The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  Like scientists, artists make general statements about the world, not about forms of energy exchange but what it is like to live in the world—statements which reader or viewer confirms by his assent and pleasure (where else does the reader’s pleasure come from but the reader’s recognition of and identification with the artist’s work?), just as the scientist confirms scientific statements by tests and reading pointers.

  Although science and art are generally taken to be not merely different but even polar opposites—the one logical, left-brained, unemotional, Apollonian, analytical, discursive, abstract; the other intuitive, playful, concrete, Dionysian, emotional—the fact is that both are practiced at a level of abstraction, both entail transactions with symbols and statements about the world, both are subject to confirmation or disconfirmation. The pleasure of reading Dostoevsky derives from a recognition and a confirmation. The dismay of looking at a bad painting or reading a bad poem is a disconfirmation.

  For a writer to reenter the world he has written about is no small feat. At the least, it is a peculiar exercise, even uncanny—like Kierkegaard going out into the street every hour during work and blinking at the shopkeepers. At the worst, it proves impossible, issuing in the familiar catastrophes to which writers fall prey.

  Thought Experiment: A deductive-empirical exercise, something like Mendeleev’s project of deducing the periodic table of the elements, then looking around to see if there are actual elements which fit in the table.

  This enjoyable exercise is the deduction of the various possible reentry modes of the artist-writer or reader-viewer from the semiotic options theoretically available to any person so abstracted from the world.

  The experiment: Start with the world, that is, the same somewhat deranged place which everyone experiences in more or less the same degree. The world is the aggregate of your perceived environment encoded by signs: other people, family, house, marketplace, culture, myth, TV, past, future, and God as more or less real depending on whether you are an unbeliever or a believer, and even if the latter, then God as more or less problematical.

  Next, there is the self, the individual conscious artist-writer reader-viewer self, the movable piece in the world, like a token in a Monopoly game.

  The problem for the movable piece: How do you go about living in the world when you are not working at your art, yet still find yourself having to get through a Wednesday afternoon?

  Note: This game can be played by artists and writers or by non-artists and non-writers, in fact by all true denizens of the age, that is, any person in the culture who feels himself orbiting the world, out of the here-and-now, out of life in a place and a time, and experiencing difficulty with reentry into such a life.

  In order to understand the purpose of the exercise and be instructed by it, let us make the following assumptions which are probably more true than false but which at any rate I will not take the trouble to defend: that the present world is in some sense deranged, the center is not holding, that the plight of the self of the artist-writer is at least in part a historical phenomenon and not an essential property of being an artist-writer; that there may have been other times and other places, whether one wishes to call them an age of faith or an age of myth, in which men perceived a saving relationship to God, the Cosmos, the world, and each other. In such times the self did not feel displaced, or if it did, it understood its displacement. The artist-writer did not, presumably, feel the same compulsion to assert his individual genius-self as would the artist today. It did not, presumably, occur to the Chartres sculptor to sign his name on the toe of an apostle he had finished on the West Portal. (Or to the Lascaux Cave painter.) Though he was a sinful man like other men and subject to certain whims and antics, he would not, presumably, have understood the nineteenth-century English poet who utters a cry: “O world! O life! O time!” and sails out in the Bay of Naples to a suicide by drowning. Or the twentieth-century American novelist riding trains through the haunted towns of America and writing: “O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”

  Options of reentry into such a world are: (1) reentry uneventful and intact, (2) reentry accomplished through anesthesia, (3) reentry accomplished by travel (geographical), (4) reentry accomplished by travel (sexual), (5) reentry by return, (6) reentry by disguise, (7) reentry by Eastern window, (8) reentry refused, exitus into deep space (suicide), (9) reentry deferred, (10) reentry by sponsorship, (11) reentry by assault.

  Object of experiment: to discover (1) which option you prefer and (2) which option is in fact open to you.

  Explanation of Options:

  (1) Successful and uneventful reentry, self intact. Theoretically, it is possible for the abstracted self to reenter the world as easily as a doctor leaving his office for Wednesday afternoon golf or the Chartres sculptor going home to sup with his family.

  Was this not in fact the case with William Faulkner, doing a morning’s work, then strolling in the town square to talk to the farmers and have a Coke at Reed’s drugstore? Not quite. Though Faulkner went to lengths to pass himself off as a farmer among farmers, farmer he was not. A charade was being played.

  Was it not the case with Sören Kierkegaard, who, every hour, would jump up from his desk, rush out into the streets of Copenhagen, and pass the time with shopkeepers? No, because, by his own admission, he was playing the game of being taken for an idler at the very time he was writing ten books a year.

  Only one example comes to mind of a writer who, though performing at a very high level of twentieth-century art, nevertheless manages to live on one of the few remaining islands of a more or less intact culture, in the very house where she was born, to enter into an intercourse with the society around her as naturally as the Chartres sculptor, to appear as herself, her self, the same self, both to fellow writer and to fellow townsman: Eudora Welty. Perhaps also William Carlos Williams.

  If you do not think this remarkable, imagine that you have lived your entire life in the house where you were born. For an American, an uncanny, even an unsettling fantasy. (2) Reentry accomplished through anesthesia. One can simply render the intolerable tolerable by a chemical assault on the cortex of the brain, generally by alcohol, and generally by writers. It has been observed that artists live longer and drink less than writers. Perhaps they are rescued from the ghostliness of self by the things and the doings of their art. The painter and the sculptor are the Catholics of art, the writer is the Protestant. The former have the sacramentals, the concrete intermediaries between themselves and creation—the paint, the brushes, the fruit, the bowl, the table, the model, the mountain, the handling and muscling of clay. The writer is the Protestant. He works alone in a room as bare as a Quaker meeting house with nothing between him and his art but a Scripto pencil, like God’s finger touching Adam. It is harder on the nerves.

  Why Writers Drink

  He is marooned in his cortex. Therefore it is his cortex he must assault. Worse, actually. He, his self, is marooned in his left cortex, locus of consciousness according to Eccles. Yet his work, if he is any good, comes from listening to his right brain, locus of the unconscious knowledge of the fit and form of things. So, unlike the artist who can fool and cajole his right brain and get it going by messing in paints and clay and stone, the natural playground of the dreaming child self, there sits the poor writer, rigid as a stick, pencil poised, with no choice but to wait in fear and trembling until the spark jumps the commissure. Hence his notorious penchant for superstition* and small obsessive and compulsive acts such as lining up paper exactly foursquare with desk. Then, failing in these frantic invocations and after the right brain falls as silent as the sphinx—what else can it do?—nothing remains, if the right won’t talk, but to assault the left with alcohol, which of course is a depressant and which does of course knock out that grim angel guarding the gate of Paradise and let the poor half-brained writer in and a good deal else besides. But by now the writer is drunk, his presiding left-brained craftsman-consciousness laid out fl
at, trampled by the rampant imagery from the right and a horde of reptilian demons from below.

  (3) Reentry accomplished by travel (geographical). The self leaves home because home has been evacuated, not bombed out, but emptied out by the self itself. That is, home, family, neighborhood, and town have been engulfed by the vacuole of self, ingested and rendered excreta. What writer can stay in Oak Park, Illinois? One leaves for another place, but soon it too is ingested and digested. One keeps moving: from Illinois to Minnesota to Paris to Italy to Paris to Spain to Paris to Africa to Paris to Key West to Cuba to Idaho. From Nottinghamshire to Australia to Mexico to Taos to France. If one can keep moving and if the places retain sufficient form and decor, the places may not run out before one’s life runs out. Hemingway ran out of places. Lawrence did not.

  An extreme case of a frantic and failed attempt to enter a habitable world, only to consume it and move on, is Kerouac in On the Road. In the course of one book he careens back and forth between New York and California six times—with one Mexican detour.

  The road is better than the inn, Cervantes said. True, but he did not reckon with ghostly travelers like the Flying Dutchman.

  Note, however, that reentry by travel and also exile (see below) nearly always takes place in a motion from a northern place to a southern place, generally a Mediterranean or Hispanic-American place, from a Protestant or post-Protestant place stripped by religion of sacrament and stripped by the self of all else, to a Catholic or Catholic-pagan place, a culture exotic but not too exotic (Bali wouldn’t work), vividly informed by rite, fiesta, ceremony, quaint custom, manners, and the like. This is by no means a Counter-Reformation victory because the attraction is not the Catholic faith— which is absolutely the last thing the autonomous self wants—but the decor and artifact of Catholic belief: the Pamplona festival, the Taxco cathedral, Mardi Gras, and such.

  The attraction between the noughted self and the fiesta (quite literally a feast for the starved vacuole of self) exists on a continuum of affinities: at one end, say, the serious yet finally hopeless nostalgia of Henry Adams at Mont-Saint-Michel, at the other the more commonplace delectation of, say, Oppenheimer and Lawrence at a Pueblo festival in New Mexico which, with its outlandish admixture of Catholic and pagan rites, allows the self the best, it thinks, of both worlds: to keep its distance and at the same time savor the esthetic of the spectacle.*

  (4) Reentry by travel (sexual). One has a succession of lovers of the opposite sex, the same sex, or both. It is difficult to imagine the self of the autonomous artist in his singular and godlike abstraction from the ordinary world of men settling down with a wife and family any more than Jove settling down with Juno. Juno—yuck! Wife, children, home, fireside, TV, patio, Medicare in Florida, growing old together, John Anderson, my jo, John—yuck! Better to grow old alone in the desert, sit on a rock like a Navajo. But how lovely are the daughters of men! Indeed, heterosexual inter course is the very paradigm of the reentry of the ghost-self back into the incarnate world whence it came. Not cogito ergo sum—God, how sick is the self of three hundred years of that cogitation, a very bad French connection—but rather: If I enter you, I am alive, even human.

  Further exercises: Why are so many artist-writers homosexual? Because the estrangement of the self can be so extreme that not even the welcoming woman can be used as a portal of reentry—on the contrary, she becomes the voracious vagina, the pure negativity which, risking nothing, maliciously requires performance and therefore threatens to expose one’s noughtness. If so, better to cast one’s lot with one’s own kind, own sex.

  And why are artist-writers more promiscuous than scientists? Because science works better, this is the age of science, scientists are the princes of the age, while artist-writers are the frantic Lazaruses at the feast, hungering for crumbs like the dogs, the while scratching and screwing around under the table.

  (5) Reentry by return. The options of travel and exile may be exhausted, yet instead of despairing, the traveler may hit upon one last alternative: the return. Why not go back to the very place one left, as a kind of deliberate exercise of freedom? Not only is it not the case that you can’t go home again, you may have to—back to the evacuated, bombed-out homeplace, a ruin which by the very fact of its abandonment has in the long interval of one’s absence magically acquired a certain solidity and integrity of its own. The Southern writer who put Valdosta behind him as fast and far as Doc Holliday and roamed the world from Martha’s Vineyard to Cuernavaca now at last gets a hankering for home. And goes home—for a while. It’s one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you’re boozing with Yankee writers in Martha’s Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It’s something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed’s drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can’t go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you—they’re not, don’t flatter yourself, they couldn’t care less—but because once you’re in orbit and you return to Reed’s drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha’s Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it’s no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.

  (6) Reentry by disguise. The writer-artist cloaks his noughted self not by wrapping himself in bandages like H. G. Wells’s invisible man but by donning the persona-plus-costume worn by those persons who strike him as having most successfully entered the world—or never left it. A more respectable word for such a disguise is role-playing. A hundred years ago, artists, would-be artists, writer-types on the Left Bank wore workers’ smocks and berets. More recently, it is jeans, beards, bandit mustaches, denim jackets, tank tops, longhorn belt buckles, and such. But what to do if the crassest members of the marketplace, car salesman, account executive, go cowboy? That is to say, what to do if one’s chosen mode of reentry has been co-opted by those very persons who had driven one into outer space to begin with?

  The disguise may be behavioral as well as sartorial. Not celebrated in past times for their pugnacity or womanizing, American writers have turned into real cutups, the Southern subspecies often taking the old-fashioned form of the hell-raising passed-out-drunk-in-the-whorehouse good-ol'-boy, the Northern more political: the cocktail-party nose-to-nose you’re-deep-down-a-fascist-son-of-a-bitch confrontation, or throwing a punch at the critic who bad-mouthed you in Time—though seldom with much effect—or beating up your wife in the kitchen. Poets from all over feel obliged to become more florid sexually. Straight poets on the lecture circuit exchange a black book listing the best lays in the universities where they read. Other poets (male) are noted for flashing and feeling up male graduate students. No more shy Swinburnes or pale Dante Gabriel Rossettis or closet Housmans.

  The main difference between latter-day Southern writers and latter-day Northern writers: both are aware of the necessity to shock the reader out of self-unawareness and into recognition of the advanced derangement of the world, but the Southern writer does it by having a character offend against a decayed but still extant ethos—a twin ethos, the Biblical tradition and the honor code. That is, he sins, usually sexually, or commits a Gothic atrocity against a backdrop of faded Jeffersonian splendor—and sometimes does both at once, like Temple Drake getting corncobbed by Popeye at the old Frenchman place in Faulkner’s Sanctuary. The latter-day Northern writer, lacking either tradition and having nothing to offend against, must rely on an act of gratuitous and comedic violence—like Michael Milton getting his penis bitten off by Helen Garp in Irving’s The World According to Garp.

  An observation about disguises: The New Orleans French Quarter has long attracted artists and writers and homosexuals for the good and understandable reasons given above: Latinity, quaintness, moderate exoticness, Mardi Gras, the usual para-Catholic aura—and the easiest way to get out of Mississippi and Ohio. But it is also a para-creative aura. J
ust as the denizens of the Vieux Carré live in the penumbra of the cathedral, they also live in the penumbra of art. Surprisingly little first-class art has come out of the French Quarter, even though it rather self-consciously imitates the decor of the Left Bank, habitat of many great artists years ago. This life style, as it is called, reminds one of the urban cowboy who secretly believes that if he dresses and walks like a cowboy, he may be a cowboy. Faulkner, never one to do things halfway, made extravagant use of standard modes of reentry in New Orleans, not merely geographical and perhaps sexual modes, not merely alcohol, but also a regular repertory of disguises. In the Vieux Carré he made appearances as a wounded veteran with swagger stick and a bogus steel plate in his head, a hard-drinking pre-hippie vagrant Left-Bank type—and wrote Mosquitoes, a not very good novel. It took the ultimate reentry, the return—he had to go home—to write The Sound and the Fury. Even then, he had to “be” a farmer on the side. Later he made the grandest Southern reentry of all, as a Virginia horseman.

  A prediction: What with artist types and writer types and homosexuals (who must be applauded for their good taste in cities: New Orleans, San Francisco, Key West) taking over such places as the French Quarter, and business types and lawyer types going cowboy, I predict that working artists and writers will revert to the vacated places. In fact, they’re already turning up in ordinary houses and ordinary streets long since abandoned by the Hemingways and Agees. Soon they’ll be wearing ordinary shirts and pants and Thorn McAn shoes, not altogether unconsciously, but as a kind of exercise in the ordinary. What else? Where would you rather be if you were James Agee now and alive and well: stumbling around Greenwich Village boozed to the gills, or sitting on the front porch of a house on a summer evening in Knoxville?

  (7) Reentry by Eastern window. Angle of reentry too shallow, skip back into space, out of singular self in a singular place back into Cosmic Self, and out of linear time and into the cycles of reincarnation and the Eternal Return. Comet orbit.