MindSpinner

When the latest issue of The Atlantic arrived a few weeks ago, it disappeared, as usual, into my son’s room. This morning I skimmed online the cover article, on Lincoln’s depression. There’s no time for commentary between this moment and five minutes from now, when I have to rouse sleeping teenagers, but I found Joshua Wolf Shank’s piece intriguing for its thesis:

… Lincoln’s melancholy is part of a whole life story; exploring it can help us see that life more clearly, and discern its lessons. In a sense, what needs “treatment” is our own narrow ideas—of depression as an exclusively medical ailment that must be, and will be, squashed; of therapy as a thing dispensed only by professionals and measured only by a reduction of pain; and finally, of mental trials as a flaw in character and a disqualification for leadership.

Throughout its three major stages—which I call fear, engagement, and transcendence—Lincoln’s melancholy upends such views. With Lincoln we have a man whose depression spurred him, painfully, to examine the core of his soul; whose hard work to stay alive helped him develop crucial skills and capacities, even as his depression lingered hauntingly; and whose inimitable character took great strength from the piercing insights of depression, the creative responses to it, and a spirit of humble determination forged over decades of deep suffering and earnest longing.

And for its conclusion:

Whatever greatness Lincoln achieved cannot be explained as a triumph over personal suffering. Rather, it must be accounted an outgrowth of the same system that produced that suffering. This is a story not of transformation but of integration. Lincoln didn’t do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy; the problem of his melancholy was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work.

I’m still reading Pretty Birds off and on, when I decide it’s time to ignore everything else that clamors for attention. I’ve been using that little stack of index cards called a Hipster PDA to keep up with all my action list, and I’ve decided that I need to write on the front card, “Read 20 minutes,” along with “Exercise.” It’s too easy to let those things go when there are not enough hours in the day. And there won’t be enough hours in the day, now that school is starting.

At first I decided that Pretty Birds is clearly a journalist’s novel. Well-written, certainly. I knew I had to buy the book when, listening to NPR, I heard Scott Simon read the passage in which Irena shoots the lemons. I also wanted to read it because of Yelena, a Serb exchange student I taught in ’92-’93. After my first three dips into the book – maybe 75 pages – I was feeling, despite the capable prose, a reporter’s careful, restrained distancing from dimensions of characters’ inner lives. Even Irena’s rape seemed matter-of-fact, as if our tough young heroine could not be fazed by something as morally weak as the Serb soldier’s clumsy assault. (In fact, the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether Irena’s involvement with her coach and the apparently gratuitous sex scene that occurs early in the novel aren’t there most crucially so that she won’t be a virgin when the soldier forces himself on her, so that she’ll be sexually experienced and tough and not let a war-time rape haunt her, though of course at some level it must.)

I’d even begun to take some issue about what began to feel like a misrepresentation of the human experience of war simply through omission. The focus on reportable exteriorities seemed to insist that an objective and somewhat distanced approach was the only way to tell the truth, to avoid putting oneself where one could never actually really be, in the shoes of these characters during this war. However, that is exactly where a novel has to put us, in order to tell what readers can know of such truths, at least by reading rather than by experiencing war.

Now that I’ve read to page 109, the distance that defines objectivity has telescoped inward as Scott Simon works his way into psychological and physical truths that are at the heart of the story he was obviously compelled to tell. Nermina’s death and Mrs. Zaric’s letter to the dead girl’s parents move us in that direction. Objective artifact, a letter, but full of human feeling.

Setting Pretty Bird free, in hopes that he will survive, strikes a new note of pathos that is not reserved for a severed human foot with its painted toenails or even for Milan Zaric’s mother earlier in the book. Likewise the story of Cesar the old blue hound and Kolo the starving bear in the zoo. It is Cesar the hound, however, that has seized upon my thinking.

Another woman brought in an old blue hound who was exhausted and hoarse from barking. The poor dog had been driven crazy by bombs. It was a quiet morning. But Cesar whimpered, bucked, and cringed in a corner, hearing whines from mortars and bombs that were above human register. (p. 101)

Irena helps the vet, Dr. Pekar, put the dog down, death being the only peace the doctor can offer. I cried. Instantaneously. Now this moment is probably, for many readers, less affecting than, say, the death of Nermina, Irena’s teammate. Maybe it struck a chord for me because, when our Sheltie had grown so old and ill that the spark left her eyes, I was the one who had to take her, on my own, to have her put down. I still remember the horrid shock when I realized that “putting a dog to sleep” was not – had not been - a five-minute process or even a two-minute process of the dog’s drifting off in my arms but a process of mere seconds. I had watched the needle emptying into the vein, not the life leaving the eyes. So maybe it was this connection that made the small incident in the book bring home some true thing about the horror of war, that it could drive the dog mad.

Three days later, I’m still puzzling. What made the death of the dog more affecting to me than the death of Nermina or Milan Zaric’s mother? Is it because in war I expect people to die but simply hadn’t thought of this additional horror - because I was braced for the one but not the other (as may have been Scott Simon’s experience, too)? Is it because humanity feels culpable – even the apparently innocent among us - for the whole business of war, having proven over and over again that war is a predilection of our species, such that we may, any or all of us, find ourselves damned to it now and then? Is it because dogs cannot pick up guns and shoot back, as Irena will do? Is it because we therefore ascribe to animals a sort of innocence we do not find in ourselves, even though Kolo the bear eats his cagemates? I don’t know.

But, in the final analysis, I am not sure I think of my former students who have gone to fight in Iraq as significantly less innocent than Cesar the dog. May they live and come home whole in body and mind. Somehow.

I remember reading years ago Beryl Markham’s poetic and gutsy (yes, both) memoir of her life in Africa, West With the Night. Markham made the horizons of a life seem potentially almost limitless. Hers is still one of the most beautifully written memoirs I’ve read (no matter how much of a hand her third husband did or didn’t have in writing it). But as I read, I thought, You’re not telling me the half of it. If you lived and perceived this bravely and beautifully, the personal aspects of your life probably also reflected adventurous courage. So I read a biography, too, to satisfy my curiosity. (I am not an avid reader of biographies, generally. If drama is life with the dull bits cut out, as Alfred Hitchcock said, biography is life with the dull bits intact.) I don’t even remember which biography it was, though it might have been Straight on ‘Til Morning, by Mary Lovell. (That title seems to ring a bell - besides Peter Pan, that is.) Whichever biography it was, it confirmed what I suspected. Markham hadn’t told her readers many of the intimate aspects of her remarkable life, but only what she had distilled as the legacy of her memories. So she gave us memories and vision, but not whom she slept with or even married. I respected her choices because those choices respected people and situations.

I’ve thought about blogging in the light of Markham’s memoir. As a blogger, I think I’d rather be a Beryl Markham than a Stephanie Klein. Not that I’m in any danger whatsoever of being likened to either, but one does like to sort out hypothetical questions. Of course, I have a challenge Markham never faced - a preponderance of dull bits as opposed to solo transatlantic flights, lions, and so forth. So if I manage to shape something worth writing and reading out of my dull bits, or better yet reach out and snatch better bits whenever the gods of endless responsibility glance the other way, I figure I may be accomplishing something courageous, even heroic, too.

The whole project is analogous to ongoing efforts in my backyard garden, which is no less than a life-long attempt to make an Eden out of bad dirt, a lot of weeds, and, currently, a plague of Japanese beetles. So there’s still a lot of bad dirt, and there are still a lot of weeds, and the horrid beetles have stripped the grape vines bare, but there’s the someday shade garden and the stone path, lilies and roses, thyme, rosemary, and lavender, two goldfish in the planter-pot-turned-pond, and, today, a handful of ripe blackberries to eat out of hand. Perhaps this blog is yet one more quest to make life not only habitable but beautiful, dull bits and all.

I’m backtracking today, all the way to last summer, when I read Life of Pi and wrote to a friend about the book. I’m pasting part of the note below.

Why would I do this? For the sake of potential conversations about books, of course. I should be blogging about what I’m reading now (just finished The Kite Runner and Getting Things Done, am sixty or seventy pages into Scott Simon’s Pretty Birds), but this summer has not offered much time for reading and writing about reading, given a job change and a summer Web project, so I’m cheating.

No doubt, I am also posting this note because a casual acquaintance disparaged reading to me today as having little substantive relevance to “real life.” He thought I was nuts for putting a shared love of books high on my list of criteria for a successful relationship. I am in full defiance mode.

Here’s the greater part of the note.

Your ideas about Life of Pi brought me back to the novel and to the task of working out what to make of it, a task I had not (and still have not) finished. But I think I am making a start. (I am very happy at this sort of thing, like a child absorbed in building a sand castle with sand that actually holds a shape.)

I should read the novel all over again. (In fact, all bets are off until I do, and all sand castles merely hypothetical until shored up on every side with little sandy buttresses.)

My impression was that I began to expect one thing while I was reading or listening, and then the book became another, several times over. I do not think this was, in fact, a lack of unity or purpose; I think it is evidence that the story is not to be read merely as a remarkable story in the survival genre that swerves into magical realism here and there. I think it’s a story about stories and storytellers, the stories we choose to believe and the stories we don’t, the stories that we mistake for truths that are not, the truths that we dismiss as stories wen we shouldn’t, and most of all, the stories that are most worth telling and hearing and believing imaginatively, if not literally, as if reality isn’t the most important thing in the world after all.

There’s a tip-off in the close to the author’s note, which is itself a fiction, like Hawthorne’s “Customs House” introduction to The Scarlet Letter: “If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.” So maybe the book is about choosing what to believe and having worthwhile dreams. It’s a testament to a faith in stories and in truths that are not slave to mere “crude reality.”

There is the story of how bad zoos are, which is dismantled and replaced by another story of how bad zoos are not.

There are the stories which are the world’s great religions, stories which each in their own way point to God, and which therefore should not be dismissed, each by another.

There is the story of the boy and the tiger on the boat, which is worth telling and believing not because it is necessarily believable, but because it is a great story that speaks to faith, resourcefulness, and the potentially indomitable human spirit. So Martel makes us believe it for a bit by force of vividness and detail, then undoes the believing with the fantastic conversation between the blind Pi and his blind fellow shipwreck victim whose paths supposedly cross, and the story of the carnivorous island, which sounds like an episode from The Odyssey. (It reminds me of the island of Circe: this is a place that will devour you, a place you cannot stay.) Then we realize that the carnivorous island story does not have to be literally true; it can by mythically true of all sorts of situations we can encounter in crude reality, from a bad marriage to a bad job to a seductive addiction.

When the story of the French cook comes along, we find ourselves attempting to choose, as Pi suggests, the story we wish to believe. Both, of course, are fictions. Martel implies that the value of a story does not lie in whether or not it actually happened. The value of a story lies in whether it speaks to us dreams worth dreaming and beliefs that keep us afloat, or indomitable, and sometimes within reach of the divine.