Setting: a really long time ago
Characters: Super smart, but not as smart as actual ancient people because novel written by me
Plot: Tragic, but not as tragic as real life
thank you
Becoming, and then Being, Elisabeth Elliot: a review
Quick! Who do we know who’s a linguist, a former missionary, a gifted writer, and wants to capture in novel form the human condition and God’s grace to us in it?
Who is awkward, reserved, and can come off as rude and abrupt, but actually has passionate emotions, a deep love for others, and a rich inner life?
Who loves nature? Crosses cultures happily, but doesn’t fit in so well in the American evangelical context? Who has a secret desire to be admired, but also suffers from poor judgement about the opposite sex?
Why, Elisabeth Elliot, of course!
Me and Elisabeth Elliot
When I was college and just discovering the things I ranted about last Friday, like the fact that we as a culture could use some guidelines about the how the sexes ought to relate to each other, I came across Elisabeth Elliot’s book Passion and Purity. I devoured it.
This book was exactly suited for me at the time. I was just starting to grow in Christ. I really wanted to do God’s will. I also, unbeknownst to me, had a lot in the common with the author of Passion and Purity: socially awkward, ascetic tendencies, perfectionistic, a longing for old-fashioned values. This book is basically about the lessons Betty, as she was called at that time, learned during her five years (!) of waiting for Jim Elliot to make up his mind that God had given him the go-ahead to marry her. Their courtship story strikes many Christian young people as really spiritual upon first hearing, and then on a second look, it starts to look as if he didn’t treat her very well possibly. But I bought into it fully.
Anyway. Full of missionary zeal to win other young people over to the idea of an extremely awkward, chaste, long courtship, I gave this book to a friend. She read it, and her reaction was, “There are the Elisabeth Elliots of this world, but I am not one of them.”
That annoyed me at the time (someone had rejected my idealistic ideal!), but from my perspective now, that friend of mine didn’t know how right she was. In fact, not even Elisabeth Elliot herself was one of the Elisabeth Elliots of the world, at least not in the sense of having perfect wisdom and self-control. At the time she was writing this (early 1980s), Elisabeth was enduring an extremely controlling marriage with a man she married because she didn’t want to be lonely. She stayed with him for the rest of her life, despite an intervention by her family. It’s chilling to realize that the woman who wrote Passion and Purity could make such a foolish decision.
Before Passion and Purity, I remember as kid seeing black-and-white photos of Elisabeth toting her small daughter Valerie into the jungle to serve the Waorani people (then called the Auca), a few years after her husband Jim was killed by them. These were the photos taken by Hungarian photographer Cornell Capa. They, and the books Elisabeth wrote about the Waorani, had made her and her martyred husband Jim famous throughout the evangelical world.
Both greater and lesser than I thought
When you think you know a story, you expect it to be boring. I put off for some time reading this duology by Ellen Vaughn, until it finally floated to the top of my reading list. Once I opened the books, I found that I couldn’t put them down. Vaughn is an excellent researcher and a vivid and sympathetic writer, and though I had read a number of books by and about the Elliots, I certainly didn’t know as much of their story as I thought.
Vaughn, aware that she is telling a story the outlines of which are familiar to readers, moves skillfully back and forth through time, as in a novel (though in rough outline, the first book deals with Betty’s early life and the second book with her post-Ecuador years). Vaughn doesn’t try to tell every story–there are too many, many of which have been told elsewhere, and others of which are apparently too private and will stay hidden forever in Elisabeth’s prolific journals. In fact, as I read these books, I felt I was getting to know two fellow woman writers: Elliot and Vaughn.
When you are a former missionary, it’s difficult to read other missionaries’ stories without comparing them to your own. Usually, this means you are reading about people who were far ahead of you in dedication, selflessness, toughness, and in what they suffered. This is certainly true of the Elliots. At the same time, so much of their personalities and stories seemed shockingly familiar. For example, young Jim Elliot was, besides being a great guy, an insufferable holier-than-thou know-it-all, of the “I’m going to go read my Bible” type. Betty, as Elisabeth was then called, was quiet and reserved and often didn’t realize that she was coming off as standoffish. Jim’s family verbally eviscerated her after her first visit to their home in Portland, and foolish young Jim passed all these criticisms on to Betty in a letter. She was devasted, but thought and prayed over the things they had said, and then concluded that none of them were things she could actually change. Later, Jim couldn’t believe he had shared his family’s words with Betty. As Bugs Bunny would say, “What a maroon. What an imBAYsill.”
They were just people, you see. Not angels. Which means that “just people” can always serve God.
Jim Elliot, you beautiful dunce.
The things they suffered also rang poignantly familiar. They suffered setbacks that lost them a year of their work–for her, language work; for him, building a mission station. Neat and tidy Elisabeth at some points had to live in squalor, and felt guilty for the fact that it bothered her. Fellow missionaries (not all) and Waorani Christians alike (not all) proved manipulative and controlling. In fact, it was relationship difficulties that caused Elisabeth eventually to leave the Waorani, after spending only a few years with them. This was not Elisbeth’s fault: person after person found it impossible to work with Rachel Saint, her fellow translator. But she took on as much of the responsibility for it as she possibly could, agonizing before God in her journals, because that was the kind of person she was.
Elisabeth the Novelist
Now we are getting into events of the second book, Being Elisabeth Elliot. Elisabeth knew that she had a gift of writing. She had made so much money from her books Through Gates of Splendor and The Shadow of the Almighty that she was able to build a house for herself and her daughter near the White Mountains of New Hampshire (talk about living the dream!) and settled down to become a writer. She really wanted to write great literature, the kind that would elevate people’s hearts and give them fresh eyes to see the great work of God all around them in the world.
If I were writing a novel about Elisabeth Elliot, I would end it there, and let her have a period of rest, in the beautiful mountains, with her daughter, writing her books, for the rest of her days. I wish that was how it had gone. I kept hoping, as I read this duology, for there to come a point when Vaughn could write, “And then, she rested.” Alas, that moment never came.
Elliot was indeed a really good writer. Sometime in the twenty-teens, when I was a young mom who had come back from the mission field hanging my head over my many failures, and had unpacked my books and settled into a rented house to minister to my small children, I found on an upstairs shelf a slim volume that looked as if it had been published in the 1960s or 70s, called No Graven Image. This was the novel that Elliot wrote when she first settled down in New Hampshire. She wished, through fiction, to give her readers a more powerful, truer picture of missionary life than her biographies had done.
This is not the cover my copy of the book had, though it also had an image of a condor.
No Graven Image was not well received when it came out. It was the old problem of marketing. To what audience do you market a genre-bending book? The people who liked to read tragic, worldly novels were not interested in a so-called “novel” about a young missionary woman, probably expecting that it would be preachy. The Christians who liked to read missionary stories were shocked and dismayed by a novel in which the protagonist flounders around, makes mistakes, and ultimately, accidently kills her language informant when he has a bad reaction to a shot of penicillin. And then decides that her desire to have a successful language project had been a form of idolatry.
Some readers appreciated the novel (particularly overseas missionaries), but most found it shocking, even blasphemous. They wanted a triumphant novel, not the story of Job. They wondered whether Elisabeth had lost her faith.
When I picked it up, in the twenty-teens, it made me feel extremely understood.
One thing that killed me as I read of Elisabeth’s later years is that this was the only novel she wrote. She very much wanted to write others, and she got as far as making notes for another novel. But life (read: men) intervened, and she was in demand for speaking and for writing nonfiction books such as Passion and Purity. She wasn’t able ever again to get the extended periods of time to concentrate that it would have taken to gestate a novel. She convinced herself that she just didn’t have what it took to write actual good fiction (and perhaps, that it was selfish to try). I am so sad to watch this dream die. I believe that she would have been a good novelist. I don’t know whether her publisher would have kept publishing her books if she had turned to fiction, or whether she would have had trouble finding another publisher. Spiritual non-fiction was what she had already become known for. She probably would have made less money, perhaps found it difficult to support herself. But still … you know … it’s hard to watch. So many things about the second volume of her biography are hard to watch. At the same time, because of Vaugh’s amazing research and writing, it’s hard not to sit back and just stare at this major accomplishment.
Funny Quote about Russians
Thanks to Tatiana and her connections, [Jackson] had done a lot of work for Russians when the Russians had still been around, and Russians loved cash. They weren’t oligarchs, just ordinary people (or at least he had liked to think they were), but even ordinary people if they were Russian made everything seem illegal, even when it wasn’t. Or perhaps it was.
Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook, pp. 137 – 138
The Yucatan Peninsula was just Completely Urban
Actual image of the Yucatan, c. 600 A.D.
Here is the article introducing yet another large Mayan urban center stumbled upon in the jungle through the use of LIDAR technology.
As the authors say in their Conclusion,
As archaeologists work to document and characterise ancient settlement systems throughout the tropics, local scale ‘dense pasts’ are proliferating. It is increasingly clear that dense palimpsests of human modification are not exceptional in these settings, despite long-standing biases that presumed them to be. The field of archaeology now confronts the twin tasks of understanding how these settlement palimpsests accrued through time, and of charting how they varied across space—the better to appreciate just how crowded tropical antiquity may have been.
Luke Auld-Thomas et. al., published online by Cambridge University Press, Oct. 29 2024
This expectation that, when we see a sparsely populated tropical jungle, it has always been a sparsely populated tropical jungle, is coming from a perfect storm of factors.
For one thing, there is the evolutionary picture of human history, which asserts that people started out, as, essentially, animals, and then became hunter-gatherers before, after a long, agonizing process, we developed agriculture and then all our technology flowed from that. This is over against the picture presented in Genesis, where man develops civilization right away. Christians who take their Bibles seriously might have resisted this false evolutionary picture of human history, but they’ve been few and far between. We were just too intimidated. But archaeological discoveries like this one are continually confirming Genesis.
Secondly, we have the Rousseauian idea of the “noble savage.” Rousseau just comes right out and says that, although history does not show it happening this way, he’s just going to assert that all people started out in a utopian “state of nature,” that only became corrupted when we came up with the horrible, destructive idea of Private Property. (Rousseau is, of course, not the only one who has painted this picture of history.) He also says that people living in a “state of nature,” without clothes, medicine, or a reliable diet due to agriculture, would be stronger and more healthy than people living in civilization. This attractive and totally erroneous picture has led a lot of explorers and anthropologists to expect–nay, hope for–small populations of noble hunter-gatherers, rather than civilizations, in what to them constituted the far-flung corners of the world. (“We don’t have any Noble Savages in Europe, but they must exist somewhere!”)
The third factor is physical. Outsiders (and even locals) didn’t see the Mayan cities because they were literally hard to see. The jungle grows over the ruins and destroys them to boot. Even this LIDAR data wasn’t immediately obvious and had to be looked at by an archaeologist who knew what to look for.
This other article speculates that “climate change” might have been responsible for the downfall of the Mayan civilization. (I guess that’s their interpretation of the original article’s use of the word “drought.”) What we know from history is that the collapse of civilizations is usually owing to a long process and multiple external and internal factors, and that like bankruptcy, it happens gradually, then suddenly. In the case of the Maya, besides the drought and perhaps disease that had filtered its way over from Europe, I might name internal warfare, the neighboring Aztec Empire, and oh yes–the human sacrifice.
A Return to Modesty at 26
So, I’m reading A Return to Modesty, which I stumbled upon in my dad’s extensive personal library.
This book came out in 1999. I remember hearing about it at the time. I was a Christian girl in my early 20s, just a year away from getting married though I didn’t yet know it. Wendy Shalit, the author of Return, was just a year older than me. I remember being jealous of her (a girl my age who had already published a book!). I also remember that it was rather snippily received. One female reviewer mentioned that it was difficult to take “being lectured to about modesty by a 24-year-old.”
That, of course, is not a coincidence. As Shalit points out in the intro, modern sexual-liberation-niks don’t just disagree with modesty-niks; they actually hate them:
I was fascinated … with the way others would react to them. People around me were saying that these modestyniks were really abuseniks: This one was “obviously very troubled,” and that one seemed to have a “creepy” relationship with her father. Or “Maybe she just had a Bad Experience.” Either way, whatever her problem is, “why doesn’t the poor girl just get some counseling already, and then she won’t take it all so seriously?”
I really became intrigued when I offhandedly mentioned my interest in the modestyniks to a middle-aged man at a cocktail party, and he screamed at me, turning almost blue: “They’re sick, I’m telling you! I’ve heard of them with their not-touching, and they’re sick, sick, sick!” Someone later informed me that this man had been divorced three times.
I began to perceive a direct relationship between how much one was floundering, sex-wise, and how irritated one was by the modestyniks.
ibid, pp. 5 – 6
By writing this book, of course, Shalit put herself among their number. She notes that feminists are often open to what she has to say about women needing privacy, dignity, and romantic dreams of a monogamous relationship … until they find out that she’s an “extreme right-winger,” that is, someone who thinks female modesty (and chastity and reticence and embarrassment and all the other things that come with it) is a good thing.
Shalit first learned of what she calls modestyniks by looking at engagement, wedding, and post-wedding pictures of an elderly couple’s granddaughter, who was following “tzniut, the Jewish laws of sexual modesty.”
In this [picture] the granddaughter was on the beach holding a little baby boy–only now her modestynik smile was twinkling under the brim of a black straw hat. “That’s for the head covering,” her grandma piped up proudly over my shoulder. “A married woman cannot leave her head uncovered.”
That’s how I learned that there are different stages in the life cycle of a modestynik. No Touching, Touching, then Hat.
ibid, p 4
All the reviewers who in 1999 were reacting to the thesis of Shalit’s book were so excited–or offended– by its serious content, that they failed to convey that Shalit is a terrific writer: spunky, funny, able to move from chuckles like this to very serious and heartbreaking content, and back, multiple times in the same chapter or even on the same page.
When I picked up this book from my dad’s library, in preparation for drafting my own book on the logistics of modesty (a project now shelved), I thought I might just thumb through it. I didn’t expect that it would lure me in, as books do, and prove to be a page-turner. But it has.
I won’t go over all the ways Shalit enumerates that the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism, by destroying the notion of female modesty, have opened Pandora’s Box for girls and boys both. I’ve ranted about it elsewhere, and so have many others. You could probably write such a rant yourself, and maybe you even have. I will say that it’s really poignant to read a book like this written in 1999.
The 90s are now officially A Long Time Ago. Cars from the 90s are now antiques (!). I am even starting to see memes that portray the 90s in a similar way that we once portrayed the 50s: a naive, wholesome time, when we didn’t have all the problems we have now. For example, one meme said something like, “The 90s were so problem-free that Kurt Cobain had to kill himself because he had nothing to be depressed about.”
As someone who came of age in the 90s, I cry foul. We were a good 30+ years after the Sexual Revolution and 20+ after Roe. We were deep into the divorce and moms-having-serial-boyfriends epidemic. We had anorexia and bulimia and cutting. Ninties kids did not have one foot in pre-1960s social norms; instead, we were completely unmoored from any kind of consistent or coherent framework for how to relate to the opposite sex, or even how to become a man or woman, except that we knew that both of those things were bad. Shalit’s book focuses on the destructive messages that girls and young women got:
Be independent. Don’t count on anyone. Have the low expectations you’re supposed to have. Be independent. Don’t ask any questions. Don’t demand more than what we say you can have. Don’t feel anything you’re not supposed to feel. Do as you’re told. Be independent! Don’t embarrass yourself by loving someone other than yourself. Remember, don’t trust anyone! Show him that you’re an independent person.
ibid, p. 94
… but of course, boys got a very similar litany about how they were not supposed to be polite or gentlemanly or, God forbid, protective of women, and in fact they were not supposed to take any initiative at anything.
They also were sadly unprepared for the fact that women have lots of emotions:
“My ex-girlfriends? Well, let’s see … she was a nut, and then she was a nut, and then her … let’s see … yes, she was a nut, and then … yeah, she was a nut, too, come to think of it! It’s strange that I’ve had such bad luck, to date so many nuts. Anyway, then there was what’s-her-name, who was evil. She left me. God, that really sucked! She was really evil! And then there was another nut …”
What makes a man perceive a woman as a “a nut”? And can all women be nuts? A silly question. Clearly all women can’t be nuts. What does it mean, then, when a society judges that a considerable number of its women are, in fact, nuts? Could it tell us something about how we view womanhood?
ibid, p. 163
If I had read this book in the 90s, I probably would have agreed with it, in a slightly superior, glad-you-finally-came-to-the-modesty-party kind of way, like the smug 20-something Christian know-it-all that I was at the time. I also would have missed a lot of the content that is now resonating with me. Because I’ve spent the 26 years since this book was published wrestling with these very issues and going on these very rants.
I might have been raised in a Christian home. I might have come up in a social environment that was relatively traditional compared to the secular one in which Shalit grew up. I even, somehow, escaped the super-explicit sex-ed elementary school classes in the public schools that Shalit was spared only because her mom found out what was happening, threw a fit, and got Shalit a pass to sit out that class in the library. (I’m not sure how I escaped the explicit sex-ed, to be honest. I went to public schools. Possibly it’s because our family moved a couple of times and school districts were on different schedules.)
But even with being–you would expect–sheltered, I still absorbed all the same messages she did, directly from the teat of society, as it were. As a Christian, I did get the message that you were supposed to be chaste until marriage (opposite of the message she got). But on the other hand I received, loud and clear, the picture of the ideal woman as tough, smart, independent, unconcerned about her clothing or appearance, ready to go join the Navy S.E.A.L.s … basically, a woman with a man’s mind and as close as possible to a man’s body. Girls who had their wedding all planned out at the age of 9 and had already picked out names for their kids, and who wore pink and giggled and blushed and so forth, were “stupid.” I’m a 90s kid, after all.
Anyway … the sad thing about reading this book is, almost thirty years later, nothing has changed. Shalit predicted a return to modesty among my generation. We were figuring out, she said, that modesty is natural to us, it protects us, it’s ultimately more romantic and even sensual. That was why, she said, we liked Jane Austen so much. And while I plead guilty on all charges, it turns out that longing for a return to female modesty has not been enough. You cannot just bring back an entire social system that is lying in smithereens at your feet. There weren’t any rules or norms or consensus about how a girl–or boy–should dress or talk or behave, and we didn’t know what to do. None of us knew what to do. And when I look at my kids’ generation, they still don’t.
Espresso Machine, Drama Queen
She ignored him while the coffee machine went through its noisy, dramatic performance in order to make a thimbleful of espresso.
Kate Atkinson, Death at the Sign of the Rook, p. 137
That Time Netflix Made a Funny
Abby: … and I think he’s Middle Eastern.
Amelia: He’s from India.
Abby [narrows eyes]: Exactly.
The Perfect Couple, Netflix
A Tale of Two Lost Boys: Perry Smith vs. Ikash son of Endu
Left to right: Dick Hickcock and Perry Smith, killers of the Clutter family; In Cold Blood by Truman Capote; The Strange Land by Jennifer Mugrage; “Don’t Eat My Family” by Jennifer Mugrage.
I hope this image gallery shows up right. I’ve never tried to make one before.
It’s unfortunate that I couldn’t find an image of either Perry or Ikash alone, but in some ways it’s fitting that the image I found for Perry features a mugshot and the image of Ikash shows him protecting his family.
This post will contain spoilers for The Strange Land, which has been out since 2021, and In Cold Blood, which has been out since 1966. This will be a rambling comparison between two character studies. Come along if you like that sort of thing.
It may seem — and O.K., it is — pretentious to compare a book of my own to Truman Capote’s masterpiece. My reasons for comparing the two characters will become clear, but to belabor the obvious, I am not comparing myself to Capote as a writer. It’s my blog, so I can be a little bit pretentious if I want, right? Shall we?
What the two lost boys have in common
The character of Perry Smith has a great deal in common, on a superficial level, with Ikash, the focus of my coming-of-age story The Strange Land. The similarities were strong enough to disturb me when I read Capote’s classic. After all, Perry drifts through the world aimlessly and then commits a senseless murder, whereas Ikash remains kind and courageous and goes on to become the shaman of his people. Perry is real, Ikash is fictional. Does this mean that I had fatally romanticized my character Ikash, a person who would not be nearly so noble in real life?
I do have a tendency to romanticize the sensitive, artistic guys, and ladies, if you share this tendency, it is something you need to watch. Just because a guy is not harsh, does not necessarily mean he is kind. As Jordan Peterson has said, “If you think strong men do a lot of damage, wait ’til you see the damage weak men will do!”
To start at the most superficial level, Smith and Ikash kind of look alike. Both are short and stocky (Smith had underdeveloped legs and feet), with wide faces, fine features, and dark eyes and hair. In fact, both are American Indian, though they are so far removed in time that this fact has no relevance for anything except their appearance. Smith’s father was John “Tex” Smith, an Irishman, and his mother was Florence Buckskin, a Cherokee. Ikash is a fictional character but was supposed to come from a tribe that was ancestral to the American Indians.
Both grew up in rough circumstances and eventually suffered the breakup of their families. Smith’s parents were both drunks. His mother left his father when he was small, and he turned to crime, lived in a series of orphanages, then on the Alaskan frontier with his father as a teenager. He eventually joined the Navy, then proceeded to drift from friend’s house to friend’s house to park bench to jail, not really having a place to go home to. His shrimpy stature was probably from malnutrition as a young child.
Ikash (again, fictional) had it slightly better. He did not suffer from hunger, because the tribe’s Beringian environment provided for them abundantly. However, his father was abusive to mother, leading eventually to her suicide, and periodically to his sons as well. After his mother’s suicide, Ikash’s family essentially broke up, and he and his brother lived together as bachelors. He was a bit of a pariah in the tribe because of his family’s reputation.
Both men are quiet, sensitive types. Both play the guitar (lute, in Ikash’s case) and sing. Both think of themselves as spiritual. In Perry’s case, he has occasional premonitions, visions, and, as he gets more beat up by the world, what appear to be dissociative episodes.
“I could give you a hundred examples. I don’t care if you believe me or not. For instance, right before I had my motorcycle accident I saw the whole thing happen: saw it in my mind–the rain, the skid tracks, me lying there bleeding and my legs broken. That’s what I’ve got now. A premonition.”
… “About that premonition stuff. Tell me this: If you were so damn sure you were gonna crack up, why didn’t you call it quits? It wouldn’t have happened if you’d stayed off your bike–right?”
That was a riddle that Perry had pondered. He felt he’d solved it, but the solution, while simple, was also somewhat hazy: “No. Because once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won’t. Or will–depending. As long as you live, there’s always something waiting, and even if it’s bad, and you know it’s bad, what can you do? You can’t stop living. Like my dream. Since I was a kid, I’ve had this same dream … What it comes down to is, [in my dream] I want the diamonds more than I’m afraid of the snake. So I go to pick one, I have the diamond in my hand, I’m pulling at it, when the snake lands on top of me… he starts to swallow me. Feet first. Like going down in quicksand.”
Perry hesitated. He could not help noticing that Dick was uninterested in his dream.
Dick said, “So? The snake swallows you? Or what?”
“Never mind. It’s not important.” (But it was! The finale was of great importance, a source of private joy. [It was a] towering bird, the yellow “sort of parrot” … which had first flown into his dreams when he was seven years old, a hated, hating half-breed child living in the California orphanage run by nuns–shrouded disciplinarians who whipped him for wetting his bed. It was after one of these beatings, one he could never forget, that the parrot appeared, arrived while he slept, a bird “taller than Jesus, yellow like a sunflower,” a warrior-angel who blinded the nuns with its beak, fed upon their eyes, slaughtered them as they “pleaded for mercy,” then so gently lifted him, enfolded him, winged him away to “paradise.”
As the years went by, the particular torments from which the bird delivered him altered, but the parrot remained, a hovering avenger.
pp. 90, 92 – 93
Perry has no outlet for his artistic nature and believes that no one appreciates his depth and intelligence.
Ikash, for his part, wants to have visions like his cousin Ki-Ki who is the tribal shaman, and eventually does have visions, but then worries that they are endangering his loved ones.
Ikash can spend a lot of time alone, thinking or praying. Smith travels with a box full of books, papers, maps, and magazines, even when homeless, which is a habit that endeared him to me before I heard more details about the murder he committed.
Ikash, as has been mentioned, moves into a protective role towards members of his tribe. Smith, despite being an unstable character in some other ways, several times protects girls and young women from the predations of his partner in crime, Dick Hickcock.
he had “no respect for people who can’t control themselves sexually,” especially when the lack of control involved what he called “pervertiness”–“bothering kids,” “queer stuff,” rape. And he had thought he had made his views obvious to Dick; indeed, hadn’t they almost had a fist fight when quite recently he had prevented Dick from raping a terrified young girl?
page 202
Finally, another burden these two young men have in common is chronic, or recurring, pain. Smith’s legs were smashed up in his motorcycle crash and appear not to have healed properly. There’s a memorable scene in In Cold Blood where the two criminals, on the way to their heist, stop at a gas station. Perry goes into the bathroom and stays in there for so long that both Dick and the gas station attendant are filled with disgust and impatience. In fact, Perry is first sitting on the toilet, then trying to rise to a standing position, with his legs hurting so badly that he’s holding onto the sink, sweating, and shaking. Ikash has periodic recurring pain from some old broken bones (collarbone, ribs), and also suffers periodic “phantom” pains in other parts of his body, that while short-lived, are severe enough to be temporarily debilitating. Ikash believes that these episodes represent instances of his “bearing” the actual sufferings of other members of his tribe, for them. They can also be understood as the lingering effects of trauma and grief, stored in the body. As can Smith’s health problems.
So what accounts for the different outcomes between these two lost boys?
Easy, you might say. You made Ikash up, so you can make him turn out however you like. Perry Smith lived in the real world, where there are no happy endings.
Well, O.K. I did not write a nihilistic book where characters are trapped by their abusive pasts, character flaws, and poor decisions by themselves and others, because I don’t believe that the world is, ultimately, a nihilistic place. But if you’re going to write hope into a book, it has to come from somewhere. It can’t be deus ex machina hope; it has to be Deus ex caelo, or should I say credo in unum Deum, Patrem Omnipotentem, Factorem caeli et terrae.
Some reviewers of my book said they found the scenes of domestic abuse difficult to read. Actually, I kept them as minimal as I could and still convey the problem, and there is much that I spared Ikash, as can be seen when we compare him to Perry Smith, who had it much worse.
Smith was the youngest in his family, so he was very small when things got chaotic between his mother and father. His mother would bring strange men home and fornicate with them in view of the children, something Ikash’s mother Sari definitely would not do. One of these episodes led to a fight “in which a bullwhip, hot water, and gas lamp were used as weapons.” After the breakup of the family, Perry ended up in orphanages where the nuns would shame and beat him for bedwetting. Ikash was also a bedwetter, as is not uncommon among little boys. Perry Smith had even more reason for it given the instability in his home. This problem continued into adulthood. He believed that his kidneys had been ruined by a childhood diet of bread dipped in sweetened condensed milk, which during the Smith family’s nomadic days was often all they had for supper.
Ikash’s family, though unhappy, remained intact until he was fifteen.
When Smith joined the Merchant Marine, Capote strongly implies that he had another horrible experience which Ikash escaped.
“But I never would have joined [the Merchant Marine] if I’d known what I was going up against,” Perry once said. “I never minded the work, and I liked being a sailor–seaports, and all that. But the queens on the ship wouldn’t leave me alone. A sixteen-year-old kid, and a small kid. I could handle myself, sure. But a lot of queens aren’t effeminate, you know. Hell, I’ve known queens could toss a pool table out a window. And the piano after it. Those kind of girls, they can give you an evil time, especially when there’s a couple of them, they get together and gang up on you, and you’re just a kid. It can make you practically want to kill yourself.”
pp. 133 – 134
Apparently, Smith was the victim of homosexual predators while he was at sea. This kind of violation, arguably the ultimate in horror, is not something I’ve ever felt up to subjecting my characters to. It is, sadly, quite common in the world (especially the ancient world), and I am not saying it’s something that a person cannot come back from. The grace of God is enough to redeem and restore anyone, no matter what they have been through (see The Sparrow.) But I have never had the slightest ability nor desire to put my male characters through this. Real life, on the other hand, is not so merciful.
Ultimately, though, it’s not Perry’s additional bad experiences that left his character to turn sour; instead, it’s relationships that he lacked and Ikash had.
Like Perry, Ikash’s immediate family was not great. His father and his older brothers bullied him. Unlike Perry, Ikash lived in a tribal situation where there were, close at hand, uncles and aunts, cousins, and a grandmother. This kind of situation is not automatically good, of course; tribes can be hotbeds of gossip and social pressure. And indeed, Ikash’s early experiences do cause him to mistrust older relatives who might otherwise be helpful to him. But he is fortunate to have quite a number of kind people in his life who wish to aid him and his mother. Grandmother Zillah does her best to provide breaks for Sari; cousin Ki-Ki mentors Ikash, and a model of a healthy marriage is provided by his father’s sister Ninna and her husband. Even with all these good helpers and models, it is barely enough.
Perry does not seem to have had anything like this kind of potentially beneficial community. His father and mother were itinerant, having met on the rodeo circuit. They don’t seem to live near any extended family. Perry does form connections with friends who he believes understand him, but because of his vagrant lifestyle, the connections are not lasting. At one point, he travels across the entire United States hoping to stay with an old Army buddy, only to find to his dismay that the buddy has moved and left no forwarding address. These kinds of near misses are the story of Perry Smith’s life. What might be called his last friend, Dick Hickock, is a cellmate who wants to use him to pull off a heist, and ultimately puts him in a situation that leads to the moral ruination, and then the death, of both of them. Dick does not understand Perry, nor does he have any concern for the best interests of Perry, the Clutter family–or anyone but himself.
In a counterintuitive dynamic, Perry’s very isolation tends to make him not only lonely, but also increasingly conceited. Having no long-term relationships means there is no check on his delusions. With no one to praise, appreciate and love him properly, there is also no one whose critiques he can take to heart. He’s left to his own assessment of himself, and not able to develop strength of character or clarity of mind. Ultimately, when he cuts Mr. Clutter’s throat, he does it without intending to. “I didn’t want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” (p. 244)
Ikash, on the other hand, is surrounded by judgmental relatives who have known him since he was small, who can love on, scold, praise, and criticize him.
Without Hope and Without God in the World
At fourteen, Ikash begs his older cousin Ki-Ki, the tribal shaman, to teach him how to have a vision.
Ki-Ki, the shaman, seemed to be in love with the world and with the many specific things in it. He was in love with his dogs, for example, with the horses, with the wild animals, in love with his wife, in love with God. It was this quality that drew Ikash to him. Ikash would love to approach the world like that. But he had never felt such love for anything, except when it was stirred in him for a few moments by some story or song of Ki-Ki’s. He longed to live in the world of the stories, but he had never been able to manufacture such love inside himself.
p. 93
Ki-Ki is uncertain this will work, or that is even viable (as he says, “visions are dangerous“), but he is willing to give it a try.
They sat, cross-legged, each with his back against a tree. Upstream, there was a view of the grey top of a mountain.
The atmosphere seemed somewhat lacking to Ikash. He looked at his older cousin and muttered, “Aren’t you going to beat a drum or something?”
Ki-Ki grinned whitely. “Then you wouldn’t be sure it was real,” he said. “Besides, God is everywhere. We need no drum to talk to God.”
As soon as he said the word “God” for the second time, a presence was felt in the gully. It was so palpable that Ikash actually gasped.
Ki-Ki apparently felt it too, for he reached out a large, hard hand and grasped Ikash firmly around the wrist as if to keep him from being swept away.
Immediately Ikash knew what his cousin had meant about danger that was not a physical danger. He felt no threat, nor any hostility, such as he had often felt from his father. But the presence was overwhelming, crowding, as of something too huge for the valley to contain.
This was not the sort of vision he had hoped for.
He heard Ki-Ki speak. “It’s too much for him,” he said, and for a second it was as if some great face had turned its terrible eyes towards Ikash … and then, oh thank goodness, the presence was gone suddenly.
pp. 100 – 102
In other words, Ki-Ki, without really trying to, functions as an intermediary to introduce Ikash to God. Later, when quite a few other tragedies have happened and Ki-Ki has been taken from Ikash, the young man has a vision of his own that he can only describe as “a father.”
“A father?” [his brother] Sha blinked, completely thrown.
“A good father.” Ikash was staring earnestly at his brother, as if willing him to grasp this difficult concept. “It gave me a sense of a really good father, the kind we’ve always wanted but never known.”
“What did it look like?” asked [cousin] Mut. He was picturing a bigger, two-eyed version of his own father.
“I told you, it wasn’t visual. I didn’t see anything except the cloud. But I felt the Father. … We have a father.” He made a slight sweeping gesture with his hand that took in himself and, somehow, the entire camp as well. “That’s what makes us able to bear the loss of all the others.”
pp. 512 – 514
A perceptive reader has pointed out that the definition of a horror story is all the bad stuff in the world that happens, minus God. God is what keeps Ikash’s story from remaining one of unremitting horror. This was the horror–the horror of other people’s sins against him, the horror of a complete lack of adequate love, the horror of his own increasingly weak mind, and eventually, his own grievous sins against others–that Perry Smith lived.
Before Smith and Hickock committed their planned robbery, to which Hickock insisted they leave “no witnesses,” they stopped by a Catholic hospital. Perry Smith knew that nuns were guaranteed to have black nylons, and he wanted Hickock to obtain some so the two could cover their faces when they went to rob the Clutter family. Perhaps, if the two had managed to do this, they would not have ended up killing the Clutters. Dick, however, came out of the hospital without having tried to get any nylons (“it was a pukey idea”). Perry was not willing to go in. He believed that nuns were bad luck.
After Smith and Hickock’s arrest, Perry Smith was kept in a cell in the home of the town undersheriff and his wife, a cell that until then had been reserved for female prisoners. (The reason was a desire to keep the two culprits separated.) Sherriff and Mrs. Meier were “deeply Catholic.”
Mrs. Meier had been rebuffed by Perry when she had suggested a consultation with Father Goubeaux, a local priest. (Perry said, “Priests and nuns have had their chance with me. I’m still wearing the scars to prove it.”)
pp. 288 – 289
Now, of course, “nuns and priests” are not necessarily the only way to find out about the redemption offered to us by the God who gives life to the dead, and calls things that are not as though they were. They might not even be the best way. My only point is that unfortunately, for Perry Smith, the only people in his life whom he associated with God, were also people who were abusive to him. He never had a chance to be introduced to the concept of God by anyone he loved and trusted. This is the opposite of the case with Ikash.
Later, in jail, Perry did make friends with a former pastor, now a fellow inmate, who was mystical and simpatico with Perry. This man, however, seemed to be a bit of an apostate, and by that time Smith had already hardened against the whole idea of God. God, certainly, can overcome stories this sad and sadder, but in this case, for whatever reason, He didn’t.
We don’t know whether Perry Smith had a deathbed conversion in the last few seconds before being hung, but tragically, from all appearances, it doesn’t appear so. Neither did Dick Hickcock. That, plus the apparent senselessness of the fate of the Clutters, is what makes In Cold Blood such a tragedy. It underlines how much Smith and Hickock–and indeed all of us–need Jesus, and that is what makes this unedifying event such an appropriate topic for this Easter season.
Spooky Farm
This is it. This is finally the texture-y, right in between Impressionistic and realistic look that I’ve been going for.
I also like the colors in this. Not too sweet, but not too monochromatic either.
This painting is an attempt to capture the eerie afternoons that happened last summer, when we had our usual season of wildfire smoke blowing in from Oregon. Not only can you smell the smoke, but it can actually dim the sunlight enough to lower the temperature.
During one of these afternoons last year, I went out and tried to photograph the odd effect the smoke was having on the appearance of the sun.
My initial photos looked like this:
While accurate, these did not perfectly capture the vibe I was getting, so I tried taking some of the same scene with a variety of filters.
The filters do a better job capturing how red the sun looked to the naked eye.
I then did a painting using one of the filtered photos as a reference.
Obviously, there is room for many more paintings here, if I choose to pursue it.
I hope you enjoy being shown the reference photos beside the picture. I know some people like that. I recently learned the term “process journal” from a novel, which I thought was really cool. Apparently this is something that all art majors know about.
If you don’t like hearing about the process, just enjoy the painting and figure that you’ve somehow stumbled onto the cover of a Stephen King farm book.
Jesus, with some well-timed Trollery
Here are some thoughts I had when reading through the book of Mark a while back. Peruse them at your own risk. I hope you find them entertaining, maybe a slightly fresh take on Jesus, but remember this is not authoritative teaching.
Defining “Troll”
Let it be noted that my husband objects to use of the verb “troll” as applied to Jesus.
He was kind of shocked when I brought this up, as a step in my thinking-through-it process. And, I get it. One meaning of “troll” is when someone insults strangers just to be smug, superior and unkind. Obviously, Jesus doesn’t do that. He doesn’t need to cut other people down in order to build Himself up. And He isn’t bitter.
But there’s another definition of trolling, which is: intentionally to violate a social norm, in order to make a point. This is the sense in which trolling can be an art form. And this sense of the word is values-neutral. Trolling in this sense can be mean, or it can be strategic. It depends entirely upon who is the target, and what point you’re making.
I’m in Mark chapters 11 and 12, if you want to join me.
The Triumphal Entry
This in itself is a political powder keg, but we don’t have time to get into all that. I want to focus on the events of the Monday and Tuesday that followed. I just want to note Mark 11:11:
“Jesus entered Jerusalem and went to the Temple. He looked around at everything, but since it was already late, He went out to Bethany with the Twelve.”
The Turning over Tables Incident
The next day (Monday, the second day of their work week), Jesus goes to the outer court of the Temple and starts making a scene. It is obvious that He planned this the night before. I imagine Him sitting on Mary and Martha’s front porch in Bethany, quietly braiding his leather whip and savoring what He’s about to do. He has probably wanted to do it for years.
Also, notice that He didn’t just turn over tables, let the sacrificial animals free, and then leave. He “would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the Temple courts.” (v. 16) In other words, He essentially barricaded the Temple and sat there all day. I can only imagine the disciples’ mortification. “When evening came, they went out of the city.” (v. 19)
But we still haven’t gotten to the trolling part yet.
The Fallout: The Direct Challenge
Well, Jesus goes right back to the same place the next day (Tuesday), and there are the authorities waiting for Him. “By what authority are you doing these things?” (v. 28) And furthermore, “who gave you the authority to do this?” (also v. 28) You can tell they are mad because they repeat it.
Jesus puts off this direct challenge by posing them a riddle about John’s baptism. This won’t make them any less mad (quite the contrary), and it won’t stop them from killing Him eventually, but it does prevent them from arresting Him right there, because after that great answer He just gave, it would cause a riot. He needs a few more days, partly because He has more teaching to do and partly because His death has to happen on the Passover.
Also, they aren’t mad enough yet.
Jesus Uses the Time He Has Bought to Troll
Mark 12:1 – 12:
Jesus tells what has since been dubbed ‘The Parable of the Tenants,’ in which some ungrateful vineyard tenants refuse to pay their rent, beat or kill bill collector after bill collector, and finally kill (!) the owner’s son.
And then He adds, “What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others.”
Hmm, their top-secret plan to kill Him is not so secret. He just told a thinly-disguised story about it, and wrapped up by saying, “You’ll get what’s coming to you.” This is the ultimate finger in the eye.
The Fallout II: The Obvious Political Trap
Mark 12:13 – 17
Having been stymied in the direct challenge, and still maddeningly unable to arrest Him because of the Jesus mobs, they re-group and send some different people (ooo so tricky!) with some flattery followed by a demand for His position on an impossible political issue.
“Teacher, we know you are a man of integrity. You aren’t swayed by men, because you pay no attention to who they are, but you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”
He responds, with an almost audible eye roll, “Why are you trying to trap me?” Which is great, but that’s not enough when a political trap is sprung. You also have to know how to get out of the trap.
“Find me a denarius.” There is then a pause while they hunt one up, because not everybody carries denarii of course, and probably a bigger crowd gathers, wondering what is going on. Finally, they find one.
“Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?”
“Caesar’s.”
“Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”
And that, a devastatingly spicy one-liner, is how we get out of a political trap.
(For what it’s worth, I don’t think Jesus was laying out a whole socio-political philosophy here. I don’t think that with “render unto Caesar” He was saying that all of our money rightfully belongs to the State (since they print it), or that there is no such thing as an unfair tax rate, or that the ideal country could have as high taxes as it pleased and still be perfectly just. Nor do I think He was trying to imply that civic government (Caesar) is a completely different realm from the worship of God, and should never be influenced by it. I’m sure that He had some thoughts about civics and religion, and might even have shared them if someone had asked Him in a more relaxed setting. In this situation, He was just answering a sound-bite-length question with a sound-bite-length answer. Ask a snappy, poorly framed question, get an answer that meets it on its own level.)
The Fallout III: The Elaborate Hypothetical Theological Question Trap
Mark 12:18-27
The political sound-bite thing having failed to work out, the Sadducees decide they are going to ask Him a really hard one. They believe “there is no resurrection” – i.e., no afterlife or future life for those who have died. They have been thinking about this a lot, and the implications are just too absurd. For example, Leverite marriage allows (actually requires) a man to marry his brother’s widow if his brother dies childless. In the unlikely (but possible!) event that one woman married seven brothers in succession, how would that work out? “Whose wife would she be at the Resurrection?”
I could be wrong, but I imagine that by the time the Sadducees got done posing this question, many in the audience had glazed over. All that was left were the theology nerds, and the twelve who were desperately trying to keep up. Scholars love this kind of reductio ad absurdum with an elaborate hypothetical, and to lay people, when it’s not boring it’s intimidating.
The question does sort of confuse Jesus, but not for the reason they meant it to. He’s momentarily thrown by the shallowness of their understanding of the Resurrection type of life. His answer is essentially, “Huh? What do you mean? The Resurrection isn’t like that.”
“Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God?” He then drops a statement that to Him seemed obvious, but which the rest of us have been puzzling and speculating about ever since: “When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.”
Wait! we cry. What do you mean, no marriage? If we aren’t allowed to pair off, how can the resurrection life be any fun? Also, will we get to be with our family members from this life? What if we don’t want to, though? Also, what age do people appear to be in heaven? What about those who died as babies… do they grow up, or are they babies for all eternity? Do martyrs get to keep their scars? What about …
Jesus does this a lot. “What are you on about? Of course [insert mind-blowing new doctrine that raises a ton more questions]!” He does know how to talk to regular people and relate to us, but, my gosh, He is sooo much smarter than we are and His perspective is so different! And many of the things that cause us to do a double take, aren’t even His main concern when He’s talking to people.
So He gets back to the main point, which is whether there is another life for the dead, and proves it with one reference to a very basic and well-known verse in Exodus.
And now for something completely different: A Sincere Question
Mark 12:28 – 34
Someone who was impressed with Jesus’ answer to the theological question asks Him a sincere one: “What is the most important commandment in the Law?”
Jesus, recognizing the sincerity, gives him a straight answer. (I won’t spoil it. Go look it up.)
And interestingly, the questioner repeats Jesus’ answer back to Him with enthusiasm. “Well said, teacher!”
I don’t think this guy is sucking up to an authority (since Jesus is not exactly persona grata right this moment), and neither can I fault him for his utterance being not very original. I think he has been turning these things over in his mind, is delighted to get his instincts confirmed by Jesus, and is verbalizing it again as a part of his learning process of really nailing it down. (Some of us can’t learn unless our mouths are moving.)
Jesus agrees: “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
Trolling II: A Riddle
Mark 12:35 – 37
“How is it that the teachers of the law say that the Messiah is the son of David? David himself, speaking by the Holy Spirit, declared,
‘The Lord said to my Lord,/Sit at my right hand/until I put your enemies/under your feet.’
David himself calls him ‘Lord.’ How then can he be his son?”
The large crowd listened to Him with delight.
I usually don’t like being presented with puzzling things that I can’t understand, but the crowd’s response is, “Teacher, I have no idea, but I love it!” This shows how ready they are to soak up anything He has to say after yesterday’s and today’s performance.
Notice, the Emperor Has No Clothes
Mark 12:38 – 40
Having just given the severely underdressed Emperor a light smack on the behind, Jesus now wants to make sure that the lay people clearly understand the man is naked.
“Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and and be greeted in the marketplace, and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely.”
Why was this necessary? For the same reason it’s necessary right now to point out, “Big Pharma is a scam. They collude with government agencies and push expensive, harmful drugs on doctors and patients rather than cheap and effective ones.” When someone has been a trusted authority for a long time, many people might not know about their dirty dealings. They might find it hard to believe. They might believe that what the authority says on the surface (the “lengthy prayers”) is sincere. Exposing it through trollery is good but it’s not enough. Jesus needs to use the cachet He has with the crowd, right now, to let them know about WidowsHousesGate and to let know that God is, in fact, just, and is not pleased with all of this. He won’t be around to shepherd these particular people much longer, so He wants to warn them about the wolves that, in a little while, will be the only voices they’ll hear.
Someone Jesus Will Not Troll
Mark 12:41 – 44
“Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny.
“Calling His disciples to Him, Jesus said, ‘I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything — all she had to live on.'”
I love it that, during what is one of Jesus’ last three days to live, He chooses to spend some of it people watching.
I also love it that, even though He is relatively young and has never had to support a wife and kids – that is, He’s not in a demographic that is normally very sympathetic to widows — He immediately recognizes her situation and is aware of her struggle to survive, almost as if He were an older person with years of hard life experience.
Out of Babel Books 