Review of "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous"

This fiction novel is written in epistolary form by a son to his illiterate mother. The story pulls back layers of generational abuse, trauma, sexual identity, and loss of life in Connecticut. The letters follow a rough timeline tracing his grandmother, mother, then his life, but in the sporadic manner of memory slowly recalled. 

 

At it's worst: An atmospheric emotional experience, waxing poetic to a point it's nauseating, something akin to reading Jenny Holzer truisms for pages on end; a redundant stream-of-conscious.

At it's best: A poet's precision in detailing generational trauma, particular pain, and making meaning out of the mundane; raw emotion that will make sure you are as painfully aware of the brutality of the world as the narrator.

The stark diction and attention to details of Vuong's writing style grab you from the beginning. Details of domestic abuse are given as if they are commonplace, yet nothing much is predictable. It's an emotional upheaval of the life of a family who has survived war, racism, and working at nail salons - but only barely.

At some points he reminds me of Cormac McCarthy with normalized descriptions of brutal pain, and at others the panic of Richard Siken, whom the author Ocean Vuang credits in his Acknowledgements page. All three authors seem to say 

"I am comfortable in this discomfort, so much so I will make it glaring. You, too, will hurt like me." 

But the same style that tempts also repells. 

 

The truisms are constant - and then exhausting. There is no climax. The closest we get is the scene where he comes out to his mother, but it was punctuated by so many interruptions of background noise that I could feel my blood pressure rise.

just write the scene, I thought.

I don't need to know the details of every person who walks into the store. I don't care how many kids there are, or what field trip they came from, or which ones are mourning a bad dream. Just tell me what you are trying to say. 

 

Some moments wax so poetic it's nauseating. I want to take out the paragraphs about buffaloes running off of cliffs and diabetics selling Cutco, take out the lines of being "blazed in the blood of light" and a living room being "miserable with laughter" and replace it with something less cloying.

To lift my weighty review, I will share my favorite paragraph of the novel.

"I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don't get enough of one or the other. The have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American's sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, "It's been an honor to serve my country." (pg. 181). 

 

The novel is chock-full of similar paragraphs that drop out of the novel and into a tumblr text-post seamlessly. Flip open the book, point to a page, and you've got your next clever photo caption. Here's an easy one:

"The truth is we don't have to die if we don't feel like it.

Just kidding."

As Dwight Garner of The New York Times puts it, it's mostly "filled with showy, affected writing, with forced catharses and swollen quasi-profundities." The pithy lines try to touch on everything; that is to say, they say nothing.

Difference in Definition Between Sex & Gender

Please feel free to add your own notes and comparisons. Perhaps one day I will come back and give biblical references for my thoughts, but do not count on it.

Gender: outward expression

Sex: deeply personal, private

Gender: outward trappings, clothing, communities and customs by which to behave

Sex: requires surgery or mutilation to change; can be deformed at/before birth or later in life. Always painful to change - there is blood. 

Gender: changes by stepping into the closet, so to say. Acting. Clothing, the requirements for which may change from year to year.

I give no ruling to say that this is an absolute. But I do say clearly that there is a difference between the two, and the fact of sex and the notion of gender are mutually exclusive, though they do often correspond. But that is a different subject.

A Comparison of Poems Written 20 Years Apart

In the following I will be comparing the first two stanzas of two different poems by Joy Davidman.
I am doing this in an attempt to highlight a shift in a poet's writing that I have sensed but never articulated: that if they start off tightly wound, they loosen up through the years.

This is in no way conclusive. I have been reading through A Naked Tree by Joy Davidman (Ed. Don W. King, Eerdman's press) and I couldn't really get through it. Mostly, I couldn't sit through all the poems of her earlier years, 1930's or so. She was not in her juvenile-qualifying years at this time, she was in her 20's at the time of writing them. But there is something in the writing that is stressed and stressed-over like the first writings of a blossoming poet that wants very much to be good.

"And Rainbow Wings"

If in my dream you wore a monstrous shape,

Some unimaginable beast of death

To part my little body and my breath,

An iron dragon or distorted ape;

If your strong semblance came in lust to rape

A flesh that flowers to this consummation,

Or brought an illusory adoration,

Sleep would become enchantment and escape."   (May 1934)

The first two stanzas here are more sound than feeling: see the alliteration; feel the shape of your mouth as you read it out loud; ask yourself what tangible senses you pick up on.
The story here (and I by no means think every poem needs a narrative or plot, but please hold back your critics of my critiquing, please) is abstract. Sure, dreams are abstract, but the senses are so unattended to that I do not know where to place my attention. Should I be thinking about the ape, the flesh, or the escape? Why does my mouth find distaste in saying "illusory adoration"?
This poem gets me nowhere except impressed with how things sound next to each other. 

I do not want more of this poem.

Now let's look at the next poem.

"XXXV"
Poor child, who read a book of magic once,

And tried such games as walking on the waves,

Distilling essences of stars and suns,

And conjuring dead women from their graves

To skip a sarabande about you! When,

As children will, you wearied of your play
And would have sent them to their holes again,

How sad to find they would not go away!"   (May 9, 1954)

Now here we have a story. There is progression in the reader's mind from child with a book, child at the ocean, child under the stars, child in the grave yard. The settings are clear.

In eight lines I have a history of the speaker's subject: a child who was once enthralled with magic found in a book, played child-like with it, only to have a haunting consequence - be it either wisdom learned too soon or longing for the first initial rush that cannot be again played out.
The sounds of this poem, as well, are less chalked-full of syllables, but instead flow like a casual sentence. 

Whatever it is, I want more of this poem. 

The first poem seems too contrived for my liking. I feel that the speaker merely wants to use the "poetic" words they find power in rather than crafting a cohesive piece.

Has anyone else noticed a trend from strained to natural in poetry or writing? Or any other shifts in an author's style through their career?

Simone Weil's 111th Birthday

"If only I knew how to disappear, there would be a perfect union of love between God and the earth I tread, the sea I hear...When I am in any place, I disturb the silence of heaven and earth by my breathing and the beating of my heart."

On this day in Pair, France, 1909, Simone Weil was born.

It is only appropriate that 111 years later, as her biggest fan, I would have a headache that bordered on a migraine all day. Also in celebration of her memory I didn't have a second cookie at lunch though I could have. I still, however, had a first cookie.

For a short article, here's this Brain Pickings article. For a piece of Weil art that has a cool-girl aloofness to it that Weil would certainly never have possessed, have this.

Simone Weil refused to join the Catholic Church. This was before Vatican II.

I have not the strength of Weil to write on when I really don't have to with a pain like this behind my eyes. I cannot, in a few words on a blog, describe to you what reading Gravity and Grace, a short collection of her scattered thoughts, for the first time was like for me. But if you can recall for yourself what it feels like to find a word for a feeling that you had always felt but never known what to call - it was something like that.

If I could bring back any person from French history, I would call back Simone Weil. If all she did was insult me in French that I could hardly understand, then I would be a happy person.

Here's a rad quote on her idea of the self and how any concept of it needs to be destroyed:

"We possess nothing in the world - a mere chance can strip us of everything - except the power to say "I". That is what we have to give to God, in other words, to destroy. There is absolutely no other free act which it is given us to accomplish, only the destruction of the "I.""

I Don't Have Pithy Answers

Edit: I wrote my first post immediately after the event, posted it, then I slept on it, then woke up to realize what I was actually trying to say.


I've come face to face with the fact that I not only don't have all of the answers to questions on Christian theology, but what few questions I do have answered are painful for me to articulate. The former does not unsettle me - it is the latter that gave me difficulty when confronted with a Catholic priest who told me he wasn't trying to convert anyone to Christianity, that "If they are in my pew and happy, then I'm happy for them."

I'm scared that my friends who invited me to this mass may not know Jesus. What's more, I am scared that I don't know what it means to know Jesus. Last night I tried to articulate the importance of the spiritual relationship and the three-parts of spirit, soul, and body that make up a person. It was fumbling, it didn't make sense.  I couldn't get my emotional truths out of my mouth. I was dismissed.

It struck me to know that for all of my sureness in my Christianity, I could not stutter out one convincing sentence in the face of someone who was content to leave this whole Jesus thing out of the matter, telling me that making people more human was enough, that improving humanity was the goal.

I could not get out the emotions, experiences, and knowledge that was in me, so I was left staring at the things in me wondering what were they, really, after all? How useful can the knowledge I have be if I can not disseminate it - if I can not spread the Word? I could not even get words out when speaking to someone who I should be able to have the same basic understandings with, but it was like we were speaking a different language.

Dr. Tran taught it my Heritage class that Theology is a language about God.

In this regard I have learned I am as good as mute.

I will likely never be a great apologist (I give room for possibility because I'm only 23 and God can do as He fancies). I come to the discussion table with emotional truths, some of which I truly can not put into orally-spoken words without losing a bit of their gravitas and meaning. But I know that I should have been able to hold my ground on something, I should have had something memorized that was stark truth and unchangeable. None of the Creeds came to mind. Not even "Jesus Christ is the Son of God, begotten, not made."

I do not know yet how to change this. For now, this is simply a marker of where I am.

Frat-Snapping at the C. S. Lewis Retreat

You know how it goes: someone mentions Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and you just can't help but react in the affirmative.

So there I was, the only 20-something in a crowd of roughly 80 people who were all closer to retirement than college graduation, trying to frat snap as the speaker continues on about examples of allegory.
That's when the longing hits me.

I missed the HRC, and everyone there at the retreat was looking for their own version of it.

One woman who flew all the way to Navasota, Texas from Maryland tells me she's been back several times because "these are my people." That same night at the Bag End Cafe, a small open-mic session at the end of the day, a man named Skip tells me from under his cowboy hat that he keeps coming back because he loves ideas, and he wants to talk to other people about ideas. The C. S. Lewis retreat is where he finds that. Early in the first day of the weekend retreat one of the directors asks everyone who has returned to the retreat and made a life-long friend there to stand up, and most of the room does. Some stood up exuberantly, and those that could not stood up on canes.

I won't be going back to the retreat. While I did indeed learn and I do think I made a new friend, it filled me with longing more than anything. These people in their 40's and 50's talked about companionship and amicability of fellow Lewis fans like this was the only place they had ever found it. I believe them. So many were looking for the very thing I had known and lived in for a solid three years - and here they had it, for a few days once a year.

How blessed I was to not find community at the C. S. Lewis retreat, knowing that I had already found it elsewhere! 

This new phase of my life does not bring with it friendly notes on my door nor laughter at midnight. There are no keen ears for my schemes, no ready hands to bring them to life. I haven't been asked for advice on boys in months. I miss hearing Emma laugh.
While I might long for the blessing to be in the same conference room with all of my dear friends again, dissing professors and translations with playful smiles, at least I have known it. I have experienced intimately that  feeling which so many others were looking for that weekend. And because I have known it, I recognize it when I see it.

I can't actually frat snap, but I tried. It was a pure, unadulterated reaction to hearing one of my most beloved books mentioned. Pure, silly joy.

 It's the kind of reaction I'm going to have whenever I see any of you again.

Horace, Odes 1.11

My translation

Mind you don’t ask—it’s wrong to know—what end to me or you

the gods will give, Leuconoe, nor try the horoscopes

of Babylon. It’s better to submit to what will be,

whether Jupiter will give more winters, or just this,

which now wears down against the high opposing cliffs the sea

of Tuscany. Be wise, pour out the wine, and to brief space

prune your long hopes. While we are speaking, time flies on

with envy: pluck the day, trust little to the time to come.

Latin text
Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi
finem di dederint, Leuconoe, nec Babylonios
temptaris numeros. ut melius, quidquid erit, pati.
seu pluris hiemes seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam,
quae nunc oppositis debilitat pumicibus mare
Tyrrhenum: sapias, vina liques et spatio brevi
spem longam reseces. dum loquimur, fugerit invida
aetas: carpe diem quam minimum credula postero.

What does it mean to be "co-heirs with Christ"?

Someone was telling me the other day that becoming a catholic after growing up a Protestant was like finding out you were born into royalty and no one had told you.

I, (who have not become catholic), did know I had been born into royalty. I was raised by romantic nerds who read too much Narnia. They didn't really understand what they were reading a lot of the time (do any of us?) but they knew it was true. So I knew that to be a christian was to be royalty, I just had little idea what royalty was. So what does it mean that we are adopted children of the King?

I knew we were "heirs with Christ," whatever that means. I knew that Peter was supposed to be the high king of Narnia and that was pretty cool. It meant he got to wear a crown. I knew Simba had a responsibility to take back his kingdom and I certainly knew what a responsibility was. I knew Aragorn was really cool and could do all sorts of useful things. But all these things were just cool. My understanding of being “co-heirs with Christ” was not much more nuanced than a childish desire to be a princess and to go on adventures.

Going back now and rereading the Lord of the Rings and Narnia and Hosea and 1 & 2 Samuel and many other things, it seems that I didn't know what a king was at all. There are lots of things these kings and queens do that didn’t fit with my understanding of royalty. I didn't know why Aragorn is recognized as king for having "the hands of a healer." I didn't know that "always a king or queen of Narnia" meant something more than vague nobility; it is also a duty. I didn't know why Simba could save a country that Nala couldn't. I didn't know that Nala was also royalty in any meaningful sense. I didn't know that Lucy's cordial was a gift for the queen, and not just a tool for use by the most compassionate female available.

While I was told I had responsibilities as a Christian, those responsibilities were all evangelism; there were no others. I didn't make the connection that those duties of the Christian are also those of the voice crying in the wilderness "make straight the paths of the Lord," of giant slaying, of having the hands of a healer, of standing at the front of the army and leading it fearlessly, of caring for one’s people, and of exposing treachery. Those ideas were all presented, but they were disjointed and misplaced. The puzzle slowly comes together, and the result is a heavy picture of honor and responsibility. Yes I am an heir with Christ, and do get to be nobility. That is an honor. That honor is not cheaply bought. The princes and princesses here in our church have that honor because they have to ride at the front of the army. The title is not really earned, it is given as adopted children, but it is profoundly expensive. It costs your whole person and then some. In order to be a king or queen you have to be more than you are, and so you need the title and the honor. It will be called upon.

Part of that responsibility lies in claiming the title. Simba and Aragorn are both born into kingship, but both of them have to claim their kingship, and the act of claiming it is their most important and most difficult duty. T'Challa wouldn't be the king he is if he didn't defend that title from people who want it only for the glory. Scar tells Simba “you don’t understand! The pressures of ruling a kingdom—“ and Simba finishes his sentence: “—are no longer yours.” Simba is not taking the title and glory and submitting to its responsibilities, dangers, and pressures. Rather, he is claiming the responsibility and the title that goes with it. A king has a duty to his people not to treat his title lightly; he needs it to lead them well.

Another part of that responsibility is knowing who else is in charge. The other kings and queens of Narnia (all of them) know that Peter is the high king, obey him (even Edmund), and all respect one another, letting each do the thing they are best at. Aragorn wouldn't be half the king he is if he didn't know how to serve under another king, bow to the king of Rohan in his own hall, know what a force of nature a shieldmaiden of Rohan is, recognize that even the king of Gondor and Arnor can marry above his station, obey his foster father/father in law, and accept the authority of Galadriel. There have to be other royals; no one person can rule alone. (Though how we are all royalty is the subject of another paper.)

We are all co-heirs with Christ. We are princes and princesses of the coming kingdom, the kingdom of heaven. Our high King will return, with the sound of a trumpet, and raise the dead. We are his children, fighting and working until he comes. It doesn't necessarily take Catholicism to realize one is royalty. Just ecumenical education in our own history. And that realization is tremendous, wonderful, awesome, and sobering. Christ has conquered death, but until he returns in glory he and his co-heirs are still fighting for the salvation of the world. And he has a royal army. Our family has in it women who died in battle, princesses who slew and tamed dragons, men who liberated slaves, kings and queens who conquered death, mystics who understood mysteries of the faith, and ordinary everyday men and women who gave their lives to feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering the homeless, healing the sick, visiting the imprisoned, and burying the dead.

Take care of one another. We are sons and daughters of the King of kings. We have work to do.


A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” ... Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.
Isaiah 40:3-5, 28-31

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. ... The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. ... No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:14, 16-18, 37-39

"Crutch" - a poem

Crutch                                                                                                                                                             

The butterflies in my stomach are

Shy yet vivid things

And when they first saw you

They peeled open their wings.

My stomach is a small space

But they manage to fly high

When on some chance morning

You smile, wave, walk by.

It is absolutely sickening

My hot, feverish blushing:

It's a symptom of the butterflies,

Their tiny heart-beats rushing.

Some times it gets so bad

I double over, nauseous.

The butterflies saw you get nervous,

Saw you regard me with something cautious.

There is a butterfly named

For every boy for whom I've had a crutch:

-a winged-turmoil in my belly

-a hope that hands might touch.

Very Old, Very Scary Things

Do you ever get that feeling when you’re reading about something old, very very old, older than the Latins ever were, and you feel that what you’re reading is somehow dangerous? Like you might come across a secret that is too old, and that you don’t necessarily want to know, and you feel like you might wake something ancient and terrible, but you also can’t stop reading. You might take one too many steps into the woods and you won’t be able to find your way back. And you realize, as you think it, that you are not in fact in the woods: you are in your own chair in your own house in the broad daylight. But if you weren’t in such a safe, well lit place, the words you’re reading, the secrets you’re hearing might not fit in the book, and maybe these words should not darken this room. The vague fear is enough to quicken your heart and freeze your body as though you’re hiding, and you hardly breathe except to turn the page. Let me demonstrate. 

There was once such a creature as a hornless rhino, with a thick grey hide, kind soft eyes, and elephantine legs, whose hocks would come up to your shoulders. He wandered the breadth of Eurasia before there was a line to break it. 

Hippos once swam in the Rhine. Hyenas hunted great shaggy rhinos who ran like horses across Russia and whose pelts dragged the ground, and women painted them both into magic caves hidden deep in French forests that we still greet with whispers. 

Europe’s lions were bigger than a tiger, and could touch their nose to yours. They were maneless, and their coats were blonde, or gray. The elk of Germany and the British isles had twisted mantles of horn wider than a car is long, and their withers would clear your head. 

Sloths grew tall as streetlamps. They were behemoths with hides so thick spears bounced off their sides, and they had claws as long as your foot. And they would meander across the plains and forests of Texas. 

Some sloths lived in the depths of the sea, dripping with seaweed and ancient eyes, bigger than an elephant and heavier than a sea cow. 

A sea cow, by the way, is not a manatee; it is the size of a semi truck. They’ve been extinct since 1760, but a fisherman in the fifties thought he saw one. 

There were elephants that had four tusks.

And two trunks. 

Or a jaw that looked like a trunk. 

America’s lions were cinnamon red with paws the size of dinner plates. Armadillos were not much bigger than a car. (Did you know modern armadillos can be 5' long?) America’s zebras had brown stripes, and the bears would dwarf a grizzly. 

There were once hogs, ugly as sin, who were as big and as fast as a horse. They’re called “Hell pigs”

There were people in Europe before the people we know as Europeans came. Some say the modern Europeans killed them. Others say the modern Europeans moved in quietly and married them. Still others say that they were a quiet, gentle people who moved into the shadows until they died out. The Finns and the Hungarians and a handful of scattered people of Russia may still speak a descendant of their language. They may speak something else entirely. 

Do you know what Old English sounded like? It had letters you’ve never heard of, and fourteen vowels. Do you know what tongue the ancient kings of Scotland used? Have you ever met an old Irish farmer who speaks no English, but a tongue older than we can even know? 

When you read the story of the Exodus, do you ever think about what words they are speaking? We can’t even today tell you how they are pronounced. If you heard them, would you know?

Do you know that there are stars that move at near the speed of light? There are stars thousands upon thousands of times the size of ours. There are stars so small, so bright, spinning so fast, that one can keep time to the millisecond on them, and a tablespoon of the stuff they’re made of weighs more than the human race. 

Why is this knowledge dangerous?

If it isn't, why does it feel like it is?