Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.
Ursula Le Guin, National Book Awards, 2014
Man, she nailed it, didn’t she?
We’re all feeling pretty beaten up. Me, I’ve ghosted my friends and closed my laptop for the past week. I put my phone away (as much as possible) and I’m trying to be present in the real world more (limited success). I hope my friends — (real world and virtual) will forgive me — but I’ve closed down. I just can’t engage in politics right now, not between my utter disillusion about our fellow citizens and the media’s endless chatter and fingerpointing — no thanks. I’ll wait for the dust to clear. After that, I’ll help who I can help and for the rest … well, they get what they voted for.
I’m trying to make this period a reset, because I’ve also been overwrought in life, and I feel terrible about that. I really want to talk about this because I feel like you’ve put trust in me and I haven’t been keeping up my end. I’ve hesitated writing this, and am still hesitating. Oversharing is unappealing, but I can’t escape the fact that events in my life have had a huge impact on what’s happening here in this small space, so here goes.
Part 1
For the past three years, I’ve been babysitting my grandson. He’s adorable (as all kids are adorable), opinionated, good-natured and quick-witted. My DIL, an attorney, has been working successive positions, trying to find a practice where she fits. She may have found it now, but she works long hours. My son is starting a farm business, so when he’s not working, he’s either on the phone with mentors, marketing stock, or researching new options for regenerative farming. They have stress upon stress upon stress piled on them. Andy and I have been keeping the baby. On average, we’ve had him about 50 hours a week. And that doesn’t count chicken processing or farmer’s markets, which I keep in a separate mental folder.
That’s a big reason why it’s been so hard — inability to plan, lack of a schedule, everything being an emergency — and at the end of the day I still have work around the house and farm, work that has also been neglected. My mental space is overcrowded. And I don’t know why I’m writing about it here except that you keep showing up, gods know why, and giving me your good will and comments and support, and I keep feeling like I’m in the last stage of a marathon that always have just one more mile tacked on at the end. I owe you. And I’m out of fuel.
But I don’t want this to die.
This is an important community. You all are important. And even if everything else goes to pieces, you keep showing up, primed with good will. I know, because I’m one of you. Everything else may fall apart, but we show up for the Readers and Book Lover’s — and I read you all, too, even if I don’t comment or rec because … 50 hours a week. That’s on top of an in-person life and an increasingly-strident and stubborn imaginative life. I want this — this community — to continue, to thrive, to grow. To delight, surprise, and inform: each other and our selves.
We have two options for Language of the Night — well, three, if you want the last option:
- 1. Guest hosts for a while. Sign up sheet and everything.
- 2. Open thread for a while. I can promise to open the store and maybe throw a tidbit up top, but that’s really all I can do for now.
- 3. End it. Let it go.
I won’t always be stuck in this place, but I am now. So let me know what you want to do, and it’ll be done.
Part 2
I just finished Julia Alvarez’s The Cemetery of Untold Stories. In fact, as this publishes, I’m at a book club meeting to discuss it (I actually joined a book club! Who would have thought?) but will be back in good time tonight to check in here, something else I have been neglecting: hit publish and go to bed because ... lack of fuel.
So what about the book? It’s sublime. Just lovely. The prose is taut and sure. Graceful, assured. For example: Alma, our main character, a well-respected Latina writer and teacher, decides it’s time to retire from both teaching and writing:
There was a rightness to these endings, however unsettling. What Alma was finding harder to accept was that aging also happens in the creative life. Maybe not for Yeats, submitting to his monkey-gland treatments. Or for Milosz or Kunitz — interestingly, all males, at least the the ones Alma could name — working well into old age. Critics liked to write about the late style, usually a euphemism for a messy grasping for what has passed. The glow of celebrity now tinged with nostalgia might keep the fan fires going, but Alma didn’t want anyone’s condescension or pity. The time had come to stop beating herself up for not being able to finish anything. She was trying to hold on to the literary version of good looks, the plastic surgeries of astute agents and editors nipping and tucking the flagging work. Every worker knows to put aside her tools at the end of the workday. Even that paramount narcissist, Prospero.
But what had he done when he put aside his rough magic? What did a world without his cloud-capped towers feel like? How did Yeats cope, stuck in the rag and bone shop of his own heart? Maybe that’s when he signed up for his monkey-gland treatments.
p. 16
As I said, great prose. It flows; there are no stumbles. It’s a pleasure to read. You can feel when you’re in the hands of an assured writer, one who knows how to weave the spell and put you into a world where nothing short of the smoke-detector going off will pull you out.
Writers often talk about characters having minds of their own — doing unexpected things, surprising their authors. These characters are alive, and every reader can tell when a character isn’t alive and has never lived: they’re flat, unrealized, uninteresting. They’re the characters who don’t change.
So if characters are alive, albeit only within the bounds of the world their author has created, what happens to characters whose stories haven’t been published? Or told? That’s Alma’s dilemma. On the cusp of retirement, she doesn’t know what to do with the books and stories that she hasn’t finished, hasn’t published. She takes them to her native Dominican Republic, where she’s inherited a small scrap of land in a barrio, and creates a cemetery for them.
But suppose that these characters really are alive; suppose they have an enduring consciousness, and suppose they have stories that they want to tell? They need a listener, because that’s what storytelling requires: a teller and an audience. And the lives of the people in the messy, couldn’t-be-finished books, the secrets that the characters would not confess to their author — all have to come out. Their stories need to conclude.
Is the book fantasy? Absolutely. Although the marketers will call it magic realism, which is fantasy with south-of-the-border seasoning. In The Cemetery of Untold Stories the lives of dissidents, siblings with their rivalries and their primal allegiances, people of the barrio, Bienvenida, the discarded first wife of Rafael Trujillo, and Manuel Cruz, Alma’s mysterious and flawed father, all come alive.
In Leaves of Grass, there’s a jarring moment where Whitman pauses and says something like “You think I’m dead? How can I be dead when I’m talking to you now?” Alvarez takes that sentiment a step further, not that authors are immortal, but that characters are. And if characters are immortal, they have consciousness independent of their authors. They have their own stories to tell. And maybe, just maybe, Alma’s stories failed because her characters kept from her the secrets that now compel them to speak — in the cemetery, to someone who can listen.
But wait!, there’s more! In post-modern contemporary literature, sometimes authors will drop the referent. Which means that, in Cemetery, for instance, even if it’s possible that characters are alive and the characters of unfinished stories long to tell their stories, and there could be a place where those characters would speak and there would be at least one character to listen, even the most astute listener won’t know the whole story. You see, it used to be that authors would use a viewpoint character, someone who, at the end of the story, would have put the whole thing together. A Sherlock, a Horatio, a Starbuck — a referent. Someone to stand in for the reader.
Without a referent, the reader has to be the referent. At the end of a book like The Cemetery of Untold Stories, there is no character who’s figured it all out. That’s the reader’s job. It’s not just passive listening; it’s active participation.
It’s a good feeling.
Coda
At the bottom there’s a handy little poll to let you vote on which option you want. If either of the first two prevail, it’s how we’ll roll for a while, until I can get my feet back under me and my mind less burdened, okay. If it’s the third option, we’ll go out classy — with a wake and everything.
And thank you. I don’t say that often enough. But thank you. For your attention, your good will, your friendship, your prickly nettlesome personae (as appropriate), your great taste and recommendations, and your awesome selves.
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