The Danger of Remembering

The first critiques of my work are in and I’m thinking about them. “You must be more generous with us,” says Don, my partner in life, as well as in art.  He is a great writer as well as cinematographer. We are essentially engaged in the same cultural critique and I trust his pronouncements completely. “These people may be stoic, but you, the author, don’t have to be.” Of course, he is right. Anna says “Often the beautiful description seems to take over and distracts me from the story and characters. I feel the author is more in love with the tiny details than the people.” Though both of them are supportive, I realize I must go deeper, see these characters more fully, in their rich and rounded essences. And not just the protagonists, but equally those adults and others who provide the crucial context in which they find themselves.

I believe the problem is partly that I am working with memory and remembered life, though trying to be present, of course. It was Gertrude Stein who laid out most clearly that remembering doesn’t make anything live. “When you write you try to remember what you are about to write and you will see immediately how lifeless the writing becomes that is why expository writing is so dull because it is all remembered,” she said in a lecture in 1936. “The business of art is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to express that complete actual present.” We all know, even more today, that each present moment is incredibly pregnant with life, and why write anyway, if you cannot call out that life.

Nostalgia is not my intention in writing. However, my childhood in North Dakota and northern Minnesota is what I know, what I came from. I can go back there and sit in those years as if they were the present. If I don’t describe the characters and their feelings enough, it may be because they are so real to me, almost part of me. I think they don’t need exposition. But I will go back and bring these characters into the “complete actual present”, if I can.

The way I see the books is really as a symphony. Each of my protagonists has their own theme, which plays against the others. Each of them will have their own movement, in which their life comes to the fore while those of the other siblings recedes. The composition of the melodies, the harmonies, the instrumentation are what I work with. But time has a part, and that time must be the eternal present.

Communal Reading

One of the great delights of reading is being able to talk with someone else about it, being able to share a bit of thought space with another person who has similarly read a book you have, being able to discuss the characters of a book as though they were friends in common. The world-wide experience people had of sharing the Harry Potter books was a great deal of fun. Many, if not most, young girls could tell you who Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy are, and probably also Mary, Laura and their sisters Carrie and Grace. Few books approach the epic number of readers these books have had, and of course the films of each of them help.

The number of my friends who are members of at least one book group are testimony to the power of shared thought spaces as well. People seem to enjoy both the expansion of their own reading choices, and the enjoyment of sharing something that they have loved, as everyone takes turns choosing the next book. From what I’ve seen, however, people in book groups learn more about each other than anything else, using the back and forth conversation about characters and themes to define themselves and enrich their understanding of life. This deepening of friendship is certainly as valuable as knowing about the books themselves. And the communities which are formed around book groups may be some of the most intense we have in our loosely knit modern “villages”.

A lifetime of reading now stands me in very good stead. My reading has been wide-ranging, and while much of it has been somewhat esoteric, going far back in time and far out in geographic space, the core of it has been a search for deep reality. From “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” (Basho) to “Death Comes for the Archbishop” (Cather) to “Doctor Zhivago” (Pasternak) to “Light Years” (Salter), I am looking for that point at which rich language provides a glimpse of transcendence in which big mind meets actually sensed existence. If the imagination does take flight, for me it must still be an illumination of the truths of life. Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” is deeply true, while also an empathetic meditation on her real family.

I’m having as much fun grounding my characters in real life as I used to do reading. They are still little, most under ten years of age. But they are already themselves, holographically representing the people they will become, given environment and time. Whether my writing craft will be able to reach down and provide readers with a glimpse of their transcendent reality remains to be seen, but that is what I wish for them.

Highbrows

Pastor Carl Mikkelson, and his wife Lois Bakken Mikkelson, are the parents of the kids in my book. Born in the early 1920’s, depression and war affected their young years, but didn’t spoil their outlooks. When better years and a big family come, they are as happy as they can be. What does become a challenge for them, is the increase of influences on their kids which they cannot control, made available by increased communications technology and the broadening outlook the 1960’s.

With their college educations and Carl’s four years at the seminary, both of them well-versed in Latin, the Mikkelsons are Midwestern intellectuals. The Scandinavian Lutheran churches supported Luther’s doctrine that redemption is a gift of God's grace, to be attained only through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. The work of the church was the distribution of the sacraments and rites, the confirmation in the faith of young people and Bible study for everyone, using the King James version of the Bible. Carl’s study of the Bible went back to the Greek and Hebrew.

Both Carl and Lois’ grandparents, and one of Lois’ parents, had come directly from Norway and Denmark. They retained many elements of Scandinavian customs and a culture which was almost northern European in its traditions. In addition, Carl and Lois wished to develop in their children the high culture which flowed from a liberal arts education, including appreciation for the old masters in art, classical music and literary classics.

It is no wonder then, that Carl and Lois regarded the abundance of popular culture which overwhelmed everyone by the 1960’s with fear and trembling. They promoted interest in folk music, such as in the television show “Hootenanny”, as much as possible, and supported all of the popular representations of Christian culture, such as “The Ten Commandments”, “The Robe” and “Ben-Hur”. But they were fighting a losing battle.

Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” appeared in 1964. It gave intellectuals a reason to find value in popular culture. Art might not have to be “serious” to be valuable! By 1964, intellectuals wanted to listen to the Beatles, to Bob Dylan, perhaps even Elvis Presley, without feeling ashamed of themselves. It didn’t matter very much to Carl and Lois. They were still involved in a knock-down, drag-out fight with the culture for the souls of their children. But popular culture did begin to make inroads.

By this time, Carl and Lois had so imbued their children with Christian values and the classical virtues of humility, patience and kindness, that is, with humanity, that they were ready for anything. It would be a long time before everyone understood this, however, and any sort of peace was made.

Karaoke Life

It seems many of us live a sort of karaoke life, these days, when we have so much free time beyond fulfilling our basic needs that we hardly know what to do with ourselves. We fill this time identifying with various sports and fictions, and communicate with each other by insisting on the relative rightness of our personal preferences. As in karaoke, we are each terribly important, at the center of a digital moment in time, and at the same time throwing our real, actual selves completely away.

One way to get past post-modern frivolity, it seems to me, is to take ourselves seriously, to once again take up the craft of a life. I see this around me too, of course, many people taking great care over the education of their children, the ecology of their surroundings and pursuits, and over the food they prepare and eat. In this use of our free time, everything matters, everything we do is important.

Post-war America was full of optimism about the ability each of us had to craft his own life. Technology was full of promise, the American dream insisted that every family might have its own little castle, and corporations took up the challenge of making everyone comfortable with better toothpastes, better televisions and better barca-loungers. Studying it as I currently am, I remember that even then the road to individual irrelevance that goes with technologically-achieved comfort, and the road to the fully-lived life had begun to diverge.

Though a lover of technology, a ham radio operator and a constant new adapter, my Dad had a healthy fear of human arrogance. On our lake, he stood out shaking his fist at the water-skiers who riled the lake and spoiled it for wildlife. He much preferred canoes, in which one could glide silently, disturbing nothing. Canoes have technology, of course. Testing it, Dad made one, a lovely little yellow shell made by stretching canvas on a beautifully-crafted wooden frame and painting it with fiberglass. As he never made another, he didn’t have a chance to hone the craft and improve it. It is a task he left to us, I believe.

To take up this task is to limit oneself, of course. Craft implies care, devotion to the understanding and learning of a skill. But I believe the world opens out from it. In understanding one thing to its depths, you learn a very great deal. And you participate in the importance, in the wonder of the meeting of the material and its meaning, which, according to physicists, isn’t as far apart as we seem to think. Everything we do is important.

P.S. Writing here in January has meant that I stand at my computer on a little platform on the big desk in the upstairs office in layers of sweaters, topped by the California Norwegian sweater one of my sisters made, wearing the warm fleece wrist warmers made by another. By noon it is colder in the house than it is outdoors, and we sometimes open the windows to the warm air. By 3:00 p.m., however, I am out at the pool in a tank top, doing tai chi. No complaints here about the writing life!