Robert Vivian is a good friend and colleague at Vermont College of Fine Arts, a Nebraska native, and a former baseball player (a fact that I find endlessly fascinating—Nebraska and baseball: some echo of the American epic in those words). He is a prolific writer of superb meditative essays and a fine novelist, also a playwright and poet. Of the second novel in his The Tall Grass Trilogy, I wrote: “Robert Vivian’s Lamb Bright Saviors is a brave and profoundly moving novel of faith and forgiveness. A closely-observed novel of voices, it speaks the tongues of America’s impoverished underbelly and reveals, amid the squalor, mystery, goodness and salvation.” Robert Vivian teaches at Alma College in Michigan. He is the author of The Tall Grass Trilogy (The Mover Of Bones, Lamb Bright Saviors, and Another Burning Kingdom) and the essay collections Cold Snap As Yearning and The Least Cricket Of Evening. His next novel, Water And Abandon, will be out this fall.
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A Few Thoughts On The Meditative Essay
By Robert Vivian
The meditative essay hinges on stillness, on a moment delicately teased out of the cogs of time to live in the timeless present: it is not interested much in opinions or even ideas, preferring instead to live in the realm of pondering and contemplation (though the aforementioned may be used as initiating sparks). Its primary focus is not the self, though it uses the self and all that it has to give as a kind of booster rocket that, once the prose reaches certain insights, is jettisoned or spent, much like shuttles that are launched into outer space as we see those burning hoops fall back into the pearly clouds after they have done their proper work of achieving escape velocity. The meditative essay is comfortable and downright friendly with paradox and has no real axe to grind: it’s too intent on paying attention to what bids it keenest focus and delight, be it a button, a homeless woman, the changing of the seasons, or the prevalence of roadkill in a certain area. It is not concerned with hierarchy or competition or anything that goes by the name of ambition or force and draws attention to itself only for the music of its cadences and what these cadences reveal, which are very often surprising to its practitioners, so much so that this same quality of surprise is the meditative essay’s own intrinsic and unshatterable reward.
It lives most abundantly—thank goodness—in what the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur called a “post-critical naïveté”—a term he coined that, according to Thomas Berry in his forward to Thomas Merton’s lovely book When The Trees Say Nothing, “brings together the response of both innocence and experience as we pass through the unfolding events of these times.” But the meditative essay is also a very elusive creature, as elusive as anything, perhaps, in any genre. Why is it elusive, and what do I mean here by elusive? Because the meditative essay cannot be willed or forced and certainly not argued into existence; it comes, like Keats says about writing good poems, like leaves to a tree—that is, the meditative essay comes organically, holistically, though of course not without the patient practice and observance of its creator. More than anything, the meditative essay is like a shy wild animal that will bolt at the slightest sign of undue ego or aggression, though it may occasionally use tiny bits of these to furnish its lair. When the meditative essay is fully and truly itself, we know its author so intimately that we swap souls with her or him: it is a consummately intimate form of exchange, as tender as a confiding lover propped up on his or her elbow in bed after lovemaking. Fear is not in its nature, nor is blame or accusation; indeed, intimacy may be its single-most distinguishing characteristic, the way it takes us into the heart, mind and soul of its author.
