The Lecture

I saw Orson Scott Card yesterday. I felt like a sinner, not having read anything of his, but I've decided I like him. He's next. Here's some stuff I got from him.

“Every story is the product of an individual mind, from someone unique and ultimately unknowable.” Then he was talking about how you can live with someone intimately for years and still not know them because they’ll still surprise you, which is why God is the only one Who can judge, He is the only one Who sees people’s hearts, knows them better than the heart-stewards themselves. This is true. And it filled me with the icy dread of utter isolation. It reminded me of the following passage, which has always depressed me in its somber, unflinching reality:

“‘Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams…’
“He was silent for a while.
“‘…No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone….’” (Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 24)

But the point Card was making was about stories: you can read a well-crafted story and come out of it knowing the characters better than anyone you’ve ever met, even better than you know yourself.

“Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.” (C. S. Lewis, from An Experiment in Criticism)

That is why we need to read: “…Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.” (ibid.)

It gets us out of ourselves and molds us into partakers of human nature. “How much larger our life would be if we could become smaller in it…we would begin to be interested in others: we would break out of this tiny…theatre in which our own little plot is always being played, and we would find ourselves under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers” (G. K. Chersterton).

In written fiction, “the reader is a collaborator with the author. You let the author guide your experience of the world with authority…the successful writer teaches and moves readers. The writing becomes a part of your life” (rough approximation of Card quote). You let someone else into your mind and heart and recreate there their own world. That’s exhilarating as well as a heavy responsibility to be the vigilant gatekeeper of your own mind and soul.

When the shaggy, skeptical kid was asking his questions (rather, I felt, seeking a public audience to voice his own budding estimations of life) and saying how we don’t know anything, Card responded at one point with: “It’s easy to think you have an answer when everyone around you agrees with you, but if you haven’t asked the question, you don’t have an answer and therefore have nothing to say. You are only an echo.” I liked that. But then he went on about…something to the effect of…what we know now will be different when we know more (?). Whatever it was, it made me think of Blake’s “There Is No Natural Religion [b]”: “II. Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that it shall be when we know more.” Dangit. I wish I could remember exactly what he said. Maybe I was just on a high that I was recognizing so many other writers in Card and I was frantically scribbling down all the echoes I heard.

He’s also Shakespeare (apart from the fact that he studied theatre and it shows…so many things added up to create a high initial impression of this guy) in that he counseled aspiring “creative career-people” to “know everything about everything.”
“The book-learning that Shakespeare displays here and there is far less impressive, in the long run, than his fund of general information. His frame of reference is so far-ranging, and he is so concretely versed in the tricks of so many trades, that lawyers have written to prove he was trained in the law, sailors about his expert seamanship, naturalists upon his botanizing, and so on through the professions. If this be paradox, it is resolved by Fielding’s remark that Shakespeare was ‘learned in human nature.’ So far as education has genuine meaning, he must be viewed as a genuinely educated man” (The Riverside Shakespeare, General Introduction, II. The Biographical Record).

Also Shakespeare in the fact that, apparently, he has worked at “artfully rendering established material” in some of his work (Joseph Smith story and Book of Mormon renderings), which is all Shakespeare ever did.

Card also talked about the “edgy and dangerous” authors being the tradition these days, those who attack the “culture of 1955.” I had this thought when reading the general introduction to the English Romantic period in Norton: “Seeking a stable foundation on which social institutions might be constructed, eighteenth-century British philosophers had devoted much energy to demonstrating that human nature must be everywhere the same, because it everywhere derived from individuals’ shared sensory experience of an external world that could be objectively represented. As the century went on, however, philosophers began emphasizing—and poets began developing a new language for—individual variations in perception and the capacity the receptive consciousness has to filter and to re-create reality. This was the shift Wordsworth registered when in the Preface he located the source of a poem not in outer nature but in the psychology of the individual poet, and specified that the essential materials of a poem were not the external people and events it represented but the inner feelings of the author, or external objects only after these have been transformed by the author’s feelings. Wordsworth in 1802 described all good poetry as, at the moment of composition, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Other Romantic theories concurred by referring to the mind, emotions, and imagination of the poet for the origin, content, and defining attributes of a poem. Using a metaphor that parallels Wordsworth’s “overflow,” and that Wordsworth would revive in a late poem, Mary Robinson and Coleridge identified some of their key poems of the 1790s as “effusions”—ardent outpourings of feeling. Coleridge subsequently drew on German precedents and introduced into English criticism an account of the organic form of literary works; in this account the work is conceptualized as a self-originating and self-organizing process, parallel to the growth of a plant, that begins with a seedlike idea in the poet’s imagination, grows by assimilating both the poet’s feelings and the materials of sensory experience, and evolves into an organic whole in which the parts are integrally related to each other and the whole.”

I couldn’t believe my internal definition of poetry had to have a whole literary period dedicated to forming it. But that makes sense. I live in a post-Romantic world. So, turning to their own minds, poets found fertile ground for creation. But human nature is inherently restless. New ground only stays new for so long. Then people had to get edgy in order to feel anything novel in their writing. Edginess translated into attacking social mores. Now the “rebels” are those who write about and support those values. Interesting.

Writers are to keep company with nonliterary types. “Stories about writers and artists are so boring and cliché.” Ezra Pound. Misogynistic Ivory Towerist. I don’t like him. Writing done just for the artistic community is exclusive and pointless. There was this one lady in the reception who, I swear, was arguing with Card in seeking justification to continue her membership in her writing group. Basically he said that writing groups are pointless and people in them never get anywhere. Your friends can’t help you improve your writing and you can’t learn from their good writing. (I can only take that so far: you can and do learn good writing from great writers, but emphasis on great. I also don’t agree that English is not a good major to prepare you to be a writer. Sure, you learn all these things that might convolute your writing, but you spend your university years in the company of great writers, tuning your ear to what great writing is and developing your own voice. Hard to do in biology or some like field, I would imagine.)

That bit reminded me of Wordsworth. He put forth a couple of revolutionary theories in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads:
“There will also be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction; I have taken as much pains to avoid it as other ordinarily take to produce it; this I have done for the reason already alleged, to bring my language near to the language of men, and further, because the pleasure which I have proposed to myself to impart is of a kind very different from that which is supposed by many persons to be the proper object of poetry.”

He talked about writing in the language of “real men,” “because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly, such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for it by poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art, in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression, in order to furnish food for fickle tastes, and fickle appetites, of their own creation.”

I’m excited to read this guy. He seems to me an amalgamation of many other people I admire and I love his “hit your right between the eyes” boldness…the essays should be fun to read.

Other exciting life news: Mission prep is amazing (Bro. Bott did tell the class to take Viagra on Monday…apparently, since we haven’t all copied the Abraham facsimiles, we need something to get us jumpstarted so we take our scriptures seriously). We went over facsimile 2 on Wednesday, with Kolob and all the other Egyptian names…he conservatively estimated, using verses in Abraham 3 and 4, that we existed about 13,000 years before we came to Earth, in which time we were helping to create the Earth (4:1), etc. We’re here in this brief stop-over of mortality to get bodies and pass the last test. 99.999999…% of our test was completed before we got here and we completed it diligently and faithfully. We’re here to make our calling and election to Godhood sure. Suddenly, with that view, everything else seems so silly. Why would you jeopardize or throw away all that for something fleeting? (Because the veil is there…that was a major selling point in Satan’s campaign, I believe: “How are you going to live the gospel when you won’t even be able to remember what the rewards are? Go and do whatever you want to do and you’ll all be exalted because I’m awesome like that.”) Wow. I can do anything.

“Practice seeing individuals around you as they are: individuals on the last page of an infinitely long final exam en-route to Godhood. And don’t sin anymore.” –Bro. Bott.

I have a sense of what it must have been like when we were intelligences being organized under God’s plan so we could progress…