The bird is on the wing: Friday, April 7th, 2023
On set pieces, sock burning, and spring (for real this time).
(you can click on the title above to view this on the Live More Lives website)
Dear Gentle Readers,
Happy Easter, Ramadan Kareem, Chag Sameach, and Happy Sock Burning, as the case may be (I have left out a gazillion other spring festivals, luckily forgiveness is a big part of many religions, please & thank you).
The theme of rebirth is common to both Passover and Easter and to completely irreligious, pagan or atheistic poetry-celebrating springtime, although much of the Christian poetry of spring does take the resurrection metaphors practically into catechism. Whether that’s a plus or a minus for you, it is beautiful.
And here is the serpent again, dragging himself out from his nest of darkness, his cave under the black rocks,
his winter-death.
He slides over the pine needles. He loops around the bunches of rising grass,
looking for the sun.Well, who doesn't want the sun after the long winter?
I step aside, he feels the air with his soft tongue,
around the bones of his body he moves like oil,downhill he goes
toward the black mirrors of the pond.
Last night it was still so cold I woke and went out to stand in the yard,
and there was no moon.So I just stood there, inside the jaw of nothing. An owl cried in the distance, I thought of Jesus, how he crouched in the dark for two nights,
then floated back above the horizon.—Mary Oliver
i thank You God for most this amazing
I thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(I who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)—e.e. cummings
It’s wonderful how words put together in a certain order can give us this feeling of uplift and rebirth. Certain words; certain spacing and rhythm; certain images, single or recurring: these all contribute. There’s a particular feeling similar to this that I have wanted to convey in fiction but until now haven’t had the right vehicle for it. It’s the similar sense of uplift, the natural high, that comes in certain moments when we’re seized by the beauty of life. It has a slightly poignant feeling, a sense of its own evanescence. My earliest memory of it is dancing round and round in a circle as a child with my sister, listening to music, giddy and transported. I’ve tried several times to capture it in writing through images of other children dancing, in scenes in nightclubs or during festivals or weddings where there’s a feeling of communal chaos and liberation and recklessness, in scenes evoking the carnivalesque.
In our Sunday essay I’ll be talking about adventure in literature, with a focus on Robert Louis Stevenson—honestly, it’s probably just a first foray into the vast topic or even into the study of this marvellous author. From Stevenson’s writing about his own writing, I was reminded that a story may hang on any number of inspirations and sustaining structures (I’ll be telling you how he developed the plot for Treasure Island, with its development hanging on a particularly suitable device). For me, certain scenes I want to write or emotions I want to convey are serving, so far, as the impetus to move from point to point, the constraint shaping the plot, for my own novel in progress. Still, ideally you don’t want to write set pieces, as in a movie. Set pieces—perfect, dramatic scenes—may be gorgeous and exciting but lack connection to the whole, giving you the sense that the author is showing off and that the scene isn’t justified by the needs of the story. Ian McEwan’s writing (he’s the Booker-winning British novelist and screenwriter whose novel Atonement became an Oscar-winning film) often feels like that to me. In fact, we can easily contrast his book Saturday, with Mend the Living by French writer Maylis de Kerangal, in which there’s a similarly meticulous, show-stopping description of surgery—a heart transplant in Mend the Living, brain surgery in Saturday.
Although McEwan’s scenes in Saturday are each skillfully observed, they are held together by nothing but bland political and personal musings that don’t do justice to the intended themes. Since the individual bits are fine, it’s difficult to demonstrate the problem with a quotation. With more space I might give it a try but for now, here is writer John Banville in a harsh review (most of the others I found instead lauded the book, while Banville expresses pretty much what I felt on reading Saturday years ago):
Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc.—are hinged together with the subtlety of a child’s Erector Set. The characters too, for all the nuzzling and cuddling and punching and manhandling in which they are made to indulge, drift in their separate spheres, together but never touching, like the dim stars of a lost galaxy. The politics of the book is banal, of the sort that is to be heard at any middle-class Saturday-night dinner party, before the talk moves on to property prices and recipes for fish stew.
Set pieces, while described in most definitions available online as good, can be the ruin of the flow and authenticity of a work of fiction, although as the other Saturday reviews suggest, some readers are just so impressed by impressive detail that the failure of the whole doesn’t matter to them, given the success of the parts (to give him his due, McEwan is a master of the worthwhile set piece, and I will never forget the excruciatingly suspenseful scene of a ballooning accident that sets off his novel Enduring Love). In poetry, though, you can get away with it because the whole thing can be a sort of set piece. When the scene you’re describing evokes the springtime, the details contribute to both a metaphor and an actual feeling of rebirth and new beginnings.
STORY CONTINUES AFTER THE FOLLOWING BRIEF INTERLUDE…
… BACK TO SET PIECES AND SURGERIES
It’s quite different to convey that feeling—of rebirth, upsurge, the poignancy of endings seeding new beginnings—using the length, variety, movement and flow required for a solid novel. De Kerengal, however, achieves this, the story of rebirth tragic and moving as we go from the vivid life and then the tragic death of a young surfer, not so far removed—just from his own first ultrasound, to the essential rebirth of the older cardiac patient who receives his heart. Before following in precise detail the sensory and emotional experiences of some of the many people involved in a successful heart transplant, with the scientifically observed well-integrated into daily ruminations, activities, and unique personalities, we begin the book with a description of the twenty-year old donor, who has just suffered what is about to be a fatal accident during a thrilling early morning surfing expedition, planned by text by three friends just after midnight. It’s a very long first sentence but here is a bit of it:
[…] Simon Limbeau’s heart, what is had filtered, recorded, archived, black box of a twenty-year-old body—only a moving image created by ultrasound could echo it, could show the joy that dilates and the sorrow that constricts, only the paper printout of an electrocardiogram, unrolled from the very beginning, could trace the form, could describe the exertion and the effort, the emotion that rushes through, the energy required to compress itself nearly a hundred thousand times each day and to circulate up to five litres of blood every minute only this could sketch the life—life of ebbs and flows, life of valves and flap gates, life of pulsations […]
And then there is a great, novel-length immersion in the youthful vigour of the doomed boy and his friends, the sudden accident, his death, and the lives of various people—those close to him, and professionals involved in different aspects of the donation of the young man’s organs. We feel all their fears and personal preoccupations and the shock and horror and tenderness and then unending but ever-changing grief of Simon’s family and friends. His mother, Marianne, calls her husband, Sean, on her cell phone and once she gets out the news that their son is in a coma, irreversibly damaged though still alive, Sean’s voice “has changed camps now, it has joined Marianne, it has pierced the fragile membrane that separates those who are happy from those who are damned: wait for me.” And yet the couple choose to let their beloved child’s body fuel life for others. It’s an unbearably moving story, with intricate details, told in a voice that is tender but also omniscient, even-handed. After great suspense as we experience the individual steps that must take place with exactly perfect timing, we arrive back to the same heart, now in a new body:
The heart contracts, a shudder, then moves with nearly imperceptible tremors, but if you come closer, you can see a faint beating; bit by bit the organ begins to pump blood through the body, it takes its place again, and then the pulsations become regular, strangely rapid, soon forming a rhythm, and their beating is like that of an embryo heart, this twitching that’s perceivable from the first ultrasound; and yes, it is the first heartbeat that can be heard, the very first heartbeat, the one that signifies a new beginning.
On the general feeling of deranged happiness (we’ll be feeling it in Toronto this week) that makes spring a giddy and, for some, a dangerous month, American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote,
Spring
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.
I love love love nature documentaries—David Attenborough is one of my heroes—and nature photography. Annual wildlife photography awards offer some extraordinary views of our drowning world (<you’ll remember we looked at the work of these amazing multimedia, world-making artists some weeks back when discussing their tarot cards, a new one of which I promise to pull for you soon, to tell your literary fortunes).
Every one of the Ocean Art 2022 winners is exquisite, both as photography and because of its subject (there are three pages to scroll through including some terribly sad photos about the state of the oceans and many more gorgeous compositions of the strange and magnificent products of evolution). This is Colossal, a great website featuring all sorts of art and craft with interviews and articles about different artists, has a nice article on them. It is hard to choose one, but this macro photograph of the female octopus starving to death, her eyes closed in what seems like a saintly expression, as her tiny babies grow in their clutch of eggs, is moving and secret. It’s astonishing for us to be seeing this. I’d like to make an oil or egg tempera painting in Renaissance or medieval style, with this octopus mother as a martyr. One day.
Dear reader friends, as you know, I am thinking through a few improvements I’d like to make to Live More Lives.
After today, the Friday miscellany will become a feature exclusively for paid subscribers who want a heavy & varied dose of literature and experience. It will come out every two weeks to start, with some changes and extra features still in the works. The Sunday longread will remain open and free for all subscribers. My hope is that a little extra time to focus on it will allow me to explore things I have been unable to do so far.
If you would like a paid subscription but are truly unable to afford it—you spend thirty per cent of your income on rent, for example, or live below the poverty line in your area—please contact me directly and in confidence. Being paid for my work is an essential part of being a writer and allows me to devote the time and energy needed to make this special, but I want to balance that with being accessible.
Please do comment—in the comments box or on the chat, any time—and let me know what works for you, what you’d like more of (I have had some requests, which I will try to get to in time), what you’d like to try, or what literary struggles or victories or discoveries you’ve made so far.
Till Sunday, friends!
-Carlyn