Proximity to Truth

     This past week I finished reading a book that a few years ago I’m pretty sure:

a) I would not have selected at all.

b) If I had started it, I would have shelved without finishing. 

c) And, if I somehow read to the end, I’d have trashed it—as I recall doing with only one book, a highly-rated novel with a similar plot line.

     Perhaps I’ve become able to appreciate the power of the way this author troubled the waters and in doing so reworked my thinking, feeling, valuing, and maybe even transformed conscience/consciousness. For this to happen, the novel was not working alone but was interweaving with other books that are especially contributing to my development, particularly Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying; John Dominic Crossan, Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges; and Attar’s Conference of the Birds (translated by Peter Avery and by Afkham Darbandi/Dick Davis).

     Rather than explaining, I’ll show portions of the book; but first, here’s the Spoiler Alert: these extracts might mess with the experience of reading Iris Murdoch’s The Sandcastle. If you plan on reading it, consider stopping now! 

     In the opening pages, Murdoch’s main character is portrayed: “He believed profoundly in complete truthfulness as the basis and condition of all virtue.” So, in the early chapters, he persists in telling the full truth to his wife even as he realizes “He could not now make his knowledge of her into love.” Soon enough, however, as he falls in love with another woman, he experiences that “truth” about the new relationship is a phenomenon he cannot express in words that will be comprehended by his wife. He’s perplexed in feeling unable, even if he tries, to tell the truth. Through the second half or so of the book, I am led (but not forced) by the author into a hard acceptance of truth as congruence instead of romance. His lover tells of the spinning (truth or lies or paradox) of the telling of their relationship this way:

“But now I can see. I see that it was you that tricked me—and I too that deceived myself. I saw it all so simply, with nothing to it but you leaving your wife whom you didn’t love and who didn’t love you. But a life has so much more in it than that. I had not seen that I would break so many many things.”

“If you love me—“ he said. 

“That word cannot guide us any more.”

     In other Murdoch novels, the congruence of parts includes the break-up of a marriage. Murdoch is not prescribing a case law in the sense noted by Crossan below. The truth of the full trajectory of the relationship of the lovers is best forecast in metaphors; in this novel, it’s in the title, The Sandcastle, and in lines spoken during the collapse of their romantic structure, “You are a growing tree. I am only a bird. You cannot break your roots and fly away with me.”

     The reason I’m compelled by Murdoch’s work may be explained in Peter Conradi’s biography:

“It could be said that all her fiction, and much of her moral philosophy, are acts of penance for, and attacks upon, the facile rationalistic optimism of her extreme youth, when she thought that setting people free was easy, that ‘socialism (of which we had no very clear idea) would bring freedom and justice to all countries, and the world would get better’. . . Her work explores, among other matters, those ‘irrational’ psychic forces within the individual which make Hitlers possible, and freedom problematic.” (Iris: The Life of Iris Murdoch, pp. 78-79)

     Concerning freedom, in a somewhat similar manner, I’m reconsidering my position in relation to the presentation of narrative, particularly in the fable and in the parable. When teaching Good Stories, I wanted students to realize freedom in constructing meaning. Going against the usual approach to the fable as having an explicit moral, we worked at considering multiple possibilities so that each individual could attempt to discern one that fit for himself or herself. We followed the direction of Lloyd Daly’s Aesop without Morals and made interpretations of narratives that did not force a specific moral. Now, I want to be careful in giving freedom, especially in view of Crossan's treatment of parable.

     In his take on narrative truth and freedom, Crossan develops the parable with emphasis on the distinctive features in texts of Jesus and Borges. He articulates “the core elements of parable” in a way that shows the shaking up of a person’s thinking/feeling/valuing and then leaving the person with the freedom to reach into the beyond:  

"... the core elements of parable. The first is paradox. The second is story. This is accomplished by effecting a structural reversal on a traditional or expected story at the deepest levels… 'symbols which through their paradoxical form expressed the inexpressible without betraying it.'" (pp. 94-95 building on and quoting from Heinz Politzer’s Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox)

But Crossan also stresses the danger in the extension of freedom: “to abide with the Holy is more fundamental than any case law and is itself original ethics and fundamental morality. It is also much more dangerous” (p. 69). This radical activity of parable in Jesus and Borges circles back again to Murdoch’s realization that freedom given to person unable to “see,” unable to discern lies, allows the rise of Hitlers.

     Murdoch does not turn against freedom; instead her work pushes us to face the lies we tell ourselves and to engage the hard truths. Our thinking, our moral sense, needs to include paradox, and our realities marry imagination. The most important truth comes in a person’s approximation to discerning the touch of the divine in oneself. As Sells develops in the Unsayings, that’s what the mystics try to show us.

   It’s now early Sunday morning 

in pre-dawn meditations on dreams 

of marking the path, 

reflecting on Attar’s parable 

of surrender to the guide

reading time inside and out

eternal now. Time

is simultaneous line and circle

the eternal return.

Being/doing, identity & ?

Living this

as the game of labyrinth,

and whether there is a center or an exit does not matter so much

as the quality of the player, unending purification.

There is only the dance 

as Eliot sings for us & realizing

all this a poem not a line,

and a story not imitative rhyme

and not just a tale told by an idiot

but some beauty composed by