"The whole so-called thing"

 “The whole so-called thing” 

“So, do you know what she said?”
     “No,” I said.
     “She said, ‘Ask Ted. He’ll know.’”
     “She was kidding.”
     “Partly,” Roz said and shrugged her shoulders. Then, she jumped in as if she were interrupting herself: “But partly not.”

She was Roz’s friend Maggie. They had been talking about the book they were reading for their Up With Women, Down With Soldiers book group, Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye. Even though it rounded the edges, I could hear Maggie’s gawky voice inside Roz’s smooth one. “Which,” the combined voices said, “you must have read” because there were underlines and writing in the margins, besides which it had my name in it, the book Roz had from the shelves on the porch.
     “So I did,” I said, “but it must have been twenty years ago. More. It must have been before the turn of the century.”
     “But you remember it? Because you remember everything you read.” This because sounded more like Maggie than Roz. They have been good friends for quite a while, and it’s a good thing except when they begin to bustle. One begins and the other joins right in.
     I said (honestly!): “I play like I do sometimes, but I don’t. I remember the book a little. But not well.” About all I remembered about it in truth was that there was a picture of Liz Taylor on the cover. “I didn’t see the movie,” I said.
     “We don’t care. What we are interested in: Do you remember the essay by Tennessee Williams in the front?”
     “Give me a hint.”
     “No,” Roz said. “Take ten minutes and read it.”
     I took the book. “What am I looking for?” I said. Roz shook her head.

Right to left: Uncle Albert and Uncle Thomas
Paris, 1947

What I was looking for, it turned out, was how, according to Williams, what he calls the Southern “Gothic School” was related to the existentialists, which had to do with the sense of both, “an intuition of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience.” Which dreadfulness is not the atom bomb or cancer or Donald Trump or anything else in the newspapers — or on the nightly news or NPR — because the “true sense of dread is not a reaction to anything sensible or visible or even, strictly materially, knowable. Rather it’s a kind of spiritual intuition of something almost too incredible and shocking to talk about which underlies the whole so-called thing.”
     Roz pointed to the underlines, when with a shrug, I started to hand the book back to her. “Don’t shrug,” she said. “What does that mean, this ‘dreadfulness’ that ‘underlies the whole so-called thing’? What is ‘the whole so-called thing’?”

Let the reader beware. The author has been reading the prophet Nahum, the prophet and his commentators. Let the reader say, “Oh, shit” and click elsewhither. Or the reader may say, “Oh, shit” and choose to hang around because he/she likes being battered about the ears.
     The room in which our conversation was taking place began to smell like a recently dead electric fire. Or my brain did. Then, I said something like this to Roz though I didn’t say it even this well:
     He [Williams] doesn’t mean by dreadfulness that bad things are happening to good people or even that bad things are happening to bad people, pretty much all the time in both cases. Things are worse, the dreadfulness is deeper, than that. There is something crooked about the way the world is spinning, so we’re all a bit off-balance, nauseated. At least, the artists and the insane feel it if the rest of us don’t. The world spins wobbly on its axis, it orbits wobbly around the sun.
     There is nothing can be done about it. In Nahum — or for Nahum — God can intervene and by crushing the evil Assyrians, the Nazis of their day, he can put it right. But for Tennessee Williams, the “Assyrians” are not the problem. Politics are not the problem, economics are not the problem, social ills are not the problem; not even war is the problem. The problem is deeper than anything on the surface of the globe. It’s deeper than sin. If it were just sin, there could be redemption. But the dreadfulness persists. The problem isn’t in the world, it is the world.
     We should be horrified, filled with dread. But, I would add, we can only stay horrified for so long. Even adolescents can remain horrified for only so long. Then, we react to our horror. We shrink into seriousness, or we break into laughter. We laugh at ourselves, our horror and our seriousness about being horrified; then we laugh at the world, the off-kilter, crooked-spinning, twitchy, creaky world.
     It is Carson McCullers’ gift — and Tennessee Williams’ — that they see what is funny about this, all of it, the “the whole so-called thing.” It is all funny, underlain with dreadfulness but infused with funny, both in the sense of curious or strange and in the sense of comic. Granted the comedy is general noir-er than noire, if there are still, relieving the black, occasional shades of charcoal, even gunmetal gray.* The Reflections in a Golden Eye stage manager: “There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed. The participants of this tragedy were: two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse.” Add that Liz Taylor will star in the movie. And Marlon Brando.

                                                                          03.23.23
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* According to PPG Paints: “Gunmetal gray is a deep, gray, toad green with an ivy undertone. It is a perfect color for an accent wall. Pair it with white.”