I believe God made me for a purpose; He also made me a wordsmith and then promptly left the sentence of my life unwritten, bidding I set out and write it. I have no tangible memory of God. And why should I? There are a few ideas from earlier programming still tossing about in the closed-circuit loop of my being that are sure to remain for the duration of this, my one and only, cloak and dagger mortality. I cannot say entirely that I trust the image of the God I was told to worship and in whom I don’t anymore, but I do believe God is there nonetheless; only where there might be, I neither know, nor am much concerned about. My design remains largely invalidated and of little consequence to a petulant and angry world. In spite of this, I know who I am and what I am built to do if only by willful dead reckoning through the gloaming in search of light. If God has given me anything of merit then it must be the memory of language even as I discover it anew and thereby ply the gift given to make it more fully my own. This gift came with some tools. Of these, God placed a tuning fork in my chest and set its inflected vibration to a most human tone; into my mouth He granted a silver tongue and breathed the pure air of language into my lungs; He enlivened the smooth tissue of my vocal cords into a speaking voice of some timbre and articulated resonance; He inspired my mind to decipher and also craft beauty in the scaffolding of words. I arrived with these implements intact, but I trail no glory nor am I entitled to any guarantee. The portion I add unto these gifts is an ethic of work at and for language. To write, therefore, is not a choice, it is a compulsion, a necessity, a desire and a want no less glorious and comfortable than the dull ache of a rotted tooth. I persist with the weight and tangle of words during the course of my days, and into the depth of each hour. It is a relentless pursuit. There is no quarter, there is no end, only the ongoing struggle to venture into the boundless pasture of the empty page and meet it with all I’ve got. If God made me, then He made me a writer–first and last. If I am to glory God, to find glory in His idea and being, then it must only come in the pursuit of the expression of the words I speak, the words I find to fill the space of a small sentence in a small hour of a forgettable day. When I write, I feel a pleasure which thereto is equal to pain–the one cannot be without the other–they exist together, just as I exist in the memory of a God I can no longer see.
****
In late spring of 2003 I arrived in Minneapolis on an errand for a job I would eventually be unable to keep. Descending into the Twin Cities I opened a novel that immeasurably increased the joyful burden already in my heart; it set the mark upon which all other novels fall short. Though I was only able to read the prologue before having to disembark and make my way out of the city and up to Plymouth and my awaiting hotel, I had a distinctive impression of the same reverant anguish Harold Abrahams must have felt when he sat in the stands to observe, with envy, Eric Liddell running with winged ease in a heat on his way to the Paris games in 1924. The writer I was reading was one, Mr. Michael Cunningham and his novel was The Hours. Mine angst, as it were, was an embodiment of recognition to the seamless mastery of his writing, of a writer in full possession of his art and its resonant power. I was, in a parallel manner, Harold Abrahams sitting on the periphery reading Michael Cunningham as if he were Eric Liddell in whose confident and supremely graced literary sentences flowed a liquid command of movement. To read him was to know I could never catch him. Cunningham’s writing honored the work of another writer of even greater and more magnanimous skill and in whose imaginative consideration of craft blended itself subtly inside of and through the beautiful voice of Virginia Woolf. Cunningham’s contribution was sublime beyond all human creativity and grace. His achievement was beguilingly simple and altogether beyond reach.
I did not go out that evening. I feigned an illness of digestion to avoid a trite and superfluous dinner with unnecessary company. It may, as a consequence, have hastened my end with that employer, but even now, all these years later, I still don’t care. I remained at the Radisson in Plymouth, Minnesota and read Michael Cunningham’s The Hours in one long concentrated sip. The experience was transcendental, emotional, and crushing all at once. I knew that even if the stars were to align themselves on my behalf I would never be able to write the sort of book Cunningham had so eloquently crafted. No doubt the ghost of Virginia Woolf herself had aided him as he wrote it–he had entered into the cave of her mind and tapped a vein of pure gold that only she would know. For his pains and prowess and above all for his care and kindness in attempting this, and succeeding, I am immensely grateful.
****
We want to live, desperately so. We want and need to treat the hours of a day as carefully as we can. To see in them what is so painfully obvious, so easily ignored. But just to see is of lesser consequence; it is to feel what we see that changes the equation and defines the experience into the language of our lives. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Such lovely flowers they would be, so fully scented and brimming with life. And oh, what a life is this life! This life, so terrible and new and old. Oh this life! Life; London; this moment of June. This life! What a lark! What a plunge!
****
That day in Plymouth which faded into a night was a haunting, a beautiful and elegant haunting. After wiping the damp from my face I wrote a note to myself on the last page of the novel and then got up from the floor and went out for a long walk under the stars. I wished for an open florist in that quiet hour but there was none to find. I would have purchased a bouquet and sauntered through the streets with my nose buried deep in its bright blooms. Even now I wish for the embrace and weight and scent of those fresh flowers! Come in, she says, everything’s ready.
****
Several years passed. One evening I watched Michael Cunningham being interviewed at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I listened. When the program was over, I went to my desk with the intent to write the author a long overdue letter. Only, I wasn’t ready.
****
Clarissa Dalloway thought of William Shakespeare; of how Shakespeare had to have thought of Othello. Under the pressed pen of Virginia Woolf a point of consideration revealed itself as a link to language and its creation; a link to a lineage of words, of life, of London, of this ongoing moment in June where the scent of flowers is just hovering in the air somewhere between dust and sunlight. There is no beginning, there cannot be an end. In Clarissa, Virginia felt what she could not have felt without creating Mrs. Dalloway on the page. In Ms. Woolf’s words it was Othello’s feeling and she felt it…talking in that beautiful voice which made everything she said sound like a caress. Oh this life! A kiss of words in a moment and right now, only just.
I hear echoes of William Blake:
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire?
Bring me my spear: O cloud’s unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of Fire!
I will not cease from mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land
It is in the words I return to God. Though he has no need of me, I proffer to think, he greets me there even as I know, full well that my life is but a drop in his very big bucket. He bringeth the princes to nothing, he maketh the judges of the earth as a vanity, he giveth power to the faint, and to them that have no strength, he increaseth might. I will not, I cannot, cease from this course, nor shall my pen sleep in this hand. I must build upon this green and pleasant land.
Language stops time and unfurls it all at once; it preserves and progresses the hours in which we measure and live our lives.
****
In the end, whether God exists or does not is of little concern to me. I find him inside of the words and, there, I welcome Him. Some of the words are His, some of them are mine but eventually the words become theirs. I am just a small voice in a broad chorus. My life, by His grace, is but a sentence.
****
To Michael Cunningham: Thank You. Those hours in Plymouth, Minnesota were a hymn and they remain. You reminded me, and still do every time I read you, why it matters to be a writer and why, as you’ve said yourself, novels are still worth the trouble they take to write.
RCS
1 May, 2021