That brings me to the subject at hand.  To Windsong, and the epilogue, and the obvious accomplishments of these pages of Ordinary Time.  They must go into time.  That’s already taking place in Part One, in the letters to friends section.  Feeling time.  That will have to be reread, and rewritten, in unision (!) with Augustine.  More on that later.  But for the moment, let’s shuttle in time, and let all caution go out the window.  Let’s begin with Don DeLillo.  His “Falling Man.”  Here’s a conjunction between O’Malley, at least the virtual O’Malley who doesn’t deserve to survive, and surely not to experience the grace raining down on his head during windsong, and Keith, one of De Lillo’s characters.  On September 11th, the first thing he does when he finishes walking down the stairs of the North tower, ashen and humbled, but still an asshole, is to say to himself, or perhaps to his wife, or to the reader: “we’re ready to sink into our little lives.”  Imagine saying that to your wife!  Imagine saying that to anyone outside a confessional!  It seems to me that whether or not Brian Wall had read this novel before writing Ordinary Time is not of great import; the only thing that is of great import is the fact that O’Malley be haunted by this kind of judgment.  This single sentence can become a touchstone for the pain and the travails of O’Malley on his sabbatical journey.  Not to mention all the newspaper capsule profiles that people were forcing themselves to read day after day, in the aftermath of 9/11.

Beautiful prose is not enough.  Beautiful prose can become a trap as deadly and definitive as television, pornography, or cocaine.  For David Foster Wallace beautiful prose was signed The Sod Weed Factor.  Or perhaps Don DeLillo.  It’s strange that Foster Wallace and DeLillo so often get lumped together.  I’ll leave the former aside, to get on with the business at hand.  People hated “Falling Man.”  Said that in the aftermath of 9/11, writers had to make sure their work was going to be commensurate with all those falling men, and falling women, and their agony, and the impossible to calculate suffering of what would ensue.  And they said to DeLillo, this doesn’t measure up.  Then the University people started saying, all over again, that reality had finally caught up with fiction and so on and so forth. 

I dread the 10 anniversary of 9/11.  I now know, thanks to Lulu editions, how to make that day pass a little more comfortably.  I’ll be reading Windsong on that day.  In the meantime, Philippe Petit, who had a big role to play in my losing my job at a French University, plays a big but strangely absent role in this year’s National Book Award winner, “Et que le vaste monde poursuive sa course folle” by Colum McCann.  “Let the Great World Spin”.   Here, then, is another response to the disappointment of DeLillo, another take on being commensurate with principle number nine, which I take to be a never-ending concern and care for the 9 people who had received miraculous treatment at the hands of the Lord and then went off and forgot about it!  Here, then, is another, not single sentence but almost, lampost under which to read and appreciate ordinary time.  My personal opinion (which matters little) is that the right whale weighs far more than Philippe Petit, but if the latter had weighed any more he might have fallen off his tightrope and given the people there that day, in 1974, another opportunity to show how un-optimistic they actually are.  The only thing that matters is that there is no doubt Brian Wall read this book before beginning OT!  Here’s an excerpt, in French — for the pleasure of that language!

La ville rassemblait ses bruits autour des passants.  Klazons.  Camions d’ébouers.  Cornes de brume.  Le ramdam des métros.  Un bus de la ligne M22 qui freine, se range le long du caniveau et gémit dans l’ornière.  Le vent plaque un emballage de chocolat sur une bouche d’incendie.  Le claquement des portières de taxi. Des poubelles bagarrent au fond de l’empasse.  Des baskets qui reprennent la forme des pieds.  Le cartable en cuir qui frotte sur un pantalon.  Le cliquetis des parapluies sur le bitume.  Une porte à tambour qui propulse au-dehors un début de conversation. 

Mais le tohu-bohu n’aurait été qu’un son compact, on n’y aurait quand même pas prêté attention — et ceux qui maugréaient le faisaient à voix basse, respectueusement. … On l’apercevait depuis le ferry de Staten Island.  Depuis les abattoirs du West Side.  des gratte-ciel neufs de Battery Park.  Des stands de bretzels en bas de Broadway.  Du parvis en dessous.  Des tours elles-mêmes.   … Sortis des bouches de métro, des limousines, des autobus, ils traversaient ensemble au feu, et pas question de lever bêtement la tête.  A chaque jour suffit sa peine.  Mais en voyant les attroupements, l’agitation, ils commencèrent à ralentir.  S’arrêtaient net ou, haussant les épaules, se retournaient lentement, revenaient au carrefour, butaient contre les nez en l’air, se hissaient sur la pointe des pieds, dominaient un instant la foule et c’était waouh, putain, nom de Dieu.

Cette fine silhouette et le mystère s’épaississait.  Elle se dressait sur la tour sud, à la limite de la terrasse panoramique, comme prête à s’élancer. …

L’air autour des badauds se chargeait d’électricité et … les commentaires jaillirent.  Agacé, déstabilisé, on se tournait vefrs le voisin, une question à la bouche.  Sautera?  Tombera?  Un petit tour et puis s’en va?  Il travaille là?  Il est seul?  Ce n’est pas un gag, au moins?  Il porte un uniforme?  Quelqu’un a des jumelles?  Coude contre coude, ces parfaits inconnus juraient, parlaient de cambrioloage foiré, d’un monte-en-l’air qui aurait raté son affaire … et il n’avait pas pris des otages?  Est-ce un Arabe, un Juif, un Chypriote, un combattant de l’IRA?  Mais non, c’est un coup de pub, une grosse boîte qui fait de l’épate ….

… une brèche s’ouvrait dans le matin d’août, les spectateurs prenaient racine, rien d’autre à faire pour l’instant, le crescendo des voix, toutes sortes d’accents, une Babel, et soudain un type roux de la Home Title Guarantee a remonté la fenêtre de son bureau et, les coudes posés sur le rebord, s’est penché en prenant son souffle, avant de crier de toutes ses forces:

–VAS-Y, CONNARD!

Les rires n’ont pas fusé tout de suite — un temps d’appréciation — mais l’irrespect était bienvenu car beaucoup pensaient le même chose — “Mais oui, putain, vas-y!” — et alors des torrents de paroles, la réponse à l’appel, une onde se propage de la fenêtre au goudron, le long de la chaussée fissurée jusqu’à l’angle de Fulton, elle continue vers Broadway, sinue dans John Street, fait le tour jusqu’à Nassau, et ainsi de suite, les dominos du rire, un rire tendu où pointent le manque et la fascination, et bien des passants ont compris que, quoi qu’ils disent, ils ont envie d’assister à cette chute phénoménale, un corps qui virevolte d’aussi haut, brise les lignes de mire, fend l’air, s’écrase, donne à ce mercredi une charge et un sens.  Ils n’avaient besoin que d’un milliseconde, d’une imperceptible glissade pour devenir une famille, alors que les autres — ceux qui tiennent  à ce qu’il reste, qu’il s’accroche, qu’il se fonde dans le béton, ceux-là se sentent habilités à mépriser les cris et leurs auteurs.  Que cet homme sauve sa vie, deux pas en arrière, les bras des flics et adieu le vide.

Tout excités maintenant.

En pleine forme.

La bataille allait commencer.

Vas-y, connard!

Non, arrête!

En haut, le mouvement.  Le moindre frémissement compte sous le vêtement noir.  Une demi-chose pliée en deux, qui semble étudier ses chaussons, tels deux traits de crayon évanouis sous la gomme.  La posture du plongeur.

Alors, figés et silencieux, ils virert.  Même ceux qui désiraient sa perte sentirent leurs poumons se vider.  Ils reculèrent en gémissant.

Un corps naviguait dans les airs.

Il s’était mis en marche.  Quelques-uns se signèrent.  Les yeux fermés, en l’attente d’un bruit sourd.  Agitée par le vent, la figurine dansait, sursautait, sautillant.

Une chemise … qui tombait, tombait, tombait — les manches d’un chandail qu’on laissa à ses toubillons, l’homme accroupi dans le ciel étant maintenant debout, les flics en haut et les regards en bas se taisaient, parcourus de vagues émotions, car la silhouette se redressait, munie d’une barre longue noire, si souple qu’elle oscillait à ses extrémités, et l’homme ne regardait que la tour jumelle dans un cocon d’échafaudages — comme un objet blessé en attente des secours — et l’on saisissait bien toute la portée du câble sous ses pieds, tous comprenaient et, quoi qu’il se passe aillerus, impossible de partir, ni tasse de café, ni cigarette dans le couloir, ni pas trainants sur la moquette, l’attente avait été un voyage enchanté, e l’on voyait le pied chaussé de noir aborder de chauds rivages gris.

Tous ont repris leur souffle au même instant, avec la sensation de partager le même air.  Cet homme était un mot qu’ils croyaient connaître, mais n’avaient jamais entendu.

Il commençait.

Little by little, slowly but perhaps surely, O’Malley starts to take on flesh.  We know, after thinking, or musing, about the man, that he doesn’t need Craig’s advice (‘You have to go where the music is’) because Craig would be knocking down an open door (French expression).  Or perhaps it’s simply O’Malley’s way of keeping a central tenant of his friend’s philosopher close at hand throughout his Sabbath.  From the very beginning, there are the violin lessons, and the incredible translation of sign language into music that have already thrown Norman for a loop in his life.  And there is also the huge and fecund presence of Carmina Burana throughout the novel.  As I said, Norman knows and feels the central place of music in life, letters and salvation, but he fact is he can’t sing.  And has a hard time with the violin.  But now we can see what a man like Norman would do, given the fact that he is lacking, or missing, in what is crucial, indeed indispensable.  What would you do if you discovered what a dearth of music occupies your life?  Listen to UTube under you’re blue in the face?  Never miss an episode of American Idol?  Norman, as we can now picture him, listens to Carmina Burana with a rage, that is, he consigns the lyrics to memory.  Yes, so that’s what all that latin is doing throughout the novel.  Not a dead language, but the lyrics of a music he can’t get out of his head.  Or rather, songs that indicate the necessity of getting out of your head.

Dissolvit ut glaciam.(40)  Poverty and power are melted like ice.  It is at this late date, in reading and in life, that I am moved to discover how to translate this short sentence.  ‘It melts them like ice.’  April is the month when the melting begins.  Poverty and power are with us to stay, but Norman, in his own discrete, stubborn way, will stand firm with the events that engraved these words, and the music giving them flesh, and that are for all of us, at least those who came of age in the sixties, a call to arms.  I’m off my rocker, and doing damage to the elementary tasks of translation.  In the song, it’s fortune, variable, changeable, mutable as Wordsworth would say centuries later, ever waxing and waning, that melts poverty and power.  Norman will, I believe, because of the singular nature of his Catholic education, place his big fat head right in the middle of an all-triumphant worship of fortune, and will just say no.  Not fortune, but something else, someone else. 

Nunc a summo corrui (47)  Now I fall from the heights.  And then riff upon riff with Nunc and Tunc.  Rhythm everywhere here, in a concentrated project to supplement the de-fault of song and music.  Now, and then, then all over again.  Once you’ve been taken up by music and what it bespeaks, you can no longer avoid falling from these immense heights, and putting your survival in jeapardy.  Always said that too much music is dangerous!

Nunc recedit hyemis sevitia (71)  Now the chill of winter releases its grip.  Time to let go, time to go out and have a little fun.  The pig is not far away: on 221, Norman is on a spit, being roasted like a pig, or a swan, and he’s ashamed of himself as we all should be.  Suckers for spring. on 227, he sees bare teeth, and will remember that when the subject comes back around to whales.  228: Eligo quod video.   I choose what I see.  Free will, except that we’ve made so many bad choices the will, at one point, say between winter and the onset of spring, no longer suffices.

It’s of the utmost importance to this reader that Norman be so adamant in his pursuit of a solution to the problem he has with music.  It’s the question of desire: unlimited, unbounded desire.  Norman is a dense, highly charged battery, and only music will let him off the hook and send him out on the high seas.  He deserves a thoughtful Christmas present: Glück’s Melodies of Orpheus for example, for piano and violin.

Simply put, Norman suddenly sees the scandal of these wars, the sheer ugliness and stupidity of so much loss of life and plunge into the abyss of evil.  He’s not the kind of guy that will get up on a soapbox and start blathering about non-violence, but he is the kind of person who can will himself, if properly driven, to make the necessary connections between the holes in the narrative of monument speak, and what monument speak should speak to but never does.  Monuments go blank and blind when it comes to commemorating the truly free, the truly right, and the truly courageous.  A reader can only be jealous when she begins picking up how masterful this scene at the bridge one week after Good Friday is, and how mind-blowing it must have been to get to this point and to know that the whole thing was clicking like a well-made box.  (Yeats) 

The funny thing was how –  out loose in the world like this — the “guests” took on heightened importance.  [The guests too will soon be at large].  An increased stature.  [Only increasing the stature of the lowly can justify statufying the rest.]  Almost an aura.  [See Benjamin on the aura]  As if only “free” beings counted — and all the rest of the species, tied to jobs, positions, incomes, et al., didn’t.  [were but cannon fodder for the next whirl of warfare on the face of mother earth]  Didn’t count.  Didn’t enter into consideration.  As if only those willing (or forced) to take their chances with a wild and indiscriminately violent world could, as it were, claim any dignity.  [Underlying clause: the causes of war can be seen as all stemming from the refusal to take on this wild and violent world, and to seek instead all manner of homeland security]  Could, in the present instance, possibly deserve a memorial.

This is praise, both the perhaps awkward or inchoate praise of O’Malley and the altogether accomplished praise of the narrator, for the preterite in history, all over the planet, in every age known to mankind.  The underdog, and the underworld beneath monument speak, and advice columns in syndicated newspapers.  It is an incredibly impertinent thing to happen upon like stumbling on a stone, or a plaque on a bridge, and realising that this is what you have thought all along, only clearer and more demanding than before.  Since the end of the writing of Ordinary Time, such things have remained underwater undertakings, but more and more people are learning how to breathe for longer and longer periods of time underwater.  As Jane Campion said in an interview about her film The Piano.

Let’s go someone else, but within the circle of fire of things of utmost importance.  Let’s take up a note, in a letter found in a recent novel: The Guernesey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  Something tells me Norman might make an exception to his newspaper habit and read these letters, not to editors, but to the inhabitants of an island.  Juliet Ashton once had a copy of a pamphlet entitled “A Defence of Moses and of the 10 Commandments” which she annotated with the following snarkey, intellectual reaction: “A word from on high or simple crown control?”  One of the ways of re-reading this delightful novel would be to see on which side Juliet finally falls on this question, after all less intellectual and certainly less snarkey than anyone might believe!

Leo Strauss taught his students to take the physical layout of books seriously, just as Norman takes the physical layout of Nashua.  The number of chapters is important, as are each title, and things like prefaces and epilogues are of the utmost importance.  So here’s a question, linked to both Shakespeare and the character, Juliet Ashton, created byMary Ann Shaffer.  Where does the EPILOGUE to OT fit in the greater scheme of things?  Is it a part of part three, “O’Malley at large” or is it an epilogue sitting outside the first three parts.  And who wrote it?  Does O’Malley have anything to do with the authorship of the epilogue?   I don’t think so.  I think the epilogue takes us  back to Part One: Cold Light; Hot Shade, O’Malley on the Scene, clearly, incontrovertibly written by Brian Wall, not by Norman O’Malley.  Perhaps the best move at present would be to read the epilogue.

Even before the image was completely lost to sight people were viewing it in retrospect.  Asking questions.  Was this a giant flowering of evil, or only the last, best, aerial view of its viewing?  A monster to destroy or one come to destroy us?  Some, viewing exclusively its dorsal side, saw it as black and ominous, a mystic shark, ill-governed; while those with a ventral view thought it white, and almost transparently beneficient.  Some cast themselves down on the ground at first sight, averting their eyes, while others stood staring after it hours later.  Some knew it immediately the transforming moment of their lives, while others thought it just another image loose in the air.  Each seemed to see what he or she had brought to see — and none to see it whole.

In talking about it afterwards, violent arguments arose, partisan perspectives. And, as the differences of opinion dug in, what had been joined together in the seeing was sundered in memory.  As to this sundering, some regarded it as an unavoidable limit and not fatal in the long run, while others saw it as an absolute division and of mortal consequence to community. 

All this disparity in viewpoint and evaluation was summed up in the three enduring accounts of the event.  Some said that while whatever had happened on the bridge was not without its ecstatic aspect, they hadn’t seen anything.  Another group said that the whale had ascended straight into the heavens, shedding shape after shape as it soared up into regions of inaccessible light.  And a third reported that, like a performing fish, it had leapt the bridge, dove back into the river, and with one last flip of its T-shaped tail gyring ater behind it, headed for the open sea. …

O D I T E

“Saving Willy” comes to mind with respect to the last alternative, albeit a very special Willy!  The second corresponds to the strong and naive faith of the people at Medjugorgie, who are sincere and pure enough to be granted this precious perception.  As for me, I belong with the first group.   I don’t think anything happened; I believe that this all occured to Norman, but I don’t know how much “all” is. 

It’s of the utmost importance for me that the epilogue not be a description of Norman’s brain or mind or memory or heart.  The description must (sic!) take Norman up in a general recap of what has always occured in cases like this one: each and every time there is an instance of divine activity in the midst of men and women and children and animals, living and dead, then the description splits up into categories.  The whole novel insists that this is an unfortunage limitation on the matter at hand.  In other words, in those of the sapiential book of Job, God is incomensurable to human categories and perception. 

Placing the beautiful epilogue outside the body of the book then requires a huge amount of work.  Work on narrative voice.  Difficult to imagine anything more boring than that.  But it must be done. 

The alternative would be, for someone audacious enough to take up the challenge, to go out and interview Nashua residents with the following question: do you remember that Saturday in April 1983 when the right whale emerged from out of the river and is supposed to have blown a few people’s minds?  This sort of thing is done as a matter of course in every publishing season in the field of exegesis, biblical history, and popular magazine stories for summers on beaches.  How much of the story is true?  How much of it actually took place?  Where exactly?  Are there any surviving witnesses?  Etc.  And so on and so forth.  In other words, the spontaneous reaction of myson John.  His father says, in testimony to his own life: the only thing occuring here is Brian Wall writing about Norman O’Malley reading until he reads no more.

Reading this novel is like painting by numbers.  You’re there to connect the dots.  There is a spectrum going from easy to hard in this task.  OT hovers at the mid-point between easy and hard.  O’Malley’s nine days of suspended animation consist in connecting things.  Here, on Friday, is one of the more spectacular of the links he discovers. 

‘This monument was dedicated to all Nahuans who had served in the Army or Navy or Air Force or Coast Guard or Sea Bees or Norse Corps or W.A.C. or Waves or Waf or Spars (?) or the Nashua Public Library!  Men on the left, women on the right, a plaque for each service. … The problem was that — even if everyone was mentioned — the proportions of this thing were all wrong.  To do justice to the enormity of that war — at least vis-à-vis the scale of the Civil War monument– they ought to have erected a forty-story statue of a nude, sneering, cyclopean monster wrenching the limbs off civilization and spatterin corpses on the roof of Dunkin’Donuts!  …O’Malley had had enough.  He had no more use for this monument.  The memory it attempted to evoke, the time it recalled, had once been nearer and truer and coursing through hearts — but this noxious thing had failed absolutely to capture it, to preserve it, and now it was gone, all but irretrievably.  … On an inspiration,he walked around to the back of the monument.  It was blank.  Nothing but rough, unfinished stone.  It seemed weird: a kind of affront (no, he chuckled, an abback!).  Perhaps this was the right side for something so wrong.  Anonymous, wordless, mineral.  … He stepped away from it a few paces t see if he was missing something … Nope.  There was nothing there to fathom.  Suddenly, he became aware of someone watching him.  … On a park bench along the street one of the Emmounds boys quickly turned away. … He turned back to the monument.  To the unfinished stone.  Staring at it intently, all of a sudden he perceived the significance of its shape.  All the plaques and inscriptions on its front had drawn away his attention from its oveall form … Amazingly, this monument conformed perfectly to the shape of the bridge.  It fitted exactly into the spaces created by the bridge’s wide arches.  It was the missing piece of a perceptual puzzle that, unconsciously, he now discovered, he had been gtrhing to find for some time.  … Just as suddenly, the whole thing made sense.  The monument.  Its reason for being.  “For those who served on park benches,” it came to him.  The nobodies.  … His mind raced away with the idea, its appropriateness.  “The brown and yellow ail!”  It was truly a “fitting” monument for the dispossessed: wordless for those who dared not open their mouths, inconspicuous for those who needed to maintain low profiles, virgin for those innocent of the world’s blandishments.  The funny thing was how out loose in the world this this, the “guests” took on heightened importance.  An increased stature.  Almost an aura.  As if only “free” beings counted — and all the rest of the species, tied to jobs, positions, incomes, et.al., didn’t.  Didn’t count.  Didn’t enter into consideration.  Asif only those willing (or forced) to take their chances with a wild and indiscriminately violent world could, as it were, claim any dignity.  Could, in the present instance, possibly deserve a memorial.  … And look!  There was Craig again.  He was sitting on a bench at the far end of the railroad triangle eating an ice cream cone (!) and watching the traffic go by.  Just outside a little brownish hut with red shutters called “Scoops.”‘

Then O’Malley remembers Augustine’s Confessions, remembers that time is not the motion of a body, but occurs and starts to weigh as an easy or difficult conveyance for the Spirit ‘first then was that to be spoken of over which it might be borne.”‘

O’Malley, compared to those of his generation that went on to college, is a badass scholar.  This is perhaps difficult to stomach, given the state of these arts today.  I tend to give the man the benefit of the doubt.  It took him two years to get answers to the questions that had come up.  And here, it takes another increment of time — real time — to figure out why so many singular people like himself spend time with words writ large on monuments in Nashua.  As on Keats’ grave, these words, O’Malley suddenly senses, are written on water.  The task remains to begin writing all over again, on blank tablets, for inconspicuous, disdained people who are the salt of the earth.  O’Malley is a badass, and he sees, for all intents and purposes, a leviathan or a behemoth emerging from out of the depths  as the only proper war monument.  He will soon be surprised by joy to see the other side of the badass experience, the one for which one must maintain a link to the adolescence forming a bridge between ourselves and our childhood.  This must have occured to O’Malley in high school.

Even more troubling, though, as I seek to yank myself out of this book and its fascination, are the following descriptions in the form of Norman’s musings.  ‘Growing up, no one had ever paid much attention to him. … Reciprocally, he had grown into someone of whom nothing much (in general; in particular: attention) was expected (even by himself.)’  (82)  ‘From the very start, people hadn’t wasted time explaining things to someone like him …’ (83)  ‘They had just assumed thathe was retarded — when he wasn’t at all (or, if he had been as an infant, it had been due principally, he now understood, to that very indifference). (83) 

On the same page, there is this on his schooling.  Ever since I began reading this novel, I have assumed that someone who reacts with Latin quotes is a college graduate.  I know am all but certain that Norman barely scraped his way through high school, and that the Latin, as well as the memory work, was the strange fruit of solitude.  ‘These days,he’d be going on to college on a “special needs” scholarship of some kind; 25 years ago, he had gone on to work for the Post Office, sweeping. … This had given him a thirst for knowledge …’

Perhaps this is why people make fun of Norman.  Why, for example, the barman is so curt and mean to him, after giving him some avuncular advice with his first drink.  Somewhere else, we learn that he had a square head.  And the guests can’t understand why or how Norman should be on the other side, looking in at them, when it would be so much more normal for them to be taking care of Norman!

What difference does it make?  It would qualify the entire story as mentally challenged, and this would make it all the more fascinating.  ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’ and Dostoevsky’s idiot are the first references to come to mind.  The reader must take into account, all of a sudden, that Norman is protected from much of what is going on around him, although it appears that he is as much a victim/actor in the ballet of the un-pessimistic glacier-hearts as anyone else. 

This would be really embarassing were it to prove mistaken.  But it could not hold a candle to what Norman has been through if it does end up being the case.

Thus opens the grand finale of Ordinary Time.  All the way to page 452, with the capital letters of ODITE dancing in satirical fun at the way I read.  I pronounce, after 40 years of life in France, grand finale like my father Stody would: it makes it rhyme with O’Malley.  The grand finale for O’Malley.

After so much care and attention to detail, and verisimilitude, the reader wonders if there have been any whale sitings in the Nashua river!  Keeping a perspective on things.  the cosmos and its laws.  Yes, the right whale was the right one to hunt, and it came damn close to being erased from the ranks of living species.  That’s right.  That’s one way to write about it.  By naturalizing it.  But there’s no way these final pages can be naturalized.  The author places us in the maw of miracle, and forces us to come clean on what we desire, or rather, desired (preterite) before we grew up to know better.  ‘It’s in the male’ shouts O’Malley, in the grips of revelation.  (Other readers may wince; this one laughed out loud.)  Something proper to the male, which will continue its merry way as soon as this ‘thing’ settles down, and begins to sink into oblivion, becoming the traditional story of that Sabbath in Nashua when something is supposed to have happened.  Few today would let O’Malley, and a fortiori the author, away with the terms of this sudden revelation: ‘it’s in the male.’  That’s why an author has to be what Pynchon calls a baddass.  Big enough, and mean enough, to say what’s on your mind and to let the politically correct stuff roll down your back like water off a duck’s.  ‘It’s in the male’ is perfect like all the rest of this scene: the male has been left to his own devices, the female has split, and the results are not pretty to behold.  That’s another way of writing about this scene and this climax, and there’s a lot to be gained for pursuing that even further.  I will.

‘In every cloud there is a silver lining.’  That’s not in the book.  It’s fresh out of my age-riddled mind this morning.  There is silver all over the place in this final scene, and the kingfisher peddals silver memories, and the whole story begins with O’Malley, treading on egg shells, vaguely embarassed in his own home, suddenly bedazzaled by slivers of silver paper over the living room floor.  Let’s make an historical, exegetical point here.  Ordinary Time is placed in the wake of the whale, and this wake is called Wisdom.  The sapeniential wisdom of the Old Testament.  You have the law, then the prophets, and finally, the grand finale, you have wisdom.  Salomon like wisdom.  Proverbs and that sort of thing.  And Wisdom holds that the created universe is good, and that man’s place in that universe is good.  That all is good.  And that it is Wisdom that teaches you that, if you but open your eyes and your heart to its voice and its song.  Every time something silver falls into the reader’s lap, it’s Wisdom rearing its might head.  This represents a huge retreat from the plane of the prophets, and the radical inauguration of the law.  It’s further down the road.  O’Malley has an elective affinity with wisdom, although it takes him light years to feel the heat.  The author, on the other hand, has dealt with the other stages: I think this is the right way to read TRILOGY, and I’ll try it out before signing out. 

Another way to go about swallowing this scene would be to wallow in it.  Simply be content with writing it out, verbatim, and then sending it to someone with the single word ENJOY.  This has to be a major locus of contemporary English-American ugliness and stupidity.  Well-meaning as always, and perfectly inane.  Enjoy.  Get off on this.  Take it to the toilet and beat off on it!  That kind of ugliness.  Because there’s no way of enjoying this scene without writing about it.  Even if the first, and most important, of its effects is to dunk you in silence.  Not enjoy, but first see it as O’Malley saw it, shimmering, pristine, hallowed as in Halloween.  Feel the stupid Halloween receding, and hallowed ground and hallowed waters taking its place.  Discover with O’Malley your heart’s desire.  Up there on the bridge, with the whale’s shape standing in for the upside down mountain of Holy Scripture.  Up there on the bridge, the assembly, the nobility and the mobility of tribes and peoples, mothers and fathers, down through the ages: forgotten, dead, past.  ‘Where had they all come from?  There were children and mothers — not a few baby buggies and sailors from sunken ships; the crowd was mottled with “guests” of every deprived degree — and along the opposite railing sixty-four Indian warriors (a long line of shapes with a shining about them) stood proudly  attentive to the awesome apparition, their squaws and youngsters fanning out on either side;  …. and soldiers of every description: blue and grey, doughy and jungle fatigued — but all were radiant and whole; though there were those in wheelchairs and on crutches, the badly-clothed and the poorly-blessed, all of whom awaiting the waxing of the whale with undisguised delight and a longing larger than the bridge could hold.  … strange … and wonderful: this mysterious commingling of the living and the dead’ (449)

One way of writing down your enjoyment, or fascination, or admiration, or secret longing concerning this bridge from author to reader would be to return to the beginning of the novel and see how many signs there have been of this mysterious commingling coming to pass.  I shall take my stand here, on this bridge: my desire is that such an event take place, that the promise of such an event be fulfilled, be accomplished, and no matter how long it takes, in whatever form it may choose to endoss, just let it come, baby, and don’t forget the water like tear-drops on our heads.  Raindrops keep falling on my head: in this grand finale, Craig and Norman finally appear as the friends they’ve always been, through thick and thin.  (At points like this, you can’t write anything without it looking like a million dollars more than you could scrape up.)

Another way of writing about this grand finale would be to take up the business about there being nothing extraordinary in the novel.  the back cover quotes the poor luck importunist, saying it’s ‘simply extraordinary.’  I haven’t found that on the blog.  My patience wore thin.  But if you follow the instructions of the author, in part one, and gouge out any occurence of ‘extraordinary’ in the book, then you are a friggin fool.  You’d have to scrape this away: ‘Instantly, all that was ordinary in the time gave way to that extraordinary motion.’ (448)  Perhaps one can write at this point that the reader has to get out from under the weight of the author’s directives, and ignore them at his own risk, peril, and luck.  The main risk is simply not reading him with sufficient attention.  I shall devote a post to this thing about the ordinary and the extraordinary soon.  And another on the preterite.  And one on O’Malley and all the folks on the bridge as a recall of Moses and all the tribes of Israel, under that reversed mountain, hearing the Lord giving them his life-giving law.  I shouldn’t do this.  I shouldn’t promise anything.  But I enjoy tempting the devil.  Even so late in the day, I enjoy the occasional wager on change.

Hegel is famous for saying that henceforth the serious modern man will be reading the newspapers instead of Holy Scripture.  I don’t know if the author knew that when he was writing OT, but it’s a good place to start off on the newspaper issue in OT.  I’m writing without the help of notes here, and so will probably say quite a few things that will have to be edited.  Here goes.  Newspapers, especially the inner sections that Norman reads (he says he never reads the headlines), are filled with voices beckoning, proposing, seducing, hating, and inquiring up a storm.  Norman just as well ought to be on a sabbatical: he’s cut his work-load down to a minimum, and doesn’t have to worry about measuring up to any domestic standards: his wife is gone, and his kids are being taken care of by a ‘professional.’  So he’s pretty much at large.  Here at large is a synonym for being on a sabbatical.  That doesn’t mean he’s resting, or living the life of Riley.  It means he’s finally got some time to do some serious inspecting of what he’s become, of what’s wrong with himself and his world, and what might be done about it.  Sabbatical: an extended moment for serious study.

I’ve already said that once Norman hits the open sea (this means: once he’s gone all the way upstream and met up with his heart), the novel ends on a Saturday.  Like the Jewish liturgy, followed by some Christians.  Saturday Sabbath.  What can throw the reader off here is the fact that there are no theology books, or philosophical treatises, or song books for the faithful.  There are only the newspaper articles he meets up with in that week’s flurry of papers, plus those he remembers.  No one in his right mind could set out to ‘study’ something with this kind of source material.  He would go under in no time.  And come back up only with crass generalizations.  No, here the reader has to understand the sabbath, and the sabbatical, as a moment when Norman is being, well, let’s say, manhandled by something or someone who remains in the wings, or underwater.  A covert operation.  This is why Norman feels, and remembers letters, of people describing the feeling, the sensation, the life-posture, of being led.  Pulled.  (Most of the time, pulled under, loosing your footing, on the brink of drowning)  The newspaper material configures itself; it’s both limited in time (there are week long sabbaths) and virtually infinite in intensional extension, if I can say it that way.  Norman has had regular bouts with newspapers for an unspecified period of time, but it has become by now almost second nature.  He’s always spent his alloted time in the toilet with reading material to help the matter along to its final destination, and now, the only difference is that the destination draws closer and the time spent feeling that pull is more concentrated, less diluted, and less easily spent finding ways to wiggle out of the draw.

The sabbath begins on Friday evening at sundown, and continues until three stars appear in the sky on Saturday evening.  There are three separate events of newspaper clusters falling out of the sky into the river.  This is not a novel for star-gazers, but it is a novel that goes a long way towards explaining why so many papers throughout the history of the media have been called ‘the star,’ this or that local star.  You get your bearings in the newspaper.  The newspaper gives you the date, distinguishes fresh news from historical commemoration, etc.  Plus film and sports schedules, without which many people who simply wither away.  These are the stars that flutter softly onto the river, where they begin to lose their familiar shape and to take on other shapes. 

The first star to flutter on down, dead as a star but conserved in an essential shape, is described on the final page of the Saturday section of the novel, before O’Malley goes at large.  O’Malley has noticed the plantation again: he’s standing on the bridge and is pissed to see Craig walking up with one of the shit-face grins on his face, and to make matters worse there is little stevie and his mother may lou approaching from the other end!  O’Malley is not going to be able to wiggle out of this appointment with his own desire.  ‘O’Malley watched a clump of newspaper lift itself into the air and soar out over the water.  On one of its crumpled but legible sheets:  McLean’s toothpaste.’ (365)

Just a clump of newspring, and something which will be picked up again in the film ‘Georgia Law’ about keeping your mouth and your manners clean. 

The next star is more precise, and more alluring.  ‘ … sheets of newspaper, one, two, three … flew from the bridge out over the water like some great black-and-white butterfly hovering over the waters.  A trick of the eyes.  Illusion.’  It’s no longer a question of getting rid of Craig, but of capitalizing (sic!) on his knowledge concerning the root of illusion.  The newspaper print has transmogrified into a butterfly!  By now, Norman’s ass is grass. 

the third star falls into the river on page 423.  This may be the same experience as the second star.  Maybe it’s all just one experience, with increasing acuity of perception and strength of attention.  After all, Norman realises with a shock that he has been praying for just this sort of cognitive conversion.  The situation is similar to that of his most recent reflection on the mills on the banks of the river.  Remembering in which order they were built.  Here we don’t know how many times newspapers have been wafted into the river water.  Quite frankly, at this stage I’m ready to jettison the three stars thing.  I think at this stage Norman is as tight and condensed as a nuclear reactor, and the three stages of ‘consciousness’ can probably run circles around the time it takes this God-forsaken newsprint to fall.  There you have the event of this post.  A change of mind.  Out on the bridge over Nashua river, on Saturday, with a whole bunch of people feeling the cold, and not wanting to return home.

I’ve put off this moment for what seems like ages now, out of respect for what is called the spoiler limit.  Anyone commenting on a novel should not say anything that might spoil the novel for a first-time reader!  I don’t believe in spoilers, any more than Norman does.  In the whodunit, it’s not who did it, it’s what has been done.  same here.  The whale that suddenly appears in the wake of the three sheets of newspaper has to be a whale because the novel works to make that whale weigh in on your consciousness and your memory as a reader and as a believer in Holy Scripture and as an American.  But it makes no difference in the world to say that the novel ends, crescendo, with a whale emerging out of the Nashua river.  It makes no difference at all, except perhaps to confirm in some cases that there are people who simply shouldn’t pick this book up, if the idea of a whale suddenly emerging from the Nashua river seems preposterous to them.  We have in France a translation of the Bible called the TOB.  Traduction Oecuménique de la Bible.  In the book of Daniel, there is a footnote saying that a work has not been translated with the word “whale” because obviously there were and never will be whales in the Mediterranean.  Now there you have an indication of how much terror there can be in the most unlikely places, in the most serious of hearts and minds.  The King James translation keeps the whale.  And Brian Wall has left his mark on the history of occurences of whales in the minds and hearts of mankind.

Nothing distinguishes the ancient from the modern man so much as the former’s absorption in a cosmic experience scarcely known to later periods.  Its waning is marked by the flowering of astronomy at the beginning of the modern age.  Kepler, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe were certainly not driven by scientific impulses alone.  All the same, the exclusive emphasis on an optical connection to the universe, to which astronomy very quickly led, contained a portent of what was to come.  The ancients’ intercourse with the cosmos had been different: the ecstatic trance [rausch].  For it is in this experience alone that we gain certain knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is remotest from us, and never of one without the other.  This means, however, thatman can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally.  It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as inimportant and avoidable, and to consign it ot the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights.  It is not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it, as was made terribly clear by the last war, which was an atteempt at new and unprecendented commingling with the cosmic powers.  Human multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled into the open country, high-frequency currents coursed through  the landscape, new constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean depths thundered with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were dug in Mother Earth. … In the nights of annihilation of the last war, the frame of mankind was shaken by a feeling that resembled the bliss of the epileptic.  And the revolts that followed it were the first attempt of mankind to bring the new body under its control. …  Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation.  (One Way Street, conclusion, written in 1923-1926, now in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, pages 486-487.)

Norman finds traces and contemporary consequences to what was set in place during the Civil War, before the Big One whose presence in the novel is as apocalyptic as in the passage above, in newspapers!  The idea is, perhaps, that at least in newspapers we can all assume that we’re talking about what’s going on out there in the world.  Newspapers don’t deal with recursive structures. 

The next post will have to be about newspapers.  Of course I would will it to be the best of them all.  Bad omen.  In the meantime, here’s a word from page 423 of OT:

TELANGIECSTATICALLY.  From telangiecstasia: an abnormal dilatation of capillary vessels and arterioles that often forms an angioma.  [an agioma is defined as tumor composed chiefly of blood vessels or lymph vessels] .

Norman ‘turned to the river — just as several large, versicolored pages from a discarded newspaper floated out over the water like some primordial butterfly, its bright-tinted wings opening and closing telangiecstatically: a multi-chromatic spectre seemingly weighed in mid-air, found wanting, then turned round and round … down and still further down … toward a tender, terrific, touching.’

I’m truly sorry it took me such a long time to get into the heart of the ‘book.’  But that’s the storyof everything important and dear to my life.

So we’re off to the races.  (I’ve already said that one outcome of a reading of this third volume of TRILOGY would be to have to, or better, want to loop back to the butterfly races.  In this novel (OT), everything gentle, bucolic, and overshadowed with woe and doom in that novel (Butterfly races) finds itself repeated and thrown out onto the table in the Masseck family saga.  That will make us readers at large!

So it’s a good thing to be at large.  Especially if you’re a prisoner.  (About to be hanged as soon as you’re caught.)  That’s got to be one way to read this final section, as the story of someone on the run, a fugitive.  The escaped criminel is still at large — the dictionary is, as usual, helpful with this good example of modern American usage.  The French reporters are still following the story of the mad flight of an ugly old geezer who is, to the considerable of France’s best (police force), at large!  And to be a reporter at large means to be able to go pretty much wherever you please.  No assignments except those you give yourself. 

I suppose the problems come when the reader discovers how much he shares with the profession of police hound.  How strongly his instincts beckon for a solution, for peace all over again (a little peace and quiet, a little law and order), for resolution, as the Romantics said, apeing the Classics.  That just has to be the overweening sense of ‘O’Malley at large”: the impossibility of peace, solution, or resolution for the reader, confronted with the surprised, and yes, extraordinary, resolution of all the plot lines in the whale book!

Let’s not allow ourselves to get ahead of ourselves.  Let’s go slowly.  Let’s begin by pointing out that the novel’s first two sections rely heavily on ordinary chronology.  The three letters of ‘O’Malley on the scene’ are dated.  They may well be factual rather than fictional dates.  (I don’t remember!)  O’Malley’s week begins on Sunday 3 April and concludes the following Saturday.  A rather dour conclusion, BTW (this abbreviation always means ‘by the way’ on this blog).  ’A week gone by.  Cora gone.  Bye.’  Proceding to part three involves a perturbation in this ordinary time structure.  The prisoner is no longer is an ordinary time frame.  Time for an interruption:

–I originally thought that the third section took place the following Sunday.  That at least that part of the ordinary time frame was conserved right up to the moment when that final event rocked the world.  I no longer believe that is correct.  This creates problems for the reader: it’s not easy to have things stop on Saturday.  It’s not easy to give up Sunday as a natural follow-up to Saturday.  (The world is divided into two groups of people, with two distinct patterns of boredom and panic: those who can’t stand Saturday nights, and those who will have no truck with Sundays.  I problem to the first group: Saturday is a synonym of being in the doldrums.  Sundays are always bright.  Women have made fun of me for this.  As if I hadn’t gotten beyond the stage of the altar-boy: as if I hadn’t hit the stage of maturity yet!)

One reason why I now think that ‘O’Malley at large’ cannot be conflated with ‘Sunday’ is Cora.  She tells Norman that she’s coming back tomorrow, and tomorrow is Sunday, right in the middle of part three.  Of course this isn’t solid proof, for this, like all the rest, can be a reminiscence, but I wouldn’t want things to end on such a relativistic note.  To feel the wind in your hair when you’re at large (or identifying with someone who is finally at large) you have to have a sane and fundamental respect for the power of those institutions which restrain you, beginning with the instititution of time!  So it’s a crucial question to be able to talk meaningfully, and reasonably, about the transformation of O’Malley who can finally bolt from his cage.

Almost everything in part 3 can be read as a re-consideration, or re-staging, of something that occured previously.  (Using the present perfect would be a grammatical mistake here, but novelistically spot on.)  Everything seen in the perfection practice brings about.  (‘Practice makes perfect.’)  One of the ‘things’ that doesn’t fit into this scheme is everything that takes place in Dunkin Donuts!  It’s on account of DD that I originally thought it was Sunday.  I would breathe a sigh of relief to learn that DD is not open on Sundays, but of course they probably make more money on Sundays than any other day of the week.  (Unsubstantiated affirmation: I’m not at large, I’m unmoored!)

the biggest reason why I thought ‘O’Malley at large’ should have Sunday all to himself is that it somehow feels better, more proper, for a miracle to occur on Sunday.  After all, Easter never takes place on a Wednesday, now does it.  We say Easter Sunday.  (Christmas, on the other hand, can be celebrated any old day: I remember feeling great about God and the world and it was Tuesday.  Christmas is all about the absolute future of birth, so I suppose any old day is good enough for that!)

I hear someone, or some voice, talking to me, saying: you’ll just have to let go, Tom.  ‘The world is full of things not awaiting your description’ as Thomas McGuane writes in ‘Panama.’  Let go of what, I respond, testily.  The logic — the answer returns like a smash.  The logic of the whodunnit.  You’re willing to jettison this logic with the ‘WHO’ but you replace it with the ‘WHEN.’  And thus you lose out on all the fun, and all the joy coursing through the lines (ha ha) of this novel.  Well, I respond, I don’t want people thinking this was an exercise in magical realism!  With that I finally silenced the troubling voice, at the very moment I was most excited about what it was coming up with.

Let’s recap.  To be ‘at large’ is what we all want to be.  To be at large is a great feeling.  It means to be alive, and it means that nobody’s going to be able to mess with you.  When you’re at large, you renew with the childhood certainty that you’ll be able to off into the airs, perhaps not right now, but soon.  A novelist rights in order to allow his characters to spring the coop, and to be at large. (I left the slip between writes and rights because it seemed right to do so.)  This novel succeeds in that.  That must have been cool – for the writer to feel that kind of freedom.  Freedom within the constraints, freedom indwelling, infinite freedom in the Cantorian sense of ‘infinite.’  At last at large, on an overpopulated bridge as wide as the great outdoors!