing I do with any degree of real competence. But in the super-visual, low-attention-span modern world – a world also of the quick and disposable status update or text message – I was apparently born in the wrong place and time.
Maybe one trouble for me is that I think almost entirely in essays. That’s where my consciousness resides; it’s pretty much my only mode of being, other than fiction. So if I’m in the fantasy part of my head, I’m in the Last-Lorns, and if I’m momentarily in the real world, I’m here in essays. When I’m vacuuming, driving, on the elliptical trainer, thoughts passing through my head, I don’t really have anything like single, isolated thoughts – my mind, even at rest, collects thoughts and attaches them into structures that translate most naturally into the form we call “essay.”
Problematically, if I try to write a personal email, rather than producing any sort of suitable “social” form, I find that my mode of thought translates into something very much like an essay. The style of it is way too formal in an extremely informal world. My style is too formal even for blogging, which is a tad discouraging.
As for the notion of the long email (as a modern stand-in for the long letter), I find that even if one does indulge in writing them, they rarely accomplish anything, precisely because there is no context for them any longer. I won’t go so far as to say that writing in this way *never* accomplishes anything, because I have had several lasting and very meaningful exchanges with particular individuals during my lifetime. But for the most part, the trouble is that the long email/letter is a deeply considered and time-consuming means of communication for the person producing it that most people on the receiving end now treat as being disposable and quick “junk,” as if the effort put into it were nothing more grueling than a three-second status update. I am not in any way trying to condemn these recipients. The truth is, these long forms are just the wrong modality for what most people are trying to accomplish these days, and I observe that by using them, I am committing an unfair action by preventing people from having any sort of next move.
A main reason for the extinction of long written communication is that it once had the purpose of defeating distance – a long, detailed letter was the closest stand-in for a personal visit. That distance has been collapsed in the modern world. Because of transportation and phones and especially the internet, distance no longer even exists. That’s righteous and mind-blowing. But for some people, the distance still exists anyway. Distance is not just literal and physical. That’s why I’ve been dispatching tales from the remote Last-Lorns since 1976.
In the main, I have resolved to quit writing long emails and write here instead, which will be easier on everyone I have ever known or ever will know. (This amounts to writing letters to everyone – which perhaps equates to writing letters to no one.) Now, I will not of course do it right; I can’t help noticing that there are limitless purportedly helpful articles about how to blog correctly. But of course I will not be doing it “right,” or even attempting to do it “right” – whatever that’s even supposed to mean.
What makes the most sense (at least as I see it) is to cease trying to exist on any kind of personal level, and exist only on a “public” level instead, even though that’s against my nature, and even if I don’t do it “correctly” here either. For the most part, I don’t really have a personal existence, anyway; writing has always been the only place where anything I have that is like a “self” exists. Also, in some strange way, if I do manage to say anything wrong and offensive, it is better to do it publicly than privately. In a way, having a blog is a way that I can protect and honor people who have been close to me or kind to me.
I have always been a bizarre mix of an absolute open book and a very reserved person. On Facebook, for example, I often don’t particularly want other people to know what I “like,” in terms of films, products, etc. In some cases, it’s because I’m rather embarrassed about most of what I “like.” I really don’t care to share. And yet here, in this format, I will share everything I’ve got inside me and will never pull any punches. I have to be completely raw and bare, or nothing at all.
So, if anyone wants me, you know where to find me – here. Apparently this is where I now exist. It’s a strange world where an extremely private person can exist only as an entirely public persona – or else doesn’t exist at all.
Great Scads of Words
I am very sorry for starting a blog. It’s just that you have no idea how much I miss writing essays.
Are introductions in order?
I have often said that there is “too much of me.” I have always needed to find places to put it, but too often, it has flooded its appropriate confines and drowned something (or usually, someone) important in my life. I figure that from here on out, I may as well place it here, in the great wide abyss. Surely here it is harmless. Most will never see it. The internet is infinite, and here it does not matter whether it is read or not read. Surely “infinity” is a receptacle large enough.
Wise Wordpress says in one of its many tutorials, “You don’t just want to write blog posts and have them sink into the bottomless pit of the internet, you want people to read them.” I would argue to the contrary that one of the internet’s greatest advantages is that it is such a great ocean that no one is ever likely to read much of anything.
I am with the camp of people who see it as a necessary, though regrettable, evil to label ourselves. (Actually, I’m not with any camps of people; but it’s just an expression.) For me, just one of those many labels might be (bear with me) fantasist; also, recluse. The latter seems important to note because it explains why I appear ignorant of absolutely everything going on around me in the world: I am. If I ever write about anything relevant or current, or indeed anything that has happened in about the last few hundred years, I can assure you it is entirely coincidental and accidental. Any resemblance to others’ opinions or activities, or any reference to anything going on anywhere in the world would be, in fact, miraculous. Like when you’re having a conversation with someone while watching TV and in one bizarre synchronous moment you utter the same word or phrase that the actor on TV is uttering.
I write. I don’t believe I can properly be termed a “writer.” To me, in the modern sense of it, a writer is a person who consistently seeks to be published, and who wants to live a literary lifestyle, which involves a presence within certain circles, on the internet, and so on. I don’t do these things properly (probably can’t do them), so I don’t believe it will ever be accurate to call me a writer. I have an MFA, but we all know that a slip of paper doesn’t make us anything. Further proof against any ownership I have of the word “writer” is that I’ve never earned a penny for it. Money is what defines us.
Regardless, I write, and I’ve always written, and that is the one thing I know of a certainty. I write more constantly than I do anything else, and it’s the only thing I love doing. I write inane meanderings like this. And I write Muller’s Mile, in its many thousands of pages. Across the years I’ve always been doing that, no matter how quietly.
In my life, despite all the quietude, Muller’s Mile can’t help occasionally coming up. I have no elevator pitch for this leviathan and have given up trying, especially since I can’t remember the last time I was in an elevator, or for that matter, in a conversation with anyone. I can form an anti-pitch by saying that Muller’s Mile is a kind of elf-less and dwarf-less and quest-less fantasy. Recently I have had serious thoughts that it is a fantasy-less fantasy, and have wondered in a very desolate way where exactly that leaves me. It’s true that there are elements that exist in Muller’s Mile that don’t precisely exist here in reality. For some reason, I guess that makes the work fantasy. (Doesn’t it seem, though, that the existence of a few unreal elements in a work make it, rather unremarkably…fiction?)
In any case, when you’re in the position of having a few unreal elements, you feel compelled to call the work something. And that something tends to be the preposterously broad label of fantasy. (I know there are potential other labels as well as thousands upon millions of sub-labels, but it’s always made me very tired trying to think about it, so “fantasy” will have to suffice.) Fantasy suggests, to me, a great degree of inventiveness, and I know that I, for one, am a million miles from being inventive. From the review of a recent well-regarded speculative fiction release, I snatched these two phrases – “dazzling imagination” – of which I have none; and “virtuosic prose” – also nada.
I’ve noted that one of the most common (and very natural) questions posed to me (and others in my position, too, I suspect) is: “Who are your favorite fantasy writers? Who inspired you to write?” The question seems to implicate: From whence do you spring? Justify yourself!
I feel like I’m either a vast disappointment or liable to get my ass kicked when I answer apologetically that I don’t read in the fantasy genre. I’m not really a fan of it. Oh, I do generally trot out Tolkien. And by that choice of words, what I mean is for the love of everything elvish and dwarvish, who in their right mind doesn’t trot out Tolkien? Lord of the Rings is viewed by some whose job it is to have important views as the greatest and most influential work of literature of the 20th century. It’s been blowing out the back of people’s heads for a long time, and will be continuing to do so for a long time to come. So of course it blew out the back of mine. But that justifies exactly nothing.
I can also say timidly that I enjoyed Harry Potter as much as the next person. But that distinguishes me from exactly zero other humans on the planet. And because I am too old to have experienced Harry Potter as a child, I don’t even have that sense of proprietorship of it that those of younger generations have.
Moving away from literary pop culture and into the more general world of pop culture, I can boast of a greater ardor for Star Wars than most females of my generation. (Now, generationally speaking, as a child of the 80s, I do claim shared proprietorship of Star Wars. Don’t get me started on that one, though.)
Beyond that, the list continues to be rather generic and broad. Like everything else above, it’s stuff that most people can claim to like to one degree or another – Marvel comic books, Star Trek, and more recently for me, Doctor Who, which I guess boasts of somewhat less bulky fandom. But not much. I’m a geek, for sure, but I don’t have genuine geek cache.
But returning to the real point, I have rarely been inspired by a fantasy writer to write. When I did my MFA at NC State, I was relieved to discover that in fact, it’s not necessarily uncommon that the genre that writers read in is not necessarily the genre they write in. However, it is more common that they do.
I greatly respect the track that many take of loving a particular work or genre, then emulating it. But in regards to most everything, I’ve always been inside out, ass backwards – I was born all wonky and reclusive, and that’s my one and only qualification for writing what I do. My head sprouts fantasy the way other people’s heads sprout status updates for social networking and outstanding ideas for getting out of the house for the evening. If my head is anywhere, it’s imagining what’s going on in the heads of the people I dreamed up when I was still a toddler and have been following around like the proverbial puppy dog ever since (when I should have been following real people around like a puppy dog instead); they grew as I grew.
My grasp on reality is tenuous at best. I don’t mean in a paranoid schizophrenic, hearing voices in my head kind of way. Nevertheless, the last thing I need is fantasy as an “escape.” Just like most people live in the real world and need to go out to a fantasy film, I live in fantasy and need to go out and watch reality – in other words, what I need from what I read or watch is a lifeline to reality to keep me tethered. Most of what I prefer is just real, fairly straightforward stuff, I’m afraid. But what I really love is 19th century British literature, and modern criminal investigations, and a whole host of other typically eclectic stuff. There happens to be a little fantasy mixed in, but no more so than the average person.
But all of this is trying to justify myself as a fantasy writer, and I already said I’m not a writer. I did however call myself a fantasist. This suggests someone who lives in fantasy, someone who is immersed in it, defined by it in some sort of innate way. That seems accurate. It also has more than a touch of self-satire in it, and that’s a relief, since it means not having to take anything seriously.
But problematically, above, I call myself “fantastic,” or at least I appear to. We often use this word sloppily and informally to mean, “really great.” But anyone who knows me knows that I would never be trying to say anything nice about myself.
So to pause a moment and appreciate the wonder of words when we are precise with them and really consider their derivations, here is the word “fantastic,” in all its glory, as defined by dictionary.com:
fan·tas·tic
adjective
1. conceived or appearing as if conceived by an unrestrained imagination; odd and remarkable; bizarre; grotesque: fantastic rock formations; fantastic designs.
2. fanciful or capricious, as persons or their ideas or actions: We never know what that fantastic creature will say next.
3. imaginary or groundless in not being based on reality; foolish or irrational: fantastic fears.
4. extravagantly fanciful; marvelous.
5. incredibly great or extreme; exorbitant: to spend fantastic sums of money.
6. highly unrealistic or impractical; outlandish: a fantastic scheme to make a million dollars betting on horse races.
7. Informal. extraordinarily good: a fantastic musical
Origin:
1350–1400; Middle English fantastik pertaining to the imaginative faculty < Medieval Latin fantasticus, variant of Late Latin phantasticus < Greek phantastikós able to present or show (to the mind), equivalent to *phantad-, base of phantázein to make visible (akin to phānós light, bright, phaínein to make appear) + -tikos -tic
It would appear that I am fantastic in the sense of being unrestrained, odd, bizarre, (grotesque?), fanciful, capricious, foolish, unrealistic, impractical, and outlandish.
So I have justified that I am fantastic in some sense. Fortunately, I need far less space to justify myself as a recluse. I leave my house to teach. That’s about it. I feel that I know very little of the world, and that as the years go by, I understand less and less. I feel that all I can do is continue to happily dispatch from my remote island. The Last-Lorn Islands, as referenced in the banner above, is the name of the world in Muller’s Mile. I usually prefer to keep my “self” and Muller’s Mile as purely separate topics, but I will indulge myself just once by saying that for the most part, I am the Last-Lorn islands. They were born with me in 1976, and we’ll continue on together for some time.
I love this quote from Russell Baker: “I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.”
I’m not that disillusioned, though. Yet. Let’s continue to dispatch for a little time.
One thing I have long noted with the “too much of me” problem is that others have lives. I do not, despite much sound and fury signifying you know what. So, in lieu of life stuff, all this energy goes into the production of thoughts that might be suitably converted into words. I have discovered, through nearly forty years of experience and experimentation, that this is good for exactly nothing – not friendships, not relationships, not making money, not networking, not getting the house cleaned, not planting a vegetable garden.
It is good for one thing, and one thing only – making words for the sake of making words.
But there comes a time when you have to live the life you have instead of hiding away because you failed to live the life you wanted.
So please forgive me: I will produce words. Most likely, I will produce great scads of them.
If I Only Had a Heart
“Realism is nonsense when you think about it. I mean, there is no such thing. Nobody writes realism, if realism is defined as ‘fiction that is objective and real and not distorted, but is just, you know, normal.’…The nature of all fiction is distortion, exaggeration, and compression. So what we call realism is just distorting, exaggerating, and compressing with the intention of alluding to, or handwaving at – taking advantage of our fondness for – what I’ve heard called ‘consensus reality’ – the sort of lazy, agreed upon ‘way things are.’
“Which, of course, is not at all how they actually are…
“What I find exciting is the idea that no work of fiction will ever, ever come close to ‘documenting’ life. So then, the purpose of it must be otherwise. It’s supposed to do something to us to make it easier (or more fun, or less painful) for us to live. Then all questions of form and so on become subjugated to this higher thing. We’re not slaves any more to ideas of ‘the real’ or, for that matter, to ideas of ‘the experimental’ – we’re just trying to make something happen to the reader in his or her deepest places. And that thing that happens will always be due to some juxtaposition of the life the reader is living and the words on the page…the heart will either rise, or it won’t.
— George Saunders
I’ll start by summarizing my understanding of the George Saunders quote about departing from realism. He feels that genre isn’t an “issue,” that any work of fiction is more important in terms of how effectively it moves a reader rather than in its surface manifestations, and that no artistic work can be defined as realistic because it’s impossible to document life. Following from this, the purpose of fiction is not (can’t be?) to capture life, but to move readers in their deepest places, to touch their hearts. Probably Saunders’s most provocative claim is that touching the heart and making life easier, more fun, or less painful for the reader is a “higher thing.” He feels that questions of form in fiction should be subjugated to this aim of ease/fun/less pain. Maybe an interesting question raised by this (and judging only by the quote I’m not sure where Saunders falls on this) is whether forms that veer further from mirroring “consensus reality” in general make for larger numbers of happy consumers. If the economics of our own culture is any evidence – the multi-billion dollar industry of superhero movies, the Lord of the Rings phenomenon, etc. – and if dollars are votes for happiness, then it might seem so. On the other hand, there are of course large numbers of people who don’t make “unrealistic” leaps in their minds, whose happiness is inspired by art that sticks more closely to “consensus reality,” and many of them are good friends of mine. I take it that Saunders probably just means that art can take many forms along a scale of “like” to “very unlike” consensus reality, but that his focus is on defending those forms that veer toward “very unlike,” since these are viewed as more seditious and constantly seem to need a defender. Presumably whether or not the heart is moved is ultimately determined by a reader’s individual temperament, choices, experience, etc.
In the first section below, I’ll expound on the subject of heart, on what makes me happy (since that’s the only heart I can attest to with any authority), and on what music has to do with that. I’ll spend the largest amount of space discussing why I’ve chosen certain forms in my attempt to make others happy through my writing. Then I’ll conclude by responding briefly to charges from earlier in my life that I’m a fantasizing self-indulgent idiot.
The Heart Rising
“Heart” would be defined differently for everyone in the world, as would the experience of “the heart rising.” I suppose another meaning of “heart rising” might be “epiphany,” but that still doesn’t help much since both are subjective. For the purposes of this essay I’ll define what the “heart rising” means to me: it’s when there’s a particular place in a story – or often it can be the work as a whole – that changes my life through my emotions. It can be any emotion: humor, delight, wonder, awe, joy, grief. In these kinds of moments, I tend to stop, look up from the page, and make that moment my own – that is, add my own feelings to it, my own meanings from deep within myself. It has nothing to do with relating what’s on the page to some experience in reality, such as “Gee, that reminds me of Uncle David’s funeral” – though perhaps for another person that’s what it would mean. The response within me does not involve wordy thoughts or specific memories, but is something primal, involving only emotions and intuitions. And even though I’ve looked up from the page, it’s a process of looking inward. Nor have I been diverted from the story, despite the fact of looking up – I’m still engaged with the story itself, and its images are what I’m seeing, but the story has caused a wordless response that is (going along with Saunders) higher. I guess I count it as a kind of mystical experience. Exhibit A: page 23 of my story “Exalted” since that’s what I was trying to describe there. In that case, I did try to put the revelation into words: “…we couldn’t have perfection and love most of the time, but we could experience it just in that moment, and then imagine the moment as forever.” But that’s only what I got from one particular movement in the Mozart string quintets. The “heart rising” is always completely different in every instance, in both its feel and its articulation.
I like that Saunders uses the word “higher” in regards to the pursuit of happiness in the arts. I believe in the ability of the arts to redeem, to uplift, to give hope, to break through to new possibilities. I agree when Saunders states that a work should make people’s lives “easier (or more fun or less painful),” though all of those effects strike me as being rather passive. I would take it a step further and insist that ideally a work should inspire real change, both inward and outward. Without The Lord of the Rings, I’d still be sitting in Indiana. Because it made my heart rise, I decided to force myself to rise to the challenges in my life. Maybe this is not quite the same thing, but when my opera was performed years back, my brother Hugh was one of the leads, and a girl named Tiffany was in the chorus. They fell in love, my brother ended a bitterly poisonous thirteen year marriage, and he and Tiffany have been very happily married for ten years now. (Incidentally, Hugh’s ex-wife also thrived once their marriage ended.) If the show hadn’t happened, then Hugh and Tiffany probably never would have met. But more to the point, I’ve heard both of them credit the environment itself (the music and words they were surrounded with) as being a factor in the emotional shifts that took place. So yes, I believe in the transformative power of art in an active, not just a passive sense. Of course, the problem is that everything I just said sounds corny, and so in public one has to make claims, as Saunders does, only for “easier (or more fun or less painful)” effects, and leave it at that. I suppose the effects must be understated for superstitious reasons as well – it’s not as though any writer can guarantee changing a person.
But even if “easier (or more fun, or less painful)” simply connotes that a person was made happier for a little while one day, it’s not as though that’s anything to scoff at. What could possibly be more magical than making someone smile? It’s a powerful trust. And certainly, I’ve been transformed at times that I can’t point to any tangible result. I can say without a doubt that James Joyce’s “The Dead” was such an experience for me, and that I came out of the story a different person than the one who went in, though I couldn’t put my finger on an outward change – unless it counts to use “The Dead” to justify writing stories that are too long for the sake of the ending, clutching it like a kind of magic talisman.
Heart, Mind, and Music
Now that I’ve defined what it means for my heart to rise (can’t vouch for anyone else’s), I have to admit that my heart really must rise for me to experience any lasting impact from a work of fiction. Going along with Saunders, for me it has little to do with genre. For me I think that it often comes down to an issue of heart/emotions versus mind/cleverness. Not that “heart” and “mind” are mutually exclusive; certainly those two can and should exist together, just as the heart can rise in response to any genre. I guess my trouble is well illustrated by the two books Wilton Barnhardt assigned for the historical novel workshop this semester: Any Human Heart by William Boyd, and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. I enjoyed Any Human Heart a great deal, and as its title suggests, its organizing principle seems to be “heart.” Though I can’t point to any particular emotional moment or epiphany I had during the course of the book, the overall structure – the novel as a whole – engaged my heart as well as my mind. I admit I had some believability issues – even if it’s realistic that the narrator would have known Woolf, Hemingway, Picasso, and many other famous people, it seems a bit “forced” for the sake of a novel – and yet, that didn’t interfere with my engagement with the book. It just seems to back up what Saunders says about there being no such thing as realism. Any Human Heart is a historical novel that strikes me as being perfectly unrealistic. In any case, it’s a book which is not in “my” genre, but which I enjoyed because my heart rose. (The reasons why my heart rose may have much to do with its form, which I’ll elaborate on more in the next section.)
Meanwhile, Cloud Atlas is more in “my” genre, but doesn’t engage me. Certainly David Mitchell is a razzle-dazzle genius as the book jacket extols. Certainly the novel is stunningly structured. Certainly he cycles flawlessly through ridiculous numbers of forms and genres – historical account, mystery novel, futuristic society and post-apocalyptic narratives, and so on – with all the words in precisely the right configuration. The entire work is very slickly produced – so slick that I fall right off the surface. Cloud Atlas strikes me as being a work that puts form and cleverness above emotional imperatives, and yet it’s ostensibly about heart, spirit, and the connections between people. Maybe one could say that Cloud Atlas is about the heart via the entrance point of the mind. But I’ve always been bad at puzzles, and Cloud Atlas is one of those books that makes me feel stupid and inadequate, as though I’m just not good enough for the great genius that wrote it. I guess I prefer my geniuses more generous – the warmth and incisive simplicity of Willa Cather, for example.
Obviously my feelings about Cloud Atlas won’t cause David Mitchell to lose any sleep, and I’m a big enough girl to understand that the fiction I dislike is simply for someone else. When a work truly repulses me, I fear the failing is mine – not that it doesn’t have heart, but that I’ve missed it through my inability to grasp part of the range of human expression. Though I’m able to appreciate the achievement of a work like Cloud Atlas, I disappoint myself that I can’t like it. It strikes me that what I said above about David Mitchell is similar to what some of Mozart’s critics have said about him over the centuries – that his music is clever, pretty noise lacking heart (O’Connell 347). Some months ago, curious to understand all of the conflicting love and hatred for Mozart, I set out on a mission to see if I could come to not only appreciate, but to like him. I surpassed my goal and fell in love with him. Though it was a challenge at first, I think he and I came to an understanding about his heart. It’s a much different kind of heart than Beethoven or Schumann, but it’s definitely a heart, and it definitely emotes – it’s just that all of the surface cleverness and prettiness go right along with the heart. It’s who he is. Why then can’t I come to a similar understanding with David Mitchell? Probably I’m pricklier about fiction because it’s my own area. Then again, music by its very nature – the direct receipt of sound – is better geared toward emotional immediacy regardless of whether it’s more “heartfelt” or more slickly pretty. Since writing depends on all those pesky little abstract symbols sitting on the page, it’s more of a challenge to touch the emotions with it – and especially so in a work that is perhaps driven a bit more by “mind” than by “heart.”
I can say from personal experience that it’s much easier to touch the emotions through music. It was a thrilling experience back in 2001 to watch my opera with an audience and see them cry in response to my words and Martin McClellan’s music. Fiction, of course, can be deeply moving; we just don’t usually get to see firsthand if someone laughs or cries. And yet I know that my own prose stories that I wrote in the years after my opera were emotionally “dead.” After having succeeded in making people’s hearts rise with my lyrics, I was greatly disturbed by that. I’ve been stubborn the past two years about rewriting those stories because I was determined to eke out at least a drop of emotion from each of them (and indeed, most of them still yield only a drop, but it’s better than nothing).
Music is what I come from. I’ve been surrounded by it my entire life, and I knew that music would be my way back to my understanding of my own heart. When I decided that I must either be able to write something that made me feel, or else quit, it was natural that I chose music as the catalyst to try to transform my writing – using it as a central organizing concept (Modus Perfectus) or as a metaphor (the two violins at the end of Muller’s Mile), invoking it like the muses (the reference to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony at the start of Muller’s Mile), attempting to capture its effects in words (the end of “Exalted”), or using it as inspiration in passages where I’m sure it’s not clearly obvious (the passage about Now-or-Never near the end of Muller’s Mile is my description of the 1st movement of Mozart’s 39th Symphony). To get a reader’s heart to rise, I think you need a modicum of talent, and you have to devote yourself to a lifelong improvement of craft. But even above that, I think you have to be true to your own integrity and your own truths to have a hope in hell of moving anyone else. That’s why I turned to music for help.
Forming a Heart
After integrity and getting back in touch with my heart, the next imperative for me is form. Here I agree with Saunders that the choice of form has less to do with genre and more to do with what works have caused one’s own heart to rise. Nevertheless, if you have a certain kind of mind – the speculative kind that is obsessed with possibilities and alternatives – genre rears its ugly head quite early on, whether you like it or not. If you have this kind of mind, you often learn sometime during childhood that you’re suited for science fiction or fantasy. My mind has always known that it generates “fantasy” of some sort, although what interests it and what it generates are not exactly the same thing. What interests it is emotional and inter-relational truth (and so it likes Jane Austen and Willa Cather), and emotional and inter-relational speculation and alternatives and possibilities (and so it likes J.R.R. Tolkien and Gabriel Garcia Marquez). What it seems to generate is stuck somewhere in the middle, but nevertheless, because it’s in the middle, most easily takes the form of fantasy. Incidentally, what was important to me about The Lord of the Rings when I read it at twenty-two – the reason it changed everything for me – was that Tolkien shows purities, distillations of emotions and relationships that don’t precisely exist in this world, but which can nevertheless exist within my mind with stunning force and vividness. Since the essence of what he portrays was what I had always perceived in my own mind, but was too much of a coward to ever assert, Lord of the Rings struck me as an act of enormous courage and integrity, an assertion of Tolkien’s own deeply felt spiritual and philosophical truths. I know that I’m not the only person Tolkien has affected that way.
I’ve always felt that if we can imagine something, then it probably exists somewhere, even if it isn’t this particular spot in the universe at this moment in time. Earth in the year 2009 seems like an absurdly limited view of the universe. And though thinking in terms of “the possibilities of the universe” may not seem immediately practical in the scheme of pleasing readers, on the contrary I think it strikes on a very intimate (and pleasing) level. I think that acknowledging that anything we can imagine exists somewhere or could exist somewhere is important to a central notion of hope, of invention, of empathy, of many other things. I fear, though, that my view on things has often been met with scorn, and because I’ve been too much of a coward in the face of that, I’ve stayed silent most of my life. But in the next necessary step of being true to my own integrity and having a hope of moving anyone with my fiction, I must say what I actually feel and “see.”
All of this is why I have felt a bit guilty about seeming to “suddenly” announce that I write fantasy, as though I woke up one day a few years ago and decided it out of the blue. Rather, “waking dreams,” and endless variations of stories are something I’ve indulged in since I was a tiny child. I always knew that it was the main thing that drove me. But people found me to be an odd and unacceptable child, and so, being the inept, cowardly creature that I am, I went about most of the rest my life trying to please everyone while keeping my most deeply felt impulses to myself. It didn’t occur to me until I was in my early twenties that I would have to give myself permission to try to do something with it (and I’ll add that the fact that I got “permission” at NC State made all the difference for me). During my whole twenties it wasn’t that I was coyly holding back, or even that I was cowering in fear of my undergrad creative writing instructors’ dislike of fantasy. It was that I was privately trying that whole decade, and failing. I have ten years’ worth (and hundreds of pages) of notes and aborted attempts at novels. The chasm between what was “allowed” and what I really had to say was so wide by then that it was very difficult to figure out a way to bridge it – to figure out a form that would work.
So far, then, I can state that whatever I might have to say takes the form of “emotional or inter-relational speculation,” and must be couched as fantasy of some kind. Also related to form, and really more important than genre (it’s just that genre is like an uninvited party guest that arrives before anyone else) are questions of structure, point of view, voice, and tone. Starting with structure: for my own heart to be engaged, I need a clearly defined structure that holds its form and does not “break,” and that extends over a substantial amount of space and time. By “extends over a substantial amount of space and time,” I mean a novel, or perhaps a novella, simply because my preference is to be immersed in a world and to explore it deeply. To illustrate “a clearly defined structure that holds its form and does not ‘break’” I’ll juxtapose Boyd’s Any Human Heart and Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas again. Any Human Heart is in the old-fashioned form of a journal, a form maintained through the course of the whole novel. Via this journal, I traveled with the narrator, Logan Mountstuart, from young adulthood to his death at age eighty-five. He stuck with me, and I with him. Though his voice matured from young man to old man, it was the same voice. The form sustained itself over a long stretch so that I felt comfortable enough to move my things in and stay. In Cloud Atlas, the forms, genres, and voices switch frequently, as already noted, and I never felt that I achieved a connection with any of them. Each time I managed to get my things unpacked I was shunted to a new hotel (and I don’t care how ritzy each hotel was).
My love for “mythologies” is probably related to this notion of structures that hold their form over space and time. What is mythology but a structure that you can depend on, a system with which you have a comfortable and happy familiarity? This is especially true in terms of how the word seems to be bandied about currently in popular culture, as in the “mythology” of the TV show Lost, the “mythology” of Harry Potter, the “mythology” of superheroes. In these cases, the term “mythology” seems to mean roughly “the collection of rules, archetypes, lore, etc. that define a particular self-contained world.” This notion of mythology is probably the underlying common element (in my own perception) of the various works I admire, even though the works are defined by vastly different kinds of mythologies. Tolkien’s mythology is wildly disparate from the mythology of Dickens’s strange comic universe – but they are nevertheless both dependable, consistent mythologies. Connecting my short stories through Modus Perfectus was my attempt to begin forming a mythology since one generally needs a lot of room to “spread out” to form a mythology. Muller’s Mile is my slightly more ambitious stab at it.
To sum up so far: I’m a fantasist who wants to use relatively large, dependable mythological structures to explore emotional and inter-relational matters. What of point of view, voice and tone? This may be the area where my undergraduate experience did me the fewest favors. These three go together so intimately that you really need the freedom to work on them simultaneously. They sink or swim together. And yet omniscient point of view – which I’ve known for years would be the key to unlocking my own voice – was flatly forbidden by all of my instructors. Most of the works I admire are told in some form of omniscient point of view: The Lord of the Rings, The Once and Future King by T.H. White, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez, Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees, Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, and most of the work of my beloved Charles Dickens, to name only a few. I think omniscient is so often an ideal choice for speculative work (and especially for my own speculative “emotional” aims) because it allows the author to leap space and time from one consciousness to another, to ignore physical limitations, and to efficiently explore the connections among all the characters. Because of this complex network of consciousnesses, omniscient lends dimension to a work for me. I guess one of the things I dislike about some modern fiction is that the form itself (choices in voice, POV, tone) tends toward what strikes me as a collapsed-in consciousness, an existence defined by little more than the body’s impulses and a collection of predetermined psychological reactions. Omniscient gives the flexibility of blasting through boundaries, to give a sense of communion and of “other” rather than “me me me,” while simultaneously allowing one to establish a consistent tone, structure, etc. and maintain it throughout the narrative. It provides maximum flexibility and stability, if you will.
In addition, I think there’s a lot to be said for the dimension added by the presence of the author’s voice/persona within the narrative, and I think it provides one more point of connection for a reader. I have never found an author’s voice “intrusive.” (Who came up with that biased, judgmental term for it, anyway, and why did it stick?) I think the strong, confident presence of an author’s voice is brave, a way of taking a stand on what he or she actually thinks. I think of Bleak House and Dickens’s scathing eulogy after the moving death scene of the homeless boy, Jo: “Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day” (572). An author’s presence in the narrative is of course almost never quite that dramatic, and it’s true that nowadays we can’t get away with something like that very easily (how I love it, though). But just as effective is the gentle once-upon-a-time voice of Hope Mirrlees in Lud-in-the-Mist, or frankly, of Jane Austen, as she sets up one of her scenarios of a woman with a collection of complicated financial and social woes who must find a good man, as in Persuasion: “A few years before, Anne Elliot had been a very pretty girl, but her bloom had vanished early; and as even in its height, her father had found little to admire in her, (so totally different were her delicate features and mild dark eyes from his own); there could be nothing in them now that she was faded and thin, to excite his esteem” (3). This single sentence provides the whole set-up of the relationship between father and daughter. Though it’s more subtle than a mini-sermon from Dickens, we understand from this that Sir Walter is so self-centered he can’t see worth in anything outside of himself, and that Anne won’t be getting any help from him. And we know exactly what Austen thinks of him.
The issues of tone and voice have only begun to come together for me very recently, despite struggling with them for years. (Again, voice and tone may have been held back by the fact that for years I did not manage to do anything with point of view that interested me.) It seems that the missing key was humor, and I’m grateful that I got the encouragement I did at NC State, because I don’t know that I ever would have figured that out on my own. Though I’ve always deeply admired comedy and humor and grew up watching Monty Python episodes over and over, I never thought it was possible for me to be funny. And yet, I knew that my own material – my “emotional speculation” and the forms that it took – was in some basic sense, rather silly. For years I couldn’t figure out how to make something so silly work on the page. To some degree, I may have been mired down back then in my admiration of Tolkien; though there are glimpses of humor and lightness in Lord of the Rings, it’s mainly dominated by big, heavy, mythic emotions. I may have thought that because the stories I envisioned were full of silliness, they had no worth. Frankly, everything in Muller’s Mile is silly: Hostage Madness, scrum scree, the idea that when Effluvia thinks of Muller it holds the weight off of him, islands in a Brimful Puddle – all silly. But my hope is that I’ve at least found a way now to make it work on the page.
Beyond individuals at NC State who encouraged me, the other person who opened my eyes to humor was Dickens. The man can do everything – sophisticated satire, slapstick, absurdity, burlesque, etc. – all in the course of the same narrative. Bleak House contains the dark satire of Chancery right alongside the grotesquely funny Grandfather Smallweed and the slapstick comedy of the Jellyby family. From Dickens I learned: just roll with it. As long as you tell a narrative with confidence and conviction, it can have “weight” and you can still veer off into any kind of humor (or other digression) imaginable. If your voice and structure are strong enough, your story doesn’t break. It’s actually not enough to say that Dickens opened my eyes to humor; he changed my entire definition of storytelling, and opened up a whole new humor-related emotional vocabulary to me that I had never imagined – a vocabulary that I could actually use on a practical level so that I could move forward. Talk about my heart rising. Thanks, Dickens.
Though it took me a long time to wake up to what I could do with humor and a lighter tone, it’s not the first time I’ve ever admired something along those lines. Back in high school, Chapter VI from Book Two of The Once and Future King was in my literature textbook, and I dearly loved the combination of myth, humor, and hope. I’d quote or summarize some of the humor from the chapter, but it doesn’t really seem to do it justice. Only reading the whole chapter does it justice, because the silly humor is so much a part of the overall voice, pace and tone. At any rate, after various antics, Arthur outlines his plan to harness Might for Right, a very new idea at the time. Then there’s this final sentence about Merlyn’s response to Arthur: “The magician stood up as straight as a pillar, stretched out his arms in both directions, looked at the ceiling, and said the first few words of the Nunc Dimittis” (255). By this, Merlyn means that he has seen the “savior,” and his work on earth is done. At sixteen I had no idea what the Nunc Dimittis was, but there was a handy footnote to explain it to me, and then the passage, and the whole chapter, provided me with a definite “heart rising” moment. This promise of hope couched in humor and myth, and with so much respect for the reader’s heart and imagination at the end, seemed purely delightful. The chapter is burned into my psyche, and it’s long been on my mind that it might be my best model for emulation, because it’s a kind of writing that I not only admire but am also capable of achieving to some degree through my own particular inclinations and abilities. I’ve looked back over the chapter many times over the past few years, and though I didn’t actively copy it as I worked on Muller’s Mile, as I look at the chapter again now, I see that the tone and voice of Muller’s Mile are often strikingly similar to it. Even the style and pace of my “omniscient summary” is very similar to the passage of summary at the start of the chapter.
The end of the chapter (the Nunc Dimittis moment) is representative of what has long been one of my favorite types of moments or endings – it makes your heart rise by leaving you to imagine some kind of fresh awe or hope. In high school I also loved Lawrence of Arabia – the historical figure and the film (my tastes of course made me wildly popular with others my age). The start of the film sets up a web of seemingly unsolvable problems for the various Arab tribes in the midst of World War I. Then there’s a scene in which Lawrence essentially walks around the desert and thinks in a very intense manner. The scene has no dialogue, though the score is effective and gradually builds until Lawrence utters, “Aqaba – by land,” by which he means that he and a small band of Arabs will cross a dangerous desert (which no one had thought of as a solution, because the desert is supposedly “uncrossable”) and take the port of Aqaba. It’s his inventive solution to the deadlock the Arabs are in. This strikes me as being very like the Nunc Dommitus scene. Somebody utters the promise of a hope, a kind of determination to make good things happen, and it’s often (but not always) embodied in a single mythic hero. It stops at the height of the moment to allow the reader to imagine the rest. I’ve encountered this kind of moment or ending often in myth or fantasy (Stephen King’s The Eyes of the Dragon ends this way, as does the final issue of the original ElfQuest comics my father brought to me when I was a child). Whether I succeeded or not, this kind of ending was what I was consciously going for at the end of Muller’s Mile – to suggest that Muller is going to make a powerful change (with a little help from Effluvia), and then let the reader imagine hopeful things, wonderful things.
So, to sum up the kind of form that makes my heart rise, and which I’ve been trying to write in lately to make others’ hearts rise: I’m geared toward emotional or inter-relational speculation conveyed through fantasy or myth in a structure that establishes itself and remains fixed and dependable. Point of view should usually be some form of omniscient, and voice and tone should be optimistic and hopeful, full of conviction, and willing to veer toward humor at any time (darkness okay, too). All of this is, of course, easier said than done. When I started Muller’s Mile, I played around with a snarkier voice and with structural ideas that would have been “flashier,” but I rejected these things as not serving the heart of the story. I started over, making Part Two my entrance point, since that’s where I best understood its heart. Then I formed the rest around it. And yet, the finished product still seems non-ideal to me. The perspectives shift to some degree throughout the narrative, but each of my three parts mainly sticks to a close third with a different dominant perspective. I would suppose that after seeing things through Brum for so long, it might be uncomfortable for a reader to shift mainly to Effluvia, and then to Muller. But that was the best I could come up with. For Principally Murdock, I also devised something I don’t feel completely happy with (though people in workshop seemed to like it all right) – a kind of omniscient first person where the characters speak as “I,” but also know and freely tell the emotions and thoughts of other characters. (Not that this idea is exactly innovative – it seems to me the last book I read that did that was Moby-Dick.)
Another challenge for me is that I lack the anthropological world-building skills of fantasy and science fiction. This is another reason that I supposed for a long time that I couldn’t write the kind of stories I wanted to write. I seemed to lack inventiveness, like many of the Dungeons-and-Dragons-playing boys around me. What I’ve discovered in the past few years is that, according to others, I do possess a type of inventiveness that, though it is not anthropological, is nevertheless adequate. It generates more of an emotional landscape than a physically believable landscape, but it’s workable with just enough grounding. However, I’m bothered by the fact that bizarre, highly improbable elements tend to invade the landscape. While theoretically I agree that there are few limits to sticking with “documented reality” – as we see, for example, with Borges’ “Library of Babel,” which happens to be the universe, as well as “a sphere whose consummate center is any hexagon, and whose circumference is inaccessible” (80) – my preference is for stories that have enough warm and familiar elements that I feel comfortable enough to hang my hat there. One of my greatest worries is that my writing is hermetic instead of generous and inviting because of being oddly random. To make matters worse (?), I often knowingly undercut myself with a kind of bizarre humor when I sense a story trying to get too big for its britches. That’s why, for example, I have a Brimful Puddle instead of an ocean. It’s a form of creative self-deprecation, and I have no idea whether this helps or harms the stories, though people seem to respond positively to the humor of these self-deprecating instances. In any case, Silly Oddness (or Odd Silliness?) seems to be what I am capable of conceiving, and to have a chance of making anyone’s heart rise, I think I have to choose forms based not just on preferences, but also on my natural abilities and inclinations. I do think that I’m at least capable of forming a steady structure consistent with the idea of mythology – it’s just an odd and silly structure. Maybe it’s not so bad if someone has the patience to get used to it. I can also make up for it to some degree with strength and consistence in the structure of the writing itself.
These are just a few of many issues I have with my writing. I suppose I just have to keep trying for heart-pleasing forms while continuing to make concessions to circumstances or to my own still-inadequate craft. I was pleased that nearly everyone in workshop this semester found Principally Murdock (which is the closest thing to Muller’s Mile that I’ve ever workshopped) friendly enough to enter. A number of people mentioned that it worked for them on a primal, subconscious level, and some also mentioned that though the humor veers into absurdity, it doesn’t compromise the reality of the world. These kinds of comments lead me to believe I’m on the right track.
In Defense of Self-Indulgence
I’d like to reflect on (which really means complain about) a view I’ve encountered from time to time that veering from consensus reality constitutes gross self-indulgence. My first public (and very disastrous) attempt to come up with something like Muller’s Mile was when I did my undergrad senior project. I made the mistake of describing the nature of my project (including at least some of the ideas described in this essay) to my professor, which seemed to convince him that I was a hopeless self-indulgent idiot. He prescribed what he apparently thought was good medicine for me – writing a plot synopsis over and over for nearly four months. I got the impression that his goal was to “rein me in” and teach me discipline. Every time I went in to talk to him he always told me several times, “You’re not thinking about the reader.” The implication seemed to be that because my material was internally-generated and fantasy-oriented that I was too selfish to think of others – that essentially, my project was undisciplined and self-indulgent.
And yet, it’s often occurred to me that this “self-indulgence” accusation only works if the resulting writing lacks any redeeming qualities. I don’t know what I’d do without Tolkien’s little bit of “self-indulgence.” A towering example of gorging, unapologetic self-indulgence is Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, but it’s also a very entertaining and original piece of writing. Even if self-indulgence goes too far, it seems justifiable sometimes in the bigger scheme of things; there are whole chapters of dialogue between Wegg and Venus in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend which seem to go on interminably, even in the context of Dickens’s long comic dialogue exchanges, or in the context of gargantuan Victorian novels. But I’ll visit Dickens’s self-indulging mind any time, happy to endure passages like those to get to one of his great shining bits of lunacy or to a scene like the so-good-it-should-be-illegal death and resurrection of Rogue Riderhood. I’m not justifying myself by pretending I’m standing on these giants’ shoulders. But I am defending self-indulgence in general – where would we be without it?
I was very shaken by my professor’s “not thinking about the reader” accusation, because the truth is, the reader is all I care about. The entire goal of my inner meanderings since I was making up crude stories in my crib has been to bring about connection, to deliver some kind of joy and pleasure. If I fail that, I fail everything. Admittedly, my first goal is to get something onto the page that pleases myself, because I’m my first reader. But if it fails to please anyone else, then I would label it self-indulgence.
As far as my own case is concerned, I agree with the workshop members who’ve said that the opening gazillion or so pages of “Exalted” are too much, but I guess I justify the pages on the basis that they were necessary for me to get to the ending (here I pull out my magic talisman, James Joyce’s “The Dead”). But some people have also said that the ending itself is too long and drawn out, and I agree; and some have said that the endings of most of my stories, as well as of Muller’s Mile, are too long and drawn out – and I say, guilty as charged. But I also say that when my undergraduate professor finally gave me permission to quit revising my synopsis and to write, the resulting two chapters, though they were certainly controlled and reined-in, were also just thoroughly bad. I suppose that I’d rather be self-indulgent and at least have some good stuff mixed in with it than to be reined in and have nothing but dross.
But whether my self-indulgence in “Exalted” is useful artistically, I think it was necessary as part of my own process. Though Augusta’s voice is not my voice and I’m the furthest thing from a music hater, much of the beginning part of the story is autobiographical. I think Augusta was a kind of sacrificial lamb for me, and that I used her to “kill” myself and everything I hated about the decisions I made in earlier years about my life and my writing. When the story launches into the greater “metaphysics” of the end, that’s my greater reality and truth, as is Muller’s Mile. That’s what I’ve been trying to get back to – this more primal, archetypal kind of invention that comes very naturally to me. On a larger scale, my thesis mirrors the same process; the end piece, Muller’s Mile, is a grown-up, fully integrated version of my earliest intentions – although I use the term “grown-up” loosely.
Conclusion
I admit it: I believe that reality is distorted, not art. Reality is constructed – distorted – in such a way that it’s often impossible to truly know and connect with one another. To feel a connection with Mozart or Herman Melville across the centuries (or William Boyd or Gene Wolfe in the present) is truer to me than the reality of going out in public and having an impersonal transaction at the supermarket, all of us wearing fake smiles and saying fake words. I suppose all of this is what gets me in trouble. It’s strange, but it seems that one of the ways to be just a little radical and seditious is to try to be thoughtfully optimistic and childlike, and to acknowledge sentiment as something beautiful. The MFA program at NC State has allowed me to put almost all of my focus on finding a “form” in which to couch that sort of thing. Since there is no way to predict whose heart will rise and whose won’t, I think what constitutes making someone else’s heart rise is simply being true to one’s own heart, and using all the tools of craft to the best of one’s ability. For many of us (all of us?), it’s our own hearts or others’ hearts we’re trying to capture in writing – not “reality,” whatever that is. I still don’t feel I’ve gotten entirely to the heart of the matter – but with Muller’s Mile I got close enough that I’m not ashamed of that work. I can keep trying to make a better fantasy of the emotions and of different kinds of loves.
Works Cited
Austen, Jane. Persuasion. New York: Dover, 1997.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Ficciones. New York: Grove Press, 1962.
Boyd, William. Any Human Heart. New York: Random House, 2002.
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. New York: Norton, 1977.
---. Our Mutual Friend. New York: Random House, 2002.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Dover, 1991.
King, Stephen. The Eyes of the Dragon. New York: Viking, 1987.
Lawrence of Arabia. Dir. David Lean. 1962. DVD. Columbia, 2000.
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: HarperCollins, 1998.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Dover, 2003.
Mirrlees, Hope. Lud-in-the-Mist. Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2005.
Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. New York: Random House, 2004.
O’Connell, Charles. The Victor Book of Symphonies. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948.
Peake, Mervyn. The Gormenghast Novels. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1995.
Pini, Wendy and Richard. “Quest’s End, Part 2.” ElfQuest Mar 1988 Issue 32.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
White, T. H. The Once and Future King. New York: Putnam, 1958.
Musical Apothecary (June 27, 2010)
Though I come from a family of classically trained musicians, no one was ever inclined to teach me much about music. And though I was very curious about these names I heard around the house from the time I was born – Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Haydn, and so on – I was too shy to ask more about them. It was really only about five years ago that I decided to take matters into my own hands by listening to classical music and teaching myself more about it. As for piano, I only took it up seriously about a year ago. (And by “seriously,” I mean only for my own enjoyment, if that’s the word.) In all the arts, I’ve always been a snob. That is, from the time I was a child I was more fascinated with the things that stood the test of time than with the things that happen to be popular at the moment. With film I do tend to look to both the past and present; but with stage works, literature, and music – though I’m aware of what’s popular in the moment – I look steadfastly to the past. Part of it may be that I share a more natural affinity with the sensibilities of works produced pre-20th century, including the greater structure and predictability that we’ve discussed in this theory course. For someone who’s a constant storm inside, it can be mighty comforting to know that there’s the harbor of a cadence ahead. It makes it easier to enjoy the beauty of the dissonances.
Some months ago I told a friend that I had learned to play a few of the easier Chopin preludes, and he asked me which ones (i.e. wanted me to name the keys). Embarrassingly, I had to admit I didn’t know. So after this course, frankly it’s nice just to be able to say what key a piece is in. Many years ago I used to know how to identify a key signature, along with a lot of the other basic knowledge in the first half of this course. But over the years I lost it all, and recently there was a large disconnect between the level of difficulty of pieces I was able to work on and my ability to actually discuss them using the basic language of music.
But now I am able to say that the two Chopin preludes I can play are Opus 28 No. 4 in E minor, and Opus 28 No. 7 in A Major. My piano is digital and is factory programmed to play certain pieces, and Prelude 28-7 is one of them. When I first started working on the piece, I listened to the piano’s “version” so that I could get the gist of what it was supposed to sound like. But a computer playing Chopin (of all people!) is comedy waiting to happen. In the hands of a machine, the rhythmic motive of this piece is, for lack of a better word, dorky. A machine is not capable of interpreting and expressing a rhythm – it is only capable of replicating the rhythm with absolute exactness. The dynamic marking at the start of 28-7 is piano and the expression mark is dolce. Well, a machine can’t play “sweetly.” It can only play a mechanical approximation of “sweetness.” It can’t feel “sweetness,” and therefore it can’t convey it.
And so, when my piano plays 28-7 with its comical mechanical exactness, I sit there and listen and feel nothing. But if I hear a skilled musician play the very same piece, I’m moved to tears, or if I play it myself, I’m moved to tears. Not that I’m a terribly good musician, but I’m moved by my interaction with the piece; one is moved by a piece in very different and equally rich ways by either playing it or listening to it. But both of those experiences depend on an understanding of the interpretation of music – an emotional and intellectual comprehension of what dolce means, and that piano doesn’t mean that one plays at a mechanical level of softness without variation (as the computer inside my piano believes), but that subtle variations in dynamics and expression can and should take place. Playing 28-7 myself, and interpreting what it means to me on a personal level, it becomes an entirely different piece. The reason for this is that, though my piano can play pieces at terrifyingly rapid tempos with absolution precision and zero wrong notes, it doesn’t understand theory; an understanding of theory enables the emotional expression of music. Composers whisper their intent in the music through many details in combination on the staff paper – pitch, rhythm, dynamic markings, and so forth. Through this, you get a sense of how much exactness the composer wants in one measure, and how much give and take there is with another. A computer just can’t pick up on the subtlety of these cues.
It strikes me that I’m being awfully mean to my piano. I’m really not downplaying the technological miracle that at the touch of a button my piano will play a piece for me – and it’s a very handy tool to get a general idea of a piece. But in the same sense that my piano fails to understand the rhythmic motive in 28-7, it also shows a complete disregard of the piece’s form. The piece is very short and is in parallel period form. A person with an understanding of theory might, for example, decide to “lean” on the differences in the consequent stretch of the piece (as in measure 13 with the unexpected F# Major-Minor 7th chord that follows the A Major tonic chord). But the piano shows no sensitivity at all to any of the changes, nor to the end of the piece. It reveals not the slightest awareness of the two chords that end the 14th measure and the chord that starts the 15th measure, which I think of as the “chords of loss,” and which are the poignant heart of the piece for me. I play only for myself, but there I usually choose to make the slightest ritard and dwell just a fraction longer on the chord that starts the 15th measure, because as a human being with reason and emotions (unlike the computer inside my piano), it’s my right to use my knowledge and experience to interpret the piece in a way that makes it have meaning for me. In other words, theory provides choices. But my piano doesn’t perceive those choices. As it blithely finishes out the last few measures of the prelude, it merely replicates the pedaling marked in the book that came with it; namely, it pedals at the start of the second to last measure, then again on the second beat of that measure. But I choose to pedal only at the start of that measure (and later noticed that other editions by different editors indicate this pedaling), which makes more sense to me because it leaves the tones at the start of the measure dying away – a kind of fading memory of the earlier sweetness, especially following the poignant chords of measures 14 and 15.
I go to different composers as old friends, or as a kind of metaphysical apothecary – sort of a medicine cabinet for the soul (at least for one who needs it as badly as I do). Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that they’re a pantheon of gods with different but equal strengths and realms, and one appeals to each of them for help in different situations. Beethoven is for inspiration, for reminding me why it matters that I never give up on writing, though the world seems determined to squash it out of me. Beethoven is a rallying of the troops against impossible odds, as he’s been for a long time for a lot of people. In the case of Bach, I tend to neglect him for long periods and then crawl back to him guiltily in my very darkest hours; it’s like when one doesn’t give a second thought to God for many months when things are going well, but then starts praying fervently to him as soon as something goes wrong. Bach is faith and strength personified. Schumann is my kindred spirit; he’s for gentle, ephemeral hopes and fantasies. In many ways, I feel more simpatico with Schumann than any other composer, so I go to him for understanding. I’m a fantasist, and playing or listening to Schumann is curiously like regarding my own writing mirrored in musical form; we seem to share the same sensibility. And Mozart…well, Mozart holds a special and entirely separate place in my heart. Mozart is my aphrodisiac, my clever and wise comedian, the constant friend, companion, and teacher of my artistic heart (which is my only true heart), my affirmation of life, my one most convincing reason to continue to have faith and go through the absurdities of life day after day. (Yes, I’m a little intense about Mozart, but hey, he’s always there for me, which is a lot more than I can say about anyone in corporeal form. Anyway, leave it to me to fall in love with the brilliant Trickster god of the pantheon. Happens every time.)
But Chopin has a very, shall we say, specialized place in my apothecary/pantheon. I go to Chopin when I’ve fallen so low I can’t feel anything at all anymore. Chopin is a guarantee of feeling; he’s the AED shock to the heart. If Chopin fails to get things pumping again, then I could almost certainly be pronounced dead. I once strained a muscle in my face sobbing so hard while listening to Ballade No. 1 in G minor (not to mention, that piece and I have a long, star-crossed history going back to some of the stormiest periods of my life). To me, Chopin is like the famous scene in Spinal Tap with the guitar amp – “This one goes to 11.” Chopin goes to 11. But the thing is, I go to 11, too. I’m intense enough as is. I’m not sure the world intended for two 11’s to be put together. I know Chopin has been called the “poet” of composers, and it certainly seems apt; he has so much emotional particularity and immediacy. His pieces are intense distillations of emotions, almost cruel they’re so sharp and sparkling and visceral. I approach Chopin with awe and fear, because I know he won’t be gentle. He’s never gentle. I suppose this is partly just telling of my own past, but for me Chopin is always ultimately about the death or loss of passion – the incompatibility of passion with this world. And I suppose precisely because of the intensity of the music, it can never help but be about the difference between that intensity and the shocking indifference of the world around it; the air deigns to carry those freighted sound waves, but afterwards turns immediately back to silence.
Actually, I’ve focused on the prelude in A Major and neglected the prelude in E minor because I really don’t feel I’m up to facing it in too much detail today. The prelude in A major moves me greatly – but was there ever a purer distillation of death than the prelude in E minor? The chords losing ground and losing ground, and the sadness of measures 8-9, and the fury and fight of measures 16-18, and the weak final surge in measures 20-21 before succumbing, and the ultimate failure to resolve in measure 23, despite those final three resolving chords – resignation instead of resolution. The death of what doesn’t matter. The prelude in E minor is a metaphor for the death of anything. But it’s unmistakably death. For my own part, I rarely need to be reminded what it feels like to die inside. I “go to 11,” and dying inside is pretty much just everyday life for me. I suppose one could use the word “cathartic” in relation to Chopin, but I’ve come to really dislike that word. It labels a sacred part of us that has no business being labeled. What Chopin does is sacred and very important – and yet that doesn’t mean one needs to experience it all the time. To balance myself out, I have to stick with my funny Trickster god most days.
The Complete Opera Journals (2010)
L’Incoronazione di Poppea journal entry, 1-26-10
I’m not a musician, and am downright musically foolish. I’m only at the bottom of the arts food chain -- a writer. (Nevertheless, everyone needs someone to pick on, so we writers like to say the poets are lower than us.) The reason I know how musically foolish I am is because I come from a family of classically trained musicians. But now at least I can one-up them in a single regard: I get to take a class that focuses entirely on opera. My best friend from childhood just finished his doctorate in music composition and says in all his years in music school he never got to take a class on opera. My mom has a doctorate in piano performance, and says she never had one either. So there! I should say my mom is enjoying taking this class vicariously. After her degree, she returned to the small town where she grew up and has taught privately ever since, so she didn’t necessarily retain a lot of the smaller details. When I call her and tell her things I’m learning in this class or in Dr. Koch’s 17th/18th century class, she says things like, “That’s amazing, I never knew that,” or “Ah yes, I remember that from a million years ago!” The fact that I’m excited about what I’m learning makes my mom happy. And as we all know, making moms happy is important.
Further, some months before I had any notion of coming back to school, I had reached a crisis point; I was distraught when I realized I could never fully appreciate my beloved Mozart unless I could come to an appreciation of opera. There was a vast hole in my love unless I could love Figaro, Don Giovanni, et al. Not only that, but my failure to understand something so crucial about him meant that my understanding of his other work would always be incomplete. Trouble is, opera just seems more persnickety (a highly technical musical term) than some forms. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb if I say that many of us really have to deliberately work at liking opera. It doesn’t happen by magic. We have to decide to like it, and then study it, think about it, and labor at it. But from personal experience, I know the best rewards often follow that kind of effort. At first it can be awkward as you learn the conventions, the context, etc. of something unfamiliar, but eventually all of that can fall away, and you’re able to connect with the work directly. The point is, on a purely musical/emotional level, which is the place I operate from as a writer, the timing of an opera class was fortuitous for me. I need a grasp of opera in order to fill a gap in my emotional understanding, and thus, a gap in my writing.
Well, on to Poppea and related subjects. I find it interesting that we have Monteverdi’s first opera and his last one in complete forms, but only parts of others. It’s awfully convenient, as though someone planned it that way as a ready-made model for college classes to demonstrate the progression of opera in the years between Orfeo and L’Incoronazione di Poppea. While I find all the salient information about Poppea interesting (that it’s generally considered the greatest opera of the 17th century, that it was the first opera based on history rather than mythology, and so on), I suppose what I find most interesting is the rapid thirty-year progression of opera’s popularity from private aristocratic performances (Orfeo) to a general paying public (Poppea). I like the idea of opera as such a fresh, exciting, complete art form, and the clearly excited public response to the combination of narrative, action, visual effects, music, etc. And of course, Poppea, as compared to Orfeo, reveals how opera conventions changed in those years, how opera became more sophisticated in its uses of recitative and aria and arioso, of instruments and voices. I especially didn’t understand to what degree opera either catalyzed or directly ushered in so much of what we recognize as modern music, and so much of what I love about intervening periods, e.g. the development of the symphony from the opera overture, and the popularity of instrumental music in general. Like so many things one doesn’t know much about, I suppose I had only ever thought about opera in a vacuum, as though it popped up out of nowhere with no relation to anything before or after.
However, I am also not without my stumbling blocks. Usually I pride myself on my ability to think outside the box in regards to gender. I am, after all, a fantasist, and we’re often known for our ability to think speculatively on that subject. So I’m surprised at how much trouble I’m having with the gender-bending pants parts, etc., which I gather originated as a result of the castrati. The castrati seem like the “guilty pleasure” fascination from this period. So many fascinating things happened at this time, including many things of much greater lasting impact and importance, yet we’re all inevitably drawn to the fact that some men were deprived of their testicles. After we talked about the castrati in class, I brought it up with a friend of mine, also a writer, and as it happened, she had read a historical novel about them. The specific question on my mind (and probably on others’ minds, too, but like me, they were too ashamed to bring it up) was in regards to the fact that the castrati were prized as lovers: who were they having sex with? A. men B. women C. other castrati or D. all of the above? My friend said she gathered, at least from the novel, that it was D. all of the above. And yet I can imagine that “prized as lovers” makes the most sense in regards to women since a woman could have an affair with a castrato without worrying about getting pregnant. At any rate, my morbid curiosity led me to get Farinelli through Netflix. Quite an odd movie. In terms of its emphasis, I think I was hoping for more about music of the period, and less about Farinelli’s testicles, but I’m probably alone in that.
In regards to the pants parts, I heard/saw several different examples of “Pur ti miro” from Poppea, some with men singing Nero’s part in a lower range, some with women singing it in the originally intended range. I had an easier time “accepting” it when it was performed by a man and a woman; but performed by two women, it’s just an utterly beautiful sound. Apparently I can suspend my disbelief in the realm of sound, but not sight! On the other hand, for us opera laypeople, I suppose some instances of suspension of disbelief are easier than others. For example, it wasn’t difficult at all for me to believe the woman playing Cherubino in the production of Figaro. Her acting is skillful, but it also seems to me that it’s just a lot harder to get used to this “pants part” convention when it’s a historical figure like Nero or Julius Caesar who we’ve been taught to think of as quite masculine. But it’s easier in the case of an “anonymous,” younger boy like Cherubino. We bring fewer pre-formed expectations to that. So perhaps Cherubino is a good entrance point for working on one’s ability to accept pants parts!
I admit I’m recycling this last thing I want to say about Poppea from Dr. Koch’s class, but I think Poppea is the only work where there’s much overlap between the two classes. It’s in regards to “Pur ti miro” -- it makes sense to me that some other composer wrote it, because it really doesn’t seem to sound like Monteverdi at all, or the other parts of Poppea. It seems weirdly in the wrong opera, sort of “plopped in” arbitrarily because it was a good song. Maybe it was, going along with the idea that arias were often added regardless of whether they made sense with the actual story to please certain singers, etc.? It sort of sounds to me like a single released at the end of an otherwise cohesive, coherent narrative. I have no trouble making sense of the rest of the narrative of Poppea when considering the theme of love as an amoral force – only this final duet. I wonder if this is just because over the centuries we’ve grown used to other quite different “vice triumphs over virtue” conventions? That is, usually it’s done in the form of a tragedy, or at least with a great deal of irony. The “villains” don’t usually come out at the end and sing a beautiful, un-ironic love song. (On the other hand, I suppose there’s always irony to something this beautiful, because of our awareness that it’s finite, and because it contrasts so sharply with the lifetime of collected pain within us.) Or perhaps in these early days of opera such “conventions” weren’t set, and so this ending didn’t jar the audience, and they could make sense of it? In any case, the song’s beauty is undeniable, but for my modern ears it works better regarded independently, rather than in the context of Poppea.
Mozart/Marriage of Figaro journal entry, 2-11-10
Mozart is one of the artists who has had the greatest impact on me in my adult life. I feel very ridiculous saying that. It sort of reminds me of an extraordinarily bad self-published fantasy novel I once saw; in the dedication the author said, “I want to thank Shakespeare and Ernest Hemingway for their profound influence on my work.” Quite aside from what an odd couple those two would make, my point is that it’s absurd for someone so low (and I mean that in every sense of the word – I’m about as low as it gets right now) to feel so deeply about someone so high.
The funny thing is, throughout my life, though I liked all the other major composers, I had never liked Mozart, had never been able to connect with his music. A few years ago I finally decided I’d better try to figure out what the problem was, and I embarked on a project, listening to his violin concertos, piano concertos, symphonies, string quartets, string quintets, serenades – trying to puzzle it out and find a point of emotional connection. For a long time, I remained puzzled, sort of slipping around on the surface without ever penetrating. But then things went too far, and though I can’t pinpoint exactly when or how it happened, I accidentally fell in love with him. It was all a mistake, I swear, and it’s highly inconvenient with all the millions of other people in love with him, and me a jealous person. But I fell very, very hard. It was the kind of love that came with all kinds of wordless revelations, and the whole world suddenly was different.
I’ve tried to figure out since then what the problem ever was in the first place. I think part of it might have something to do with what David Vicar says in his liner notes with the DVD of Figaro: “So please can we dispense with the view of Mozart as a rococo charmer?” (12) Over the years, I suppose I had heard that prejudice repeated by various musicians, and it may have infected my ability to really hear the music. On the other hand, Mozart, compared to some composers, often does seem to require more dedication on the part of the listener to break through to the heart of the music. Perhaps it’s just that Mozart requires a more sophisticated ear than many composers, and my own ear wasn’t sophisticated enough until just recently.
I had previously assumed that one explanation for my trouble with Mozart must be that he was very far from my own sensibilities. But that wasn’t it at all. My own sensibilities are precisely his. I can’t disagree with the work of a man who said, “Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.” (Sorry, I can’t cite it because I actually copied it off of my Mozart finger puppet. How do you cite a finger puppet?) Also, as I already mentioned in my email about Figaro, Mozart’s unceasing comic genius seduced me. There are so many musical jokes that can’t be explained in words. It’s like trying to explain the punch line to a joke, which instantly makes it not funny. Mozart’s jokes are utterly unexplainable in any language except music itself. Vicar seems to completely object to the word “charming” being used to describe Mozart, but in my humble opinion, I don’t think it can be avoided. Mozart is charming and funny. It’s just that as with all truly great humor, you have to be able to read multiple layers simultaneously, perceive multiple dimensions. The music is charming, but it’s also ten other things at the same time, sometimes including “funny” and sometimes not.
At any rate, another explanation for my past difficulty with Mozart might be similar to the well-known problem of the Academy Awards constantly favoring drama and short-changing comedy. The respect for comedy apparently waxes and wanes throughout history, but nevertheless, throughout every age, including this one, there seems to be a persistent idea that works must be heavy, ponderous, and intense to be moving, or to say anything important. I think I bought into that idea when I was younger, but now it seems to me like the not-fully-matured thoughts of a child. Humor is quite capable of conveying ideas every bit as profound as ponderous drama, and frankly I think it often does a better job. Or perhaps the idea is that humor and drama work well together in balance – each lends the other extra dimension. There’s no real reason for “Voi che sapete” to be moving, but it is moving since we recognize the feelings of young passion from the distance of years, and also since we comprehend the sadness of the Countess’s situation as we listen to such beautiful and simple naivety. For that reason, I like the libretto of Figaro better than the libretto for Don Giovanni. Figaro seems to have more nuance and layers, while some of the dramatic situations in Don Giovanni seem more one-dimensional to me. (I’m just being mean to Da Ponte because prickly writers like me are convinced we have the right to criticize other writers, whether it’s Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, or some lucky bastard who got to work with Mozart. Hey, nobody’s perfect.)
I like that Vicar says Mozart is “simply sociable,” that the “pulse of Mozart obeys the rhythms of our own bodies,” and that the music contains “the natural beats and inflections of our physical human experience” (9). I have funny experiences listening to Mozart on my iPod – for example, at the point that I step off the bus one slow movement ends and a fast movement begins, as though the music somehow knows what I’m doing and is acting as a soundtrack to my life. I like that Mozart doesn’t even seem to mind if I step into a stall to pee; that would really annoy some composers. The music is somehow simultaneously appropriate for all activities at all times, whether happy, sad, or merely the everyday human comedy. At the same time, though Vicar and others call Mozart “profoundly human,” I also have to say that one of the things that awes me about Mozart is that he makes me feel things I can’t even identify. (Granted, that’s mostly in the instrumental music. With operas, the music is necessarily more grounded because it’s attached to a situation and lyrics.) But both of those things can be true simultaneously anyway – profoundly human and profoundly inhuman. That’s a bit of a paradox, but paradoxes are often true, and I think Mozart is full of them.
At any rate, I draw heavily on Mozart’s energy in my writing. A story of mine “about” Mozart called “Exalted” was recently published online. I also used my impressions of the first movement of Mozart’s 39th symphony as a description for an important structure in my novel. “Exalted” is better, but here’s that bit:
Recently Lilyish had begun going to the Isle of the Ongoing Party several times a month just to hear what Apogeans were saying about Brummagem and about his strange structure on Casino that was so important to him. This was what they were saying:
The unapologetic joyfulness. The unapologetic grandeur. Golden, of course, with enormous stained glass windows of every color all around its miles and miles and miles of perimeter. The breathlessness of it. The sun rising over it. The waves crashing onto its shores on the side of the island where the Puddle is deep, the light reflecting off the water and the burnished walls. A symphony of a place that barely holds together, that threatens to shatter apart it flies so high. A towering structure, dizzying in its heights. Ah, to glide up its walls, and then across the tops of the domes, soaring over its peaks! Stunning to look up its sheer gleaming face. Horrifying to drop from its apogee. Always something you don’t quite expect around every diaphanous corner or curve: a purple waterfall spurting out of a spout, a grinning gargoyle frozen in mid-leap, thrilled with its dance. Bravura was one word. Resplendent was another. Confection, concoction. The brassy ballsiness of it. Formidably solid, and yet gossamer and aery. The youthful energy and loftiness and majesty of it. The height and the sheer driving force, without the trough in which to rest and take a breath. That Brummagem Bratt cackling and crowing over the sound of the rock creaking and bending and stretching! And just when you thought he had exhausted the possibilities, that there was no new place he could go, no natural next step, then there would be a rapid run of a thousand shining ideas, just throwaways, like a rapid burst of whiz-bangs.
But usually I draw from Mozart in more purely emotional ways, and no one would ever notice it in my work. This course on opera was fortuitous as I realized I could never fully appreciate Mozart unless I could come to an appreciation of opera. I had thought that was an impossible task. But I specialize in the impossible, and it seems it’s coming along well.
Bel Canto journal entry, 2-23-10
Pardon me if this journal entry is pretty useless. My friend’s husband (with whom I was also friends) died quite unexpectedly this week, leaving two small children behind. Though I’ve seen a lot of death, I can say without a doubt that this is the hardest thing I’ve ever experienced or witnessed. I know it’s time for Bel Canto, but I do just have to add that Figaro helped keep me going this past week. On the way to viewings, wakes, masses, memorial services, and family gatherings, I’ve had Figaro playing in the car, and somehow it gives some sense of hope and redemption in the midst of the chaos.
Well, for me, Bel Canto just isn’t Mozart. But I must say I do very much love Rossini and Donizetti’s apparent humility. I like the Rossini quote from class, about Mozart being the inspiration of his youth, the torment of his working years, and the consolation of his old age. And I also like Donizetti’s quote from Wikipedia:
Donizetti, when asked which of his own operas he thought the best, spontaneously replied, 'How can I say which? A father always has a preference for a crippled child, and I have so many.'" (Louis Engel: "From Mozart to Mario", 1886)
I love Donizetti’s wit, and boy, can I identify with how he feels. Though I guess some consider me a talented fiction writer, I’m most assuredly not a once-in-a-hundred-years genius like Mozart, so I guess I’d have to identify more with these guys – not that I’m likely to reach their exalted levels either. I’ve always considered myself just intelligent to understand that I’m not brilliant, and to thus feel the pain of it. That’s part of why Amadeus is one of my favorite works. Oh, how I understand all that Salieri says, and the source of his “villainy.” True villainy always comes from love, and a sense that whatever we hold to be eternal and sacred has violated and rejected us. I’m there now, and there’s nothing more bitter.
At any rate, back to topic…I shall feign cheerfulness. I have to respect these opera composers of this period churning out popular compositions for the masses. I suppose it sort of reminds me of the hit-making sensibility of a later time and place: Tin Pan Alley. I’d certainly be interested in seeing all of The Barber of Seville sometime. If it hadn’t been for the events of this past week, I might have been my overachieving self and sought it out and watched it. Judging only by the two arias we watched, the overriding tone of the opera seemed to me to be “good, light entertainment.” Simply put, it seems “fun.” On the other hand, I did find myself feeling slightly annoyed by Rosina’s aria. Perhaps I’m a person who will tolerate only so many vocal acrobatics before getting a bit bored by it.
Again, while appreciating the degree of vocal skill involved, I found the mad scene from Lucia vaguely annoying after awhile. I did enjoy the sextet, but for me, it’s interesting to think of it in relation to Mozart’s ensembles. While the overall sound of the Lucia sextet is beautiful, it doesn’t seem to have Mozart’s attention to unique character expressed through each individual voice. It has impressive emotional impact, but not the same kind of nuance.
I admit that the “beautiful singing” emphasis probably just isn’t my thing. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bias because I’m a writer and have a preference for narrative. Rather, in general I seem to have a bias in all the arts for balance and moderation. Somehow I guess I think of the term “idiomatic figuration.” This will probably turn out to be a dumb, flaky analogy, but here goes: I only like playing works that were written specifically for the piano as an instrument. I can’t stand half-assed popular arrangements that ignore 90% of the piano’s capabilities and sensitivities. Well, to me, part of the “idiomatic figuration” of opera would involve sensitivity to all of its different potentials and trying to achieve a balance, rather than an exaggeration of any one facet. See? I don’t think that analogy worked out very well. But perhaps you get what I’m trying to say. I’m sure it fits somewhere into a debate that’s been going on for the last few hundred years.
When I think about it, the “pendulum swing” we talked about in class still goes on in current-day popular music. For awhile there tends to be more of an emphasis on “form” (pretty singing, good dancing, etc.), and then we go into a period when “substance” reigns again (heavy lyrics, deep messages). But hey, different strokes for different folks. It’s good to have a little something for everybody.
March 7, 2010
Dear Giuseppe Verdi (or Joe Green, as my mom likes to call you),
No, we don’t know one another, and I realize you’ve been dead a long time, but a little thing like that never stops me. I doubt you particularly care what I have to say, but I’m writing to explain why I can’t like your work. Oh, I recognize its brilliance, power, narrative depth, and the way that you synthesized all of the elements of opera up to that time. But here’s the thing: because I define the aesthetic sensibilities of my own writing against other aesthetic sensibilities that I encounter (mainly in music and literature), it’s very instructive for my own purposes to think about why I just don’t seem to be connecting with your work. Over the past several years, I’ve been gradually noticing that my sensibilities have changed from earlier times in my life, and this week I think you’ve brought me new revelations about how and why I’ve changed.
Several years ago I used to still pride myself on my ability to not only appreciate, but to like virtually every artistic expression that I came across, in any style, tone, or genre. But in more recent times, I’ve surprised myself by starting to “pull back,” to reject certain work as being unsuitable to my own tastes. I’ve felt guilty about it. And yet, I’m beginning to wonder if, intuitively speaking, it’s the right thing. Maybe all those years of openness and sponging up the full range of possibilities already served their purpose, and now I’ve reached another point of development where I’m ready to define myself, my sensibilities, and my tastes; to pull back and refine. To be patient at the plate, waiting for exactly the right kind of pitch for my style of hitting, instead of swinging at every pitch. (Ever been to a baseball game, Verdi?)
How to put it? I’ll be blunt. Verdi, my friend, the older I get, the less I feel the need to be hit over the head with eleven thousand tons of tragic irony. When I was 18 (or 20 or 23), I would have loved Rigoletto, La Traviata, and Il Trovatore. Back then I loved oversized Romantic sensibility, intense emotions, and heartbreaking tragedies and ironies. I loved sobbing my heart out. In fact, if we could go back in time and tell young Elisabeth that eventually her tolerance for such things would wane, I doubt she would have believed us. Young Elisabeth would probably not recognize the Elisabeth who has taken her place.
Oh, Verdi, I just don’t feel a need to see tragedy blown up to operatic proportions anymore; my own emotions are operatic enough. I can’t say that I’ve necessarily seen more tragedy in my life than other individuals, but I’ve seen my share, and throughout my life I’ve certainly taken the road less traveled. I saw the death of my father when I was ten, and five years later I saw my step-father sent to prison as an innocent man, his career and his life ruined. At 18, I moved to NYC and dedicated my life to serving others in a religious order; I left at 22 because I missed the arts so deeply, but my soul was permanently torn in two with guilt. While there I was deeply in love with a man and wrote love sonnets to him, but he never regarded me with anything but utter indifference. I’ve visited alcoholism, suffered crushing isolation and loneliness for many years, and recently experienced the horrific death of a friend. I’m not getting any writing done these days, which is my only real source of joy. I’m unmarried with no real prospects, and getting too old to be able to have any children. Soon I must make the decision whether to try to have a child by myself, or to let go of that dream and devote the time and energy instead to a celibate life of writing. If I get accepted next month for teaching licensure (a career I don’t want), by the time I finish the training, I’ll have at least $150,000 in debt. Sound melodramatic? It is, and it happens to be my “real” life. Verdi, I’m already heartbroken, crushed, and weary. Perhaps this is just not the right time for me to be receptive to your work. In five years, perhaps I would feel differently. But right now, I don’t want to see a scene of a father holding his dying daughter in his arms; only a few days ago I listened to my friend’s mother describe what it was like to be the one to find her son’s dead body. And all of it, Verdi, all of it, has been utterly steeped in dark irony (just like your work) and stamped with the official seal of the indifference of the universe to mankind’s suffering.
So couldn’t you treat me gently, Verdi? I don’t need more tragedy. I need faith.
How do I explain? In La Traviata, in one of the act finales we see Violetta’s conflict between whether to live life for pleasure or to take a chance on love. She is asking if love is real, if it can be trusted. This seems to be part of the age-old conflict in many narratives between reality and the “romantic,” between the truth of our senses and the truth of the heart. Well, recently I went through several very dark days, wrestling in my own way over whether to trust “reality” or to trust my heart. I had been supposed to go and stay with my best friend whose husband died (the aforementioned dead body). For the past few weeks, I had given her many words of support, and one thing I told her was that I thought of her as a sister; that of all the people I’ve met, if I could choose a sister, I would choose her. I was very honored that she had asked me to stay with her after her family went back to Texas. I felt needed, and I looked forward to fulfilling everything I had always hoped and dreamed that friendship could be. I packed all of my bags, but the same day I was supposed to move out to her house, I received a message from her that there had been a change, and her parents had decided her 18-year-old sister would be staying with her instead.
Without ignoring the fact that others’ pain in these circumstances is senior to mine, nevertheless (in addition to losing a friend and watching others I care about suffer) this brought me a fresh, personal kind of pain. I was crushed, though of course I couldn’t say anything to my friend about it. I’ve been to her house to visit since then, and recognize that I’ve been relegated once again to being a guest, an “outsider” of sorts. She and her real sister spend literally all their time together, and I sit there politely while they discuss household matters, plans for the future, what movie they’re going to watch. It’s not that I’m jealous or sulking – in fact, I’ve been quite busy and productive. It’s good that her sister is with her, and I want my friend’s life to get better, whether it includes me or not. But that does nothing to help my disillusionment.
I personally hold friendship as a very high kind of love; much of my writing focuses on friendship. Violetta sings of love as a “crucifixion of the heart.” But not all crucifixions of the heart have to do with the romantic love between a man and a woman. There are other kinds of love, other kinds of crucifixion that are just as painful, depending on what each of us most values. And so, it felt like a door had been shut on all of my love, my idealism, my belief in friendship, my desire for closeness, for a sister, for all of the things my heart had wanted. I realized the stark reality: I have no sister (no siblings at all), and never will. That particular loneliness can never be assuaged. And I can never be someone’s sister (or even close companion) just by wishing it. Societal conventions rule us all. The real sister is there with my friend; the one who merely wishes in her heart to be a sister is not. And so for a few days, it seemed to me that love had failed and reality/tragedy had won, as seems to happen in your operas. (I know I’m oversimplifying, but overall, that’s what the tone of your operas feels like to me.)
But then, I came out the other side of this pain with a resolution. I’m still tentatively working it out, but it seems to me that in the heightened emotions immediately following the tragedy, I got two different realities mixed up: the tragic reality of this world in which we live, and the reality of the heart. I accidentally believed that the reality of the heart (the desire to be like a sister to my friend) could become true in the reality of the world. It cannot. And yet, why can’t these two worlds exist separately, with equal reality? Why do we necessarily have to consider them to be in conflict, as in La Traviata, and so many other works by other artists? I do love my friend as a sister, regardless of whether or not the societal strictures of the real world provide me with the means of actual expression or demonstration of it. The lack of these things does not make the truth of my heart any less true or real. Even if my friend and I never spoke again in reality, that love in my heart would remain unchanged. And so, it seems to me that I can become both more of a realist in my life, and more of an idealist in my heart. Perhaps that sounds like the kind of split that leads to insanity, but in fact, this conclusion has brought me a great deal of peace. (So don’t cue up one of your mad scenes just yet, despite my letters to dead men.)
Verdi, my fiction is the landscape of my heart. And when I care about someone, I often end up casting them in that world (though in “archetypal” ways, rather than direct character portraits). This week it suddenly made sense to me why I do this. By placing people I love there, it’s a way of reinforcing the existence of that truth – the truth of the heart, the truth of love. In reality, I can’t always love people completely, but in that place, I can. I can express my love completely and perfectly there. And why should that world of the heart be considered any less real? In many ways, I feel its truth more fully than the “real” world. That world of the heart always remains true, just as my love for my friend remains true in that place, regardless of what happens in reality. Life is fickle and cruel, but the heart isn’t. I guess one can be dark and pessimistic and say that the landscape of the heart is meaningless in the end and that tragedy and cold reality always triumph; but I don’t know why one can’t just as easily say that the heart is a world of its own with its own triumphs, though its ultimate ends are admittedly more mysterious.
I’m not really sure why my sensibilities always turn in this direction – why my aesthetic preferences and expressions are comic in nature, rather than tragic. Everyone is just different, I guess. I know that you lost your beloved wife and children at a young age. That was undeniably horrific, and perhaps it explains your lifelong penchant for the tragic. And I know that you were simply writing according to your own heart and your own talents, embracing your penchant for the intense and dramatic, and writing in the genres and idioms of your time. It’s no different now. I’m acquainted with a lot of other fiction writers, and many of them embrace realism/tragedy/darkness in their work the darker their lives get. In fact, this is true of my friend. Over the course of her life she’s seen as much tragedy as anyone I’ve ever known, and her writing – much like yours, Verdi – is powerful, intense, dark, and tragic. But in my own case, the darker my life gets (and it’s gotten significantly darker the past several years), the more my writing tends to turn to a comic sensibility – to that reality I perceive in my heart rather than the outer tragic reality. And to tell the truth, it’s a lonely proposition to be a literary writer with a comic sensibility (though yes, I write literary fantasy). I’m vastly outnumbered. Nearly all of the literary writers I know write dark, murky fiction.
Speaking of that, you’ve also helped me realize part of why I love Mozart so much. Now, I know it’s not fair to compare two very different composers, nor is it fair to compare opera buffa to opera seria. I’m just using the comparison to explain my own preferences. And so I will bring up again this little matter of your tragic irony plummeting me violently over the head. At the end of Rigoletto, while he sings of having achieved his revenge, there’s a horrible irony that we as the audience know the body hidden in the bag is actually that of his daughter. We dread the agonizing moment of truth when Rigoletto uncovers the face and finds Gilda. A much different kind of irony occurs in Act 4 of The Marriage of Figaro in Figaro’s aria “Aprite un po’quegli occhi.” On the surface, this aria is a bitter misogynistic rant, but we as the audience know to take the opposite meaning since (unlike Figaro) we know the women’s love remains true. To me, the irony here is serving a relatively rare purpose in the arts: to make the point that love is steadfast.
Making the point for love back in Act 3, and thus informing the meaning of Figaro’s aria in Act 4, is the towering strength of “Dove sono.” That aria is about this very thing I’ve been talking about: the truth of the heart and the hope in that truth. For me, the most uniquely brilliant thing about that aria is the turn near the end when it progresses from sorrow to hope (from the cavatina to the cabaletta?), and Rosina expresses a soaring triumph and faith in the love in her own heart. Everything I’ve been trying to say is summed up in that aria. How surprisingly rare it is to find that kind of comic, hopeful sentiment intelligently expressed. That’s why Mozart is more precious to me than the gold and jewels to pay off all my debts, or all the riches in the world, for that matter. (And the same sensibility runs through all of his work in all genres.) I can weep at your work, Verdi, because it buffets all of my emotions with tragic events. But I can weep at “Dove sono” because it touches the deepest part of me that I consider truth, the only part of my being that I consider unassailably joyful and unchangeable. In Figaro there does also remain a sense of uncertainty, of the realities of life, and the inevitable vagaries of human nature. And yet, to me the opera leaves no doubt of a belief in the steadfast truth of the heart, despite everything else. Mozart wouldn’t write something as sublime as “Dove sono” unless it’s meant to stick with you as an overarching point. The aria wasn’t an accident.
Though Figaro can’t magically make “real life” any less miserable, it does reinforce that truth I know in my heart. Tragedy, as in your work, Verdi, is already quite visible in the world, and I’ve witnessed a great deal of it recently. But that inner world – that gentle, fragile faith in love, the truth of the heart (at least of the “comic” heart) often remains invisible unless manifested in the arts. I can look about me and see tragedy all the time; but to see the secret love and faith in people’s hearts, which I believe to be no less a reality, I have to look to music, to a stage, to a screen, to a book. To me, it makes more sense to invest everything I’ve got in me as an artist to support these delicate, fleeting expressions that we each wonder if others secretly harbor. I will do all I can to add to them within the range of my talents and abilities; to make the invisible heart visible. This is something I already knew about myself, but experiencing some of your work has helped me to consolidate myself even more fully within that aesthetic sensibility.
Verdi, I’m beginning to wonder if I really don’t even like opera – maybe I only like Mozart. Or perhaps only comic opera. (Okay, probably just Mozart – I just can’t seem to shut up about the guy.) At any rate, I can say that I’ve felt the same way about modern Broadway shows for quite some time, too; I’ve lost patience with the very bombastic, melodramatic ones. Tragedy is just not my thing anymore.
Sorry to have bothered you with this anti-fan letter, Verdi, but it’s been a tough few months.
Yours,
Elisabeth Hegmann
P.S. I really love how straightforward you were with your librettists. I especially like, “I have patched it up, in order to write the music, but you will have to write some better verses…” and “I received the tenor cabaletta today. It says absolutely nothing…” (Seton 337). Give ‘em hell, Verdi!
Boris Godunov journal entry, 4-16-10
I suppose what I find most interesting about Boris Godunov is this idea that the chorus (the Russian people) is the most important character. That made me think of a movie from several years ago, The Queen, with Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II. There’s a scene in which the queen is passing through a large crowd after Princess Di’s death, and a little girl walks up to the queen and gives her some flowers. The queen supposes that it’s yet another bouquet of flowers for the deified Diana, and is touched and surprised to find that the flowers are for her. I found the scene deeply moving, and realized that, though many different interpersonal dynamics are explored in the film, what really makes it unique is that it’s mostly about the Queen’s relationship with Britain – with her British subjects. I’d argue that the scene we watched early in Boris Godunov between Boris and the Russian people (chorus) strikes a very similar chord; not in terms of the sentiment, but in terms of the “relationship” being explored – that between ruler and people. It’s always so refreshing to see a more rare dynamic like this explored. Let’s face it: the most commonly explored relationship in all the narrative art forms – opera, novels, films, etc. – is love, love, love: specifically, the love between a man and a woman. Don’t get me wrong, sexual, romantic love is a great thing. But doesn’t it get a little old when it’s the cornerstone of every story ever told?
Which brings me to a second thing I find interesting about Boris Godunov: that originally it had no major female roles, and that these were only added as a response to criticism in order to get the opera produced (from the Wikipedia article). This in turn reminded me of a few comparable works in other genres. For example, the film Lawrence of Arabia, in which there is famously not a single woman (except in the brief part where women are seen sending the men off to war; regardless, no woman ever speaks a line). And as another example, Moby Dick, which also famously doesn’t feature a single woman. Though I suppose it’s counter-intuitive since I’m a woman, these count among my favorite works. Now, part of my love for these works may be that I simply disregard gender lines and look directly to what I admire in the realm of art and ideas; I love Jane Austen as much as I love Melville, and she certainly told stories as well as anyone in the history of literature (…all of which happen to be about the love between a man and a woman!). And yet, perhaps the absence of women in a story also means more room to explore other kinds of themes – profound and unique themes unrelated to getting married and making babies. I suppose that’s horribly misogynistic of me. Or maybe I’m not a misogynist, but just more generally a misanthrope: men are at least 50% to blame for what women do in stories, whether they wrote it or they’re a male character taking part in the romantic canoodling!
In any case, neither women nor romance are bad things, and they’re certainly necessary parts of life, and thus necessary to portray in art – what’s bad is when writers lazily fall back on love stories with no merit or originality. There are other stories to tell in this world, other relationships to develop, other forms of love to be explored – nationalistic love of one’s country or heritage certainly being one of them. And yet, Mussorgsky’s critics had a point: it can’t be denied that romance sells. It’s quite interesting that Mussorgsky had to add or expand female roles and amp up the romance to get his opera staged. It does also occur to me that the matter has to be understood in the context of long-established operatic conventions. I suppose an opera without important female characters was unthinkable, just as Mussorgsky’s orchestrations, harmonic style, etc. were difficult for even some of his friends to accept (from the Wikipedia article). But that makes it all the more interesting that Mussorgsky’s original vision was to overlook those conventions. It would seem that his vision was a bit ahead its time, and a bit ahead of what people were able to tolerate, much like Melville with Moby Dick. At least in Mussorgsky’s case, he got to see Boris have success in his lifetime, which is always a wonderful thing. (It breaks my heart to think about Melville dying after the fall of all his fortunes, and having seen his beloved Moby Dick panned by critics and the public, with true reverence for the work only coming fully a century after his death.)
At the same time, I’m not suggesting Mussorgsky should be criticized for agreeing to the requested revisions. Most creative souls at one time or another agree to revisions that don’t necessarily go along with their original vision. Sometimes it makes sense just to be practical about it, as long as it doesn’t in some way compromise the entire vision. (In the case of Boris Godunov, it seems that none of the revisions harmed the overarching focus of the completed opera.) Plus, once you get the door to open for you, you can sometimes later restore a work to what you originally intended – or others sympathetic to your goals can do it, as in the case of Boris more recently being performed with Mussorgsky’s original orchestrations. And though I certainly can’t have an opinion with much authority, not being a great scholar on Boris Godunov, perhaps many of the suggested revisions ultimately strengthened the work, and were quite valid criticisms. But they still sting like hell!
Another interesting aspect of Boris is the “argument” about what the opera is “about,” and which scene should end the opera: Boris’s death, or the scene with the Russian people. I would have to agree with those who choose to end the opera with the scene with the Russian people – if nothing else, just because it’s the more unique and interesting emphasis, going along with the rest of Mussorgsky’s unique vision. That’s certainly not denying that Boris Godunov is a fascinating, conflicted individual. But that’s just it: there are thousands of brilliant works about fascinating, conflicted individuals. A work with an emphasis (and an effective emphasis) on a national, cultural group dynamic is far rarer.
Speaking of Boris Godunov as a character: I find his descent into madness more satisfying and realistic than some I’ve seen. The MacBethian style of madness has always worked well for me in the context of my own knowledge and experiences. (Not that I’ve ever murdered anyone, but that I trace many of the tragedies of my life back to things I did wrong, or times that I should have been more responsible in some way.) I think it’s easier to empathize with this type of “madness” because it’s easier to understand it on an internal level; at some point, everyone has done something wrong that they recognized was ethically incorrect (either before or after the fact) and later regretted. This is as opposed to works in which a character says “Oh poor me, everyone has victimized me, and now I’ve gone stark raving mad.” I guess as one example I could cite Lucia di Lammermoor. Lucia’s madness doesn’t seem empathetic to me, but only sensationalistic, providing an excuse for her to warble like a bird onstage for 25 minutes. I’m not just picking on Lucia di Lammermoor, though. I know that sort of sensationalism that buffets one’s senses without being particular relatable was a convention of certain Romantic sensibilities and works. (And I suppose pure, exalted, wronged women were a convention as well). Speaking of Shakespeare, Boris’s Shakespearian or novelistic way of portraying a complete world also seems uniquely its own, portraying both humor and tragedy, as well as all levels of society, from the peasants in rags, to the monks in their monastery, to the sumptuous scenes of royalty at the Kremlin humor. (And wow, that Russian production of Boris Gudonov really is something, isn’t it? It’s always interesting to see what was considered a priority in the Soviet heyday. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so much glitter and costume jewelry in one place before.) It was great to see some levity in the scene with the priests at the inn on the Lithuanian border, and the utilization of the folk song in that scene.
I never liked Tchaikovsky (nothing personal – just not that into him), so it’s interesting to learn about this other school of composers, the Mighty Handful, and their desire to find expressions that they felt were more genuine to Russian culture (Seaton 378). Also, I’m thrilled these days when I hear of folks who held down jobs like postal worker, chemist, etc. and still managed to have a lasting impression on their art form, since God knows teaching high school is not exactly the rewarding and exalted career I had ever hoped for. I’ll grasp onto whatever hope I can find.
Richard Wagner journal entry, 4-24-10
First off, what was Wagner smoking, and where can I get some?
But seriously. In truth, I understand all too well, because that funny place in the head is where I reside also. The same place that J.R.R. Tolkien also apparently resided, the place that compels one to create that enormous structure known as “mythology” and spend twenty or thirty years trying to materialize the godforsaken thing. I can’t speak for those other guys, but in my case it’s not even that I want to do that, or ever had some big “ambition” to do it. It’s just how my mind works. There’s just this enormous, already-existing story inside me that I have to try to get out. I’ve been conceiving it for ten years, seriously working on it for three. What does that leave, another seventeen years or so?
That was one of the biggest frustrations of the MFA for me: many of my fellow MFAers were primarily short story writers, which comes with instant gratification. Short stories take little time to write, and you can instantly send them out, win awards, get published. Things aren’t even too bad for a conventional novelist; a novel might take a year to write, but after “only” a year you have a product that you can market around to agents or publishers. The kudos and congratulations come quickly. But not only am I not a short story writer, I’m not even precisely a novelist. I’m this poor debased breed of creature that conceives of an enormous original project that could take decades to complete – an enormous commitment, and an enormous gamble, for a work that everyone may ultimately ignore. Oh, I’ve had short stories that I don’t really care about published in minor publications online. And during the MFA, the powers that be said that I’ve got the talent, that my project has all the necessary ingredients; and yet, all the talent and originality in the world mean very little if you put all your eggs in one basket and no one chooses that basket. I wonder how many people have conceived of these massive sorts of projects, but instead of turning out with the success of Wagner or Tolkien (or even a more mid-level success, such as a cult writer with a small but intensely devoted fan base, which is what I’ve been told I would ultimately be if the gods smile on me), their lifetime’s work vanished forever into obscurity?
Well, whatever the case, Wagner has got me thinking deeply about form this semester. Under the circumstances, it would be a little unnatural if he hadn’t. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is my birthright from my father; he died when I was ten with no life insurance or any other significant possessions – the only things he left me of any meaning or value were his LOTR volumes that he adored (and re-read every year). I did not read LOTR for the first time until I was in my early twenties, when I became curious to try to understand more about who my father was. And LOTR was what got me writing in earnest – not because I had any desire to copy its style (unlike many of Tolkien’s admirers, my writing bears no resemblance to his), but because it revealed to me on a more abstract level that all the artistic goals I had always thought impossible were possible. I can’t even say how beloved LOTR is to me, how much gratitude I have to Tolkien for having the courage to take a risk like that.
Seeing part of Wagner’s Ring cycle was a strange revelation. How bizarre that Wagner invented geek culture. Because of Wagner we have Tolkien, and because of Tolkien we have the entire genre of fantasy. We have comic books, we have Star Wars. I always find it rather funny, these guys like Wagner who state very specific goals of what they’re trying to invent and the sort of legacy they expect to leave the world, and then end up leaving a legacy no less important, but entirely different than what they’d had in mind. I wonder how Wagner would feel if he could see comic book conventions and roomfuls of slacker gamers.
Though I had always known that LOTR owed a mighty debt to Wagner, I had no idea that it was this mighty. Now, that doesn’t take anything away from the achievement of LOTR. For all its similarities, Tolkien’s creation is very different in its aims and the way its story world is fleshed out. And yet its basic skeletal structure is the same as the Ring cycle. A theme involving “the destructive force of the lust for wealth and power”? (Seaton 360) Yes, that’s definitely the kernel of both the Ring cycle and LOTR. But if anything, I find that fact to be a tremendous relief and encouragement. I had always been daunted by LOTR, because it seemed like Tolkien had pulled its structure out of thin air, like a sorcerer, and that none of us merely mortal writers could ever approach such a feat. But in fact, like all of us, Tolkien built on things that had come before. It’s like the old saying, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” Tolkien stole. Good for him.
Now, I don’t pretend to be able to create anything even nearly approaching LOTR. One of my greatest weaknesses as a writer is “world building”: all of those details that give form and order to the story world, a skill especially crucial for any kind of fantasist. My material tends to be purely emotional and archetypal; it has trouble finding specific embodiment. One criticism I’ve received from peers, mentors, and agents is that my story world is too formless, shapeless, vague, and random. Confusingly, I have also been praised for this – for rebelling against the tyranny of genre and form, and doing something different. Left to me to decide, I would choose something in the middle between these two groups. I would like for my story world to have more shape and purpose, though still remain unique by steering clear of over-used genre structures. Plus, my fiction is full of absurdity and other humor – all the more need for greater structure to keep things glued together. But at the end of my MFA, I’d run out of ideas on dealing with these issues, so in my final exam essay I simply admitted I knew the problem was still there and would continue working on it. And I have, though without much progress until recently.
Now, not only am I weak at world building, I’m a stubborn perfectionist about it; at many points I’ve thought of possible forms and structures, but threw them out as not being “good enough.” On that note, there are actually three guys who got me thinking about form the past few months: Mozart, Wagner, and Thomas Edison. (And what a strange tea party those three would have.)
I found Wagner’s view of Mozart interesting: “Mozart he regarded as a fine composer whose librettos had simply been too trivial to produce really great results” (Seaton 360). This is quite funny to me. It seems to reveal some very basic temperamental difference between Wagner and Mozart. For Wagner, form seems to be all-important and all-consuming; the form must be precisely the form of his heart, his philosophy, his intellect. Mozart seemed to regard form more as a vessel in which to pour his heart and intellect; though form is of course important, the view seems more relaxed and above all, practical. Wagner wanted to invent a new form, while Mozart busied himself exalting forms that already existed by filling them with his massive talent.
It’s clear that Wagner and the Romantics in general were deeply concerned with form and what to do with it. But the things I’ve realized recently about form did not actually come from Wagner. The trouble is that I’m too much like Wagner by temperament – not only in the sense of writing a massive mythology that takes twenty years, but also that I’m a self-centered, idealistic blow-hard, full of extremes and metaphysical mumbo jumbo. (What else are these journal entries of mine?) And just like Wagner, I’m liable, as I said above, to be a stubborn perfectionist about form. The trouble is, that’s not helping me, but working against me at this point. Somehow, by regarding Wagner’s Ring cycle, it made me determined to face my own problems with form. And that involves looking to folks on the opposite end of the temperamental spectrum for help, which is why I pulled my buddies Mozart and Edison into this.
From Mozart and Edison I’ve learned: You must have a form, but the form needs merely to be workable, not perfect. It’s important to choose the right form, and to choose a form that personally engages you, but there’s no sense in obsessing over it. They seem to be saying: let’s stop being so philosophical, and be more practical. (More about Edison in a moment.)
I agree with Wagner that the librettos for Mozart’s operas weren’t perfect. But would any material available to Mozart at the time have matched his talent? Wasn’t it better that the man simply wrote material that personally interested him? It’s better to have work from Mozart with some imperfections in the form than to not have work from Mozart at all. And it doesn’t take anything away from the overall effect of the work. Plus, Mozart had a principle on his side that doesn’t work for anyone except world-class geniuses; his talent was so great that he could fill any vessel he chose with it and turn it to gold. I’m sure he knew that. But that principle isn’t very useful to the rest of us.
And yet, maybe it is. And this is where Edison comes in: if you have a superior light bulb, a merely sufficient system (form) will do. Edison knew that it was absolutely necessary to his light bulb’s success that he create a workable system in which to “plug it in.” Thus, the greatest reason he succeeded at the light bulb while others failed was that he created that system (a source of direct current electricity). Nevertheless, he put most of his effort into perfecting the light bulb; in the end, a merely sufficient (not perfect) system was enough to mean success for the entire project.
Similarly, Mozart had a superior “light bulb” that he could plug into any merely sufficient system. (Okay, some quite absurd double entendre is popping up here…and amazingly, I’m not even drunk right now. Wish I were.) Now, I ain’t Edison, Mozart, or Wagner, but nevertheless, I know I have a superior light bulb. In the case of a writer, that means that my work is highly original, and that all the right elements of craft are in place. Thus, I need a merely sufficient form. I should feel free to “steal,” like Tolkien, but I don’t have to try to be perfect, like Wagner.
Not sure any of that makes any sense, other than to myself. The specific changes I’ve been making to my work aren’t important, but as a result of these musings on Wagner, Mozart, and Edison, I was struck by a form that I think will work. It’s not perfect, but it’s workable, and it will add structure and order to my story world.
I don’t know why composers help me so much on a creative level (and God only knows why Thomas Edison is hanging out with them in my mind). Maybe since I grew up around musicians, music and theatre were so continuously present from the very beginning that I don’t know how to think without them. Or maybe my own imagination is so free-wheeling and fiction itself so structureless, that music, so structural at its base, provides me with a very necessary structure in which to think. In any case, I don’t think I would ever solve the problems facing me in my fiction if I looked to literature alone. I’m a musical nincompoop; I have no talent whatsoever in either playing or analyzing music. But music throws an extra dimension of light on everything in the art form in which I do excel; illuminates things for me that I’d never otherwise see or feel.
Wagner Part II: Romanticism and Wagner being like James Cameron
Like many young people, my entrance point in my teenage years to the art of the past (whether music, literature, or artwork) was the Romantic era. I suppose that all that emotional intensity and pathos, the ideals, the rebellion against conventions, etc. is something that young people identify with. It’s more immediately accessible, more, well, obvious in its intent than many other eras of art. The Romantics are the rock stars of the past, with that kind of youthful immediacy. In Dr. Koch’s class, one guy was discouraged to learn that we were going to spend three entire classes (gasp!) on Mozart – he wanted to skip Mozart and get directly to Beethoven. That seemed pretty emblematic to me – the youthful rush to Romanticism, to skip everything else more measured and subtle. Oh, I know that what the Romantics did was very necessary – it’s always necessary for someone to come along and shake things up and provide new forms and possibilities in the arts.
But apparently I’ve changed greatly with age, because nowadays I tend to regard the Romantics with deep distrust. This is probably because I regard myself with deep distrust, and I am a Romantic. I deeply identify with them – their ridiculous blustering, their intense emotions, their endless philosophizing, their naïve principles, their over-hurried rush to tear things down. I feel the right to laugh at them because they’re me and I’m them. The derision I feel toward them is the derision I feel toward myself. How stupid, naïve, and mortified I feel that only a few months ago I still believed in high ideals of close friendship, that I invested all kinds of time and energy into what I thought was true connection. There is no such thing in this world. But a Romantic at heart is always a Romantic at heart. It can’t be changed (even if what I really most admire is the elegant, balanced beauty and exalted emotions of the Classicists). And so, as I told Verdi a while back, everything that I believe survives in my heart, and thus in my art, even though all evidence indicates that those ideals are dead in my life.
Like Wagner, art is my spirituality, both in terms of what I put on the page and the experience that other artists give me. That is the most unshakeable aspect of my being. It is the one thing that I know. I’m quite alone in those sensibilities – during the MFA, “art” was something quite different to all the others. It was just…something to do. It wasn’t sacred. It didn’t have a purpose. It wasn’t their soul. I quickly learned to be quiet about what writing means to me. In fact, the only other person I’ve ever known with whom I’m simpatico is my composer friend, Martin McClellan (we come from the same small town and have been friends since he was 8 and I was 12).
I’m certainly not as extremist and Hitler-like about my views as Wagner. (Seriously, his ravings on p. 359 of the text somehow remind me a bit of the speeches of Hitler and other dictators.) But again I’m mocking him because we’re made of the same cloth. When I was 18, I wrote rather side-splittingly funny “treatises” with absolutely identical sentiments to Wagner’s. I recognize everything he’s saying, the kinds of words he uses – salvation, gospel, progress. That’s what music and the arts are to me, too. And at about 22, without knowing anything about Wagner or ever having been exposed to the idea, I came up with the theory of Gesamtkunstwerk in regards to musical theatre. Of course, I thought it was highly provocative and original at the time.
But however much my thinking is like Wagner, I could never have resolved on “world domination” like he did. The 20th century came along and screwed us all up, made us all cautious and bitter. Present-day Romantics are more caustic, more measured. The Romantic movement was the last hurrah of unbridled spirituality and ideals, and thus the last period I identify with. Once the 20th century started, that particular sense of spirituality was gone, with some exceptions of course, such as Tolkien. That’s why LOTR strikes me as such a huge risk – it so strongly stated the case for an earlier sense of spirituality in a culture that had turned entirely to materialism.
And yet I really don’t believe that Wagner’s sunrise was a sunset. Understandably, like all Romantics (me included), he and his allies were impatient about seeing some instant, obvious result. They had their sights trained on that particular operatic form that he invented. Maybe that particular form didn’t catch on like wildfire, but his theories and the spirit in which he created the Ring cycle live on – though admittedly it can be hard to find it done really well. My friend Martin and I talk about that all the time. We find very few modern works with which we connect, and when we do, we get very excited. It’s hard to describe, but we know them when we see them. Maybe Martin and I are not exactly a “sunrise,” but we share many of the same values as Wagner (well, minus the anti-Semitism), and we also create work in that same spirit, and so do many others.
More to the point, Wagner’s spirit and theories live on in the most popular current art form: film. It’s clear to me that Wagner invented film without actually inventing film. Watching the Ring cycle is so odd, because it’s trying to do all the things that modern film does: visually, aurally (the bigness of the sound), etc. I understand that’s a bit of an ironic statement since film took its cues from Wagner (sewing everything together with leitmotivs in the score springs to mind). But I stand by that statement; Wagner was apparently, in theory, trying to invent film. Because, obviously, film did become the collective artwork that completely changed the world. The text defines the idea as, “Universal artwork that represents the collective experience of the culture from which it proceeds and also synthesizes into one entity gestural, verbal, and musical types of expression” (359). No offense to Artist-Wagner, who wrote operas, but Theorist-Wagner’s definition seems to fit best to film. Wagner certainly anticipated where things were going.
I know that we talked from the beginning of the course about opera being analogous to film in terms of its effect and popularity – but other operas we’ve seen don’t actually resemble film. They don’t “feel” like film. The Ring cycle does. And I’m not referring to the Met staging and set. I mean the opera’s feel – its pace, imagination, “special effects,” characterization, and so on. To talk about the “feel” of something seems like a cop-out, but in regards to the Ring cycle, I don’t think so. It seems that a feel, an immersive experience, is exactly what Wagner was going for, by creating an entirely new way of viewing/hearing a story. But bizarrely, the Ring cycle doesn’t resemble early film or even film in the mid-20th century. It resembles modern film of the past 20-30 years – and even more specifically, the modern blockbuster, post-Star Wars.
Star Wars was the film that cemented the pattern for blockbuster films, and it was also incidentally the film that brought back the popularity of the traditional film score, which had fallen out of favor during the early part of the seventies (filmic melodramas = music + drama… and Wagner wanted to write “music dramas”…hmmm, interesting). Star Wars takes a page from the Ring cycle in many ways, including its utilization of archetypes/mythology, and its score (e.g. the use of leitmotivs). But more to the point, obviously that movie really, really caught on, and ushered in an entirely new kind of incredibly popular artistic filmic experience, usually utilizing mythology in some way, fantastic creatures, boffo special effects, a lush score, dynamic visuals, etc. I would argue that what the Ring cycle most resembles is the modern blockbuster, and that Wagner invented all of its constituent parts. Like a lot of brilliant visionaries, perhaps Wagner theorized and anticipated where things were going more than a century ahead of when it happened.
Wagner is sort of like James Cameron. But James Cameron envisions things a mere decade ahead of when the technology catches up, and thus he can execute his visions once “only” ten years have passed. But Wagner envisioned things a full century ahead of when the technology caught up – consequently, it wasn’t really possible for him to make a blockbuster 3D film. Given the technology and the opportunity, I wonder if Theorist-Wagner would have persuaded Artist-Wagner to have the career of a producer-writer-director like Cameron, George Lucas, or Peter Jackson. It seems possible. Wagner didn’t even necessarily want to write opera (renaming it “music drama,” and so forth) – he wanted a new narrative art form.
And so, I don’t think Wagner’s sunrise was a sunset. What Wagner anticipated would happen did happen, just not in precisely the way he intended. Okay, so art didn’t replace religion, and the world has not lived in peace as a result of the Ring cycle or Star Wars or Avatar. But come on, it’s just crazily unrealistic to expect a huge dramatic sunrise that bathes the whole world in glorious sunlight. Like Wagner and his pals, I too wish that such sweeping miracles were possible in this world, but such is not the case. Instead, what happens is that the sun comes out from behind the clouds in little glimmers, and you have to be quick to catch it. Modern-day Romantics have to be more practical, more willing to take what we can get. I would argue that many of these modern films retain that same sense of Romantic spiritual purpose, in a dominant culture which is materialistic. Avatar, now the highest grossing film of all time, is certainly highly spiritual, both literally (the story and message) and in the immersive 3D experience of it.
Of course, a small but very vocal and influential band of people sneer at “populist” art and say that it’s escapist, low brow, etc. (I know these insults well – “serious” artists love to argue that fantasy, which is always mythological/archetypal/spiritual at its core, is not serious art.) But the “volk,” unperturbed, continue to speak with their dollars. One could argue that Wagner’s “volk” do still know what they’re doing. Wagner believed it was important that art embody “the essential beliefs and ideas that stood at the core of cultural integrity” (Seaton 360). I would argue that’s exactly what people are trying to hold onto by embracing these films.
Probably not original musings on my part, but still very interesting to me to try to trace Wagner’s legacy, in its spirit.
Verismo Journal, 4-25-10
Bizet
Though I certainly “know of” Carmen, and am familiar with its most famous arias, I’ve never actually seen it. Since we’re only able to watch a few scenes of most of these operas, I’m ending up with a basic must-watch list that will probably take me the next few years to watch. All semester I feel like I’ve been writing about things with which I have only the slightest familiarity, the only exception being The Marriage of Figaro, which I’ve now watched and listened to multiple times.
I can’t believe that Georges Bizet was yet another of these guys who died young, just when his work had reached its full maturity, never witnessing its full success. The world has seen far too much of that, damn it.
I guess the thing I can understand best about Carmen is that it was innovative, combining opera comique with more serious scenes – and risque (for the time) behavior. Bizet pissed people off with Carmen, and that’s often pretty good evidence that someone produced a masterpiece.
I like the fact that Bizet takes friendship as a major subject in Les pêcheurs de perles. As I told Verdi a while back, friendship remains one of the main themes of my own work, despite the fact that in real life (as I prophesied then), I’ve lost every single friend I had in this area. I know I’m ornery, complicated, and difficult, and yet I guess I’m somewhat puzzled, because it seems to me that most difficult artistic sorts are nevertheless able to find like-minded souls. Mussorgsky had the “Mighty Handful.” Tolkien had the Inklings. In La Boheme, the Bohemians certainly have a nice camaraderie going. But every friendship I made during the MFA, whether close or casual, has now evaporated (well, except for the support of my mentor, John Kessel, for which I’m grateful.) I guess some of us are just meant to go it alone. The one friend I have in the world (Las Vegas, to be precise) is my childhood friend who’s now a composer, Martin McClellan.
I talked to him a few nights ago, and he said something interesting: that all his lasting friendships were formed either in childhood or in his early twenties (i.e. his early college years). Perhaps he’s right, and true friendship is impossible in adulthood; if you fail to make connections earlier in your life (like me), maybe you’re just screwed. I remember reading somewhere the idea that the older we get, the more “specific” our experience gets, and the less likelihood that we’ll identify with (and connect with) others. We end up with a long history that gets harder and harder to “mesh” with others’ histories. I can certainly vouch for that; after having been alone for 33 years, it seems highly unlikely that I’ll ever be anything but alone for whatever remains of my life.
The point is that I can appreciate the subject matter of Les pêcheurs de perles. In the context of what I said above, the fact that Zurga and Nadir were childhood friends makes it emotionally believable. (I can’t imagine giving up my life anytime soon except maybe for my one childhood friend, Martin.) The friendship duet is touching. These lovely themes of love, friendship, and sacrifice are always beautiful in art, even though they don’t work out in life.
Janáček
Janáček and I might have at least one thing in common: my last name is supposedly Czech, specifically from the region of Bohemia.
Our text says that verismo is a synomym for realism. Like all “realist” art, verismo puzzles me. It may just be that the term “realism” has always struck me as a misnomer. It seems obvious to me that no artwork can represent “reality”; all art is a construction. Also, I believe that rality is fairly subjective, that reality is something different for everyone. I think I’ve always resented the term “realism” because it seems to be insisting on some kind of objective reality. But works termed “realist” have never had much to do with my own consciousness or sensibilities – with my own “reality.” I certainly respect such works – again, I think the biggest problem I have is with the term. Maybe if verismo were called “Tortured- Soul-of-Humanity operas” I’d have an easier time with it.
Our text says that verismo operas “were set among the lower classes, and culminated in violence” (374). So far, so good: the characters in Jenufa are simple, hard-working folk who incidentally murder babies. The text goes on to say, “…the composers chose plots that were unrestrainedly emotional and melodramatic.” Jenufa makes good on that point, too. Infanticide is about as melodramatic as it gets, and the opera is certainly relentless in its emotional intensity – in particular, the 2nd act. And throughout the opera, there are no clear lines between recitative and aria, which contributes to the relentless drama and intensity.
That’s part of my problem with the terms “realism” or “verismo.” Daily consciousness isn’t relentlessly dramatic and intense; most of the time it’s just dull, but in any event, it’s an unending stream of a variety of emotions all over the scale. Even at the most trying times of my life, my consciousness has been a mix of both terrible pain as well as perceived humor and moments of relief. That’s why I’ve always found works that incorporate humor to be closer to my own “reality”: a balanced view of drama and humor, with troughs and peaks. A work like Jenufa strikes me as being pain and grief very purely distilled. It’s certainly within an artist’s rights to produce such a work, and it has great merit; it causes us to examine issues and emotions in a new light. I just don’t see what it has to do with being “realistic.” Nor do I see how using more prose-like language, or stripping away spirituality and mythology makes something more “realistic.” Such a work is merely stating its opinion in the former case that language and/or music should sound a certain way, and in the latter case, that those things don’t or shouldn’t exist. But it shouldn’t have the right to dictate anyone else’s truth and reality.
I thought it was interesting that several people in the class laughed during the scene in which Jenufa loses it. Ostensibly, they were laughing at her acting (and the way she ran into the wall in her delusion). But it seemed to me they were really laughing because they needed relief from the relentless grief and drama – a way to release the tension. The point where they laughed would in fact have been where a scene of comic relief appeared in a different kind of opera (or film, or theatre production) – but of course there wasn’t one in this case. (Unless the giant rock in the middle of the set is meant to be the comic relief – it is a pretty funny character in its own right.) They laughed where they needed a laugh. And I felt for them. I respect the artistic choice not to provide that laugh, to keep the audience uncomfortable. But it’s very far from my own sensibilities. My job is to give people that laugh.
The foster mother is certainly a fascinating character. Steva is right in saying that she’s full of gloom and severity. (And admittedly the opera does acknowledge its own gloom and severity in that way.) It’s interesting also that he calls her a “sorceress” -- almost a kind of winking nod to that operatic archetype. One advantage of verismo, I suppose, is being able to portray a character like the foster mother who acts coldly and does something quite evil, and yet is still strangely sympathetic. Here is a woman who is compelled by social mores, feels cornered and trapped by what she feels society demands of her, which is something universally identifiable. On the other hand, maybe I’m alone in empathizing with the foster mother, judging by the class’s reaction to both the character and to her voice! Maybe they haven’t lived long enough to know what it feels like to violate one’s conscience in a big way. At any rate, it would never have occurred to me to question the quality of the soprano’s voice, because it simply seemed right for the character. Thus, the idea of “dramatic musical acting” makes sense to me - that it’s not about the beauty of the voice, but the drama of it.
There’s a scene in Act 2 between Jenufa and the foster mother (before Jenufa goes sleep) that was strangely like watching my younger and older feminine self torn in two. Jenufa is the young idealist passionately in love, full of love for her baby and enthusiasm for motherhood. And the foster mother is bitter, wasted by life, long past the point of being able to love. Indeed, through the course of the opera, it’s as though Jenufa’s temperament is somewhat converging with her foster mother’s (though perhaps with a better fate). Jenufa tells Laca that she doesn’t know why he would want her - she can no longer feel or love as she once did. The passion and enthusiasm of her youth is gone; she loved deeply and passionately, but it was never really consummated or returned; her beauty is gone; she must resign herself to milder feelings. I identified deeply with Jenufa on these points. I found it hard to take. Embarrassingly, I cried in class, but no harm done since the lights were off, I guess.
It helps me to think of Thomas Hardy being in the same vein as verismo. The trained literary writer in me understands this kind of opera – this kind of drama. I can analyze it with those skills far more easily than other operas we’ve looked at. And yet, that’s part of what bothers me about it. It seems to veer more toward literature and plays; I prefer operas that I have to understand by thinking purely in terms of the conventions of opera – not the conventions of other genres and art forms. Verismo is just not my cup of tea. Thomas Hardy is also far from being my cup of tea.
One more miscellaneous point: in a work like this where an illegitimate birth is key to the plot, is it harder for a modern audience to get it in emotional context? When we see two people fall in love in an opera from the 17th or 18th or 19th centuries, it’s still universally identifiable; when we see a character die, we still understand in modern times what it means to grieve. But nowadays, women get pregnant out of wedlock all the time, and most people don’t give it a second thought. I’ve always felt that Pride and Prejudice loses something in a modern reading (or viewing, if in film form). Pride and Prejudice of course remains a hugely popular story in the present day, and most aspects of the story remain very timeless and relatable; but when it gets to the part of the plot where Lydia runs off with Wickham, the violently dramatic way in which the other characters reacts suddenly becomes almost laughable. (Even more regrettably, this is the climax of the story, where the tension is supposed to be highest.) After all, Lydia isn’t even pregnant out of wedlock; all she’s done is run off with Wickham…and of course there’s no overt reference that she’s even slept with him (though one can infer it). This plot point always has the effect of breaking the spell of the story for me, reminding me that it’s a work from a different time with different sensibilities. I have to consciously remind myself that Lydia’s action means not only the end of Elizabeth’s hopes of marrying Darcy, but the utter ruin and downfall of the entire family.
My maternal grandmother was born out of wedlock in 1909, and we weren’t able to coax the name of her real father out of her (so that we would know the name of our blood relative) until only a few years before her death at age 93. Such was the stigma of illegitimacy for her, and I suppose, for her generation. But just a few generations later, sexual mores have changed greatly. I’d argue that they’re one of the few things that really “dates” a work.
However, in Jenufa, I think this plot point works better, because everything is so specific to the foster mother’s internal psychology. It isn’t just assumed that we know we’re supposed to feel shocked (as in Pride and Prejudice). Instead, because we so clearly hear all of the foster mother’s thought processes, justifications, etc., and see it all through her eyes, it’s less jarring.
April 24, 2010
Dear Giacomo Puccini,
Well, I got the call: Martin wants to write an opera again. Not that we have some big commission to do it. It’s just that Martin has finally recovered enough from his disillusionment over his doctorate that he feels like being creative again. I know how he feels; I, too, generally ignore my MFA in order to remember why I write and do it well. But I was very lucky in that I had an incredibly understanding and supportive mentor who gave me the freedom to follow my own vision. Martin had no such luck at IU. He became so bitter that I was very worried about him for awhile; he’d lost all that youthful energy, joy, and passion about writing music that he’d had when he was younger, and which I had always loved and admired about him.
Martin and I can’t get back the energy and passion of our youth. And yet the joy in the act of creating is always, always still there for me, and I think it’s still there for him, too. The only trouble is that a million years have passed since we wrote Tales That Are Told and the Jackson County Players workshopped and performed it for us. Several months ago, Martin visited me here in Raleigh; we watched the VHS tape of the performance and nearly injured internal organs laughing so hard at ourselves. The first act achieves Waiting for Guffman levels of hilarity. (Wish you could have seen that movie, Puccini.) However, the show – well, technically opera, since it is through-composed – the opera gets better and better as it goes. By the end of the second act, Martin had become a better composer and I’d become a passable librettist. The show is worthless as art, but it’s an interesting, very explicit illustration of two young artists learning as they went.
Well, we’re both older and wiser. But that’s part of what I can’t understand: I can’t imagine why Martin wouldn’t want to work with a more experienced librettist. He was 18 when we wrote Tales That Are Told, talented but green and untried. Now he has a doctorate in music composition, is well-respected, has won awards, and so on. I have roughly equivalent credentials in my own field in terms of degrees, awards, etc.– but as a fiction writer, not a librettist. Martin says that he believes in me nevertheless. Well, more power to him. I desperately need someone to believe in me right now.
In a weird way, I’m also resentful. Martin literally ordered me to write the libretto for Tales That Are Told when I first returned to Indiana from NY when I was 22. But I was grateful then and grateful now for his pushiness; it was basically like pushing someone into the water and forcing them to learn to swim, to face their fear. I was terrified. I hadn’t written anything since I was 18, and I was so insecure (and so emotionally shattered at that point, for a variety of reasons), that if Martin hadn’t forced me, I would never have gotten back to writing so quickly. After we started working together, I actually became filled with ambition to become the next big duo: Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Mozart and Da Ponte. That’s really what I wanted to do; I thought I was going to be first and foremost a librettist. I had no thoughts then of ever writing prose again. Then Martin went off to college and didn’t have time to be my collaborator anymore. (He never finished setting the second libretto I wrote for him, and that’s a relief, because it was garbage.) I was left in the lurch. I did try to find another collaborator, and worked long distance for awhile with a composer in New York. But the magic wasn’t there; we didn’t like each other’s work, and there was no excitement. So I went back to fiction, and that’s where my focus has been for the past decade. I’ve placed all my attention on my Wagnerian mega-work, Muller’s Mile. But now Martin is ready again; essentially, once again, he’s ordering me to write a libretto.
And yet, this is emblematic of what allows our friendship to work – that I can be humorously honest about my feelings, and neither of us gets offended. And that we seem to balance one another out in many ways. When Martin decides it’s time, it’s time. Me, I’d probably just keep procrastinating and working on my mega-work until the end of time. It’s nice that someone is willing to force me to churn out a relatively quick product once in a while.
I suppose I see it as being the proper order of the universe, anyway. The composer is more important than the librettist. It’s the librettist’s job to be yanked around and abused, and it’s the composer’s right to do this. It’s not a problem. And what do I have to complain about, anyway? In the world of my mega-novel, I’m omnipotent god. If I were to name the two areas I would most ideally like to focus in, it would be opera/musical theatre (as librettist) and fiction (as novelist). It’s a good balance. When writing novels, I’m unrivaled and unchallenged god over that world; as a librettist I’m a collaborator and a servant, but quite happily so. I feel that I’m not an underling to any particular person, but an underling to music, a servant of music. That’s a tremendous honor, not an imposition.
Under those circumstances, what am I going to do – say no to Martin? Of course not! I’d have to be out of my mind to do that. I can bitch all I want about being yanked around, but of course I’m going to put everything I’ve got into it. I miss collaboration so badly – not just my short time writing librettos, but all the time I spent around musical theatre since I was four years old, onstage or backstage. I miss musicians, singers, actors, I miss the chaos of backstage, the parties, the politics, the applause, the smell of theatres. I have such reverence for actors – they’ve given me so much inspiration over the years for all my writing; I love the chance to serve them with my words. And most of all, I love music, but words are as close as I can ever get to it. For a writer, it’s incomparable seeing your story come to life with music. I have no words for it. It’s the closest thing in this world to magic, to heaven, to that feeling of “My God, what did I ever do to deserve to be this lucky?” And that’s one of the main things that recommends me to Martin, I suppose – you’d be hard-pressed to find a person who cares more, who’s more passionate about wanting to do it. For better or for worse, I know Martin values that more highly than technical expertise or years of experience. I hope at least that my greater experience and knowledge of narrative will serve me, even though it’s more specific to fiction than the stage. I do think that years of experience with craft makes me better prepared to properly do my homework on libretto-writing. And I can certainly discipline myself to be more practical; Martin is working for a performing arts school in Vegas, and plans to find out if they’d have any interest in premiering our work. If so, it would behoove me to write something geared precisely to their tastes, rather than being stubborn and following my own tastes.
There’s another thing to be said: Martin and I work well together. Working with Martin is some of the best fun I’ve ever had in my life, because it’s so natural. We’re on the same page, have the same kinds of artistic goals; it’s a joy to work together. That’s something I took for granted when he was 18 and I was 22, but over the years I’ve come to understand how rare that is. We just happened to luck out, knowing each other from childhood. Not that we don’t fight and have disagreements, but we have a knack for ceding territory to one another. We seem to have that indefinable quality one might call “creative chemistry.” To throw that away would be ludicrous. I’d never think of it.
And yet…and yet. I only hope we still have creative chemistry; time has passed, and we’ve both changed. I know we have an unshakeable friendship. But I would hate to find that my material no longer inspires him, that it fails to excite. I can’t handle another disappointment of that magnitude in my life right now.
So why the hell am I telling you all of this, Puccini? For several reasons. First of all, because Martin suggested he and I should do some kind of adaptation or modernization to have a greater chance of commercial success, and La Boheme, more than other work, makes me think about these issues (because of Rent). Second, because, though I’m loathe to admit it, the nature of my work with Martin in the past was much like yours and Verdi’s and others who focus on big, dramatic, powerful emotions. Third, because I tend to look to proven, timeless works for guidance in my own writing (rather than the works of the present), and I think that La Boheme perhaps offers insight into some of my past weaknesses.
And so, first of all: adaptation/modernization. I had long been curious to see La Boheme because of Rent. Rent is in many ways to blame for the fact that I ever wrote librettos for Martin in the first place, because as a teenager Martin was obsessed with love of Rent. Jonathan Larson was his inspiration. Now, the truth is, I detest Rent, and always have. I checked it out in its heyday, during the years I was living in New York. I owned the Broadway recording and listened to it quite a lot, tried hard to like it (mainly because the damned CDs had cost so much). And I tried hard to like it for Martin (who incidentally, in more recent years has also come to hate it). But I just don’t like it. I don’t like the characters, I don’t like the music.
I told my mom my fears of eventually seeing La Boheme and not being able to like it because of my bias against Rent, and it made her sad. She told me about one of her esteemed music professors at IU in the 1960s, a big burly man who rarely showed emotion. Well, Boheme meant so much to him that when he would attempt to discuss the opera in class, tears would fill his eyes, and he would choke up and be unable to continue speaking.
And so, this week I did my best to watch Boheme without bias. The trouble is, I really think that’s impossible. Because I was enormously familiar with Rent, there was no way to watch Boheme without thinking of the comparisons, of what Larson had “borrowed” (the landlord coming for rent, the group of friends and their “occupations” – philosopher, musician, writer, etc., Mimi wanting her candle lighted, AIDS standing in for consumption, and so forth).
Actually, I wasn’t nuts about Boheme, but I don’t think it was Rent’s fault. I think it’s just yet another of these works that is “not for me.” I was prepared for that. Part of the trouble is that I already feel too deeply; I don’t need a work that causes me to sob through most of it – I think it was a ten hanky evening for me.
And I dislike the characters, resent them, in fact – both Rent and Boheme. I’ve lived an eccentric life, but far from a free life. I never got to have camaraderie and understanding with anyone, never got to be with anyone I loved. And I was certainly as full of longing and passion as any of these characters. Despite the tragedy of Mimi’s death (in Boheme), I think part of the point of both Rent and Boheme (though Rent emphasizes it more with Mimi actually living at the end, songs like “Seasons of Love,” etc.) is that it’s happy that these two lovers at least found each other and loved one another for a brief time. “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” That’s sweet, but my youth is gone, and I never got to be young. I never had fun. And I never achieved any of the rather basic things most people want: love, children, friends, a partner. It’s neither Rent’s nor Boheme’s fault that I’ve turned into a bitter, ruined wreck. I’m merely saying that though I believe in the message of the works, that doesn’t mean I have any desire to sit through them. I’m emotionally incapable of liking either work, because I’m a loveless human being.
What does interest me about Boheme is its greatness, its timelessness, its universality. I prefer to look to the past and ignore the artistic vagaries of the moment. If something has lasted a century or more and it still fascinates people, then to me it seems worth studying. There are admittedly some flaws with that view. I often think with horror, for example, of the many works throughout history that may have been just as great as the ones that “made it,” but have been lost to us through bad luck. How many novels might there have been that were as great as Moby Dick, but were lost forever to obscurity through sheer bad luck proportional to the good luck of the works we preserve and revere? And yet, the “test of time” is as good as any test we have. It may be ruthless and unfair, but it’s also practical. There’s little we can do about the works that have vanished into the mists of time.
On the other hand, the “vagaries of the moment” have a certain importance in the choices one makes. Larson channeled timely issues through Rent, and it wasn’t exactly a failure. Yet I would argue that as opposed to Boheme, Rent has not aged well. AIDS is not the same thing as consumption, and gays, lesbians, transgender, and bisexual folks (even if they are philosophers and artists) are not the same thing as bohemians. Larson politicized the material, made it emotionally charged in a way that’s different from the way Boheme is emotionally charged. Though Larson certainly followed his heart and produced a work he believed in, Rent was of the moment, while Boheme remains timeless.
At any rate, the point is that in terms of doing an adaptation, I’d hate to “ruin” something beloved like Boheme (as Rent somewhat “ruined” it for me), even if only on a small scale (e.g. one performance seen only by a handful of people). Adaptations and modernizations are, in my mind, prickly with these kinds of ethical concerns. There are so many dangers and possible missteps. No offense to Jonathan Larson, but I think my own choice would be to do a “respectful” modernization, not a “controversial” one. And I think I’m more likely to choose a novel or some kind of historical material rather than a work that was written for the stage to begin with. I’m open to either faithful period adaptation, or “modernization.” The point is staying true the heart of something, only making those changes that are absolutely necessary. More than anything, I want to do my best to be as respectful and ethical as possible. Nevertheless, no matter how hard you try, not everyone is going to like it. I have to resign myself to that.
This leads me to the second and third issues that Boheme calls to mind for me, since they’re interrelated – the fact that, in the past, my lyrics/librettos have been rather intense and dark. Yes, I admit it. I did it, too: these emotionally charged, over-the-top scenes. In Tales That Are Told, I killed the child of one of my main characters in the second act. I knew I would rip the heart out of the audience at that point, and I did. During the performances, I could see and hear them crying. (And who knows? Maybe I’ll murder children again if I’m feeling ruthless and desperate enough.) By contrast, the fiction I’ve written in recent years, though weighted with some seriousness, is much lighter. It’s hard to say how I’ve changed as a librettist over the years; perhaps when I sit down to write a libretto, it will naturally “come out” with more humor this time, unlike in the past. Or perhaps it’s just that a libretto comes from a different part of one’s self, a different part of one’s mind than fiction. One is not like the other. Maybe librettos channel that more intense part of myself, while I reserve more “balance” for fiction. (Of course, recently I’ve learned that I love opera buffe – and especially Mozart’s opera buffe. But what am I supposed to do with that fact? I can’t write an opera buffa! I may be inclined to ignore the “vagaries of the moment,” but not to that extent!)
Of course, there are other factors that affect this. If I adapt something, obviously I have to remain true to the spirit of the source material, and that will dictate the degree of humor it contains. Collaboration affects these things, too; you feed back and forth off of each other. Back in the day, Martin’s music was very dramatic, a bit dark, and perhaps that’s why my lyrics came out as they did. I don’t know how Martin’s music may have changed over the years. In any case, I need to be mindful to write material with a tone that suits his style, that caters to his current strengths. I need to find these things out.
But no matter what tone the material takes, it’s a virtual guarantee that there will need to be some kind of relief or humor. One of the hugest weaknesses of Tales That Are Told was that every aria, one after another, was glum. There was so little variation that it became unintentionally humorous after awhile. One thing I liked about Boheme (and one major thing I learned from it) is that though there are long stretches that are emotionally relentless, they’re alternated with scenes of greater levity. The opening scene with the burning of Rodolfo’s drama for warmth is quite humorous. This is followed by the emotionally charged scene of Rodolfo and Mimi’s proclamation of love for one another, which is in turn followed by the more light-hearted second act, with Musetta’s appearance, her solution for the payment of the checks, etc. Even Mimi’s death is preceded by a scene where the men are goofing around. There’s a lot of balance. This tells me that even if the part of my mind that creates librettos proves to be as intense as it was when I was 22, I need to consciously add greater humor and levity for practical dramatic reasons.
Yours,
Elisabeth Hegmann
P.S.I have a magnetic finger puppet of you. You look like a waiter in a French restaurant. When I walk by you on my refrigerator, I feel like I should complain to you about dirty forks. Verdi, Mozart, and Beethoven live with you on the fridge. The four of you are a bit like the bohemians in La Boheme, except instead of a garret, it’s a freezer door. Verdi looks like Santa Claus on acid, Mozart is wearing gold lipstick and looks like a drag queen, and Beethoven looks really, really pissed off. Which is to say he actually looks like Beethoven.
Wozzeck journal, 4-28-10
I’ll keep these final entries short, partly because I’ve rambled on way too long already, and partly because I never have much to say about anything beyond the end of the 19th century. My sensibilities seem to resonate with earlier times; I have little enthusiasm for works in any genre from the start of the 20th century to the present (except some films). My basic view of life is spiritual, ordered, and rests on an unshakeable intuitive faith; it’s no surprise that atonal music and expressionism fail to inspire me. I guess the problem is that I don’t agree with virtually any of the dominant thinking of the 21st century, including the various college disciplines (psychology, sociology, etc.). My journey through my B.A. and M.F.A. was extremely painful and combative (although I kept the combat to myself as an internal battle – probably part of why it was so damned painful). The irony is that I pleased everyone by doing good work while ultimately agreeing with virtually nothing. I’ve been able to form my own views, to clarify how I feel about things and why, which is enormously valuable – it’s just that I formed most of those views in opposition, which gets rather exhausting. My own ideas, experiences, and opinions aren’t supposed to be important, and I know that. But at this point in my life, I insist that they are, damn it. That makes me an egotistical self-important bitch, but I can’t say I really give a hoot what anyone thinks of me anymore. (Boy, the idea of me teaching high school should be interesting. Can I put on an act, spout things I don’t actually believe for eight hours every day? I’d better, since it appears to be my last shot at not living on a cardboard box on the street.) I’ve enjoyed this past semester in Opera and 17th and 18th century music, because I mainly got to look back to time periods with artistic sensibilities that make sense to me.
Berg and company are another thing about which Martin and I feel similarly. As I recall, we’ve had conversations where he nearly started foaming at the mouth over the 2nd Viennese School (though if I remember correctly, part of what angers him is that he believes that Schoenberg’s ideas helped destroy symphonic music as a popular art form). The quote from Schoenberg in the text helps me understand my own basic difficulties with him: “…a work of art can produce no greater effect than when it transmits the emotions which raged in the creator to the listener, in such a way they rage and storm in him” (Seaton 394). In essence, that’s the exact opposite about how I feel about art and its purpose, and it’s the exact opposite of my own goals as an artist. There’s no way to reconcile myself to this view in any way. This is a case of agreeing to disagree with Schoenberg, and nothing else can be done about it.
Nevertheless, I will always defend the right of an artist to convey anything he or she wishes, no matter how unpleasant (and have had to do so on many occasions). That’s the great thing about the arts; no matter how deeply I disagree with a certain expression, it’s my responsibility to defend it, because it’s part of the range of human experience and empathy. And regardless of how I feel about Berg, Schoenberg, and company, it’s important that I know about them. It’s interesting to me that Romanticism led in this particular direction, but not surprising; when you start tearing down all the walls, others are going to come along and tear out the doors, the floor, the ceiling, the plumbing.
About Wozzeck: I do really like that drunken philosopher in the pub. My immortal soul stinks, too, buddy! I’ve always had a great fascination (for lack of a better word) with the toll that World War I took on the collective unconscious of the world. It was like the western world as a whole was permanently wounded, permanently disillusioned by the horrific losses and the knowledge of the unthinkable destruction we were capable of carrying out from that war onward. Of the many dark artistic sensibilities that followed WW I, my personal favorite is absurdism. And there are a lot of absurdist sensibilities in Wozzeck. The distorted folk songs are a really interesting effect – everything twisted as though from Wozzeck’s point of view. I don’t necessarily believe that atonality was the only choice to convey this character’s insanity and madness; there are so many points of view one can take on a story. But it’s certainly an interesting choice.
The orchestral interludes between sung sections were deeply disturbing and unsettling, contributing to a rise in the general tension. Also, the opera seemed to lack the natural narrative transitions we’d expect. Of course, recitative is long gone in all the operas we’ve watched since Wagner; now they all have this continuous interwoven texture (which, not surprisingly, I don’t much like). Before Wagner, the recitative signaled things like transitions and pacing to the audience. But here in Wozzeck, not only do we lack these “signals” of the past, but we also seem to lack any kind of “natural” narrative transitions we’ve come to expect in dramatic works. As one example, when Wozzeck kills Marie, I don’t recall there being any explanation as to how or why they were together in the woods. They’re suddenly just there, and then he kills Marie. These “blank spots” in the story seem to mirror the shattered nature of Wozzeck’s psyche. And at the end, the reaction of Wozzeck’s kid was downright creepy. If Wagner’s sensibilities are akin to the later fantasy genre, Berg’s sensibilities in Wozzeck strike me as being akin to horror films – a genre that also prides itself on peeling back the outer layers to show the ugliness and madness that lies beneath. (If that’s what one believes.)
Postmodern opera journal, 4-29-10
I wish I felt like I had something smart to say to wrap things up, but I just really think I fail to “get” these modern movements and schools of thought. I suppose some of my views have been influenced by Martin over the years. (He really hates minimalism and Philip Glass.) The idea that composers have migrated over to where the money is, in film music, and away from opera, makes sense to me. That’s what Martin is doing in Las Vegas – trying to get closer to L.A. He always has been far more practical than me; he’s also talked about the fact that he would write things for purely commercial reasons, even if he got no personal artistic satisfaction out of it whatsoever. I admire the fact that he wants to try to work at what he actually does. Unfortunately, I’m more of the artistic sort who feels forced to get a job I detest, but which is steady, so that I’m free to write whatever I want to write. I’m just not a competitive sort. I can’t fight the other people who are better at promoting themselves.
But those are dull practical conundrums. What interests me are creative conundrums, and the biggest creative conundrum for me is how to look to modern works for a cue on what directions I should go when writing a libretto. It seems clear that I should have an awareness of the present, and make shrewd decisions accordingly. But the trouble is, I just have no affinity for modern work at all (nor am I known for my shrewdness). I suppose I have to look, by necessity, more at current musical theatre than opera, which is a shame; the style, tone, and subject matter that would suit me as a writer seem to be located more in modern musical theatre. I say “a shame” simply because I prefer opera as a genre. For one thing, I dislike spoken dialogue interspersed with songs; I far prefer a work to be sung through. On the other hand, it’s clear that the lines can be blurred, as with Rent. Regardless of how much I dislike that show, it’s nevertheless instructive on a variety of levels. But all of this is a problem I can’t solve today. I have a hundred ideas on things to write a libretto about, but I don’t have the right idea yet, and it won’t come until I have some space to breathe and focus.
I know Poulenc’s name somehow, but can’t place it, and it’s driving me crazy. I suppose my mom probably had a student working on a piano piece by him at some point. At any rate, that was a mighty interesting scene from Dialogues of the Carmelites. What a great idea to have the nuns singing as a chorus, and have their numbers shrink (and the sound diminish) as they’re each beheaded. (Not the most cheerful thing to watch, but effective.) The sound of the guillotine as part of the music is great, too, as is the bare staging. Far more effective than if things got a bit too literal in the staging and the set.
Nixon in China, Jackie-O and Satyagraha, though very different, all seem to have certain similarities. Not just the music’s minimalism, but an ambition to say something serious, big, and philosophical about the modern world. This inclination seems natural, the subject matter apt. And it’s interesting to me that the concern with celebrity shows up repeatedly. That’s a theme that appears (unbidden) in my own writing as well, as it’s a subject that fascinates me. Apparently it fascinates all of us. But all I can say on a personal level about these three works is that what I saw neither moved me nor interested me.
Glass seemed to be capturing a bit more of a minimalist “meditative” state in Satyagraha than Adams with Nixon in China, which had a bit more of a sense of driving forward as a traditional narrative. That makes sense, I guess, since in the commentaries by the director and others on Satyagraha, the meditative quality was a lot of the point. I understand that it’s possible as well as perhaps an interesting experience to contemplate and meditate on texts and plots one doesn’t understand, to simply hypnotically experience whatever is happening; but I must say I really prefer to contemplate and meditate on texts and plots I do understand. Those giant newspaper puppets were pretty awesome, though. I wonder if they would let me borrow them for Halloween?
I found it interesting that Nixon in China uses the conceit of showing the inside monologue of different characters onstage. This tells me that trends on the stage have gone hand in hand with certain trends in literature that I happen to dislike. That is, things have moved away from omniscient point of view, and toward a variety of limited, subjective points of view. I understand the need to experiment, but the effect doesn’t move me or interest me. It also seems natural that things are moving toward multimedia experiences, as with Jackie-O. Trouble is, multi-media doesn’t really seem to enhance an artistic experience for me or make it more powerful. Instead, it dilutes it. An old-fashioned purist I am, and an old-fashioned purist I will remain.
I grew up with West Side Story, along with all the Broadway standards. From childhood through my teenage years I was in or stage managed something along the lines of 50 musicals, though never West Side Story, quite amazingly, considering how frequently it’s performed by high schools and community theatre groups. In any case, it’s not one of my favorites (boy, am I a bitch in this entry – I seem to have become the Simon Cowell of Music 330), though I do understand how groundbreaking it was in its subject matter at the time and the dramatic way it handled it. The biggest instructive point for me is probably the fact that even back then it was blurring the line between musical theatre and opera. That just goes to show that when Martin and I go ahead with our project, I can borrow freely from either form as I see fit. That gives me a little hope that I might be able to come up with something I actually like, and that I won’t have to have a giant Campbell’s soup can onstage. I mean, the can is kind of awesome. I just don’t happen to want one.
The Complete Goofy Quizzes on Victorian Novels (2008): Villette, Mill on the Floss, The Woman in White, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Dracula
First installment of Elisabeth’s Really Goofy Unauthorized and Unofficial Quiz on Victorian Novels: Villette
(This quiz is cumulative. No right or wrong answers.)
1. Short answer:
Mrs. Jellyby arranges a field trip to Borrioboola-Gha for the students at Madame Beck’s boarding school. At the last minute, she has a dawning realization of England’s own social problems, and decides to take a number of orphans (including Jo) off the streets of London, and re-settle them in Borrioboola-Gha in hopes of a better life growing coffee. Mrs. Jellyby and the street urchins arrive at the Rue Fossette to stay overnight before traveling on the next day to Borrioboola-Gha, and Jo wanders into one of M. Paul’s lectures. M. Paul begins to interrogate Jo on the extent of his learning, first in French, then resorting to the abominable English, but finds that Jo is in utter darkness as to the meaning. To each question, Jo only replies, “I don’t know nothink.” He has not the least idea of all that language – he is, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb!
“Est-ce que vous avez l’intention de m’insulter?” demands M. Paul.
Jo only thinks (for perhaps Jo does think, at odd times) what does it all mean, and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me?
“Je te deteste, mon garcon!” cries M. Paul.
Is this the occasion that M. Paul finally falls down foaming at the mouth and has a coronary over all of this deplorable ignorance? Does he leap from his estrade in a passion of anger and attack the stove, demanding that Jo move on? Or does he weep tears of mercy declaring, “Decidedly I am a monster and a ruffian!”, and dedicate the tiny amount of money he is not already giving to charitable causes to Mrs. Jellyby’s Borrioboola-Gha Orphan Project? Explain.
Choose an answer and very briefly explain why:
2. Which Sexy Victorian Doctor would you marry? A. Mr. Woodcourt or B. Dr. John
Or which Flawless Angel of the House would you marry? A. Ada or B. Paulina
3. Which narrator would you be best pals with? A. Esther Summerson or B. Lucy Snowe
4. Your Sexy Victorian Doctor or your Flawless Angel of the House has been cheating on you, and you need to engage the perfect Spy/Investigator to get to the bottom of things.
do you choose: A. Mr. Bucket or B. Madame Beck?
5. Who does the guilty adulterer/adultress turn out to be?
Lady Dedlock
Ginevra Fanshawe
Colonel de Hamal
Sir Launcelot du Lac
Other
6. Bonus Question for those also in the Middle English class (or anyone else interested):
Dr. John, in league with Morgan Le Fay and the ghostly nun of the Rue Fossette, makes a bet with the Green Knight over who can teach the better moral lesson through a beheading game. Dr. John dyes himself and a horse red, charges into Madame Beck’s fete calling himself the Red Knight, and demands that someone come forth and cut off his head with an ax. At first, no one speaks or moves, and Madame Beck, for the sake of honor and reputation, nearly has to do it. But then Lucy Snowe steps in with perfect poise and humility, and cuts off the Red Knight’s head. He retrieves it from where several of the girls have been kicking it around on the dance floor and remounts his horse, carrying the head under his arm. Before riding off, he calmly decrees that Lucy must seek him out a year later to have the blow returned to her own neck. Meanwhile, Sir Gawain sets off on his quest to find his own green-hued challenger. He stops and dawdles at a castle, partying and flirting with maidens, somehow failing to recognize (despite striking similarities), that his host at the castle is the very same Green Knight he’s seeking. In Lucy’s quest, she proceeds to take us through several months and hundreds of pages, describing complex personifications of Hope, Love, and Reason, but Unreasonably withholding from us (even though we’ve already figured it out for ourselves a long time ago) that she’s known all along that the Red Knight and Dr. John are the same man. Who exasperates us more? Gawain, who acts like a clueless numbskull? Or Lucy, who knows things but refuses to tell us? When Lucy arrives for her beheading, does the Red Knight/Dr. John go through with it, or does she learn her lesson and narrate less mysteriously?
The Really Goofy Quiz in Victorian Novels: Mill on the Floss edition
(This quiz is cumulative. No right or wrong answers.)
1. God grows weary of Maggie Tulliver’s endless agonizing, and decides to use a deus ex machina to put her out of her misery as rapidly as possible, along with all of England while he’s at it. Because he is God, his decision cannot be questioned by critics. He resolves on a spectacular apocalypse of seven plagues, but is having trouble deciding the best order. Help God put the plagues in the most pleasing and logical order:
a. Fog. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, fog down the river, fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping onto the cabooses of collier-brigs, fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats, fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners.
b. Mud. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
c. Smoke. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full grown snow-flakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.
d. Flood. That awful visitation of God’s which Maggie’s father used to talk of – which had made the nightmare of her childish dreams.
e. Spontaneous Combustion of all tipplers across England. Say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally – inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only – Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.
f. Storm. Not till the destroying angel of tempest had achieved his perfect work, would he fold the wings whose waft was thunder – the tremor of whose plumes was storm.
g. A plague of millions of Harold Skimpoles visited simultaneously upon every household in England. They are each a mere child in the world! All they ask is, to let them live. That isn’t much. Their wants are few. Give them the papers, conversation, music, mutton, coffee, landscape, fruit in the season, a few sheets of Bristol-board, and a little claret, and they ask no more. Why should they regret their incapacity for details and worldly affairs, when it leads to such pleasant consequences?
2. Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope. Let if be theirs to conceive of the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread: the seven plagues will not be visited upon England, for God has changed his mind, deciding that Maggie is worthily conscientious after all, and not just a drama queen. Who does he send as his harbinger from Heaven to impart glad tidings of mercy to the British people?
Jo, the innocent.
Richard Carstone, the repentant.
M. Paul, the true-believing philanthropist.
Lady Dedlock, the martyr.
Sir Gawain, the licentious, with a number of fair ladies with him.
All of the above, in a burst of heavenly light.
3. Forget duty, honor, and internal conflicts. Forget dying in an eternal embrace with your brother. God has pulled back those floodwaters, and you get a second chance. Do you:
Keep on floatin’ down that river with Stephen Guest, out of passion, enjoying a good sex life as long as it lasts.
Marry Phillip Wakem, out of friendship and honor, living out your days enjoying mutual understanding and an active intellectual life.
Form a ménage a trois with Bob Jakin and his wife, enjoying that wacky sense of humor and refreshingly laid back attitude toward life.
Persuade Sir Galahad to lose his holier-than-thou virginity and give up the Grail Quest.
All of the above.
4. Which of these conflicts is most complicated and difficult to comprehend?
The outbreak of World War I
Mr. Tulliver’s lawsuit over the mill
Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce
The Dodson family quarrels
The Wars of the Roses
Lucy Snowe’s relationship with M. Paul
5. Best comedic couple:
Mr. and Mrs. Badger (He admired her exceedingly, but principally, and to begin with, on the curious ground - as it seemed to us - of her having had three husbands.)
Mr. and Mrs. Glegg (“Well!” said Mrs. Glegg, rising from her chair, “I don’t know whether you think it’s a fine thing to sit by and hear me swore at, Mr. Glegg; but I’m not going to stay a minute longer in this house. You can stay behind, and come home with the gig – and I’ll walk home.” “Dear heart, dear heart!” said Mr. Glegg in a melancholy tone, as he followed his wife out of the room.)
Mr. and Mrs. Pullet (Mrs. Pullet had married a gentleman farmer, and had leisure and money to carry her crying and everything else to the highest pitch of respectability.)
Mr. and Mrs. Bagnet (Old girl, give him my opinion!)
Ginevra Fanshawe and Alfred de Hamal (During the first year or two, it was only of herself and Alfred she wrote; then, Alfred faded in the background; herself and a certain new comer prevailed; one Alfred Fanshawe de Bassompierre de Hamal began to reign in his father’s stead.)
Sergeant George and Phil Squod (“How old are you, Phil?” asks the trooper. “I’m something with a eight in it,” says Phil. “It can’t be eighty. Nor yet eighteen. It’s betwixt ‘em, somewheres.”)
6. Middle English bonus question. Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.
Le Morte D’Maggie
Chapter 6: How Sir Launcelot was revealed to be the third lover of Maggie Tulliver, how he acted like a sexist bastard and an annoying twit, and of other matters
As the French book maketh mention, when the corpses of Maggie and Tom Tulliver were fished from the flood, they were put in a fair bed with all their richest clothes laid about them; and they were put within a barget, and the barget covered with black samite over and over; and so Bob Jakin steered the barget unto the Deanes’ house, and there he rowed a great while to and fro or any espied it.
So by fortune Stephen Guest and Lucy Deane were speaking together at a window, and so as they looked into the Floss they espied the black barget, and had marvel what it meant. Then Stephen Guest called Philip Wakem and showed it him.
“Sir,” said Philip, “wit you well there is some new tidings.”
Then these three departed and came to the barget and went in; and there they found the two fair corpses lying in a rich bed, and poor Bob Jakin sitting in the barget’s end, and no word would he speak.
“Alas,” said Stephen, “Now is my joy gone.” And then he fell down and swooned, and long he lay there as he had been dead. And then, when he arose out of swoon, he cried out sorrowfully, and said, “Alas!”
And then Stephen wept again, and Lucy and Philip also; and so they fell on swooning. And when they were revived, Lucy espied a letter in Maggie’s right hand, and told it to Stephen.
Then Stephen took it and said, “Now am I sure this letter will tell us what has happened, and why they are come hither.”
So then they went out of the barget and brake the seal. This was the intent of the letter:
“Most noble knight, Sir Launcelot, I drowned myself in the flood, for I was your lover, that men called Maggie Tulliver; therefore unto all ladies I make my moan. A clean maiden I died, I take God to witness, but I am going straight to hell, for I wrapped my arms fast around Tom to take the heartless sadistic pig down with me.”
This was all the substance in the letter. And when it was read, Stephen, Lucy, and Philip all wept for pity of the doleful complaints.
Then Phillip stood ever still afore the barget, and ever he apelled Maggie of treason for the willful murder of Tom; for the custom was such that time that all manner of shameful death was called treason; and he was a passing heavy man. And Lucy stood still and was sore abashed, that she nist not what to say. And Stephen made sorrow out of measure, and took Philip in his arms, and thrice there they swooned.
“Jesu mercy,” said Stephen, “Alas that ever I should endure this much swooning and weeping. I am come to mine end. But would to God that I wish where were that traitor Sir Launcelot, that hath caused all this mischief.”
Then was Sir Launcelot sent for, for he was lodging nearby on way to a tournament; and when he was come Stephen made the letter to be read to him. And when Launcelot heard it word by word, he said,
“My lord Stephen Guest, wit ye well I am right heavy of the death of this fair damosel. God knoweth I was never causer of her death by my willing, and that would I report me to her own brother, were he not lying here dead as well. She was both fair and good, and much I was beholden unto her, but she loved me out of measure.”
“Ye might have showed her,” said Lucy, “some bounty and gentleness that might have preserved her life.”
And when Sir Launcelot had heard this answer, then the tears ran down by his cheeks. “Wit you well my heart was never so heavy as it is now, but much more I am sorrier for the loss of Tom Tulliver than for the loss of this maiden; for maidens I might have enow, but such a noble Dodson shall never be again;” and ever among these complaints, Sir Launcelot wept and swooned.
And Stephen answered him: “Good knight, thou speakest truly. As for our most noble Tom Tulliver, I love him and honour him as well as ye do, and as for Maggie I love her not anymore, for she is a destroyer of good gentlemen.”
Then Philip looked upon the corpse of Tom Tulliver and the tears brast out of his eyen, thinking on the great courtesy that was in Tom more than in any other man; and therewith he turned away, and might no longer behold him, and said, “Alas, that ever this novel began.”
What event immediately follows this passage?
a. They all kiss together, and weep as people out of their minds.
b. Stephen and Philip go with Launcelot on a quest to Rome to have Tom Tulliver
formally canonized as a saint.
c. Lucy falls for Launcelot and lays herself down with the corpses in the barget to pine
away and die.
d. Launcelot goes to London to share some wine with Mr. Tulkinghorn and trade
misogynist complaints.
e. In lieu of visiting Maggie’s tomb, Stephen and Philip go barefoot in their shirts
founding convents every ten miles to sing and read day and night for Tom Tulliver’s
sake.
f. All of the above.
g. None of the above.
The Really Goofy Quiz in Victorian Novels: Woman in White edition
(This quiz is cumulative as always. No right or wrong answers.)
Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:
It is the grand misfortune of Frederick Fairlie’s life that nobody will let him alone. There he is, reclining, with his art-treasures about him, and wanting a quiet evening. Because he wants a quiet evening, of course Louis comes in. It is perfectly natural that Fairlie should inquire what the deuce Louis means by making his appearance, when he has not rung his bell. Louis replies, with a devilish grin, that he has had enough of Fairlie’s damned complaints, and has taken the liberty of inviting thirty or so party guests to his study for the evening. Fairlie seldom swears – it is such an ungentlemanlike habit – but when Louis grins, Fairlie thinks it is perfectly natural that he should damn him for grinning. At any rate, he does. Louis is so obliging as to leave off grinning, and informs him that the guests are outside, waiting to see him. He adds that their names (in Fairlie’s opinion remarkably vulgar ones) are Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed, Mr. Gilmore, King Arthur with his companion Sir Lucan (wounded in a recent battle), and Alfred de Hamal, who thought it was a costume party and has come dressed as a nun. As if that isn’t enough for Fairlie’s nerves, also in attendance are Lords Coodle, Doodle, Foodle, Goodle, Hoodle, Joodle, Koodle, Loodle, Moodle, Noodle, Poodle, Quoodle, Cuffy, Duffy, Fuffy, Guffy, Huffy, Juffy, Kuffy, Luffy, Muffy, and Puffy.
Fairlie is obliged to ask Louis if their shoes creak. Creaking shoes invariably upset him for the day. He is resigned to see the Party Goers, but he is not resigned to let the Party Goers’ shoes upset him. Louis affirms distinctly that their shoes are to be depended upon. Fairlie waves his hand. The Party Goers enter. Their shoes do not creak. But many of them shut their mouths and breathe through their noses, and they all perspire at the hands. And why have they all got fat noses and hard cheeks?
Before Fairlie can object, Mr. Gilmore approaches his chair and speaks. “I have come here not for a party,” he announces, “but at great personal inconvenience to inform you that for your niece’s sake you shall take the whole responsibility of this discreditable settlement of Miss Fairlie’s twenty thousand pounds—“
Mrs. Smallweed begins to shake her head, and screeches like a horrible old parrot without any plumage, “Twenty pound five and fivepence! Twenty thousand bags of money! Twenty hundred thousand million of parcels of bank notes!”
“Will somebody hand me anything hard and bruising to pelt at her?” exclaims Mr. Smallweed, looking helplessly about him, and finding no missile within his reach. “You hag, you cat, you dog, you brimstone barker!” Here Mr. Smallweed, wrought up to the highest pitch by his own eloquence, actually throws what appears to be a nun (but is actually Alfred de Hamal) at Mrs. Smallweed in default of anything else.
“Pray excuse me,” begs Fairlie, “But could you contrive to speak in a lower key? In the wretched state of my nerves, both sound and movement of any kind are exquisitely painful to me. You will pardon an invalid?”
Lord Coodle begins admiring the portfolios on the shelves near Fairlie’s chair, and Fairlie sees an opportunity for bringing out his art-treasures for the general admiration. He surmises he can have the red and green portfolios brought over by Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle –supposing it to be impossible for the Duke of Foodle to act with Goodle, which may be assumed to be the case in consequence of the breach with Hoodle. Then, giving the task of holding the coins to Joodle, the adjustment of the reading easel to Koodle, touching the bell to Loodle, and balancing the portfolio to Moodle, what is he to do with Noodle? He can’t offer him the fetching of the tablettes; that is reserved for Poodle. You can’t put him to work holding the magnifying glass; that is hardly good enough for Quoodle. What follows?
But while Fairlie is contemplating this, Gilmore approaches his chair again.
“Mr. Fairlie, I must insist. As to the matter of the twenty thousand pounds—“
Mrs. Smallweed instantly begins to shake her head, and pipes up, “Twenty thousand pounds, twenty twenty-pound notes in a moneybox, twenty guineas, twenty million twenty percent, twenty—“
Grandfather Smallweed throws a cushion at Mrs. Smallweed. “You brimstone chatterer! You’re a scorpion! You’re a sweltering toad. You’re a chattering clattering broomstick witch, that ought to be burnt!”
But the effect of this act of jaculaton is twofold. It not only doubles up Mrs. Smallweed so that her bosom falls against Mr. Fairlie’s face (what has he to do with her bosom?), but the necessary exertion recoils on Mr. Smallweed himself, whom it throws back into Arthur’s wounded companion, Sir Lucan, like a broken puppet. Sir Lucan falls in a swoon, that the part of his guts fall out of his body, and therewith the noble knight’s heart bursts. And when King Arthur looks over, he beholds Sir Lucan, how he lays foaming at the mouth, and part of his guts lay at his feet.
“Alas,” says the king, “this is to me a full heavy sight, to see this noble duke so die. Alas, he would not complain him, his heart was so set to attend this party with me: now Jesu have mercy upon his soul.” And the tears brast out of the king’s eyen. Also overcome with weeping over the fate of Sir Lucan are Lords Coodle, Doodle, Foodle, Goodle, Hoodle, Joodle, Koodle, Loodle, Moodle, Noodle, Poodle, Quoodle, Cuffy, Duffy, Fuffy, Guffy, Huffy, Juffy, Kuffy, Luffy, Muffy, and Puffy. The tears brast from their eyen, and there is much, much swooning.
All of their faces have become sadly unfinished, thinks Fairlie, especially about the corners of the eyelids. In fact, he thinks they have begun to cry. He certainly sees something moist about King Arthur’s eyes. Tears or perspiration? He checks with Louis. Louis is inclined to think, tears. Let us say, tears. Fairlie distinctly objects to tears. Tears are scientifically described as a Secretion. Fairlie can understand that a secretion may be healthy or unhealthy, but he cannot see the interest of a secretion from a sentimental point of view. He closes his eyes, and says to Louis,
“Endeavour to ascertain what they mean.”
Louis endeavours and King Arthur endeavours. They succeed in confusing each other to such an extent that Fairlie is bound in common gratitude to say, they really amuse him. He thinks he shall send for them again, when he is in low spirits.
But we will not try to repeat King Arthur’s Middle English explanation of his tears interpreted in the English of Fairlie’s Swiss valet. The thing is manifestly impossible.
1. What is Frederick Fairlie’s next reaction?
To throw out the Party Goers. Then tepid water strengthened with aromatic vinegar for himself and copious fumigation for his study were the obvious precautions to take; and of course he adopts them.
He remarks to Louis that something outside or inside Sir Lucan suddenly creaked.
Louis says Sir Lucan creaked when he collapsed. Curious. Was it his shoes that creaked, his bones, or his guts falling out of his body? Louis thinks it was his guts. Most extraordinary!
He enjoys his customary siesta, and awakes moist and cool.
To wonder: was Sir Lucan very yellow, when he came in? or had he turned very yellow, in the last minute or two?
He declares that he is not answerable for this deplorable calamity with Sir Lucan, which it was quite impossible to foresee. He is shattered by it; he has suffered under it, as nobody else has suffered. He wishes to mention, in justice to himself, that it was not his fault, and that he is quite exhausted and heartbroken. Need he say more?
2. Help Wilkie Collins complete his novel!
In Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Miss Flite’s birds are called Hope, Joy, Youth, Peace, Rest, Life, Dust, Ashes, Waste, Want, Ruin, Despair, Madness, Death, Cunning, Folly, Words, Wigs, Rags, Sheepskin, Plunder, Precedent, Jargon, Gammon, and Spinach. (Twenty-five names, count ‘em!) In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Tess’s eight cows are named Dumpling, Fancy, Lofty, Mist, Old Pretty, Young Pretty, Tidy, and Loud. But good old Wilkie Collins was just in too much of a hurry to bother naming Count Fosco’s cockatoo, two canaries and five white mice. Drat the deadlines of those pesky serial novels and the pressures of writing-as-you-go! Help Wilkie Collins complete his most famous work by naming Fosco’s pets! (Note: the youngest mouse is possibly named Benjamin, but Fosco might also just be speaking figuratively).
The pets are called:
Mick, Keith, Sonny, Cher, John, Paul, George, and Ringo.
Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sneezy, Bashful, Sleepy, Dopey, and Snow White.
Charles, Wilkie, Thomas, George, Bram, Emily, Charlotte, and Anne.
Benjamin, Cenjamin, Denjamin, Fenjamin, Genjamin, Henjamin, Jenjamin, and Lenjamin.
Or fill in your own creative names!
The cockatoo is named…?
The two canaries are called…?
The five white mice are called…?
3. You open your big fat mouth and tell Anne Catherick about the old taboo of not wearing white after Labor Day. She kills herself, and Mrs. Clements accuses you of murder. Who do you hire as your lawyer to defend your case?
Mr. Tulkinghorn
Mr. Vholes
Mr. Wakem
Mr. Gilmore
Mr. Kyrle
The Pearl Maiden, with her incisive mind (if it’s capable of the subtleties of Middle English theology it can certainly handle 19th century law) and intuitive understanding of the color white.
A defense team made up of all six.
4. Prove that you are a better detective than Walter Hartright. What is the real cause of the mysterious vestry fire that kills Sir Percival?
Sir Percival was known to drink heavily, and God chose that moment to begin his Plague of Spontaneous Combustion of all tipplers to punish England for the dramatics of Maggie Tulliver.
God spontaneously combusted Sir Percival for reasons unconnected with Maggie Tulliver.
Sir Percival spontaneously combusted of natural causes, with no supernatural intervention.
Lucy Snowe was in the church praying at the time and spontaneously combusted – an inward fire of shame so quenchless, and so devouring, that it soon licked up the very life in her veins.
Actually, Walter Hartright is correct – Sir Percival had an accident with his matches or his light coming into contact with the quantity of combustible objects in the vestry.
Walter Hartright has vastly overrated Sir Percival’s intelligence, and the laughable nincompoop lit the fire on purpose to destroy the register, then managed to get himself stuck in the vestry.
5. You are a Victorian gentleman. Help! Fire!! Fire! is repeated, re-echoed, yelled forth: and then, and faster than pen can set it down, comes panic, rushing, crushing – a blind, selfish, cruel chaos. It is your expected duty to at least pretend to be competent and do something about it. Do you:
Realize spontaneous combustion has occurred and think “O Horror!” while running away, striking out the light, overturning people in the streets, and shrieking, Help, help, help! Come into this house for Heaven’s sake!
Adopt a look of comely courage and cordial calm, and thrust back the panicking mob, saving a girl you coincidentally knew as a five-year-old back in England and who is fated to become your wife.
Try to save your villainous archrival out of good Christian decency by organizing a crowd to knock down the door of the burning building with a beam.
Help along the demise of your villainous archrival by “accidentally” breaking a window of the burning building, “forgetting” that this will accelerate the flames.
Throw Laura Fairlie onto the fire for good measure, and marry Marian Halcombe.
6. You are a Victorian lady. The Indian summer closes and the equinoctial storms begin; they rage on for nine dark and wet days, of which the hours rush on all turbulent, deaf, disheveled. Strong and horizontal thunders the current of the wind from north-west to south-east; it brings rain like spray, and sometimes, a sharp hail-like shot; it is cold and pierces you to the vitals.
In other words, it rains and you get a little wet. Do you:
Catch fever and confess your sins to a Catholic priest even though you’re a vehement Protestant, then swoon and wake up in the home of your unrequited love.
Catch fever, swoon, and get carried around a smelly old house in your bed while an obese Count is busy ruining the life of your wimpy dolt of a sister.
Get swept away in a flood in an eternal embrace with your brother before you have time to catch fever or swoon.
Catch fever, swoon, then lift up your skirts and do a tap dance to “Singin’ in the Rain,” swinging around a gas lamp pole.
Catch fever, swoon, then ride laughing on the handlebars of a Victorian gentleman’s bicycle to the tune of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head.”
Catch fever, swoon, and run to a shelter, discovering that you are the illegitimate daughter of Lady Dedlock.
Skip the fever and swooning and go fight a fire with a Victorian gentleman.
The Really Goofy Quiz in Victorian Novels: Tess of the D’Urbervilles edition
(This quiz is cumulative as always. No right or wrong answers.)
1. Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:
Tess was milking Old Pretty, and the sun chancing to be on the milking-side, it shone flat upon her pink-gowned form and her white curtain-bonnet, and upon her profile, rendering it keen as a cameo cut from the dun background of the cow. Soon the sound of Old Pretty’s milk fizzing into the pail came through the hedge, and then Angel felt inclined to go round the corner also. Tess did not know that Clare had followed round and that he sat under his cow, watching.
An influence passed into Clare like an excitation from the sky and did not die down. Resolutions, reticences, prudences, fears, fell back like a defeated battalion. He jumped up from his seat, leaving his pail to be kicked over if his milcher had such a mind. Tess saw him now and advanced forward to meet him, but Clare stepped aside so that Tess fell to the ground, and went quickly towards the desire of his eyes. Kneeling down beside Old Pretty, he clasped her in his arms.
Tess was taken completely by surprise as Old Pretty yielded to Clare’s embrace with unreflecting inevitableness. Having seen that it was really her lover who had advanced, and no one else, Old Pretty’s lips parted, and she sank upon Clare in her momentary joy with something very like an ecstatic moo as he struggled to support her.
He had been on the point of kissing that too-tempting mouth, but he checked himself, for tender conscience’s sake.
“Forgive me, Tess dear!” he whispered. “I ought to have asked. I—did not know what I was doing. I do not mean it as a liberty.”
Old Pretty by this time had looked round, puzzled, and seeing two people crouching under her where by immemorial custom there should have been only Clare, lifted her hind leg crossly.
“She is angry—she’ll kick over the milk!” exclaimed Tess, her eyes concerned with the quadruped’s actions, her heart more deeply concerned with the relationship between the quadruped and Clare.
Tess got up from the ground and they stood together, Clare’s arm still encircling Old Pretty. Tess’s eyes, fixed on distance, began to fill.
“Why do you cry, my darling?” he asked.
“Oh—I think you know!” she murmured.
As she saw and felt more clearly the position she was in she became agitated and tried to withdraw.
“Well, I have betrayed my feeling, Tess, at last,” said Clare, with a curious sigh of desperation, signifying unconsciously that his heart had outrun his judgement. “That I – love Old Pretty dearly and truly I need not say. But I – it shall go no further now – it distresses you—I am as surprised as you are. You will not think I have presumed upon her defenselessness –been too quick and unreflecting – will you?”
“Oh, I won’t tell anyone,” Tess sighed in exasperation.
Clare had allowed Old Pretty to free herself, and in a minute or two the milking of both Tess and Clare was resumed. Nobody had beheld the gravitation of Angel and Old Pretty into one, and when the dairyman came round by that screened nook a few minutes later, there was not a sign to reveal that the markedly sundered pair were more to each other than mere acquaintance. Yet in the interval since Crick’s last view of them something had occurred which changed the pivot of the universe for their two natures; something which, had he known its quality, the dairyman would have despised; yet which was based upon a more stubborn and resistless tendency than a whole heap of so-called practicalities. A veil had been whisked aside; the tract of each one’s outlook was to have a new horizon thenceforward—for a short time or for a long.
END OF PHASE THE THIRD
What event immediately follows this passage?
The Reverend and Mrs. Clare recognize that though Old Pretty is of a humble background, her basic nature is good and simple, and they approve of Angel’s relationship with her.
Clare elopes with Old Pretty but then discovers she has been with a bull and has born a calf that died; Old Pretty, broken-hearted and rejected by Clare, returns to live out her days with Dumpling, Fancy, Lofty, Mist, Young Pretty, Tidy, and Loud.
The young Tom Tulliver comes along on a serial animal-torturing spree and drives Old Pretty to madness; she drowns herself in the river.
Tess slaughters Old Pretty with a knife in a ritualized sacrifice scene at Stonehenge.
2. Help Thomas Hardy edit his novel!
Just like all the characters in his novel, Thomas Hardy got a little carried away in his zeal for Tess, and added too many colors to describe her eyes in the following sentence: “At first she would not look straight up at [Angel], but her eyes soon lifted, and his plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with their radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and grey, and violet, while she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have regarded Adam.”
Help Hardy edit his most famous novel by choosing no more than two evocative colors for Tess’s eyes!
Choose from: Blue, black, grey, violet.
Or mix and match as many colors as you want from the following list and help Hardy by writing an even more colorful sentence!
List of colors to choose from: Asparagus, burnt orange, caput mortuum, carnation pink, chartreuse, cosmic latte, cyan, coral red, deep magenta, electric indigo, eggplant, firebrick, harlequin, Hollywood cerise, mauve, ochre, peach-yellow, puce, raw umber, rich carmine, ruby, salmon, shocking pink, sepia, teal, ultramarine, viridian, yellow, zinnwaldite.
Ex. “At first she would not look straight up at him, but her eyes soon lifted, and his plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with their radiating fibrils of shocking pink, and harlequin, and Hollywood cerise, and zinnwaldite, and electric indigo, while she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have regarded Adam.”
3. One day as Angel Clare studied the curves of Tess’s lips, they sent an aura over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which well nigh produced a qualm, and actually produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic sneeze. God witnesses this curious phenomenon and is inspired to add an extra plague to punish the world for Maggie Tulliver; he sends a pandemic whereby everyone all over England goes into an allergic sneezing fit any time he or she studies the curves of an attractive person’s lips.
In order to please God and safeguard yourself against lip fetishes and everlasting sneezes, you decide to strengthen your faith and your soul. Who do you choose as your personal adviser for your spiritual training?
Lucy the Protestant
M. Paul the Catholic
The whole Clare gang: Reverend and Mrs. Clare, Reverends Cuthbert and Felix, and Miss Mercy Chant
The Pearl Maiden and Sir Galahad the chaste
Mr. Chadband, the oleaginous
Angel, the failed free-thinker
4. Clare persistently woos Tess in undertones like that of the purling milk, as no milkmaid was ever wooed before by such a man. Which of these suggestive pastoral activities would you choose as the best atmosphere for wooing your own love?
The milking
The skimming
Among broody poultry (translation: they’re sitting on their eggs)
Among farrowing pigs (translation: they’re giving birth)
The cheesemaking, where you can kiss your love’s arm and tell him or her, “Your arm is as cold and damp to my mouth as a new gathered mushroom, and tastes of whey.”
All of the above, like Clare.
5. That dastardly trickster Alec D’Urberville is at it again with his ghastly comicality, putting on yet another disguise and jumping out of nowhere as he emits a long, low laugh to scare the daylights out of Tess! He has already dressed up as a preacher and affected the classic Halloween costumes of a devil (with a real fire for special effects) and a ghost (with an authentic tomb). What other classic costumes and pranks does Alec use to chill Tess?
A clown costume with a squirting flower on his lapel and a rubber chicken.
A skeleton with wind-up chattery teeth.
Richard Nixon with a hand buzzer.
A zombie with fake vomit.
No costume this time; he just places a whoopee cushion on her seat.
All of the above.
The Really Goofy Quiz in Victorian Novels: Dracula edition
(This quiz is cumulative as always. No right or wrong answers.)
1. Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:
Dr. Seward’s Diary – 18 September
As I was going out of the room, Quincey Morris said, “When you come back, Jack, may I have two words with you all to ourselves?” I nodded in reply and went up to Lucy’s room to check on her. She was still sleeping, and the Professor seemingly had not moved from his seat at her side. So I went back down to Quincey and took him into the breakfast-room. When we were alone, he said to me:
“Jack Seward, I don’t want to shove myself in anywhere where I’ve no right to be; but this is no ordinary case. You know I loved that girl and wanted to marry her; but although that’s all past and gone, I can’t help feeling anxious about her all the same. What is it that’s wrong with her? The Dutchman—and a fine old fellow he is; I can see that—said, that time you two came into the room, that you must have another transfusion of blood, and that both you and he were exhausted. Now this is no common matter, and, whatever it is, I have done my part. Is not that so?”
“That’s so,” I said, and he went on:
“I take it that both you and Van Helsing had done already what I did today. Is not that so?”
“That’s so.”
“And I guess Art was in on it too.”
“That’s right.”
“And probably Tom Tulliver.”
“You guess correctly.”
“And Inspector Bucket?”
“That’s so.”
“What about Walter Hartright?”
“Yes.”
“And Alec D’Urberville?”
“He was in on it.”
“Stephen Guest?”
“That’s so.”
“What about Mr. Tulkinghorn? Has he been in on it?”
“Of course.”
“And Henry Irving, I suppose.”
“Yes.”
“Sir Percival and Sir John Durbeyfield?”
“No. We rejected spurious sirs.”
“What about Sir Gawain?”
“Naturally.”
“Count Fosco?”
“Si, Signore.”
“John Jarndyce and Lawrence Boythorn?”
“Right.”
“And Angel Clare? Has he been in on it?”
“That’s so.”
“Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet?”
“Certainly.”
“Lords Coodle, Doodle, Foodle, Goodle, Hoodle, Joodle, Koodle, Loodle, Moodle, Noodle, Poodle and Quoodle?”
“That’s so.”
“And Cuffy, Duffy, Fuffy, Guffy, Huffy, Juffy, Kuffy, Luffy, Muffy, and Puffy?”
“Yes, except for Juffy.”
“And how long has this been going on?”
“About eleven years.”
“Eleven years! Then I guess, Jack Seward, that that poor pretty creature that we all love has had put into her veins within that time the blood of 1,144 strong men. Man alive, her whole body wouldn’t hold it.” Then, coming close to me, he spoke in a fierce half-whisper; “What took it out?”
I shook my head. “That,” I said, “is the crux. Van Helsing is simply frantic about it, and I am at my wits’ end. I can’t even hazard a guess. There has been a series of little circumstances over the years which have thrown out all our calculations as to Lucy being properly watched.”
What event immediately follows this passage?
a. They resort to Mr. Guppy, Mr. Vholes and Conversation Kenge as a source of blood.
b. They have “bad luck” for another eleven years with missed telegrams, the removal of garlic from Lucy’s room and other assorted calamities. Surely there is some horrible doom hanging over them that every possible accident should thwart them in all they try to do.
c. They realize that Harold Skimpole and Grandfather Smallweed are the bloodsuckers responsible, and they drive a stake through each of their hearts.
d. They give Lucy a transfusion of Mr. Krook’s blood, and she goes up in flames.
e. Van Helsing promises that later, give or take a few hundred pages, he will explain all, but for now he has sown his corn, and Nature has her work to do in making it sprout; if it sprouts at all, there’s some promise, and he waits till the ear begins to swell.
f. During one of Van Helsing’s particularly long and winding metaphor-filled speeches, Lucy is finally sucked dry down to the last sip, and expires, ending the Eleven-Year Blood Brotherhood.
2. Come on, turn to the dark side. You know you want to. Overlook the weight problems and the blood sucking issues and choose a Count as your lifetime partner in crime:
a. Count Fosco: maybe not conventionally sexy in body, but his mind is a knockout
b. Count Dracula: tall, dark, handsome bisexual older man – and growing younger by the day
c. The Count on Sesame Street: the man – er, muppet – taught us everything we know about our numbers
d. The Count of Monte Cristo: rich, smart, good with his sword
e. Count Olaf: an over-the-top performance of eccentric villainy, and a chance to pick on the Baudelaire children
f. Count Chocula: an unlimited lifetime supply of chocolate – who can resist?
g. Count Dooku: actually, never mind on that one – Star Wars Ep. II is a lousy film. Let’s pretend instead that Darth Vader circa The Empire Strikes Back is a count…not so hard to do if we’re going to think of Van Helsing as Yoda.
3. Most exciting scene with a speeding carriage or cart:
a. Alec D’Urberville’s attempt to seduce Tess on the way to Trantridge with his sexy, fast dog-cart driving, the wheels humming like a top and the flinty sparks from the horse’s hoofs outshining the daylight.
b. The hunt for Lady Dedlock.
c. The cart racing for the sunset carrying Dracula’s chest, with the vampire hunters pursuing on horseback, the wolves converging, and Mina and Van Helsing brandishing their revolvers.
d. Speeding carriages and carts are not very exciting now that we have cars.
4. Favorite colorful and eccentric foreigner (as in not British):
a. Count Fosco
b. Count Dracula
c. Professor Van Helsing
d. Hortense
e. M. Paul
f. Madame Beck
5. Which fictional woman would you rather strangle in a jealous rage: Tess Durbeyfield, whose face (and other attributes) makes her so irresistible that she’s forced to try to make herself look ugly to keep the men away; or Lucy Westenra who receives three different proposals in a single day from dashing, well-to-do vampire hunters, and later gets to mingle her bodily fluids with all three of them plus a vampire and a professor. Explain.
6. Bonus Middle English question
Read the following passage and answer the question that follows:
Dr. Seward’s Diary – 22 September
All the time of Lucy’s burial Van Helsing was, I could see, putting some terrible restraint on himself. When it was all over, we were standing beside Arthur, who, poor fellow, was speaking of his part in the operation where his blood had been transfused to his Lucy’s veins; I could see Van Helsing’s face grow white and purple by turns. Arthur was saying that he felt since then as if they two had been really married and that she was his wife in the sight of God. None of us said a word of the other 1143 operations, and none of us ever shall. Arthur and Quincey went away together to the station, and Van Helsing and I came on here. We were joined in the carriage by Frederick Fairlie, his servant Louis, Sir Launcelot, and Arthur – not Arthur Godalming, but Arthur, King of the Britons – who had all attended Lucy’s funeral with us. But the moment we were in the carriage, Van Helsing gave way to a regular fit of hysterics. He laughed till he cried, and then he cried till he laughed again; and laughed and cried together, just as a woman does. I tried to be stern with him, but Arthur and Launcelot joined Van Helsing and weeped as men out of their minds. In their words, the tears “brasten” from their eyes to see such noble manhood, and then they actually swooned on the floor of the carriage. I was going to attend to them and try to revive them, but then Van Helsing went again into a laughing stage of his fit, and I had to draw down the blinds lest any one should see us and misjudge. Mr. Fairlie also began to laugh with him and said that he was bound in common gratitude to say that Van Helsing really amused him, and he thought he should send for him any time when he was in low spirits. But when Van Helsing laughed so hard that the tears burst from his eyes again, Mr. Fairlie asked Louis if it were tears or perspiration. When Louis said he thought it was tears, Mr. Fairlie said that he could not understand the interest of a secretion from a sentimental point of view, and I was inclined to agree with him.
“For the life of me, Professor,” I said, “I can’t see anything to laugh at in all this. Why, poor Art’s heart was simply breaking back there at the funeral.”
“Just so. Said he not that the transfusion of his blood to Lucy’s veins had made her truly his bride?”
“Yes, and it was a sweet and comforting idea for him.”
“Quite so. But there was a difficulty, friend John. If so that, then what about the 1143 others? Ho, ho!”
“I don’t see where the joke comes in there either!” I said; and I did not feel particularly pleased with him for saying such things.
“Ah, you don’t comprehend, friend John. You see, King Laugh he come to me and shout and bellow in my ear, ‘Here I am! Here I am!’ till the blood come dance back and bring some of the sunshine that he carry with him to my cheek.”
By this time, Launcelot and Arthur had recovered from their swoon and were listening intently to Van Helsing.
“Sir Professor,” said King Arthur to Van Helsing, “I require you tell me where to find this heathen King Laugh that we may do battle with him.”
“No, friend Arthur,” said Van Helsing, “You misapprehend. When King Laugh come he make them all dance to the tune he play. And believe me that he is good to come, and kind.”
“So God me help,” said Sir Launcelot, “either King Laugh shall slay me or I him, but that he shall be christened or ever we depart in sunder.”
“King Laugh, he is not something to fight or christen,” Van Helsing said. “But he come like the sunshine and he ease off the strain again; and we bear to go on with our labour, what it may be. Ah, now King Laugh have pack up his crown, and all that is to him – for he go far, far away from me, and for a long, long time.”
“If King Laugh flee from us we shall slay him, and he shall never the sooner be quit,” said Arthur. “Now we must depart, so pray we Our Lord that we may meet together in short time.” And he and Launcelot took off their helms and kissed together, and Van Helsing laughed until he cried at their departing while Mr. Fairlie asked Louis to translate.
What event immediately follows this passage?
a. It is manifestly an impossible thing to repeat on his phonograph Arthur and Launcelot’s Middle English and Van Helsing’s Dutch English interpreted in the English of Fairlie’s Swiss valet, so Dr. Seward does not try.
b. Arthur and Launcelot find King Laugh and convert him to Christianity; he joins the vampire hunters, is martyred with Quincey Morris in the effort to kill Dracula, and both are canonized as saints seventy years later.
c. King Laugh steps into the carriage and becomes acquainted for the first time with Dr. Seward, whose diary entries are never the same again; their soberness and reliability destroyed, no one believes the account, Dracula’s reign of terror goes unstopped, and the whole world is converted to vampirism.
d. Arthur and Launcelot succeed in converting King Laugh to Christianity, and Mina falls in love with him and leaves Jonathan; the vampire hunters’ faith in the wonderful Madam Mina, and thus all of womanhood, is destroyed, and they cease pursuing Dracula; his reign of terror goes unstopped, and the whole world is converted to vampirism.
e. Arthur, Launcelot, and King Laugh are all disappointed that they did not get a chance to take part in the Blood Brotherhood, so Van Helsing and Dr. Seward use Mina as a replacement for Lucy; with a little help from Dracula they go on another eleven-year transfusion spree.
Three Poems (2005)
I Saw Johnny Depp in Secret Window
I go to the movies alone on Monday nights
Weariness makes me taut like the screen
Blank and white
Ready to receive the likes of that crazy Johnny Depp
I guess for some it’s the looks
But for me it’s the subtle Chaplin humor
After my ticket is torn I head to a stall
So I’m not pulled out of the best scenes
By those tired demands
As I come out I see the urinals
And realize in a B movie twist I’m in another dimension
The realm of the wrong sex
I plan a daring escape before the aliens return to the ship
Peeking my head out just enough to see
The father and son with popcorn staring at posters
The manager adding up figures on a screen
Then like characters I’ve seen in movies
I walk out slow and deliberate
So as not to attract the wrong kind of attention
I sit in the theater with couples
Their popcorn a loud crunch at the wrong moment
Their candy a rustling that muffles dialogue
The urinals hadn’t seen me
They wouldn’t tell the joke behind my back
To the next guy who stepped up
But I needed someone to laugh
And I was ashamed to be alone again in that theater
With the couples slurping through their straws
Whispering things not meant for me
In the hollow moments between trailers
After the credits I hurried through a side door
Afraid the manager had seen me after all
Lousy film, great performance and all that
Nowadays everybody goes to see Johnny Depp
They like his brand of comedy
But I am invisible at the movies
The unseen men’s room comedienne
The star that no one is watching
Mowers
The lawnmowers march steadily forward
Over neighboring countries of grass
The push mowers advance from the west
Over the fields razed so many times
They’re cracked and yellow
While the red riding mowers
Sweep around our left flank to distract us
They are loud proclaiming
Their racial supremacy dogma
The superiority of one plant over another
We sit in our garden in the late afternoon
But we can’t hear the voice of the ghost
The ghost of our venerable old gum tree
Gone all these years
Here is our appeasement:
We are growing native prairie land
We are peaceful here
We don’t need the mechanical troopers
But all over the neighborhood
The blood from the grass spills
The purges go on
And the voice of the ghost is drowned
An Apology to Garrett for the Poems
All those thee’s and thou’s,
Your dark eyes and your soul,
My breath and my inspiration -
What the hell was I thinking?
You only liked it when I called you a beautiful bastard,
A sewage romeo,
The casanova of the mop sink room.
I know because you laughed.
You wanted limericks, not sonnets,
And we were in New York City in 1998,
Not 19th century England.
You didn’t want to be
The melody that lights my dreaming mind,
Or the music I would still remember.
You didn’t want autumn’s west wind in your eyes,
And who could blame you? It would probably sting.
I was convinced I had the soul of a poet
But that soul was a damned traitor.
She will never be trusted with anything important again.
I think you and I can both be relieved about that.
July 30th, 1998,
I listened furtively to your music
Ballade No. 1, Opus 23 in G minor
Staring down the front of my filthy overalls
When you caught me in the act
And with one word,
Chopin
Acknowledged everything I’d felt for months.
That was the real poetry wasn’t it?
In that moment all that happened
Is you looked at me and knew I loved you.
As the years go by,
The things I want to say to you
Slip into the same between the lines place
As the word Chopin.
It’s a place that’s gone mute.
I don’t understand hearing your voice on the phone now.
You want to recommend some CD’s to me.
It’s a strange, late offering from you,
But I’m trying to accept it as though it were divinely ordained.
It would make you laugh to see me.
Now your music plays in my car.
One CD ends, and I grope to replace it with another.
You have provided the soundtrack for my life after all.
That was the only thing I was right about,
Saying I’d remember the music.
Bea vs. France (2005)
Bea’s problem with France had started when she found out it had ruled the world for a short time. Ruling the world was sexy, so she sat up straighter and took more notice of it. Next she learned that her favorite actor Andrew Anson lived there. Then her 52-year-old bachelor cousin Jerry vacationed in Europe and brought back a box of caramels he’d bought while laid over at Charles de Gaulle. He gave one to Bea while he sat on her sofa showing her photos of mountains and castles. Bea had never eaten anything brought back directly from Europe. She expected it to taste differently than caramels in America, but she was disappointed. Though it was good, it lacked distinctive identity. She walked over to the trashcan to throw away the crumpled gold wrapper, but then thought better of it and set it aside. Later she stuck it to the wall by her computer with a thumbtack where it gleamed prism-like when the afternoon sun hit it.
The French Happy Meal was another unpleasant surprise. Bea found out about it by accident while surfing the web. The French apparently called McDonald’s “McDo’s,” and in addition to the old familiar hamburger or Mcnugget standbys of the American Happy Meal, children in France had exotic choices - a ham sandwich or star-shaped fish pieces, apricot-peach juice or black currant flavored water.
And there was the fact that the French had sex 130 times a year, more than anyone else in Europe. Or America, for that matter. Of course, they would use birth control most of the time, but occasionally they’d conceive French or half-French children, like Andrew Anson’s kids, who would grow up and one day ask for star shaped fish pieces and black currant water from McDo’s.
Bea knew that France had been there all her life. But after the gold wrapper, the McDo’s Happy Meals, and the French sex, France was a new threat. It was after her, was coming at her from everywhere. Bea told herself to stay on guard.
E-News from the French Government suddenly began arriving in her email unbidden. In the gift shop across the street from Bea’s coffee shop, the owner put up a whimsical three-dimensional map of France - the Eiffel tower protruded from Paris in a rude, phallic way. And France was there in the daily language in words Bea liked, in words she was indifferent to, and in words she hated, such as ointment. France just refused to back down. Each time she encountered it, she smiled a little and nodded as if to say “touché” to her opponent. But what did it want from her? Was it planning a bigger move?
#
Bea asked her friend Joey Mullins about France at the coffee shop one morning.
“Back when I took French in high school I didn’t even notice it had anything to do with France,” she yelled over the sound of the cappuccino maker. “What changed?”
“I can tell you this much - you can avoid Francophiles, but beyond that you’re stuck with France,” Joey said, taking his cappuccino from her. “I mean, there’s gonna be the French Open, the Tour de France, the Cannes film festival, the diet books by the skinny French ladies. And politicians are gonna keep hating French politicians because they’re strange and contentious. And there’s no escaping Casablanca.”
“Not true,” Bea said, wiping up some milk she had spilled. “I only saw it once.”
Joey shrugged. “Why don’t you just save up your tips until you have enough to buy a plane ticket? Meet France head on.”
Bea set a jar on the windowsill of the coffee shop and began stuffing it with dollars and nickels. She settled in to save for a long, long time. And then it came: the magazine announcing Andrew Anson as the Sexiest Man on the Planet. Beside a big photo of Andrew was a declaration written by his French lover Valentina which had originally appeared in French Elle:
“Andrew Anson, My Lover,” wrote Valentina.
All that I dreamed of, wanted, need. Our story is love and friendship united. I have the impression that no one could love the way we love. When we talk about work, it’s not too much and never during a romantic dinner.
Bea read it aloud to Joey in the coffee shop.
“Can you believe that crap?” she said while picking up a particularly puny tip from the couple who had just left. “’When we talk about work it’s not too much and never during a romantic dinner.’ Is that what passes for being clever when you’re gorgeous?”
“Give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it works better in French. Here, add this to your fund,” Joey said, handing her an extra dollar.
#
Bea closed up for the day and took a cup of coffee to the back patio to contemplate her next move. “Andrew Anson, My Lover” was the most disturbing piece of evidence yet – the implications were terrifying. If Valentina was telling the truth, it meant that something had happened in France that passed beyond the realm of common human experience: love and friendship had united; Andrew and Valentina loved in a way that ”no one” else could.
Bea tried to think of reasonable, grounded explanations. Maybe France was a mystical place where people could experience this higher state of loving. But if so, the rest of them were shut out as from well-defended medieval fortifications – France belonged only to the French because they were born there, or to the half-French, or to people who at least had a French last name and the money and celebrity to hook up with a French beauty like Valentina and impregnate her twice.
Maybe Valentina and Andrew were the sort of people who were easily satisfied in a relationship. But judging by the nature of Valentina’s declarations, it sounded more like every heretofore impossible romantic dream had come true. Not just that, but Andrew and Valentina had been together for several years and had a couple of kids by the time she had written this. So her words couldn’t be considered a byproduct of the initial flush of falling in love. It sounded like the real deal, and Valentina was confirming what Bea had always suspected – there was a happily ever after, but it wasn’t for her.
As she sat in the evening calm sipping her coffee, she thought she saw something delicate floating just outside her range of vision. Then she heard the small fluttering noise, and realized it was a hummingbird. She tried not to make any clumsy moves. She knew they had hummingbirds in France – there was a passing reference to them in Madame Bovary. But then she belched, and the hummingbird flitted away. In France, Valentina would never belch and scare away a hummingbird. Bea went back into the shop, took the jar off the windowsill, and threw it in the trash.
Then she saw it: sitting by the sink on top of yesterday’s mail was a new movie magazine announcing in bold letters “World’s Sexiest Man.” But it wasn’t Andrew Anson this time. The star Matt Gillis reclined lazily on the front, hair disheveled and shirt unbuttoned. Just a few days ago Bea had seen an internet poll on the actor with the dreamiest eyes, and Matt had won by a landslide. She looked at the cover photo. Not bad. Flipping through the article, she noticed that Matt was Irish. Ireland had never ruled the world, but it had always been a rebel out there on the fringes. Being a rebel was sexy. Bea fished the jar out of the trash, just in case. You never knew when Ireland might make a move.