An art of becoming? What about an art of being?

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About ten years or so ago I was driving somewhere with a friend. He and I were at approximately the same life stage—married and with a few kids—and although we had spent quite a lot of time together as we were growing up and in our teenage years, we had by now both settled into a routine of our nuclear families being the center of our lives with only occasional and fleeting retreats from that milieu to engage in other pursuits. He asked how life was, and I replied with something like “you know, same old same old.” When I said that to him, I could see on his face a look of recognizance, but also of resigned sadness. Suddenly I realized that I wanted to be able to tell him about adventures I’d had, and that he wanted to tell me the same kinds of things; but our lives were, in truth, rather mundane. Yet we had both been conditioned by the narrative arts to want to tell exciting things to each other. We had both been trained to expect drama and adventure in our stories; and how could I tell him the story of my life, adventure-free, without it being a boring, poorly-constructed story?

In his book The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker argues that all stories are categorizable into a very small number of patterns. Although it has its limits, his “basic plots” idea can be easily mapped onto just about every narrative one will ever encounter; and all of his plots, to a one, deal with some hero realizing there is something wrong with the world and having to overcome some obstacle before being ushered into a fuller sense of life or a greater awareness of their own powers. This is what Booker calls the “meta-plot”: all stories, all of the basic plots, can be distilled into Booker’s meta-plot, one in which change, desire, and becoming are the qualities which make a story worth telling.

Stories are models for living. They are patterns of how to act and behave in the world; they are guides; they are maps. They are aspirational narratives, telling us what to want and how to want it. Even Scripture proclaims this truth about stories: St. Paul, referring to the testing of the children of Israel in the wilderness, says “These things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did. [. . .] These things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come.”¹ So I’m a little puzzled and maybe a little disturbed that stories tell us how to become much more than they tell us how to be. Stories, the best technology we have for showing ourselves how to navigate the perils of life and come out intact on the other side, are actually terrible at showing us how to keep to a stable and uneventful course, how to accept an existence that isn’t rife with danger and big decisions, how to engage in what Eugene Peterson calls “A long obedience in the same direction.”

Why is this a problem? Because we get our cues about how to live from the culture around us—and especially from stories. Imagine being told, over and over, that you ought to desire a certain set of things. Imagine every formative force in your life telling you, for instance, that it is good to eat cows and chickens, and bad to eat raccoons. Would you eat a racoon? Imagine being told, over and over, that you ought to wear deodorant. How hard would it be to step out of that habit, to go against that expectation? Certainly such a step would be possible but it would involve quite a lot of cognitive dissonance and soul-searching before the decision was made.

Now imagine being told, over and over throughout your life, what makes for a good life. House in the suburbs? Vacations every summer? Going out to eat with regularity? Our culture is very good at pushing onto us what it thinks are the “correct” goals and ways of life; this problem has grown since the invention of Instagram, but it’s as old as all the advertisements showing us happy people solving their life’s problems through consumerism. How hard is it, these days, to forego whatever it is that society says is an essential part of the good life? Are you going to be the person who doesn’t use streaming services, doesn’t own a car, doesn’t have a phone?

Now think on this: stories, in order to be good stories, must focus the energy of their plots on a hero becoming something, never just being something. Implicit in the basic structure of all narrative is the idea that the life worth reading about is full of drama, excitement, and a rising from height to height. The stories are riveted on moments of change, enlightenment, and awakening; they all stop at “happily ever after.” There is no narrative model for how to remain static in life. Stories tell us we ought to desire things, to change and grow; but stories don’t tell us how to be contented with what we already have. And I think that’s a grave deficiency.

On the last page of The Great Gatsby Scott Fitzgerald writes a remarkable passage describing Jay Gatsby’s desire for Daisy Buchanan, first instantiated in the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat the brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.

The “aesthetic contemplation,” felt by the discoverers of the North American continent and equated, here, with Gatsby’s discovery that Daisy Buchanan lived right across the bay from him — it’s an aesthetic of possibilities, of potentials, of becoming. I’ve always loved that passage, and that line about “man’s capacity for wonder.” there is indeed something fundamental in the human heart, a yearning to discover and explore . . . but where are the stories about discovering and exploring another person, about making an entire universe of love and life with that person, which to the people involved will certainly be a grand adventure but which to the rest of the world might seem a rather boring thing to write a story about?

When stories do focus on married couples it’s practically inevitable that something bad is going to happen. Think of Anna Karenina. Think or Middlemarch: that book is a masterpiece through and through, and it’s about people settling down to a happy married life and then getting their hopes dashed. I know of only one exception to this literary pattern: the “Reader, I married him” chapter in Jane Eyre . . . but that’s the last chapter in the book. The story that keeps our attention, the one Charlotte Brontë felt worth the telling, is all the storm and stress that gets Jane to the point of marrying Rochester. Whatever happens after that is assumed to be too boring to discuss.

The same pattern happens in romantic comedy films, which stereotypically focus on the beginnings of the relationship and end when the couple finally realizes they are right for each other. As I mentioned before: “Happily ever after” is only ever the last line of the fairy tales; the stories don’t concern themselves with the day-to-day lives of the characters once they have become whoever the story was shaping them for. Whatever lessons or examples we could take from the story are necessarily not going to be about people who are stable and settled, with no great swings of fortune or wild chances in their lives.

And this is the danger in that sort of worldview, the worldview of becoming. If I want to embark on an odyssey of becoming, I have a wealth of narrative patterns to follow, models of how to become the thing I want to become; but if I am already where I want to be, I’ve got none.

So if I am at a stable position in my life, and all the stories are shouting at me about how great it is to become something . . . am I not getting a subtle message that I ought to ditch my current situation, break the relational bonds that keep me where I am, abandon that long obedience, and go off and become something new?

The stories of the Bible are an exception to this general trend in narrative; although individual strands of the Biblical story feature striving, becoming, desiring, accomplishing, the overall tone is very often one of settled existence—although, most often, it is a negative settled existence, as in the book of Judges where the children of Israel keep falling into the same sins over and over again. I know of very little secular narrative art which speaks to the truth that stability and stasis are good things and that there is value and worth in the settled life. The closest I can think of is Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook, where the narrator putters around the Russian countryside, shooting woodcock and other game birds, and interacting with the peasants and landowners he meets along the way. But the theme of stasis does get discussed occasionally in music and in visual art.

The best music of stasis was made by the American minimalists of the late twentieth century, and the masterpiece of that kind of music is Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians. It is a fascinating, multifaceted, enthralling work. (The original recording by the composer from 1978 is the standard version; but my favorite is the recording by the students at Temple University from 2016.) Very few musical works combine a pervasive sense of bubbling activity with a feeling of placidity and calm; this one does so with majestic excellence. The whole work is united by a set of chords (called “pulses” which begin and end the work) as well as Reich’s favorite melodic / rhythmic motif, one he used with great frequency throughout his career. The music floats around these two poles, gradually coming in and out of focus, subtly varying and recombining its themes. In structure it is very like a long-term relationship: there are boring parts indeed, and parts that are jarring and uncomfortable even; but on the whole, looking back from the end, the piece displays a unity, completeness, and overall rightness that is remarkably apt. And Music for 18 Musicians contains very little Beethoven-style impetus for the kind of thematic development often encountered in sonata-form classical music: Reich’s piece exists in a powerful place of stasis, calmly occupying its area. It is a splendid depiction of a life of being, not becoming.

The visual-art equivalent of an aesthetic of being can be found in the art of Carl Holsoe, an early-twentieth-century Danish painter whose work I’ve discussed before. A leisurely stroll through this collection of his paintings will disclose his intense preoccupation with the women in his life, particularly his wife, seen almost invariably from the back while doing some sort of activity about the house.

I can imagine Holsoe hanging around the house and watching his life unfold with his wife in the house with him; and as she puttered around the house reading, watering the plants, or arranging the table, Holsoe was enjoying it all so intensely, finding so much beauty in the little mundanities of his life, that he was inspired to make art about it. Even in the paintings where there is not a human figure present—and he made several pictures of the interior of buildings, quietly existing in a sort of eternal placidity—the sense of settled being is intense; in all of these paintings, the overwhelming impression is of an aesthetic where nothing needs to change at all, and where things could keep going as they are, indefinitely, and where such a state would be most blissfully desirable above all else.

Isn’t that a much healthier ideal than the always-striving, always-becoming focus of the narrative arts? Truly, it is profoundly refreshing to see Holsoe’s paintings and imagine a calm and placid life validated by art, one where simply being is given its full worth.

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I’m not sure if anyone really cares to know what I’ve been doing these last few months, but whatever; I’m telling the story anyway. December was an extremely rocky month for me. I had planned a good amount of writing along with the standard holiday stuff . . . and then I came down with some sort of sickness and was wiped out for two weeks. Although I never got an official diagnosis all the signs seem to indicate I had pertussis. I had to miss nearly all my Christmas-related events and was in pain the whole way through the Christmas holiday itself, which was quite disappointing. I’m better now except for a lingering and very obnoxious cough (pertussis is also known as “hundred-day cough,” so I think I’ll be coughing for a while).

But readers will note that I’ve been much quieter than usual in the months prior as well. In October we started a giant rearranging of furniture at my house which took a good chunk of the fall; one of the results is that I now have my own office space upstairs in one of the sunniest rooms of the house. Here is a picture of the desk at which rough drafts, outlines, and research notes for RUINS are actually created. Yes, this is indeed the very sanctum itself.

No Instagram-worthy aspirational props here; this desk is quite beat up and the back is falling apart. My wife and I found it on the curb a few blocks from our house and dragged it home. You can see Dr Pepper and Chex Mix on the desk; RUINS is powered by junk food. There’s all kinds of crazy knickknacks in the cubbyholes at the top of the desk, including a weird vase-like object full of paintbrushes; some enormous acorns on a plate, which I found in Oklahoma; a squeeze bottle of superglue (so the kids can’t reach it); a thumb piano which I made at work; and a little framed drawing of a tomato, atop a stack of American Girls books. I’m quite pleased with my new office. The rest of the room includes a very comfortable couch for napping, a second desk for document storage and research notes overflow, and. on a pedestal in the corner, an enormous Boston fern which is a family heirloom, having once been owned by my wife’s great-grandmother.

So I guess I’m all set to get back in the groove of writing more regularly. Already I have nearly completed a 4400-word-long essay about my hometown’s art museum. If you aren’t from Omaha you might find it boring so you can go ahead and skip it if you want.

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1. 1 Corinthians 10 : 6, 11.