The Keeper, Blog #3: Literature and Faith

One day not long after that conversation, I was at the Drive-Thru Window at a nearby corporate burger place ordering a Happy Meal and thinking about Crime and Punishment. I should have been thinking about my high cholesterol numbers and how I should back up, back out, and drive over to the Natural Foods Store, buy some quinoa or something. Instead, I was thinking about the fact that Svidrigailov—he’s a pretty creepy character in Dostoevsky’s novel—committed suicide in the closing chapters, but Raskolnikov, the axe murderer, didn’t, although he’d considered it many times, being upset with himself, and rightfully so, for being an axe murderer. Although Raskolnikov had only meant to kill one person, the pawnbroker, he’d ended up killing her sister, too, who was pregnant—so three victims counting the fetus, two of them what those military guys I was talking about in Blog #2 would call “collateral damage.” After perpetrating such horrors, I thought while waiting for my Happy Meal, and despite also contemplating killing himself and thereby putting an end to his miserable theory-ridden existence, Raskolnikov, in contrast to the nihilist and sensualist Svidrigailov, decided to live on and take his punishment anyway, which would almost certainly entail a period of removal to Siberia. He even began finding a kind of faith in the ultimate meaning of his life going forward.

This was itself thanks in large part to another character named Sonya, who in spite of having destroyed her own life sacrificially by becoming a prostitute—there were an alcoholic father and several hungry little step-brothers and -sisters in the equation, as well as a consumptive step-mother, all of whom had to be provided for—still believed in the Good Book and derived particular sustenance from the story of Lazarus. Despite his Enlightenment skepticism regarding all things miraculous, Raskolnikov couldn’t help internalizing Sonya’s faithfulness first, and then, little by little, her faith itself, which eventually became his. All told, and especially to secular ears, it’s a pretty cockamamie faith but it's there, it's in him at the end, and he believes in it. Naïve and even superstitious as it might appear, this faith, it can't possibly be called a bad thing.

I call it cockamamie, by the way, because, well, all faith is cockamamie if you think about it. In the face of all the blood of human history, and especially the blood you’ve shed in your own life—or through your taxes paid other people to shed, which is the same thing—to still have faith, well, that makes no sense. But it does have a point. And the point is human need. We need faith, whether it makes sense or not, and, aside from the Happy Meals American exceptionalism serves up to us, the Age of Progress, with its nuclear destruction and its global warming, its black holes and expanding universe, provides us with nothing at all, really, to believe in. It gives us plenty to believe, but none of it is worth believing in.

To be precise, the human need for faith derives exactly from the fact that, as by the end of the novel Raskolnikov has learned, we don’t live our lives theoretically as if playing out externally derived, ideologically determined, conclusions. We live our lives internally in interaction with a world that is what it is, as distinguished from what a theory tells us it is or is someday going to be. If according to the philosophes and the ideologues we are living in a progressive age, nevertheless according to our actual experience of our environment we are still coping with the same, or almost the same, levels of cruelty and adversity as people have been since the beginning of communal time. A real faith recognizes the cruelty and the adversity and provides us with a framework within which to find some spiritual consolation, usually in the form, as in Sonya’s case, of reaching over to one another and providing each other some sort of sustenance, spiritually as she does for Raskolnikov, or, with regard to her step-mom and little step-brothers and -sisters, materially by providing them with the wherewithal to eat. After all, her life as a prostitute has been all about bringing in rubles, not for her but for them.

Historically, it’s only been this sort of faith—one that recognizes the ongoing reality of human suffering and weakness—that has inspired souls to reach thus out to one another, to extend sustenance by way of extending love. This is what Raskolnikov comes to understand and that's why I love the crazy bastard. Who, of course, doesn’t exist, being a character in a book. I think it’s possible to love someone who doesn’t exist, as per, say, one’s best and proudest version of oneself. Or God, even, for Whom there’s no empirical evidence, as the scientists would point out . . . in fact, mostly the other way.

Anyway, although I love Raskolnikov I don’t exactly approve of him, of his cruelty to others as well as to himself, as implicit in his proto-Nietzschean theory of the Extraordinary Man, the logic of which necessitates, even celebrates, both sorts of cruelty. The theory’s glorification of destruction, that is, resonates not only outward but inward toward the annihilation of self, specifically those tendencies towards empathy and fellow-feeling that can only appear within the framework of the theory as weaknesses.

This is all as much as to say that Raskolnikov’s ideology represents both in potentia and in practicum a modality of Freud’s death wish and provides a justification for a kind of intellectualized sadomasochism.  So I feel compelled to give assurance that, apropos of my friend the history teacher’s thought-provoking observations on that sunny day, I have been able to reach some clarity to the effect that despite thinking, writing, and reading about so many depressing things and despite the fact that I like Raskolnikov so much, I am not by any stretch of the imagination, as far as I know, a sadomasochist.

Nor am I a proto-Nietzschean inclined to murder people with an axe in order to break some long-standing moral law and show I have the inner strength to cut myself off, and gladly, from the rest of the world, leaving behind my slave mentality and acceding to the twilight joy of Zarathustrian ubermensch-ness. I don’t love Raskolnikov because he killed somebody—well, three people—all for a dopey theory he had. Rather, I love Raskolnikov because he deeply and sincerely repented his actions and even humbly took on the embarrassment of faith. So it’s not like, as Zarathustra would have me, I enjoy pain or anything, mine or anybody else's, and it's not like I enjoy feeling depressed either. In fact, aside from sometimes assaulting my colleagues with my boorish opinions while they’re sharing their excellent and expensive scotch with me, I don’t think I’m even a very mean person. On the whole I’m pretty gentle and nice to people and I stay relatively cheerful. I try not to insult anyone and I would never bring a picnic lunch to a disemboweling.

In fact, I would never even go to one.

Nor is everything I ever read or write primarily about misery and violence.

I once wrote a poem about day lilies, for instance.

Another time I wrote one about a woman feeding ducks.

My favorite book in the world is Good Night, Moon.

Yet, when I’m reading one of these other books or writing one of my crazy poems, I do not find human misery to be an impediment to my sense of, well, for want of a better word, enjoyment. Yes, enjoyment. But not in a superficial sense. My enjoyment comes from the way every great book I’ve ever read reinforces my faith in faith. They all challenge it and then they show a way through or around or over or sometimes even under those very challenges and back to it—back to an at least semi-illuminated world of renewed and feasible faith.

Or at least faithfulness.

Reading great literature, whatever it’s about—the creative process, too, whatever it’s about—well, these things make me happy, but more importantly they make me faithful, and that makes me willing to go on and happy to do so.

In spite of, you know, the river.

*

As for that poem I mentioned—not the day lilies one but the one about the woman feeding ducks—well, I wrote that not too long after my friend and I had our tête-á-tête and after I subsequently partook in my solitary Happy Meal with thoughts of Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov, and Sonya dancing in my head. I happened to be in Cape May Point, New Jersey, one day, walking along with nothing to do, and I saw this very tough-looking woman standing by herself in a crowd of waddling noisy ducks, as well as a few sort of out-of-place geese, patiently distributing feed-corn from one of many bulging pockets that made her cargo shorts look rocky everywhere and also made them kind of sag down her hips. She was scattering the corn around and talking really nicely to the ducks and I could tell they sort of liked her. They weren’t just in it for the corn and all. They really liked her. Not wanting to seem creepy and intrusive I resisted the urge to stop and just watch but I did walk around the block a few times so I could watch her again looking tough as nails and acting so nice to the ducks.

After a while, I got the feeling she might notice that I was passing by a few too many times for it to be natural and okay and I didn’t want to rile her up, she looked so tough, so I didn’t go around past her anymore. I went on and just went home. But for the rest of the day I kept thinking about her and those ducks quacking around her obviously very happy to see her. In order to stop thinking about it but also to not forget—because without knowing it or even trying to she’d renewed my faith in humanity—the next morning I wrote a poem about it.

At the risk of seeming more narcissistic than—or even as narcissistic as—I am, I’d like to include it here, adding that, on the off-chance that it pleases, a reader can find more like it in my poetry books—A Communion of Saints and Eternal Life, and, most recently, A Tree and Gone. This poem is in Eternal Life but all three books, if I say so myself, are pretty good. There are some sad ones in them, but there are some inspiring ones, too. It’s a little bit of self-promotion, I know, putting it here, but it also may work as a piece of evidence, so to speak—Exhibit A—to prove my case—that, in spite of my opinions about history and progress and rivers of blood, I’m a happy enough person and not a sadomasochist or a morbid ubermensch-wannabe trying to convince himself. Writing makes me feel happy and fulfilled because it expresses a—momentary, at least—faith. Like a little religion.

A minute religion.

Here it is.

It’s called “Woman Feeding Duck.”

Woman Feeding Duck

She has a gigantic pink

triangle tattoo’d on her upper arm.

I don’t know she’s butch, but to think

she is confers a quirky charm

upon the sight of her brave in

wife-beater shirt and cargo shorts,

clod-hopper boots, argyle socks, unshaven

legs stocky and, well, gnarly, all sorts

of ducklings and geese around her

clamoring with half-raised wings,

bossy now they’ve found her.

She coos the loveliest sorts of things

to this one, a handful of corn

extended to its ungainly orange bill,

which is shiny and fat as a flugelhorn.

Peck. Peck. It pecks its fill.

There’s laughter in her eyes

and the fingers of her other hand

conduct a cantata of surprise

behind her back.—I am unmanned.

I wrote that poem in the morning, right after my first cup of coffee. It was something to get out of bed for—the coffee and the poem—so I got out of bed.

I drank my coffee, then I wrote the poem.

*

I wasn’t wrong, then, when as I masticated the hell out of my slap-happy corporate burger I thought to myself that far from having difficulty, as my friend had thought I must, getting out of bed in the morning I tended to spring from even the deepest of slumbers like Liberace himself unto his piano. And I was often quite inspired by the simplest scenes—a beautiful dog, say, lying at rest under a Japanese Maple in a backyard; a picnic lunch spread tidily upon a mead far from anything even remotely resembling a public disemboweling; and, the following week or so, a tough-looking woman feeding ducks and a few geese with what could only be thought of as love. Aside from moments like these, too, books and writing were things that leavened what might be called—by an anti-empiricist neo-Romantic bourgeois apologist for, well, bourgeois things like sentimentality—my soul.

And so was teaching.

Teaching after all is a lot of fun, especially if your students are a lot of fun, as mine mostly are. Adolescents, in fact, are smart and funny and just a little goofy, so you can kid them and they can kid you back and it’s all good. And they do the most cockamamie things sometimes, things that make no sense in the larger adult world where following protocols is so important, along with remaining focused all the time while struggling to achieve goals in the belief that they are related to something larger, something along the lines of what we would call progress.

For instance, if a group of kids enters a supermarket together, right there in the supermarket they’ll stop and help some confused-looking old lady with flaming orange hair wearing leopard-spotted pajamas under her fake mink coat to download an app on her smart phone that her nephew the doctor gave her, all so she can buy her favorite candy for half price. That is, kids might be in a rush and all or more interested in goofing off with one another than dealing with some random old lady in her pajamas, but they’ll do it anyway. They’ll help her. Her nephew the doctor wouldn’t and he’s the one who gave her the phone in the first place. He had to get to a meeting over at the hospital, of course, to find out about some new protocol or other, so he couldn’t help her download any apps, he’d just been dropping it off. But the kids help her, because she seems confused and a little bit like their grandmom and happens to be wearing very cool pajamas.

So I loved teaching too, I realized, because I loved kids and I loved what I taught, which was, as noted, literature and creative writing. And the reason I loved the latter—literature and writing, that is—was that those things almost always found a way to say that even under the worst circumstances faith would prevail.

Or at least could.

Or, maybe, could have.

Not some pie-in-the-sky faith so obsessed with something beyond the present moment that it can’t even register real human suffering when it’s right there in front of it. No, a faith in the importance of seeing that suffering and responding to it, giving help, giving sustenance, even if it’s only an app to get some candy. That kind of faith is in my opinion a good thing. I really like a faith like that. It makes me able, as my friend put it, and willing, as he also put it, to get up in the morning.