God, The World, and Me: Essays and Poems by

This is as much as to say that a conventionally realistic novel reflects a certain metaphysics or philosophy of being and knowing. Modern novels of a less conventional sort also reflect a metaphysics, but it is a new metaphysics, a radically new way of talking about the locale of existence. Formalism was an aesthetic and critical movement that thrived in St. Petersburg and other eastern European cities early in the twentieth century. The Formalists pegged a whole philosophy of language and literature on the split between meaning and signifiers, between aboutness and pattern.

What they did was put a theory to the things painters like Whistler and, soon after, the French Impressionists, and Surrealist poets like Breton, Eluard and Ponge — all the way back to Mallarme Nabokov sneaks Mallarme quotations into his novels — had been doing ten, twenty, thirty or more years before. They simply recognized that aboutness and pattern were two aspects of the things we call art and language, and that you could, in fact, have pattern without aboutness. Since it seem impossible to have aboutness without pattern, a corollary of this is that aboutness is somehow secondary, a poor cousin, on the aesthetic scale of things, to pattern.

Or, again, a reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country, a landscape, a mode of living which he nostalgically recalls as part of his own past. Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use. This is what the post-Sausurrean critics, recently so popular in Europe and on American university campuses, are saying.

Aboutness is old-fashioned, authoritarian, and patriarchal. Signs — read, pattern, poetry — are playful, subversive, and female. How a thinker can jump from a purely logical incongruence — the fact that, apparently, you can have pattern without aboutness but not vice versa — to these strings of value-loaded predicates is marvelous indeed and evidence that the instinct for narrative and romance has not died behind the ivy-covered walls of academe.

Another corollary of splitting the categories of pattern and aboutness is that there is a sense in which pattern itself creates meaning. Or to put it another way, the novel is about its own form. Or every book is about another book, or books. And every work of art is a message on a string of messages which begins nowhere and ends nowhere, to no one and from no one, and about nothing except the field of pseudo-meaning created by previous and future messages.

It is all a game of mirrors and echoes. A little dance of images, words, and patterns. The of the Hindus, or all is vanity, all is dust, sure enough. Form or pattern and aboutness or content, or reality are the binary opposites of thought. The stance of the modern, whether he or she is a novelist, critic, theologian, or psychologist, is that ontology begins and ends with the former, that so-called reality is a highly suspicious article.

We are pressed back to a position of washed-out Cartesianism: I think, therefore, I think; or more precisely, I think, therefore something is thinking. Reality, meaning, aboutness, the good, God and the self are pushed away into the realms of the unconscious, the unknowable, the unspeakable, and the unfathomable. In a very logical sense, they no longer concern us here as we race toward the end of the twentieth century.

Think of yourself in a room with bare plaster walls and no windows or doors. You have an infinite supply of variegated wallpapers.

You paper the room with something in blue with a skylark pattern, then you do it over with angels, then an abstract, decorative pattern. This is the first effect of language, according to the philosophers and critics. As soon as you begin to use language, describe the world, you can no longer see it. You can only see your description. The second thing you notice is that each layer of wallpaper covers the previous layers. In a sense the old wallpaper, the past, becomes part of the reality you are describing with each new layer of wallpaper.

And sometimes you wake up in the morning and wish you still had the skylarks. You might even try to scrape some of the new wallpaper off.

But that only makes a mess. All you have is the design of each successive layer of wallpaper, and, just possibly, the shape of the room, its broad outlines, its cubic form. Life and art are a little like this. To be a writer is to write with this knowledge, that the wallpaper is wallpaper and not the room, walls and plaster. Or, to put this another way, aboutness is illusory. What we see as aboutness the artist sees as just another pattern or part of a pattern. Or again, everything is pattern, infinitely plastic and malleable. A person who believes in a particular conceptual system believes that everything can be explained by reference to that conceptual system.

Whereas the artist sees the pattern and feels the mystery that looms beyond the pattern. The truth of the matter, everything that seems supremely important in life, begins when the talking, writing, painting, sculpting, filming and singing of discourse stop.

But great art is pattern over mystery, it is juggling words over whirlpools of silence. In the extended sense, this view of language, life and art can seem exceedingly austere, if not forbidding and bleak. Just as Nabokov says that one of the functions of a novel is to prove that the novel in general does not exist. Few of us can help feeling a nostalgia for the old ways, or what we think are the old ways, of talking.

For certainty and immortality. For familiar stories with plots and characters and recognizable locales.

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For adventure, romance and magic. They often feel they have a stake in the old way. They invent metaphors and analogies — machine breakdowns, erosion, war, disease — to make themselves feel easier. And to sell books.

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You can see where nostalgia led Levi-Strauss in his wonderful autobiographical novel Tristes Tropiques. The annihilation of the self, of meaning and aboutness, by structural anthropology drove him into a quest for theological support, which he may or may not have found wandering amongst the Buddhist temples of the Far East. Or of Michel Foucault leaving his university office every afternoon to pursue a gruesome and self-destructive quest through the bath houses of New York until his death from AIDS.

One can look at people like Sartre, Foucault and Levi-Strauss as contemporary monks whose intellectual vigor and honesty led them to the conclusion that God, man and reality cannot be reached through words. On December 6, , at the age of fifty, Thomas Aquinas suffered something like a nervous breakdown and never wrote again. That, by analogy, telling a story is a logically impossible project.

In this regard, the American Catholic novelist Walker Percy once wrote:. A good novel — and, I imagine, a good poem — is possible only after one has given up and let go. If one opts for the former, that is that; it is a letzte Losung and there is nothing more to write or say about it. But if one opts of the latter, one is in a sense dispensed and living on borrowed time. One is not dead!

Rather one feels, What the hell, here I am washed up, it is true, but also cast up, cast up on the beach, alive and in one piece. I can move my toe up and then down and do anything else I choose. The possibilities open to one are infinite. A dead writer may be famous but he is also dead as a duck, finished. And I, cast up here on this beach? I am a survivor! True, he made the beach, which, now that I look at it, is not all that great.

The editor and I will prevail. Doug, I have two essays that I have gone to over the years for courage, solace and inspiration in my pursuit of novel writing. So glad to have this wonderful to have it all here. One has to commit, and then yikes. I remember Bob Day very well. He was a good drinker! Her was also a wonderful writer. I still recall how gorgeous the passage was that he read from Last Cattle Drive.

Give him my best if you see him! Must now go read his new book on your site. My God, Doug—this essay reaffirms, sanctifies, revivifies, nails down, holds sacred everything I have ever believed about novels or writing—that it all stems from the poetic impulse.

A godsend, a gift—thank you, friend. More so now, as I write my first novel. And everything Viv said. As a fiction writer, I purposefully study poetry to learn how I can improve my story-telling. In the least I figured a poem could teach me to make my images count and to be concise. But all the talk about patterns and repetition! And blew me away. I feel inspired, and I needed that in the midst of this major transition in my life.

Thank you, thank you. I always come back and reread this essay from time to time. Coates felt that he had become more radicalized.

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The only endorsement Coates sought was that of novelist Toni Morrison, which he received. Between the World and Me takes the form of a book-length letter from the author to his son, adopting the structure of Baldwin's The Fire Next Time ; the latter is directed, in part, towards Baldwin's nephew, while the former addresses Coates's year-old son.

Coates contemplates the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States. He prioritizes the physical security of African-American bodies over the tradition in Black Christianity of optimism, "uplift," and faith in eventual justice i. His background, which he describes as "physicality and chaos," leads him to emphasize the daily corporeal concerns he experiences as an African-American in U. Coates's position is that absent the religious rhetoric of "hope and dreams and faith and progress," only systems of White supremacy remain along with no real evidence that those systems are bound to change.

Coates gives an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth "always on guard" in Baltimore and his fear of the physical harm threatened by both the police and the streets. He also feared the rules of code-switching to meet the clashing social norms of the streets, the authorities, and the professional world.

He contrasts these experiences with neat suburban life, which he calls "the Dream" because it is an exclusionary fantasy for White people who are enabled by, yet largely ignorant of, their history of privilege and suppression. To become conscious of their gains from slavery, segregation, and voter suppression would shatter that Dream.

Coates uses his friend's story to argue that racism and related tragedy affects Black people of means as well. After reading Between the World and Me , novelist Toni Morrison wrote that Coates fills "the intellectual void" left by James Baldwin's death 28 years prior. Scott of The New York Times said the book is "essential, like water or air. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote that Between the World and Me functioned as a sequel to Coates's memoir, which displayed Coates's talents as an emotional and lyrical writer.

Is this kind of fear inevitable? Can you relate to his experience? Why or why not? Why do you think Coates chose this literary device? Did the intimacy of an address from a father to his son make you feel closer to the material or kept at a distance?

One can read Between the World and Me in many different ways. It may be seen as an exploration of the African American experience, the black American male experience, the experience of growing up in urban America; it can be read as a book about raising a child or being one. Which way of reading resonates most with you? I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals.