Prime Passage: Resistance by Barry Lopez

... Now we believe that without love our homeland -- perhaps all countries -- will perish. Over the years, as we have learned what it might mean to love, we have generally agreed that we've better understood the risks. In our nation, it is acceptable to resent love as an interference with personal liberty, as a ruse the emotions employ before the battlements of reason. It is the abused in our country who now most weirdly profess love. For the ordinary person, love is increasingly elusive, imagined as a strategy.

We reject the assertion, promoted today by success-mongering bull terriers in business, in government, in religion, that humans are goal-seeking animals. We believe they are creatures in search of proportion in life, a pattern of grace. It is balance and beauty we believe people want, not triumph. The stories the earth's people adhere to with greatest faith -- the dances that topple fearful walls; ethereal performances of light, color, and music; the enduring musics themselves -- are well patterned. And these templates for the maintenance of vision, repeated continuously in wildly different idioms, from the eras of Lascaux and Shanidar to the days of the Prado and Butoh, these patterns from the artesian wells of artistic impulse, do not require updating. They require only repetition. Repetition because, just as murder and infidelity are within us, so, too, is forgetfulness. We forget what we want to mean. To achieve progress, we've all but cut our heads off.

Optimism

"Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning he had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen. … And yet I was aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.”
– James Baldwin, "Sonny’s Blues"

Last week’s election was an event of such exultant transformation for Americans everywhere (and even non-Americans in countries all over the globe) that I, like most who witnessed it, experienced a rare emotional mingling of passion with politics.

Here in Portland, on the moment the election was called, a crowd of strangers downtown erupted into a spontaneous chorus of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” From the looks of it, most of these celebrants were too young, as am I, to have ever witnessed such a grand and exuberant historical moment, or to have been inspired to such emotive patriotism by a political event. Like me, most were too young to have lived through the blood-bright tangle of tragedy and social progress that was the 1960s.

I was born during the Carter administration and came of voting age just in time to cast my ballot in the Clinton/Dole contest of 1996, whose outcome sustained an era of blasé prosperity and kept the partisanship pendulum swinging for years. They seemed, those years, to be all politics, little more. Aside from silly extramarital scandals besetting the White House, it was a period almost ahistorical in its uneventfulness. Bombs fell in Kosovo, and important things happened in Ireland, but those were overseas events, and did not substantially reverberate in our national character. Here at home we hummed along — or maybe droned.

So during my lifetime I’d never had the pleasure to witness how the national political stage can, on rare occasion, furnish a scene of monumental drama and beauty. I had never — I might as well admit — experienced that glorious swelling in the breast which some of my elders proudly referred to as “American optimism.” Quite the opposite, sadly, for the true defining national events of my lifetime were all squeezed into a single fatal day early one September. The world-splitting consequences of that day — ideological wars within wars at home and abroad — only degraded my faith in the course my country was taking.

But now, after years of allowing the box-cutters of the 9/11 terrorists to scar our hearts with divisive fear, after years of accelerating our aggressions abroad instead of nurturing optimism and coming together in spirit at home, we Americans have finally embraced renewal. And I have learned, for the first time in my life, what the old proverbial American optimism feels like. At last, I understand it to be profoundly alive. Cynical politicking, lobbyists, or a disaffected citizenry cannot squelch it; despite such corrupting influences, optimism is implicit always in the self-correcting genius of our democracy. While it may lie dormant in certain periods, still, even after the gloomiest epochs, this fundamental spirit can be revived. It awakens through the people whenever the people give sway to their higher instincts. And how refreshing, now, to think that our new president may strive to govern much the way he campaigned — by inspiring the people to rise to the beckons of their better selves.

Here’s part of what he said in his speech in Grant Park on election night (the whole remarkable speech merits close reading):

Let us summon a new spirit — of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look not only after ourselves but each other. … In this country we rise or fall as one nation, as one people. Let’s resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that have poisoned our politics for so long. … As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, ‘We are not enemies but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection.’

To those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too. And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled behind radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular but our destinies are shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.

To those who would tear the world down, we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security, we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright, tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

That’s the true genius of America: that America can change. Our union can be perfected.

We all know Obama ran a masterful campaign. But perhaps “Hope,” “Dreams,” and “Change,” despite being politically serviceable, despite their repeated, calculated deployment from the campaign stump, really are more than mere buzzwords. Perhaps they are genuine emblems of a spirit that America was once celebrated for — and which it may yet personify.

On NPR’s Fresh Air on November 5th, journalist Bill Moyers reflected on the events of the previous night:

Joseph Campbell, the popular scholar of mythology once said to me, ‘Moyers, if you want to change the world, you change the metaphor.’ And yesterday America changed the metaphor. It was a symbolic moment for a country whose whole history has been pinioned by race. I just felt a great stone lifting from our neck. … Now, yesterday did not end issues of race in this country. … The realities are going to be with us, but …symbolically, metaphorically, and politically, I think race is not going to have us by the throat the way it has for so long now.

I was struck, too, by these eloquent words in an Oregonian editorial on November 5th:

Every president takes office promising to make the United States a different country than it was. Few succeed, and Obama’s White House plans, like those of any other president, deserve to be viewed through the prism of improbability. But through this historic campaign, and his impressive, once implausible triumph, Obama has already done something that few presidents manage during their entire term in office. He has shown us that we are closer to becoming the country that we hope to be.

On the night of Tuesday, November 4th 2008, I learned first-hand how an external, seemingly remote political event can become internal, emotionally relevant, and even intimate to the masses. As Anna Quindlen observes at the back of Newsweek’s special Elections Issue, Obama has, if only for a moment at the start of his presidency, “made the political spiritual.”

For me, that’s the astonishing essence of this turning point in the history of our nation: The collective soul of a people truly can be transformed. I don’t mean to say it happened all at once last Tuesday. It’s only beginning, and it may take generations. But it’s possible. Call that American Optimism.

(P.S. Take a moment to check out the President-elect’s new web-page soliciting your vision for America.)

Scenes From the Author's Head (Illuminating His Novel-in-Progress)

Prime Passage: This Morning, This Evening, So Soon by James Baldwin

"The Americans on the boat did not seem to be so bad, but I was fascinated, after such a long absence from it, by the nature of their friendliness. It was a friendliness which did not suggest, and was not intended to suggest, any possibility of friendship. Unlike Europeans, they dropped titles and used first names almost at once, leaving themselves, unlike the Europeans, with nowhere thereafter to go. Once one had become "Pete" or "Jane" or "Bill" all that could decently be known was known and any suggestion that there might be further depths, a person, so to speak, behind the name, was taken as a violation of that privacy which did not, paradxoically, since they trusted it so little, seem to exist among Americans. They apparently equated privacy with the unspeakable things they did in the bathroom or the bedroom, which they related only to the analyst, and then read about in the pages of best sellers. There was an eerie and unnerving irreality about everything they said and did, as though they were all members of the same team and were acting on orders from some invincibly cheerful and tirelessly inventive coach. I was fascinated by it. I found it oddly moving, but I cannot say that I was displeased. It had not occurred to me before that Americans, who had never treated me with any respect, had no respect for each other."
(Going to Meet the Man, Stories by James Baldwin; 1965)

Prime Passage: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination

From the introduction to Falling Upwards (2006) by cultural critic Lee Siegel:

"... The arts are losing their capacity to create an original experience, though no one has been able to say why. It seems harder and harder to make a work of art that does not conform to the dictates of the trivializing media, or that does not follow the lead of marketing experts...

"It's often the artists themselves -- novelists, painters, filmmakers, television writers -- who seem to believe that art is exploitable for nonartistic purposes. They seem to have given up on the idea of art as an autonomous end. Making art now often serves as a means to advancement. ...

"Art has become more, as the people in the personnel department like to say, 'goal-oriented.' ...

"This has a terrible effect on art-making. The general anxiety now is that if you don't have a gallery, or a movie about to be released, or a six-figure advance for a book soon after college, you have bungled opportunities previously unknown to humankind. ...

"Learning to make art takes time. But instead of the artist patiently surrendering his ego to the work, he uses his ego to rapidly direct the work along extra-artistic shortcuts, toward the success that seems to be diffused all around him like sunshine."

Prime Passage: Blue Highways

From William Least-Heat Moon's Blue Highways, a description of the land and sky outside Pioche, Nevada:

Calm lay over the uncluttered openness, and a damp wind blew everything clean. I saw no one. I let my speed build to sixty, cut the ignition, shifted to neutral. Although Ghost Dancing [the author's car] had the aerodynamics of an orange crate, it coasted for more than a mile across the flats. When it came to a standstill, I put it back in gear and left it at roadside. There was no one. Listening, I walked into the scrub. The desert does its best talking at night, but on that spring evening it kept God's whopping silence; and that too is a desert voice.

I've read that a naked eye can see six thousand stars in the hundred billion galaxies, but I couldn't believe it, what with the sky white with starlight. I saw a million stars with one eye and two million with both. Galileo proved that the rotation and revolution of the earth give stars their apparent movements. But on that night his evidence wouldn't hold. Any sensible man, lying on his back among new leaves of sage, in the warm sand that had already dried, even he could see Arcturus and Vega and Betelgeuse just above, not far at all, wheeling about the earth. Their paths cut arcs, and there was no doubt about it.

The immensity of sky and desert, their vast absences, reduced me. It was as if I were evaporating, and it was calming and cleansing to be absorbed by that vacancy.

Perils of the Internet

"After several generations of ‘technological improvement’… we have become a people who cannot think about anything important.”—Wendell Berry

The Internet is widely celebrated as a democratic, informational, and connective blessing. But what if it also exacerbates the “American malady” that the poet Stephen Spender bemoaned back in 1949?—“The commercialization of spiritual goods on an enormous scale, in the same way as material goods are commercialized.”

What if the Internet poses a threat to the cultivation of a rich, reflective inner life? What if Internet-mentality endangers Art—its creation, its place in our culture, and our ability to appreciate it?—or the cultivation of real knowledge?

Ridiculous! you say. The Internet as a cultural negative?! You’ve gotta be crazy!

Well, I do see the self-destructive irony of using the Internet to blog about the potential damage the Internet is wreaking on our spiritual lives. But here goes anyway.

I’ve recently sunk my teeth into three books that deeply and compellingly question the real nature of online culture, and the price we may be paying in our eagerness to embrace the Internet as a godsend. (Don’t get me wrong: I want you to keep reading the words on this screen).

1. Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob by cultural critic Lee Siegel. Published earlier this year, Siegel’s volume makes the most curmudgeonly arguments of the books I’m discussing today—but Against the Machine also advances a number of salient points. The most arresting, and hard to dispute, is Siegel’s assertion that culture on the Internet—that is, the ‘cultural offerings’ most readily available to browsers through Google rankings, etc—is often qualitatively of the lowest common denominator.

Though the Internet promises freer access to information or culture than older mass-culture media, Siegel contends that it does so by using the same mass-culture formula used by network TV: Popularity = Value. And a trawl through mainstream primetime offerings will immediately show the cultural folly of such a formulation.

Siegel is not alone in complaining that the Internet as we know it actually lowers the cultural bar, rather than raising it to accommodate a refined cultural hunger in the American public. It’s a concern being echoed in numerous places these days.

The effect on American youths of prolonged Internet use is a point of special worry. Recently the Los Angeles Times featured a prominent review of writer Mark Bauerlein’s new book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. Bauerlein argues that the intellectual atmosphere of the Internet is one of information detrimentally streamlined. Consequently, instead of nurturing real curiosity and undertaking real inquiry, students reared in the Internet age adopt a kind of intellectual tunnel vision fixated on results and indifferent to substance. They “seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort. … Going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits.”

Similarly, the cover of the current July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly bears the bold words, Is Google Making us Stoopid? Affixed to the article is the telling subtitle, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Writer Nicholas Carr begins the piece with a confession:

"I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. … The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online. … And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles."

Carr’s article is interesting and well worth taking in, but his insights have their antecedents in an eloquent book which receives nary a mention in the Atlantic article—the second in this three-book profile...

2. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts. Published in 1998, well before Internet addiction became a societal norm, Birkerts’ book was astonishingly prophetic—and hence destined for the honorable obscurity allotted to things well ahead of their time. A decade ago Birkerts foresaw the ominous consequences of our rush to move our existences online—the many dangers the Internet posed to the spirit, and correspondingly to the rich stuff of the spirit, such as art:

"Our lives are busy, distracted, multitracked, stressed. We may have altered our cognitive apparatus—speeding up, learning to deal with complex assaults of stimuli—in such a way that we can no longer take in the [printed] word [of literature] as it is meant to be taken in. …

While circuit and screen are ideal conduits for certain kinds of data—they are entirely inhospitable to the more subjective materials that have always been the stuff of art. That is to say, they are antithetical to inwardness. …

Being online and having the subjective experience of depth, of existential coherence, are mutually exclusive situations. …

What I fear is a continued withering-away of [artistic and creative] influence. … My nightmare scenario is not one of neotroglodytes grunting and wielding clubs, but of efficient and prosperous information managers living in the shallows of what it means to be human and not knowing the difference. I fear a world become sanitized and superficial.

Digital/Internet culture is collective or ‘horizontal,’ says Birkerts. It is a world of disembodiment, fragmentation, and abstraction, predicated entirely upon instantaneousness. And though it was not yet so at the time Birkerts wrote The Gutenberg Elegies, the Internet has since become a realm of rampant commercialization too. It therefore stands opposed to the real culture, creations, and relationships which give meaning to our lives.

In contrast to our online mentality of today, says Birkerts, our pre-Internet mentality allowed for a greater number of deep, personal (‘vertical’), and cohesive experiences. The old fashioned acts of reading or experiencing art entailed the “slow, painful, delicious excavation of the self.” Today, however, we are reducing—if not abandoning—these rich, subjective experiences in favor of constant connectivity and the light-speed acquisition of data. In other words, we’re trading inward cultivation for the collection of lifeless information.

“We will bring our terminals, our modems, and menus further and further into our former privacies; we will implicate ourselves by degree in the unitary life, and there may come a day when we no longer remember that there was any other life. …

To me the wager is intuitively clear: we gain access and efficiency at the expense of subjective self-awareness. …

We have created invisible elsewheres that are as immediate as our actual surroundings. We have fractured the flow of time, layered it into competing simultaneities. We learn to do five things at once or pay the price. …

We are experiencing the gradual but steady erosion of human presence."

The Gutenberg Elegies and Against the Machine share an important central message, which, for all our connectedness in the Internet Age, has been much too rarely transmitted till now. It is this:

As our personal time becomes more and more ‘virtual,’ as we become increasingly enmeshed in 24-hour connectivity, our individuality—our very identity—comes under threat, for the psycho-physical experience of staring at a terminal is the same for everyone. Individuality, personality, and independent thought are deeply conditioned by varied experience—there is no changing that. Of course, information and ideas have a role in shaping us as individuals—and these are accessible through a computer terminal—but they alone cannot sustain individuality. Contrary to popular belief, the democratization of information cannot itself liberate people. And what power it possesses to do so may well be countered, even dispelled altogether, by the dangerous flattening of psycho-physical experience produced in all of us by prolonged ‘screen-time.’

This brings me to the third book in this discussion.

3. The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman. Published in 2001, Berman’s volume takes aim and fires at a relatively new American culture in which “community life has been reduced to shopping malls,” and “endless promotional/commercial bullshit…masks a deep systemic emptiness.” He presents engrossing parallels between the onset of the European Dark Ages and the consumer decadence subsuming our national culture.

His societal critique is broader than the subject of the Internet, but it inherently takes up the soul-damaging aspects of the Internet Age, and sounds notes similar to those of Siegel and Birkerts.

"Mass culture [is] not culture, but entertainment, and…to believe a society could become cultured via this process [is] a fatal mistake. … [Nevertheless] the drift in the United States today is toward the submergence of the self into the Mass Mind, a trend that is powerfully encouraged by corporate culture and the new technology. Along with this—as in the early Middle Ages—we see the dissolution of interiority, and the loss or denigration of individual judgment and achievement. All this is a major factor of the disintegration of American culture, which, popular opinion to the contrary, is a herd culture, not an individualistic one."

Berman’s argument builds to an inspiring discussion of what he calls a “New Monastic Individual,” a kind of person who quietly ‘checks out’ of the “total commercial environment” and espouses habits or causes that will help to sustain our culture through its coming ‘twilight’ in the same way that a coterie of monks preserved the Western world’s cultural treasures during the Dark Ages.

"[New Monastic Individuals] belong to no class, have no membership in a hierarchy. They form a kind of ‘unmonied aristocracy,’ free of bosses, supervision, and what is typically called ‘work.’ They work very hard, in fact, but as they love their work and do it for its intrinsic interest, this work is not much different from play. In the context of contemporary American culture, such people are an anomaly, for they have no interest in the world of business success and mass consumerism. … [But] the new monastic individual is the purest embodiment of the human spirit."

Against the Machine, The Gutenberg Elegies, and The Twilight of American Culture form a beautiful triumvirate on the themes of Technology versus the Soul, Commodity versus the Spirit, Creativity versus Commerce. The reader will find valuable counsel embedded in each book.

(Against the Machine: Popularity does not equal value; Log off; Go outside; Have a face-to-face conversation.

The Gutenberg Elegies: Information is not everything, neither is connectivity; Plumb the present moment; Be cautious toward electronic devices; Protect and nourish your subjectivity; Spend more time with the printed page.

The Twilight of American Culture: The cash value of things is not their only value; Avoid mistaking the “tools of the good life” for the good life itself; Defy the “commodity culture”; Be “monastic.”)

This post also appears at Soul Shelter.

In Defense of Reliant Novels, or: Questioning Some Dubious Estimations About Historical Fiction

Over at the Critical Mass literary blog, one of the current PEN/Faulkner Award judges, Molly Giles, offers a glimpse of her experience sorting through the boxes and boxes of books by prospective awardees. Her observations are interesting, and strike me as much more well-considered and humane than the run-of-the-mill cynicism of other lit-judge reflections regularly showcased in the realm of literary gossip (which often feature comments such as: "I got so sick of reading I started looking for reasons to quit a book; if a novel used first-person present-tense I immediately threw it aside and reached for the next.")

Literary judging is, fundamentally, an elite privilege. It therefore carries with it a kind of moral responsibility. Ostensibly, a judge is commissioned to prize great literature, wherever it is found, and seek its furtherance. Thus the judge ought to take pains to ensure that his or her range of consideration is as broad and inclusive as possible. In other words, merely reviewing the latest Roth, Delillo or Updike — or lavishing the better part of one's attention upon titles already widely embraced or copiously reviewed while merely skimming work by an unknown — does nothing for the cause of furthering this country's contemporary literature. Then again, perhaps an award can never suffice for that.

But Giles certainly deserves applause for breaking the mold with her affirmative and uplifting perspective, as revealed in statements like: "Few of the titles I loved were publicly visible."

And while it’s often impossible to know, as a novelist, just how fully ignored or engaged one's work may be by readers, let alone by award judges, I found it heartening to note, near the close of her comments, that my new book Lost Son did receive consideration (see her embedded reference to a novel she read -- or at least looked at -- about Rilke).

“Month after month I did nothing but read,” Giles reports,

“I hunkered down, hooded over. Finally, the last box was emptied. A bare space glimmered on my dining room table... I had twenty-six pages of single spaced notes, a new trifocal prescription, a deep respect for my two fellow judges, who had been sweet tempered and supportive, and I’d been in the company of some of the most wonderful writers in America.

What did I learn?

That most of what gets published deserves to get published.

That most of what deserves to get published also deserves to be showcased in bookstores, airports, and book clubs—and is not. Few of the titles I loved were publicly visible.

That best-selling authors write as well as writers no one has ever heard of.

That many writers no one has ever heard of should be best-selling authors.

...That American writers write about war, but not about this war.

...That American writers prefer the past to the present: the bulk of the novels I read were historical fictions, many of them based on real people. While I enjoyed reading about Woody Guthrie, Florence Nightengale, Errol Flynn, Rilke, Hitler, Byron, Pocahontas, Stephen Crane, Edward Curtis and William Blake, among others, I wondered why…why rely on the known instead of the invented? Some novels even recycled fictional characters: Huck Finn’s father, Gregor Samsa. My conclusion: it’s easier for novelists because this way they know the end.

“Huck Finn’s father” refers to Jon Clinch’s impressive novel, Finn. And the Gregor Samsa reference, I believe, is to the wonderful Anxious Pleasures by Lance Olsen (which I wrote a brief review of last year). “Errol Flynn” denotes Margaret Cezair Thompson’s The Pirate’s Daughter (with which my book shares a colophon). “Pocahontas” signifies Matthew Sharpe’s surreal Jamestown.

While Ms. Giles’ reflections as an erstwhile judge deserve praise for thoughtfulness, I’m chilled by the dismissiveness of her final remarks, the nonchalant disrespect they exhibit.

If we want to ponder why novelists write novels based on real people or preexisting fictional characters (a subject well worth discussing), we shouldn’t allow an essential question to elude us in favor of one that is implicitly ungenerous. Most certainly the question should not be, as Giles puts it: “Why rely on the known instead of the invented?” Phrased this way, the prompt itself already contains a preemptively qualitative judgment, implying not so subtly that the writers of these works look for ("rely on") shortcuts, and find them in the existent narratives of another person’s biography or another writer’s plotline instead of writing ("inventing") something of their own. Given a question so erroneous, it’s no wonder Giles offers so crass an answer: “It’s easier for novelists because this way they know the end.”

It’s easier. Now, there’s a sentiment unbefitting the largesse Giles has already demonstrated. Why insinuate authorial laziness, rather than grant that some more honorable artistic impulse may motivate such novelists?

To be fair, Giles is not writing a critical essay here. Her tone is offhand. Maybe she thought her cursory estimation would best serve her closing — and coming from a novelist would supply a dash of wryness. But she ought to remember that she’s writing as a judge, and her observations will be read as those of an arbiter of literary quality.

Were Giles to examine at length the matter she briefly raises, I should hope she would reach a more worthy conclusion — and that her colleagues in award committees and critical circles would do likewise.

First, of course, they would need to revise the question. And a more responsible question would be: “Why return to these known stories?”

I pose that question to myself now, wanting to grant it the thought it deserves. As one who has novelized the life of Rilke, I could give my own extensive answer — but I’ve already done so elsewhere.

Rather than repeat myself, I want to quote E.L. Doctorow, a gifted novelist with a long career of “relying on the known” in such novels as Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and most recently The March, the 2006 winner of … well, the PEN/Faulkner Award.

In his marvelous essay “Notes on the History of Fiction,” Doctorow makes numerous cogent observations on the very subject which, when briefly raised by Ms. Giles, evokes only her condescension.

Doctorow’s piece is worth quoting at length, but I’ll start with three sentences:

“Common to all the great nineteenth-century practitioners of narrative art is a belief in the staying power of fiction as a legitimate system of knowledge. While the writer of fiction, of whatever form, may be seen as an arrogant transgressor, a genre-blurring immoralist given to border raids and territorial occupations, he is no more than a conservator of the ancient system of organizing and storing knowledge we call the story. A Bronze-Ager at heart, he lives by the total discourse that antedates the special vocabularies of modern intelligence.”

Ms. Giles, I fear, would disagree. Her disparaging remarks suggest a critical inclination to divorce modern fiction entirely from what Doctorow calls “the total discourse.”

In fact, whether Giles is being tongue-in-cheek or not, I feel she evinces an apparent fallacy in contemporary literary perception. It’s precisely because this fallacy finds voice in such an obviously thoughtful person that I can’t help but wonder just how insidious, how little observed, the shallow idea might be even in those disseminating it. Giles’ casualness in letting it slip leads me to suspect that it’s a notion of some currency — one getting passed around like a pathogen. Its hosts may hardly notice it, though they’re transmitting it wherever they go.

The fallacy, of course, is this: The novelist who employs the age-old device of retelling, who looks to “the known,” who dares to rummage in history, biography, or indeed literature itself, is inevitably a kind of cheat, a lesser talent, one too lily-livered to make up his own damn story. The only truly worthy novels of today are those that rely exclusively on authorial invention, those in which the author does not already “know the ending.” Historical, biographical, or lit-spinoff novels, on the other hand, reflect little more than the novelist’s cheap “reliance” upon events or imaginations not his own.

The sophism is clear enough if we follow the embedded logic, which insists that history, biography, and literature are at once inflexible and exhausted — that they cannot possibly accommodate imagination or invention. Indeed, Giles absurdly indicates that the ending of any “reliant” novel can only mimic the “known” ending of the story that forms its basis — never mind whether the reliant novel prefers intimate characterization over historical explanation, like Karen Fisher’s magnificent PEN/Faulkner finalist A Sudden Country, whether it delights in the inventively askew as does Olsen’s Anxious Pleasures, or proves merely obliquely referential to its historical basis, like Ondaatje’s The English Patient.

My Rilke novel, I must protest, does not end with the poet’s death. Though the novel begins from the “known” record of Rilke’s life — and his death will indeed remain the conclusion of that ever-expanding record — my narrative of Rilke operates by methods of inquiry distinct unto itself, therein becoming its own uniquely inflected record, and thus naturally culminating in a unique conclusion.

Every fictional narrative, whether or not emergent from an actual history or preexisting story, will lay down its own laws. In order to be sustained by the author and absorbed by the reader as literature, it will demand invention at every turn. The reliant novelist’s work therefore, if not harder than the “inventor” novelist’s, is most certainly no “easier.”

I’ve described Lost Son as a letter sent to a ghost, which is my way of highlighting the very personal nature of the novel, for the book does not purport to be — and is not interested in being — an authoritative portrait of Rilke, a known story retold. The creation of fiction based on the life of a poet as legendary as Rilke can only be a personal process, and that personal process — the important process of seeking to understand, assimilate, and perhaps digest and transcend one’s influences — is as much the theme of my narrative as are the events of Rilke’s life.

Thus, Lost Son opens with an epigraph by author and critic Lee Siegel:

“We must understand one another or die. And we will never understand one another if we cannot understand the famous dead, those fragments of the past who sit half buried and gesturing to us on memory’s contested shores.”

Lost Son, being personal and subjective, being the record of one individual search for understanding, is a new story.

Ms. Giles, apparently, is an academic. Is her fallacy university-born? (Surely it doesn’t come of her role as an author.) I admit that I share Thoreau’s innate mistrust of institutions (“Wherever there is a lull in truth,” said old Henry, “an institution springs up”), so I suffer an involuntary wariness toward academe where it professes to nourish and sustain literary art through drills in technique, the doctrinal enshrinement of certain great texts, or consensus opinions in workshops — pedagogical approaches that risk breeding what Frank Lloyd Wright called the incubus of habit that besets the mind. Wallace Stegner (a creative writing teacher himself) was referring to this very incubus when he spoke of where critics go wrong:

“They tend to run in pack … For ten years at a time a single critical attitude rules, and a limited range of books is praised, a special vocabulary springs up, bright graduate students catch the tone and lingo and write (and here is a case of writing with an eye very definitely on an audience) to please the reigning critics rather than to discuss a new book in its own proper terms … Being so pluralist a nation, we ought to have pluralist literature and pluralist literary criticism. The fact is that nothing in so much as our literary criticism do the forces of fashion and stereotype take over.” *

Elsewhere, Stegner was equally perceptive and outspoken regarding the kind of learning universities ought to foster:

“What we most need is neither generalists nor specialists, but specialists who can generalize and generalists with a specialty... Try self-consciously to produce specialists and leaders in [a] pre-professional college, and you will, I am convinced, produce half-men, limited men, men with imperfect vision and low horizons.” **

I can’t help feeling that Giles’ bizarre notion ought to elicit a bold question. We know our universities are fast becoming the last bastions of learned literary appreciation in this country, as good review publications dwindle to ever smaller numbers and independent bookstores fold in the shadows of corporations. In the absence of any substantial system of literary patronage, universities are among the last incubators, even, of new literature; while BookScan figures bar the development of healthy young novelistic careers, witness how many of our nation’s wonderful literary journals are produced under the auspices of institutions. And given this state of affairs, this cocooning-away of literature, further separating the art of fiction from “the total discourse” and moving it toward classification as a discreet (even arcane) discipline, we must ask ourselves how many unexamined critical biases are incidentally produced? Do MFA programs, given their dynamic of a collective criticism, unwittingly (I emphasize unwittingly) propagate such biases? Could an idea like the one at hand — that historical novels are not real novels — ever emerge spontaneously and isolatedly? Or mustn’t some vector, perhaps many vectors, such as those in the social-literary culture of an institution, be responsible?

Who can say? Not I, certainly. I won’t pretend to draw conclusions here. I just wonder.

In the end, of course, such questions are diversions from the more material concerns: 1) That we recognize this particular bias to be an emperor lacking clothes, and 2) that we examine an emphatically current artistic impulse as it deserves to be examined, in a conscientious, responsible, and respectful manner. If American writers today “prefer the past to the present” we ought to allow for the possibility, at least, that a certain artistic merit, and maybe even artistic significance, underlies this tendency. Better that than to leap to the disheartening conclusion that novelists today shun invention and scramble after the easy and well-known.

I only bring up universities because Doctorow’s eloquent apologia continues with an insightful observation about them — or about their essential irrelevance to the novelist (Doctorow has taught at NYU):

“[The] gift of the [novelist’s] practice seems to come of its inherently solitary nature. A writer has no credential except as it is self-awarded. Despite our university graduate programs in writing there is nothing that licenses a writer to write, no equivalent of a medical degree, or a law degree or a Ph.D. in molecular biology or divinity. Writers are on their own. They are specialists in nothing. They are liberated. They can use the discoveries of science, the poetics of theology. They can ventriloquize as anthropologists, report as journalists; they can confess, philosophize, they can leer as pornographers, or become as wide-eyed as children. They are free to use legends, myths, dreams, hallucinations, and the mutterings of poor mad people in the street. All of it counts, every vocabulary, every kind of data is grist for the mill. Nothing is excluded, certainly not history…

“The writer has a responsibility, whether as solemn interpreter or satirist, to make a composition that serves a revealed truth…the novelist hopes to lie his way to a greater truth than is possible with factual reportage. The novel is an aesthetic rendering that would portray a public figure interpretively no less than the portrait on an easel…That the public figure of historical consequence makes a fiction of himself long before the novelist gets to him is almost beside the point. Once the novel is written, the rendering made, the historical presence is doubled. There is the person and there is the portrait. They are not the same, nor can they be.”

And here we find supported with glorious authority a truth I noted earlier about the novel as an art form.

The novelist’s portrait, if it is a serious work, is an entity in itself, raising concerns wholly unique to the sensibility from which it emerges, and plumbing depths not yet plumbed in any such manner by the historical or biographical records that precede it.

Put another way, the narrative of a historical, biographical, or lit-spinoff novel moves along an arc no less autonomous or artistically absolute than that of any other good novel. That this arc is rooted under a larger factual arc does not alone make it a mere narrative excrescence — nor a simple plagiarism of the past. If it is truly a novel, it throws its own parabola, whether it involves so-called known figures and events or not. If it is truly a novel, its locus lies wholly within itself.

What’s more, we might further consider the nature of the “known” upon which the novelist in question “relies.” Surely history, biography, and enduring literature are far more personal, and therefore perpetually subject to interpretation, than Ms. Giles allows by her concluding slur (“easy endings”).

Where is the authoritative account of the American Civil War to assure us we know that story once and for all? — and I mean no disrespect to the massive achievements of Shelby Foote. Where is the conclusive life of Thomas Jefferson or John Brown, Marie Antoinette or Albrecht Dürer? Where the inarguable commentary on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis? A billion radii can be drawn to these everlasting centers of human thought, event, and persona — which is the very reason we revisit them our whole lives long. In fact, we tend to find them, after the passing of years, accentuated with meaning entirely new to us. Surely Ms. Giles, being an author herself, cannot believe these enduring narratives to be as static as she inadvertently propounds.

And she must agree that the novel, that most prismatic of art forms, by its excursive and complicating points of view, by its use of the endlessly lithe and subjective medium of language, by its prodigal narrative descants, its soul-scouring close-ups and chronological curlicues and go-anywhere frames of vision — surely the novel is uniquely suited to present us with two (or two-hundred) fresh explorations of an event or a person we thought we “knew.”

The successful historical, biographical, or lit-spinoff novel can function as something far richer than a faithful reiteration. It can remind us powerfully of the ambiguity reigning over our impersonal history just as it reigns over our ostensibly personalized present. It can remind us that the realms of the human, being inexhaustibly various, are ultimately unknowable, and therefore a source of never-ending mystery and discovery, vast spheres for never-ending excursions.

A reliant novel might well reawaken us to the hollowness of dogma, the flatness of much inherited understanding, and the human responsibility to gaze long at our own predecessors, our own defining events — to judge them if we must, but to do so by virtue of a humanizing complexity and a non-trivializing empathy.

In my case I find my novel’s main character, Rilke, subjected to a speciously “defining” force exerted upon him by the generations who try to understand his work. He must weather the curse of all legendary figures: turned into a spokesman for a certain way of life or a certain artistic manner. Coerced into this posthumous mouthpiece role, he gets a violently polarized reputation. He’s either adored as a saint of modern poetry, or reviled as a profligate husband and father.

But conducting my own novelistic inquiry into Rilke’s story, I know that neither of these two extremes can truthfully reflect this bygone figure. And meanwhile, I seek to create a work that illumines and affects. I wish to stir in readers a resonant equivalent of what Rilke’s story stirs in me. That task can only be undertaken in a manner deeply personal, humane, and probably more self-revealing than Rilke-revealing. And so the resulting novel, I believe, is something much more storied, much more necessarily inventive than a known tale retold.

Doctorow continues with a further salient point:

“The scholarly historian and the undocumented novelist make common cause as operatives of the Enlightenment. They are confronted with faux history as it is construed by power, as it is perverted for political purposes, as it is hammered into serviceable myth by those who take advantage of its plasticity.”

One might amend this comment to note that the biographical novelist, too, is often confronted with faux biography as it is construed by hagiographers, iconoclasts, cynics, or old associates or cousins nursing a grudge. But, says Doctorow,

“The novelist is alone in understanding that reality is amenable to any construction placed upon it.

“The historian and novelist both work to deconstruct the aggregate fictions of their societies. The scholarship of the historian does this incrementally, the novelist more abruptly, from his unforgivable (but exciting) transgressions, as he writes his way in and around and under the historian’s work, animating it with the words that turn into the flesh and blood of living, feeling people.”

The reliant novel, by taking us back to those old imaginative centers in its expeditions of invention, inquiry, and enrichment, is nothing less than a reconnaissance mission of the human spirit back into itself.

So, why create a novel that revisits a “known” story? Sven Birkerts, in his brief essay, “Biography and the Dissolving Self” (1994), may provide one answer with regard at least to biographical fiction. His is a cultural interpretation which insightfully considers our zeitgeist of “fragmentation,” “abstraction,” and endless bureaucracy:

“More and more we find ourselves living at a remove, with the feeling that life has gone blurry, has lost its singular intensity; we feel our coherence dissipating among needs, obligations, and great troves of competing stimuli… [but] burrowing into a life, the reader experiences clarity and purpose by proxy. It is an exalting baptism. For one thing, the circumstances of earlier times were, if not simpler, then more resonant, and felt more authentic… Things seemed to have density, weight—to matter… Biographical narration itself is premised on coherence and meaning. The biographer almost occupationally views his subject as living under the aspect of a singular destiny, with everything around him contributing to press his experience into its intended shape. Which of us feel some comparable sense of destination about our premillennial lives?” ***

Why start a novel from a “known” story?

I have my own intuitions, which tell me authors do so — and will continue to do so — because such work may serve to bind human beings to one another across time, battle lines, and social divides. Because such work may help us by its arresting humanity to become more expansive, imaginative spirits, to traverse and restore even those realms that were formerly but great black spaces where inspiration had stagnated or empathy withered.

……………………………………
Each of the following reliant novels offers the reader far more than a known story retold or an all too familiar ending recycled. Each will reward your attention abundantly:

-Wintering by Kate Moses (about Sylvia Plath)
-I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company by Brian Hall (about Lewis & Clark)
-Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje (about jazz legend Buddy Bolden)
-The Master by Colm Toibin (about Henry James)
-Insect Dreams by Marc Estrin (another remarkable work about Kafka’s Gregor Samsa)
-Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Harriet Scott Chessman (about Mary Cassatt and her sister)
-The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford by Ron Hansen
-A Sudden Country by Karen Fisher (about the Oregon Trail)
-The March by E.L. Doctorow (about General W.T. Sherman’s infamous march)
..............................................

Quotations used in this post:
* On Teaching and Writing Fiction by Wallace Stegner, Penguin Books 2002
** The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner edited by Page Stegner, Shoemaker & Hoard 2007 (letter to David Packard, May 1959)
*** Readings by Sven Birkerts, Graywolf Press 1999

A Darkened Cinema

Writer and film director Anthony Minghella died today in London. He was 54 years old, and my favorite living filmmaker. His movies, all made from Minghella-authored scripts, are:

Truly, Madly, Deeply
The English Patient
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Cold Mountain
Breaking & Entering

Minghella was also an accomplished playwright.

This man's work has been a primary and enduring source of inspiration to me since I first viewed The English Patient on the big screen in 1996.

Today the storytelling world has lost a great light, and young writers have lost a great teacher.

Art Awakens Us: The Diving Bell & the Butterfly

“Being, in excess, wells up in my heart.”–Rainer Maria Rilke

The most powerful works of art connect us to ourselves and each other. They awaken us, un-distract us, and bring us home to the substance of life: a touch, a taste, a color. They affirm human existence in its romance and tragedy alike. Our time here is brief, they remind us; we are duty bound to savor the wonders around us while we may.

Like Rilke wrote in his Ninth Duino Elegy:

…To be here means so much / …everything here, all this that’s disappearing, seems to need us, to concern us, in some strange way, / we who disappear / even faster!

Good art touches us at our own uniquely human core. I believe it resonates on a level profoundly more intimate than the “everybody’s reading it, seeing it, listening to it” craze often sparked by honors bestowed upon a book, a song, or a film from this or that committee of judges.

So maybe it’s fitting that this little film review should concern a quiet little movie nominated for four 2008 Academy Awards, which remained conspicuously absent from the proceedings onstage at the Oscars last week, for while viewing this film I had one of the most astonishingly personal, emotional art-experiences of my life. Actually, I phrase it badly to say I viewed the movie at all; I inhabited it, would be more correct. It’s called The Diving Bell & the Butterfly.

Based on the true story of Jean Dominique-Bauby, an elite epicurean from the French fashion world, the movie explores Jean’s bodily and spiritual trauma in the aftermath of a devastating stroke that left him paralyzed at age 43. At the start of the film he awakens from a 20-day coma to find himself surrounded by doctors who inform him he’s “locked in,” that is, afflicted by a rare syndrome that leaves him fully conscious and capable of normal thought, but unable to move or speak. He can blink his eyes, nothing more.

From this place of bleakness and despair, an unthinkably expansive journey begins. In a mesmeric approach to the paralytic’s story, director Julian Schnabel puts the viewer directly into Bauby’s body. We see through the stricken man’s eyes and are privy to the murmurous narration of his thoughts. We are “locked in” as he is. A shutter closes on screen whenever we blink. It’s a startling out-of-body experience. With Bauby, we suffer one eye being sewn shut (to save it from infection); in a wheelchair we’re pushed down a hospital corridor and catch glimpses of our contorted face reflected in a window; our limp body is submerged in a tank, sponged and scrubbed by orderlies.

We are completely dependent upon the doctors and hospital therapists, and very soon we come to love these people. They are good-hearted and generous of spirit. They are beautiful.

Bauby’s real story culminated in the publication of a memoir about his experience, entitled The Diving Bell & the Butterfly. Amazingly, he “dictated” the book in the midst of his paralysis, blinking his single good eye as a means of selecting, one at a time, each letter of each word he wished to use. In the film, we participate in Bauby’s first slow attempts at this process.

Eventually Schnabel’s camera pulls back. We glimpse Bauby from the outside. And though we’re now looking at him, we remain inside him. Because the trance of the film’s empathic opening lingers, we’re attuned to his interior world as we watch him in his wheelchair, his hospital bed—and also in memories from before the stroke, when he was in his physical prime. Through it all, this interior world becomes a luminous, living place.

This man has lost everything: his body itself, the pleasures of movement, sensation, privacy, personal freedom—but his spirit is alive and well, perhaps even freer than ever. The “locked in” man transcends his condition. He imagines, loves, and creates, and we are swept along on this spiritual journey.

Bauby wrote in his memoir:

My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court. You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face. You can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, discover Atlantis, realize your childhood dreams and adult ambitions.

Schnabel’s film positively resonates with the preciousness of life in all its sensual particulars. It explores how art and imagination liberated one human spirit; how, even in his “broken” state a man could celebrate the pulsing beauty of existence. And where Jean Dominique-Bauby is set free by his own art, thoughts, dreams, and memories, we too are set free through the art of the film that tells his story. We take flight into him, as he takes flight into the gifts of life.

It’s an experience equivalent to what Rilke describes later on in his Ninth Elegy:

Between the hammer strokes our hearts survive / like the tongue / that between the teeth / and in spite of everything / goes on praising.

I emerged from The Diving Bell & the Butterfly renewed, inspired, and alert to a fresh immersion into my own senses. This film is a gift.

[Note: Rilke translations here are by David Young.]

This post also appears at Soul Shelter

The Web of Influence

Over at the website of the Poetry Foundation, writer Geoff Dyer has a thoughtful essay entitled "Genius Envy" which deals with Rilke, Rodin, Cezanne, the photographer Edward Steichen, and the web that connects them all. Dyer explores how artists of different disciplines have inspired one another, and how in experiencing the world's great works of art we are all inevitably led to meander through this web of inspiration, tributes, references, and poetic iterations.

I believe this idea is one of the major themes in Lost Son, and Dyer articulates my own sense, while writing the novel, of beholding ever-unfolding vistas (in my case, from Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salome, Gerhardt Hauptmann, Clara Westhoff, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Rodin, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Cezanne, Baudelaire, Eugene Atget)....

Here's a bit from Dyer's piece:

"Rilke struggled to directly translate what he considered the sculptor’s most distinct quality—his ability to create things—into the “thing-poems” [Dinggedichte] of 1907-8.

As the young Rilke had come to write about Rodin and his work, so the young Edward Steichen came to photograph Rodin and his creations....Rodin became convinced not just of Steichen’s individual talent but of photography’s viability as an art form.

....Whatever your starting point, whether your particular interest is poetry (Rilke), photography (Steichen), sculpture (Rodin), or fiction (Balzac), you will, so to speak, be led astray. After this meeting there will be dispersal. And the dispersal will lead, in turn, to new meetings, new convergences....

In real life our chances of meeting people are limited and contingent. In the realm of art and literature those constraints are removed; everyone is potentially in dialogue with everyone else irrespective of chronology and geography."

The Rilke/Cezanne connection is likewise discussed by W.S. Di Piero in his essay "Only Collect," also at the Poetry Foundation website.

Rilke's Birthday - "He Will Be Spacious"

Today is the birthday of Rainer Maria Rilke, born in Prague in 1875. One of the world's greatest poets, Rilke is the main character in my recent novel, Lost Son.

Here’s Rilke at age 23, writing in his journal during his first stay in Florence, overflowing with fresh impressions upon seeing some of the western world’s greatest works of art. In substance these youthful thoughts are already quintessentially Rilkean, as though the young poet is laying the foundations of a religion all his own.

The translation is by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler, from their beautiful Diaries of a Young Poet:

“Know then that art is: the means by which singular, solitary individuals fulfill themselves. We have all been born in chains: they have them silver-plated or gilded. But we want to rend them; not through ugly and brute force; our desire is to grow out of them.

“Know then that the artist creates for himself—only for himself. What for you becomes laughter or weeping, he must shape with the hands of a wrestler and raise it up out of himself. In him there is no room for his past; and so he gives it a separate, independent existence in works of art. But only because he knows no other material than that of your world does he place them into our days. They are not for you. Do not touch them, and regard them with awe.

“There is an unspeakable brutality in the present-day relationship of the crowd to the artist. His confessions, which helplessly take refuge in the forms of common things, are regarded by the many as no different from those things. All have their hands on them; all may pronounce what is to their liking and what does not suit their whim. All take the holy vessel into their hands as if it were an object of daily use, as if it were a possession that at any moment they might break without punishment: defilers of the temple!

“Therefore the artist’s way must be this: to bridge obstacle after obstacle and to build step after step, until at last he can gaze into himself. Not straining, not forced, not on his tiptoes: calmly and clearly as into a landscape. After this return home into himself, deed after deed will be a leisurely joy; his life will be a creation and he will have no further need for the things that are outside. He will be spacious, and all maturity’s extent will be inside him.

“The artist’s work is a putting-in-order: he places outside himself all things that are small and transitory: his lone sufferings, his vague longings, his fearful dreams, and those joys that will fade. Then the realm inside him becomes spacious and
festive, and he will have created that worthy home for—himself.

“Often I have such a great longing for myself. I know that the path ahead still stretches far; but in my best dreams I see the day when I shall stand and greet myself.

“Once during this last dear winter we talked about it: whether the creative person is qualitatively different from the others. Do You remember? [note: Rilke is addressing Lou Andreas-Salomé.] Only now do I know the answer. The creative individual is the more spacious person, the person out beyond whom the future lies. The artist will not for all time endure alongside the man. When the artist, the more mobile, the deeper of the two, becomes ripe and strong enough to engender his own kind, when he lives what now he dreams, the man will wither away and little by little die out. The artist is the eternity that juts into our days.....

“....Give art your protection, so that it does not learn of the day’s quarrel; for its homeland is the other side of all time. Its struggles are like the storms that bring the seed, and its victories are like springtime. Its works are: unbloody sacrifices of a new covenant....

“....Every artist is born in an alien country; he has a homeland nowhere but within his own borders. And those of his works that proclaim the language of this homeland are most deeply genuine....”

See also Cunningham's "Rainer Maria Rilke: Myths, Masks & the Literature of a Life"

No Country for Old Men

This weekend found me in a movie theatre, transfixed for the better part of two hours by the Coen brothers' very worthy adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. It's been a long time since a film has gripped me as intensely as this one did. An especially odd experience, given that adaptations often addle.

I hope, if time permits, to jot here a few thoughts about the film before long. For now, I thought I'd direct readers to my recent essay, "The Art of Reading Cormac McCarthy," which appeared in the last issue of Poets & Writers magazine, and which I've just posted in full at my main author website. You'll find the article linked under "Shorter Works."

Keats's Birthday

On this day in 1795 the great English poet John Keats was born. His life was a tragedy. He was orphaned by the age of 15 and died in Rome at the age of 25. But his slim body of work lives on, often held to be second only to Shakespeare.

I post the following chilling poem in the spirit of Halloween. It's thought to be a fragment from a longer work that Keats never completed.

This living hand, now warm and capable...

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed -- see here it is --
I hold it towards you.

Rilkean Dance

A new London staging of the French ballet Giselle, the brainchild of 19th-century intellectual Théophile Gautier, incorporates Rilkean thoughts and images. As reported in the Guardian:

"The clue to the piece's real agenda lies in the title, a sly borrowing from a collection of poems and essays by German writer Rainer Maria Rilke. What [choreographer] Miller is actually doing is using the Giselle story to express aspects of Rilke's philosophy...Throughout his life, Rilke insisted that 'one is alone' and that lovers are, at best, 'the guardians of each other's solitude'. Miller graphically illustrates this in a tableau in which Giselle and Albrecht are slumped on child-sized chairs in tender mutual incomprehension. Giselle is in her wedding dress, he is carrying flowers. Rilke constantly returned to the idea of death as transformation and to the image of flowers, particularly roses, as a metaphor for both.

So this is really a piece about life-change. In Miller's version of the ballet, Giselle's mother encourages her daughter to dance (rather than forbidding her because of her weak heart), because only by risking death, metaphorical or otherwise, can transformation be effected. As Rilke writes: 'Only someone who is ready for anything, who excludes nothing, can relate fully to another.'..."

Listen Online: A Reading from LOST SON

Back in August, I recorded a 20-minute reading from Lost Son for The Writer's Block at KQED radio in San Francisco. I chose the section in which Rainer Maria Rilke first meets Lou Andreas-Salomé.

You can now listen online.

Rilke Week

It's "Rilke Week" over at the literary blog, Chekhov's Mistress.

Cormac & the Coens

A suprising second public "appearance" by Cormac McCarthy in a single calendar year, this one in Time Magazine, where he chats with filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, whose adaptation of No Country for Old Men opens November 9.

If only the editors of Time had been wise enough to publish the full conversation, and not just this edited version...

The New York Prodigal Son

The New York Sun, in an October 5 description of a Manhattan art exhibit called "The Art of Forgiveness: Images of the Prodigal Son," deploys a number of literary references, including a mention of Rilke's own rendition of the Biblical parable:

"In his semi-autobiographical "Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge" (1910) writer Rainer Maria Rilke, (1875–1926) argues that the story of the prodigal son is about a young man "who did not want to be loved," and who therefore rejects suffocating family affection in order to express his own personality: "Shall he stay and pretend to live the sort of life they ascribe to him, and grow to resemble them in his whole appearance?" By fleeing family smothering, Rilke's prodigal son obtains special powers: "I believe that the strength of his transformation consisted in his no longer being the son of anyone in particular. This, in the end, is the strength of all young people who have gone away." "

Sarkozy et Rilke

This recent Newsweek article, Sartre, Meet Sarkozy, mentions that the new French President Nicolas Sarkozy, a self-proclaimed man-for-the-common-man, was unsure how to pronounce "Rainer Maria Rilke." (Not an uncommon problem, but interesting to note an occurrence of Rilke's name in the realm of national politics and major media. Incidentally, it's "Rīner Maria Reelk-uh").

"The acclaimed novelist and playwright Yasmina Reza (best known, perhaps, for her play "Art") was allowed to follow [Sarkozy] throughout the campaign and write an unexpurgated book about it. Even if she were to massacre him, he said, he'd come out of it with his reputation enhanced. Now a best seller, Reza's "L'Aube le Soir ou la Nuit" is not always complimentary. (In one passage, Sarkozy calls Reza just before a big speech and asks her how to pronounce the last name of the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. She says he has it right. He's not sure and drops the name altogether.) But Sarkozy was correct about the overall effect of the book. It makes him look like a down-to-earth man of action even as it associates him with a French intellectual world he eschews: a neat trick indeed."