Fraternal Geotheobiosociopersonal Musings

The other night, up Provo Canyon, at Steve Peck's reading from his The Scholar of Moab, I met George Handley.

This weekend I have read his book, a dense and thoughtful and poetic and troubled and deeply Mormon text that has done what a good book ought to do: awaken thoughts and feelings in a reader.

I'm aware of the ironies involved when a reader responds positively to a deeply Mormon book while drinking a bottle of Squatters' hoppy IPA (last night) or while drinking an invigorating cup of Cafe Ibis' Guatemalan Organic Shade Grown coffee (this morning). But I'm going to enjoy the barrel-aged irony and note that it has hints of sego lily and sage, notes of trout, and an aftertaste of youth.

Handley writes about flyfishing the Provo, about his family's history in the region, about Mormon history and theology, about taxing adventures in canyons and mountains, about his marriage and children, about his brother's suicide and his own continuing complex responses to that tragedy, about depression and exhilaration, about relationships between humans and the environment, about living liminally between heaven and earth, body and spirit, about the stories we tell and about how they determine how we live.

I might quote any number of memorable sentences, retell any number of memorable stories. But I'm going to quote this passage to stand for the rest:

"No one is responsible for my imagination except me, and while institutions are often guilty of historical distortion and intentional error, and while historical inquiry is always valuable, I can only blame myself for failing to understand that I am always in time's flow and that historical memory is always rhetorical. I don't need fewer myths, only better ones, spawned under the conditions fate has allotted me. The only potent thing is imagination" (84).

It's true, I think, that we're responsible for our own imagination and true that we need better myths.

Handley's book is full of better myths and I'm better now for having woven them into my own stories. As a result, however, Handley has become responsible for my own imagination. And the churches and political institutions around us in Utah Valley, especially as we are young and without alternate stories, are also responsible for our imaginations. And then (this is eternally circular), I'm responsible again for my own. And for Handley's.

I'll add a footnote to the story he tells of the battle between Utes and Mormons that ended with Utes taking temporary refuge up Rock Canyon, under the guns of snipers on canyon walls. An Indian woman climbed one wall and then jumped to her death (a suicide that, in this book, echoes that of Handley's brother). The peak above where she jumped was subsequently named Squaw Peak.

"Squaw" has a whole set of hateful meanings. In the 1970's there were even (linguistically questionable) claims that the word meant vagina and was the ultimate insult. Several states have since renamed locations bearing that name.

That our peak still bears this name indicates that we continue to need new myths.

A couple of final thoughts.

I understand what it means for Handley to be obsessed with the early and tragic death of his brother. I am still, twenty years later, thinking and writing and dreaming and agonizing and wishing and wondering about the death of my own brother, at the age of 40, of AIDS.

I won't tell any story, ever again, without flavoring from that story.

I gave up my job at BYU, one year after Handley arrived there, in part because of solidarity with John. To work for an institution that hates him and his kind felt like treason—fraternal treason.

the Provo River painting in the UVU library

My other thought is tied to the previous post about Terrance Malick's film The Tree of Life. Some of the most powerful moments of the film stem from the loss of a son and the cosmic questions that arise. As I watched the images from volcanoes and nebulae and waterfalls and all the rest, listening to the characters wrestling with god, questioning god, haranguing god, and as I read Handley's own heartfelt responses to tragedy in the context of religious belief, I had the sense that god is what we sink to or rise to when there's no other place to go. God is our metaphor (and yes, we believe profoundly in our metaphors) for what is groundless yet has meaning, for what is inexplicable but comforting, for what is achingly beautiful and thus profoundly challenging. "Every angel is terrible," Rilke's Duino Elegy tells us. And yet we need them, I need them, as metaphors, as better myths.

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Religion

Michael has commented this morning and repeatedly in past days about religious goings-on in the book. So have I. It helps to have this conversation as we unravel the threads of this text.


There will be religious readers who, mistakenly, find the religious references in this new text inspiring.


I too find them inspiring, as I tried to show in the previous post. I hope that response is not mistaken.


What saves this and many other of Peter's texts for me is that he's aesthetically religious, not spiritually religious. He finds his meaning in consciously constructed forms. Thus the importance of the priest's claim just cited by Michael that he too is an actor.


I've tried to think this through in an essay that begins as follows:

Recreating The Self: Stations of the Cross in Peter Handke’s The Left-Handed Woman

Griffen, Austria

Surrounded by a high, crumbling, brick-and-wood wall, the graveyard is on the west side of the former monastery. With little trouble we locate Maria Handke's welltended grave, damp today from the rain. Over the church's massive front door hangs a statue of Mary, her foot balanced delicately on the neck of a fine green dragon. We swing open the worm-eaten door and enter a working church housed in a partial ruin. Oak pews shine darkly with woodwax and use. Altar rugs cover platforms of unpainted pine. The scent of mildew. Pyramidal piles of fine plaster dust gather at the base of disintegrating walls.

Inside the entrance, German and Slovenian signs give directions to the confessional. German-language pamphlets are stacked on a table to the left and a table to the right displays similar pamphlets in Slovenian. Naive paintings of the fourteen stations of the cross have Slovenian captions: "1. Statio Jesus je k'smerti obsojen."

Fat little red prayer books (Gotteslob). Red, gold, and purple bookmarks dangle from each volume. Leafing through one I find the stations of the cross. The book declares itself "Eigentum der Kirche" (Property of the Church). I decide that is a misnomer and slip the book into my pocket (actually, Zarko's pocket; he has loaned me a good wool jacket for the trip). We leave the church and step out again into the dripping rain.

Abbott and Radakovic, Ponavljanje (Belgrade, 1994)

The mystical is the mind's beginning and at the same time hinders its further development. Peter Handke (Geschichte des Bleistifts)

Everyone experiences the biblical stories, but without the events; everyone travels at some time to Emmaus, but nothing approaches one except -- powerful emptiness Peter Handke (Phantisien der Wiederholung)

I seek order in the right form. As opposed, perhaps, to a religious or faithful person I must find a new form in each of my works.

Peter Handke (Interview with Löffler)

While the protagonist of Peter Handke's The Left-Handed Woman rests with her son during a hike up a low mountain near their home, she tells him that years ago she saw some paintings by an American: "’There were fourteen of them. They were supposed to be the Stations of the Cross -- you know, Jesus sweating blood on the Mount of Olives, being scourged, and so on. But these paintings were only black-and-white shapes -- a white background and criss-crossing black stripes. The next-to last station -- where Jesus is taken down from the cross -- was almost all black, and the last one, where Jesus is laid in the tomb, was all white. And now the strange part of it: I passed slowly in front of the pictures, and when I stopped to look at the last one, the one that was all white, I suddenly saw a wavering afterimage of the almost black one’" (138). Although the woman's description of the paintings is inexact in several respects (most notably in that all of the stripes or "zips" are vertical in the actual series), she clearly means Barnett Newman's "Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani," now in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. (In April of 1966, while Handke was in Princeton, New Jersey for the meeting of the Gruppe 47, Newman's series of fourteen paintings was being exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.) The afterimage the woman experiences while viewing the last two paintings in this series is given an immediate counterpart in Handke's story when, after having taken a photo of his mother on the mountain with treetops and the sky behind her, the boy sits in the bathtub with her and says: "'I still see the trees on the mountain'" (139).

These parallel, contiguous descriptions of image and afterimage link events of the story with the stations of the cross. In this context, the story of Marianne's decision to leave her husband Bruno and of her subsequent attempts to construct a new self takes on the shape and color of the Christian Via Dolorosa. Various narrative structures support this identification, as do several specific references linking Marianne and Jesus Christ.

Most strikingly, a fourteen-part structure underlies the entire story. . . . references to day's end and beginning divide the narrative into fourteen distinct days (other, intermediate days pass with no mention).  

Repeating this structure, the narrator's "translation" of "The Lefthanded Woman" . . . which appears in the narrative immediately preceding the hike up the mountain and which reads like an oblique description of Marianne's life, has fourteen clearly distinguishable parts, several of which correspond to events in the story.

............ the rest of the essay here:

http://works.bepress.com/scott_abbott/54/

Making Things: The Pleasures of Poesis

My friend Frank McEntire is exhibiting a group of works called "reli-QUERY" in the Nox Contemporary Gallery in Salt Lake.


In a book published in conjunction with the one-man show, Frank has included an essay of mine called "The Other Side of the Limit. The book is titled "The Destructible Object and Other Essays: The Sculptural Work of Frank McEntire." It includes six essays and a lot of photos of Frank's work.


Below is the first page of my essay. To the right is a flagstone walk I laid on the north side of our house a couple of weeks ago.


Both the walkway and the essay are things I have made. Both constructions required concentration and some skill and considerable effort. Both have a form that wouldn't have existed without me. Both make me feel like I have done something, made something.

Art from the Americas: Boston Museum of Fine Arts

The figurine, maybe 6 inches tall, is of a naked standing man. His clenched hands are raised, his head turned slightly to the side and to the back. Two odd sharp points stick out from his chest.

The note below the little man reads as follows:

RITUAL TORTURE FIGURINE

Guatemala AD 600-750

"The ritualized torture of war captives was part of a complex set of beliefs about the importance of sacrifice in matters both earthly and cosmic. This figurine's raised arms, clenched hands, and bared teeth all convey his scream of pain. The figurine is also a whistle; the blow hole is his anus."

We continue to tour the Art of the Americas wing. There are multiple elaborate rooms recreated from mansions of the wealthiest Bostonians. And then portraits of the wealthiest and most powerful people.

The museum, despite its other wonders, for whatever complex personal psychological reasons, becomes a house of horrors for me today.

I loathe the anthropologist's theoretical distance ("a complex set of beliefs"), coupled with the art historian's understanding of how the fine art object "conveys" pain. I loathe the worship of things collected by people who took advantage of economic conditions before, during, and after the American revolution.

Interdisciplinary Bauhaus

This summer I'm teaching (with Doran Sanft) an Integrated-Studies course on the Weimar Republic, that ultimately failed but fascinating German experiment between the World Wars. When we read Walter Gropius' "Program of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar" (1919), I thought that the following lines (along with the image of Breuer's famous chair) were an instructive interdisciplinary manifesto:

"Today the arts exist in isolation, from which they can be rescued only through the conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen. Architects, painters, and sculptors must recognize anew and learn to grasp the composite character of a building both as an entity and in its separate parts. . . . The Bauhaus strives to bring together all creative effort into one whole, to reunify all the disciplines of practical art -- sculpture, painting, handicrafts, and the crafts -- as inseparable components of a new architecture. The ultimate, if distant, aim of the Bauhaus is the unified work of art -- the great structure -- in which there is no distinction between monumental and decorative art."