The Art of the Personal Essay

A Two-Part Seminar on Essay Writing with

Edward Moore, S.T.L., Ph.D.

at the

Sayreville Public Library

June 18 and 25, 2015

http://www.sayrevillelibrary.org/

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest.

~ E. B. White

One writes out of one thing only -- one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

~ James Baldwin

The English word essay derives from the French essai, meaning "attempt" (from the verb essayer, "to try"). The self-obsessed, and utterly brilliant, sixteenth-century writer Michel de Montaigne called his collection of writings on numerous topics -- ranging from friendship, to cannibalism, and just about everything in between -- essais, and so we usually call a short piece devoted to a single topic which the writer is attempting to explain, an essay. However, an essay may be quite long, even book-length. Jacques Derrida's groundbreaking work Of Grammatology, for example -- which ushered in the deconstructionist movement in literary and cultural theory -- was called an essay. My entire career as a writer has been devoted to the composition of essays, some book-length and highly technical (my works on Origen of Alexandria and Plato's Academy, for example), others shorter and more accessible, on topics of personal interest, such as favorite authors, music, artworks, or -- less often -- political and social concerns. There are two types of essays: the formal, a carefully constructed defense of a position, concept, or idea (a doctoral dissertation or a master's thesis are examples of a formal essay), and the informal or personal essay, which can be as long or as short as the writer wishes, and on any topic or topics under the sun. There are no strict rules for the personal essay -- and therein lies the difficulty; freedom can lead to extravagance, sloppiness, logorrhea (diarrhea of the pen, or keyboard). For the personal essay is rather like the guitar -- it is easy to play a guitar poorly, difficult to play one well. But when one plays well, it can be an extraordinary experience. Just recall Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen at their best. A personal essay, when written poorly, might be rambling, or confused and confusing, or simply boring. When written well, it can have a profound effect on the reader, and bring lasting satisfaction to the writer.

The most difficult part of the personal essay is choosing a topic -- or at least it should be. Just because an event or experience or idea is important or interesting or profound to you, does not necessarily mean it will be so for your reader. My first trip to Providence, RI -- the birthplace and lifelong home of my favorite author, H. P. Lovecraft -- when I was nineteen, was a deeply moving experience for me, one of the milestones of my career as a writer, thinker, and -- without sounding too dramatic, I hope -- as a person. To simply write a chronicle of the events that occurred during that visit would be, I fear, to bore my reader -- which is why I have never done so. I could easily write of the John Hay Library, where I held Lovecraft's manuscripts (with the appropriate protective gloves on my eager hands) and flirted with the pretty librarian; where I strolled up the nearly vertical streets of Stamper's Hill, stopping before the various pre-Revolutionary homes that served as the loci of events in his tales; where, at sunset, I sat across the river and watched the sun set aflame the dome of the Christian Science church, which crowns the hill "as London is crowned by St. Paul's." Indeed, I could go into detail about my youthful and futile efforts to write like Lovecraft and how, after that visit, I came into my own, as it were, and decided that -- for all my love of belles lettres and the "dark side of life," as someone put it to me -- my mind is attuned to philosophy, and so here I am, philosophizing to you about essay writing. So, topics. Simply put, if you have to sit and wrack your brain for a topic, you are not ready to write a personal essay. If, however, you have sufficient interests, things you love, like, despise, or wish to change, et cetera -- in short, if you are a thinking human being -- you have the ability to write a personal essay. Some of my recent essays include book reviews, reflections on Manichaeism, a discussion of free speech and terrorism, and a little panegyric on the duos of John Coltrane and Paul Quinichette. Some of these have been published on my blog, The Aristocrat, where I am my own editor and anything goes. Yet I desire readers -- and I have quite a few of them, thankfully -- so I do my best to keep my essays entertaining, and to avoid self-indulgence (I think), which is the temptation of many writers, Yours Truly especially. Hemingway, James Baldwin, and other fine masters of the craft, advised writers to write from personal experience. That is all well and good, for some topics. But it is also fun to go out on a limb, and write of things of which you are not quite sure, to question out loud, as it were, to send your immature ideas out into the world and see if they can hold their own against the numerous linguistic predators lurking in the dark corners of social media. We are fortunate, I think, to live in the digital age, in which any piece of writing we feel like typing can be sent to hundreds of thousands of people instantly, and perhaps get tweeted, go viral, and cause our in-boxes to fill up with praise mail or hate mail or, sometimes -- and it's no big deal (so I tell myself) -- no mail at all.

So what is the difference between a personal essay and a memoir? In an ideal world, an utopian realm in which truth is always told (or written), the only difference would be the extent of topics covered: a memoir would cover the writer's entire life up to the point of writing, with no poetic license taken, nothing omitted, nothing embellished; a personal essay would focus on a single topic or perhaps a few inter-related topics, again with truth-telling the primary concern. However, we do not live in an ideal world. And the first and arguably the greatest memoir ever written, the Confessions of St. Augustine, is filled with pious embellishments, exaggerations, and not a few omissions (though it is easy to read between the lines, in places). Augustine's concern in his memoir was, of course, with himself -- and his goal in writing, to use the poet e. e. cumming's words, was to spill his bright illimitable soul. And in so doing he gave the Western world its first introduction to the inner life of a person. A millennia later, Montaigne allowed his bright, if not illimitable, intellect to shine forth as he ranged over numerous topics, attempting definitive explanations or elucidations of all, yet more often than not simply stopping short, leaving the continuing exploration to the reader. This is the personal essay par excellence, a conversation between the reader and his or her unknown audience -- a linguistic act demanding attention and, if the reader is so inclined, a response. Shakespeare knew the essays of Montaigne, in English translation, and we would not be amiss to call the Bard's inimitable Sonnets personal essays in verse. The subject of the personal essay, then, is not so much the events of the writer's life -- an essay is not necessarily an episode in an autobiography, although it can be! -- as the writer's response to ideas or emotions arising from or provoked by life-events. Indeed, consider Shakespeare's Sonnet 30, for example:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:

Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,

For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,

And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,

And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,

And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er

The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,

Which I new pay as if not paid before.

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

A personal essay is akin to a caprice in music, i.e., a piece in which the composer allows him or herself free reign, for the sake of experimentation or simply for showing off. One might be familiar with Paganini's 24 Caprices for solo violin. These pieces were written by that outrageous fellow (it was said that he sold his soul to the devil in return for his mastery of the violin) for one purpose: to dazzle the listener with virtuoso fireworks -- and to bedevil the performer with finger-twisting scales and nearly impossible leaps and twirls of the bow. In composing a personal essay, similarly, one may use one's facility with language to show off in grand euphuistic style, to haul even the most mundane topic to the auroral empyrean wherein Tithonus himself will open his eyes wide in juvenescent wonder. In the Hawthorne essay that we are about to read, old Nathaniel takes something as literally yawn-inducing as insomnia and gives us, as we shall soon see, quite a memorable little performance. Here is Hawthorne's "The Haunted Mind": http://www.eldritchpress.org/nh/hmind.html.

Now, just for fun -- instructive fun -- we are going to listen to Hemingway read his piece, "In Harry's Bar in Venice" (recording on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE04BmNmgAI ).

He was rather intoxicated, or pleasantly buzzed, when he recited this. A truly fine example of Hemingway's personal essay style is A Moveable Feast, actually a collection of inter-related essays forming a more or less cohesive narrative. Let us take a moment to read chapter 12, "Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit":

http://charlyawad.com/images/books/A%20Moveable%20Feast%20-%20Ernest%20Hemingway.pdf

Persuade or Convince?

The topic that one chooses for a personal essay need not be one that requires an argument for or against an idea or concept; in other words, you might not have to convince your reader of anything. However, to make the essay interesting, it is a good idea to at least introduce an idea that requires a bit of persuasion. Intelligent people enjoy having their preconceived notions -- or even their deeply held convictions -- challenged. I certainly do. Even if I am not persuaded or convinced (more on that distinction in a moment) I enjoy taking the intellectual ride with the writer. In Hawthorne's essay, he is not making any earth-shattering claims, rather, he is simply taking the reader on a little excursion into his night-world, which he finds valuable for moral and spiritual reasons. For my part, since first reading that essay, many years ago, I have had a different attitude towards insomnia; now, when I wake up in the wee hours, I think of Hawthorne's words, and I reflect on mortality and the purpose and value of life. Or I take a sleeping pill. But either way, Hawthorne's essay has been proven successful -- for I have not forgotten it; its idea has remained in my mind. That is not to say I have come to hold his views on the afterlife; I remain an atheist and a materialist. He would have had to write a very different essay to convince me of an afterlife and a glorious home on high.

The distinction between persuading and convincing: In ancient Greece, in the Classical era, the philosopher Socrates found himself at odds with the great Sophists, i.e., teachers of disputation who specialized in winning arguments by using beautiful language to persuade their listeners of the rightness of their positions. According to Socrates, and his brilliant student Plato, truth is one and indivisible, and can be communicated through accurate language, simple and accessible for all. The Sophists, however, were not concerned with truth; rather, their only concern was with winning arguments. They were the great lawyers of the age, and highly influential. Socrates, in his simple speech, which consisted almost entirely of questions, made the Sophists sound rather silly, as he gradually, through adroit questioning, poked holes in their elaborately constructed arguments. [Let us pause here to review Plato's dialogue Euthyphro: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/euthyfro.html] In essay writing, one may of course take the tack of the Sophists, and meander in zig-zag fashion, treating truth as something culturally determined. That is what the philosopher Nietzsche did. One of his famous sayings is: "There are no truths, only interpretations." I would add that while I do not believe in absolute, universal Truth (with a capital 'T') I do believe in personal truths -- and a fine, even a great, essay will communicate some personal truth. I think that Emerson comes closest to doing this, even though his style is rather slippery and aphoristic. Yet when one reflects upon his rather feverishly expressed words, one gets a sense of truth-saying that increases with each reading of his piece. He wrote many more essays besides Self-Reliance, and he is well worth the effort of careful study. [See the full text of Self-Reliance: http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm] In fact, the late Harold Bloom (with whom I was fortunate enough to have studied back in my days at NYU, so long ago) made the characteristically hyperbolical statement that "Emerson is God." What he meant, I think, is that Emerson is a writer's writer, not merely a model, but rather a writer to study over and over again for inspiration -- and to me, the Emersonian well (to indulge in a silly pun) is well-nigh inexhaustible. So a personal essay, at its best, is more akin to the linguistic pyrotechnics of the ancient Sophists, for when we sit down to spill our bright illimitable souls we are not attempting to communicate universal truth(s); rather, we are only trying to -- at best -- persuade our readers that we are on to something, and to hopefully invite them to think and / or read about our idea(s) at greater length. If we are aiming to convince, however, we had best sit down to compose a rigorously argued treatise like the Summa Theologia of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Commentary on Romans by Martin Luther, or the Principia Mathematica of Betrand Russell. While these works are monuments of the human intellect, I doubt that many people have them on their bedside tables, or downloaded on their tablets. A well-worn copy of Emerson, however, may easily be found in the home of many a thinking person.

First, Second, or Third Person?

In a 1994 interview, the underread, if not underrated, writer of literary dark fantasy, Thomas Ligotti, recommended first-person narration for its ability to render all effects -- emotional, aesthetic, even intellectual (a rarity!) -- immediate and aesthetically promising. Ligotti mocked the third-person style, in which the writer gives us what amounts to stage directions. For example, "Tom jabbed a thumb over his right shoulder and said 'Scram!'" Or "Tammy stood at the water cooler wondering if Brandon would approach and say 'Hi'." Ligotti likened this style's effect upon the reader to listening to a radio station that plays one bad song after another. This is not to discount completely the third-person style; Somerset Maugham's novel Of Human Bondage, or Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, are two examples of the third-person being not only effective but necessary for the impact of the tale. Joyce Carol Oates's recent novel Carthage, however, commits numerous sins to which a writer is tempted when she or he uses third-person. In my recent review essay, "On Unreadable Writing," I take aim at Oates and others who waste our time with telling rather than showing. This distinction is especially important in personal essay writing. I shall quote briefly from that article (published in my blog, The Aristocrat: www.antiplebeian.blogspot.com):

The magic that I admire in writers like Tolkien, Somerset Maugham, Isaak Dinesen, Huysmans, and Donna Tartt (to name a few), which consists in drawing characters and scenes so vividly that unique faces appear in the mind, scents and sounds enter the olfactory sphere without any conscious conjuring on my part. In the works of these writers, the people and worlds being described are already there, and I am encountering them, instead of being told about them. I would revise Gore Vidal's statement that a story is what it tells and no more, by repacing "tells" with "shows." For the background of the characters, their motivations, their emotions, their vices and virtues, only become effective as art when they do not come alive for the reader, but rather enter the reader's mind as already existing.

Now essay writing is its own artform; even though it has many affinities with the short story and even the novel -- e.g., conjuring of atmosphere, immediacy, a tripartite structure that tends toward a conclusion and even, in the best essays, builds suspense -- a personal essay is just that, personal, and while it must show itself to the reader as an artform, it is crucial that the writer avoid artifice. I do not like being pulled aside by a loquacious person, saying to me, in tremulous voice, Listen to this! I've got to tell you something! You're not gonna believe it! Or, even worse, being a member of a captive audience where said loquacious person is holding forth. I am sure many of you, at some point, have been at a dinner party or other social gathering, in the presence of someone who wants to to tell a story, a personal anecdote. This person usually begins by making some mysterious remarks, in the hope that someone will ask them to continue. Of course, if no one asks, this person will invariably begin the anecdote anyway, much to the annoyance of the captive audience. We have all been in such situations. A very poor essay teller (I will not call him a writer), E. B. White (my apologies to anyone here who enjoys his work -- and I admit to enjoying Charlotte's Web as a child) has the habit, in his essays, of pulling at his reader's wrist, as it were, and insisting that the reader follow him on whatever excursion he has planned. It is amazing to me that anyone follows him. I certainly cannot. But I will quote, as an example of what not to do, the opening of his very long and ironically titled essay, "The Years of Wonder":

Russia's foolish suggestion that a dam be thrown [one does not "throw" a dam, one builds one] across the Bering Strait brings back happy memories of that body of water and of certain youthful schemes and follies of my own. I passed through the Strait and on into the Arctic many years ago, searching for a longer route to where I didn't want to be [if this were being told to me at a dinner party, I'd reach for more wine at this point]. I was also in search of walrus [hearty gulp of wine here]. A dam, I am sure, would have been an annoyance.

Such is the opening paragraph. The reader, of course, has the luxury of closing the book; our hypothetical captive dinner party attendee has no choice but to find out why the dam would have been an annoyance and why, in the name of all that is reverent, the author was seeking out walrus. So does anyone find this captivating? Would you read on? Why?

Before discussing the relative merits or demerits of White's effusion, allow me to place it alongside a much better (in my humble opinion) opening paragraph by James Baldwin, from his essay, "Every Good-bye Ain't Gone":

I am writing this note just 29 years after my first departure from America. It was raining -- naturally. My mother had come downstairs, and stood silently, arms folded, on the stoop. My baby sister was upstairs, weeping. I got into the cab, waved, and drove away.

That's it. Why should we care? Baldwin is showing (not telling) us a scene that has played out numerous times, in all times and all ages, in all countries ... The terse style is reminiscent of Hemingway (this essay was written in 1977, long after Baldwin had established his style) ... Nothing is really special about this opening paragraph. So why read on? Only two questions arise, and they are not earth-shattering: Why is he leaving America again? And why is it "naturally" raining? What does that mean? This is not enough upon which to build an essay -- but it is enough to nudge one gently to the next sentence, which is, "It may be impossible for anyone to tell the truth about his past." Now we are moving along. We have a mystery here. A possible confession of something kept secret for twenty-nine years. I had no problem reading on. But what about E. B. White? What follows his inane opening paragraph? He writes: "I was rather young to be so far north [What does age have to do with longitude and latitude?], but there is a period near the beginning of every man's life when he has little to cling to except his unmanageable dream, little to support him except good health, and nowhere to go but all over the place." More inanity. White is writing not to us, but at us, and using a cutesy mode of reminiscence that makes me picture him in a rocking chair, sipping an iced tea and gazing out over a garden in need of weeding. It is a warm, comfortable day, we have nowhere to go, so we might as well indulge the old man and let him ramble -- assuming, of course, we are in a kind mood. Baldwin, by contrast, is in earnest, grim-faced, speaking with gravity, wasting no words. He is not trying to sell us anything, nor is he attempting to buy our time with nice language. He has something to show us, and he is taking us there. That is good writing.

So, what of the second-person mode used by Hawthorne? It is not easy to pull off, frankly, which is why it is rarely used. It takes more than a fine writer to recognize when the subject matter calls for second-person. The opening to "The Haunted Mind" (the title itself is sufficient to pull one in!) involves the reader immediately in an experience that we all have had: "What a singular moment is the first one, when you have hardly begun to recollect yourself after starting from midnight slumber!" It is worth noting that a mundane topic, or the description or discussion of an experience that we all have had -- many times -- is cast in a new light when it is placed on the page (or on the screen). "In every work of genius," wrote Emerson, "we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." Indeed, Hawthorne rendered back to us an experience so common -- waking in the middle of the night, thoughts flowing hither and yon -- that we rarely, if ever, give it much thought -- unless, of course, we've experience a nightmare of rare power. What Hawthorne is describing in his little essay is what Wordsworth called "emotion recollected in tranquillity."

You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed, like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction, and drowsily conscious of nothing but delicious warmth, such as you now feel again. Ah! that idea has brought a hideous one in its train. You think how the dead are lying in their cold shrouds and narrow coffins, through the drear winter of the grave, and cannot persuade your fancy that they neither shrink nor shiver, when the snow is drifting over their little hillocks, and the bitter blast howls against the door of the tomb. That gloomy thought will collect a gloomy multitude, and throw its complexion over your wakeful hour.

The adjective "gloomy," repeated here, does not accurately describe the feeling of the moment, of waking on a frozen night, alone in the dark with thoughts of mortality -- one's own and others -- roiling in one's brain; the gloom will settle later, when one is awake in the clear light of day, and the tempestuous night-thoughts a distant, but still effective, memory. The power of the second-person style is more than evident here.

Even more rarely do we find the third-person used in personal essays. The intellectual autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, was written effectively in the third-person, but that work is not an essay -- although the section "The Virgin and the Dynamo" has often been extracted and presented in anthologies as a personal essay. This is not to say that one cannot 'get personal' in the third-person. In my own academic work -- wherein one is expected to be as objective as possible, and the third-person is the rule -- I have attempted many times to give a first-person flavor to my third-person account. Here is an example from a long article on Maximus the Confessor that I wrote for an academic conference back in 2003:

We have seen how the final goal of salvation, for Maximus, is the transformation of the soul into a receptacle of God involving the substitution of the human ego with the divine presence.  Indeed, as Maximus clearly states, in salvation "only God shines forth through the body and soul when their natural features are transcended in overwhelming glory."  Such a statement implies that the redeemed soul is stripped of its nature and of any defining characteristics qualifying it as a distinct, autonomous being, a person.

I am barely an inch away from first-person here, and am only adhering to the academic standard for the sake of conformity (something of which Emerson would not approve!). I, of course, disapprove of Maximus' position, as my choice of words makes clear. This paper later went on to appear as a crucial chapter in my doctoral dissertation, which was published as a book in 2005, and is still selling rather well today (for a recondite philosophical tome). I credit that minor success to the flirtation with first-person narration that I undertook throughout that work, and several others. In writing personal essays, of course, I always use first-person.

Hercules Germanicus

A Review of James Reston, Jr. (2015) Luther's Fortress: Martin Luther and His Reformation Under Siege (Philadelphia: Perseus Books)

© 2015 Edward Moore

Holbein, Hercules Germanicus (Luther represented as rampaging Hercules)

What a fine idea it was to place Luther's ten months spent in what amounted to house arrest at Wartburg Castle under a microscope, as it were. The period is fascinating, and Reston does a fine job of making a ripping good yarn out of it. And I mean this as high praise. The book is a page-turner, and I read it in one sitting. Of course, I am deeply interested in the various transformations of Christian theology as they occurred over the centuries; but one of my deepest interests is the art of translation, and the manner in which translation shapes dogma, and vice-versa. Martin Luther was a man of many talents -- and many masks. I do not mean to imply that he was insincere. But like any survivor -- and he was a master at keeping his head, literally -- his performance under "examination" showed that he knew when to use humility as a powerful shield against the destructive, sub-literate forces arrayed against him. As a writer and translator myself (of Anglo-Saxon poetry, rather different from Luther's translation of what was, in his time, a living and speaking text, to be handled with the greatest care -- poetic license being a big no-no) I can only contemplate with wonder Luther's burdensome task -- understatement is necessary here, as no proper words spring immediately to mind -- of translating the Holy Bible while isolated, in hiding, in a small, opaque-windowed room high above the Thuringian forest, waiting for the announcement -- which could have come at any moment -- that imperial forces were arrayed outside to arrest the "heretic." Yet he prevailed, and even though his translation contains examples of doctrinal, if not poetic, license, it is nevertheless a transformative achievement, rendering an ancient text into a German language which was, at the time, a salmagundi of mutually incomprehensible dialects. "I have so far read no book or letter," says Luther in the preface to his version of the Pentateuch (1523), "in which the German language is properly handled. Nobody seems to care sufficiently for it; and every preacher thinks he has a right to change it at pleasure, and to invent new terms" (quoted in Philipp Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 7, ch. 4, § 63 [1888]). This occurs today, not only in contemporary translations done by committees of the various denominations, many of which subtly alter the text to make it say, or at least imply, what they (the guardians of their own doctrine) wish it to say.

The Jehovah's Witness translation, ironically labeled the "New World Translation," adds an indefinite article in John 1:1, producing the translation "... and the word was a god" (my emphasis). The Greek of all versions reads: ... kai Theos ên ho Logos. With the definite article ho we get, "... and God was the Word" (as rendered in the 1996 Apostolic Bible Polyglot, edited by Charles Van der Pool); in contemporary idiomatic English, of course, it is "... and the Word [Logos] was God." Driving home recently with a JW friend, we debated a bit about this irresponsible toying with language (as I saw it, and see it) for the sake of maintaining what is, from a mainstream Christian perspective (and, indeed, from a contemporary scholarly, atheistic perspective -- that of Yours Truly), an heretical theological position. Christ was not -- according to all of the Church Fathers from Justin Martyr, Clement, Origen, and Athanasius, on through the Cappadocians, Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, and Aquinas (to name just some of the big guys) -- "a god," He was / is the God (if one wants to use that unnecessary definite article). That most difficult of Christian theological constructs, the Holy Trinity, is impossible to explain in a half-hour car ride -- indeed, it was impossible to exlain over the course of several centuries of earnest (again, an understatement) theological debate, sometimes at the end of a sword, or a set of hot pincers. Luther himself, however, who was heroically unconcerned with his physical safety, did not require rigorous scholastic debate nor piles of hair-splitting theological tomes to help him craft a translation that spoke to the German people of his age -- a translation which would, through the mediation of Tyndale's English, serve as a foundation for the great King James Version.

Luther went about his work in a spare cell, with no spirit-lifting view of the romantic countryside about the Wartburg. He had no library to consult, as Reston tells us, only the Greek and Hebrew texts he managed to carry with him on his sham abduction. "It would be easy to romanticize the process [of translation]," Reston tells us.

But a more realistic vision involves sweat and frustration, long hours, and a feeling of being overwhelmed. He approached the assignment with awe. Later, he would call it 'a great and worthy undertaking' and say that, given the unsatisfactory Bibles then available to the common person, 'the people require it.' But the language of the Bible dazzled him. He truly believed that he was dealing with the very words of God. (p. 141)

This is all well and good; reverence for a text that one is translating and / or interpreting is, indeed, a prerequisite, I believe, for the task. "A translation is an interpretation. Absolute reproduction is impossible in any work" (Schaff, History of the Christian Church, ibid.). But there is such a thing as "uncanny" interpretation, in which eisegesis -- i.e., reading into the text what one wants to find there -- becomes a temptation too powerful to overcome. Luther's struggles with his sinful nature -- well-attested in Reston's book, though not sensationalized -- especially the carnal aspect, led him to fall in love with the notion of sola fide ("faith alone"), and to translate Romans 3:28 (not 3:23-24 as Reston mistakenly cites on p. 214) as "daß der Mensch gerecht werde ohne des Gesetzes Werke, allein durch den Glauben," where the original Greek reads: ... pistei dikaiousthai anthrôpon khôris ergôn nomou. The phrase "without the deeds of the law" did not mean, as Catholics argued, good works accomplished in the course of one's life, but rather works pertaining to the Mosaic law, which Jesus fulfilled through the all-encompassing commandment of love. Indeed, the Greek reads quite clearly, khôris ergôn nomou. James 2:24 ("by works a man is justified"), which the Catholics cited to uphold their doctrine of charity and civic responsibility (at least ideally), led Luther to denigrate this letter as an "epistle of straw," but the Catholics, theologically, were in the right. After debating the issue for months, the Roman prelates finally proclaimed that "the believer is justified by the good works he performs by the grace of God and the merit of Jesus Christ" That is, not by circumcision and the observance of Judaic purity laws. "In short," as Reston sums it up, "good works purified and perfected faith, and the combination of the two led to salvation" (p. 215).

Luther himself was aware of this, but he felt the need to push his sola fide (and sola scriptura) doctrine to its logical -- many thought and said illogical -- conclusion. That this conclusion involved the destruction of centuries-old works of art was not Luther's doing. The great reformer called for moderation; indeed, he wanted a painfully slow transition from the old religion to the new Protestant form of worship, so as not to upset those whose faith was rooted in the old visually-oriented style of worship. Those were, of course, the many illiterates, who relied on preaching and especially artworks to help them understand the meaning of scripture. This is why so many drawing by Lucas Cranach were included in the editions of Luther's bible. Some of these were so incendiary -- like the Whore of Babylon wearing a papal tiara and riding, drunken and disorderly, on the back of a dragon -- that they aroused "more passionate umbrage among Catholic commentators than any other part of the translation" (p. 211). These "cartoons," as they were called, were quite effective, and many Catholics crossed sides and became Lutheran. The consequent closing of minds, resulting from the belief that the bible is the only book worth reading, and that no effort to better oneself through education or other liberal and liberating endeavors amounts to a scintilla in the scheme of salvation, did more than the 1527 sack of Rome to put the final nail in the coffin of the Renaissance. Thankfully, England, at that time still a rather isolated little kingdom, was slow in receiving the graces of the Renaissance; while "the Turkish juggernaut stood before the gates of Vienna" (p. 230), Sir Thomas Wyatt, Surrey, and other stars of Tottel's Miscellany were lifting English verse out of the alehouse and into the courtly realm, where it would blossom in the magnificently nimble lines of Sidney, Dyer, Spenser, and later the superlative Shakespeare -- and we must not forget Tyndale, Coverdale, and the grand cadenza of the scriptural concerto, the King James Bible of 1611. My concern of course is with language, my greatest love. And Luther took a rag-tag language and shaped it into a majestic vehicle for some of the most influential words ever written. "Und wenn ich alle meine Habe den Armen gäbe und ließe meinen Leib brennen, und hätte der Liebe nicht, so wäre mir's nichts nütze" (1 Corinthians 13:3). To put his life on the line so that every person should become a priest, and follow his or her own conscience; to preach to the repressed masses that sexual desire is not sinful, but a gift from God; to declare that love of Christ and faith in His all-embracing divine humanity is sufficient for salvation, was indeed to show a powerful love of his own that makes him one of the supreme champions of personalism. However, Reston displays admirable scholarly honesty by not ending his story there, but by telling us just enough about the dark legacy of Luther and Lutheranism to temper our admiration.

Luther was an anti-Semite, there is no way around it. Toward the end of his life he published two pamphlets, "On Jews and Their Lies," and Von Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi ("Of the Unknowable Name and the Generations of Christ"). In the former text, Luther wrote:

Here in Wittenberg, in our parish church, there is a sow carved into the stone under which lie young pigs and Jews who are sucking; behind the sow stands a rabbi who is lifting up the right leg of the sow, raises behind the sow, bows down and looks with great effort into the Talmud under the sow, as if he wanted to read and see something most difficult and exceptional; no doubt they gained their Shem Hamphoras from that place ...

Reston does not shy away from discussing, albeit briefly, the use put by the Nazis to Luther's disgusting anti-Jewish onslaughts. This discussion is relegated to an "Author's Note," which is understandable, since the subject of the book is admittedly Luther's time at the Wartburg and the subsequent impact of his return to Wittenberg. As an atheist, I find religious figures interesting only insofar as they contribute something positive to the furtherance of personalism. Luther was rather inconsistent here, as one readily sees in his shameful backing of the nobility during the Peasant's Revolt, for example. Yet such error is mitigated by his devotion to an ideal -- indeed, an ideal that was born of great personal suffering, both physical and existential. He was, in a way, the Hercules of Germany. But he was a suffering and very human Hercules. No son of Zeus was he. His fear that God would abandon him, and his continual struggle against the Devil, made for a life of trials that cannot be compared to the mythical tests of Hercules. The son of Zeus might have placed Cerberus in a headlock, but Luther threw a pot of ink at Satan. That takes balls.

Luther's Fortress is not only a valuable contribution to Luther scholarship, it is an introduction to the way a sincerely religious thinker can become -- as Harold Bloom said of John Milton, William Blake, and Emily Dickinson -- a sect of one. In whatever area of life we find our intellectual and emotional outlet we should remain unique, a great I AM; for the crowd, as Kierkegaard said, is untruth. Luther cared not for the crowd, which is an agglomeration of people; he cared rather for the community of persons which, if each person remains unique and unrepeatable through a vibrant intellectual life of his or her own, each person has the ability to become a member of a society, that is, a commonality that is a conscious sharing of moral and ethical ideals, not a blind devotion to externality, or the bugaboo of authentic existence, as Emerson would say, conformity.

Finally, as a musical enthusiast, I was pleased to encounter, at the end of the book, some words about Luther's musical compisitions. I have always been moved by Bach's arrangements of "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God," and Mendelsohn's Reformation Symphony never fails to raise my mind to lofty things, and even to regret , as did Sartre, my inability to believe in God. I think Luther would applaud my sincerity and, if he had the power, place me in Dante's first circle, where I would be able to spend eternity gabbing with Socrates, Plato, and other great "Christians before Christ."

"Butcher-Bird; impales victims on thorns"

© 2015 Edward Moore

She works in a book store, but wait until you see her behind.

~ Shrike describing his girlfriend to Miss Lonelyhearts in Nathanael West's novella Miss Lonelyhearts

Do you remember those musty, dusty, often dimly lit shops specializing in "used, rare, and scholarly books"? It is within such books that one occasionally discovers marginal or interlinear notes jotted down by an unknown reader. Once in a while these jottings prove to be of value, illuminating a certain difficult passage, or providing a cross-reference or biographical detail that one would have otherwise overlooked. The literary world is becoming a less personal place, due to the encroachment of digital media and the consequent vanishing of independent bookshops. It was in one of these endangered habitats that I recently picked up a few well-worn tomes, literally for a song. The pretty college-age woman behind the counter was listening to Bob Dylan, and I began singing along, in my best Dylan impression, to "Visions of Johanna." The latter-day hippy was impressed, and as a reward for my hipness pointed me in the direction of a pile of books that were there for the taking, too battered and marked with readers' glosses to be sold. I picked up Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts and flipped to the first page, where I encountered the jotting that serves as the title of this little piece. The name of one of the main secondary characters, Shrike, is circled, and this definition provided. It struck me as odd, so I took out my phone and did a quick Google search. The definition for "shrike" that came up was: "a songbird with a strong, sharply hooked beak, used for impaling lizards, insects, and small birds." Oddly, the rest of the little book is unmarked; the anonymous studious reader of a bygone era did not provide more notes. I showed the shrike comment and definition to the hippy woman, and remarked that Derrida would have found material for an essay in that one little jotting. Alas, the young literature major had not read Derrida. What that portends for the state of literary studies at the present time, I cannot say. I snatched up a few more freebies -- Demian by Hesse (with lots of underlining), a collection of short stories by Richard Matheson (lots of illegible comments), and a collection of poems by e. e. cummings with markings that betray the unknown reader's inability to scan the lines -- and, so as not to seem like a cheapskate, purchased for a reasonable sum the score of Paganini's 24 Caprices (my ex-wife discarded my own irreplaceable copy, which had my own bowing and fingering notations and comments such as "Damn! this kills my wrist!"). The young student, who finally introduced herself as Julia, was again impressed by my musical acumen, although I had to admit that I no longer played the violin, and that I wanted the score so that I may follow along with recordings. Nevertheless, the Paganini score received that day its first jotting, the lovely Julia's phone number -- yes, written by hand, not thumb-tapped directly into my phone! Will I call her? Let's see ... She likes Dylan. Good. She hasn't read Derrida. Bad. She likes classical music. Good. I didn't see a cat in the shop. I'll have to ask her if she likes cats. If she does, I shall ask her out, despite the fact that I find it strange that a very attractive young woman of no more than twenty-one or -two should be interested in a not ungainly but certainly not model-material man of forty-one. I suppose that mystery will solve itself. In the meantime, let's discuss Miss Lonelyhearts.

A dreary, depressing, nihilistic yet deeply human novel, awash with symbolism -- some likely unintentional (Miss Lonelyhearts and the self-proclaimed virgin Betty bathing nude in the pristine Connecticut countryside, making me think of baptism and the virgin Mary), some clearly intentional, even overwrought (the grisly dream of the lamb; Miss L. feeling like a "rock" conjuring for me St. Peter, the rock [petra] upon which Christ will build his church [Matthew 16:18]; also Peter's eventual martyrdom, in the patristic tradition, came to mind, foreshadowing Miss L.'s demise) -- Nathanael West's mini masterpiece (and I do not use that term loosely) breaks most of my own private rules for a great piece of literature. Not a single character is likeable; all are profoundly flawed and therefore deeply human, by which I mean that every character is motivated by some desire that will take them beyond their immediate reality and into a space where their value as a person will be recognized. It might be trite to say that each character simply wants to be loved -- but is that not the primal human desire that lies at the root of all tragedy, comedy, romance, and even satire? In this tiny novel -- a novella, to be precise (58 pages in the 1946 New Directions paperback edition that I picked up at Julia's bookshop) -- West gives us all of these perennial genres, yet the whole is enflamed with a feverish desperation, a breakneck racing after something -- perhaps merely a momentary rest in a place of acceptance. Transitions are abrupt, indeed, the art of the segue is absent from this work. Dialogue, except for the superbly surrealistic imagisms of the memorable and aptly named Shrike, is sparse and journalistic -- but it works. Events do not develop in this novella, they occur, up to the finale, which was like a punch in the face.

Nietzsche remarked that pity is the most debasing of emotions, both for the one feeling it and for the one being pitied. West's eponymous male character began his stint as an advice columnist with the idea, fed to him by Shrike, that the whole thing was a big joke. But we see, at the very beginning of the tale, that the letters received by Miss Lonelyhearts (we never learn his real name) are provocative not of laughter but of pity; even if some -- like the letter from a woman with no nose -- produce a guilty chuckle, we are quickly brought to pity when we read the final line of the noseless woman's letter: "Ought I commit suicide?" Shrike's constant joking, while a petty torment to others, is to Miss Lonelyhearts a spur driving him to seek meaning in what he does, that is, to do more than provide insipid advice. He has a Christ complex, which Shrike mercilessly lampoons; but despite Shrike's cynicism and strained rhetoric and mixed metaphors, this impaler of small creatures occasionally spits some gobs of wisdom, as when he dictates the opening of a column to Miss L.:

"The same old stuff," Shrike said. "Why don't you give them something new and hopeful? Tell them about art. Here, I'll dictate:

"Art Is a Way Out.

"Do not let life overwhelm you. When the old paths are choked with the debris of failure, look for newer and fresher paths. Art is just such a path. Art is distilled from suffering. As Mr. Polnikoff exclaimed through his fine Russian beard, when, at the age of eighty-six, he gave up his business to learn Chinese, 'We are, as yet, only at the beginning. ...'

"Art Is One of Life's Richest Offerings.

"For those who have not the talent to create, there is appreciation. For those ...

"Go on from there."

Later in the story, we are shown just how unkind (to put it mildly) Shrike is; but this brief encomium for art, offered at the very beginning, before we witness the full power of Shrike's psychic vampirism, is almost a meta-commentary on the work itself. There is appreciation. Not all works of art must edify. For art is distilled from suffering. And I know, having suffered greatly over the past five years -- loss of home; loss of career; abandoned by wife; abandoned by friends; alcoholism; violent, drug-addled girlfriends -- that I am, indeed, at forty-one, only at the beginning. I write because I must. I have a survival instinct that drives me to seek meaning, and when meaning is absent, to appreciate the mobile nature of the mind, which is not "its own place" (as Milton's Satan believed) but rather the inveterate seeker after places, finding rest in none but some value in all. This manner of intellectual or noetic existence does not lead to happiness (or joy) -- "whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu" (Keats, Ode on Melancholy) -- but it does lead to achievements, accomplishments. And no matter how small these may be, they are moments in the ever-expanding consciousness of the self, and are therefore of infinite value to the unique, unrepeatable entity that is the I, the ego. So I do not believe, as did Nietzsche, in a morality of joyous freedom; but I do believe in creativity born of suffering.

James Baldwin, in an essay on "The Creative Process" (1962), wrote that "The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempts to avoid this knowledge." In West's novella, Miss L. is experiencing, by way of poorly worded letters dumped on his desk each morning, varieties of and variations on these extreme, universal states and is compelled to respond. Since he is neither an artist nor one who appreciates "that life is tragic, and, therefore, unutterably beautiful" (as Baldwin wrote), far from correcting delusions, he falls victim to a destructive delusion of his own, that "His heart was the one heart, the heart of God. And his brain was likewise God's." We , the reader, witness Miss L. engaging in violent, destructive and self-serving behavior, nothing Christ-like. After discovering that he has impregnated no-longer-virgin Betty, Miss L. has a nervous breakdown of sorts -- and we feel no pity for him. A fool of the worst kind, he turned out to be; a fool who thinks he has God on his side. "Miss Lonelyhearts was very happy and inside of his head he was also calling on Christ. But his call was not a curse, it was the shape of his joy." We know such fools for Christ all too well. So when the finale of his accidental death arrives, abruptly and shockingly, we are relieved. Thinking that God will aid him in the performance of a miracle, Miss L. rushes out the door to meet the "cripple" with whose wife he had been sleeping, and finds out too late that the seemingly harmless fellow with the bad leg and distorted features has decided to light somebody up with a shotgun. There is confusion, but Miss L., now no longer a "rock" but a "furnace" (the biblical symbolism is inescapable), tumbles down the stairs "dragging the cripple with him." Perhaps Betty -- no catch herself, but at least tethered to the here-and-now -- will hook up with Bill Wheelwright (if she hasn't already done so) and live in mediocrity ever after ...

* * * * *

Short novels, or novellas, have always appealed to me. I agree, to an extent, with Edgar Allan Poe's remarks about the ideal length of a fictional or poetic work: that the capable writer has the opportunity to produce a single, concentrated, and lasting effect upon the reader in a piece that can be read in a single sitting. Indeed, I read Georges Bataille's novella The Story of the Eye nearly twenty years ago, at the height (or depth, as it were) of my Surrealist phase, and have not forgotten it: the episode in which the lady squats over the saucer of milk and ... ahem ... the bullfight after which the bull's bullhood becomes a meal ... and of course the business with the eye. But my recollection has nothing to do with the "shock value" of the piece (it has been described as literary pornography -- it is not that); rather, the morbid anti-sexuality of the short work forced Yours Truly to seek a meaning, a parable, allegory, anything -- only to realize that life does not contain literary devices. I read the Marquis de Sade's gargantuan "novel" 120 Days of Sodom around the same time (someone, I think it was Klossowski, quipped that reading this work was like reading a pornographic phonebook) and am only able to recall a single phrase: "He embuggers bucks." Hilarious, but not profound -- at least not in a literary sense. Our lives are episodic -- as well as "nasty, brutish, and short" -- and novels that accurately reflect or imitate life -- even if that life involves coprophiliac fantasies or sex games with eggs -- should be episodic as well, if not nasty, etc. Yesterday, I went out early to pick up some books at the local library and then ate lunch in the park -- it was a gorgeous day -- after which I took the bus to the next town -- a quaint, almost mediaeval-looking place with houses dating back to the early nineteenth century -- and paid a visit to the bookshop where dreamy Julia works. And there I found her, sitting behind the counter, engrossed in some activity with her phone. She looked up, smiled, and gave a warm hello. Now these brief sentences would, I think, meet with Poe's approval; they are certainly economical. My reader's imagination is called upon to fill in what most of our contemporary novelists would have laboriously spelled out: minute details about the park, exactly why and how the day was gorgeous, people on the bus, architecture of the town, and so on. West doesn't belabor such points in his novella, and so he achieves economy. A single reading has been sufficient to maintain his work unsullied in my mind. Similarly, seeing Julia for a second time added nothing to her beauty, nor did it detract. A changeless angel is she -- short, yes, but so far no evidence of nastiness or brutishness.

After exchanging pleasantries, I told her about Miss Lonelyhearts and the sharp-beaked Shrike who pierced so many hearts but could not pierce the "rock" Miss L. "So you liked the book?" Like is too comon a term. "I appreciated it," I said, "the way one appreciates a drawing by Masson, for example." I brought up Masson because I was returning in thought to my Surrealistic youth, when my satchel was stuffed with books by Breton, Soupault, Artaud, Bataille, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, and other Surrealists, proto-Surrealists, and anti-Surrealist Surrealists, and the Village was my home. Julia did not know Masson, so she did a quick Google search. I told her to check out "The Massacre," a brutal drawing, executed (no pun intended) with frenzied lines suggesting the manic haste of the artist and the feverish rage of the knife-wielding brute doing the killing. Julia was not convinced of its artistic value, and when I gazed upon it again, after many years, I found that I could not give a coherent statement as to its value. With Max Ernst's painting, The Daughters of Lot, things were different. I told her the biblical story, of which she was -- and I don't know why I am still surprised at these educational lacunae -- unfamiliar. After God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot went with his daughters to a cave up in the mountains, where they got their dad drunk and slept with him, in order to "preserve the seed" of their papa. They each bore Lot a son (Genesis 19:30-38). Julia was amazed that the Bible contains such tales. I told her that there are many more such scandalous episodes in the Hebrew scriptures, mentioning Noah's drunkenness, and giving her an embellished account of David and Bathsheba. She was suitably impressed, but since there were now several customers in the store, we could not continue our conversation. A perfect opening was provided then. So I quickly asked her if there is a pet store nearby, as I needed to get cat food. She said yes, there is, and with a smile asked me what kind of cat I have. I told her Siamese, and she said, in a breathy voice, "I love Siamese, they're my favorite." Splendid, I thought, she likes cats -- and I asked her out for lunch on her next day off. She accepted. Two days from now I will be having lunch with the changeless angel.

Of course, the first date will go well. And the second, and the third. But eventually, sooner or later, she will pierce my heart with her own shrike-beak and tear it out. It will soon regenerate, to be torn out yet again by another Erinye (I am mixing myths here, I know). Such is the story of my life. So why do I endure? Well, some clues are given above. I find purpose in accompishments, however small. Next week I will begin conducting a two-part seminar on essay writing at the local library. My hope is that at least one of the participants produces an essay that is publishable. A feeling of accomplishment would result, for me, from that. But what I really want is love. Again. I had it once, and it taught me that Tennyon was full of shit. "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all." My ass. To lose at love is to have one's heart and balls ripped out on a daily basis. Memory is a bitch of a vulture that preys upon the open wound that will never heal -- until someone greater comes along who will heal the wound and restore one to loving and loveable wholeness again. That is what I seek. Is Julia the one? Too early to tell. I certainly hope so. The eyes of the beloved are the windows to the soul, as classic Platonic philosophy held; and James Baldwin has described precisely the experience of the beloved's gaze: "anyone ... who has ever been in love ... knows that the one face which one can never see is one's own face."

One's lover ... sees the face you wear, and this face can elicit the most extraordinary reactions. We do the things we do, and feel what we feel, essentially because we must -- we are responsible for our actions, but we rarely understand them. It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less. ("The Creative Process")

And so, another trite-sounding conclusion: we can only love another person to the extent that we love ourselves. Loving is not understanding, however. I agree with Baldwin that if I understood myself better -- if I had understood myself better, back then -- I would not have done so much damage to myself, nor would I have allowed others -- one "other" in particular -- to damage me to the extent that they (she) have (has). I have pulled myself together, put down the bottle for good, entered therapy, and returned to the struggle for meaning -- not because I understand myself, but because I love myself. I am a noetic seed that has been cast into this world to either sprout or rot away ... or get gobbled up by a bird.

* * * * *

"You spiritual lovers think that you alone suffer. But you are mistaken. Although my love is of the flesh flashy, I too suffer." These words of Shrike, of the harpoon beak, when spoken to Julia over a giant stromboli that we were unable to finish, produced luscious laughter that made a kiss inevitable. And so it was. She had just told me of her last boyfriend, of a whopping eight months, and how it had taken her several weeks to get over him; that is what provoked the Shrike quote. Before that, we had been speaking of safe, comfortable things, such as places we would like to visit -- and I, being forty-one to her twenty-four (I was pleased to discover that she is two years closer to my middle age than I had previously thought), have visited several of the places on her list, and so was able to keep her interested as I embellished my memories with anecdotes taken from books I was sure she had not read. Very odd, a literature major whose reading seems to consist solely of the Twilight series, Toni Morrison, and a biography of Amy Winehouse ... Literature is dead, they say. Long live literature! After the lunch and the kiss, we strolled about the college town and did some shopping. I bought for her Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, and pointed her to my review of that superb work. Then, just when I thought the date couldn't possibly get any better ... it didn't. Julia asked me about my ex-wife. My mind reeled. Memories of joyous times, long romantic walks, fetish-spiced lovemaking, deep conversations ... I couldn't talk of that stuff, I might tear up. Memories of bad times, my drunkenness, being left home alone at Christmas, no more lovemaking thanks to demon alcohol, no more conversations thanks to same ... No way I was speaking of any of that. The gray area, not her fault for leaving me, I brought it on myself by refusing to get help ... But no, she made a vow, she left me when I needed her the most, took everything I had, left me penniless and homeless with an addiction ... She is surely in a very satisfying relationship by now and I am walking about with a woman seventeen years my junior -- who has not read Milton! "So, do you and your ex-wife keep in touch?" "No." "What's her name?" "Butcher-bird. She impales her victims on thorns."

A Rainy Po-Mo Morning with Mani and the Arabian Nights

© 2015 Edward Moore

The Arabian Nights -- or the Thousand and One Nights as it is also called -- is so ingrained in the popular consciousness that even the semi- or sub-literate among us know at least a bit about Ali Babba, Aladdin, Sindbad and, of course, Scheherazade. While a few of the tales comprising the Nights are highly entertaining, the majority are absurd, "loathsome and insipid" (in the words of the tenth-century bibliographer Ibn al-Nadim). Properly edited, they make good fodder for Disney films. That's about it. I will open myself to the charge of a smug "high brow" attitude towards literature and, perhaps, to the graver charge of Eurocentrism, by pronouncing my judgment that these tales are unworthy diversions from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, et cetera. The literature of personood -- which I have spent my entire career defending against those academics for whom "multiculturalism" means every culture but the Western -- begins with Chaucer's wife of Bath, achieves unmatched depth of expression in Shakespeare's Hamlet, and rises to the precarious height of world-defying (anti-) heroism in Milton's Satan. A tradition that has always opposed the "tyranny of the majority," finding it "an opiate ... that preys upon the vital forces" of personal will, as Walter Bagehot put it ("The People of the Arabian Nights," in The National Review 9 [July 1859] p. 56), is maintained by individual writers who speak their "latent conviction" in order that it may become the "universal sense" (Emerson, Self-Reliance). In the Western tradition (of which, more below) the focus of the great works has always been on persons: the Faustian spirit, the yearning for the infinite, that drives the person to either excel gloriously or to fail heroically. An authentic scribe of personhood does not require a twenty-two page introduction, as a popular translation of the Arabian Nights includes. I sat down to read this introduction in the quiet dark of early morning, as the rain beat wildly against my windows. By the time the rain ceased and the gray light revealed the distant river and the whirling seagulls, I found myself reflecting not upon the exotic tales of Scheherazade but on a topic that I thought I had laid to rest many years ago, when I was a doctoral student: the ancient (and dead) religion of Mani, or Manichaeism.

I admit to getting irritated rather easily by odd, dubious, or absurd statements. One will discover a goldmine of the absurd in the writings of academics who have been immersed in postmodernism and the language of cultural and critical theory. I know this well, for I was once a po-mo artist. But I have long since outgrown that formative stage. Originality and the concerns of personhood demanded a maturation of style and conception. As I was skipping lightly this morning over Mushin al-Musawi's Introduction to The Arabian Nights (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics 2007) -- and ignoring several jarring po-mo glitches -- I was brought to a coffee-snorting halt by this sasquatch of a sentence:

[E]arly European translations of the Nights were not foreign to the Manichean tendency to study the other and reach for its [sic] exoticism, to view it [sic] in relation to the so-called European tradition and to simultaneously appropriate its habitat [sic] for the sake of self-fulfillment against imaginary deprivations. (p. xxii)

My apologies for the several [sic]s; I know it is distracting, but I am not sure if al-Musawi is using "the other" as an impersonal pronoun, referring to Islam, or to Muslims. In the sentences immediately following, he writes "Muslims or Islam." I find it rude, in any case, to use "other" for any referent, despite the fact that so many po-mo pundits love to toss that word around, especially if the "other" can be shown to require "liberation" or, better yet, "empowerment." I was going to add another [sic] after "so-called European tradition," but I think I can handle that perhaps unintentional insult by reminding Mr. al-Musawi -- and anyone else who cares to read -- that the tradition of personalism began in the West. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, as complex as it is, gave birth to the concept of the person, hupostasis, as a unique, unrepeatable entity, possessing dignity and equality before human and divine law. One need not be a Christian to see the value in this. I am an atheist, but I am more than willing to tip my hat to Christianity for giving to homo sapiens this invaluable conceptual gift. Now, to Manichaeism. I have studied that religion deeply, and cannot for the life of me figure out what Mr. al-Musawi means. But I shall try to unravel this mystery; for it is a dreary day, tiny rivulets wend their way down my balcony to the empty street below, and a slate-gray sky lowers upon my house. A perfect atmosphere for an academic mystery. I shall now light a pipe (actually, a cigar) and begin.

I was a mere twenty-four years-old when I discovered ancient Gnosticism, in the unlikeliest place: a collection of essays by the French philosopher and novelist Georges Bataille. The title of the essay was "Base Materialism and Gnosticism" which, I later found out, was a very poor explication of Gnosticism; indeed, it was a highly creative eisegesis. But it drew me in, and I was soon laboring over the actual Gnostic texts in the Nag Hammadi collection, and reading contemporary scholarship by the best in the field -- an august company which it took me six years of intense research, writing, lecturing, and publishing to join. While the Manichaeans did not hold any special interest for me -- I was rather drawn to the philosophical Gnostics, like Valentinus and Basilides -- I recall being fascinated by the Manichaean notion of the "redeemer redeemed." Mani, the founder of the religion and acknowledged by his followers as a redeemer himself, taught the following (quoted from my own article on "Gnosticism" for The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy [2004]):

The Manichaean cosmology began with two opposed first principles, as in Zoroastrianism: the God of Light, and the Ruler of Darkness. This Darkness, being of a chaotic nature, assails the “Kingdom of Light” in an attempt to overthrow or perhaps assimilate it. The “King of the Paradise of Light,” then, goes on the defensive, as it were, and brings forth Wisdom, who in her turn gives birth to the Primal Man, also called Ohrmazd (or Ahura-Mazda). This Primal Man possesses a pentadic soul, consisting of fire, water, wind, light, and ether. Armored with this soul, the Primal Man descends into the Realm of Darkness to battle with its Ruler. Surprisingly, the Primal Man is defeated, and his soul scattered throughout the Realm of Darkness. However, the Manichaeans understood this as a plan on the part of the Ruler of Light to sow the seeds of resistance within the Darkness, making possible the eventual overthrow of the chaotic realm. To this end, a second “Living Spirit” is brought forth, who was also called Mithra. This being, and his partner, “Light-Adamas,” set in motion the history of salvation by putting forth the “call” within the realm of darkness, which recalls the scattered particles of light (from the vanquished soul of Ohrmazd). These scattered particles “answer” Mithra, and the result is the formation of the heavens and earth, the stars and planets, and finally, the establishment of the twelve signs of the zodiac and the ordered revolution of the cosmic sphere, through which, by a gradual process, the scattered particles of light will eventually be returned to the Realm of Light. The Manichaeans believed that these particles ascend to the moon, and that when the moon is full, it empties these particles into the sun, from whence they ascend to the “new Aeon,” also identified with Mithra, the “Living Spirit”. This process will continue throughout the ages of the world, until all the particles eventually reach their proper home and the salvation of the godhead is complete.

As I read this passage, I recall vividly the day I wrote it. I had spent the morning and a good part of the afternoon in the reading room of the Columbia University library, desperately trying to arrive -- in true essentialist fashion -- at a rigorous and precise definition of Manichaeism. It wasn't happening. So, annoyed, I took a cab down to NYU and sat in the park, sipping from a bottle of gin and waiting for the flash of noetic light that would illuminate the required definition and permit me to finish the article on Gnosticism, the deadline for which was rapidly approaching. As the sun began sinking -- literally and figuratively -- I had a eureka moment. Instead of a definition of Manichaeism, why not tell the story of Manichaeism? When I got back to my apartment, I looked over what I had written so far -- on Basilides and Valentinus, the Sethians -- and realized that it was all wrong! Definitions do not capture the multifloriate nature of beautiful things; and Gnosticism, for all its strangeness, is beautiful. So I scrapped that draft and began anew. I told the story of Gnosticism. Little did I know that I was effectively pigeonholing myself, and that the next decade of my academic life would be devoted to the Gnostics.

To study the other and reach for her exoticism. At age twenty-five, dreams of being a renowned scholar of Gnosticism, speaking at Columbia or, better yet, Oxford ... Also dreams of a better significant other (there, I used the word), or perhaps not "better" just more attuned to the realm of peer-reviewed journals and conferences, one who is, yes, more "exotic" if by exotic is meant one who can speak of bygone ages in dead languages while waiting for her Big Mac. I finally did meet the exotic one, and we answered to one another. We agreed on much, but not everything -- which is good, for total agreement quenches passion. She found the Gnostics to be too pessimistic for her taste; I did not agree. Just because one finds little value in this realm of change and decay does not mean that one is a pessimist. In fact, the Gnostics had a spiritually effulgent vision of a life beyond this one. Being an atheist, I cannot take them literally, but I do find comfort in the idea that every intellectually vibrant person adds value to this world, by the simple fact of his or her existence. In Manichaeism, the scattered particles of the fallen godhead must be returned to the realm of light. Yet, unlike the philosophical schools of Gnosticism, the religion of Mani gives no pride of place to human beings; human agency is confined to aiding the scattered particles in their return journey. Here is the final part of my Manichaeism story, composed with the aid of a bottle of Bordeaux on May 19, 2004:

It should be clear from this brief exposition that humanity as such does not hold the prime place in the salvific drama of Manichaeism, but rather a part of the godhead itself—that is, the scattered soul of Ohrmazd. The purpose of humanity in this scheme is to aid the particles of light in their ascent to the godhead. Of course, these particles dwell within every living thing, and so the salvation of these particles is the salvation of humanity, but only by default, as it were; humanity does not hold a privileged position in Manichaeism, as it does in the Western or strictly Christian Gnostic schools. This belief led the Manichaeans to establish strict dietary and purity laws, and even to require selected members of their church to provide meals for the “Elect,” so that the latter would not become defiled by harming anything containing light particles.

I recall a quiet sense of fulfillment when I typed those final lines. In those days, it was self-fulfillment, and when my archontic consort sat on my lap, reading over my work, I accepted that true fulfillment comes through another person. I sent my article to the editor, satisfied, and went to the kitchen to prepare a fish curry.

I mention the fish curry because the culturally sensitive, anti-imperialistic significant female person with whom I was sharing my life at that time expressed her dismay over my enjoyment of Indian food and utter lack of interest in Indian culture. When I responded with the remark that my own cultural heritage (Western, European) offers more than enough intellectual, moral, ethic, and aesthetic stimulation for a single lifetime, I was told that I am a cultural chauvinist. To this day, I have never ceased to "own" that label. I feel that it is important for those of us who still love the West and its contributions to world culture to maintain our middle ground between the self-hating heirs of European civilization and the outright racists. The former are those who enter a liberal arts program and study only the works of "marginalized" persons to the utter neglect of the Western canon (which is quite fluid in any case); the latter are those who demand the expulsion of Muslims, for example, from European nations and use chillingly Nazi-style sloganeering to make their point. These latter folk, these Huns, can be left to civil authorities; they should not be given a voice in the academic -- or any other -- realm. The former, however, are a real threat to the Western tradition of open, critical investigation. I recall my undergraduate days at NYU, and the several comparative literature classes I took: a negative critique of a work by a person of a marginalized or colonized culture was not tolerated. A careful critical exegesis of a novel or poem, if it did not result in a highly sympathetic or, preferably, a trumpet-blowing celebration of not only the writer but the culture that the writer was representing, was ignored or -- worse -- used as an excuse to brand the exegete with the career-destroying label racist. In this spirit Mr. al-Musawi agrees with the nineteenth-century essayist Leigh Hunt that the Arabian Nights should "be kept away from dissection and exacting scholarship" (p. xxii). Fear, of course, is the motivating force behind this opinion; fear that this glorious production of Eastern civilization might be found lacking, or not up to the standards established by the best European writers. Edward Said, in his influential study Orientalism, cries out against any European appropriation of Eastern culture, for even the most positive reasons, as imperialism. What is to me such an obvious pissing on cherished Western ideals -- that not subjecting the works of marginalized or colonized writers and artists to the same rigorous critique to which Western writers and artists are subjected is to fall prey to a reverse colonization, similar to the acrobatics that occur when one wishes not to offend by putting away the alcohol at a dinner party or permitting a woman to wear a head scarf in an open, liberal society -- is to many evidence of a morally and ethically advanced mind. In this age of bombings, beheadings, kidnappings in which the West responds by bombing, kidnapping and, if not beheading, certainly torturing in other more "scientific" ways, no one can claim a moral high ground. Yet in the walls of academia, when one discusses the Arabian Nights or Manichaeism one should be permitted to pass a judgment.

* * * * *

After sleeping on it, I still don't understand what Mr. al-Musawi meant in his Manichaeism comment. Is Western imperialism driven by a sense of duty, to return the "scattered particles" of Eastern humanity to the light -- or Enlightenment -- of Western civilization? Neo-cons have assured us that the people whose nations we are bombing are (literally) dying for democracy. But only the most moonshine-addled gun-loving praiser of the lord believes that steaming pile of logorrhea. The rest of us know that it is about empire. Anyway, today being a Saturday, I awoke to the strains of Schubert's Trout Quintet, and just as the ecstatic piano run of the fourth movement was giving way to the gentle morgenstimmung of the cello, I was sipping coffee and re-reading Mr. al-Musawi. Defeated in my effort to uncover his meaning, I wrote up the final reflections, a victim of my own logo-centrism.

On Unreadable Writing

© Edward Moore 2015

Someone -- I can't remember who, for the life of me -- once wrote that all novels are really letters aimed at one person. As it happens, I believe this.~ Stephen King

Several times I have tried, and failed, to write a novel. The reason is not for lack of an idea, nor for lack of facility with language. My problem is my inability to use language to show, rather than merely to tell, a story. Having spent the greater part of my life in the field of philosophy and related studies like patristic theology and textual criticism, my method has been to unravel knotted threads of discourse and lay them out straight for my reader. My work has been the telling of the various tales of Platonism, Gnosticism, the more problematical thinkers among the Church Fathers; in this, I did not show but told -- for every philosopher knows that language is the house of being, as Heidegger once said, and that a definition that is not rigorous and precise is no definition at all. And if one is a Platonist, one will avoid degrading the noetic realm by dragging its concepts down to the realm of re-presentative material. So, whenever I set out to write a novel or a short story, I soon become aware that I am explaining every character's actions, providing detailed analysis of motivations, and never permitting my characters to come to life and to act. What I love most about fiction -- the creation of atmosphere and personality -- I have not been able to achieve. The magic that I admire in writers like Tolkien, Somerset Maugham, Isaak Dinesen, Huysmans, and Donna Tartt (to name a few), which consists in drawing characters and scenes so vividly that unique faces appear in the mind, scents and sounds enter the olfactory sphere without any conscious conjuring on my part. In the works of these writers, the people and worlds being described are already there, and I am encountering them, instead of being told about them. I would revise Gore Vidal's statement that a story is what it tells and no more, by repacing "tells" with "shows." For the background of the characters, their motivations, their emotions, their vices and virtues, only become effective as art when they do not come alive for the reader, but rather enter the reader's mind as already existing. Lovecraft wrote, in "Some Notes on a Nonentity," "[I] insist on reproducing real moods and impressions. ... I never write when I cannot be spontaneous -- expressing a mood already existing and demanding crystallisation." This is precisely what I, as a trained philosopher and theologian, am unable to do. Yet this literary handicap of mine is useful, I think, when it comes to that most problematical of literary genres, criticism.

"Uncanny" critics, according to J. Hillis Miller, engage in a fair amount of eisegesis that is sufficiently grounded in the text to lend an authoritative air to the interpretation, and then permit the criticism to take flight, barely tethered to the text. As I have discussed at length in my essay on Lovecraft, "A Nighted World As Mad As I," works of fiction that encourage the reader to bestow meaning by a co-operative or "demiurgic" manner of interpreting the various tropes -- a style of reading / interpretation / criticism that permits the reader a creative, as opposed to a merely receptive, role -- occupy a higher literary sphere than those barely readable or unreadable texts comprised of authoritative narration. The general subjective / objective dichotomy, manifested particularly in the author / reader distinction, is blurred and smudged by the moist finger of the creative reader. "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts," wrote Emerson in Self-Reliance, "they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." In this context Emerson noted the works of Plato and Milton, and the Bible. Yet how is one supposed to relate to and provide a proper critique of works that are not simply second- or third-rate, nor even poorly composed to the point of distraction, but to works that are so bad that they are, literally, unreadable? Should the conscientious critic ignore such works? Or should she take on the unpleasant task of discussing such works for the sake of an effort to correct what is wrong with so much contemporary -- and near-contemporary -- 'literature'?

Arche-centrism, or giving primacy to the prime -- that is to say, the belief that by returning to origins one has a chance of grasping the essential -- may be outmoded in philosophy and critical and cultural theory, but it still aids us, I posit, in the effort to rid our multifloriate language of obfuscating accretions. It is with this end in mind that I have translated some Anglo-Saxon, or "Old English," poems into modern English: the Wanderer, Wulf and Eadwacer, Waldere, and Deor (available at http://steliasseminary.academia.edu/EdwardMoore). Pleased with the manner in which our language lends itself to imitation of the ancient verse forms, I set myself -- in the case of the Wanderer, which I re-titled "Thus Spoke the Earth-Strider" (after a passage in the original) -- the challenge of rendering the translation in a modern verse form. As I explain in the introduction to the translation:

I have rendered [the Wanderer] in a verse form of my choosing; one that neither attempts to reproduce the original alliterative half-line (impossible for contemporary uninflected English) nor to imitate it in some sort of hybrid concoction that would likely be an assault on the ear. Instead, I have relied upon the old faithful loose iambic -- agreeing with Robert Frost that "in our language ... there are virtually but two [meters], strict iambic and loose iambic" ("The Figure a Poem Makes") -- arranged in stanzas of five lines with one concluding half-line (more or less). This is an unabashedly modern structure, unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world, but done for the sake of art. I believe (I hope!) that I have succeeded in achieving the only purpose of meter: to make one want to read the poem aloud (as all ancient poetry was).

Not only did I succeed in adhering, with seeming effortlessness, to the loose iambic structure -- keeping hypermetric lines to a minimum, and then often intentionally, to vary the rhythm -- but I also managed to imitate, without sounding silly, the alliteration of the original.

Thus spoke the earth-strider, ever mindful

Of merciless slaughter, dire destruction

And the downfall of his dearest kinsfolk:

A tally of my cares I often recount

In solitude before the rising sun.

Such is my lot.

("Thus Spoke the Earth-Strider," II. 7-12)

This type of historically conscious, and conscientious, discipline for the sake of our common vehicle of expression has led me to a renewed appreciation of the powers of the English language and of those who draw upon its full potential in their novels, short stories, essays, and poems. Yet I have also grown increasingly sensitive to writing that is labored and repetitive, disordered, inarticulate (unintentionally mixed metaphors, convoluted syntax), lacking originality or that is the result of the writer simply trying too hard (absurd or overused analogies, humorless clichés, excessive name dropping, et cetera). While my ultimate goal is to aid in the proliferation of the former, it is with the latter -- what I am calling unreadable writing -- that I will concern myself here.

Fortunately, unreadable texts often announce themselves early, in some cases, as early as the epigraph. On the front page of her unreadable novel Carthage, Joyce Carol Oates includes an hubristic if predictable quotation from Crime and Punishment, and a statement from an "American Iraq War Veteran." So we learn two things, before we even start reading the novel: 1) Oates still has Dostoevsky on her mind (and has the balls to place the Mad Russian alongside her own dubious novelistic self in the reader's mind); 2) Here is yet another novel attempting to cash in on the public affection for "our heroes." Already, at that point, I did not feel like reading the book. But I did. And I discovered something about unreadable books -- they truly are unreadable! This is not just hyperbole on my part. My mind actually shut down, completely, in authentic zombie fashion -- and I was stone cold sober! -- at approximately page 60, after seemingly endless pages of repetitive, italicized emotion busters that seemed to have been copied directly from Oates's notebook. Here is a representative sample (note: this is the fifth time in nine pages that the italicized phrase "missing girl" has been used):

Kincaid was a friend of the Mayfield family, or had been. Until the previous week he'd been engaged to the missing girl's older sister. The father had tried to see him: just to speak to him! To look the young corporal in the eye. To see how the young corporal looked at him. The father had been refused. For the time being. The young corporal was in custody. As news reports took care to note No arrests have yet been made. How disorienting all this was!

Indeed. Diorienting and annoying. And it goes on for 482 pages. As every writer knows, maintaining interest in a third-person narrative is difficult; in the wrong hands, the tale easily degenerates into a journalistic style account. A writer who wants to be read and remembered must not simply tell a tale, he or she must show the reader the persons and events that make up the story (I realize that I am repeating myself here, and italicizing; but this is not a novel, and I am the only character speaking -- and I've renounced any claims to the title novelist.). One of the "don'ts" in this regard is authorial intrusion into the narrative. Quite simply, to maintain the effect of immediacy -- and showing not telling -- the only voices that should be heard in the narrative are those of the characters. Now apart from the annoying repetitive italicized phrases and telegraphese prose style, Oates's Carthage simply does not contain any likeable characters. It is not sufficient for an author to tell us that so-and-so is a stand-up guy, or that such-and-such radiates warmth and happiness; we must see these things, these people, for ourselves. I never cease to be amazed at the manner in which morals and ethics retreat when faced with an authentically drawn fictional character. Consider Alex in A Clockwork Orange. If he had been presented by any other method than first-person narration, he would not have come across as morally equivocal -- indeed, we would never have been able to like him. Oates's Cressida is at best an odd young woman -- at worst, sinister -- with no real positive qualities to make one care, one way or the other, if she lives or dies. So Carthage is not only an annoying novel, written in bad, quirky prose; its main character is dispensable.

From the earliest times, until recently, the main characters in works of fiction were aristocrats or warriors, often both. The epic of Gilgamesh; the Iliad and Odyssey; the great tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the historical books of the Hebrew bible; the Aeneid, et cetera -- all were concerned with the trials and tribulations of the high born. But when the modern era gained momentum, writers began to represent the lower classes, and the novel as we know it -- concerned with ordinary people, just like us -- was born. Alas, it has taken a long time for writers to realize that ordinary people are simply not all that interesting, and that fiction about vampires, werewolves, and zombies appeals to the contemporary mind more than fiction about construction workers, home health aids, and florists. F. Scott Fitzgerald's preoccupation with the American aristocracy of the early twentieth century, however, did not help him to produce likeable characters, nor to write readable novels. While it is fashionable, nowadays, to at least praise The Great Gatsby, I will stick to my rapiers and place Fitzgerald's entire novelistic oeuvre firmly in the unreadable category (I do like his short stories in Babylon Revisited). The novel that is the worst -- so bad it is painful -- is This Side of Paradise (1920). Opening the book to a page chosen at random, one is guaranteed to find a stilted, history book dry passage containing at least one ridiculous metaphor or analogy. Here it goes ... A-ha! Check this out:

Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen. (bk. I, ch. 1)

A simple exercise, to demonstrate the weakness of third-person narration in general, and the wilting badness of this passage in particular, is to re-write this inelegant sentence in the first person, sans the silly metaphor. Observe:

Strolling along the crowded thoroughfare, I put on my best romantic mask, and met the ambiguous eyes of the passersby. It seemed to me impossible that these people should fail to notice my light-hearted step and to conclude, Here is a young man marked for glory!

When the first-person narration is used, the reader is treated to a more intimate experience than is possible with third-person. Indeed, the main reason I seek out fiction is to get a break from the rigors of philosophy, history, and related disciplines, which form the bulk of my research.

The human sciences are, at the highest level, impersonal. Therein lies both their strength and their weakness. A philosopher composing a treatise is occupying the realm of concepts, and he sees the history of ideas laid out for him from the vaguest beginnings to the most bafflingly complex contemporary conclusions -- conclusions always ready to be superceded by new research. Yet when the philosopher wishes to express his or her deepest personal views, she will choose fiction. Of contemporary novelists, Donna Tartt is the most philosophical one that I have encountered. The finale of The Goldfinch -- when the main character, Theo, is reflecting upon the vicissitudes of the eponymous painting by Fabritius, the inanimate protagonist, as it were, of the entire novel -- is a chrysostom song celebrating personalism, and like a great symphony the entire novel was building up to that grand climax. Here it is:

[I]t is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time -- so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

Of course, it is not only the painting that is being referred to here; "beautiful things" means also beautiful people, people capable of inspiring and experiencing great love. This is the core concept of personalist philosophy, and Theo's education in and by beauty and love is what raises him above an aristocrat, in every sense of that term. The themes of love and beauty in Donna Tartt's novel are painful, in the way that love of a beautiful person is painful -- one cannot seem to ever get close enough to the beoved, and the distance, however small, is the cause of seemingly infinite pain. The pain of longing. But this is healthy; the intensity of desire reminds the soul (metaphorically speaking) of its divine origin. We have lost our wings, as Plato said, and are seeking to re-grow them and fly once again to our true home: the realm of perfect beauty and love. I can think of no literary theme superior to this one. That being said, if one is going to write a novel about inferior experiences, one must create compelling characters and include some deep insight into areas of human existence that are not often illumined. Fitzgerald's major insight was that people with money are in fact different from those without it; but they have problems which, at the end of the day, are just as destructive of happiness as the problems faced by unmoneyed folks. Hemingway tells us that he was sad when he learned that Zelda, Fitzgerald's wife, had cheated on her husband with a French aviation officer. Hemingway couldn't understand how Fitzgerald could still share a bed with Zelda. Hemingway, for all his tough-guy posturing, was a sensitive soul, who cared about others, and considered infidelity a betrayal. Self-centered people, in my experience, do not have a problem with infidelity -- either committing it or being the cuckold -- for self-centered people live only in and for the present. To commit adultery is to live for the present; to be the cuckold is to be absent from the present. For the truly self-centered person, whatever happens in his or her absence is irrelevant, it is like it never occurred. The moral and ethical life of a self-centered person is rather simple, cut-and-dry. Of course, it does not offer much in the way of material for good novels.

The desire to escape. At its best, fiction takes us out of this world, places us in a realm either better or worse than this one, and dazzles us with persons and events so far beyond our ordinary run of experience that we forget time and place and responsibilities and merge with the fictional realm. If the writer is especially astute and capable, we may even be treated, unwittingly, to some type of moral lesson or perhaps simply a re-affirmation of what is essential to us as human beings. Tolkien's magisterial Lord of the Rings is the finest example of responsible escapist fiction. A goodness and beauty that is meant to be shared by everyone but owned by no one is the theme of the great trilogy. The glory of Middle Earth, under attack by a malignant entity seeking to control everyone and everything capable of goodness and productive of beauty, is familiar to us, for it is the undying realm of childhood, effortlessly populated by all that we hold dear. There are many levels on which to read Tolkien's masterpiece, but the most timely is, in my opinion, the ecological level. Without being didactic, Tolkien inspires us to be good stewards of nature. Everyone who has read the books, or seen the films, will remember the Ents. Although I had been raised to have a deep concern for the environment, when I first read LOTR at age 14, I was inspired with a renewed zeal for protecting all plant and animal life. There are, of course, many other moral and ethical "pieces" in LOTR, not least Gandalf's eloquent anti-death penalty statement and Sam's moving encouragement to Frodo to endure in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, for we are all part of a story, and the story will only continue if we endure -- and prevail. William Faulkner said much the same thing in his Nobel Prize speech. Other excellent writers of fantasy include Wiliam Morris, E. R. Eddison, and Lord Dunsany. It would be helpful, here, to distinguish fantasy, as practiced by these classic writers, from utopian fiction, which I will get to in a moment. Thomas More coined the term, utopia, and it does not mean "good place" -- rather, it means "no place" (from the Greek). There is irony in the very term, and it is frequently lost on people with little or no literary background, especially a dunderhead like George Lucas with his "Edutopia" initiative (I'm angry at him for giving Star Wars to Disney) or Wawa with its "Coffeetopia." Before discussing utopian fiction, and one of its unreadable practicioners, we would do well to spend a moment on horror, or dark fantasy.

The supreme master of horror -- or the weird tale, or dark fantasy -- is Howard Phillips Lovecraft. To the left and right of him, and each just barely a head below, stand Edgar Allan Poe, and Thomas Ligotti. There are many reasons for Lovecraft's supremacy, not the least his philosophy of composition, so difficult for a lesser writer to put into practice.

Spectral fiction should be realistic and atmospheric -- confining its departure from Nature to the one supernatural channel chosen, and remembering that scene, and phenomena are more important in conveying what is to be conveyed than are characters and plot. The 'punch' of a truly weird tale is simply some violation or transcending of fixed cosmic law -- an imaginative escape from palling reality -- hence phenomena rather than persons are the logical 'heroes'. (Lovecraft, "Some Notes on a Nonentity")

This is precisely what Lovecraft accomplishes in his best tales, and Poe and Ligotti rise to this level occasionally as well. For all of his archaisms and unabashed displays of linguistic virtuosity, Lovecraft is capable of weaving a very homely tale of terror. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, for example -- a novella that I consider to be his masterpiece -- Lovecraft sets the scene in his beloved hometown of Providence, RI, and begins by describing the nestled tree-lined streets, steep to the point of near verticality, and the antique houses settled comfortably on plots of what was once colonial farmland. The increasing age of the town, as one proceeds from the top of the Hill down toward the ancient waterfront, seems quaint and even cozy at first, but Lovecraft gradually unsettles his reader, by revealing, in slow deliberate stages, the dark primal secrets of a man who once called Providence his home -- and is returning to do so again. I recall, as if it were yesterday, my own trek down the precipitous hill to the waterfront, where I thrilled to discover dark and narrow Doubloon Street and then, watching as the setting sun worked its faery magic on the hillside, turning the Christian Science dome into "a miracle of rare device," I suspended all disbelief and reflected upon the career of Joseph Curwen and the choking mystery of necromancy. There is no moral or ethical lesson or affirmation to be drawn from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, or indeed from any of Lovecraft's works; for his concern was with atmosphere and phenomena -- and with what he called an "indifferentist" philosophy. This intellectual dimension is what places Lovecraft on a higher plane than most practicioners of escapist fiction. Neither aristocrats nor dairy farmers interested Lovecraft, not even when they are engaged in adulterous affairs. "I could not write about 'ordinary people' because I am not in the least interested in them," he wrote.

Without interest there can be no art. Man's relation to man does not captivate my fancy. It is man's relation to the cosmos -- to the unknown -- which arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric [sic] pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background. (Essay from 1921)

As an atheist, Lovecraft did not believe in supernatural entities. The horrors of his mature tales were aliens, beings more highly developed than humans, but still perfectly natural, in the wider, cosmic scheme of things. As an atheist myself, I can attest that while I -- like every so-called normal human being -- am subject to the buffetings of emotions and sensations like love, anger, joy, sorrow, fear, arousal, et cetera, I remain, at the rational level, fully aware that these are but bubbles in the vast sea of humanity, and that humanity is a tiny evaporating puddle in the infinite desert of nonbeing. Lovecraft knew this well, and he knew that an authentic response in the face of nothingness was fear. Like Poe before him and Ligotti after, Lovecraft knew that the philosophical limit of art is nihilism -- and the supreme form of nihilism is decay in the face of the insupportable knowledge that we are ontologically nothing. So why bother with an utopia?

The "problem of happiness" remains even if one accepts Lovecraftian nihilism or, better put, indifferentism -- the belief that the universe doesn't give a damn about us. Whatever the universe thinks or doesn't think about us, the fact remains that we give a damn. Construction of an ideal society in the face of cosmic indifference appeals to those who see such an act as hopelessly heroic. And who doesn't admire a tragic hero? Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World is justifiably and deservedly a classic, but its value is not literary but ideological. The world of this novel is not one in which a single cosmic law is violated, as in Lovecraft's tales, but rather the entire work is one nightmare vision in which human reason has turned on itself. Huxley wrote that "reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays." Indeed, and one does not read utopian fiction in order to escape or take a vacation from reality; one reads such works for the sake of a preconceived notion, to experience the notion in action, so to speak. Conclusions logical and illogical are drawn, and one is left wondering if the exercise was worth the paper. Huxley himself, in his 1946 foreword to Brave New World, wrote that the novel's "defects as a work of art are considerable; but in order to correct them I should have to rewrite the book ... And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else." If the author has so distanced himself from his work, how is the reader expected to approach the work with receptive mind. Of course, no amount of receptivity will permit one to remain warm and open when faced with identical eight-month-old babies being wheeled around on a dumb-waiter. But that is the point. The brave new world is sickeningly inhuman, as is so much of our own world. Which is why the novel is still considered timely by many readers. But the damned thing is unreadable. I've read as much of the thing as my mind permitted; the longing for a good human villain, however, was overwhelming. Give me Alexander De Large any day.

My happiness, or lack thereof, will inevitably affect my reception of a novel, or indeed any work of art. This is not a deep insight but a simple observation. When I write anything, be it a philosophical essay, a piece of criticism, or one of my many ill-starred attempts at fiction, I am conscious of writing with a particular person in mind -- a very special person who once upon a time broke my heart. When I read a work of fiction I seek points of similarity with my own exeriences. The closer the story is to my own life, the more I enjoy it -- or perhaps, if the story is not a happy one, if it conforms to some of my own sad experiences, I gain no small solace from the knowledge that others have similarly suffered. Lucian Taylor, in Machen's semi-autobiographical novel The Hill of Dreams, is a foredoomed young man who believed that he had found happiness in the ideal realm, and that the ever shifting realm of appearances held his beloved and him captive -- a state of suspension that could only be alleviated by and through the beauty of art and dreams. That the logical conclusion to this Platonic style of existence is inevitably death -- for which philosophy is but the practice -- is the tragic element in this tale. Not tragic, perhaps, for the reader with his or her mind firmly anchored in the becalming bay of the common. For better or worse, my life has been, from my well-remembered youth onwards, an endurance test that would make Beowulf and Breca look like chumps.

Castor and Pollux, presented musically by Jean-Philippe Rameau, serves as an apt segue from this piece to the next, which will be a reflection on The Arabian Nights and "orientalism." In closing this somewhat disconnected series of outbursts about unreadable writing and writers and the outstanding stuff that makes so many look so bad, I will simply state that my life has been, and remains, that of a mortal seeking immortal things. Precisely, a mortal seeking an immortal love, a changeless angel who will never turn on me, will never stop answering the phone or coming to visit -- will never tell me that she has met someone else. As the lush strings of the Orchestra of the 18th Century kindle the dead air left behind in my apartment after the exit of yet another promising goddess, I cannot help but reflect mournfully on the desperate nature of my quest. In my private tragédie lyrique I shall sing of her lush red hair, the arboreal brown eyes, exquisite lips and the delicate bones of her tiny lily-white and blue-veined feet ... I shall recall that I helped her dye her hair, lovingly massaging the red dye into her thick heavy hair; I shall recall gazing into those warm eyes as I gasped her name; I shall bring to my mind the taste of her ruby lips; I shall tremble at the memory of her low-toned laughter as I kissed the tender soles of her feet ... Does she feel loved? Even now, as she reclines in another man's arms? It is a terrible thing to have no memories of adorable women that are not saturated with pain.