literature – Planet of the Blind

Yeats and Ruth Benedict

“Experience, contrary to common belief, is mostly imagination.”

  —Ruth Benedict

You can cross the snowy fields and see castles and diamonds because imagination is there. In Scandinavia they call it troll power. You know the world as trolls do. This is why children can’t answer the question “what did you do today?” And its why poets can’t reply honestly when asked “where did you get that idea?”
When imagination rules experience we’re at a loss for words, at least at first. Later we grow up—the editor inside us who’s an adult tells us experience is not of the imagination at all. In general this is what MFA programs do. The study of creative writing is good for the delete button. When Yeats writes of faeries he’s telling us to resist this. In his 1901 essay “Magic” he says:

“I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are —
That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.
That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.
That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.”

Yeats had a different view of symbols than the Constructivists or Surrealists. He took them quite literally. The poet Kathleen Raine wrote: “For Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness.”

“A kind of magic” begs the question “what kind of magic?” Only Yeats could answer this and he spent his life working to do so. But at its core he believed the magic resided outside the mind. The poet’s job was to translate nascent signals of mystical experience into ordinary language. He loved Newton’s alchemy; Hermes Trismegistus; most of all he loved the story tellers in the Irish countryside—that place and culture vanishing before his eyes. What kind of magic? Preservational. Yes belief is mostly imagination. And the evocation of spirits though we can’t say who they are. This shouldn’t stop poets from trying.

Hail to the Crippled Writers

Yes optimism for the wretch is a dyer’s art but it must be farcical in its hope. (Think Shakespeare’s Bottom.) One must be ridiculous in the boot black factory.

Let’s celebrate what for lack of a better term one might call the optimistic imagination as practiced by wretches. I’m in mind of G.K. Chesterton’s assessment of Dickens, that he was: “delighted at the same moment that he was desperate. The two opposite things existed in him simultaneously, and each in its full strength. His soul was not a mixed colour like grey and purple, caused by no component colour being quite itself. His soul was like a shot silk of black and crimson, a shot silk of misery and joy.”

Yes optimism for the wretch is a dyer’s art but it must be farcical in its hope. (Think Shakespeare’s Bottom.) One must be ridiculous in the boot black factory. (Dickens-Chaplin.) This is the thing, likely a tee shirt slogan: we hope in misery. As for the literary imagination printed ideas are invariably sad even when they propose optimism and no honest writer can ignore it. What did J.P. Morgan’s library smell like in 1902? Short answer? The vapors of sorrow.

A game I play, more often than I should admit, is a dramatic transference for which there may be a name but I’ve never found one. Perhaps there’s something in German. In short, I employ the characters of Shakespeare and Moliere as standard bearers for people I meet and especially for public figures. The literary term for this is “comparison” but what I’m describing is better than that—“kayfab” is what they call it in professional wrestling, where everyone, both wrestlers and fans collectively pretend a false drama is real. Essentially I live and have always lived since my late teens in Tartuffe and The Taming of the Shrew and at this stage of life there’s no help for it. This is comedy as it’s lived but not necessarily admired. Moliere:

“The comic is the outward and visible form that nature’s bounty has attached to everything unreasonable, so that we should see, and avoid, it. To know the comic we must know the rational, of which it denotes the absence and we must see wherein the rational consists . . . incongruity is the heart of the comic . . . it follows that all lying, disguise, cheating, dissimulation, all outward show different from the reality, all contradiction in fact between actions that proceed from a single source, all this is in essence comic.”

Both Moliere and Shakespeare grew up watching morality plays, fables whose stock characters were invariably named God, Death, Everyman, Good-Deeds, Angel, Knowledge, Beauty, Discretion, and Strength. Because they lived during the first flowering of public literacy they understood the indispensable healthiness of word flipping. Talk about nature’s bounty! Words were no longer merely to be received and absorbed. Can you imagine the joy of a 17th century adolescent forced to watch Everyman or The Second Shepherd’s Play, as he substituted Satan, Life, Neighbor, Sin, Second Rate Demons, Ignorance, Ugliness, Gossip, and Basic Human Weakness for the stock characters of religious drama? Of course you can. Almost no one who’s lived through a high school production of The Man of La Mancha has not done this.

Comic irony is when you recognize the impostors beyond their appearances on stage. The characters in Tartuffe are at every holiday party. They creep through the workplace. Confidence men, hypocrites, exceptionally vain head cases, the credulous, and all who make their living feigning virtue. Ah, nature’s bounty indeed!

By living Moliere I reside in kayfab—I know the world may be better or worse than this adoption, but I can bear my illusions for not to live in Tartuffe would be, at least for me, unsupportable. Comedic representation is healthier than plodding credulity and more philosophical since incongruity is the mainspring for understanding the irrational. If you’re following me, you’ll say my proscenium of custom if it’s all Moliere, all Shakespeare, all the time, is a matter that must by necessity make me unreasonable. I prefer this to any conversation with the human resources crowd or political canvasers or god help me, professors at a conference. I’d gladly sip the milk of custom and spit it in a potted plant than talk to Orgon or Tartuffe. Contradiction isn’t a customary beverage. It’s milk and iodine and it’s healthier for you than any drink Madame Pernelle will offer.

Shakespeare was the first comic writer to dramatize reverse psychology as Petruchio, a wandering nobleman, undertakes the wooing of Kate who’s notoriously short tempered and cruel:

“Say she rail; why, I’ll tell her plain
She sings as sweetly as a nightingale.
Say that she frown; I’ll say she looks as clear
As morning roses newly wash’d with dew.
Say she be mute and will not speak a word;
Then I’ll commend her volubility,
and say she uttereth piercing eloquence.”

We are the ones invited to say she rail; we’re instructed to become as devious as Petruchio. Taken into his confidence we’re delighted by his promissory book of lies.

That’s optimism as comedy. Not as a vehicle for pratfalls or put downs, but discernment and the vanity of hope.

Hope is comedy. The sadness of the world is irrational. This is how I live. I think of Auden’s line: “All we are not stares back at what we are.” If an empowered disability identity is “out” and on the street it’s ironies are inherently complicated by the acculturated language of normalcy. This is both a signature subject for performance theory and disability studies. It is also the seed bed of literary consciousness. Watch out! The crip writers are comics.

On Giving Thanks Just Now

It’s difficult to give thanks in America when we’ve decided bravery is simply a matter of bullying and bigotry. When we’ve forgotten courage was once a defense of the weak and that sustaining humanitarian values was what we imagined we stood for. At least that’s what we said. At least we used to say it. Maybe we only said it between 1932 and 1945. And maybe even then we didn’t mean it. Ask Japanese-Americans. Ask the Jews of Europe. Ask the men who were experimented upon at Tuskegee. Today you might ask the brave men and women fighting the Dakota Standing Rock pipeline. What values does America defend? One is tempted to say, “thanks are so old school.”

I’m giving thanks for our literary culture and it’s unafraid practitioners—those who dare say the Emperor has no clothes, who still believe our souls can clap their hands. From Chris Abani to Carolyn Forche; W.S. Merwin to Ethelbert Miller; Alberto Rios to Sam Hamill—oh it’s a long list…Rita Dove to Dorothy Allison; Marvin Bell to Natalie Diaz; Mark Doty to Gregory Pardlo—the list is vital, enduring, sweet and sour, filled with ichor and iodine, our tough minded American writers who believe still in Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, John Dewey.

I think the coming years will be painful, arduous, and mean spirited. When, last week, Newt Gingrich floated the idea of a new House Un-American Activities Committee, one could only imagine the plan was already “off the work bench” as Newt never has an original idea and “The Donald” hates contrarianism, free speech, the press, academics, and science. I’ve seen several posts on Facebook quoting Bertolt Brecht’s famous lines:

In the dark times

Will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing.

About the dark times.

Against this, or alongside, one may add Churchill’s axiom: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”

I’m giving thanks for the continuation, the fights to come, the ardor that is poetry and literature, the rising notes and the silences just before them when we imagine impeccably how the song will go.

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.