Degenerates, Monks and Writers: Nonfiction — Richard Farrell

Jun 012010
 

To continue the Numéro Cinq religious threads, I offer the following.  (An ablution, perhaps?  A burnt offering?)

I used to be an altar boy in Christ the King Catholic Church in Worcester, Mass.  I have no sordid tales of degenerate priests.  The priests I knew were kind, serious men.  They understood rituals and sacred spaces in a way that made church seem magical and removed from the mundanity of life in the working class neighborhoods where I grew up.  My favorite time in church was when I prepared the altar for mass; when the church was empty and quiet, when I lit candles, placed unblessed wine and water aside before the prayerful arrived.  The poet Rodney Jones says that his sense of the religious springs from a recognition that Sundays have a different feel from other days.  In the introduction to his poem, “Life of Sundays” he says the following:

“I’ve written a number of poems at the edge of a long study of religion.  This is probably a poem that comes from my reading of Stevens as much as my understanding of an individual life of a person like myself who’s not a believer and yet who maintains some sort of superstition about Sundays.  I think I could recognize Sundays from any other day if I came back from the planet Mars.”

I have drifted far from the faith of my youth, yet one of my favorite places to go is an empty church.   Jones speaks directly to me about this.

Later in life, at the U.S. Naval Academy, I found a similar sense of the sacred in the military rituals.  Annapolis imposed rigid institutional codes to instill in me a sense of duty, responsibility and service.  We (the midshipmen) were somehow different, somehow set apart from the rest of the world because we believed in those codes.  The inevitable drift towards war seemed, somehow, beside the point.  The rituals of that life informed the decisions we believed in: the honor code, the sense of duty, the pride in service.

Yet in both of these formative experiences, something lacked.  Both (the religious and the militaristic) somehow served only to exclude.  Only those on the inside could be admitted, accepted.  The rituals of church and state demanded an adherence to singular principles.  You believed in Christ.  You believed in Country.  Outside of these narrow confines was the enemy.

Literature (I think, I hope, I pray) offers a broader view of the sacred.  Literature grapples with similar structural concepts, with ritual and meaning, but not towards a single answer.  The artistic search scatters as it meanders toward a destination.

In a very elegant, brief essay, “Degenerates,” (Found in The Best Writing on Writing, Vol. 2, edited by Jack Heffron) the poet (and Benedictine oblate)  Kathleen Norris talks about the connections between monastic life and writing.  Norris lives with monks and talks about how monks and writers (poets) face a similar challenge: to live outside a world devoid of a sense of the sacred.

I told the Trappists that I had come to see both writing and monasticism as vocations that require periods of apprenticeship and formation.  Prodigies are common in mathematics, but extremely rare in literature, and I added, ‘as far as I know, there are no prodigies in monastic life.’  This drew a laugh, as I thought it might.”

Norris goes on to describe her life living with the monks and the similarities to the writer’s life.

I was recognizing the dynamic nature of both disciplines; they are not so much subjects to be mastered as ways of life that require continual conversion.  For example, no matter how much I’ve written or published, I always return to the blank page; and even more importantly, from a monastic point of view, I return to the blankness within, the fears, laziness and cowardice that without fail, will mess up whatever I’m writing and require me to revise it.  The spiritual dimension of this process is humility, not a quality often associated with writers, but lurking there, in our nagging sense of the need to revise.  As I put it to the monks, when you realize that anything good you write comes despite your weaknesses, writing becomes a profoundly humbling activity.”

I take comfort in being an apprentice, that the beatings I’ve endured at the hands of certain elders of the ‘church’ (read: certain, unnamed VCFA advisors) are going to temper my faith.  (Please note a benevolent sarcasm in this.)  Norris puts it this way:

Poets and monks do have a communal role in American culture, although it ignores, romanticizes, and despises them.  In our relentlessly utilitarian society, structuring a life around writing is as crazy as structuring a life around prayer, yet that is what writers and monks do.  Deep down, people seem glad to know that monks are praying, that poets are writing poems.  That is what others expect of us, because if we are doing our job right, we will express things that others may feel, or know, but can’t or won’t say.

-Rich Farrell

On Sex, Canadians, and What Paris Taught Me About Defeat

May 272010
 

In the dark days after the humiliating defeat of our villanelle, Paris and I have done some serious soul-searching.  The defeat weighs heavy on her (as it does on the author.)  She remains convinced that the Numero Cinq readership failed to identify the alternating motifs of pathos and love within the poem’s intricate structure.  But alas, as Paris tells me frequently, “Get over yourself.”  (Have truer words ever been spoken?)  We will be back, she vows.

So sex then.  An odd thing happened to me this semester:  almost all of my stories became highly sexualized.  I can’t blame my advisor for this, short of saying that he pressed me to build strong desire/resistance patterns in story structure.  He admonished me to make something happen in my stories, but didn’t say how.  As I reflected back on the stories I wrote this semester, I was surprised to see how I dealt with his guidance: I put a lot of sex in my stories.  This lead me to ponder, why?  I think the answer lies in a deeper, more complex relationship between the mind and the body, a relationship steeped in my culture and history as much as anything personal.

The Canadian poet, Steven Heighton, says that “violence is the sexuality of America.”  In his essay, “Body Found in Reservoir,” he explores how portrayals of violence in North American culture reflect a punishment of the body for its sexuality.  Another Canadian, songwriter Bruce Cockburn, put it this way in his song “Last Night of the World,”: “I learned as a child not to trust in my body//I’ve carried that burden through my life//But there’s a day when we all have to be pried loose.”  I didn’t consciously seek to ‘pry loose’ this mind-body contradiction in my stories this semester.  It arrived because I wanted to add a component of strong desire to my writing, but at what point does a torrid sex scene become, as my wife recently commented on one of my stories, gratuitous?   Heighton says this:

Violence is the sexuality of white North America because violence is all we have left.  The passions demand a physical outlet but in our bones we feel it’s somehow wrong to love the body.  So sex—no matter how aggressively marketed or universally portrayed, no matter how frankly and coolly discussed on talk shows or in the narcotic literature of self-help—remains fraught with an obscure gloom and guilt.”

Hollywood certainly offers up raw sexuality at every turn.  To return to my muse: Paris Hilton embodies this contradiction.   Her sexuality certainly calls attention to her body, but the mind seems a tad empty.  (Sorry P.)  Our culture in general offers the body willingly, with its ubiquitous promises of a perfect, unobtainable model (botox, liposuction, laser hair removal, Hair Club for Men, etc.)  Yet all these ‘cures’ seem to take us further away from the real body and into some hyped-up fantasy of perfection, which constantly implies that such perfection lies tantalizing close but always a hair-breadth out of reach.  Steven Heighton puts it more eloquently:

For the first few hundred years, it (the hiding of the body) worked.  Nowadays, if North Americans are still fundamentally puritanical, they show as much skin as anyone else—though in this seeming casualness there’s a strain of the frantic exhibitionism I mentioned before in regard to porn.  No group of people at peace with their bodies could muster such sad, huddled masses of anorexics and bulimics and the world’s highest per capita rate of abuse of steroids, sleeping pills, sedatives, and laxatives.

So back to my sexual drift this semester:  Did my use of sexuality in creating characters or situations reflect a healing of the mind-body?  Can I continue to write about sex without turning it into soft-porn?  The following sexual motifs appeared in my last four stories:  men masturbating each other in a foxhole, a threesome, oral sex in a parking lot, and S&M scenes between a husband and wife.  None of these stories was explicitly about sex, but these recurring situations gave me some pause.  Clearly a good sex scene ratchets ups the tension in a story, but writing about sex is certainly not daring anymore.  So what am I trying to accomplish with this?  A part of an answer might lie in Nancy Willard’s essay, “What We Write When We Write About Love.”  (Found in The Best Writing on Writing anthology edited by Jack Heffron.)  Willard describes a childhood scene where she is supposed to be watching a group of fraternity brothers serenading her sister as part of a courting ritual.  Instead of watching, she turns her binoculars onto a couple in the back seat of a car, doing what couples do in the backseat of cars.

Writing a love story is a little like finding yourself with a pair of binoculars in your hand, caught between passion and scruples, ceremony and sex.  If you err too far in either direction, you can end up on the side of pornography or romance.  The difference between a love story and a romance is one of intent.  When you write a romance, you carefully follow where many have trod, so that your readers can recognize the genre through its conventions.  But in a love story, you try to show love as if your characters had just invented it.  Follow your characters, and they will give you the story, but you can’t tell ahead of time where they’ll lead you.

What I draw from this is that sexuality becomes a matter of intent, not content.  It becomes a matter of healing, not manipulation.  It arcs toward love, toward the fusion of the mind-body gap.  It should celebrate, not denigrate.   Heighton says, “wherever the flesh is hated, or endangered, love is threatened as well.”

—Richard Farrell