No Ideas But in Things

A brilliant American doctor, William Carlos Williams, writing poetry in his office as he waited for his next patient, pulled us back from intellectual idealism and romanticism, by stating as a maxim for his work: “No ideas but in things.” Colloquial English, the panorama of reality in his native New Jersey captured Dr. Williams and influenced many who came after him. The bits of language which have nourished me tell people’s stories. In literature, I learn who characters are and how they embody ideas, what causes them to come to grief, or ecstasy, before they die. 

It was Elizabeth Bishop who pointed me to Darwin. Elizabeth, who lived near Rio de Janiero for almost 15 years, read Darwin all her life. Bishop had a perilous childhood, but it resulted in poems in which the power lay in what was not said. Precise observation, often of animals or natural phenomena, and a modesty of expression are her hallmarks. Her spare, elegant poetry hits heavy where it lands. No ideas but in things.

Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle [1845] is the adventure story of a young man in his twenties, who trained himself to be an excellent field biologist along the coasts of South America and then retired to his home near London to spend the rest of his life writing about what he had found. In The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, David Quammen says it isn’t the idea that we all have a common evolutionary background that horrifies people. It is that natural selection accomplishes it. No divine spark, no hand of providence watching over its precious creation. And certainly no special demi-god status for man. Evolution is relentless, out of chaos and uncertainty, toward survival. No ideas but in things.

Christopher Alexander, a British architect who spent most of his life working in Berkeley, California, states that our current problems are a result of our certainty that matter is value-free. We treat matter as a mechanism and act as if nothing we do matters. But if we were to accept the living character of space and matter, everything matters. “It paves the way to an ultimately personal view of the world. Matter is personal. We then treat all creation – of buildings, gardens, roads – as the protection of the personal which resides in matter, and which, through our actions, may see the light of day.” [The Nature of Order, Book Four, The Luminous Ground, 2004] No ideas but in things.

Robert Pirsig upends the concept of value further. Value is not a property of matter, he says. Matter is really a subspecies of value. “The metaphysics of quality says that if moral judgments are essentially assertions of value and if value is the fundamental ground-stuff of the world, then moral judgments are the fundamental ground-stuff of the world.” [Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, 1991] Pirsig shows us how, grounded in the world, life migrates toward freedom. No ideas but in things.

We look ever toward the point at which matter and spirit meet, where, often briefly to our heavy, everyday perception, matter is illumined by the light within. It can happen anywhere, any time. There is as much chaos and uncertainty in spiritual evolution as there is in physical evolution. Physical evolution looks toward success in being alive, but the evolution of the spirit looks toward value. Spirituality is flat-out value. No ideas but in things.

And finally from Pasternak – my mentor since earliest days: “So that there shall be no dead branches in the soul, so that its growth shall not be retarded, so that man shall be incapable of mingling his narrow mind with the creation of his immortal essence, there exists a number of things to turn his vulgar curiosity away from life, which does not wish to work in his presence and in every way avoids him. … Hence all respectable religions, all generalizations, all prejudices and the most amusing and brilliant of them all – psychology.” [From The Childhood of Luvers, 1918, translated by Robert Payne]

No ideas but in things.

With One Hand Waving Free

Yesterday, before lunch, I finished a first draft of With One Hand Waving Free. Unlike last year when I celebrated the end of a draft of Fit Company for Oneself with a fire, a glass of wine and some chestnuts, this year I took a nap in the sun in the hammock! Yes, in October in San Rafael, California, the sun is strong in the middle of the day and, though it has moved far to the south, it falls full on the hammock that is the furniture of our front garden ‘room.’ Sweet sun lies upon me like a human hand, blessing me with its warmth.

The title of this book, from Dylan’s song “Mr. Tambourine Man,” is apt for Line, Marty and Paul. Each of them, in his own way, finds a “diamond sky” to dance beneath, intent on seizing the day and letting tomorrow take care of itself. Indeed it is inherent in their understanding that if you embrace the gifts and needs of the day, tomorrow will follow naturally, resulting in the life you are meant to live.

Line uproots herself from Chicago, taking her small son but leaving her husband who is embroiled in growing violence. She takes a train to San Francisco, where Marty is already living. Marty goes to California to live with a family she met in England, but then takes a clerical job which frees her to read and think as she likes. She falls for an enigmatic young architect whose absences and silences Line distrusts. Paul finishes college, at last brought face to face with the fact that he cannot become a Lutheran pastor as is expected. He takes a teaching job in Fairbanks, Alaska. The end of the book finds Sparky (Line) reunited with her gang in San Francisco when Paul stops briefly on his way.

So now that you know what happens, do you want to read the book? When I read fiction, I go straight to the end to get it over with. Then I am free of the plot and can read to find out what the writer thinks is important, and how the characters embody his or her values, or not. I am reading for values, plain and simple. Needless to say, many books do not stand up to this kind of reading! But that doesn’t stop me. I write for values too.

Robert Pirsig states in Lila: An Inquiry into Morals that the world is nothing but value, that value in fact drives evolution. He asks whether quality is to be found in the subject or the object, and when he realizes that it is in neither, he decides that it is independent of either and the source of both. He states that “without Dynamic Quality an organism cannot grow. But without static quality an organism cannot last. Dynamic liberals and radicals need conservatives to keep them from making a mess of the world through unneeded change. Conservatives also need liberals and radicals to keep them from making a mess of the world through unneeded stagnation [http://robertpirsig.org/MOQSummary.htm].”

This is a big topic to drop into a blog post crowing about finishing the draft of a novel! Nevertheless, in trying to place what my novels are doing in the world I think about it a lot! They are clearly not providing heroes and heroines fighting obvious good and evil. They do not sponsor the received ideas of any nation or creed. They are a sincere attempt to watch my characters muddling through experience based upon my own and that of my friends and relations. Line, Marty and Paul make mistakes, have successes and failures, which are often not understood until much later. In a complex world such as ours, growth is not always in one direction. People grow up, down, around and through.

And it is slow! With a great deal of luck, my characters will be in their fifties before I let go of them. Maybe even older. What does it mean to become whole? To become a real person? These questions open a look into the dynamic values in which I am interested and which I hope that Line, Marty and Paul’s lives embody over time.