What five books or writers have mattered to you?

Wendell Berry does this work of measuring various influences on his life in an essay entitled ‘The Long-legged house,’ in Recollected Essays. He describes a place he calls the Camp, a cabin built along the Kentucky River by an ancestor which he then repaired and rebuilt and used for  himself during his life. He writes about what the Camp has meant to him in the context of that place – the river, the woods, the animals. He is particular about many things.

Wendell Berry has attempted to recollect the material of his life in this, and in other writing he has done, and to make some sense out of it. And having done it very well and with thoughts that then resonated in my own mind, Mr. Berry goes to the top of my list of writers. And the links of the chain also work their way back as Mr. Berry also writes of reading Thoreau and other writers that have been important to him, as well.

I have a good collection of books that I have read by Mr. Berry over the years. It would take more time  than I intend to take here to try to understand how his words have shaped my life. But I have no doubt that they have considerably done so, as I find that I repeatedly go back to my bookshelf and read Mr. Berry’s words again, often finding them still potent.

The other book that has had a profound influence in shaping the course of my life is the Bible. I am no fundamentalist in how I interpret the Bible today, but many of its words form a foundation for who I have become. The Bible is a collection of writings, of course, and I have read or heard parts of it over and over again – most often during the time in my life when I was most impressionable.

Lines still come to mind years later: “Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against Thee.” I think that it is in words written down - the ideas that are distilled in ways that then lodge within our memory - that we are formed. We are not merely the dust of the earth.  I am a picker and a chooser with the Bible, to be sure. And over the years, I have returned to the scriptures to reinforce some words and not others. But many words remain a part of me whether or I want them to or not. And it’s not just some of the revealed truths that I still acknowledge, but characters and stories that have instructed me. In the beginning was the Word, says John.

With my first two choices, I think it becomes clear that my original question is not one I will actually answer very completely. I never assumed that I would be able to. Maybe I will manage to illuminate the question. If we give ourselves time, I do believe that we can learn some things from our words and experience. And if we can be somewhat thoughtful and articulate, we can learn from each other.

Books and writing – both in general and in particular- have mattered much to me in my living. I cannot easily tease out precisely where a mark has been made, but I have to recognize that my mind is a kind of village of the words of other writers.

But to dash off a somewhat completed list: there is a science fiction novel called ‘The Dispossessed’ by Ursula Leguin that I first read while sitting in a library for several days in Frisco, Colorado as a friend and I waited for our ride after backpacking in the Gore Range. I later bought myself a copy and underlined passages throughout. The descriptions of alternate ways of structuring society - of ways people might choose to organize themselves to live freely and yet still share with each other - became solid concepts to hold onto in my mind. I reread the book again recently and was pleased to discover that I remembered the characters and I still appreciated the dilemmas they faced and saw again the vision that still stirred my imagination.

A lot of science fiction that I mostly read in my youth – particularly the books that focused on human culture in some way – surely had some influence on me. I remember Isaac Asimov, and especially his sweeping Foundation trilogy. The details in the first book in that series had less punch upon partial rereading, but the overall sweep still interested me. They were perhaps the right books at the right time. I have mostly forgotten many other books in this genre – although I might still recognize a struck chord if I read them again.

C. S. Lewis straddles some of the areas that mattered to me as I was growing up. His science fiction trilogy and his Narnia stories began to open up a tight and mostly closed system of beliefs about God. There was wonder in his conception of faith, although who knows how he would feel about how far from fundamental Christianity his initial push carried me.

I realize that I will say little about many, many books and authors that changed my life in some significant way - if only I could find a way to identify and measure them. Edward Abbey, Ivan Illich, Annie Dillard. A book called ‘The Shantung Compound.’ A good translation of ‘The Brother’s Karamozov.’ I have loved John McPhee’s descriptions of the world. And books explaining quantum physics and evolution and other aspects of the natural world. And books that attempt to explain the human mind and why we think and do the things we do.

This quick recollection of books that matter to me is about these mentioned books and also ones that I’ve forgotten. And what about a number of bad books - books that I never bothered to finish? Even some of those should receive honorable mention in a role call of books and writers that have were important to me – some slightly useful piece of writing, long forgotten, that I happened upon in books I assumed were only a waste of my time.

Here’s a word from William Faulkner: ‘...how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it...’ And yet words become doing – or ‘flesh’ as it was written by King James - when they shape human beings. As it turns out, much of the shaping of what I think has been done by writers. I am, of course, most grateful for the good ones that I have read.

What I don't know

There’s an expression ‘to know’, as in Abraham knew his wife and she bore him a son, such that up until some point in history if I had said that I knew this or that particular woman violence might have ensued. Now we might think that we have moved beyond this kind of linguistic confusion, but we really haven’t.

Every idea that each of us holds is a mixture of faith and empirical reality. When we say we ‘know’ something, we are really saying that we believe something – albeit with the backing of varying degrees of information that we have attempted to empirically verify.

Reality appears to be hard. But every idea we have of reality is soft. Although, once again, some ideas seem softer than others.

My point is this: we can’t avoid religious disputes. Even when we think we are talking about solid things – science, for example - our direct access to empirical information is limited.

It might seem simple to say that we now know that the sun is an enormous nuclear reaction, a ridiculous number of hydrogen atoms too small to be seen individually fusing into slightly bigger helium atoms. Each of these particular atoms is still not visible to the naked eye, but in this process of fusion, stupendous amounts of energy are released - heat, light and other radiation and such. And, we might go on to say that all of this is happening at a location in space an amazing distance away and, of course, that the ball of blazing gas is also speeding along in the universe at an unbelievable rate of speed because of an initial large bang and gravity and such.  And so we go on to blithely speak of a host of other supposedly demonstrable facts mixed in with some imagined ideas and some concepts passed down from people who say that they know.

But if I come up to you and say that it is fine if you want to believe all that, but I believe that the sun is really simply a giant flaming ball of metallic gold that has been lit on fire by celestial beings with powers we can’t comprehend and is pulled across the sky by teams of reindeer too small to be seen by the naked eye - your science wouldn’t have a prayer.

In other words, if you think that if I truly believed my theory of flaming balls that I couldn’t then also come up with an answer to every objection you could raise to my theory, you clearly haven’t been paying attention to reality.

And by reality, I’m talking now primarily about the people in it. We are all, more or less, religious nuts. We throw around expressions like ‘I know you,’ and ‘you don’t know as much as you think,’ as if we are making sense.

People used to say that even a broken clock is right twice a day. But that was before digital. Still, even if only by accident, we can concede that some of us might be right about something.

But here is my point, again: belief and faith must always be considered in human discourse. And talking, that is, trying with words to bring hard reality to bear in our considerations without beating each other up seems to be smarter than the alternative.

But whatever you and I believe, however well we think our ideas are established, in the end each of us will do what we do.

Reality seems to be objective and vast in space and time – though some people will question this - and in all of this, we individual humans are barely visible to the naked eye and are here for a only a limited time, so it seems reasonable to me that each of us would go ahead and act on what we know, however incomplete our empirical knowledge. Some of us will be wrong. What we actually know, however, in any sense, biblical or otherwise, still relies heavily on faith, and for all of our tools and repositories of tested facts, what any of us really ‘know’ is still barely visible to the average individual human eye, so we can only anticipate many more stupid religious arguments.

But arguments about what we believe are still better than the alternative lethal altercations - so long as we can indeed limit ourselves to verbal battles over words and ideas. I think the sun is a flaming ball, and I’ll leave it at that, for now.

I think the changes mean something

I would say that I’m firmly in favor of incremental change. But the world in which we live is not like that.

My dad was born into a world in which shouting was long distance communication. A horse and buggy was fast. Now we’ve ripped through so many changes that it hardly pays to mention them. It’s enough to say that I can talk to an image of your face in an instant even though your body is half-way around the world. I could actually reach out and touch your warm cheek in less than a day, flying at 30,000 ft. All these changes in space and time mean something, I’m quite sure of that. But here I sit, the pace of my own life from birth to now proceeding just as evolution decreed, and I think that my own life is moving along too fast all by itself.

So all I can do is try to make some sense of it. And where I usually start is with what, in all of these changes, is the same. The rest I’ll have to sort out as best I can – a little bit at a time.

But let’s say that some of this stuff means something. Perhaps I could tell you a story.

That’s something people have been doing from the beginning. Computers, the movies, even books – all are ways that we tell others what we have to tell. There’s considerable flash in the way we tell stories today, but it’s still fundamentally the story we crave.

So…

I met a girl. This happened long enough ago that the details don’t much matter. Maybe she was six when my wife and I moved into our house on New Hampshire Street. This girl was one of the neighbor girls. I watched her play and grow up. I talked to and teased her now and then. She moved away.

But my wife and I kept in touch with her parents, so we kept up a little with her and her sister. Surely there is so much more to tell about her life, but here’s just this: just recently she got married. It was too far for us to go – not really the distance, but the time and money. And then we saw the photos on Facebook.

She has gone from being the girl I met to a bride and considerably more. I got to see the photos – so much more than nothing – so much less than being there.

In my grandfather’s day, the girl that you met became the young woman that you saw married - and also so many of the moments in between. Significant aspects of space and time where different then.

I have some thinking to do to make more sense out of this. I met a girl. Today I know more of her than I might. And less.

Let’s do something right

I look at everything in our society twice. The first picture shows what media, industrial farming, big corporations, and on and on, are doing to our culture. And then I look at where people are doing good things and living with respect and satisfaction.

I can try to avoid adding my support to the former, but like they say, whaddya gonna do?

Way back in college days, we talked of the kernel growing in the husk of the old seed, new wine in old wineskins, the resurrection and the life.

A lot of talk has flowed down the river, but people are doing good and doing it well all along the way if you look at what is near at hand. Not solutions for the entire culture, perhaps, but people growing their own food, selling produce in local markets, people making solid things and working together for small progress for ourselves and a few others – that counts for something.

As far as I can tell, it has always been thus. Cottin’s Farmers Market was strong this year. That’s one picture I keep my eyes on. And others like it.

These things close to home are good sources for writing that encourages me, and, I hope, a few others. I’ve abandoned the talk of making everything better. Let’s do some things right – for now.

Life is real. Stories are made up.

I am not trying to recreate reality with my stories so that readers can vicariously relive the experience. Instead I think of much of the writing I do as art. Compared to painting – these stories fall in between representational and abstract works. Impressionistic, perhaps.

I start with observations of real people in real places doing real things. But then I select and shape with words, trying to express what interested me in the experience in the first place, highlighting certain elements, looking for hints about what it might mean.

I could break individual stories down for you – point out where the words describe fairly closely what happened, where I added thoughts and then bits of other experiences later. I should really reveal what I left out, which from the perspective of actual reality is almost everything. As the writer of the story, I know better than anyone how closely I have told what I experienced. Truth is another question entirely.

But to some degree, what happened is lost to me, too. The passing of time and the act of writing plays with my mind and my memories. So a story is really a new experience – one that the writer and the reader are having. The sense that you are looking in on something of life is part of it. A movie or historical novel based on true events is like that, but so are many stories that are imagined solely on the basis of fragments of the experiences of the writer or of others that are then shaped through the writer’s understanding of reality. Imagination can take humans far, but we tend to bring our selves and life as we know it along.

That’s what’s going on in my stories. You might ask what is fact and what is fiction, but don’t let those questions get in the way of wondering if the world is in some way like what I am writing and just what does that mean. Without a time machine, this book is the best way I know how to reveal to you something – whatever it was – that interested me enough to want to share it with you. If our minds connect that would be something.

For the record. Not only did I make up the family and the exchange over plugging parking meters, I believe I never told anyone not to plug the meter on a Saturday, thinking that it was Sunday. I might have done it. I might have, but I’m not sure. Does it matter very much?

I really drink egg creams at Aimee’s all the time. I could give you a thousand factual words about egg creams with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back. Or I could buy you one. Words aren’t everything.

Art books: In the eye of the beholder

I consider myself a street writer. With the modern technology of self-publishing, all I ask is that you to put about $4 in my guitar case – that is, you pay for the printing costs and a few incidentals so that I neither make money nor lose money while I get to do what I want to do – which is write. My time and creativity I’m happy to give away to anyone who will listen.

If I really wanted to get wider exposure and a paycheck to begin to cover my time, I would need an established publisher. But even talented musicians who go on tour and have their albums widely distributed often need real jobs or they finally go back to the real world when they ‘grow up.’ And for many published writers, they usually require day jobs in academia or something. The J. K. Rowlings and the Rolling Stones are the rare exceptions, although there are ways that some writers do make an ordinary living just writing. Think volume.

Doing the math, if I could sell my books at a reasonable market value, I might net about $10 each. That would mean I’d have to sell a book an hour for than 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year just to make about half the median income in the United States. And I’d better be married to get health insurance. As a writer moves into the publishing world, publishers and booksellers need to make their living, too, and the writer’s royalty per book drops drastically. Of course, I could sell a million books a year. Some do.

So as it goes financially, street writers basically work for nothing – tips. And even the bulk of writers work primarily for supplemental income – pin money.

So it is with great satisfaction that I spend my time and creativity writing and not selling books. Writing is a primary way that I express appreciation for what matters to me in life. It is work that I do with pleasure for no pay and, yes, it helps when readers pay most of the dollar costs. But since I can print one at a time, there’s no real financial risk. And it is also important to mention that self-publishing makes it possible for some few people to be able read my writing  –  for me to be read - at all. And the only real hitch is that my reach as a street writer is so limited. I would indeed love to have lots of people a year reading what I have to say. It would indicate to some degree that what I express is worth something to someone else.

But for now I’m a street writer. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t already think that it was worth doing for myself.

And I still keep looking for ways to make my writing available to people who might be interested.  I’m pretty sure some people will enjoy reading some of the stories in my next book titled, ‘Little Bird: Small tales and poetry.’ So if you don’t want to stand in a long line outside my house waiting for midnight to roll around when that book will be released to the public with unimagined fanfare, I suggest you pre-order. I’m considering asking $7 bucks. I’ve added some extra costs, especially with the cover, and I’ve been drinking more egg crèmes lately – expenses, you know.

***

If you really want to add you your ‘Haverkate-Ens’ collection, there’s:

            Sidney Core’s Secret $4 (in stock)

            The Sky is Reflected in the River $4

            Cairns $4 (in stock)

            Bowersock $7

            Kaw River Bridge $15

            Little Bird $7

If you just want to borrow them and read them and look at the pictures, just ask. And remember, there’s a post on my blog every Thursday. But the reality is that however good my writing is, not that many people I know are as interested in reading what I want to write about as they are in reading the work of other writers. I have books on my shelf that I would recommend to you before recommending my own. But on any given day, something I wrote might mean something to you.

Sidney Core’s Secret is the one book at this point that I would like to see legitimately published, but no nibbles. You should see the so-so stuff in kid’s lit that has gotten published. Still, I haven’t tried very hard.

One of my biggest real difficulties as a writer is a lack of criticism. Because you know me, it’s hard for you to talk objectively about my writing without feeling like you are directing criticism at me. And, being human, it’s also tricky for me to separate out those things. That’s one reason published writers have gone through places like the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. It takes a village to raise a writer (apart from a few solitary geniuses). If you read something of mine and have a useful word to give, I would like to try to go from ‘pretty good’ to ‘better’ in my writing. So far I’m mostly guessing about how good my writing is.

But I’m having a pretty good time working at it.