Connecting–a question

by: David Rothgery
Date: May 9, 2016

In my last post, I responded to a question that had been bothering me. It concerned the value of pointing the reader to a World Two? In it I discussed the concept of a “pilgrim”—a word I use instead of “seeker” to refer to those with a profound dissatisfaction with living in “World One.”

But is there not an irony, a hypocrisy here?

This website and the publishing of the book itself are squarely, solidly, in World One. “Here I am. Pay this many dollars for my novel and read it. Have a conversation with me about it.”

When I first began writing many years ago, I told myself I just wanted to write “something beautiful.” Share it with 100 readers. A 1000 would be better. A writer wants to communicate, be appreciated by others of like mind anyway. He thinks of how it happens. It used to be a teacher or a friend or a parent suggested he or she read this novel, this collection of essays, this book of poetry, or perhaps it was a blurb’s lavish praise on the back cover. It still happens that way. But now there is the Internet—websites, blogs. And the world of putting ideas out there has a decidedly more cynical, commercial cast to it.

Even so, is it not the case that the thoughts readers are asked to share still come in the form of words? You must read the words. Why would you choose to read this book, these words? Any book. Any words. Even words on websites.

So I turn to how it’s done today. And hope for the best. That I get someone to share my thoughts. Appreciate how I constructed the story, how I painted this scene or that. And hope that this “someone” recommends that you too “read this book”—because “it’s not only a good read, but a thoughtful one, one that may disrupt your thinking.”

Or should I think in terms of the Beautiful itself? Art in the quest for meaning is itself meaningful. Perhaps.

Maybe it all ends in silence. You frame the big questions and wait. Stephen puts his questions in a jar and sends them out to sea. To God. For answers. If he gets the answers, they’re probably not from God. God, as in Dostoyevsky’s story, is silent. Stephen’s Silkie, too, is silent.

The novel Silkie: World One, World Two ponders the significance of these matters. Stephen and Silkie are pilgrims.

[NOTE: In my other novel Little Mozarts, Little Kings [see the synopsis on this website], Colin too is a Pilgrim.]

Obama’s conversation with Robinson about the need for empathy—and novels

by: David Rothgery
Date: April 4, 2016

When President Obama sat down with novelist Marilynne Robinson in Des Moines last September, much of the conversation centered on the “gap” between Christian and traditional American values (“Love thy neighbor as thyself,” generosity, humility, importance of hard work), on the one hand, and formal governmental institutions, on the other. The New York Review of Books published the entire conversation, but it was what Nicholas Dames, in “The New Fiction of Solitude” (Atlantic, April 2016), did with it that got my attention. Dames asks, alluding to the Obama-Robinson meeting, “How often does power pay homage to imagination?”

The answer? Probably not often—at least on the global level. Still, U.S. presidents often honor artists. Poets read at Inaugurations (e.g., Frost, Angelou), and the list of artists who have received the Presidential Medal of Freedom is 100 plus long: actors (Streep, Moreno, Peck); painters (Wyeth, O’Keeffe, Rockwell); musicians (Anderson, Dylan, Ellington); and, yes, novelists (Steinbeck, Morrison, Allende).

Nicholas Dames, however, saw the Robinson-Obama visit as a more significant, revealing phenomenon. Obama was seeking insight from a novelist regarding our country’s loss of empathy—specifically, for others in very different situations from us. He sees the novel as a stimulant for reinvigorating that empathy, the growing deficit of which “imperils democracy.” Serious novels exercise the “moral imagination.” In a complex world “full of grays” but with “some truth,” novels “expose every part of ourselves—what it means to be human.” Obama, in recognition of their unique contribution to social values, laments the effect on our culture of so few reading them anymore. Literary novels, according to Dames, require and demand a solitude which moves beyond introspection to a sort of disruptive insight about the self. Quoting the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of the multivolume autobiographical My Struggle, Dames writes:

“Even then I had felt I was being false, someone who carried thoughts no one else had and which no one must ever know. What emerged from this was myself, this was what was me.”

Dames concludes that the new novelist may be what we need: “a stubbornly solitary voice . . . telling us what it means to be human—and what may keep us human.”

A big question

by: David Rothgery
Date: 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.