Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Considerations: On the Intentional in Literature and Life

I am always deeply impressed by intentional action. I rarely act with much deliberation, finding it somewhat gauche. This is not to say that I'm impulsive, or erratic, for I'm perfectly capable of satisfying my short-term needs with intentional action: when sleepy, I go to bed; when thirsty, I reach for some water; when hungry, I stare longingly at my unmarinated cats. What I mean is that I have no broader plan in life. One day melds into the next; time is an ever-receding ever-rushing ocean, and I the graceless feeding manatee, basking in the lukewarm shallows of unfulfilled ambition. I enroll in programs and go to places and do things that will give me credentials which no one will respect, but if you asked me why I preferred this course of action to any other then I would be as bereft of sensible answers as the average Jay Leno program is of humour. It would be more accurate to say, then, that in the grand scheme of things I rarely act with deliberation, which is why I find myself terribly awestruck when people are apparently so deliberative that they plan in advance what literarily significant gestures they are going to execute that day, such as are in accordance with them as a literary character.

To give you an idea of just what it is I'm talking about, read the following passage from the Feb. 2009 issue of Harper's:

"I heard the voices of predators again through the wind. And for loss, for vengeance, for sorrow, I fired the last three rounds that my father had left in my rifle into the dark of the field behind the barn. I was responsible for the bullets and knew, as I sent them, that they would have to fall somewhere."

Here, in the closing words of his tale about his love affair with that most American of objects, the rifled gun, Benjamin Busch acts very deliberately. With his father deceased and gone to that great shooting gallery in the sky, Mr. Busch, now a grown man (a Marine, no less), decides to spend a moment shooting into the darkness outside the family home with the .22 rifle they both cherished. I'm personally astonished by this. Do people really do things of this sort? Who is around to record the significance of this gesture? The wolves in the woods don't care. They don't talk, and their writing is incomprehensible, filled as it is with esoteric references to German philosophy and serving as it does as a mouthpiece for their nationalist rhetoric. For personal satisfaction? If it was personally satisfying then the author would keep it to themselves. The secret, I suspect, is that he was intending to write this article since infancy and has molded his life in such a way as to allow a nice arc of character development, one which ends with a man firing three bullets at nothing in particular and feeling darned good about it. Imagine the planning involved in such an endeavour! Imagine the foresight! Always the question must haunt him when considering whether to do this or that: "is it good for the story?" Even so quotidian a thing as stealing your neighbour's newspaper becomes fraught with worry when Harold Bloom might be opining on its consistency with you qua literary character. "Is this the Benjamin Busch we've come to know in the rest of the story?" Yet, for some reason, Benjamin Busch is full of confidence and energy and is able to achieve gainful employment while I'm left to suffer from catastrophic anxiety whenever I try to explain how to make macaroni and cheese to a six year old retarded girl. Benjamin Busch also plays Officer Anthony Colicchio on TV's The Wire, while I play a short-legged pedant who gets short of breath pronouncing "pronounce." So, in some ways, we're really quite alike.

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