friend, Anna, among these marginal women. She runs about twenty sheep and each one is an individual to her, living out a fairly normal ruminant life except, of course, for the lambs, whose sale has put her sons through university.
Yet even slaughter—I do not shrink from the word—can be accomplished with respect. Anna takes the lambs to her local butcher two-by-two in a small van, because she believes the large cattle trucks frighten them. The butcher renders them unconscious with a stun gun and then cuts their throats. They are hung immediately and the meat is perfectly tended. Anna believes it’s a mark of reverence for the animals to take perfect care of their meat and to waste nothing.
I told my friend that if I wanted to have an effect on animal rights, I would be inclined to follow Anna’s reasonable example …
“Mary!” Ben snaps across my line of internal chatter. “Stop thinking. Flip that ram for me, will you? Your body knows how to do it. Don’t try to do it with your mind.”
Ben has, in some cosmic transaction, accepted the position of my Zen master.
I WOULD NOT SAY I am looking for God. Or, I am not looking for God precisely. I am not seeking the God I learned about as a Catholic child, as an eighteen-year-old novice in a religious community, as an agnostic graduate student, as—but who cares about my disguises? Or God’s.
In childhood, exiled by rheumatic fever to a back bedroom, I existed for months in boredom so exquisite it approached, as it now seems to me, the threshold of satori. Next to my bed was a table, and on the table lay a thick glass to protect the wood surface beneath. Propped on pillows, a child could stare slantwise into a half-inch angle of refraction that disappeared into infinity. I longed to slip into this world under glass and drift through the dense sea of light where (something told me) no gravity governed the operation of things. Yet sometimes the prospect of liberation terrified me; tumbling into sleep, I would waken in horror at a dream of falling into a void between the glass and the table, drifting forever without even the minimal distractions of my confined life: soap operas on the radio, lunch, arithmetic worksheets, fear of the doctor, the click of my mother’s heels when she came home from work.
When the temptation comes over me to say I am looking for God, this primal scene sometimes returns. Other recollections crowd in as well, many of them from childhood; all of them have in common the sense of brushing (with longing and fear) against a parallel universe. The young exist quite naturally in a liminal world; consider how children’s books retain this intuition of possibility: that in the back of the wardrobe or through a wrinkle in time, down a hole in the garden, on the back of a sparrow, or in the company of Mr. Toad, you can simply chuck the grown-ups and be there, where things count. Plato, I believe, had long periods of indulging a similar whimsy. And so do most poets. “There are things I tell to no one,” writes Galway Kinnell (telling):
Those close to me might think
I was sad, and try to comfort me, or become sad themselves.
At such times I go off alone, in silence, as if listening for God.
I am saying these things to explain why, in the middle of my life, I found myself wandering away, as children do, sometimes alone, sometimes in silence. I went to Anna’s sheep farm in England, to a Buddhist monastery in France, to a parsonage in rural Maine. I completed a certification program in spiritual direction, learning to talk to people who wanted to talk to God. I went back to serious work in my first college major, music, and traveled around singing and playing fiddle duets with Robin, the man who has long been my music partner and life’s companion. My university job no longer interested me as much as it once had. Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was books that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, “Don’t get lost in the dramas of life”; and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus.
Or maybe it was twenty-five years of Quaker discipline that had made me suspicious of fiction; Quakers have, after all, some theology in common with that clique who shut down the theaters in 1642. The Society of Friends, with its practical focus, has tended to produce natural scientists, botanical illustrators, and manufacturers of chocolate bars. Quakers seldom write fiction and I can’t, offhand, think of any who write it well. Our rather unimaginative testimonies about literal truth lead us away from what we, erroneously, take for its opposite: story. Once I was staying at a Quaker community that suffered flooding in the night from an ice dam on the library roof. Fortunately—or as it turned out, ironically—one of my goddaughters was staying with me, a young woman employed professionally as a museum preservationist. She sprang into action. “I’ll call a friend of mine who knows how to dry out books,” she volunteered, looking at the sodden volumes, many of them rare. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” the librarian told her. “It’s only the fiction section.”
I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I learn less and less from them that helps me to ponder my life. In time, I found myself agreeing with the course evaluations written by my testier freshmen students: “All the literature we read this term was depressing.” How naive. How sane. One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: “This is how you spend your days? Thinking about things like this?” I was ashamed. I could have been learning about string theory or how flowers pollinate themselves.
I think his remark was the beginning of my crisis of faith. Like so many of my generation in graduate school, I had turned to literature as a kind of substitute for formal religion, which no longer fed my soul, or for therapy, which I could not afford. With therapy, given luck, time, or medication, the neurosis wanes and one no longer makes appointments. Teaching English, the neurosis wanes as well, and then … well, why do you think so many English teachers become administrators, or throw themselves into abstract contemplation of critical theory? For my part, I became interested in exploring the theory of nonfiction and in writing memoir, a genre that gives us access to that lost Middlemarch of reflection and social commentary. Quakers are, as a group, pigheaded individualists. George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, issued a famous challenge to his followers: “Christ saith this and the Apostles say this, but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of Light and hast thou walked in the Light?…” What could be more validating to the journal keeper?
I do not think, however, that a memoir is intrinsically more truthful than a novel. Indeed, the diarist should remind herself daily how subjective her occupation is, because she has the overwhelming advantage and responsibility of inscribing her version of events. She should keep in mind, at least—as should her readers—the old country-and-western song, “We live in a two-storey house. She has her story and I have mine.” One kind of nonfiction is, I think, a subspecies of poetry, and poetry is a way to honor the stream of things by observation. Poetry affirms the hunger of our condition: for each other, for comprehension, for God, for the landscape outside self. But it is not botanical illustration.
Having come to doubt the reality of (literary) transubstantiation, I needed, as I do in any crisis, a practical focus. So I became a shepherd: a hireling shepherd. It’s a job with good Biblical antecedents.
