Sunday, December 25, 2016
12/25: As The Year Comes To A Close, Treat Yourself To Some Essay Collections
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Saturday, December 24, 2016
12/24: Special Delivery -- from Dave Mondy
Spot a boxy UPS truck pinballing through town -- especially today -- and there's a slight twinge.
It's not nostalgia -- I don't miss delivering UPS packages -- but I when see a brown-clad man darting toward a front door, managing that I-might-slip-on-ice shuffle, I flip back to my brief time as a UPS delivery guy. The feeling fades quickly.
But say I saw a purple Bachman's truck -- as I did yesterday, back in MN for the holidays -- well, it was instant internal time travel. Shooting me back to my mid-twenties, when I worked for years as a seasonal Flower Delivery Driver.
On New Year's Eve, I wrote about being a bartender on New Year's Eve. So on Christmas Eve, I thought I'd write about being a delivery driver on Christmas Eve.
Brilliant!
But then, an election happened (perhaps you heard about this?). And I read all these great advent entries here (seriously, read all of them), and it seemed insane to post anything unrelated to these insane political times. It's almost all that's on my mind. All the time. But all I've got are frothing facebook posts -- mostly unposted, always unhelpful. Instead, I'm starting to show up to actual gatherings. Listening. Not writing. I know, I know, you're dying to hear my white male take on issues of the day, but alas, you'll have to hold that baited breath. For now:
The Poinsettia Holiday Happiness Bouquet© adorning the foyer of every office building?
The package pinned awkwardly behind your screen door?
They all arrived via a human holding an honestly interesting job. And before I crash-landed in academia in my early thirties, I held a bunch of those jobs. So here's a few snapshots of, say, a single Delivery Day.
Christmas Eve, 7:00 AM--
Idling in a big boxy Dodge Diplomat -- an outmoded, gas-gobbling Diplomat (note to self: avoid easy political joke!) -- I'd sit in on the edge of the Bachman's lot, waiting.
Waiting for my weird car to be filled with flowers.
Bachman's Floral had a standing battalion of signature purple trucks, ferrying bouquets to the fortunate year-round, but on a few heavy holidays, they needed extra help. Specifically: Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Christmas Eve.
On those days, if you'd taken the training and passed the proper checks, you could pull your car into their huge, heated garage...
To emerge as the operator of a mobile greenhouse. Your previously shitty car was suddenly bursting with flowers, chock-full of gladiolas, hydrangea, loose-stem roses, calla/stargazer lilies, floating carnations in odd sealed globes, a 55-lb. ficus, and especially, at this time of year: one million Poinsettias.
It's funny. You might actually laugh, actually pushing leaves aside as you order an Egg McMuffin -- quick eats, before bliztkreiging through your delivery list, trying to empty your car of its floral contents before noon -- so you could re-load a new batch. You're paid per flower. The more you deliver, the more you make.
First on the list are office buildings -- and those always go smoothly. You wonder: Is there anything more joyous to deliver than flowers? (Maybe presidential pardons?)
Say a name to a receptionist, and watch her call it out. Watch a middle-manager walk toward you with a big smile. Sometimes, they give you a hug. Sometimes, even better, they give you a tip.
And then, you're off to the residential deliveries. Most go smoothly. Most.
Christmas Eve, 11:00 AM--
"These must be from Terry!" the woman said. "Can you come in, put them down?"
There's only one answer when an old woman asks this.
"Can you put them, where...? Right there looks good..."
Okay, will do.
"Can you, sorry, can you open them?"
Sure, okay.
"Those must be, those are carnations but these are, what, violets? I think those are violets, of some strange sort, but those are... I'd have to look in my flower book?"
She said it as if asking a question, as if asking permission. Permission to go get her flower book. But she already knew: I was a pushover. I'd look at that flower book. I'd stay.
"Would you like coffee," she said, "or I suppose this is a busy time..."
That's the dialogue I remember, and yes: Using her flower book, we identified every bulb. I stayed there for about a half hour. Leaving her house, I worried I was behind schedule -- and I remember her sweatshirt, too: bright red and puff-painted with a giant Christmas tree. A shirt exactly like her: almost annoying, if not so endearing.
But then, I was worried about delays with the upcoming nursing homes. Rightly.
Christmas Eve, noon --
Be nice, I'd always tell myself. Before mouthing, just a few minutes later, Fuck this!
For example: I had to find a "May Simington" -- just a standard Poinsettia drop-off -- but then, I was sent to four different buildings as the Diplomat idled. And when I finally found the right receptionist...
She looked down. Found the name: May Simington -- a Sharpie line drawn through it. "I'm sorry, she's passed."
It gets as unceremonious as that, I remember thinking. The black Sharpie line of death.
That very same year, as I left, I saw an old woman bashing her wheelchair against the front door.
Full of misplaced gallantry, I held the door open -- and I held that gentlemanly pose as she zoomed down the front drive. Immediately followed by a panicked attendant, yelling, "No no no no, Mary Mary Mary, no no no! Mary, where do you think you're going?" Mary didn't know. Didn't even know how she got outside. Muted crying. The sudden smell of urine. "Did you see how she got out?" the attendant asked me. "No, god, that's terrible," I replied, slinking back to the car with the undelivered Poinsettia.
Christmas Eve, 4:00 PM --
Speaking of flowers and death, the strangest Christmas delivery was to Lakewood Cemetery.
"This one goes to the mausoleum," the desk attendant said -- and then he drew a quick map, with a winding line leading me through Lakewood's sprawling grounds.
But I still got lost. I circled past the giant grave of Hubert H. Humphrey several times before finally arriving at a massive stone cube.
Inside, a janitor led me down to a lower level which was (yes) completely dark. He clicked on a light that (yes!) did that flicker-creepily-before-fully-buzzing-on thing -- and then the man went back up the elevator, leaving me alone. I wandered the hallways, poking my head into various corridors, until finally finding the right spot: This large square room, the walls a grid of smaller squares. Filing cabinets for human bodies.
I found the cabinet engraved with the recipient's name, and then... what? What do I do now, I wondered. Knock?
I set the flowers down on a stone bench and left the room -- but stopped short, doubled back, to unwrap the Chrysanthemums. Then, I faced them toward "her". Back in the car, I looked over my delivery list, where I could read reprints of the "secret" messages sealed inside the cards. The message inside the mausoleum delivery:
Merry Christmas to my beloved mother.
Christmas Eve, 5:30 PM --
Reading the secret messages was one of my best things about that job. Here's one of my favorites:
Dear Max,
Can't wait til you and your owner visit me in the new year. Don't worry about flying in the kennel. They give you drugs and you sleep the whole time. You'll love Colorado. We have a huge yard. While the humans are inside doing whatever they do, we can run around all we want.
Sincerely,
Ollie
But my all-time favorite message was:
I'm sorry I asked that. I'm sorry. I was drunk, it was a stupid thing to ask, I'm sorry. Love you.
I still wonder, still want to know: What the hell did he ask?! Picture him typing that, ordering flowers online at 3:00 AM.
That message belonged to a late bouquet on the last day I worked delivery. The address adorned a hulking, old-money mansion on Lake Calhoun. An extremely elegant, extremely attractive middle-aged woman answered my ring. She wore workout clothes, and behind her, I can still see two objects: a Nordictrack Ski Machine and a giant Miro -- quite possibly an original.
Back in my Diplomat, I convinced myself she was flirting with me. Driving away, I chided myself for actually buying into the "delivery man in a porno" cliche. And, nonetheless, kept thinking: You should go back. Ask about the Miro. She'll be impressed you know it's a Miro! She'll see you are artistic and attractive and...
Of course, I didn't actually go back. I'm not a maniac. But that was the problem with being a seasonal delivery driver. You were in self-imposed isolation, self-imposed meditation, all day long on a happy holiday. If you were newly single, thoughts could get pretty desperate. Pretty dark. Even, or especially, if your car was fully infused with floral aromas.
The goal, always, was to finish before it got dark -- but within a Minnesotan December, the sun sets around 4:30 PM. So I'd always find myself finishing up the final drop-offs in the frozen nighttime.
Fortunately, my last delivery lent me a gift.
Christmas Eve, 7:00 PM --
I'm so lucky I wasn't filmed.
Had camera phones already been ubiquitous, I'd be a GIF Star right now, my folly endlessly replayed beneath the caption, DELIVERIES: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
The 55-lb. potted Ficus had been in my backseat all afternoon -- with delivery instructions reading After 5pm, so I put it off until the very end of the day. And trying to lug the damn thing up a tiered walkway around Nokomis, I fell. Though "fell" doesn't do justice to my spill.
This was a cartoon-character-slipping-on-a-banana, leap-into-the-air-before-crashing-down, ultra-embarrassing tumble. Listen: I had dirt from the Ficus pot smeared across my chest when I rang the doorbell.
I suspected my back was fucked, but driving home, I assured myself I was fine -- and then, in my apartment parking lot, I couldn't stand to exit my car. Had to barrel roll out the side, resting my knees beside the open car door; then, I pulled myself upright using the seatbelt like pulley. Without the adrenaline burst, I'd be kneeling there still. Back in my apartment, I collapsed on the fake parkay, crying.
The only positive of physical pain: It drives out all other kinds. A person in pain desires only cessation of pain -- and if it arrives, he's happy. It took an hour to find a painless position on the couch, and another hour for the Advil and Maker's to kick in, but then: euphoria. And then, the happiest thought: I'll never be able to do this again.
Honestly, I liked delivering flowers -- but as with so many jobs I've enjoyed, there was this counter-intuitive relief (this exhale) the exact moment I knew I was free of it: That was cool... and thank good I never have to do it again.
Christmas Eve, Coda --
Speaking of pain cessation and flower deliveries...
Yesterday, flowers were delivered to my brother's hospital room.
Some delivery person dropped them off just moments before I arrived. The flowers were still wrapped, and as my sister unwrapped them, we saw: roses, interwoven with pines boughs, revealing a Christmas tree motif. It looked pretty good. Then I looked back at him.
My brother's heart has never worked quite right.
If you spotted him walking around, day-to-day, you'd never know this -- but one of his mitral valves loves to allow a backflow of blood. Oops. A tiny, important flaw. In eons past, we'd never know this, of course. He would've just keeled over at some point. And even a few years ago, even if we knew what was wrong, the only solution would be to apply a bone saw to his chest plate, just to fix this tiny trouble.
But now?
On Wednesday, they simply stopped his heart for an hour, deflated one of his lungs, and sent robotic arms into his chest cavity -- via a keyhole incision in his armpit -- to stitch things up.
And today, just two days after his surgery, he left the hospital as an outpatient. And here's my question:
Did you know we could this?
Watch this video of a surgical robot pealing a grape, and then restitching a grape.
Did you know we already had this technology?
It seems so sci-fi, but yeah, humans can already do this. We're amazing! Right? My brother has a long recovery ahead of him, but I'm already humbled by his willpower (handling pain that puts my ficus injury to shame). And here's the thing about this fellow: Even if I were to ignore my personal bias, I'd conclude that he's the type of guy we need more of, not less. A philosophy prof teaching critical thinking and ethics to med students at the world-famous Mayo clinic. A thoughtful, empathetic guy. And now, because of things humans invented, he can hopefully stick around a little longer.
I didn't mean to add this odd addendum at the end of this post. But I've been so myopically pessimistic lately. And I've talked on the phone, a lot, with my brother about our mutual pessimism regarding The State Of Things. And yet, if only we don't fuck everything up, I've now seen firsthand that humans can do such cool things. It makes me think of so many other cool things I've seen this year: Moonlight, for example. Other great movies. Other great books. I'm tempted to ramble on now, recommending many things, as if this were a year-end list.
But no one, no one, needs that. From me. So instead, I'll just add a final "delivery"... a final restatement: If only we don't fuck up everything, we can do cool things.
That seems like a corny conclusion. Something to write on a website at 3:00 AM when ordering flowers. Something to keep private.
Thank god no one can read this sealed card.
----------
Dave Mondy has been honored for his work in many genres: food writing (Best American Food Writing), travel writing (Solas Awards), creative nonfiction (notables in Best American Essays), sports writing (Iowa Review nonfiction contest), radio (Prairie Home Companion), and theatre (many national tours, fringe festival awards, etc.). He currently teaches creative nonfiction and other writing classes at the University of Arizona.
It's not nostalgia -- I don't miss delivering UPS packages -- but I when see a brown-clad man darting toward a front door, managing that I-might-slip-on-ice shuffle, I flip back to my brief time as a UPS delivery guy. The feeling fades quickly.
But say I saw a purple Bachman's truck -- as I did yesterday, back in MN for the holidays -- well, it was instant internal time travel. Shooting me back to my mid-twenties, when I worked for years as a seasonal Flower Delivery Driver.
On New Year's Eve, I wrote about being a bartender on New Year's Eve. So on Christmas Eve, I thought I'd write about being a delivery driver on Christmas Eve.
Brilliant!
***
The Poinsettia Holiday Happiness Bouquet© adorning the foyer of every office building?
The package pinned awkwardly behind your screen door?
They all arrived via a human holding an honestly interesting job. And before I crash-landed in academia in my early thirties, I held a bunch of those jobs. So here's a few snapshots of, say, a single Delivery Day.
***
Christmas Eve, 7:00 AM--
Idling in a big boxy Dodge Diplomat -- an outmoded, gas-gobbling Diplomat (note to self: avoid easy political joke!) -- I'd sit in on the edge of the Bachman's lot, waiting.
Waiting for my weird car to be filled with flowers.
Bachman's Floral had a standing battalion of signature purple trucks, ferrying bouquets to the fortunate year-round, but on a few heavy holidays, they needed extra help. Specifically: Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Christmas Eve.
On those days, if you'd taken the training and passed the proper checks, you could pull your car into their huge, heated garage...
To emerge as the operator of a mobile greenhouse. Your previously shitty car was suddenly bursting with flowers, chock-full of gladiolas, hydrangea, loose-stem roses, calla/stargazer lilies, floating carnations in odd sealed globes, a 55-lb. ficus, and especially, at this time of year: one million Poinsettias.
It's funny. You might actually laugh, actually pushing leaves aside as you order an Egg McMuffin -- quick eats, before bliztkreiging through your delivery list, trying to empty your car of its floral contents before noon -- so you could re-load a new batch. You're paid per flower. The more you deliver, the more you make.
First on the list are office buildings -- and those always go smoothly. You wonder: Is there anything more joyous to deliver than flowers? (Maybe presidential pardons?)
Say a name to a receptionist, and watch her call it out. Watch a middle-manager walk toward you with a big smile. Sometimes, they give you a hug. Sometimes, even better, they give you a tip.
And then, you're off to the residential deliveries. Most go smoothly. Most.
***
Christmas Eve, 11:00 AM--
"These must be from Terry!" the woman said. "Can you come in, put them down?"
There's only one answer when an old woman asks this.
"Can you put them, where...? Right there looks good..."
Okay, will do.
"Can you, sorry, can you open them?"
Sure, okay.
"Those must be, those are carnations but these are, what, violets? I think those are violets, of some strange sort, but those are... I'd have to look in my flower book?"
She said it as if asking a question, as if asking permission. Permission to go get her flower book. But she already knew: I was a pushover. I'd look at that flower book. I'd stay.
"Would you like coffee," she said, "or I suppose this is a busy time..."
That's the dialogue I remember, and yes: Using her flower book, we identified every bulb. I stayed there for about a half hour. Leaving her house, I worried I was behind schedule -- and I remember her sweatshirt, too: bright red and puff-painted with a giant Christmas tree. A shirt exactly like her: almost annoying, if not so endearing.
But then, I was worried about delays with the upcoming nursing homes. Rightly.
***
Christmas Eve, noon --
Be nice, I'd always tell myself. Before mouthing, just a few minutes later, Fuck this!
For example: I had to find a "May Simington" -- just a standard Poinsettia drop-off -- but then, I was sent to four different buildings as the Diplomat idled. And when I finally found the right receptionist...
She looked down. Found the name: May Simington -- a Sharpie line drawn through it. "I'm sorry, she's passed."
It gets as unceremonious as that, I remember thinking. The black Sharpie line of death.
That very same year, as I left, I saw an old woman bashing her wheelchair against the front door.
Full of misplaced gallantry, I held the door open -- and I held that gentlemanly pose as she zoomed down the front drive. Immediately followed by a panicked attendant, yelling, "No no no no, Mary Mary Mary, no no no! Mary, where do you think you're going?" Mary didn't know. Didn't even know how she got outside. Muted crying. The sudden smell of urine. "Did you see how she got out?" the attendant asked me. "No, god, that's terrible," I replied, slinking back to the car with the undelivered Poinsettia.
***
Speaking of flowers and death, the strangest Christmas delivery was to Lakewood Cemetery.
"This one goes to the mausoleum," the desk attendant said -- and then he drew a quick map, with a winding line leading me through Lakewood's sprawling grounds.
But I still got lost. I circled past the giant grave of Hubert H. Humphrey several times before finally arriving at a massive stone cube.
Inside, a janitor led me down to a lower level which was (yes) completely dark. He clicked on a light that (yes!) did that flicker-creepily-before-fully-buzzing-on thing -- and then the man went back up the elevator, leaving me alone. I wandered the hallways, poking my head into various corridors, until finally finding the right spot: This large square room, the walls a grid of smaller squares. Filing cabinets for human bodies.
I found the cabinet engraved with the recipient's name, and then... what? What do I do now, I wondered. Knock?
I set the flowers down on a stone bench and left the room -- but stopped short, doubled back, to unwrap the Chrysanthemums. Then, I faced them toward "her". Back in the car, I looked over my delivery list, where I could read reprints of the "secret" messages sealed inside the cards. The message inside the mausoleum delivery:
Merry Christmas to my beloved mother.
***
Christmas Eve, 5:30 PM --
Reading the secret messages was one of my best things about that job. Here's one of my favorites:
Dear Max,
Can't wait til you and your owner visit me in the new year. Don't worry about flying in the kennel. They give you drugs and you sleep the whole time. You'll love Colorado. We have a huge yard. While the humans are inside doing whatever they do, we can run around all we want.
Sincerely,
Ollie
But my all-time favorite message was:
I'm sorry I asked that. I'm sorry. I was drunk, it was a stupid thing to ask, I'm sorry. Love you.
I still wonder, still want to know: What the hell did he ask?! Picture him typing that, ordering flowers online at 3:00 AM.
That message belonged to a late bouquet on the last day I worked delivery. The address adorned a hulking, old-money mansion on Lake Calhoun. An extremely elegant, extremely attractive middle-aged woman answered my ring. She wore workout clothes, and behind her, I can still see two objects: a Nordictrack Ski Machine and a giant Miro -- quite possibly an original.
Back in my Diplomat, I convinced myself she was flirting with me. Driving away, I chided myself for actually buying into the "delivery man in a porno" cliche. And, nonetheless, kept thinking: You should go back. Ask about the Miro. She'll be impressed you know it's a Miro! She'll see you are artistic and attractive and...
Of course, I didn't actually go back. I'm not a maniac. But that was the problem with being a seasonal delivery driver. You were in self-imposed isolation, self-imposed meditation, all day long on a happy holiday. If you were newly single, thoughts could get pretty desperate. Pretty dark. Even, or especially, if your car was fully infused with floral aromas.
The goal, always, was to finish before it got dark -- but within a Minnesotan December, the sun sets around 4:30 PM. So I'd always find myself finishing up the final drop-offs in the frozen nighttime.
Fortunately, my last delivery lent me a gift.
***
Christmas Eve, 7:00 PM --
I'm so lucky I wasn't filmed.
Had camera phones already been ubiquitous, I'd be a GIF Star right now, my folly endlessly replayed beneath the caption, DELIVERIES: YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.
The 55-lb. potted Ficus had been in my backseat all afternoon -- with delivery instructions reading After 5pm, so I put it off until the very end of the day. And trying to lug the damn thing up a tiered walkway around Nokomis, I fell. Though "fell" doesn't do justice to my spill.
This was a cartoon-character-slipping-on-a-banana, leap-into-the-air-before-crashing-down, ultra-embarrassing tumble. Listen: I had dirt from the Ficus pot smeared across my chest when I rang the doorbell.
I suspected my back was fucked, but driving home, I assured myself I was fine -- and then, in my apartment parking lot, I couldn't stand to exit my car. Had to barrel roll out the side, resting my knees beside the open car door; then, I pulled myself upright using the seatbelt like pulley. Without the adrenaline burst, I'd be kneeling there still. Back in my apartment, I collapsed on the fake parkay, crying.
The only positive of physical pain: It drives out all other kinds. A person in pain desires only cessation of pain -- and if it arrives, he's happy. It took an hour to find a painless position on the couch, and another hour for the Advil and Maker's to kick in, but then: euphoria. And then, the happiest thought: I'll never be able to do this again.
***
Honestly, I liked delivering flowers -- but as with so many jobs I've enjoyed, there was this counter-intuitive relief (this exhale) the exact moment I knew I was free of it: That was cool... and thank good I never have to do it again.
***
Christmas Eve, Coda --
Speaking of pain cessation and flower deliveries...
Yesterday, flowers were delivered to my brother's hospital room.
Some delivery person dropped them off just moments before I arrived. The flowers were still wrapped, and as my sister unwrapped them, we saw: roses, interwoven with pines boughs, revealing a Christmas tree motif. It looked pretty good. Then I looked back at him.
My brother's heart has never worked quite right.
If you spotted him walking around, day-to-day, you'd never know this -- but one of his mitral valves loves to allow a backflow of blood. Oops. A tiny, important flaw. In eons past, we'd never know this, of course. He would've just keeled over at some point. And even a few years ago, even if we knew what was wrong, the only solution would be to apply a bone saw to his chest plate, just to fix this tiny trouble.
But now?
On Wednesday, they simply stopped his heart for an hour, deflated one of his lungs, and sent robotic arms into his chest cavity -- via a keyhole incision in his armpit -- to stitch things up.
And today, just two days after his surgery, he left the hospital as an outpatient. And here's my question:
Did you know we could this?
Watch this video of a surgical robot pealing a grape, and then restitching a grape.
Did you know we already had this technology?
It seems so sci-fi, but yeah, humans can already do this. We're amazing! Right? My brother has a long recovery ahead of him, but I'm already humbled by his willpower (handling pain that puts my ficus injury to shame). And here's the thing about this fellow: Even if I were to ignore my personal bias, I'd conclude that he's the type of guy we need more of, not less. A philosophy prof teaching critical thinking and ethics to med students at the world-famous Mayo clinic. A thoughtful, empathetic guy. And now, because of things humans invented, he can hopefully stick around a little longer.
I didn't mean to add this odd addendum at the end of this post. But I've been so myopically pessimistic lately. And I've talked on the phone, a lot, with my brother about our mutual pessimism regarding The State Of Things. And yet, if only we don't fuck everything up, I've now seen firsthand that humans can do such cool things. It makes me think of so many other cool things I've seen this year: Moonlight, for example. Other great movies. Other great books. I'm tempted to ramble on now, recommending many things, as if this were a year-end list.
But no one, no one, needs that. From me. So instead, I'll just add a final "delivery"... a final restatement: If only we don't fuck up everything, we can do cool things.
That seems like a corny conclusion. Something to write on a website at 3:00 AM when ordering flowers. Something to keep private.
Thank god no one can read this sealed card.
----------
Dave Mondy has been honored for his work in many genres: food writing (Best American Food Writing), travel writing (Solas Awards), creative nonfiction (notables in Best American Essays), sports writing (Iowa Review nonfiction contest), radio (Prairie Home Companion), and theatre (many national tours, fringe festival awards, etc.). He currently teaches creative nonfiction and other writing classes at the University of Arizona.
Friday, December 23, 2016
12/23: Dave Griffith, “You gotta serve somebody”: On the Religious Essay
The first day of Advent this year was November 27th
and it ends tomorrow, December 24th.
This is not something you would know from looking at my son’s LEGO Star
Wars Advent calendar, which has twenty-five cardboard windows, behind which
reside various cellophane bags containing either Christmas-themed LEGO people
(mini-figs, for the uninitiated) or a handful of pieces that once assembled
resemble a snowman, or toy-sized replicas of spaceships, like Boba Fett’s ship,
Slave 1 and Darth Vader’s Tie Fighter. Really
it’s just an awesome Countdown to Christmas calendar.
My son is a LEGO freak.
Put a handful in a bowl, pour milk over them, and he would eat them. Likewise, he L-O-V-E-S Star Wars, so every
morning he wakes up completely geeked to open up another window, which I,
bleary-eyed, supervise from the couch at 7:30 am, coffee in hand.
This is mostly a good thing. My wife and I are cradle Catholics, and we are
raising our children in the faith, albeit in the Dorothy Day-Thomas Merton-Berrigan
Brothers tradition, and so this morning ritual of assembling small LEGO
contraptions (LEGO in Danish means “I play well,” btw) is at the very least
inspiring in him a sense of building anticipation, a sense that we are readying
to celebrate something really big, something game-changing.
Advent calendars, like Advent wreaths, rosary beads, and
eating fish on Fridays during Lent are practices that fall under the broad
heading of popular piety, devotions that are not required of faithful Catholics
in any kind of dogmatic way. They are,
according to very insightful post on Godzdogz,
a blog run by students at Oxford studying to become Dominican monks (and that I
cite here just because the title of their blog is ridiculous) “. . . a bridge between the things
of God and the things of the world . . .”
The
online Catholic Encyclopedia, a much more buttoned-down, yet very handy and
thorough reference if you ever need to settle a bet on the origins of the
doctrine of transubstantiation or what happened at the Council of Trent, notes
that the “feelings of devotion” found in popular pieties are “derived from four principal sources”:
2.
by
the form which puts them within the reach of all, or
3.
by
the stimulus of the association with many others in the same good work, or
In
other words, they make us feel good, anyone can do them, they help create
community, and they tend to be rituals practiced by monks, priests, and other
religious, people for whom doing this kind of thing is easier because they
aren’t as encumbered by the quote/unquote vicissitudes of everyday life, and
therefore they inspire us to get up off our asses and make some kind of gesture
or sign that we actually believe in something.
I’ve
never thought of the essays I write as popular or particularly pious in any
way. I tend to regard them as too
Christian for some and not Christian enough for others.
And
yet this idea of popular piety appeals to me as a writer of what some scholars
have called “religious essays.”
Religious essays don’t get much mention at the AWP—I should know because
I keep pitching panel ideas and the powers that be keep rejecting them—nor even
in explicitly religious publications, which tend to favor certainty over the
kind of doubt that essaying inspires, but I assure you, the religious essay is
a thing. It is given a surprisingly lengthy
entry in Tracy Chevalier’s 1000 page tome Encyclopedia
of the Essay, which begins:
In
some ways, the term “religious essay” is an oxymoron, since “religious” is
commonly used to suggest faithful devotion or orthodox certainty while as
Graham Good suggests in The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (1988), the
essay tends to explore “inconsistencies” rather than reinforce existing
systems.
The
entry cites writers like John Henry Newman, Emerson, Kierkegaard, Miguel de
Unamuno, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Simone Weil, Thomas Merton, Jacques
Maritain and Theilhard de Chardin, Elie Wiesel, Annie Dillard, and Wendell Berry, all of whom
coincidentally grace the bookshelves in our house, with a special place given
to Maritain and de Chardin. Both
Frenchmen inspired Flannery O’Connor, especially de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist
whose mystical theory of human evolution inspired the title of her story “Everything
That Rises Must Converge.”
The fact that the religious essay gets some love in this
enormous reference book is not any kind of validation of faith any more than an
entry on food essays is a validation of the importance of food, but this list
of writers is objectively impressive.
They all, each in their own ways, bear witness to the hidden, messy
aspects of humanity.
But religious folks don’t have a corner on this market. Maritain, one of my personal heroes, was
adamant that there is no such thing as a Christian Writer. There are writers
who happen to be Christian, for sure, but seeing your writing as part of, or
proof of, your devotion to Jesus, will, he believed, lead to bad art.
Which
is why when I reflect on what makes the best so-called religious essays good I
must admit that it’s not because the writer has made an iron-clad case for
belief, or spectacularly shamed abortionists, but because they have helped
remind me that my problems, and the world’s—those things that keep us from
being our best selves—are not new, but ancient.
They have always been with us and will always be, no matter how morally
or ethically enlightened we feel we have become.
If
I do have a bias, though, it is that great art creates a bridge between the
things of God and the things of the world.
If you’re not comfortable with the phrase “things of God,” then insert
some word or phrase that for you describes those things that are transcendent,
mysterious, or metaphysical.
I’m
usually leery of saying such things in spaces that are not marked as explicitly
friendly to earnest discussions of religion, but I’m offering these words here
because I believe that we essayists are, by our nature, religious beings. The
root religio is generally
interpreted to mean “to bind together,” or “reconnect.” (This is the meaning
that St. Augustine, who most credit with the creation of the memoir, used in
his writings.) To my mind essayists are in the business of creating communities
around faith and doubt, connection and disconnection, by helping us to define
and refine our thinking and our selves.
Baldwin, Bell Hooks, Tim Wise, Roxane Gay, and Ta-Nehisi
Coates take on race; Sontag, Didion, Solnit, and Leslie Jamison chronicle the ethical
and moral conundrums of the places and times they inhabit; McLuhan, Postman,
Foster Wallace, and Ander Monson,take on media, technology, and how our
self-hood is challenged by all that we passively consume; and Woolf, Audre
Lorde, Hooks (again), Richard Rodriguez, and Gay (again) confront issues of
gender and sexuality.
These are by no means exhaustive lists—I know I’ve left some
important names out—but they are my own personal flash-anthologies, groupings
that have coalesced in my mind over the years that I have been essaying. They are all guiding lights, whom I learn
from, steal from, and emulate. But, frankly, none of them, even McLuhan and
Rodriguez (both Church-going Catholics), speak directly to my own particular religious
experience as a forty-year old, midwestern, white, straight, cis-gender,
Catholic pacifist.
This is why the so-called religious essayists noted above
are, to my mind, such an important part of the essayistic and literary
tradition. From age to age, they seek to define and refine what it means to be
human in a world that often appears dominated by a spirit of resignation and
indifference in the face of the evils of war, poverty, and bigotry, all in the
name of unfettered mercantilism.
Essayists who take seriously religious traditions, take as
their starting point a notion that humans are vessels of the divine and are
therefore called to lives of discipleship and witness to truths and principles
that will lead us out of such moral morass towards lives defined by love and selflessness
not hate and opportunism.
As our new Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan would have it, “You
gotta serve somebody.”
And essaying, whether you think of yourself as religious or
not, is a form of service, of discipleship, to an ancient and innately human compulsion
to seek the truth wherever it may be found.
For many of us—and here by “us” I need to expand beyond essayists to all
manner of artists, to include our readers who labor in so many different ways
to earn a living and provide for themselves and their families, and do so while
shouldering the weight of grief, anxiety, self-doubt, and addiction—when we
come to the page, whether as writers or readers, we are searching for good
news, for truth, for beauty that will restore to us some courage and dignity
that will help us in turn to bring good news, truth, and beauty to others in
whatever way we are able.
I’m afraid I’ve crossed the sub-generic boundary from
religious essay into sermon, another fascinating and rich literary tradition,
but whose roots are not explicitly religious.
According to the OED, the word
originates in the 13th century from the Old French root sermon, meaning simply to talk, or
discourse, pre-dating the word “essay” or the practice of assaying by nearly three-hundred years. This is a bad habit of
mine, but one that as I’ve gotten older have learned that I just have to
own.
Maggie Nelson, another essential essayist who I should have
mentioned earlier, devotes a few paragraphs in her 2011 The Art of Cruelty to an essay I wrote on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, reflecting on my concern that
we can’t be like Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle McLachlan), both “pervert and
detective.” Nelson disagrees, saying, in
essence, that we “more often than not” we are both, though, she writes “. . . well-intentioned
moralists like Griffith may wish that it weren’t so.”
I cringe a little now at how piously absolute my statement
is. But in my defense I wasn’t just
writing about Blue Velvet, I was
writing within the context of the second Iraq war and the Abu Ghraib prison
scandal with folks like military prison guard Charles Graner in mind, someone
who believed his job was to keep our country safe from terrorists by “roughing
up” suspected Al Qaeda operatives, a euphemistic phrase found in the Senate
Intelligence Report on CIA Torture translated into photos of Iraqi men (most of
whom were pretty criminals rounded up in police state sweeps), naked, stacked
in pyramids, being menaced by guard dogs, and mock executed. It was, as many of you will remember, a
moment when America’s moral fiber was being called into question. The word ‘soul’ was bandied about a lot. People were asking, What have we become?
I counted myself as a part of that “we.” In the Blue
Velvet essay and the several other that comprise my first book, I was
writing to try to understand my own fascination with violence, and how I might
be able to reason my way free of its allure. Nelson calls me on my failure to find a way
out by saying that there is no way out, you’re human, to which I would say I
assayed: I attempted, I tried.
In the end, I’m grateful to Nelson. She exposed, without even knowing it, a
dualistic note in my thinking, one of the most fundamental Christian heresies:
the idea that the universe is governed by two opposing forces good and evil,
and the evil must be rooted out at all costs, a doctrine that can be easily
perverted into an “us vs. them” proposition—either you’re with us or against
us—which makes for a jingoistic theology and foreign policy, as well as,
unwittingly, to the creation of propaganda instead of art.
But one thing that I think Nelson completely missed, or,
really, just couldn’t have known, is that my desire to separate the pervert
from the detective is not connected to Catholic shame and self-hatred, or a
demand that art have a neat moral calculus, as much as it is that I know my
nature and I must try to resist it. Make
of it what you will, this is a reflective and religious impulse, an examination
of conscience. When I teach essay
writing, I sometimes call this a “move,” making it sound that we’re doing when
we essay is all just rhetorical chess.
Actually, for me, it’s more of a spiritual practice that has been
engrained in me no doubt from reciting the Confiteor at Mass (“I confess to
almighty God and to you my brothers and sisters…”), from preparing for
confession, and from reading the great religious nonfiction writers, many of
whom I have already listed above.
This is all to say that my absolute statement—you can’t be both—was not made in a dogmatic
spirit, but as a public declaration that I saw the danger of thinking that I
could be both; a fear that in being both I was somehow better, more
enlightened.
I wished that I had put it in those terms, but then again,
no, because then Nelson would not have been goaded into conversation with me,
or the me who wrote those words ten
years ago.
This is all to say that I believe the essay, and especially
the religious essay, is a means of putting ourselves and others to the
test. It is as the French Jesuit Henri
de Lubac said of the essays he and his compatriots wrote during the rise of
Nazism, a means of “spiritual resistance,” a means of holding oneself
personally accountable, of giving testimony to what we believe to be true, even
at the risk of ostracization or worse.
I feel a long way from my sons LEGO-building morning ritual,
and yet now revisiting the
list of why popular pieties stoke feelings of devotion in us, I’m more convinced
than ever that the essay is a form whose popularity and importance. Will never
wane. Essays invite us to dialogue; they
engage us in deep contemplation over what is true and what is illusion, and in
so doing put us in conversation with a long, long line of thinkers and writers
who though we may ultimately disagree with, often earn our respect because of
their willingness to ask difficult questions, to bear witness, to resist easy
answers.
There’s one more way that LEGOs factor in here that, in the
spirit of Advent, in the spirit of preparing for the arrival of something, I
need to share. While it is generally
agreed that the root of “religion,” religio,
means to connect, or bind together, there is another earlier, competing interpretation,
that scholars trace to Cicero, whose own essays span the first century before
Christ. Cicero favored re- (again)
+ lego, which comes from the Latin legere, variously meaning to “read,” “consider,” or "choose",
to “select,” "go over again," or "consider carefully,” and, it
is sometimes even translated “I put together.”
It is
this sense of the word “religion” that I want to privilege on this day and in
this season of hope, the sense that we are all carefully considering and
putting together an understanding of what we are here for, what we are called
to do. As my favorite religious essayist
Thomas Merton wrote: “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at
the same time.”
*