In Which I Pay Attention

public computers

This is a re-post from five years ago. I've been thinking about the importance of paying attention, and this story came to mind...

A while back I was in the library checking my email on the public computers. The patrons of the library's public computers constitute what may politely be called a cross-section of humanity. At my library, they don't just let you sit at whichever computer you like. They assign you one, and it's right next to the person who sat down just before you did. Which is to say, there isn't any of that natural spacing of the discreet whereby two people in an elevator stand in the back corners and the third person stands in the middle right by the door. No, at the library computers you're spang up against the next fellow. The fellow I was spang up against was managing his account at an online dating site. He was a white-haired, paunchy old boy with a long, straight nose that ran bulged off to the left just at the tip-end, putting me in mind of a train that derailed right before pulling into the station. Every half-minute or so, he chuckled at something some dating prospect or other had written in her profile, wagging his head each time and cutting his eyes over toward me. Clearly he hoped I would ask him what he was laughing about or otherwise engage him in conversation. I was determined not to. I was in a bit of a hurry--just trying to check my email and get out of there--and I wasn't up to it anyway.

Soon my neighbor wandered away from the dating site and to a medical self-diagnosis site. He stopped chuckling and instead made little murmurs of interest--or maybe it was concern. I didn't take the bait. I was locked on to that email. At last the man nudged me with his elbow. He pointed at his screen. "How would you pronounce that word?" he asked.

I looked at his screen. "Splanchnoptosis, I guess." I went back to my email.

"Splanchnoptosis," he repeated. "Prolapse or backward displacement of an organ in the abdomen." He rubbed his ample belly. "I'm pretty sure that's what I've got," he said. I glanced in his direction and gave a quick, sympathetic nod, then looked off, hoping he would get the message.

The man turned his chair to face me. "You probably didn't know that you can cure cancer with baking soda, did you?"

It finally occurred to me that whatever my email said, it wasn't going to be nearly as interesting as the things this old boy had to say. I turned my chair too, and we were face to face.

"That's right," he said. "Some doctors in Italy taped pouches of baking soda under the armpits of women with breast cancer. Six weeks later, the tumors were gone. No surgery. No chemo. No radiation. I saw it on YouTube." He crossed his arms triumphantly, as if he had been one of the Italian doctors who made the discovery. "It's all about the pH levels."

He extended a thick right hand in my direction. "I'm David," he said.

I shook his hand. If I told him my name, I'm quite sure he didn't hear it. He was off again. "But there's no money in baking soda, is there? Where would the medical-industrial complex be if everybody was controlling their pH levels with baking soda and wasn't getting cancer? What would the doctors do? You can't make the mortgage on one of those doctor houses by selling baking powder, can you?"

David looked behind him as if to be sure nobody was eavesdropping, though he was speaking so excitedly now that I suppose everybody in the computer room could hear every word, unless they were wearing foam earplugs. He leaned in close. "You know who built all the hospitals, don't you?"

I shook my head.

"The Rockerfellers. That's who. The same Rockerfellers that are in charge of everything else. You think that's a coincidence, that the Rockerfellers built all those hospitals and the Rockerfellers are in charge of our health policy? You want to know why you didn't know baking soda is the cure for cancer?" He snorted disdainfully. "Ask the Rockerfellers. Only they won't tell you."

David gestured toward the people who were lined up outside the computer room for early voting. "It's like I told one of the women out there," he said. "I said, 'Do you really think you're smart enough to vote? Do you think you can outwit the military-medical-industrial complex? Because that's who runs things around here. Do you think you're smarter than the Rockerfellers?'"

To think my natural inclination was to ignore this guy.

"But there's no telling what women want, is there?" David said. I wasn't sure if that was a rhetorical question. "I know what women want," he said, "and I know how to give it to them." He leaned in even closer than before assumed a confidential tone. "They just want somebody who will listen."

Wendell Berry and the Romanians: Story and Place, Part 1

Wendell Berry

At Hutchmoot 2011, Andrew Peterson and I hosted a session about story and place. This post is the first half of the talk I gave at that session. The second half, which concerns itself mostly with Flannery O'Connor and a little bit of Marilynne Robinson, will come in the not-too-distant future. In The Myth of the Eternal Return, Mircea Eliade tells the true story of a folklorist who schlepped around Romania collecting ballads and folk stories in the 1930s. He was especially taken by a ballad about a young shepherd who had the misfortune of having a mountain fairy fall in love with him. He was already betrothed to a village girl, however, and had no interest in the fairy. The fairy was insanely jealous, but the young man would not be moved; he loved his village girl and was determined to marry her. So the day before his wedding, the fairy pushed him off a cliff.

Shepherds from the village found him at the bottom of the ravine and carried his broken, lifeless body back to the village. When his fiancée saw them, she burst into a long, emotional lament full of mythological references reaching back before the beginnings of history, as if her sorrow were the oldest sorrow in the world. That lamentation forms the main body of the ballad.

Part of the folklorist’s job, of course, is to try to figure out where such stories and ballads come from. This one, the villagers told him, was very old, passed down for who knew how many generations. But the folklorist kept asking, and somebody remembered that the fiancée in the ballad—the one who sang the original lament—was still living in the next village up the road. So maybe it wasn’t as old as all that, the villagers agreed.

“Wait a minute,” I can picture the folklorist saying. “You’re saying that the whole thing with the mountain fairy happened just up the road?”

“That’s right.”

“And it happened recently enough that the fiancée in the story is still alive?”

“That’s right,” said the villagers. “She’s the one you ought to talk to if you want to know more about the ballad.”

So the folklorist did. He traveled to the next village and there he found a woman in her late fifties or early sixties who said, yes, she was the fiancée from the ballad.

“So what happened?” the folklorist asked.

“Well, it was about forty years ago,” the woman said. “I was engaged to be married, but the day before the wedding, my fiancé fell off a cliff and died.”

“Fell off a cliff?” the folklorist said. “You mean was pushed off a cliff? By a mountain fairy?”

“Oh, I don’t know about any fairy,” the woman said. “I’ve heard about her in the ballad, but before that, all I knew was that he fell off a cliff and died the day before we were supposed to get married.”

“But what about the long, soulful lament with all the mythological references?”

“I mourned him,” the woman said. “It was a sad thing, losing a fiancé the day before the wedding. But I couldn’t have made up all that business that’s in the ballad. I was a simple village girl. I did the regular mourning that you would expect, but then I tried to get on with my life.”

After talking with the woman, the folklorist headed back to the first village. “Hey, I talked to the woman in the ballad,” he told the villagers. “She said there wasn’t any fairy. She said her fiancé just had an accidental fall the day before their wedding.”

“Pitiful, isn’t it?” said one of the villagers, shaking his head and clucking his tongue. “The poor woman was so crazed with grief that she couldn’t even remember the fairy who pushed her fiancé to a horrible death.”

There are about fifteen things I love about that story. One of the biggest is the villagers’ vision of the world they inhabited. “You think these are podunk villages?” they seemed to be saying to the folklorist. “Oh no, friend, there are big things afoot here in these villages—more than meets the eye. And these peasants here—they’re full participants in the eternal.” They believed that their mundane world interpenetrated with a world of transcendence.

In his Port William novels, Wendell Berry is doing something very similar to what those Romanian villagers were doing with their story of the jilted fairy. Berry writes of a forgotten little place, and in so doing demonstrates that there are vast things afoot—much more than meets the eye.

Certain religious traditions speak of “thin places”—places on earth where the veil between the seen and the unseen is particularly thin, where mortals are more likely to see the goings-on of the spirit world. Perhaps those Romanians viewed the fairy’s cliff as a thin place. The point of Wendell Berry’s whole project, it seems to me, is that every place, if you settle down and look at it, if you pay attention, is a thin place. After he finished his education in California, Wendell Berry moved back to the Kentucky County where both sides of his family had lived for five generations, and he said, “I’m going to keep looking at and listening to this place—this landscape, these voices, these folkways, these old stories—until it gives up its secrets.”

I’m not trying to be especially mystical here. I think I’m talking about a pretty straightforward truth that Christians claim to believe. C.S. Lewis put it this way in an oft-quoted passage from “The Weight of Glory”:

It is a serious thing to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.

There are no ordinary people.

You have never talked to a mere mortal.

Nations, cultures, arts, civilization these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

The job of a storyteller, you might say, is to make thin places, places where we can see truer things than we normally see in the world around us. To do that requires that we pay attention to the world as we find it. We need to look and keep looking, confident that the truth will tell itself.

Big, eternal truths are pulsing and surging just below the surface of things, forever threatening to bust through. And the surface of things is scarcely adequate to conceal them.

Original Music: Branko's Love Song

If you've read The Secret of the Swamp King, you might remember Branko's love song. Heretofore, the "song" has actually been a poem. Enter Jonathan Barnes of Nashville, a man with feechie tendencies of his own. He set Branko's words to music. Here he is performing Branko's Love Song:

The First Feechie: Enkidu

gilgamesh

I'm teaching a world literature course this fall. We started with the epic of Gilgamesh. It's one of the oldest surviving works of literature, probably written around 2500 BC. To put it in perspective, that's about a thousand years before Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt. I'm pretty sure Abraham would have known the story of Gilgamesh--and known it as an ancient story. When Gilgamesh was written, civilization was still a relatively novel concept in the Fertile Crescent. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the central conflict/friendship of the epic should be between a civilizer (Gilgamesh) and a suspiciously feechiefied fellow named Enkidu. Two-thirds god and one-third man, Gilgamesh is stronger than anyone else in the world. When he becomes king of Uruk, he oppresses his people, taking whatever he wants because no one can oppose him. When the cry of the people of Uruk goes up, the gods order the goddess Aruru to make his equal. So she pinched off some clay and dropped it in the wilderness, and up came Enkidu:

His body was rough, he had long hair like a woman's; it waved like the hair of Nisaba, the goddess of corn. His body was covered with matted hair like Samuqan's, the god of cattle. The was innocent of mankind; he knew nothing of the cultivated land. Enkidu ate grass in the hills with the gazelle and lurked with wild beasts at the water-holes; he had joy of the water with the herds of wild game.

Civilization didn't come easy for Enkidu. When friendly shepherds tried to give him a meal, he didn't know what to do with himself:

All the shepherds crowded around to see him; they put down bread in front of him, but Enkidu could only suck the milk of wild animals. He fumbled and gaped, at a loss what to do or how he should eat the bread and drink the strong wine.

When at last Enkidu comes to the city of Uruk to meet the heretofore unrivalled Gilgamesh, the two become friends in a most feechiefied manner: by fighting first and shaking hands later.

Mighty Gilgamesh came on and Enkidu met him at the gate. He put out his foot and prevented Gilgamesh from entering the house, so they grappled, holding each other like bulls. They broke the doorposts and the walls shook. Gilgamesh bent his knee with his foot planted on the ground and with a turn Enkidu was thrown. Then immediately his fury died. When Enkidu was thrown he said, 'There is not another like you in the world. Ninsun, who is as strong as a wild ox in the byre, she was the mother who bore you, and now you are raised above all men... [or, as Dobro Turtlebane would have said more succinctly, 'You got what it takes, Civilizer!]...So Enkidu and Gilgamesh embraced and their friendship was sealed.

Enkidu and Gilgamesh go on to have many adventures together. More than once Enkidu gripes about having given up his wild life and gone civilized.

All that to say, feechie stories have a very long and august history, going back as far as Western literature itself. And yet, as a genre, feechie stories don't always get the respect they deserve. Would you believe that there isn't a single university in America with a Feechie Studies department? Not one! Maybe we should start a movement--or at least circulate a petition.

How Stories Do Their Work On Us

Reading with my children has reminded me of a truth that years of adulthood had almost caused me to forget: that “story” is truer than “precept.” We adults tend to think that we arrive at the truth of a story by reducing it to two or three abstractions that the narrative embodies. The parable of the Prodigal Son is “about” grace and forgiveness.The Lord of the Rings is “about” courage and friendship. We listen with half an ear as the preacher reads the scripture lesson, because his sermon is going to boil it down to three basic truths anyway. But our children know it’s the story that does the work on us, not the disembodied precept. If you don’t believe it, open up a book of Aesop’s Fables; skip the fables, and just read the morals at the end of the fables. You might just as well tell punch lines instead of telling jokes. The moral may summarize the story and bring it to a point, but the moral isn’t the point.

It’s not that abstract concepts or ideas are unimportant. Mercy, forgiveness, repentance, abundance—all the things that form the basis of Christian truth—are abstract concepts. But being mere mortals, we can’t really understand any of those things if they aren’t grounded in what we can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. You can talk about grace until you’re blue in the face, but you aren’t going to come up with a definition that improves on the parable of the Prodigal Son: a father, arms outstretched, welcoming a rebellious and wicked son back into his home. And the word “friendship” doesn’t mean much unless you’ve seen a friend in action—Sam Gamgee, for instance, nearly drowning himself rather than let Frodo journey to Mordor alone.

The Habit of Understanding The moral benefit of a story goes far beyond the “moral of the story.” Almost by definition, an avid reader is in the habit of understanding what it’s like to be somebody else. Whatever the moral of the story, reading sharpens the skills of empathy, which is not only a moral virtue, but a huge advantage in any pursuit. Habit Five of Steven Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” boils it down: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Readers, you might say, are habitual understanders. A story allows a reader to join in the inner lives of its characters. Readers aren’t mere spectators or audience members. A well-written book allows them to experience what it’s like to be another person. And isn’t that the very basis of empathy and kindness? Isn’t it a key component of love? Our natural tendency is to close in on ourselves, to be so concerned with our own interests, our own preoccupations that we find it hard to understand another person’s perspective. More than that, we find it very hard to understand our own selves.

Consider the case of David and Bathsheba. Because I tell stories for a living, one of my heroes is the prophet Nathan. He’s the one who had the unfortunate job of confronting David about his adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband Uriah.

One has to be careful when exposing a king who has already demonstrated a willingness to murder in order to keep his guilt hidden. So Nathan made up a story. He told about a rich man with many flocks and herds and a poor man who had only one little lamb that he loved like a family member. When the rich man needed a lamb to feed a visitor, he took the poor man’s pet lamb rather than slaughter one of his own.

David was enraged. He vowed that the rich man would die for this injustice. That’s when Nathan brought the truth down like a thunderstroke: “You are the man.”

It was one of the great moments in the history of fiction. Cut to the heart, David repented of his sin. And Nathan the prophet lived to tell more stories.

Nathan’s story did what all great fiction does: it took David out of himself, and it gave him an emotional attachment to what it is good and right. Nathan didn’t tell the king anything he didn’t know already. David knew it was wrong to kill a man and take his wife. But he had built for himself a little world of self-justification and self-protection and self-indulgence that made it possible for him to ignore the moral facts of the matter. Nathan’s story took him out of that world and let him see what it looked like from the outside.

Loving the Right As the prophet Nathan knew, it’s not enough to know what’s right. People have to desire what’s right before they’ll do it consistently. Stories have a unique ability to shape a person’s sympathies—to change what they desire.

I love the Narnia books. I think what I love most about them is the fact that they give us a chance to renew the way we feel about things we’ve known all our lives. If you’ve been paying attention in Sunday School, you already know all the theology in the Narnia books. They don’t give you new facts to chew on. They help align your feelings and desires with regard to the facts you already know.

Instead of giving you a lecture on the importance of staying warm, Lewis builds a fire and says, “Here—feel this. Doesn’t that feel good?” You can hardly help but love Aslan for the things he says and does. You can hardly help but desire what’s good and right and true.

A virtuous life is a life of adventure—of facing challenges, standing firm, rescuing the powerless, righting wrongs. A good adventure story dramatizes that adventure and makes it seem like the sort of life that nobody would want to miss out on. It doesn’t just tell the reader what’s right; it helps the reader towant what’s right.

Real life doesn’t always feel like a great adventure. Sometimes doing the right thing is rather dull. Great adventure stories remind us that in the end, the choices we make every day are the stuff of greatness. The world is changed by people who choose to tell the truth, to show kindness, to be courageous.

Our natural tendency is to burrow into our own little lives and so lose perspective on what really matters and what’s really true. Our good deeds start to seem irrelevant, and our bad deeds start to seem like they’re no big deal. We all need to step outside ourselves now and then—perhaps to try out another, better self, or perhaps, as David did, to see our own situation from another viewpoint.