Not Dead Inside

            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.”