Marginalia, no.95

…One of those grotesque ironies that are too strong for the delicate stomach of Art but in which reality abounds, as though life itself enjoys laughing down the aesthetic proprieties.

~ Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

Cf. ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ – the same sentiment, with a change of inflection.  The would-be Realist pinches his nose at the merest fleeting odor of unlikelihood, as if art were subject to a law of averages.  But every hour contains its exceptional minute, and perfect plausibility is perfectly implausible.  Chance, dreams and (if all else fails) the cosmic fact of something rather than nothing render the most mundane existence a catalog of marvels.

Suffer the Little Children

What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.

It’s been a couple weeks now since I finished Peter De Vries’ book and I still can’t bring myself to begin another novel.  I pick here and there at Chekhov stories, at Montaigne and Emerson and DeQuincey.  I read magazines.  But in between and throughout the day I return again and again in my mind to The Blood of the Lamb.

My father used to say so, and having been a father myself now for six years, I suspect it’s true: Until you have children of your own it’s impossible to understand the burden of heartache that comes with parenthood.  It weights your steps like leaden boots.  It bounds your vision in every direction.  It colors every thought.  It groans perpetually in the nerves and in the marrow of your bones, sharp, but vaguely sweet.

That people are ever able to survive the suffering and death of their children is incomprehensible to me.  I think about the quote above and I think about De Vries’ own loss.  The Blood of the Lamb is more than a tragicomic (and more tragic for all its comedy) fictional re-creation of his own daughter’s death by leukemia.  It’s also very much about faith, and the death of faith.

I wonder why he didn’t write ‘love’ instead of ‘believe.’  In its power to evoke it, love seems almost a form of suffering in its own right, and it’s not hard to imagine that the more objects you give your heart to in a world of universal transience, the more you open yourself to pain at their inevitable loss.  But he didn’t write ‘love.’

Perhaps he meant that the more we suffer, the less we are likely to believe; or, conversely, that the more things we believe, the more we are bound to suffer over them.  Or perhaps he meant that the particular things we believe (religiously, personally) grow naturally out of our individual fears, as a way of counteracting those fears and pushing them – and the psychological suffering they entail – farther away.  But I don’t think so. 

I wonder, instead, if De Vries was simply saying that we suffer according to the terms of our personal creeds.  The believer in Self, then, suffers specifically in terms of the self; the believer in Nothing in terms of the void; the believer in a personal God in terms of close acquaintance with unobliging omnipotence.

What does it mean for a believer in Love (as every parent must be) to suffer in terms of love?  Maybe The Blood of the Lamb is De Vries’ answer to that question.

Marginalia, no.82

Perhaps T.B. had been a mistake.

~ Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

Contracting TB got Don Wanderhope out of one fix while putting him into another.  That’s typical of tuberculosis.  Its near-eradication in the twentieth century was a disaster for literature.  Among the more richly allusive ways to snuff it, TB had ranked up there with drowning at sea: Keats and Lycidas arm in arm.  Swine flu doesn’t have the same cachet.  One can only hope these new drug-resistant TB strains will re-light the chandeliers in the grand alpine sanitariums someday.