As I Lay Dying

Recently I've thought of my presence in New Orleans as ill-fitting.  I watch myself interacting with locals as a visitor.  I see women at bars as unapproachable--somehow removed from whatever my plane is...  I look at all this dripping beauty through a temporary gaze; here, I am not a part of the land.  As I walk down the sidewalk on my way to my coffee shop, I see cracks in the pavement.  And whereas identical pavement cracks once stood out to me in Seattle and even in Walla Walla as some sort of natural spite against the world, here they merely exist.  I am growing here... learning from my inhibitions and my setbacks and my strengths and my triumphs, but there is a lingering in my mind of my fitting into this place as a circle might fit inside of a square; there is an unconquerable void around my edges.

Addie Bundren's passage in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is one wrought with regret.  She presents her reasons for marrying her pathetic husband, for birthing her troubled children...  but far beyond that, she gives us a disposition that strikes me as fundamentally pertaining to my life right now.

She recalls:

"He had a word, too.  Love, he called it.  But I had been used to words for a long time.  I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear."

And of course, throughout my education and until today, I've thought of words as little tools to be used for the sake of conveying those feelings we have but cannot explain, those moments we know but cannot understand.  Words have always, then, been the survivors; they've been the vehicles behind my shining moments of truly being able to acknowledge those deepest feelings I've felt.

But in this passage, Addie makes things simpler.  In her view, the triumph of words is always secondary to the triumph of feeling, the triumph of existing.  It is as though, for her, words like "love" and "fear" exist as consolation prizes, substitutes for the true experiences we face, the true emotions we feel, and the true existences we endure.  They are, then, ill-fitting...  because the truth is, for her, that if we have a word that perfectly describes our moment, then we are not truly feeling our moment at all.  Rather, we are filling some square void with a circular substitute...  we are filling a lack of reason with an excuse...  we are filling the void left by an emotion with some lifeless explanation...

for me, though, the image of the circle ill-fitting into a square of equal diameter is reductive.  For how often do we recognize that the deeper we look into our lives, the more complex our lives become.  If we narrow down, for instance, the root of a personal issue to a comprehension of "love," do we not, then, find many different facets that make up our "love"?  That is to say, once our circle has "ill-fitted" into our  emotional or sensual square, doesn't that square then morph into a pentagon?  A hexagon?  An octagon? etc.  And etc...  And the beauty of this is that as this exterior shape continues to grow in terms of angles, our "circle," our "understanding,"  touches more and more surfaces of this exterior shell.  And yet, with those increasing moments of contact between our verbal circle and out experiential shape, we also find an equally increasing number of gaps in between understanding and void, between sensation and description...  between being and the means by which we understand our being...


...does this leave us feeling weak or empowered?  This, I think, is the beauty of Faulkner.  He presents to us this question with such a natural ease that we must confront our growing understanding with our growing confusion, and vice versa.  He gives us a slap in the face while commemorating us...  He gives us the strength to find our own beauty as we writhe in our own despairing mirth...

and vice versa.


There are two different kinds of "good vs. bad" writer; there those who label individuals and "good" and "bad," and then there are those who present the conflict of "good vs. bad" internally within each individual.  This seems almost intuitive.  But even those dumbed down and dualistic presentations of good vs. bad that we see in, for example, comic book stories, provide the reader with an interpretation of good vs. bad that registers on an internal and personal level, one that can only be understood by someone with the understanding that, within them, both "good" and "bad" exist...  in a sense, then, the fight between good vs. evil exists within all of us.  And I think we all understand this pretty well.

But why, then, do we always want to convince ourselves that we are good?  Why do people have such an urge to take these artists' representations of good and bad (and our understandings of their works) and process them in a way that eventually makes each one of us "good"?  I know this seems like a simple question.  But the answer, too often, is too reductive and, frankly, naive.



Within all of us exists the understanding that with each growth and new contact between our verbal or comprehensive circles and our world's shapes, we are experiencing a simultaneous growth of gaps between our different points of knowledge...  the more we know, the less we know, and etc.  We've heard that before.


But if this is true, why do we fight so hard to convince others that our way is the correct way?  That our vision of the world is the clearest view?  Most importantly, why do we work so hard to convince ourselves that somehow, innately, we've ended up on "the good side"?


I think that we are all wrong just as often as we are all correct.

and vice versa.