The History of Love

During yoga class Owl when twisted over into a warrior two with a bind—a painful and unnatural position especially if you have no thigh muscles—her instructor reached for a book.

Owl considered defenestrating herself. Owl adores yoga, and Owl adores being read to, but in her limited experience, yoga instructors have the most deplorable habit of picking out a poem about living simply or being a better person and reading it in a singsong poet’s voice eerily reminiscent of tape recorded ocean noises. Then they fold their hands and lecture on Morals. This can range from why you shouldn’t hit your dog to boycotting large corporations unless you approve of child labor.

This is usually intended to lessen the pain of the pose, but Owl finds that it deepens it. You can’t run away and you can’t argue. You can only suffer in silence. But I don’t have a dog!  But what if you’re a poor child laborer and you don’t have the money to shop at indie stores?

Then her yoga instructor began in a quiet voice that focused more on enunciating each word precisely than rolling out the vowels for emotional emphasis. This is what she read:

The first language humans had was gestures. There was nothing primitive about this language that flowed from people’s hands, nothing we say now that could not be said in the endless array of movements possible with the fine bones of the fingers and wrists. The gestures were complex and subtle, involving a delicacy of motion that has since been lost completely…

If at large gatherings or parties, or around people with whom you feel distant, your hands sometimes hang awkwardly at the ends of your arms – if you find yourself at a loss for what to do with them, overcome with sadness that comes when you recognize the foreignness of your own body – it’s because your hands remember a time when the division between mind and body, brain and heart, what’s inside and what’s outside, was so much less.

The book was The History of Love, the author, Nicole Krauss.

Owl nearly stole it from her instructor after class. Instead she managed to wait until it arrived at the library, and then she read it in a series of delirious gulps.

The History of Love is about cranky Leo Gursky who lives alone in his New York apartment. Leo Gursky was young, was once a writer, was once head over heels in love, and once wrote a book about being in love.

Leo Gursky is still in love, still a writer at heart, but the book was destroyed in a flood before anyone could read it, he’s old, he’s retired from the business of unlocking doors for a living, and instead knocks over cups at Starbucks—that way if he dies, someone will remember him.

The History of Love is also about fourteen year old Alma Singer. Alma’s father is dead, her mother buries herself in translations to keep her love alive, and her little brother thinks he’s a holy man, and tried to jump out of a window to see if he could fly.

Krauss tangles up gloriously colorful narratives about people who seemingly have nothing to do with each other and then weaves them together in a story that twists and turns every few moments, and bursts into pages of brilliant and imaginative prose.

There are excerpts about the Age of Glass, a time when people were convinced that parts of their body were fragile and could shatter at any moment. There’s an obituary for Isaac Babel the writer who believed in the spaces between words more than words themselves, there are tips on how to survive in the wild, and notes on being a holy man.

Krauss must have laughed as she wrote, must sipped sparkling cider and hummed lullabyes. Maybe she did none of these things. Maybe she hit the dog. It doesn’t matter. Part love letter, part mystery, History of Love, is more than a love story, it’s a lesson that there are no limits to the magic of the written word.   

[Observation: Krauss is married to Jonathan Safran Foer and The History of Love is very similar to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. There are dead fathers, children scrambling all over New York in search of someone, experimental prose, and both were published in 2005.  Which raised a lot of questions in Owl’s mind about influences and the intersection of marriage and writing. But Krauss is famous for being closemouthed about her marriage. Pooh.]

Art, Artists, Artistry

Every so often Owl encounters artists like the souls who post on Thought Catalog and gets a serious attack of the vapors. Owl would very much like to declare herself an artiste, but then she reads the sculpted prose of the people who post on Thought Catalog, their descriptions of life as an artistic twenty-something, the hangovers and hangups, the breakups and breakdowns—la vie bohème.

Owl is a dull creature, fond of convention, even fonder of rules. She is capable of having a one hour conversation on knitting. She can be found at the library on weekends, and is utterly outraged that it’s closed on Friday nights. Her idea of Bacchanalian pleasure is a mug of hot chocolate and a slice of cardamom bread. She has no desire to experience la vie bohème. It sounds uncomfortable.

And Owl despairs. She cannot shake herself of the notion that the desire for a life without rules is the same spirit that goes into the creation of great art. In order to create anything you can’t look around and duplicate what has already been done. You have to stand on your own feet, see some crazy vision, nod and say—This is how it ought to be. And then do it. And then keep doing it even when people want to lock you up in a padded room.

This takes guts. A certain disregard for convention, and an unshakable madness. And perhaps this is why you get the mythology of the tormented artists. Maybe, in order to do these things, artists have to be slightly mad, completely mad, possessed by some wild beast that can not be contained in a single body so it manifests as alcoholism, angst, abuse, and at its highest and most purest form: art.

Lately Owl has been reading Roberto Bolaño’s much lauded The Savage Detectives which has added to her despair.

If anyone was possessed by this madness it is Roberto Bolaño who spent most of his life wandering through Latin America, stealing books, starving, reading and writing poetry. In Mexico he burst into poetry readings held by poets he thought were corrupt and screamed until he drowned out their words. Isabelle Allende was mediocre, Gabriel Garcia Marquez a mere socialite, and the less said about likes of Laura Esquivel and Paulo Coelho the better. He called for a literary revolution, and if he couldn’t make people get up and follow him, well then, he’d be the revolution. Ballsy, and belligerent, if that’s how a writer should live, than Bolaño the complete and utter badass, was the master of them all.

Owl was captivated by the first paragraph of The Savage Detectives:

I'm not really sure what visceral realism is. I'm seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I'm in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I'm an orphan, and someday I'll be a lawyer. That's what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night.

Owl wanted to be bff with Juan García Madero. Then he joins the visceral realist poetry movement. He stops attending class and starts going to bars to write poetry. He boozes up, gets laid, and gets high, all in proper artist form. (Here Owl sadly realized she and Juan García Madero were never meant to be. Owl is not the sort to cut classes. Or even booze it up.)

A hundred fifty pages in, Madero’s voice is replaced with a series of interviews that capture the lives of two poets as they travel from country to country. There are about fifty different people who are interviewed, the interviews span two decades, several different countries, and to make matters worse (or better) Bolaño chops up the interviews, layering them against each other so every two pages the narrative jumps from person to person.

The Savage Detectives is technically brilliant. Bolaño must have papered his walls with lists of his characters in order to keep them all straight. But the overall effect is discombobulating. It is difficult, if not impossible to keep track of all the characters, so they become indistinguishable, fifty or so angry voices, getting high, getting drunk, rolling into bed, rolling out, howling for love but managing not to love anyone, not really, not in anyway that matters, and then it just fades into noise, one continuous roar. At first it’s sordid, then it’s exhausting, and finally it’s boring.

There is very little about poetry, and when it is mentioned, like everything else, it gets lost in the roar. If there’s any lasting flavor the remains once you finish, it is about the emptiness of old age once dreams have grown sour.

The critics called the book genius. Owl wonders if this is because Bolaño lives up to the mythology of the tormented artist. Actually Owl does not like to think of Bolaño, when she does, she feels totally incapable of living up to such heights of madness. His vision of artistry seems exclusive—being an artist is like belonging to a club. Either you’re in or you’re out and if you’re out, you’re out and God help you.

Instead of God, Owl turned to Natsume Sōseki’s Kusamakura. Sōseki came of age when Japanese writers were turning towards Western literary traditions. While Bolaño raged against the conventions of Latin American writing insisted on the importance of a revolution, Sōseki turned back to traditional Japanese literature. A revolution, perhaps, but an opposite one, a desire to go back to the old structures of the past instead of rampaging ahead into unknown lands.

Kusamakura is plotless. It follows a narrator as he meanders up a mountain and around its hidden springs. There’s a lot of staring off into the distance and meditating on the nature of art. Where The Savage Detectives is noise, Kusamakura is quiet, where The Savage Detectives is long, Kusamakura is brief, and where The Savage Detectives ultimately has very little to say about the creation of poetry other than how it’s fifty odd characters mostly failed to create poetry, Kusamakura outlines an entire philosophy of art.

According to Sōseki art is more a state of mind than a product. To be an artist is to be able to create a certain emotional distance from personal experiences and view them dispassionately.

You must forget the pain of your own broken heart and simply visualize in objective terms the tender moments, the moments of empathy or unhappiness, even the moments most redolent with the pain of heartbreak. These will then become the stuff of literature and art.

Anyone can be an artist as long as they “cut [themselves] loose from the entangling strictures of gross self-interest.” It has less to do with creating than with perceiving. To be an artist is to experience life without getting consumed by emotional reactions. It is an attempt to transcend the immediate visceral reaction to realities of life and instead step back and passively regard the moment for what it is, untainted by personal interests.

Owl has no comment on which version of artistry—the wildness of Bolaño which is all about the visceral or the dispassion of Sōseki—is more true. Neither. Both mixed up and laid together side by side, after all both writers created books that are still being read today. But she knows which version she prefers.

On her birthday Owl went to the Asian art museum. It was not a particularly easy birthday, Owl was bitter—tired of her endless desire to write and how ill suited it made her for daily life, desperately afraid of her life without writing.

She stopped by a room full of ancient Chinese scrolls. In the manner of Chinese scrolls, the landscapes loomed large and the people were few and far between, a commentary on their relative importance. There were mountains surrounded by curling wisps of smoke, thick forests, riverbanks, and off in the corner a boat or a small hut where inside a scholar read a pile of books.

Owl looked at the largeness of the mountains, the smallness of the scholar reading and in that moment she broke free of all her doubts and attained a moment of clarity. She saw that her life was small, one of many, that her life was indeed good.

She came into possession of a certain serenity, a knowledge that she was one of a long chain of people who had come and gone but spent their lives reading books, that this was acceptable, unimportant even, and that regardless of what she does, the mountains will remain large, eternally beautiful.

In that moment she was absolutely sure one day she would be very happy.

This serenity lasted for days.

The Betrothed

Ciao amico! Benvenuti! Vieni con me in Italia bella! …Owl kisses her wingtips, Owl devours platters of spaghetti, Owl has plunged deep into Alessandro Manzoni’s old school epic The Betrothed (Bruce Penman’s translation) and is so.so.so. Italian.

The year is 1628. The place, in case you missed the memo, is Italy. Lucia and Lorenzo are in love and engaged to be married. The end, alla fine.  But no! The evilnous (evil+villainous)  Don Rodrigo happens to see Lucia walking down the road and his man parts go all “Oh hai there” and well, Don Rodrigo has minions and money and Lorenzo doesn’t so there is EPIC FLEEING! Riots! Hiding in nunneries! Famine! The PLAGUE!

Really. The plague.

Involuntary separation

 The best part? All of this is more or less happened because Manzoni wrote the book in 1827, and researched the living daylights out of it. The Betrothed is crissed and crossed with references to the manuals Manzoni consulted, his opinions on the manuals and then his opinion on everything in general. Manzoni has a lot of opinions.

Highlights:

(A) Manzoni as the omniscient narrator. Manzoni is the most crotchety, anal, judgmental, adorable sourpuss of a narrator ever. Whenever Lorenzo goes off and does something stupid (every few moments) Manzoni folds his hands over his stomach, rolls his eyes and goes—“Gentle reader, please don’t be such an idiot.” And when Manzoni approves, he nods his head, pats Lorenzo on the back, and keeps going.

(B) Manzoni as the tangent man. So, sometime Manzoni just totally forgets that he’s got lovers on the run and he stuffs Lucia in a nunnery, gets Lorenzo into heaps of trouble and then leaves them there because he’s busy introducing the newest member of the party, like a nun. Who maybe attempted murder.

And by the time Manzoni’s done talking about his murderess nun, you kinda want to be best friends with her.

(C) Manzoni the psychologist. Ten to one Manzoni’s the sort who sat on the edge of the room during all the big parties, scaring up the courage to ask lovely ladies to dance, or possibly not dancing at all because he was so busy watching people, because his novel is rich with minor human truths.

When a friend, then, indulges in the joy of unburdening a secret onto another friend’s bosom, he makes the latter, in his turn, feel the urge to taste the same joy himself. He implores him, it is true, not to tell a soul; but if such a condition were taken absolutely literally, it would at once cut off the flow of these joys at their very source. The general practice is for the secret to be confided only to an equally trustworthy friend, the same conditions being imposed on him.

           

Minor quibbles:

(A) Lucia spends most of the book, fainting, trembling, crying, pleading or blushing. Owl gets the idea Manzoni may have been slightly crushin’ on her which is probably why she’s less of a person and more of a symbol of dewy trembling maidenhood. Or head. (…Owl apologizes for crassness.) Ooh, and maybe why Manzoni keeps separating her from Lorenzo. Lucia must be his!

(B) Villainous men who spend their entire lives lopping off the heads of peasants for fun and going bowling with said heads, are not going to suddenly be tortured by guilt when they encounter a tremblingly-bosomy maiden. Yeah, even if she’s Lucia, and even if Manzoni’s crushin’ on her like no other. Owl ain’t buying it. Sorry.

Owl is dimly aware that The Betrothed is an Italian classic that’s the equivalent of a Dickens-Thackery lovechild (she’s quoting from Penman’s introduction), and it should be treated with solemn respect, say a thesis paper littered with buzz phrases like the ‘human condition’ and ‘agency’, but books are written primarily to be enjoyed, books become famous because they are enjoyable. The Betrothed is a carnival. It’s full of bright lights and colors, metaphorical clowns and jugglers, and the king of them all is Manzoni who keeps the plot sparkling and dancing so the reader can’t help turning the page.

The Betrothed is also comforting. It’s a carnival, but it’s the carnival your parents took you to when you were little, which ends with cotton candy on a stick, instead of say, getting eaten by a clown. Manzoni is a devout Christian, and in the end The Betrothed is a commentary on faith. Trust in Providence, Manzoni insists. Providence may kidnap while you’re walking down the street, may lock you in a cellar for no good reason, may decide to label you a criminal because you got drunk in the wrong place at the wrong time, but in the end, if you are good, if you are honest, and if you are pure of intent, despite all your mistakes, despite your complete and total foolishness, all the loose ends will fall neatly into place and Providence will take care of you.

If only Owl could believe this.

Invisible Cities

Sometimes Owl is tempted to wander down the open road with a loaf of bread, a bit of cheese, and a few stamped postcards knotted up in a kerchief. She dreams of cities that sparkle in the sunlight, cities covered in dust, the wide open spaces between cities, and the endless road. Unfortunately whenever she tries, she is plagued with worries about running out of bread, worries about rain because kerchiefs don’t do wet so well, so she turns around and goes home for some strawberry-banana-chocolate sandwiches and a book.

Owl has three modes of reading. In the first mode she drags herself through a book because she wants to impress people with her literary curriculum vitae. (See Mark Twain, see also J.R.R. Tolkien who should be castrated for the Two Towers). Owl admits this is a terrible thing to do, but she reads copious amounts of comic books to atone. In the second mode she’s picked up some delicious escapism, done a serious face plant into the paper and is dead to the world for the next forty eight hours. (See anything by Diana Wynne Jones.) When she emerges she walks into a lot of walls and is woozy. In the third mode, in the third mode, call the cops, put the ambulances on hold and bring out the parachutes because Owl tasted the sublime, Owl’s heart cracked open and spilled across the grass, Owl just hit the sky and is wheeling about in a flaming ball of ecstasy and she’s never, never coming back.

Enter Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, full of twinkling cities and decadent prose. Owl may have teared up reading it. Teared up because it’s good like that first bite of double chocolate cake frosted with an inch of fudge ganache. Yeah. That good.

 Owl isn’t even going to try to write a synopsis. She’ll let Gore Vidal do the talking:

In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo. The mood is sunset. Prospero is holding up for the last time his magic wand: Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire, of his cities, of himself.

Marco Polo, however, diverts the emperor with tales of cities that he has seen within the empire and Kublai Khan listens, searches for a pattern in Marco Polo’s Cities and memory, Cities and desire, Cities and signs…The emperor soon determines that each of these fantastic places is really the same place.

Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant.

To read Invisible Cities is to visit the most fabulous cities on earth, cities named after beautiful women, cities whose descriptions are one paged prose poems that read like love affairs. Some of them are sweet and frothy, some of the dark and twisted, all of them are glorious. Skim through the descriptions and you will reel from the beauty of the prose. Savor them slowly and you will discover hidden truths about the curious creatures that are cities, about the lone traveler who chooses to wander from place to place.

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses white or black or grey or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave; the houses are dismantled; only the strings and the supports remain.

Invisible Cities ought to be boring, a book of fifty odd cities broken up by dialog between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, and to be honest, reading it is like traveling for a long long time. At first every sight in every city is precious, something to marvel over. Then the details of each city blur together, the cities begin to blur, you only notice what is so novel that it is beyond the scope of your imagination, or what is so familiar you nearly drown in homesickness. In doing this, you will begin to understand the place you came from, and see how it shaped you. This is the only way to learn these lessons of self and homeland.

Read Calvino. Read him to travel to wonderful cities, to dream as you've never dreamed before, and to discover the invisible city that lies inside of you. When you eventually surface in your living room, you will be exhausted and exhilerated, you will be irrevocably changed.

Searching for invisible cities

The Screwtape Letters

Now that all the spare corners of Owl’s mind are no longer filled with vague worries about homework assignments and final exams, she worries about other questions, in particular, the tricky business of how one should live life. Owl stutters and stammers through the minutiae of daily life. Does one help the old lady walk across the street? Yes, of course. But what if Owl is late to work and she is supposed to take meeting notes? Leave the old lady or miss the first part of the meeting and turn in incomplete notes? What if Owl is cranky and does not feel like helping old ladies across the street and will do it with a hint of impatience? Is it better to help an old lady across the street a little impatiently, or to keep out of it all together?

Moral dilemmas

Owl’s expensive college textbooks contain no helpful guidance. Owl is alarmed. She has spent a decade and a half in school, could probably take the derivative of x with regard to y, yet she is ill-equipped to answer such questions. She has no fundamental code of behavior to consult.

Most days Owl suspects that these questions are the important ones, answering them is akin to discovering the secret to living a happy life. However, Owl lives in a city full of up and coming young professionals who talk about how large their salaries are, how much overtime they put in and how very rich and famous they will be one day. When Owl asks them about minutiae they cough politely and offer to buy her a mocha latte to shut her up.

After one or two mochas and a few hours in such company, Owl tends to believe that the real questions of life may have to do more with climbing ladders that lead nowhere instead of asking questions on how to live.

Enter C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, a series of letters from Uncle Screwtape, a high ranking official, advising his young nephew Wormwood, a junior officer, on the finer points of corrupting an average human soul. That’s right. Hell is a bureaucracy, Uncle Screwtape is a devil who works for Satan, and Uncle Screwtape wants to eat your soul.

 

Owl has her doubts about Lewis. His Narnia books made her feel rather uncomfortable about lions, but the Screwtape Letters is a diabolically clever examination of the foibles of human nature. By writing a how-to manual on corruption Lewis produces a photographic negative of true spirituality that is more powerful than any amount of preaching. It is highly irritating to be told you should aspire to certain ideals. But when someone describes certain human foibles in ridiculous and satirical detail and they sound awfully close to your regular old self…ay yi yi.

For example, Uncle Screwtape on false humility:

You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather, he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be. No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth.…And since what [he is] trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, [he] cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping [his] mind endlessly revolving on [himself] in an effort to achieve the impossible.

And the photographic negative, (i.e. true humility):

The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favor that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbor’s talents—or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognize all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things.

While Lewis wrote as a practicing Christian, Screwtape goes beyond the scope of Christianity and addresses psychological truths, spirituality, call it what you will. Owl does not have a tidy phrase to explain the manifold social pretensions and affectations that obfuscate ones relationships with the world, with other people, and above all, with oneself. 

She can only say that she struggles with these issues all the time, false humility, pretension, complacence—all issues left out of the college classroom, but issues that religion and philosophy have been trying to address since humans acquired synapses. 

Replace God or Christianity with any other belief—Art, Science, Buddhism, Compassion—and The Screwtape Letters still ring true. Owl personally translated Lewis’s references to God and Christianity to writing. (She's a tad obsessed.)

There are a dozen demons out and about, small demons, tiny little creatures who roost on shoulders and whisper:

Do this. Everyone else does, so it’s alright.

Or, conversely:

Don’t do this. No one else does, so it can’t be right.

They do this every moment of every single day. They are there when you decide whether you really ought to go for the third mocha, if you should dine with people you don’t much like, if you should maybe pretend not to like Harry Potter because you’re forty three and dignified.. Each time you listen, they nibble a piece of your soul. A small piece, not much of a piece, but if you listen often enough, you let enough of them nibble, you wake up one day and there is nothing left.  

Never fear. Uncle Screwtape will tell you how these demons work, and although he purports to be a soul eater working in the bowels of Hell, Uncle Screwtape will save you from sinking into the morasses of petty sins that plague daily life.