I happened across this while doing a little cleaning up. I wrote it to honor my teacher, Lewis White Beck, at a memorial conference held for him at the University of Rochester (September, 1998). He was a wonderful teacher, a wonderful man.
On a Certain Use of ‘Democratic’ in Whitman
I have come to Whitman slowly, zigzag, reluctant. I do not know why. I do not know fully why. I do know that my youthful exposure to him left me in flinty indifference. (I must have pulled Leaves off the shelves in, say, 10th grade. I worked in a library and stood and read what I shelved or read what caught my eye near what I shelved. I was not–and was–an ideal library employee.) I reckon that part of my (lack of) reaction was tied up to the ceaseless singing of ‘democracy’. I have always had a hard time with art that slummed with politics. My thought must have been somesuch: “Yeah, right, democracry. It’s great and all. But come on. Canting for democracy? Not just any democracy, but an earlier version of the one I inhabit? No, no, not for me. Go your own way, Walt. I will go mine.”
I am not here to apologize for my 10th grade self. He was my 10th grade self–sophomoric by definition. I have not, at any rate, put that child away entirely. He is still along for my ride. I still shrink from the appearance of politics in poetry. That’s a reaction of mine not yet completely owned. I hope one day to own it completely or to shrug it off.
But a couple of days ago, caught up now in a much different general reaction to Whitman, I came across this, from the “Preface Note to Second Annex”:
I have probably not been enough afraid of careless touches, from the first–and am not now–nor of parrot-like repetitions–nor platitudes and the commonplace. Perhaps I am too democratic for such avoidances.
That use of ‘democratic’ stopped me. (It is, I admit, in the half-hug of ‘perhaps’. But I rate that staginess and not an expression of actual half-heartedness.) I had made a very similar use of it myself earlier in the day. But my use of it was not meant to be political, but rather ur-political, a recognition of a fact about human relations that underwrites any political use of ‘democratic’ I could vote for. So too, realized, was Whitman’s.
Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless–each of us with his or her rights upon the earth,
Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here. (Salut Au Monde!)
His, my, our use of ‘democratic’ is a use as a greeting-word, as a profound acknowledgement of others, not en masse, not as a political body, but as an each-in-all, as individuals too distinguished to be the same and too similar to be entirely distinguished. Such an acknowledgement makes demands, demands even on art, on poetry. (And on philosophy.) It demands writing poetry to such individuals and for such individuals. It demands an unclamping, letting the poetic machinery run free, acquiring a careless, carefree touch. It demands liberation from an over-active poetic conscience, from concern about repetition, about platitude, about commonplaces, about saying something too trivial and obvious, something insincere, something unworthy of reader or occasion. The poet must overcome scruples and take the breaks off his heart, and let his tongue wag unleashed, garrulous to the very last.
This feature of Transcendentalism-of Emerson and Thoreau, and, yes, I now admit, Whitman–is one that makes it honorable, and that ties it to writers and philosophers I care about, each of them a Transcendentalist in his or her way: Socrates, Plato, Kierkegaard, James, Wittgenstein, Lawrence, Frost, Murdoch, Anscombe, Robinson. It demands that we lift up our ordinary lives into our philosophical imagination, making them receptive to intense reflection, without making them fodder for scholarship or museum preservation, never forgetting that the point is to know those lives better so as to live them better.
(I am not claiming to have made a discovery for anyone else here, only for myself. I now suppose that this use of ‘democratic’ is all over Whitman, and that everyone but me has known it.)
Church Not Made With Hands (Music)
To Get the Final Lilt of Songs (Whitman)
To get the final lilt of songs,
To penetrate the inmost lore of poets–to know the mighty ones,
Job, Homer, Eschylus, Dante, Shakspere, Tennyson, Emerson;
To diagnose the shifting-delicate tints of love and pride and doubt–to truly understand,
To encompass these, the last keen faculty and entrance-price,
Old age, and what it brings from all its past experiences.
Ears to Hear: Bill Mallonee’s *Slow Trauma* (Music Review Essay)
I
Earlier this week, I was walking across the red brick and green tree campus of Auburn University, where I am lucky enough to teach philosophy. My daughter–a rising senior philosophy major–was walking with me. We were chatting, and, our chat, as our chats often do, turned to books. My daughter reported that she was nearly finished with Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead.
As my daughter knows, I venerate Robinson. If Robinson were to walk toward me on the sidewalk, I would step off, doff my cap, and cry, “Empress!” as she passed. I deeply admire Gilead. My daughter continued: “But I think I am going to have to read it again when I am older. I don’t think someone my age can fully understand that novel.” I stopped and thought for a moment–then I agreed. “Yes. Some novels you can understand because you can make do with your imagination to fill in where necessary. But with other novels, only experience can fill in where necessary. You can imagine being experienced; but that will not substitute for experience where it is necessary. James Gould Cozzens’ Morning, Noon and Night is another novel like that. You have to have lived forty years or more fully to understand it.”
II
I recall this conversation because it highlights an important fact about Bill Mallonee’s fine new album, Slow Trauma. This album, which I think continues what is now a conceptual trilogy of albums that includes Winnowing and Lands and Peoples, is perhaps the Mallonee album that is most clearly the result of his long experience and experiment in art and in living.
The slow trauma is life itself. We know–late at night, when we cannot sleep, and the ceiling reveals nothing, and our joints cry bitterly about their long misuse–cringingly, we know at such moments that no one escapes life untraumatized. But we forget that the trauma has been on-going since our first greedy suck of breath, accumulating. We keep such thoughts at bay when we are young, maybe we do even until we get just past halfway betwixt mother and Maker. But eventually, they settle on us, heavy: we are at war with Time: we are going to lose. Time is a bloody tyrant. He happily besieges us. He can wait for the walls to fall. Beginnings and endings are his speciality. But he is done with our beginnings. Our endings are all that are left.
III
Mallonee’s album is neither a carping lament nor a willful carpe deim. Its dominant tone is reverence. Mallonee has a deep understanding of human limits–and of the human limits in handling human limits. He knows we would like nothing more than to deny our humanity and to transcend those limits. We so imagine them that we run against them, believe ourselves to be caged by them. But there is no cage. We are limited to our nature but not by our nature. Our slow trauma is our slow trauma.
Mallonee realizes that coping with our slow trauma necessitates acknowledging it as part of who and what we are. It would be nice to opt out or be lifted up, be caught up in a cloud or be given a spot on some low-swinging, sweet chariot. But neither is likely to happen. We have to hoe our row to its end, sweaty and dirty, knowing the weeds grow back when we finish. But while we hoe, we are surrounded by mysteries. Our hoeing, our living, has a meaning–but that meaning has not been vouchsafed to us. And what would it matter if it were? How could we recognize it as the meaning of our life? And how could what I recognize be the meaning of my life, if that recognition comes before my final chary exhalation? My life after I have recognized the meaning of my life would then not be able to change the meaning of my life. But that cannot be right. Repentance, at least, is always possible, even if it is unlikely.
We are homo viator. We are in passage, in transit. The meaning of our life is not available to be known until we are not around to know it–and maybe not even then. The meaning of our life extends past our death into the lives of those we have touched and those we have refused to touch. Our journey’s end is our end, our last stop our last stop–but our meaning travels on. It continues without us. We don’t arrive, and then get to go and see the sights. Arrival at our destination is our departure for Parts Unknown.
We have to live within these limits. –How do we do that? Mallonee opens the album with a short song (“One and the Same”) responsive to the question.
What to hold onto?
What to let go of?
And what to give away?
What’s going to save you?
And what makes you smile?
Sometimes, they are one and the same.
We often see things under aspects. The thing I need to keep and the thing I need to reject are sometimes the same thing–but seen under two different aspects.[1] What exalts me is the same thing as what makes me chuckle–but under different aspects. We deplore this state of things. We want to be able to see under nothing, non-aspectually. But when we try to see what is both needful and rejectable, but to see it non-aspectually, it simply recedes into some indeterminate, more or less middle distance, neither foreground nor background, just an irregular clump amidst visual clutter. This means that we cannot have what we want, some final, non-aspectual vision of the thing. We are stuck with it as both needful and rejectable. This is not a problem to be solved, but a condition of our lives. Things don’t sort for us. They remain a weird tangle, knotted to us and to each other inextricably, in inexplicable ways. No final preference ordering is forthcoming.
IV
We are curious about Parts Unknown. We wonder at mysteries. As we should. Still, we need to remember that mysteries are not unsearchable because they are abysmal, dark rifts. They are unsearchable because they are blinding, consuming fires. Those fires create the light in which we see light. We live in the light of mysteries, surrounded by uncreated light. We come to understand the mysteries, to the extent that we can be said to do so, not by staring directly into them, as if we could interrogate them, but by looking ever more carefully at what they allow us to see: the world around us, and especially other people. We understand the mysteries by caring for what they show us. (We love God by loving what God loves. Thus are the first and second commands forever yoked together.) Our spiritual posture toward the mysteries is forever interrogative–but our question-marks are not symbols of skepticism, but of a desire to progress from glory to glory, to move ever deeper into the Heart of Wonder. The next of the wine in Cana is better always than the last.
You know, it’s funny how things can get so damn misplaced
Where you bet your farm and where you place your faith
And time is such a precious thing to kill
I just wanna see over that last hill
Will my highbeams flood the plain?
Will the Gatekeeper know my name?
Will there be Someone to claim me for his own?
Well, you whisper to yourself when time runs low
Darling, I’ll carry ever smile we shared with me when I go
Lord, gather me unto Thyself when my wayward heart grows still
I just wanna see over that last hill (“That Last Hill”)
It is important to recognize that this is an entreaty, a prayer, not a demand. Mallonee asks to see. Mallonee’s aversion is the clenched fist, the demand aimed at heaven or at earth, the refusal to touch unless it is to hurt–but he also knows how easy it is to clench the fist, to treat the mess, the ugliness, the pain, the worry, as excusing the fist: it is easy to harden our hearts and curl our fingers. Reverence sours into resentment. The light of the mysteries fails us–because we fail it–and so the light we see by is now itself unlit. The world becomes a grey-on-grey assembly of petty nothings. We all know the temptation of such moods.
No, it’s not really a good time. No, it rarely is these days.
Loneliness she washes over you like a wave;
And the snow is ever falling down.
Doldrums in Denver…Doldrums in Denver
And it’s time you leave this town…There ain’t nothing for you now.
(“Doldrums in Denver”)
In such moods, faith and hope seem hellish currency, too awful to carry. We cannot keep ourselves from such moods. They come and they go, and fighting against them when they come tends only to aggravate them. To blacken their shades of grey. All we can do is let them come, endure them (yes, even, after a fashion, reverencing them), in holy indifference, asking for nothing and refusing nothing. One of Mallonee’s greatest strengths as a songwriter is his gift for writing from and creating in his listener this holy indifference. (The ‘holy’ here is an alienating adjective of a complicated sort; it changes the register in which we should hear ‘indifference’, making of indifference a yielding, a pliancy, an availability, instead of self-willed stoicism.) Such a state is, I hazard, Mallonee’s most fecund state as an artist: his best songs seem to me to come from a state of waiting. And, as a result, they re-create that state when–perhaps even most successfully when–the songs are not in any way about that state. As Emerson once said: “Character teaches above our wills.”
V
Holy indifference and reverence are not two distinct states. They are rather the inward-looking and the outward-looking faces of the same state. It is a state opposed to the state expertly captured by Alan Dugan, in “Passing Through the Banford Tolls”:
Proceeding sideways by inattention I arrive
Unknowingly at an unsought destination
And pass by it wondering: what next?
This is not the sort of wonder Mallonee seeks to cultivate, the inanition of boredom. Mallonee’s waiting is of a qualitatively different kind.
VI
The most remarkable song on Slow Trauma is “Waiting for the Stone to be Rolled Away”. It opens with a lilting, meditative guitars, anticipating the melody. It then settles into a gentle, upbuilding cadence. The first verses and the last:
There’s a halogen glow cast from across the street
From the parking lot of the Holy Spirit Assembly
It’s a beacon in the desert night until the break of day
Waiting for the stone to be rolled away
I told Solomon, the shepherd of the flock
I’ve got none of the gifts he’s got
You see, you cannot speak in tongues if you’ve got nothing to say
Waiting for the stone to be rolled away
….
Baby, gimme those keys, sit back and just watch me
Navigate this thing back home with considerable ease
Down these sad, back streets of doubt to a new and brighter day
Waiting for the stone to be rolled away
This song manages three levels at once. One, the actual scene in the desert night; two, Mallonee’s reflections on his own work as an artist; and, three, a metaphysical representation of the human plight. (Consider the density of the name, ‘Solomon’ here–the name perhaps of the actual minister of the Assembly, the name of the writer of the Songs, the name of the not-entirely-grateful vessel of God’s wisdom: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation”. –Doldrums in Jerusalem.) Mallonee’s gift of tongues, perhaps not a form of Pauline glossologia, but a gift nonetheless, is real. But he too needs an interpreter, someone with ears to hear–someone who has not only had experience, but lives and has lived in devotion to that experience, intent on creating a heart that passes out of itself. We are all waiting for the stone to be rolled away.
VII
This brings me back to my wise daughter, and to Marilynne Robinson. Some things we grow into understanding. We have to develop certain habits of mind and feeling, and that takes time. We have to learn how to hear–we need the proper acquist of experience, and we need training in how to listen, lest, hearing, we not hear. We have to become human ourselves in order to hear the music of the human voice–in order to understand. Robinson, contemplating this issue in her essay, “Wondrous Love”, writes:
Jesus spoke as a man, in a human voice. And a human voice has a music that gives words their meanings. In that old hymn [“In the Garden”]…as in the Gospel, Mary [Magdelene] is awakened out of her loneliness by the sound of her own name spoken in a voice “so sweet the birds hush their singing.” It is beautiful to think of what the sounds of one’s own name would be, when the inflection of it would carry the meaning Mary heard in the unmistakable, familiar, and utterly unexpected voice of her friend and teacher. To propose analogies for the sound of it, a human name spoken in the world’s new morning, would seem to trivialize it. I admire the tact of the lyric in making no attempt to evoke it, except obliquely, in the hush that falls over the birds. But it is nonetheless at the center of the meaning of this story that we can know something of the inflection of that voice. Christ’s humanity is meant to speak to our humanity…The mystery of Christ’s humanity must make us wonder what mortal memory he carried beyond the grave, and whether his pleasure at the encounter with Mary would have been shadowed and enriched by the fact that, not so long before, he had had no friend to watch with him even one hour.
Our lives are shadowed and enriched by Mallonee’s voice and music, if we hear it. His work is a beacon in the desert night. He is waiting, watching with us–and that eases the waiting, the watching.
[1] A very simple example: the way food looks when we are hungry and not dieting, and the way it looks when we are not hungry and dieting.
Season 3 Q3: Change?
Spoilers!
This is the last in the series of short essays I have been writing. It is also likely to be the last Chuck-related essay I write for a while. Other tasks demand my attention. I thank those who have read and commented on these essays.
We cannot step into the same river twice. –Heraclitus
We cannot step into the same river once. –Cratylus
Change is hard for us. It is hard to endure. It is hard to understand. Each hardness hardens the other. While we are changing, especially early in the change, we have a hard time knowing exactly what is happening to us. We have a hard time putting up with it. We have a hard time conceptualizing it. While we are changing we are somehow in a passage and a transportation between two worlds which seem to have no real unity–a murky one behind, a brightening one ahead. But we cannot see clearly into either or see clearly during our passage. As we change, we are doing our undoing; we put off the old person so as to put on the new, but the new is not a ready-made.
Season 3 is the season of change in Chuck, the moulting season. I do not deny that changes have been underway since the pilot. I do not deny that changes continue in Seasons 4 and 5. As Chuck says in vs. the Coup d’Etat, “change is inevitable”. Still, S3 is the season of the most fundamental changes, the season in which Chuck and Sarah finally break free of the asset/handler relationship that has imprisoned them and find their way to a new relationship, a relationship in which each of them is renewed, changed. I have addressed some of the central changes in the first couple of essays (here and here). In this final one, I want to address some of the larger issues of S3 and of the series.
Abstractly stated, the problematic dynamic between Chuck and Sarah involves three things.
(1) Sarah is changing and wants to change, and she needs Chuck to help her.
(2) Chuck needs to change but Sarah fears him doing so.
(3) Chuck does not fully believe in the depth of the change in Sarah.
(1) Sarah is changing and wants to change. She has changed enough to recognize that Chuck represents both the tutor of her change and, in some way, its destination. She needs Chuck to teach her how to change and to be there as what she is changing for. But this means that she does not want Chuck to change. If he does, he imperils her education in change and the goal of her change. One of the most unsettling features of S3 is Sarah’s despair over the changes in Chuck. She despairs for him, first and foremost, but she also despairs for herself.
Sarah is in the midst of change, in the middle of her transportation between two worlds, when her tutor seems to abandon her and deprive her of the result of the change she most desires–him. Sarah’s despair causes her to flail about wildly, even if it is hard to notice it given the amount of attention Chuck’s even wilder flailing draws. Sarah ends up with Shaw as a slumping stand-in for Chuck; Shaw becomes her substitute teacher. But he is about as effective as substitute teachers normally are, that is, not very. While under Chuck’s tutelage, Sarah was oriented on her future–even her forays into her past are for the sake of her future. Under Shaw’s tutelage, Sarah orients on her past; she starts trying to identify not the person she is to become but the person she was (Sam). While Sarah wounds Chuck when she shares her name with Shaw, Chuck and Sarah will both eventually realize that it is not her name, not her real name. It was Sarah’s name but is no longer. Shaw educes nostalgia of a sort in Sarah (he is trapped in a different sort of nostalgia himself) but he cannot manage Sarah’s passage into her future, her transportation to a new world.
(2) Chuck needs to change. Sarah fears his changing and takes it to be unnecessary, but it is necessary. Sarah loses faith for a while in Chuck (and in herself as a consequence). She is focused only on the way others–Beckman, Shaw, Casey–picture the result of Chuck’s changing. She really cannot imagine anything else clearly herself. Chuck is no help here, because he only knows he is changing; he cannot see clearly what he is changing into, and, adding to the confusion, he sometimes believes he needs to change into what Beckman et al. want him to become. Chuck is a hero and has behaved heroically frequently enough for his heroism to be a settled feature of his character–Sarah recognizes that it is. Because she recognizes this about Chuck, she sees his changing as unnecessary: he is a hero; he does not need to become one. But Chuck does not see himself as Sarah sees him. He does not recognize what she recognizes.[1]
Recall the exchange in vs. the Final Exam. Chuck, nauseated and unbalanced by the sudden assignment to kill the mole, asks Sarah what he will be if he is not a spy. She answers that he will still be Chuck, and that is good enough. Sarah means what she says–he will still be Chuck, the hero, and his not being a spy is inconsequential. (That last claim fudges: given how things stand between them, personally and professionally, if Chuck is not a spy he will probably not be with Sarah–and that is consequential, and Sarah knows it. But of course, to her credit, she is not really thinking about them at this moment, only about him.) But Chuck hears her as sentencing him to the Buy More, as sentencing him to being (to use a later line) alone in Burbank.[2]
Although being alone in Burbank is preferable to being a killer, Chuck now knows what he wants to do with his life and who he wants to do it with–to be a spy with Sarah. He wants that so desperately that he is willing to entertain killing the mole, although he cannot will to kill him. (This is why we see his trigger finger begin to squeeze and then release the trigger: he cannot do it. He cannot kill simply to realize his dreams. But that he can so much as squeeze the trigger measures his desperation.)
Chuck needs Sarah to help him become what he wants to be, to help him to understand what it is he wants to be. But they are in an impossible situation. He needs her to make real his change; she fears his change and resists it–wants nothing to do with it. She feels guilty, regrets, that he even wants to change. He cannot explain and she cannot help.
(3) Sarah is changing at a depth that mostly eludes Chuck or is hidden from him. Chuck wants Sarah to change. He fears that the change he sees is either merely apparent or temporary or superficial. It does not help that Sarah is not always aware of how deeply she is changing. For example, at the end of S2, Sarah believes she can leave Burbank, leave Chuck, and go with Bryce to Washington. She is conflicted; yet, she believes she can do it. She cannot. During Ellie’s wedding ceremony, Sarah realizes that her belief is false. She can no longer choose to be a spy if choosing it means she will have to abandon Chuck. But Chuck does not know how deep this change reaches in Sarah. –He lingers in unclarity about this, to lessening degrees, until S4. The ghost of this lingering helps make the end of S5 so unsettling–it is as if, at some level, Sarah did not change after all. –And Sarah’s anger and pain and hurt serve to mask the depth of the change in her. Chuck cannot see that she does not want to choose the spy life if that choice costs her him. She does not want him to choose it since she thinks that choice must cost him her.
****
I could say more about these changes. I say some more about them in my book. But, even though I could say more, I will finish here. Perhaps the most impressive achievement of Chuck is the fundamental but believable and emotionally satisfying changes in its main characters. Few shows have managed such changes. Relatively few have really tried.
Change is hard. Portraying it is hard. As characters change, they go out of focus for themselves and, as a result, for the audience. But we can, with patience and with a disciplined imagination, bring into focus why they go out of focus.
S3 is messy. It admits this near the end of vs. the Three Words. To straighten up some of the mess, we have to remember that we can conceptualize change (to the extent that we can) only by contextualizing it between a past (world) and a future (world). We have to see the changes as changes, as in passage or in transportation. No still snapshot alone will make sense or help us to make sense. Now, I cannot straighten up all the mess of S3; I have not tried. But if we keep in mind that fundamental changes are underway, we can explain some of the mess, excuse some of the mess, and, perhaps, ignore the rest. We can face the changes.
[1] Besides, being a hero–unless you hail from Krypton or chance bites from radioactive spiders–is not exactly a career choice.
[2] Among the many challenges of S3 is recognizing just how different Sarah’s vision of Chuck is from his of himself, and recognizing the centrality of Chuck’s vision to what happens between them. Sarah sees him as a hero, and as a man who can educate her in what it means authentically to be human. He sees himself as a underacheiver, losing and losing on his way to being a loser. –Is Sarah’s vision more just? Yes. –Is it as efficacious as Chuck’s vision? No.
As Chuck will tell Sarah in vs. the American Hero, he has hated himself for all his existential maundering–his (personal and professional) indecisiveness, caused by his inability to get over his failures: his failure at Stanford, his failure with Jill, his failure to escape the Buy More, his failure to get out of his sister’s apartment. (N.B., if this isn’t the only time Chuck uses the word ‘hate’, it is one of a very few. ‘Hate’ is not one of Chuck’s words; but there it is, falling off his lips, characterizing his relationship with himself. (One’s self is the one self one cannot fail to have a relationship with. The only question is what that relationship is to be. Even failing to have a relationship with oneself turns out to be having a particular relationship to oneself. I am deeded to me.)) Chuck’s self-hatred nourishes the roots of S3’s darkness (as do Sarah’s hurt and regret). Acknowledging it and overcoming it is Chuck’s task. So, despite the fact that Sarah’s vision of Chuck is more just, his vision of himself has more explanatory power, particularly in the arctic night of the first 13 episodes of S3.
Fenelon on Self-Love
While we are so imperfect, we can understand only in part. The same self-love that causes our defects injuriously hides them from ourselves and from others. Self-love cannot bear the view of itself. It finds some hiding place, it places itself in some flattering light to soften its ugliness. Thus there is always some illusion in us while we are so imperfect and have so much love of ourselves.
Season 3 Q2: Why Does Chuck Refuse to Run? Or, The Man Who Walked Backwards
This is the second in the short series of essays on S3. Spoilers!
No other moment in Chuck more decisively shapes the entire series than the moment when Chuck meets Sarah at the train station in Prague. He sees her; he smiles wanly; he begins to walk toward her. He heads to break her heart.
As he walks, Frightened Rabbit’s song, “My Backwards Walk”, plays. That song centers the scene, the series. The song takes us into Chuck’s interior, into his inner life, and allows us to move on his pulse. It sheds light on the motives that he does not or cannot provide to Sarah in what he says to her.
I want to investigate some of the lyrics of that song–in the context of the scene, in the context of the series. But let me say this by way of framing the investigation: the singer presents himself as breaking with a lover, but the singer’s actual point is that he cannot manage to do it, that he does not want to do it. This makes the dominant image of the song so powerful. The singer presents himself as leaving, as walking away from his lover, and yet he is walking backwards: he is moving away, or trying to, but he remains fixated on her, oriented upon her. He is steering by her even as he tries to leave her. He is not simply sneaking a backwards glance, like Lot’s wife at Sodom–he is, as paradoxical as it sounds, walking away toward her. It is not the best strategy for leaving; but, then, he doesn’t really want to leave.
Before I turn to some details, let me quote a parabolic passage of Kierkegaard’s, from his Works of Love:
When a man turns his back upon someone and walks away, it is so easy to see that he walks away, but when a man hits upon a method of turning his face toward the one he is walking away from, hits upon a method of walking backwards while with appearance and glance and salutations he greets the person, giving assurances again and again that he is coming immediately, or incessantly saying “Here I am”–although he gets farther and farther away by walking backwards–then it is not so easy to become aware.
Kierkegaard here plays with direction. He imagines someone who walks away from someone else, but who does so while facing the person, saying things and gesticulating as if he were walking toward the person.
Chuck plays with direction in the scene I am considering. But plays even more complicatedly with direction. Chuck walks toward Sarah while he walks away from her, but he walks away backwards. He walks toward her–in order to walk away from her. And he walks away from her by walking away toward her. Chuck does not mean to confuse anyone with all this walking to and fro. Rather, Chuck means to exemplify just how complicated Chuck’s state of mind is.
Sarah’s last name, ‘Walker’, has been important to the show from the beginning. Her first action on the show is to walk toward Chuck, who is standing at the Nerd Herd desk. That walk becomes the true icon of the show, more iconic, really, than the dark Intersect sunglasses. It is the true icon because it compresses into one action all the action of the show: the whole show tracks Sarah’s walk to Chuck–a walk that itself does not proceed exactly in a straight line. If you stop and think about it,the iconicity of her walk is clear, and it is insisted upon: the show returns to that walk obsessively–from a variety of angles and in a variety of ways.[1] But we have not yet seen Chuck walk toward Sarah in any iconic way, and when we finally do, he is walking toward her, but walking backwards toward her.
The difference between Chuck’s and Kierkegaard’s backwards-walking man is that Kierkegaard’s man really walks away. He pretends not to be walking away–perhaps his pretence fools him too. But he is walking away. Chuck is not walking away, not really, not for good. He does know he risks losing Sarah.
So this again is the complicated image, our paradox: Chuck walks toward Sarah there on the platform. That is what is happening in physical terms. But he is walking away from her as he does so–he never turns his back on her. Because he still takes his bearings from her, still steers by her, he is walking backwards toward her.
“My Backwards Walk” begins:
I’m working on my backwards walk
walking with no shoes or socks
and the time rewinds to the end of may
I wish we’d never met then met today
I’m working on my faults and cracks
filling in the blanks and gaps
and when I write them out they don’t make sense
I need you to pencil in the rest
To understand these words in the scene, we need to move backwards in time, to the fateful conversation between Chuck and Sarah near the end of vs. the Break-Up. Although that conversation seems initially to involve them both making up excuses for not remaining close and growing closer, for refusing to bank on a future together, it actually involves them both revealing their deepest fears about the future. Chuck eventually says to Sarah that even if they were together, they could not be together (“Even if our relationship were real, it wouldn’t really be real”). He gives various reasons–but the one I want to focus on now is this: He imagines them as misfit for each other because he imagines himself continuing to work at the Buy More while she continues to work as a spy. Chuck rightly cannot see how that would go.
The reason why I focus on these words is that they frame the lyrics. Chuck has known–when he allows himself to reflect on it–that if he and Sarah are to be together, more has to change than the handler/asset structure of their relationship. He knows that he has to change. At bottom, what Chuck knows is that, independent of the handler/asset structure, he and Sarah would still be unequal. He would be a Nerd Herder; she would be the CIA’s top spy. The difference in their careers and in their career success presents as much a problem for them as class differences did for lovers in earlier times. In a sense, Chuck is poor, Sarah is rich. Chuck feels like he has to make good, be somebody, if he is going to be a match (consider that word) for Sarah.
When Chuck downloads the new Intersect, when he acquires all these new abilities (e.g., Kung Fu), he transmogrifies from computer to weapon, from a posture of receptivity to one of spontaneity. (Beckman’s comment to Sarah: “You were protecting Chuck from the world, now you are protecting the world from Chuck.”) As Chuck struggles to understand the significance of his transmogrification, the NSA and CIA have already made plans for him–he will be trained to be a spy, a super-spy. No expense is to be spared. Powerful people, presumably Beckman and others of her ilk, begin to whisper to Chuck about what he could do, about what he could be, about his duty. All this would turn anyone’s head, make it hard to come to any realistic self-assessment, to sort out what you want from what you are being told you want. But for Chuck, who has been so long an underachiever, who has looked like a loser so often, even to those closest to him (Casey, Awesome, Ellie), the chance to finally be a winner, to be a force, must be especially compelling.
Chuck has been painfully aware of the distance between himself and Sarah, of his dependence on her. Chuck has never been able to credit himself with genuine heroism, with any kind of self-possessed competence (outside of video games and electronics, both of which he derogates while still loving). In the pilot, Chuck has a post-it stuck to his computer screen: “You are a professional nerd”. This is a bit of wry, bitter self-deprecation. For Chuck, the word ‘professional’ is meaningless in the context of the post-it sentence–and that is his point to himself. There are no professional nerds, there are only bigger and smaller nerds–losers of differing size. Chuck longs for the status of a professional; this is something he admires in Sarah, and it is a reason why, when she rejects what he wants or rejects advances from him as “unprofessional”, Chuck tends to be moved by her rejection. This is also the reason why he is so sure that Sarah will choose Bryce or Cole or Shaw over him: they are professionals, they are matches for her. But, with Sarah, Chuck is overmatched.
The first word to consider in the lyrics is the repeated ‘working’. In S3, Chuck is working, working on himself. He is trying to become better, to become more. He wants to acquire the standing of a professional. Chuck wants to be a spy. He wants to be like Sarah. He wants to be her equal, he wants to be a match for her. He wants to follow in his father’s footsteps. He does not precisely want to imitate his father (for example, he does not want to abandon the people he loves, even if for good reasons); he wants instead to emulate his father, to be what his father was but to be it in an improved way. The new Intersect has equipped Chuck to reach his goal, and doing what Beckman wants seems to him to be his way of working on himself.
Chuck is engaged in a project of self-transcendence. And Chuck’s project faces a twofold problem: One, Sarah is the catalyst of the changes in him; she matters more to his project than does the Intersect.[2] He needs her with him if he is to become what he wants to become. Two, and as is true of every project of self-transcendence, Chuck cannot forecast with any accuracy or in any detail, exactly what he wants to be when he transcends himself. After all, although he can say, “I want to be a spy”, he also knows that he does not want to handle real guns; he has no taste for lying; and deceiving others, particularly those he loves, demoralizes him. (Under Shaw’s manipulative influence, Chuck will waver on some of these points, but he never wholly succumbs.)
Chuck can name what he wants to be–“a spy”–but he has no clarity about what that actually means: we might say that Chuck is working to create a concept, ‘spy’, the marks of which are still in flux. He is more clear about what are not marks of his concept than of what are marks of it: for example, does not fall in love is not a mark of Chuck’s concept; ignores or imprisons his own emotions is not a mark of Chuck’s concept; carries a lethal weapon is also not a mark of Chuck’s concept.
These two problems make clear the point of the lines
I’m working on my faults and cracks
filling in the blanks and gaps
and when I write them out they don’t make sense
I need you to pencil in the rest
Chuck is working on his faults and cracks, trying to be a better man. He is filling in his blanks and gaps. But the problem is that he needs Sarah to help him figure out what he is trying to be, to help him create the concept he wants to instantiate. When he writes the marks out they don’t make sense. He needs Sarah to pencil in the rest. But he knows that Sarah resolutely opposes his becoming a spy; she wants to keep Chuck from the spy life. Sarah, however, means by ‘spy’ why Beckman and Shaw mean by ‘spy’. She does not yet understand that Chuck wants to keep their word but exchange its meaning for another, new one.
But of course, as he walks toward Sarah in Prague, Chuck is at best fitfully and unclearly aware of all of this. He knows he feels compelled to do what he is doing. He also wants to do what he is doing. But what he is doing turns out not to be what Beckman takes him to be doing or what Shaw, later, will take him to be doing. All hands agree: Chuck is becoming a spy. But Beckman and Shaw mean something by the term that Chuck will not end up meaning by it. This manifests itself in his inability to flourish under their training. They are not training him to be what he wants to be–but he is not himself clear about the source of the trouble. Given what Chuck will eventually mean by ‘spy’, his emotions will turn out to be a strength, not a weakness. He fails under Beckman because she is teaching him things he does not want to know and failing to teach him what he does. But Chuck is only a bit more aware of this than Beckman, and she is not aware of it at all.
Because Chuck is still so much in the dark about what he is doing, what he is trying to become, he cannot enlighten Sarah effectively when he tries to explain why he will not run.
Chuck knows he cannot explain. That knowledge prompts the wan smile when he sees Sarah. What is going on in him is still in process, and it is going on deep within him. He cannot yet give it voice. All he is sure of is that he cannot finish whatever has begun in him by running with Sarah. He does not realize though that she is not the problem–the running with her is the problem. Chuck is in the crucible. To leave now would be to leave half-finished. It sucks to be where he is, it hurts, and it will get worse. He will learn that the crucible is not spatially located in Prague; he is carrying it with him; he will carry it all the way back to Burbank, where it will change its form, but its severe test will continue.
As I have said, Chuck is not remotely clear about all this. All he has is a feeling, a concretion of hints and suggestions that have characterized his life since Sarah found him. That he will decide to become a spy presents itself, albeit in a form not explicitly thematized, as early as the first scene of the pilot, when Chuck and Morgan are pretending to be spies so as to escape from Ellie’s party. Being a spy is already lodged in Chuck’s imagination, and to a degree not to be explained by being a fan of Bond films. (In fact, as we realize as the show continues, the explanation goes the other way around: his imagining being a spy is why he so loves Bond films.) As Chuck’s father suggests, being a spy is in Chuck’s blood.
Still, on the platform in Prague, Chuck is undergoing the early stages of these change into a spy, his sort of spy. He knows that Sarah will not understand the changes, and he knows that he cannot help, because he does not yet understand them. The best he can manages is the misleading, treacly stuff he says: “A life of adventure”, “Helping people”. But those things do not make anything clear for Sarah. She thinks he is choosing for himself the last life she would choose for him–and choosing it instead of choosing her. He is not doing that. But he cannot explain what he is doing. Chuck foresees his problem when he sees Sarah on the platform. He knows that the current state of things between them makes their parting unavoidable: he cannot go; she cannot accept his not going. The tragedy, like all tragedy, is necessitated. Character is fate. All Chuck can do is let her go, and hope they can find each other again. To do what he feels compelled to do, Chuck believes he must remove or distance Sarah from his life. He can’t, of course; but he does try.
I’m working on erasing you
just don’t have the proper tools
I get hammered, forget that you exist
there’s no way I’m forgetting this
Think back once more to the conversation late in vs. the Break-Up. Sarah tells Chuck that when he gets rid of the Intersect and resumes his normal life, he will forget her. He rejects what she says: “I very much doubt that.” Sarah is part of Chuck even then, and more so as they stand on the platform. He cannot forget her, no matter how hard he tries. He cannot erase her without erasing himself. (One lesson of vs.Phase Three is that Sarah goes as deep in Chuck as he does.) He does not have the proper tools to erase her. He can bury himself in work. (As he will do in Prague.) He can bury himself in drink. (A strategy that he tries later in S3.) But there is no way he is forgetting her.
I’m working hard on walking out
shoes keep sticking to the ground
my clothes won’t let me close the door
these trousers seem to love your floor
I been working on my backwards walk
there’s nowhere else for me to go
except back to you just one last time
say Yes before i change my mind
say Yes before I…
you’re the shit and I’m knee-deep in it
Chuck desperately wants to say Yes to Sarah. He wants to go with her. He cannot go with her. He wants her to say Yes to a question he cannot ask. She wants to say Yes to a kiss Chuck cannot give. Chuck needs Sarah in order to become what he wants to be. He is not clear enough about what he wants to be clear about that. He alienates the deepest part of himself by alienating her, thus causing unintentionally his own suffering in S3. He starts trying not to love her; he starts telling himself he does not love her. He works hard on walking out. He will keep miserably at it, keep trying not to love her until Morgan tells him categorically that he does loves her. Morgan knows: Sarah’s the shit and Chuck’s knee deep in it. When Chuck finally admits that, the Intersect begins to function again–because Chuck’s heart begins to function again.
Back and forth. Backwards and forwards. To and fro. Towards and fromwards. The ancient Greeks conceptualized our relationship to the past in an image that reverses the one we use. We conceive of the future as in front of us. The past is behind us. We walk forward into futurity. But they conceptualized themselves as walking backwards into futurity. The past is available to be seen, since they face backwards. The future is unseen since they are walking backwards into it. Like the Greeks, Chuck walks backwards towards his future, toward Sarah, although neither of them can see that as they stand brokenhearted on the platform.
[1] We even get to see other women make that walk toward Chuck–Lou and Hannah. But Sarah’s walk is premonitory in ways that theirs are not Neither of them are a comet appearing in Chuck’s life, although each does cross Chuck and Sarah’s stars for a time.
[2] There is a good reason why, in their conversation on the beach in the finale, Chuck says that his life really changed, not when Bryce sent him the Intersect, but when he met a spy named “Sarah”. Sarah makes Chuck the best version of himself. The Intersect never, neither in early versions nor in late, has that power. The Intersect adds to Chuck’s already great potential; Sarah actualizes Chuck’s potential. Chuck’s quandary has never been his lack of potential. It has always been actualizing his potential.
S3 Question 1: Why Doesn’t Sarah Believe Chuck?
An essay about a central question of S3. I will be posting a least one or two more such essays in the next few of weeks. Spoiler warning for anyone watching the show for the first time.
For more than two seasons, when no one else would or did or could, Sarah trusts Chuck; she believes him and believes in him.
Then–the Red Test. And now she does not believe him, even though she knows that she did not actually see Chuck shoot the mole. Sure, what she saw, arriving seconds later, looks like the immediate aftermath of Chuck shooting the mole. But Sarah is a spy. She manipulates appearances for a living. She knows how far things can sometimes be from what they seem to be. (In fact, a logical difference the show insists on is this: in real life, things are almost always what they seem; in the spy life, they are never quite what they seem.) So, why won’t she believe Chuck? I do not think the answer to this question can take the form of a rationalizing her disbelief. The best that can be done is to make her irrationality understandable. Chuck’s Red Test depresses all of Sarah’s buttons at once; it is no wonder she short-circuits.
So why does Sarah fail to believe Chuck? Why does she disbelieve his denial that he shot the mole? –Is it because she loves Shaw? No. Of course not. Sarah does not love Shaw and she knows it. She has what she felt–and still feels–for Chuck to compare her feeling for Shaw to, and, whatever she feels for Shaw, is not that.[1] As she says, what she has with Shaw is different (she says this when they are on stake-out in vs. the Final Exam.)[2]
Is it because Chuck changes during the weeks and months as he struggles to become an agent? That plays a role, because Sarah sees him lying to Hannah, for example, in a way that clearly indicates that his character is under pressure, perhaps is cracking. But she also sees him pull back from the precipice.
Is it because of Prague? That, too, plays a role, an important one. Even when she seems to have moved past it, that disappointment haunts Sarah throughout the season, and it helps explain her choosing Shaw. Despite her bravado in telling Chuck he cannot hurt her, he can hurt her–he has, and he still does: the whole situation of S3 appears for Sarah against the background of her crushed dreams for the two of them. She is living through her wretched hollow. Every day with Chuck is a reminder of what she does not have: a real life with him. Every day stabs. Every day cuts her with some shard of what-could-have-been. Choosing Shaw is choosing a back-up, makeshift life-in-waiting. It is not what Sarah wants, and she knows that, even if she tries to ignore it. (Sarah does surely like Shaw; and, equally important, she admires him. As she says, she has a type. But liking plus admiring have never equalled love, not in any sober calculus of the heart.) Sarah has retreated to her old posture, treating her own emotions as if they were her asset, and she their handler. That did not work out well before; it is not working out well now. Complete emotional invulnerability demands complete emotional numbness. Sarah can no longer be numb. Chuck quickened her emotions for good, and they refuse to be deadened again. She cannot kill her love for Chuck; she can only deny it.
So why does she not believe him? Answering the question forces us to go back to a much earlier conversation between Chuck and Sarah. In vs. the Truth, Chuck, Sarah and Casey, all suffering from the effects of the truth serum/poison, are sitting in the hospital hallway. Sarah, clearly making no effort to withstand the serum at that moment, tells Chuck how sorry she is about all that has happened. And by all, she means all–not just Ellie’s being poisoned or Chuck’s being poisoned, but everything that has happened since she arrived. This is an important speech. It comes from deep inside Sarah.
From nearly the beginning of their fake/real relationship, Sarah has felt a mixture of gratitude for the presence of Chuck in her life and of regret for her presence in his. Just as Chuck cannot easily see himself as a hero, Sarah cannot easily see how much of a role she plays in his being heroic. But others, especially Morgan, can see how much Sarah catalyzes growth in Chuck: “When Chuck is around Sarah, he’s the Chuck we all knew he could be.” Sarah is so involved in Chuck’s effects on her that she often fails to see or forgets her effects on him. (This fact bulks large in the dysfunction of S3: Sarah cannot see that Chuck refusing to run with her results from her good effect on him. She has actually succeeding in making him think that maybe, maybe he can be a hero.) Sarah tends to focus only on how she complicates Chuck’s life, and how the complications cause him frustration, anxiety, shame and pain. She regrets all of that. And she carries that regret with her into S3.
At Traxx, when Chuck joins Sarah at the table, flushed with excitement about (he thinks) having become an agent, and about having dinner with her, Sarah has to tell him that he now faces his Red Test. He must kill the mole to become an agent. But before Sarah can deliver that doom to him, Chuck thanks her for all she has done and comments that he would never have gotten to where he is without her. She does not want him to say that. It is–literally–the last thing she wants to hear. Her regret about her presence in his life crashes in upon her. If she had never come along, Chuck would not have had to undergo any of this (Seasons 1-3), or to face the choice to kill the mole or to fail to become an agent. Sarah realizes the vise that Chuck is in: He can kill the mole and so lose her, or he can fail to become an agent and so lose her. Chuck may not see all that quite so clearly, but he can feel the vise closing.
Later, when Sarah arrives in time to witness the immediate aftermath of the shot that kills the mole, Sarah reports to Shaw: “Chuck is a spy.” From her point of view, the Chuck she knew and loved, her Chuck, is as irrevocably dead as the mole. But, still from Sarah’s point of view, Chuck does not kill himself: she kills him: she is responsible for pulling the trigger that causes Chuck to pull the trigger. Sarah is so sure that she is responsible for what Chuck has done that she never really stops to consider whether or not Chuck has actually done it. Her pervasive guilt for all that has led up to the Red Test colors how she sees the Test. (It is worth remembering here too the guilt Sarah feels about her own Red Test. It is no accident that she is thinking about her Test immediately after Chuck’s.) The crashing wave of guilt she feels swamps Chuck and everything else. She cannot distinguish her guilt from his–all the guilt is hers. But, strangely enough, this makes it impossible for her to believe–at least initially–that Chuck is not guilty. She is guilty, so he must be. After she has had a little time to reflect, she begins to wonder if maybe Chuck is telling the truth. At least, she is wondering enough to ask him about it when Chuck takes Shaw’s place at the restaurant table (in vs. the American Hero).
She has still not sorted it all out when Chuck saves Shaw–or when Chuck at last professes his love to her. She has sorted it out enough to take it to be somehow possible that Chuck did not kill the mole. He is no longer swallowed up in her pervasive guilt. But if she no longer disbelieves him, she still does not yet believe him. She does intuit this much: Shaw’s decision to infiltrate the Ring’s compound is reckless, not courageous; Chuck’s decision is courageous, not reckless. At some level, Sarah can tell the difference.
An aside: generally, Shaw’s actions seem virtuous only because they are instances of vices that look like virtues, and so are easy to confuse with them: foolhardiness with courage (as in infiltrating the compound), cruelty with honor (as when he brutalizes the bound assassin for his inappropriate remarks to Sarah), manipulation with mentoring (as in his relationship with Chuck) obsession with loving memory (as in his relationship with his dead wife), possessiveness with love (as in his relationship with Sarah). Shaw manages to be broken, bad, while looking good. From the moment Shaw first appears, burning his Zippo in Beckman’s office, it is clear that there is something wrong with that man. But getting it into focus is hard, because he seems right, he seems good. It will require a certain sort of context, an appropriate series of events, to sift Shaw’s virtuous appearance from his vicious reality.[3]
As I said, Sarah is beginning to notice these things about Shaw. No one else–not Chuck, not Casey, not Beckman–notices. Well, no one else other than Morgan, whose comment about Shaw’s stiffness (“He’s a stiff as a board!”) seems to me to penetrate deep into Shaw, to a fundamental unresponsiveness, a lack of genuine care, in him.[4] But even though Sarah is starting to notice these things, she is not clearly conscious of them. She cannot articulate them.
Sarah can tell that Chuck’s decision to go after Shaw is noble. He does it for her sake and not for his own. But she is still awash in her own feeling of guilt, and she still does not exactly believe Chuck; so, she cannot satisfactorily process what she feels about him and about what he is doing. He seems like he is virtuous, her virtuous Chuck, the man she loves. But in her guilt she has convinced herself that that man is dead, and that his blood is on her hands.
When Chuck professes his love for her, when he kisses her, when he forswears convincing her–wanting her instead to freely choose him–he effectively washes her hands. His words are a benediction. It may still be wrong to say that she exactly believes Chuck. She has not worked that out completely yet. There are also the complexities of her commitments, to Shaw and to Beckman, still to work through. But, at long last, the high tide of confusion, hurt, guilt and regret begins to go down. She can begin to remember: she is grateful for Chuck’s presence in her life. Casey will soon transchange that gratitude into joy. Sarah will have waited it out.[5]
[1] In the tumult of The Red Test (and of S3 generally) it is hard to keep the sequence of events in mind. Sarah makes her trip to DC with Shaw before The Red Test. And it is right after the Red Test that Shaw asks Sarah if she still loves Chuck. She answers: “No. Not any more.” So while she was with Shaw in DC she was still in love with Chuck–and Shaw knew it. Although I do not know how to prove it, I am reasonably convinced that Chuck’s Red Test and Sarah’s ‘proctoring’ of it are compelled by Shaw to drive Chuck and Sarah finally apart. His question, coming when it does, reveals that.
[2] As I mention in my book, ‘different’ for Sarah almost always means ‘worse’ or ‘compares unfavorably to’. It is a bit of emotionally controlled shorthand, and Sarah has a set of such terms at her disposal. They are among her techniques for avoiding the use of first-person desiderative verbs, to avoid having to express desire or aversion, emotional satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Later in S3, she will be able to answer Chuck’s question: “Sarah, do you love me?” by saying, “Yes”. But she will struggle to use the word ‘love’ herself (vs. the Tooth).
[3] Keep in mind I say all this while still harboring a certain sympathy for Shaw. There is a story to tell about how he got to be as he is. It does not excuse him but it does make him less opaque. Also, I am not saying that Shaw is purposely deceitful about himself, as if he realizes his viciousness and tries to keep his vices hidden. He does not realize (fully) that he is vicious. He is as taken in by his looks as anyone else.
[4] Watch carefully. Morgan’s judgments about other people are perceptive, particularly about those closest to him. And he has something of the visionary or prophet about him where Chuck is concerned. Time and time again he predicts something–“Chuck and Sarah will come right through that door”–and is proven right. This surely matters for his S5 prediction that one kiss will revive Sarah’s dormant memories.
[5] I have been weaving Imogen Heap’s “Wait it Out” into the essay. I have done so in order to bring the song to mind. That song does far more in S3 than comment on what is happening early. It takes us into Sarah’s inner life and allows us to understand its shape, to understand what is happening in her, from the beginning of the season all the way to Casey’s revelation. The parallel to this song for Chuck is Frightened Rabbit’s “Backwards Walk”. I will discuss that soon.
Single Wide Life (Poem)
Single Wide Life
Growing up in a double wide trailer
Single wide world
Coal-gutted hillsides
Power plants loom umbrageous
Over my high school
Kyger, Gavin Plants
Lighting New York, New York
Dumping cancer
Killing Cheshire, Ohio
Southern Ohio, welfare checks in the mail
Daughters pregnant another time, bun in the oven,
Bigger check in the box
Valedictorian enlisted (Navy)
Sight the world to see it
Life keeps on–an enlarging stain
“Cough, cough:
Has the mail come?
Shut the damn baby up!”
Chris gets on the bus
Holding a browned dishrag
To his bloody mouth:
He fell, he says:
His sister whispers their
Dad broke a coffee cup
Across Chris’ mouth
He squeezes into a corner of the seat,
Takes out a paperback of Candide:
He is reading it because I did
And he reads while his lip clots
Pangloss
The best of all possible worlds
Growing up in a double wide trailer
Single wide life
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 