Circular Reading
"Fire Remains the Same" by mpardo.photo is marked with CC0 1.0
In 2009, I am embarrassed by a woman who is Welsh. I barely know what “Welsh” means other than “sounds English,” but apparently “Welsh” means “Not-English.” The woman is one of my tutors at Blackfriars Hall in Oxford. Having finished implying that I should know Wales is a complicated country and not some tribal hangover like York, she turns to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.” She gives a classic, bracing British smile. “Amazing how he stuffs it all neatly into this one poem, isn’t it?” she says. But I do not understand the poem even a little. I am studying Heraclitus, or rather Heraclitean cosmogony as preserved and expanded by the Stoics, and if you’re wondering—No, I don’t really get any of that either. When I say I don’t understand Hopkins’s verse, I mean at the most superficial level of “what is happening” or “what is the poet describing.” I can tell my tutor the individual words, barely, but not a bit of their content. I am “Jack, joke, poor potsherd,” as Hopkins puts it. I am floundering.
A private conference room and no one is looking me in the eye. That’s my first clue. Other students hand me an edited packet of my own writing like the famous four feathers from that old novel (also a Heath Ledger film!) about shaming a coward in public. This is my last MFA workshop and it is a failure. I have attempted something I think is avant-garde; I have been reading too much Joyce; I am in an MFA program and determined to innovate first and communicate later. I am torn to shreds. Sitting in the room, a small room not unlike my Oxford tutorials although it’s nearly a decade after Oxford, I listen to my peers and instructor check off my excerpt’s failures one by one. The setting doesn’t feel historical. The pace is too fast, too summative. The supporting characters are flat.
But every failure they list pinpoints an area in which I thought I was brushing originality. No one in the 50s thought, “Gee whiz! ‘Diners,’ ‘greasers,’ and ‘hotshops’ are the only things I should say!” People likewise don’t turn their lives over and over in their minds the way writers rotate word after word for effect and sentences should reflect this: they should move. As for supporting characters, they are seen as flat in life when the principle POV is racist or blinkered or self-absorbed, which is everyone. Check. Check. Check.
I’m wrong, of course, which is why I am so livid. I have not learned how to write. I have not learned in a straight line—no better in my last year of art school than my first, and maybe worse.
How I want to learn is like a machine. I want to input, retain, recall like an iPhone. My iPhone reduces this capacity in practice—I don’t remember phone numbers, I log them—but my iPhone also tempts me to imitation. Silly, of course. We do not store information so much as we experience it. We are not flesh machines who upgrade or upload. Even the pleasure of storing data (baseball statistics, facts about WWII) is just that, a pleasure, sometimes an effect of vanity or a collector’s dopamine fix, but never an object of pure capacity. When there’s no practical need, the spirit either responds, or else there’s no learning. If I were an iPhone, I think the modern lie goes, I’d be free of the need to love.
At our new church I don’t know when to cross myself or when to kneel, even though they explicitly tell us when to kneel, and I don’t know if I’m allowed communion. We have moved across the country so I can attempt more schooling, and moved across denominations as well. What no one in Denver can understand about “moving to New York” is that we are actually relocating, in terms of their imagination, to Pennsylvania. Cost of living will be cheaper, we’ll be in a smaller town, the region is basically out in the country. Syracuse, New York. We are slow, too slow, in coming to love it. Before we love it, we are trying a new way to worship and learning these words: “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone.” Learning the city and learning this new church. Learning as acclimating. The church is both too high for our background and too low in terms of actual fundamentalists, but we go back again and again. We take my mother-in-law when she visits, an ex-Catholic and non-church-goer, and it’s the week the priest is gone and we basically pray out loud for thirty minutes and then someone speaks in tongues. (Forgive me, ex-Catholic mother-in-law!) My interest is not prophesy, but repetition. I want to return and repeat and return and witness accretion. Me, the man who cannot learn in a straight line.
Writing programs believe learning is practicing, we are there to “learn the craft,” whereas I wish I could be contemptuous of craft. Or rather, I am contemptuous of craft except when it helps me, just as I chafe at all formal education until the knowledge is blended seamlessly into the language of my temperament. The writer Joy Williams, goes the legend, was once asked to give a craft talk and brought a blue box of Kraft Mac&Cheese to the stage and made wry remarks about...Kraft. I hope it’s true. My simplicity is that I try to learn my craft through email, long texts, through every bad story I produce, and I mostly produce bad stories. My second year of my program, I start praying in earnest because I am writing bad stories at a Very Good MFA and public failure and core-identity crisis all seem at hand. I critique stories well and give pointed comments, but I want to write better. Such a gift, it seems, is beyond me. I can do nothing systemically. I cannot proceed in a straight line. I cannot begin at “Begin” and end at “End” or understand the purpose of a narrative or my choices or even the point of writing—aren’t there people starving and taxes to be paid and wars? I start praying-before-writing during the second year of my MFA and you have already heard about the third year. A failure.
We are back in Denver and we have two kids. For some reason I’m recounting how I don’t know enough about Russian history, China’s Cultural Revolution, Ida B. Wells, J.I. Packer, or the inception of English football. We are discussing the loss of brain cells from having two children, or I am, when my wife stops my blather of self-denigration to suggest that I “experience the learning process as failure.”
“Gah,” I tell her. “You’re right. What a moron I am for not knowing this sooner!”
We laugh. But also, it’s true. I can do nothing systemically. Every worthless degree I’ve hung around my neck has confirmed this failing. I cannot read by syllabus, I cannot mimic scholarly depth, I cannot read Frederick Douglass’s three autobiographies back to back to back (for example) or go poem by poem through Hopkins’s oeuvre for even one month. Naturally, then, I want to write novels, those classically whimsical and carefree projects thrown-together last minute. “Whoops! Here’s 75,000 words that are good! It just keeps happening to me!” What I experience is almost imposter syndrome, except I’m correct about the flaw. I have published peer-reviewed work on Hopkins, and I still haven’t finished a single biography on the man. Sometimes I forget the year he died, and he died young enough it deserves to be remembered.
“Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone.” The words have by this time been repeated once a week for two to three years and they are less rote, or rather less empty, now than at first. We attend a church in Golden, Colorado, or we try to. We are newly doubled in the number of our children. One plus one, as the sages foretold, is not two. One child plus another child is at least three times the first child. But when we do attend and when we navigate the squirming and the coloring and the smiles of neighbors assuring us we aren’t ruining their practice of sacrifice and worship with over-loud whining (the children, usually) and curt, whispered threats (me, always), the words land like individual footprints on the mind. “Most merciful”—that than which nothing can be greater, who has yet, and for no reason I deserve, promised to be unfair on my behalf. “We have sinned”—we, those of us speaking together, the words personal because I am speaking them, but a promise of support, of solidarity in the act of sharing them aloud. We, together. All the flounderers eating the same body.
When my children are born, I memorize a Hopkins poem a piece to say over them. I re-learn Hopkins only after internalizing Hopkins, which feels backwards to my generation and obvious to my mother’s. He becomes a part of me before I understand him. He wants his writing to imitate his theology, the True Presence of the Host a model for all inscape, for that essence, or rather essence-ing, which each thing has of itself and yet which also calls forth the Essence. Learning! And I could have learned this when I was in college, or when I was in grad school, or when like a practical joke I was in grad school again. I learned some of Hopkins’s secrets along the way, un-systematically and experientially, just as I learn everything. He designs the words to shed their word-ness, their initial communication shorn for the sake of their sound. I learned and re-learn him sound-first. “Heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs they throng, they glitter in marches”: clouds!
I hold my children and I practice: “Glory be to God for dappled things.” I practice and I repeat and I do not feel like a failure except for when I forget the words. Two years of repeating a poem and sometimes—poof!—I cannot conjure it for a midnight episode. I go daddy-dumb, an intensification of how I am always a little imprecise.
We move back to Colorado and I discover hesychasm. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
If you know about hesychasm, then you realize I’ve already said too much. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
I sit at my computer in the garage trying to write and hear my family inside. Writing a novel is not like learning and learning is not like prayer and prayer is not the handmaiden of anything but God. I keep failing. I do not simply experience the learning process as failure, I experience the way I experience failure as failure. I review my failures and see their similarities, the inconsistency of rigor and habit of mind. The Stoics, if not their cosmogony, have gotten to me at last! Still, I don’t want to be rigid or predictable. What is rote can only become meaningful by way of personal response or personal necessity; in my case, through resonance at the words somebody else designed. “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone.” The feedback loop is necessary and unsystematic even though it is regular. Different words press with greater and lesser weights at different times. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” I am one of the blockheads, I cannot learn what I cannot love. I cannot memorize to memorize or hit a word count like a happy slap on the word doc’s ass—smack! “Good luck!” I knew Hopkins young and learned him late. “Like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; each mortal thing does one thing and the same: deals out that being indoors each one dwells. Selves goes itself, myself it speaks and spells”—and so on. A telling out of who we are by how we are.
That’s from memory, of course. If I could do the work justice, if I could strap it down, approach it systematically, there’d be proper line breaks as well. But the words are mine.
“Hesychasm!” I remember, whenever I want to get to the heart of learning, and maybe worship, too.
“Me, a sinner.”
Everything rote dies before it lives again.