Literal Perfection

Louis Zamperini tells author Laura Hillenbrand that he’s easier to write about than the subject of her first best-seller which was the racehorse Seabiscuit.  He says this is so because he can talk.   I thought of Zamperini as a human Seabiscuit* while reading his story entitled Unbroken.  Like Seabiscuit, he was born to run; he trained to become the Olympic athlete that he was ever so briefly until called to serve duty.  He flew fighter planes until one blew up and left him and two other men stranded and lost in the Pacific.  Then he was found by the Japanese, who captured and imprisoned him.  He barely survived the torture, starvation, and freezing weather of the POW Pacific camps.  But like Seabiscuit, Zamperini overcame the adversity and became stronger for it.  I have never read such a compassionate understanding of post-traumatic stress syndrome as what Hillenbrand presents in this book.  But then again, I don’t read that many war stories.  This, however, is not just a war story, it’s a story of a man who finds his himself lost, literally and figuratively, and then comes home to his country and eventually to himself.

In the chapter entitled “Coming Undone,” Hillenbrand writes about Zamperini’s becoming undone after holding all his emotions in while being a prisoner of war so as to survive, after coming home and falling in love with a beautiful woman and marrying her, and then almost losing her because of his love of drink.  His wife badgers him into attending a tent sermon being led by a young Billy Graham.  Hillenbrand describes the young preacher upon arriving in town:

“In the second week of September 1949, an angular young man climbed down from a transcontinental train and stepped into Los Angeles.  His remarkably tall blond hair fluttered on the summit of a remarkably tall head, which in turn topped a remarkably tall body.  He had a direct gaze, a stern jawline, and a southern sway in his voice…” (p. 369-370)

Louie is resistant to hearing Graham’s sermon and at one point he begins to walk out.  But Graham commands that no one leaves the tent.  And then he speaks these words:

 “’If you look into the heavens tonight, on this beautiful California night, I see the stars and can see the footprints of God,” he said….’I think to myself, my father, my heavenly father, hung them there with a flaming fingertip and holds them there with the power of his omnipotent hand, and he runs the whole universe, and he’s not too busy running the whole universe to count the hairs on my head and see a sparrow when it falls, because God is interested in me…’”

The beautiful language of paradise reminds Louie of the time he spent in the Pacific:

“He remembered the day when he and Phil, slowly dying on the raft, had slid into the doldrums.  Above, the sky had been a swirl of light; below, the stilled ocean had mirrored the sky, its clarity broken only by a leaping fish.  Awed to silence, forgetting his thirst and his hunger, forgetting that he was dying, Louie had known only gratitude.  That day, he believed that what lay around them was the work of infinitely broad, benevolent hands, a gift of compassion.  In the years since, that thought had been lost.” (374)

Louie stays to the end of Graham’s sermon and ends up a believer, but not just in God and religion, but in himself as that unbroken spirit that he is.

 *Seabiscuit is another riviting non-fiction read by Hillenbrand.

I thoroughly enjoyed traveling the journey of Marion Stone, from his birth in Addis Ababa as a twin conjoined at the forehead with his brother Shiva, their separation immediately thereafter from each other and from their parents, their almost-as-immediate adoption, and his path to becoming a doctor, which is not simply his vocation, but his purpose:

“We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose….I grew up and I found my purpose, and it was to become a physician.  My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself.”  (pp.6-7)

With this intent, Marion travels across continents of land, and also the lands of his interior psyche.  Conditions of the human body that come to light for healing, from within the depths of emotional wounds, are the means through which Marion explores.  His adopted father, Ghosh, also a doctor, is the one who introduces Marion to this world:

 “Ghosh, in giving me the stethoscope, was saying, Marion, you can be you.  It’s okay.  He invited me to a world that wasn’t secret, but it was well hidden.  You needed a guide.  You had to know what to look for, but also how to look.  You had to exert yourself to see this world.  But if you did, if you had that kind of curiosity, if you had an innate interest in the welfare of your fellow human beings, and if you went through that door, a strange thing happened:  you left your petty troubles on the threshold.  It would be addictive.” (p. 275)

This is true not only for the medical physician but also for the practitioner who sees beyond the physical — the metaphysician, the mystic, the spiritual seeker.  This is really what Marion is at heart, a spiritual seeker exploring the mysteries of the human being.  I’m grateful that I met Marion on the path.

I listened to Lucky by Alice Sebold, my first audiobook, during the first week of the New Year.  It’s about how Sebold was raped when she was 18.  Sebold followed Lucky with her bestseller, The Lovely Bones.  I didn’t like The Lovely Bones, and I thought Lucky would be a downer.  It turned out to be one of those surprises that I’d judged incorrectly by its cover.  (For another one, see my blog post “A Winning Handicap” about Lisa Genova’s book Still Alice.)  I came about listening to Lucky because I was staying for a week of residency at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony.  Within a few hours after my arrival, while looking through a notebook of information, I learned that Sebold was a previous resident artist.  I was impressed that such a well-known author had stayed at Dorland.

I asked the caretaker, Robert Willis, about Sebold.  He was making a fire for me in my cabin (the only heat is a wood-burning stove, but it works very well).  He asked me if I was familiar with her first book.  “You mean Lucky?”  He said, “That’s it.  As you can imagine, it was tough for her.”  He paused, “She found this place to be healing.”  Robert went on to tell me that Sebold has stayed at Dorland many times, and at one time even took over his job as caretaker for a few months.  He also said they’ve become good friends.  He mentioned something about Australian director Jane Champion wanting to make a movie.  It wasn’t clear to me if it was a documentary movie about Dorland, or if was a movie based on Lucky, because Sebold writes about Dorland in her book.

The day before I started my week at Dorland, I jumped out of my Luddite persona and dived into technology full-on with the purchase of an I-phone, with Siri no less.  After my conversation with Robert, I went on my I-phone and was about to order a copy of Lucky from amazon.com when I thought of how I could listen to an audible version of the book.  Within minutes I was hearing Alice Sebold read Lucky.  I listened before going to bed, while hiking, when driving to town for supplies, and whenever I felt I could use some inspiration.  The culmination of Dorland’s tranquil setting in Temecula’s mountain wine country, my preparing for this residency by honing my writing skills, and listening to Sebold, gave me all I needed so that every moment of my residency was one of immense productivity.

The title of Sebold’s book is supposed to be ironic.  A policeman tells her she’s “lucky” after she’s been brutally raped because she wasn’t killed.  It’s as Robert said, “tough.”  I thought it might be too tough for me to listen to and enjoy, but I did.  Sebold comes out the other side with a different perspective, one of seeing beyond the physical world of facts.  It’s a metaphysical viewpoint, and one that seems to allow her to be at peace with what has happened.  So it felt to me as if the title was not totally ironic in that she feels, somewhere in all of the darkness, there is a fleck of light that one might call “lucky.”

Some people believe that how you spend your New Year’s day and eve in an indication of the coming year. On New Year’s Eve I wrote, ate a late dinner, and then listened to Sebold’s story.  As I was listening, I kept hearing a lot of “yakking” from the canyon below.  I thought that perhaps there was a group of campers who were celebrating, partying it up big time.  I opened the door and looked out to see only darkness.  I didn’t venture past the porch, so I thought maybe the campers were on the other side of the canyon, beyond the perch below where another resident cabin was located.  The next morning I asked Robert about the noise.  “Were there campers below?”  He chuckled, “No, coyotes.”  “Ah hah!”  I thought to myself, I’ll have a lucky year, writing with inspired zest and zeal, celebrating and partying big time – with or without coyotes.

I was excited about my book-to-film club’s choice of a classic I had never read:  John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.  I knew it was about farming but not much more.  Oh so little did I know.  The dustbowl of the 1930’s in America’s heartland and the growth of the farming industry in California during that same time are major characters.  But it’s the Joads, an Oklahoma family looking to better their lives with a move to California, upon whom the story centers.  This exodus to the West was made by many others from central states beside Oklahoma, but the derogatory term of “Okie” is what was used to describe them.  The Joads’ journey to California is precarious, as they travel Route 66 with a junker of a trunk which they’ve made into a flatbed to hold all ten of the Joads, their dog, an itinerant ex-preacher, and as much of their supplies that they can cram in.  This is all they have after the bank takes over their homestead.  I was on pins and needles hoping they’d make it.  And, they do, more or less.  But California is not all that’s promised.  It’s a tough dog-eat-dog survival.  I couldn’t stop reading because I wanted to see who survives – and how.

The desperation of the Joads and their fellow Oakies is eerily recognizable in today’s world.  The unemployed looking for any work that will pay, even if it’s a substandard wage.  Banks taking over homes, crops failing due to drought, and the unwelcome harshness that greets the Oakies as they cross into the California border is another mirror looking back in to today of immigrant workers being refused entrance to the Golden State.

So what could be so inspiring about such a sad story we know all too well?  It’s the Word of Jim Casy, the ex-preacher who really is still a preacher, just one who no longer follows the dogma of a certain religious sect but rather follows his mind and heart.  Casy is a Moses-Jesus figure.  He is Moses with the Exodus of the Okie-Israelites into the Egypt of the Promised Land of California, yet he does not take on the role of leader but rather as spiritual support.  He is asked to give prayers for the living and dying and refutes his ability to give a good prayer, but that doesn’t matter.  This is when Jim becomes more Jesus-like in that he realizes the letter of the law is not necessarily what is so important, but rather that one lives according to the higher law of Divine Love and Unity.  This is the Word that Jim contemplates in ramblings he shares with the Joads, especially their son Tom, who becomes one of Jim’s disciples.  Casy leaves the Joads, and yes, eventually dies (he is after all a Jesus figure), but he’s still with them in that Tom remembers Casy’s teachings, such as this:

 “Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an’ he foun’ he didn’ have no soul that was his’n.  Says he foun’ he jus’ got a little piece of a great big soul… his little piece of soul wasn’t no good ‘less it was with the rest, ‘an was whole.  Funny how I remember.  Didn’t think I was even listenin…’”(p. 418)

 Tom is the disciple who doesn’t realize he’s been indoctrinated until the time comes when he has to leave his family so he may be safe from harm.  Tom knows he’ll take on the work of Jim Casy in organizing migrant workers.  But he doesn’t seem to quite realize, however, the extent that Casy’s teachings have influenced him, until he says goodbye to his mother:

 “I’ll be ever’where – wherever you look.  Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.  Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there.  If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ – I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready.  An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build – why, I’ll be there.  See?  God, I’m talkin’ like Casy.  Comes of thinkin’ about him so much.  Seems like I can see him sometimes.”   (p. 419)

The movie was such a disappointment that the only thing my group could think of was that it needs a re-do, and today’s environment is the perfect one for telling this story.  (The movie was made a year or two after the book was first published.)  The only part of the movie where we didn’t talk amongst ourselves, pretending to watch, was when Tom gives his Word of “I’ll be ever’where.”  It’s beautiful Word, written or spoken.

It was a few months ago when I read two books within a few days of each other:  Henry James’ Washington Square (published 1881) and Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea (published 1966).  You wouldn’t know it by the two titles, but both novels are about women — women defined by their space and place.  Catherine Sloper, daughter of Dr. Austin Sloper, lives with her father and aunt in their home which is located in the Washington Square district of New York City circa 1840-1850.  Antoinette Cosway lives in Jamaica, on a rundown estate and her story takes place circa 1840.  The “Wide Sargasso Sea” refers to the sea between Antoinette’s Caribbean homeland and England, the homeland of her husband Rochester.  That same Rochester of Jane Eyre.  Antoinette is called Bertha by Rochester.  She’s the crazy woman in the attic.  The forward to my Penguin version of Wide Sargasso Sea tells of how author Jean Rhys was incensed at Bertha being sidelined and dismissed as a “Creole woman” who has gone mad.  Rhys was Creole and from the Caribbean, and she wanted to tell Bertha’s story so she wasn’t some minor character.

The idea of women being minor players on the grand stage of life is perhaps one the reasons that I feel the pull to intertwine Catherine’s and Antoinette’s story together.  Catherine is considered plain and dull in looks and personality, and so the chances of her finding a suitable match to marry her are supposedly diminished.  But she has a healthy inheritance from her mother, who died shortly after she gave birth to Catherine.  Also, Catherine will get an even larger inheritance from her father when he dies.  This dowry makes her supposedly more marriageable.

Antoinette is considered to be odd and eccentric, like her mother.  Her mother is described as beautiful, but she goes mad after her son dies.  Antoinette is not described as the beauty that her mother is, but her looks are not what make her a prize offering for a future husband.  Like Catherine, Antoinette has an inheritance.  Rochester agrees to marry Antoinette knowing he will get her inheritance.  What he doesn’t know is the woman he’s marrying.  He doesn’t know that when she was a young girl, her insane mother rejected her and she was sent to live with her aunt.  That same aunt then moved to England and left Antoinette behind in a boarding school.   Antoinette is a motherless daughter.  She’s been rejected, abandoned, and then sold as if an item for commerce by her stepfather in the arranged marriage to Rochester.  This is the same woman who becomes unstable and finally mad as she realizes that she has no way out from her predicament of being married to a man who doesn’t love her, whom she doesn’t love, and who owns her and her inheritance.  Not only is Antoinette owned by her husband, he takes away her name calling her Bertha instead, and he takes away her freedom by locking her up in his attic.

Catherine, like Antoinette, is also a motherless daughter.  Her father has his widowed sister move in with him to help with Catherine.  Her aunt is a romantic, a gossipy meddlesome one, but still she wants to see her niece married.  Catherine’s father, however, is a stern respected doctor who looks at Catherine as if he were diagnosing one of his patients and sees her as unmarriageable material.  But, Catherine, like Antoinette, has her own desires that she wishes to fulfill, especially when it comes to one particular suitor who woos Catherine with what she believes is sincere love.  Her father sees anything but sincerity in the gold digger.  To confirm his opposition to this union, he takes away Catherine’s inheritance if she marries him.

If it seems that I’m telling the plots of both stories, I am.  But the plots aren’t what make these two slim novels such great reads.  It’s the women.  I never thought Washington Square could be such a page turner, but it was; I wanted to see what Catherine would do.  She starts off plain and dull but she grows into a woman who has a backbone which makes her all the more attractive.  Antoinette seems to be a child with a wild imagination who believes that things like cups and saucers talk to her.  At least I call it imagination; others may not see it that way and consider it a sign of lunacy, and thus a foreshadowing of what is to come.  I see Antoinette as being a free-spirited child who grows up to be a woman who wishes to be free-spirited but feels hemmed in by the conditions of her life.

The conditions of both Antoinette’s and Catherine’s lives appear radically different in that one lives in the Jamaican country and the other lives in the parameters of New York City, but the locales are simply window dressings for these women.  The essential elemental facts of life are the same for both of these women during their time:  they are considered property of the men they marry, and just as they belong to their respective husbands, so does the women’s property now belong to their husbands.  They have no free will except not to marry, which is the choice that Catherine makes.  And Antoinette is not even given the choice to not marry Rochester.  It’s forced upon her by her stepfather for his own personal agenda.

That these women do not shrivel to suit the size of the compressed space that they are stuffed into would stifle many, but instead these two expand in their own ways to go beyond seeming limitations.  Yet it does all depend on the lenses through which we see them.  At the end of Washington Square, we see Catherine, never married, sitting by herself, doing needle work.  At the end of The Wide Sargasso Sea, we see Antoinette as she escapes from her attic prison and descends downstairs, candle in hand, determined to set the house on fire.  The freedom of such a doomed escape might be the best that Antoinette feels she can hope for.  The freedom to pursue the life of a happy spinster is perhaps the best that Catherine feels she can hope for.  We really don’t know what goes on in the hearts and heads of these fictional women, only their actions and consequences.  How true that is for real women as well.

I will remind myself of Catherine, Antionette, and many other women, real and fictional, when I find myself judging others for the choices they’ve made.  I will no longer be deceived by what appears to be.  I will remember that each person has a story inside of them that I do not know about.  Sometimes our story is one of overcoming a seeming tribulation, or it may be the story of “poor me,” or it may be the story of “I am here to do some good.”  Whatever our story is that we have inside of us, that makes us tick, we can always change it – once we have acknowledged it.  This is the power of paying attention to what stories we tell ourselves, noticing the narrative that runs over and over again in the mind.  Once we know what it is that we are thinking about ourselves and others, we can be clear when making choices, including the choice not to judge others, real and fictional.

The Leopard by Jo Nesbo is in the genre of bloody Nordic crime thrillers.  It’s thick at 676 pages, all of which I turned quick to find out who done it.  I love Inspector Harry Hole.  He’s a drunk and a coke addict, living in a fleabag rent-a-mattress space in Hong Kong trying to numb out the hurt from the loss of his girlfriend Rakel and recover from the trauma of solving his prior case, The Snowman (the prior book in the Harry Hole series).  This is how the beautiful Kaja, another Crime Squad investigator, finds Harry on her mission to bring him back to Norway to investigate a new batch of serial murders.  I don’t have to say much, except that Harry solves the murders.  It’s bloody at times.  Other times it’s quite touching.  This is probably why I like this particular work and look forward to reading more of Nesbo’s Harry Hole series.  I read the Stieg Larsson book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, another Nordic crime thriller, but it left me feeling too tormented to have any desire to read the rest of the trilogy.

It’s funny to me how something that seems far away from anything of a metaphysical or spiritual nature, such as a bloody crime novel, can actually be right there in that very realm.  This is the case with Nesbo’s The Leopard.  One of the reasons I like Harry Hole is because I can relate to his broken heart and broken spirit and to how both get mended.  This is what happens towards the end of the story when Harry unites with Kaja – something that seems inevitable because there is an attraction between them, and besides who doesn’t like a good romance in between grisly murders?  But it’s not just a romance, it’s also an internal process that Nesbo gracefully articulates:

“He pulled her in to him.  And at once felt something slacken, like a muscle that had been held in quivering tension for a long time without his realizing it.  He let go, gave up, let himself fall.  And the pain that had been there melted away, because something warm following the bloodstream around his body, softening it, giving it peace. The feeling of free fall was so liberating that he felt his throat thicken.  And knew part of him had wanted it…” (p. 581)

This isn’t just lust.  It’s Harry’s heart opening, and not just to Kaja, but to himself for he is no longer that man who felt the need to shut himself off from the world.  As I was doing some internet research on Jo Nesbo, I found this entry on Wikipedia:

“The Leopard[’s] …Norwegian title is Panserhjerte, which does not directly translate to The Leopard; it rather means something along the lines of “armoured heart”; moreover, “leopard” refers to the stealthy thread of the killer in the book, while “armoured heart” is what Harry Hole himself gains by his experiences. “

Opening an armored heart is most definitely a metaphysical journey, one that Harry Hole takes while traveling all ends of the earth to pursue the Leopard.   Perhaps this is what it takes for all of us, to travel into far unknown interior realms in pursuit of a stealth mystery and discover that the real secret has always been inside of us, locked up and armored waiting for us to open it.  It’s the secret of knowing that we have a whole heart (and not a “hole” heart, pun intended).  This heart of ours wants to be opened and released.  It makes me think of this excerpt from Robert Browning’s poem Paracelsus:

“Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise
From outward things, whate’er you may believe.
There is an inmost centre in us all,
Where truth abides in fullness; and around,
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in.
This perfect, clear perception – which is truth.
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
Binds it, and makes all error: and to KNOW
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,
Than in effecting entry for a light
Supposed to be without.”

“Silk” by Alessandro Baricco

“Scratch most feminists and underneath there is a woman who longs to be a sex object.  The difference is that is not all she wants to be.”  This is from TV correspondent and author Betty Rollin.  I don’t know in what context she said this, but I’m taking it as being one of the best explanations as of why Fifty Shades of Grey is the phenomena that it is.

I’ve never read Fifty Shades of Grey, but I’ve heard so many reasons why so many women have.  But really there’s no reason to explain why.  Erotica is like comedy, to each their own.  I recently found mine.  I now have absolutely no interest in reading FSOG, not after having read Silk by Alessandro Baricco.   Silk is a poetic novella that is about the silk trade circa 1860 and spans across Europe to Japan and back.  It’s also a lustful love story.  This is just a taste of its delicious erotica:

“Until finally I will kiss your heart, because I want you, I will bite the skin that beats over your heart, because I want you, and with your heart in my mouth you’ll be mine, truly, with my mouth in your heart you’ll be mine, forever, if you don’t believe me, open your eyes my beloved lord and look at me, it’s me, who can ever cancel out this moment that’s happening, and this my body now without silk, your hands touching it, your eyes looking at it…” (117-118)

Silk was my film-to-book club’s selection for November.  I’d never heard of the book or the movie before.  After watching the movie, I knew why it went straight to video.  The cinematography was stunning, but the story that it told was a big slow disappointing thud.  Thankfully, the book was not at all like the movie.

I don’t feel that there’s any reason to justify our reading if we finding it pleasurable, whether it’s romance novels, erotica or mommy porn.  Just so long as the pleasure does no harm, it’s to be enjoyed.  On that note, I’ll end with a quote from Chilean writer Roberto Bolano:  “Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to f**k is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.”  And that’s Absolutely Divine to me.