Getting The Words Right

But getting the words right isn’t just for writers. It’s for everyone.

Getting the story of one’s life right is what we’re all about. What we’re all here for. Our stories must be true, compelling, interesting, original, coherent, meaningful, and important, just as any good piece of writing must be.

The characters must be dynamic. In other words, they must learn from their experience. They must change as they learn.

There must be considerable conflict. The protagonist must face difficult choices.

The conflict must achieve a kind of resolution, no matter how tentative or ambiguous or nuanced.

Good writing delivers news of some kind, and so should our lives. Good news of some kind. Hope is the most abstract form of good news. Love and forgiveness taken together are the most powerful form of good news.

In good writing there is verisimilitude. There is the feeling that this is plausible. That this could actually happen. That this could actually be real. That the characters are possible.

And so should our lives be plausible. Non-random. So should our lives have understandable motive. So should we be believable. Integral. So should we have some consistency. Some constancy. Even in the midst of our changing.

Believable and interesting characters must struggle. Their careers must have hard patches. Maybe long, hard slogs. But they cannot be thoroughly defeated by their suffering. If they are, what we get is merely pathos, bathos, and death.

Good writing finds something affirmative even in the midst of the most terrible circumstances. Well drawn, fully imagined protagonists tilt the world toward the sun, even if that tilt sometimes seems very slight.

Good writing is surprising. Vivid. Varied.

It can be minimalist. Rhapsodic. Circuitous. Direct. Spare. Elaborate. Prosaic. Poetic. Lyrical. Cacophonous.

Good writing is not formulaic. It is not trite. It is not sanctimonious. It is not stuffy.

A life well lived lets the wind blow through. It opens itself to the elements and their vagaries. Their contingencies. Their extremes.

A life well lived does not hide. It is not fearful. It embraces its times and its place in time. Its talents and its inadequacies. Its personal and familial place. And it launches itself out onto the flood of experience to see where the flood will take it. To see how it might make its way across the flood.

The story of our lives is not knowable in advance. It is not predictable. If it is, it is bad writing. We don’t really know how it will turn out. How we will turn out. We have our point of view. But that’s all, really. All we can claim with certainty. With the certainty of personal experience. Personal awareness. But we go with it anyways. Getting the words as right as we can. As we go.

And the words and other actions seem. They sometimes seem. When they work. They seem to be given to us, in part. Provided. As though their authorship were not wholly our own. As though the author is both us and some other. Someone present but not exactly present.

Someone with us here. With us almost elsewhere, as well. As though we are getting these words as interpreters. Translators. Who are taking words from a language that is quite different from our own and finding their rough counterparts here.

Or maybe that’s not right. Maybe we aren’t so much translators. Maybe, as I say, it’s more like we are co-authors with someone little seen and even less heard who by hints and insubstantial suggestions moves us together toward a plot and a style in which he’d like to be pleased.

Spiritual Discipline

But I said spiritual discipline, not moral discipline. There is a difference.

And what I mean by spiritual discipline is this. It’s a method by which we can approach God. Not emulate God. Not imitate God. Not be like Jesus. Not be good.

And what better way to approach God than by telling the truth, to the best of one’s ability? What better way to approach God than by fitting the words one has been given exactly to what is, what has been, and what might be. To say the world with an immediacy, a verisimilitude, a concision, an incisiveness, an honesty, and a freshness that makes this articulated world impossible to ignore.

Getting the world right is the objective. Honoring God’s creation is the objective. Making a secondary linguistic creation that has illuminative power upon the first is the objective.

Why do this? Why go through the agony of this? And the joy of it? The great disappointment and difficulty of it? What’s supposed to happen? Why bother?

Because getting the world right. Making the world right. Saying the world right. Gets one involved with the mind of God. With the creative, active, seeking, loving mind of God.

It gets one involved with God’s creation, which is where he is. Where he creates and seeks and encourages and loves. So it gets us involved with his work and with understanding his work as he sustains and makes and remakes the world. And us. And all his creatures. Everything.

God’s own life and home. Our own lives and home. This. Right here. This and what this has been and what it might be. All of this. Together.

Mistakes

Rain. Rain this morning. In this flood destroyed part of the world, it has been dry, and we need this rain. A paradox. An unkind paradox. But of course the paradoxical is everywhere.

Particles that are neither here nor there, for example. A particle whose momentum is determinable but whose position isn’t. Or whose position is determinable but whose momentum isn’t. And these are everywhere. Particles like these.

You are certain of something. You are absolutely convinced you know something to be true. Then it turns out you are wrong. Someone or some event brings the fact to your attention.

That certainty. That lovely feeling of being right. Of having got this one right. Well, it disappears. Like a lake into sun-heated sand.

And so feelings along with statistics and. Well. Just about everything else. Aren’t all that trustworthy.

Hard to trust oneself. What one knows and doesn’t. What one believes and doesn’t. After awhile. After more decades than one can count on a hand.

I read with surprise and pleasure yesterday the comment on the “Made Up Stories” post. Kathy Snodgrass! Wow!

Something I thought was true, wasn’t. Something I thought I remembered correctly, I hadn’t.

I begin to wonder how much I really do get right. Factual matters. Matters of judgment. Moral discernment. Aesthetic assessment. Spiritual insight. Matters of faith.

Saying anything about anything is chancy. Feels chancy. After you discover one of these mistakes. One of these many mistakes I know are there. Have got to be there. In the record. The record of this blog. The record of my life. The full cosmic range of them.

A pastor friend said to me the other day that writing is a spiritual discipline. Well, I don’t know who between us said it first. But the idea has been there between us and in us for quite a while. In the way we talk about our writing and our faith.

I’m not sure where the idea started in my pastor friend’s life, but I do know where it started in mine. It began first in a poetry workshop with Donald Hall. It then was nurtured in poetry workshops with Philip Booth and W.D. Snodgrass, George P. Elliott, Richard Murphy, and Howard Nemerov.

In those days, we didn’t call it a spiritual discipline. If we talked about it, we used words like honesty and integrity and skill. But the idea was that we were not merely messing around with words. That there was a moral intention in what we did and how we did it. We felt our word work and our life work were one integral and coherent thing. Or should be.

And of course, one felt cared for by these great teachers. One felt deeply valued because these fine writers took precious time away from their work to work with us and to help us learn their medium and their discipline.

Good writing gets things right. This was the idea.

Undercroft Church

Putative worshippers are directed to the understory, me among them. I descend with the crowd. How second or third century, I’m thinking. How London Blitz. How reminiscent of fallout shelters, circa the late 1950s. How Fuehrer bunker.

The people are friendly. The people are always friendly. Everyone very politely introduces himself. Herself.

We sit around tables, looking at one another. Round tables. There’s a stage at one end of the room. Drum kit et cetera to the right. Projector attached the ceiling playing announcement slides on the screen beside the drum kit et cetera.

The junior pastor works the crowd. The assembling crowd. A man. More a business man by the way he’s dressed—dark suit, white shirt, dark diminutively patterned tie. A large man. A man who likes his food, there’s no denying. A man who likes to wear his sin on him like a suit. Like a very fat suit.

But he seems. How to say this. He seems prosperous. He seems well paid. He seems quite happy to be himself. He seems to suggest that this particular sin of his is okay. It’s really rather respectable, even if it is a little uncomfortable.

The way he carries himself…. I’m a man of some importance, see? He seems to say.

The songs happen. And the songs—this is a contemporary service, not the main service—are the namby pamby Christian songs that have been playing on Christian radio now for about 30 or 40 years. Maybe longer. Songs that are superficial in word and music. And are played and sung by this particular keyboardist and guitarist and vocalist to be quickly over. Unimportant in our lives, really. An entertainment. A quick dose of music and then we’re out of here kind of lilt to it.

I’m thinking they ought to be playing this in double knit suits.

Communion is an assembly line affair. First pick up the bread. Then pick up the little cup of grape juice. Then down the whole business as you’re walking. Then drop the cup in the trash before returning to one’s seat. A lovely bit of efficiency.

The homily is called the message here. The message. Might as well call it the sound byte. In it, the junior pastor likens Jesus to a modern business executive. Confident, competent, calm, companionable. He actually uses these four words. He asks us to be like him, Like Jesus, I mean.

One man at my table. An older man. A man who plans to go to Dubai, of all places. Vacation in Dubai. Says he really likes this pastor because you can understand every word, he says. Every single word.

Made Up Stories

Speaking with a pastor friend the other day who has been reading this blog, and he said he liked the entry on the Harley Davidson shirt. Debated whether or not it was real. Others telling him, no, it can’t be real. Finally he came out on the side that it was indeed real.

And so I had to disabuse him. “Pretend,” I said.

“Pretend?”

“We are all a congress,” I said.

“A congress?”

“One version of me,” I said. “One version of who I am. Of what happens or might happen or might have happened. My children gave me a Harley Davidson shirt for Christmas, and so that got me thinking.”

We’re all characters in an exemplum. Or exempla, I should say. We’re all wandering around in the story of our lives, capable of thoroughgoing evil or something better. We’re all making up the story of our lives. And at any point our lives can go in many directions, depending on the story we want to make. Or depending on what the story wants to make us.

I remember a conversation with the same pastor friend some years ago. We were having breakfast at the Ahwahnee hotel in Yosemite valley, because that’s the only meal we could afford there. The ceiling was tall. The setting was. Well, it made me feel like people could say important things in a place like this. The place seemed to draw forth a feeling of momentousness.

I chose to speak about a former poetry teacher, a fellow by the name of W.D. Snodgrass, who wrote a book of poems later in his career called The Fuehrer Bunker. It was a group of dramatic monologues in the voices of Hitler and his colleagues.

I had recently heard Snodgrass being interviewed on public radio, and in that interview he said that the book, The Fuehrer Bunker, had destroyed his career. When asked how that could be so, he said that all his friends and acquaintances and possible employers shunned him after he published the book. Shunned him because he presented these Nazi monsters as mostly ordinary, pathetic, and bathetic human beings.

The attitude of his friends was that the Nazis were monsters; they could not be ordinary human beings. And picturing them as ordinary human beings was morally reprehensible. Morally vile. And they concluded that Snodgrass was therefore morally vile and didn’t want to have anything more to do with him.

And then I said that the moral of that particular little story is that people don’t like to think of themselves as monsters. As possible monsters. They don’t like to think that placed in circumstances like late 1930s and early 1940s Germany, they might have actually become Nazis or at least looked the other way as the Jews were exterminated and Europe was devastated. People will in fact become quite vicious if asked to recognize the monstrous in themselves.

I don’t know about you. I think a little fiction thrown into one’s actual life from time to time helps to keep one on one’s toes. A little fiction about what might be or might have been or could actually happen helps. Helps us to get over the idea that we ordinary good people can’t possibly be monsters.

Or at least it does seem to help me.

The Melting Church

Like the Wicked Witch of the West when doused with water, this church diminishes.

Of course, its music is impossible to sing. And that’s part of it.

But there’s also the pastor—a man about the size and shape of Jabba the Hutt—with a tendency to laugh and smile like he’s keeping an evil secret or perhaps sharing one especially with you.

The people are kind and welcoming, numbering no more than 50. I hear from my friend the organist that they can’t afford to pay Jabba. They won’t be able to afford to heat the church this winter. He says the way Jabba and the board are talking about this, they expect a miracle from God.

My friend says that they regularly get visitors, but none of them returns. It’s like there is plague here. Or the rumor of plague.

It’s mostly an older crowd. Older like me or even older than that. Perhaps the young have all, one speculates, been murdered in unspeakable midnight rituals by the vile Jabba. Or perhaps there’s a more mundane explanation. Maybe they were just bored to death.

As I say, the people. The poor people. They have the gentleness about them of people who have suffered terribly at the hands of a despot. A tyrant. People who long for release from their evil captor but who dare not risk escape, for fear of reprisals. For fear of the torture their remaining family and friends will have to endure.

I say diminishing. What I mean is, the people are melting away. Dying off, certainly. Many members are sick at home or in the hospital. (Hence the plague metaphor.) Others are moving away or have moved away as the neighborhood has deteriorated and has now been eviscerated by a flood.

I’m told the nearby interstate put a steal-reinforced concrete stake into the lungs of this church when the roadway was built in the 1960s.

After the service, drinking coffee, I get to know Jabba’s assistant a little. A professor from a local university who has become a part-time pastor. Very well read. Curious. Full of life. Excited by ideas. Someone one might actually talk with about all this God stuff.

Someone. Diana, I’ll call her. Someone more interested in exploration than judgment. Someone who might also long to sing.

More Quiet Church

Windows still open. A lawnmower’s energetic snarl oscillating loud and soft with the breeze and its position among the houses as it goes about its business.

The bench is hard. It’s becoming harder. There’s only the cushion of myself between my bones and it. Oak. Some real pain coming from my nether regions.

The others close their eyes or look elsewhere. I look elsewhere: at the bush outside, the house next door, the lawn, the sky. I look at the people. Mostly women. One golden retriever of a young man on my bench with a sniffly, watery-eyed young woman. One stray looking mongrel of a man near the coffee women, sitting in relation to them as a dog might sit, waiting for some attention.

One more man in front of me. A sort of aging bull mastiff of a man. Alone.

Four men. Ten women. Odd. I don’t know. We men may feel like accessories, but we’re not sure.

The day passes slowly now. It pokes at us through these infernal oak benches. It torments us by its deliberately slow and smirking passage.

Finally, after about an hour, one of the coffee women tells a story about watching the television news with her grandson and about his concern for some illegal immigrants who were arrested recently nearby. She wants to talk about these illegal immigrants and the injustice of their arrest. The unfortunate impression made on her grandson.

She invites comment. She asks for other concerns.

Silence. The bubble is once again invoked.

Ten minutes later, we break for coffee and donuts. One of the coffee women asks me several questions. Turns out she used to be something different but in that different church, no one was interested in talking about their concerns about the then-imminent Iraq invasion and war. This was several years ago. So she left the different church and came here. Where people care about the things she cares about.

The mild mongrel man asks a few quiet questions. Then they need to move on to their business meeting, and I depart. And I feel. Well. A little sore in the hindquarters and a little sudden freedom of spirit. Outside, it’s warm. The sun is lovely as it washes over everything.