From the hills of Ohio to the School of Our Lady
An interlude reflecting on the sources of fiction and a long overdue pilgrimage
El Greco is among my favorite painters worldwide, and I think by a fair margin my favorite religious painter. This is because the man could not lay brush to canvas without depicting Faërie, some of the light and shadow that comes from what the narrator of my novel (who seems at least once to have been as impressed by El Greco as I am) calls the world behind the world. El Greco’s religious figures have something of the posture, otherworldly distortion, and luminescence of Eastern Christian iconography (or so they appear to me), which would make sense since the man was from Crete originally, even if he studied in Italy and worked in Spain. Like few if any other artists in any medium, El Greco unites in his art the ancient Christian East and West. The image at the head of this letter, for example, is at once utterly Spanish and Byzantine. It is the focal portion of a late painting called “The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception.” It is both a traditional and, since 1854, a dogmatic title for Catholics: the Orthodox and Protestant Christian traditions do not call Mary immaculate. El Greco had naturalized as a Western Christian. Yet only he, perhaps partly because of that Eastern heritage, could depict a woman called immaculate, surrounded by angels, and haloed by the dove representing the Holy Spirit, so fantastically dark.
The seemingly minor piece of news which is the occasion of this interlude arrived in my inbox on August 22nd, the octave of (i.e. eight days out from) the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a major feast in both the Christian West and East (where it is called the Dormition, or Falling Asleep, of the Theotokos, the God-bearer). It had been supposed to arrive on the 15th, the actual Assumption. In the Eastern Church (or so I seem to recall from reading Juliet Du Boulay’s book Cosmos, Life and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village over a decade ago), the liturgical year is bookended by this feast, commemorating Mary’s bodily assumption to heaven upon her death, and by the feast of her nativity on the 8th September. These Marian feasts thus enclose the feasts pertaining to her son, just as the woman’s body nurture’s the infant in the womb. So says Du Boulay, and it strikes me (though I’m not Orthodox) as a beautiful idea of time, associating it with gestation, as if all of mundane temporality were nurtured within eternity like a child in the womb.
In any case, what I mean to say about the timing of this piece of news is that one of my major themes, incumbent upon me as a writer of fiction and not just as a religious man (this was my point in The new transcendentalism, part 1), is that there is no such thing as mere coincidence. Purging that concept from our thinking is one of the most important tasks we must undertake on the way to a newly enchanted cosmos. All coincidence signifies mysteriously. Or as an old friend of mine put it ages ago and far away: either everything matters, or nothing does. The trick, theologically, is to avoid ascribing every last event, moment, passion and particle to the will of God, such that the Ground of Being Himself ends up intending and causing objective evil. Any such juggling of karma runs the risk of decaying into a determinism little different in effect (though perhaps much crueler in tone) from the deadening materialistic determinism that has lain like a pall over our culture since the 19th century, scarcely budged by newfangled conceptions of ecological interconnection, quantum indeterminacy, and chaos theory.
But I can hear John Cleese’s God-voice from Monty Python’s Holy Grail thundering GET ON WITH IT!!!
Very well, then.
The official or anyway the Latin name of America’s “flagship” Catholic university is:
Universitas Dominae Nostrae A Lacu
The University of Our Lady of the Lake
The woman in question is of course the one pictured in the header image. The university—but what is a university? Where does that word come from? You hear about this thing called the universe all the time, which if we imagine it as living, moving, ordered, beautiful, and created, is a cosmos. Is a university anything like a cosmos? Or is it more like a universe of disenchanted, disanimated matter? Universitas originally was the word for guild or corporation (in a pre-capitalistic sense), and the best gloss I can give on its literal meaning is all folded into one. For Christians, therefore, Christ is the universe, or more poetically, he is cosmic. The same could be said for the Buddha Mind, what Bankei called the Unborn, or for the Tao. All these are lively and life-giving, dynamic—not static or frozen (remember Dante made the bottom of Hell frozen: stasis is a sign of damnation and death; whatever lives, moves itself or, as Dante put it, the sun and all the other stars). But I digress again…Taking the Greek cosmos to be the proper translation of universitas (or vice versa), we see that Greek focuses first on order and then on beauty, while the Latin term we use to designate an entire world or all of creation focuses on unity or interconnectedness.
So, if I wanted to swap in the Greek term I could say that it seems—to finally get to my trivial bit of news—that I’ll be presenting a paper on the fiction of two Catholic masters of fiction, the contemporary Norwegian Jon Fosse and the 19th century Bohemian Adalbert Stifter, at “The Cosmos of Our Lady of the Lake.” It sounds like the title of a short story R A Lafferty (America’s most brilliant neglected fantasist, who as it happens was Catholic) could have written, probably about presenting a paper about writers of fiction at… Yes indeed, the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. There are two lakes there, I’m told, named for Mary and Joseph, but “lady of the lake” has an Arthurian ring to it, bringing to mind something like this:
And, for me at any rate, the Lady of the Lake, wielder of one great talisman (as pictured here) reminds of another Joseph than Mary’s spouse—he of Arimathea, who is supposed in the mythopoeia of the Middle Ages, from which modern literary fantasy traces its descent, to have brought the greatest talisman of them all, the Holy Grail, to Britain.
It’s not remarkable (or terribly important) that I’ll be presenting a paper at Notre Dame. What is remarkable is that it has taken until now for me to have occasion to visit the place. I lived in Chicago for eleven years, and since then have lived in southeastern Michigan for six. During those seventeen years I married a Catholic and became one myself. When I cycled around Lake Michigan one summer I came within twenty miles of Notre Dame. When we lived in Chicago we used to visit Berrien County MI (the southwestern-most county, very near Notre Dame). I drove from Chicago to the east coast, where my family live, I don’t know how many times, and the turnpike goes right past the school. You would think I could have made it to Notre Dame at some point in the past seventeen years.
But that’s not the real reason it’s remarkable I haven’t yet seen the place, because you’d still be justified in asking, Who cares? Why bother visit some town in Indiana if you have no business there? The real reason has to do with how I grew up in Cincinnati. My best friend for seven or eight years was one of my neighbors. We were inseparable, in and out of each other’s houses all the time. His family was Catholic, and they had conceived a special devotion, as Catholics say (or used to? anyway I like the language of conception, very Eckhartian), to the University of Notre Dame, especially as instantiated in its football team. Bear in mind, sports fans, this is the end of the 1980s/beginning of the 1990s I’m talking about, when I first was annexed to this family and began spending my autumnal Saturdays watching Notre Dame football with them, and playing football with the neighborhood kids.
Everything about my friend and his family was mysterious and intriguing—and therefore so was Notre Dame fated to become for me—since my family and background was so very different: a bunch of intellectual, non-religious, outdoorsy people, some of them Jewish, most of them one or another kind of Protestant or outright anti-religious but not a single Catholic; and old-fashioned love of baseball but not much for football: my people are not Midwesterners, you see. When my relationship with my friend and his family was severed, it was a blow, but it did not happen before some beckoning idea of the University of Notre Dame had implanted itself firmly in my mind, and that is why it is so strange that in the seventeen years I’ve lived within easy reach of the school, I have not yet managed to visit.
My friend, in the hope and fantasy that is typical of boyhood friendship, always intended not only for himself but for the two of us together to go to Notre Dame for at least one degree. Thanks to modern credentialism and the all-seeing eyes of the internet, I confirmed some years back that he made good on his part of the ambition by attending Notre Dame Law. But I long ago lost touch with his family and had no way of finding this out through more social channels. Why did this happen? The moment of severance is as clear in my memory as it is strange. My friend, like his elder brothers before him and his father, I believe, attended the prestigious Jesuit high school not far from where I grew up. I almost went with him. I was unhappy in our public school system, good though it was, and my parents, despite being as I’ve said very much not Catholic, offered to send me to the Jesuit high school with my friend.
I visited this high school one day in the spring of 1996. I liked it. There was a feeling of peace and sobriety in the place (both of which contrasted with my public school environment) combined somewhat paradoxically with energy, a kind of learning and striving and ambition that I wouldn’t exactly call devout but it was focused and… innocent somehow. That’s how it felt to me then, anyway. The senior who showed me around was a shy but affable guy who reminded me of what my father might have been like at that age. He took me and my parents to the chapel at one point, and though I recall little of what we talked about I do know I asked him when we visited the chapel if any non-Catholics went to the school, specifically if there were any Jewish kids. He said there were plenty, and then I was left alone for a few minutes to reflect in that place.
It was a glorious spring afternoon, a classic Cincinnati spring afternoon, lush and vibrant, warm caressing light streaming through the stained glass windows. I didn’t make the decision then, but if I had I would have decided to go to the school. Everything about the moment spoke invitation, a brightly evident destiny. Almost palpable to me was not only the wholesomeness of the school, particularly the chapel, but the keen desire of my best friend that I should accompany him there, and my parents’ respect for what they thought (correctly, as far as I know) to be a vigorous and virtuous institution. But when I returned home and talked about it with my parents, I told them I would not go to the Jesuit school. I would remain in the public school.
Why? The most proximate reason, though I could not have admitted it to myself at the time, was that the public school was where the girlfriend (my first) I was newly endowed with attended. And for many years after this decision, which perhaps more than almost any other I have made has governed the course of my life, I have relied primarily on that reason in explaining to myself why I chose not to go to the Catholic school. I was an exceptionally and precociously romantic young lad, and I wanted as much as possible to be in the company of young women. I succeeded in this aim throughout high school and much of my time as an undergraduate, and from that result I learned most of what I really know about how human life naturally works (much of which the present dominant culture seeks to deny or mutate), and eventually stumbled into the relationship which has become the marriage and family with which I am blessed today. So at the deepest level I do not second-guess myself.
But now that more than a quarter of a century has gone by since that springtime, I am less impressed by the force of Eros in my young life and more interested in another force or drive or power of which I’m not sure of the name, and which I hold to be the power truly responsible for that long ago decision. It is the something (my daemon perhaps, as Socrates called this phenomenon) that guides me secretly by an unknown mechanism which disproves any simple voluntaristic account of the psyche. Neither, however, is it what people usually mean by the unconscious or a subconscious, terms which have never made much sense to me. There are times I feel it is only a dark power, what Saint Paul referred to when he said, “For that which I work, I understand not. For I do not that good which I will; but the evil which I hate, that I do.”
Perhaps that is what was at work in me when I opted not to go with my great friend to the school, and through a whole pattern of life that would follow from that school, and which would have included the University of Notre Dame—about that I have no doubt. But negative and even fell is not always what this force is, I think, and I don’t really think it was that when I opted not to attend the Catholic school. The force has impelled me sometimes into decisions which have been obviously the best of my life but were as unexpected as my refusal of the Jesuit school and, therefore, of my friend’s ongoing companionship. The truth is that one way and another this force is responsible for the total shape of my life, how everything—thanks not infrequently to the occasion of sin—has come to be just so. It could be I am talking really about what Christians call providence and moments of grace. As a writer of fiction, these ideas—which are more than ideas, they are experiences both intuitive and empirical—loom larger for me with each passing year, each page written.
And it is through fiction, I am increasingly convinced, that one can best explore these timeless vexed questions of decision, destiny, free will and fate—fiction, rather than theology or philosophy, as much as I love to study those subjects, because fiction is more than just propositional thought, more even than ideas. I do not consider the narrators and protagonists in my fiction to be alter egos, however much my fiction comes out of my (inevitably faulty) memory and speculation. And I don’t consider anyone’s fiction a representation of what could have been. Yet we do at times have this uncanny sense that there is such a thing as the could-have-been. In fact it’s all too easy to be haunted by this sense. That happened to me once, with regard to the pivotal moment I’ve been describing here, and the result was a novel. The could-have-been may not be the aim of fiction, but it can be a point of departure, as it was for T S Eliot in the first of his Four Quartets:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Fiction cannot answer that I do not know, only religious faith can begin to answer it. But once upon a time I was a new University of Chicago ABD—that is, all but dissertation, I had left my doctoral program in English in despair over my secular course of studies, my secular beliefs (or lack of same), and the sheer grief of the feeling that I had taken a wrong turn somewhere way back in my life—round about the spring of 1996 it could have been. I remembered my boyhood friend and his ancestral religion and the city where we grew up together, and what came out of that protracted memory and meditation was a number of things, certainly a metanoia on my part, a change in the orientation of my heart and mind (still very much underway!), and a novel, which I called The Comedy, finished a couple of years before I returned to school for an MFA, a move that would eventually result in Absolute Music.
When I was working on the MFA but had not yet discovered Gerald Murnane’s work and hit upon the project that would become my now actually published novel, I took up the material of The Comedy again and began refashioning it. Several of the main characters of the book, including two men who as boys played endless games of fantasy together—often imagining themselves in the world of Arthur and Gawain, Guinevere, Morgan, and the Lady of the Lake—are associated significantly in the main storyline with the University of Our Lady of the Lake.
One of the problems I encountered working on the project was that I had never been to Notre Dame. I find it impossible to compose fiction involving in any significant way places I have not visited and with which I’ve become at least somewhat familiar. I intended the chief male character to have obtained his doctorate from the Medieval Institute at Notre Dame, a program which, if I had known of its existence when I was first applying to graduate school, I would surely have preferred to the doctoral program in English at the University of Chicago. His boyhood friend was to have attended the school as well in some capacity, and the chief female character in the book, the friend’s younger sister, was to have finished her time at Notre Dame as an undergraduate at the same time as the chief male character finished his doctorate there. The book, though it would primarily take place in Cincinnati, was to have been the story of the much delayed romantic union, many years after the time at Notre Dame, of the chief male character and the chief female character, and as such it needed to include several pivotal scenes in the place which the narrator, adopting the boyhood friends’ designation, refers to as the University of Our Lady of the Lake.
When I received the news that I would be visiting Notre Dame this autumn, I decided to look again at my work on this novel, once called The Comedy with a reference to Dante, though it might better be imagined as my North American reworking of certain Arthurian motifs, with Notre Dame as a kind of Camelot or perhaps the Region of the Summer Stars. In doing so I was surprised by how much work I had put into this project some five years ago, just before beginning work on Absolute Music but after I had given up on publishing the book. I was surprised also to discover that it is still very much a live project, and that I desire now—knowing that I will finally be able to overcome one of the obstacles that hindered work before, my never having seen or known anyone at Notre Dame—to take it up again and publish the book.
It is a very strange thing about fiction that it can come not only from old, deep memories, such as mine of my boyhood friend and his family’s Catholicism and love of Notre Dame, but also from layers of memory laid down upon those older layers—in this case, my memories of a time of terrible confusion and yearning and regret as well as feverish independent and lonely research, when I came to view the chief male character of The Comedy, studying for a doctorate at the Medieval Institute at Notre Dame, as a version of myself that ought to have been but whom I had prevented by my decision to avoid the Jesuit high school and forsake my boyhood friend.
I am very much looking forward to presenting my paper on two Catholic writers of fiction much greater than myself, and discovering there in my encounter with always unimaginable reality whether the place will indeed be suitable for the kind of fiction I am called to make, compiled of memory upon memory and, over all of that, fantasy.
Thank you for this thoughtful and thought-provoking essay, Jonathan.
In poking around on the internet, I found a story by Ed Cohen, "One Lake or Two," Notre Dame Magazine, Autumn 2004. Cohen says the property was originally called Sainte-Marie-des-Lacs (Saint Mary of the Lakes). There were two lakes, separated by marshland, but it might have looked like one at the time of year when Father Sorin founded his "University," as he envisioned it would become. Also, I found two other schools with similar names: Baton Rouge's "Our Lady of the Lake College" (founded 1921) changed its name to "Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University" a few years back, and San Antonio (founded 1895) is home to "Our Lady of the Lake University" (also formerly a college). They each have a lake as well. It's interesting how things come to be named.