Pigs and pearls

I'm still thinking about Flannery O'Connor's prayer journal, published in time for Christmas gift-giving, and why that publication might have been a fairly bad idea. R. T. aka Tim brought it up on his new blog, A Commonplace from Eastrod, and there I simply said that the book was part of that unclean effort to trawl through a writer's remains and find something, anything publishable.

Long ago I was asked for my manuscripts and papers by a librarian at Wilson Library at UNC, and I replied that I was not sure that I liked that idea, and that I would think about it. I'm still not sure, though in a sense one would be lucky if anybody actually wanted to trawl through one's remains in hopes of finding a bit of ambergris in the beached corpse! Certainly a great deal has been published that would have been better to remain as rare library research material for academics or else destroyed. I'm still wondering whether it is not better for writers to burn the dross and leave the gold.

So one reason to dislike the publication of the prayer journal is that it was a private thing, not meant for people but intended by O'Connor solely for the maker of the prayers and the Maker of the maker of the prayers. Flannery O'Connor was guided by that purpose and her audience was one, or three-in-one. Some words are meant for a wide audience; some are not.

But there is another, stronger reason not to publish the journal, and it is one that surely compelled O'Connor in her writing: the well-known biblical injunction not to cast your pearls before swine. In the Bible, the kingdom of heaven is compared to a great, wondrous pearl. So when a Christian like Flannery O'Connor is enjoined not to strew pearls before pigs, she is being cautioned not to offer what is holy where it will be debased and muddied: "Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you" (Matthew 7: 6, NRSV.) And no, it doesn't mean people are pigs...

O'Connor the writer, reading that familiar line, knew that it was asking her to know her audience, and saying that it is wrong to be the cause (don't strew your pearls willy-nilly!) of other people trampling on what belongs to God. What is holy can be muddied and torn by people with no sympathy or understanding, and that can lead to rejection and scorn for the one who offers the pearl. Well, that's familiar as part of the story of Christ, isn't it? Interestingly, the gospel record shows that Christ was willing to say the most astonishing things to people just-met but was rather close-mouthed and oblique with unsympathetic questioners. Moreover, the gospel shows us the peculiar power of story. Parables often carry the freight of meaning; they tell the truth but tell it slant--that is, stories protect the pearl yet reveal it to those with eyes to see, ears to hear.

Flannery O'Connor seems to feel in a similar way about art and writing in her essays: “Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.” Without eyes to see and ears to hear, one never grasps the pearl of art. And in O'Connor's view, that understanding is limited to those who will take the trouble to grapple with stories. What is regarded as the difficulty of her stories can be seen as a way of obeying the injunction not to cast pearls before swine. Only those who will take trouble to understand will, in fact, receive them.

 * * *

For further comments and some sharp arguments against me, go to Pigs and pearls, part 2. Some of them have a better grasp than I do on those pigs and pearls!

Rocking in the ship of trees--

All dressed in snow and holly and berries for the season...

Here's a poem for the nigh-endless falling feathers and stars and cold of the past three days. I wrote it for my youngest child one night when the winter winds were toying with the corners of our federal-era house. It was originally published in Angle. Last year it was reprinted in The Foliate Head (UK: Stanza Press, 2012), where it has the company of many other poems and the marvelous interior and exterior artwork of the Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

Stanza goes foliate!

Ship of Trees

Nails tingle in boards, freezing in the grain,
And the whole house struggles to conjure some
Swaying rootedness, rampire and bulwark
Against invader cold and winter’s gusts.
Outside, the still-living limbs comb and catch;
Migrant months ago all leaf-freight tumbled
South to mulch—and so this naked writhing
With no green hands to stem the streams of air.
In the heaped bed, your hazel eyes yawn black,
Staring into the night, at pale tossings
Past the windowpanes, as the winds shiver
The glass, playing it like an instrument.
I lie down by your side to whisper how
Inside each weathered length of sawn clapboard,
—More than two centuries old, that harvest—
Sleep rings of years, the memory of trees.
Wood will remember how to stand in brunt
Of freeze and gash of winds, to dance, to tack
Like a grove of chestnuts sailing the breeze,
Bringing the cargo of us to shores of dawn.
And when you drift away from me, I lie
With eyes open to the rule of darkness,
Hearing the cold withdrawing of the nails,
Watching branches sweep the prickles of stars.
Your breath is pulsing on my cheek, and I
Shift closer, pushing away all winter thoughts,
Letting each die, alone, in the chilly room
Like a stranger who lacks my harbored joy.

Out-of-fashion characters, creation, one writer's mind--

Image by Clive Hicks-Jenkins from Thaliad
(Phoenicia Publishing, 2012)
www.phoeniciapublishing.com

Certain subtleties of character creation are seldom seen in the novel these days. And they are hard to catch. They are difficult to portray in our time, being rejected by the various gatekeepers of the novel, those who know best or feel that they do.

I'm thinking about someone I know, someone I hardly noticed for a long time because she was very quiet and modest and also there was nothing to call attention to her appearance. She did not put herself forward in any way, and clearly did not think particularly highly of her own gifts, though she often admired others and their abilities. Yet she grew on me over time for the simple reason that she seemed to have a lovely quality of goodness--a steady, shining light.

Such a character is entirely out of favor as a subject for the literary mainstream in our time, and no doubt would be considered unbelievable or sentimental by many critics. Mere inclusion of such a figure would be difficult; could a writer even get away with it? And yet it is as true as many another character, and a wonderful example of noiselessly bearing up under life's slings and arrows and witnessing to the nobility of human beings.

This person shed light elsewhere on other characters as well, and is a good example of how many fictional and real people bump up against each other and illuminate one another. (If fictional characters do not collide and illuminate in a story, well, the tale is less true to how we live and learn.) That is, when I finally began to notice and admire her light-bearing character, it struck me how quickly a newer acquaintance of mine had been drawn to her, and how he had seen in her a lovely, tender light it took me years to perceive.

And that understanding told me several things about character. It told me that my newer acquaintance was a person with a delicate, discerning sort of mind, and that he had no care for what the world thought in establishing his friendships. I admired both those qualities. It also suggested to me that I was often a little too busy to pay attention and that I was not as discerning a person as I might like to be, no matter how many paper characters I had created in books.

It also suggested to me that I might like to pay a little more attention to the more subtle ways that light (or dark) is shed from one character to another in my books. It suggested that I might want to be a little more alert to these linkages in real life. Suddenly I knew myself better, and almost felt myself to be a character in a story, one whose world had suddenly turned a little faster on its axis and who had come to a greater self-knowledge.

Ferrywoman says

Up at 5:30 to meet the varsity bus... Take care out there, world! Me too. Going to a wrestling tournament in snowsnowsnow. 

Later: Made it home, and must say that weather.com underestimated the snow, which is starting to look quite high on the iron table out back... We stopped in the sticks and loaded up on apple cider and homemade cinnamon raisin bread and cheddar and other Yankee rural delights. Stay warm, all!

Even later: snow, now, no, O!

Sunday afternoon requests: Dear pilots, please keep my husband safe today. Dear planes, please go to the right destinations. Dear little scraper, please be enough to quarry one truck out of one mountain of snow at the airport.