Marilynne Robinson and the Project of Imaginative Compassion

Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, stop it now, and check out from the library or buy on Amazon all the novels of Marilynne Robinson.  There are only three of them: Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home.  They will improve you, I promise.  Truly, there is no wiser, more generous, more patient, or (therefore) more powerful voice in literature.  I would describe her wisdom as devastating--her insights are so pure, so true, so right, that one trembles before them and begins to get a sense (in our non-theistic times) of what the ancients might actually have been up to in describing, and prescribing, a righteous fear of God.  That may sound like giddy overstatement, and I suppose it is, but she is the first writer in some time who has left me saying, My God, this is what literature can do.  Of course, literature can do other things as well--goodness knows I believe deeply in more volcanic stuff, Rushdie, Bellow, William Kennedy, etc.--but Robinson's great project of imaginative compassion is simply unparalleled in its directness, humility, clarity and moral force.  I've long had the sense that art can save us; if you are committed to the idea that it cannot, I wish you luck in maintaining your view upon reading Robinson.

Let Them Be Incorruptible

A monk, an abbot, in fact, kneels, alone, and calls to mind those of his brothers who are soon to undertake a monstrously difficult voyage.  He thinks, about these brother monks of his, thusly:

They'd want much praying for; none was more susceptible than the wanderer to the ills that afflict the spirit to torture faith and nag belief, harrowing the mind with doubts.  At home...conscience had its overseers and its exterior taskmasters, but abroad the conscience was alone, torn between Lord and Foe.  Let them be incorruptible, he prayed, let them hold true...

That to which the abbot prays his brothers might hold true, is the way of their fictional Order, the Albertian Order of Leibowitz.  The abbot, of course, is fictional, too, this is from a book, and a rather remarkable one at that, especially considering that it's technically classifiable as a science-fiction book, taking place as it does over the course of nearly two millenia, and ending with a second world-wide nuclear holocaust in the year three-thousand, seven-hundred and some-such.  The book's imagined monks follow the rule of their founder, one Isaac Edward Leibowitz, a one-time nuclear technician who in the 1950s, after a first, incomplete, bout of international nuclear mayhem, undertakes to save what he can of recorded human knowledge from destruction -- the survivors on the North American continent are so traumatized that, in their grief and rage, they seek systematically to eliminate learning from their culture.  It is in defiance of this virulent anti-intellectualism that Blessed (later Saint) Liebowitz is martyred.  It is in defiance of later generations of this suspicious rabble that the brothers collect, preserve, reproduce, defend and study all extant texts from Leibowitz's--our--time.

The book's title is A Cantlicle for Leibowitz.  It was a sensation in its time, some 250,000 copies sold, even though it probably isn't a towering, preeminent achievement of world literature (whatever any designation like that might mean, if anything).  It is probably better described as a serious, often humorous, ultimately powerful engagement with a single question: what price security?  The answer to which comes: there is no security, at any price.  Security is unpurchasable.  Humanity is erratic, and the only protection against eternal doom is the ingenious, heroic surrender that is personal humility.

And, of course, adherence to the pre- and proscriptions of Catholic doctrine and dogma; Leibowitz is an explicit, if relatively nuanced and calm, defense of the doggedly objective universe of the Church (or at least that's the reading of the book that most readily suggests itself to me).  Even so, in its careful tracing of the paths of human confusion the book is unmistakably more literary than evangelical.  It may come down on the side of dogma, but it is not dogmatic.

None of which has anything to do with the quote with which I began, and I admit, the quote itself is not central to the themes or events of the book.  It's just something that caught me, which it would have done in any case, but which it did all the more so as the gentleman who recommended the book to me, a Foreign Service Officer from Nina's class of new recruits, is this week bound for Beijing to begin his first assignment.  Such departures well remind us that we're not to be in Virginia forever, or even for very much longer, and that in fact we're unlikely to be in any one spot for very much longer than a few years over the coming decades.  A fact which none of us much minds, but which can easily fall victim to our all-devouring myopia.  And while it's probably an overripe bit of romanticizing to imagine ourselves the noble, wandering objects of the abbot's prayers, it does not seem to me unreasonable to call out for whatever aid the cosmos might be able to provide to us and to our diplomatic colleagues as we trot off, wearing our various suits and badges of uncertainty -- what do we believe, and whom; who is Lord and who is Foe; what is conscience, where home?

In the service of human certainty, let us be unconvinceable.  That we might be free to believe, let us perfect our doubt.

Leibowitz's author, by the way, Walter M. Miller, Jr., shot himself to death in January, 1996, at the age of 72.

This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine

Says Prospero of savage, tragic and ill-used Caliban.  Of course there has grown up around Shakespeare's wizard and slave a rather intemperate notoriety, most notably of the sort that holds up the pair as a model of colonial oppression.  Which is fair enough so far as it goes.  But what to make of this last line Prospero speaks regarding Caliban?  This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.  It's shattering, no?  Absolutely shattering, heart-breaking, pregnant with aching regret and sorrow.  Or so it seems to me.  I can't get it out of my mind.

And to that end, I've been tinkering with the idea of doing a novel-length reinvention of The Tempest (because nobody's ever had that idea before).  With an ambassador, a woman, (thanks Julie Taymor and Helen Mirren for that inspiration: watch here) playing restlessly at the magic and misdirection of international relations, as the title character.  The following paragraph came to me, the opening:

The Ambassador, the Honorable Helena Whitaker (ne Prospejo) is a woman of incantations.  Also of elaborate, loud curses, prognoses, inducements.  Storms of reminiscence.  Finally, of bindings.  Each day, most often straightaway in the morning, in company of her ice water and mysteriously scented underthings, she is forced to acknowledge anew her connection with all the rigors of attachment and corrective orthodoxy that haunt her so, that define her.  She sees, in her inner projections and outlines, a universe of these bindings, damned bindings, bindings both tender and accursed, exquisite, necessary, destitute and unsustainable.


I don't know.  What do you think?

American Augie

I cannot imagine a more electric opening for a novel than the one I've just read.  It is from The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow, and it goes like this:

     "I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.  But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.
     Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining."

My God.  I mean, my God.  Such juice, such recklessness.  Who does this anymore, who has the courage to be so brusque and essential?  I'm only fifty pages into the book, I don't know yet what Augie's going to grow up to do or be (if you know, please don't spoil it for me), but he seems to announce himself here as a kind of butcher.  The frankness, the almost rude clarity of his formulations--whoever else he is, or will be, Bellow seems to indicate to us, Augie will cleave.

Of particular interest are the first four words: I am an American.  I can't get over it.  It feels like just about the most audacious thing anybody could ever say, it feels just berserk with irony, guts, muscle, regret, paranoia, almost disbelief.  But here's the question: did it feel that way to readers in 1953 when Adventures was published?  Did it feel like that to Bellow?  Or were we all a little more matter-of-fact back then?  How much, if anything, can we understand about ourselves by trying to understand the difference between what Augie's proclamation meant at mid-century, and what it might mean now?

Maybe I'm making too much of this.  As I'm working through it, it's beginning to sound a little like, I don't know, rehash Tom Brokaw or some such.  And I have to admit the chapters that follow Augie's opening salvo seem to me already to have taken a detour or two down the side alleys of their own rambunctiousness and rather herky-jerky enlightenment.  (All of which is, of course, entirely forgivable--the fifty pages of Adventures are the only fifty pages of Bellow I've ever read, but his restless mastery thus far earns him precisely what every author must earn: the right to follow his or her own inner dictates.)

Well, enough with the snooty parsing already.  I suppose the distillation of all this, the point, is to note, for the benefit of...whoever might benefit from it, that Augie's opening is no less than the reason any of us are in this literature business to begin with: the peril, the responsibility, the thrill of self-definition.  I am an American.  Beat that.

People Live

I want to say something about Ukraine, and it is this: Ukraine is exactly like where you live.  Exactly.  And I don't care where you live.  You live in California?  Ukraine is exactly like California.  You live in Dublin?  Just like Ukraine.  Omaha, Chicago, Pretoria, Rome.  You get the idea.

What do I mean?  I mean that in Ukraine, just like everywhere else, people go about their daily lives with the bedrock, usually implicit conviction that those lives are the only normal lives in the world, and that the lives being lived in other places around the globe are the ones that are dangerous, spectacular, backward, or otherwise incomprehensible.

Think about that: wherever you live, whatever you're doing right now, there's a Ukrainian for whom your life is dazzlingly strange.  Keep thinking about that.

Why do I want to say this about Ukraine?  Well, I want to say it about everywhere, it's a topic that obsesses me as a writer and as a human.  But I bring up Ukraine here in part because it's close to my heart, and in part because George Weigel, Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center here in Washington, D.C., wrote, about a month ago, a rather uncharacteristically (for him) breathless article about the arrest, trial and sentencing of Ukraine's former Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko to a prison term on some pretty patently trumped-up charges.  (You can read Weigel's article here).


Though any number of sources have tended, terribly incorrectly, to equate Ms. Tymoshenko's victimization in this particular case with a personal and professional saintliness on her part (she was at one time Ukraine's Energy Minister, in which capacity she was deeply implicated in the extremely, extremely fishy sale of gas transit rights to a Russian company, among other somewhat less drastic but no less exasperating transgressions), they are all correct in identifying the Tymoshenko affair as a preposterous one.

What they all miss, however, is the extent to which all this politico-legal flummery is viewed by Ukrainians as completely normal.  For Ukrainians (if I may be so foolhardy as to speak for them), Ms. Tymoshenko's fate is not the menacing herald of some resurrected totalitarian instinct.  It's just good old-fashioned stupidity; and furthermore, as such, it's barely news.  East or West, North or South, most of us have long since caught on that politicians are, in crucial ways (though perhaps not in every way), just dopes.  Complete boneheads.  Thus, Ukrainians quite rightly view President Viktor Yanukovich, (one of the men responsible for Ms. Tymoshenko's prosecution), as a typical political idiot, tone deaf to the likely consequences of his actions.  Though it may seem paradoxical to the West, it is precisely because Ukraine has put up with external domination for centuries that it tends not to perceive every knuckleheaded pronouncement from Kyiv as cause for hand-wringing.

And here we come, finally (I know, I know), to my particular response to Weigel.  As my wife puts it, the average Ukrainian's understanding of the cosmos hasn't changed much over the last, say, 1500 years.  As pagans, they reckoned that there were forces in the world greater than them, which forces had to be, somehow, survived.  When Christianity came, they reckoned that God was a force in the world greater than them, Who had to be, somehow, survived.  And so on through the centuries.  Droughts, Mongols, Russians, Jesus, the souls of the dead, etc.  Mysterious and dangerous, all, to varying degrees.

And so, in my experience, it remains with Ukrainians.  The world is to be shrugged at and kept a wary eye on.  Ukraine, Mr. Weigel, is neither Catholic, as you'd like it to be, nor Russian Orthodox, as Russia would like it to be, nor neo-Soviet, as you fear it could become.  It is pagan.  It is superstitious and a little goofy.  I know neither how to make this point strongly enough, nor how to make the fact of it more palatable to my Catholic friends and family: I have never, in my decade of involvement with the country, met a Ukrainian who knew or cared anything about religion.  Church weddings are for pretty pictures, and that is all. 

Because I understand this to be true, because I've come very deeply to understand and even (to a point) to identify with the Ukrainian world-view, I have a further complaint against Weigel, and it is this: to suggest, as he does, that "In keeping alive the idea of a free and independent Ukraine, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church played a role similar to that of the Catholic Church in Soviet-occupied Poland", is to do precisely what he accuses Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church of doing, namely, claiming Ukraine for himself.  I am sorry, Mr. Weigel, but you, as a Catholic, do not get to take credit for Ukrainian independence.

As I mentioned above, there are a thousand nuances, caveats, and clarifications that should be added here, but to which the blog format is particularly unaccommodating.  I'm sorry that I can't paint a fuller, more accurate picture.  But even if I could, the take-home message would be the same, and it would be summarized brilliantly by Isaac Babel, the early 20th-Century Ukrainian short-story writer and novelist.  In response to the West's furor, it's trembling reportage, analysis, prognostication, outrage, and so on, I would offer a four-line dialogue from Babel's Diary of a Red Army Cavalryman, between an itinerant soldier from Odessa and a resident of the town in (then) Poland which the soldier's regiment has entered:

"Where are you from, young man," the man asks.
"From Odessa," the soldier answers.
"And what is it like in Odessa?"
"People live."

What the Artists Know

Dr. Timothy Snyder is an eminent historian, Yale University professor, and author of the much-celebrated 2010 book, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin.

The bloodlands of Dr. Snyder's title roughly correspond to the expanse of Eastern Europe between Berlin in the West and Moscow in the East (though he refines the area further than that) and running from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south.  Since more than 100 of us at the Foreign Service Institute are currently preparing to depart for posts in this region (present-day Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Russia), our regional studies instructor (former University of Nebraska professor, Bill Gleason) prevailed upon Dr. Snyder to speak to us about the theses of his work, and it was our tremendous good fortune that he agreed.

Though Dr. Snyder is clearly a unique thinker and a gifted speaker, he is first and foremost a historian (or, if you prefer an historian).  This means, of course, that his ideas exist within the contexts and traditions of academic historiography.  His innovations are improvements upon and responses to the way that historians have thought in the past.   Thus, most of us in his audience who are not historians will have relatively little to say about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of his several revolutionary postulations.

But one particular moment during his address stood out to me, mostly due to the fact that it was so much like so many other moments I've experienced in my life while listening to scholars of whatever caliber.  It was this:

During a discussion of "collaboration," i.e., work (sometimes banal, often heinous) performed by non-Nazi or non-Soviet populations on behalf of either the Nazis or the Soviets (and forgive me, historians, if this definition takes too many liberties with "collaboration" as a term of art), Dr. Snyder reported that scholars have too often focused on ideologically-motivated collaboration, and too little on economically-, or socially-motivated collaboration.  He averred that quite likely the vast, vast majority of collaboration was indeed motivated by very simple social and/or economic exigencies; i.e., that everyday Latvians, Lithuanians, Belorussians, etc., acquiesced to the ghastly demands of Nazi or Soviet soldiers simply because that seemed at the time like the only way to survive.

Well this seems uncontroversial.  And indeed, as I understand it, it's not so much that academic historians have denied that this is the case, but rather that they've tended to write it off as unworthy of much concerted study (or as too difficult to study because so often undocumented, or what have you).  Dr. Snyder, though, appeared to me to be suggesting that in as much as each "common" or "unexceptional" life constitutes a kind of universe unto itself, a comprehensive and utterly inimitable mode of being in the world, those common lives are proper subjects of inquiry every bit as much as the unexceptional lives--the farmer offering eggs to a Nazi patrol tells us as much about the nature of war, deprivation and betrayal, as does the spy trading in secrets about troop movements or supply routes.

And it was at this point that I thought of a book I recently re-read.  Written by a young gentleman named Jonathan Safran-Foer, it's titled Everything is Illuminated, and among its many subjects is a Ukrainian grandfather haunted by memories of a night in 1943 when a German solider gave him a choice: identify your best friend as a Jew or witness the murder of your wife and infant son. 

I thought as well of South African Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, in which a local authority in a far-flung corner of an unnamed, vaguely post-apocalyptic empire is forced either to repress the residents of the settlement for which he's responsible or face personal ruin.

I thought of Chilean novelist (and recent Nobel laureate as well), Mario Vargas Llosa, writing about (among so many other things) the machinations in which so many Dominicans were caught under the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the 1940s and 50s. 

And so on. There are of course poems, films, paintings, songs, and any number of other artistic forms as well which treat of this topic.  It's an all but biblical theme.  The question is, why has it been missing (to a greater or lesser extent) from the discipline of history?  Why has it taken a Timothy Snyder to bring into the academy what the artists have been talking about for millenia?  And why does it always take a Timothy Snyder?  Because it always does.  Any curious, perceptive lay person paying attention over the years will have noticed that academia is forever atwitter over ideas that have been abroad for decades.  The pompous, oblivious professor agog over his discovery that water is wet, the wheel round, etc., etc., is all but a trope in popular culture.  Why?

I don't have an answer, really.  I have inklings, suspicions, some of which, probably inappropriately, border on grudges.  In asking the question, though, I'm actually less interested in the intricacies and interrelations of various academic pathologies (we all know about them, and we all know that they are legion), and more interested in exactly what it is that artists are doing so presciently and boldly and sensitively.  I should probably better ask what it is, after all, that our artists know, what they're able to intuit and reveal.  If historians catalog and compile, and then deduce; if scientists hypothesize and then test, and then report (and I realize, many would suggest that those are big ifs); then what are we artists doing?  Do we even know?  And if we did know, would our knowledge render us unable to go on doing it?

Sentence of the Day

In case, like me, you're not having any fun with your sentences these days, here's one of William Kennedy's:

It was dark now and I was wet to the underwear, standing in the middle of desolation, maybe about to be buried in a landslide, giving traffic directions to a bleeding, one-eyed psychopath who was, with one hand, trying to drive a mythic vehicle backwards up an enchanted mountain.

Now if that don't put the gnats back in your herb garden, what does, huh? ;)