Unresting, unhasting and silent as light

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation…while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

The Book of Job opens Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, and its questions and choruses inhabit the whole film. In particular, “Where were you?” echoes. It is the question asked of God, and it is also God’s answer. Other questions, whispered, intimate, draw lines through the film’s chaotic beauty. Where are you? What are we to you? Why should I be good? How can I get back to where they are? These questions resonate through the life of an ordinary family, reckoned in aeons, honeycombed with oppositions: grace and nature, mother and father, innocence and knowledge, music and silence. One brother’s death brings memories throbbing to the surface and makes the questions urgent. The response, flung across the heavens, is a shout of joy.

For me the film has a correlative in a well-known nineteenth-century hymn by Walter Chalmers Smith. Without the chaos and silence of the film, the hymn enacts the same truths: to grow is to die, yet life’s mystery is bright, not dark.

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most blessèd, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty, victorious, thy great Name we praise.

Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light,
Nor wanting, nor wasting, thou rulest in might;
Thy justice like mountains high soaring above
Thy clouds which are fountains of goodness and love.

To all life thou givest—to both great and small;
In all life thou livest, the true life of all;
We blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree,
And wither and perish—but naught changeth thee.

Great Father of glory, pure Father of light,
Thine angels adore thee, all veiling their sight;
All laud we would render: O help us to see
’Tis only the splendour of light hideth thee.

Cracked

Since posting about creativity versus health, I've been feeling some misgiving, deepened by reading Virginia Woolf. Because it's not exactly a choice, is it? Whether to be mad or not. And mental health and good behaviour are not always what they're cracked up to be.  They are guarantors of happiness only insofar as happiness is constituted in conformity, in treading the via media. I think as I get older I'm growing less tolerant of social transgression, more plaintive about disturbance of the peace. This happens, no doubt, when we get comfortable, when we become elder to the new generation. But when we become elder still, we face the final unravelling of everything we've woven so tightly, so decorously round ourselves.

Dementia, the long goodbye, is a horrible darkness, but in some cases that darkness is ever so slightly illuminated by creation. Dementia patients can find in themselves a sudden sensitivity to art, a sudden ability to paint or compose that they never had before. Ravel's Bolero is the notable example: a piece made by a demented mind that has a driving rhythm and a strange, lurching magnificence. We would be poorer without it. Oliver Sacks has been criticised for exploiting his patients' stories of neural anomaly, but I think he's added immeasurably to our stock of human experience. Experiences on the perilous edge of human consciousness, which we might never know except by reading about them, challenge our notions of what it means to be human, what it means to be healthy or happy or good, how much our notions of normal are constituted in perception. And Woolf, gifted and afflicted, lyrically afloat in the full-fed stream of her consciousness, wrote at a depth few of us reach. We would be poorer without her.

She's one of many artists - the ones Sonya Chung was harking back to - that embody Shakespeare's compounding of the lunatic, the lover and the poet. And of course, as the poets would testify, we would be poorer without a spectrum of experience that involves the unconforming, the unbodied, the inexplicable. Keats saw it in Shakespeare, but the coinage, ‘negative capability,' is his. “When man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." When experience of all kinds is welcome evidence of existence, and the fuel of creative fire. While I might personally fear an exile from the middle way, collectively we need the experience of these border rangers. We need the negatively capable to testify to the enduring mystery of existence. To find the hard shell of normal and crack it open.

West of Eden

The Iowa Writers Workshop turns 75 this year, and a number of alumni will be writing about it. You can read all the essays as they come in here. IWW was the first creative writing program offered at an American university. Its alumni boasts three laureates and seventeen Pulitzers, and the program itself won the National Humanities Medal. Former faculty include Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Philip Roth, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell, and past students include Michael Cunningham, Nam Le, and Flannery O'Connor.

Marilynne Robinson (one of those Pulitzers) has been on the faculty for twenty years. In this lecture at Washington U, she gives a wry account of the contest between East and West in the United States:

"I find that the hardest work in the world— it may in fact be impossible—is to persuade easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling. On learning that I am from Idaho, people have not infrequently asked, 'Then how were you able to write a book?' Once or twice, when I felt cynical or lazy, I have replied, 'I went to Brown,' thinking that might appease them—only to be asked, 'How did you manage to get into Brown?'"

Iowa, being roughly in the middle, but still west of east, defies the preconception. It's a byword for culture, and its capital is a UNESCO City of Literature, rubes and all. I want to go to there.

All well and good

Sonya Chung writes, at The Millions, “on Facebook, you compose your status, you present a manufactured version of yourself, your voice, your images. It occurs to me that I recoil from Facebook and Twitter partly because they feel to me like the Flanders household from The Simpsons, where everything is ‘okeley-dokeley!' — upbeat, positive, happy."

This is part of a larger argument that today's young creative set, unlike Bloomsbury or the Beats, are happy, healthy and conscientious - and boring. They marry and have children, they tend their mental and physical health. They're not battling addiction, depression, and dysfunction so much as juggling child care and yoga.

Sounds good to me, but Chung thinks that with mental health and emotional clarity come “a certain creative loss." It's true that creative achievement has often been accompanied by melancholia, but melancholy is not always the harbinger of genius. It's also true that health and happiness are not the be-all and end-all of human fulfilment. However, given how tenuous our hold on both tends to be, I don't think either should be counted cheap. Anyone who's lost them knows their value.

And which would you honestly choose? A tragic life followed by literary immortality, or a happy and sane one, followed by anonymity? Unhinged or okely-dokely? Call me boring, but I'd take the latter every day.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

Is there more than whimsy in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by woods on a snowy evening”? Is there a comment here on the soul’s exile from nature, its emersion and collusion in civilisation, in contracts with neighbours and even with tamed beasts that use bells to speak? Perhaps. But scraping off the snow to look for social commentary rather wrecks the effect. I think instead Frost wanted us to read a poem about somebody stopping by woods on a snowy evening. To feel the chilly breath, the softness of falling snow, the dark, deep loveliness of evening woods that half tempt him to forego sleep and venture further in. It’s a delicious moment, but one he cannot keep except in poetry.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.