susanstinson

On Thursday, I heard Marilynne Robinson give the last of a series of four lectures at Yale. The series was called “Absence of Mind: The dispelling of inwardness from the modern myth of the self."

The talk was in Linsly-Chittenden Hall, a domed lecture room with seats that might be as old as I am, the kind with a fixed wooden arm to write on. Mine had smoke weed carved deeply into it; also, cut in less deeply: emerson and his brothers.

There were lots of gray-haired people, including three women talking about their writing group. Some of the students were formally dressed. There was a guy with the aggressively unimpressed air of a reporter with a brown scarf slung around his neck and an open laptop in the front row. Tall, black mikes stood in the front of each aisle that made me imagine urgent, lengthy questions before anything started. A sign language interpreter sat on the stage with his shirt sleeves rolled up, casually chatting with friends. It was beautiful day out, although it was supposed to rain. The daffodils were already in bloom. After I looked at the people a while, I noticed the huge black hearth near the entrance. Then, the stained glass, beautiful, with allegorical figures and words like music, religion, reverence , science, research, art, intuition, allegory. There were bas relief profiles and heads of Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Plato, Franklin, et all, each in his own little alcove above a window around the dome. A student tapped the mike before he sat in the adjoining row.

Marilynne Robinson has iron gray hair, straight, with a little flip at the shoulder. She had on a black pantsuit and purple silk scarf. I had the impression of wryness and intense reserve. Also of a lot of lived experience, and that she was not someone to back away from a rant should a rant seemed called for. She didn’t refer to her novels except in response to questions, but she is one of my favorite writers: Housekeeping. Gilead. Home.

I loved being under the sound of what she called the beautiful voice of human thought.

• She suggested that the soul could be thought of, not as an argument, but as an experience.
• She referred to the response that God gave to Moses when asked who he was: I am that I am, saying that people use the phrase I am, often, almost always with a modifier. I am hungry. I am typing. I am a reader. She called this the abrupt descent into singularity from the breadth of existence.
• Also: Complex life may indeed be the wonder of the universe. If it is, it is not diminished by the fact that we kill it routinely.
• The mind is what the brain does.
• She said that contemporary thinking about the soul tends to use the model of the wager -- that the soul exists primarily to be saved or lost, not as a name for an ongoing experience. She said that she, along with Descartes, thinks that the soul is mind’s self awareness, the part of self that stands apart and appraises. And that human beings are capable of negotiating our own enhancement.
• She said: The strangeness of reality consistently exceeds the expectations of science. Science not a final definition of reality, but a highly fruitful way of inquiring into it.

I talked to her a little afterwards, and asked if that definition -- a highly fruitful way of enquiring into reality – would extend to writing fiction. She smiled, and said that she wouldn’t disagree.

One of the most moving things she said was when, in response to a question, she spoke about having written three sad book. She said that she hadn’t set out for them to be sad, but that she knows that they are. But then, she said, she has spent years immersed in art of all kinds from all over the world, and knows that art at the highest levels can absorb huge levels of pain and make it thrilling.

Then she spoke about getting letters from readers, saying things like: My father was dying, I read your book aloud to him. I was so comforted.

She said, “Something that breaks your heart can enlarge your life. It’s amazing.”

When I spoke with her, I told her a little about what is going on with my novel. She told me to be brave. I said that I am. So, there’s that to live up to.

I loved the intellectual stimulation and moral seriousness; her beautiful, stern, aging presence; even the little chair desks that were fixed and immovable, yet still accommodated me in all my fullness at this difficult moment in my life. It was a pleasure -- a rare, fine, sweetness – to get to hear her talk.

I liked this account of a literary novelist's take on economic hard times, including a rush of hope at the AWP by my friend Sarah Van Arsdale.

PS Did you see this, desayunoencama? She mentions your press with excitement.

I just joined Facebook, so if you're there and want to friend me, that'd be swell.

Paul Lisicky is reading the manuscript of my novel, and posted this beautiful thing about it last night.

Last night I read a story, "The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea," which I loved in a salted, dazzled, aching way. The boy walks much too far out into the desert of a low tide and then runs into a cave, just before the waves, running the same speed as the sea! He gets backed to the wall of the cave by the water and stares at the sea to stop it. It's about passion, this story, imagined from the school dormitory by the children who didn't run away to sea, and it is beautiful in a way that wrenches me.

It's a translation from French in the October 27 issue of The New Yorker. The author, J.M.G. Le Clezio, won this year's Nobel Prize. I hadn't been paying enough attention to remember that, and I've never read his work before. This story is so good.

There are dangers here of parochialism, isolation, and romanticizing home (who makes it, at what cost; what happens there; who gets to stay and who gets to leave and who has to stay and who has to leave), but, still, this is speaking to me this morning:

To stay at home is paradoxically to change, to move. When poets -- and people of any other calling -- stay at home the first thing they move away from is professionalism. They move away from "professional standards." Their work begins to develop under pressure of questions not primarily literary: What good is it? Is it at home here? What do the neighbors think of it? Do they read it, any of them? What have they contributed to it? What does it owe them?

from "Notes: Unspecializing Poetry," in Standing by Words by Wendell Berry


PS: A old school bus painted green and white with THE VEGAN BUS painted on its side just had a hard time making the corner to drive down my narrow street. They gave a little toot of a honk a bit farther down. I wonder what's going on at the fairground this weekend! Okay, I just googled: The Vegan Bus. Either they are going to the Hunter/Jumper horse show at the fairgrounds, or some of them just live around here.

The bulletin board over my desk fell down.

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
James Baldwin

The novelist doesn't write to express himself, he doesn't write simply to render a vision he believes true, rather he renders his vision so that it can be transferred, as nearly whole as possible, to his reader. You can safely ignore the reader's taste, but you can't ignore his nature, you can't ignore his limited patience... I have to make the reader feel, in his bones if nowhere else, that something is going on here that counts.
Flannery O'Connor

Being in the moment utterly, yes -- eat an apple when you eat an apple, as Zen phraseology might have it -- but then trying also to move on from there as mindfully and scrupulously as possible, bringing any intellectual or imaginative arabesques back to the authentic human experience where they belong.

Padma Hejmadi, Room to Fly: A Transcultural Memoir

My friend Judy sent me a link to this article about Politeness and Authority by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times:

It’s a delicate thing, coming to the moment when you realize that your perceptions do count and that your writing can encompass them. You begin to understand how quiet, how subtle the writer’s authority really is, how little it has to do with “authority” as we usually use the word.

Tomorrow's my birthday. I think I'm going to climb the firetower in the state forest with my love to look at far stretches of trees on the hills.

• I'll be reading from the novel this Saturday, 3:20 - 4:10 pm, at First Churches in Northampton as part of a conference on Jonathan Edwards and the Environment. Come if you'd like!


• I finished another draft of the novel. People are reading. Some have been praising. Who knows what will happen next, or how, or when? I'm summoning my patience and resilience. Deep breaths.

I'm still dreaming of The Oxbow by Thomas Cole for the cover. I hear that the word shaddai, the Almighty, appears to be written upside down in Hebrew letters on the distant hill.

( Here is the painting.  )