Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  So what is sent away when we are forced out of our homeland? Words. It is to get rid of our words that we are gotten rid of, since speech is not a piece of property that can be confiscated, bought or sold, and therefore left behind on the lot like a car you have traded, but is the center of the self itself. The excruciation of exile lies in this: that although the body is being sent into the world as Adam and Eve were sent by the Angel, the soul is being cast into a cell of the self, where it may mark the days with scratches on the wall called writing, but where it will lose all companions, and survive alone.

  This claim of mine concerning the centrality of the spoken word is, of course, disputed, widely rejected, believed to be passé. In our picture-perfect time, who should accept it? Okay. So on your next date, draw a picture of your passion. Thus explain your needs. How far into real feeling will it take you? Will it not inadvertently possess a certain lavatory style? When next you are alone, and pondering some problem (should you call him? will she or won’t she? does he like the amplified guitar better than the cradled bass? in what will she prefer that I express myself, chalk or crayon?), try posing your questions in terms of the flickering image so many say they love and see as the future’s salutatory wave. Think through anything. Start small. Continue simple. But comic-strip the solution into being.

  If we can read, it is expected that we also ought to be able to write, or, anyway, type. How many of us, in our camera-crafted age, can take a really good photograph, or copy a pictured face, or form an interesting image in any medium, or read a blueprint, understand a map or set of architectural plans, or even follow the right arrows when trying to catch a suburban train? If this is a visual age, why is our visual competence next to nil? We can’t even doodle with any skill.

  We could say, of Cronos swallowing his children, that he had sent them to hell inside himself. For quite a few of its sufferers, exile is a spiritual condition, not merely a geographical one. This is what many of our American writers of the teens and twenties meant when they described themselves as exiles, and when they weren’t just putting on airs. Gertrude Stein said that when American expansion had reached the Pacific, there was nowhere else to go but “west in the head.” And into the head we went. Then sent our luggage east of us to Paris. Where we spent our exile wasn’t the real issue. James Baldwin wasn’t sent into exile in France. His exile began before he was born, when the darkness of all our beginnings darkened his skin.

  The expression “spiritual exile” is a metaphor, of course, but a significant one, since there is a large number for whom exile is only a pro forma punishment: they are doing well and have found a happy home in their adoptive country. “Alienation” pretty well describes the condition of heart and mind which constitutes the inner content of actual, of effective, exile. While alienation can be mutual, as it often is with married pairs, it is often as solitary as masturbation. Citizens can become alienated from their government without the nation noticing. That failure to notice is often part of the condition. Still, being indifferent to someone or something does not imply that you once upon a time felt otherwise, or that you must continue to mourn your separation.

  “Alienation” as a philosophical term is no longer in vogue, so perhaps it is safe to pick it up again, if only for a moment. What is more familiar than your own face—the one there in the mirror, the face you are shaving? But what is that behind the head? It is a wall you’ve never seen, a wall the mirror has invented, and the head, too, wobbles on its neck now, as if it were under water. Remember how it felt to return after many years to the high school of your youth: how small the halls were; how tattered the blinds; how grim the lockers—a greasy green, and dented without design. Reality and memory were out of tune then, and now they are again.

  The movement of the razor over the face, the scrape of the blade, the cream being pushed here and there like suds across a floor, have all leaped over oddity and reached the surreal. The operation of doorknobs is inexplicable. Doorknobs ought to be easy. We only expect bidets to be mysterious. But as alienation settles over our souls like a fog, features, operations, relations, without actually altering, offer us different points of reference, their aims shift, their essences dissolve. An inner weariness wells up; everything is an obstacle, asking us questions we do not understand. We issue the same old orders to our body, but despite that our limbs flair awkwardly; walking cautiously straight ahead, we still back into things as though blind; we forget how to sneeze.

  At the same time, of course, how vividly, how accurately, how freshly, we see, for everything we had known well, we had long since ceased to know: the flag was noble; the flag always waved; priests, presidents, and poets were worthy of respect. And now the bathroom wall surprises us; so does the tone in our wife’s voice when she says no once again—a sound which suddenly seems the same as the scrape of our razor. We really hear, perhaps for the first time, the gurgle of water down the drain—down the drain like the departure of all hope. In the blink of an eye, we’ve placed a Duchamp here, another there, until we have a world full of the familiar made strange.

  We have spent a lifetime making things a part of ourselves, constructing, as they say, a second nature: learning to walk, to speak, to ride a bike, pick a lock, spoil a party, dance the fandango, wash dishes, shovel snow, swim, do our job, turn on, turn off, go to the bathroom, stoop to conquer. We had felt at home in our yard, with its swimming pool, until someone threw an open can of paint in it, until adolescents made a habit of swimming nude there in the middle of hot nights, until a squirrel drowned. We had felt at home in our home, freshly done in chintz and lacquer, until the kids brought their noisy punk friends in the den, the dog began pooping in a corner, robbers ripped us off, and the wife stopped making the bed. We had felt at home in our flesh until our flesh grew old, grew flabby, went fat and blue-veined, and then there was that stranger in the mirror with his red-rimmed eyes, and the stubble, every morning, like an early field gray with frost.

  Then strangers invaded our private hunk of public space with their hands out and each of their unblinking eyes staring and staring. Then strangers came too close to us in the subway, and sat down beside us with empty seats on every hand. So now we come warily up to the ports of our eyes, and go about, even when alone, hidden deep within like a pip in a pumpkin, and protected from the actuality of everything, especially every touch, as we always did at rush hour, so as not to feel felt when packed in the train like a tin.

  Alienation is the exile of the emotions—of hope, of trust—sent away somehow so they won’t betray us.

  The exile that I have personally experienced is one far less gruesome than the fate that befell Cronos’s children; it is not at all dramatic like the epic of Oedipus; not a bit lyric, either, like a ballad bemoaning the old days from the lute of a Slavic poet. It does not even concern the exile of a person whose speech was found to be offensive, and who was sent away where his message could be heard no more. I am talking about the loss of the use of a language (a use that, in my opinion, is its fundamental employment—the poetic in the broadest sense), and how that limb of our language has been cut off and callously discarded.

  This has been, of course, my subject all along. And someone may ask, so complete has been its disappearance, what is this special use of language, and what makes it so special? Alas, to answer would require another essay and an honesty absent from most hearts. It is, first of all, a use of language which refuses to be a use. Mere use is abuse. That should be the motto of every decent life. So it treats every word as a wonder, and a world in itself. And it walks along and upon them, even over dizzy heights, as confidently as a worker on beams of steel. And it does not care to get on, but it dwells; it makes itself, as Rilke wrote, into a thing, mute as the statue of an orator. It reaches back into the general darkness we—crying—came from, retouches the terrors and comforts of childhood, but returns with a magician’s skills to make the walls of the world dance.

  Paul Valéry divided buildings thus: into those
that were dumb, and therefore would be, on my account, soulless, dead; those that spoke, and would be, on my account, solid citizens and a worthy norm, provided their speech was clear and honest and unaffected; and those that sang, for these found in themselves their own true end, and rose like Shelley’s lark, through the heaviest atmosphere.

  We have grown accustomed to silence from this sort of singing. We make other noises. Yet it is an old rule of history that exiles return, that they return wrathfully, whether a banished people, a forbidden idea, or a barricaded way, to reclaim what should have been their heritage. They return wrathfully, not only because they remember and mourn the life they were taken from, but because the past can never be recovered, not even by a Proust, not if you wish to take up residence in it again. To listen to our stories, other selves have been invented to replace the dolls, who, if any remain, are alive somewhere in other arms. But of course poetry, if it returns, will never make us pay. No. It will not put us to death or in prison or send us, as it was sent, so sadly away. It will simply put us to shame.

  THE STORY OF THE STATE OF NATURE

  1. THE DAWN OF THINGS, OR FIRST LIGHT

  Imagine that, at a point in an otherwise empty space, an event the precise size of such a point takes place. We do not require the Big Bang. A flick of the Bic will do, the simplest spark of life, perhaps God’s guilty shout like the king’s in Hamlet: Give me some light!

  According to the most popular conception of causality, largely derived from Aristotle, this brief alleviation of the general darkness will be followed by an effect occupying every immediately adjoining area. The preferred image is that of a single pebble striking the smooth surface of a still pond. Our initial disturbance, having done its deed, is indeed done, and passes out of the present into what will later be dignified as “history.”

  If Act I has the duration of an instant (so small as scarcely to exist), Act II is a membrane, an onionlike skin that is infinitely thin and the shape of a hollow sphere. Since every effect is required (by this theory) to change itself immediately into another cause, the little bubble of consequence which encompassed our originating point will find an additional film forming about it, as if the surface of the globe were constantly growing a further surface just above itself—like layers of atmosphere, like countries of cloud.

  However, it is important for us to remember (what will be important later mainly because we shall have forgotten it now) that the vacancy created by the obligatory disappearance of the First Cause into the sphere of its following Effect will be filled by one of the consequences of that Effect, because every event which succeeds the first will be like a ball with an equal emptiness on both its concave and convex slopes; so that creation will continue in two directions: explosively outward in the direction of infinity, and implosively inward in the direction of the dawn of creation, its first light. The energy of any event will therefore be divided, inasmuch as each will bear twins, one concave and expansive, one convex and contractive—inspired and expired breaths.

  When a particular contraction reaches such a degree of concentration that inwardly there is no place left to go, it will radiate outward once more, although in a greatly weakened condition. To complicate our image perhaps to a point of incomprehensibility, we have to keep in mind the fact that every returning system will have two sides just as the venturing systems do, so that twinning will be incessant in both types. In short order, expanding rings will encounter contracting ones, causing incalculable consternations, collisions we may expect to become causes themselves, and so on, and so in, and so on, and so in, ad infinitum.

  If we return to the image of a growing globe for a moment, it is easy to see how we might understand one bit of surface as causing the character of the region most contiguous to it the way sweat stains a blouse or a shirt. Such attention would be like running a needle through our onion and following only the tunnel it tore. It opens the path for a narrative.

  With such a focus, the unitary nature of the rings is lost; they become segmented, as if a circle of dancers were skipping away from one another. But when I watch widening rings of water, am I right to imagine each small piece of the wave causing only the ripple “in front of it,” or is the movement of energy through the medium itself a continuous and unbroken whole?

  Our story begins, abstract as it must be (its characters without qualities, so brutal and distant), when we set up alongside this continuum of activity a metronome to mark the stages—indeed, to make them, since the notion of rings, spheres, layers, levels, degrees, thin skins, and lucent orbits is an invention of this clock, which insists, to accompany its monotonous ticks, on an appropriately parallel row of monotonous tocks.

  The metronome’s beats will encourage us to think of this three-dimensional circus we call creation as a single, regularly segmented line of time. It will furthermore fasten an arrow’s head to the right, or expanding, end, so that the line will seem to intend its direction, and may even mean to strike something when it arrives—perhaps, like Cupid, a critical point in the cosmic heart.

  Narration relies on the notions of event, cause, sequence, aim, and outcome. None of these can be assumed to be an essential part of the nature of things. We find them only in accounts of a certain kind.

  2. THE DESCENT OF MAN

  Men sprang, some say, from the dragon’s teeth. Others argue that men are the terrible teeth themselves; teeth which rend one another like meat and close like a grate upon whatever life gets lodged between them. However, the fuller story only ends with men of that kind: carnivores who may eat up all creation. It begins, instead, with the favored creatures of the Age of Gold, the children of Cronos. It begins at a period when this god is in an unusually benevolent mood, for during that dawn of dawns men eat only acorns, fruit, and honey; they drink only the milk of goats, and are wholly unaware of worry, death, disease, or any labor.

  Their silver-sided offspring seemed solely mother-made, so close to their mother’s realm did they remain, living in the fields and on its bread the way, later, mice would occupy a farm. Men of the Silver Age were as ignorant as children, playful, careless, quarrelsome, like children easily distracted from their angers, also like children, incompetent at organization, and therefore incapable of war.

  Then men of bronze, their torsos hard as the metal of their spears, fell from the ash trees—broken off like branches, shaken free like leaves, such were the tempests of that time. They ate both bread and flesh, one slab upon another, and went to war as eagerly as to a parade, because they were as simple and pitiless as their ax blades and the cruel gaze of their eyes.

  These creatures—gold, silver, bronze—each had the gods for parents: whether one alone begot them, forced them from a breast or brow, or whether they were a consequence of the noisy coupling of two Titans like the cars of a train, and given in secret to some natural resource—wave, plant, cave—to bring forth. In any case, they were pure descendants of the divine, however mean their spirits may have been, and bore the emblems of the sun, or moon, or earth, upon their banners; but the fourth race of men, also brazen, with chests as solid as shields, came from the wombs of mortal mothers, somewhat as Jesus did, and, like him, established themselves as heroes: the warriors, for instance, who besieged Thebes, who journeyed with Jason in search of the gleaming fleece, or those who waged the Trojan War and went to their reward in the Elysian Fields.

  From godlike men of several sorts to those of heroic mold and then to men who were merely human: that was the descent. Last in line was the iron race, lacking even a lick of divinity, degenerate throughout, as Robert Graves describes them: “cruel, unjust, malicious, libidinous, unfilial, treacherous,” and, above all, in every want, insatiable as the squirrel or the weasel—hungry though sated, after orgasm still bloodily engorged.

  While this narrative deals with a specific species and not some anonymous point of plosion, and its stages are more discrete, bulky almost, it nevertheless has the same shape: a temporally calibrated, entropic departure
from a privileged starting place. What it adds is evaluation: the early ages are better than the later ones—and not simply because they are prior or more powerful. Furthermore, loss of value in the effect is directly due to a weakening, a lowering of value, in the cause. In narratives, good and evil pass through stories like halls through a house where the occupants either sigh with relief and say the breeze feels good, or suffer a chill and complain of the draft.

  3. ME ADAM, YOU EVE

  The Greek version of the descent of man, which I chose to cite, did not attempt to personify its personnel; nor did it particularly care to designate a location, for presumably the entire world was every Age’s oyster. It did add a few lively touches concerning diet and character, but its principal interest was genealogical. It is a tribal theory. The lines it draws are lines of blood. The familiar Christian account I turn to now, although confused almost to the point of incomprehensibility, creates a theater and a company of players, then puts them down in a most dramatic and attractive setting: a walled and gated garden with a river to water it, fruiting trees, creatures of various kinds to occupy its earth and air, a militant angel, God, and of course, enjoying a breeze, the devil in the costume of a serpent, as well as Adam and Eve in their eventual leaves. There are scenes and conversations; there is buck-passing; there are temper tantrums, dramatic confrontations, and all sorts of other advances in the art of fictional excitement.