Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Omnibus Review by Anita Mathias of Rushdie, Ishiguro, Lahiri, and Manil Suri

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Anita Mathias
Omnibus Review

Commonweal Magazine.

Salman Rushdie’s dazzling, densely textured maximilist novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Picador USA, $16, 575 pp.) tracks the brilliant rock stars, Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara, a contemporary Orpheus and Eurydice, through three great cities, Bombay, London, and, inevitably, New York; and through the familiar story of fame, desperately pursued, turning out to be less delicious than imagined, leading to paranoid, reclusive misery. Though Rushdie’s characters are often mere embodiments of an idea–Vina, like the painter Aurora in The Moor’s Last Sigh (Pantheon), incarnates the destructive concept of the artist as sacred monster, sacrificing morality, decency, and love for art–I found myself moved by the dumb, stoic suffering of Ormus Cama, an immensely gifted musician who wanted nothing more than calm married love, but loved the wrong woman for that life.The Ground offers vintage Rushdie: his erudition and humor; his magpie allusiveness and multicultural jokes; the lyricism, playfulness, and sheer plenitude of his style; and his trademark ricocheting between the sublime and the silly, popular culture and high art, all incarnated in the voice of the narrator, Rai, ostensible friend of Ormus, and Vina’s secret lover. “An everything novel,” Rushdie calls The Ground. Finally, in an uncharacteristic and Shakespearean peaceful conclusion, after the mythic figures of Vina and Ormus vanish–Vina dies in an earthquake, and Ormus is shot dead by Vina’s ghost in a tiresome flash of magical realism I wish Rushdie would abandon–the lesser artists, the photographer, Rai, and the popular singer Mira Celano, settle down to a life of mutual accommodation and domestic happiness.
The Death of Vishnu (W.W. Norton, $24.95, 256 pp.), a first novel by Manil Suri, a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, presents five rambunctious families in an apartment building in Bombay, squabbling over the expenses of the dying (in the cosmos of the novel, reincarnating) janitor, Vishnu. Suri gives us a dead-on and hilarious portrayal of the melodramatic quarrels of the materialistic Asranis and Pathaks, and the simmering pettiness and viciousness engendered by a claustrophobically close society. In a conscious imitation of the progress of the soul in Hindu theology, the higher floors of the apartment building house the more evolved. These include Muslim Mr. Jalal, who desperately seeks the common truth underlying all religions (and, in a chilling scene, is lynched by a Hindu mob when his son elopes with the Asranis’ daughter), and the widower, Vinod Taneja, who has loosened all cords of desire. Though the dying Vishnu’s hallucinatory memories of love and the Hindu myths feel tacked-on and obtrusive, the book is a sprightly, realistic, funny portrait of lower-middle class Indian life and its pretensions.

The polished, elegant surfaces of Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning volume of nine short stories, An Interpreter of Maladies (Houghton Mifflin, $12, 198 pp.) belie the howling emptiness at their depths. In her carefully observed, minimalist tales, Indian immigrants discover the nightmarish price of the American dream of lots of stuff. Strangers in a strange land, imperfectly understanding, imperfectly understood, missing their community-oriented society, they wrestle with unfamiliar New World problems–loneliness, depression, and isolation which destabilize the marriages that, in at least five stories, agonizingly disintegrate. In a savage story, “A Temporary Matter,” a suffering couple, Shoba and Shukumar, tell each other erstwhile secrets, and we watch them steadily, viciously destroy each other as they face the death of their love and marriage. “Mr. Pirzada” and “Mrs. Sen” present Indian faculty couples, alienated and adrift in a foreign world. More restfully, the final story, “The Third and Final Continent,” details the not uncommon odyssey of the restless Indian (like Lahiri’s and my own and, it’s rumored, Rushdie’s) from India through England to America; and the advent of love within the confines of an arranged marriage.

An Artist of the Floating World (Vintage International, $12, 206 pp.), a slender, perfect novel by the British-Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro, explores the stream of consciousness of a self-deceived man in postwar Japan (reminiscent of Stevens, the butler in Ishiguro’s better-known, poignant The Remains of the Day). In fascinating sections, Masuji Ono, an artist dedicated to depicting the ukiyoe, “the floating world” of “the nightless city” of the pleasure district, pours himself into his art, painting fifteen-hour days as a student, and later as a sensei, a master. Later, exposed to Japan’s poverty, he asks the age-old question of the moral artistic spirit: Isn’t making art unconscionable in a world of pain? Consequently, he betrays his gift, and supports the Imperial Japanese armies. After Hiroshima, he faces a Japan craving amnesia, with the militarist faction shunned, and an epidemic of public harakiri, honor suicides. In imagistic dreamy sections, Ono reflects on his life, unable to face the tragedy of betraying his gifts, his promise, his joy for chimerical ideals, yet finding hope in the buoyancy of the young in the new Japan. Part of the novel’s pleasure lies in decoding Ono’s classic unreliable narrative, and the Japanese facade of invincible politeness. Ishiguro is a stunning writer with absolutely perfect pitch. His flawless novel, suffused with sadness and beauty, has the delicacy and restraint of the ukiyoe prints of the moon, cherry blossoms, migrating birds, and dreamy geishas with their admirers, sipping away all sorrow.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group

Donald Hall in "Life Work" on tricking writing out of oneself

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Donald Hall, how he tricks so much work out of himself.

“At any moment, when a poem does not occupy me wholly, when I feel impatient, or discouraged, or tired, I drop it quickly; after a while—one hour, three hours—I feel the poetry-juices drying out. Instantly, I stop; I put the  poems away until the following morning.
Wakes up at 4.15.  Four hours done by 10a.m. Been up for 5.5 hours. “Over the last four hours, I have done my day’s work. I cannot fake it in the afternoon; if I push too hard, I become impatient and do bad work. Gets into bed between 8.30 and 9, reads until his eyes refuse to stay open.”
 

Christians like Trees. Who bear fruit as they learn to trust

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Christians like Trees. Rooted in trust and faith

Blessed is the man
who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked
or stand in the way of sinners
or sit in the seat of mockers.

But his delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither.
Whatever he does prospers.
Don’t you love this image of stability and permanance–a tree planted by streams  of water, yielding its fruit in season, with leaves which do not wither, prospering in whatever it does?
To be like a tree, with deep roots, not moved and shaken by the winds of chance, adversity or even good fortune.
There is the opposite image in Jeremiah.
Jer 17:5 This is what the Lord says:“Cursed is the one who trusts in man,mwho depends on flesh for his strengthand whose heart turns away from the Lord.n
Jer 17:6 He will be like a bush in the wastelands;he will not see prosperity when it comes.He will dwell in the parched placeso of the desert,in a saltp land where no one lives.
Jer 17:7 “But blessedq is the man who trustsr in the Lord,whose confidence is in him.
Jer 17:8 He will be like a tree planted by the waterthat sends out its roots by the stream.sIt does not fear when heat comes;its leaves are always green.It has no worries in a year of droughttand never fails to bear fruit.”
It’s interesting to see how seriously God takes trusting in oneself rather than trusting in him. The one who trusts in flesh, himself, or in other people, is actually cursed, according to this passage. “He will not see prosperity when it comes.”

How many people do you know who are prosperous, but do not see prosperity, either through over-spending, through bad luck, or through fear, or miserliness?

But the one who trusts his dreams to God does not fear in a year of drought, its leaves are always green, he always bears fruit.

Trusting in God, of course, implies leaving our dearest dreams in his hands. He may say yes, bless and fructify them. Or, he may have other dreams for us.

Art, a staff to help us bear the ills of life.

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I am looking forward to spending the day at the Ashmolean tomorrow.
Watching Kenneth Clark’s Civilization has rekindled my interest in art.
 
Art is a staff to help man bear the ills of life. It sweetens life.  Since man can only concentrate on one thought at a time, it temporarily drives grief from your mind, leading to a temporary forgetting of grief. Like spirituality, it is a life-enricher and life-enhancer,  the sugar and MSG of the mind.
 In my opinion, Art is one of the greatest sweeteners, among the sweetest things, in our human experience!! Along with friendship.
And here endeth my rhapsody!!

A very relaxing Friday evening writer's party

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Watched Zoe in Noel Coward’s manic Hay Fever, then went to a writer’s party (smuggling the girls, who were not invited, into a corner of the beautiful North Oxford garden.) Our host, the designer for the current Doctor Who, being filmed near Cardiff, had designed his garden using clever tricks of perspective to make it appear larger. He showed the girls interesting architectural elements salvaged from skips which he’s using in this Dr. Who.


Had some really good, congenial literary conversations which does not always happen at these parties.

The shepherds are senseless and do not inquire of the LORD Jer. 10:21

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The shepherds are senseless
and do not inquire of the LORD;
so they do not prosper. Jer 10:21

A church with a pastor who does not know how to really pray will soon become a country club!
Not just shepherds. No one who does not enquire of the Lord will prosper as he otherwise could have. Because he is firing on one cylinder, his own, not a billion, his own and God’s.

Remembering to enquire of the Lord is a learned skill. We only acquire it slowly.

It continually astonishes me how much I do without enquiring of the Lord. Which turns out to be suboptimal, sometimes wasted effort.

A recent example. Over Easter, in France, I heard the Lord suggest I take up blogging. On my return in mid-April, I did. My blogging proved relatively successful.

In less than three months, my blogs shot up the UK ranking charts.

However, instead of resting content with my God-given success, I decided to read up on blogging, and learnt that the A list of bloggers and blog rankings is Technorati top 100. And, without enquiring of the Lord, decided to get my blog or blogs there. How? Adding a post each day that my blog ranking on Technorati slipped by even 1. So yesterday, I wrote 10 posts on my three blogs, and did not work at all on writing my books which is my true calling.

Today, I realised that getting into the Technorati top 100 was not a calling God had given me. Writing my second and third book is.

So, I have decided to limit my posts, no more than four a day.

And leave the rankings to the Lord. He can get me into the top 100 if it is his will. As a gift, not as something I have sweated for.

The blogs are monetized, and earn something daily through Google adsense. They thus help to support my family. So I will increase postings if Google adsense income drops (and also work smarter rather than harder, learning some of the techie things to do with adsense, blogging and SEO that one needs to know for successful blogging). But I will leave rankings in the hands of the Lord.

A very good place indeed to leave anything and everything.

Vermeer–Artist of Domestic Peace

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So one can be so quiet, so quiet, so still and peaceful in the midst of domesticity!

That the hands work is no excuse for the mind not to think.

You can almost hear the silence.  The milkmaid serenely fills her earthenware bowl.  “The Young Woman with a Jug” pauses to dream out of the window.  The lacemaker is lost in her work. 
 I gaze at Vermeer’s women.  I trust most things that help me lose track of time–reading, writing, gardening, hiking, the sea, art galleries, prayer, sex, good movies, good conversation.  
Vermeer’s women lose themselves is: housework.  It glows!  Is this domesticity?  Can it be?  That’s the way I want to live my life, like “Woman Holding a Balance,” slowly, tranquilly, not fighting the irrelevant relevant, the distracting, trivial and necessary tasks of my days, but embracing them as an oasis of contemplation in which desert flowers may bloom.
Vermeer’s paintings, poems one might say, on the radiance of domesticity are more moving when we learn of the hurly-burly of his household–a wife, eleven children, and a feisty mother-in-law.  Those paintings that could have been called “Shanti, shanti, shanti” or “Tranquility” instead of “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window” are probably sighs of yearning, images of an elusive Eden.  They hint how manual work–if used as time for contemplation–might be redeemed,

The Writing Process

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As humility comes before honour (Book of Proverbs),  the moment of horror and despair in writing, the moment when you feel you know nothing at all, is the precursor to the flood of insight and intuition. That moment of helplessness and dread often precedes light.
You begin with confidence.  You move to a place of blackness, dread, fear, chaos, and despair, and slowly, you write your way out of that place by just putting down the one thing you do know, the one clear thought you do have.
The process of planning a birthday party is a bit like writing,  “I don’t know how to do it, I won’t be able to do it, I don’t want to do it, It may not be any good,” sheer despair, and then as things begin to coalesce one feels better and better, until finally one is confident.