{"id":12705,"date":"2019-08-31T16:24:50","date_gmt":"2019-08-31T20:24:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/?p=12705"},"modified":"2019-08-31T16:50:58","modified_gmt":"2019-08-31T20:50:58","slug":"gods-of-the-lost-three-short-book-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2019\/08\/gods-of-the-lost-three-short-book-notes.html","title":{"rendered":"Gods of the Lost: Three short book notes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

It can be hard to tell gifts of the spirit<\/em>
\nFrom clever counterfeits\u2026<\/em>
\n\u2014Mountain Goats<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory<\/em><\/strong>. I\u2019d read this before (of course?) but didn\u2019t remember it well. It took me a while to warm up to this harrowing story of a demoralized, alcoholic priest in hiding from Mexican Communist authorities. Looking back, I respect the decision to open with \u201cthe bystanders\u201d\u2013the local dentist, the pious family, the surrendered priest-husband Father Jose, and of course the idealistic Communist lieutenant and his more normal, workmanlike subordinate. We spend a lot of time in short portraits of other lives, at the beginning, and all of these do pay off at the end.<\/p>\n

The book began to work for me during the priest\u2019s long-delayed attempt to escape the district where he\u2019s being hunted, into a place where he\u2019ll have more freedom and peace. This man, who chose the priesthood thinking it would be a soft option, is now lashed to the same desperate conditions as his people\u2013not primarily even persecution, but hunger, exhaustion, harsh terrain and weather; jail, which is what the poor get, not martyrdom. He has finally become unprotected.<\/p>\n

And he thinks of himself as simply incapable of doing otherwise. The understanding of what it is to be a priest has sunk in so deeply that even terrified (Greene is so good at depicting fear, the kind of fear that exposes you) and convinced that he is damned, he can\u2019t persuade himself that his consecration no longer matters. He doesn\u2019t believe he or anybody could be bad enough to undo it. One thing I took from Vassily Grossman\u2019s Life and Fate<\/em> is the way the Soviet interrogators used people\u2019s consciousness of their own weaknesses to destroy them. You can\u2019t argue against the interrogator who knows what you really did do wrong; and this demoralization corrodes your conscience until you feel someone like you inevitably will give in, so why not now? You no longer have a place to take your stand. This may be a crass comparison, but that corroded despair reminds me of some of the emotions of late-stage alcoholism. And so I admit I kind of clung to Greene\u2019s portrait of a man alcoholic, demoralized, utterly aware of his failures\u2013and yet also aware that he is not relying on his own broken conscience, his own strength of character, but on a fact about the world outside himself, which he can\u2019t change and therefore must suffer as he suffers the thunderstorms: Christ is King.<\/p>\n

This book turns out to be something I\u2019m obsessed with anyway: how hard it can be to distinguish humility and self-hatred. I loved the final confrontation\u2013it\u2019s really a confession scene, with the roles reversed\u2013not so much for the musings on the terrifying love of God, though they\u2019re right, but for all those small moments where we see who this priest is, what remains of him. He\u2019s still got the well-trained Catholic in him, the cocktail-party Catholic who can make jabs at materialism, and they\u2019re not particularly silly jabs but they make him giggle here, from fear and from awareness of the flimsiness of this kind of argument. I love that the arguments the priest makes are incomplete but pointing toward something real (\u201cBut if they want to suffer\u2026\u201d) and also, especially and more, love that all his concessions do so much more than his arguments to change the lieutenant\u2019s view of him. I love that he defends others (\u201cThey didn\u2019t all run\u201d) but never himself (\u201cThen perhaps we\u2019ll be doing your Church a service.\u201d \u201cYes\u201d). Ah, there\u2019s nothing so comforting as seeing a person rise to the occasion while thinking himself worthless and lost.<\/p>\n

And nothing so challenging, to the Lieutenant in every reader.<\/p>\n

Cordwainer Smith, The Best of Cordwainer Smith<\/em><\/strong>. What an odd book! Smith is the pseudonym of a CIA psychological-warfare expert and devout Episcopalian. These are science-fiction stories set in a far future where men and women travel the stars in telepathic partnership with cats and harvest life-extending drugs off the backs of extraterrestrial sheep; and sin and love and suffer just like now.<\/p>\n

The stories are all set in the same universe, and this edition had a helpful note at the beginning of each story placing it in the broader context of, what, the Cordwainerverse I guess. The prose is a romantic variation on the Golden Age spacesuit style: like a simpler, maybe sweeter, heterosexual version of early Samuel Delany. You can feel the huge universe, unexplained and not entirely explicable, unfolding beyond the edges of the page. Many of these are moral tales, but only because if you make enough slices-of-life, lots of the slices will include moral choices.<\/p>\n

Things I loved: Boy howdy, does this man love cats. I\u2019m always here for a book where the author can\u2019t hide his cat-farming tendencies. I loved the women, also. Smith wrote some of these stories in partnership with his wife, but even in the ones he wrote by himself, the women are vivid and unexpected: leaders of political movements, religious figures, spaceship pilots\u2026 and various overlaps of these roles. I enjoyed the metafictional aspects\u2013apparently Smith was influenced by Chinese classics and storytelling traditions? I can\u2019t speak to that, but there\u2019s lots of attention to the structure of the story (a love story, a ballad, a legend) and the difference between the conventions of the tale and the experiences of the tale\u2019s subjects.<\/p>\n

And then there is his constant attentiveness to power, and the abuse of power. Humans in this future have made a lot of sketchy variations on humankind, a lot of unwise subcreations. They first try dehumanizing themselves, and then move on to imbuing robots and animals with human traits. The people-made-from-animals, or \u201cunderpeople,\u201d have no rights and exist in something close to slavery. People get food and other necessities free from the government; \u201cunderpeople\u201d work for a living, at grueling jobs with low pay, and when their usefulness runs out they\u2019re put down. I picked up this collection because I\u2019d heard of one story, \u201cThe Dead Lady of Clown Town,\u201d in which a dog-girl becomes a kind of Joan of Arc figure. That story is great and weird in itself. There are all these unexplained moments which hint at deeper inequalities or emotions: the way the dog-girl has a dog\u2019s loyal eyes; the way the underpeople\u2019s secret haven is painted sewage colors and called \u201cClown Town.\u201d There\u2019s so much ornamentation\u2013the dead lady herself, who\u2019s somewhere between ghost, icon, and robot; the romance between the misfiled witch Elaine and \u201cthe Hunter,\u201d which jabs into D\u2019joan\u2019s story at an angle and never quite fits; the fate of the dissident Crawlie.<\/p>\n

To oversimplify a baroque tale: \u201cDead Lady\u201d is a story about religious love, which is necessarily but not essentially political. D\u2019joan\u2019s tools (the D\u2019 is for dog!) are a saint\u2019s tools, and not actually the weapons of the historical Joan, or at least not her earthly weapons. Her story is powerful on its own but gains from appearing in the same collection as \u201cThe Ballad of Lost C\u2019mell,\u201d about a cat-geisha or cat-escort who leads a political movement for underpeople\u2019s rights; also about, as the title hints, the tragic unromance between the cat-woman and a human lord.\u00a0The details of C\u2019mell\u2019s job, and her assumptions about the human lord, are so vividly and perfectly imagined, from the subtly revealing clothes she has to wear to the way she\u2019s heard many, many men say they want to help the underpeople, right before they make \u201ca very raw kind of pass indeed.\u201d It would be easy for this genre to objectify C\u2019mell; instead Smith imagines her, as a woman who\u2019s had to live within her job and has learned some hard lessons from it.<\/p>\n

The politics are far less strange than the\u2026 weaponized humility??? of \u201cDead Lady.\u201d They\u2019re more compromised; C\u2019mell seeks concessions, not an overturning of her world\u2019s order. But the two stories together suggest that these views of injustice can\u2019t be separated. The concessions and the politics rely on the religious shock, and will in some way transmit that shock through the flesh of the social body, even if nobody wants that.<\/p>\n

Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon<\/em><\/strong>. A nine-year-old girl steps off the Appalachian Trail, partly to pee and partly to escape her mother and brother\u2019s ferocious arguing. She thinks she can get back to the path by a shortcut. That \u201cshortcut\u201d heads the wrong way, into the deep woods, where the girl will travel for over a week, alone\u2013and touch her physical, mental, and spiritual limit.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a great premise and by the end of this short-for-him novel King delivers. This paragraph from Rachel Manija Brown sums up why I wanted to read it:<\/p>\n

If you read survival memoirs, you\u2019ll notice that many real people who got lost in the wild, in addition to their suffering and fear and physical breakdown, also had some kind of transcendent or spiritual experience. In between periods of misery and despair, they came to understand themselves, the natural world, and some kind of greater force in a way which felt deeply and lastingly important to them, though many say that no attempt at description can convey what it was really like. King delves into this phenomenon, giving the book an atmosphere at once delicate and powerful, full of realistic and suspenseful wilderness details balanced with a satisfyingly ambiguous exploration of that which is inherently unknowable and indescribable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(full review<\/a>, though it has spoilers!)<\/p>\n

There were things I intensely disliked about this book\u2013primarily King\u2019s ongoing love affair with cutesy-gross language. Bad times aren\u2019t \u201cthe pits\u201d; they have to be \u201cthe puppy-shits.\u201d When little Tricia is afraid or sick she gets \u201cbutterflutters\u201d in her stomach. This stuff is on almost every page and it almost<\/em> drowns out the horrific sublimity of the sequence in the dead marsh, or the triumph of Tricia\u2019s feast on checkerberries and beechnuts.<\/p>\n

But everything in that paragraph above is done so well\u2013the spirituality of raw survival, as experienced by a nine-year-old girl with only the religious education you get from watching baseball on TV and asking your dad questions when he\u2019s half-drunk. Tricia considers three possible gods: an interventionist God who maybe even helps the Red Sox win (can God really be a Red Sox fan?); a capricious, good but weak god who satisfies less the more you care; and the God of the Lost, who is hunting her in the forest, a black-robed priest with a face full of wasps. Tricia confronts each of these gods, and her questions, her need and her strength feel completely true to life.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It can be hard to tell gifts of the spirit From clever counterfeits\u2026 \u2014Mountain Goats Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory. I\u2019d read this before (of course?) but didn\u2019t remember it well. It took me a while to warm up to this harrowing story of a demoralized, alcoholic priest in hiding from Mexican Communist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,7],"tags":[144,1428,415,52,131,322],"class_list":["post-12705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-mackerel-snapping","tag-and-if-my-prayer-go-unanswered-thats-okay","tag-cordwainer-smith","tag-greeneland","tag-if-whiskey-were-a-woman-id-be-married-for-sure","tag-it-is-very-dark-you-are-likely-to-be-wrestled-by-an-angel","tag-stephen-king"],"yoast_head":"\nGods of the Lost: Three short book notes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It can be hard to tell gifts of the spirit From clever counterfeits... --Mountain Goats Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory. 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