The Composition Notebook Of A Centuries-Long Caravan Of Asylum Seekers

“The Bible was the only book he read. He didn't read it often but when he did he wore his mother's glasses. They tired his eyes so that after a short time he was always obliged to stop.”

That’s Flannery O’Connor describing the psychic pickle Hazel Motes is in in Wise Blood. I read O’Connor very closely, but I’d overlooked these sentences until my friend, Micah Carver, pointed them out to me. In a beautifully cartoonish way, it gets at the challenges many of us face in seeing what’s in front of us.

You know anybody who has a really hard time hearing in their own heads the words appearing in the Bible in a voice other than a particular relative, minder, coach, or pastor? I do. Is there a way out of an authoritarian mindset, a parental complex? I imagine so. But it’s sometimes tough.

I often tell my students I know we aren’t the only people in the room. There’s also the people in our heads. They show up when we’re considering questions, poems, arguments, images, and news footage. Before we know what we make of any of it, we’re hearing them—or ghosts of them—tell us how they feel about all of it. This is natural. I wonder what Doris Dark and Joel Dark and Todd Greene and Hortense Spillers and Harmon Wray and Will Campbell and Bob Sherman might say about what I’m seeing and hearing all the time. It’s natural.

The task, I think, is to allow them a hearing, consider their imagined words, and then assume the burden of deciding what we make of what’s in front of us. This is the long, slow, new-every-morning work of overcoming deferential fear. It’s not always easy.

The Bible is a mess. I also think of it as a witness to God. In the classroom and out on the mean streets of our one human barnyard, one of the ways I try to get the ball rolling in lifting the text out of whatever strange and possibly toxic and unhelpful conceptions we might bring to it is by characterizing it this way: The Bible is the composition notebook of a centuries-long caravan of asylum seekers.

Not everybody loves or approves that characterization. But, to borrow a saying transformed into a lyric by Shirley Eikhard and popularized by Bonnie Raitt, it gives them something to talk about with me, presuming they’re still willing to speak to me after I’ve voiced this characterization.

If you’d like to hear me speak of these things aloud, it is now the case that my publisher has arranged an audio recording of me reading Life’s Too Short To Pretend You’re Not Religious: Reframed and Expanded. A sample audio can be found here.

Stay safe, everyone.

Credit: The image above is a photograph of Nick Cave taken by Bleddyn Butcher