Creatures, what if Hell is a freezer where a man worships meat? In this edition: symbolic kittens; Jesuit tricks (for making friends); “The Brothers Karamahjong.”
House of Raging Kittens
We’ve got cats! They’re a brother and a sister, three months old, he is mostly black and placid and she is a feisty tortie. They have more furniture than any of my apartments. They’ve got a cat tunnel, and like every cat I’ve ever known, when they get in that tunnel they lose their tiny minds. The whole tunnel writhes—a wildly rolling eye, a flash of claw or fang, sometimes a whole paw flailing out from between the seams—yowls, thudding. We’ve nicknamed it their Rage Cage, or occasionally “the Tunnel of Terror.”
The other night they were in there and I found myself thinking, I love it when they rage in their cage. And then I was like, ...why? Why is that pleasing?
And I thought it was maybe like why I love the seasons. I love resonant abstractions (summer, spring) when they are accompanied by their sensual specifics: the silvery haze above the heat-softened street, fireflies and fireworks; forsythia, then crocuses, then cherry blossoms, then magnolias, always in that order. These reliable beauties make time feel cyclical, not lost; there’s also the more sordid pleasure of mastery, I have lived almost all my life in one place and so I know what that place feels like before a thunderstorm, I know what these trees are and these weeds and vines. Now that I’m moving, I’m learning a new place, and its natural and cultural rhythms do sometimes feel like puzzle pieces or clues that fall into place with a pleasurable snap: that orange dragonfly is a flame skimmer, these are the things people sell during graduation season at special stands, the trees are different here because they don’t have to be cut back to protect the power lines. This is an earthquake! I like it when these things are different from how I’d imagined them, because knowing the real thing makes me feel like an insider. This pleasure is probably lightly sinful but it is also helpful for writing fiction, where it’s so important to picture accurately and to convince.
The Rage Cage thing doesn’t offer those pleasures. But it offers a pleasure of which these other ones are, maybe, variants or shades: the pleasure of something being intensely itself. Crystallized; simplified, like a memory. Remember when they were kittens and they’d rage in their cage? This is a moment when life becomes more like art, every object chosen and symbolic, weighted with presence. I can blame my conversion, in part, on a conviction that objects in the physical world were at once beautiful and wanting, somehow not yet fully themselves; that there was a meaning to them which went beyond their usefulness, even their usefulness in provoking pleasure. In art the trees become real trees—emphatic trees!—whereas in life trees can seem a bit casual and insufficiently-considered.
You can argue this the other way around, I know: real trees become more emphatic, more real, than art trees, if you are willing to be present to them. The reality of the tree or (yes) the girl can be glimpsed, in shocking moments. Art and humble attention can both reveal the tree as a word spoken by God. This is why I write so often about what it’s like to clean a surface.
A World of Friendship
I finally read Matteo Ricci’s On Friendship: One Hundred Maxims for a Chinese Prince, in the Billings translation, and I wonder why we don’t talk about it more. “We” here is the people around me: people involved in the various intertwining conversations about gay Christian life, lay celibacy or “singleness,” and friendship as a form of kinship. I guess partly it’s because the maxims themselves are mostly familiar; they’re explicitly intended as a compendium of received wisdom, and the wisdom is a somewhat astringent version of Aristotle, rather than the more emotional and vividly Biblical friendships in e.g. Aelred. The most interesting thing for me, in the maxims themselves, was the insistence that friends must share worldly goods in common. If one friend is rich and one is poor, can they even be said to be friends?
But what’s maybe more provocative than the maxims themselves is their context: a sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary trying to shape Western traditions of male friendship into an elegant, endearing intervention into Chinese traditions of ditto. He’s entering a complex political situation in which friends, and the debating societies (!) in which their friendships were forged, might become threats to the existing authorities. And friendship itself can appear as a stray egalitarian, potentially subversive relationship in a thought-world of hierarchies. This is maybe not so different from the marginal role of friendship today! Ricci explicitly links friendship to social stability—he creates this frame story where he’s only offering this collection as tribute to a prince—but implicitly it’s as unsettling as Jesuit celibacy.
“I Ate Her Lace Bones”
Lan Samantha Chang’s recent novel The Family Chao is a riff on The Brothers Karamazov set in a family-owned Chinese restaurant in the American Midwest. I mean, done and done, I’m already sold. So should you be! But let me suggest some of the pleasures (and absences, I guess) in this novel.
Chang is the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but I am humbled to report that her prose has none of the careful, familiar qualities of what I think of as “workshop fiction.” Chao is totally undefensive about the fact that its characters speak about their lives in melodramatic terms. The dialogue is big and grabby—I thought of Philip Roth, or like, Henderson the Rain King. Here you go, here’s the womanizing, hard-drinking, soon-to-be-murdered patriarch ranting at a Lucullan Christmas banquet that perfectly combines Dostoyevskyan terrible parties with the Chinese-American fiction trope of lush depictions of food:
“Yeah, it’s time for me to move on to new things! Business abroad, business in Shanghai—I’m not selling my house, but I can’t be tied up here in Haven every day. This is our final Christmas party here, so drink up! And to my son, our host, the big spender? Good luck with your new job. You’re unemployed.” Leo raises his glass. “To the future!”
There’s some troubled murmuring.
Yes, Dostoyevsky haunts this book—in the way Ming Chao calls the white townspeople “villagers,” first as a resigned insult and then as a plea; in the role of women’s sexual reputation; in the occasional, sideswiping mentions of God. I’m me, so I would have liked this last point to be developed more. We get Buddhist nuns, and characters who live on both sides of the Buddhist/Christian dichotomy, and I liked both of those elements and wanted more of them. Chang knows that the trick to writing realistic dialogue is to make sure nobody ever answers the question they were asked, and most of the explicit references to God (“your Father in Heaven,” very different from the earthly guy!) come in these misanswers. That gives them a glancing power, but doesn’t leave room to rant and explore. You won’t get anything here like the Karamazov patriarch’s hooks-in-Hell speech, let alone “Rebellion” etc, that just isn’t what we’re here for.
Instead we get Midwestern noir: leave now, so you get out in front of the snowstorm. A woman testifying in court, regaining her self-respect through the loss of her public honor. Noir with a hint of melodrama and comedy—those lace bones are taro root, the food refrain returning in a horror-comedy key.
The clash between the Chinese and white American communities, and the difference between China and Chinese America, are handled so well here—it feels like the Karamazovs were always second-generation, exiles, success-hungry and closely-watched. “The community” is a chorus here. America is a place where innocence can be violently regained. America = free will, moral expectations, as vs. the Chao baseness and intertwining; but America is also crime and abandonment, to be Chinese-American is to have “[t]he blood of the thief, the pioneer and the marauder, the yearner and the usurper.” You are American because all your victims are here.
Fried taro cake by Haha169, via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.
“I can blame my conversion, etc.” It comes up again! I was at FUS, and one of the hobby horses of one of my favorite professors involved just this, albeit expressed from a metaphysical and mystical angle in a Thomistic way.