Kicking up/off the Dust

Another piece of the puzzle, from Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurdis Brigge:

It would be difficult to persuade me that the story of the Prodigal Son is not the legend of a man who didn't want to be loved.

As put this way, here - at the tail end of a book so basted in amour de soi that it turns whatever room you read it in into a stuffy Parisian garret - the sentence unwinds hypnotically and strikes you on the forehead. Was it there the whole time? Meaning, have I really been returning every night, after days of dreaming, to a room not empty and peaceful but in fact stalked, like a bathroom sluice by a venomous cobra? 

The prodigal fears knowledge because for the same reason we all do: because he knows that it will imply him in the world, which he loves deeply but is also revolted by and terrified of. The story of the prodigal, like the flight of a boomerang, gets its shape exactly from this weird tension, between the hyperactive, self-involved twirlings of the hero, and the larger, slower, but no less circular arc along which these twirlings are gradually returning. For a good example of this, pick that most Oedipal of our century's genre's, the neo-noir. The private eye works his way deeper and deeper into a mystery, until finally he becomes a part of that mystery - and not just any part, either, but the agent: the keyhole through which evil leaks at last into the world. He has tried to do good, but in his puritanical, utterly-cool way he has insisted that the good he does be done on his own terms, meaning professionally, in a way he could escape if he wanted to. Except that you can never escape, no one can, and to build a super-capable persona around the idea that there's somewhere else to go other than the world means, in the end, to become that most beautiful and illustrative of characters, the Fool. 

What does this have to do with us? The philosopher Stanley Cavell's kaleidoscopic reading of King Lear, The Avoidance of Love, frames the problem with characteristically care (and commas): "If good is to grow anywhere in this state, it must recognize, and face, its continuity with, its location within, a maze of evil." For Cavell, Lear messes up because he refuses to recognize this - and he refused to recognize this (the world as a "maze of evil") mainly because he does not want to admit that, in this kind of world, we have an obligation to one another - an obligation that we must acknowledge in order to even begin to consider ourselves good people (or maybe just people). 

But Malte, like all prodigals, kicks instinctively at obligation. "Not until long afterward would he realize  how thoroughly he had decided never to love, in order not to put anyone in the terrible position of being loved." Oh how generous of you, Malte! How utterly selfless, to avoid that most difficult of human works - not because you resent having to take out the trash and brush your teeth twice a day, but because you want to relieve all your potential lovers of "the terrible position of being loved"!

It's easy to laught at Rilke - but I remember reading NMLB for the first time when I was 17 and being floored by this very inversion. Yeah, I thought! (with that peculiar, almost glandular feeling of teenage epiphany, which I remember being somewhere between popping your ears and realizing that you're coming down with a cold) Being loved sucks. It pulls you out of your self-sufficient dream and into a relationship, meaning something contingent and social and imperfect. More importantly, it forces you to "put yourself out there" in a way that Cavell, again, utterly nails in the Lear essay:  "We must learn to reveal ourselves, to allow ourselves to be seen. When we do not, when we keep ourselves in the dark."

The dark, the dark. The other night, a friend and I had a few beers and walked around town talking about atonement. Portland at midnight is an interesting place: empty enough to feel strange, but still small enough to feel domestic. Its west end (spotted like a pumpkin patch with empty brick mansions) crests in a promenade that overlooks the city like a tsunami too in love with itself to fall. Inspired, perhaps, by this melancholy vageling, my friend (who has read far too many German books) made the suggestion that his decision to go into healthcare (after years spent doing something completely different) was motivated in some part by a desire to atone. Cue shiver of recognition - but then isn't that how it happens in the story, too? The prodigal sits in a strange bar, salted by indolence, unaware of everything except the person who sits down next to him by chance, and then opens up his mouth to say a truth so startling that our hero understands immediately that someone is watching. The boomerang of meaning returns. As Rilke says somewhere else, forever, "You must change your life". 

(image: not sure. If anyone has any idea, please let me know)

Sleep: a Job for Ghosts

Sleep. As a nursing assistant working the night shift in a large hospital, I have a complicated relationship to it. On the one hand, I worship it the way a farmer worships the sun - that is, as the mysterious fickle God of my art. On the other hand, I don't get much of it. So, despite all my attempts at equanimity I find myself eyeing sleepers with a sort of sideways glance, like a vampire at a drive-through.

One of the most paradoxical things about hospitals (especially big hospitals, which seem to be the only kind there are these days) is that they prize sleep as a central component of the body's healing process, while at the same time making it practically impossible for real live patients to get any. They are noisy, terrifying, and most importantly full of interruptions; on an average night an aide like me will wake up a patient at least twice simply in order to check his or her blood pressure. The reasoning behind why I do this is sound from a medical perspective: most of the patients on my unit are in a fragile state of health and therefore need to be monitored. But the actual consequence of this reasoning is paradoxical. We monitor the patients' health, but every time we do this we wake them up, meaning prevent them from healing as effectively as they would in a more quiet environment.

Real nursing, as far as I can tell, begins where the various manipulations that are typically help to be the profession's bread and butter - the pulse taking and medication-administering and catheter-inserting - end. In the aftermath of the disregulation forced on the patient by such interruptions the good nurse (or nursing assistant) creates something utterly different: calm. With meticulous art, he prepares the patient's room for sleep - and not just the literal room, but the other rooms floating inside it: bed, body, heart. The head-scratching and - I hate to put it this way, but so it goes - magical nature of his ability cannot be overstressed. I have seen it happen. Great nurses walk into a room and people start to relax. Relaxing, they begin to heal.

Nurses bring sleep: because of this, however, they are not typically great sleepers. Like Morpheus, they are imagined most of the time as watchers, lingerers, pausing in the corner of other people's dreams but never staying there long. Gennady Aygi, in his essay/poem "Sleep and Poetry", writes about the Russian poet Velmir Khlebnikov: "Unlike the other futurists, [he] belongs to the 'sleepers', the dreamers. But he is vigilant too, like a tempted saint." Are nurses similarly tempted by sleep? No doubt. But, the lure is bitter - for like all creators they buy their power at a significant cost. They can manipulate, but not participate.

The peripatetic nature of "runners-from-sleep" (to translate from an Aygiism that doesn't exist) links them with that other character of recent concern: the walker. Like him, they exist on an edge that may be made-up and may be real, between will and waste. Having sublimated their true fears (of surrender, extinction, regeneration), they move through the world without every being completely in it. Are they happy? No less than other people - though perhaps it is this very question that prevents them from resting, since it suggests that happiness will be found if only they keep looking.

"To speak means to be forever on the road," says Mandelstam; still, it's always interesting to ask how much sacrificers secretly enjoy their sacrifice, no matter how much they like to complain about it. Nabokov characteristically called sleep "the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals". My own relationship, for all its leer, is similarly patronizing. I don't want to sleep, because deep down I think of life as a race and sleep as time wasted, away from the fight (somewhere, someone is gaining on you). So I feel compelled to say that night nursing - that most sleepless profession - is actually perfect for me, since it lets me both have my cake (not sleeping) and eat it too (complaining that I never get to sleep). A job for prodigals, it posits the testamental division between prophets and false prophets, meaning those who can renounce their pride, and those who only pretend to. One group is sleeping, the other is not. But then the next question comes: which one?

Image: Chagall, "Poet with Birds", 1911. "The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping the sense of wonder awake in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in his long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep"

Literature as Self Mutilation

The history of literature is full of if onlys. Two of my favorites are Emily Dickinson and Robert Walser. If only they'd been recognized in their own time, two lives of loneliness and mental illness might have been averted, and the histories of American and German and World literature invigorated a hundred years earlier. Plus, we would probably have the cure for cancer and a black president and new iphones....for everybody!

Thinking of this, we moan and weep about the waste that is human life...But what if, between Kleenexes as it were, we put the problem to ourselves in a completely opposite way, and say that Dickinson's and Walser's lives occurred exactly as they had to in order to produce the works that they did; and that therefore, the hypothetical "fulfillments" that we wish for them would actually have been disasters, which would have prevented these writers from creating the works they did?

Viewing a writer's life this way - that is, as less a success and more a complicated, elaborate mistake - is itself problematic, since it takes the capacity to write out of the creator's hand and diffuses it into that strange and unreliable god Circumstance. But then isn't every writer simultaneously an autonomous creator AND a sort of conduit to his/her times? And following this, aren't the snakes that the world puts between a writer and his/her goal at least as important as the ladders, since they force him/her beyond a willful expression of intention and into the strange, dangerous, quasi-improvisational space that is creative reaction? 

In order to get a picture of this, close your eyes and imagine you're an aspiring writer (if you're already an aspiring writer, don't bother to close your eyes). As an AW, you've grown up reading or hearing or seeing works of art that you admire, and this admiration leads you to want to create works of art of your own. Naturally, your first attempts at this are imitations of those works that you admire - imitations that succeed or fail to a varying degree (both in your own eyes, and in the eyes of others). With every success, you gain confidence and ambition; with every failure, discouragement, and an appreciation for the successful works that others have pulled off. Eventually, you get to a point where you are either succeeding more than you're failing, or failing more than you're succeeding. Both of these possibilities have their own satisfactions and problems - but it is only in the latter's case that you are gradually pushed towards a difficult question. The question is, very simply, Are you ever going to stop failing and succeed at this? A Yes to this question means back to the drawing board for more work; but what does a No mean? Does it mean Stop writing? Or does it mean, perhaps more strangely, Stop writing these things that you've been trying to write, that you love, and that have for so long been associated in your mind and heart with any future you might have as a writer?

Putting it this way, I want to suggest that the urge to write, to create, is less an aspiration (with its airy connotations of rising) and more a drag, a sinking towards oneself, so that certain writers' "careers" can resemble the movement of spilled water towards the edge of a table. Along these lines, inherited conceptions of what successful writing would look like can act like cards or hands placed in the path of the water, causing a build-up of mass that may at first seem like a failure to move but is in fact nothing more than the accumulation of potential movement that will express itself, and in gushes, the minute said conception disappears. 

In other words, by failing to write like Faulkner, Welty learns to write like Welty. By failing to write like Browning, Pound learns to write like Pound. The writer shoots for something that he loves and falls short, and again and again, until eventually he falls so short that he relinquishes his goal - at which point his idol cracks and he sees what he's been missing this whole time, which is not just his own possibilities, but the real object of study, life. 

Seen this way, failure is a key mechanism of an artist's development - maybe the key mechanism. So we might profitably bogue a page from David Foster Wallace's essay Authority and American Usage, in which he suggests that SNOOTlets (DFW's neologism for budding grammar nazis) develop their hypertrophic linguistic abilities due to an inability to mimic other kids: 

"Little kids in school are learning about Group-inclusion and -exclusion and about the respective rewards and penalties of same and about the use of dialect and syntax and slang as signals of affinity and inclusion. They're learning about Discourse Communities. Little kids learn this stuff not in Language Arts or Social Studies but on the playground and the bus and at lunch. When his peers are ostracizing the SNOOTlet or giving him monstrous quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him, there's serious learning going on. Everybody here is learning except the little SNOOT - in fact, what the SNOOTlet is being punished for is precisely his failure to learn... He has only one dialect. He cannot alter his vocabulary, usage, or grammar, cannot use slang or vulgarity; and it's these abilities that are really required for 'peer rapport'..." (Consider the Lobster, p. 103)

Culture here reminds me of biology: adaptations evolve due to a weakness in the organism with respect to the pressures of its surrounding environment. Ergo, if you adapt perfectly, there's no need for the claw or tail or eyespots to be called from the depths of their cells.

So far so good... But what about that second group we mentioned above, the Successes, who set out to imitate, and do? To those of us getting spat on, their lot seems pretty sweet. But I wonder if there isn't more to it, at least in some cases. To adapt is one thing, but to be born into a world that seems to have adapted itself to you, before you even got there? 

The self-mutilation that this fit might demand returns us to that old saw, the Prodigal Son. His story was a favorite of Walser, who also achieved a fair amount of success as a young man. His first essay-stories and novels floated into the world to critical acclaim and then disappeared, as he eventually did, to a Swiss sanitarium. The rest of his career can be seen as a series of increasingly-drastic obstructions, both literal (the sanitarium, an aggressive abhorrence of self-promotion) and literary. Of these latter, the most famous is Walser's habit - adopted around the time he entered the sanitarium where he would spend the last two decades of his life - of writing his stories out in stenographers' shorthand on whatever scraps of paper came his way. These included beer coasters, bills, envelopes, postcards. Sometimes the story filled the frame, sometimes it didn't. 

Fans of the Microscripts (as these collected stories are called in English) usually praise the product, while lamenting the (diagnosed) schizophrenia that caused Walser's life to be so strangely, severely mangled. Rightly so... But behind these lamentations is the question of whether the Microscripts could exist without the weird panoply of obstructions that their author adopted, or felt the need to adopt, in order to call them into existence. The question, difficult and unsolvable, turns around our conception of happiness. What is it? And what about those strange individuals who seem to run, not to it, but away from it - as if in terror of the nightmare of perfect adaptation? 

The story of the prodigal son contains a great mystery, which is why someone with a happy life would decide one day and seemingly out of the blue, to exchange that life for wandering and unhappiness. Why would anyone do that, we wonder? And yet, we exchange our happiness for unhappiness everyday and in a hundred different ways. Walser and Dickinson write in ways that they "shouldn't", live in ways whose invisible logic we describe as tragic and impossible - as if it weren't logic at all but a sort of super-human, sub-human force, like gravity.