Falling Through Space (8 page)

I
AM READING
the correspondence of Gustave Flaubert and George Sand. I love these letters. They are a perfect match for me at this time in my life. George Sand was a settled grandmother of fifty-seven when she began this correspondence with a despairing Flaubert. She had given up her wild life and gone to live among her family in the French countryside near Nohant. She had a little granddaughter named Aurore whom she adored and she was deeply involved in the lives of her family and friends. She wrote movingly to Flaubert of their illnesses during the long French winters. There is a great charm about these letters. “A hundred times in life,” she declares in one letter, “the good that one does seems to serve no immediate purpose: yet it maintains in one way or another the tradition of well wishing and well doing without which all would perish.”

I was thinking of that this morning. I was out walking in my new neighborhood watching the early morning mist rising from these streets that were pasturelands when I left Jackson, Mississippi, eighteen years ago. Well wishing and well doing. How often I have tried to tell writing students that the first thing a writer must do is love the reader and wish the reader well. The writer must trust the reader to be at least as intelligent as he is. Only in such well wishing and trust, only when the writer feels he is writing a letter to a good friend, only then will the magic happen.

I have done the other thing. I have written bitter and cruel things and even published some of them and I regret them every one. This big brain of ours can think of anything. The job of the civilized man or woman is to choose what to keep and what to throw away. I want to love the world as George Sand did. I don't want the bitterness and despair of Flaubert. His letters to her are full of sadness. He thinks the world is full of stupidity and cruelty and evil. George Sand also saw the evil of the world, but she did not think it was the ground of being. In a radiant passage she defends her Utopian political ideals. “Everyone must be happy so that the happiness of a few will not be criminal or cursed by God.”

Over and over in these letters Flaubert despairs, George Sand cheers him up and insists he must love the world. Their letters often cross in the mail.

I am sleeping well with this book by my side, feeling privileged to be allowed to share the record of this amazing friendship. The edition I am reading is the translation by Aimee McKenzie and it's hard to find. You will have to go to a library or have the book ordered by a bookstore. Most of the best reading in the world must be searched for in card catalogs or on dusty shelves in the back of stores.

“A
BODY
does not experience itself as falling through space.” Einstein called that the happiest thought of his life. It was the basis of the special theory of relativity and his search for a unified field theory.

A body does not experience itself as falling through space. This does not mean you or me falling from a ladder or the top of a ten-story building, although it can mean that too. It is Monday afternoon. I have been thinking about that concept since Saturday night. I had a debauch Saturday night. You all know what wild lives writers live. It began at four in the afternoon when I made the mistake of going to the bookstore. I left with three books, the New Modern Library edition of
On the Origin of Species
and
The Descent of Man
by Charles Darwin, a book called
Darwin for Beginners
by Jonathan Howard, and the Abraham Pais biography of Einstein.

I was excited. I kept stopping on corners and reading. I went on up the mountain, ran into my house, stuck a diet dinner in the oven, and settled down on the couch to read.

I opened the Pais book on Einstein and began. “There was always about him a wonderful purity, at once childlike and profoundly stubborn. It is no art to be an idealist if one lives in cloud cuckoo land. He, however, was an idealist even though he lived on earth and knew its smell better than almost anyone else.

“Nothing was more alien to Einstein than to settle any issue by compromise, in his life or in his science. When he spoke on political problems he always steered toward their answer. Were I asked for a one-sentence biography of Einstein I would say he was the freest man I have ever known.”

Oh, my God, I said. This will take the wide net. I turned off the diet dinner, picked up the phone, ordered a large combination pizza, and settled down — about nine thirty I could take no more. I went on off to bed. As always when I attempt to read about physics I am filled with wonder, a sense of ecstasy, pattern, texture, design. “Subtle is the Lord,” Einstein said, “but he is not malicious.” We are allowed to see what is going on. I went to bed without washing my face or hands. I snuggled deep down into the covers, for it is still winter here. I dreamed of fields of green going out from me in all directions. I was the center of the dream but not of the world. I fit into the plan of the world. I was in the right place and I could move. The fields stretched out — on and on — there was nothing frightening anywhere. Nothing that could not be seen and wondered at and understood. Nowhere I could not go by walking. I was not hungry or tired or scared. There were no snakes behind me in the grass, no insurmountable hills to climb, no unbridled horses coming to ride me down, no cars plummeting down hills toward water, no dragons to slay.

In the night I woke and opened all the windows so I could hear the wind blowing across the Ozarks. A body does not experience itself as falling through space. Because there is no fall and there is no space.

I
WILL BE
fifty years old tomorrow. My fiftieth year to heaven, as Dylan Thomas once wrote. I read that very long poem out loud to myself every year on my birthday.

This year I am going to spend my birthday with the work of another genius. I don't know what genius is, but I know that when it breaks forth among us we recognize it and protect and cherish the gifts it leaves us. Bona fide geniuses are almost always very careless about leaving their work around in unprotected places. As if they know someone will take care of it for them. Or, perhaps, they can afford to be careless since they understand it springs from abundance, from an inexhaustible well.

All men honor genius, in all times, in all cultures, because it shows the rest of us what we can be, what we are made of, this dazzling, complicated creature we call man.

For my birthday, I am going to visit a house painted by a genius. The whole interior of the house is a mural of such brilliance and light that there is no way to describe its effect upon the mind of the viewer. Looking at that mural is like watching a child dance or a bird in flight. The mural was painted by Walter Inglis Anderson, who lived and worked in a place called Shearwater Pottery in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. Here, among his family and his children, protected from the world, he painted hundreds and hundreds of brilliant watercolors. He also carved huge wooden sculptures from fallen tree trunks and made murals and woodcuts and pottery and illustrations for children's books.

No one bothered him. No one told him to stop, or to do it another way. So he just got up every morning and did the work of a genius.

Often he threw a gunnysack full of canned goods into the bottom of a rowboat and rowed out into the Gulf of Mexico to a small deserted island that is part of the barrier reef that guards the Mississippi coast. There he painted everything that lives and breathes and moves. Hundreds of perfectly achieved watercolors on one and sometimes two sides of quite ordinary typewriter paper. When Hurricane Camille was on the way, he rowed out to the island and tied himself to a tree to ride out the storm protecting his island from the elements.

Genius is like a wild thumbprint. You can never look at trees or water or animals or yourself in quite the same way again after you have shared his vision. All he saw was magic and yet there is an orderly and logical intelligence to everything he wrote or painted. Pattern, texture, design, weave and weave and weave. “Wing, wind, wave. Wave, wind, wing.”

He was in the habit of dashing off notes to himself on scraps of paper. On the backs of drawings or in the logs of his trips to Horn Island. Verses, aphorisms, stories, essays. An overwhelming mass of bits and pieces that fit together to reveal the shape of the quest he was on.

Here are some of the things he had to say.

“It is literally true that the demon to the student is technique. And it really is evil. Pay no attention to it, either in dancing or in painting.”

“The evil to the beginning painter is confusion. Too many details. As he learns technique he forgets his demon and thinks he has defeated him with technique, but he has just given him a hiding place.”

“True art consists of spreading wide the intervals so that the imagination may fill the spaces between the trees.”

“The normal or even fairly normal man has to be almost knocked down physically to be anything but sublime. Why this is done I don't know. What reason is there against man realizing his sublimity I don't know.”