A woman my age wrote me after reading A Circle of Quiet: “I didn’t know I was allowed to doubt.” And several people, after The Summer of the Great-grandmother: “It doesn’t worry me any more that I am angry at what is happenning.” This is a heavy responsibility, but I blunder into pride if I think that it is all mine, any more than the book is all mine.
A professor and novelist, Dr. Caroline Gordon, from whom I have learned an enormous amount, told our class that we do not judge great art; it judges us. Oh, yes, it does. And the judgment of the work of art is quite apart from the moral virtue, or lack of moral virtue, of the artist. God’s ways are not our ways, and quite often the most superbly transcendent work comes from artists who deny God and themselves in their daily living. They may be drunkards, sex-ridden, adulterous, but when they are at work they are wholly thrown out of themselves into collaboration with their work. And a work of art is indeed a work. Serkin does not sit down at the piano and play Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata without doing his finger exercises every single day. I think it was Rubinstein who said that if he did not practice for one day he knew it; if he didn’t practice for two days his family knew it; and if he didn’t practice for three days his public knew it.
Guernica did not spring in an hour to the canvas. The Brothers Karamazov wasn’t tossed off in a week; it encourages me to remember that Dostoevsky did version after version of his novels.
To turn closer to home and to a less elevated analogy, one of the girls I lived with in Greenwich Village has gone on to be a concert pianist. No matter what the rest of us were doing, she practiced eight hours a day, finger exercises, one tiny phrase over and over again for what seemed forever. She was working on her first New York concert, and I’ll never forget Handel’s Harmonious Blacksmith Variations, or the Brahms Second Piano Concerto, or the Bach Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue as they slowly moved to life as she grew with them. If she diligently practiced her music, it also practiced her.
Montaigne says “the work of its own force and fortune can second the workman and surpass him, beyond his own invention and knowledge.” I witnessed the truth of this as I saw the great compositions pushing the young pianist. When a work of art does this, the mediating circle integrating sunside and nightside is widened. Prayer, too, of its own force, can take the one at prayer far beyond the wildest imaginings.
I learned something of the force of the work myself during that same period when I went through my first shattering experience of falling in love and having the love turn to ashes. I not only survived, but did a considerable amount of growing up through the writing of my first full-length novel.
I concentrated on my work because it was what saved me. I had, over this broken affair, left the apartment with the other girls, left my entire group of friends, and moved into a tiny apartment of my own, so the noise and confusion was in my own heart. When I was working on that first novel I was genuinely and painfully unhappy. But during the actual writing I was at play; I was completely thrown out of my subjective misery into the joy of creation, so that what might have been a totally destructive experience became instead a creative one, and a freeing one.
I was freed during the writing as my book wrote me, not as I wrote it. And surely this was an experience of that special kind of unity which makes me understand the Trinity. The pages which built up on my writing table were not me, nor was I typewriter and paper; but we were, nevertheless, one. The same kind of collaboration can come when I read a book; the books which matter to me, to which I turn and return, are those which read me. The music I play, or listen to, is that which actively participates with me in harmony or counterpoint. The same thing is true in graphic art. There has to be an amorous interaction between the work of art and the person who is opening himself to it, and surely the relationship within the persons of the Trinity is one of Love, Love so real we can glimpse it only on rare occasions.
Hugh, or any actor, will tell you that the response of the audience can make or break an evening in the theatre; the audience collaborates, quite literally, with the actor.
As I understand the writing of a book, or a poem, so I understand the Eucharist, so I understand the Creed, the symboles by which I live. And in joyful moments I know prayer in the same way that I know great painting, or the Bach B Minor Mass. This is not to say that I think worship and prayer are less real than the daily world of provable fact, but that I think they are more real.
We are a generation out of touch with reality: the ‘realistic’ novels push me further away from the truth of things, rather than bringing me closer. When once I was asked if I wrote anything other than fantasy, I said that I also write adult novels, and the inquirer grinned, “Nowadays the word adult in front of novel means porno.”
What about using ‘the language of the people’ in the translations of the liturgy. What people? We speak English today rather than a form of Norman French because Chaucer wrote in the language of the people, but I doubt if the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker went around saying, “Whan that Arcite to Thebes comen was/Ful ofte a day he swelte and seyde ‘Allas!’/For seen his lady shal he never mo.”
Shakespeare, too, wrote in the language of the people, but I doubt if many of his contemporaries talked thus: “We are such stuff/As dreams are made on, and our little life/is rounded with a sleep.” The only parts of Shakespeare’s plays which seem dated are some of the comedy scenes where he has used the language of the lowest common denominator, and such language is quickly dated and then obsolete.
Nor did Cranmer use the language of the people of the street, but the best language he could possibly offer to God. Using limited vocabulary is to deny us our ability to grow in grace, to move from the limited to the transcendent. I’m glad that those who are working on the new Episcopal liturgies have been aware of this; the most recent draft of the Prayer Book is head and shoulders above the others and gives me hope. As our lives have no future if we have no memory, our language has no future and becomes dead if we forget its roots.
Chaucer and Shakespeare both came along at times when the English language was in need of redemption, and we are at another such time, and perhaps our Chaucer or Shakespeare is yet to be born, or it may be that the English language, like Latin, will dwindle and become obsolete. The Bible becomes more difficult to read with each generation, because the translators for King James weren’t threatened by limited vocabulary. This holds true for Shakespeare, too. Recently I reread one of his early plays, written before he had moved into his giant stride, and on a notepad I jotted down all the words which I felt to be valid, useful words which are no longer in our vocabulary. There were, over one hundred.
But it is not only the English language which is in danger. It is a fear for languages all over the world. After the Second World War the Japanese lost so many actual written characters that college students today cannot read the great Japanese works of literature, because they no longer know the characters used by the classical writers. This destruction of language is a result of war and is always a curtailment of freedom.
In Russia, where the worship of the Trinitarian God in the full beauty of the liturgy is officially discouraged, it would not be easy for a Russian to read the works of Alexander Solzenitsyn even if these works were not forbidden, because so much vocabulary was lost in Russia after the revolution. In one of Solzenitsyn’s books his hero spends long hours reading the great Russian dictionary which came out in the 1890s. Solzenitsyn himself has one volume of this two-volume work, and in his novels he is forging the Russian language back into vitality, taking the words of the people of the streets and the words of the great dictionary and pulling the fullness of language out of the shadows and into the light. This is what Dante did in the writing of The Divine Comedy. It is what the English language needs if it is to survive as a great tongue. And surely language and liturgy are intertwined.
When Hugh and I went on a trip to Russia I almost didn’t get a visa because our travel agent put down my occupation a
s writer. Writers think. Writers ask questions. Writers are dangerous. She finally persuaded ‘them’ that I write only for very small children and was not a threat. In any dictatorship, writers are among the first to be imprisoned, and vocabulary is quickly diminished and language deteriorates. Writers, if their vocabulary is not leashed, are quick to see injustice, and rouse the people to do something about it. We need words with which to think; kill words and we won’t be able to think and we’ll be easier to manipulate.
So I worry about the tyranny of language which is incapable of containing mystery. I worry about the weakening of our theology. For the past few years, for instance, I have missed gifts and creatures of bread and wine; this says something theologically important to me: the bread and wine, too, are God’s creatures; it is an affirmation of the goodness of creation; when our big vegetable garden is first manured in the spring, the rank, life-giving manure is also a gift and creature, a symbol of incarnation.
If we are children by adoption and grace, how can we drop the we are bold to say before the Our Father? We are indeed bold to call the Lord of the Universe by the homely name of Abba, Father, and I don’t want this dulled for me, so that in my own eyes the magnificence of the one I worship is dwindled and diminished. I want to cry out to him in all his Trinitarian Glory.
But why only three? If he is indeed the maker of the galaxies, isn’t three a small number for his persons? Aren’t there probably dozens, if not millions? There well may be, but there is for those of us on planet earth a special quality about the number 3—not magic, though it has been made so—but special. After all, we are the third planet from the sun, so it is bound to be a number of particular significance for us.
CATECHUMEN
A very young star: That, too, is a star?
The wind: Yes, Like you. A sun. But older.
STAR: How old?
WIND: About half way.
STAR: What are those objects circling it?
WIND: They are called planets.
STAR: Will I have them, too?
WIND: It is likely.
STAR: Will this be good?
WIND: It can be very good.
STAR: The ones that travel farthest from their sun—
WIND: Yes?
STAR: There is ice, and flame that is frozen, and much wind that is very unlike you.
WIND: It is part of me.
STAR: And it is good?
WIND: It is Very good.
STAR: But I am a blaze of fire and flame—
WIND: And for you I blow, too.
STAR: You blow wherever …
WIND: I blow where I will.
STAR: That planet—one, two, three—third from the sun—
WIND: One, two, three: Yes. For it there are numbers, and the number is three.
STAR: Those tiny moving creatures?
WIND: They are men.
STAR: Where the sun shines on their planet they cannot see me; they cannot see stars. How strange. Why is that?
WIND: They could see you if they went down deep, deep, into the bottom of a well.
STAR: Will I, too, have a planet with men?
WIND: It is possible.
STAR: Will this be good?
WIND: Now I must ask a question. What is good?
STAR: Good is—God is—Good is—that it is. I cannot answer.
WIND: Then watch these men.
STAR: What is that, which is dark where it should be light?
WIND: It is a hill.
STAR: What is that upon the hill?
WIND: It is a tree.
STAR: What is that upon the tree?
WIND: It is a man
STAR: But I do not understand.
WIND: You need not.
STAR: But I hear this man.
WIND: Yes.
STAR: But I am because he spoke, because he is spoken.
WIND: Yes.
STAR: But he is not like those other men.
WIND: I did not say he was. They are like him.
STAR: I thought that it was dark upon that hill, and now it is so bright that my light is nothing. O Wind, why do I feel pain?
WIND: From the nails.
STAR: It is not my pain.
WIND: Yes, it is yours, because it is his.
STAR: For you, too?
WIND: Creation groans.
STAR: Wind?
WIND: Yes?
STAR: It is over.
WIND: It has begun.
So for us the number is three, and it is enough; it holds the full glory.
“The Church is lowering its standards,” I heard someone remark wistfully. In a wakeful period in the wee sma’ hours of the night the phrase echoed back to me. What does it mean? And in my mind’s eye flashed a vivid picture of a knight on horseback lowering his standard to the dust in defeat.
There are small subtle lowerings as well as the more obvious ones. If we fast now we do it for sociological and ecological reasons; all valid, and important. But we should not forget that fasting is also an aid to the prayer of the heart. It is indeed right and proper to fast in order to give the money thus saved to the starving people of the world, but it is also good to fast as a discipline which opens our hearts to God, and so to our neighbor.
If I am to show my love of God through love of neighbor, through walking a second mile with a stranger, through cutting my cloak in half in order to share it with the coatless, then I am able to show this love of neighbor only because first I must be able to accept my flawed and fragmented self enough to love myself; and I can love myself only when I can accept that God loves me, just as I am, without one plea.
One Lent, lost in the isolation of an attack of atheism, I wrote:
This is a strange place
and I would be lost were it not for all the others
who have been here before me.
It is the alien space
of your absence.
It has been called, by some,
the dark night of the soul.
But it is absence of dark as well as light,
an odd emptiness,
the chill of any land without your presence.
And yet, in this Lent of your absence,
I am more certain of your love and comfort
than when it is I who have withdrawn from you.
I thank God for the characters who come to me in my stories, and who make me realize that the Institution is not the Church; the Church is all of us flawed and fallen people who make up the Body of Christ.
And so we are part of the Trinity, and that is an awesome thought, and the only thing to do is raise our voices and sing!
If I find the Holy Spirit the easiest person of the Trinity to understand, my faith in God the Father is also somewhat easier than my faith in God the Son; but it still involves the calm acceptance of mutually contradictory statements. He is infinite and wholly other and beyond mortal comprehension. And yet I reach out to hold his hand. I shelter under the shadow of his wings and know his nearness. No moral system, no personal rectitude, no code of ethics, is going to get me through this time we live in. I cannot do it alone, or even with the help of everybody around me, though it may be through their help that God is holding my hand.
It is always God the Son I find most difficult: the man Jesus of Nazareth, the dead Jew, is my stumbling block. It is easy to worship the Word who spoke the stars. But that Word made flesh?
There are books attempting to prove that he was an Essene
that he was married
that he was a homosexual
that he was a guerilla fighter, out to free Israel from Rome
that he was not dead when he was taken down from the cross (death by the slow strangulation of crucifixion usually took three days) but that his disciples hid him and produced him, in a horrible hoax, three days later
that he was a demiurge sent to clean up the mess God had made of the world
that he was only pretending to be human and didn’t really share in human
suffering
that he was a good rabbi with delusions of divinity
that it doesn’t matter whether he was God or not
etcetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
All these books mostly tell me what he is not. I can only guess at a few things which help show me what he is:
Jesus of Nazareth was a carpenter, which at that time meant that he was of the respectable middle class; he had a carpenter’s strength; he had powerful lungs: he stood in a boat and spoke to thousands gathered on the shore (neither Ethel Merman nor Jesus Christ needed a throat mike), and the fact that he could cry out in a loud voice from the cross despite the strangling cords which compressed his rib cage is evidence of enormous physical power.
I don’t know what he looked like, but he did not have blond curls and blue eyes. He was a Jew of Jews.
Since he did not fall for any of the temptations Satan offered him, he had no hubris, and so he is not a tragic hero. With the tragic hero there is always the question of what might have been, how the tragedy could have been averted. If Oedipus had not killed the old man at the crossroads; if Faust had not heeded the temptation of knowledge and youth; if Macbeth had not listened to the witches and lusted for the crown.…
With Jesus the might-have-been was answered when the Spirit led him into the desert to be tempted. There is an inevitability to his life, but it is not a tragic inevitability, because his will remained free.
He is hard for the consumer in the United States—or Soviet Russia—to understand, because he couldn’t have cared less about the world’s standards of success.
The Irrational Season Page 19
