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.

Ashes

Friends, you haven't lived until you've had an infusion of chemotherapy drugs on Ash Wednesday.

I find I am crazily moved by the joy of ashes.  Gorgeous ashes, silvery, strange and potent.  Why would ash ever be an emblem of denial or irretrievable failure?  Ash proves a great success of burning; ash is memory.  We are made of ash, and this is beautiful news.

What a fearsome, magnificent, poetical day.

Athletes

I've been thinking a lot about athletes.

The primary task of an athlete is mastery.  Mastery of so many minute and continually recurring tasks.  And this is what I can't stop thinking about.  What does it entail after all?  Control, of course, but that's surely only a first step.  For ultimate control, final, comprehensive control, is never possible.  Thus, if mastery exists at all, mustn't it involve to a tremendous extent the ability to accept the unalterable universe?  The force of that universe, the limits it imposes?  Isn't mastery then, primarily a function of knowledge?  Of understanding limits, possibly even delighting in them?

The question is how to arrive at that delight.  For the process of coming to understand one's limits (of endurance, of skill, of creativity, of determination and patience) is a miserable business.  Nothing but the serial experience of thwarted objectives.  Whence, out of such grand frustration, might  satisfaction finally arise?  Whence derives our ineradicable certainty that mastery is its own reward?

Of course the question doesn't apply only to athletes.  Rather, it applies to anyone whose life is or has become a second-by-second challenge.  For it is in that continual drip of seconds that the most fearsome desires come: for relief, or achievement, finally.  Relief from pain or tedium, relief from the weight of insignificance.  Achievement of recognition.  The flaring of such desires is a temptation away from mastery.  And mastery, in turn, is the knowledge that those desires, because they will never relent no matter how many external consolations we obtain, are immaterial.  Mastery is its own reward, it is the comprehensive acceptance of disappointment, and it is the only thing we can ever really accomplish.

This was surely all worked out by a small Asian man in the 9th Century B.C., but it's helpful for me to parse it afresh now as I count hours and cycles of treatment, and as I try to assess the potential yet remaining in my body, its capacity to run, jump, lift, breathe, ride, walk, stand and so on, in spite of so many inducements no longer to do any of the above.  Really, I don't know how cancer patients think of anything else...

I feel like an athlete.

Six Lessons in Humility and Patience

There's an excellent book out there by Prof. Joseph Williams, titled Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace.  It's a manual of composition in professional writing, and it should be part of every English language high school curriculum in the world, but in particular I've always thought the title was magnificent.  So I stole it.

Why?  What does its reworking here describe?  My six cycles of chemotherapy treatment.

This is what happens on treatment days: I have to come to the 'infusion center' as it's called, and sit in the presence of the terrified, the wrecked, the slowly dissolving, the bewildered, the dying.  They look like hell, busted up and raked over, staring glassy-eyed at their blood pressure cuffs, leaning forward in their recliners to accept a thermometer.  And with them before and around me, I want nothing more than to deny the flatly obvious: that I'm just like them.  My uppity soul.  I don't want to be like them.  I want distance, I want my carefully honed sense of superiority back.  But I can't have it, can I?  Because I am just like everybody else, aren't I.  I stare at the blood-pressure cuff, don't I.  I lean and cringe just like they do, powerlessly.  Oh, what a lesson!  What a bitter, necessary lesson.  A bitter cause for laughter.

And here is what happens after treatment days: I take mega-doses of Prednisone and so can't sleep.  I get nauseous and register actively the smell of absolutely everything, even things that don't normally seem to have a smell.  Muscle spasms, headaches, fatigue, the whole list and litany.  Just like that which everyone else experiences.  And there's nothing to do but bunker up, duck and cover for however many days, because nothing will help.  Wisdom doesn't help, sharing doesn't help, and screw courage, what does courage have to do with it?  It's the waiting that gets you there.  Like a lion, hungry and without options there in the weeds.

After today, four lessons left.  Will I really learn?

The Picasso Answer

I've had a lot of people ask me about writing, about continuing to write during chemotherapy.  Will I be able to write, I've been asked.  Well, yes and no is one accurate and necessary answer.  There are predictable patterns of incapacity in the course of chemotherapy treatments, and they're not to be trifled with, they are no joke, and anyway they impose themselves, there's nothing I can do about it.  But they go away.  And life and vitality seem to return, however provisionally, and use of the imagination seems warranted again.  Or at least that's how this first cycle of treatment, some 11 days in, has seemed to go so far.

But I heard recently an answer to the question that I like far more.  Picasso is reputed to have said it, though I don't know when, where, to whom, or in response to what.  Who cares.  It's the right answer, and right answers are beyond citation.  It's this:

If they took away my paints, I'd use pastels.  If they took away my pastels, I'd use crayons.  If they took away my crayons, I'd use a pencil.  If they stripped me naked and threw me in a cell, I'd spit on my finger and draw on the wall.

 

Of Cancer, Death, Ancient Samurai, Bruce Springsteen and the Purposes of Life: An Open Letter to My Favorite Priest in the Wake of My Lymphoma Diagnosis

Dear Father P.,

First of all, I just wanted to make sure to express to you, unequivocally, how much our recent conversations have meant to me.  In my life I've met some humble people, some patient people, some caring people, some insightful people and certainly some funny and joyful people, but I've never met anyone who combines such a depth and fullness of each of those traits as you do.  Put them all together, as you have, and it results in what we ought to call wisdom.  True wisdom.  And probably true generosity, true love.  Those three things are probably, if you break them down, very close to the same thing.  And personally, I don't find them (wisdom, generosity, etc.) in the pieties of many of the Church's fine and good representatives.  Rather, I find them in the unaffected elementalism with which I think (hope) you and I both approach the mystery of life.  If God gives men what they have, then He has given me an instinct to venerate and pursue honesty above all.  Honesty and spiritual joy.  I've found that I can share these things with you in ways that I can share them with very few other people I've ever met.  And I'm indescribably grateful for that.

Second, and following from the above, I want to thank you for being someone with whom I can discuss questions, issues, ideas pertaining to the end of my own life.  It's said that for the ancient Japanese samurai the first and last thoughts of every day should have been thoughts of death.  But we don't live among samurai.  No one, it seems, wants to think of death, or speak of death.  And while it seems (for the moment at least) that I may not soon be asked to face death after all, I don't want to forget the moments of the past few weeks when the thought of my death was very much with me.  I think it would be a mistake to slip back into the Western world's common obliviousness to and distaste for confrontation with death. I suppose that's easy to say at the moment, when I'm on an emotional upswing due to the relatively good outlook I took away from my first meeting with the oncologists at Georgetown earlier this week.  But it seems as if it would be foolish, and lazy, and dishonest of me to live henceforth with little thought of death.  And I recognize the paradox (well, what we in the West might call a paradox; in the East perhaps it's no such thing, perhaps it's perfectly straightforward) that the thoughts of death are precisely those thoughts which allow for the fullest engagement with life.  Not morbid thoughts, of course, but clear-eyed contemplation of the fact that our lives will end someday, and surely too soon.  I pray with all the vigor and life of my soul that whatever God may be, and whatever He may want from me, He allow me to live long that I may experience the fullest human joys and sorrows on the way to accomplishing it.  But I also have no illusions of specialness, or of deserving that long life any more than the millions to whom it is not granted. 

Instead, I focus on sources of inspiration such as the video posted below.  I know, I know, it's a pop song, and pop songs are vulgar, and in poor taste for such high and astute intellectuals as we are, right?  But I can't help it, I have giddy, excitable, unrefined tastes.  And pop-rock though it may be, it's a song, in its way, about death, and when I hear the words sung, 'Bring on your wrecking ball,' I think, Yes.  Yes!  This is how a man must meet his Maker: as Jakob met the Angel, in a great loving, wrestling roar of life and death.  And after all, the fact that one artist, a loudmouthed rock-star from New Jersey has given me this uplifting way to understand my own mortality is the reason I write books and letters like this one: because I want to give somebody something like that in return.  In gratitude for everything I've gotten, I arrange my life around the hope that someone will read one of my books someday and hold some insight from it close to their heart as they pass into the crucible.  Do you think that can happen?  You think that might be what God wants from me?  If so please ask Him, on my behalf, for a great deal of time on the planet, because I've got some work to do.

For your love and wisdom, Father, thank you.

SM

New Stone Street, Available Now

Just a note about the newest Stone Street: last week I spoke with some members of the Junior Professionals Program instituted by Invest Lithuania and the Lithuanian Ministry of Economics.  The program (known as JPP) brings young Lithuanians who've graduated from universities in North America, Europe and elsewhere, back to Vilnius to work in various ministries of the Lithuanian government for one year.  I met several of the program participants at an event in Vilnius during the summer, and was sufficiently impressed to invite some of them to a sort of panel discussion of their experiences prior to and at the outset of their year of government service.  The panel participants were +Paulius Vertelka, a recent graduate of the University of Illinois-Chicago, Gintarė Janulaitytė, who holds a master's degree from the University of Hawaii-Pacific, and +Milda Darguzaite, who lived in the U.S. for sixteen years before returning to Vilnius to work as a special adviser to the Minister of Economics, and who, in that capacity, essentially created the JPP program out of whole cloth.  All in all, an interviewer couldn't have asked for a funnier, more thoughtful, more exciting or dynamic panel.  Click here to listen or sign up for the Stone Street podcasts, or click to the right for an RSS feed of the show, and hear what the future sounds like.