God's Instrument

St. Francis Day is October 4. I have just learned that today. I looked it up because a prayer that is commonly attributed to St. Francis has been with me all my adult life and it’s time to share what I found in it. When I first heard it, I thought there was only one “Prayer of St. Francis.” It was sung at my first wedding, and I later paid an artist to do a calligraphy rendition of it for my wife.

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
Amen.

Around the time I turned 50 and came to Missouri, I told my late cousin, Walt Bouman, who was a prominent theologian, that I had come to realize I had a calling as a “secular minister.” He chuckled and replied in his rich and resonant voice, “to those who are called, there is no distinction between the sacred and the secular. A minister is a minister.”

In the last couple of decades, I have developed some altogether contradictory religious ideas. I even hesitate to say “I” developed them. Maybe they developed me. I’m not being cute when I confess that I don’t know if there is a boundary that separates “my” action from action I do at the prompting of “that.”

I once began a journal, several years ago, lost in a computer failure, in which I was prompted to begin with the sentence, “God is not human” and go on from there. Though my religious tradition asserts that “God” is not subject to definition, we use the metaphors of humanity to express our sense of that which is beyond understanding. So when I speak of “God,” I am not suggesting that “he” has a gender, an age, or a point of view. I don’t know anything and yet I have something to say about this.

In the midst of a charette in Osage County, Missouri in 2001 I suddenly connected religious tradition to the work of a county historical society. Religion is prominent in the social customs of the people in Osage County. They even asked me to sing the Doxology as a blessing for our parting meal. I realized in the midst of a brainstorming session with them that the stewardship we know from our religious education is identical with the stewardship we must exercise in our voluntary associations.

Remember the Bible story of Cain and Abel? After the Bible’s first recorded murder, Cain barks back at an inquiring God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Of course, the lesson of this tale is, Yes, we are our brother’s keeper. We are the keepers of endangered species, as Noah discovered, much to his inconvenience. We are the keepers of strangers, and even reviled populations are composed of people who possess divine goodness, as Jesus taught in the parable of The Good Samaritan.

This sense of wide-ranging stewardship extends to historical work. A county historical society is inherently married in a relationship of stewardship of both the intelligence of the population and that population’s sense of relationship with place. No other entity in a county is so intimately connected with the stories that pertain to this place or to the things that distinguish this place from any other places.

If we are stewards of place, what may we do to increase people’s appreciation of all the beauties, virtues, sorrows, and other meanings that belong here and nowhere else? That was the question I posed in the charette in Osage County, Missouri, and the people there reached into their store of social skills, creativity, and kindness and developed a new form of activity that would engender love of place. For me, it was a religious experience. It was beyond “business as usual,” and it changed the way I see the work I do.

One of my avocations is singing. I keep in shape by vocalizing every morning during my 20-minute drive to work. One day as I approached the office I took the most remarkable breath I have ever drawn, and suddenly the opening of the Prayer of St. Francis popped into mind, and it occurred to me that God had just drawn that breath, through me. I had experienced the feeling of being the instrument of God’s breathing. One thought led to another, and before you know it, I’d embraced an idea that “God loves to sing, and I’m the only opportunity for God to sing in the space I occupy.” So I became the instrument of God’s love of singing, and that concept rippled out in all directions until virtually everything I touch or do is touched or done with a sense of a divine presence not of my making, but which inhabits and uses me. And what is true in my thinking about me, is true in my thinking about you. My sense of the divine is much more immediate since these ideas were granted to me by some deity called “Holy Spirit” in one tradition, or “Athena” in another.

Three years ago I quoted the opening line of The Prayer of St. Francis at a charette in the Champ Clark House in Bowling Green, Missouri. “This house may be thought of as an instrument of God’s purpose,” I said. “What sort of purpose becomes divine participation?” Something to that effect. I wasn’t implying that the trustees convert the house into a place of worship, but that they see the house as an instrument of active energy rather than as a stationary object intended as a container of various items and the occasional visitor. A historic house is a tool of education. The prayer might be extended this way: “Lord make us and this historic house the instruments of a learning that is worthy of divine participation. Where there is hesitancy, let me extend a hospitable greeting; where there is befuddlement, an opening moment of focus; where there is indifference, let me spark interest; where there is too much to tell; help me talk less, and listen more!”

I know an instrument of learning that is also the product of prayer. It’s the touring exhibit on Sac and Fox heritage. The exhibit contains and communicates a Sac and Fox story about “Twelve Boys” and their sacrifice of self to provide enduring aid to the people. Sandra Massey, who served as the lead tribal liaison in developing the exhibit content, recently wrote me an eloquent letter about the meaning of the exhibit as a tangible thing. She said, “Because the exhibit is the result not only of tribal history but prayer, it has taken on a spirit of its own. It is connected to the heart of the people through the Twelve Boys, who have found a modern venue through which to help the Sac and Fox survive in more than a physical sense….The Missouri Humanities Council did not form a partnership with the Sac and Fox to facilitate the return to our homelands, but through the “Homeland” exhibit it happened. Where the exhibit may stand so also is our presence as a people.”

Seven years ago I was among crowds of visitors in the Basilica of St. Francis in the town of Assisi in Italy. Inside that space I felt positively infused with the hopeful and holy energy that pilgrims had brought there. I have not had such a feeling before or since. It opened me to considering another indefinable and indescribable “that,” which some refer to as “the power of prayer.” I sensed that power as an environment that day in Assisi. I believe now that it radiates outward like radio waves, such that the thing we pray for may or may not be the thing affected by the energy we release and receive in the mental stance of a prayer. Indeed, this text is a prayer. You don’t have to relay it to 16 friends. If you got this far, the energy is already at work.

Hands-On, Body-Engaged Learning

Recently I stopped in to see what was going on at an outdoor entertainment venue. I’m glad I had my camera, because what I thought would just be a quick look around became what can only be called staring. I realized that although people of all ages appeared to be enjoying themselves, the play environment seemed like a history park.

The area where I stopped was devoted to the experience of getting into something unusual and getting the feel of it. Here’s a wagon, or half of one, designed for photo ops. People couldn’t resist trying it on for size.

And here’s a dugout canoe that made me wonder of Lewis and Clark’s party had traded for something like this with the tribes along the Missouri River. While I stood there with my camera, the canoe was almost never empty!

You can see in this next shot that the space people enter is designed in several levels, even though it didn’t have to be. The visitor not only enters the space horizontally, but must ascend and descend to gain passage through it. There is no direct route. Yonder, near a replica Mississippi River boat, I saw children playing in the dirt by a simulated stream. Were they “panning for gold?” I didn’t get over there to find out.

And here, bordering this zone of play is an old-fashioned split-rail fence and a big windmill. What museum is this?

Not many paces beyond this area, I spotted parents and children of all ages enjoying some water jets that were clearly designed to be part of the hands-on experience of this place.

I started to see this environment with new eyes, the eyes of someone who’s trying to teach “visitor-centered thinking.” Here is an environment designed to absorb the energy of children and to gratify the adults who are hoping the kids will have a good time.

What history museum is this? It’s not! It’s a new learning environment at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. It is not only hands-on, but body-involved. I saw some kind of tree house that was accessible by a sturdy walkway. Under the tree house hung simulated “jungle vines” that children grabbed and swung on. On the other side of a walkway was a rope bridge between one tree and another, with rope mesh on the sides to prevent any falls. It was not a stable walk, and the instability tempted parents as well as kids.

A botanical garden is a prime example of a space that has traditionally served self-guided individuals and couples. In recent years, this garden has devoted enormous attention to the cultivation of tomorrow’s members and patrons. They have invested in family-friendly experiences that are physical, creative, social, and fun. All of this fun impinges not a bit on the self-guided people who are seeking the pleasures of seeing the ever-changing face of this planted environment.

If you are involved in a local museum or historic house, I hope you see something you can use in this photo-blog. Whether you sell cars or operate a museum, your most important product is a good memory. You’ve got to put the visitor’s experience at the center of your thinking. Museum work these days is not about your skill in displaying objects for self-guided learners. It is about your ability to translate everything you know about good hospitality to the cultivation of people’s interest.

Graphic Artist in the Garden

My long-term friend, David Watkins, was already a fine graphic designer when I knew him as an undergraduate at Penn State in the 60s. He married the love of his life, Susan, and moved to make a family, a life, and a career with her at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

That’s David a couple of weeks ago with his granddaughter, Lily. His garden has been a living work of graphic art as long as I’ve made the nearly-annual visits there with San.

This is a blog about David’s artistic gift, how he creates interest by the art of selecting and composing what is in the frame, for David is an art photographer, too, and we had gone to Ithaca for his big gallery opening there.

Outside, the “frame” is what is on the boundary of the residential lot. Within the lot, David has created a variety of garden beds near a large deck, so those beds have become the “frame” for human interaction on the deck. The beds themselves are framed by deck, lawn, and a pathway. There is reciprocity there. In the small zone where human space meets plant space, David has arranged potted plants as well as a small arrangement of smooth rocks. This part of the garden frame has more human presence than the part beyond it. See here, what you face while standing on the edge of the deck and look toward the slight rise to the back yard:

Shift perspective just a tad, and you see David’s eye for color, form, and texture capture your attention. Your eye is compelled into the center of the space by that beautiful rose purple coleus in that rustic-looking pot.

Ascend into the yard and look at that big lime-green hosta, and see how he “frames” the key feature with variety on one side – more kinds of potted coleus – and consistency on the lawn side – a border or silvery purple heucheras, not in pots but “grounded.” We are now in the zone of the yard.

Looking beyond this view, the visitor sees a steep slope down to a pathway that runs the length of the house out to the street. As the overhead canopy produced too much shade for daylilies, David converted the planting to a hosta gallery, each variety planted next to a dissimilar one, the whole bed tied together with large juniper bushes above and small begonias below, with a small border of hand-set stones to buffer the more austere texture of the poured concrete walkway.

Color, form, texture, composition: the elements of my friend's special talent. In the art gallery, those gifts produce wonderful evocations of what is magical in the zone where the natural meets the man-made. Here is a detail David noticed while visiting somewhere; some tulips drooping next to a plaster wall, like something you would see in a painting by one of the Dutch masters. He made the picture, cropped it to balance the flat surface above the flowers with the place where the wall's man-made curvature meets the natural floral curves, balanced the illumination just so….and it was breathtaking!

Here is a large photograph he printed on canvas rather than paper, a pond somewhere in Vermont, utterly simple as a graphic statement.



Finally, here is an example of graphic manipulation of the image to move along the path from realism toward abstraction. He has used computer software to subtract visual detail and enhance what remains, but not so much that you have left realism entirely. I have watched him work on images in his studio, tweaking this and that to see how it will affect the image, and finally settling on an array of choices that represent what the artist’s eye sought out.

Suggestive Pacing

If you’ve read more than one of my blogs, you know that I pay special attention to how a book begins. I didn’t learn to read entirely by reading. There were helpful voices along the way, such as Ezra Pound’s book An ABC of Reading, or Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, or my weekly poetry tutorial with Hayden Carruth back in 1975. We’d sit outside on balmy afternoons that fall, wild Asters in bloom by the bubbling brook beside his house in Johnson, Vermont, and he would show me what he noticed in my poems. He always noticed more than what I was conscious of writing. In that process of simple affirmation, he taught me to appreciate what was truly “mine” in the way I set things down. He did this in such a way that I didn’t have to force what was natural to me. I just had to open a door and get “myself” out of the way, and then see the sorts of things he had seen in the results. He found it remarkable that I was an aspiring poet who didn’t read much poetry. I tried to, I really did, but I am drawn more to narrative writing. That’s what I like to read.

Here is the beginning of a haunting narrative:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There’d be no surviving another winter here.

When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

The author is Cormack McCarthy. The book is The Road. We enter the story in a factual statement about a man and a child sleeping for an undefined number of nights, cold, outside in the woods. Their environment is unnaturally dark and growing darker all the time. The man apparently touches the child to see if he is still alive. Each small breath is “precious.” The two people stink. The man has dreamed of them “like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost…”

In this first paragraph, there is something strange about the rhythm of the sentences. Some have a gesture of length to them, and then come some that begin with a stark noun, like the second sentence, “Nights dark beyond darkness…” Words left out, as if “saving breath” for the minimum number to get an idea out. The third sentence works the same way, saving breath. Then two longer sentences followed by the need to “catch breath,” in a manner of speaking. Back and forth it goes, moderately long sentences and “catching breath” sentences.

By the second paragraph, the writer is not just saving words, he is saving apostrophes. The man “wasnt” sure of the month. He “hadnt” kept a calendar for years. Years: the strange situation of the man and the child, in a dimming environment, has been an extended time. The geographical location of the two has become critical to their survival.

In the third paragraph, we see “the soft ash blowing in lose swirls over the blacktop.” The man keeps his face covered with a white cotton mask. In the last sentence of the third paragraph, we learn that the child is a boy, and the boy is the “warrant” for the man. And even a comma is spared in the last sentence of that paragraph: “If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

The white cotton mask suggests that breath is not “precious” only because it is a child’s breath. ALL breath is precious when the air is full of “soft ash blowing in loose swirls.” Anyone who has ever cleaned the ash out of the fireplace knows how fine it is, how you don’t want to take a lungful of it as you sweep. The environment the man and child inhabit is dark and growing darker, and fine ash covers everything, and they have to be wary as they make their pilgrimage south to warmer country.

If the boy is the warrant for the man, what would the man do without the boy? Is the theme of this story what Albert Schweitzer called his central tenet, the “reverence for human life?” Why is the landscape “godless” while the man considers the child the virtual “word of God?”

A few pages later McCormack brings religion back into this godless landscape:

It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond ran along the crest of a ridge where the barren woodland fell away on every side. It’s snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom.

They pushed on together with the tarp pulled over them. The wet gray flakes twisting and falling out of nothing. Gray slush by the roadside. Black water running from under the sodden drifts of ash. No more balefires on the distant ridges. He thought the bloodcults must have all consumed one another. No one traveled this road. No road-agents, no marauders. After a while they came to a roadside garage and they stood within the open door and looked out at the gray sleet gusting down out of the high country.

Again the narrative pace has to “conserve its breath.” There could have been a comma after “the tarp pulled over them.” Instead, there is a pause for breath and a continuation, each phrase a sentence in its own right, allowing for shortness of breath.

A little later, before we’ve read much more than half an hour into this tale, we get a picture of what the human environment was like several years earlier.

In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

I thought of the “death of the humanities” when I read that reference to “old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night” at a time when all people appeared to be “creedless shells of men.” My late cousin Walt, the theologian, once quipped that “God is what’s left after everything else is gone.” In the narrative at hand, the life of the boy is the warrant for the life of the man, and it becomes apparent that the man has trouble breathing and that they are both slowly starving.

Halfway into the story,

They scrabbled through the charred ruins of houses they would not have entered before. A corpse floating in the black water of a basement among the trash and rusting ductwork. He stood in a livingroom partly burned and open to the sky. The waterbuckled boards sloping away into the yard. Soggy volumes in a bookcase. He took one down and opened it and then put it back. Everything damp. Rotting. In a drawer he found a candle. No way to light it. He put it in his pocket. He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

Despite the desperation of the situation, this tale moves fast on a concentrated fuel that is McCormack’s imagination. The environment may be in the last stage of collapse, but the energy that sustains a consistent narrative “voice” is perfectly focused and tuned. I felt I was breaking the spell every time I had to set the story down, and I finished it in a single day’s reading. There is something affirmative in this bleak and hopeless tale, or you wouldn’t keep turning the pages. It shapes an answer to the puzzle of faith when everything around is “godless” or “creedless.” When you read it, let the sentences guide your speed. They will set your pace. Hold to the pace they set. Absorb. Reflect.

Roberto Bolaño and the Numbness of Exile

There are times during a summer when the exhaustion of hybridizing daylilies is relieved by a trip to see distant friends. At such times, I take along several books for airport reading and to make the hours in the air pass more easily. Roberto Bolaño was the author I read on a recent trip to Ithaca, New York. A Chilean writer working in exile, Bolaño lived only fifty years. He died in 2003.



I read a collection of his stories titled Last Evenings On Earth. The collection is unified by a narrative voice of an exiled Chilean writer, perhaps a different writer in each story, as the historical time may shift from story to story, and by an offhand, informal delivery infused with an absolutely rigorous vagueness. Also, a love of unexpectedly vivid descriptors, like this passage about Henri Simon Leprince. Look how the story opens:

The events recounted here took place in France shortly before, during, and shortly after World War II. The protagonist – whose name, Leprince, is oddly appropriate, although he is quite the opposite of a prince (middle class, well educated, respectable friends, but downwardly mobile and short of money) – is a writer.

Naturally he is a failed writer, barely scraping a living in the Paris gutter press, and his stories and poems (which the bad poets regard as bad and the good poets don’t even read) are published in provincial magazines. Publishing houses and their accredited readers (that execrable subcaste) seem for some mysterious reason to detest him. His manuscripts are invariably rejected. He is middle-aged, single, and accustomed to failure.

Bolaño’s phrase, “some mysterious reason,” is part and parcel of the atmosphere of offhand vagueness that is elevated to a style. As the story continues, Leprince is drawn into the Resistance. His task is to help better writers escape the Nazis. He is willing to take great risks. Whatever made him detestable in the opening passage comes back into a description of his work for the Resistance:

For the writers, however, Leprince is something of an enigma and a surprise. Those who enjoyed a certain notoriety before the capitulation and never deigned to notice Leprince find themselves running into him everywhere they go, and worse, having to depend on him for protection and safe passage. Leprince seems to have emerged from limbo; he helps them, puts the meager sum of his possessions at their disposal; he is cooperative and diligent. The writers talk to him. The conversations take place at night, in dark rooms or corridors, and are always conducted in whispers. One writer suggests he try his hand at composing stories, verse, or essays. Leprince assures him that he has been doing precisely that since 1933. The nights of waiting are long and anxious, and some of the writers are talkative; they ask where he has published his works. Leprince mentions mouldering magazines and newspapers whose mere names provoke nausea or sadness. These conversations generally end at daybreak: Leprince leaves his charge in a safe house, with a hearty handshake or a brisk hug followed by a few words of thanks. And the words are sincere, but once the episode is over the writers avoid Leprince, and he fades from their minds like an unpleasant but forgettable dream.

There is something elusive, something indefinable about him that people find repellent. They know he is there to help, but deep down they simply cannot warm to him. Perhaps they sense that Leprince is tainted by the years he has spent in the underworld of sad magazines and the gutter press, from which no man or beast escapes, except the exceedingly strong, brilliant, and bestial.

Another very strange story is titled Anne Moore’s Life. It takes an hour to read it, and in that hour the story lurches and shifts location and characters as if someone were trying to describe a family history to you while constantly flipping channels on a television. Dislocation and relocation is a major theme of the stories, and lives lived in backwater places, far from where protagonists began. The story of Anne Moore begins this way:

Anne Moore’s father served his country and the free world on a hospital ship in the Pacific from 1943 to 1945. His first daughter, Susan, was born while he was at sea off the Philippines, just before the end of World War II. Soon after, he returned to Chicago, where Anne was born in 1948. But Dr. Moore didn’t like Chicago, so three years later, he and his family moved to Great Falls, Montana.

That is where Anne grew up. Her childhood was peaceful but it was also strange. In 1958, when she was ten years old, she glimpsed for the first time what she would later call the ashen (or the dirty) face of reality. Her sister had a boyfriend called Fred, who was fifteen. One Friday Fred came to the Moores’ house and said that his parents had gone on a trip. Anne’s mother said it wasn’t right, he was just a boy, he shouldn’t be left alone in the house like that. Anne’s father reckoned that Fred was old enough to look after himself. That night Fred had dinner at the Moores’ house, then sat on the porch chatting with Susan and Anne until ten. Before leaving he said good-bye to Mrs. Moore. Dr. Moore had already gone to bed.

This is boring, and bewildering, right? You wonder why you’re reading such blather, seemingly an unedited ramble, though with surprising sureness about details. The passage continues,

The next day Fred took Susan and Anne for a drive around the park in his parents’ car. According to what Anne told me, Fred’s state of mind was noticeably different from the night before. He was preoccupied and hardly spoke, as if he and Susan had argued. For a while they just sat there in the car, in silence, Fred and Susan in the front and Anne in the back, then Fred proposed that they go to his house. Susan didn’t answer. Fred started the car and drove to a poor neighborhood where Anne had never been; it was as if he was lost or, deep down, didn’t really want to take them to his house, even though he was the one who had suggested it. Anne remembers that as they drove around Susan didn’t look at Fred once; she spent the whole time looking out of the window, as if the houses and the streets slowly filing past were part of a never to be repeated show. And Fred, gazing fixedly straight ahead, didn’t once look at Susan. Neither of them said a word or turned to look at the young girl in the backseat, although at one point, momentarily, she caught Fred’s eye in the rearview mirror, staring at her, hard and bright.

When they finally arrived at Fred’s house, neither Fred nor Susan made a move to get out. Even the way Fred parked the car on the street instead of in the garage was non-committal, provisional, a deliberate pause. As if by parking like that, he was giving us and himself extra time to think, says Anne in hindsight.

After a while (Anne doesn’t remember how long) Susan got out of the car, ordered her sister to do the same, took her by the hand, and they walked away without saying good-bye. When they were several yards away, Anne turned and saw the back of Fred’s neck; he hadn’t moved, he was still at the wheel, as if still driving, staring straight ahead, says Anne, although by then he may have closed or half-closed his eyes; he may have been looking down, or crying.

They walked back home and Susan refused to explain her behavior, in spite of Anne’s questions. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find Fred in their backyard that afternoon. It wasn’t the first time he and her sister had fought, and they always made up soon afterward. But Fred didn’t come around that Saturday, or on Sunday, and he wasn’t in class on Monday, as Susan was later to confess. On Wednesday the police arrested Fred for drunken driving in a poor neighborhood of Great Falls. After questioning him, they went to his house and found the bodies of his parents: his mother’s in the bathroom and his father’s in the garage. His father’s body was partly wrapped in blankets and cardboard, as if Fred had been intending to dispose of it in the coming days.

As a result of this crime, Susan, who seemed at first to be coping remarkably well, had a nervous breakdown and was in therapy for several years with a series of psychologists. Anne, by contrast, was unaffected, although the incident, or the shadow it cast, would revisit her intermittently in later years. But at the time she didn’t even dream about Fred, or if she did, she sensibly forgot the dreams as soon as she emerged from sleep.

Even while spinning out this yarn in excruciatingly unnecessary detail, Bolaño pulls us into a sense of what his writing confronts: numbness, lack of bearings, and vagueness: “by then he may have closed or half-closed his eyes; he may have been looking down, or crying.” Or this portrait of a literary style in the character of Fred: “Even the way Fred parked the car on the street instead of in the garage was non-committal, provisional, a deliberate pause. As if by parking like that, he was giving us and himself extra time to think”

Extra time to think; a narrative style that subjects you to an experience, and the experience is one of the writer's themes. And this line, possibly autobiographical, "Although the incident, or the shadow it cast." Toward the end of the story, the narrator, who is a writer says,

After that I had no more news of her.

Several months went by. I moved. I went to live by the sea in a village that has acquired a legendary aura since Joan Marsé wrote about it in the seventies. I was too busy working and dealing with my own problems to do anything about Anne Moore. I think I even got married.

“I think I even got married.” He must have chuckled when he thought of that line.

The notion of saying good-bye appears in the stories again and again, an obsession. Here is the opening of a story about Mauricio (“The Eye”) Silva

Mauricio Silva, also known as “The Eye,” always tried to avoid violence, even at the risk of being considered a coward, but violence, real violence, is unavoidable, at least for those of us who were born in Latin America during the fifties and were about twenty years old at the time of Salvador Allende’s death. That’s just the way it goes.

A couple of pages later, The Eye and the narrator are both displaced:

One day I heard that The Eye had left Mexico. One of his former colleagues from the newspaper told me. I wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t said good-bye. The Eye never said good-bye to anyone. I never said good-bye to anyone either. None of my Mexican friends ever did. For my mother, however, it was a clear case of bad manners.

Two or three years later I left Mexico too. I went to Paris, where I tried (not very hard, admittedly) to find The Eye, without success. As time went by I began to forget what he looked like, although I still had a vague sense of his bearing and his manner. There was a certain way of expressing opinions, as if from a distance, sadly but gently, that I went on associating with The Eye, and even when his face had disappeared or receded into the shadow, that essence lingered in my memory: a way of moving, an almost abstract entity in which there was no place for calm.

This memory of The Eye could be a metaphor for a memory of a lost homeland, an "essence" that "lingered in my memory: a way of moving, an almost abstract entity in which there was no place for calm." I’ll close with a kind of Bolaño magic from a story about a writer’s residency at a provincial writers’ workshop funded by a local arts council in a Mexican town named Gómez Palacio. A strange woman who directs the arts council has insisted on taking him on a twilight drive into the desert:

Now we’re coming to a very special place, said the director. Those were her words. Very special.

I wanted you to see this, she said proudly, this is why I love it here. She pulled over and stopped in a sort of rest area, although it was really no more than a patch of ground big enough for a truck to park on. Lights were sparkling in the distance: a town or a restaurant. We didn’t get out. The director pointed in the direction of something—a stretch of highway that must have been about three miles from where we were, maybe less, maybe more. She even wiped the inside of the windshield with a cloth so I could see better. I looked: I saw the headlights of cars. From the way the beams of light were swiveling, there must have been a bend in the highway. And then I saw some green shapes in the desert. Did you see that? asked the director. Yes, lights, I replied. The director looked at me: her bulging eyes gleamed, as do, no doubt, the eyes of the small mammals native to the inhospitable environs of Gómez Palacio in the state of Durango. Then I looked again in the direction she had indicated: at first I couldn’t see anything, only darkness, the sparkling lights of that restaurant or town, then some cars went past and the beams of their headlights carved the space in two.

Their progress was exasperatingly slow, but we were beyond exasperation.

And then I saw how the light, seconds after the car or truck had passed that spot, turned back on itself and hung in the air, a green light that seemed to breathe, alive and aware for a fraction of a second in the middle of the desert, set free, a marine light, moving like the sea but with all the fragility of earth, a green, prodigious, solitary light that must have been produced by something near that curve in the road—a sign, the roof of an abandoned shed, huge sheets of plastic spread on the ground—but that, to us, seeing it from a distance, appeared to be a dream or a miracle, which comes to the same thing, in the end.

Then the director started the car, turned it around and drove back to the motel.

“Exasperatingly slow” is the effect of this style, almost like sitting in a “concert” of silence by John Cage and expecting something conventional to happen. Boredom, exile, and in that context, a vision of “a green light that seemed to breathe” in the middle of desolation.

Although the narrative pace is so offhand and vague as to seem careless, I found this collection a page-turner. The style is fascinating, and the situations memorable. I hope you saw some of the writer’s special gift in these excerpts.

Journeys Into Adulthood

Hello darkness, my old friend....

That's the first line of Paul Simon's I remember, from The Sound of Silence. Even then, when I was an undergraduate, what stayed in my mind was a radical inelegance in fusing words to a tune. The first stanza went this way:

Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

You know where I'm going with this, right? The creepy way he and Art Garfunkel had to sing all the words that ended the 3rd and 4th lines in each stanza....

Because a vision soft-LEE-EE creep-ING

This was off-the-wall horrible, but we adored him for elevating our youthful enchantment with vague and lonely ideas and making them...art!

If his lyrics seemed to be unremarkable in those days, his guitar playing was the key that got his music into my soul. Paul Simon played in the same folky finger picking style that I did, that we all knew how to do, but I think he made his playing sound more fluid, more natural to the music he made. In those years, he was a star and I was a grad student, reaching for a new fusion of art song with folk song. I didn't have a gift for melody, nor one for harmony, and my song lyrics were, if not admirable, workmanlike. Years later I realized that liking something and wanting to be like somebody were not the same thing as having the gifts to belong in the spotlight.

Since I'm being a critic, I owe you a brief, mercifully brief, glimpse at what passed for a song lyric in my lonely boardinghouse room when I was studying much better music in grad school:

It's been dark all day on the lonely side of town,
The light behind the clouds is slowly failing.
I will set my mind at peace before the night comes trickling down,
I'll provision all my thoughts and set them sailing.

I could do a few things pretty smoothly, you know? I could get a lyric started and then smash into a creative wall. I could do this repeatedly! The thing about "fewness" is that it wears down the listener by the third or fourth song of a set. Paul Simon developed a broader talent, learned to invent melody for his lyrics while not being what one would call a "melodist." Mozart was a melodist, and Schubert, but they didn't write their own lyrics. Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, contemporaries, groped around for their melodies in thin air. In the process they both came up with some successful surprises and song structures. Simon's sheer inventiveness got him over any number of musical and lyrical difficulties. Bridge Over Troubled Water signaled a maturing of his talent as a song-writer. Even my mom loved it! Let's celebrate inventiveness in the human soul!

I lost interest in Paul Simon until his Still Crazy After All These Years album in 1975. Those songs were amazing. What sat me down and nearly brought me to tears was a saxophone solo on that first song, the title song. It’s one of those snatches of melody that works its way in like a fishhook and stays there, and you’ve been landed, grounded as it were, in a defining moment of the soul, and it’s not a particularly happy one. It's not just the saxaphone, either, it's Simon working with Phil Ramone to "produce" an appropriate environment of sound for these songs. It's the soft background of an electronic keyboard, a muted, intimate feel of a small ensemble, so that the sax gives the impression of being a thought, a recollection of some kind, rather than a musician in the same acoustical space; and then Paul Simon comes back in and sings,

Now I sit by my window
And I watch the cars
I fear I’ll do some damage
One fine day
But I would not be convicted
By a jury of my peers
Still crazy
Still crazy
Still crazy after all these years

Like Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks album the previous year, this one revolves around the breakage of love. The rhythm of the rhyme gets in your ear in Paul Simon’s lyric to “I do it for your love:”

The sting of reason
The splash of tears
The northern and the southern
Hemispheres
Love emerges
And it disappears
I do it for your love

Eleven years later, I caught up with him again when he created the Graceland album and the tracks of South African music from Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and on the title track an image for guitar players only:

The Mississippi Delta was shining
Like a National guitar
I am following the river
Down the highway
Through the cradle of the Civil War

The National guitar, chrome plated, gleaming, and I know the silvery look of the river when the sun hits it right. But if you don’t know it’s a “National” guitar, you may think it’s some sort of nonsense about a “national guitar,” whatever that is! He’s on a pilgrimage, a divorced man with his nine-year-old child, thinking about the crevasse of love lost:

She comes back to tell me she's gone
As if I didn't know that
As if I didn't know my own bed
As if I'd never noticed
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead
And she said losing love
Is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you're blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow

And the guilt he feels about this breakage is assuaged in a statement of faith:

But I've reason to believe
We both will be received
In Graceland

You know, that’s the kind of song that’s so personal, nobody’s cover of it carries the sense of insight or conviction Simon brought to it. The other night I heard Alison Krauss sing it at the Gala honoring Paul Simon. She was great, the band was great, and Jerry Douglas’s dobro playing was beyond words. But it was as if she was giving a “reading” of someone else’s autobiography. We have to make our own journeys, and the maps we leave behind are sometimes embedded in a song.

Paul Simon always seemed to me to operate in Bob Dylan’s shadow, way back then. But when they both left childhood behind and lived the sorrows of an adult, their careers took different turns. I’m fascinated to consider Blood on the Tracks and Still Crazy After All These Years as crowning achievements of two highly gifted song writers of about the same age, who then had to go on and figure out how to grow themselves anew after their phenomenal beginnings.

Long Sentences

A year or so after leaving Santa Fe, a place of unique beauty and a certain theatrical self-consciousness, I picked up a liking for Latin American fiction. Was I feeling nostalgia for all the tradesmen who said a quick bueno! at the end of any transaction or point of understanding? Could be; that was about 25% of my Spanish vocabulary, other than food items, and I missed my Latino neighbors and the people I had known who grew up in the Pueblos in the area. I missed saying bueno!

My intro to LA fiction was The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a Columbian writer who later won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Unlike his other books, which I then devoured, The Autumn of the Patriarch is written with the feel of an extended “rant.”

But I’m getting ahead of my story. My story begins with the energy that one usually finds in the first sentence of a novel. Here is the opening of The Autumn of the Patriarch.

“Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.”

The translation is by a gifted man, Gregory Rabassa, and I imagine that he has been careful to preserve the Marquez sense of pace by leaving out as many commas as Marquez presumably did. The comma is an interesting little rhythmic tool. When we learned grammar, the comma was just a clarifier of meaning. It had a structural purpose. In the sentence-world of The Autumn of the Patriarch, the comma appears to be reserved, as much as possible, to create large rhythm within even larger rhythm.

That’s a heck of an opening sentence, isn’t it? Did you like the idea of “stagnant” time being stirred up by the wings of vultures? Did you see that instead of placing a comma after “windows,” where it would ordinarily go, and a period after “inside,” where it really does belong in conventional writing, Marquez establishes this ranting by using the comma only to join two sentences that a grammar teacher would have separated with a period?

How about “lethargy of centuries?” There is something surreal about a “great man dead” who apparently held the town in his grasp for centuries.

If I quote you the three sentences that follow the opening one, you will see that Marquez is warming us up for a marathon of ultra-long sentences that, literally, take away your breath if you read them aloud. It is a feat and a feast to read this thin book!

“Only then did we dare go in without attacking the crumbling walls of reinforced stone, as the more resolute had wished, and without using oxbows to knock the main door off its hinges, as others had proposed, because all that was needed was for someone to give a push and the great armored doors that had resisted the lombards of William Dampier during the building’s heroic days gave way. It was like entering the atmosphere of another age, because the air was thinner in the rubble pits of the vast lair of power, and the silence was more ancient, and things were hard to see in the decrepit light. All across the first courtyard, where the paving stones had given way to the underground thrust of weeds, we saw the disorder of the post of the guard who had fled, the weapons abandoned in their racks, the big, long rough-planked tables and plates containing the leftovers of the Sunday lunch that had been interrupted by panic, in shadows we saw the annex where government house had been, colored fungi and pale irises among the unresolved briefs whose normal course had been slower than the pace of the driest of lives, in the center of the courtyard we saw the baptismal font where more than five generations had been christened with martial sacraments, in the rear we saw the ancient viceregal stable which had been transformed into a coach house, and among the camellias and butterflies we saw the berlin from stirring days, the wagon from the time of the plague, the coach from the year of the comet, the hearse from progress in order, the sleep-walking limousine of the first century of peace, all in good shape under the dusty cobwebs and all painted with the colors of the flag.”

I went back into Marquez after reading a new book, Dancing to “Almendra,” by the Cuban writer, Mayra Montero. The story is told by a cub reporter at a minor newspaper in Havana, who becomes fascinated with the presence of the Mafia in the casino business during the last months of 1957. There is revolution in the air, and the Batista dictatorship is cracking down, leaving bodies to be found in the street on many mornings. Here is the opening energy of her book:

“On the same day Umberto Anastasia was killed in New York, a hippopotamus escaped from the zoo in Havana. I can explain the connection. No one else, only me, and the individual who looked after the lions. His name was Juan Bulgado, but he preferred to be called Johnny: Johnny Angel or Johnny Lamb, depending on his mood. In addition to feeding the animals, he was in charge of the slaughter pen, that foul-smelling corner where they killed the beasts that were fed to the carnivores. A long chain of blood. That’s what the zoo is. And, very often, life.”

The book begins in this factual, newspaper style, and by the second page has downshifted into the run-on sentences of a youthful narrator for whom the blurt and rant come naturally. After the opening, set in 1957, the story flashes back ten years. The narrator, Joaquín, and his friend, Julián, are thirteen, and they are at the Hotel Nacional, where Julián’s mother, Aurora, works as a dining room decorator. They stumble onto a meeting of Mafiosos who are planning the execution of Bugsy Siegel, the strongman of Las Vegas. This memory of Joaquín’s is erotically-charged by his fascination with his friend’s mother, and it is in this associative memory that we learn what the novel’s title means:

“At the meeting in the Nacional, they concluded that Bugsy was a hindrance, they decided to wait six months, and then they raised their glasses to signal agreement. He was eliminated on June 20, 1947, while he sat on the sofa in his house in Los Angeles, reading the paper and waiting for his dear friend the actor George Raft, with whom he was supposed to have dinner at Jack’s. That’s what they discussed at the “convention” while Aurora, Julián’s mother, was placing orchids in the centers of the tables, removed from everything, radiant because she was in love, she’d just fallen in love again, though her son suspected nothing and neither did I; it was a secret between her and the man who’d won her. I saw them once, some time later, dancing to “Almendra,” the danzón about the almond. It seemed to me that listening to “Almendra” was like watching a pendulum; it was a melody that could hypnotize the people who danced to it, those two people in particular but also the ones who had the experience of seeing them dance. Aurora and that man, like a single seed, satisfied at last and for that reason strong, their passion spent, I understood this despite my youth. There was something solid and distinctive in the way they connected, in the honored way they followed the rhythm. There was no hope for anyone else.”

You could imagine the laid-back voice of Garrison Keillor spinning a Lake Wobegon yarn like that, or you could juice up the pace and imagine, rightly, that this is a tale spun by a man traumatized and still feeling it.

A few pages later, Joaquín sketches in his family life at home during that time in 1957:

“I asked Santiago, the brother I hardly ever saw at home except for Sunday lunch, for help. Sunday was when Mamá cooked chicken and rice, a tradition her children despised and her husband was indifferent to; my father boasted of eating anything, even stones. Santiago led an intense social life. He was only on loan to us, he barely swallowed two mouthfuls because somebody was always waiting to have lunch with him someplace else, he’d tell me about it in a quiet voice. Often he hid the food in a napkin and then threw it in the toilet. During those lunches, Lucy looked like a corpse, pale and teary-eyed, not because of the food, which after all was merely a passing revulsion, but because she felt uncomfortable in her clothes and had to sit there in front of the entire family, especially in front of my mother and father, who separately were sarcastic but together became binomial acid, above all when they attempted to overlook the ambiguity (the great ambiguity that was Lucy) and called her, not without a certain irony, señorita. Won’t the señorita have more rice?”

This breathless style carries the reader, as if the gas pedal is stuck to the floor, straight to the end of the story, a story written in Puerto Rico by a newspaper columnist who was born in Cuba, and who seems caught up in loving nostalgia for pre-Castro Havana, its popular music and night life, the tourists and gamblers from the states, and the dictatorship locked in an embrace with the Mafia; she writes of Havana as Joaquín writes of his pubescent memory of Aurora and her lover dancing to Almendra.