How Literature Saved My Life (9 page)

JÖRG FRIEDRICH:
“The Allies’ bombing transportation offensive of the 1944 pre-invasion weeks took the lives of twelve thousand French and Belgian citizens, nearly twice as many as Bomber Command killed within the German Reich in 1942. On the night of April 9, 239 Halifaxes, Lancasters, Stirlings, and Mosquitoes destroyed 2,124 freight cars in Lille, as well as the Cité des Cheminots, a railroad workers’ settlement with friendly, lightweight residential homes. Four hundred fifty-six people died, mostly railroaders. The survivors, who thought they were facing their final hours from the force of the attack, wandered among the bomb craters, shouting, ‘Bastards, bastards.’ ”

DOUGLAS BOND (PSYCHIATRIC ADVISER TO THE U.S. ARMY AIR FORCE IN BRITAIN DURING WWII):
“Unbridled expression of aggression forms one of the greatest satisfactions in combat and becomes, therefore, one of the strongest motivations. A conspiracy of silence seems to have developed around these gratifications, although they are common knowledge to all those who have taken part in combat. There has been a pretense that battle consists only of tragedy and hardship. Unfortunately, however, such is not the case. Fighter pilots expressing frank pleasure following a heavy killing is shocking to outsiders.”

HEMINGWAY:
“Hürtgen Forest was a place where it was extremely difficult for a man to stay alive, even if all he
did was be there. And we were attacking all the time and every day.”

FUSSELL:
“Second World War technology made it possible to be killed in virtual silence, at least so it appeared.”

Not a Quaker per se but sympathetic to Quaker pacifism, Nicholson Baker wanted to give himself the toughest possible case to make. In
Human Smoke
, he takes hundreds of passages from innumerable sources and positions them in such a way that an argument clearly emerges. War, even WWII, is never justified. All deaths are human smoke.

When the war was winding down and the draft was over, I registered as a conscientious objector
.

W
HENEVER
U.S.
SOLDIERS
in Vietnam saw the horror show revealed with particular vividness, they’d often say, flatly and with no emphasis whatsoever, “There it is.” Michael Herr’s
Dispatches:
“ ‘There it is,’ the grunts said, sitting by a road with some infantry when a deuce-and-a-half rattled past with four dead in the back.” Gustav Hasford’s
The Short-Timers:
“Sooner or later the squad will surrender to the black design of the jungle. We live by the law of the jungle, which is that more Marines go in than come out. There it is.”

The movie version of
No Country for Old Men
, ostensibly a thriller, gets at something profound—namely, in the absence of God the Father, all bets are off. Life makes no sense. How do I function when life has been drained of meaning?

I
N STANDARD ERASURE POETRY
, the words of the source text get whited out or obscured with a dark color, but the pages in Jonathan Safran Foer’s
Tree of Codes
have literally gone under the knife, rectangular sections physically excised using a die-cut technique that resembles X-Acto artistry. The result: chinked, rectangular cutouts around which remaining text floats, reminding me of the shape of floor plans (albeit for buildings made of nothing). The cutouts produce windows and doorways to portions of up to ten successive pages of text at a time. Words and phrases get revealed, repeated, then covered up. Language waves at me through these X-Actoed text windows, disrupting the surface texture of the page. The composition not only interrupts normal eye movements but in effect forces me to read the book back to front at the same time I’m reading it front to back.

Lifting the pages up one by one, I discover a lyrical seminarrative delivered by a single narrator, characters
(a mother and father), a single plot point (the father’s death), and a shift in setting (the movement from an Eden-like garden to an urban frontier). Futzing with Bruno Schulz’s book
The Street of Crocodiles
, Foer gets intimate with the Polish writer; Foer is writing a book with, through, and for Schulz by unwriting the original. There’s much debate about the relevance of books to our byte-obsessed culture, but I’ve yet to come across any assemblage of text, hyperlinks, images, and sidebar ads that presents a more chaotic and multidimensional reading experience than this book.

“I felt light,” says the narrator midway through
Tree of Codes
. At this point I think, too, of the book itself, which, composed of half-empty pages, feels to the touch too light. When I pick up the doctored book-object, it weighs less than the eye says it should. So, too, when I separate the delicate pages one by one and examine not just the words written on each page but also the space through and
past
these pieces of paper, I have the uncanny experience of looking
through
empty picture frames.

Turning pages, my hand (accustomed to a physical understanding of the page) literally measures subtracted weight. This tactile emptiness lies at the heart of the book’s attempt to plumb antispaces—landscapes unrecoverable at the levels of text, paper, geography, and memory—which are excruciating to Foer, whose oeuvre is simultaneously an attempt to recover, through art, the dead bodies of the Holocaust (his mother’s parents were
survivors) and a demonstration that such an attempt is not only impossible but also wrong (“to write a poem after Auschwitz,” etc.). The book is both hospital and crypt: the thousands of tiny rectangular spaces are both beds and graves.

No one from my immediate or extended family died in the Holocaust, and yet in a way that’s difficult to explain, it was the defining event of my childhood …

B
UILT TO
S
PILL
’
S
“Randy Described Eternity” is a launching pad for the empty space between your body holding your guts (built to spill onto the pavement) and the vast cavern of forever-land eternity. Doug Martsch manipulates the thin, hollow body inside his electric guitar toward both extinction and monument, marking our inability to hold the dual concepts completely in mind. This isn’t thrill-seeking exploration or death taunt. It’s a slow plod toward guitar inexpressible. No benedictions or apologies, just a few shafts (I can always hope) of illumination. Electric guitar solos simultaneously battle against postmodernity and worship it—feedback jamming the alternating currents into sound sculptures of pain and ecstasy. White-boy field hollers: slow it down, add pedal steel guitar, and you have a country song. Keep
the guitar/drums setup, add a light show, and you have the rock existential thing. Martsch doesn’t really close in on death, but hey, his guitar’s alive.

P
HILLIP, WHOSE
MFA thesis I’d just directed, died in a freak accident. He was walking his dog, lightning struck a tree, and a heavy branch hit his head. At the funeral, many of his classmates and teachers told standard stories: funny, sad, vivid, delicately off-color. I praised him fulsomely, thereby casting a warm glow back upon my own head. Another professor, trying to say something original, criticized his fledgling work. I upbraided her for her obtuseness, but I felt bad about badgering her and made it worse by harrumphing, “Words are famously difficult to get right. That’s why being a writer is so interesting.” Worse still by adding, “Who among us doesn’t get the words constantly wrong?” She said she would write Phillip’s widow an explanatory and exculpatory note, but it came out wrong, too, I promise. Because language never fails to fail us, never doesn’t defeat us, is bottomlessly … —But here I am, trying to paper over the gaps with dried-up glue.

W
ITHOUT RELIGION
, no one knows what to say about death—our own or others’—nor does anyone know after someone’s death how to talk about (think about) the rest of our lives, so we invent diversions.

In Bruges
is a film about two English hit men who are sent to the medieval Belgian town of Bruges, where they have to while away the days, knowing they’re next. Given death’s imminence, is any particular activity of any greater significance than any other activity? Good question.

Lance Olsen’s novel
Calendar of Regrets
is concerned with tourists, travelers, cafés, voyeurism, the lure and illusion of art, what happens when we die: “Movement is a mode of writing. Writing is a mode of movement.” Every major character moves from existence to (literal or figurative) nonexistence. “I’ve been dreading the disengagement one experiences upon arriving home. You end up maintaining a fever-distance between where you are and where you’ve been. As if you’re recovering from some sort of illness.”

Vladimir Posner says that when a Russian is asked how he’s feeling, he tends to go on and on about how he’s actually feeling, whereas when an American is asked the same question, he invariably answers, “Fine.” We’re doing fine, making progress, moving ahead, living the dream, it’s all good …

Mesmerized—at times unnerved—by my ninety-four-year-old father’s nearly superhuman vitality, I undertook an investigation of our universal physical condition. The result was
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead
, which tries to look without blinking at the fact that each of us is just an animal walking the earth for a brief time, a bare body housed in a mortal cage. Some people might find this perspective demoralizing, but I don’t, truly. Honesty is the best policy. The only way out is deeper in. A candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating. I now see life entirely through that book’s Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects, and I find I can’t (after finishing the book, I couldn’t do anything for several months).

Sarah Manguso’s
The Guardians
goes to hell and back, just barely back, and ends with a tiny glimmer of uptick—not too much but not too little, either. It’s the only affirmation that anyone can offer:
astonishingly, we’re here
. The book majors in exposed nerve endings. Without which, sorry, I can’t read anything. Manguso is mourning both her friend Harris, who on p. 1 commits suicide, and herself (she’s “dead” now, too). “It doesn’t mean shit,” an Italian security guard tells her Israeli friend about his passport, which is crucial, since Manguso is always asking what, if anything, means shit? Nothing does or, rather, everything is shit. How then to put one foot in front of the other? Well, let us investigate that. Life and death are in direct tension (as are Manguso’s vow not
to make anything up and her acknowledgment that, of course, she will—constantly). I did something I do when I genuinely love a book: start covering my mouth when I read. This is very pure and elemental; I want nothing coming between me and the page.

In Denis Johnson’s
The Name of the World
, Michael Reed, whose wife and daughter have recently died in a car accident, wants, as if he were Adam in Eden (or Adam in
Leaving the Atocha Station
), to name the world in a pre-fallen world, but he realizes that the world isn’t like that, was never like that, so he becomes a war correspondent in order to have running confirmation that the world is as terrible as he thought. Wherever he goes, he’s walking across a graveyard. So are you. So am I.

I
N HIS EULOGY
for Christina-Taylor Green, one of the victims of the Tucson shooting spree, Obama said, “If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today.” However, for many people in the post-transcendent twenty-first century, death is not a passageway to eternity but a brute biological fact. We’re done. It’s over. All the gods have gone to sleep or are simply moribund. We’re a bag of bones. All the myths
are empty. The only bravery consists of diving into the wreck, dancing/grieving in the abyss.

As baby boomers enter their/our senescence, we’re all looking for companionship in the dark. Michael Billington, reviewing Simon Gray’s
Close of Play
in
The Guardian
, wrote, “To embody death convincingly on the stage is one of the hardest things for a dramatist to do. Mr. Gray has here managed it in a way that, paradoxically, makes life itself that much more bearable.”

Greg Bottoms: “When things go wrong, when Nietzsche’s ‘breath of empty space’ moves over your skin, reminds you that you are but a blip in the existence of the world, destined from birth to vanish with all the things and people you love, to mulch the land with no more magic than the rotting carcass of a bird, it’s nice to imagine—” Imagine what, exactly?

Some people might find it anathema to even consider articulating an answer to this question, but if, as Rembrandt said, “Painting is philosophy,” then certainly writing is philosophy as well. Isn’t everyone’s project, on some level, to offer tentative theses regarding what—if anything—we’re doing here? Against death, in other words, what solace, what consolation, what bulwark? Tolstoy: “The meaning of life is life”—for which much thanks. Ice-T’s answer: “A human being is just another animal in the big jungle. Life is really short and you’re going to die. We’re here to stick our heads above the
water for just a minute, look around, and go back under.” Burt Reynolds: “First, it’s ‘Who’s Burt Reynolds?’ Then it’s ‘Get me Burt Reynolds.’ Then ‘Get me a Burt Reynolds type.’ Then ‘Get me a young Burt Reynolds.’ And then it’s ‘Who’s Burt Reynolds?’ ” Beckett’s mantra: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Okay, you’re going to go on, I hope and assume. Congratulations. Why, though? What carries you through the day, not to mention the night? Beckett’s own answer: he liked to read Dante, watch soccer, and fart.

As a nine-year-old, I would awake and spend the entire night sitting cross-legged on the landing of the stairs to my basement bedroom, unable to fathom that one day I’d cease to be. I remember being mesmerized by a neighbor’s tattoo of a death’s-head, underneath which were the words “As I am, you shall someday be.” (Now, do I yearn for this state, the peace that passeth all understanding? What if death is my Santa Claus?) Cormac McCarthy: “Death is the major issue in the world. For you, for me, for all of us. It just is. To not be able to talk about it is very odd.” I’m trying to do a very un-American thing here: talk about it. Why? Pynchon: “When we speak of ‘seriousness,’ ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death, how we act in its presence, for example, or how we handle it when it isn’t so immediate.” DFW: “You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just
a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of a writer’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.” The only books I truly love do exactly this—