Like a cat caught chasing her own tail
I ought to shake you off. After all
these years the betrayals seem less wrong
than part of who I am. We both know
we knew and still know now, though we haven’t
spoken for years and probably never
will. Our life remembered roams this place,
troubled heart sleeping in doorways on
streets that look empty to those who lack
empathy. They don’t know what it’s like
to endure sadness for sadness’ sake.
How did I wake up here? The simplest
answer is not enough. It cuts to
the soul, a death-wishing admission
that I was and will always be less
than I wanted to be—for you, for
me, and any who comes after. The
hard penance is to forgive yourself.
New York and Orlando April 2015
Notes and Credits
I took this painting from the Wikimedia Commons. In Russian, its name looks like this: Исповедь. Бернардинский собор во Львове (Церковь Святого Андрея УГКЦ). Google translates it as “Russian : Confession . Bernardine Cathedral in Lviv ( Church of St. Andrew Church).” I can’t find a painter’s name or year in all my trying on the Net. Yet of all the things I encountered when using search terms like “confession,” “penance,” and “forgiveness,” this is the most sinteresting and haunting thing I found. Mere commons photographs of confessionals would not do. The pain and loneliness of confession and absolution are captured here, and that is what I sought. The poem itself is my own journey. Not sure how far along I am in my own forgiveness, but with hope I will get there one day. It’s the only way I can begin to return the love I have, so I need to work on it.
I ran to love but hid from its embrace.
I looked at it instead through windows,
where love so deep took its place besides things
out of grasp, too expensive, too precious
too good. To want but never have was
perfection, to hold yet be restless, bet
nothing while everything rested in dreams
that replaced what we did with a stream of
desire till life crashed in. Glass spilled the day
I broke your heart, but the heart I crushed was
my own. It lives now behind glass with things
that never took place while the Furies’ buzz
kills forgiveness and fans faint embers of
loss. All I have is there, too precious,
too good, too gone, and I can’t remember
why or how. In a weak moment I
imagine a word that might bring us back
when a voice cries “No! Love is not selfish.”
Love claims and love lets go, one easy as
the other, remorseless, beyond joy or
pain with no thought to please—but only to
be. Behind the glass is nothing now but
empty space. No door, no window, no vent,
no way through or round but to feel the rain
of a thousand shards fall to the ground. I
try not to howl or jump when I am cut,
for cuts heal. And love lives like this: patching
over scars and new skin, sometimes clear and
others deformed but always relentless.
You cannot hide from love; love tells me this.
For love always tries again, not to get
it right, but just to love, again.
—New York, April 5, 2015
Notes and Credits
The opening photograph is taken from the NY Daily News piece, “Tilda Swinton sleeps in a glass box for surprise performance piece at Museum of Modern Art,” by Margaret Eby, March 23, 2013. No photographer was attributed. The piece is a strange play on celebrity that makes me thing of Goop. But it still seems a good photo for the poem, which puts the experience of love into museum boxes in order to dissociate from the pain while keeping the experience alive with false hopes. Writing the poem made me consider that love is not so sentimental as automatic. We bring sentiment to love that isn’t there and needn’t be there. Love will never be more than what it is. Never build a life around love, but around what you bring to love. And as for love itself, let it be what it is. My first love post was one of the early TRS posts; looking at it now it feels like life has changed so much. And love is here, again.
This is the second reflection on ideas about “progress” and change through novels that explore the consequences of progress for ordinary people and their everyday live. The first considered Patrick Chamioseau’s Texaco, and here the conversation turns to Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and 2666.
The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living it from day to day, thinking we’re alive, thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn’t matter. But every damn thing matters! It’s just that we don’t realize. We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don’t even realize that’s a lie. ―Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth
Cesárea
The Savage Detectives and 2666 are monumental novels about a search for literary ghosts in the cities and towns of northern Mexico’s Sonoran Desert. They were written by Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean who lived much of his life in exile, in Mexico and Spain, searching for ways to make words reconcile the world that is with the world of his own experience and imagination.
In The Savage Detectives, Bolaño assumes a pose akin to Chamoiseau’s in Texaco, as a thinly disguised self called Arturo Belano, whose poetic vocation reflects his directionless quest for authenticity and escape from the Latin American “Boom” generation—those writers like Octavio Paz, Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, & etc. whose work won four Nobel Prizes and utterly defined the “Latin American” voice. Their monumental dominance is for Belano and his generation a straight-jacket of Latin exoticism that is nothing like the world they grew up in. Belano/Bolaño’s world is one in which global currents are washing over Latin America, wearing away what the Boom Generation created.
Cesárea Tinojero’s only known poem, “Sión”
The Savage Detectives follows Belano’s group of poets—the “Visceral Realists”—from an early adventure in the mid-1970s to find an obscure 1930s Mexican poet, Cesárea Tinajero. In the 30s, she worked for one of the generals leading the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910 and only wound down by the 1930s. The Mexican Revolution itself was the constituting event in Latin American history that drew a line between the United States and everything south of the Rio Grande. It made the Boom Generation possible.
By the late 1970s, long after her general died, Cesárea is presumed living in somewhere in Sonora not far from Santa Teresa, itself a thinly disguised version of Mexico’s border boomtown, Ciudad Juarez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso. After rambling through the desert, they finally find her, aged and alone, in a small room in Santa Teresa. Through a local teacher who had befriended Cesárea, they learn that she had lived a very lonely, impoverished life, lately having taken to scribbling visions of the future, afraid of persecution and even death, in a scene that appears to foreshadow 2666 without being specific enough to say anything at all.
“… Cesárea spoke of times to come and the teacher, to change the subject, asked her what times she meant and when they would be. And Cesárea named a date, sometime around the year 2600. Two thousand six hundred and something. And then, when the teacher couldn’t help but laugh at such a random date, a smothered little laugh that could scarcely be heard, Cesárea laughed again, although this time the thunder of her laughter remained within the confines of her own room.” (The Savage Detectives, p. 634)
Belano and his cohorts will meet Cesárea herself, but before anything much happens her end meets the end of the Visceral Realists in a thudding anticlimax that explains the preceding 400 pages chronicling the group’s dissolution and dispersal around the world.
Archimboldi
2666 isn’t a sequel to The Savage Detectives, but in important ways it picks up where the earlier left off, with a crew of literary critics searching for Benno von Archimboldi, a German author whose Pynchonian mantle of self-imposed obscurity only heightens the reverence of his followers. As with Cesárea Tinojero’s oblique reference to the year 2600, Archimboldi is also referenced in The Savage Detectives, as “J.M.G. Arcimboldi,” credited for the Archimboldi of 2666‘s early novel, The Endless Rose. By the time of 2666, set around the turn of the millenium, Archimboldi has had a 40-year career in which he has published 21 novels and is mentioned frequently as a short-list candidate for the Nobel Prize. Like most of their colleagues, Archimboldi scholars are a fanatical lot and would go to the ends of the earth to find their master—which leads them to Santa Teresa a quarter-century after Arturo Belano and the Visceral Realists arrived there to find their master.
What is different between the two novels is the Mexico they depict. Where The Savage Detectives chronicles a generation’s futile struggle against the grandiose and Nobel-studded world of their literary forbears, 2666 completes that story by portraying a Mexico that is at once devouring itself with it’s own misogyny and violence while at the same time it is irretrievably caught in a tide of globalization, which abets the local violence and even explains it as its own pathology. Like Texaco, 2666 is a novel about a city that stands for a larger story about the price of progress.
If the apogee of the Mexican revolution, in literary terms, is Octavio Paz’s Nobel Prize, then the nadir, in human terms, is the killing of up to 400 young women—femicidios—in Ciudad Juarez between 1993 and 2004. These murders are historical core of 2666, just like slavery and urban modernization are the historical core of Texaco. Thumbnail sketches of the murders in the fictionalized Juarez of Santa Teresa, hundreds of them, are meted out in clinical detail for over 280 pages in the longest of the novel’s five sections, “The Part About the Crimes.” Plot points filter in and out of an utter fog of forensic reportage like familiar faces wandering into a dream, trying desperately to drag it into the waking world. The scourge of violence becomes banal and then fades into normalcy. “The Part About the Crimes” is the reader’s own exile from everything she knows, the reader as Aeneas in Hades seeing a prophetic vision of dystopian globalization that reverses the familiar story of progress, replacing civil society and the rule of law with a world descending into inexplicable, and inexplicably unjust, viciousness.
In the last section of the book, “The Part About Archimboldi,” we finally learn who this writer is in an epic tale spanning the Russian Revolution, World War II, the Cold War, the emergence of computer technology, and the femicidios of Santa Teresa. In the end, it’s the story of how the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, a Latin American novel that was written in Spain and unmoored itself from Mexico with a cast of characters from the United States, Spain, England, France, Germany, Russia, Chile, Romania, Italy, Mexico, and other places. Set on the border between the U.S. and Mexico, in an international metropolis that reflects the two countries’ grand fraternal struggle for coexistence, 2666 continuously finds its border-crushing narrative crashing against the invisible wall between these two countries. Like Chamoiseau, Bolaño in The Savage Detectives and 2666 reimagines the world he has lived in and feeds it back to us in overlapping waves of murder mysteries, vision quests, and pilgrimmages. These books are the chronicle of Bolaño’s life swept up by the grand rip currents of history.
Notes and Credits
Photographs and images: The first photo is of crosses placed on Lomas del Poleo Planta Alta, Ciudad Juárez, in the place where the bodies of eight murdered women were discovered in 1996. It is from the Wikimedia Commons. The photocopy of Cesárea Tinajero’s poem, “Sión,” from p. 398 of The Savage Detectives, is a photocopy taken by Tom Sparks and posted on his blog, WFTM. The air photo of Ciudad Juarez’s sprawl across the countryside up to the mountains was taken from an article in El País online, ¿Porqué Ciudad Juárez?
Five Latin American writers would win the Nobel Prize between 1945 and 2010: Gabriela Mistral (Chile, 1945), Pablo Neruda (Chile, 1971), Miguel Ángel Asturias (Guatemala, 1967), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia, 1982), Octavio Paz (Mexico, 1990), and Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru, 2010). These writers and many others equally as notable, including Jorge Luis Borges, Júlio Cortázar, and Carlos Fuentes, to name a few, not only created a globally recognized “Latin American Literaure” but they also exercised a palpable influence on post-World War II literature in general. García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is recognized as the overarching masterwork of the era, bringing the notion of “magical realism” to fore in world literature, while Cortázar’s Rayuela has become a post-modern touchstone that has far eclipsed the Boom Generation.
From 1993 onward, around 400 women have been killed in Ciudad Juarez, a city of about 1.5 million people just across the Rio Grande from El Paso. Most of the victims of the femicidios were young and suffered violent deaths that included rape and torture. Few of the murders were solved. Those who could fled the violence (an estimated 700,000 people leaving the area in the late 1990s-early 2000s) while those who couldn’t continued to work in the maquiladora factories created to supply U.S. companies with cheap production based almost entirely on the miserly wages paid to the Mexican workers—mainly women—who have flocked to the border for work. The violence has ebbed and flowed, but it nonetheless continues to the present day and has spawned movements and organized reactions.
Most of us will chase something at one point or another. It may be a short chase, after something well-defined and easily obtained. Or a long chase, made as much by the struggle as by the goal itself. Or a youthful chase full of bright-eyed, dreamy exuberance. Or the quest of later years, when what lies ahead is increasingly defined by what went before.
For some, the chase is a noble cause that will leave the world a better place, regardless of whether or not the goal is achieved. Others will take the low road of vengeance, recrimination, or pride, plunging into the depths like Captain Ahab on the bloodied back of Moby-Dick.
“Moby-Dick, p. 548” by Matt Kish
To those caught up in the chase it’s not always so clear which side they are on. For those convinced of their righteousness, the nobility of the cause is beyond question, hardship merely a price worth paying, while to others the same quest is utter nonsense. In the end we only remember the quests that hit stride at the right time, when the right people are paying attention. Those chasing Holy Grails and windmills tend to go down anonymously. It doesn’t mean their quests were futile or unimportant, even when they were imaginary or sad. As Dona Walda put it after we finished her oral history in 1993, “We’re not important, but in our own lives we’re important.”
My father once told me that when you see a shooting star, it means a great man has died. It’s an archaic saying that calls to mind stargazers and great dreamers, who loom in my imagination like ancient Greek statues but are just as easily my own grandfathers, my mother, a neighbor who befriended us when we needed it. So many little things come together to make a life under the stars and with the stars, each one’s path to “follow a star,” as the saying goes.
Seen a shooting star tonight And I thought of me If I was still the same If I ever became what you wanted me to be Did I miss the mark or overstep the line That only you could see? Seen a shooting star tonight And I thought of me
Bob Dylan wrote that verse as he stared down fifty, as I am doing. It makes me wonder, too. What are these shooting stars, really? My father believed in “great men,” whose lives we look up to like we look to the stars. Centuries of belief in the ancient world tie our lives to the movements of the stars. The great tragedies are “star-crossed” while Abraham lifted the history of a nation by counting those same stars against the backdrop of nothingness and everything all at once. I believe in the chaotic beauty of a universe held together as much by accident as intention. We all chase our stars, our white-whales and our Holy Grails, eventually going the way of the stars themselves, flaming out against infinity.
Notes and Credits
Photograph of Supernova Remnant N 63A Menagerie from NASA, taken by the Hubble Telescope. You can find the whole Hubble collection at the Hubblesite, which catalogs all the photographs along with explanations of the phenomena being documented.
Photo of a white (albino) humpback whale found at Cryptomundo. The whale is called “Migaloo,” and more photos can be found here by Dan Burns of Blue Planet Marine and Southern Cross University, New South Wales, Australia.
Dona Walda was the matriarch of a family I met in Aurá, a suburb of Belém, Brasil, in 1992-93. I came to know Dona Walda and her family as I took oral histories of their experiences in Aurá, which was founded by land invasion in 1990 during the gubernatorial elections of that year, when candidate Jader Barbalho went around the state promising to legalize invasion neighborhoods if he won the election. I visited with my friends from Aurá from 1992 through 2004, learning much from their neighborhood’s history and writing a few pieces about he neighborhood association for scholarly journals. Dona Walda’s statement after her interview with me is one of the most touching things that I’ve heard across my entire career of interviewing people about their lives. A wise statement, I will never forget it.
This is the third of three essays on grace. The three parts move through different aspects of grace—reason, beneficence, and the unknown—roaming across Sartre, the epistles of St. Paul, Flannery O’Connor, Roberto Bolaño, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Amalfitano
In the novel 2666, Roberto Bolaño’s character Amalfitano thinks about a drug store he used to go to in Barcelona. For convenience’s sake he would go in the middle of the night, and he always found the pharmacist reading in his chair. The pharmacist’s selections troubled Amalfitano.
“He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartelby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown.”
To Amalfitano, this was a kind of cultural laziness at best, at worst a cultural sclerosis leading one day (and perhaps soon) to the death of culture (as he knew it). Nothing will ever be learned about the world if we choose only the easy things, turning our heads away from those moments when, as Bolaño/Amalfitano continues, “the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”
Trying to understand the world requires some effort and the willingness to get dirty doing so. To read the perfect works of the masters—indeed to rely on anything we might call “perfect”—is a graceless pleasure, for grace lurks in the shadows and cracks of the world, there for the taker, but only taken by the one who can see it.
The unknown is an essential, core element of grace. Maybe it is where grace comes from, or perhaps it is the conveyor of grace, the medium through which grace passes into the light of day to touch someone’s life. To recognize grace is to surrender control (or pride, hubris, arrogance—call it what you will), and in the surrender a new kind of freedom is born. It is the freedom to make something of what we are given.
Taleb
Nassim Nicolas Taleb is a statistician, philosopher, and financial trader who has made it his life’s work to understand random events. It all began when civil war erupted in Lebanon in the 1970s and Taleb, whose family included two deputy prime ministers and a supreme court justice, became swept into the conflict. The adults said the war would last only a few days, but it stretched to 17 years, and with each turn of events the adults came up with new reasons for it.
“Later, upon replaying the wartime events in my memory as I formulated my ideas on the perception of random events, I developed the governing impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability.”
The random is cousin to the unknown, and Taleb’s business is harnessing knowledge about randomness in order to help people make decisions that protect their investments. His methodology separates randomness into two kinds: the known-unknowns (more or less predictable, manageable patterns of financial fluctuation), and the unknown-unknowns (big, system-altering shocks like the stock market crash of 1987, the attacks of 9-11, or the economic collapse of 2008). These unknown-unknowns Taleb calls “Black Swans.” These are things quite out of the ordinary that do, in fact, occur from time to time. Over his professional life, Taleb has made a modest fortune by dealing with risk and randomness in this way, both for himself and others.
Still, looking back at a quarter century of his work, he is troubled by his findings.
“Is the world unfair? I have spent my entire life studying randomness, practicing randomness, hating randomness. The more that time passes, the worse things seem to me, the more scared I get, the more disgusted I am with Mother Nature. The more I think about my subject, the more I see evidence that the world we have in our minds is different from the one playing outside. Every morning the world appears to me more random than it did the day before, and humans seem to be even more random than they were the previous day. It is becoming unbearable. I find writing these lines painful; I find the world revolting.”
Taleb, it seems, has caught Roquentin’s malaise. Yet like Roquentin, Taleb finds ways to cope, and at the end of the book, he provides a list of 10 principles that might minimize the effects of Black Swans and help us deal with them when they do happen. The last principle is the clincher and the most important: “Make an omelet with the broken eggs.” That is to say, whatever we might do to hedge again the worst events (encompassed in the first 9 principles), we should be ready to pick up the pieces after disaster strikes, be it a Hurricane Katrina or a stock market crash, and rebuild with what is left, in whatever condition we find it.
It’s a good list, but it was incomplete in some deeper way that could challenge the Black Swans on their own, definitive, inevitable terms that take no prisoners and offer no excuses. To do this required a trip back to his home town of Amioun, Lebanon. There, Taleb went to the cemetery and visited the graves of his father and other loved ones. With him, he carried the works of Seneca in the original Latin, bearing in mind an adage originally attributed to Cicero that “to philosophize is to learn how to die.”
“I wanted to prepare myself for where I will go next. This is my plan B. I kept looking at the position of my own grave. A Black Swan cannot so easily destroy a man who has an idea of his final destination.”
Grace
The Black Swans that Taleb writes about are mostly negative, harmful events. For St. Paul, grace was a Black Swan of a different sort, life-altering, inexplicable, yet beautiful and redeeming. For Ruby Turpin, recognizing grace in her life was the Black Swan that snuck up on her when Mary Grace threw a book at her and called her out for what she was.
For those who can recognize grace—whether in their own lives or in the operaton of the universe as a whole—grace becomes an expected part of life while remaining a Black Swan nonetheless, for they have no way of explaining their ability to recognize grace or why it was even visited upon them in the first place. There may not be a “reason for everything,” a reason that might console us, take away the unfairness of life, or explain why one person deserves something while others don’t. Truth be told, we really don’t need reasons for everything.
Be humble. Accept grace and build a good life because of it. Never count on it to last, but take it while it is given. Seek no reasons for grace, but live with it and share it with others freely, openly, with no reason for sharing it but that it is good.
Notes and Credits
The images in all three essays on grace are the paintings of Macha Chmakoff, a French painter whose works can be found at http://www.chmakoff.com/. She has granted me reproduction rights for these images and provided high-resolution .jpgs for the postings, for which I am very grateful. This work is called Consolation, and it depicts a person in the arms of another. I have never seen these works on the canvas, up close; I have only seen them on the Web. Her use of color and muted, vague definition touches me. Ms. Chmakoff and I have struck up a friendship over her paintings and my writing, and that, too, is an element of grace that I am thankful for.
Direct quotations: Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer (Picador, 2008 [orig. Spanish version 2004]), p. 227. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (Random House: 2007), p. 10 (replaying wartime events), p. 215 (Is the world unfair?), and p. 375 (cemetery).
There is much more I could write on grace, and I may at some point soon. The twists and turns of grace in the history of the Reformation are instructive as a lesson in counter-intuitive consequences. Some of the reformers who sought to return to a simple Pauline church of grace and community wound up creating new order of oppression—Calvin comes to mind most prominently here. It’s a return to a fundamental question of the meaning of human will. For the Calvinists (and some extent all Protestants, from Luther forward), faith and salvation by grace alone—sola fide—was a doctrine that freed ordinary people from the scrutiny of the Church. In the Catholic doctrine, salvation through good works simply placed too much power in the hands of the church to rule on the affairs of ordinary people and political powers alike. Sola fide took the Church out of the picture, but almost as quickly the Protestants began to create political and other alliances that arrogated to their churches great powers that were used to enforce a new orthodoxy just as brutal (if not moreso) than the Catholic orthodoxy it replaced. This is, however, a discussion for another day.
This is the second of three essays on grace. The three parts move through different aspects of grace—reason, beneficence, and the unknown—roaming across Sartre, the epistles of St. Paul, Flannery O’Connor, Roberto Bolaño, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The Road to Damascus
A few years after the death of Jesus, a Jew named Saul of Tarsus, who was also a citizen of Rome, became a Christian and changed his named to Paul. Prior to his conversion, Saul persecuted the Christians. As Paul, however, he became the greatest apostle of the early church, moreso than St. Peter or the others who were with Jesus in his lifetime. Working tirelessly until his own execution at the hand of Rome, Paul established numerous churches throughout the Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Paul’s letters to these congregations provided definition for the faith and are a critical part of the Christian Bible.
Paul could not explain the change in his heart that occurred on the road to Damascus one day, when he was struck blind and heard the Lord speak to him. He had to accept this as an act of radical, unsolicited, and unreasonable beneficence. This he called the grace of God.
“For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect.” (1 Cor 15:10)
The grace of St. Paul is a divine beneficence that is unknowable and without a cause such as we can recognize. To understand grace is to find a place in between the rigid certainty of dogma and the despair of Roquentin. With grace, we accept that good things happen for no reason that we can understand. In deeming God the author of grace in the universe, goodness is given a source and it is made relatable. Without needing to explain beneficence, one must simply accept this: You are loved, for no reason that you may know or understand. But you are loved.
Flannery O’Conner wrote stories that often dealt with the consequences of grace for proud people. They were crushed by grace. They could not bear beneficence. To a friend she wrote,
“All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal.”
Let it Be
Grace presents a challenge: to live up to its goodness. This is a challenge to act freely, for one must choose to live up to the goodness one has been given, even when that goodness was given freely and with no good reason for it.
For Ruby Turpin, the protagonist of O’Connor’s story, “Revelation,” recognizing grace caused her to crash on the shoals of her own hypocrisy and bad faith. Mrs. Turpin was a well-(enough)-to-do woman in the Deep South whose Christian piety propped up her sense of racial superiority. She was self-righteous in the most ungenerous sort of way.
“If it’s one thing I am, it’s grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’ It could have been different!… Oh thank you, Jesus, thank you!”
The story is set in the reception room of a local doctor’s office, where Mrs. Turpin is telling all this to another woman in the room, a woman of similar class and beliefs it would seem, whose college-aged daughter, Mary Grace—a name well chosen—begins to seethe with each word out of Mrs. Turpin’s mouth. The climactic moment comes when Mary Grace finally boils over in rage and throws a book at Ruby Turpin, telling her quietly, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog!” After the incident, back on her farm, Mrs. Turpin sinks into filth and despair, overcome with a sickening sense, much like Roquentin when he discovered that his world wasn’t ordered the way he’d imagined it to be. As she slops her hogs, she has a revelation of the righteous ascending to heaven with her and her husband bringing up the rear at the very end of the pack.
For Saul of Tarsus, the recognition of grace provided a reason to change for the better, to set aside violence, hatred and pride. Writing to a different friend, O’Connor commented,
“There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment.”
The nausea demanded of Roquentin that he become the sole author of his own life, but it also demanded a kind of surrender. To be author of own’s life was not a Promethean charge to become a god. Quite the contrary, this freedom was “rather like death” at first, until Roquentin realized that in this freedom he gave away precious things (his sense o right and order) in order to take up a different, ultimately more rewarding, task. This is a theme Sartre visited in later works, most notably his play, The Flies, in which freedom leads to persecution and hard choices about breaking laws or traditions in order to do the right thing.
Grace demands the humility to accept that we may neither deserve nor benefit from the goodness we receive. “There but for the grace of God go I,” as the saying runs, paraphrasing the English Protestant martyr John Bradford as he sat in jail and watched other prisoners being taken for execution.
Grace demands the humility to surrender, to “let it be.”
Notes and credits
The images in all three essays on grace are the paintings of Macha Chmakoff, a French painter whose works can be found at http://www.chmakoff.com/. She has granted me reproduction rights for these images and provided high-resolution .jpgs for the postings, for which I am very grateful. This work is called Paul, and it is one of her many Biblical paintings that are beautiful and stunning. I have never seen these works on the canvas, up close; I have only seen them on the Web. Her use of color and muted, vague definition seaks to me and touches me. Ms. Chmakoff and I have struck up a friendship over her paintings and my writing, and that, too, is an element of grace that I am thankful for.
For the early Christians, the time of Christ through the few decades after his death was a time without reason. They believed, Paul along with them, that the world would end soon, in their very lifetime. They believed that Jesus would return to judge the living and the dead, and that all those chosen by God would be taken to heaven with him. In the face human law, persecution, the might of Rome, and the weight of the old Jewish law, Jesus’ teachings tore down all conventions and laws that had come before. Jesus remade the world for these believers, and like Perpetua and Felicity in Carthage in 203 AD, they went to heroic lengths to demonstrate their faith.
In 67 AD, Paul was beheaded by the Roman Empire, an execution given him due to his Roman citizenship, less painful and drawn out than the crucifixions of Jesus and St. Peter, or the wild animals and soldiers who killed Perpetua and Felicity in the arena. The Frontline documentary, “From Jesus to Christ,” provides a robust discussion of the historical Jesus, the early Christian Church, and St. Paul’s role in defining the church and spreading the faith across the Mediterranean world.
The first Flannery O’Connor quotation, “All my stories …” I discovered on the blog Cage Wisdom, a site dedicated to the flms of Nicholas Cage. The second Flannery O’Connor quote, “There is a moment …” is from an essay by Patrick Galloway called “The Dark Side of the Cross,” which can be found here.
St Paul’s writings are foundational to the Christian Church. Differing interpretations of Paul were used by clerics and theologians on all sides of the Reformation, though by and large it’s possible to say that Reformed Protestantism is more singularly grounded on St. Paul than on the other letter writers of the New Testament. That is to say, branches of Reformed Protestantism represent a Pauline purism, while Catholicism balances St. Paul with the other traditions evident in the early church. As I am finishing the second part of this essay on grace, I am thinking of a fourth essay on St. Paul’s grace in modern Christianity. Perhaps it will come, but for now, I leave it out of this essay on grace, because my understanding of grace is more personal (and larger than) Christian theological traditions. My references are Christian because that is what I know, but I hope the notion of an unaccounted for, unexpected, superfluous experience of beneficence is something in the human experience that can stand apart from specific religious of philosophical tradition. Indeed, gratuitous beneficence is something any culture needs to understand.
In The Flies, Sartre uses the Greek Electra myth dramatize the proposition that people freely determine their own lives through their actions. Fleeing from responsibility for one’s actions, or from the consequences of those actions, is to flee from the truth. In the story, Electra’s brother Orestes must assume must assume responsibility for killing his mother and stepfather in Electra’s defense. She is too weak to do so, but in the act of assuming responsibility Orestes becomes fully human, finally showing throwing off the chains of self-denial and self-abnegation that Zeus and the gods used to keep people compliant and quiescent. Now free, Orestes walks into the future pursued by the Furies (giant fly-like beings) who peck at him and torment him. Such is the price of freedom.
This is the first of three essays on grace. The three parts move through three aspects of grace—reason, beneficence, and the unknown—roaming across existentialism, Sartre, the epistles of St. Paul, Flannery O’Connor, Roberto Bolaño, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
A Reason For Everything
There are people who say that everything happens for a reason. This is true, for every event will always have an explanation. Natural events—say an apple falling from a tree—have mechanical explanations that can be objectively verified. When people are involved, it’s less clear why things happen the way they do. The reasons begin to get fuzzy, or they become contested. These are the debates charted in the far too numerous tomes cluttering our bookshelves and Kindles. Yet no matter how ham-fistedly human pretense tortures the truth with conspiracy, polemic, or just plain history, the fact is that in human events, too, everything happens for a reason.
But this is not what people mean when say that everything happens for a reason. These reasons are invoked when unexpected events change life in some irrevocable way, whether for good or ill. These reasons give purpose to the challenges we face. Yet this saying says less about the nature of the universe than about the instinctively human drive to narrate order into it. This takes place at the expense of reason, for it overlooks the simplest explanation that fits the facts:
We don’t know why some things happen, including the big, unexpected things that change lives and the course of history—and we may never know.
There may be no “reason” to the universe. It is shot through with events we can only call random, which appear to rob the world of purpose and meaning. In response people seek different ways to build up the certainties they need. Some avoid asking questions or wondering why. Theirs is an existence amid the fog of quick pleasures and slovenly gratification. Others turn to dogma or hard-and-fast explanations of the grand mysteries of life, preferring to believe that everything happens for reason, even if they have to make up those reasons again and again in order to adjust the truth to the events of the day.
Others still, a much smaller number to be sure, find themselves stuck in the middle, vexed and even anguished at the lack of universal order and meaning, repeatedly disappointed by every attempt to find larger truths they can hold on to forever.
Roquentin
Such was the case with Antoine Roquentin, the main character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea. Roquentin was sickened by the sense that his own life and actions were “superfluous” and even repugnant, since he could no longer find any deeper meaning to the world outside his own mind. Instead of feeling intentional and historical, he was an alien in a world that treated him with indifference. After fighting these feelings almost to the point of madness, he finally accepted that this was the real nature of life—empty, indifferent, unnecessary—and in this he found his reason to act.
“I am free: there is absolutely no reason for living, all the ones I have tried have given way and I can’t imagine more of them … My past is dead …”
Roquentin now had the power to define his own life and what it meant, yet still he despairs.
“I am alone in this white, garden-rimmed street. Alone and free. But this freedom is rather like death.”
In the face of this bleak, graceless epiphany, Roquentin decides to abandon the historical biography that he was working on when the nausea struck him. Instead, he will write a novel. The novel will define him, as “a little of its clarity might fall over my past” and then one day “I shall feel my heart beat faster and say to myself: ‘That was the day, that was the hour, when it all started’.”
Thus fiction replaces history to give meaning—and reason—to real life.
Notes and Credits
The images in all three essays on grace are the paintings of Macha Chmakoff, a French painter whose works can be found at http://www.chmakoff.com/. She has granted me reproduction rights for these images and provided high-resolution .jpgs for the postings, for which I am very grateful. She wrote me, “I am delighted with [John’s] respect for the work of artists, for he does not reproduce the images from my website without my permission. As an artist this touches me deeply. On the other hand I do this also as a sign of friendship between our two countries, France and the USA, in spite of our political and economic differences.” Thank you, Ms. Chmakoff.
The painting that leads this essay is “Le Chemin de Damas,” The Road to Damascus. It was on the road to Damascus that Saul of Tarsus had the conversion experience that led him to become Paul the Evangelist, the apostle who more than any other spread Christianity across the Mediterranean world in the decades following the crucifixion. Prior to his conversion, Saul persecuted Christians. On the road to Damascus, something changed in an irrevocable way that turned Saul into his opposite. He had no reason by which to understand this.
Paul Bloom’s essay in The Atlantic (December 2005), “Is God an Accident,” reviews recent science on the human instinct to read and narrate order into the universe: “Our quickness to over-read purpose into things extends to the perception of intentional design. People have a terrible eye for randomness.” The notion that there is no purpose to life (that we can recognize) is hard for human beings to swallow, because a sense of plot and story-line is hard-wired into our cognitive structure.
Quotations from Nausea: Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New Directions: 1964), pp. 156-57. I devoured Sartre in college and eventually wrote my senior thesis on the evolution of “freedom” in his work, from Nausea through the Critique of Dialectical Reason, his last great work. Along the way I read most of his plays, all the novels, his memoir (The Words), Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir his last years, Adieu, and another biography I have since misplaced. At the end of the day, I can fully appreciate the humor of Marty Smith’s Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook.
This essay uses a fictional character, Roquentin, as an exemplar of behavior, attitudes, and ideas that should be meaningful to real people. I treat Roquentin as if he were real, for he is. I never quite agreed with the way Dan Qualye was ridiculed for using Murphy Brown as an example for a discussion of values in America. (There were plenty of other, legitimate reasons to ridicule Mr. Quayle and hope he would never have a chance to sit in the Oval Office.) In all, the 3 pieces of this essay mix real and fictional characters, because their actions (fictional, real, or historical-but-embellished) are meaningful.
St. Paul, the overarching subject of the 3 essays, is a real figure who comes to us through writing: his own letters to his congregations across the Greco-Roman world and the writings about him that survive, notably in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. We know that not all the letters attributed to Paul were written by him. Those that are still contain later insertions and redactions added by scribes over the centuries. In the end, the way Sartre finishes Nausea is the key: Roquentin will gain his freedom by leaving history and biography and writing a novel. This is just what Sartre did; Roquentin’s redemption was the day, the hour, when it all began for his author as well. Through the very act of creating, even fiction, we give purpose to our lives and order to the universe.
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, whose right to shoot him was protected by the second amendment, Colonel Aureliano Boone was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover books. At the time, America was a village of McMansions built on the bank of a river of polluted water that ran along a bed of stones polished to unearthly brilliance by chemical waste, petroleum fertilizers, and random sewerage, all of which made the children look like fat prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, for nothing lasted longer than the attention span of an 8-year old pointing his stubby, French Fry fingers at things he could not understand. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged right-wingers would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would create new radio shows. A heavy gypsy with an untamed ignorance and limp, fist-fucking hands, who introduced himself as Rush Limbaugh, put on a bold demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Kansas, where scientific knowledge had peaked around the time of the Scopes trial. He broadcast from house to house, his ideas attracting every angry white racist, bigot, gun owner, know-nothing dipshit, and ditto-headed idiot who had been lost for a long time, dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Rush Limbaugh’s magnetic charm. “Freedom has a life of its own,” the gypsy proclaimed with a nondescript Midwestern accent. “It’s simply a matter of waking up its soul.”
There was a time when searching any string of words with “Lascaux” in it would bring up my post, “The truth and change, 3a: From Life on Mars to Linden,” as one of the top three hits in the images section—because of the photograph I used of the caves in Lascaux, France. I got the photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Then there was “bee tree,” or “bee bee tree,” which for a long time brought up my photograph of a tree in Prospect Park, Brooklyn (11215), where I observed a bee swarm with my son in 2008. I took the photograph, along with the photograph of the bee warm itself. This photo was in the post, “The truth and Twitter, part 3: The Swarm.”
And then these images completely disappeared from the Google Images searches.
Which made me begin to wonder: How do search terms work? A friend told me to embed vivid descriptions in my photographs, because Google really likes this. And then I thought about all those search terms that I see every day on my data. Some are downright weird—“life goes on symbology” or “rocket party dei black eyed beans”—and some sound really cool—“gilgamesh Foucault” and “shot of major truth and rocket science.”
I’m no whiz in SEO (search engine optimization), but I thought it would be fun to post all the search terms I have seen, down to a certain level (all these are multiple viewings) that people have used to find truth and rocket science, whether they intended to or not. What happens when people search these terms? Do they come to this posting, or some other? Does this (not entirely) random assortment of words bring about some kind of Internet query magic? Would be fun to see …
Update, 15 minutes after I posted this originally
Within 15 minutes of posting this, these search strings came up. I just had to add them. It’s obvious why.
medieval witch killings paintings
envy the epic of gilgamesh
eclectic
wolverine michigan desk
maghan lusk
sleeping dogs
pond @wordpress
blacklight poster
zebras
brigadier pudding
hubris fingerprint
faroeste gary cooper
mirrors “lady from shanghai ”
blacklight poster
bee bee tree (almost every day for a while)
lady from shanghai mirror scene
“not many people make me laugh”
tett creativity complex
john locke public domain pictures humane
iran twitter
rocket party dei black eyed beans
bacon francis house
Walgreen
lotte zweig
“kareem fahim”
zebras
twitter iran
reichstagsbrand
sleeping dog
bee tree
sleeping dogs
Walgreens
zak smith
tattoo and tattoos
“life goes on” tattoo
tattoo design principles
Credit: The photograph is of tattoo work by Grisha Maslov, copyright 2010, obtained from Wikimedia Commons.
Gilgamesh
heroism in Gilgamesh
gilgamesh Foucault
Foucault Gilgamesh
Note: I am not sure where this came from, since Foucault is not mentioned in the post with Gilgamesh.
amoebas and dysentery
gas exchange in amoebas
amoeba pictures
poem on dysentery
amoebic dysentery brazil
live amoeba vs. fixed amoeba
Amoeba
Brazil
brazil land of the future by Zweig trans
lolalita brasil1
brasilia architecture falling apart
brasilia
faroeste caboclo
brazil colony
forest manaus
social science
standard deviation diagram
one standard deviation bell curve
stats bell curve normal curve
standard deviation bell curve
bell curve
iq bell curve
bell curve standard deviation
iq bell curve diagram
standard deviation diagram
bell curve diagram
unicorns and medieval stuff
medieval maiden painting
unicorn pictures
unicorn truths
unicorn Bristol
unicorns
unicorn
unicorn medieval
unicorn museum castles in new york
the unicorn leaps out of the stream
the start of the hunt
unicorn in captivity
the unicorn is found
the start of the hunt
the truth about unicorns
the hunt of the unicorn
Sylvia Plath and Leonard Shelby
plath writing
leonard shelby
Credit: The chart of the timeline of Memento (Christopher Nolan) is by Dr Steve Aprahamian, and can be found on Wikimedia Commons.
Both can shine brilliantly, sparkling in the light to dazzle your eyes, making young couples blush with happiness and pride. Like the truth, diamonds aren’t nearly as rare as their market value would indicate. Both can be found with ease when you know where to look. Every once in a while, someone stumbles on a massive diamond in the plain light of day, just one more rock in the landscape until a chance encounter sets it apart. No small amount of truth is discovered in the same way. What sets these discoverers apart from the rest of us is as often as not luck.
The truth and diamonds leave two trails, one of bliss and hope, the other of blood and cruelty. More banal than ironic, this is the way of the universe. The same truth that turns a God of peace into a God of war also turns simple assumptions about fairness into human rights.
What happens when beauty and ugliness form a bond so tight that they become inseparable? The trouble with the truth and diamonds is that they can lead you anywhere. What really matters is where you want to go.
Notes and Credits
The opening photograph of the Hope Diamond is by Chip Clark, who passed away on June 12, 2010, away after 35 years as a photographer for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington. Mr. Clark’s beautiful photographs of gems, animals, birds, and other things can be found all over the web.
The Hope Diamond is surrounded by legend. It seems that most who have possessed it have come to tragic ends. It is currently owned by the United States of America and is on display at the Smithsonian.
The playing cards were photographed by the author, from a miniature travel deck for Patience (Solitaire) given to me in 1992 by Professor Raymond Grew, a mentor of mine in graduate school at the University of Michigan.
It should be noted that the truth also grows more precious with time, the simple truths of youth seeming to appear ever more complex and enduring as time goes along, much like the songs of Neil Diamond and just about everything touched by Johnny Cash.
truth and rocket science 