Moore, Beauty, and More Beauty

On November 6, I taught Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run The Frog Hospital? I had seen, making the syllabus this summer that this would be the day after the day and I thought, whatever way it went, we’d be grateful for some Lorrie Moore.

I felt wrong about so many things that day, but I felt great about having put Moore there to bolster us. We read lots of passages out loud. We talked and talked about sentences, humor, friendship, violence, language. It was the best I’d felt in hours, days. I am grateful for the gift of students always; selfishly for how they force me outside of myself; and also, for all the ways their sharp, generous perceptions of the world make me feel less lonely, bolster and engage and excite me; the exact opposite of so much of what feels hard about the world right now.

I have been thinking, how or what to write you. More broadly, I have struggled, trying to think about a way to think about this space that makes it feel more pointed to me, more contained as an offering that I might more consistently give. And then I thought about this: the past couple years I’ve been trying to make sense of beauty. I’ve been trying to seek it, see it, hold it, offer it to other people. I’ve been trying to hold tight to the import and value of it on its own terms.

This is not always easy for me who is always going going. Who is trying to be productive, who has to work. But the work I do, the times when it feels best, is, in part, an engagement with, and offering of beauty. Part of my job, both as writer and as teacher—and for a long time I would have been embarrassed by this fact—is to ask people to pay careful, close attention to what’s beautiful, to take pleasure in it, to think and feel about and around it but not demand that it always make sense.

In a class I taught a few weeks ago on Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life,” we talked about all the many things that language can do: how repetition of words and stories can feel like boon and bolster, how declarations can make things true—do you take this woman to be your wife, etc; how utterances, instructions, words offered in forms so particular we don’t forget them—when we were kids in Florida, this rhyme about snakes on walks: red touching black, safe for Jack. Red touching yellow, kill a fellow'—can sometimes keep us safe.

For a long time, I was pretty devastated by everything that language can’t do, but for the next little while, I want to spend some time trying to show you some of what I think it does so well.

So first, a favor: if you can right now, and bear with me. Of course you don’t have to do this, but maybe try?

Stand up.

Clear your throat.

Put your shoulders back.

Think about what language is and can be.

Read this paragraph out loud:

“Our nerves tightened and all the bones of our ears fell in line. It was Miss Field’s own arrangement of a Schubert rhapsody, and the notes, for once, took flight. I didn’t, couldn’t, catch Sils’s eye—she was standing over with the sopranos—but it didn’t matter, I didn’t have to, because this wasn’t personal, this was singing, this light, this was girls, after weeks of rehearsal, celebrating the ethereal work of their voices, the bell-like, birdlike, child-sound they could still make so strongly in unison. Strung along the same wire of song, we lost ourselves; out of separate rose and lavender mouths we formed a valedictory chorus to our childhood and stuck us deep in the brain and low in the spine, like a call, and in its wave and swell, lifted us, I swear, to the ceiling in astonishment and bliss, we sounded that beautiful. All of us could hear it, aloft in the midst of it, no boys, so parents in the room, no one else to tell us, though we never managed to sound that beautiful again. In all my life as a woman—which began soon after and not unrichly—I have never known such a moment. Though sometimes in my brain I go back to that afternoon, to relive it, sail up there again toward the acoustic panels, the basketball hoops, and the old oak clock, the careful harmonies set loose from our voices so pure and exact and light we wondered later, packing up to leave, how high and fast and far they have gone.”

Now sit and read it again quietly to yourself.

At the beginning of the book Moore makes clear that Berie, our main character, wants to split her voice. “I wanted to make chords, to splinter my throat into harmonies—floreted as a field, which is how I saw it. It seemed like something one should be able to do. With concentration and a muscular path of fresh air, I felt, I might be able to people myself, unleash the crowd in my voice box, give birth, set free all the moods and nuances, all the lovely and mystical inhabitants of my mind’s speech.”

floreted as a field?? so good.

She wants, by herself, to make lots of different sounds and music. But then, at the end of the book, her most prized memory, is when she is one of many voices. When she gives over to the lovely mystical inhabitants that live outside of her, and, in astonishment and bliss, she gets to make beauty with this group of girls. She would never know a moment like this again. And/but, here’s another thing: because of language, even though the moment is long over, she gets to articulate it, recast it in story. She gets to offer it to us.

For the next bit here, this is what I’m giving, what I want this space to be for all of you, bits of beauty, built through language, that I want to show you—because I believe that it has value, import—that I want to ask you to pay careful close attention to.

Also: in the vein of Lear from last week, the piece that I was working on about Lear published; it is also very much in conversation with these ideas:  

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/reading-king-lear-during-hurricane-season

Please feel free to send me bits of beauty that have meant something to you? I hope very much that you’re all hanging in amidst the murk.