Of sycamores and the Holy Grail
Notre Dame talk on "fiction and the spiritualization of matter"
I traveled last week to Notre Dame to present a paper at the De Nicola Center’s annual Fall Conference, the theme of which this year was ecology or, to use the more biblical and metaphysical term, creation. The paper—which I admit is a creative writer’s paper (or maybe I should say a creative critic’s) rather than a scholar’s, to the extent the distinction holds with me—seems to have been well received. Its somewhat bizarre and overwrought title was “Fiction and the Spiritualization of Matter,” and it has something to do with a discussion I was just beginning to have the other week with David Schaengold on radiopaper, about what’s real and what’s… something other than real in fiction. In fact the paper is made as much from the words of others as from my own. I’ll post it below after a break. First, some thoughts about my trip.
On Thursday I teamed up with Caitlin Horrocks to give a reading at The Bookman in Grand Haven, Michigan, about a three-hour drive from where I live. Any chance I get to lay eyes on the shore of a Great Lake I try to take, for they are great spirits, the Great Lakes, and one may take much inspiration from them. But it wasn’t to be this time. I arrived in my hotel a little before 5PM, and though I was able to watch the sun slip below the horizon over the wide bay the Grand River makes at its mouth, I didn’t actually see Lake Michigan itself. For dinner after the reading I wanted to go to a brewery closer to the shore and maybe get near enough to at least listen to the surf that the rising south wind was churning, but the brewery was closed by then. Along with my family, I’ve been struggling with health for the past month or more—mostly a terrible cough I can’t quite get over—so I headed back to my hotel. I had to leave well before first light the next morning to get to the conference at Notre Dame already underway, so to my chagrin I did not greet the Lake.
(I missed Robert Pogue Harrison’s lecture at ND on Thursday evening. It’s a shame, as I’ve admired RPH since I read his book Forests as a young graduate student at the University of Chicago. Everything he has written is amazing, but that book is not to be missed.)
As I wrote previously, I’d never been to Notre Dame before, though since I was seven the place has held a weird quasi-mythical status in my imagination. It was cold and getting colder under solidly grey skies when I arrived there—but let me backtrack for a moment. The drive to Grand Haven on the 10th of November I did with the car windows down. Consider that: a drive across lower Michigan in the second week of November with the car windows down. It was in the 70s, and had been unseasonably warm for two weeks. At the reading, Caitlin called the weather eerily beautiful, and that’s exactly what it was. (I wonder if more and more the beauty of the Earth will be an eerie beauty.) But that Thursday night the season began to shift. I fell asleep to the wind moaning outside my south-facing hotel window. But by the next morning the wind had swung about to the north, pushing me to Notre Dame.
My panel started at 9AM and somehow I made it through my own presentation without coughing much. But it’s when I’m trying to be still and attentive to others that the coughing strikes. It’s merciless. So many times while my fellow panelists presented I had to choke back coughing (often unsuccessfully), tears welling from the effort. It’s embarrassing, and of course you worry about freaking out the people around you (large packed room that morning), because who wants to end up like the unshaven bohemian hacking his lungs out from consumption? Of course I had tested right before leaving for Covid and flu, and wouldn’t have gone if I had either, or anything I thought was still contagious. And in fact the crowd at Notre Dame was not squeamish, and people were generous and put up with talking to me while I coughed.
I became engaged in a long and fascinating conversation after the panel, a wide-ranging discussion of many things but focusing partly on Tolkien, whose work is the cornerstone of one half of my current book-in-progress. (The other half of the project is grounded in Thoreau’s work—for an extremely condensed distillation of my ideas about Thoreau you can check out my latest post at Slant’s blog; there will also be more in my next letter, the much delayed New Transcendentalism part 3.) By the time that conversation was over, I was just about dying from being stuck indoors trying not to cough. I was definitely not going to head to a crowded hall for lunch, where I would have to worry about spitting food at my fellow conference attendees while eating and inevitably coughing. Besides, I had a campus to explore.
My first order of business when traveling is always, if possible, to get a sense of place, and that simply cannot be done entirely indoors. I’m not sure I believe there is such a thing as an entirely indoor place. Places may include buildings, even very meaningful buildings, whether that’s the Hagia Sophia or Kamo no Chōmei’s hojoki (the ‘ten-foot hut’). But I always think of buildings as existing in a place, and the place is part of or is granted by the natural world—or as I prefer to call it, the given world—which we shape and reflect, but yet it proceeds us.
Well, then, I walked to the Basilica and sat in there for a spell. It’s a beautiful church, one whose ceiling is decorated as the cosmos, a starry firmament populated by angels, which is my favorite kind of church decoration. In a sense, this symbolism is the opposite of what I just described: it is the ancient Christian idea of the dome (though not an actual dome in this case) which unites and encompasses heaven and earth. The church building as the place of places, the cosmos. The best book to read about this is perhaps Jean Hani’s The Symbolism of the Christian Temple. I’ll skip the digression… for now. Anyway, despite the theme of the conference, I wasn’t feeling inclined to think much on such matters just then in the basilica. I had to get outside again.
So I went to the grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, right by the basilica. It was while making my way there that I first began to notice something unique about the Notre Dame campus: the sycamores. They were everywhere, and they were huge. Here are some by the grotto:
You can see the grotto on the right, below the dome. As I passed the spot from which I took this photo, a young couple went by me in the other direction. I heard the man talking nervously and gently to the woman. When I got to the grotto maybe fifteen seconds later and turned to look back to where I’d been standing (which is to say, at one of the two small lakes, behind me in this photo) in order to see some more towering sycamores, the man was on one knee proposing to the woman.
I was nonplussed for two reasons: First, that it should happen at all, in this age when the younger generations have been very deliberately and systematically robbed of romance and faith. It takes great faith, courage and wisdom to marry, even to carry on a courtship in, as Yeats put it (albeit despondently), “the old, high way of love,” the ancient way that beholds cosmic significance in the coming together of man and woman. This couple was in their early twenties, probably undergrads. I harbored no thought such as “Best of luck to them—they’ll need it getting hitched that young.” I was conscious simply of catching sight, for a moment, of the Great Way at work.
But the other, simultaneous reason I was nonplussed watching this solemn yet tender moment occur—the beginning of a great story, a quest—was that in that place (I mean the entire campus, where I saw several other young couples going about hand-in-hand) it seemed totally natural. I was shocked but not surprised. Maybe I just haven’t been in the right places at the right times at any point in the last fifteen or twenty years (what are the odds?), but on the university campuses where I’ve spent most of that period (that’s quite a variety of institutions), I’ve rarely seen young men and women paired off amorously. It’s gotten to the point of being almost unimaginable.
Back to the sycamores by way of an aside. The sycamore’s close cousin, which you more commonly see planted, is the plane tree. That name, plane, comes from the Greek word for “broad” and is the same that is at the root of Plato’s name (he had a broad brow, perhaps). The plane tree/sycamore has a wonderful big fat leaf. The tree is associated with love (Plato, who wrote much about love, is supposed to have met with his students under one), and in fact my wife and I were married (in our civil ceremony) beneath two plane trees. To watch the marriage proposal happen at Notre Dame, within sight of the Marian grotto and beneath sycamores, felt as if for a moment I had wandered into some great allegorical poem out of another age. But here’s the thing: although cities are often planted with plane trees, I can’t recall ever visiting a university campus that was dominated by these great-leaved, half-pale trees of love.
Sycamores are white in their upper parts, as the beautiful mottled bark gives way to what looks like massive bones. Here is a spectral gang of them gazing at me from across St Mary’s Lake on the following day, Saturday, shortly before I headed home:
I walked around Saint Joseph’s Lake and Saint Mary’s Lake that first day, drinking tea from a thermos and eating a protein bar for lunch, coughing as I pleased. That’s when I took the photo in the header image. I will say, it’s good to be in a place where you go for a walk in a little woods and you run into the representation of a great Marian apparition, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Patroness of the entire New World and a figure of special importance to the indigenous inhabitants of the New World. I may have more to say about her in my book because of how she’s related to what I call deep history and rooted holiness, as well as to Native Americans, all of which was of great concern to Thoreau. Running into Mary like this, momentously yet casually, reminded me of places in Europe where the ancient faith is inscribed on the landscape to the point where you can’t miss it if your eyes are open. I can’t imagine a better way of meeting Mary than this, shining forth from a still living tree. Note that she is cloaked in the same way the ceiling of the basilica is decorated: she wears the cosmos.
On my way around the lakes I found stations of the cross in the woods, leading up to a crucifixion scene. This was a better place for me to pray than the basilica, and so I did. I also did some tai chi. Maybe that would strike some Catholics as sacrilegious. It is anything but that. In our Western spiritual traditions we are hyper-articulate, very good at putting the most awesome ideas into words. But despite the eucharist—consuming the body and blood of Christ—at the heart of the Christian religion, we are extremely bad at actually embodying the grand cosmic ideas we profess. But for me tai chi does this. It is not worship, which the eucharist is, but microcosmic enactment and embodiment. I was, however, too ill just then either to pray or to perform the moving meditation that is Supreme Ultimate Boxing. (Btw, I have an essay linking tai chi and some core Christian ideas in the latest volume of the print-only Jesus the Imagination.) And I had to get back to hear Alasdair MacIntyre speak.
The venerable moral philosopher—whose books, starting with this one, helped change the way I thought about almost everything when I read them 10-12 years ago—ended up delivering something of a problematic lecture. That was apparent almost from his first sentences. What he had to say about God’s foreknowledge was problematic from a Jewish as well as a Christian perspective. It was really quite surprising, and everyone was astir about it that evening and the next day. I missed the last ten minutes or so, however, thanks to yet another coughing fit that I just couldn’t suppress. I had to practically bolt from the room, and I thought wryly as I did so that perhaps it looked as though I was scandalized and outraged by the lecture, which of course was not the case. I was just doing a very bad job that weekend of being indoors.
I was only at Notre Dame for about 24 hours more after that. I heard many interesting things, and bought Keith Lemna’s book after hearing him speak. (It chimes very well with another book I’m finishing now, Bruce V Foltz’s Noetics of Nature.) Then my poor health and that of my family called me home a little prematurely. As it happened, though, leaving early might have been for the best. Snow descended on the region that evening, hurled eastward by Lake Michigan, just two days after it had been in the 70s. Before I left the campus I took another walk around one of the lakes, and the scene felt Arthurian somehow, as if I wandered in the mists of Avalon and might at any time happen upon an enchanter keeping the Sangraal (the Holy Grail) in secret.
Fiction and the Spiritualization of Matter
My driving question today is this: What does an author of fiction do in a philosophical or ontological sense, and why does he or she do it, when describing the natural or what I prefer to call the given world? What I have assembled here is not an argument but a series of questions and suggestions, a tapestry woven mostly of the words of others—words which live together in my mind and seem to belong together, to reveal something in their juxtaposition.
First I want to consider what kind of a writer of fiction begins a book this way:
Twenty years ago, when I first arrived on the plains, I kept my eyes open. I looked for anything in the landscape that seemed to hint at some elaborate meaning behind appearances.
Or like this:
When the waves of the Aegean parted, and the mountains of Lesbos began to emerge from the depths, damp, shining and serene, the waves were astonished to see the island, their new friend. They were used to traveling from the regions around the sea of Crete and breaking on the shores of Anatolia. All they knew of dry land were hard mountains, gigantic cliffs, and yellow, rocky land. But this, this new island, was something different; how very different it was! And that’s why the waves said: ‘Let’s take the news to the nearest land, to the land of Aeolia. Let’s tell it about the island, the new land that married light with serenity.’
Or like this:
Above the wagon rolling along a stony road, big thick clouds were hurrying to the East through the dusk. Three days ago they had inflated over the Atlantic, had waited for a wind from the West, had set out, slowly at first then faster and faster, had flown over the phosphorescent autumn waters, straight to the continent, had unraveled on the Moroccan peaks, had gathered again in flocks on the high plateaus of Algeria, and now, at the approaches to the Tunisian frontier, were trying to reach the Tyrrhenian Sea to lose themselves in it.
And how about this:
For the greater part of its course the river Drina flows through narrow gorges between steep mountains or through deep ravines with precipitous banks. In a few places only the riverbanks spread out to form valleys with level or rolling stretches of fertile land suitable for cultivation and settlement on both sides. Such a place exists here at Visegrad, where the Drina breaks out in a sudden curve from the deep and narrow ravine formed by the Butkovo rocks and the Uzavnik mountains. The curve which the Drina makes here is particularly sharp and the mountains on both sides are so steep and so close together that they look like a solid mass out of which the river flows directly as from a dark wall. Then the mountains suddenly widen into an irregular amphitheatre whose widest extent is not more than about ten miles as the crow flies.
And then there’s this:
One arm of Lake Como turns off to the South between two unbroken chains of mountains, which cut it up into a series of bays and inlets as the hills advance into the water and retreat again, until it quite suddenly grows much narrower and takes on the appearance and the motion of a river between a headland on one side and a wide stretch of shore on the other. The bridge which connects the two banks at that point seems to make the change of state still clearer to the eye, marking the spot where the lake comes to an end and the Adda comes into being once more—though further on it again takes the name of a lake, as the banks separate, allowing the water to spread out and lose its speed among more bays and fresh inlets.
And since I love rivers, being a Cincinnati man, one more in that vein. Bear in mind all these continue the description for paragraphs, even pages more:
The city of Passau is situated on the upper part of the Danube. By this city the river has flowed from Swabia and Bavaria and waters one of the southern exits of the Bavarian and Bohemian forests. This exit is a steep and mighty cliff. The bishops built their Upper House on this cliff, a mighty fortress to defy their subjects if the need arose. East of the Upper House is another rocky crag crowned with a smaller building. This once belonged to nuns and for that reason is called the Convent. A gorge with raging water, that from above looks black as ink separates the two crags. This is the river Ilz, flowing from the Bohemian-Bavarian forest, sending its brown and black waters to the Danube. Here it unites with the Danube, causing the water along the latter's northern bank to be a darker ribbon for a considerable distance downstream.
And finally, consider this—what kind of book begins this way?
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters….
I think you know how that one continues. Leaving aside the seventh and final example, the books are in order: The Plains, by Gerald Murnane; Land of Aeolia, by Elias Venezis; The First Man, by Albert Camus; The Bridge on the Drina, by Ivo Andric; The Betrothed, by Alessandro Manzoni; and Witiko, by Adalbert Stifter. There are several ways of meaningfully answering: What sort of writer would begin a work of fiction in this way, by evoking landscape? The two characteristics I would point out now are formation in a sacramental Christian culture and modern or postmodern historical situation.
Most works of fiction do not begin in this manner. Most, whether long or short, prose or verse, and indeed whether modern or premodern, begin with the human world: with a character, a family lineage, a city, dramatically in scene, etc. If they begin in the voice of a character-narrator that voice will usually be self-referential, as in my first example, but not—as is the case in the first example—immediately concerned with a landscape.
There are important differences among my examples, of course, and the way a book of fiction begins does not necessarily entail much about how the story will go or how it will be told. But I do think that the beginning of a book of fiction tends to signal something fundamental about the disposition of the author, his or her basic intentionality toward the world in the double sense of will and of perceptual consciousness. In my last example (the Bible), the author is held to be also the author, or creator, of the world in question, namely this real world. But does this not apply to every author? Is not writing—especially the writing of fiction—the creation of a world? Perhaps a new one with each book, or then again perhaps all fictions coincide in one world which both is, and is not, this world. Such is the opinion of the author of at least one of my examples, Gerald Murnane.
There is I think a very great difference between modern and premodern writers vis-à-vis the landscape, the Earth. I’ve been wondering lately whether there is any landscape description in the literary sense—the way it appears in the first six examples—in the Bible. You could call this gratuitous landscape description: a description undertaken purely for the sake of the intrinsic qualities of what is described, and not to participate in allegory or any other rhetorical trope, which includes metaphorical and symbolic discourse of all kinds, and anything dictated by literary conventions, such as the tradition of pastoral or georgic poetry, the medieval hortus conclusus (enclosed garden) or locus amoenus (pleasant place), etc. In the Western tradition such gratuitous description is almost if not entirely absent from literature prior to the modern period. It is also mostly absent from the Bible, much as the Book of Books overflows with imagery from the given world. But it is not absent from the beginning of Genesis and also, I think, not absent from God’s answer to Job or from the Song of Songs—there may be some other places you can think of. The short of it is that when it is God speaking directly of his creation, he is surely not being rhetorical: for His word is the creation.
In a similar way, the fiction-writer’s word is—in the deepest ontological sense—his creation. The author will perhaps at times feel—unlike the absolute ground of being Himself—that she is the mere conduit by means of which this word can be uttered and this world (or some humble corner of it) brought into being or revealed to be. Nevertheless, there is no other term for what occurs than the act of creation. But if this is the case, then in what sense can we say an author of fiction describes this already-extant very real Earth?
Rather than call what the author of fiction does creation, J R R Tolkien in his seminal essay “On Fairy-Stories” coined the term subcreation for the process and the truth of what goes on in fiction. But he was speaking there of what we now all fantasy literature. It’s easy to think of fiction as another world if that world is patently not this one, but an invented world or some quite skewed and unconnected version of this one; however, with all seven of my initial examples that is not the case. The first idea I want to suggest is therefore the counterintuitive notion that all fiction comprises a single world, which both is and is not this world, and that God is the maker of that world as surely as of this one—as Tolkien states in his essay. My second suggestion is that if a writer of fiction takes up some portion of this real or as Tolkien put it primary world and inscribes it in her fiction, then that portion of the world is transfigured. I have a phrase from Vladimir Soloviev that seems it could denote this process: the spiritualization of matter. The great Russian philosopher used this phrase in various ways (cf. Oliver Smith’s book) that are quite nuanced and complex, but the gist of it is that the ultimate human task is to take up this Earth and transfigure it in this way.
I said just now that this transfiguration or spiritualization is not much or at all present in premodern literature, and I believe that is so because in order to describe, evoke, and finally transfigure a world, or any portion of it, one must feel alienated from it. Yes, indeed: in this moment of disenchantment there is the greatest potential for transfiguring re-enchantment. The biblical worldview which posited Man fallen with the whole creation still did not admit a radical division between Man and creation. That division is the source and burden of our objective modern perspective. But it is also a hidden blessing, for as the authors I’ve cited (and many others) attest, we have now the opportunity for a deliberate spiritualization which our more enchanted ancestors may be said to have lacked. There has never been a better time to imagine our way back into the creation myth in Genesis and those other portions of the Bible where God’s perspective on his creation is revealed. And I think revealing God’s perspective on his creation is also and at the same time revealing the creation.
Soloviev’s intriguing phrase resonates in my mind with Tolkien’s closing words in the essay on fantasy. I would simply substitute “fiction” for “fantasy” below:
Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the “happy ending.” The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will be like and unlike the fallen that we know.
What he means by “at the last, redeemed,” here is quite likely what Murnane means when he discusses in various parts of his oeuvre the idea of being able to view the world of fiction from its far side: “the country on the far side of fiction,” as he puts it. And for the necessary groundwork, so to speak, for these ideas of the spiritualization or fantastic transfiguration of the Earth I look to Sergius Bulgakov’s notion of the whole Earth having become the Holy Grail when blood and water—bodily human life, both the flesh and the soul, as Bulgakov understands it—spilled from the side of Jesus on the Cross. He writes (pp. 33-34) in his essay on the subject that the Holy Grail:
abides in the world as the mysterious holiness of the world, as the power of life, as the fire in which the world will be transfigured into a new heaven and a new earth. For the church, the body of Christ, is not only the community of the faithful but also the whole universe in God. Even as the human being is a microcosm and the world is an anthropocosm, so the realm and power of the church extend to the entire universe. All of nature thirsts for the body and blood of Christ and receives them in communion in the blood and water that flowed out of his side when he was on the Cross.
He notes furthermore that (pp.43-44):
It is not surprising if this mystery, till now still not illuminated by the theological-dogmatic consciousness, has lived only in the obscure presentiments of Christian legend and poetry, in which the holy myth is clouded by human imaginings, by romantic reveries. But at the appropriate time this mystery can take center stage in the Christian world's consciousness.
I would say this is a great argument for the necessity and beauty of “romantic reveries.” But in any case, if what Bulgakov says is true, then how should we not be always blessing, praying ceaselessly when we are in the midst of the given world? I would like to finish by quoting two masters in whose work we can see exactly this happen. Both authors are Catholic: first a few moments from the Austrian Adalbert Stifter’s 1845 novel The Bachelors, and then from Norwegian convert Jon Fosse’s recently completed masterpiece, Septology.
The orphaned youth, Victor, on his way to his uncle’s isolated estate on an island in a mountain lake, is in a boat with two locals taking him to his final destination:
At last they reached the green water, where the mass of trees on the island plunged to their reflection into the lake water, penetrating its depths. Then across from Hul the little bell hanging between the four posts rang out for evening prayers. The two rowers immediately shipped their oars and quietly said their evening prayers while the boat thrust forward as if of itself alongside the grey rocks that descended from the island into the lake. Here and there on the surrounding foothills the light played deceptively. The lake had even acquired stripes, some of which shone and even threw up flashes, even though the sun had set some while earlier. Across all this came the continuing and diligent ringing of the bell, rung by invisible hands as it were, since Hul could no longer be seen, and around the lake there was not one spot that even from a distance might seem like a human habitation.
Victor is a pious young man—that is why, I think, that the narrator tells us a little earlier when he’s on his way that he was surrounded by thousands of creatures rejoicing [quote]. The example of the local villagers may have improved even his piety, for the next morning:
... in the passage, it struck him that he had forgotten to say his morning prayers that day for the first time. It must have happened as a consequence of the huge and unprecedented impressions he had been affected by that morning [i.e. landscape]. He returned to his room, therefore, went and stood at the window again and spoke the simple words he had once secretly thought up for this purpose, and which no one knew anything about. Then he set off a second time in search of his uncle.
Jon Fosse’s novel is stream-of-consciousness in the voice of an older painter named Asle. It is a doppleganger story in which there is another Asle. Once the point-of-view Asle was married to a woman named Ales, who wrote holy icons (it is interesting, it it not, that that is the correct term for the making of holy icons: they are written) and she read Meister Eckhart with Asle. They were never able to have children and Ales died young of disease. In his dying days (and the dying days of the other Asle, who has drunk himself near to obliteration), in Advent in the west of Norway, the landscape is about all that is left of the present world that Asle is conscious of. He has a “landmark” which grounds his prayer, and grants him access to his deceased wife and other memories, and visions of his past or of the other Asle and his past:
(II, 168): now she is everything that exists in language, because God is the pure, the whole language, the language without division and separation, yes, something like that can be said too, Ales says and then she says that it won't be long before we are indivisibly together in God, the two of us together, like we were on earth, but in God, Ales says and she can't tell me what that's like, because people can't picture it, Ales says and I say that I'm tired and Ales says I can go lie down, yes, I need to, she says and I sit in my chair and I look at my landmark in the water, near the middle of the Sygne Sea, look out at the waves, and Ales’s voice goes away and I hold the cross on the rosary tight and I see words before me and I say inside myself Pater noster Qui es in caelo…
(II, 235): the sea is always there to be seen, yes, I can see all the way out to the mouth of the fiord and the open sea, yes, I see the Sygne Sea and the islets and reefs out there, the holms and skerries, and the islands protecting the mouth of the fiord, and then I see the spaces between the islands where it opens out and you can see the ocean itself, yes, even if it's dark or snowing hard or a heavy rain or there's a fog I can see the water, the waves, the ocean, and it's impossible to understand, actually, I think as I sit there in the chair at the round table and I take my bearings and I look at the spot I always look at in the water and I see Asle standing in the hall outside the classroom…
(II, 242-243): it’s this stillness that is God’s creative silence, as Ales used to say, because God is an uncreated light, she said and I’ve experienced myself that the black darkness is God’s light, this darkness that can be both in me and around me, yes, this darkness I now feel that I am, because in the darkness is a stillness where God's voice sounds in silence, I think and I see the chair where I always sit next to the round table and I go over to the chair and I sit down and I find my bearings and then I look at my landmark, at the waves, and I think that often when I sit like this and look at the water I pray a silent prayer and then Ales is near me to, and my parents, and my sister Alida, and the grandmother, and Sigve, and I get very still inside, and I think that everyone has a deep longing inside then, we always long for something and we believe that what we long for is this or that, this person or that person, this thing or that thing, but actually we are longing for God, because the human being is a continuous prayer, a person is a prayer through his or her longing, I think and then I look at the chair next to me and I see Ales sitting there and then she starts singing softly, almost inaudibly, she sings Amazing Grace…
(II, 258…260): and I sit on my chair and look out at the fixed point out on the Sygne Sea, like I'm in the habit of doing, and I notice that Ales is sitting here next to me and she's holding my hand and I think that yes, really, it was the night before I went to Bjørgvin with my pictures to try to get into the art school that my grandmother died, I think and then I hear Alice say your grandmother's in a good place now and I feel that Alice is so close so close, she's sitting in the chair next to me and I can feel her hand in mine so clearly and I look at the chair and of course I don't see anything and I let go of Alice's hand and then I put my arm around her shoulders and I look at the waves and I see Asle and Liv, and she has a big belly… and I sit in the chair here next to the round table and I look and look at the same spot in the water, in the Synge Sea, and I have my arm around Ales's shoulders and I think that I should have said a prayer for Asle, and then I collect myself and then I pray for God to let Asle get better, and if he can't get better then for God to take him into himself and give him peace, take him into his Kingdom, God's Kingdom, God's peace, God's light, I pray and I look at the waves and I see Asle…
(III, 61): I go and sit back down in my chair by the round table and I look out the window at my spot there in the Sygne Sea and I think that it's my own darkness I'm sitting and looking into and that's why I can see the water, the waves, in spite of the darkness and I look at my landmark, at the waves and I see Asle running down the stairs in 7 University Street
By way of a concluding very unscientific postscript I will say that I believe Bulgakov was right when he wrote that “once one has seen the Holy Grail, it is impossible to forget it, and it is impossible not to take communion from it.” This describes my own experience as a boy. I lived and I played—which is to say, lived in story—in a fantasy world which was at the same time most assuredly the real, green world all around me in southwestern Ohio, the outdoor given world in which I was most content in all seasons and weathers. And my fantasy was always quest, as fantasy must be, and quest is always quest for the Holy Grail, for the ultimate desideratum. What I instinctively knew as a boy—instinct adult learning hasn’t improved upon—was that this is true of fantasy, which I can never extricate from the Earth, because this green, given world is the Holy Grail: that in which we live and move and have our being. But I think we must always be reminded of this. That may be the liturgy—the common work—of story, of all art: to remind us of the Holy Grail.
I was able to hear this talk in person and intellectually delighted by how it proceeded. The last several novels I have read (most of them contemporary) follow the anthropocentric track noted after the opening section of this talk. Many of them don't try to venture beyond each of their authors' time periods either. I have been thinking about this predicament in fiction also from the perspective of an aspiring author. While drafting my own story some time ago, I made a note of a blog post that asked whether western authors really can tell any story apart from the Christian story in some derivation or another. If this is a restriction, it is of quite a different caliber than those which we impose on ourselves through our selection of characters, time periods, and scenery. I went back to my notes on the post after hearing the above talk. Lo and behold: the author of that blog post happened to be Jonathan Geltner.
I look forward to reading more.