Book Beings

BIG name for a book: The Return. Victoria Hislop’s second novel, following her popular debut, The Island.

Books titled The Return share with The Iliad, Divine Comedy, and War and Peace a BIG thematic title that promises a BIG delivery. Such works are must-reads for any serious Book Being.

Victoria Hislop was thinking BIG. Give her credit for that, but you also have to wonder what she was thinking…

I do try to avoid clumsy books, but I couldn’t help myself. The Return takes place mainly in Granada during that notorious prelude to World War II, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Very hard for me to pass by a book that addresses that pivotal conflict without picking it up and bringing it home with me.

The tragic story of the Ramirez family unfolds during those terrible years. There are some believable stretches (the descriptions of thousands of exhausted, starving refugees fleeing from city to city from Franco’s Nationalist forces and allied German bomber planes are particularly effective), but the characters seem more like caricatures, are never fully convincing, and are prone to speaking in cliches.

I should care about them, I want to, but I remain lukewarm, seeing too much Victoria Hislop in them and not enough Mercedes or Concha or Antonio or Pablo.

The story of the Ramirez family is sandwiched between the current day meetings between  an old Spaniard, Miguel, a café owner who somehow has come to master English like an Oxford don, and a married, youngish, middle-aged Englishwoman, Sonia, who came to Granada with Maggie (her single-but-on-the-prowl-for-a-Spanish-husband girlfriend), presumably to get away from the overbearing English husband for a few days.

It happens that Sonia’s mother was a Spaniard who died some years ago in England. Sonia’s almost complete lack of knowledge about her mother and her mother’s past and family are nearly as disturbing as her kindly English father’s utter cluelessness about his late wife’s past and family history. (You would think the woman had wandered into their lives for a couple of weeks solely to dust and change the bedding.)

The revelations that gradually emerge during Miguel’s account of the Ramirez family during  the war and the role his little café plays in bridging the gap between past and present are predictably implausible.

Still, the novel might have survived these flaws and given the reader something to chew on but for Hislop’s inability to refrain from interjecting her opinions and biases at nearly every turn. So that during the bullfight de rigueur scene, we get this: “The cruelty of the crowd was palpable. They did not want the bull to die too soon…” Is this Miguel’s opinion? Not likely, but it is included as part of his account.

In Hislop’s world, Bullfighting = Cruelty = Nationalists, whereas Flamenco = Truth = Republicans. If she was trying to make the point that the insular-minded Nationalists represented the old Spain and its progress-hindering old traditions, flipping flamenco over to the progressive, outward-looking Republicans (which included among their ranks Soviet-trained Communists, Socialists, and Anarchists) makes little if any sense.

Clearly, dance is dear to Hislop. She sprinkles in a few intense salsa (salsa? really?) and flamenco sessions for the gals from Britain to help them let loose and break a sweat in hot, romantic Granada. But this is about more than just having a good time, as Hislop offers an ongoing meditation on the liberating effects of dance, and in particular, of flamenco, which  speaks to the deepest part of us.

Which is? The deepest part, I mean… What exactly is the deepest part of us?

In Hislop’s world, flamenco is completely divorced from God and religion, despite the Spanish gypsy’s inescapable immersion in the imagery and spirituality of the crucified Christ and la Dolorosa, the suffering Madonna, the Virgin Mary. So we are to believe that flamenco is shunned by traditionalist Spaniards but embraced by atheistic Marxists?

Interesting take.

Examples of Author Interference abound in this novel. One more. When a Republican prisoner is at death’s doorstep, Miguel/Hislop offers this insight, “The priest that sometimes exploited such men for a last minute conversion did not bother to visit.”

What clever phrasing. If the priest visits, he is exploiting. If he doesn’t bother to visit, he is being inhumane. A “heads” I win, “tails” you lose scenario for the author.

This bias is extended to the entire Catholic Church, which, it would appear, exists only to punish innocent people and ensure they never find happiness. Consider that even the Spanish refugee children who are spirited away to England and are routinely welcomed by the curious but gentle English populace, are shunned by those nasty, embittered English Catholic nuns who provide these little rogues shelter and sustenance.

Clumsiness in writing can sometimes be overlooked and forgiven. Bias and the suppression of truth cannot. Being the grandson of two Spanish Republican grandfathers, one murdered, one exiled, gives me a bit different perspective on the matter.

Yes, it is widely known the Catholic Church officially sided with Franco’s Nationalists, and it is widely known that some priests were quite active in the war against the Second Republic and the men and women who fought to defend it.

But Hislop sees the conflict as I did when I was a teen: all the Nationalists and their supporters were evil, and all the Republicans and their supporters were good.

How arrogant and self-righteous I was! Maintaining such a position, of course, placed me beyond reproach, at least in my own little mind. I could blame it on youth and ignorance. Or I could confess to having had an over-inflated sense of Self that left me no room for objectivity.

I once heard an American military expert on the radio talking about the good guys (i.e., us) and the bad guys (i.e., them), in reference to Operation Shock and Awe, and I recognized my own arrogance and felt myself cringe.

The reality, of course, is that good people with noble intentions don’t always agree and may even wage war against each other. By the same token, bad people with the worst of intentions can also disagree and kill each other. And too often the vast majority of disinterested and innocent people get caught in the middle and end up being pushed to one side or the other without fully understanding what is at stake other than personal survival.

To her credit, Hislop does not deny that atrocities were committed by both sides, but her attacks against the Nationalists and the Church are presented as undeniable fact whereas the burning of churches, the raping and murdering of nuns, and the executions of priests by Republicans, some of which was already happening before Francisco Franco’s uprising, are only mentioned in passing and have the odor of rumor rather than fact.

In her concluding note Hislop cites the decision by the Spanish Government in January 2009 to grant the right to apply for Spanish citizenship to the children and grandchildren of those who went into exile after the fall of the Second Republic. This marks the closure of what had been known for decades as the pacto de olvido, which was an unofficial national silence about what had happened during the 3-year civil war.

My two grandfathers are buried in Spain. When I go to Spain I visit the grave of the one who returned from exile in the United States during the amnesty of the early sixties. The one who was murdered was left in a mass, unmarked grave somewhere.

What right have I to point the finger or to condemn? What right has Victoria Hislop?

If the Catholic Church has too often failed its people and its God, it has also, for 2000 years and counting, preserved and proclaimed the teachings of Christ during the world’s darkest hours.

How else would you or I know, for instance, that Jesus invited those who are without sin to cast the first stone?

I’ve never been a big fan of the writing style of Joyce Carol Oates. At times her writing  seems to me awkward, a bit uneven and unfinished. But her widely acclaimed 2004 novel, The Falls, has a strange, muscular power that drew me in and caused me to lose myself in the very mist rising from those rampaging waters.

Niagara Falls has been known over the years to have a remarkable power to entrance, beguile, mesmerize… Suicidal persons often look for grand landmarks to mark their  passage. You have to be careful in such a place, especially if you are one of Oates’s characters.

Oates has made this extraordinary natural phenomenon personal to a disturbing degree. Her words create a timeless being of immense seductive power that waits for you and me with resolute patience, like Death itself.

The personalization of The Falls is one reason I like Oates’s novel, despite its flaws. The other two are the erratic and insulated Ariah Erskine, and the maddening story of Love Canal.

The novel begins with two virgin newlyweds groping their way toward marital consummation in a Niagara Falls hotel, the soon-would-have-been-too-old-to-be-married daughter of a Presbyterian minister and the primed-to-receive-his-own-parish-church young Presbyterian minister.

Intimacy between the young couple turns embarrassingly grotesque. Before the following morning has fully revealed itself, the groom has hurled himself to his death into the famous and unforgiving gorge.

In order to assert some degree of control over her circumstances, the shaken Ariah determines she is damned, identifies herself as a damned creature, and arranges to live her life with no expectations other than disaster.

Oates beautifully crafts those days of shock and disorientation, Ariah’s stubborn refusal to be overcome by her circumstances, and the ripple effects of the weird tragedy as family and community assess the groom’s unthinkable act. The Widow Bride of the Falls takes on a mythic quality as the years pass, an altogether distinct being from the real widow bride.

Ariah’s damnation perspective colors the rest of her life, and is only partly softened during a several-year period of relative happiness that corresponds to her second marriage. Dirk Burnaby, a local attorney and son of a wealthy family, inexplicably falls in love with the skinny near-spinster at first sight as she stands daily watch at the rail above the gorge, waiting for her groom’s bloated corpse to appear.

Burnaby’s love does not free Ariah from her persecution complex, however, as she remains the perpetually pursued fugitive. As a result, she forever dons the armor of cynicism and sarcasm, and refuses steadfastly to be controlled or broken by persons or circumstances.

She expects damnation to revisit her at any moment. It does, of course, the moment Burnaby decides to obey his conscience and represent working class families in their initial suit against an alliance of the powerful and wealthy – the chemical companies, developers, contractors, politicians, judges, medical establishment, and board of education of the city of Niagara Falls.

The brazen negligence and disregard for the life of the poor and working class people demonstrated by those responsible for the toxic waste site known as Love Canal is rendered with cutting precision by Oates.

As much as I found myself captivated by Burnaby’s heroically naïve and doomed attempt to Beat the Power on behalf of the disenfranchised, and by the story of Love Canal itself, this important element, because it is developed to too great an extent, gives the novel a fractured quality.

Love Canal and Burnaby’s quest take on a life of their own. Yes, it is because of what happens to Burnaby as a result of his involvement in Love Canal that we see Ariah’s fatalism come to fruition and her life and that of her children forever altered. The Burnaby Quest could have, and maybe should have, formed the basis for a separate novel, however. But because it remains such a prominent element in The Falls, which is really Ariah’s Story, Ariah is gradually reduced to secondary status.

Oates has too many stories to tell to fit into this one novel. Nonetheless, the content of the novel makes it a compelling read, its loose structure notwithstanding.

Are character’s italicized thoughts sprinkled throughout the novel necessary? I could have done without most of these phrases that have little meaning or fail to create mood. They get in the way, adding nothing to the narrative or to our understanding. Is there a necessary musical quality or cadence I am missing maybe?

A few of the sections are narrated in the first person by someone who at first sounds like one of Ariah’s children, Chandler, Royall, or Juliet. But you quickly realize the speaker has referred to the three siblings by name. So is this speaker a completely unaccounted-for fourth sibling? An unborn child? A ghost? I am perplexed….

Some characters seemed destined to play larger roles in the outcome of the story, but later simply exited like phantoms. I am thinking in particular of “the woman in black,” who reappears briefly years later to perform a curious act and then vanishes forever. To a lesser degree, Burnaby’s mother also seemed headed toward some significant moment, but then slipped silently off into the sunset.  The Holocaust survivor and widower, Joseph Pankowski, Ariah’s neighbor, also seemed destined to play a bigger role, but he too is dismissed without event.

A lot goes on in this novel, too much. Ariah’s story becomes lost in the second half of the novel. Very late in the story Oates introduces Bud Stonecrop, a strange, laconic, and physically powerful young man with a shaved head, who she invests with great sexual power. Conveniently, he ends up being the key to resolving the family’s uncertainties about their husband and father’s demise, and bringing closure and redemption to Ariah and her small brood. Interesting character, but he does seem a bit of an afterthought.

The Falls does have some wonderful moments, but Oates seemed to lose interest in Ariah as she went along. Ariah’s existential predicament, which should have been the foundation upon which to build the novel, is reduced to a series of superficial defense mechanisms and sarcastic remarks.

If Ariah will not show who she really is, and who she becomes in the end, shouldn’t Oates show the reader? A neat little resolution (forged by a new and lesser character) is attached to Ariah in the end, like a life-time achievement award, a plastic silver badge to wear on her second-hand blouse.

Fyodor Dostoevsky wanted to write a story about a perfect man and show how that perfection jarred with the world. He created Prince Myshkin, a somewhat Christ-like figure, and placed him with less perfect persons in a complicated scenario populated by Russian aristocrats.

You couldn’t help but love the gentle and humble prince, or hate him. Were you a truer person in his presence, or were you threatened by his purity? He graciously accepted being referred to as an idiot, happily acknowledging his lack of knowledge regarding most subjects of worldly concern.

But Myshkin could see into the hearts of men and women. He was no idiot. But the world, because it could not understand such a man, took pleasure in calling him The Idiot.

Perhaps The Innocent would be a more appropriate way to refer to Prince Myshkin. But is someone who is capable of seeing into the human heart an innocent? Is someone with such knowledge, which is greater than all the knowledge of the world, innocent?

Jesus Christ was innocent of any crime, or sin, as he hung crucified at Golgotha. Jesus could see into the hearts of men and women, know their light and their darkness. He knew everything that was in the human heart, yet was there ever anyone more innocent?

Having such knowledge is not like having an illegal firearm in your night table drawer or marijuana plants in your basement. Knowing evil does not make one evil. Is a physician who diagnoses a cancer in his patient doomed to develop cancer?

Like Jesus, Prince Myshkin enters into a world of sin, recognizes sin, but does not himself succumb to sin.

It takes a supremely special person, a saint or a Man-God, to remain innocent in this, our world.

As far as the rest of us… We were innocent once, before our knowledge of good and evil, before that first moment in our tottering little lives when we consciously chose to put our needs and pleasures before those of others, regardless of the collateral damage our choices may have caused.

To have knowledge of sin and to succumb to it regularly is uniquely human. This is not to say most people do not want to be good. We are good, most of us, but we are weak and inclined to make poor choices.

The state of the world shows us as much. As do literature and history. As does the Bible, which in addition to recording the Inspired Word of God, doubles as a chronicle of human folly.

No one ever called a sheep an idiot, to my knowledge, but maybe the Divine Shepherd was acknowledging a special brand of obtuseness in his metaphor for his followers, those who hear his voice. Sheep, though docile, are not noted for their acumen, after all. And they tend to stray.

If someone were to refer to Christians as The Flock of Idiots, should we be offended? For having heard His Voice, what excuse have we for our sins? Does our deeply embedded human weakness explain it? Does it entitle us?

This observation may engender smiles from those who don’t like Christians on principle, but no one ever said Christians were not sinners. It could be argued we are the greatest of all sinners.

The way I look at it, perhaps The Innocent better represents Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin, whereas The Idiot is more suggestive of Leonard Marnham, the protagonist of Ian McEwan’s 1990 novel, The Innocent, one more like us (sheep or non-sheep, doesn’t matter), than the saintly Russian.

Not saying Dostoyevsky erred in his choice of title. Far be it from me… No, The Idiot is the perfect title because it makes clear The World’s interpretation of innocence. And similarly, I do not question McEwan’s choice of The Innocent, so finely laced with irony.

It happens that Marnham has worn his innocence for longer than most, like a baptismal gown that has shrunk and disintegrated with each passing day, until, at 25, there is no more gown and he is left naked. He is no different from the rest of us. It is just that some are late bloomers.

Marnham is a radio technician who has left his home in England, where he lived with his parents, to work for the Americans in West Berlin in 1955, the beginning of the Cold War.

To his surprise, he is assigned a small role in a joint US-British covert operation (setting up and repairing tape recorders), which involves the building of a secret tunnel from the American sector to the Soviet sector. The goal of the operation is to tap phone lines and intercept communications of the Soviet High Command.

For 25 years Marnham has led a comfortable, sheltered life.  He lacks knowledge, not only of the world, but of people. Everything is new and surprising. His first apartment, his role in the covert operation, post-war Berlin, the  Americans, the Germans, women, sex.

Unlike Prince Myshkin, he is unable to see into the hearts of men and women. He cannot see into his own heart, nor probe his insulated self. His is a lethargic, immature spirit, more attentive to proper protocol and social etiquette than to human emotion. He lacks decisiveness and conviction. He is like a pampered child, completely self-centered.

Marnham may think he is in love with Maria, the German woman he met in a night club. But his inability to see into her heart, and to understand her fears, leads him in one moment to treat her in a way that shakes her to the core. He sluggishly recognizes his mistake, and wins her back after some time, but she no longer sees the safe young innocent she was first attracted to.

When Maria’s former husband, a drunken German veteran, enters their shared life, Marnham is confronted with a series of disastrous circumstances that change his life forever.

Like most of us, Marnham the Innocent is ill-equipped to act unhesitatingly in a crisis. He is trapped in a miasma of fear, guilt and self-preservation. Maria, the survivor, infinitely more experienced, draws him out and sets him (and herself) in motion on a dark path, having made the decision for them both.

We can understand why Marnham ends up doing what he does, maybe. Each act can, perhaps, be justified, however unthinkable. We can place ourselves in Marnham’s shoes, take each step with him, and, given the sinister peculiarities and difficulties of the situation, think, yes, maybe I too would do the same. Maybe.

But all extenuating circumstances and justifications aside, would it be right?

Perhaps, ultimately, The Innocent is the one who, immune to self interest, trusts that doing what is right is the path to salvation, even as The Idiot breathlessly seeks the elusive escape hatch that leads to perdition.

Lennon and McCartney had an almost effortless ability to create something new and interesting from disparate themes, images and sounds. Their infectious energy and awesome brilliance still make me laugh.

And despite Maxwell’s Silver Hammer ineluctably falling down on all our heads one day, the Lads shined a light of wonder that made us like the world and each other and the idea that all you need is love, despite all the incomprehensibilities that separate us.

Unfortunately, our experience of life is colored too much by the unoriginal and mundane. Though Popular Culture embraced the Beatles (and their prowess for generating money for the many), more often than not PC’s predictable, formulaic stories hashed out in books, music, art, film, and TV have given us a New Mediocrity in which to stew.

Maybe that’s the place most of us like to be and the language we speak best. Ratings, Best Seller Lists, Top 40, Box Office seem to suggest as much.

Sure, if we seek diligently we can extract a good from anything, ascribe a good to anyone. If, if, if we try. And we should.

But heck, do we need to be reassured all the time, like 5-year-olds marching off to first day of kindergarten? Do we need to consistently be granted smug expectations? Is it so bad to be challenged and provoked by fresh insights, moral dilemmas, unforeseen circumstances, unthinkable choices and outcomes? Would it be the end of us to see through someone else’s eyes on occasion?

I’m talking about pushing against walls. Or climbing them. Because LIFE IS BIG!

Jim Morrison sang, Break on through to the other side. My other side might be different from Jim’s, and yours from mine. But are we destined or meant to only know what we already know?

Nah, don’t think so. But that’s a question each one has to ask himself…

So I begin to think in Walrus terms. Not John Lennon. Not J.D. Salinger. But the Collective Walrus (or Walrus Collective). A mass of Walri? Being as One, and massed against the rocks.

And I see Polar Bear, singular and hungry as he lumbers onto the scene. And I’m thinking, “Ah, man, the baby walri…”

But Collective Walrus is thinking Polar Bear = Threat, and that mountain of shifting, wobbling gray matter whirls to face it. In moments all the young disappear behind a blubber wall sprouting imperial tusks.

PB hesitates, discerning no easy target, then hurls himself upon CW (or WC), targeting a small female that, shockingly, is larger than he.

It is then you sense the tragedy that is about to unfold. Off balance and unable to pierce the thick skin, PB is forced to withdraw for the moment. Nervous random tusks have inflicted first wounds.

PB studies the situation. It is most problematic. He appears small now against the immense excited males with their coarse tusks and immovable bulks. They are easily twice his size, and massed together they are daunting. He paces about and targets a new victim. Again he falls upon a female, but soon withdraws, collecting fresh wounds.

Only desperate, starving polar bears will challenge the Walrus Collective, the narrator grimly offers. Sobered by recognition and understanding, my sympathies shift.

Time and again PB falls upon one of the smaller walruses, but each time with less conviction. Finally, exhausted and severely wounded, PB circles a patch of ice like a tired dog selecting a place to rest, and gingerly curls himself into Death.

Just feet beyond the dying animal, the Walrus Collective have already forgotten their adversary and resumed their patient routines, la-de-dah.

J.D. Salinger died recently at 91. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge as a young soldier and suffered a nervous breakdown in 1945. He wrote The Catcher in the Rye and a number of stories about members of the Glass family, those brilliant, preoccupied folks, and then dropped out of the world.

Of course what Salinger endured and witnessed in War changed him, his mind, his dreams and visions, his approach to relationship, his view of others and God. It affected his artistic choices, what he chose to write and how he wrote it.

Hapworth 16, 1924 was Salinger’s last published story. It appeared in The New Yorker magazine in 1965. He went to live in a secluded rural area of New Hampshire, provoking various characterizations from Society, among them coward, recluse, and grump.

Now there’s talk (based on letters to a friend) that he wrote regularly during his extended sabbatical, beginning at 6:00 each morning. (Hooray!)

You could say we all, in good standing with Society or not, are destined to face the Collective Walrus one way or another.

Trying to get what we need to keep going vocationally, artistically, psychically, biologically, financially is a foregone conclusion, no? Getting wounded in the process, falling down, getting up, falling down, becoming invisible, forgotten, all foregone, yes?

(Your point being?)

There is the Rising, see, for those who believe, see. And for those who don’t believe too, see, because unbelief is another form of belief, yes?

Can’t wait to see where Salinger has yet to take us.

Who the hell do you think you are?

Can’t place it, the moment or location, but hasn’t just about everyone been asked this question in this precise way some time in his life? Maybe it was in Spanish, in my case. Or maybe it was a rhetorical question, directed by a frustrated elder or superior at not just me but those around me as well, the Captive Collective (e.g., classroom, military barracks, locker room, office, church…).

Who do you think you are? sans “the hell” can appear less accusatory, though I’m betting most times it’s not. How often, for example, have you heard a forthright person earnestly ask another, Who do you think you are?

Completely stripped of challenge, hostility, resentment, accusation? Not often, I wouldn’t think.

So, let this then, possibly, be the first time for you. I ask you (warmly and earnestly, if rhetorically, but with only good intentions), Who do you think you are?

There are teeming hordes itching to answer it for you. You are a heathen to some, an infidel to others. A saint, a pig, a rodent, a luminary. You may very well be all things to all people.

Like Jesus, for instance. What must have gone through his mind as the apostles apprised him of the many identities the speculating populace had ascribed to him.

Jesus asked Peter, Who do you say I am?

Couldn’t control what others thought. But Jesus thought it important for Peter to know for himself who he thought Jesus was.

Important because for some, the answer to that question is the answer to the first question. If you believe Jesus is the Son of God (i.e., one with God the Father and thus God Himself), then you know who you are.

What you believe is who you are, whether you are Christian or not. And if the words you speak are what you believe – if they are an integral part of you, not to be separated from your very flesh – then your word is who you are.

The problem with imposing on someone else a who-you-are-ness, a you-are-a-heathen, you-are-an-infidel, a saint, a pig, a rodent, a luminary, is that you are showing the world a who-you-are in so cross-eyed, unfocussed, and self-defeating a manner that you become lost to yourself.

This was Saul’s (i.e., Paul’s) problem on his way to Damascus to persecute Christians. He got so cross-eyed and unfocused that he went blind, for a time, and became lost. But being lost is not the worst condition, if later found.

If you are what you believe and what you say, and if you say another is this or that, and your word is who you are, then who you are could be a shrill cry, or an angry shout, or maybe even an ass kiss, depending on where you are coming from.

Or at least that is who you are until you take a much closer look at yourself (myself) and find the center that holds everything together and from which all good springs.

Otherwise we are falling men. Still. Paradise Lost and counting…

Speaking of which…

Don DeLillo’s post-9-11 novel, Falling Man, touches the sky and drills down into our well of being and who-we-are-ness with ancient questions about life and death, and whether any of this means anything and whether God is.

This Inescapable Planet where things get hairy, a Vale of Tears to some, the ultimate Cosmic Cruelty to others. Sometimes the world roars too loud and is too big and jagged and rough and who we are is bled down to feeble word-breaths by disoriented, ash-covered survivors: I am standing here. I am standing here. I am standing here.

This Inescapable Irony of people praying God help us kill them and God don’t let them kill us.

Different people, same God. In fact, one God.

DeLillo unfurls the performing artist known as Falling Man:

A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduct. He’d appeared several times in the last week, unannounced, in various parts of the city, suspended from one or another structure, always upside down, wearing a suit, a tie and dress shoes. He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump.

As earnestly as you or I may ask such a reckless, outrageous, crazed, attention-starved man (or is he an avatar? an angel?), Who do you think you are?

Should we?  What happened to Who do we think we are?

We judge, we judge, inescapably…  (Why not accept he is what he believes and is the word he speaks in Silence?)

If I am hearing him right, the Falling Man, Silence is the language we all should master on the off-chance of genuinely hearing one another unencumbered by shrill cries, angry shouts, and maybe even ass kisses, should that be the case.

You’ll surely think of other examples, but for me two that stand out as being highly representative of “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” are the 1996 Yankees (who won the World Series without a super star on the No-I-in-Team team) and Pink Floyd’s trenchant observation of the precariousness of the human condition in The Dark Side of the Moon.

I’ll add Richard Powers’s National Book Award winning novel, The Echo Maker, to the list with its disparately unifying elements of sandhill cranes, disoriented humans, and the mysterious note left on the hospital bed of a 27 year-old man, Mark Schluter, who nearly died in a car accident during a winter’s night on a lonely country road in Nebraska.

Each of the novel’s five parts takes its title from the five lines of the anonymous note left on Mark’s bed. And each part begins with a meditation on the nature and migratory habits of sandhill cranes (FYI, one of the Anishinaabe peoples of North America were called Cranes, or Ajijak, meaning Echo-Makers).

Mark’s sister, Karin, his only surviving relative, leaves her self-affirming job and returns to their home town to take care of Mark until he can take care of himself. When Mark begins to speak words again, Karin’s heart skips a beat, but she mistakes them for attempts at communication. Mark is simply echoing what he hears others say, the doctor tells her.

In time Mark recovers most of his faculties and memory (he doesn’t remember the twelve hours before the accident or the accident itself). Unfortunately, he believes his sister is an imposter, commissioned by some sinister covert agency to torment him. To Karin’s growing dismay, he continually punishes her with despairing questions about the whereabouts of his real sister.

When Karin tries to apply reason to their exchanges, Mark dismisses her attempt as deception. He won’t be duped, he assures her, and creates his own reasons for why things are as they are.

Like Karin, Blackie, his dog, is also an imposter. When Mark returns to his recently acquired  modular home, he is convinced it, along with the rest of neighborhood, is a fake, and marvels at the depth of effort and expense committed to fooling him. Mark is suffering from a rare cognitive disease called Capgras.

Desperate for help, his sister emails the famous cognitive neurologist, Gerald Weber. Surprising himself and his wife, Weber flies from New York to Kearney, Nebraska to meet Karin and Mark. Weber fails to do anything but disappoint Karin and leaves after a couple of days of note-taking, incapable of foreseeing the consequences of his brief visit.

As the new, temperamental, child-like Mark accommodates himself to his fake dog and fake home, and abides the ever-present Karin-wannabe, Karin begins to mold herself to her new reality: “There was no back to get then to. For each new day, her own integrating memory increasingly proved that my brother was always like that.”

How fragile the brain, mutable the mind. According to Weber, Brains of any flavor produced reasonable explanations for unusual perceptions.

Maybe we’re all a bit disoriented.

Weber left Kearney only moderately troubled by the fact he was unable to help the Schluters. But increasingly perturbed by the realization that maybe he was a phony? He could not deny his motivation for going to Kearney was total self interest. He was curious, couldn’t pass up the opportunity to add to his portfolio of anecdotal narratives.

Not coincidentally, criticisms of his latest book sting him like a scorpion. His peers begin to view him as a lightweight who shuns scientific method, preferring to be the novelty-hungry public’s fabulist.

Weber is forced to peer into himself. Does he share Roger Waters’s (of Pink Floyd) concern, There’s someone in my head but it’s not me?

How well do we know ourselves? When is the last time you or I took a long hard look at ourselves? In this shrinking world of text messaging, tweets, and facebook, has examination of one’s conscience become obsolete? The domain of medieval mentalities?

Know thyself… easier said than done, no?

Oh, I suppose we think we know ourselves. We post a head shot of ourselves on Facebook, tell the world who we are in 150 words, invite others to befriend us and do the same…

Given the infinity of choices this world offers us, we hone our choosing skills and get good at picking this over that. We know almost instantly who or what we like and who or what we don’t. We have become a decisive, impatient race. Time waits for no one.

We know things, the difference between A and B, and which we like better. We like the feel of surface. We like to surf. We face-book and tweet to our heart’s content. But do we know ourselves well enough to predict with total certainty how we will react to any given situation?

Because we don’t know ourselves that well (we don’t, I think), and we don’t always know why we choose A or B or do or fail to do this or that, what’s the point of trying to figure someone else out, much less judge him?

For

we are more than we appear to be

we are more than we appear to be

we are more than we appear to be.

In the title story of her short story collection, Everything that Rises Must Converge, Flannery O’Connor introduces us to Julian, a gloomy young man burdened by a martyr complex, and “Julian’s mother,” who embodies everything he detests.

Julian, who is living with his mother in a run-down neighborhood where the houses are “bulbous liver-colored monstrosities,” is one year removed from acquiring a college degree at a third rate college. His bleak job prospects, financial dependence on his mother, her Old South racism, and his conflicted feelings about his lineage (he remembers seeing the old decayed family mansion when he was a child, before it was sold: “he never spoke of it without contempt or thought of it without longing”) pit him mercilessly against his mother.

On their way to board a bus that would take them to her “reducing class” (she needs to lose 20 pounds to lower her blood pressure), she remarks, “They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence.” She is wearing a recently purchased atrocious green and blue flap hat that makes her look “less comical than jaunty and pathetic.”

Julian is obsessed with teaching his mother a lesson. The confined space of the bus offers an opportunity. When a well dressed black man boards, Julian leaves his mother’s side and crosses the aisle to sit next to him, relishing the color rising in his mother’s face.

Later, a giant black woman wearing a hat, green dress and red shoes boards with a four-year old boy. Because there are no other places to sit, the little boy climbs onto the seat beside Julian’s mother and the bulging black woman (a “bristling presence”) seats herself next to Julian, who notes and enjoys the irony of the two mothers swapping sons.

But there is more pleasure to be had: “The vision of the two hats, identical, broke upon him with the radiance of a brilliant sunrise.” He grinned hard as he stared at his mother, thinking, “Your punishment exactly fits your pettiness. This should teach you a permanent lesson.”

Amazingly, after the initial blow, his mother recovers and begins to appreciate the humor of the situation, snatching her son’s triumph from him before he can fully possess it. If the story were to end here, we might point to lessons learned for both mother and son.

In the new world of racial integration and decayed plantation mansions, the wearing of an identical hat (however hideous) by a black woman and a white woman signifies a converging. This equality is further emphasized by the trading of sons by seating arrangement. Julian’s mother, far from devastated by the irony, is instead amused by it, and possibly mildly awakened to new possibilities.

Julian, who would gladly have opted for his mother’s utter humiliation, has his joy stolen from him by her recovery. Will this small defeat serve the young man over the long term? Will he come to understand that to desire another’s humiliation is a failure of character that can lead to further gloom if the lesson goes unheeded?

As readers, we can walk away at this point, spectators on our way to the next spectacle. We can murmur to ourselves, of course the unexamined life is not worth living.

But Flannery O’Connor won’t let us walk away unwounded.

The final twist that hurls Julian into “the world of guilt and sorrow” elevates this otherwise near comical story to tragedy. It whispers to us, “We are dangerous to each other! In our failure to recognize and honor one another’s human dignity we are enemies to one another.”

Earlier, before boarding the bus, they had argued. Julian pointing to his head, saying, “True culture is in the mind, the mind.” And Julian’s mother replying, “It’s in the heart, and in how you do things, and how you do things is because of who you are.”

Granted, the mother’s idea of who she was – the privileged descendent of state governors and plantation lords – distorted her perception of the reality of a changing world. But she also understood herself to be her son’s mother, blood-compelled to love him and support him with all her strength and life, and want only what was good for him.

Her son saw it all differently. Perhaps the Slave-Owner’s-Great-Grand-Daughter idea obscured the blood reality of Mother. In Julian’s world, culture and relationship consisted of abstraction, not blood.

Later, watching her, “He felt completely detached from her. At that moment he could with pleasure have slapped her…”

It would be one thing to think such an act – a son slapping his mother – and quite another to do it. He did neither. Instead, when he could have lifted his mother from her unexpected humiliation at the hands of the “bristling presence,” he chose instead to drive the “lesson” home, buffeting his mother with triumphant recriminations and insults.

Julian’s mother, prisoner to her own idea of who she was, had tried to give the little black boy, Carver, a shiny penny as both pairs of mothers and sons left the bus. And when Julian failed in his attempt to stop her, he then tried to destroy who she was. He succeeded, to his own detriment.

A certain arrangement of words may sound right enough to you that you write them down without fully comprehending what they mean grouped together or why they sound right.

Where did they come from? Is this the spark of inspiration?

More often than not such word groups are conceived and quickly trampled by more desperate ones pushing forward, ensuring the demise of all. (when someone cries Fire in a crowded theater…)

Sometimes a spontaneous burst flips a word group from the tongue too quickly for it to be assailed, and it emerges autonomous. But it means nothing, or very little. This kind of word group may be repeated for the sake of repetition (which may be, for some, a good in itself, like the repetition of tides, seasons, prayer chants) or to annoy others.

On occasion the words stick.

25 or 6 to 4 may seem gibberish to some, but they stuck with Robert Lamm of the rock band, Chicago. Huge hit. Clean opening lyrics, Waiting for the break of day- Searching for something to say.

Granted, the 70’s were the coming out party for widespread recreational drug use, but 25 or 6 to 4 was simply the answer to the pre-dawn question, What time is it? and not a mystical/psychedelic code.

Some word groups are worth nurturing once they’ve been sounded out either for self illumination, connecting with others, giving someone the business, or profit making.

I saw, but did not read, an article recently about “finding your inner artist.” A photograph of an older woman flipping paint on a canvas a la Pollock drove the point home, apparently.

I don’t know…

I suppose we’re all searching for something to say. Unless we tend toward a bovine personality.

People are always searching for something to say. It could be for a lower form of expression, as in finding a new way to disparage a rival, a more creative way to exploit a customer, a more convincing way to tell a lie.

Searching for something to say can lead to higher forms of expression. A new way to express how much you love or respect someone, or a more creative way to communicate what is true.

So what if Robert Lamm’s 25 or 6 to 4 word group isn’t the most profound expression. Not everyone can be Shakespeare. But it was the seed for a hit song that made some people feel a  part of something bigger when they heard it because it connected with them on a very basic, human level.

You didn’t have to be a musician/songwriter sitting in a rehearsal studio at 3:35 or 3:34 AM to get it. Sometimes we get tired and we get stuck, incapable of doing or expressing or contributing  - incapable of doing anything but being.

And sometimes we need someone else to say for us what we have been searching to say in order that we feel we are not alone. That’s why great music and great art and great books are necessary. If we can’t say it and there’s no one to say it for us, then we might as well all be locked up in some gulag clawing at our cell door.

Human beings, some more assiduously and consistently than others, are searching for something to say in different ways. One may find self indulgence rewarding, another will opt for lying, and yet another will enjoy heaping shit on his neighbor.

These fall into the lower form of expression. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

Select word groups, like seeds, burst, develop and grow, rising to the heavens. The rising qualifies them as a higher form of expression. People search for things to say, and when they find them, sometimes they end up as books.

Now, not all books were created equal, and some are good, while others are a disgrace. The good ones are easy to identify because they rise up. That is, they lift people to a more profound understanding of who they are.

I’m not saying they make you feel warm and cozy or even good about being a human being. They may make you feel like hell, but they will draw you inexorably closer to an understanding of what is true, and a big part of that truth is that you, me, Jack and Jill are not alone, though it may seem like we are much of the time even when standing in the midst of others.

Rising correlates with light and life. Look at the flowers and how they turn their heads toward the light – they know. Descending correlates with darkness. That which dies falls. In rising things are made clear. In descending things become murky and obscured. Isn’t it easier for people to come together, to converge, where there is light and no possibility for duplicity or deceit?

I picked up Flannery O’Connor’s collection of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge. It was published posthumously in 1965, shortly after her death at age 39.

Her choice of title was what got me thinking. What did Flannery mean? Her use of that word group for her title can be traced to the philosophical writings of the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard wrote of the transcendent Omega Point toward which all complexity and consciousness evolves. Without going into detail, think of the Omega Point as another prism by which we perceive God.

There are certainly other interpretations of the word group everything that rises must converge, but it seems to me O’Connor is speaking of the ultimate ideal, when the final sum total of human beings’ search for meaning or Truth (everything that rises), ends in the finding and necessary communion with that Truth and with each other (the must converge part).

Of course this is the ideal, the ultimate, and great books, I don’t think, will depict rapturous human beings launched into the heavens like dazed, euphoric missiles but instead all that impedes and obstructs and diverts and distracts us from rising and converging.

How genuinely a book (or painting or poem or song or piece of music) can render the human pilgrimage in all its joys and sorrows makes it a force for rising, and our recognition and response to such a book (or painting or poem or song or piece of music) brings us ever closer to convergence/communion. And for all our sakes it’s always worth remembering we are more than we appear to be.

Life is precious. Somebody told me that this morning. On my way to work on a rear bumper sticker on a Chevy veering right off the highway, exiting.

I like to think whoever applied that sticker on the Chevy’s rear bumper didn’t really have to tell me that because I’ve known it all along, but who could blame him for reminding me?

We could all use a little reminding now and then. We could remind each other rather than toss such words into the Bin of Irrelevance. We could take those words and brand them on our hearts for others to see so that they know who we are and maybe they will recognize themselves at some point.

If you do not believe life is precious then you should talk to a man eaten away by cancer who fights to his last breath to live. Or you should take the time to meet Joe Bonham.

Joe Bonham is a creation of Dalton Trumbo, who wrote the National Book Award novel, Johnny Got His Gun.

If you’ve been reading this blog you’ve met Joe, the 20-year old man with no arms, no legs, no face, no hands to touch, no nose to smell, no mouth to taste, no ears to hear, no tongue to speak. But yes a brain to remember and a mind to dream and take stock of what was left of himself.

Joe possessed a remarkable, unflagging desire to rejoin the world of the living though he was as dead as any living being could be and during his loneliest moments wished he really were dead.

There are different forms of slavery, and the worst perhaps is to be denied the life of the senses. I am not even speaking of freedom as much as of sentient being, of the ability to perceive and to be perceived, to be in the world with other human beings.

Joe had lots of time to think. There was nowhere for him to go, nothing for him to do. The doctors and nurses saw him as a medical miracle, took pity on him, thought him beyond the reach of human intelligence and communication, a metaphorical “war hero” turned senseless living lump of meat.

Joe thought of how much like a slave he was:

He thought of the Carthaginian slaves down in the darkness blinded and chained and he thought they were lucky guys. They died soon there was no one there to take care of them to make sure the breath of life stayed in their bodies as long as possible. They were in agony but they died soon and even in their agony they could stand on two legs they could pull against their chains. They could hear and when someone spoke some great noble coming down into the treasure house they could hear the blessed sound of a human voice.

Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay for my favorite movie of all time, Spartacus. I didn’t know he’d written it, but in reading about Joe I read about Trumbo and his troubles and getting black-listed back in the day and jailed when some Americans determined that a right and proper way to deal with those you disagreed with.

(He wrote not only Spartacus, but among many others, the screenplay for Henri Charriere’s Papillon too, which dealt with another form of slavery.)

So there are different forms of slavery and what makes slavery of any form despicable is the taking of someone’s freedom, which we often correlate with the taking of someone’s life.

But I am not talking about freedom, as precious as it may be. I am talking about life in and of itself, regardless of whether you are living it the way you want to or not.

Some of us consider ourselves slaves to our jobs or relationships or circumstances, but in most cases we can choose to change our lot. We have free will. We may end up worse, and it would be good to know beforehand, but that is not always possible. The important thing is that we can gain freedom from what we find insufferable though the price may be steep indeed.

Spartacus, and his thousands of slave followers, chose to fight the Roman legions rather than remain slaves. The idea was not to die, but to live. They did everything within their power to live. If they had known the outcome beforehand, would they have surrendered their shot at freedom to ensure they continued living, even as slaves?

It’s a rhetorical question. Who knows. Each person is a world unto himself. We vacillate, we change our minds, often at the last moment. Who knows how any of us would react in a crisis or during a moment that requires we choose one path over another.

Papillon was another who risked his life to gain freedom. Was he saying freedom is more precious than life?

I don’t know what Papillon was thinking. I don’t know what Spartacus was thinking. What I do know is that freedom is not more precious than life. If we risk life for freedom it is because we want to live in freedom. The point is not to die but to live. Freedom vanishes the instant life vanishes.

We can glorify death all we want, if that’s what we want to do, but Life always trumps Death. You can’t glorify death unless you’re alive to do it.

I think this is what Joe Bonham is saying, what Dalton Trumbo is saying: life is precious, in and of itself. Even the lowest of creatures intuit this. Why is it so hard a saying for some of us?

World War I has been on my mind a lot lately. All Quiet on the Western Front planted the seed a long time ago. There followed A Farewell to Arms, The Guns of August, and The Four Horseman of The Apocalypse (by the Spanish writer, Blasco Ibañez), among others.

Recently, Deafening, by the Canadian writer, Frances Itani, presented a unique perspective from which to view the impact of the “Great War” on everyday people as far away from the trenches as small town Ontario.

Some months ago I was browsing the shelves of a tiny bookstore in a coastal town and came upon a paver-sized paperback containing Pat Barker’s World War I trilogy, Regeneration is also the title of the first of the three novels. The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road complete the trilogy.

I’ve about 70 pages left to read of the nearly 800, and I’ve only today discovered that Pat Barker is a woman. Was I surprised? More than I should have been.

A couple of things here: first, I should be ashamed at not having learned of this fabulous English writer and her books until recently; and second, I have to re-evaluate my notions about writers who write about war.

Stephen Crane demonstrated in writing The Red Badge of Courage that a writer didn’t have to fight in a battle to write convincingly about it. Crane listened carefully to those who fought, absorbing their memories, and was able to channel the survivors’ experiences and voices into a timeless novel.

Nor does the war-writer have to be a male. In Regeneration Barker uses actual accounts of World War I soldiers, and the writings of Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, an English psychiatrist/anthropologist who treated British Army officers for shell shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Imagination and creativity, seriousness of intent, a passion for one’s subject, respect for the reader, and a desire to communicate the innermost truth of that subject in an effective and compelling way, is what the good writer is about. Pat Barker succeeds on all counts in the Regeneration trilogy.

Having read Frances Itani’s novel, Deafening, I should have been prepared for Barker’s uncompromising graphic depictions of the horrors of war. There may have been a day when women writing about war left it to their male counterparts to try to put into words the horror, but that is no longer the case. Barker’s war images are as haunting and memorable as Remarque’s in All Quiet on the Western Front.

Have we become immune to The Horror?

El Coloso, by Francisco Goya

Some say the graphic nature of today’s movies and television shows featuring homicidal madmen, sympathetic hitmen, vigilantes, renegade cops, gang avengers, professional torturers, serial killers, rapist/murderers and genocidal generalisimos feverishly depleting the population in ever unimaginable ways, has desensitized us to the evil humans are capable of doing to each other.

Is a dose of horror-immunity a good thing, like a flu shot? Will it help us cope, keep us healthy, or will it change us into something we should not dare become?

The disasters of war reach far beyond the battlefields and years. In an interview with Wera Resch, Barker explained why she chose to write about World War I (and maybe why I find myself thinking too often about it):

…because it’s come to stand in for other wars, as a sort of idealism of the young people in August 1914 in Germany and in England. They really felt this was the start of a better world. And the disillusionment, the horror and the pain followed that. I think because of that it’s come to stand for the pain of all wars.

Regeneration, the novel, was first published in 1991 and was nominated for the Booker Prize. It was described as one of the four best novels of 1991 by the New York Times Book Review. The third novel, The Ghost Road, won the Booker Prize in 1995.

As a final note, if you are offended by graphic depictions of sexual situations, you might want to prepare yourself before reading the second and third novels of the trilogy, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road, or avoid them altogether.