What Are We Doing Here?

by Marilynne Robinson

  Once I solved a word puzzle in a daily newspaper. It was a quote from Robert Schumann. It said that to compose music one need only remember a song no one has ever heard before. This is another kind of liberating constraint, the sense of answering to what is unconsciously and intimately known, perhaps known more deeply because it is still very widely potential, the song we could not know we yearned to hear. The impact of this sentence of Schumann’s was certainly greater because it emerged out of bleary gibberish, just below the comic strips and beside the crossword. I would never have expected to find a thought there that was so perfect an instance of its own truth, something I would not have thought to say but was more than ready to affirm.

  Am I implying teleology here? Does art call up a response that is essentially the recognition of a new thing? This sounds like a paradox, and to call something a paradox too often ends discussion. Earlier I introduced my favored word, entelechy, and then I left it behind. But it is precisely useful here. The active principle of wholeness or completion in an individual thing. I would say it is true of art generally that it occurs along a continuum between expectation fulfilled, however surprisingly, and expectation disrupted, however profoundly. Is it ever possible to expect Lear to enter carrying the dead Cordelia? Expectation might be called the emotional investment of the audience (meaning those who experience an art, as distinct from those who make it, and who must also participate in this same expectation in a way that makes either fulfillment or disruption a meaningful choice). Certain critics have been so struck by the social or communal aspect of participation in an art that they have reduced fiction to a species of automatic writing—and, by extension, I suppose, painting to automatic painting and so on. The writer is thought of as entrapped, incapable of saying or meaning anything other than whatever her culture induces in her, strive and struggle as she might. This makes interpretation easy, which it really ought never to be. It also accounts rather brusquely for genre and for cultural and national aesthetic traditions. To mention that memory of a song no one has heard, to invoke Stevens’s phrase “the voice that is great within us,” seems like mystification, except to people like Schumann and Stevens, who might be assumed to speak with some authority. Experience demands a richer vocabulary than theory can give it, for all its neologisms.

  “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.” That is Stevens again. The mind is always in process, moving in time through the currents of possibility, realizing formally meaningful things in and from the flux of consciousness, paragraphs and poems that have an overplus of meaning even the writer would not have recognized if certain words had not come together in a certain order. The ways in which they are satisfying—to the ear, to the senses, to cultural memory—fill them with meaning. So, beauty disciplines. It recommends a best word in a best place and makes the difference palpable between aesthetic right and wrong. And it does this freely, within the limits it finds—cultural, material, generic. Another paradox, perhaps, a discipline that is itself free, and free to make variations on such limits as it does choose to embrace. Beauty is like language in this. It can push at the borders of intelligibility and create new eloquence as it does so.

  * * *

  I am treating beauty here as an active principle. I use elegance as a virtual synonym for it, pleased that elegance has status by association with good thought, though I try not to exploit this. I do not mean to say that one thing or another rises to the standard of beauty, rather I propose that beauty manifests itself in one thing or another, even asserts itself when accident permits. In saying this I intend to suggest a kind of force active in reality, perhaps very pervasively, that we have no instruments to measure or record except our minds and senses. Consider the ancient, perhaps universal association of beauty with power. The greater the god, the more splendid the temple, as if like were meant to conjure like.

  My impulse is always to reach for metaphors, and the comparisons that present themselves to me here are to stones or ice or sandbars in a river, all of which are in the nature of the case very shapely. The lovely forms they take on minimize their obstruction of the river water. At the same time, their accommodation of the currents slows their own erosion. One might say they collaborate in persisting as themselves. They are visually more satisfying because both of these things are true at once. Elegance upon elegance. When I write I make it a rule never to do anything—choose a name or a detail of any consequence—for only one reason, or two reasons. Or three, ideally. This is, for me, an important scruple, on the principle that things are simultaneous and reciprocal in their nature, the river and the stone. When at any point this is not acknowledged, there is a fraying of the fabric of the imagined world. This sounds very intentional. It would be truer to say that on such grounds my mind warns me away from ideas I might myself have considered pretty good.

  Through the whole length of this essay I have been trying to earn the occasion to say that our intuitions having to do with the way things are and become are real enough to participate in the elegance of meaningful complexity, which may be one definition of beauty, a necessary if not a sufficient one. These intuitions include a compounding of time, so that we can see how things tend, and how they might complete themselves out of the constrained variables of the reality we posit for them. I can see I am assuming that these things occurring in time encounter a kind of contrary wind, what time itself might be if it were symmetrical, or if it is, for that matter. The completion of a character or a fiction, a play or a poem, must have the look of teleology, a denouement that seems prepared and inevitable, that seems to have approached, not simply to have eventuated, to have arisen within the arbitrary limits imposed by every good choice made in the course of its invention, not as a foreshadowing but as a reality still imminent. Entelechy.

  I suspect I have not mentioned grace at all. To me it means, among many things, a sense of or participation in the fullness of an act or gesture so that the beauty of it is seen whole, the leap and the landing. Ethically it means an understanding of the wholeness of a situation, so that everyone is understood in her humanity, the perceiver extending no more respect to herself than to others, understanding any moment as a thing that can bless time to come or poison it. As an aesthetic, for the novel, at least, both the first and second definitions are in play. Theologically, grace must include the fact that we have untried capacities to live richly in a universe of unfathomable interest, and that we can and do, amazingly, enhance its interest with the things we make. Isn’t it true that we actually add things to the universe, the great plenum? And this is true, I would say, by the grace of God.

  A Proof, a Test, an Instruction

  The Nation, December 5, 2016

  Let us say, as a thought experiment, that History and Providence conspired to create a president suited to twenty-first-century America. He might unite in his own person the two races that are shorthand for difference and division within the society, and have deep personal bonds with both black and white. Race has only the meaning culture gives it—and we learn every day that culture is a heavy-handed enforcer of the distinctions it has made. An ideal president would be one suited to his circumstance, to dealing with the potent aftershocks of an unjust and violent history. If it were clear that he loved and honored, and identified with, both streams of his heritage, he would bring as much humanity to this grievous old affliction as any one person could bring to it.

  Only imagine how the unacknowledged empire our country has become would be made more knowing and refined if this president had the memory of passing his childhood among the children of societies that seem remote to most of us, chasing a tattered kite down a muddy road, hearing the call to prayer, learning new forms of courtesy, seeing the effects of lawless government on the lives of good people. Again, if this president had family who were part of the emergence of Africa from centuries of colonialism, a continent at the threshold of the world’s future, a complex and fragile phenomenon capable of igniting and also extinguishing extraordinary individua
l gifts, he would have a vantage point uniquely suited to his responsibilities toward this volatile planet. In both cases he would have ten thousand times the understanding that is supposed to be acquired in congressional junkets and sophomore years abroad.

  This is a kind of understanding individual Americans are happy to claim on the slightest grounds. Oddly, at the same time the public seems to be flattered by the notion that a “real” America would be more provincial than it ever was, isolated from the effects of foreign influences as colonies in a mercantile empire, then as an immigrant country, never could be. Those who speak of the United States as great, formerly if not at present, must acknowledge that immigration has been concomitant with our greatest moments, wherever they wish to locate them. It is perverse, though clearly effective, to treat deep experience of other cultures as compromising. The candidate John Kerry spoke French—so much for him. So did Jefferson and Franklin and Adams, and they read it, too, as educated Americans did during that seminal period, to our benefit, no doubt.

  The United States is a very great power. It created its modern posture against an adversary it took to be equivalent to itself, perhaps even more powerful. The opponent has fallen away, more or less, and America is left with an overhanging capability to do harm, which is an important definition of power. This capability may no longer be suitable for deterring threats to us, but it is real and undiminished. As we learned in the course of this instructive election season, there are those who think that since we have it, we might as well use it. Not against Russia, of course, that important region in the new nation of Oligarchia, but against ragtag radicals who torment regions that do not need the further catastrophes our power would visit on them. No war will end war, short of Armageddon. So we had better consider other options. A president for whom other societies are not abstractions, who knows that the children of our enemies are as silly and lovely as our own children, would be well suited to helping us live more consistently with our values, granting all the obstacles history has put in his or her path.

  * * *

  The success with which Barack Obama has been estranged in the minds of many Americans, made to seem foreign on precisely the grounds that made him singularly qualified for his office, reflects a refusal to accept what America is—not only a multiethnic and multiracial nation but a pervasive cultural and economic presence in the world, with responsibilities equal to our influence, a daunting thought. We are mighty and the world is, in every way, fragile. Tact and restraint, where possible, are indicated. But we—politicians, journalists, cultural figures—do little to encourage a temperament suited to our role.

  The growing din of our politics, and of the media fantasists who create terrifying worlds of threat and deceit and who increasingly shout down our politics, is not likely to yield a mature consensus about our role and our obligations. It is true historically that Americans in meaningful numbers have mocked and bedeviled our great presidents. They, being great, have tended to do good things for good reasons, and therefore to be able to answer reasonable criticism. This fact has led their detractors to resort to scurrility potent in its time—Abraham Lincoln was mixed-race, Franklin Roosevelt was Jewish. And now Barack Obama is Muslim. The notion, given force by the insistence of those who propagate it, is that Islam itself is evil and full of insidious intent, as Judaism was said to be in the 1930s by those who wished to discredit Roosevelt. The object in every case is to instill the belief that a great deception has been carried out, the true character and motives of the president are sinister, his government is illegitimate and must be opposed. I do not share the exceptionalist or providentialist faith that malicious behavior, outright slander, is somehow vindicated by the fact that we have survived it so far. I don’t accept the view that playing on prejudices is just another part of political give-and-take. I think history has indulged us, allowing us to get away with abusing the democratic system in ways it will not sustain forever. Would anyone object to what I have said here? Well, in fact, Barack Obama would object.

  * * *

  It is a remarkable thing to have some meaningful conversation with a president of the United States, in this case a man young enough to be my son. Barack Obama is gracious, poised, and intense in the face of concerns and demands I cannot imagine. There is a sentence in a benediction common in mainline churches like his and mine—“Return no one evil for evil, but in all things seek the good.” It seems to me always that his remarkable dignity and resilience must have its source in a transvaluation of this kind. He is extraordinarily alert. His attention runs a little ahead of the moment, to the next question, to the courtesy or reassurance he thinks the moment might be about to demand of him. It must be clear to anyone who has read his books that he is eager to learn from any encounter that might yield insight into a kind of query he brings to experience, which is, I think, an openness to an extremely inductive understanding of value, one that he is always ready to expand and refine. Though he would not apply such words to himself, the president is a philosopher, perhaps a theologian.

  In the land of the blind the one-eyed man might seem delusional. There are risks in having an interesting mind in this odd climate we have made for ourselves. There are risks also in being in fact faithful to the faith so many of us claim. The president is taken in some quarters to be non-Christian because he is disinclined to hate his enemies. This can only mean that an uninstructed and unreflective “Christianity” has indeed taken hold in the population. The wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God, according to the Epistle of James. But we have lived for years with the raucous influence of self-declared Christians who are clearly convinced that their wrath and God’s righteousness are one and the same. Then when the president, though he is insulted, balked, and provoked, refuses to yield to anger, his self-possession is apparently unreadable. A considerable part of the population must have ceased to recognize and respect piety, not to mention simple dignity.

  President Obama would say that my thinking is far too harsh, distracted by the nonsense of the moment, and that the essential thing, the thing that always wins out finally, is the goodness and wisdom of the American people. Only confidence in the ultimate wisdom of the people makes democracy sustainable through crises. The dynamic of the system assumes dispute and contentiousness, but respect for this dynamic and for those who sustain it, however heated the argument, is vital to democracy. In the long term, on the whole, respect will prove to have been justified, and to have kept contention from flying out of control. I hope he is absolutely right, and that his capacious optimism can embrace my indignation, as, by his lights, a necessary energy, together with all the contending passions that drive the country forward.

  * * *

  President Obama is fascinated by the cohesion of communities and societies, by the numberless people who day after day do the numberless things that sustain the life of a city. He has seen what happens where cohesion fails, in America and elsewhere, and this no doubt makes him more aware than most of us are of its value, its beauty, its enormous fruitfulness. This awareness of the value of community also gives context to his equal and deep respect for all lives lived honorably and responsibly, and to his desire to help the marginalized enrich and enjoy the good life of community.

  This is a consistent element in his thinking. He often quotes the phrase “a more perfect Union,” which is first in the list of purposes for which, according to its preamble, the Constitution was ordained and established. The language assumes union, and acknowledges at the same time that this union is flawed and difficult. The comparative “more” implies that it will be improved rather than perfected by the new Constitution—realism on the part of the Founders, no doubt, who were already dealing with contending regions and interests. But that “more” also implies relative perfecting yet to be done, a continuous adjusting of law and custom to more nearly align them with the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the First Amendment. It is because there is the fact and the strength of union
, whatever its failings, that these failings can be alleviated or overcome.

  I was in college when Margaret Mead was in her glory and anthropologists could still claim to find societies untouched by the modern world. The idea was that in such places human nature would have been preserved in a purer form than in the rationalist and technological societies of the West. By observing these societies we could learn what we are essentially and how we ought to live. These societies were gentle, violent, uninhibited, and so on, depending, it came to seem, on the preferences of the anthropologist. People who have no historical memory in the Western sense and who are engrossed in their lives may not think to wonder what drove their ancestors to the depths of a forest and deprived them of the benefits of better resources and wider contact. In any case, the “primitivity” of these populations could in general be called poverty. Globally and historically, it would seem to be natural in human societies to create wealth, however badly they distribute it. So the isolation of such groups was probably more defensive than Edenic.

  In retrospect this thinking seems akin to some of the less savory rages of decades just preceding it, having to do with purity and authenticity, the radical undermining of self and identity supposed to result from foreign influence and racial or ethnic mingling, the same kind of nostalgia that had mocked up Norse cults and Druidic rituals and that is stirring among us now. Cities in those days were called inhuman. These days they are called war zones. It all seems credible at any given time, perhaps in part because the ideal of the organic society, philosophically respectable since 1800, has predisposed us to accept it. In course of time it exhausted its field of research, since the researchers themselves were a corrupting Western contact. An anthropologist told me that he and his colleagues now do polling.