The Character of Attention

Beauty as Liberation in Marilynne Robinson's What Are We Doing Here?

Yesterday, reading my copy of Marilynne Robinson’s book of essays What Are We Doing Here, I found (as I so often do in books) the receipt marking the occasion of my having purchased it.

Prairie Lights Bookstore. Iowa City. 2018.

Now, there’s something. I went to do the math in my head, but stopped, as I didn’t want to know the answer. It was long ago enough.

But what might be a better question than “how long ago was it?” is “why did it take this long to finish reading?”

Answering that second question, it turns out, wasn’t simple. For it wasn’t simply laziness, and it wasn’t exactly disinterest.

Surely, having finished the book, I prefer The Givenness of Things, the one which preceded it. Both books are collections of essays largely comprised of lectures she has given throughout the country. I found Givenness just as I was getting heavily into meditation, had heard her lecture on Shakespeare and the Liberal Arts, and was turning toward a mystical mode of experiencing life that almost certainly indicated to me that there were unspoken levels to reality which weren't being described.

Marilynne Robinson did describe them, although not in any sort of woo spirituality. She instead wrote about everyday life and the levels of consciousness which occur to any given human being given the quietness to hear them. Her writing about Shakespeare and Calvin, the types of writing and culture going on at that time, and how all of this suggested a phenomenally vast aspect to human consciousness hit me at that time right where I needed to be hit. When I immediately bought What Are We Doing Here upon release, I just wasn’t in the same place with those same needs.

Marilynne Robinson is an individual who possesses an astounding array of unique traits. For many years, she taught fiction writing and literature at the University of Iowa writer’s workshop. Her first novel, which was not written in a creative writing school, was not intended to be published, but it was published without Robinson’s effort (a friend gave it, unbeknownst to her, to an agent). That novel, Housekeeping, went on to win the PEN award, and became a bestseller. Her second novel, Gilead, took nearly 25 years to come out, became a bestseller as well, and won a Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

So she’s a great novelist who sells well without ever having tried to write for an audience. She’s also an open Christian (a member of the Congregational Church of Christ), and does nothing to disguise this. But she also does nothing to advertise it. In her novels, it’s simply part of the cultural and metaphysical tapestry, even as some of her characters do meditate on theological themes.

In her late career, as mentioned, she became a traveling lecturer, being invited to universities across the globe including Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford. While some of these lectures were on the state of education, on political rhetoric and slander, on religion and theology in general, and on topics of mind and Spirit in the age of science, others were about Shakespeare, Early Modern life and culture, and the unique forms of Christianity we lump into the category “Puritanism,” which covers an intellectually diverse cluster of sects and writers who never themselves used that word, but who all benefited from newly printed translations of the Bible throughout the world.

So, while it’s not that surprising to hear of a novelist/professor/lecturer, it is really something to hear of one who lectures so insightfully, and with greatly researched precision, on so many topics absolutely crucial to the history of thought and culture and our state of ideas, including democracy.

That she does so in such a powerfully quiet and unassuming way, with such a refreshing blend of skeptical acumen and large-hearted compassion, is astounding to me.

Which brings me back to What Are We Doing Here? Part of what kept me away from the book was the fact that, at the time, I wasn’t ready or interested in hearing some of its content —more investigations of Puritan thought? It wasn’t where I was, or felt I needed to be. Part of what brought me back to the book, I think, is the fact that it is so prescient for our time now.

Here she is sometime before 2018 talking about a phenomenon that would show itself to shape the entirety of our discourse (in her essay “Slander”):

“People enjoy sharing in consensus, especially when it allows us to indulge a guilty pleasure—to be among the despisers rather than the despised, to feel we have permission to express, if only to ourselves, hostilities we might otherwise find shameful. Catharsis can feel so good, and so can the strong sense of identity that comes with knowing who is with you and who is against you—whether this is true or not. The drama depends on your believing you have antagonists, even if a bit of intervention is required to make them in any way sinister. But if our words and meditations are present to God’s sight, as we so often say they are, and if for him a thousand years are like a day, he might see in any of our thoughts and utterances the impulse that in a year, a decade, or a century will disrupt peace and destroy life. From his perspective, it could be a word spoken by anyone, an acquiescence in some ordinary meanness, that tips a nation toward offense, disgrace, brutality. In other words, we might, at any moment, at every moment, stand before God in that second judgment [described by Flavel], guilty for our part in crimes we do not quite intend and will not live to see.”

What I love about this passage is its use of the concept of God to imagine a larger sense of self similar to that of karma. Our individual thought and its effects on ourselves and our loved ones is one thing. But the larger habit of vilification that comes from a tendency to demonize the Other grows exponentially, particularly in this age which we all know to be acceleratingly amplified through social media. The events of the past year can all be traced back to events that started the decade before, and the decade before that. I myself begin to see them when politics started to lean on what were then called “negative ads.” The decision in, say, the Bill Clinton campaign, to shrug and accept that a negative ad simply “works,” that, in James Carville’s formulation, political parties “exist for one reason, and that is to win elections,” gives license to anyone who participates to eschew what would ordinarily be common humanity in order justify the means by winning a team sport.

We see how that turned out, and how impossible it is for a wave that huge to be reversed. It must, perhaps, turn in on itself, and we only hope we don’t sacrifice our civilization in its wake.

The idea of God becomes a way of thinking about consciousness that gives us the ability to take a broader view of the larger patterns that surround our individual experiences, and how our thoughts and beliefs contribute to those larger patterns. It’s something like meta-cognition, thinking about thinking, but the thing about the way in which humans use the term “God” in the activity called “Prayer,” is that it becomes interpersonal. Our “words and meditations [being] present to God’s sight,” is a much harder heart-hit than simply journaling might be. It’s not simply a matter of thought—it’s about Love. And that Love is the emotional and spiritual fuel that creates and sustains larger connections.

This is in an essay which starts with an anecdote about Robinson’s mother, a “sharp-minded woman, aware and proud of her intelligence,” who “lived a very private, sheltered life, never employed, devoted to her flowers and her dogs.” Late in life, living in a retirement community, “she started watching Fox news” and before she left this life, had decided that “I, her daughter, a self-professed liberal, was one of those who had ruined America.”

This personal anecdote (the likes of which Robinson uses seldom and sparingly) cuts to the bone of just what Robinson is after in many of her essays in Absence of Mind, the Givenness of Things, and here in this book. The idea that there is so much of ordinary life that is of huge significance. Who cares if you while away an hour or three with a little filthy gossip? Well, it turns out, it can greatly damage your relationship with your daughter, a relationship which might have already been strained.

I remember in a therapy session of my own, processing childhood trauma, that much of what I was trying to get my parents and even siblings to do was to simply stop and pay attention. And Robinson is aligned with this manner of thinking in her essay on fiction, which is interestingly called “Grace and Beauty”:

“Now, if I were to give a character a childhood trauma, say, or if I were to make her materialistic or pietistic or paranoid, then she would most likely be acting out the behaviors we are conditioned to expect of people of whom such things are true. Then characterization preexists the character, and to the extent that it does, she is deprived of autonomy. If on the other hand, she has a kind of coherency of tone and manner, which might be called something emergent, self-renewing, self-elaborating, then these same things could be true of her without any loss of autonomy.”

Note that Robinson is not saying that trauma doesn’t exist, nor that a character in the novel shouldn’t be a person who has experienced trauma. Nor is she giving the standard line of how strong persons should resist self-applied “victimization” narratives. And it is in resisting the urge to front-load the character with so much context that she gives the character autonomy. Though she is speaking of transcendence, she’s talking about a Transcendence that is very much rooted in the earthly experienced life of a conscious person, with all of the semantic complexity that surrounds such a person, very much Spirit-like.

In a couple more sentences, she takes that even further:

“I absolutely never think out characterization in terms like these before I write, or as I write. But I do work from a sense of the experience of human presence, which forbids that diagnosis or moral judgment should have a central place in my attempts to conjure it. I reflect on my own exclusions, and when I do this in retrospect it can seem as though I have proceeded on the basis of a theory rather than by following the grain of the credible as it presents itself into my mind. The standard I use is strictly experiential.”

Look at that all important word, there—conjure. In order for Robinson to truly, to accurately, to beautifully create a human character in a work of fiction, she must grow so quiet within her self and her own mind that she brings the spirit of that character to life. And when she listens to that character, she hears the “kind of coherency of tone and manner” that makes a person a person. Which includes all of the history of that person, including the trauma, but makes itself known to the expert novelist as a revelation of character—that indescribable and yet indelible essence, or, as I am wont to call it, a soul.

That oracle-esque soul-craft is furthered in the next few sentences where she describes that aforementioned experiential standard:

“What is the specific absence I feel when I miss someone? The most estimable person on earth could not fill the place left empty by a dear friend, even if it is never clear at all why that friend should matter so much. What is the abstract, the ghost, that persists in the mind, meaning him or her and no one else? What makes the atmosphere of a house change when some particular person walks in the door?

We know we’ve really met somebody when we feel that void in their absence. And it doesn’t have to be a good friend or lost love. Anyone who makes a mark—that is, has a strong character (from the Greek kharaktēr “engraved mark,” also “symbol or imprint on the soul”)—leaves this kind of effect on us, making a huge part of their essence the way in which they interact with others.

It’s this kind of respect, reverence, affection, and compassion that allows Robinson to be the genius novelist she is. And it’s this same capacity that allows her in other essays to contemplate phenomenology, theology, politics. It allows her to take historical adventures into the seventeenth century and bring back insights we can still apply today. And it celebrates and strengthens the core of the Humanities and Fine Arts which, while they may be under attack right now in our universities, can not and must not ever be destroyed. They are the source of our autonomy and agency, our souls, and the reason for our Being.

Robinson, Marilynne. What Are We Doing Here? Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.