[a chapter from ‘Whaterever It Takes’
I asked Maya about a series of words, printed in green, at the edge of a painting on her desk: ‘Lowering, Towering, Flowering.’ Printed in formal Roman letters, as if chiseled there in stone, they reminded me of those renaissance paintings of naked zaftig women and muscular men trimmed with a few words such as ‘Obedience to God,’ laid out on the periphery to keep the religious authorities at bay.
Maya told me that this was a reminder to her—she often became engrossed in some subject within the frame and forgot her original purpose. She painted them over when she had finished. “I think I started that habit when I was quite young. I got the idea from Mom.”
I had often seen odd words at the edge of Julia’s manuscripts and never asked about them. I pursued it with Maya. “Why those words?”.
“They rhyme. They stick together in the mind that way. It was her rule to look for the poetry in things. Not that it should necessarily be a good poem or a bad one, but to see how things connected to one another, so that they could be taken one by one and not overwhelm me. She used that same rule for all kinds of things. I remember one verse, one of my favorites, that she made up on the spot when we complained too loudly about missing the beach.”
She recited it then, with a little dramatic flare:
“It was a graysome day
With rain too bored to fall;
Fettered in fog amidst the trees,
And on windows, blistered small.
The road was dark with wet,
No puddles shone at all,
And in the grass were diamonds
Where sun collected small
Spiders stepped out carefully
Squirrels stayed home to bawl
And when the worms
came out to breathe
The robins bit them small.
“When we were young, this became our motto. Elena would say, whenever she was frustrated by something she could not control, ‘But where’s the poetry in that!’ She even said it once when we all had the flu and Mom was sick and vomited on the floor and it made a good mess but it made us all laugh anyway because it was her and not us. Except for Mom, of course. Mom didn’t think it was very funny at the time. But we still say it today. When things don’t go right. When the mundane becomes petty. ’Where’s the poetry in that!’”
The thing of it is, that Julia likes to talk.
One evening, she just said it, out of the blue, after I had been hammering a little bit on her narrative about Donovan. In her usual way with some double entendre clearly present.
“But where’s the poetry in that? He is not a stupid man. Uneducated, simple in his wants, but very perceptive and bright. He has, so far at least, relied too much on his native abilities and not enough on what he had learned … But I can’t give him any ideas. He has to have the ideas on his own. And he happens to live around a lot of people who exist on the received wisdom of the Bible without ever giving it a deeper thought. Being bright in such a world is difficult. It can get you killed! Received wisdom is tough on those who do not believe. And you know that he does not. He has seen the sham of it. This is not real Christianity that he faces. This is dogma.”
She did not explain what she knew I already understood, but much of it was in the fabric of the book and I was not about to argue with her sense of a man that she knew far better than I ever could.
I was about to go when she said, “You know, it would be far easier if he could be caught up in the Industrial Revolution. He would fight that. He would be a Luddite! He would see immediately how that—the machine monsters in the factories—how they would be stealing his humanity as much as plowing the fields for Rolf ever did. And he has no problems with the intrusion of logic. Logic was never a part of his upbringing. His narrative is his own. He has the Bible, and John Donne, and Chaucer, and Shakespeare. He understands the narrative.”
I could hear then that she was onto a jag. Her words came faster.
“Logic can be a wonderful tool—much like its cousin, math. A kind of shorthand. But there’s no poetry in it. All the subtlety, nuance and color of language, reduced to numbers. A kind of communication, but only of a very limited nature. Good for counting the herd, or the beans. Einstein said that logic might get you from A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere…Storytelling is the making of analogies. Cause and effect…The slaves to logic would even have it be a philosophy. The slaves of logic want it to define morality, when it can do no such thing. Logic cannot define truth or beauty, though it might help us in our mortal re-creation of it…They frequently confuse logic and reason. But I think that may be intentional. Reason is by analogy. Logic is addition and subtraction. Those who think otherwise—and they are the majority today, to be sure, because it is the easier path for thinking that is laid down in the public schools by teachers who don’t want the bother of analogies—to much time taken—inefficient—Those are the sorts of people that you must live with now, and the ones my daughters must live with, and my grandchildren. The mind that evolved over the millennia within our brains was the result of analogy, not math. A brain reduced to math is a poor machine at best. Better to have beads on a string. Logic might lead us, through reasoning, to find a right or a wrong, but an axe is not a moral code. And the ones who believe it is, have no sense of humor about it. They sense the danger. One joke they play is to say they don’t accept ‘analogy.’ They arbitrarily reject analogy as false reasoning because it is not precisely and always the same—as if their precious logic has any physical appearance in real life, or in the lives of the ten thousand generations that came before. And then, they always offer their basic theorem: if ‘a’ equals ‘b’ and ‘c’ equals ‘b’ then ‘a’ equals ‘c’, which, not coincidently, is an analogy, crude as it is. But truth and beauty, beauty and truth, they can not be reached by the false deductions of addition and subtraction. Sherlock Holmes will forever be looking for his cocaine in that particular hay stack.”
“You are mixing your metaphors. He might be looking for a needle if he was taking heroin.”
“I am tired.”
“Good night.”