Keep Looking

Don DeLillo

You look out at the water near the end of the day.  The sunlight is reflecting off the surface in interesting ways.  At times it doesn't look like a lake at all, but also not like anything natural.  The play of light is wholly unsettling, but you can’t not look.  You walk up to the shore and look down to the water.  At first you see nothing but changing patterns of light and dark and color; nothing is recognizable.  But gradually you see shapes below the surface, shapes that glint and glow, move and morph.  Then they’re gone.

That’s my experience reading the nine stories that comprise Don DeLillo's The Angel Esmeralda.  The surface is puzzling and not entirely coherent, but there are glimpses of an inner order that is compelling.  The language is pleasing but not unconventional.  The plots are straightforward.  There is little that is explicitly postmodern.  But the real action is below the surface in the realm of ideas.  DeLillo’s real subjects are ideas and feelings, and his approach is always from the side, never straight on.

I remember reading some of the stories when they originally appeared.  This time I read a few of them more than once.  The feelings stay with me even if I remain a little frustrated that my glimpses below the surface are so fleeting.

I won’t even try to discuss the individual stories, but suffice it to say that DeLillo has quite a bit to say on the subject of terror in modern life.  Sometimes the terror is explicit, sometimes not.  DeLillo seems fascinated with how we deal with fear in everyday life.

I’ll have to come back to these stories.  I can’t not look.

Dora Lite

Therapy.  It has been an important strand in my life for many years.  I’m not currently in therapy.  Perhaps I should say that I’m not currently seeing a therapist. But I do hear my former therapist’s voice in my head every day.  It’s my voice, but I needed his help to find it. That voice represents a view of my life from a higher place; and at times that voice provides detachment from the crusted ruts and self-constructed ruthlessly enforced agendas that have inevitably grown from my past.

We live, we learn, we remember, we construct stories that make sense of our experience. That ability is our greatest strength and our most powerful curse. We are bombarded by sensory input.  We use our brains to make survival sense of it.  We do a pretty good job, for the most part, but sometimes in the long run those stories sell us short because the narrator’s point of view is too localized, too restricted, too personalized.  If only there were a generic human psychological handbook that we could reference so that we would not draw conclusions based only on a personalized and narrow slice of evidence.

My guess is that literature is one of our attempts to produce such a handbook.  We read the narratives of others, stories told from others’ points of view, and then we filter them through our own internal stories. Sometimes when we read fiction a new streak of light enters the semi-darkness of our consciousness; sometimes we are able to see something truly new, and we are forced to reconstruct our own narrative in ways that take into account the new data.  It’s still our own personal survival handbook, but the point of view is ever so slightly broadened.

Stephen Grosz is a psychotherapist with many years of experience.  His book, The Examined Life, is a non-fiction collection of 31 short chapters. In each he  summarizes the therapeutic experience for one patient.  The chapters are short and contain no technical medical or psychoanalytical jargon.  Just stories told in human terms.  In each of these short chapters Grosz attempts to explain a patient’s patterns and to some degree the newly discovered paths that offer escape from those ruts.  In some stories the gains are huge, in others quite modest.  In some the jump from reported experience/feelings to insight is difficult to follow (and for me virtually incomprehensible), and in others the connections are clear and convincing.  I suspect the distinction lies solely in my own ability to truly empathize with each patient’s situation.

If nothing else the book offers hope that we can all grow beyond the seemingly ironbound limitations of our everyday lives.  Our own view is so limited, and we must constantly work to broaden it.  Grosz makes the point that the therapist’s most important job is to be truly present.  That means setting aside all preconceived notions and truly listening, being open, patient, and accepting.  It’s a lesson we can all stand to revisit from time to time.  Be truly present for ourselves as well as for others.

I don’t have all the answers, not even for myself.  And when I interact with others I need to set aside myself and be truly open to what others might offer.  I can choose to accept those offerings or reject them; I can embrace or construct healthy boundaries.  But if I don’t truly listen, I’ll never know what an appropriate reaction might be.

And listening to ourselves may be the most important skill of all (along with that essential sidekick self-deception). We can’t deal with all the complexity at once.  We need to artificially simplify in order to survive, but we also need to be open to what is beyond the walls that we have constructed for ourselves and that we reinforce every day.

Is it time for me to go back to therapy?  There’s never a bad time for therapy.  It doesn’t hurt (except the bills), and for the most part it can only help.  For the time being the internal therapeutic voice seems to be serving me well enough.  Or is that just self-deception talking?

A Room (on Elba) with A View

Lots of stir about the latest young whippersnapper, Tao Lin. Couldn't put it off any longer so I tackled his latest, Taipei, a full-length novel. It’s not particularly long; the narrative is not complicated; there aren't that many characters; no post-modern trickery here.  But it’s not an easy read; nor is it a pleasurable read in the usual sense. The story, such as it is, centers on a young Asian-American writer (Paul) who takes lots of drugs, does many public readings, goes in and out of romantic relationships, and in the course of the book gets married.  Doesn't sound especially unusual, but this is the most bizarre book I've read in a long time.

Paul’s childhood places him in a self-imposed protective isolation.  In a sense the book represents his attempt to escape that exile.  IMHO he achieves little more than a glimpse out the barred window, but some reviewers (see NYT) think he achieves more.  As an intelligent and well-educated young adult Paul wraps himself in multiple layers of protective irony to the extent that any kind of normal emotional reality is so distant as to be inconceivable.  Lin writes in an informal journalistic blog-like style, complete with syntax that only a programmer can appreciate.  At first I had to read every chapter twice it was so different.  I did find a flow after a while, but what kind of flow I’m not really sure.  One reviewer called it “a massive discharge of waste matter.” 

The style is so flat, so devoid of what at least I take to be fundamental humanity as to be almost unreadable … or maybe super-readable (or compilable) … or just plain boring.  Characters are introduced with their age in parentheses, almost like programming code.  They never truly interact.  They are concerned only with themselves and with their images of themselves as seen online, in mirrors, or most often in their own heads.  It really is like a group of blind people in a circle jerk.  Each is intensely involved in his own experience, but minimally aware of what’s going on around him.  Yet each longs for interaction.  What they’re doing is only a substitute for the ‘real thing’, so the isolation paints a crushing underlying despair.  I so dearly hope that Lin’s personal life is not accurately portrayed here.  You can’t get out of depression easily if you don’t truly feel.  And the only path out is a long and painful one that I wouldn't wish on anyone.

Perhaps Paul’s experience shouldn't be taken literally.  Perhaps the book is meant to represent metaphorically the alienation imposed on us by society and especially by technology (both electronic and pharmaceutical).  If so, I guess I get it.  But if so, we’re all in a shithole without much hope.  The few strands of light that Lin shows at the end are only a hint of the beginning of the start of the awakening. And it will only get worse. Every year we’re offered new more up-to-date tools that are supposed to help us, but actually only distance us further from human interaction and the concomitant fundamental joy and pain., and push us deeper into the hole If we continue to take the bait offered by those tools, we’re doomed to a life-long mostly futile struggle to find the simplest pure and strong feelings about each other. Our masochistic feelings about ourselves play an impenetrable zone defense that keep us far from the basket.  But if we don’t take the bait, we’re outside the mainstream (or at least the whippersnapper version thereof), and doomed to yet another version of exile.

Is this the novelistic version of art as the urinal on the wall?  In a way it is.  I’m not fond of it. I wish him well. I'm happy to have read it. I’ll take it as a warning.

“Abandon all hope ye who enter here."

John Banville continues to thrill me.  Shroud (2002) is part of a loosely bound trilogy (Eclipse, Shroud, Ancient Light), but stands very well indeed on its own. This is almost writing for writing’s sake.  There isn’t much of a plot at all, at what plot there is is not particularly interesting or even credible.  But no matter.  The ‘plot’ is merely an excuse for Banville to write marvelous passages about identity, authenticity, love and death, a pretext for absolutely hypnotic mood painting.  It’s poetry in the guise of a novel, and that’s just fine by me.

The book is divided into three sections.  The first is the least successful and the most plot-centric. The main character is an aging academic and writer.  Early on he muses:

‘For a second, strangely, and for no reason that I knew, everything seemed to stop, as if the world had missed a heartbeat. Is this how death will be, a chink in the flow of time through which I shall slip as lightly as a letter dropping with a rustle into the mysterious dark interior of a mailbox?’

In the second section, that character as a young man assumes the identity of a recently deceased friend.  The switch is not premeditated, and the motives are mixed.  Political circumstances (Nazi’s clamping down on Antwerp) trigger the ruse, but Banville is quick to explore many facets of the inevitable consequences.  I quote at length partly out of respect for Banville’s prose, partly because I suspect and hope that retyping Banville’s words will have a positive effect on my own writing:

‘No, I did not attend Axel’s funeral. I knew that I would not be welcome, that my presence would be an embarrassment, possibly a danger, to the Vanders.  I do not know when it took place, or where, even. I think now I should have been there to see him into the ground. It is said that those close to a person who goes missing will not find peace and an end to their grieving until they know the fate of their loved one, and, especially, the place where he, or she, is interred. I would not wish to appear fanciful, but when I look back over the years of my life, and those moments in it of great stress and suicidal urgings, I wonder if all along I may have been in a state of suspended mourning for my friend.  Does this make me seem too good, too faithful? It does. But certainly there is something buried deep down in me that I do not understand and the nature of which I can only intuit. It will seem too obvious if I say that it is another self – am I not, like everyone, like you, like you especially, my protean dear, thrown together from a legion of selves? – but all the same that is the only way I can think of to describe the sensation.  This separate, hidden I is prey to effects and emotions that do not touch me at all, except insofar as I am the channel through which its responses must necessarily be manifest. It will prick up its ears at the tritest, most trivial plangency; it is a sucker for the sentimental. Sunsets, the thought of a lost dog, the slushy slow movement of a symphony, any old hackneyed thing can set the funereal organ churning. I will be passing by in the street and hear a snatch of some cheap melody coming from the open window of an adolescent’s bedroom and there will suddenly swell within me a huge, hot bubble of something that is as good as grief, and I will have to hurry on, head down, swallowing hard against that choking bolus of woe. A beggar will approach me, toothless and foul-smelling, and I will have an urge to open wide my arms and gather him to me and crush him against my breast in a burning, brotherly embrace, instead of which, of course, I will dodge past him, swiveling my eyes away from the spectacle of his misery and keeping my tight fists firmly plunged in my pockets. Can these splurges of unbidden and surely spurious emotion really have their source in a bereavement nearly half a century old? Did I care for Axel that much? Perhaps it is not for him alone that I am grieving, but for all my dead, congregated in a twittering underworld within me, clamouring weakly for the warm blood of life. But why should I think myself special – which amongst us has not his private Hades thronged with shades?’

Banville also describes the liberating aspect of the identity assumption:

‘Everything had been taken from me, therefore everything was to be permitted.  I could do whatever I wished, follow my wildest whim. I could lie, cheat, steal, maim, murder, and justify it all. More: the necessity of justification would not arise, for the land I was entering now was a land without laws. Historians never tire of observing that one of the ways in which tyranny triumphs is by offering its helpers the freedom to fulfil their most secret and most base desires; few care to understand, however, that is victims too can be made free men. Adrift and homeless, without family or friend …I could at last become that most elusive thing, namely – namely! – myself.  I sometimes surmise that this might be the real and only reason that I took on Axel’s identity. If you think this a paradox you know nothing about the problematic of authenticity.’

And, to offer yet more contradiction:

‘What did it benefit me to take on his identity? It must be, simply, that it was not so much that I wanted to be him – although I did, I did want to be him – but that I wanted so much more not to be me. That is to say, I desired to escape my own individuality, the hereness of my people. This seems to matter much. Yet I have lived as him for so long I can scarcely remember what it was like to be the one that I once was … I pause in uncertaintly, losing my way in this welter of personal, impersonal, impersonating, pronouns.’

But it’s in the third part that Banville creates a stunningly hypnotic vision.  The main character, an old man, has fallen in love with a young girl:

‘The object of my true regard was not her, the so-called loved one, but myself, the one who loved, so-called. Is it not always thus? Is not love the mirror of burnished gold in which we contemplate our shining selves? Ah, see how I seek to wriggle out of my culpability: since all lovers really love themselves, I am only one among the multitude. It will not do; no, it will not do.

I am, as is surely apparent by now, a thing made up wholly of poses. In this I may not be unique, it may be thus for everyone, more or less, I do not know, nor care. What I do know is that having lived my life in the awareness, or even if only in the illusion, of being constantly watched, constantly under scrutiny, I am all frontage; stroll around to the back and all you will find is some sawdust and a few shaky struts and a mess of wiring. There is not a sincere bone in the entire body of my text. I have manufactured a voice, as once I manufactured a reputation, from material filched from aothers. The accent you hear is not mine, for I have no accent. I cannot believe a word out of my own mouth. I used Cass Cleave [the young girl] as a test of my authentic being. No, no, more that that; I seized on her to be my authenticity itself. That was what I was rooting in her for, not pleasure or youth or the last few crumbs of life’s grand feast, nothing so frivolous; she was my last chance to be me.’

That about sums it up for this Humbert Humbert, and for modernity’s seemingly futile quest for authenticity. We’re just too damned self-aware to be the least bit fundamentally confident.  We’re doomed to constant reinvention, self-reflection, and self-doubt. Banville points out the consequences for writers:

 ‘... every text conceals a shameful secret, the hidden understains left behind by the author in his necessarily bad faith, and which it is the critic’s task to nose out.’

In this novel the damning physical evidence of the main character’s duplicity is hidden inside a fountain pen, a lovely symbol indeed.

There is a dinner scene near the end of the book which is a wonderful combination of Fellini, Bergman (think the dinner party scene in The Hour of the Wolf’), Philip Roth, and maybe even a bit of Woody Allen. So many levels of falseness; a gaping chasm where only truth and faith could really do.  Finally the main character realizes that his own recently deceased wife probably understood his deception but kept silent and just loved him as best she could.  His first glimmer of what a more genuine life could have been:

‘What I marvel at is her silence. All those years when I thought I was preserving myself through deceit, it was really she who was keeping me whole, keeping me intact, by pretending to be deceived. She was my silent guarantor of authenticity. That was what I realized, as I stood that day in the stationer’s shop on the Via Bonafous and one whole wall of my life fell down and I was afforded an entire vista of the world that I had never glimpsed before.’

Shroud is not an easy book. I read it slowly and not without some frustration.  But there are passages to will stay with me for a long, long time. For now, Banville will be my therapist.

What were you reading in 1995?

Picked up a used copy of T.C. Boyle’s story collection After the Plague (2001) for next to nothing a while back.  Sixteen stories, all previously published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Esquire, GQ, etc.  It’s curious how old-fashioned these stories seem now.  In the last 10-15 years there has been so much prominent experimentation in the genre that has pushed the boundaries of the genre quite far.  Not that all the experiments have been successful, but they have been interesting for the most part.  These stories were initially published mostly in the 1990’s I presume, and they do show their age.

Bad boy?  Not really.  Not at all, actually.

 What might have seemed adventurous then is now old hat.  Form is very traditional.  No prominent dialect play or time shifting here.  Even point of view is very straightforward. Nothing post-modern in the least. The language is everyday and easy to read, the subject matter non-controversial by today’s standards.  The ideas are interesting but treatment is a little clunky and heavy-handed.  Crafted but predictable.

I especially enjoyed ‘Rust’, ‘Achates McNeil’, and ‘My Widow’. For the most part the stories avoid the overwritten ‘240 volts where 12 would have done nicely, thank you’ approach in many of his novels.  There is some subtlety and grace here.  Take it to the beach.  You’ll smile here and there and be grateful.