The Floating Opera

John Barth

Having heard tick, will I hear tock? Having served, will I volley? Having sugared, will I cream? Having eithered, will I or? Itching, will I scratch? Hemming, will I haw?

Poor Mr. Haecker, he must wait to learn my opinion (wait, wretched soul, for Judgment Day, I fear), but not you, reader. Suicide was my answer; my answer was suicide .

Unless a man subscribes to some religion that doesn't allow it, then the question of whether or not to commit suicide is the very first question he has to answer before he can work things out for himself. This applies only to people who want to live rationally, of course--who want to work out an ethics for themselves.

Hamlet's question is, absolutely, meaningless.

Barth begins with a hugely startling premise--The Floating Opera is a man determined to commit suicide's explanation why he is still alive. Alone, this would probably have caught me, but Barth takes it a step further, and walks out into the entire world, challenging the lunatic faith we have that we will be here in the next year, next week, next minute, to finish this piece.
Barth's narrator, Todd Andrews is diagnosed with a heart condition the result of which is that he could drop dead at any moment, maybe now, maybe tomorrow, maybe never.
With much fatalistic pondering, Todd totters about in a world that will shock you with it distinctly modern air, though it was published in 1953. As a whole, The Floating Opera is nothing less than a philosophical treatise asking one of the great questions: is their something in life worth living for?
Barth's relies heavily on allusions--particularly to antiquity and Shakespeare (who can resist?) and for book that tells you at the outset how it's going to end, carries a heavy amount of tension. Another admirable point of Barth's writing is the logical precision of his plot. You can bet your socks everything is consistent...think about this and think about it again once you've finished the Opera.
And Barth must also be credited for his skill in the many perceptive asides his narrator takes the time to dress his reader's ears with. For instance: "Olfactory pleasure being no more absolute than any other kinds of pleasures, one would do well to outgrow conventional odor-judgments, for a vast number of worth-while smells await the unbiased nose. It is a meager standard that will call perverse that seeker of wisdom who, his toenails picked, must sniff his fingers in secret joy." The man who has honesty to recognize this, the wit to so eloquently phrase it, and the balls to shout it out, is surely a man who can write a book worth reading.

The Bird Artist

Howard Norman

It might've just been the mad ravings of a parrot in Newfoundland lonely as hell.

Elle est retrouvée.

During the hearing in the ninth chapter of The Bird Artist, a man named Rut says: “Ask one question straight out: ‘Is there anyone here in this room murdered the lighthouse keeper Botho August?’ It might get direct results” (208). Mitchel Kelb, the acting magistrate responds “That may be more effective than English proceedings, but it’s not my protocol here.” Rut raises more than a mere issue of protocol. He gets at a central question of language and, by this, life. How directly can we approach reality? Kelb says “The truth doesn’t usually come that quick in such cases, anyway” (208). Quick and direct approaches to reality are not the way of The Bird Artist.

In The Bird Artist truth is not always the straightest or most direct approach to reality. It is a book full of truth, yet very little is written in such a way as to be direct. Fabian begins the novel with his name and where he lives and what he does and says “Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think of myself” (3). While this may seem to be a direct approach to reality, perhaps even blunt, by the end of the novel we find that the reality Fabian truthfully speaks of on page 3 is considerably more complex than such simple statements allow for, which questions the nature of truth and falsehood and their relation to reality.

Truth is not the same as reality. Falsehood is not the opposite of reality. Falsehood is closer to reality than we are willing to believe. Truth is an alliance of senses, consistency between expression and perception. Falsehood is the inconsistency between expression and perception. Falsehood puts the senses at war with each other. As such, we find that all we say and all we write involves some element of falsehood. Even these words here and the definitions I have just given of truth and falsehood are not absolutely true.

Fabian murders Botho August. For the reader there is little doubt of this. Even though Margaret shoots Botho for a third time, the first two shots are enough to kill Botho. Yet during the hearing Fabian is “legally acquitted” (241). However Fabian notes: “A village has an intuition of its own, plus which everyone knows that the truth is larger than the law. Whatever it did not prove, the hearing taught my neighbors that I had murdered Botho August” (241). Despite Mitchell Kelb’s legal decision, Fabian is still known as a murderer. He freely admits to us that he lied: “They had studied my face when I lied” (241). Legally—you might say truthfully—Fabian is a normal man. But in reality he is a murderer. Norman forces us to come to grips with this distinction in many ways throughout The Bird Artist. He lays falsehood and truth next to each other and asks us how much our recognition of either of them affects reality.

Fabian lies and puts the blame for Botho’s murder on Orkney. What does this mean? The reality is not changed. Fabian is still the man who murdered Botho. Fabian still thinks of himself as a murderer as does the rest of the village. So what purpose did this little charade fulfill? Norman wants us to understand that truth, or what we define as truth, often seems to contradict reality. There is a difference between a man who kills another man and a man who is called a murderer.

It is the same difference between a woman who has a secret affair behind her husband’s back and a woman who is known throughout a town as an adulterer. Alaric is secretive about her relationship with Botho until Orkney leaves for Anticosti. And even when Orkney is gone, she still attempts to hide it, although feebly. She claims that Botho is hiring her and gives Fabian pathetic excuses about the necessity of someone else knowing how to operate the lighthouse (90). And when Fabian runs into her on her way to the lighthouse at night, she claims she “was just up to visit Helen Twombly’s grave by moonlight” (99). Why does Alaric bother with the façade? Is there any difference between a secret affair and a public one? Her affair with Botho surely is public. Fabian tells Margaret that he thinks everyone knows about Alaric’s affair (103) and at Helen Twombly’s funeral, a man says, “If Botho August hadn’t been dallying all night with Alaric Vas, we might’ve had the lighthouse’s help and found Helen in time” (121). If people perceive a situation and express it inconsistently with that perception, this is falsehood.

The difference I am speaking of is not a difference of reality. The man known as a murderer and the man who is an unknown killer both live with the reality of bloody hands. The woman who sleeps with another man in secret and the woman who lets it be known that she is loose both have laid in other beds. The difference is a difference of truth.

Margaret recognizes this when she tries to explain her “past” with Botho. She does not tell Fabian clear that she slept with Botho. She subscribes, unwittingly, to Isaac Sprague’s advice: “Bird artists should invoke a bird, feather by feather, not merely copy what we observe in the wild” (15). Margaret says, “Fabian—listen carefully. From Botho August’s bed, you can see so far out across the water. It’s—” (105). Margaret does not try to express the situation as she perceives it; instead she attempts to “invoke” her perception of it in Fabian.

It would be real for Margaret to tell Fabian Botho fucked her. It would be equally real for Kelb to call Fabian a murderer. It is also real when Fabian says his mother is an adulteress. But none of these are truthful. The perception of Margaret has of what she did with Botho is not that she does not want to be with Fabian. She has to invoke the reality of what happened between her and Botho without striking at it too directly because the direct approach to reality would not have been as truthful. If she had simply told Fabian she fucked Botho, it would have belied the reality that she loves Fabian.

In the same way, if Fabian had been convicted as a murderer it would not be as truthful as saying that he is a bird artist. Direct and blunt statements of reality often are too pure to express the truth of the situation. ‘Fabian is a murderer’ does not capture the turmoil of his relationship with Margaret, the circumstances of his mother’s adultery, the weakness of his father, or life in Witless Bay.

Surprisingly, one of the few characters in The Bird Artist who understands this distinction between truth and reality and falsehood is Reverend Sillet. While Fabian is painting the mural in the church Sillet comes to him and says, “I wonder, however, about just what this mural might contain as a higher calling. What the mural might call to in yourself, Fabian. How it can become a redemption. Redemption for you by fixing the truth to the church wall in a way you didn’t with your testimony at the murder hearing.” “You mean what? You want me to show the murder?” Fabian asks. “I don’t want the mural as a confession. No. That’s for Catholics. I simply want there to be some higher purpose involved” (254). Sillet does not ask for a depiction of Fabian shooting Botho. This would be the direct attempt at reality, what Sillet calls a confession. He wants Fabian to invoke the reality of what has happened in Witless Bay in the same way Fabian invokes Helen Twombly. He paints her as a mermaid and is more truthful with that than he would have been had he painted her watering her plants with milk.

So Fabian paints Botho as part bird in the lighthouse and himself as the corpse face down in the mud. He calls Botho the “presiding angel of Witless Bay” (273); Botho’s memory hangs with the village stronger than any rotting corpse could. The reality of Botho’s murder becomes truthful in Fabian’s depiction of it. By putting wings on Botho and placing him in the tower (as well as calling Botho a “presiding angel”) Fabian is more truthful to the village’s perception of the murder. The murder was not a thing of one man shooting another in the mud. It was a public thing. It was displayed and it is not going away.

Fabian places a cormorant on a buoy next to his mother. Cormorants were the one bird he could not draw. Sprague concedes “cormorants can look eerily like a fossil bird come alive in your harbor” (88). But Sprague also cautions that “Bird art must derive its power from emotion, naturally, but emotions have to be tempered and forged by sheer discipline, all of the sake of posterity” (89). Bird art is truth. Truth must derive its power from emotion. Truth must also be tempered by discipline. Emotion paints Sillet levitating but discipline ensures every detail of the man is captured even down to his “button-down shoes” (273).

Invoking truth from reality requires the proper mix of emotion and discipline. The discipline ensures that Fabian tells us in the first paragraph of The Bird Artist that he murdered Botho August. Emotion enables him to tell us the story of his love with Margaret and the beauty of her addiction to whiskey and his reliance on coffee. Discipline keeps truth close enough to reality that it resonates but emotion muffles the picture enough to allow us to feel it fully.

Quoi? L'Eternité.

The Gateless Gate - 無門關 - 无门关

Wu-Men

三

Many people ask many questions of Master Gutei. Whatever they asked about the Way, Master Gutei raised one finger. A visitor, who was already walking the Way, asked Master Gutei's servant, "What is the sort of teaching your master gives?" The boy stuck up one finger, too. Hearing of this, Gutei summoned his servant, saying, "There is something more to teach you but this is not it." And he cut off the boy's finger with a knife. The boy began screaming and ran away because he thought Gutei would not stop with one finger. But Gutei called to him. The boy still had enough presence of mind to turn around, and when he did, Gutei stuck up one finger. The boy was suddenly enlightened.
Later, when Gutei was on his deathbed--much to the boy's delight--he said to all the monks gathered around him, "I was taught this one-finger Way from Tenryu. I have relied on it all my life, but have never used it up." As he said this, he entered nirvana--he never stuck up one finger again.

Mumon's Commentary: The enlightenment of Gutei and the boy have nothing to do with the tip of a finger. If you realize this, Tenryu, Gutei, the boy, and you yourself, are all run through with one skewer.

四十

Master Isan was a monk under Hyakujo before he went to Mount Daii. Hyakujo wanted to choose a master for Mount Daii. He predicted reality TV and requested that all the monks come together to have them present their views so he could choose the most outstanding person to send.
He took a water jug, set it on the ground and said, "You may not call this a water jug. What will you call it?" The head monk who had quite a head but not enough of it said, "It cannot be called a wooden sandal." Hyakujo then asked Isan. Isan stood up, strode over to the water jug and kicked it over. Isan did not wait to see if he scored a goal with his shot but strode as purposefully out of the building.
Hyakujo laughed and chuckled and generally had a good time. He said, "First monk, you have been defeated by Isan." So he ordered Isan to found the new monastery on Mount Daii.

If you want I could talk for hours and days and nights and more than seventy coffee-cups, but the answer most likely wouldn't be in anything I said, nor even, though you might expect it, in the writing of it. Rather, if you think about it (and this is the strong point of Zen as I see it), you should come to the realization that you cannot realize any of this in your mind. Realization as a term even has already cheapened and missed the target as it were. We are no longer shooting at straw, but cardboard with little circles scrawled on it. That's going somewhere, isn't it?
On another note, if you are foolish enough to think I chose these particular koans because they were interesting, you should stop immediately and focus on their numbers. For those of you still reading, please recognize that you have stepped a step farther along the Way than those who are focusing on the numbers. Now it's only a pity that the Way is infinitely long and so where you are on it is meaningless. What is one, three, forty or a thousand on a continuum of infinity? The answer (using two languages to get to a third) is two.

Letter to a Man in the Fire

Reynolds Price

The moment when Jesus washed my cancer wound and the moment, weeks later, when my legs were plainly failing. Alone in a dark bed, I asked how much more pain I must suffer; and a voice answered More.

The worst of all events that can befall our selves, our loved ones, or our people, are the appalling if not killing stretches of our lives in which God is silent and, in that silence, appears to torment us or someone near to us for no reason discernible by the human mind.

Observe that all of creation is the vehicle upon which you pursue the Creator's will. Attempt any change of pace or direction at your own dire peril. Relish the journey for however long it lasts and wherever it goes.

There is a point in this unique letter where Price refers to himself as an outlaw Christian. His perception of Christianity--or perhaps I should simply call it life--is not one you would hear preached from many pulpits. But he at least thinks things through and gets as close as anyone who settles to think the matter out.
The circumstances of the Letter are compelling alone. Sometime in the '80s, Price discovered he had spinal cancer and the doctors gave him 18 months to live. As he suffered through less than hopeful treatments and a failing body, he believes that Jesus came to him in a dream and washed away his cancer. Price did recover, though he permanently lost the use of his legs, is still alive twenty years later. Price published a book about the experience and hearing of it a young man by the name of Jim Fox, who was also recently diagnosed with cancer, wrote Price a letter asking why. Price's Letter to a Man on Fire is the response to this question.
Any letter dealing with such a weighty question--why God let's bad things happen to us--would be difficult enough, but add to this the fact that Jim Fox died not too long after he contacted Price, and the seventy or eighty pages of this letter will make you think.
Price draws few conclusions, allowing his thoughts to remain speculations--soft enough to be bring perhaps some small solace to pain-filled ears. But it is clear at the same time that Price's outlook, though serious, is not serious-enough to be joyful. At some few moments it seems he has almost peeked past our ignorance and distraction to the reality of vibrancy behind it, but these moments are rare.
Price is not a big enough fool to delve into the joy of the matter. Price, if he is a fool at all, is a very small fool--and that is the sadness of Letter to a Man in the Fire.

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Janna Levin

Where is God in 1+1=2? There is no God.

But we all know you discovered the ultimate limit. Einstein showed that nothing can travel faster than light, Heisenberg realized that we can never transcend quantum uncertainty, and you taught us that numbers, numbers even, are forever beyond human reason.

Some books are worth reading because they are well written, others are worth reading because their topic is interesting. This is one of those others. Janna Levin is not a particularly engaging nor interesting writer. The few points where you encounter her pure voice are mostly characterized by a reliance on the scattered and whimsical-sounding tunes of complex physics. And sometimes the topic is of such interest, bad writing cannot taint it.
Perhaps I'm being too hard on poor Levin, but the distance between subject matter and quality of writing was great. This doesn't mean Levin is an especial bad writer because the topic is an incredibly interesting one.
The stories of Alan Turing and Kurt Godel are out of this world. The intellectual battle Levin demonstrates between Wittgenstein and Turing and Godel is beautiful. It will make you want to read Godel and Turing's work, and perhaps even Wittgenstein's. And the similarities between
Godel and Turing's lives will astound you. The only thing more intriguing is what Godel and Turing are arguing about.
If you have ever encountered a logician who tried to argue determinism or pure chance (randomness) with you, you will no doubt recognize the depressing feeling of being slowly backed into a corner and finally discovering that last beautiful supernatural ground you stood upon was consumed too. Godel dreamed up the escape hole through which one can jump into an infinitely bigger world where logic is no longer the triumphant king, but honest servant.
Godel's incompleteness theorem is beautiful.

Buddenbrooks

Thomas Mann

Why, even the lamps aren't lighted. That's going too far with the revolution.

She still loved to set a good table, to dress well and richly, to ignore events that were unpleasant, and to share with complacency in the high regard that was everywhere felt for her son.

I can't. I get so tired of things. I'd like to sleep and never wake up. I'd like to die, Kai! No, I am no good. I can't want anything. I don't even want to be famous. I'm afraid of it, just as much as if it were a wrong thing to do. Nothing can come of me, that is perfectly sure. One day, after confirmation-class, I heard Pastor Pringsheim tell somebody that one must just give me up, because I come of a decayed family.

This great dirge of the middle class, sung as the first generations that were truly mediocre were finally waking to the sound of their own foolish dreams crumbling about them. The middle class has justly been known as many things but I have yet to hear it called what Buddenbrooks paints it as: unspectacular.
Mann charts the downfall, and by way of this the earlier rise, of the Buddenbrook family. This merchant family enacts the drama of all middle classes. They try hardest to not be what they clearly are. The Buddenbrooks, each foolish and bewildered one of them, try to step out of the class they are in. They reach furiously for the upper classes only to come to burning end without ever skidding along the bottom. Despite all their best efforts to be gloriously rich or stupendously poor, they find nothing other than mediocrity.
What is the end of these insatiable passions? Paralysis. Hanno's "decayed family." The Buddenbrooks are a family with more determination, drive, perseverance, and industry than many others--they simply cannot recognize that there are things to do besides those you have to do. They are weak because they never focus on what they are, but always what they want to be. Thomas Buddenbrooks, in a sparking delirium as he dies, discovers: we can never be what we want to be, because the only thing we are is what we will never cease to be. Chasing after the rest, what we see beyond the prison bars of our personality, is simply a foolish denial of where and when reality is.
The Buddenbrooks are the tiny details of life--interesting, exotic at times, even humorous to watch, but you can never escape the feeling that they are just one more mediocre grouping of atoms spinning about with no general purpose at all.
The true length and breadth of nobility appears in the young person of Count Mölln. His hands are dirty and his cloths shabby; he has no plans for a brilliant future, nor even any securities for the year after this--yet you get the feeling you've never come across a nobler man.

Burning Bright

John Steinbeck

The twins have the same blood. They'd understand. Old Joe Saul said then in Greece we wore high shoes and wooden masks when we were gods. He said in Rome we tumbled in the red sand of the arena after the blood had run, and we juggled burning sticks in front of the set-up crosses and their burdens.
Then in the dark centuries, he said, we laughed and played in the miracles, and we were the only gay in that laughter-starving time. From then on, he said, everybody knows.

I'm sailing at midnight. I've done everything I can--everything. Now you will be all alone on your particular dark ocean. Maybe your soul will require the destruction of everything beautiful around it for its small integrity. But I always thought it might be a little braver soul than that, Joe Saul. It is so easy a thing to give--only great men have the courage and courtesy and, yes, the generosity to receive.

There are two aspects of this story that deserve especial notice. First, the form. Steinbeck called Burning Bright one of his play novelettes (or something like that) and intended it to be a play readable as a novel and vice versa. However this is only the tip of the iceberg. In the actual text, Steinbeck works wonders. He begins the first act with a compelling enough story in a certain setting. But in the second act he keeps the characters and storyline but completely changes the setting. What was a circus full of circus performers becomes a farm with farmhands--names and all completely the same. But the story keeps right along as if there had been no change at all. Steinbeck continues this change in each act, making Burning Bright incredibly enchanting. There is a great pleasure in recognizing the characters in their new skins, sometimes even with new traits and features. Not only does Joe Saul the farmer who was the trapeze artist surprise you at times, but he also is entirely recognizable as Joe Saul, regardless of his name. Each character remains exactly who they were though they are a new human being. This form of Steinbeck's not only makes for an enjoyable read, but is also quite fast.
The second aspect of the novel is its topic. As usual Steinbeck makes you feel like you are hearing an ancient, almost primordial tale. Steinbeck would have been one of those bards in the dark ages who kept fur-clad warriors in rapt attention around a small fire in the midst of the raging wilderness as he told the ways of the world. All the more so now, though we have a much more fearsome wilderness to keep us from hearing him.
You will be surprised by the course of Burning Bright. I am not sure what to think of it myself, it will challenge you, and that for sure. Especially Mordeen's comments at the end. Look for them, make sense of them if you can, or maybe don't.

Gilead

Marilynne Robinson

So my advice is this—don’t look for proofs. Don’t bother with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they’re always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp. And they will likely sound wrong to you even if you convince someone else with them. That is very unsettling over the long term. “Let your works so shine before men,” etc. It was Coleridge who said Christianity is life, not a doctrine, words to that effect. I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.

A novel in the form of a long letter, Gilead fades between fatherly advise and narration as John Ames, an ailing and elderly pastor attempts to set down in words all that he would tell his young son. But it is not so much the story that caught me as the tone. Robinson beautifully captures the weariness and confusion of an old man looking back on his life, yet there is excitement too. Gilead does well to mark out and dispel the idea that in aging we click through phases of life like gears. Ames remembers merely being himself as life slid through him. What were fears in his childhood were still fears in his old age, only dealt with differently. What was confusion when a young man is still confusing to the old, if the confusion is accepted more peacefully. This is not to say that Robinson's Ames never learns or grows, he does but not in the manner of a person mastering concepts ("Aha! I've figured out loneliness, that one's done" or "love, yes confusing at first, but with the proper time and industry..."). Instead Ames relates to his son how he has grown with his troubles, trials, and joys.
For a letter written by a dying man it is terribly peaceful and wandering. Robinson takes her time in putting John Ames' thoughts down onto paper. Stories about wild grandfather's who preached with one eye and a bloody shirt, tales of a son's wayward son, and a dust-filled journey to Kansas all peak out of the Reverend's words.
There are also several startling insights into faith--startling because they take much of what is said in faith as truth. Such passages as: "It is one of the best traits of good people that they love where they pity. And this is truer of women than of men. So they get themselves drawn into situations that are harmful to them. I have seen this happen many, many times. I have always had trouble finding a way to caution against it. Since it is, in a word, Christlike." Or: "As it was, the beauty of the poems just hurt my feelings." Are just a few of the many thoughts that will force you to bite your lip and think for a bit.