sarah masen

The Dark Corner

Getting In There

"Respect, I think, always implies imagination--the ability to see one another, across our inevitable differences, as living souls." - Wendell Berry, (Sex, Economy, Freedom, & Community)

"Language is a Trojan Horse by which the universe gets into the mind." - Hugh Kenner, Dublin's Joyce

HELLO. HOW ARE YOU? I'M FINE. WRITE SOON.

In truth, any art that isn't about sharing isn't worth talking about. It's probably not even art. There's obviously a kind of gratuitous gut-spilling which might, technically, fall under the category of "sharing," but if it's more about foisting the screwed-up contents of one's imagination upon the innocent, well-intentioned bystander than actually being of benefit to someone, it's probably best kept to oneself. Presumption kills.

I used to think that the "Dedication" bit of a story or novel, the part that says "For Mom" or "To Bob Dylan" or "For My Beloved Son," was something the writer came up with later; that she finished up and then got to thinking, "Now, let's see: who should this one go to? I know. Salman Rushdie. Here we go: 'For Salman.'" But somewhere back there, I started seeing it differently. It occurred to me that, in some cases, an entire narrative might possibly be aimed at communicating something to a particular person. And maybe it took Herman Melville all of Moby Dick to adequately transcribe whatever it was he wanted to say to Nathaniel Hawthorne. And even then, what it demanded wasn't an insanely long sermon, a theological treatise, or a text book; but rather, a very well-told story.

When I first started writing letters, it became quickly apparent that "Hello. How are you? I'm fine. Write soon" wasn't likely to elicit the kind of replies or responses that I might find even remotely interesting. I'd have to come up with something different. A heavy bombardment of ridiculous questions worked for a time; the kind that, if left unanswered, might imply that the reader has something to hide or was just devastatingly dim-witted. And I still resort to this tactic occasionally. But my desire to provoke reactions and push buttons and get someone to talk to me ended up assuming the form of some really weird prose which sort of pushed the definition of what's usually called a letter. Lengthy, barely strung-together sentences with haphazard images of relative import (but which were, nevertheless, intensely personal) started making their way into envelopes and letter boxes the world over. It was--and still is, of course--very much like the proverbial "message in the bottle," jettisoned from wherever I found myself, but specifically intending any of all sorts of things in the way of appreciation, fondness, befuddlement, impressions, revelations, or maybe just something that had actually happened. No limits.

It eventually started to look a lot like fiction.

ANYTHING YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH

Marshall McLuhan very specifically defines art as "Anything you can get away with." I'm still trying to figure out why I like the sound of this so much. It certainly manages to demystify the whole business by implying that the artiste is in desperately dire need of people, of a community, who can decide and assess whether or not the profferred ART is, in fact, legitimate. The gullibility factor is effectively acknowledged but without forgetting the sobering facts. Without an audience, the individual's work might bear some psychiatric value as an instance of navel-gazing out loud, but it isn't exactly art. You've got to get it past someone. It has to break out of orbit and somehow mean something to someone other than yourself.

Darn.

I personally started very small. I'd write a big long letter and, with any luck, get a big long response. People enjoy being asked questions, as it turns out, and they'd occasionally even tolerate my observations and commentary. And when they found my convictions intolerable. . . longer responses. An audience of one.

Eventually, I became so sufficiently pleased with the quality of my letters that, before sending them off, I entered the habit of nonchalantly (this was a ploy) handing them over to bored, complacent friends who were watching television or looking at the floor. To my amazement, they seemed perfectly willing to read the things all the way through. One or two even appeared to enjoy them. I'd get a "Nice letter," or "I wouldn't mind getting a letter like that sometime." And, when they knew with absolute certainty that I was up for it: "What'd you mean by that there?" Joy of joys. World without end.

Prose is no dead end, but, given certain contexts, it can start to feel like it. It becomes a question, again, of what we can get away with,what people are willing to listen to, and how to work your way around or simply machine-gun a path through peoples' prejudices. At this point, HOW you say something is actually more important than WHAT you say. Because until the HOW, the WHAT is void and without form. This is what I'll term the Ambush Method of storytelling.

AMBUSH

David (King David) carefully orchestrated and saw to fruition the murder of one of his own men, Uriah the Hittite. Upon hearing of her husband's death, Bathsheba entered a time of mourning and was then sent for by David, the father of the child she carried, to be made his wife. As is often the case in such situations, David had somehow maintained a sort of cognitive dissonance in which the hideousness of his actions, apparently, had yet to occur to him. Nathan, the prophet, was then, we are told, sent by God to enlighten him.

How to approach a man like David? Given his current disposition, it's perhaps realistic to assume that an overly abrasive or forthright condemnation of his actions might have resulted in more killing. And there is, as we all know, a hardness in each of us that doesn't take too well to moralizing or what is called finger-wagging. Nathan came to David with a story.

There's these two guys.

Uh-huh.

One rich, one poor.

Yeah.

The rich one had flocks and flocks of sheep.

Right.

And the other one just had the one little ewe. But he loved it like nobody's business. He treated it like one of his own children, giving it food and drink from his own table and even let the thing sleep in his own bed.

Where are you going with this, Nathan?

Well the rich guy eventually had a visitor come around and he had to come up with something to give him to eat. He wouldn't bother with his own animals, so he snatched away the poor man's one little ewe and cooked it up for his visitor.

"Then David's anger burned greatly against the man." 2nd Samuel 12:5

So what would you do with a man like that?

I'd kill him.

No.

Yes. He has to pay for having done such a thing and for having no compassion!

Seriously?

Whaddayamean "Seriously?" What more does he deserve? The sonnuva--

Wait .

What?

You're the man.

And with that, David was busted. The news that followed and his reaction to it have a terrible beauty and weirdness of their own, but I don't want to get into it right now. I would like to observe, though, that this story (and others like it) isn't simply a trick or a formula by which we can cajole or confuse people into believing what we want them to believe or into seeing things our way. The word for that sort of thing is, I believe, propaganda. A story is a vehicle for something, certainly, but not a message or a piece of information that might be conveyed in some other way. If that was the case, you wouldn't really need the story in the first place. It might also be important to note that almost everything we have in the way of what Jesus had to say, verbally, to the people around him was shared through the sharp, fluid language of stories. Stories, similes, and metaphors.

IT LIVES

To try and bring it all back around, I'd like to ask a question (by no means rhetorical): What is it that we have that's actually worth sharing?

Madeleine L'Engle was once asked how one might determine whether or not a piece of art, a novel, a play, or whatever was Christian, and her response really and truly set me free: "If it's good, it's Christian." Much much later, I came across an interview with Woody Allen in which he was trying to explain the pleasure with which he engaged in writing and why he didn't worry too much about the attention it received: "Because if there's anything of value there, it will live; and if there's not, better it shouldn't. That's one of the nice things about writing, or any art; if the thing's real, it just lives."

Are the words and the stories and the ideas we share with the people around us the things that live? Are they good? Do we want them to be? When I look down the barrel of such questions, I am personally humbled. But I'm also invigorated by the thought, by the promise, and by the reality of a Creator whose overwhelming resolve is to make of my imagination something worth sharing; and to make of my understanding a means to perceiving others and knowing the world around me not in the short-sightedness of what I want them to be, but in the beauty of what they are.

© 1996 David Dark