Beaten to the Case

Some time ago I had the idea of writing an essay--like, a real essay--about my fascination with the world of fanfiction. I would talk about its modern flowering, its  lingo (complex as Cockney slang) and the way in which I participated: in it the first story I tried to write, in sixth grade, was an undisguised Sherlock Holmes knockoff. "I'm writing a Sherlock Holmes knockoff," I would explain to classmates proudly. In the essay I would try to connect my love for Holmes' London, seedy, huge, and umanageable, and my appreciation of the overgrown city of fan fiction as a comparably messy but still worthwhile human creation. However, by way of Emily Nussbaum's review of the third season of BBC's TV miniseries Sherlock, my current favorite TV show, I found that the game was on, and I missed it: Anne Jamison's book Fic: Why Fanfiction is Taking over the World pointed out that when Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Holmes to escape from the crushing popularity, his readers were so distraught that they wore black armbands and wrote what can be considered the very first fanfiction. It's the connection that would have made my essay make sense. I had the clues in my hands, Watson, and I let them go!

On the other hand, I've found a new book to read, and I can't complain about that. And perhaps I can figure out something a little different that would still work. Anyway, if you are a fan of Sherlock, or perhaps a fan of the books that thinks you will never watch the series, read Nussbaum's excellent review, which includes some insights that get us a little further into the mystery of why we still love these characters and their world enough to write new stories for them a century later.

Noli Timere

Seamus Heaney’s last words to his wife, sent in a text message, were the Latin phrase Noli timere: do not be afraid. I hesitate to stamp a meaning on these words, other than their undulating cadence, their peaceful music, their importance in many Bible passages. In some ways it seems almost immoral not to be afraid today, considering the precarious state of the world. But one of our best lights got as close as the living can come to death and had these words for us. Something to carry around and consider every now and then, like his small, solid poems.

It makes me sad that it is Heaney’s death that will be the thing that finally leads me to read more of his work. I had read his chart-toppers like “Digging,” and could probably recognize one of his poems if they were put in front of me (look for bogs, damp, and short, musical lines), but had never read a mass of his poems. However, based on the several obituaries and remembrances of Heaney that I have read (probably the most I’ve read about a recently-deceased person ever), it seems that this irony might just make him chuckle. My personal favorite essay on his death is from his friend Tom Sleigh, which gives a rare glimpse into a relationship between two practicing writers.

Something that makes Heaney’s last words ring even stronger is their harmony with the English poet John Keat’s last words, which were reimagined in this poem I’ve recently discovered:

Keats

Christopher Howell

When Keats, at last beyond the curtain

of love’s distraction, lay dying in his room

on the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the Bernini

Fountain “filling him like flowers,”

he held his breath like a coin, looked out

into the moonlight and thought he saw snow.

He did not suppose it was fever or the body’s

weakness turning the mind. He thought, “England!”

and there he was, secretly, for the rest

of his improvidently short life: up to his neck

in sleigh bells and the impossibly English cries

of street vendors, perfect

and affectionate as his soul.

For days the snow and statuary sang him so far

beyond regret that if now you walk rancorless

and alone there, in the piazza, the white shadow

of his last words to Severn, “Don’t be frightened,”

may enter you.

There Will Be Time

"There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea."

--T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

A couple days ago, I thought it would be a great idea to write an essay about the composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s famous “Leningrad” symphony—the controversies surrounding its meaning, the thrilling story of its composition, my experiences of it, and my own take on its import. This led to a trip to the local library. I returned with a short biography of Shostakovich, a collection of essays about him, a recording of Symphony No. 7: Leningrad, as well as a CD of the string quartets of Debussy, Faure, and Ravel—for fun.

I got home, sat down at the table with my laptop, plopped the Leningrad Symphony into the CD player, and realized that there was nothing I less wanted to do than write an essay about Shostakovich at the moment. It was like hearing from a friend about a great hiking trail, and going there and finding a charred wasteland of cooled lava under a mountain that may or may not be emanating smoke. What made me think I would enjoy writing an essay on a summer day? Shostakovich stared up at me from the cover of the essay collection. Most photographs you see of the Soviet composer are from his early years, where he appears bespectacled, precocious, even adorably childlike. Here he glared at me through tight wire-rimmed glasses as a middle-aged man, his face flabbier than in his youth, his expression cross and demanding, the survivor of Stalin's purges. “So you’re going to write about me and my symphony, eh?” he seemed to say, as the ‘hero theme’ from the first movement swelled defiantly from the stereo system. “Like to see you try, sobaka.”

For years, most of my unscheduled summer days have gone a little like this: I have a fabulous idea for a short story, essay, poem, invention, experiment, adventure—and then when I actually set out to do it, I end up napping, staring at clouds, or drinking tea and re-reading an old favorite book. A full-time internship interrupted this cycle, but now that it’s over I’m faced with the old dilemma. I make two simultaneous and diametrically opposed demands of my summer days. First, they are to serve as a reservoir of physical and spiritual relaxation, an oasis of calm, the memory of which I can tap into in scarcer, more difficult times during the school year. Second, they are to be the time in which I actually carry out the long list of projects I’ve accumulated over the school year.

I imagine that years from now, when I hopefully have a real job and a family to deal with, I’ll look back on these empty summer days as something from a fairy tale. “Whole days of absolutely nothing?" I will ask my former self incredulously. "Why didn’t you just enjoy that while it lasted?” To which my former self will shrug his shoulders and pour himself a plate of kettlecorn and try to make it a little further into a Robert Frost collection while watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.

The obvious solution to this problem would be to alternate days of rest and work. But I always want to do both things on the same day, usually at the same time. And when I inevitably fail to either work or relax, I tell myself, like Prufrock, that there will be time for both the next day. Take today, for example. I planned to polish up a couple essays I had been working on that could serve as blog posts. Coffee-fueled optimism at 10 a.m. told me I could do this. Then it got to be 10:30 and I felt that if I did something low-energy, like listening to an episode of This American Life, I would be both rested and rejuvenated in my pursuit of finishing the essays. Then it was 11:30, I had listened to an episode of This American Life from 1997, been informed of the wider world, amused, and intellectually challenged, and I still didn’t want to work on those essays. But after the autobiographical short story by David Sedaris on the episode, I did have this idea for writing a short autobiographical essay that would emphasize ridiculous characterizations in the way he did: things like the photograph of a dead composer on a book cover trash-talking someone. And believe it or not, I actually wrote that essay. Did I feel accomplished at completing a small project, or did I feel mentally rested because I allowed myself to write about something that I found fun to write about? Well, I really felt neither of those things. What I felt like was eating Zebra Cakes and watching shows about shark attacks on the Discovery Channel while reading a Wallace Stegner novel.

A Most Unworldly Fellow, 'pon My Word

Stephen Maturin as portrayed (quite well, I think) by Paul Bethany. Even if the plot of the movie has essentially nothing to do with the books, it brought the characters and the world of the Aubrey-Maturin series to thrilling life.

The year is 1804: Captain Jack Aubrey, R.N., is returning from a near-run victory over a French squadron in the South China Sea, and has anchored at a small island in order to fix his coordinates by planetary observation. His ship’s surgeon and particular friend Dr. Stephen Maturin is recovering from an exceptionally painful time in India that culminated in a pistol duel that nearly killed him; the until-recently raving feverish doctor is deposited under a large shade tree to take some air while Aubrey and his officers set up their instruments. After the sun has set and Venus has been successfully observed, Aubrey looks to collect Maturin, and finds that the doctor has wandered off and returned with company.

“My God, what is that monstrous thing?’ Jack cried out.

‘It is a tortoise, my dear. The great land-tortoise of the world: a new genus. He must weigh a ton. I do not know that I have ever been so happy. I am in such spirits, Jack! How you will ever get him aboard, I cannot tell; but nothing is impossible to the Navy.’

'Must we get him aboard?'

‘Oh, no question about it. He is to immortalize your name. This is Testudo aubreii for all eternity; when the Hero of the Nile is forgotten, Captain Aubrey will live on in his tortoise. There’s glory for you.’

‘Why, I am much obliged, Stephen, I am sure. I suppose we might parbuckle him down the beach. How did you come by him?’

‘I wandered a little way inland, looking for specimens, and there he was in an open space, eating Ficus religiosa. I plucked some high shoots he was straining for, and he followed me down here … See his gleaming eye! He would like another leaf. It does me good to see him. This tortoise has quite recovered me,’ he cried, putting his arm round the enormous carapace.”

Stephen has discovered a fictional tortoise apparently larger than the Galapagos species, winning himself (and of course the creature’s namesake) immortal fame. I searched the Internet for an illustration of the victorious Stephen, his arm round the dear tortoise’s shell: I searched in vain. Nonetheless, this scene, towards the end of H.M.S. Surprise, the third book in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, is illustrative of Stephen Maturin’s behavior. His speech is full of praise for unusual plants—“vegetable magnificence!”—unusual creatures—“the tapir, the boa, the peccary! You may find it hard to credit, Jack, but never yet have I beheld a boa”—and disparagements of “vulgar-minded lubricious blockheads” with whom he disagrees, usually regarding his unpopular beliefs on the social contract, the abolition of slavery, the independence of the Irish and the Catalans, and other such hopeless causes near to his heart. Stephen’s wonderfully complex character, and the shocking political and personal messes into which he delivers himself, are some of the chief joys of the books.

Many of my friends know of my obsession, my long-carried love for this series: an affliction that seems no closer to ending than it did four years ago, the first time I picked up Master and Commander and was swept into the world of sun-struck port cities, proud tall-masted ships, an impossibly amusing late-Georgian form of English, and the weather-tested, year-seasoned friendship of  Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin—a friendship that began when Maturin drove an irritated elbow into Aubrey’s ample side when the good captain began to enthusiastically beat the time on his knee to a spirited Locatteli quartet.

What I was first enamored with in Master and Commander was a powerful sense, underneath the winding, globe-trotting plot and democratic sweep of characters, that Deus providebit—that no matter what happens, humor and humanity will carry us through it, and one way or another we will be carried to some kind of safety, be it our intended destination or not. O’Brian, I believe, saw heaven ordinant in the contingencies of history. The most important ship in the book is named Surprise. Friendships begin with blows, battles are won with barely-successful ruses, governments are a hair’s breadth from backing the wrong revolutionaries, squalls are survived by the improbable integrity of a single tiny sail. Though the books portray a time now gone, nothing seems inevitable; the sun brightening their sea is as young as ours. This is largely due to the way O’Brian relentlessly takes advantage of the many contradictions, blind-spots and blips in the historical record and creates whole worlds around them—believable alternate fates, 1800a or b, as he once put it, and always sparkling with intimate details of that time.

I often find myself re-reading favorite books in the series to experience this largely unspoken faith in Providence. But lately, the biggest draw has been the chance to commune with my alter-ego Stephen Maturin. Like me, dear Stephen is barely nine stone (well I am not even nine stone). Stephen plays the ’cello (one of the many things I have learned from these books is that cello is short for violoncello) and Jack the violin (as do I, a bit). A “learned cove,” he is trained as a physician and a Fellow of the Royal Society, with a keen interest in natural history. He has a sharp, often unexpected wit and is a polyglot of immense ability. His official employment is as ship’s surgeon. But his most memorable trait is his unworldliness: his inability, most of the time, to accept the basic tenets of social behavior in his contemporary culture; his shy and reserved nature, though open with a few close friends; his immensely varied academic pursuits.

He is set in sharp contrast to the books’ more widely celebrated hero, Jack. A big, boyish, red-faced lieutenant at the start of the series, Jack is infinitely more worldly than Stephen. He loves the noise and excitement of battles, fox-hunts, the strategy of making a ship go as fast as ever it can. But most importantly he develops a great heart and great affection for his unusual friend.  Somewhat given to whoring in his youth and overeating and drinking all his life, he somehow matures enough in book two to become engaged to Sophie, a wholesome, intelligent woman from a country estate, and has a stable family life all his days (in spite of the occasional quickly forgotten infidelity on the other side of the world.) Stephen, on the other hand, nearly destroys himself again and again in the pursuit of the dashing, capricious socialite Diana Villiers, and family is something that seems forever just over the next horizon.

Yet as different as they are, and as much friction as there sometimes exists between them, each develops deep appreciation for the other’s talents. Aubrey has an indefatigable, even blasphemous belief in Maturin’s medical abilities: “It is a great comfort to me to have you aboard: it is like sailing with a piece of the True Cross.” Stephen, likewise, has a wholly ignorant faith in Jack’s abilities as a sailor, often completely trusting his friend’s skills even as the ship sinks under them (though of course Stephen, a hopeless lubber, would like as not confuse the settling of a dying vessel for the natural movement of a ship at sea).

They both find themselves in need of the other many times; Stephen, in particular, desperately needs the home that Jack’s ships provide, though he is not even entirely aware of it. “Poor dear thing, how very much he is in need of darning—how very much he needs someone to look after him. He really is not fit to wander about the world alone; it is so hard to unworldly people … How little learning does for a man—he knows almost nothing.” So says Sophie of Stephen, her close friend. And she is quite right—though medically, academically, Stephen has few equals, he is much like a child in social matters.

This resonates with me every day of my life, though in less extreme ways. As soon as I think I’m clever, as soon as I think I understand my fellow humans, it all comes down on my head. I am absent-minded and misunderstand direct address many times each day; I ignorantly flout traffic and pedestrian laws and conventions; I attempt to convey something I find interesting, a book (like these), a little-known classical composer, and I am greeted with the familiar polite interest, the dubious promise to look it up someday. But I am not really that disappointed most of the time. I have learned to expect and accept that I am slow to absorb customs of behavior and that my interests are shared by precious few people. It makes finding those people all the more exciting.

Now, Stephen is not entirely my doppleganger. For one thing, he is much smarter than me, cleverer, and braver, and is employed by the Royal Navy as an intelligence agent. I am no polyglot, though I do study Russian, which can sound like Martian to those unfamiliar with it. Stephen was also addicted to laudanum until he took up chewing coca leaves. But he is the dramatization of a type, and we are one in our strangeness, in our peculiar and passionate interests in unloved facets of the world that often seem to draw us away from other people. Few other individuals could study beetles at such length, could nearly die in the pursuit of defecating gulls on a bare rock near the Equator, could adopt a sloth, could take such delight in successful suprapubic cystotomy. Not that I completely have all his same interests, nor do I pretend to know exactly what a suprapubic cystotomy is (except for shockingly painful without modern anesthetics) but I have my own set of strange passions and hobbies that I share with so few others that Dr. Maturin is about as close as I’m going to get in literature to a reflection of the peculiar part of myself.

That’s why I ran for these books towards the end of the second semester of college. At no other time had I felt more unready for the world, unsuited for even the basic, ubiquitous experiences of college students. I do not cope with change well, but often that was not what I was struggling with. Most often, I struggled with basic acceptance of myself. I wanted so strongly at times to just be a different person. The shy, quiet, observant, overly studious person must change, and change utterly, I thought. In hindsight, I do not think that I ever really needed to change in the ways that I thought I had to. Growth and change would come, but they would come from a more subtle engine than passing myself under the harrow again and again because I felt like I did not measure up to how others near and far were “adjusting.” The relentless, self-applied pressure on myself to be different wore me down incredibly; at the end of the year, I slowly began to realize my mistake and began to stumble back to the familiar. I had to read those books again. I had to call on my particular friend Dr. Maturin.

For all his originality, Stephen always finds a place in the ad-hoc family of Jack’s ships. More specifically, Jack and Stephen’s friendship is as close as a sibling relationship, such as ones that neither of them had growing up. Like brothers, with all the squabbles and shared experiences, but also in a sense stronger, because they chose and created their friendship themselves. And through the series, partly due to spending so much time around Jack, the accepting, bright part of Stephen’s nature becomes stronger; he always had a good heart, but before meeting Jack he was something of a cantankerous hermit vagabond philosopher who happened to have a good heart.

I’ve been exponentially more fortunate than Stephen as far as being accepted goes—in my family, first of all, who do not question when I raise a ladder to peer into a robin’s nest; in my high school’s newspaper staff, a group that in many ways resembles the ragtag band that make up H.M.S. Surprise’s company; in my friends in St. Louis and from Truman. I am grateful for these relationships, for all the people that support who I am, either by joyously living their own lovable peculiarities or with their large-hearted, Aubrey-esque appreciation for those different than them. Right now I’m particularly grateful to my new friends from school, who helped me through a rough time, and probably did not realize how much they were helping just with simple friendship and by being amused at my many quirks.

Ultimately, I think the power of Aubrey and Maturin’s friendship lies in the differences in their personalities. They are not the kind of differences that make a friendship impossible, though they seem to threaten to at times; ultimately, the differences bear witness to the truth that worldly and unworldly people can live happily alongside each other, and even be friends—that the paths of asceticism and affirmation are equally valid, that identity is not some sort of necessary evil we must overcome in order to be part of a community, but rather our greatest gift. So ultimately, I do not think it is such a bad thing that I spend much of my time reading peculiar books which have not yet been read by a single living soul among any of my acquaintances; or that the first thing I think of when I step out of the house is to search for peculiar birds in the yard; that I use semicolons (and artless parenthetical asides) too much; or that I remain, even in college, a relatively shy, reserved person. No, not a bad thing at all, to be unworldly: not a bad thing at all, to be myself.

Something New

Yesterday in Kirksville, we awoke to fogs and temperatures above freezing--quite an anomaly, as the norm is currently sub-zero wind chills. The mists cleared as the day went on, and afternoon recalled the feeling of spring. The air was mild and humid, full of the earthy smell of the ground thawing. Finches and sparrows called from the bushes, and squirrels rose from their shelters to look for food.

It felt like a tiny Easter in this already long winter. Perhaps that's what I needed it to be, at least. The priests that I know are fond of reminding people that the most important holiday is actually not Christmas, but Easter. Yesterday, though, I thought how perhaps it's fitting that most of us still like Christmas better--or at least, look forward to it more. As a kid, I understood Easter to be a sort of watered-down Christmas. Presents in small plastic eggs instead of big square wrapped-up things. Even when I began to consciously consider the religious aspects of the two holidays, somehow God coming into the world was easier to grasp than dying to save it. I'm still not sure anyone living actually understands what that really means. Christmas is easy to understand. What came afterwards is more difficult to parse out. Year after year, never feeling much wiser, always looking out from the same eyes, maybe we get a sliver closer to the truth.

We're always trying to understand the future in terms of something that has already happened to us. We're always looking for the Temple to be rebuilt, not destroyed. For a warrior-savior that conquers that which we fear, not someone who helps us not have fear. For a new Jerusalem, not an entirely new kingdom. We've never been ready for something entirely new.




Here are some pictures I took when it snowed at Truman on the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day--well before yesterday's thaw.



One of the shelters in the Sunken Garden

The Sunken Garden and the bell tower

Dobson Hall (my dorm) and some bikes that probably won't be used for a while

I Believe in Small-Scale Anarchy ... Hi, New Classmates!

For our orientation week at Truman University, we freshmen were asked to write "This I Believe" essays. I had never heard of this project before. I started reading and listening to some of the essays, both the recent ones and the ones broadcast on the radio in the 50's, and realized I could probably listen to them all day--it's a bit like "This American Life," fast-food style. Most of the essays are about 500 words and take only about three minutes to read or listen to, but the writers accomplish a lot in that brief time, telling beautiful, painful, or just amusing stories and synthesizing life lessons from them. It's also a bit like the format of my old column for my high school newspaper, which was around 600-700 words and had many of the same goals. I've posted my essay below; I read it to about 100 classmates in a lecture hall. About two dozen others chose to read their essays. It may have been a bit out there for my first essay at Truman, but that's the energy of starting so many things over in a new place, I guess.

I believe in anarchy. Let me explain.

This is not a plug for a stateless society. Maybe I should rephrase and call it small-scale anarchy, because that is all that is usually possible in this world. The kind of anarchy I am interested in occurs in the smallest imaginable moments, usually when we are most alone—when we encounter a panhandler on the street without a mother or father with us to brush him or her off, when we see a wrapper on the floor in a deserted hallway, when we are alone with another person on a date, when we find ourselves holding the answers to a quiz we have to take next period, when we are faced with a choice and have no one to stop us from making the wrong decision. Situations with no rules, with no authorities, when we are accountable no one and nothing but our own conscience—these are times when we are most free to choose, and therefore have the most potential to do good or evil, to do something truly horrible or beautiful.

Anarchy of this kind is not always small-scale. But it is the only scale I have experience with. And just because these moments seem small does not mean they are not important—extremely important, sometimes the best evidence as to what kind of person we are and often profoundly influential on other people.

I don’t believe in anarchy just because I believe in humanity and our ability to choose the right thing when given the chance. I believe the human spirit is fallen, and that people, including and especially me, face many barriers to choosing good when there is no authority to tell them to do so. Indeed, these moments of anarchy are also the times when the influence of God, and an omnipresent, interventionist God at that, is clearest—a God that somehow pulls humans over high mental barriers and deeply rutted prejudices in order to be able to be merely free to chose the right thing. But these moments are also when the human spirit is at its strongest, because we so often do choose to do good, against all odds.

I have only spent five days at college, but I have already noticed that there is a huge amount of anarchy here. The absence of parents, the ease of access to all sorts of things we know we shouldn’t want, and the sheer number of people and situations makes this a place where students are forced to make many more decisions on their own than they ever have before. My fifth-grade teacher once said that you really only find out what a person is like in college. I think I understand what he meant now. Only when we choose entirely for ourselves do we begin to determine what kind of person we are and will become.