Remember the nights

Learning to help things grow
(A lot more pictures of my garden are here.)

I’m sitting on a blanket on the grass at my local park. I’ve never been here before, and I don’t know why. There are children playing in the creek with buckets and pails. Why do we bring children to parks to play and never take ourselves? I don’t know if I’ve laid out a blanket on the grass, listened to music, read, and wrote, since I was in college. Why do college students deserve this sensory fulfillment any more than adults do? Why don’t we treat ourselves as well as we do our children?

Maybe this decision is the one I’ve been making since I dropped out of society five years ago to hike the Appalachian Trail. I decided then that I wanted to experience every moment of every day fully, not from inside of a computer in a cubicle. I’d rather suffer with holey clothes and cheap haircuts and a basement apartment than cage myself eight hours a day. It’s a decision that has not been met with great approval by family and friends, nor society at large. I believe in what I’m doing, even if everyone else seems to believe it self-indulgent nonsense.

My next adventure, I’ve more or less decided, is to buy a little piece of land, probably in Alabama. There I’ll build my own house, with my own back and brawn and hands. I have no construction experience and very little aptitude. Still. Would I rather lock myself up from dawn to dusk (at least for six months of the year, when sunlight appears after eight and disappears before five) and pay someone else to do something I can learn to do myself? I’d rather heft the beams in my own arms. Heck, I’d rather pour my own concrete.

I’ve never had a job--paid, at least--where I was rewarded for creating something with my own hands. I envy people who get paid for building things. Marx was right. He said that human beings are fundamentally divided between the proletariat, who see the results of their labor--at the end of the day, the ditch is dug, the stones are in a pile--and the bourgeoisie, who use their minds but are divorced from what they produce. He said, and I concur, that those two halves, intellectual and physical, are only fulfilled in the pursuit of art. Is it any wonder we use the term creativity? Something new is created. Something new takes form.

How many Americans, I wonder--seventy percent? Ninety?--spend their days moving paper from one stack to another? No wonder our economy is destroyed. We don’t make anything. We earn our livings making nothing. Then we spend all the money we earn on cheap plastic nothing we buy at Wal-mart. This cycle is patently insane, and yet we all continue in it. Why? Because we’re ashamed not to. We’re ashamed to say that the emperor has no clothes. And we like our cheap plastic crap, our fried chicken, our garbage bags, our splinter-board furniture.

I learned recently that a coworker of a friend, an executive assistant at a financial company, makes $80,000 a year. She shuffles paper for a living. She has a $300 key-chain. What does that say about us as a nation? As people? As Christians?

I can’t say I won’t give up, that I won’t take one of those jobs eventually. I like fried chicken, too. The battle may exhaust me. I may lose. I may go hungry, at least metaphorically. I may fail. At the end of my life, though, at least I’ll be able to say I had this afternoon on the grass, in the sun, watching ants crawl on clover.

Everything in its right place

The New Yorker recently featured a retrospective on the life and work of David Foster Wallace--a brave article, filled with fire and verve and quotes about what it means to be a fiction writer, and what it means, really, to be a human being. David Foster Wallace, if you don’t know, is the brilliant contemporary novelist who hanged himself on his front porch last September, at the age of 47.

He said: freedom “means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to, and to choose how you construct meaning.”

There are so many things I have to say about him and the article: what a gift is to have access to the New Yorker again, to feel like I’m participating in a dialog with the best minds alive today, relishing every exquisite sentence. What a tragedy it is to have lost one of our best novelists. How awful is the continued massacre of artists by their own hands. How I feel required to apologize for his and my own battle with depression, and how I refuse to do so.

What I want to say most, though, is what a brilliant man he was, and how lucky we are that he managed to stave off his fear and doubt enough to create at least two novels. How grateful I am for that. I haven’t read them yet--I’ve only read his shorter work--but I savor their future reading the way kids look forward to dessert. That anticipation in this case is coupled with sadness that his words are so finite. Two is all we get.

Despite his awful death, I believe he grasped in some essential way the core of what it means to be successful in life. His end doesn’t matter as much as the courage he had to make good choices about his own internal life for 47 years, to battle the demons of addiction and depression that stalked him. I find it intolerable that, because he eventually succumbed to those demons, after going off the antidepressants that kept him alive for twenty years, people can invalidate his life’s work.

He sought to find the truth behind experience. He wasn’t willing to accept archness and irony as substitutes for substance. He wasn’t afraid to risk being cheesy. Or he was afraid, terrified, but he was brave enough to confront that fear and overcome it, for a long, long time.

In the book he was working on when he died, a vast exploration of the inner lives of IRS agents, he said:

“Bliss--a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious--lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”

So much of his internal struggle echoes mine. I fight those same neuroses, trying to control my inner life. Lately, people, intending to be helpful, have dangled these ghosts in front of me, the specters of the artists who offed themselves serving as cautionary tales. See, you really don’t want to be an artist. Look what happens to them! They’re consumed by despair! They go crazy! They kill themselves!

I refuse to be scared by demons or ghosts. I celebrate the accomplishments of those who spent their whole lives battling mental illness and the war of our culture against those who speak painful truth. I’m so grateful that David Foster Wallace managed to wrest meaning and beauty from his experience. I refuse to invalidate his success.

Account

Flowers are pretty.

Another poem today, this one by Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish national treasure. (I should add that I'm also not the author of the previous poem, as some seem to have assumed. That was John Updike, who died last year.)

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness,
Like the flight of a moth which, had it known,
Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame.

Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety,
The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored.

I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride,
The time when I was among their adherents
Who strut victoriously, unsuspecting.

But all of them would have one subject, desire,
If only my own—but no, not at all; alas,
I was driven because I wanted to be like others.
I was afraid of what was wild and indecent in me.

The history of my stupidity will not be written.
For one thing, it’s late. And the truth is laborious.

How'd I end up here?

1932-2009

Fine Point
December 22, 2008

Why go to Sunday school, though surlily,
and not believe a bit of what was taught?
The desert shepherds in their scratchy robes
undoubtedly existed, and Israel's defeats--
the Temple in its sacredness destroyed
by Babylon and Rome. Yet Jews kept faith
and passed the prayers, the crabbed rites,
from table to table as Christians mocked.

We mocked, but took. The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying, Surely--magnificent, that "surely"--
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever.

He’ll stop the next war

Sophia looks to heaven

My current source of stress is an article I’m writing about American perceptions of poverty. I’m having a really hard time with it. I don’t know how much I have to say about poverty. I do believe that after growing up in the vast, dirty necropolises of Bangkok and Manila that I have a better conception of what global poverty really means than the average American. I believe that much of my angst and uncertainty and depression, and that of my brother and sister and fellow missionary kids, is due to having experienced the reality of suffering around the world. I also believe that almost all Americans don’t want to hear about it.

We learn this lesson young, as missionary kids. We learn to stifle our knowledge, to stuff it down, to become chameleons, able to adapt to the culture we’re surrounded by and ignore all of our previous knowledge. We learn that American kids don’t want to hear about Thai kids. We learn that Thai kids don’t want to know what America is like, don’t want to hear us brag about all of the fancy stuff we’ve seen. We learn that the lines that separate the poor from the rich are very distinct, and we learn that we’re on one side of the line in one country and another in the other.

I didn’t choose this topic. It was chosen for me, by an editor. I’m realizing why many writers have problems being given assignments. While the subject is close to my heart, it’s almost too close--so close that I have a tough time writing objective sentences. Poverty IS suffering. Poverty is what’s wrong with the world. And poverty is our fault. Poverty is MY fault. I also know those are not helpful ways to think about it, and that, in order to deal with poverty, I have to put those facts out of my mind.

The fact is: no one wants to hear about it. No one wants to hear about those whose suffering is worse than their own. No one wants to hear about things that they can do nothing about. What does it help to feel the pain of the poor more deeply? I don’t know.

High on the hill

I watched this clip today, sent to me by a friend. I completely believe this, 100 percent. So why do I feel embarrassed saying so?



Maybe it’s because so many other artists and writers are skeptical of this kind of romantic, spiritual creative process. Primitive cultures aren’t, for sure. They believe that art taps into divinity. Generally, the artists and the shamans are the exact same people. So what place does art have in a world of scientific rationalism? I don’t know. Maybe that is why all artists go crazy and shoot themselves with shotguns in cabins in Montana.

Then again, all artists don’t. A companion piece, a point-counterpoint to the Gilbert speech, is the recent article about Ian McEwen in the New Yorker. Here is a writer who has abandoned all hope of the mystical, who has completely embraced the dominance of science in all areas of life. I, too, believe in science. But what, specifically, do I believe about science? That science always leads back to the mystical, even when everything is completely explained.

Current scientific theory holds that the universe curves back in on itself at the outer edges of time. The human brain remains an almost completely unexplored phenomenon. We’ve been unable to replicate even the most basic scientific process--photosynthesis--manually. I always think of the Mandelbrot Sequence, the exquistely beautiful graph of numbers that delves into infinity, explored in one of Arthur C. Clarke’s obscure books (I don’t even remember its title). That is science, that is art, that is God.

That doesn’t mean that I believe in a god of the gaps. I believe that God IS the gaps, that God IS science, that the creative process is as scientific as anything else, and that being able to explain something scientifically doesn’t take away its mystery.

The McEwan article reminds me of my favorite quote from Maus, where the lead character quotes Samuel Beckett as saying, “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”

“Yes,” responds his mouse-masked therapist.

A beat.

“On the other hand, he SAID it,” says Maus.

“He was right,” says the therapist. “Maybe you can include it in your book.”

Don’t cry

One of my life's great loves

So I decided to take myself seriously, and listen to my own advice. If I’m going to have faith, then I have to have faith that Secret will find herself a new owner, with as much love for her as I have, and that she’ll go on to have many wonderful adventures. I enumerated things I was procrastinating yesterday, and seriously listing Secret for sale is at the top of the list. Yesterday I put together a listing on eBay. I already have bidders! Exciting, but also nerve-wracking.

The real reason I hadn’t listed her up to this point is that I didn’t want to. I’m having profound difficulty abandoning the sailing dream, giving up on all of the memories that Secret holds. I know all adventures come to an end, but I really believed this one had a future. I had hope, even now, that I’d get back to her, and I have deep, deep guilt for letting go.

I have to let that dream go. God has plans for me, and if sailing is again in my future, I’ll find another boat. In the meantime, I can use the boat to move forward, instead of having an additional chain tied to my ankles.

So, any takers? You have a week!