Meditations from a Movable Chair

Cross Currents, Summer, 1999 by James E. Giles

Andre Dubus, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1998. 210pp. $23.00 (cloth).

There are two enduring reasons to read a book: for pleasure and for insight. When the two reasons come together synergistically, you have a favorite book and, if the author of that book produces the same pleasure and insight in subsequent works, you have a favorite author. Let my first choices, then, be the works of two of my favorite authors: Jorge Luis Borges and Andre Dubus. Borges, the Argentinean writer who died in 1986 without winning the Nobel Prize for literature (which many thought he richly deserved), has been well served by Collected Fictions, newly and uniformly translated by Andrew Hurley. These short stories combine scholarly and historical references and imaginative flights. Once you read Borges's work, the distinctiveness of his voice and his gifts will become apparent. His influence extends from Latin American writers like Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez to John Updike and Umberto Eco. Viking is to be commended for undertaking this collection of his fictions as part of their commemoration of the centenary of Borges's birth in 1999. (Viking will publish volumes of his selected poetry and selected nonfiction next year.)

Another favorite author, Andre Dubus, has published his second collection of essays, Meditations from a Movable Chair. Dubus' reputation is based primarily on his short stories, but he became a writer of unusually fine and well-crafted essays. In 1986, Dubus was hit by a car while trying to help a motorist in need. Until his recent death, he was confined to a wheelchair- hence the title of this collection. Dubus' turn to the essay allowed him to deal with this traumatic event. The accident and its aftermath acted like a time-release capsule that produces consequences over time. These essays are delayed epiphanies.

Dubus tests the limits of his ethic of manliness rooted in the sensibilities of an ex-Marine and a man who lived intensely in his body. He learns to appreciate the simple achievement of taking his first shower after his accident, "hot joy on my body, which for eight months had felt unclean" (78) - or making love as a cripple (91), the unsparing word by which he continues to describe his condition. In one of the best essays in the collection, "Giving Up the Gun," Dubus recognizes the need to resist the seductive link between manliness and gun owning. He had long owned a gun in order to protect those whom he loved. (In the first piece, "About Kathryn," he recounts the rape of his sister.) After his accident he continued to own a gun not only to protect others, but also to protect himself and to retain his manhood. But one day, recalling a confrontation that almost led to his killing another man, he decides to give up his gun. He ends the essay with these words: "Then I felt something detach itself from my soul, departing, rising, vanishing, and I said to God: It's up to You now. This is not the humble and pure and absolutely spiritual love of turning the other cheek On the train, I gave up answers that are made of steel that fire lead, and I decided to sit in a wheelchair on the frighteningly invisible palm of God" (193).

Invisible, but palpable because for Dubus the world exists incarnationally and life is sacramental. "I need," he writes, "sacraments I can receive through my senses. I need God manifested as Christ, who ate and drank and shat and suffered, and laughed. So I can dance with Him as the leaf dances in the breeze under the sun" (187). When the priest goes to the tabernacle for the consecrated hosts, Dubus sees that all experience is consecrated.

But the Eucharist is not only there in the tabernacle. I can feel it as I roll into the church. It fills the church. If the church had no walls, the Eucharist would fill the parking lot, the rectory, the nursing home, the football stadium. And the church has no walls, and the Eucharist fills the women smoking outside the nursing home; and the alcoholics waiting to gather, but already they are gathered, as they are gathered when they are apart; fills the man cursing God from the isolation of his mind; fills the old man watching a woman, and looking for robins. When I am enclosed by the walls and roof and floor, and the prayers and duration of Mass, I see this, and feel it; and when the priest places the Host in the palm of my hand, I put it in my mouth and taste and chew and swallow the intimacy of God (144-45).

The worth of these essays is in the pleasure we take in Dubus' use of language and in the insight they offer because he can look at himself and the world without sentimentality. This insight is profoundly simple to state but far from easy to absorb into our affections and actions:

I sing of those who cannot. To view human suffering as an abstraction, as a statement about how plucky we all are, is to blow air through brass while the boys and girls march off in parade to war. Seeing the flesh as only a challenge to the spirit is as false as seeing the spirit as only a challenge to the flesh. On the planet are people with whole and strong bodies, whose wounded spirits need the constant help that the quadriplegic needs for his body (155).