Pray Attention

… am reading Ron Hansen’s Hotly in Pursuit of the Real and so for a moment do you then read with me.

The title is from a line of Flannery’s I didn’t know but that is no matter; I didn’t know of Hansen’s book until a week or so ago, nor his A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, his riff on Cain’s Double Indemnity.

Hansen seems to have a fine life but what do I know … seems to write whatever he darn well wants … has anyone looked at his work for connecting gossamer? Apart from. a couple on the Western side of things … this ain’t no never mind neither; I would say the exuberance of the varietals is the connection, the this bit of life and that one over there like flowers in a field, not necessarily plucking them but noticing, attending, giving account.

In a selection from the Pursuit called ‘Seeing Into the Middle of Things’ there is this

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

A line from Thos Hardy which reminds me of Mr. Dooley’s description of the role of the newspaper

to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable

except Dooley, the fictional creation of Chicago journalist Finley Peter Dunne apparently didn’t put it ‘zackly that way and the way he did say it was in a litany of expostulatory exasperation with the overreach of the journalistic enterprise.

But again, never mind — either line sees to the middle of it, sees not exactly the same as to the nub though not unrelatedly either.

+

I have known a Chicago journalist or two in my time and they are hard-barked men and to a man — no doubt the women are as well but I have known only the male sort — they have been hotly in pursuit of the factual, which is not exactly the same as the real but not unrelatedly either. One in fact told me explicitly to let the facts speak and there’s an end on’t and I’m not real sure he was fully right but he was closer than most.

You have to be committed to the facts to let them speak, for instance; rarely indeedly do we let facts speak for themselves … I feel it a fearsome business most of the time not to put my two cents’ interpretation on the facts (though I find it easy enough, instead, to excise others’ qualifying rounds fired when I’m doing the editing).

Don’t call a hotel ‘low-end’ was the specific injunction; just say it’s sixty-nine bucks a night and let the reader decide where it ends. Of course there are some burgs where that isn’t as low-end as another but really on balance he’s right: better to trust to the facts.

I fancy even that my own locution shared liberally with younger cubs new to the newsroom — ‘ruthless for the reader’ — isn’t unrelated to what I learnt if not at the feet then at least sometimes bent over the knee of better journalists than me.

+

Hansen lauds the facts as well.

He says John Ruskin believed ‘faithful observation of the facts of existence’ were enough to render ‘fresh disclosures’ of God, resulting in great art — that is, praise. Get the facts right and great art and knowledge of God will follow. Hansen follows this with some lines on his poet Hopkins and the Jesuit’s work flowing from ‘how Hopkins so acutely saw the world.’

This is quite far afield from the ‘so much the worse for the facts’ line which may or may not have been spoken by Hegel (Lukacs said it was Fichte), or a similar one perhaps by Huxley (Darwin’s bulldog T.H., not A.), or Einstein’s about changing facts to fit the theory.

+

Annie Dillard, Martin Buber, Simone Weil and Mary Oliver make appearances in the essay as well, as do the craft of silversmithy and accounts of the blind who’re by medicine’s marvels returned their sight.

There is, for instance, an entire poem before Oliver’s oft-quoted line

Tell me, what it is you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

which poem I didn’t know. It is here, if you didn’t know either, and here is Mary Oliver reading it.

Weil speaks on the only need the unhappy have which is for we to give them our attention, and certainly they us, when a different day. And so there is much before the French mystic’s oft-quoted line

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.

And if we give them our attention we pray with them and what we pay attention to is what we love and whom else to love but the one, as someone said in a different context and prolly meant in a very different way, we’re with.

Hansen wants us ‘to attend to and confront the world honestly, unblinkingly’ as it relates to both beauty and creation as well as ‘confusions, distortions, and sins.’

This calls to mind E.B. White, who in a piece on Rachel Carson and Silent Spring noted that we must tell the truth about the world we see, and that this includes what Carson saw, as well as, when true, that the sunset is beautiful or the person, maybe the one we’re with even. It can even be neither, in a sense: take Dallas Willard’s take on the importance of ‘paying attention to our pansies,’ by which he meant attending to the supposedly but a’course not really small things in our chats — not so grand as our conversations perhaps, but nonetheless crucial and perhaps more so and in either event more numerous — with neighbors and others.

Willard and White are two fellows not in the essay, though they well could’ve been, all things considered.

‘Our continuing goal,’ Hansen writes, ‘ought to be that we become truth-tellers and truth-seekers … without squeamishness or defensiveness or false piety and reserve.’

Yes. And another thing …

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.]   One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

Read More »

Seeking the King

A line everywhere misattributed to Chesterton reads thus: The young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God. This line is not from the great [several senses of the word] man who recently celebrated his 150th birthday, but the mid-century most unmodern novelist Bruce Marshall. The words — which do

Read More »

He’s the Guy

Those social media posts of ‘this moment in this famous film was totally unscripted!!!’ as if that by itself makes it better miss the point. Moat unscripted material, like most ideas, inventions, ideas, notions, &c … fails — such is the nature of creativity: the best stuff, it is devoutly to be wished, sticks around;

Read More »

‘Round Here

Imagine someone, potentially anyone, even you, perhaps, but let us, in any case, say. Yes, you. You pull into the diner – Earl’s, Norm’s, Dinah’s, something like that. A sort-of Googie architecture … but maybe not quite, as if it’d been a little late for the Space Age, and late is the one thing you

Read More »

Random

Whee

Each animal has its glory. The dog his ears, the rabbit her tail, the dolphin their leaps. Elephant trunk Moose antlers Giraffe … duh Walrus tusks Whale tails Wolf howl Bear claw Bird caw + [We’d first say flight of course but see, think, feel they all fly and largely the same — tho the

Read More »

One Question, Two Answers

How to be really great Your life will be immeasurably great — incalculably awesome — if you put others in place of … you.  We will be great if we put others before us.  That is, if we put them first. One week at church, a pastor culled some points from a book on Christian

Read More »

Trusting Taylor Sheridan

Yellowstone sucks. Och! — but you knew that. Wait … umm … we can agree on that right? + Prolly not — else why this blog post and the recent headline that its ‘creator’, Taylor Sheridan, said Season 4 is in the can. + I tried to get through Season 1 again. Had bought it a

Read More »

For M

The great story is the search by the lover for the beloved. I love M. I am in love with M. [angry as well; in love and in pain, simul.] To love as Christ loves. (ask, seek, knock). God pursues. Christ stands. Spirit groans. I am he. I seek her even if she will not

Read More »

Related

Kim Possible

All the while watching Mad Men seemed to me the question was ‘Would Don Draper be redeemed?’ Breaking Bad was running roughly concurrently and the same question with an otherly alliteration was being posed: ‘Would Walter White be damned?’ The answer to the first was quintessentially postmodern, exquisitely childish, and thereby perfect — neither. Or, as an actual

Read More »

How Long O Overlords?

How many more evangelical celebrity figures have to shoot themselves before the church industry stops putting men and women on stages and the rest of evangelical fandom stops putting them on pedestals. This time it was Darrin Patrick. Eight months ago — the news broke on Suicide Awareness Day — it was Jarrid Wilson. Which itself

Read More »

Tubercular Dude

Did not know this until just now but a few weeks ago was World Tuberculosis Day, which honors the date the TB bacterium was discovered in 1882. The CDC says no ‘celebration’ until it is eliminated. The discovery came with its own pandemic, killing 1 in 7. From the safety of 140 years thence, this

Read More »

What I Recalled Watching Netflix

[Television is educational.]   One Saying the same stuff over and over looks like you have different things to say. Two If you’re ever in a below-average film or streaming series, and you beat the tar out of a guy, in a house, and you gaze down in both some shock as also a certain

Read More »