It’s much too early and way to cold
these winter mornings when my daughter and I make the drive to Kearsley High
School, but no matter how groggy, I don’t forget to grab my cd of Bach’s
Christmas cantatas. As soon as I say
goodbye and pull her blue head close to give it a kiss, I drive off into the
dark morning, flipping open the cd box and just missing a bus that is turning
into the school, I pop the cd into the slot, and it’s full blast joy. I feel every cell pulsing with the notes,
rushing with the shepherds and the angels to greet the light of the world. Ten minutes later, I’m back in the College
Cultural neighborhood, waiting for the second cantata to begin—the melting
sweetness of flutes and oboes—when, oh when? In the few seconds of waiting, I stare at the
rough trunks of maples in the dark and think how deathly quiet the world would be
without this music—the whole world like Flint of empty space and burned-out
houses and trailers with shattered windows still standing in their parks. Depressed.
Before Christmas, I made my
fifteen-year old teenager, who identifies as EMO (black clothes, piercings,
dyed hair, full of angst) go with me to the Bach concert in Ann Arbor. We’d run around to her favorite stores and
eaten in a Korean noodle place surrounded by cool-looking young people. We both felt out of place—Flintstones surrounded
by lacquer and sparkle—and she later told me that restaurants in Ann Arbor make
her anxious. But sitting in the dark of
the auditorium as soon as I heard the roll of the tympanum, the call of the
oboe, and then all those notes suspended one above another in motion—I felt so relieved
that I cried. I felt everything. It was as if there was a sound board inside
me, and I was making the music, too. In
that transcendent few hours, it no longer mattered that I couldn’t share my
emotional world fully with my daughter or my husband or my students; the music
reminded me it is there, it is real, a resource, and that was enough. I was so grateful and so deeply happy. And surprise!
My daughter didn’t want to leave at intermission. She twined her arm around mine as the soprano
lines in helpless love twined round the gentler movements of the flute. “Maybe I should get out my cello again,” she whispered
in the dark, and I knew that the music had calmed and reassured her, too, in
ways that I never could.
The students that I encounter in
English classes at UM-F are a lot like my daughter, and, more and more, I hear
them use “anxiety” or “mental issues” as an excuse for falling behind or not
coming to class or not turning in a paper on time. From what they tell me and what they write,
technology and the future-oriented image-driven world we live in is the cause
of their disease. “I can’t fully digest
my Instagram feed (do I even want to digest it?) or sit still without migrating
to some numbing screen,” writes Morgan Troxell.
Instead of reading, more and more students listen to audio books so that
they can drive or multi-task, they text so as not to be surprised by the
textures of human voices, they are distressed by their felt addiction to their
phones but cannot put them down. They
fashion selves on Facebook and Snapchat and speak in the “new language” of
memes. A student recently told me that
my literature classes were “comforting,” and I think the comfort comes, not
from me (potentially a maternal figure for many of the young ones), but from the
fact that literary English is much more like music than the other forms of
English they encounter throughout the day—techno-speak, business jargon and
text messaging.
As “Information” has come to predominate the modern world,
English is at risk of being reduced to the language of facts, of lists, of
organization, of balancing accounts, of making laws, and of being in
charge. But the tyrannical rule of
“Information” cannot dispel completely our primal need for that other language
of the imagination. That other
language—literary language—is full of stuff—“fruit-cakey”—is how a student described
Shakespeare’s English, and she was right.
It is full to bursting with ideas, images, figures of speech, sounds and
rhythms that satisfy the ear’s need for music, the mind’s need for ideas, and
the human being’s need for a language of real exchange. We don’t need to catch or understand all the
words or metaphors. We feel stuff when
we hear music, and if we let ourselves, we feel stuff, too, when we read
silently or read aloud. Literature is
generous that way, and it should be calming because it awakens us to
ourselves—to all that there is in us that cannot be reduced to a selfie or a
Facebook post.
Scientific studies have shown that
social media makes people feel isolated and depressed. After scrolling through the perfect families and successful “friends” on Facebook or the dating sites where everybody looks too good to
be true, it is a total relief to enter the world of just about any
fiction. The characters, if they are
interesting, will more than likely be very imperfect. When asked why she was always writing about
“freaks and poor people,” Flannery O’Connor said that novelists were much more
interested in the poor because they live with less padding between themselves
and the world and because, despite what most of us would like to think, human
beings are not perfectible by their own efforts. What we have in common and, finally, what
makes us human, and therefore beautiful, is that we are limited. We long for things. We don’t understand things. We are in conflict. We are homeless wanderers through this world,
looking for our other half, looking to beget in beauty, looking out for our own
transmigration.
Most importantly, literature teaches us to think—to have our
own authentic ideas that move us to join, to act, to (hopefully) make the world
and our relationships better. The ideas
I’ve just shared with you—that anxiety stems from soul alienation and that it
can be cured by art that connects us to our own fullness—came out of working on
a story I taught a few weeks ago—“Cathedral,” by Raymond Carver. This is a modern story, published in 1983. It isn’t written in verse and the language
contains no no obvious musical effects.
But any master storyteller will find ways to engage the reader’s senses,
and Carver, who is suspicious of explanation and information, does it by
helping us feel our way into the world of the blind man, who, without eyes,
navigates new situations effortlessly, sensing and swimming in the shifting
currents of life. Through much of the
story, however, readers stand on shore with the socially anxious, first-person
narrator—who is never named—drinking scotch, making awkward remarks, and
wishing that we, too, could take the plunge.
The narrator seems like a prejudiced prick at the beginning
of Carver’s tale. He is aggravated that
his wife’s blind friend, Robert, is going to be visiting his house. At least he admits that his ideas of the
blind come from movies and television, and it is pretty obvious that he uses
these negative stereotypes to feel superior.
And he needs a leg up in the situation because he is threatened by his
wife’s close, ten-year relationship with this man, who was once her employer. “One
her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch her
face. She agreed to this. She told me he touched his fingers to every
part of her face, her nose—even her neck!
She never forgot it. She even
tried to write a poem about it. She was
always trying to write a poem. She wrote
a poem or two every year, usually after something really important had happened
to her.” The narrator’s wife showed
him the poem when they first started dating, and he tells us, “I didn’t think much of the poem. Of course, I didn’t tell her that. Maybe I just don’t understand poetry.” As we listen to this first-person unnamed
narrator tell about his marriage and Robert’s visit, we hear that he feels like
a fifth-wheel, like he’s watching through a window people having
relationships. “They talked of things
that had happened to them—to them!—these past ten years. I waited in vain to hear my name on my wife’s
sweet lips.” I was surprised that when I
asked how many of the students identified with the narrator (who is a very odd
guy), almost everyone raised their hand.
Evidently, many of us feel like spectators of life rather than
participants.
As the story unfolds, it is the
blind man who teaches the narrator to see, by helping him face his core fear
that he is hollow. The wife poops out,
after having had a huge dinner, too many drinks, and a few hits off a joint,
and this leaves the narrator alone with Robert to surf the late-night TV
offerings. For lack of anything better,
they listen to a program on the church and the Middle Ages. As he watches the camera pan the sculptures
and frescoes of cathedrals in Spain and Portugal, the narrator realizes that
it’s possible Robert doesn’t know what a cathedral looks like. When he inquires, Robert admits that, other
than what he’s learned from listening to the program’s narrative, he doesn’t
have a good idea. “But maybe you could describe one to me? I wish you’d do it. I’d like that. If you want to know, I really don’t have a
good idea.” So the narrator begins,
looking around the room for clues, and winds up at a loss. About all he can say is that they’re “tall,” “big,” “so big, some of them, they
have to have these supports.”
Finally, he gives up, feeling like his awkward physical description
cannot possibly convey the desire of the builders “to get close to God.” He
ends in apology and says that the reason he can’t effectively describe them is
that they “don’t mean anything special”
to him. “Nothing. Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on late night
TV.” He comes face to face with the
fear buried in my students and, I bet, in all of us: “It just
isn’t in me to do it.”
So Robert like a gentle and generous
god, himself, throws the narrator down on the floor and gets him involved in an
art project. Taking his suggestions, the
narrator gets a heavy brown shopping bag, unfolds it, and prepares to draw a cathedral. Robert places his hand atop the narrator’s
hand to follow the sweeps and arcs of his drawing arm. Totally involved in the work, the narrator
builds his own version of the cathedral:
“I put in windows with
arches. I drew flying buttresses. I hung great doors. I couldn’t stop.” Toward the end of the process, Robert tells
the narrator to close his eyes and then, “Don’t
stop now. Draw.” And the narrator keeps working on intuition,
copying what his mind’s eye sees, following the rhythm of a feeling about
cathedrals. When Robert tells him to
open his eyes, the narrator chooses to keep them shut, “I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do.” Arguably he’s high (and students always bring
this up), but the story is trying to help us experience the high that comes
from making connections (to Robert and to himself through imagining something
very old and very far away that he didn’t think he cared about). He had it in him after all. “I was
in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside
anything.” Where is he exactly? It seems to me that he has gone down inside
himself and from that very exciting and very full internal place, he “sees
feelingly.” This enables him to connect
with Robert and enthusiastically create something. This is the same man who had earlier in the
story seemed so empty, with no work that he cared about, no interests, no
friends. He just sat on the couch with a
drink in his hand and judged others.
Because Robert blind, he is obviously
not “perfect” or even whole, but it is his vulnerability that draws the
narrator to him. He is not as
threatening as are other people who have eyes to judge him. The relationship Raymond Carver describes in
“Cathedral” could be an analogy for the way we can be more ourselves with books
and the imperfect “people” in them. The
book is blind and mute—helpless without a reader. Its characters wait for us to care, to
notice, to give them voice, to bring them to life. If we join them, if we can bear to put down
our phones, open the cover, and follow the story even if we don’t think we’ll
get it, we may be surprised to find ourselves, to feel our own power to
resurrect, to build and connect, and make something like a modern cathedral. As one of my students said, “the relationship
is the cathedral” and, someone else added, “it is holy” “because reaching out
to others is what makes us whole.”
