fiction – Planet of the Blind

Malamud, William Boyd, and Squishless Fiction

I’ve been thinking all afternoon about Bernard Malamud. He understood the mixture of milk and iodine that constitutes adult consciousness. He could be tender, strict, sentimental and then unsentimental, having the realism of Zola and the darkness of Kafka. It’s customarily said we are lost. Malamud asks us to consider in what ways this is so. And in what ways it isn’t.

The second consideration is where the harder aspects of literary consciousness reside. “Middlemarch” is just so.

I’d add Dos Passos to this list along with Dostoevsky and Toni Morrison. For me, too much contemporary fiction is just squishy. Wave your Updike or your “Fleischman is in Trouble” but come on, contemporary fiction is squish and has been so for decades.

Enter William Boyd whose work defies the squish. His people are not cartoons coated with style. Boyd knows this and writes in his novel “Any Human Heart”:

“Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary—it is the respective proportions of those two categories that make that life appear interesting or humdrum.”

The novel is built around this. No squish.

Without giving too much away the narrator, Logan Mountstuart is a strange mixture of Augie March and Don Quixote but with more of the former’s discernment. He wanders the world having left his native Uruguay and meets everyone in the kaleidoscopic art scene of the 20th century. Its his comic irony that makes him:

“Picasso seems to me one of these wild, stupid geniuses—more Yeats, Strindberg, Rimbaud, Mozart, than Matisse, Brahms, Braque. It’s quite tiring being with him.”

Comic irony, that self awareness which springs from knowing who you were when younger and then, who you are now, becomes the locus of the narrator’s sensibility. He’s Bellow without the bullshit:

“Reading Nabokov’s Ada: an intermittently brilliant but baffling book— an idée fixe on the rampage, leaving friendly readers stunned and exhausted behind. I have to say that as an admirer of style—a loaded word, but actually best thought of as a synonym for individuality— VN’s mannered artfulness, his refusal to let a sleeping word lie, becomes in this book more and more like a nervous tic than a natural, individual voice, however fruity and sonorous. The studied opulence, the ornament for the sake of ornament, grows wearing and one longs for a simple, elegant, discursive sentence. This is the key difference: in good prose precision must always triumph over decoration. Wilful elaboration is a sign that the stylist has entered a decadent phase. You cannot live on caviar and foie gras every day: sometimes a plain dish of lentils is all that the palate craves, even if one insists that the lentils come from Puy.”

I remember a friend, a budding novelist announcing that he was “Henry James without the bullshit” which is amusing enough but it wasn’t true. And like Malamud, there’s no bullshit in William Boyd. No squish. The scalpels take care of it.

Dear Bear

It’s been a year since I had a major heart attack. The surgery was brutal even as it was successful. When I was in intensive care I fell in and out of consciousness. One morning I woke to see a black bear walking past the glass wall separating my room from the external corridor. I asked for strawberries because that’s what the bear would have eaten. I believed in that bear.

Now, one full year has gone by. I’m still discussing things with the bear.

I recall Wordsworth:

“Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown, even as a seed?
Who that shall point as with a wand and say
‘This portion of the river of my mind
Came from yon fountain?’”

Two halves of a life were debating, rather bitterly, like unhappy twins. Both had studied the classical methods of confession so were voluble but insincere. Neither half knew how to escape forward. Anyway, it was late in the day when shadows spread across the lawn like symbols of past actions when the transitive life stood between them—one may call her “future pneuma perfect” though it scarcely matters for she can take care of herself.

“What,” she said, “causes you to think the past is definitely settled? Don’t you know it’s changing right now, beneath your feet?” “This is the future of resignation—patience, day-dreams, small plantings…”

My bear is F.P.P.—the future pneuma perfect is both in my head and out in front of me.

In turn I must ask “what does it mean when I say I’m after something?” And what does forgetting mean while going forward? And what the hell is forward? I’m Karl Jasper on methadone.

Once, when I was a college student, on a study abroad trip to the Greek islands, I rented a motor bike because my pals were doing it. Some of them knew I couldn’t see, or at least I imagined they knew, for I while paraded around without asking for help, I was halting and clumsy. But it was the late 70’s: no one had any language for disability and hey, I was an unlikely guy and so were we all. We rented our motorbikes on the island of Santorini—a dark crescent that rises steeply from the sea—it’s all that remains of a larger island that vanished in a volcanic flash in the 16th century BCE.

We rented the motorbikes in Fira from a man who was listening to a football match on the radio and who scarcely noticed us. He didn’t need to see our licenses, only required a credit card and we were off. I followed a boy named Roger who wore a red windbreaker. If I stayed very close I could track his jacket with my left eye. I saw his rectangle of red bobbing up and down. It was the flag in a bullfight. The sharp curves and severe hills of Santorini wound like a lethal high speed ribbon under my wheels. I swayed and dipped but I held that red flag in view, or imagined I did, and unlike my classmates, I saw nothing of the panoramic ocean or cliffside ruins, or pelicans crossing the road on foot.

Thank you Karl Jasper, I think…and thank you Bear.

**
So now I’m old and I still don’t know what its about. “It” which can be attached to the possessive but can also stay bound in itself like Hamlet’s nutshell.

Once, (again) on a trip to China with multiple artists, I was the only one to hit a ceremonial bell by throwing a coin.

Thank you Karl and Bear.

We children hid among trees and watched the old woman who we’d been told “had a lobotomy”and we saw her as a witch. We dug into our foxhole. She came out of her trailer home and swept her garden path with a broom. We were speechless, ambiguous little creatures in the presence of nameless adult suffering.

This is why memories in the middle of the night can’t be assuaged by TV. The sadness of others carries us. From moment to moment I get down on my knees and touch the ground with my hands. If forgiveness isn’t possible at least I can tap some Morse Code. Dear defenseless dead, do your teeth still chatter? Dear Bear…

Each morning I gather mosses…

Each morning I gather mosses, even in January, even when bending to customary tasks. Washing dishes, I touch the moist earth. It’s a game I play to keep alive.

Generally, I think human beings would be better creatures if they talked with their feet.

Go on. Push the child you once were into the deep end. The kid will do fine.

A memory: just before heart surgery (mine), one of the hospital interns who spoke no English tried talking to me using a translation app on his iPhone. But I couldn’t read it. I was thinking about the probability of death. And we couldn’t talk.

Now give me that damn candy and leave me alone!

Trying to live well and grieving all the time. You’re one of them, those others.

You know all those “top ten” lists. Here’s a new one—top ten dream clots:

Talking to a dead mother on the phone while a dead father stands over your shoulder and tells you what to say…
Buying strange bread in a foreign land with your hands tied behind your back and a gag in your mouth…
Old acquaintances gathered in a gentle place, a room with soft lighting, and all the old wounds and wrongs have been forgiven. Trouble is, we were in a funeral home. And one of us, probably me, had tracked dog shit all over the fancy carpets.
You’re pretending to see as you did during childhood. You’re in the softball game. Nothing you do will lead to a good outcome. But you want so desperately to fit in.
A train and you’re on it. Perfect. And your uncle who was sinister in life is next to you talking about vodka.
Dreaming
Of the little girl
Who was beside me
In the infant hospital
All those years ago
Blind children
Side by side
Her singing
Savage laughter
You see yourself in mirrors
Them ovoid ass bad pants
A mannequin’s poor dream
Mozart

Improbable yes but I dreamt of him
And though we were in a room
Rain fell and it was beautiful
Water coursing down the walls

“We only get so much”
He said—“opera is for the young”
“String quartets, for dying”
He was there alright

I tend to not have nightmares. My dreams are odd though. They tend to be like Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about waiting for the dentist.

I recognized they weren’t living men
There was a blind man there, not me,
And he had a dog, not mine
In the cafe
With red curtains
My twin brother
Who died at birth…

Spinoza and Giving Up on Contemporary Fiction…

If, like me, you admire Spinoza, you’re a problem. Here’s a spoonful:

“Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.”

False wonderment and ignorance. The peanut butter and jelly of American society. Yum yum! Donald Trump is selling bibles! Yum yum! The mob can’t get enough. Spinoza of course understood the role of clergy in the promotion of faux miracles. If you truly believe this then you’re the problem. You’re the problem in almost every group. You’re always going to ask “what’s wrong with this story?”

Ernest Hemingway called this sensibility the “bullshit detector” and he was almost right. He meant that first rate writing uncovers or subverts falsities. But what if the dominant narrative of your age is all nonsense? Americans are intensely attracted to victimhood. Everyone is now an undeserving wretch.American fiction is, nowadays, almost entirely unreadable. Every new novel is concerned with sub-Cartesian victimhood. It is unbearable. Do you understand false wonderment? Three divorcees go to a summer house and while walking through a tangle of spider webs come to understand themselves. The interpreter of nature and the gods is Dr. Phil. Self-help tabloid fluoride is in the water.
Yum yum! I’ll get no credit for saying this. I’ll likely be attacked. And don’t read this as an attack on women writers. Men are equally caught up in the sad victim story telling industry. In fact everyone is caught by the shoelaces with this collective hive drone.

Someone recently asked me what fiction I was currently reading. I’m reading about evolution.

On the Ableism River

A woman sneered at me not long ago. We were on an airplane. Her seat was next to mine. Spotting the guide dog at my feet she pitched a fit. She told everyone within earshot that she was allergic to dogs. She needed immediate attention. She demanded a seat in First Class. She was, as they say, a “hot mess” and I tried to empathize—who am I to say she didn’t have allergies or that this wasn’t a deep inconvenience for her? Yet her nastiness was the thing. She was affronted by the very idea that I was “there” in that space. She sizzled with contempt.

If you’re disabled you know all about the contempt sizzlers. As Mark Twain would say, “you’ve met them on the river.”

More about the river…

The river is god itself. Not your ideas about it. Not your yearnings. It goes about its business, moving the glory of creation wherever it needs to go. Children sit on the banks dreaming. This is proper prayer.

The ableists’ river is also god itself. Its where self-contempt goes to bathe. And here come the cripples, floating down stream like loaves of bread…

You see, some days a cripple just doesn’t know what to say.
River. Bread, Children. Dreams. God in the mix. And sad strangers who can’t speak our language.

I wish that woman with her dog allergy well. I don’t think she had an allergy at all. It was in her voice. Studies show you can spot liars by their intonations. Hers said: “I’m a nasty, self absorbed wart. And I want you to pay attention to me.”

The dog just slept.

This morning I feel strongly that her tribe has taken the reins of our government.

A few years back I attended a speech by two senators who were instrumental in passing the Americans with Disabilities Act: Tom Harkin and Bob Dole. A Democrat and a Republican. They spoke about the bipartisanship that made the ADA possible. But then Bob Dole said something that made my ears prick up: “Today’s GOP would never support this.” The Tea Party was in vogue. Hatred of cooperation was the new rule. This was before Trump.

This morning we’re seeing the GOP controlled House fresh off of voting to eliminate Medicaid and other crucial programs for veterans, the disabled, the poor, and the elderly, flat out crowing about their wonderful new bill.

 They have a collective allergy.

Teaching in the Age of Trump

When I was very small I didn’t know that I’d meet people who wouldn’t like me until one day, climbing stairs with my father, my hand in his, we met an elderly Swedish woman who lived just below us and who said, “Tsk, Tsk” because I was blind. I was only four and it was winter in Helsinki, Finland. This was a foundational moment for me as such moments are for all sentient beings, its the very second we sense we’re not who we’ve met in the mirror, or having no mirror, we’re not exactly who our parents say we are. Cruelty is one way we arrive. It comes without warning like branches tapping a window. “She’s a fool,” my father said as if that solved the riddle of human embarrassment.

If you teach at the post-secondary level and care about soul (not all teaching concerns itself overtly with soulful things, nor should this be the case per se) you’re likely a stair climbing contrarian, the kind of professor who knows the Swedish dowagers both of history and the ones living next door. Knowing we’re incontestably faced with deviant personalities, people who, according to private or political history, have been rendered un-civic-minded is central to narrative literature and when properly encountered this can strengthen the ironies of compassion. I swear, as a boy I felt sorry for my grey Swedish matron. She’s still (for me) the image of absolute loneliness. The reach of dramatic irony is broad in poetry and fiction and while it’s not my intention to sound new age-y the human soul needs all the nutrients it can get. Who hurt the old Swedish woman who lived downstairs? Was it her White Russian husband who beat her and her children and then died in middle age having drunk away her dowry?

No one should have the power to steal our compassion. Books alone won’t prevent the theft but they’re the perfect anodyne for thin skinned covetousness and envy, the two conditions most prevalent in hyper-consumerist, post-industrial economies. No one’s reading John Bunyan these days but he’s worth quoting: “You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.” Compassion is a muscle. It’s flexible when used. Employing it we enter wider circles.

In the Age of Trump we’ll need help with compassionate climbing. I do not single out students any more than faculty or administrators—all people of conscience are rightly confused by the wide and unrelenting brutishness we’re now seeing.

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries, as the Dalai Lama has often said. Our survival both as individuals and communities will now depend on understanding this. Again, echoing the Dalai Lama, compassion is the radicalism of our time. It’s a radicalism that can be practiced daily. It’s also the hardest thing to put into action. “You must not hate those who do wrong or harmful things; but with compassion, you must do what you can to stop them — for they are harming themselves, as well as those who suffer from their actions.” (Dalai Lama)

Over the past few days I’ve been putting together a literary reading list for our present moment. I’ve been culling books that highlight the radicalism of what, for lack of a better term I’m calling compassionate irony. These poets, non-fictionists and fiction writers are assembled here in no discernible order—their work has come to me as I’ve walked in the public square. The public square is a steeper place now. I believe the following books are now necessities:

Viet Thanh Nguyen: The Sympathizer

James Lecesne: Absolute Brightness

Toni Morrison: Sula

Anne Finger: Elegy for a Disease

Gail Godwin: Father Melancholy’s Daughter

Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad

Adrienne Rich: An Atlas for the Difficult World

Jacqueline Woodson: Another Brooklyn

Kurt Vonnegut Jr: Slaughterhouse Five or The Children’s Crusade

Kwame Alexander: The Crossover

James Baldwin: Giovanni’s Room

Dorothy Allison: One or Two Things I Know for Sure

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

Saul Bellow: The Adventures of Augie March

Azar Nafisi: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Naguib Mahfouz: The Cairo Trilogy

Sam Hamill: Habitations

Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass

Pema Chodron: The Places That Scare You

Kenneth Rexroth: Collected Poems

Deborah Tall: A Family of Strangers

Kwame Dawes: Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems

Mark Doty: Fire to Fire

Wang Ping: The Last Communist Virgin

Robert Bly: My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy

Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems

Bernard Malamud: The Stories of Bernard Malamud

Anita Desai: Clear Light of Day

John Banville: The Sea

Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge

John Irving: The Cider House Rules

Richard Yates: A Good School

Carl Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Paule Marshall: The Fisher King

W. H. Auden: Collected Poems

Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Americanah

Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children

Naoki Higashida: The Reason I Jump

W. B. Yeats: Collected Poems

Per Petterson: Out Stealing Horses

Magda Szabo: The Door

Tove Jansson: The Summer Book

Majgull Axelsson: April Witch

Jean-Dominique Bauby: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Bruno Schulz: Sanitarium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

Jerzy Ficowski: Waiting for the Dog to Sleep

Gyula Krudy: Sunflower

Chris Abani: The Secret History of Las Vegas

Binyavanga Wainaina: How to Write About Africa

Joan Didion: The Year of Magical Thinking

Carlos Fuentes: The Death of Artemio Cruz

Mo Yan: Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

The list above is my start—a syllabus of the compassionate climb. You’ll notice I’ve left Kafka off but include Bruno Schultz. Left off Camus but included Carl Jung. One prefers the early Rushdie and Thomas Hardy before he elevated his wife to sainthood. Compassion resists Aristotelian templates—it doesn’t like being talked about. Like a milk snake it shines in its own way. Compassion is more than fellow feeling or empathy—it is mercy. All the books listed here are merciful. Please, start your own lists. Share them. The literatures of compassion are necessarily shared in a university without walls.