deconstructionist word

With respect to the requirements of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.

-- Aristotle, Poetics

There was a battle about truth last weekend, an old-fashioned meeting engagement fought in the open pages of my favorite sources of truth, the New York Times and National Public Radio. There's a book about this battle,* the quarrel seven years ago between a writer and a fact-checker. Jim Fingal the fact-checker said to John D'Agata the  writer that he had made many errors of fact. Said D'Agata to Fingal, don't bother me I'm an essayist and the details are of no consequence.

D'Agato had written about a suicide in Las Vegas in the year 2002. He referred to the young man who had jumped from a hotel observation deck by his actual name and then, shall we say, he mused about what was going on in the city at the same time.  Along the way he made statements of factual form.  He wrote for instance that at the time of the death there were "34 licensed strip clubs in Vegas," and that it took nine seconds for the suicide to reach the ground.  Fingal's findings included the following corrections: there were 31 licensed strip clubs, and the fall lasted eight seconds.**

Ah, if only I had a person of skill at my disposal, who would verify or disprove with more care than I can give the few factual statements I allow in these digital pages! I would be grateful for such service. It's hard for me to get excited about a difference of three strip clubs or one second. But D'Agato got very excited and defended all his, let's call them liberties; he defended them as the prerogative of a writer seeking greater Truth.  Those lucky enough never to have been confused by false pedagogy of the "five-paragraph essay" (a bizarre creature of remedial education precisely opposed to what it claims to be) will know that D'Agato is claiming certain privileges of an essayist. He certainly disdains the title of journalist. He was not, he says, "reporting" on the death, and Fingal is "ruining this essay" by confronting its factual statements with actual facts.

D'Agato's very specific defenses illuminate the literary territory that he wants to live in. 34 is the right number of strip clubs, he says, "because the rhythm of '34' works better . . . than the rhythm of '31.'" (I can't help but note, factually, that the the rhythm of "34" is precisely the same as the rhythm of "31.") He describes the other Vegas suicide of the date in question as a hanging (when it was in fact also a leap from height) because "I wanted [the death] to be more unique." D'Agato assumes omnipotence, in the manner of a poet or novelist, over the figurative world of his text. Works of fiction aim to be true in a way related to fact but at the same time transcending fact.  There was no Oliver Twist, but Dickens revealed the brutality and cruelty of nineteenth-century London more effectively than a hundred books of social history (and this, dearest reader is not a factual statement, so I am beyond the need of a fact-checker as I write it.) Here's the point: D'Agato was not writing a novel.  He might have written a novel.  Many novelists these days write about this kind of subject (Don DeLillo, where are you when we need you?) But the piece of writing in question is not fiction.

If the fact-checked essay had been a short story instead, its writer could invent names, persons, dates, cities, incidents and personal narratives, with only a voluntary and impressionistic relation to fact. Readers would understand his allegiance, and no issues of truth would arise. The truth of fiction, as Aristotle noticed, is the truth of the probable rather than of the possible. The beholder is not supposed to say, "Yes, I was just talking to Antonio the other day in the Rialto," but rather, "Yes, Antonio is like a kind of person I might talk to if I went to some place like the Rialto."  There is no controversy among liberally educated people about the contract of fiction; but if a writer behaves this way outside the bounds of fiction he wanders in the Colbertian wonderland of "truthiness."***  It's truthy though untrue that there were 34 strip clubs. It's also truthy though untrue that Obama is a Muslim. In the South as half my family grew up there it was truthy that "niggrahs" weren't ready for freedom, and in 1988 it was plenty truthy that Willie Horton was coming to rape your daughter.

It's worth saying again that I'm a liberal, was born, raised and will die a liberal. But these days a liberal has to be a conservative as well, since those who now call themselves conservative have abandoned their posts. So as a conservative I must point out that, though I do not own it, there is such a thing as truth. It's precisely because there is truth that as a liberal I must refuse to let anyone claim to own it. The truth is too important to be owned, and everyone who claims it must be tested. There is truth, and what conflicts with it is falsehood, and no human being is completely true.

We don't hold it against Tolstoy that there was in fact no civilian named Pierre Bezukhov wandering through the battle of Borodino. And when Tolstoy says that all happy families are alike, you may disagree with him but your disagreement is not factual, because you are disagreeing with his judgment and his definitions not with the facts. What is "happiness"? How exactly are happy families "alike"? These are not factual questions. You want to know what Tolstoy means when he asks them, and he tells you for a thousand pages, and no fact-checker comes to plague  him. But these are rights of a novelist.

There are different categories of truth. There's the truth of a fact, of a cadence, of a currency, of a soliloquy, of a dialogue, of an epigram, of a quatrain, of a prayer, of a lover's vow, of a plumb line, of a gunsight, of a song, of a self-evident right. The different  categories of truth are tested in their various ways, but factual truth is tested factually. And unless you're writing fiction, every factual statement a writer writes is subject to fact-checking -- and the writer should be grateful.

An essay is not fiction, but it is not particularly about facts, and an essayist who does not want to spend his days with the fact-checker will be sparing in his factual statements. Lucky for him, such a writer is in a great tradition. Montaigne wrote that "I study myself more than any other subject." And the essay is a private musing on experiences not meant in themselves to be questionable, a private musing written in the hope of being so predictably unpredictable, so astonishing in its self-evidence, that it has public appeal.  Emerson's thundering serial aphorisms are meant like an organ concerto to sweep you into another realm before you can wonder about the truth of the first note, which would not in any case determine the value of the last one.  The essayist says "I am here, now, seeing this and thinking that, reminded of a third thing and suffering its experience, following where it escapes and tracking it to the next site where a dying campfire shows that the sprite has once again gone missing."  To read an essay is to go on a journey with a guide who, if she had a map, wouldn't show it to you. If you don't like this, you don't like essays.

An essay is literature not science; it is a singularity not a generalization.  It is verifiable -- or disprovable -- only by the power -- or the weakness -- of its performance. Many of the most important truths are performative. Certain things become true because the right person says it in the right way at the right time. If the pastor says, accompanied by the signing of certain documents, that you are now husband and wife -- well then you are now husband and wife, and if you try to pretend otherwise the law will catch you up. If the Treasury says in writing that a pigmented piece of paper has the value of a dollar, then it really does have the value of a dollar, whatever at the moment that value is; and if you try to pass off another piece of paper as a dollar, a piece of paper that the Treasury has not approved, then you are a criminal no matter how exactly you have rendered the "truth" of a dollar in your counterfeit. Emerson mints his own currency; he gets away with arrogant ellipses because his fireworks blind you.

An essay is not a news report. But when it acts like a news report it is vulnerable to factual correction. There are many today who say they are not journalists, and all they really want is to avoid the responsibilities of journalism. So Mr. D'Agato, if you are not a journalist, don't act like one; if you are an essayist, remember how essayists write.

Yes, as a liberal compelled to be conservative, I say that there is truth, and that to refuse correction is to lie. All discourses are not equivalent in value; and we know this because the Deconstructionist Word once became flesh, and it was George W. Bush.

*The Lifespan of a Fact, John D'Agato and Jim Fingal (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012).  I have not read the book. My source for the facts of their dispute is Jennifer B. McDonald's review in the New York Times Book Review of Feb. 26.

**I do not find the latter dispute in McDonald's review, but I heard it discussed on NPR.

***McDonald also noticed the destination of this slippery slope: "Suddenly there is no difference between essaying the Truth and essaying Truthiness."

deep river

My home is over Jordan.

-- Spiritual

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

-- William Faulkner

The bass line goes so deep I can't sing it, I'm only a baritone. So I sing the upper bass, near the bottom of a sliding column of eight voices. The room is just big enough for sixty of us. When we all hit the chords just right my head rings, and for the next days and nights my brain rings too. I can't find the off-switch. Not an unpleasant condition this, but it I'm likely to get lost in the subway: I could miss my stop while the chords in my head are descending again into the deep.

I don't look very hard for the off-switch. My home is over Jordan, I want to cross over. I'm obsessed with a song from another world: it was not meant to speak my mind. It speaks against me, so why does it stick to me so?

We don't know the names of those who made songs like this. The buyers and sellers of those people suppressed their names and their languages, stole their present labor and their future hope as well, manipulating their loving and child-bearing by principles of animal husbandry. The singers were exiles and unwilling sojourners, and nothing here belonged to them not even their children. This was not their home.

The songs must have had a comforting surface, because it's said that even the masters loved to hear them. From the veranda the singing must have sounded like resignation. There's no happiness for me here, so I'll get my reward in the next world, where my home is. The masters were glad to let the souls of chattel be rewarded, provided that first they got full value of the bodies they had bought or bred. Good, they said to each other of an evening, good. Let them sing. Let the happy darkies tranquilize themselves.

White folks may still mistake the songs for opiate, hearing them as the masters did. Heard that way, the songs offend or bore us. Offend us because they seem to accept what should not be accepted. Bore us, because that is how we stay distant from the suffering our parents profited from. How can we enjoy these songs, knowing what we know now?

The songs of enslaved persons present a conundrum also for descendants who are not enslaved. Can the songs that braced the soul in soul-crushing times model the ways of prosperity? Can survival-songs of the powerless teach the use of power?

The masters were bamboozled. They swallowed a sugar-coated pill, and what they took into their guts, their bones and hearts, was defiance cleverly disguised, exposed and concealed in the same phrase. Frederick Douglas himself said that he "did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of these rude and apparently incoherent songs." It was only as a free man that he realized "slaves sing most when they are most unhappy,"* and this body of their work realizes -- makes real -- their hope.  Jordan is a river of new life -- "Wade in the water, children." Jordan is not Styx but the Ohio.

Naming your home is resistance. To name your home as somewhere else is rebellion. I am a human being, they said; I belong somewhere in this world, but I ought not to be here. Some singers thought death would be better than this. Some thought they could return to their African homelands across the deep river of Ocean. But many were thinking of crossing a North American river, where the kingdom of enslavement met its boundary.  On the other shore was a place where you could belong to yourself. Some were planning their escape -- "Follow the drinking gourd," the Little Dipper that contains the North Star. They remembered that they were people of the Promise Land. And when they got there, there would be no boundaries, and they would "walk all over God's Heaven."

There's no way to do the research that would confirm this, but this art for sure saved lives. Surviving and remembering who you are in the face of cruelty is a victory. The masters knew what was at stake, and they did all they could to erase the memory of home. But actual Jordan is not in question here; the depth of Jordan River is poetic. Neither written nor aural scripture measures the river. The choir was saying, I ought not to be here, I ought to cross the water again, or take the underground railroad to freedom. Who are we? we are the people from elsewhere, people of Promise.

I think all this as I try to remember to get off the train. But when the chord hits just right my head melts and I'm not sure what wall I will walk into next, or what part of the city I'll arrive at. I'm outside of myself. That's what ecstasy is, standing outside. I guess this is why people sing, why they once sang -- to get through the day that they couldn't get through without the song. To escape and save themselves for another day. To remember where they came from.

Frederick Douglass, "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave," The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: New American Library, 2002), pp. 349-350.

infinite nutshell

I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space.

-- Hamlet

If you build it, he will come.

-- W. P. Kinsella, Field of Dreams

He has at least three diseases, two of which are cancers, but neither of the cancers will kill him. Something else will take him first, and that something is his "hospice diagnosis," the disease whose symptoms we treat. Other teams evaluate and treat his other sicknesses. The latest developments in demise are the stuff of our talks, the threads emerging and submerging in his tapestry of decay. You may think this sounds morbid but - mirabile! -- it is not.

He reviews his life, his phobias, joys and losses, from the kitchen table. We have a grand time. There is a frissive pleasure to be taken from his contrarian thoughts and provoking questions, which he offers in sparkling humor.

He's an introvert, no small talker. He's agoraphobic, and doesn't like crowds. Walking into an office party he wouldn't know what to say. But for life and death, the cruel choices of precedence among disorders competing to dismantle him, he's a raconteur of the first order. He doesn't plan to die. He plans for pleasure -- he wants to get a lesion taken off his nose because it's ugly; the doctors (not ours) say "Why bother? you'll die in six months." But he's thinking of how he will look, what his life will be like, as if he had a future before him. As if he were alive.

Put him in at the wheel of a car, with his oxygen stored beside him, and he's as good as ever. He drove to Pennsylvania the other day and felt like a healthy young man. It lifted his spirits. When he can think this way, like a person without disease, his quality of life improves.

He can do this on his own. I'm flattered that he likes to do it with me. He finds me useful. That's because we're alike. He is quite charming sometimes, and so can I be. But it's an effort. We work at it. It costs.

I too am an introvert. There's a psychological test, one of the assessments to which counselors are subjected at thresholds of training, the first of whose categories is an introversion/extroversion scale. I'm about as introverted as the scale can measure. I've learned, as my cohort has, various skills of presentation -- how to behave with others when you have something to do. Sometimes, if you're one of us, your meter hits Empty. The persons around you are quite suddenly a crowd, and they're taking all the air from the room, and you must go elsewhere without delay, to some place that is at least momentarily your own. You might recover strength in the presence of those you know and trust well, one or two at a time; but sometimes you must be free even of them, must have a room to yourself and your thoughts, or sometimes a room just to yourself until you can remember how to recognize your thoughts. Because that is how you know who you are -- in the quiet of the inner room, and everything you do for others (and you must do with others) is measured and guided by what you heard in the inner room. Or else. Or else you start to go crazy. Which, if they understand what I mean, no one would want.

This -- this writing -- this is a way for me to recognize my thoughts. I have to make place for them, so they will come.

We are, I think, a minority. A lot of us are artists, philosophers, inventors, creators. Some of us learn to be nice about it, but we want to do things our way. The majority do not understand us well. Not only our utterances but our very silences arouse their suspicion, originating as they do from a place that is not of this world. So our success in the world depends to a large extent on how well we learn to pass for normal.

On the other hand, we don't understand the extroverts very well -- the people who retreat from solitude into the safety of a crowd because in silence they dissolve: the people who learn right out there in public, as they say and do stuff, who they are. We detest above all their untragic optimism, their unadulterated hopefulness. We have to keep reminding ourselves that they're not crazy, they're just, well, different. The universe would be incomplete without them. And it would also be incomplete without us.

So it's all right if they leave us alone, because for a long time, much longer than they expect, we'll be perfectly all right. We can keep ourselves company.  Sometimes in fact we yearn for our own company. Prayer, meditation, writing, composing, singing, running, sculpting -- these are our private places, our disciplines of solitude, our temples of contemplation built in faith that the gods will come and a real world will appear.

Over a lifetime, if we learn how to do it well, we become our own good company. They used to say that an artist needs "experience:" if you didn't like Hemingway head for every war, famine, drunken revel and physical ordeal the world can supply you could not be "authentic." But experience can truly arise in a country house, a wheelchair or a bed. My cohort and I, when the time of our dying comes, will be separated from the society we have cultivated in the nutshell of our minds. So it is a good thing to leave some artifacts behind, some trace of our investments and our expeditions. How else will our heirs know who we are, as opposed to who we passed for?

ille locus

  . . . to arrive where we started

and know the place for the first time.

-- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Though we've always called it our Tiffany chandelier, it isn't a chandelier but rather a pendant lamp.  We don't know whether it's Tiffany or just Tiffany-style, but it is more than a century old.  It shows its age: one of its ribs has come loose on the inside.  I've seen modern knockoffs of it: the cheap glass lacks  striation and texture, and the knockoffs are made of flat panels, whereas our chandelier has only rounded surfaces.


It doesn't come from England and has nothing to do with Charles Dickens.  It's just this: my mother-in-law's aunt-by-marriage was once in service at a house where Dickens had lived.  She did the same work in America, and the family for whom she worked gave her a wedding present.


Its pattern is called "Grape:" clusters of little red circles against green leaves, and the background is a variegated brown like peanut butter swirled in ice cream.  Its circle of light discovers the table and those gathered round it; the rest of the room rests in softer amber, a butterscotch light.  This lamp has now hung from six ceilings.  The last of these is the story I have to tell.


Illud tempus -- that's what Mercea Eliade called it.  That time, as opposed to this ordinary time.  The time in which cosmos was made out of chaos, when Marduk slew Tiamat and made heaven and earth from the split parts of her body, or the time as some say when heaven and earth came together again in the flesh of an infant -- such time is not like this regular time of ours that just goes on and on.  Not this time but that; not of this world but out of it; not secular but sacred.  Illud tempus is always the same time it ever was, the original time, the time in which the world was made and life becomes possible.  It isn't after or before anything.  Every Christmas is the same as the others, always starting over again but knowing how it's done.


That's why there is so much sentimentality, tradition, repetition.  I'm too old and by this time of year too tired to keep track of traditions any more; but we could count on the younger daughter to remember everything -- the height of the tree, the colors of the lights, which ornaments and how many, the size, shape and color of the candles born by the wire reindeer that draw a wire sleigh across the top of the piano -- because she knows that it isn't about now but about how it will always have been: it if doesn't take us out of clock-time and into the timeless presence of incarnation, then it isn't Christmas at all.


Philosophers have always been interested in meaning and in how things come to mean other things.  It happens all the time: these letters for instance, arranged in certain patterns, are worthless except for what they represent in your mind as you scan them; how can this happen, that things stand for other things that aren't even things, aren't even there?  Human life is inconceivable without it, but how can the mind conceive of the condition of its own existence?  It's called semiology.


The American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce distinguished three kinds of signs: the icon, the index and the symbol.  Icons mean something that they resemble: the printer icon on this computer looks sort of like a printer, and Byzantine icons look sort of like the Virgin Mary or some other saint.  Indices point to what they mean, often by a causal connection: the lowering cumulus clouds predict rain, and the brevity of a bar on the thermometer recommends that I wear a coat outside.  But the mind's true subversion of reality occurs in the Sherwood Forest of symbols, where the rules are forgotten and anything can come to mean anything, so long as those using the sign agree.  The most outrageous of all symbols is perhaps the Cross, which is nothing originally but two pieces of wood nailed together; which came to mean by Roman custom the agonizing and shameful death of a traitor; but which in the stories of one prophet's execution came to stand for his restoration and eternal life.  The means of death now represents for millions their victory over death.  It goes to show you that the link between the thing that means something (called signifiant by Ferdinand de Saussure) and what it means (signifié) is a marriage of convenience and utterly arbitrary.


Anything can mean anything, to those who agree on the meaning.


My world has been disrupted since last Christmas.  I'm not in the same place.  I've lost thousands of generous and friendly books and a study the size of some people's parlors with floor to ceiling windows, eight acres of woods and streams and the kitty who used to roam them with me.  There are gains as well as losses.  I am proud to live on the crowded island where twelve gates welcome the world, in the city where (according to my radio station) eight million people live in (mostly) peace and enjoy the benefits of democracy, most of which are only a subway ride away.  Every day I greet a few more of my books who have survived.  My music traveled with me, stored in a tiny shiny box.  And the study I now share, where I write these words, is smaller but flooded with sunlight.


Our chandelier however lay for months here in the study, perched on boxes of unpacked books, waiting for the super to install it.  Just before the holidays it went up, replacing the harsh overhead fixture that had glared on the dining table.  And now our friends can see the red grapes and green leaves, and the soft amber light, that bless our home.  The table itself and the sideboard opposite it are restored from their place in Gramma's house to something like their original splendor of tiger-oak.  Right next to it an eight-foot tree with a selection of the familiar ornaments and hundreds of white and red LED's.


I was waiting for something.


I was waiting for this lamp that is not a chandelier, that has nothing to do with England or Charles Dickens, to bring the spirits of Christmas, the memories and artifacts of a family that is not mine but rather my wife's family, to this extraordinary occasion.  I know where I am now. This is illud tempus.  And it is also ille locus.  I've been traveling here always.  This is my place, and I had not known it.

still hope

If God didn't exist, it would necessary to invent him.

-- Voltaire* 

My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live.

-- Miguel de Unamuno**

I don't usually answer comments. Each reader has a right to pleasure or to pique: their words deserve to stand. I've had my chance, and second thoughts don't always improve on first ones. But the reader asks a question. "Do you think a minister can successfully do their job without personally believing in god?"

The question leads me in many directions, because the response must depend on many variables. What in this situation is "success"? What is the "job"? What does one mean by "belief" or for that matter "God?" Anyone who thinks these meanings are obvious should study the history of contention and murder on these precise subjects.

Unamuno thought that one could minister without belief. His San Manuel, martyr, spends himself in the comfort of his people, through words and rituals whose truth he no longer believes. By the church's own doctrine, his state of belief or unbelief has no significance.

The word "belief" often stands in for the word "faith."  Believers and atheists alike speak too often as if faith were a kind of knowledge. But faith is not knowledge: where there is knowledge, faith cannot arise. I cannot have faith that there is a blue blazer in my closet, because I know the blazer is there. I only act in faith when I must affirm what cannot be known.

When you pledge your life in marriage to a person who cannot possibly yet deserve such investment, you are acting in faith. Or when you go into harm's way for a cause that is worth your life. Or when Walt Disney bet all his profits from Snow White on an animated choreography called Fantasia. Or when Steve Jobs decided I would want a tiny shiny box called IPod to store and retrieve two months of selected music.

Faith can be horribly wrong, but we can't do without it. In faith we can do things that are impossible otherwise.  It's what Yeshua meant by "moving the mountain." For each of us there is a mountain that, if we give more than we have, more than is prudent, more than our accountant would recommend, will move when we tell it to. The search for that particular mountain, the one that has one's name on it, is the spiritual quest.

I don't believe a lot of the things that some of my clients believe. Some of them believe that their prayers will heal their diseases, or save their mothers from death. Some think they will survive their bodies. Some think that their suffering or their grief is a message from God. But I don't have to agree with them. This isn't a theology class.

Though what I do is a ministry, I don't come to the client as a "minister." If the client wants to hear a specific theology, I'll help him locate a person who can provide it; but I am not that person. A clinical chaplain assesses a spiritual crisis, names the dangers and blesses the assets. The client, his passion lifted up to the regard of the greater audience, is empowered to his own liberation. Sometimes I am successful, sometimes not so much.

I do not preach to clients. I study a "living human document:" that's what Anton Boisen called the person otherwise dismissed as a "patient." If I hear the document's message, I speak it aloud so the client can hear it. Yes, there is after all a theology of chaplaincy, an immanent theology. The Word has come to live among us, and we meet it at the bedside.

At our best we are poets, giving to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. And for this purpose we do not bowdlerize: we give form to loss and terror as we do to courage, love and hope. We are all dying, and we're all triumphing over death for another day, and how we do it is our story. Telling the story, even a tragic one, confirms the client to himself. It says, you are not alone. You are seen and heard. If the one who sees and hears is only mortal me, that is not nothing; and in moments of faith it seems that I am standing in for one who sees us all. If my client flatters me with that faith, that is his way to healing. How else could it be? how else than through flawed and dying flesh could an incarnate word be spoken?

Sometimes only tragic art can save us. How can there be a play like King Lear? An actor who specializes in the bleak art of Samuel Beckett said that as long as someone writes as beautifully as Beckett there is still hope. The tragic poet says to those who suffer -- and we all suffer -- yes, I have heard you, and you are worthy of being heard, and you are not mad, deranged or evil; but you have seen the truth. Beauty perishes, virtue is punished and sense runs to nonsense, and yet there is still truth, beauty and virtue. So hold to these things however lightly. My search for truth, like Unamuno's, is a search for what gives us life in the time we are given; and the search for life is a search for truth. Nothing else deserves the name. As the Grecian urn said to Keats, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know, and all ye need to know."

To us this is a ministry, though some would not call it so. Every day we learn again that we cannot rescue our people and we cannot save them, but there is sometimes revealed among us a healing power. I put on my shoes each morning knowing this could really happen today. That is my "success."

*Peter Gay, Voltaire's Politics: The Poet as Realist (New Haven: Yale University 1988) p. 265: "If the heavens, despoiled of his august stamp could ever cease to manifest him, if God didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent him. Let the wise proclaim him, and kings fear him."

**Miguel de Unamuno, "Mi religión." (1907) http://www.ensayistas.org/antologia/XXE/unamuno/

pro nobis

What can I give him, poor as I am?

-- Christina Rosetti, "In the Bleak Midwinter"

Lord, we don't get it. Don't ask us to sign on to this. We hope something good comes of it, but we don't see it now. Not right now.

Sometimes when the young ones die, they are still gorgeous. Ravaged inside, they still have their muscle tone, their bone structure and complexions intact, and they lie in their beds like sleeping beauties.

I'm standing in a tiny room stuffed with people. We're gathered, mother and brother and sisters and children, nieces and nephew, children and grandchildren and best friend, and there aren't enough chairs for us. The chairs are stuffed, with padding and with the people who pile on them, some in the laps of others, arms around each other. The air is stuffed with shock, and with anger. They knew it was coming, but they still weren't ready.

It was too big a crowd, too much emotion for the room they had shared with another patient who still breathes, his own knot of loved ones around him. It's too much for this room too, too much for any room. We stand and we sit and we huddle together, and I'm in the middle of them with my hand on his friend's shoulder. It's all I can think of to do.

Lord, don't ask us to understand this.

I come from a church where people don't like to pray, don't like to admit there's anything to pray to. Their great American guru told them to rely on themselves, never to admit they need anything from anybody, never to think they lack what they need to take care of themselves. "Men descend to meet," Emerson said, and left the church. Sneak up on them, catch them on the right mood, caress their egos, and my people might admit that they "meditate" every now and then, about nothing in particular; but to beseech whom they know not for what they cannot name is, shall we say, foreign to their nature.

I don't meet many of our people in my work. I do meet many requests for prayer. Ora pro nobis, they say in their various ways.

Make him better, they sometimes mean, and we cannot do it. If we could cure their sickness, they would not be here.

Make it all right, they sometimes mean. Because they do not think it's right, but think they ought to say so.

This is the Department of Reality, and I will not say it's all right. I will not. I will say that they are loved and deserve to be loved. I will say, as my father's prayerbook does, that God walks in the valley of every shadow, that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, that nothing will be the same now but that a different life is to be found, that you may stumble over it when you least expect, but it will be the life of a person who loved and lost, for grief is the dark lining of joy. But I will not call this event a blessing.

I will not say that God wills young people to die. I will not say it. Those who are angry, let them shout. Those who are broken, let them wail. If they want to climb into the bed and take the corpse in their arms, well, let them, they're in a great tradition -- others have done it before. If God isn't big enough to bear the scandal, then God can go to hell with the other false spirits. But God is by definition -- the only God I'm willing to deal with -- big enough. Prayer brings faith into being, that there is something big enough to hear the truth. If there isn't, we're already dead.

Ora pro nobis. They want me to pray. This isn't about me, or about the fashionable skepticism of my people, or about Criticism so High and Mighty that its legs don't touch the ground. This is life and death. If I didn't plan to get in the trenches, I should long ago have taken off the uniform to nurse my doubts at home. This is for them.

What do I have to give them? the truth. Start with the facts. Give the death its proper name, enumerate the people who are here, give voice to their wound, rage, incomprehension. Call God to account. If there is faith, it means that we act as if there were someone to call out. I know my advocate lives, says Job, so come here, give answer. Not a solution but a response, show that you heard me.

When the Voice spoke from the Whirlwind, it didn't say that everything was all right. It said that Job had been heard. People can bear a lot, if they have been heard.

The good that is to come is not in the event itself. In seven years of this work, I've learned nothing good about death, but I've seen good things come from facing death, one's own or someone else's. "Life is real, Life is earnest," wrote a poet of my people. Death makes life real: otherwise it's just endless rehearsal.

So out of this whirlwind I hope the voice will speak to them. In time.

The sleeping beauty still lies in the other room, not to be revived. I've named the people, and lifted up their loss into the light. And what is the meaning of this? it is still to come, as they learn how to live not in spite of but with the loss. Be our good shepherd, says the prayerbook, walk with us in the valley of the shadow. Our part is to keep walking, and keep calling out.

early holiday

Everything can be taken from a man or woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude . . . to choose one's own way.

-- Viktor Frankl

There had been a change in her condition. In the vernacular, we say she had "taken a turn." That's what I learned in the overnight notes -- she had taken a turn, for the worse.

I called her apartment, where niece and caregiver were holding vigil. That's what I learned when I spoke to them -- they were waiting for Charlotte to die. That's what the change meant. She was, as we say in our lingo, "actively dying."

Niece and caregiver thought that Charlotte would like it if I came over. So I cancelled other appointments and went to visit Charlotte. I found her, as we say in our notes, "unresponsive." Her eyes were closed, and there were seven or eight seconds between her breaths. Otherwise she did not move. A peaceful scene.

I said a psalm or two, and spoke a wish to whomever listens in our extremity, that her last visions would be beautiful. It's said in our business, we say it to ourselves and to clients, that the last sense to go is the sense of hearing, and that therefore words of love, or perhaps just the sound of the voice, may be of comfort as the the last coma descends. I don't know what evidence there is for that advice, but we say it and we act as if it were true. It's of comfort at least to those who are left behind -- there's something they can do in the last moments. They don't just have to suffer. There is something they can do.

Then I talked in the living room with Karyn, the niece; about the help she can get from her brothers and sisters as Charlotte slipped away, about funeral plans, about financial arrangements. Rita the caregiver came from the bedroom, saying that Charlotte had changed again. I went to the bedside and at first it looked the same to me; but her breaths became less frequent. The intervals grew. Ten seconds. Fifteen. Thirty seconds. Then we waited as a minute elapsed. Another minute. I touched her hands, then her cheek. She was cold. It was a simple as that. No turmoil, no evident struggle, no death rattle. There were tears in the room, but also a sense of accomplishment: she had died at home as she wanted, and without suffering.

Karyn looked at me. "Thank you for coming. She was waiting for you."

I don't think she was waiting for me. I don't think my part in this story was as crucial as that. But I said -- and this is another piece of our lore -- that some people hang on until something important happens, till a family member arrives, a holiday passes, a child is married or a baby born. I don't think I was that important in this case. I don't think Charlotte was waiting for me. But it comforts her niece to tell the story this way, and it's not my job to kill her hope, or to trash the beauty of her fiction.

But here's another story. Roberto was twenty-two years old, and dying fast of lymphosarcoma. It was early October, and he saw that he wasn't going to live for the holidays. So he asked for -- no, he demanded, he made a fuss -- that the family should gather a month early, and have a Thanksgiving dinner. His mom thought this was a bit much, considering the complications. It was hard enough just to take care of him, without organizing an extra holiday. But he was tough. He insisted.

So they gathered; the family came from far and wide on that day. They had their turkey, and he got to see them all. He told them he loved them, and they gave thanks for his life, for their life together. And he died that evening, on his self-declared holiday, at 7:30.

Roberto couldn't survive his illness. He couldn't even survive to the holidays. But knowing what was impossible, he could embrace the just barely possible. He could declare his own holiday. He could call his people together. He called, and they responded. He was brave. He was clear in his head. He was a loving son to his mother, brother to his siblings, nephew to his uncles and aunts. He brought rejoicing to the day of his death. He declared his holiday, and held on for it.

The death of a young person is the hardest kind. So much is lost, the full life that older people sometimes in their last days say was theirs. But his courage and his honesty brought celebration to the day of his death. In obscenity he made beauty. He chose his attitude, and made his death into a song.

In neither of these cases did I do anything. I witnessed what someone else did. Karyn told a story of Charlotte's death. Roberto told the story of his own. They were no longer powerless. No longer victims, they became authors.

A pastor may come to speak the good news, but a chaplain comes to hear the good news. These were miracles, and I got to see them.