Essays strain for coherence
One of the services a writer can provide for the mental alertness of the populace is to renew the sense of how strange and lonely this world is.
U.S. essayist David Searcy does as much in his new essay collection, Shame and Wonder. The first essay, The Hudson River School, has the writer visiting a sheep rancher in the north Texas Prairies, not far from Dallas, where much of Searcy’s work is set. The rancher was once plagued by a coyote decimating his herds. His solution was to stake out a likely looking spot and, when night fell, play a tape recording of his daughter Joellen’s infant shrieking. It worked: The coyote appeared and was duly shot.
This rancher has a whole series of “predator-calling” recordings, including “Chicken Hen Squalls,” “Gray Fox Distress” and “Baby Crying (Joellen).” The crying baby especially un-nerved Searcy.
The essay has many of the characteristics of Searcy’s writing — a tentative, repetitive style, a hint of transcendence, a near-mysticism arising out of the emptiness of the prairie, the same sense of emptiness that has been with us since the beginning of civilization.
“This is it, the empty shoreline where the Greeks made camp outside the walls of Troy, where you could stand and gaze upon the empty world,” Searcy writes. The distance between towns on the highway adds to the feeling: “The miles between these little towns seem so completely empty, like a vacuum.”
Always he returns to that surrealistic sense of things. “How extraordinary, beautiful, uncomfortable and strange our lives have been,” Searcy writes.
In A Futuristic Writing Desk, Searcy suggests another ornament as a counterweight to the surprises which come out of emptiness. He cites an “animal behaviourist” who noticed that cattle, “urged along a chute, will balk at an unfamiliar object like a paper cup left carelessly on their path. Get rid of the paper cup and off they go to the killing floor as easy as you please. But just like that they’re overwhelmed. A simple, thoughtless little thing like that will bring them to a sudden realization. Stop to notice and you’re lost.”
An essay on baseball falls into a familiar pattern — first comes the odd linguistic rhythms. “I had a glove,” Searcy writes. “I owned one. But had never come to terms, somehow. Whatever those terms were, I had not come to them.” Then comes the evocation of landscape — in this case, the baseball fields. (“The rust-red baseball dirt is clean and cleanly chalked.”) Is this also the element of ornament, the rust-red basepaths, cleanly chalked? “That was dedicated dirt,” Searcy writes. “There were conditions.”
Some specific cultural references follow, chiefly the 2011 World Series in which, Searcy writes, Texas lost “in the most horrific manner ... Twice a single pitch away from winning it all.”
This particular essay also reminds a reader that “baseball seems to gather all our hopes unto itself without self-consciousness, apology or error on a beautiful Sunday morning.” This seems to be an antidote of sorts to the empty world the ancient Greeks looked upon, as well, Searcy writes, as the “crap and violence we have to deal with — death and violence, terrible suffering, every day.”
But I cannot see anything really cohere in this essay, or in the others. There is nothing except strain and hard chisel work, scraping off dead language — a noble effort, I have no doubt, but I wish parts of the work were less obscure.