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Published on: 9/13/2006
Last Visited: 10/17/2006
This week, Seattle writer Valerie Trueblood contributes a column about Swiss writer C.-F.Ramuz.
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In July, it got so hot in Seattle--a near-100-degree, breathless, un-Pacific-Northwest heat--that I thought of a novel I used to love, and took it off the shelf and read it again: The End of All Men.
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It's all happening in a "here," told in three persons: I, Ramuz, comes and goes in the heat, coolly summoning you, the reader, to see what they, the villagers, are going to be driven to do.
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It fills in until the vast scale is apparent (see this photograph of his region), as aloof from individual ruin as Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
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Because Ramuz, who says, "I tried to close my eyes to see heaven: it was the earth," poses the question of exactly what our own attitude is to the earth, and by the time we finish reading this eighty-some-year-old fantasy we've lost our comfortable environmentalism and begun to grieve.
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"Set down nothing but what is seen."
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Glimpses of village and family life dimming, going out.
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I wish the president, who is said to be reading Camus, would spend one of these hot summer nights in Crawford reading The End of All Men.It's simple enough.
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Long before I had kids or book contracts or Internet access, I was struck by something Spalding Gray said in an interview with Tricycle magazine.
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I never met him, and have long suspected that he might be one of those charismatic, neurotic handfuls best worshipped from afar, but he was one of my heroes, and those words meant a lot to me. At 31, I was loathe to relinquish my dream of a life in the arts, despite overwhelming evidence that, should I ever be tempted to offer myself up for serious consideration, the Big Infernal Machine would drop my resume in the shredder without even opening the envelope.
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Every three months, I lay a couple thousand copies of my zine, The East Village Inky on the United States Postal Service.In return, my PO box is regularly stuffed with letters, photos, and other ephemera from subscribers who feel like they know me, which indeed, they do, far better than they would have had the hours I devoted to my zine been spent trying to get an article published in the mainstream press.As the sole employee of The East Village Inky, I've never had an editor tell me that a joke is too off-color, a reference too obscure, or a two-page, run-on sentence too long.I might have made more money if I tried playing within the parameters established by the Big Infernal Machine, but I doubt that readers would have been swayed to send unsolicited plastic cocktail monkeys, fresh mint and a Bar Mitzvah present for my cat.
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I spend so much time hunched over my keyboard, it's hard to remember that not everyone is courting a dowager's hump via constant connection to the web.The handwritten nature of my zine means that I can work on it anywhere, as long as I have a pen and paper.I could knock out a page in the middle of a pasture!I'm not fettered by electrical outlets or wireless access, though I do rely rather heavily on correction fluid.My natural tendency toward sloth could only spell trouble when coupled with the one-click ease of publishing half-baked thoughts on a blog.Since I have to go over the East Village Inky's final pages, anyway, checking that I've laid them out correctly, there's always a checkpoint for realizing that the way I've stated something makes me sound like a total ass-bite. (When you write your own zine, you can use idiosyncratic words like ass-bite, a beauty that was lost on the large-circulation editor who attempted to change my characteristic "heinie" to the generic, and to me much less descriptive, "butt.")
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A previous contributor to Moorishgirl.com, he sends in this short column, titled "Church of the Big Legs."
As a child, when I thought of Unitarians, I thought of pizza and women with big legs.My best friend across the street in Greenville, South Carolina, where I grew up, was Unitarian.One Sunday his family took me to their church, which was like no other church I had been to.I had had some inkling that it might be a little different because he had told me to bring my swimsuit and a towel, but I didn't think anything could be much stranger than my own religious upbringing.
As a toddler, I had often accompanied my great great aunt and uncle to a small conservative Baptist church, where the preacher harangued, and I often screamed back in a kind of mutual and strangely satisfying hysteria.Then my father, who was from the Midwest and whose parents had been Christian Scientist and who had his own mystical leanings, decided we (at least my brother, my mother and I) should attend a Christian Science Church, while he stayed home and read the Sunday morning paper.At the time a Christian Science Church in a Southern town was a real anomaly, and when my teacher at school discovered I was Christian Scientist, she would ask me questions in front of the whole class like, "If you contracted malaria, would your parents give you quinine?"In my religious upbringing I had gone from fire and brimstone to Mary Baker Eddy's murky mortal mind, from the heat of hell's eternal furnace to the intellectual intricacies of Science and Health.
So the Sunday morning I accompanied my best friend's family to a Unitarian Church I did not know what to expect.I certainly didn't expect that their church would be a house in a neighborhood.
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I was nine-years-old and hadn't seen that many women in shorts.My mother never wore them.No mothers I knew wore them.I certainly had never seen anyone in church wear shorts.While no one else was wearing shorts that day, I had the suspicion as I looked around, that all Unitarian women had monstrous legs.
After what they called "church" which seemed more like conversation to me-no hymns, no prayers, no responsive readings, just talk and a lot of it--we kids were shepherded down some stairs which I assumed led to a dank and moldy Bible class, where verses would be chiseled into our consciousness like epitaphs on tombstones.Instead we were led down to changing rooms, where we changed into our bathing suits, then went into the backyard.To my astonishment, there was a pool.Not a tiny baptismal pool, but a beautiful full-length swimming pool.Instead of reciting The Psalms that morning we did the backstroke.Then we ate this round doughy deliciously cheesy food called pizza.When I got home my mother hardly had time to ask me how it went, before I launched into a detailed description of the church we had to join.I told her about the pizza, the Sunday school swim and the woman with the big legs.She frowned at this last, said some women had big legs, and I should never talk about their legs because it would hurt their feelings.
I was puzzled and deflated by her response.I didn't understand why big legs were anything not to talk about.The woman's legs were interesting.An arresting fact.A breathtaking phenomenon.
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I never mentioned her legs or any woman's legs again to anybody.For nearly 40 years I have kept silent on this subject.I only bring it up now to show that as a child I had not the foggiest idea who these Unitarian people were and what they believed.
But as I child I believed what was in front of me. Pizza, a house that was a church, and a woman with remarkable legs.Oh, I knew all about the Baptist God, the fierce bearded fellow who sat on the edge of his cloudy throne, lightning bolt in hand waiting for me to sin, and I knew about the Christian Science God who gave me a pained look every time my thoughts wandered to the corporeal, which as far as I could figure was mostly where my thoughts stayed.
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And we remained reluctant Christian Scientists until, at the age of 14, I announced I wasn't going to church anymore.I remained churchless for the next 25 years, although during much of that time my father plied me with readings from writers like Thomas Merton, Huston Smith, Bagwan Sheree Rajneesh, Joel Goldsmith, Meister Eckhart, Gurdjieff, Adam Smith, William James and many many more.
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But their language was so abstract, so philosophical, so high flown, I would find myself yearning for the mundane, the sensual, the ballast of the embodied moment.I turned to fiction.While my father moved up into religion, I moved down through story.I read Eudora Welty, James Agee, Walker Percy, Katherine Ann Porter, William Maxwell, Fitzgerald and Hemingway and other writers who were so adept at inhabiting their characters and their worlds, that their books felt far more moving and at times more spiritual, than the spiritual writers themselves.
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Then my wife and I, who live in Asheville, North Carolina, had our own little embodiments-two children.We were able to bring them to the very denomination I had wanted to join as a child.While I was more than a little disappointed to find no sw
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