Waylon Jennings and the Apophatic

    The Heifner boys of Nashville--their father used to write Sunday school literature for Southern Baptists before the fundamentalists took over--brought my attention to a column today by our mutual friend John Pierce of Ringgold, Georgia. Pierce is somebody I do know from Ringgold, he and a 13 year old girl named Pearl that showed up at the Open Door Home in Rome Ga in the fall of 81.

     Pearl sang the song to me and a former Miss Alabama contestant and won that days do you know this song contest.

    Back to Pierce and the Nashville Revenants. You can read JP's effort at Goodfaithmedia.org and it is worth the search. He brings up a hero of all of us, Will D. Campbell and if you don't know Will then you aint much of a Babdist.

    Will was a friend of Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter, a Pentecostal preacher's daughter. So JP's musings meshed well with my reading in the last few days of two reviews of Marilynne Robinson latest novel Jack, the third in the Gilead Trilogy. The New Yorker is more of a profile with two pages on her special relationship with Obama, two of ten. It's ending on the Garden of Eden, the Fall is Marneyesque with a Barbara Brown Taylor Snake serpent twist.

    But it is the New York Review of books exegesis I would focus on if Miss Chadwick had assigned Robinson for me to write up in the Advanced English class at Gaffney High. I like new words even if I rarely use them well in the flow of things, as they seem to stick out like when my Dad tried to say Pierre Trudeau at Bethany Baptist in Gaffney in 74.

   I remember Billy pronounced it Purr Tru doo.

    So apophatic is the word of the day. Joins diapason and defenestration in my showoff vocabulary.

    Here is how nybooks gets to apophatic. The rest is up to you to read Pierce on Will and Waylon. I think it will be self evident as far as words can take us:

         Since both characters are literary, Robinson floods the book with quotations and allusions. They discuss Hamlet, he compares himself to Raskolnikov, he frequently cites his favorite Frost poem (“I have been one acquainted with the night”), he recommends William Carlos Williams’s Paterson to her, and the air is thick with quotations from Milton and Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson and Thoreau and Paul Dunbar, as well as the Bible and Thomas Traherne and old hymns. This makes for a heavily loaded text, unlike Housekeeping or Lila, which beautifully stay within the eloquent, unliterary language of their female narrators. More like Ames in Gilead, Jack often sounds like a theologian or a philosopher; phrases like “homiletical legerdemain” or “the garments of misfeasance” drop easily into his mind:

A metaphysics is a great help in rationalizing scruple-driven behavior.

He would abandon all casuistry, surrender all thought of greater and lesser where transgressions were concerned, even drop the distinction between accident and intention. He was struggling in a web of interrelation.

She might have no idea yet that embarrassment, relentless, punitive scorn, can wear away at a soul until it recedes into wordless loneliness. Maybe apophatic loneliness.

Robinson has said, in one of her essays, that she enjoys reading about “the apophatic—reality that eludes words,” and that “as a writer, I continuously attempt to make inroads on the vast terrain of what cannot be said…the unnamed is overwhelmingly present and real for me.” These are interesting clues to her pursuit of Jack. But she runs the risk of making him sound too like her.

In her essays, she has often drawn links between Shakespeare, Puritan writings, and American literature, which she sees as a sanctification of the individual,

a fascination with the commonest elements of life as they are mediated and entertained by perception and reflection…. Sacredness is realized in the act of attention…. The exalted mind could understand the ordinary as visionary.

Whether she’s writing about Renaissance literature or seventeenth-century Puritan preachers, Dickinson or Wallace Stevens, Robinson looks for that attention to “the incomprehensible complexity—spiritual, intellectual, and emotional—of anyone we encounter.”