If Any of You Lack Wisdom, Let Him Ask of God: It Is Our Right to Be Secure in the Knowledge that God Lives

 

 

I am reluctant to write about my religion.  There are multiple reasons for this.  I’ve always wanted to be taken seriously as a writer and have succeeded in that to a minor extent among a few writers who have had more success than I have.  These days, other than Buddhism, religion isn’t taken seriously in literary circles.  I guess I’m guilty of desiring to be both of the world and in the service of Christ simultaneously.

But it’s more than that.  I also fear friends will be offended, that they’ll feel I’m trying to convert them, and truth be told, I am.  But it’s not that I feel they are deficient in some way.  It’s just that I want to share what is most important in my life—my religion.

So great is this fear, we had some friends visit a couple of summers ago, and we wanted to take them to Cove Fort, not to share our religion, but just because it’s an awesome old lava-stone fort built around a courtyard and restored beautifully.  In short, it’s something beautiful in our area to see.

However, it’s owned by the church.  When we were asked by the missionary tour-guides if we were all members, I quickly said yes, which was a lie.  The truth is I didn’t want our friends to receive a missionary discussion because I didn’t want them to feel we had taken them to the historic site with ulterior motives in mind.  I would have preferred the old fort to have been a hide-out for Butch Cassidy rather than a frequent stop for Brigham Young.

In The Outsider, Colin Wilson follows a significant portion of the literary development of the twentieth century, in which the narrators and/or protagonists (outsiders) of many literary works have this dreadful secret, which they want to suppress because it will do society no good to learn, but they can’t suppress it because there is a “distressing sense that truth must be told at all costs, otherwise there can be no restoration of order” (Wilson 15).

And what is this truth?:  that existence is meaningless, most succinctly captured in Hemingway’s short story, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”:

It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant.  You do not want music.  Certainly you do not want music.  Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours.  What did he fear?  It was not fear or dread.  It was something that he knew too well.  It was all nothing and a man was nothing too.  It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order.  Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada (Hemmingway 291).

I have felt that sterile night, and have sought the clear light of a clean, well-lit diner to hold off the impending chaos.  So, I’m not here to refute that reality, or to mock those who have stared the void in the eye.

But it is not the only reality I know.

I have another secret, one that is hope, goodness and light.  Oddly, I’m more reluctant to write about that than I am of memories of nothing and for nothing.

But I will be silent no more.

Last weekend I came home from church hurting.  I have an extreme case of epididymitis, an inflammation of the epididymis at the back of the testicle, usually caused by a bacterial infection.  It makes sitting very uncomfortable.

Anyway, I skipped Sunday school, and went back for priesthood.  I was late and just sat down and listened to the lesson.  It was a good lesson, taught by a good friend, and I listened intently but was not particularly moved emotionally.

At the end, I was asked to say the prayer, and I did so.  Part way through, I started to thank God for having the gospel in our lives, and I couldn’t, not because I’m not thankful—it has come to mean everything to me—but because I felt the Holy Ghost so strong I couldn’t speak.  It was as if my tongue had been bound.  I tried three times before I could get it out, and only succeeded on the fourth try.  By that time I was in tears.

When I was finished, before I even knew what I was doing, I rushed over to hug this guy I once knew from the town bar.  Anyone who knows me at all knows that’s just not the sort of thing I do.  I’m shy to the core and physical expression of emotions—even handshakes—just aren’t my sort of thing.

What had happened?  Well, I am thankful for the gospel.  And I haven’t been getting well despite numerous prayers and blessing on my behalf.  It even felt as if I’d been struggling with my testimony, having a few thoughts of “Our nada, who art in nada, nada be thy name” myself  (Hemmingway 291).  So, perhaps my Father in Heaven felt I needed some reassurance that He was there for me.

But, I don’t think so.  I think it was my old drinking buddy who needed to feel the spirit most, and I was the vehicle used to answer his prayers.  That just seems to be the way the priesthood works—not directly, but through others.  He too was crying when I’d finished my prayer.

I want to continue exploring the void explored in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider.  I think it does identify a real phenonemum, and I believe I have some insights into that reality.  But there is not time for that here.

Instead, I also want to testify that life on this earth is not all nada y pues nada.  That God lives and has a plan and purpose for each of us, and that we do not have to know this on blind faith alone, that there are other ways of thinking than logic, and other means of communication than words—and that although we may never know all the pieces of the puzzle to life (to do so would abort free-will),  we are promised by God in James I: 5 that if we sincerely ask of God we can know enough about the meaning of life that we don’t have to make it on faith alone:

If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.

It is our right to be secure in the knowledge (not just belief) that God lives; it is just a matter of being humble and patient enough to receive his reply.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Hemmingway, Ernest. ""A Clean Well-Lighted Place"." Hemmingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Book of the Month Club (Scribner's/Macmillan Publishing), 1987. 291.

Wilson, Colin. The Outsider. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, Inc., 1982.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Master’s Scribe (Buddhism, Furious Fiction, Pugs, Zen)

Camilla, the fat pug, waddles across the blue-gray snow fields of Mount Fuji like a three-legged pig.  Jack, the Hokkaido fox, should be chasing her.  But how can he?  One leap and he’ll be well beyond the ugly little tanker.

The narrator won’t like Camilla being called an “ugly little tanker.”  I can hear him say, “Nothing ugly.  Only perception ugly. ” He doesn’t like much of what I type on his behalf.  He says I use too many words.  That’s because he’s a Zen Buddhist monk from Kamakura who sits on a straw mat all day playing Call of Duty Advanced Warfare.  He says enlightenment is found in the moment of action.  “No words; use thumbs only, fingers.” 

I’d quit if he didn’t pay well.  He says although words kill the moment, a monk without books to his name is no monk at all these days. 

“California read enlightenment too much!  Zen not self-help.  No problem.  No help.  Just be.”

“Okay,” I say, “but what about the fable?  Why not have the pug chase the fox?  She’s slow; he’s fast.  We have struggle, plot.”

He says Americans are too logical, that you can’t write a fable with logic.  You shouldn’t write a fable at all.  It should just be.

“How can it be, if we don’t write it?” I ask in exasperation.

He smiles, “Your journey, not mine.”

Moving from a Literature of Disbelief to a Literature Belief: An Open-Dialogue with The Outsider by Colin Wilson, Part I: I See Too Deeply (Henri Barbusse’s novel, L’Enfer)

There have been three times in my life when I did something irrational and brave:  I said, Screw it, I made a mistake, and I cut chords with the past and almost started down the path to the sort of life I wanted.  But the first couple of times, at the last moment, I faltered and clung to doubt and self-imposed limitations instead of walking out of the picture I was in and into the one I wanted.  Of course, it would not have been perfect, but if I’d had the courage to carry through, it would have been perfect compared to where I’d been.

Pure sunlight shines between two Austrian pines my brother and I planted back in ’96.  The snow, mostly in shadow, is cold, hard and blue.  It seems like the perfect day for reading, drinking hot chocolate and reflecting.  Marci even made Chili.

What I want to reflect on here is moving from a literature and life of isolation and disbelief to a literature and life of connection and belief.  I once thought I’d found my bible, The Outsider by Colin Wilson.  It described perfectly the void I was feeling and the literature I loved.  A window, even if accurate, is just one view of existence.  Having looked through other windows since then, I’d like to go back and look out that window again.

I think all of this will come to play in this dialogue, but I want to get right to the book, and when I found the book, and why it meant so much to me.

It was a cold winter, and during the week I lived alone in a dorm.  I’d dropped out of school and moved back to Dry Creek, this piece of family land that has never let me live fully anywhere else.  But there was nothing here for me.   The only jobs available were the type for college dropouts.  I ended up being a janitor at an indoor mushroom farm on the other side of town and decided a formal education might not be so bad after all, so I went back to school in a bigger town, two hours from Dry Creek.  However, I was twenty-six and really didn’t belong in an undergraduate program anymore.  I’d had some poems published, had been somewhat involved in a writing community in El Paso.  After returning to Utah, all I wanted to do was get my degree, so that I could get a teaching job in my hometown and live the rest of my days at Dry Creek, writing poems about stone, cold water, deer carcasses and drunken nights in the town’s two bars.  I had no belief beyond sight—to live and bear witness to a meaningless universe, which was at least bearable if I were there to witness a deer bounce down a gravel road covered in thin snow, the cottonwood along the creek a faint pink in the last day light.

Back at in college, I’d hear girls laughing outside my dorm room, but they sounded so young, so remote, like distant memories.  They weren’t even that.  I was incredibly shy and my romantic adventures were few and far in between.  Older, I still liked the giddy laughter outside my walls, but it was different.  It did not stir the restless hunger of a teenager.  No, it was more like the fondness of a father.  I had never had a real college experience, but I was mature enough to realize I’d missed that train.  If there was a world for me, this wasn’t it. 

So, during the week, I walled myself in my little cinderblock room to write.   On weekends, I went home, got drunk with a band of single and divorced Paiute women and a drop-out actor, and when not at the bar, soaked in as much of Dry Creek as possible.  The next week I’d start the process all over again.

When at school, I seldom ventured outside my dorm except for class and to go to the library.  My writing professors admired my craft, but as I was writing at a master’s level and most of my classmates had barely opened a book, I had no connection with my peers.  I remember Jim Aton would have us rate each other’s papers and then would give us his rating.  According to my peers, my paper was almost incomprehensible.  According to him, I should get it published.  So, I doubled up on my studies to get out of there.

The campus had a beautiful, new library, with a three story glass atrium, but hardly any books.  On top of that, they had all-but-illiterate undergraduate students weed the small collection they had.  As a result, I’d pick up collectible books on the discard rack for 25 cents.

One of the books I picked up--not a collectable--was The Outsider by Colin Wilson.  As it so accurately named what I’d been feeling and capturing in my own writing, it quickly became my Bible.

I still have the book.  It’s the 1982 Tarcher edition from  Houghton Mifflin with a forward by Marilyn Ferguson.  The cover is simple: a black rectangle with a thin red border.  Centered near the top is the title and author, also red print.  It looks serious, revolutionary—and when first published in 1956, it was.  

Chapter One, “Country of the Blind,” begins as follows:

At first sight, the Outsider is a social problem.  He is the hole-in-corner man.

Damn, I thought, that’s me.

He then quotes from Henri Barbusse’s novel, L’Enfer:

In the air, on top of a tram, a girl is sitting.  Her dress, lifted a little, blows out.  But a block in the traffic separates us.  The tramcar glides away, fading like a nightmare.

Moving in both directions, the street is full of dresses which sway, offering themselves airily, the skirts lifting; dresses that lift and yet do not lift.

In the tall and narrow shop mirror I see myself approaching, rather pale and heavy-eyed.  It is not the woman I want—it is all women, and I seek for them in those around me, one by one.

Defeated, I followed my impulse casually.  I followed a woman who had been watching me from her corner.  Then we walked side by side.  We said a few words; she took me home with her… Then I went through the banal scene.  It passed like a sudden hurtling-down.

Again, I am on the pavement, and I am not at peace as I had hoped.  An immense confusion bewilders me.  It is as if I could not see things as they were.  I see too deeply and too much.

I knew that feeling immediately.  It was my old friend.  I’d written poems about it:

The Question

I think normal people just go to sleep,
which isn’t a bad idea, and I use to.
Nine o’clock always as a kid, and looking forward to it,
that cold blue room in the lean-to add-on.
I plugged in the electric blanket and cuddled up
after a firm talk with God
about how if I did this, he’d do that,
and I’d grow up happy, successful and loyal,
with a wife, five kids,
an architectural firm and a house,
a great space of light and body
headed by me, Patriarch,
like God headed the Church,
the building, the body, the light.

But then, I don’t know, something happened.

Oh, I know it happens to all of us,
and few of us really sleep,
with houses balanced on loans,
beds suspended over arguments with elastic smiles,
marriages held together with kids as tape,
marriages not held together,
kids torn like tape, a piece on each flap,
flapping in the wind,
the guilt of having torn such a little body,
but how do you live in a house so small,
and with her?

And how does she stand you,

both of you growing,
swallowing space?

All healthy things get bigger,

more complex,
cells and histories of cells,
whole cities wiped out within
with new information and cable TV.
The cage can only make you rabid,
the things she says ticking off in your head.

Okay, so I don’t have it so bad.

I have none of this.
I have one single question
that keeps me up at night:

How do I make it mine?

At the time I wrote that poem, my mother thought the ending-line,“How do I make it mine?” referred to marriage.  And it does,  sort of, but not really, because prior to it “something happened,” which is the first fulcrum of the poem, a pivot between the secure fixed universe of youth and the open, uncertain universe of adulthood.  What I desired to make mine was life in all its complexity, but something had robbed me of that possibility.  What was that “something”?

When I opened The Outsider, I knew immediately my something was the same something  that makes the romantic encounter in L’enfer so banal.  Like Henri Barbusse’s protagonist, I also saw “too deeply and too much.”

Or so, I thought at the time.  In this series of essays, I will in fact argue that like so many of my predecessors,  even though I saw deeper than many, I actually didn’t see deeply enough.  But, I'll get to that later.

Is Etta James the Heart and Soul of Poetry?: Etta James, Van Morrison, and the Art of the Repeated Line

I dreamt that the key to poetry is the music of Etta James.  As I really didn’t have a clue who Etta James was, I thought this is either ridiculous or quite significant.  (Note:  a couple of weeks earlier I dreamt I would be the father of a major school of poetics, Rammed-Earth Poetry, so clearly my id is searching for some sort of significance here.)  Still, could a dead relative of mine, or Etta herself, or perhaps even God Almighty be directing my artistic pursuit from the other side?  I don’t know.  Part of me always wants to write off the muse as pure crap, but some of my best poems have come to me in dreams.  So, then I think, well, it’s just the workings of the subconscious.  But, when I put on Etta this morning, I thought sweet damn that lady do sing the blues so sweetly redemption is hanging out on the street corner just waitin to smile up at me with great big, black eyes that contain all the love in the universe!

And I thought there might be something to this crazy dream after all.  Now, I’m not ready to toss William Carlos Williams in the trashcan yet, but maybe there is something other, something just as real, but different than the right-on images, perfect line breaks, and plain ol’ American dialect--something that’s missing not only from my own work, but also the work of my heroes.

I know repetition draws me, the chant, and going back mid-step, before your foot is fully forward, like Van Morrison does:

 

 

But how do you get that on the page independent of the blues band?  If, I say if, I say, if it’s the ramble and the row, the slow winding out, then pulling back in, then bellowing out heart and soul that drives poetry, the eye has to be able to pick that up, line by line, so the music forms in the reader’s mind.

Is it doable?  I don’t know.  Or is that even why Etta James is the heart and soul of poetry?

But, I do know this: although I woke up thinking I had a crazy dream, after listing to Etta, I do believe she is indeed the heart and soul of poetry and I’m more than willing to explore possibility that some of her spirit can be captured in the unaccompanied line. 

Besides, it’s kind of like deciding that Julia Roberts holds the secret to acting.  Even if you’re wrong, after seeing her smile, quite frankly, who gives a damn?  After hearing Etta, my life aint gonna never be the same nohow.  And I thank whatever dead relative cared enough about to let me in on that secret.

 

 

 

The Broken

Sit in recliners
& watch
television
flinching
now & then
from pain
unfolding
like spring.

There are meadows
in the mind, but
the days are blotchy--
a brief moment
of yesteryear
in intense sunlight
before clouds
of reality
move across
the valley
& blacken
the front.

Prayers
are worn
like windbreakers,
always a little
too thin.