NARRATIVE SKILL
“Close Reading” is the blog of Slant Books, a publisher that specializes in fine writing, esp. concerning religion. Though they say they are not exclusively “Christian”, that is their focus. I read the blog for the “Close Reading” feature, not to find books. It does help to have had a “religious studies” background and to have been raised a sort of vulgar Presbyterian in the sense of “belonging to the masses.” Having been a UU minister is not much help. Their Enlightenment-based unity is not friendly to the illogical, the dreamt, the dissociated.
What I’ve hungered for is not so much religious fulfillment, which I find the immanence of the Montana prairie validates for me, but rather the fine and sophisticated writing that could be based here if on had the impulse, altogether a human construction over time and place. It’s probably best to give an example: Jane Alison’s “Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative.”
Her excerpts show how attentive and complex writing uses spaces, timing, sequence, description, and in general the experience of one’s eyes taking in the writing to a prepared brain that constructs of it some signifying meaning. It is as much about the reader as the writer. When I was preaching, I tried to remember that a sermon happens in the space shared by both the speaker and listener. This is also true of teaching.
These are issues that I began to learn about in Dean Barnlund’s “Language and Thought” classes at NU in 1957 and continued with Richard Stern’s classes at U of Chicago in 1978. (His book on narrative called “Honey and Wax: “Pleasures and Powers of Narrative,” was his basic text. It’s on Amazon and GoodReads — not expensive.)
The energy behind this interest comes from two sources. One is simply enjoying the achievement when I manage it, or even finding a brilliant analysis of someone else’s writing. The other is the need to explore the increasingly overwhelming cosmos through experience and science and to record it — even if no one else even knows I did that.
I find these two forces entirely missing from Medium. Also from Aeon/Psyche with its Templeton-dominated world frame and even from “Close Reading,” though — true to its name — it IS close. Until now I never had the time and means to really try to do it. I doubt there is anyone in this village or even in this state who would want to read such stuff and I’m too afraid of intrusions and scoffing to be open about it. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of someone sympathetic in Scotland and wonder what that means. They do a lot of open theology in Scotland.
Sometimes I’m not up to it and write about cats or something I remember from when I was young on the rez, in spite of all those trying to map out their identity by excluding me, just as I now exclude them from my best writing. Such arrogance and concentration take energy. Of course, as soon as humans are told they’re excluded, they want in.
My weakness,shared by many, is not grasping my audience well enough, or even finding it. This is the key to being published but publishing has been destroyed, partly by mercantilizing — blowing away the pattern of the aristocrats enjoying the beauty of the book as well as much as the content.
But this isn’t just about books. It’s about the practice of writing. I suppose also about speaking to an audience. Writing has an audience in the writer’s head. Sometimes a real face-to-face transmission of words, whether to someone who “gets it” or an audience who “groks” what is being said, can create a moment of shared mind with great power. I remember a morning at Seabeck Conference Center that created such an interval so that I just put my manuscript aside and we entered “call and response.” Outside the glass walls of the room, even the place seemed to participate.
But that’s not exactly what I mean because I’m solitary now and what I put on the page is what counts. It is also enabled by the computer moving words around or prompting word spelling etc. I can include simple facts, or I can build structures complex enough and only possible if the reader has a high-lighter in hand. I have shelf-space for relevant books that far exceeds any time left to read them. And it is both a pleasure and a reassurance, a hoard against a perilous future that nourishes me more than my cache of dry food. You do have access through Medium.com.
What justifies this is really accomplishing the work, morning after morning, come heat or cold, insults or praise, regardless of others past or future. Very Presbyterian, this obligation to my anchorite stronghold. But time is stalked by an aging brain, so far producing something more like being an absent-minded professor than a demented elder.
I remember old Eliade setting his office at Meadville on fire by putting his always-burning pipe down among the piles of paper on his desk. He was still a brilliant thinker, as though all those concepts crowded out common sense. Not that I dare compare myself to Eliade. Not even to Annie Dillard, who actually had a family and understood formal philosophy, but was able to closely observe the world, as I try to do now while I can. It’s not “close reading” nor closely observing nor close writing, but still close.
“Close (clohz) is a verb that means to fasten, to complete, to shut, to fill or block, to come nearer to, to come together, to end. . . .The word close is derived from the Old French word clos, which means secret or confined.”
