A big question

David Rothgery
January 16, 2016

April 10, 2016

This question has been puzzling me of late—about all my writing but most specifically my novel– Silkie: World One, World Two.

Of what value is a novel that points a reader to a World Two? That urges him/her to confront by way of an existential love story the inexplicable nature of human suffering?

Answer: Dissatisfaction—a profound one.

Specifically, in Silkie, Stephen, the narrator, is dissatisfied with World One–the safe, certain realm of social mores, laws, bureaucratic policies, moral precepts, and professional expectations. These not only fail to explain but discourage an honest asking. Stephen asks: Why is it a magnificent eagle can be caged for years in a box? How is it that three young Mexican girls are raped and killed as they cross a desert to search for work, for food?

World One provides answers: It erects gods, recites scriptures, submits to dogma, bows to authority.

All around him, but somehow unreachable because of an invisible “wall,” Stephen senses a World Two—one which compels altered perceptions. And he wonders: Is this World Two the place where all that is incomprehensible in World One is made comprehensible? Or where everything wrong is made right? Or is it, rather . . . death?

This profound dissatisfaction with living entirely in World One has a long history as the driving force behind the creative process for artists and thinkers.

For writers, it takes the shape of story, metaphor and symbol. Dostoyevsky’s Christ–responding to the Inquisitor’s charge He has doomed Humanity to an eternity of pain—is silent. The citizens of LeGuin’s “Omelas”–learning their happiness is founded in the unspeakable suffering of one child— “walk into the darkness.” Morrison’s “Beloved”—inhabiting two worlds–emerges ghost-like from the forest.

For scientists, precise description becomes compelling image. Loren Eiseley, the natural science writer, marvels at the “star thrower” flinging starfish beyond the surf to save them while all around lap “the insatiable waters of death.” Carl Sagan reminds us that our earth is but a “pale blue dot . . . in a vast cosmic arena . . . . “ and that our “posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light . . . millions of light years away from the nearest galaxy[of] billions of galaxies, and the universe is still expanding, and we humans have been on this earth less than one percent of its existence, and each of us is only one of billions still alive, and are we so important then?” Annie Dillard concludes we live in “a monstrous world [which] running on chance and death, careening blindly from nowhere to nowhere, somehow produced wonderful us. I came from the world, I crawled out of a sea of amino acids, and now I must whirl around and shake my fist at that sea and cry Shame!” Plunging into the “fecundity” of nature, Annie Dillard decries the “crushing waste” in a universe “that does not care if we live or die,” and wonders if “God has the same affectionate disregard for us that we have for barnacles.” [If life has no meaning, why do so many existentialists—writers and scientists alike–work so hard to artistically express its meaninglessness?]

Dillard’s intense, descriptive brilliance as she probes for answers in the world around her is unmatched. I cannot even come close to her lyric power. She labels herself a “pilgrim.” In a way, though, I too am a pilgrim–on the same journey as Dillard’s: to make sense of a cosmos whose modus operandi is, apparently, clumsy chance. The setting for my pilgrim though is not the natural world. It is the mind itself.

“When World One is no longer enough, and glimpses of World Two make you call World One into question,
something like a disruption happens. [Silkie reviewer]

Recent news images haunt me: starving children fleeing Syria; an impoverished mother nursing her infant while pounding rocks in a sandstone quarry in 100-degree desert in India; the stoning death of a young Afghan woman (accused of but innocent of burning a Qur’an). Such horrors do not lend themselves to neat social laws, theological explanations, or even scientific certainties.
The danger of responding to our dissatisfaction with World One is that we don’t know how. Straying too far from it–whatever the romantic allure of the mystic, the unknowable–is deadly when it moves beyond metaphor and image and fantasy.” Stephen (the narrator in Silkie) jeopardizes his career, relationships, and even his sanity. He is not even certain there is a World Two.

He is certain, however, that there is the need for a World Two. For moving, on occasion, beyond the petty concerns, superficiality, and insensibility that World One mandates. In his search, he is transformed.