Beginning. Middle. End.

Posted at 9:07pm.

“

The term “imagination” in what I take to be its truest sense refers to a mental faculty that some people have used and thought about with the utmost seriousness. The sense of the verb “to imagine” contains the full richness of the verb “to see.” To imagine is to see most clearly, familiarly, and understandingly with the eyes, but also to see inwardly, with “the mind’s eye.” It is to see, not passively, but with a force of vision and even with visionary force. To take it seriously we must give up at once any notion that imagination is disconnected from reality or truth or knowledge. It has nothing to do either with clever imitation of appearances or with “dreaming up.” It does not depend upon one’s attitude or point of view, but grasps securely the qualities of things seen or envisioned.

I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.

”

May 14th 2012

Further Out Into McCarthy’s Darkness (In Response to Ms Odradek)

1 note |#

Ms Odradek was kind enough to reply to my last post on Cormac McCarthy’s drive towards the dark by linking to her mini-review of “Outer Dark”. Read her review here.

This response is somewhat of an exploration that her review implicated in me.

If Cormac McCarthy is writing tragedy for the purpose of catharsis, then perhaps he sees himself as Dante’s Virgil leading various infernal travelers through hell and possibly through purgatory. Catharsis is a purging, afterall.

A few examples from “Suttree” (it’s the most recent of his that I’ve read). Harrogate, a backwoods hick who meets Suttree in jail, eventually finds himself trapped in a cavern beneath Knoxville after he detonated a sewer main. In the cave, he loses all his light and is swallowed in a darkness (and poo) that is so complete that “he might have been as big as the whole universe or small as anything that was.” An outer darkness, as it were. Suttree, after searching for three days, descends into the caverns to retrieve Harrogate from the darkness.

In Dante, there are two circles of hell with excrement – the gluttons and deceivers. The gluttons are in the outer circles of hell and are only punished by being turned over to their sinful desires. The deceivers, however, are in the 8^th circle, past the Styx, and are receiving active punishment for their intentional sins. Over the course of the novel, Harrogate progresses from just a lustful and gluttonous person to someone who plans his sins – he transgresses with intent. At this point, Suttree finds him in the glow of a red lantern with maps of the city – in the image of a demon cartographer – attempting to find a bank so he can blow it up from underneath. Suttree continually warns Harrogate, against this progress, that his actions will land him in prison or dead. Harrogate eventually winds up in the penitentiary, and Suttree ultimately fails as Virgil.

Further along the lines of McCarthy seeing himself as Virgil: In “The Road”, which opens with an allusion to the “Inferno”, the father acts as a type of Virgil walking his son through the various parts of the terrestrial hell, and finally when the father has gone as far as he can go, hands his son to another set of parents. I’m sure there’s much to be explored there.

It’s interesting though, that in “The Sunset Limited” – McCarthy’s most explicit and thorough exploration of the faith question (via Christianity) – Black, the religious character, momentarily retracts the doctrine of hell from his beliefs while he’s arguing with the atheist White. I’m not sure what to make of that. Black is the Virgil character in this story. There’s been some critical speculation that both characters are already dead, the apartment setting in some afterlife, and the White character has one more chance to change his ways before being whisked away to suffer the hell of suicides. The play ends with Black lamenting that he couldn’t change White’s mind. Black asks an invisible God why He didn’t give him the right words. This Virgil ultimately fails again.

Come to think of it, McCarthy’s Virgil bears a certain resemblance to the Old Testament prophets who, when called, are told by God that they will fail in their vocation. Isaiah: “Make the heart of the people dull, their ears heavy, and blind their eyes, lest they understand…and turn and be healed.” Ezekiel: “Surely, if I sent you to a people of foreign speech, they would listen to you” and “Behold, you are like one who sings love songs with a beautiful voice and plays well on an instrument, for they hear what you say, but they will not do it.”

I suppose that through this catharsis, McCarthy is trying to get us to desire the light. He’s attempting, and often succeeds, the anagogical; creating a desire in his readers – a leading up to - which I think was Dante’s ambition as well. That is McCarthy’s genius. If he’s Virgil, then he can only lead his readers so far – through Purgatory – before love must eventually take over and be the guide. Maybe “The Road” comes the closest to this love – a baton pass to another father-figure. And maybe, as Dante knew, it would be foolish to explicitly describe the Light, although he names it often – just lead the reader to the precipice and urge their desire for it.

The difference between McCarthy and Dante is that McCarthy seems content to stop in Purgatory. He’s fine residing in the Vestibule of hell, as if like the other virtuous pagans, the Christ-question were never presented. Dante for his part began to describe the effects of the Light. The OT prophets, despite the carnage they described, also had dramatic points of hope. If there’s light in McCarthy, it’s flotsam to cling to so as not to drown outright. Dante’s and the OT prophets’ light is actually something to stoke the imagination – a visionary imagination to build life upon.

I don’t want to take away from the extraordinary accomplishment of McCarthy’s project, and maybe I can’t legitimately question what he sees as his work. But I can say that I wish there were somebody with his scope and gift who also imagined the Light – a Beatrice to his Virgil. Does this point to a bigger change in history? Whereas the Greeks, or even the Romans via the original Virgil, saw life ultimately as tragedy because of death. But Dante the Christian, addressing the culture of Christendom, saw life at least for some as comedy because in his mind death no longer had any sting. And for Dante that comedy even reached back through history to redeem something of the tragic world that had come before.

And now it seems that in our post-Christian world, that moon affects the tide differently than it did in Dante’s time, and the flow has begun to pull the comedy out to the chaotic sea of the ancients, dimming Dante’s light.

Posted at 9:00pm and tagged with: Two column, cormac mccarthy, tragedy, comedy,.

April 28th 2012

4 notes |#

Cormac McCarthy. Suttree. Vintage Edition, 1992. p. 89. Originally published in 1979.

We have been having a near-biblical plague of miller moths in Amarillo lately. I am reminded of this scene from Suttree as I read at night hearing the dusty smack of a billion flittering bodies against the window, about the lightbulb, watching the shower of motes spilling from all the collisions. The news keeps saying they’ll all be dead in two weeks.

Anyway, throughout the book Suttree is haunted by a twin. He was born a twin to a stillborn brother; an Antisuttree reaches towards him from another life in the reflection of a glass door; a lamp reflecting in water becomes a zygote dividing into two cells with disparate wills; an othersuttree precedes him in an bedlam journey through an obscure wood. Suttree muses that the stillborn twin was carted off to Purgatory while Suttree himself was condemned to a terrestrial hell – an impenetrable divide like a pane of glass between the two: one living in the eternal pre-dawn light of Limbo and the other confined to the darkness of black inferno.

The moth, clearly anthropomorphized, is another twin. Suttree’s question, as he leans close to look, he and the moth peering at each other through the glass, is rhetorical. What do you want? The moth wants the light. He’s a supplicant of light for crying out loud. Has anybody in all of history seen a moth that flees the light?

And this is the frustrating thing for me when I read McCarthy: he is known for turning his imagination towards the darkness and not flinching, but each time there’s a hint of light – pre-dawn gray - in Suttree he shrinks away. I know he’s out to imagine the tragic, but each time it feels like a moth becoming aware and turning to leave the light. If he’s the twin confined to hell, then surely he has chosen it. If he’s writing the tragic simply as a warning, which the book ends with (Fly them), then ought there be some light – otherwise all warnings are to flee the dark for otherdark.

I don’t want callow optimism. I want light.

Posted at 1:52pm and tagged with: Cormac McCarthy, Suttree, moth, light,.

“

Suttree wiped his plate with a piece of bread and sat back. He fell to studying the variety of moths pressed to the glass, resting his elbows on the sill and his chin on the back of his hand. Supplicants of light. Here one tinted easter pink along the edges of his white fur belly and wings. Eyes black, triangular, a robber’s mask. Furred and wizened face not unlike a monkey’s and wearing a windswept ermine shako. Suttree bent to see him better. What do you want?

”

April 14th 2012

Reblogged from poetrysince1912|7 notes |#

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

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poetrysince1912:

The poet Christian Wiman is giving voice to the hunger for faith — and the challenges of faith — for people living now. After a Texas upbringing soaked in a history of violence and a charismatic Christian culture, he was agnostic until he became actively religious again in his late 30s. Then he was diagnosed with a rare form of incurable blood cancer. He’s bearing witness to something new happening in himself and in the world.

—On Being

I’ve been stuck on Wiman lately. His essay Finishes: Ambition and Survival in his book of essays Ambition and Survival is a clear understanding of how to age as an artist (and better than Eliot’s appreciation of Yeats), but has been incredibly valuable to me as a trajectory for aiming a life of writing. Both his prose and his poetry are exemplary in living an engaged life; a life quiet enough to hear the disturbances that need to be quieted. And his style is remarkable; you can almost hear the rhizomes of thought feeling their way.

Here’s a link to an interview with Bill Moyers that has also been valuable.

Posted at 12:26pm and tagged with: Christian Wiman, poetry, faith,.

April 9th 2012

3 notes |#

Thomas is known for his incredulity and doubt, but I think it was less doubt and more what Paul called the “working out of your salvation with fear and trembling.” There must be trepidation when God expresses in a personal event that He is concerned for one singular person, even in the midst of a great crowd (the humiliation of grace and favor). Imagine Thomas’s fingers trembling in the spear wound. Look at Peter’s discomfort (turning his head) at witnessing the scene, perhaps because of his own fear and trembling.

The painting in process is by Jack Baumgartner, a farmer-craftsman-artist in rural Kansas, who I think captures the mystery of that simultaneous fear and comfort that attends faith. I like the fact that this work is in process, much like faith always is, but I look forward to the painting’s completion as I anticipate the completion of the good work begun in me. Until then, my fingers tremble in the wounds.

Posted at 12:14pm and tagged with: Jack Baumgartner, st. Thomas, faith, Christ, Easter, doubt,.

Thomas is known for his incredulity and doubt, but I think it was less doubt and more what Paul called the “working out of your salvation with fear and trembling.” There must be trepidation when God expresses in a personal event that He is concerned for one singular person, even in the midst of a great crowd (the humiliation of grace and favor). Imagine Thomas’s fingers trembling in the spear wound. Look at Peter’s discomfort (turning his head) at witnessing the scene, perhaps because of his own fear and trembling.
The painting in process is by Jack Baumgartner, a farmer-craftsman-artist in rural Kansas, who I think captures the mystery of that simultaneous fear and comfort that attends faith. I like the fact that this work is in process, much like faith always is, but I look forward to the painting’s completion as I anticipate the completion of the good work begun in me. Until then, my fingers tremble in the wounds.