I am spinning, floating, suspended after Mark’s two lectures on If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem, while all of life conspires to conflate and converse and heckle and cheer. Mark has added many layers of understanding to my read of the book – the whole of Faulkner’s work, really – bringing in contexts and criticism pertinent and rich with the meanings of transactional economics (wrought by industrial capitalism), regionalism (exalted and reconfigured, re-presented to mean a nation), the Global South, Reconstruction, the contemporaneous arts of Faulkner’s time, and gender. It is almost too much to process, to feel, to absorb.

I am caught on Mark’s first analysis, presenting the disrupted narratives of modernity (no story/ different stories/ stories differently told), in music, dance, and theater, which he uses to expose the story-less-ness of the book. His example is Martha Graham’s ballet Appalachian Spring, disjointed members, pieces without a story line. As Mark explains, the two novellas of If I Forget Thee O Jerusalem similarly are not one narrative, nor two stories either. Neither are teleological, to mean they are not linearly expositive, and do not arrive at any ends. Rather they betray elliptical or circular notions of story and time, deriving and gaining meaning and power from their juxtaposition and association, and from the conversations between themselves of gender and motif and setting, even as the novellas occur in different times. Faulkner’s stylistic choice puts me in mind of two aspects of both my art and design work: collage – so non-linear and layered – and the co-creative aspect of any audience’s experience of any art work. This is both the way I know, and the way I make.

Mark finds two novels in the book with this holistic analysis – one an anti-colonialist colonialist novel; the other an anti-existentialist existentialist novel.

To mean in the first case that Faulkner neither validates or romanticizes the South as it existed before carpet-baggers raided it like so many hedge fund managers. He recognizes – rues – the loss of humanity centered in profiteering, but he presents the cultural societal fabric being rent apart by it as suffocating, stultifying, enraging to those who do not, cannot opt for the freedoms implied/offered by social change. Mark posits The Wild Palms novella as carrying this thesis. The only salvation, redemption for both Harry and Charlotte is in the art they make and do not sell, that they make for themselves: Charlotte’s sculpture The Bad Smell, and Harry’s narrative ruminations. Even so, Harry and Charlotte are tragic characters, defeated, Harry distinctly un-heroic. Although he survives, and lives in order to remember, to embody the memory of choice, to not disappear in a whitewash, his rebellion is meaningless, futile, unremarkable. He is in the end unlikeable.

There might be a bit of romanticization, though, in The Tall Convict’s journey in the grip of The Old Man. On the surface, he is written heroically in an existential sense, doggedly persistent to stay within the frame given him despite many opportunities to escape. He does not fight Fate, but accepts it, willingly tossed about, willingly rowing. This despite one memorable escapade where he lives primitively by his own hand and finds much satisfaction, worth, and dignity doing so. But Faulkner presents this romanticized non-transactional survival interlude as a joke, a farce, as no solution to the problem of modernity. The Tall Convict simply experiences it as another page in his book, not as an alternative he can or will choose. The Old Man is in the end not comedic, classically. On the contrary, the Tall Convict is laughable – comedic in a contemporary way. He has no art – living by one’s wits does not count – and therefore no redemption. He has given in to convention for the sake of safety, which is not, in the end, a moral position.

Heady stuff, but I find Faulkner’s critique of transactional economics subsuming, resonant, exhilarating, exalting. Because this is where I live, as an artist: I do not sell my work. I do not understand any piece of art I have made as a commodity. My works represent ideas, discovery, and learning. And so they are for viewing and sharing, and for the conversations they incite, encourage, engender. My art belongs in exhibits, it belongs together, and not to any person. It is un-owned. The realization is overwhelming. It stops me. I am tearful, affirmed and grateful: I know who I am.

And then, out of time, another story weaves in. I have received a curious email, sent to MUSE. It is an inquiry about my landscape design for the town of Bay City Oregon, done oh-so-long-ago, when I was a student. Here it is:

“Enjoyed reviewing your work on Bay City at  https://muse.deborahzervas.com/Bay-City/.   Hoping you could refresh my memory as to when this work was done for the city.   They are working on a new vision plan, but thought yours was for something else.
Anyway, beautiful work.”

I am astounded, who, why, what, why now? I reply, needing answers, trying to make sense of her interest:

How nice to hear an appreciation of my design work, thank you for sharing yours.

My proposal for Bay City was made as a University of Oregon Landscape Architecture student, in the spring (I think) of 2005, under the tutelage of Anita Van Asperdt .  Mine was one of many proposals, and none were built.  I believe the town was unable to raise money for any work – a tax increase proposed for that purpose was voted down. I’ve always thought it a missed opportunity. I’m happy to hear the town is again considering re-vitalizing efforts.

I’m so curious about your connection to Bay City – do you live there? I have such a sweet spot for the place, having spent so much time getting to know it. I’m almost homesick, hearing from you.  🙂
Do lmk what’s going on there –

She responds with words so generous, I am filled to overflowing. She has remembered all along, kept the vision in her mind’s eye, waiting for the moment to bring it again into the view of others.

That is where I thought this work was from.  I was mayor at the time, in fact I served on the Council from 1997 until last December.  Interest in the park and Patterson continues and something that makes that happen is your work.   I will continue to serve on the Bay City Vision Committee and presently work as a consultant on some land use projects.  It was wonderful to come across your site.

Thank you!  and thank you for portraying my community so beautifully.

Faulkner hits hard again. Here is the meaning too of my – best, most rewarding – design work; it is non-transactional. It is one reason I get no play, no pay, and yet exactly why the work endures, wherein lies its power and import. The value of the work is un-accountable but clear. Community design in its best sense is the design of place that fosters community. It is meant to enhance human life, social relations, our interactions and our bonds with each other – the non-negotiable fabric that supports meaning, life itself. These things are never for profiteering, are not for making money, not for economic gain.

Resonance with Faulkner’s meanings, knowings, offerings – and the manner of his display, his exhibit, his unearthing – spirals – expands – inflates uncontrollably. I see myself un-Reconstructed, un-Industrialized, Irreducible, More Than Exchanged, non-linear, Collaged, Interacting, Dialogical. It is too much. My body can hardly contain, bear it. I feel as though I will fly apart like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. I’m sputtering, spinning, chattering, gesturing fragments at Bruce just home from the office, struggling to put it, keep it together.

He centers me with a gentle, quizzical smile and seven words. “This is why we made MUSE, Doob.” It is the gift he has given me, of MUSE, that my work exists always, is always on exhibit, elliptically and without end, new conversations starting, old ones continuing, my ideas living, breathing, talking, conflating, in a marvelously un-transacted way.
After a fraught fifty-five years, at odds with so many contemporary conventions, so many social tenets of modern life, I am wonderfully at peace.

Thank you Faulkner, Thank you Mark, Thank you Bruce.
And thank you, Dear Reader, for playing along.

See Bay City’s design again: here

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We are reading four of Faulkner’s novels with Mark, and the second is Light in August, which I read years and years ago. I didn’t recall any of the story upon this read, but I do remember being surprised, shocked, in wonder – I’d say amazed, if it weren’t such an overused word – upon reading it the first time, due to its subject and unromantic portrayal, and also at the unfamiliar craft and power of Faulkner’s writing. I had picked the book up for the title. The change of light in August was a new awareness then, marking that coming-out-of-childhood jump in scale, where the Earth suddenly has a serene and heedless presence, an existence independent of all unnoticed human doings. I was enveloped in the light of August when traveling abroad, in Paris – the sense of it enhanced by everything new-though-old, the city sparse, light of people, grand and extensive and other. And every summer since, for years and years and years, I waited, watchful for that moment when the quality of light transmuted, the sun not so high, the rays slanted and indifferent, summer’s hold slipped to hint at the impending fall. Mark (a southern boy, born and bred) says Faulkner refers instead to the few days in August when the Deep South’s heavy, oppressive summer heat breaks – a respite – but for me the remembered feelings of suspended in-between, of loss and indifference framed my read of the novel this time and the one before.

I won’t recount the plot lines here. They seem to me simply a theater for Faulkner to display his surgical understanding of the South: to articulate the master narratives of a place-time and the mechanisms used to maintain and impose them. The overwhelming feeling I had reading Light in August was fragility. Not as an insignificant, weak, and mortal component of a vast ignoring ignorant universe, but as a social creature, secured by – or exiled from – community. Bruce and I have lived many places and traveled to many more, and over our lifetimes we have gathered much confidence in our ability to live anywhere, thrive anywhere, cosmopolitan and universal in our knowings. But Faulkner exposes the conditionality, the precariousness of belonging, and now I am not so sure. It is a hysteria of sorts (not unlike that of witchy Salem) that delineates the danger of difference, the safety of conformity and the eager willingness – the need – to assign inside and out. Gossip is the time-honed and forever service-able tool that establishes the boundaries of the real, for truth is simply and only what everyone agrees it to be. How easy to lose the fellowship, and how dire the results. The Old South would be a difficult place to claim even a fingerhold, its overarching pillars and rooted bedrock out of reach for anyone new. Not easier for Bruce than me either, despite his growing-up time in West Virginia. We are on the wrong side of history, her-story, the story.

The most beautiful thing about Faulkner’s writing is that he is not teleological in his story-telling – there is little of climax or moral or point or ending. Rather he paints a landscape for you to enter and sense and discover. Mark explains this as a quantum physics experience (the scientist in me forbearing …) but I rather understand Light in August (and Absalom, Absalom! ) as fabric, with extent and rhythm, threads and unfinished ends, woven of characters and events even as the reader watches, the whole eventually apparent and complete, though all the same unfinished, continuing, spinning out and on. Faulkner is a difficult (and unsatisfying) read for many because of this, but I don’t mind doing the work. I find his book-worlds collage-like, layered with many paths and meanings and discoveries, open-ended and divergent. Like me.

Reading Faulkner, though, I have to contend with his misogyny. Mark promised to address it but never quite got there, so I am left to my own perceptions and interpretations. None of the female characters are developed or complete – they seem to be only foils or symbols or the problem. Whether this is (critically) descriptive of the worlds he relates or an authorial point of view I cannot say. But reading Faulkner’s male characters I am suffused and perplexed: why are men so angry? Why are men so angry at women? Why are men so weird about blood? Is menstruation somehow a betrayal of desire? Does procreation make sex ugly, banal, and vulgar? Reveal its animalistic inherence? Is sex just too messy, in its completeness? Maybe all that men want is the romance of zipless fucks. Does blood make love a sham?

Maybe what only a woman can know – the profundity of the electric spark: life beginning within you, while making love to someone you love. It colors sex forever after. It is The Frame. Would that men could know this too.

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