Wednesday, June 28, 2017

“A Brilliant Music Stilled” (In Memory of Brian Doyle)


“…And please give Teacher the grace to be alert to the real questions being asked here, which are usually silent and in the eyes...
                                                                        —Brian Doyle, “Room Eight”

One month ago, Brian Doyle, whom I consider the greatest personal essayist ever, living or dead, ceased to be among the living. I preached his stuff to friends, told them that he had the unique gift of not only changing you with his writing, but often doing so within a single page or so. How many writers were both that striking and succinct? Few but the greatest personal essayist ever, living or dead. I was thinking of essays like “How We Wrestle Is Who We Are,” “Leap,” “Pea by Pea,” and “Original Skin” as I preached the wisdom of reading his stuff, though I also believed the slightly longer ones (in the whopping 2-3 page range) are equally worthwhile, stories like “Joyas Voladores” and “Rec League.” Not all of those essays were created equal, but all in at least one moment struck me in a way that made the day I read it a day worth having lived.
One time, as a creative writing MFA student at BYU, I got the chance to introduce Brian at the school’s English Reading Series, and I took the opportunity to preach to people there too. Generally, authors were introduced with a list of accolades, but as I thought of Brian’s work I felt like the implications of accolades fell far short of his real value. Accolades weren’t why I planned to give him my full attention. The spirit I felt in his stuff was, the life. So I wanted to give the audience that, the real reason I thought they ought to listen to him. Despite believing this was the best way to actually introduce him, I still might not have had the guts to do it though—after all, I’d never heard of simply skipping the accolades in an author’s introduction—but as I reflected on the idea, I remembered a tip he’d given writers: “Follow the energy.” I didn’t think he’d mind me taking his words seriously. I explained some of that to the audience as I introduced Brian, setting them up for a sample of what they had coming:
“Great writing is an arrow,” I quoted Brian, “shot into the hearts of others.” And then I riffed, following the energy.
“Brian’s metaphor makes writing sound dangerous, even fatal,” I said, “which I like, because there are parts of me I want to die—a whole version of me in fact. His phrase gives me hope that the right story could kill my inner demons and make me a new man.” I claimed then and claim still that Doyle has a bevy of such arrows in his quiver, and that thus we ought to listen to him, because one of those stories might be that arrow with our name on it, might be the thing that hits us dead on and kills off our darkness for good.
In other words, I agreed with another of Brian’s great lines: “If we told the right story, we could change the world.”


Because I was already introducing him for the English Reading Series, I was also given the chance to drive Brian from Provo to Salt Lake City where he’d do another reading. That might sound a bit like the school pulled a Tom Sawyer on a gullible grad student, convincing me I was lucky to handle the logistics of their Reading Series (“Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” asks Tom), and maybe sometimes schools do that, but in my case I was more than lucky. This was the greatest essayist ever, living or dead, and I had an hour alone with him for a handful of dollars in gas.
I picked him up at his hotel in Provo and we went north to SLC, talking more about life than writing. I was happy we did that at the time, but I feel especially glad we did now. It was right, considering we were on “the brief sunlit road between great dark wildernesses,” that we talk about what mattered most. Brian didn’t just write words. He offered companionship to others on the road.


I saw Brian for the last time in 2015 in Flagstaff, AZ. He was keynote speaking at NonfictioNOW, a writing conference, which was taking place in one wing of a fancy hotel. A long corridor served as the heart of the conference, pulsing with people. Booths advertising books and MFA programs lined it on one side, backlit by tall pleasant windows, while doors to capacious conference rooms stood on the other. Brian wasn’t always around, but when he popped in, he’d trigger mild heart attacks, cause people to clot around him listening to whatever he was saying, even answers he gave to other people’s questions. I was always part of the clot. Despite feeling like a fan boy, I wasn’t willing to miss out on what Brian might say. I suspect others felt the same.
As people fighting to pass by compressed the circle around him more tightly, at one point, he glanced up and noticed me. We hadn’t talked in five years.
“Bentley! It’s great to see you here! Do you wanna catch up in a bit?”
“Definitely!” I responded, obviously.
A little while later, he told the people around him “I need to talk to Bentley for a minute” (as if anyone had a clue who I was), nodded kindly to me and gestured towards a conference room. A conference organizer approached him with some keynote speaker stuff on our way to go talk. I didn’t hear what he said, but apparently he took a rain check. Soon, I found myself alone with him in a conference room meant for 300. We might has well have been in that car headed to Salt Lake when we began to talk.


In the conference room of NonfictioNOW’s hotel, Brian asked me about life and I expressed some angst typical of MFA grads—“I don’t really know what I’m doing. I thought about going on for a PhD, or maybe teaching high school. (Frankly, I wish I could go back to my MFA and keep whitewashing fences.)”
My typical answers had a twist though, although it didn’t come out in my words—I didn’t know how to put it into them. It wasn’t just a crossroads that concerned me. It was a deeper struggle which had left me revolving head over heels in the several years since I’d graduated. I didn’t know how to explain it, and certainly knew that even if he wanted to, he didn’t have time for it, so I simply tried to ask about its application—where I might ought to go with my life to enjoy what really mattered. He gave me some predictably Romantic answers—principled, “follow the energy” type stuff, “consequences be hanged.”
For me, such Romantic answers were predictable, since I know Brian and am something of a Romantic myself—at least in how I think. I think I was on my way to living like a real one too, back when I met Brian in grad school. I had lost my way though, and lost it badly, and I still can’t explain how on the page any better than I could tell Brian in person.
The terrible irony of it all was that as Brian gave me his lofty, moving thoughts they led me to despair. This was the right path, I believed, but I didn’t know where I was. It was like having someone hand you a map to heaven when you can’t see where you are on it. I wasn’t even sure if where I was was on the map. It wasn’t that I doubted the destination was breathtaking. So as he continued giving me Romantic advice for the journey, I brokenly concluded that not even he knew how to find me. Not even he, an unusual soul who’d specifically sought me out, could help. There was nothing left to do but stop troubling him, to let him go back to whoever was waiting in the hall, to hear him out while I hid my misery at his words, which, though they were very wise, all told me, “I don’t actually get you.” In “Joyas Voladores,” Brian himself once said, “We are utterly open with no one in the end”—essentially, we eventually wind up alone. As he talked, I felt alone already.
Unexpectedly, Brian stopped talking. He looked at me.
“Something’s wrong,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
I pursed my lips, unsure of what to say: “Yes, but you tried hard, and it didn’t work, and you’ve got to go anyway, so why try”; “Yes, but really I don’t know if anyone can help me, so really, don’t worry about it”; “Yes, but I can’t even tell you where I am—I don’t know”?
He leaned forward intently. His whole aspect, so prone to being merry, was now serious and responsive. His eyebrows furrowed, his blue eyes focused through the small lenses of his glasses. His skin like leather that had just begun to show age, his dark hair (plus some gray) more desiccated and subdued than it used to be.
“Tell me. What’s wrong?”
I didn’t know what to say. I really didn’t know what was wrong, although he was right—something was. I tried to explain though and he listened and gave me some advice that amounted to just figure things out for yourself. Don’t take anyone else’s word for it. Find out the truth for yourself.
What lingers with me though was that moment, right after Brian leaned in, when he chose to listen, to pry into the silence. That choice felt substantial to me—literally, like, it was substance, it had a shape: an orb that stirred somewhere between or throughout him and me. I’m still chewing on it, on that raw recognition, that genuine acknowledgement. That moment hits me in the heart as I think about it. And so I think about it, and maybe I bleed as I do. Maybe the wound is fatal, the way to find who I want to be. Maybe Brian knew the answer after all. It had something to do with his priorities, how when everyone wanted to listen to him, he said, “Nah. I want to listen to this kid.”


A few days after Brian’s passing, I went to the Provo Temple, a holy place to Mormons. With some trees giving shade, I sat in the grass to read. I had planned to resume my reading of Anna Karenina, but felt a sort of nudge to read Leaping, by Brian Doyle. I’d brought that book of his along just because.
I’d read it once before, but had picked it up a few weeks before to reread it—my favorite of his books—but I’d only read the intro so far, so when I picked it up, I found my bookmark was at the book’s first essay, “Room Eight.”
The story relates various experiences Brian had while teaching Catholic Sunday School to fourteen seven-year-olds. He ditches the textbook, makes the class Q&A, and tries to be real with the kids. At one point, he shares a pretty amusing prayer that shows what I mean by “real”:
“Dear God, please help us not be mudheads for at least ten minutes, and please let Teacher remember that he said he would give us a five-minute break in the playground, and please let us not shout and interrupt and belch loudly so as to make the whole table dissolve into fits of giggles, and please give Teacher the grace to be alert to the real questions being asked here, which are usually silent and in the eyes...
And suddenly I was tearing up without understanding exactly why. I was remembering that chat with Brian at NonfictioNOW and realizing, I think, that he had had other such chats with people, people like these seven-year-olds (who might actually be older than me by now), that he had long known that people ask the most important questions without words, and that answering those questions matters. I was realizing all the more that Brian really believed this, that this was really who Brian was, and I was glad to have known him and sad he was gone. He always told writers that the key to great writing was listening, and I think that he spoke from experience. His writing hits me in the heart anyway, exactly like his listening. (Maybe somehow, mystically, they are the same thing.)
            So now I’m going to turn this into a final introduction for Brian, and tell you all, whoever you are, that if you’d like to be hit in the heart with an arrow (who doesn’t?), or at least if there are parts of yourself you wish would die—or a whole version of you even—well, then I know of some writing that’s dangerous, some stories that might even be fatal. There are a bevy of them quivered in the works of Brian Doyle. I recommend you read them. I recommend you listen. They are shot by one who listened first then carefully took aim, so there’s a sporting chance that they’ll hit you right where you live. They might just take your life. They might give you something better.
            They have changed my world.
            Please welcome, and give your full attention, to Brian Doyle…

(Here are some links to some of my favorite stories he wrote:)

“Leap” – about 9/11 – http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/questions/leap.html
“Joyas Voladores” – about hearts and hummingbirds – https://theamericanscholar.org/joyas-volardores/
“How We Wrestle Is Who We Are” – https://orionmagazine.org/article/how-we-wrestle-is-who-we-are/

Leap: Revelations and Epiphanies, as I wrote, is my favorite book of his, followed by The Wet Engine: Exploring The Mad Wild Miracle of the Human Heart


https://www.gofundme.com/doylefamilyfund

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