A Net to Catch the Whole

“So Are You to My Thoughts” is, to some degree, inspired by the work of mathematician and architect Christopher Alexander. As a teacher at the University of California, and as a working architect, he came up with a way of looking at the value of buildings and other structures which he published in a series of books called “The Nature of Order”. One of the central tenets of his concept is that wholes are not made up of parts, but rather “wholeness creates its parts … the sub-wholes – or centers – are induced within the wholeness, and come from the wholeness.” Wholeness has a recursive nature, in that the stronger the whole, the stronger are the centers induced within it, thus in turn making the whole stronger. Wholes are deeply connected with each other and with their centers.

Applying this to people, it seems to me very true. In this way of thinking about growth and education, we are not simply the result of our particular DNA expressing itself. We don’t purely will ourselves into being. In fact we are induced by the family and culture, indeed the generations, which precede us. Of course we are free to create our lives, to flower in the ways we are meant to. It is just that the stronger the wholes which create us, the stronger we are, and the deeper the interlock between us and the wholes we are part of, as well as those we create.

In looking at Line, Marty and Paul from this point of view, I see how important the places they grew up, the culture of their extended family, and of course the times, were to them. They live in a small town of about two hundred people where cultural life almost completely takes place in church and school. Land was laid out by homesteading in the 19^th Century and farms are about 160 acres each, planted to wheat mostly, with some soybeans and sunflowers. The town was created so that farmers could co-operate in storing their grain in big elevators and sending it to cities by train, which runs along one side of the main street on which Line, Marty and Paul live. The most potent political question in the town is the extent to which farmers should co-operate, for instance in the powerful Farmers’ Union. Land for the school was laid out in accordance with 19^th Century township practices and is funded and regulated by the state.

As the children of a Lutheran pastor who is educated by the organized church, Line, Marty and Paul are perhaps a little more aware of religious questions in their culture, but  probably not much. They take all of it completely for granted. Their eyes are open to the subtle differences in income and education levels in people in their town, but they are taught, both in school and by literal readings of Christ’s teachings as written down in the Bible, a fundamentally egalitarian acceptance of others.

Alexander’s work is mainly about value. “Value is a measure of the degree of connectedness a given place, or thing, or event, has with the ground,” he says. He takes four long books to explain it in quite readable prose, but I cannot follow his mathematical definition of “the wholeness”. I do see wholeness as a way of determining the degree to which we are able to fulfill our promise as humans. Examining its embodiment in my characters, I find a reason to write.

The Eisenhower Years

I recently realized that the first book in my series, "The Pastor's Kids," is almost exactly co-existent with the years that Eisenhower was president. Though kids that grew up in cities may have felt the pressures of the Cold War during those years, in North Dakota, on the wheat-growing flood plain of the Red River, it didn't feel real. Those were stable years. We were still helping a few Displaced Persons from World War II, but our main thoughts were about school, church, friends and ourselves.

Though our life would look a little bleak to a kid from today, we had the richness of the seasons and plenty of playmates. And the world did trickle in to our little town. Crates of peaches and cherries, Sears catalogs, many glossy magazines and books found their way to us. We sometimes went to the neighbors to watch television, but in 1956, Dad and Mother rented one to watch the elections, and couldn't part with it when they were over.

The kids in the photo above (which I found somewhere on the internet), are actually quite close to my characters. Paul, on the left, a few years younger than Marty, the next, and Line (short for Caroline) in the middle are the three protagonists, the kids through whose eyes we see the world. Their Dad calls them "Sparky and the gang," as Line, always bright-faced and out in front, calls the shots for the other two and they can hardly be separated.

The next kid, Kristen, should be a little bit younger in relations to the others, but she is a stolid little kid, like the one in the picture. The last one, Ellie, should be older and blonder. Ellie was the first child, born in 1941 and of a different cast of mind than the younger kids. Their parents were scrambling when she was born. Their Dad was still at the seminary and their Mother worked at an orphanage, the three of them only getting together on Sundays.

The conflicts in the book are thus the age-old sibling rivalries, as well as the inner conflicts of kids who want to be richer, or more heroic, or just more ordinary than they actually are. Paul contracts polio, and his struggles with it, and with his desire to be a naturalist, are a constant theme. For him the grail is truth, painful though it might be.

Line is struck most by the general unfairness of the world. Kids on farms seem poorer than the town kids, illness strikes her beloved brother, and she has a hard time reasoning out how the loving hands of God can hold her, when she and others have so many troubles. For her sister Marty, the beautiful is the good. Her main problem is that it is elusive. A thing may shine with light one day and not the next. It may grow in importance for you, but then you become so used to it you can't even see it.

It remains to be seen whether I can make anything interesting, or even readable, out of my characters and their conflicts, but I am certainly going to try!

So are you to my thoughts as food to life ...

For a couple of years "So are you to my thoughts as food to life," the first line of a Shakespearean sonnet, has been the title for the last in a series of books I am writing, and thus also the overview title. I thought that, once I had time, I would decipher the rest of the sonnet to the extent that it might bear meaning to the books. Given time, however, I don't think the rest of the sonnet works for my purposes.

The first two lines are great:

"So are you to my thoughts as food to life,
Or as sweet-season'd showers are to the ground."

We are all meant to flower and fruit in our own unique ways. We are deeply interconnected in this and dependent on the resources we provide each other. Like trees, we stand under the sun with our arms uplifted, full of gratitude for the light and rain which give us life as we dig our toes deep into the earth of our communal culture.

I am grateful for those I love, those given to me to touch, to talk to, and those so far away I must write to them! They are as necessary to life as food. Our fruits do not belong to us alone, but to our interconnected love. Sometimes our lives have been stressed, developing stranger flowers, more complex fruit, as certain vineyards do which have to dig into the water and mineral tables deep in the soil.

The last lines of the Shakespearean sonnet describe the lover alternately enjoying his love alone, or with others, feasting and then being surfeited. Helen Vendler suspects it is one of the sonnets in which Shakespeare was more interested in the language he was using and its conceits, than in what he was saying.

But rather than choose another title, I have decided to use this one anyway, as I've lived with it so long. It does point to something of what I mean to say.