Innocence

 Icy, sodden snowbanks jigsawing around Farmington, making “outside” something the boys and I have to make it a point to do. But that’s the beauty of childhood, at least for an adult: all you’ve got to do is sit in dissatisfaction for a few minutes, and inevitably their attention begins to build, like bacteria in a petri dish, plumping into individual forts that then add battlements, and connect, until eventually you’re bombarding Bunker Hill. In his “Prayer for my Daughter”, Yeats remembers this world:

“Considering that, all hatred driven hence,

The soul recovers radical innocence

And learns at last that it is self-delighting,

Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,

And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will...”

That’s the dream, right? The Rousseauian wager, in which all we have to do is get rid of all this stuff (civilization to Rousseau, “hatred” to Yeats, material possessions to my parents and, who knows, maybe “distraction” to my generation), in order for the soul to return to something so pure and joyful that we recognize it as, if not heaven itself, then as close to heaven as we can get in a fallen world.

How much are we willing to sacrifice for this dream? Penelope Fitzgerald begins her novel innocence (punctuation from the Mariner edition cover, though the title page has it as Innocence) with a historical parable. The Ridolfis, a family of 16th century Italian midgets, creates a sort of enclosed garden, in which their only daughter, who is also a midget, might grow up without having to encounter the scorn of the outside world. Everything in this preserve is miniaturized, so as to give the young woman the illusion that she and her family are the same height as everyone else. At one point, the Ridolfis are able to acquire a young orphan named Gemma - who is also a midget - from a nearby town, to be a companion for their daughter. The problem of loneliness seems to be solved, for the girl is deaf and dumb and therefore the perfect playmate for a someone who is not allowed to hear anything about the outside world; but then twelve months or so, an unexpected thing happens: Gemma begins to grow! FItzgerald does not hold back:

“Meanwhile Gemma had taken to going up and down the wrong steps in the garden, the old flights of giant [i.e. “normal-sized”] steps which had been left here and there and should have been used only for occasional games. The little Rudolfi made a special intention, and prayed to be shown the way out of her difficulties. In a few weeks an answer suggested itself. Since Gemma must never know the increasing difference between herself and the rest of the world, she would be better off if she was blind - happier, that is, if her eyes were put out. And since there seemed no other way to stop her going up and down the wrong staircases, it would be better for her, surely, in the long run, if her legs were cut off at the knee.” (Innocence, p. 10-11)

*

“The sustenance of the comic strip is sheer continuity, the endurance of its daily, hypnotic present tense.” (204) So says Donald Phelps, in his majestic, terribly-edited (I found at least two-dozen typos and misspellings) Reading the Funnies. The book raises the question (among others) of what an “innocent” art might look like, since certainly it can’t look like me and my sons throwing snowballs. Figuring this out requires a certain amount of overlaying, since Phelps’s knotting, thinking-out-loud style rarely says things directly, at least not without immediately taking that direct statement as a starting point for another flight (echoes of Mandelstam’s metaphor for poetry as an airplane that somehow, mid-flight, builds another airplane). Still, two ideas I took from the book were, first, the consecration of day to day, “ordinary” life as a vital part of the greatest comic strips’ achievements, and two, the existence of style in these achievements as a sort of continual reckoning, “a device for keeping faith with the world, even as he keeps it at bay.” (p. 123 - this is Phelps on Harrison Cady’s style particularly). Both ideas are compelling to me, and seem to ring off Fitgerald insofar as they suggest the obvious: that is, that at the end of the day there is no innocent art, although there may be an art of innocence. An art about innocence - an art that wants to think about how “innocence”, such as it is, can be indicated, if only by pointing at the place where it would be, if we were really innocent. For Phelps, so far as I understand him, the American comics of the ‘30s and ‘40s - for all their frequent corniness, lameness, or just plain incomprehensibility to readers 80-years later - had a unique ability to do this; thus they managed the pretty inconceivable trick of being “Radical” in the Yeatsian sense while still being as ordinary as a walk in the snow. How they did this is one of the fascinating and useful histories that this book maps (one brief example, about Harold Gray, of Little Orphan Annie fame: “The attitude which can be inferred from a comic-strip is the operative factor, or, none at all; and Gray’s attitude, to any one-eyed reader using that single eye with minimal discretion, comprises the most profound (and very far from smug) distrust of even the latitude of the law…”). 

Finally Davenport, from that hidden poetics, II Timothy:

“If my writing, involved as it is with allegiances and sensualities, with its animosity towards meanness and smallness, has any redeeming value, it will be in its small vision (and smaller talent) that Christianity is still a force of great strength, imagination, and moral beauty if you can find it despite the churches and dogma.” 

For the record, I think he is only almost telling the truth here. He wants to put another word where “Christianity” is, but he either doesn’t know what that word is, or is afraid to use it. And thank god, since using it would very much deplete the power of his beautiful essay - not to mention its truth. 

Quieting

Woke up at around eleven o’clock in the middle of last night’s snowstorm to a sound that it took me a minute to identify: silence. Twelve years ago Layla introduced me to the practice of sleeping with a fan, or white noise machine, or really anything capable of blanketing us thoroughly. This being pre-kids, I still slept like a normal or at least normal-ish human being, and so adapted to it - adapted so thoroughly, as last night demonstrated, that the abnormal interruptions occasioned by, say, three-quarters of a foot of wet snow congealing to every...single...surface has the power to actually reach over the barrier between sleeping and waking and pull me out, or back in I guess. Like a rabbit being sucked back into its original hat.

This morning I think about it, as the neighbors and I all work our little plots of driveway with those modern New English equivalents of the original ox and plow, the snowblower. Noise is individual; but silence is communal, shared. That’s what makes it difficult to sleep in, to take for granted - at least if you’re not used to it. We are all in it, together, like children huddled in the same cave. So, listening to my wife breathe in the darkness, I can tell that she’s awake too. I can hear everybody, it seems, lying in the dark of our common power-out, listening to the listening. 

*

Two writers I’ve been abed with recently come to mind on the topic of silence. The first is somewhat obvious. As a sculptor of prose, Penelope Fitzgerald is pretty much unbeatable, not because her sentences are superb (although they are), but because, reading one of her chapters, or pages, I begin to realize that, really, novels aren’t made out language - or at least not any more than the David, for example, is made out of a mountain. Language is the space that a novel occupies, it’s ground; but the novel itself, that is, the part of the imaginative experience that the reader and writer inhabit together, listening and whispering to one another, like kindergarteners trading nursery rhymes, is the space that language creates: the empty place that it points to, sometimes subtly, sometimes insistently, and sometimes (Fitzgerald is like this) with a schoolmarmish eyebrow raise. Knausgaard:

“Literature is not primarily a place for truths, it is the space where truths play out. For the answer to the question - that I write because I am going to die - to have the intended effect, for it to strike one as truth, a space must first be created in which it can be said. That is what writing is: creating a space in which something can be said.” (Inadvertent, p.8-9)

One would not expect such over-explainer as Karl Ove to enter the mix here, but it is a strange truth of literature, I think, that a writer’s relationship to silence does not necessarily have anything to do with the amount of words she uses. It’s more about the cut - the amount that is left, not behind but on the table, between us, for us. Like an inexhaustible meal, or a battery, a current that must run, if it does, in the space between points. One way I like to get a handle on this in Fitzgerald’s work is the descriptions of people. These descriptions, for the most part, do not exist - but then how are the people there: how does the reader see them, says the MFA lizard-brain? Well, weirdly, by not seeing them, or by seeing them in action, or from the barest glimpse - the way a classical Chinese painting can make you see an entire landscape from a dripping branch.

“She was in appearance small, wispy and wiry, somewhat insignificant from the front view, and totally so from the back. She was not much talked about, not even in Hardborough, where everyone could be seen coming over the wide distances and everything seen was discussed. She made small seasonal changes in what she wore. Everybody knew her winter coat, which was the kind that might just be made to last another year.” (The Bookshop, p.8)

Spare, Defoe-like, and yet plaintive as Chekhov, this is the “everybody knows” of fiction - an everybody that is Fitzgerald’s whole project. We are the everybody. 

*

And yet there is so much snow to shovel, so much sheer wadded bulk to move from its current, blocking position to a different one, imperceptibly-torqued perhaps but then flooding us with so much sudden light and meaning that sometimes I feel that silence really is better served, in a weird and totally paradoxical way, by the maximalists. Or, because the term doesn’t really mean anything, by those writers for whom the shovelling is more the point than the finished sculpture, and who therefore do not skimp on showing their work. Here is Donald Phelps describing the “two cardinal images”, of transformation and fighting, used by the comic-book artist E.C. Segar, who invented Popeye in his long-running strip Thimble Theater:

“These two sets of images, dream-like transformation and bloody melee, share a common importance to Thimble Theater: the twin source of that gravity which converts humor into comedy, by investing it with the undertow of the world, and what Kafka called the weight of our own bodies. They represent the habitation within the world-at-large which, in the most notable comedy, and much other art, the imagination makes of itself. And their extremity, winging toward the poles of legerdemain and the savage sculpture of fight-to-the-finish, set off, by contrast, the marvelous kind of seriousness, the sense of reality being hard-by, which informs Thimble Theater through its thirty-six short seasons under Elzie Crysler Segar. Without my memories of such scenes, I could almost believe in the successful film adaptation.” (Reading the Funnies, p.41)

Here and again, and again in his essays, Phelps appears to want to say everything - and yet in a weird way, I find myself constantly feeling as I’m reading him that he is talking around something, a secret that he is leaving sitting there, as if his entire project were some sort of gigantic figure he were trampling in a lonely corn-field. He is respecting something, he cannot say it, and he knows he can’t say it, so he keeps saying, coming close but never hitting it directly. In this way he reminds me of Montaigne, which is to say that he reminds me of all the great essayists, up to and including Phelps’s own idol Manny Farber, who painted what was there as an accretion, rather than refutation, of what was not. A voice in the silence, which I guess is a way of saying a voice of silence. All of ours.