This I Believe
- By Jim Hicks
I imagine you’ve all heard this title before. Also that the NPR series going by this name has, on occasion, made you roll your eyes, and—maybe once or twice—stop and take notice. Moreover, my guess is that if you write at all, and especially if you have on occasion used the verb “to write” intransitively, as I just did, then you’ve also rolled over in your mind the question or possibility of your own particular contribution to the NPR genre. Assuming, that is, that you’re the sort of person that believes that beliefs are something people have, or should have, or ever really know.
Rest easy. This isn’t going to be one of those. What I have in mind is a story, or a set of interlocking stories, about some friends, and also about reading. The reading is something you may know already, since its author is quite famous (among our crowd anyway). And this may well be the most accessible (and, for all I know, most read) text he ever wrote, even though it was originally written to be heard, not read. These words—originally given as a commencement address at Kenyon College—have also been irrevocably shaped, given a real edge as we say, by the death of their author. As you may have guessed, I’m referring to a speech by David Foster Wallace, given a few years before he died by his own hand, not yet a half-century old.
Where I came across it is one mark of its success—a bilingual German/English edition, in Ratingen, a largish city in Germany’s Rhine-Ruhr region, not far from Düsseldorf and Köln. The title appended to the speech, “This is Water,” refers to the anecdote that DFW used to frame his remarks. An older fish swims by two younger fish and greets them by saying, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” After a while, one of the young’uns looks at the other and asks, “What the hell is water? Like most, I found this opening to be a great hook (so to speak). My own readerly response, though, was a bit self-congratulatory, since for years I’d actually been using the same quandary in class—can fish see water?—as an illustration of how ideology works on us all. I haven’t the faintest idea why DFW and I happened to be fond of the same (non)image, or whether we stumbled across it in some common source. I suspect, though, that it’s actually a rather common figure, part of the default setting in a rather wide group of thinkers. Imagining the existence of some group that had both DFW and me as members, well, that’s what I meant by self-congratulatory.
My old college roommate, who I’d come to visit, had gotten the book off his shelf and handed it to me, an example of some recent reading he’d liked, and also a gesture of connection. Greg studied accounting and has made his career at a German company that makes and sells pumps, with a lot of their business in Iraq. He has three great kids, all boys, the oldest just finishing high school; his wife Alex is Slovenian-German and teaches English at a local university. I knew something of DFW, of course, but hadn’t yet read the speech, so I glanced at the opening page or two, and then we went for a walk. I hadn’t seen Greg in years, and this was my first visit to his home, so he took the opportunity to show me around a bit.
Though I didn’t read it until we got back, it’s actually the second anecdote in the speech that I mainly mean to mobilize here. Rather than paraphrase, I’ll just plug it in. We’ll talk later.
There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."
We walked through Greg’s neighborhood for a block or two—mostly one-family residential, a German suburb of sorts. Then we came to a big park, an open woods with a river, and eventually an old mill now turned into an upscale café-restaurant, used for weddings, banquets, and whatnot. A building next to the café houses a preschool, run by a local parents cooperative. When their boys were young, Greg and Alex had been very active there, helping out with maintenance as well as governance, and, in Alex’s case, also with education. As we walked, we talked some about local flora and fauna, some about DFW and some about suicide, and also just generally compared notes. Our lives have had more in common, after all, than do most who’ve chosen such different careers: Greg is an ex-pat, like my wife is. He and I both married outside the language we were born in, and, as a result, we’re now of the two-nation clan. I made a point of telling Greg that I envied him his family; my wife and I have students, but no kids. I also wanted to tell him that I regret not encouraging him more that day, years ago, when he surprised me with some poems he’d been writing—kind of Prufrocky, as I recall, but inventive, interesting. I remember telling him only that he should read more poetry, to have more models and to train his ear.
Mostly, though, we talked about Greg’s treatment regime, and about how his kids and wife are holding up. In circumstances of this sort, one’s material circumstances open the window to discussions of what’s really at stake. You spend some time looking out that window too, but it’s never easy to say what you see. Over a year ago, when they cut out part of Greg’s tongue, they thought they’d gotten it all, and the chemo and radiation would do the rest. But now there’s another tumor blocking his esophagus, and no good options left.
The point of DFW’s talk, of course, is to haunt us with how foolish our consistency often is, but also to bring home a sense of our radical freedom. In his second anecdote, the atheist seems more dogmatic, and more foolish, than the believer, yet this message also swims with the fishes: “an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.” Learning to trip the switch on our default setting is what DFW advocates: there are other ways to read the world around us, other choices to make.
In conversation with Greg that day, I remember we wondered about limits. After all, DFW was talking to college kids on graduation day, not to a friend on his way to Munich for experimental proton radiation therapy. As I tried to say something about what Greg was now facing, I remember thinking about how things had gone for my mother, and for my sister, and arguing that, even when some things are certain, some horrible things, we inevitably still get surprises. Some of these are simply wonders, because those we love are simply wonderfilled. But I was also remembering Jean Améry’s description of the shortcomings of our imagination. In that case, Améry had often thought of what the Nazis would do to him when they caught him, as they eventually did. He later wrote: “Nothing happens as we hope it will, nor as we fear it will. But not because the occurrence, as one says, perhaps ‘goes beyond the imagination’ (it is not a quantitative question), but because it is reality and not phantasy.” There’s no sugarcoating it: Greg, like the rest of us, has that to look forward to.
As for the minor matter of worship, I just don’t know. DFW argues that “The only choice we get is what to worship” and that we’d better aim high (“JC or Allah . . . YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles”) because “pretty much anything else [. . .] will eat you alive.” I get the radical freedom, and I’ve always enjoyed the logic of Pascal’s wager, but I’d be surprised if choice fully covers it.
There’s something of a counterargument in Franklin’s Autobiography, where he describes admiringly the practices of a contemporary religious cult called the Dunkers. They chose not to write down their articles of faith, because they see that past beliefs they once held to be true are now seen as false, and they suspect that their current beliefs are no more permanent than those they’ve left behind.
Franklin comments, This modesty in a sect is perhaps a singular instance in the history of mankind, every other sect supposing itself in possession of all truth, and that those who differ are so far in the wrong; like a man traveling in foggy weather, those at some distance before him on the road he sees wrapped up in the fog, as well as those behind him, and also the people in the fields on each side, but near him all appears clear, tho' in truth he is as much in the fog as any of them.
I have to say I’m with the old printer on this one. And, just so we’re not mistaken, no one could have been more aware than he that this shout-out to the Dunkers, somewhat paradoxically, also managed to set down, in very fine type, a doctrine of his very own.
No doctrine will do, but you still hold up the best light you’ve got. When we tell stories (autobiography a fortiori), we’re doing no less. We take what we’re given, and we make of it whatever we can—with results that are sometimes surprising. That night in Ratingen, for example, I had (as usual) more irons firing that I had hands to hold them. So (as usual) at some absurd hour of the night I was still trying to catch up on a bit on correspondence. Then suddenly, in my inbox, I chanced upon a message from Karen Henry, another old and dear friend. Its subject line was “Thinking of you and Tarkovsky.” Karen and her husband Tom co-founded a theater group I worked with back in the ‘80s in Boston.
Enclosed were a series of poems, one for each of the senses, along with an anecdote about the poem “Sight.” That one was about “family movie times – times we would watch films together in the winter with the woodstove blazing, times to be simply together, happy as a family (not brother and sister warring or parents holding the limits).” For some reason, Karen added, Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice kept haunting her. She even went out and bought it, because she hadn’t seen the film since I took them to see it “years and years ago.”
Here are the first two stanzas:
Old man running through the woods
as green stains the screen –
what I remembered
of The Sacrifice.
I thought Alexander ran
through a fern woods
like the woods I run through
with moss-covered stones
turning toward destiny
or dream
a promise he makes
to give up everything he loves
to save
everything he loves
to save us all
from holocaust.
But the running
is from loved ones
trying to net him
after he sets his beautiful house
on fire.
They watch it burn
along a vacant beach
the house ablaze
a skeletal frame
like match sticks
crashing down.
I can’t assume that you’ve all seen the film (Russian modernist auteur cinema is something of an acquired taste . . . kind of like DFW), but you’ll get the gist here. The Sacrifice hinges on two stunningly beautiful images, two actions, taken by Alexander, the film’s central character (played by Erland Josephson). The first is the planting of a dead, leafless sapling in a pile of rocks. Alexander teaches his son, who is mute, to water the tree each day. At the end of the film, as Karen rehearses here, Alexander burns down the family home; we watch it burn for what seems an agonizingly long time. Here are Karen’s two final stanzas:
At the end
Little Man
lugs two buckets of water
to the barren tree
Alexander and he planted
in rocks at the beginning
of The Sacrifice.
He does not know the fate
of his father
he speaks—healed at last—
and asks:
“'In the beginning was the word,’
Why is that, Papa?”
Camera pans up
the slim broken branches of the tree
Bach’s Passion swelling
the shimmering ocean beyond
flames ever brighter
till all burns
all burns away.
The poem, the film, my friends . . . as I was reading, it all somehow (as it sometimes does) came together. Isn’t that what we’re after? Moments that leave you speechless, aching, and yet somehow feel transcendent. Why else read—or write—at all? Perhaps I should just leave you with that question. If there’s an answer, I’m guessing you won’t hear it on NPR.
Postscriptum: After long hours of struggle, Greg passed away at home in the early morning hours of Thursday, August 8. Surrounded by his family, he died the way he lived, with passion, dignity and acceptance.
