The Matthew Passage

English 363
April 28, 2010

The Matthew Passage:
Damned Ideology in Mountains Beyond Mountains

    Before Tracy Kidder leads us up the crisscrossing trail through the religious manifesto of the Matthew Passage in Mountains Beyond Mountains, we've already become familiar—if a bit uncomfortable—with the multi-faceted persona of Dr. Paul Farmer.  Farmer is shown as an agent for grace, an iconoclastic saint, and an avid, delighted practitioner of deep, abiding faith in the midst of 20th century academia and secular medical science.  He becomes familiar, because we are show Farmer in several of his guises and see his work as if at first hand; uncomfortable, because most of that work as been among the "wasteland" and "slums" in regions of the world that are, at best, "littered with ... garbage, garbage on fire, and with ramshackle-looking developments, like ... strip malls that had moldered before being completed" (135).   Somewhere amidst this familiar discomfort, Kidder allows Farmer to display in vivid terms, his working compassion and to challenge to us—as readers, as humans—to find in ourselves some measure of care, concern, and action for those born into the global rural squalor of poverty and disease.

    One of the first impressions Kidder shows is Farmer self-description as "'a poor person's doctor,'" but, as Kidder tells us honestly, "he didn't quite fit my preconception of such a person" (7).  What follows is a seeming paradoxical personality assessment that we will come to understand is part of the conflict within Farmer that drives him to perform his work:

[Farmer] clearly liked the fancy restaurant, the heavy cloth napkins, the good bottle of wine.  What struck me ... was how happy he seemed with his life.  Obviously [he] could have been doing good works as a doctor while commuting between Boston and a pleasant suburb—not between a room in what I imagined must be a grubby church rectory and the wasteland of central Haiti.  The way he talked, it seemed he actually enjoyed living among Haitian peasant farmers.  At one point, speaking about medicine, he said, "I don't know why everybody isn't excited by it." (7)

Although this description is intended to summarize the dichotomy of Farmer's personality, it becomes something more akin to a personal testament, crossing over into religious experience.  Kidder says that Farmer "smiled at me, and his face turned bright ... a luminescent smile.  It affected me quite strongly, like a welcome gladly given, one you didn't have to earn" (7).  This precise account is easily analogous with what theologians call Grace—that is, a spontaneous, unmerited divine gift.

    The concept and importance of grace is an idea which separates not only Roman Catholicism from the Calvinists and Protestants, but, in Mountains Beyond Mountains, can also be seen as what separates Farmer from his more urban and conventional fellow medical practitioners.  His acts of grace are seen by both those he works with and treats as being the reason he is considered to be not only happy—as exemplified by his point about being excited by his work—but also that dreaded religious term in the midst of a secular world: Dr. Paul Farmer is also a pious man.

    After Farmer secures a spot in a homeless shelter for an ailing alcoholic and drug abuser named Joe—secured with false promises that Joe will no longer engage in habits that Farmer himself enables Joe to continue—Farmer visits the shelter on Christmas, bringing presents for everyone.  Farmer's gift for Joe is a six-pack of beer hidden non-discretely in a paper bag.  In Farmer's method of healing, he considers a six-pack of Budweiser as the healthier alternative for the ailing alcoholic than Joe's preference of a 1/2 gallon of vodka.  "As Farmer was leaving the shelter, he heard Joe say to another resident, just loudly enough to make Farmer wonder if Joe meant him to overhear, 'That guy's a fuckin' saint.'"  Kidder expounds upon Joe's comment, "It wasn't the first time Farmer heard himself called that.  When I asked him his reaction, he said he felt like the thief in Hawthorne's novel The Marble Fawn, who steals something from a Catholic church and, before making his escape, dips his hand in holy water" (16).  Even as Farmer performs his acts of grace for those ailing souls in the homeless shelter on Christmas, he breaks the very rules that govern the addicts being taken in.  Farmer may be a saint for his manner of treatment, but his role of divinity is an iconoclastic one.  It is a contradiction he noticed in himself years earlier while still in Harvard medical school.

    There was a time in human history when mythology accounted equally for science and religion, but in more modern society, the two are usually viewed as being counterpoint, if not outright the antithesis of the other.  It was not a binary Manichaeism which Farmer ascribed to, and he makes this clear when he voices, "'the fact that any sort of religious faith was so disdained at Harvard and so important to the poor—not just in Haiti but elsewhere, too—made me even more convinced that faith must be something good'" (85).  Kidder weighs this animosity, telling us that Farmer "'was taken with the idea that in an ostensibly godless world that worshipped money and power or, more seductively, a sense of personal efficacy and advancement, like at Duke and Harvard, there was still a place for God, and that was in the suffering of the poor'" (85).  This epiphany then is when Kidder brings us to the rise on our own mountain trail where we see just ahead our intended destination—the summit of our thesis: the Matthew Passage.

    Dr. Farmer performs his medical work for the poorest, most diseased, and impoverished people this world has to offer.  This work is accomplished not because of, but despite numerous bureaucratic, political, and financial hindrances placed in his way.  Frequently, Farmer must leave the remote locations of his medical work to travel to Moscow, Lima, New York, or Boston, to obtain funding, medical supplies, or other materials.  In discussing this need to interact with politicians and corporate business personnel, Kidder perhaps inadvertently illustrates clearly the point Farmer will later make in a reference to the Gospel of Matthew:

When he was younger, Farmer used to come and go ... in jeans and a T-shirt, until he realized this upset his Haitian friends, who always dressed up to travel.  Then Père Lanfontant told him that if he was going off to represent them to the world, he should wear a suit.  Farmer owned two but had loaned one to a friend.  He preferred the black one anyway, because it allowed him, for example, to wipe the fuzz off the tip of his pen onto his pants leg while writing up orders at the Brigham, catch a night flight, say to Moscow or Lima, and still look presentable when he arrived. (184)

It is hidden here among these words in which Farmer displays his faith in such a profound and integral manner that it becomes blind commonplace in his everyday life.  Kidder tells us that Farmer has two suits, but had loaned one of them to a friend.  A page later—when Farmer relates his Matthew Passage—the connection is linked, and once noticed, becomes as if our perception is cleansed and we gaze into the infinite divine.

    Kidder describes a drive along a remote road in the Haitian wasteland and seeing emaciated beggars, barefoot children, and starving livestock.  Kidder makes a Biblical comment—"if you've done it unto the least of them, you've done it unto me"—meant to impress Farmer, and the doctor replies:

"Matthew twenty-five," said Farmer.  "Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me." He went on, paraphrasing, "When I was hungry, you fed me.  When I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink.  When I was a stranger, you took me in.  When I was naked, you gave me clothes.  When I was sick, when I was in prison, you visited me.  Then it says, Inasmuch as you did it not, you're screwed."  He smiled, swerving around another giant rut in the road. (185)

This, then, becomes the mustard seed of all that Farmer does.  He finds joy, not in the suffering of others, but in his work to ease that suffering, even if that ease comes, as it almost always does, in a temporary form.  Instead of trying to find the loopholes in his faith—like that which might be found in a bigoted, derogatory man who lives his life deliberately blind to those who suffer around him only to make a death-bed conversion to his own Lord and Savior in a vain attempt for grace and forgiveness—Farmer enacts his faith with delight and graciousness, though the road he chose leads him through hardships he could have avoided for a much easier, much more comfortable path.  It is not the vague idea of grace and redemption Farmer deals with, it's the filthy, bloody sort that exists in the forgotten and ignored vectors of our planet.  The difficult sort that comes about when treating sick and tubercular patients in Cange, Haiti, or the seemingly insignificant act of loaning one of his two suits to a friend—"I was naked...and you clothed Me" (Matt 25:36, NASB).  Farmer lives his faith with deliberate joy, not with snide duplicity.  He does what he does not out of fear of damnation, but out of love.  Not love as some poetic ideal, but love as a verb of doing, of being.  Farmer welcomes those giant ruts in the road which he travels, and gladly swerves past them en route to the next place where compassion is needed.  He does not seek material rewards for his actions, as performing charity for recognition negates the intention and purpose of such work.

    Farmer's journey is our journey as readers, as people.  A trek up the crisscrossing path of a mountainside.  And Kidder has guided us through the Matthew Passage, we have reached a wayside on our trail.  A overlook where we can take a respite and look around to see from where we've come, to take in where we might go from here.  We may spend a while here to enjoy the accomplishments of our own hard work.  We see there is a path down the other side of this summit, and, in the distance, another mountain to climb; more ruts to traverse.  This is a geography we don't just look at, we have to read it.

    There is always going to be another mountain.

    There is never going to be some grand reward for this labor.

    We climb the next mountain because that's the path.  The journey is the reward, not some possible destination.  If we journey well, the destination will be gracious and welcoming whenever we reach it.

    There are more mountains beyond these mountains, another sick person along our path, another asshole who will snark about the world's problems without contributing to any solution, another situation that confounds/delights/infuriates/astounds/inspires and perhaps, sometimes, will make us cry.  No matter what anyone does—you, me, Tracy Kidder, or Paul Farmer—the poor, like disease and atrocity, will be with us always.  It's how we deal with what is inside ourselves where all work begins.  We must be healthy if we intend to for our work to help others.  Farmer could not treat his sick patients if he were ill himself.  He shows us that obstacles are to be overcome; fear is merely an opportunity to exercise courage.  And, as we climb the next mountain to find who might be ill, we may, at times, feel too much which will lead to frustration at the seeming futility of it all.  We rationalize the situation, and ask ourselves:

    —What can we do?

    Tracy Kidder has given Dr. Paul Farmer a voice to reply to us by example:

    —Do what we can.

    That, as Farmer has shown, is the quintessential essence of charity and compassion.  And the keys to the kingdom of heaven in this world.

    The view from this summit is divine, but now we must, like grace, descend again to take up our travels along the next path.



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Stories Told by Others as Stories of Their Own

ENG 363
March 5, 2010

Stories Told by Others as Stories of Their Own

    When sitting down after a holiday dinner with your extended family and the kids have gone to bed and the dishes are washed and dried and put away and the fire is burning finely in the hearth to keep at bay the cold rain and snow and another drink of whatever it may be your pleasure to have a glass of at such times and one of the elders of your family starts in on another story of the days that used to be there is rarely—if ever—an agent of the court at hand to insist the teller of such tales place their hand on the Good Book and swear before God and man that what they are re-telling in this family context is the Truth, the Whole Truth and nothing but.  Family stories are not the sort which are put forth before the bar to be judged for veracity citing witnesses and calling to hear from others who were involved in the plots revealed by the elder of your family when sitting down to share life's tales with their family on holiday evenings with a drink in hand and a fire in hearth.  Nor do we, as family members, readers, or other tellers of our own tales, expect such stories to be held up to the same scrutiny as testimony given in a room of polished wooden balusters and attorneys with shiny shoes and tailored suits.

    Family stories are given a certain leniency when it comes to the measure of veracity—and many times they are expected to stretch objective truth.  Tales grow taller, more dramatic, with age and each successive retelling.  Few people are satisfied or even able to tell the story of a family event from some time past without adding a certain spice, a certain dimension, to the narrative.  And the stories of family past in the trio of books we have journeyed through show—each with their own unique perspectives—that they are no exception to this expectation.

   Rooted Deep in the Pigeon Valley: A Harvest of Western Carolina Memories by Carroll Jones is centered on family stories; they are the focus of the narrative, plot, and theme of the work.  He sets out to give readers a comprehensive history of his ancestor.  Using them as such, it is understandable that Jones has based those stories he shares upon historical documents and personal diaries.  While neither is beyond reproach for pure validity, both are commonly accepted as being valid sources for historical information.  Diaries, although prone to the very exaggerations and subjectivity that separate family tales from sworn testimony, capture the voice of the person writing and the time period from whence they come.

   Upon introducing his great-grandfather, William Harrison Hargrove, Jones tells us directly, "I knew he was a Civil War veteran, but beyond that the details of his life and history were rather murky" (25), before leading through a whirlwind summary of his life's adventures —"His personal diary provides a record of his odyssey" (33)—leading up to the War Between the States, his time with the 21st Regiment North Carolina Infantry during the War, and his travels following it.

  It may come as no surprise that Jones makes Hargrove the hero of these adventures, complete with admirable character traits and few, if any flaws.  "It is a testament to William's character that he stopped off in in Petersberg to check on friends recovering from wounds and sickness in the hospital there.  He steadfastly remained at the side of the injured Garland Furgeson for almost two weeks waiting to assist his good friend home" (34).  Of course, no real, breathing person has a flawless life, but this idealizing is the result of selective telling. 

    Selective telling can come in different forms. One way is as Jones has done, taking all evidence at hand—historical documents and personal writings—and then picking which parts of the narrative to pass on.  Another is through assembled memory and habit of telling the story in a given manner.  This latter method is more indicative of Daniel Robb's shared family stories in Sloop.

    To his credit, Robb does tell us he fills in blank spots in the tales he passes along to readers, "There is a story my father has told me many times" (216), and starts off with the broad strokes of a story retold by someone who was not a participant in it, but quickly adds details to heighten the tension and dramatic effect of a situation where his father (as a young boy) and a friend take a boat out onto Buzzards Bay and almost sink it.  "'Keep bailin', man,' I imagine Jim sayin. 'We gotta keep bailin', or we'll be sailing her across the bottom.  And your mother wouldn't like that'" (217).  Robb contributes numerous details that he states are only "in his mind" (217) so vivid that they would likely not have been remembered by anyone actually experiencing the event.  But he does state that it is only his memory of the way the story was told and not a description of what actually happened.  "That's the story as far as I know it," he tells his readers, "It's the story I tell" (219).  In fiction terminology, this is the mark of an unreliable narrator.  But unreliable narrators are usually withholding a key piece of information from their audience.  In a non-fiction memoir, this device can easily raise questions about the veracity of anything the narrator imparts.  Complete with an odd comma inserted into his text, Robb does reveal his own unreliability: "I am not sure, that I have these stories exactly right, but that's how I recollected them for a while now.  That's how I tell them."  His memory, complete with imagined additions, replay the stories with details and information that certainly did not exist when they were originally told by the people they actually happened to.

    Perhaps the most authentic re-told family stories come in Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls.  Although the tales in Half Broke are a few shades more subjective than even Robb's partially made-up retellings, they come off sounding like just the sort one might expect from a family hand-me-down.  They adhere to neither historical veracity nor consistency between one another.  A story told exactly the same way twice is told, not from memory of the event (or story as it was originally heard) by out of habitual retelling.

    Walls narrates this "True-Life Novel" in the persona of her own grandmother.  This lends an air of credibility to the stories she relates which would not otherwise be present in the book coming from a more distantly involved narrator.  The family stores then seem to come from someone with direct personal interest in the events of these family stories rather than a removed descendent.  One example of this would be Walls (as her own grandmother) recounting "Dad's pa" serving under "Colonel Robert E. Lee ... stationed on the Texas frontier, fighting Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowa" (11).  Robert E. Lee had one of the most documented lives in human history, and a cursory glance at his military record shows that, while not an impossibility, it would take a most anguished stretch of the the concept of time and of the English language to have Robert Casey "serving" under Lee in that particular time and place.  Likewise would be the case of the family story told about Billy the Kid, "who had stopped at the Casey Ranch when Dad was a teenager" (35).  Although Walls does not provide the date of the narrative in which these stories were told, it is again factually unlikely that Adam Casey (Dad) was of the age where this was possible.  But, again, these are hand-me-down family stories, and they are told in Half Broke Horse under that auspice.  They sound as if they were originally told that way, and in an age long before the history of the world was accessible with a few keystrokes and access to the internet; they are re-told with the authenticity of a folk tale.  More intriguing then, are the conflicting stories about Adam Casey's temper and accusations he faced concerning a murder. 

    In what began as an argument over fence lines, Adam Casey was accused of murdering another man.  As Walls relates it, Adam "insisted he'd been framed ... and after serving three years in prison, he was set free" (8).  There are many reiterations that Adam didn't murder the man and yet successive unrelated stories Walls shares paint a contradicting portrait of the man.  One of these conflicting stories holds that "he had a terrible temper" and "impatience with folks who had trouble understanding what he said" (given that he had a limp and a speech impediment due to a horse having kicked him in the head when he was younger).  "He'd start sputtering and cursing, and ... pull out his pistol and plug away at things, aiming to miss people—most of the time."  One incident in particular Walls cites as having Adam so enraged as to attempt to murder a tinker who Adam thought "overcharged to repair the kettle."  Adam went to get his guns, but the Mexican woman who helped around the Casey house hid them.  "Dad worked himself into a lather, hollering about his missing guns, but I was convinced Lupe saved that tinker's life" (11-12).  This is not the description of a man who could rightfully claim innocence when accused of having carried out violent retribution upon another.  But it is evidence that all of the family stories as they came down to Jeannette Walls were ones that had been collected and compressed and retold by family members over the span of several generations.

    Just because the tales Jones, Robb, and Walls tell of their families have differing levels of credibility doesn't mean they aren't true.  There is a modern proverb from author Neil Gaiman which states, "Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot."  According to this, stories hold more longevity than factual events do.  Solidifying this point from another perspective is a line from a parable by lyrical poet and story-teller Robert Hunter: "Stories are as much a part of a human as their blood, their bones, their children, their lovers and their dreams."

    The family stories Jones, Robb, and Walls offer us are, by their very context and own admissions, not meant to be taken as literally and factually true.  They are, after all, stories told by others as stories of their own.  That makes them folklore of a sort, whether they remain within the bloodline of a family or are shared by someone in that family with an untold number of strangers reading the words on the page of a published book.  If fiction can be called a lie that tells the truth, can not the same be considered for the stories we hear on cold nights when we sit near a warm hearth with a preferred drink in hand and ears eager to hear the tales handed down one to another through the years, without holding them to the scrutiny we would wish from someone swearing before their personal Almighty that what they are telling you is as pure a form of truth as Socrates, Avicenna, Kant, or Nietzsche ever dreamt of in their small epistemological philosophies.

Works Cited

Gaiman, Neil. Sandman: Dream Country. New York: Vertigo, 1992. Print.

Hunter, Robert. "The Orfeo Files." Letter to Terence McKenna. May 1996. Online.

Jones, Carroll Clark. Rooted Deep in the Pigeon Valley: A Harvest of Western
    Carolina Memories. Wilmington: Winoca, 2009. Print.

Robb, Daniel. Sloop. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Print.

Walls, Jeanette. Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel. New York: Scribner, 2009.
    Print.


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Drydocking Sloop

English 363
January 29, 2010

Drydocking Sloop

I entered the little cafe, which was built flat-roofed and crisp of line in the '50s, and now had hardwood counters and tables, shade-grown coffees (promoting triple-canopy ecosystems, birdlife, and general ecological health), and whole-grain pastries.  It is, of course, a vital part of the process of "boatbuilding" to visit such places often, and sitting there at a varnished hrdwood table was Ben Travis, local hydrology engineer—a wiry, grey-haired forty-five-year-old who seemed always to have a glint in his eye, and (more to the point) was building a thirty-six-foot schooner in his backyard, which he intended to sail around the world with his family.

I asked him the green white oak question, and suddenly the glint vanished, replaced by the blank look of one who knows he has valuable and arcane knowledge. (Robb 93)

    This passage reveals to me another example of the narrator's sense of subtle smug condescension, not towards the reader or audience per se, but a general voice of superiority.  It also has an example of what could be termed hollow description—that is, a descriptive passage that reads well, but shows very little concrete evidence without having to dissect the sentence to infer its meaning.

    Let us begin with this latter point, concerning the hollow descriptions.  When Robb-as-narrator tells us that this "little cafe" was "crisp of line in the '50s, and now had hardwood counters and tables" it calls to mind far more about what is not being described as much as what is being described.  What exactly is 1950s "crisp of line" design, and how does that differ from the apparently more recent style of "hardwood counters and tables"?  In my own experience, hardwood style isn't necessarily "crisp" but it is usually straight of line (hence a specific varietal of tree is known as lodgepole pine because of its even grain and pole-line straightness).  The following description of Ben Travis does indeed show us-as-readers something about the fellow, but it relies on worn-out clichés to do so: "wiry, grey-haired forty-five-year-old who seemed always to have a glint in his eye" is a generic description of an archetype who is wise and happy and, according to cliché tradition, is about to become serious and impart Very Important Wisdom.  Obliging, this happens in the following paragraph when "suddenly the glint vanished, replaced by the blank look of one who knows he has valuable and arcane knowledge."  The knowledge in this instance is valuable within context and arcane only so far as people have been using white oak to build boats in New England, so the use of "arcane" seems a bit brash and overblown.  Or, one could argue with a Hemingway attitude, that "arcane" is a ten dollar word used when a fifty cent one might have sufficed.  But fifty cents doesn't get one very far in this little cafe with its shade-grown coffee.

    Which brings up the former point concerning the narrator's smug voice.  To what purpose does it serve to offer a comment (complete with Very Important Sounding parenthetical) about "shade-grown coffees (promoting triple-canopy ecosystems, birdlife, and general ecological health), and whole-grain pastries"?  Personally, having been a professional coffee-roaster, I am familiar with the extent of coffee practices around the world and the value of fair-trade organic (why were these two features not mentioned?) shade-grown coffee (coffee being the second largest commodity traded in world markets and ethical business models within the industry can set standards for thousands of others), but in unpacking the meaning of Robb's passage here, I call into question the term "triple-canopy," never having heard it before, nor able to find any reference to such a thing outside of Robb's own narrative.  This description sounds more at home in a sales pamphlet than a narrative memoir, unless the point is to ensure us-as-readers that the narrator is a socially conscious supporter of environmental causes and is hoping for a big thumbs up and us-as-readers to collectively say, "Good for you."

    The point of this passage from Robb is, I think, to show us the sort of everyday places in his small town where old knowledge and wise still reside, and it waits, available for the asking, to seekers such as the narrator to come along and pluck it from today's vine.  This wisdom and knowledge is, of course, represented by Ben Travis, while the cafe in which he waits for the seekers of his arcane wisdom is a place that was built some fifty years ago (showing it has some sense of tradition in a region with only a few hundred years of Western Civilization under its metaphoric belt) but now has a much simpler air about it, embedded, perhaps, in the grain of the varnished hardwood counters and tables.

    I understand that the author (via his narrative persona) seems to attempt to show us-as-readers—the sense that some wisdom, the important knowledge, is something that comes from age and place and word-of-mouth handed down from adept to apprentice.  I just don't think he does so without being smug and disingenuous towards the audience and the world that resides outside his small sphere of influence.  It feels to me more like reading a political propaganda piece or moralistic tract than the tale of someone looking to folk wisdom and tradition in order to fulfill their own spiritual path.


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