for hearts that don't make sense

Goodbye Sky Harbor
Is tomorrow just a day like all the rest
How could you know just what you did?
So full of faith yet so full of doubt I ask
Time and time again you said don't be afraid
If you believe you can do it
The only voice I want to hear is yours
Again
I shall ask you this once again
And again
He said:
"I am but one small instrument."
Do you remember that?
So here I am above palm trees so straight and tall
You are smaller, getting smaller
But I still see you

Books and music. These are the things by which I am able to keep myself alive (and a cat in my lap, too ... sometimes). It's fun when those two things intertwine, particularly when just by happenstance you find that two things you love very much, have found a connection to each other. So, as I sat perusing the internet this afternoon, I found the lyrics to a Jimmy Eat World song (a band that connects other things in my life in strange and wonderful ways), off their album "Clarity," that I like a bit and read that it was based on one of my most beloved books, John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany. It's a book that I've now read four times, each time it captures me in different ways.

John Wheelwright is one of my favorite characters of all time. And the scene that the lyrics of the above song describe, which takes place toward the end of the novel, are a lovely tribute to the doubt and faith that pervades the whole book. Religion is a loaded topic for me. In fact, there is not much good I have to add with regard to organized faith. But I am full of faith--I am full of belief. I tend to place it in myself and those I hold closest to me--I choose my faith the way I choose to keep those who capture me, close. They are what I accept as my soul. So, there is something about John, a recognition, as it were, about his doubts with regard to Owen's unfailing trust in the unknowable, without allowing that to have any doubt about Owen--his best friend.

There are plenty of heady conversations and monologues in the book about belief, written in a manner that I always found to be some of the most intelligent and gentle of ways--layer upon layer of knowledge and theory. Each side is represented in Irving's trademark quirky brilliance, with pain and tragedy and moments of pure innocence. Small moments of truth. There is criticism, certainly--but always handled in the searching way that all things one places one's life's faith in should be. And it is intertwined with questions of fate and justice and the hypocrisy of blind belief. And John, the straight man to Owen's "prophet" (if there can be such a thing), points his finger to the sky (and looks down on Owen from the sky, in this instance) still questioning Owen's absolutes.

Never one for absolutes myself, I enjoy the view from above, searching the horizon without expectation, looking forward to the answers, should they ever reach me. Clarity, indeed. Thoughts on that, another night.

a necklace of incomparable beauty

"Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you? ... Do I have any right to come after you with my dusty mind full of the junk of maybe five thousand books? I hardly even get out to the country very often. Could you teach me about leaves?" --Beautiful Losers

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"St. Antoine" © 1999 duluoz cats

unstuck in time

"All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber." --Slaughterhouse Five



Ow. My heart. God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.

So it goes.


Obits
NY Times
Voice of America
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Photograph of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Associated Press

off with her head

I read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland when I was in college. One of the children's lit classes I took--funny how I always knew that was where my heart would lie. It's a complicated tale, made all the more so by the history and psychological profile of author, Lewis Carroll. But, ignoring all of the rumor and implications of his love of young girls and its place in his writing of the story, as an adult, I find reading "children's" stories ever so enlightening (and why I am never as impressed as everyone else at "child" authors; for there is something ever so much more difficult for an adult who looks to reach out and speak to a young mind, to curl up and in point of fact, place himself back into seeing the world as a child, and who recognizes the intellect and cadence of their mind, that than any author of adult fiction can ever know.

Alice, however. There is a fascinating parallel with her that I feel right now. Something about nonsense and misconception; deception and "things that aren't what they appear to be." That seems to be all around me these days.

Having no head (no pun intended) for math or numbers (and some would argue, logic), I find it all the more incredible that this little book of "nonsensical things" would have been written by a mathematician. I suppose one would have to allow that the whole connection between "logic" and "mathematics." But to add to that fiction and story, and "make believe" is a dichotomy not even I can bridge.

So much has been written and dissected about Alice, but what I like most to focus on is the need that she has to express and understand. Chapter 1, as I remember writing about, oh, so many years ago--her "eat me" drink me" was a demand for conversation, the need for conversation and her disappearance down the rabbit hole because of a sense of being ignored, of having been denied wisdom of information and understanding. Lacking a dialogue with others. This is a very basic aspect of human psychology, and also a basic technique of good old-fashioned children's morality tales. Think Aesop or Grimm. When one applies the psychology of conversation and understanding with the art of fairy tale and a child's sense of disconnection with the adult world--the sense of being out of control of one's own circumstance--you get to the basic human feeling of "falling" or, more simply, failure. This relates to a child's lack of understanding of the conscious (and why children's stories are so often based in the world of fantasy and make-believe). And why children, old people, and drunks are often thrown into the same tank together. There is that old saying, of course, about "drunks and fools [read children, "innocence"]" and the fact that they don't allow reality to interfere with their world. It is the figurative "falling down the hole" in order to avoid hurt and damage, physical and emotional--a literal escape, as well.

What is fascinating about Alice, though, is the sense that the first few chapters make--she knows who she is until she comes in contact with the outsiders, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter. She is certain of herself and her emotions--she questions ceaselessly (even when confronted with the gibberish of the peanut gallery)--it is her great concern to find the significance of life (and here is where chess and math and logic play their role in answering her concerns), and more specifically, her current place in the world and the what she should do with with her life. In fact, her great question, posed in Chapter 6 to the Cheshire Cat is, "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" To which he replies, "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to." But, Alice, being a child, doesn't know where she wants to go, she only knows that she doesn't want to "go among mad people" (who among us does?)

This is my joy of her. Her great understanding (or Carroll's, as the case may be), of the concept of Wisdom. The understanding of the "sphere of the visible" and what it means to incorporate consciousness and reason--the chessboard, being the obvious physical manifestation of reason, in this case--more to the point, however, is that Alice understands emotion and environment and all of its many mutable incarnations. Her behavior, particularly in Chapter 2 as she tries to find her way through her new environment, takes her through many emotions that both a child and an adult go through as they look to find their way in the world.

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Illustrations by John Tenniel, from the 1866 publication of Alice.