353. Paris Review, Readers' Digest, God.

After struggling to find a less brutal characterization I have to say that the Paris Review has just published a Readers' Digest article.  The distilled Readers' Digest article.  "I [Did a Far-Out Thing] and Found God."  That is what the intelligentsia made fun of in the fifties and that is what "Letter from Williamsburg" (Summer Issue, 2016) amounts to.

Kristin Dombek and her boyfriend find a woman willing to go to their apartment and have three-way sex with them.  After the first of these experiences Kristin finds "a peace immanent and tangible as a body, some kind of giant embrace in the air, and it was most definitely not coming from my mind."  

After the third encounter she sees the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, "The one who watched, the one who did, the one who felt.  The one with power, the one who suffered, the bliss." 

 In the end she presents herself in what looks to me like a state of  bliss.  "There was a world outside the world I’d known.  I have never been so relieved in all my life.  And the first thing I wanted to do, but I did not do it, was pray."

In the Readers' Digest piece you got both the thrill, often transgressive, of the thrust into the exotic, and the comfort, at the end, of your provincial (US: Mid-American) minister: God is everywhere and will reveal himself where you least expect him.  When you got on to more sophisticated periodicals you realized how facile this was, how shaped by editors for an unsophisticated audience.  When you got to great religious literature— Dante, Thomas à Kempis, Donne, Herbert — you learned how hard-earned such visions were.

You, reader of this blog, knowing that the author started as an unsophisticated member of a Mid-American church and became, by trade, a sophisticated reader of cosmopolitan articles, might predict his pulse as he reads Dombek's piece.  Sure enough, excitement at the thrust into the exotic.  He's a patsy, as of old, for the Readers' Digest editors. 

If you think that's not predictable you need to know that he's the kind of Mid-American who, when he first encountered toplessness in the Bois de Bologne, couldn't keep his eyes on the path.  No surprise now that he can't keep them on the page.

But exotic transgressions draw him back as they always do, and as cynical editors know they will do.  He feels the old thrill.  But then, "Wait a minute.  This is the Paris Review!"  I need an explanation.  Is there a higher Review?

I can't see behind the curtain of my age, and my age's age.  I can't see what the Paris Review editors see.  I see only what's in front of the curtain, and that looks like Readers' Digest superficiality. 

In the shadows, yes, I see something I might understand — instability so great it hallucinates stability (God) anyplace, a need for goodness so strong it steals words for their established goodness (as, "love" for a moment's physical warmth), a quest in which the mundane is never worth a look.  Or, less sympathetically, I see self-indulgence pushing for some justificatory vision at the end of an indulgence.

And I feel pity because the writer has so far to go.  Romantics generally have a long way to go but this one....I can't measure it.  I get an idea, though, when I picture the man in Frances Cornford's poem, bent over his love's "slight essential words" with "attentive courtesy" before they, like a man with his prized guitar, "begin to play."  Or Lear picturing daily prison life with Cordelia, the two of them chattering about "who's in and who's out" at court (see Post 349).  Will this  couple's threesomes ever arrive at chatter, vital chatter?  The first of their partners has two sentences, the second four.

Chatter apparently is limited to "those capable of monogamy."  (Oh, a glimpse, a pang.  Words to go back to, smart analyst.)  Is she the unfortunate outsider looking in?  Or has she simply not tested her capability, not pushed it past the laundry-stacking boredom?  She seems to know from the start that God will never appear to the housewife loading the dishwasher.  Nor to anybody in her church.

But back to that look over at monogamy, which I took to be a longing look.  That's not Readers' Digest.  Is this what the editors saw?  A feel for pain in the odd, an honest report from the cultural frontier — detailed, well-written, necessarily intimate but rare and courageous?

Taking it that way has many attractions.  It allows me to feel less a brute, and more welcome behind the curtain.  I'm the open-minded, adult academic whose oath of objectivity keeps him calm (what he hopes will be called cool) and his eyes on the page and the path.  Ah yes, threesomes.  It's an acquired insouciance, but it admits you to the company.

With it, though, comes the academic's alertness to superficiality.  And reluctance to say, "I know," until he knows.  There's so much here I don't know.  You're young, says Dombek of herself, and you're trying to be good, and you're wrestling with God (who tells you what good is), and you get tired.  "So you give up."  So.  Therefore.  Everybody behind the curtain understands that.  Every reader of the Paris Review apparently understands it, the inevitability, the helplessness, without editorial intervention or gate-keeping,

But I can't say I understand it.  The problem is compulsion.  When is it resistible and when not?  When are you obliged to resist it whatever your knowledge of its resistibility?

There is no doubt about what you do in two of the great books in my Great Books Course, the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost.  In them the formula ("algorithm" now), which happened to be the formula of my and most other Mid-American ministers, was "reason over the passions."  Compulsion to a passion was never irresistible.  In both Paradise and Ohio your reason, feeling a passion, was supposed to suck it up and assert control.  That's what Adam was supposed to do and that's what I was supposed to do.

Dombek glances at Adam when she finds "a new kind of knowledge" in "just watching."

We [she and her live-in] had come to think that this might be some part of why God forbade eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: eat it and you can no longer believe that your happiness comes from him or me, God or me, him this or her that, or me this or me that.

Dombek tries, but I really need assistance here.  The couple had "come to think."  How?  I'm lost.  Thinking happens.  What a contrast with Milton, who (through the angel Raphael) patiently explains how happiness comes to a fallen creature: little by little, day by day, using his reason not just to suppress the passions but to get the most out of them.  The one hope of regaining the jouissance that came so easily before the Fall.  Raphael sees it as "light after light well used," the light of sensible daily care, familiar care, not the light of mystical vision.

If that's not understandable I can go back and note that what Adam (in Milton's eyes) lost most damagingly was his ability to respond.  That's a loss of Paradise whatever the external decline.  Getting it back takes work.  In a relationship it means listening to your opposite "with attentive courtesy," working your way back to the essential chatter — in which lies your, nay man's, nobility. 

That's clear.  To oppose it I need a comparable clarity.  Because I don't get it from Dombek I need help.  From somebody on the inside.  Until I get it all I'll see is what's in front of the curtain, the Readers' Digest.