"But the Boulder Is Gone"

Alice Munro's work is filled with landscapes that don't mean anything and yet reverberate with non-meaning and a sort of backward emotional soulfulness you can't label or justify.  They are simply the nameless centers of universes that encompass us all.  In "Chaddeleys and Flemings," one of her most expansive and yet intensively introspective stories, she turns the boulder-decorated gravesite of a one-legged nobody in rural Canada into the end of a line of thought about what we know about other people, what we remember, what we need to remember, and what truthfully ends up worthless, which happens to be most everything and then again nothing at all.  The hopelessness is the quid pro quo and is the reason you need to hope.  Her artistry collapses philosophy and makes feeling become the only compass, a feeling that is schooled and chilled by a direct connection to what is "there."  And "there" is this:  dirt, gray grass, that comatose boulder sucking in the light, allowing words to defy but never erase, words being gravel and weeds and dimly lit sky.

"But the boulder is gone," writes Munro.  "Mount Hebron is cut down for gravel, and the life buried here is one you have to think twice about regretting."

I'm always trying to figure out why I love  Munro so much.  It isn't her way with words as much as her way with getting outside of words, finding that perfect "objective correlative" that pieces together a moment that transcends metaphor and simile and theme and configures the shape behind "hope" and "despair."  It's something so secret and universal the words turn out to be usefully useless, and you come upon that image of that boulder now gone and yet as heavy as it ever was.  The tongue can't go there.  The brain can't either.  But it's all she has to work with so she finds the pulse inside the boulder, that feeling throbbing within the most uninteresting object and scenery and scenario. 

I'm almost halfway through her Selected Stories right now, reading them slowly, but also trying not to lose the impulse to skip to get to those diamond-sharp insights that happen almost every paragraph.

What Kind of Party Is This?

 

 

"Dance of the Happy Shades" is one of those short stories that has a meaning and sentiment so effortlessly deep you almost have to reread it to grasp its gravity, and to remember it in all its glory.  In fact I remember reading it way back in the day, when I was trying to teach myself how to write, and I think it must have left a radioactive pellet in my brain.   Reading it again the other day felt like some kind of secret and gorgeous electro shock therapy.  I was bawling by the denouement.  That power comes from the tenacity of the voice, a chatty but sharp and almost grim evocation of a sad, sad party in which Miss Marsalles, an elderly piano teacher, shows off the students she is teaching with a sandwiches-and-punch recital in her home. 

 

The plot follows the day all the way through in the point of view of one of her students who isn't impressed, and whose mother seems almost disgusted by Miss Marselles' lack of cleanliness, and by the fact that she is old and unmarried and living with her sister who just had a stroke.  Miss Marselles' home, her sandwiches, her flat purple punch all contribute to a drab, melancholy atmosphere that gets somehow exonerated with the appearance of children from a "special school."  Miss Marselles visits them and teaches them at the school, and she includes them in her recital without making a big deal out of it.  But all the other mothers and children seem shocked by their sudden appearance.  And when one of them, Dolores Boyles, a "a girl as big as I am, a long-legged, rather thin and plaintive-looking girl with blonde, almost white hair," sits down and plays the piano with strange and undeniable grace, the room changes, as does the way we suddenly have access to Miss Marselles' soul.  All the peripherals disappear.  The piano teacher's life comes into focus in such a grand and succinct way we suddenly understand what it means to actually be alive without having to struggle with ego and meanness and self delusion.  We know what it means to live within a self-imposed realm of grace and kindness.  

 

It takes the appearance of a "freak" like Dolores Boyles to show us how to release Miss Marsalles from the category the narrator wants to consign her to.  Dolores Boyles is also released.  The representation of both in that moment has a magical matter-of-factness:  "Miss Marselles sits beside the piano and smiles at everybody in her usual way.  Her smile is not triumphant, or modest.  She does not look like a magician who is watching people's faces to see the effect of a rather original revelation -- nothing like that.  You would think, now that at the very end of her life she has found someone whom she can teach -- whom she must teach -- to play the piano, she would light up with the importance of this discovery.  But it seems that the girl's playing like this is something she always expected, and she finds it natural and satisfying; people who believe in miracles do not make much fuss when they actually encounter one."

 

Damn.

 

That's all I ever want when I try to write:  that sense of complete understanding delivered without decoration or apology, just given to us like a letter from a saner and more poetic plane of existence.

 

Incomprehensible

Molly Springfield is an artist I came across the last day of a show at Indianapolis Museum of Art on Sunday, titled "Graphite," a wonderful exhibit focusing on drawings made with, you guessed it, graphite.  What a lucky find.  Her work has a hermetically sealed innocence and intelligence to it that boggles your brain.  In a suite of drawings of copy-machine pages, Springfield pulls together obsession and yearning for knowledge in a sleek, creepy package.  The words are Proust's (from Swann's Way), the color and style from Xerox.  Each drawing I saw is a simple, rigorous articulation.   She turns words into objects with these pieces, replacing the beauty of Proust's prose with the method Proust used to express it.  It's like falling in love with some one's clothes, not the person, which isn't as superficial as it sounds.  The lusting after of intelligence, the need to consume and show what is being consumed, is what these drawings seem to represent, a sly comment on the luxury of reading without really reading.  The cleverness is not in the joke being given to us here, but in the supple realization, the graphite drawing representing a copy, and the copy being the original text on which the drawing is based.  A crazy conundrum pops up, and yet what's truly amazing is the quiet prayer emanating from Springfield's practice.  These are pages of a secret Bible you don't have to read to comprehend.  You just have to see.  It's like a formalized dyslexia, the sumptuous nothingness language can become once you realize you don't need to know what's being relayed to understand the power of its inception. 

Diligently Inevitable

I read "The Shawl" by Cynthia Ozick aloud in class on Monday.  Damn.  It's one of those stories that make you want to stop as your surge forward but you can't stop because every part of what you're reading and seeing inside your head is so diligently inevitable you feel tossed aside and yet pulled within, caught up in something that destroys and disappears and destroys and disappears.  Ozick's story gives us direct access into horror, and yet at the center of everything is a sort of insanely beautiful sensuousness, evidenced by this last paragraph:

"All at once Magda was swimming through the air. The whole of Magda traveled through loftiness. She looked like a butterfly toucan a silver vine. And the moment Magda’s feathered round head and her pencil legs and balloonish belly and zigzag arm splashed against the fence, the steel voices went mad in their growling, urging Rosa to run and run to the spot where Magda had fallen from her flight against the electrified fence; but of course Rosa did not obey them. She only stood, because if she ran they would shoot, and if she let the wolf’s screech ascending now through the ladder of her skeleton break out, they would shoot; so she took Magda’s shawl and filled her mouth with it, stuffed it in, until she was swallowing up, the wolf’s screech and tasting the cinnamon and almond depth of Magda’s saliva; and Rosa drank Magda’s shawl until it dried."

You earn that kind of poetry by staring violence and ugliness and vileness right in the face.  You suck in the putrid air of what people can do, and you exhale the grace they are capable of.  As I read out loud I felt the room get quiet and uncomfortable, and the whole way through the discomfort increased.  No room for laughs, just recognition.  When you can create something this humorless and yet so incredibly accessibilie, you find other ways to connect outside of "likability" and "relatability."  You find the core of every one's existence, all of it guided through the consciousness of Rosa, and you locate morality in the death of a baby you truly feel is your own.

Above is a drawing by the German artist Kathe Kollwitz, who died in 1945.  Her drawings, prints and paintings have the same mysterious and effortless clarity as Ozick's writing, so clear and pure it feels like the world is about to disappear.

You Will Be Missed



Dont't worry about what happens next.  Simply walk through the door, and you'll find all that you once feared has turned itself inside out.  I used to be like you.  I used to fall into that same trap, but birds don't need restrictions.  They need sky.  They need air.  They need destinations.  This isn't makebelieve either.  I wore myself out getting here, blistered and cut, scorched and frozen, a little bit pissed off.  I've flown over wars, carnivals, traffic jams.  My eyes are smaller because of it.  You came out of that room and you were terrified, but then it all went away.  I came at you like you knew it was about to happen, the fury and finesse pulling itself out of the moment and into our convergence.  Birds don't belong indoors, but I wasn't a bird anyway, just a flicker.  Then you knew.  It wasn't really over particularly, just a rought start.  You continued walking but you were already laid out on the floor.