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“Beginning In Damnation, Bound For Deliverance”

Kathryn Schulz profiles Cheryl Strayed, author of the memoir Wild (recently made into a motion picture, seen above), which recounts her experience living alone in the woods for three months. Schulz connects Strayed to a tradition of religious pilgrimage – “the Muslim walking to Mecca, the Buddhist to Bodh Gaya, the Hindu to Puri, the Catholic to Lourdes”:

Religious pilgrims walk outdoors, but their fundamental journey is inward, undertaken to improve the state of their soul. So, too, with Strayed. The subtitle of Bill Bryson’s book is Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail. The subtitle of hers is From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Like Dante, then, Strayed is on a spiritual journey, beginning in damnation, bound for deliverance. That makes Wild a redemption narrative — and that, in turn, helps explain its popularity, because redemption narratives are some of the oldest, most compelling, and most ubiquitous stories we have. We enshrine nature writing in the canon — you were probably assigned Thoreau and Emerson et al. in high school — but it is redemption narratives that dominate our culture. Among other things, you can hear them in religious services all across the land and in AA meetings every day of the week.

Wild embodies this ancient story. Or, more precisely, it embodies the contemporary American version thereof, where the course is not from sin to salvation but from trauma to transformation: I was abject, dysfunctional, and emotionally shattered, but now I see. This version has more train-wreck allure than the traditional one (being a mess is generally more spectacular than merely being an unbeliever), and it is also more inclusive. Identifying with it requires no particular faith, beyond the faith that a bad life can get better.

Unbelievers In The Pulpit, Ctd

A reader adds to the conversation:

There’s a book about The Clergy Project called Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind. One of the interesting bits about it was that the more the people in The Clergy Project studied their religion the more their doubt increased to the point of them becoming agnostic or atheist. It turns out that seminary not only produces preachers but atheists as well. Ironic.

At any rate, I have a problem with David Watkins’ characterization of clergy who stay in their positions despite their loss of faith. He leaves out an important group who stay in out of fears both financial and social. There’s the stress from living a lie, lying to your congregation, lying about what you believe and who you are. Then there’s the fact that if outed your career is ended and you may not have any recourse to alternate employment. Being outed can also end your socializing with people you have associated with for years. David Watkins seems to play down the suffering of those forced to live a lie in order keep their livelihood, family, and friends.

Another zooms out:

I’m not at all surprised that clergy have become atheists. I wonder how many unbelievers are in the pews. Because I am one of them. I’m a regular churchgoer and give substantial time and treasure to the church. Yet if someone pressed me on my beliefs, I would have to say I’m an unbeliever.

So why do I still go? Several reasons: My wife and kids are active in church groups. I enjoy attending church. I like what Christ has to say. Further, liturgy is very comforting to me and I value the weekly space that going to church provides me. It is more than belief, it is my cultural touchstone. All in all, I would miss the time I spend with my Christian community.

Quote For The Day

“Do I really want it, this self, these scattered fingerprints on the air, to persist forever, to outlast the atomic universe?

Those who scoff at the Christian hope of an afterlife have on their side not only a mass of biological evidence knitting the self-conscious mind tight to the perishing body but a certain moral superiority as well: isn’t it terribly, well,selfish, and grotesquely egocentric, to hope for more than our animal walk in the sun, from eager blind infancy through the productive and procreative years into a senescence that, by the laws of biological instinct as well as by the premeditated precepts of stoic virtue, will submit to eternal sleep gratefully? Where, indeed, in the vast spaces disclosed by modern astronomy, would our disembodied spirit go, and, once there, what would it do?

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as window on the world that we can’t bear to think of shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent screams at the thought of future aeons – at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me.

The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience. Though some believers may think of the afterlife as a place of retribution, where lives of poverty, distress, and illness will be compensated for, and where renunciations will be rewarded – where the last shall be first, in other words, and those that hunger and thirst shall be filled – the basic desire, as Unamuno says in his Tragic Sense of Life, is not for some otherworld but for this world, for life more or less as we know it to go on forever: ‘The immortality that we crave is a phenomenal immortality – it is the continuation of this present life,'” – John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

(Hat tip: John Benjamin)

Not Having The Patience Of Job

The sociologist of religion Peter Berger posits that modern atheism emerged as “a rebellion against the monotheistic faiths that originated in the Middle East – Judaism, Christianity, Islam,” and that, as such, it “makes much less sense in a non-monotheistic environment”:

The rebellion is triggered by an agonizing problem: How can God, believed to be both all-powerful and morally perfect, permit the suffering and the evil afflicting humanity? This is the problem called theodicy, which literally means the “justice of God”; in the spirit of the rebellion it is also a demand that God has to justify himself. The most eloquent expression of this atheist rebellion in literature is by Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov rejecting God, because he allowed the cruel murder of one child.

Within the Hebrew Bible the problem of theodicy is of course confronted in the Book of Job. Its happy ending (Job’s restored good fortune) is probably a later redaction, intended to assuage the outrage at Job’s innocent suffering. If one brackets the ending, the message is one of submission to God’s will, whatever it may be. The most radical version of this theodicy (if one can call it that) in the history of Christianity is that of Calvinism. God, in his inscrutable will, has ordained from eternity who will be the elect destined for heaven, and who the damned going to hell–and nothing an individual can do or fail to do can change the divine edict. There is a certain (if perverse) grandeur in such faith.

On a related note, Shalom Carmy reviews Mark Larrimore’s The Book of Job: A Biography, which marks when the problem of evil came to dominate readings of that Biblical text:

For Larrimore the medieval and early modern periods mark the rise of the Book of Job as disputation, with Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, and Calvin as his chosen representatives. These writers see the book through the prism of the question of evil. Maimonides is the first of them to ascribe specific philosophical views to Job and to the other speakers in the dialogue. For the sake of argumentative consistency and focus, Maimonides dismisses many powerful emotional passages as philosophically irrelevant digressions. Other theologians, in the service of Job’s pious image, play down his pungent sayings. Calvin, for whom Job is a vehicle for communicating the transcendence and inscrutability of God, cites some of Eliphaz’s utterances as if they were Job’s, assuming, as did other Jewish and Christian writers, that all Scripture delivers the same message, irrespective of the speaker.

With the modern problem of theodicy, the readings of Job that attract Larrimore’s attention are increasingly embedded in larger philosophical, literary, or academic projects. Perhaps the most thought-provoking element in this book is Larrimore’s emphasis on the importance of Kant, more than Leibniz, as the hinge around which the history of theodicy revolves.

(Image: Satan pours on the plagues of Job in William Blake’s The Examination of Job, via Wikimedia Commons)

How To Write Tall Tales

Nick Ripatrazone riffs on Andre Dubus’ essay on the craft of short story writing, “The Habit of Writing,” in which he reveals how and why he “changed his method while writing a story, ‘Anna,'” which is told from the perspective of its eponymous female character:

“At my desk next morning I held my pen and hunched my shoulders and leaned my head down, physically trying to look more deeply into the page of the notebook. I did this for only a moment before writing, as a batter takes practice swings while he waits in the on-deck circle. In that moment I began what I call vertical writing, rather than horizontal. I had never before thought in these terms. But for years I had been writing horizontally, trying to move forward (those five pages); now I would try to move down, as deeply as I could.”

Horizontal writing is focused on amassing pages and words. When Dubus wrote horizontally, he wrote convinced that fiction was created through aggregation. Vertical writing, in contrast, values depth over breadth. Stories are written when they are ready to be written; they are not forced into existence by planning or excessive drafting. Horizontal writing seeks to move across the page; vertical writing seeks to dig into the page, to value the building of character and authenticity over the telegraphing of plot. The folly of horizontal writing is that it convinces writers that fiction writing operates on a production model. If they simply sit at the desk and pound out page after page, the story will come. That might be true, but Dubus argues that such forced work creates a lot of “false” fiction. Curiously enough, by seeking to undermine the stereotype that writing is the result of inspiration, writers have fallen for the other, no less romantic opposite: that writing is factory work, and daily devotion is rewarded with final drafts. Both approaches are magical thinking. Vertical writing is no less work, but it is better work, work at the right time. It requires patience in the willingness to wait for a story to feel ready to be written, as well as the attention and focus necessary to inhabit the story once gestated.

Read last weekend’s Quote For The Day from Dubus here. Check out all the Dish-love for Dubus here.

A Smaller Screen For Sex

NSFW, but safe for NSFW Saturday:

Adam Sternbergh asks why there’s a “tendency in modern mainstream movies to treat sex as something that happens elsewhere, offscreen and unspoken of”:

Part of the reason is because of the internet, that perpetual digital orgy, which has busted the movies’ monopoly as the place where we go to glimpse naughty things. (That sexy scene in Moscow on the Hudson? The whole movie’s currently streaming on Hulu.) And part of the reason is because Hollywood, in the blockbuster age, has succumbed to the self-neutering gospel of the four quadrants — by which the world is split up into increasingly gory R-rated action and horror films; fun-for-the-whole-family superhero epics (superheroes, it’s well known, have no genitalia); animated films for the kid in all of us; and movies by Nicholas Sparks.

In the era of Top Gun, The Big Easy, Body Heat, or other steamy Hollywood thrillers, the goal was to appeal to both men and women with the promise of (among other things) onscreen sex.

(Ergo the fabled “date night” movie.) Now the goal is to appeal to adults and their 12-year-old kids with the promise of the absence of sex. As for more serious films, flipping back through the Best Picture nominees from the last few years — films like Argo and The King’s Speech and Inception — the only ones with truly memorable sex scenes are Black Swan and The Wolf of Wall Street. Yet in the former, the sex (between Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis) plays out like a nightmare; and in the latter, the sex feels like a porno directed by Hieronymous Bosch.

But the real cultural shift — as any with a pay-cable subscription will tell you — is that the small screen has finally steamed over. After decades spent as Hollywood’s prudish country cousin, TV now brings televised sex of near-Caligulian variety and inventiveness into our homes. There’s even a term, sexposition, created specifically for moments when characters are communicating information while also having, or watching, sex. TV, in particular pay cable, has claimed this ground in part because it can — there’s no MPAA threatening to slap censorious NC-17s on True Blood every week.

Of course, Dan Savage has been trying to reverse this trend for years with his amateur porn festival:

Worst Sex Of The Year

In fiction, anyway. This year, Ben Okri has been awarded the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award for a passage in his tenth novel, The Age of Magic:

“When his hand brushed her nipple it tripped a switch and she came alight. He touched her belly and his hand seemed to burn through her. He lavished on her body indirect touches and bitter-sweet sensations flooded her brain. She became aware of places in her that could only have been concealed there by a god with a sense of humour.

Adrift on warm currents, no longer of this world, she became aware of him gliding into her. He loved her with gentleness and strength, stroking her neck, praising her face with his hands, till she was broken up and began a low rhythmic wail … The universe was in her and with each movement it unfolded to her. Somewhere in the night a stray rocket went off.”

Okri faced some, er, stiff competition for this year’s award:

The winner of this year’s Booker, Richard Flanagan, with The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was a contender with: “Hands found flesh; flesh, flesh. He felt the improbable weight of her eyelash with his own; he kissed the slight, rose-coloured trench that remained from her knicker elastic, running around her belly like the equator line circling the world.”

Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage resorted to naturalistic metaphors: “Shiro’s were small, but her nipples were as hard as tiny round pebbles. Their pubic hair was as wet as a rain forest. Their breath mingled with his, becoming one, like currents from far away, secretly overlapping at the dark bottom of the sea.”

Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Cunningham’s The Snow Queen weighed in with: “He hears himself gasp in wonder. He falls into an ecstatic burning harmedness, losing, lost, unmade. And is finished.”

Face Of The Day

Christopher Jobson captions:

When scouring through the minute details of artist Cayce Zavaglia’s embroidered portraits (previously), it’s difficult imagine each work is scarecely larger than 8″ x 10″. Her process, which she refers to as both “thread painting” and “renegade embroidery,” begins with a photoshoot of each subject, namely friends, family, and fellow artists. Roughly 100-150 photos are winnowed down to a single selection which she then begins to embroider with one-ply embroidery thread on Belgian linen.

(Image: Cayce Zavaglia’s “Florence,” 2014, courtesy of Lyons Wier Gallery, New York)

A Short Story For Saturday

This weekend’s short story, Julie Hayden’s “Day-Old Baby Rats,” was recommended by a reader. Hayden died too young at age 42, and this selection comes from her only collection of stories, The Lists of the Past, published in 1976. Writing about the story, S. Kirk Walsh describes how “Hayden’s nameless protagonist embodies the acute loneliness of living in Manhattan — how the distorted lens of irrational fears and past traumas can transform the city into a dangerous landscape, seemingly impossible to navigate.” How it begins:

DOWN NEAR THE RIVER a door slams; somebody wakes up, immediately flips over onto her back. She dreamed she went fishing, which is odd because she’s never fished in her life. She thought someone was calling her “baby.”

There’s a lot of January light crawling from beneath room-darkener shades, casting mobile shadows on walls and ceiling. The mobile is composed of hundreds of white plastic circles the size of Communion wafers. As they spin they wax and wane, swell and vanish like little moons. Their shadows are like summer, like leaves, the leaves of the plane tree at the window, which hasn’t any, right now, being in hibernation.

Though the crack between window and sill, air that tomorrow’s papers will designate Unsatisfactory flows over one exposed arm, making the hairs stand up like sentries. Long trailer trucks continue to grind along the one-way street, tag end of a procession that began at 4 a.m. with the clank and whistle of trains on dead-end sidings, as melancholy as though they were the victims they had carried across the Hudson. The trucks carry meat for the Village butcher shops, the city’s restaurants—pink sides of prime beef that you cannot purchase at the supermarket, U.S.D.A. choice or commercial, pigs, lambs, chickens, rabbits, helped off the trucks by shivering men who warm their hands over trash-basket fires.

In the apartment across the hall the baby is bawling, “I want my milk.”

Read the rest here. Peruse previous SSFSs here.

Beauty In The Eye Of The Digital Artist

Josh Dickey lifts the curtain on “beauty work” in the movie industry, which he describes as “a digital procedure of sorts, in which a handful of skilled artists use highly specialized software in the final stages of post-production to slim, de-age and enhance actors’ faces and bodies”:

As Photoshop is to magazine photography, digital beauty has become to celebrities in motion: a potent blend of makeup, plastic surgery, muscle-sculpting, hair restoration, dental work and dermatology. Even the most flawless-in-real-life human specimens are going under the digital knife. Because they can. Because in this age of ultra-high definition, they have to. …

The technique made its “out” debut when Lola [Visual Effects] aged Brad Pitt backwards for Benjamin Button in 2008. As it turned out, the most striking visual in David Fincher’s epic wasn’t Button the shriveled, elderly man-child. It came toward the end of the film, when Pitt emerged into the golden light of a dance studio as a naturally radiant, strapping 20-something — this, at a time when Pitt, in his mid-40s, was just beginning to age into his real-life role as the sexiest man alive.

Dickey writes that, though few performers cop to it, beauty work is de riguer in Hollywood:

A recent comedy hit featured a top actress in her 40s who required beauty work on every single shot she was in — some 600 total. With artists working around the clock, seven days a week, the beauty work alone took close to three months.

The payoff? Nearly everything written about the film remarked at how fit and young the actress looked. No one suspected it was anything but good genes and clean livin’.