News of the latest in the recent flood of notable passings reached me late last night:  Saul Bellow is dead at 89.  There’s something that rings very end-of-an-era to me about his death, and this despite my just flat not liking his work at all.

Not liking it, however, did not prevent me from praising it when I had to.  Some years ago, when a certain bookselling site was first getting off the ground, back in the day when the site’s editors were still asked to produce or commission substantive reviews (though uniformly positive ones—bad books, or at least bad books that were not written by living legends, were simply not reviewed at all), I wrote on Ravelstein.  I’m stunned to discover today that the review is still on the site.

What I was unable to say in that review, however, was how thoroughly unpleasant I found the novel, or how clearly out-of-the-past Bellow seemed, so of a piece with the measured rebellion of the 1950s, a rebellion that slid comfortably and easily into reaction, as to be nearly incomprehensible today.  Bellow famously got himself in trouble in his later years by responding to questions of multiculturalism by asking “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” His baffled response to the ensuing furor—in which he expressed surprise at the critical opinion “that I was at best insensitive and at worst an elitist, a chauvinist, a reactionary and a racist—in a word, a monster”—shows, for me, the extent to which he never fully recovered from the immediate post-war moment, never really made it into the late twentieth century.

A few years ago, I heard Martin Amis speak at the Huntington, and in the course of his talk, Amis claimed that the British novel was the core of serious work in contemporary fiction at that moment, insisting that the American novel was effectively dead, because Bellow and Roth were no longer producing.  Never mind, of course, that Ravelstein had just come out, as had The Human Stain.  What was fascinating in this for me was Amis’s hard-core assumption that the American novel was Bellow and Roth, that there was nothing else but these two men.  That nothing mattered to the American novel except the middle-class, misogynist, Jewish-American novel.

So, the end of an era:  not the end of the novel in the U.S., but perhaps the end of the domination of the field by a force that honestly hasn’t mattered to it in years.  Perhaps a final closure of the “post-war” period, and a move, at last, into the twenty-first century.

There’s something very satisfying about scratching things off a list, particularly when they’ve hung around that list for much longer than they ought.  Knocked off two senior thesis drafts over the weekend, and just finished a household task that should have been taken care of weeks ago.  One last thesis draft ahead, and then there’s that (three months and counting) overdue article…

Why, roughly 34.095, -117.719.* Of course.

I’ve gotten a new toy in the last few days, and I’m just the teeniest bit obsessed with it:  the Garmin Forerunner 201, a “wrist-mounted GPS personal training device.” It’s got some nifty stopwatch and lap timing functions (way more extensive than any digital watch I’ve ever had), but its key feature is that it uses GPS readings to tell you how far you’ve gone, and how fast you’re going.  And it’ll store up to two years of training data.  Two years!  It’ll let you set various interval timers, it’ll let you compete against a virtual training partner, it’ll let you set distance, time, and pace goals, it’ll track weekly and monthly mileage, and it’ll let you download the whole shebang to your computer.

Your Windows computer.

Now I’m on the hunt for an OS X hack for this function.  Surely some equally obsessive but code-literate Mac bigot has already thought of this…?

—

*A slightly incorrect and insufficiently precise value, to prevent random folks from knocking on my door.  I could be perfectly correct and precise, but I won’t.  Thanks.

So, moved as I was yesterday by the solemn, sonorous tolling of the bells at the church just a block from me, whose bell tower I can see from my balcony, but which I’ve never set foot in, I went to an afternoon Mass, wanting to spend some time focusing on my hopes for the more inclusive, more compassionate, more contemporary Church that I still hope is forthcoming.

This was not a good choice.  And I’m still a little heartbroken by how it went.

The Mass itself was fine—the church is tiny, and everything about the service is a little unpolished and awkward, but well-intentioned and friendly.  But as I’m sitting there, using this service for contemplation, for once again asking whether I can find some space within which I can carve out a personal relationship to the Church that will be more comforting than painful, there were no fewer than three moments that jarred me right out of that space, that hurt so acutely that any comfort was completely undone.  Twice, in the course of the Mass, in the prayers of the faithful and at another point that I can’t remember, the lector’s text—note that it wasn’t the priest who said this, but the lay reader of the scriptures—referred to “the sanctity of life, from conception to a natural death.” Twice.  And in the intercessions, as the lector called upon us to pray for those who have recently died, including the pope, of course, Terry Schiavo was included on the list.

Now, yes, I think that she and her family need all the prayers that they can get, for her peace (at last) and their healing.  But the unsubtlety of the series of comments were a painful announcement that my perspectives were not wanted, that I live outside the bounds of acceptability in this church, and that there would be no home for me here.

I walked home utterly demoralized.  Went online and discovered that my beloved Cathedral had held a special Mass beginning an hour after the disastrous one I’d just been through.  I hadn’t even thought to look.  It would have been worth the hour-plus drive each way, to have gotten to spend some time there, in the one place where I’ve actually been able to believe that the Church still wants me.

It’s ironic, in some sense, that the Cathedral—where Sunday Mass is often presided over by the Cardinal, where the enormity of the structure and the height of the ritual’s pomp dwarf the individual—is an infinitely more diverse and accepting place than is my neighborhood church.  In part this is due to the Cathedral’s location, at the nexus of a number of very different working-class ethnic communities, and thus with an extremely diverse congregation.  But the building itself creates this sense, as well, despite its size; the tapestries depicting the Communion of Saints, first of all, represent those saints in their diversity, and include among them images of contemporary Los Angeles kids.  But what always gets me is the tapestry depicting the baptism of Christ, which stopped me dead in my tracks the first time I went into the Cathedral.  It took me a minute or so to figure out why:  Jesus, on his knees, facing away from the viewer.  Facing the same direction we are.  Not above us, but with us.  One of us.

There was none of that yesterday; there was only dogma.  The things that make belief seem possible to me were repeatedly shattered by the too-apparent attempts to manipulate that belief in ideological directions.  Probably I should have gotten up this morning and driven to the Cathedral, to wash yesterday’s Mass away, and to remember the kinds of inclusiveness that remain possible.  Instead, I’m going to run, to spend some time with my thoughts, alone.

I’ve spent the morning sitting on my balcony reading student papers and enjoying the quiet.  The church two blocks from me had been ringing its bells for about two minutes before I realized that it wasn’t noon, and wasn’t Sunday, and there wasn’t a Mass about to begin.  The bells have now been ringing for about ten minutes, and should go on for another twenty:  the Pope has died.

What I’m feeling now is nothing short of weird.  I was no fan of this Pope, who I’d argue, as does jo(e), single-handedly set the Church back decades, and who made it impossible for me ever to make a full return to the faith of my childhood.  Through his dogmatic (literally!) positions on birth control, on abortion, on women in the priesthood, on stem-cell research, on celibacy, and so many more issues, through his refusal to acknowledge the complexities of life in the twenty-first century, he made me feel that my relationship to the Church could never be more than partial, with qualifications and caveats and asterisks.

But there’s something in this moment—listening to the call of the church bells, knowing that a worldwide mourning has begun—that does remind me, deep in my blood, that I am and always will be a Catholic.  Like it or not.

And there’s the slightest glimmer of hope.  Hope for a return to the days of John XXIII.  For a new beginning.

The “catholic” referred to in the Nicene Creed, quoted in my title, is the lower-case version, implying universalism rather than denomination.  And perhaps today the upper-case version might have the opportunity to imply the same.

I report with heavy heart that my right second toenail passed from this world yesterday morning, 1 April 2005, at approximately 10.15 am, Pacific time.  Friends and family were by its side as it found, at last, peace.

No ceremony has been planned.  The search for a successor has already begun, though the process will be a lengthy and private one.

Support has been coming to me from all over in the last few days, from Eric’s comment on the original whiny post, to Jason’s comment on the followup, to several email messages and conversations with colleagues and friends.  Most moving to me in all this is the students who’ve leapt to my side, and particularly that they’ve done so without disavowing their fondness for my colleague, who is equally deserving of their devotion.

This is the point at which I’m supposed to say that I realize that my whining post looked like I was begging for this kind of reassurance, but really I wasn’t, I just wanted to get this off my chest.

Not true.  I was totally begging for reassurance.  I really needed to hear that I belong in this profession, and that I’m not alone in the kinds of crises I periodically face.  And you all came through, both on the site and in the backchannel.  And for that, I thank you.

But at the behest of one e-mail communicator, I’m now contemplating what it would mean for this site, and my writing more generally, and my career on the whole, if I finally left behind the nervous, uncertain, forever in need of reassurance persona I’ve been lugging around and instead allowed the total ass-kicking persona that’s lurking in the background room to grow.  Is this a persona I can give voice to?  What would that voice sound like?

Many years ago, I found myself in a group therapy session with a cluster of massively depressed people, all of whom were talking that day, in various ways, about their complete inability to develop self-esteem.  I’d been a member of this group for about a year and a half, and this day, for whatever reason, my patience with the process and with the kind of wallowing that the group inspired just flat wore out.  I kind of lost it with them, and with myself, and said that the only way to develop a positive sense of self was just to DO IT.  “Just decide,” I blurted.  “One day I woke up and just decided that I deserved better than this.  That I was worth it.  You’ll never get out of this pit until you decide to get out.” (I left the group very shortly thereafter, needless to say.)

What I left out then, or maybe what I hadn’t figured out yet, was that it takes a while for belief to catch up with that decision.  It takes a period of faking your way through being confident before actual confidence can take root.

So perhaps this blog will allow me a kind of space to enact this total ass-kicking persona in ways that will permit the persona to take root, for me to begin to believe in myself as a kicker of ass.  It’s interesting to note, though, in light of the book that Jill pointed out, that one of the things that holds me back from fully inhabiting such a persona is the sense that it’s unseemly to brag.  And if there were ever a self-defeatingly girly mode of being, man, that’s it.

So:  more horn-blowing.  Less whining.  More imagining what can be, and less regretting what isn’t.  And more kicking of total ass.