Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mammary
Plus 20th-century peasants, a thing about ten years of sobriety, and more.
Welcome, creatures! Below you’ll find three short book notes and a Qualification. j/k I don’t have enough humility to do my Qualification in a newsletter. Turn that Mobius strip of self-aggrandizement and self-abasement in your hands and watch its single surface twist!
Before he had finished, a light was shining through the thick curtain of the confessional door. The light grew brighter and brighter until the booth was full of bright noon. The curtain began to smoke.
“Wait, wait!” he hissed. “Wait till it dies.”
“wait wait wait till it dies,” echoed a strange soft voice from beyond the grille. It was not the voice of Mrs. Grales.
I recently re-read Walter Miller’s extremely Catholic science-fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. Published in 1959, it’s about the nuclear era (have you noticed we’re still in it? Let’s hope we never notice that again!), the Mobius strip whose single surface is both hubris and humble love of learning, and the undying witness of the Jews. Miller himself was a Jewish convert to Catholicism; Canticle has both a wry streak of recognizably Jewish humor and a deep respect for the mystery of God’s relationship with His chosen people.
The novel has three sections, covering multiple millennia of life on Earth after global thermonuclear war. All three sections take place at the same desert monastery. The first section is stripped and immersive. Every element in every scene is necessary to the single impression being created, as if even the novel’s artistry had taken a vow of poverty. The second section is more didactic, saved for me by the unnecessary flourish of throwing in a kind of court Fool. And the third section is a mix of Catholic theology, haunting images of loss and salvage, and reminders of the ultimate, thorough mystery of God. You can know your duty in any given conflict (we usually don’t, even when we know the rules, but sometimes you do know it) and still understand nothing of the One Who gave you your orders.
In a way a lot of this novel is about building. It’s about what we can build; and so in the end of course we must be confronted by what cannot be built, but can only be given.
I also read Carlo Levi’s 1945 Christ Stopped at Eboli. This is a roman a clef, I think, about his time as a political exile under Mussolini, among the peasants of the Italian South. It’s colorful—the local ladies decide he needs a housekeeper, but no respectable woman can be alone with a man, so they find him the kind of woman who can, viz. a witch. It’s scathing in its portrayal of the total abandonment of the peasantry by Church and state, by every form of politics except brigandage. And it’s intent on showing that these are 20th-century peasants whose lives are unrecognizable to 20th-century eyes. The peasant villages have sent half their men to America, and the rhythms of emigration and occasional return have shifted sexual mores without changing the economic situation much. The peasants can enter the world not made for them, but they can’t become the kind of people it was made for.
And last, I re-read Philip Roth’s hysterical symptom, The Breast, and remembered why I love it so much. The Breast is a paranoid, filthy novella about an English professor who turns into an enormous human female breast. Like most college novels, it’s about the defeat of reason and intellect. It’s written with gut-level seriousness, it’s just very emotionally raw about, like, what it would be like to be turned into a breast. It’s a novel about absurdity, helplessness, and humiliation (I am already signing the papers, you don’t have to read me the rest) and also about the consolations to be found in total helplessness and humiliation. If nothing else, Dave “The Breast” Kepesh reasons, when your suffering reaches a certain pitch of devastating absurdity you will have to acknowledge that it means something. And isn’t it better to mean something, as a breast, than to mean nothing at all?
And the Beer I Had for Breakfast Was My Empire of Dirt
So I checked the dates and discovered that my ten-year anniversary of sobriety, aka My Last Drink (So Far), is not today but actually two days ago. Feels good not to know the day exactly tbh. I didn’t want to do a newsletter just about that, which would anyway just be quotes from David Carr’s Night of the Gun, the book that helped me most. But I’m going to reward myself with my favorite sandwiches (yes, the ones you bake in the oven, with the canned corn, don’t judge me) and I figured I would give a couple very small thoughts.
I think a lot about how similar the last months of my drinking were to the first months of sobriety. Every day I was pretty much consumed with trying not to drink. I thought about it constantly. I planned, rationalized, reverse-rationalized reasons not to drink. There were a lot of days, both before and after Jan 8 2k12, when basically all I could accomplish in a day was to lie in bed and not drink. Sad shit but also, if you think about it in a certain light, hopeful.
On the one hand there’s the thing David Carr says (heart emoji, gun emoji), “Part of the problem with authentic recovery is that you are stuck with the same rhetorical set that you had when you were chronically relapsing. This time, I’m really about something. No, this time. No, now, I really, really mean it.” On the other hand, just because your life still feels like chronic relapse, i.e. dishonest, imprisoned, and shameful, doesn’t mean you are not crawling up toward the light. Slowly throughout 2011 I started to do more humble things, to be a little more honest with a few more people, and all of that mattered even though I was not able to put together more than three weeks at a time without alcohol. Those days, and the later days that felt exactly the same except that I didn’t drink at the end of them, were part of the rescue operation.
The other thing is a specific reverse-rationalization I am using with some of the stuff I’m working through now, and which I first used with drinking. You can see this toward the end of Amends iirc. It’s basically, “You have learned all there is to learn in alcoholic drinking. You did learn some things there, and now you know them, so be grateful for them; but you have conclusively proven that ‘additional research’ in that area will not yield further insights. It’s time to learn whatever there is to learn in sobriety.”
That’s a tricky one because it incorporates the rationalization that you do learn stuff in active addiction; you learn stuff in sin generally. (Bracketing whether it makes sense to characterize active addiction as sin. I’m gonna go ahead and say it’s pretty much always got some sin in it. That’s part of why it can help you understand and be gentler toward normal people, since their normalcy also is pretty much always intertwined with sin.) It’s very hard to trust that you are done learning from the experience of sinning. It’s even harder to trust that the experience of turning away from sin and toward Christ—imho this is a better way to think about it than “away from sin and toward virtue”—will offer its own strange lessons.
The lessons you learn in active addiction are, in my experience, immediate and convincing. I’ve used a lot of them in my fiction! The lessons you learn in sobriety, the new way of life, are slow and strange. They’re not really available for use. They reshape you more severely. This is because God is more mysterious than evil. Order is more mysterious than disorder; maybe this is why when we try to enforce order, on ourselves or others, we mostly just rearrange the disorder so we notice and repent it less.
Or so I think today. Ten years is nothing (I remember when ten days was an eternity) and whatever wisdom or lol political philosophy I think I’ve gleaned from my experience is just foolishness with an eye for patterns and symmetries. But I am grateful to God, my Rescuer. If you pray, thank the God of your understanding for me; and pray for me.
icymi
I wrote a book.
Also I did a year’s-best round-up, and managed to forget a couple nonfiction books that should be on there—if you’ve read this thing already just know that Philippe Girard’s biography of Toussaint Louverture and Bridget Eileen Rivera’s gay Christian book are both excellent.
Now Playing
The Mountain Goats, “Cotton.” Let it all go.
Broken vodka bottle via Pixabay under a Creative Commons license.