The Concrete
Last week, I submitted a piece of writing to the Milton Center Writing Group at Seattle Pacific University, a pretty salty bunch of writers working weekly under the leadership of Greg Wolfe, editor of Image Magazine. The writing was a piece of the novel I'm working on concerning the further adventures of Cyrus Manning, the lead character in Leaving Ruin. The piece was one I was curious about, because I had written it in a style that was very removed from Cyrus' normal voice, and was trying to get at a sort of furious violence that often lies underneath the search for God, a violence we see too often expressed these days.
What I learned from their strained, decidely cool response to the writing was nothing new really, but something that I needed to hear again. In fact, the concept I walked away from that session with has been forcing its way into my consciousness with the relentlessness of the jackhammers recently tearing up the concrete in my neighbor's back yard.
Live in the concrete.
Since graduate school, I have been accused of overintellectualizing things, thinking too much. And since I decided to attempt the writing life, I've been struggling over and over to commit to the concept that universals--which in the end, are what interests me--only come through the particulars. That the only real way to talk about abstractions such as love, freedom, sin, and God are through concrete particulars related to the stories of real human beings.
And of course, the corollary to that is that it's the only way to live those universals, too. Again, our universals are discovered and revealed through our particular acts. That's just another way of saying "Faith without works is dead."
Concrete means sensual, means paying attention to the reality in front of us, means observing without turning away. To see is the crux of the matter. I had the thought this morning that sometimes, in order to think a thought, you have to close your eyes. It's strikes me that the way of abstraction is to do just that...to close our eyes.
Open the eyes of my heart, Lord...
8:42:59 AM
