by Peter Turchi
Or at least, that’s a life of growth. All of us have the option of avoiding challenges, of looking for the easiest way to do what we’ve done before, to read what we’ve read before, write the sort of poem or story we feel comfortable writing. Novelist, short-story writer, and essayist Francine Prose—such a prolific writer that we might assume she has gained a mastery that makes writing at least a little bit easier—has said, “The challenge is to keep doing something different, something harder and scarier in every way than the thing you did before . . . to do something more difficult every time.”
MOUNT EVEREST, SCHOOLING, DANGERS OF SUCCESS, AND THE LONG JOURNEY WE’VE CHOSEN TO MAKE
So far so well, but the most and the best of the Poem I perceive remains unwritten, and is the work of my life, yet to be done. . . . The paths to the house are made—but where is the house itself?
— WALT WHITMAN, in notes for a preface made on May 31, 1861, his forty-second birthday
The making of poems is so mysteriously tied up with not-knowing that in some sense the poet is a perpetual amateur, a stranger to the art, subject to ineptitude, failure, falsity, mediocrity, and repetitiveness. Even to remember what a poem is seems impossible for a poet—one suspects that professors, or professionals, rarely have that problem. Nonetheless, some poets . . . make you want to use the word professional because their careers are testaments to their stamina of craft and spirit. Having found an initial place for themselves to stand and a way to speak, they have lost and found it again and again; they have reconceived themselves, gone past their old answers into the new questions.
— TONY HOAGLAND
Conductor Marin Alsop has called Mahler’s Fifth Symphony “the Mount Everest of music.” “It’s a large-scale journey,” she writes.
Even as a young man, Mahler was after the big picture. When other twentysomethings might have been writing lighthearted music, Mahler was trying to solve the riddles of the universe through his epic symphonies. . . . The first two movements explore this struggle between darkness and light with no resolution. The third is a miniature journey unto itself, a kind of commentary by Mahler on popular culture past, present and future. For a conductor and the orchestra musicians, it’s extremely challenging on many levels. . . . Just like the Everest climb, pacing is critical to the outcome. My goal is to give our journey a sense of structure, arrival and resolution. Mahler loves conflict, contrast, obsession and excess. But I always have to temper and monitor the indulgence so that it doesn’t become self-indulgence. I have to feel as one with the musicians, and be vigilant about the path we navigate together.
To call a piece of writing difficult most often means that it challenges our ability to comprehend it in one way or another. To comprehend is “to grasp with the mind.” The opposite of difficult work would be work that already lies within our grasp—work that is either immediately comprehendible or preconceived. This “easy” or easier work might still give us pleasure, especially when it satisfies our expectations, or works subtle variations on a familiar form we’ve come to enjoy; but, like my wife playing those weddings, eventually we’re likely to find that simply clutching what’s already in our hand is less interesting, less fulfilling, than extending our grasp.
Of course, we can’t expect to grasp everything we reach for. Some work we read might elude us; some work we try to write might require understanding or skills we haven’t yet developed. But even to make the attempt is to reach beyond what we can hold, what we can do, now.
Correction is about a life devoted almost entirely to perfecting one’s art. We learn that Roithamer built the Cone for his beloved sister, whom he wishes to make “perfectly happy by means of a construction perfectly suited to her person.” After six years of obsessive dedication, he completed the project and brought her to it. But this is no happy story of affirmation: soon after Roithamer showed his sister what he had made, she died, miserable. Roithamer wrote in his notes, “The effect of the finished Cone is not as anticipated.” Shortly after that, Roithamer hanged himself. For Roithamer, the ultimate correction is annihilation, death. While Correction is by no means an instruction manual, it offers much to ponder about artistic ambition, difficulty, and dedication. Here are a few of the notions Bernhard offers us through his characters:
I have finished my Fifth [Symphony]—it had to be almost completely re-orchestrated. I simply can’t understand why I still had to make such mistakes, like the merest beginner. (It is clear that all the experience I had gained in writing the first four symphonies completely let me down in this one—for a completely new style demanded a new technique.)
— Gustav Mahler
Every idea and every pursuit of an idea inside us is life. . . . The lack of ideas is death.
When we set out to do something we’re constantly being sidetracked, we’re thought to be crazy, our refusal to yield and to compromise. . . impels us onward. . . . The world around us is constantly balking and hindering us and it is precisely by this constant inhibiting and hindering action that it enables us to approach our aim and finally even reach it.
We have to go along with a crazy idea, our own, even when we don’t remember how we got it, we must go along with this crazy idea all the way, bring it to realization in the teeth of all the doubts and all the rules and all the recriminations, despite everything. We bring this idea to realization in order to bring ourselves to realization.
The idea demands fulfillment, it demands realization, and never stops demanding to be realized. One always wants to give it up, but one ends by not giving it up because one is by nature disinclined to give it up and in fact one sets about realizing the idea. Suddenly one’s head is full of nothing else, one has become the incarnation of one’s idea. And now one begins to reap the benefits of all one’s suffering, of one’s origin and everything connected with one’s origins. . . . It all turns out to be useful, and the worst of the horrors are most useful of all.
Resignation, weakness, emptiness, the failure to make it real. It’s all a matter of schooling oneself, a school in which I am both the teacher and the pupil.
Conductor Herbert von Karajan has said that when one hears Mahler’s Fifth, “you forget that time has passed. A great performance of the Fifth is a transforming experience. The fantastic finale almost forces you to hold your breath.” And yet after its premiere, Mahler is reported to have said, “Nobody understood it. I wish I could conduct the first performance fifty years after my death.”
Achieving the difficult thing by no means necessarily leads to the deep satisfaction, the recognition, or the life of bliss we might imagine. Andrew Wiles is the mathematician credited with proving Fermat’s Last Theorem, which had stumped thousands of dedicated mathematicians for over three hundred years. Wiles devoted himself to the problem for nearly nine years; the final proof was over one hundred pages long. After it was verified, he said,
There’s no other problem that will mean the same to me. This was my childhood passion. There’s nothing to replace that. I’ve solved it. I’ll try other problems, I’m sure. Some of them will be very hard and I’ll have a sense of achievement again, but there’s no other problem in mathematics that could hold me the way Fermat did. . . . Having solved this problem there’s certainly a sense of loss, but at the same time there is this tremendous sense of freedom. I was so obsessed by this problem that for eight years I was thinking about it all the time—when I woke up in the morning to when I went to sleep at night. That’s a long time to think about one thing. That particular odyssey is now over. My mind is at rest.
One can hear the resignation, almost as if Wiles is accepting death. To have accomplished what he set out to do is not the ultimate source of pleasure. The actual accomplishment, we’ll assume, was a source of pleasure; but the sustaining pleasure was the work itself.
People have told me that I’ve taken away their problem, and asked if I could give them something else. There is a sense of melancholy. We’ve lost something that’s been with us for so long, some
thing that drew a lot of us into mathematics. Perhaps that’s always the way with math problems. We just have to find new ones to capture our attention.
Math problems, symphonies, building a house, and writing a story or poem or novel are the same this way: we set goals, we progress, we set new goals.
It’s all a matter of schooling oneself. There is no reason to doubt Mark Twain’s expressions of frustration; they ring not of false modesty but of sincere exasperation. We also know from his letters that, late in life, he thought that “wretched God-damned book” was his best. Precisely why he struggled so painfully, and why he valued the result so highly, is a private matter. Though their letters and journals are sometimes revealing, for the most part we can’t know what problems other writers give themselves, or what makes a particular piece of work difficult for them. On the rare occasions when it happens, it’s a privilege to be in the company of writers so dedicated to their work that they willingly share their challenges—both those they think they’ve met successfully and those they’re in the midst of struggling with. We each have our own sense of the problems we’ve chosen—or the problems we’ve been offered, or the problems we somehow find ourselves confronting. There’s no point in pretending that every moment of engaging them will be a joy. But our deepest pleasures as artists result not only from surmounting but from continuously engaging with the difficulties that represent our greatest ambition.
33 The ideal reader is thinking, “Don’t you mean ‘puzzle’? Because the author knows the answers, and before long, we will.” Yes: this is, in the story as a whole, a puzzle—and barely even that, because the answer is going to be handed to us. In the moment that we read the sentence, though, it raises questions we can’t possibly answer, what we might think of as localized, or small-scale, or short-term mysteries.
34 If the answer seems obvious, you probably also know why a barber in Geneva would rather cut the hair of two Frenchmen than of one German.
35 Poet Heather McHugh, a fan of anagrams, set some sort of record when she created a sonnet that is an anagram of Shakespeare’s sonnet 23.
SOURCES AND SOLUTIONS
Some puzzles are solved in solitude, others by groups. This book developed, slowly, from personal interests and from readers’ responses to Maps of the Imagination. Some of those readers suggested related books and essays; others were kind enough to invite me to address various groups, ranging from professional designers and design teachers to object-oriented programmers, from a marketing team at General Mills to young game creators from around the world. All those interactions provided unanticipated information (the seasonal market for croissants, the role of music in establishing the tone of a video game) and sparked new ideas. The individual chapters grew out of, and eventually outgrew their origins as, lectures delivered at residencies of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. During the years I worked on them, I lived in Norway, North Carolina, and Arizona. At Arizona State University a small, trusting group of graduate students engaged in a seminar on puzzles and mystery, and various insights and readings from those discussions and others that followed inform these pages. My greatest debts are to the Warren Wilson MFA program, which has long been receptive to unusual approaches to the discussion of writing, and to the students at both Warren Wilson and Arizona State who not only tolerated what seemed to be (and were) highly digressive discussions but eagerly joined them. Their enthusiasm was encouraging, and their questions, occasional frustrations, and bemusement were instructive.
The two people most responsible for seeing this book completed are my wife, Laura, and my supportive, patient editor, Barbara Ras. Assistance came in various forms from Debra Allbery, Andrea Barrett, Robert Boswell, Richard Gabriel, Allegra Hyde, Cathy Jewell, Charles Ritchie, and Richard Schmitt, among many others. My sense of the forms writing about writing can take has been influenced by many earlier teachers and essayists, from Aristotle to E. M. Forster, from Virginia Woolf to Flannery O’Connor, as well as by contemporary practitioners, most notably Robert Boswell, whose Half-Known World is itself richly narrative; Charles Baxter, who has modeled, for many years, a kind of essay that manages to be instructive, playful, and idiosyncratic; Ellen Bryant Voigt, whose essays and lectures are models of passion, clarity, and rigor; and Stephen Dobyns, whose books of essays (which claim to be for poets, but benefit any writer) are extraordinarily lucid and combine close reading and strong opinions with good sense and a generosity of spirit. More generally, my colleagues at Warren Wilson have reinforced the value of never-ending exploration.
Experts in other fields responded to my questions with remarkable magnanimity. They include puzzle master Will Shortz, with whom I crossed paths, serendipitously, at a table tennis club (we didn’t play; he would have won), and who introduced me to the puzzles of Thomas “Dr. Sudoku” Snyder and to Michael Ashley; Thomas Snyder, who allowed me to reproduce some of his work here, and whose website is a portal into another dimension; Michael Ashley, who agreed to compose an acrostic with a literary theme on very short notice; master designer of theatrical illusions Jim Steinmeyer, whose books on magic are both entertaining and instructive; and video game designer and teacher Jesse Schell, whose The Art of Game Design was an inspiration, and who invited me to meet his students and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, a real-world Wonderland. Ultimately, not much more than a mention of video games made it into this book, but the conversations there informed my views of other puzzles and games, and reminded me that it’s possible to do serious work and still have great fun.
Arizona State University and the University of Houston provided funds directly related to this project, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation provided financial support long ago, when I thought this book would focus on “writing as a way of seeing.” I came to see it differently, but the foundation, a true patron of the arts, placed no restrictions on the final product.
Finally, I’d like to thank some of the independent bookstores who supported Maps of the Imagination and so, in the best way they could, made this book possible: Malaprop’s in Asheville, NC; St. Mark’s Bookshop in NYC; City Lights in San Francisco; Micawber’s Books in St. Paul, MN; Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, MA; the Tattered Cover in Denver; Prairie Lights in Iowa City; Collected Works in Santa Fe; Chapters in Washington, DC; Daedalus Bookshop in Charlottesville, VA; Maria’s Bookshop in Durango, CO; Powell’s Books in Portland, OR; and Barbara’s Bookstore in Chicago. While I discovered Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, AZ, after Maps came out, I appreciate that the puzzle section there is located behind the podium provided for visiting writers, so gave me frequent reminders of my work while I listened. Here’s hoping those booksellers and their kind are around for years to come.
The Contemplation of Recurring Patterns
Michael Korda is quoted from Tracy Daugherty’s Just One Catch: A Biography of Joseph Heller; Juan Tamariz is quoted from Alex Stone’s Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks and the Hidden Powers of the Mind; Howard Thurston’s instructions for the Front and Back Palm are from his 1903 book Card Tricks; and all references here and throughout to Marcel Danesi are to his book The Puzzle Instinct, an excellent overview of the history of a wide variety of puzzles, their applications to other fields, and their broad appeal.
1. Directions for Attaining Knowledge of All Dark Things
John Le Carré is quoted from an interview in the online Short Attention Span Press; the illustration of books at leisure is The Card Players, Jonathan Wolstenholme, 2004, watercolor on paper, private collection, © Portal Painters/The Bridgeman Art Library; Jerry Seinfeld is quoted from “Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up,” by Jonah Weiner, in the New York Times, December 20, 2012; the image of the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, written in hieratic script, circa 1650 B.C.E., appears thanks to the De Agostini Picture Library/The Bridgeman Art Library; the first sudoku puzzle is from jolanda85/Shutterstock.com; Benjamin Franklin is quoted from his autobiography; most of the
crabby author quotations are from Emily Temple’s “The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History,” originally posted on January 1, 2012, on Flavorwire; Flannery O’Connor is quoted from “Writing Short Stories,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose; Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was released in 1969 by the Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation; Joseph Heller’s discussion of the origins of Catch-22 is from Tracy Daugherty’s biography; John McPhee is quoted from his essay “Structure,” in the New Yorker, January 14, 2013; Charles Ritchie’s Night in Three Panels (2000; watercolor, graphite, conté crayon, and pen and ink on Fabriano paper; sheet/image 4 1/2 × 19 1/8 inches; private collection) and Night with Terraces (1995–97; conte crayon, wax crayon, watercolor, graphite, and collage on Fabriano paper; sheet/image 13 × 29 3/4 inches; private collection) are reproduced here by permission of the artist; Bruce Springsteen is quoted from Springsteen on Springsteen: Interviews, Speeches, and Encounters, ed. Jeff Burger, Chicago Review Press, 2013; the Emily Dickinson stanzas are from “I dwell in possibility”; Kathleen Spivack is quoted from With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, and Others; Ross MacDonald is quoted from his book Self-Portrait: Ceaselessly into the Past; Milan Kundera discusses his seven-part structures in The Art of the Novel; the Don DeLillo quotation in the footnote comes from “Don DeLillo: The Art of Fiction No. 135” in the Paris Review 128, fall 1993; T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker” is part of his Four Quartets, copyright renewed © 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, all rights reserved; as of this writing, Foldit is still online at fold.it, and the image of one of the puzzles is reprinted with the permission of the Foldit Project, University of Washington Center for Game Science.