A Republic Made of Words

Texas could confound the writer plumb out of a guy, but then I guess even a bona fide author like Faulkner could have said that about Mississippi, and he had to spell  “Yoknapatawpha” all the time.

The trouble is, Texas is and it isn’t what most of us claim for it. We live with a “real” Texas that’s as fictional as Faulkner’s made-up Mississippi county. That’s how a suburban dad (or essayist) can crank up an Ennio Morriconi spaghetti western CD and transform a drive to his daughter’s soccer game into the dusty drama of Once Upon a Time in the West.

Larry McMurtry found a good solution. He wrote the gritty, contemporary Last Picture Show and its four sequels. And, he wrote the western epic, Lonesome Dove, and its two prequels and a sequel. All were true in the way great fiction is always true.

But what do you do if you want to simultaneously present the myths and the realities, understanding that the former are as necessary to us as boots in the brush country? You risk pissing on both campfires if you get into the gap between the “I am” and the “I pretend” in the way one might explore how America is some sad distance from the glowing claims of its inclusive “we-the-people” founding documents. The pretenders might just turn in for the night if you douse the light. The proud realists will wonder where the heat went.

For an answer, I look back aways. I grew up in a red brick house on the eastern bank of Braes Bayou in Houston, not far from South Main. It was a small house for a family of seven. One of my earliest memories is of my mother and older brother sitting at the kitchen table, a window air conditioner rattling behind them and a single, shaded lamp hanging over them. They were reading. I saw them. They were looking at black squiggles on the white pages of a book. Books smelled good. I had no idea what the squiggles meant. I must have been four or so, and I determined then that I’d crack that code. Somehow, I could sense the unexplored country I was missing and I ached with the desire to join them there. This is an experience shared by many, I’m betting.

In the third grade I was awarded a certificate for having read 50 books. By high school I was, pretentiously, taking The Brothers Karamazov with me when I went deer hunting with my dad on a ranch outside Quemado, just north of Eagle Pass and east of the Rio Grande. “Quemado” means “burnt-out,” and it got its name from Spanish explorers who believed the little valley had been scorched by a volcano. When I read Dostoevsky today I still smell the smoke of the sage caught in the drive shaft of our pickup.

Some time later I realized that it wasn’t red brick that made the home of my youth so solid, so safe, so real. It was words. Our home was made of words, those black scratches I found so beguilingly mysterious in the open books before the rapt faces of my mother and brother. Words, spoken so sparingly by my father and with great care by my mother, who read “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” in Reader’s Digest like it was brought down from the mountain by Moses. Words were a dependable bulwark against hurricane and nosy neighbors. I used words to make my Davy Crockett fantasies real, to describe newly discovered possibilities of life.

States and nations are made of words, too. That’s how the poets can try “to write a republic,” as Charles Olson put it. Words deserve a patriotism of their own. The real risk in exploring the gap between the mythic and the real is the risk of linguistic battery. If you go arrogantly about scraping the words people live by off their tongues, holding some to be truer than others, you are going to get bitten.

But some words are truer than others. When false words are followed, bad things happen. For instance, we speak of a mythic equality in America while practicing a politics of exclusion. Texas agribusiness preaches self-reliance and warns of big government, but happily cashes its federal subsidy checks.

Still, I can’t explore the gap with perfect objectivity because I’m not outside it, above it or beside it. I live in the gap, too. Nonetheless, it’s not moral to leave iron inequality disguised with the gold leaf of language, though care must be taken when the mask is pealed away.

There’s too little respect for words among the dominant political voices in America today. Without that respect, few truths are likely to emerge.  As it turns out, Texas might be a good place to attack the problem. After a little examining, it becomes clear that what is most confounding about Texas is really a blessing. Important truths spring from the contradictions of myth and reality, and we have contradictions aplenty.

W.E.B. DuBois, the great African-American thinker and champion of social justice, argued that democracy depends upon the tireless pursuit of truth. He said,  “…there is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.” One of DuBois’ literary forebears was the French essayist Michel de Montaigne, who lived by the honest words, “What do I know?”

These are not contradictions. Montaigne’s humble skepticism is necessary to DuBois’ courage. “What do I know?”  McMurtry’s mythic, life-loving Texas Ranger, Gus McCrae, could have said it, showing us that even as we dig for the truth, it’s crucial that we don’t throw too much dirt on the stories people live by. There’s knowledge in them, and to deny that knowledge would be the coward’s way out.

There’s a companion piece to this essay posted at FireDogLake today. It speaks to the awesome responsibility we assume when we set out to write a republic. I chose the quiet photograph of poet Carl Sandburg dancing with Marilyn Monroe as a symbol of diverse, democratic voices (you can see more photographs in the series in a video here). I’d like to see it on a stamp or a dollar bill.

In the end, the responsibility we assume takes a lot more listening than writing.