Denis Johnson. The Name of the World.

This picture was an anonymous work that almost anybody on earth could have made, but as it happened, a Georgia slave had produced it. The work's owners, the Stone family of Camden County, had found the work in the attic of the family's old mansion. It was drawn with ink on a large white linen bedsheet and consisted of a tiny single perfect square at the center of the canvas, surrounded by concentric freehand outlines. A draftsman using the right tools would have made thousands of concentric squares with the outlines just four or five millimeters apart. But, as I've said, the drawing, except for the central square, had been accomplished freehand: Each unintended imperfection in an outline had been scrupulously reproduced in the next, and since each square was larger, each imperfection grew larger too, until at the outermost edges the shapes were no longer squares, but vast chaotic wanderings.

To my way of thinking, this secret project of the nameless slave, whether man or woman we'll never know, implicated all of us. There it was, all mapped out: the way of our greatness. Though simple and obvious as an act of art, the drawing portrayed the silly, helpless tendency of fundamental things to get way off course and turn into nonsense, illustrated the church's grotesque pearling around its traditional heart, explained the pernicious extrapolating rules and observances of governments--implicated all of us in a gradual apostasy from every perfect thing we find or make. (pp. 12-13)

As soon as we had our drinks in hand, Vince, talking over his shoulder the whole time, led me into the back room toward the dancing in which he'd claimed to have no interest. He stood well under six feet, but he had tremendous mass and solidity and moved like an ocean liner among the small tables. (p. 55)

The blond boy she'd been talking to sat two rows ahead of me. Once again it occurred to me--it more than occurred, the insight knocked the breath out of me--that the boy lived in a silence. Why on earth had he come? He sat quite still, completely self-possessed and perfectly alienated. For all he heard, he might have been in this chapel alone at midnight. Perhaps he was sensitive, in some tactile way, to an atmosphere thickened by hundreds of blended voices--how many? As the hymn swayed around me like wheat in a wind I found myself counting the house. Fourteen rows, about a dozen folks on each side of the aisle: nearly three hundred people, all singing beautifully. I wondered what it must sound like out in the empty green fields under the cloudless blue sky, how hearrtrendingly small even such a crowd of voices must sound rising up into the infinite indifference of outer space. I felt lonely for us all, and abruptly I knew there was no God. (Denis Johnson. The Name of the World. HarperCollins, 2000, p. 88)

(Johnson's doomed souls -- here a college prof goes to a department party, only to discover that his colleagues have gathered to celebrate the several years that he had spent with them --wander through a universe so barren and fallen, that it appears at times to posit the existence of God only in order to distinguish the past from the present, perfection from imperfection. I'm quite besotted with Johnson, whose indignant, savage, and compassionate eye sees everything.)

Dostoevsky. Brothers Karamazov.

"It's not God that I [Ivan Karamazov] do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God's, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept. With one reservation: I have a childlike conviction that the sufferings will be healed and smoothed over, that the whole offensive comedy of human contradictions will disappear like a pitiful mirage, a vile concoction of man's Euclidean mind, feeble and puny as an atom, and that ultimately, at the world's finale, in the moment of eternal harmony, there will occur and be revealed something so precious that it will suffice for all hearts, to allay all indignation, to redeem all human villainy, all bloodshed; it will suffice not only to make forgiveness possible, but also to justify everything that has happened with me--let this, let all of this come true and be revealed, but I do not accept it and do not want to accept it!" (p. 235-36)

"We have our historical, direct, and intimate delight in the torture of beating. Nekrasov has a poem describing a peasant flogging a horse on its eyes with a knout, 'on its meek eyes.' We've all seen that; that is Russianism. He describes a weak nag, harnessed with too heavy a load, that gets stuck in the mud with her cart and is unable to pull it out. The peasant beats her, beats her savagely, beats her finally not knowing what he's doing; drunk with beating, he flogs her painfully, repeatedly: 'Pull, though you have no strength, pull, though you die!' The little nag strains, and now he begins flogging her, flogging the defenseless creature on her weeping, her 'meek eyes.' Beside herself, she strains and pulls the cart out, trembling all over, not breathing, moving somehow sideways, with a sort of skipping motion, somehow unnaturally and shamefully--it's horrible in Nekrasov. But that's only a horse; God gave us horses so that we could flog them. So the Tartars instructed us, and they left us the knout as a reminder. But peoople, too, can be flogged. And so, an intelligent, educated gentleman and his lady flog their own daughter, a child of seven, with a birch--I [Ivan] have it written down in detail. The papa is glad that the birch is covered with little twigs, 'it will smart more,' he says, and so he starts 'smarting' his own daughter. I know for certain that there are floggers who get more excited with every stroke, to the point of sensuality, literal sensuality, more and more, progressively, with each new stroke. They flog for one minute, they flog for five minutes, they flog for ten minutes--longer, harder, faster, sharper. The child is crying, the child finally cannot cry, she has no breath left: 'Papa, papa, dear papa!'" (pp. 241-42)

"In my opinion, there is no need to destroy anything, one need only destroy the idea of God in mankind, that's where the business should start! One should begin with that, with that--oh, blind men, of no understanding! Once mankind has renounced God, one and all ..., then the entire old world view will fall of itself, without anthropophagy, and, above all, the entire former morality, and everything will be new. People will come together in order to take from life all that it can give, but, of course, for happiness and joy in this world only. Man will be exalted with the spirit of divine, titanic pride, and the man-god will appear. Man, his will and his science no longer limited, conquering nature every hour, will thereby every hour experience such lofty delight as will replace for him all his former hopes of heavenly delight. Each will know himself utterly mortal, without resurrection, and will accept death proudly and calmly, like a god. Out of pride he will understand that he should not murmur against the momentariness of life, and he will love his brother then without any reward. Love will satisfy only the moment of life, but the very awareness of its momentariness will increase its fire..." (pp. 648-49)

"The elder of the two [brothers, Ivan] is one of our modern young men, brilliantly educated, with quite a powerful mind, how, however, no longer believes in anything, who has already scrapped and rejected much, too much in life..." (p. 606).

"[W]e are of a broad, Karamzovian nature ... capable of containing all possible opposites and of contemplating both abysses at once, the abyss above us, and abyss of lofty ideals, and the abyss beneath us, an abyss of the lowest and foulest degradation" (p. 699).

"And so we shall part, gentlemen. Let us agree here, by Ilyusha's stone, that we will never forget--first, Ilyushechka, and second, one another. And whatever may happen to us later in life, even if we do not meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember how we buried the poor boy, whom we once threw stones at--remember, there by the little bridge?--and whom afterwards we all came to love so much. He was a nice boy, a kind and brave boy, he felt honor and his father's bitter offense made him rise up. And so, first of all, let us remember him, gentlemen, all our lives. And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune--all the same, let us never forget how good we once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are." (Fydor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov. Transl. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. North Point Press, 1990, p. 774.)

(I thought this novel was interminable, exasperating, and finally magnificent. No more a murder mystery than is Hamlet, it asks all the big questions, and its greatness lies in its refusal to answer them. Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation breathes new, inspired life into the text, and Dostoevsky's passionate, compassionate eye -- on his way to his son's burial, a father bends down to retrieve a flower that has fallen on the snow -- sees and embraces everything. If it's true, as someone once wrote, that reading only begins with rereading, let reading begin here! In the shadow of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, practically everything written in the 20th century, with the possible exception of Faulkner, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, read like sketches, drawing room exercises. But then, if you can't see anything past your own doorstep, what else is there to write about, besides alcoholics ripping electrical wire out of houses in order to pay for another shot of booze?)

Denis Johnson. Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

English left feeling unsure--was he now cleansed, and if so, of what exactly? What crud had the winds of absolution carried off, why did he still feel such grime in the creases of him? An unspiritual explanation was that it was hot. Summer had arrived. Now it was past ten and everybody, even the most debauched, was awake and on the stroll. The crowds were of a size to menace civil authority. Was anybody left in Boston or New York? When you're this completely naked, he thought, much more naked than you'd be without clothes, when you're naked of all your signs and your moves, as naked, say, as the minute you were born, then these thousands of lives going by will rake you. Something like the permeable mask a fencer darkens his face with, that's what his heart needed here.

He put on a casual look: no, not at all, none of this was getting to him; but everything was getting to him--the birds of electricity beating their wings in the wires, the repertoires of ambulances, the thud of defectively muffled engines and the whacking, like rugs being wearily beaten, of stereos through the open windows of cars. The frosty pink was fading from his mouth and the sweat dripped down the inside of his thighs, although occasionally a small breeze reached under and disturbed the leaves and blossoms of his skirt's tropical motif. Above all he was embarrassed to be wearing men's Jockey shorts. It seems an easily appreciated thing, all you had to do, for heaven's sake, was watch him walk. He had to remind himself with every breath that he was invisible to these wraiths.

At a family grocery they were putting out crates of fruit to tempt the thirsty strollers. What a miracle to see a produce truck, uncoupled, drive out from under the massive husk of its trailer. Let him treat his burdens like that!

From the end of Bradford he headed right, out toward Herring Cove. The sky was open now, he was in the National Seashore, a realm protected from civilization, and the road wasn't so crowded. Rather than walk right through the parking lot, he left the pavement a quarter mile or so below the cove and cut across the dunes that rose and fell for quite a distance before they lay down in front of the sea. A few minutes and he'd lost sight of the road, of everything but the sand and the sky; it showed him how all things could fall away in an instant; now he crested a dune and came into a crater empty of everything but sand and the intersecting footprints of other people; the notations delved here by their journeys showed him how each life was one breathtakingly extended musical phrase, and he prayed that their crossings were harmonious.

In some former existence he'd been hunted over sand like this, run down and eaten, turned to the predator's flesh and bones. He felt his life extending backward into the conflagration of all other lives. And it reached out of him like a frond of smoke, touching the tender pink future. This sand presented itself as evidence that he'd someday father children and grandchildren on the earth. He could hear their feet knocking in the rubble as they scavenged in our dregs, stumbling around after some gigantic holocaust. (Denis Johnson. Resuscitation of a Hanged Man. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991, pp. 237-39.)

(When I read in a recent NY Times Book Review that Denis Johnson's dedication to "HP" in his Tree of Smoke is, undoubtedly, a reference to a "higher power," I was skeptical, but that was only because I'd never read him. But if he's a Christian novelist, he's a Christian on acid, writing of hope and despair in the tradition of Whitman, Kerouac, and Burroughs, trying to hang on to what's left of his soul. In Resuscitation, English moves from the Midwest to Cape Cod, where he falls for a lesbian and attempts to become a private investigator. Written in a style that's alternately gritty, moving, and iridescent, this is a novel that's impossible to put down, if only because the author's got you in a death grip and won't let go.)