Reep

Mark Reep: art and writing, here

Some years ago I spent a long, hot, blue day sailing on Cayuga Lake with a new friend. After taking the measure of the loveliness of the lake and after adjusting our perspective to the horizon and the line of hilltops, and after the third beer and second sandwich extracted from the icebox, we found that we didn’t really have that much in common, and our conversation slipped into argumentation, which was then, as now, his chief dialectic, and which was then, the act I performed, or found myself performing, when I realized that the person with whom I was speaking was just too easily assuming that he was going to be able to get the better of me; in his opinion, in all matters.
I will always maintain that he is a good man, if for no other reason than having a son with a woman eighteen years older than he, and seeing that child through to college, another eighteen years after the parental relationship had foundered. Stout fellow! But his idea of proving his point (he worked in Cuban sugar cane fields in the 1980s, and formed cells of radicals all over central New York State whose worked hovered just below militant vandalism) consisted in the main of shrieking: “You mean you don’t think America is also a dictatorship?” In return, I would begin to analyze by means of spurious accusations, aloud and somewhat belligerently, that his motives in all his activism lay in Freudian sumps within himself, remarks that preceded, for both of us, those long minutes of silent brooding and painfully trying to eke out the killer retort.
There are those who will say that sailing washes away all sins.
The boat cut long reaches and vectors up and down the lake. One napped, the other reclined desultorily at the tiller.
The sun began its fall toward the western horizon, and we pointed the bow toward our port, as the wind began to fall.
Now there was less splash against the hull, and no fluttering of the mainsail. We dropped the jib.
I have always found it difficult to explain the tenderness inherent in rapprochement, as it seems to be one of those inflections of the human will that is sustained by the natural goodness of people who are not naturally cruel, or invidious, and who are through no credit of their own, the fruits of cultures that have settled around the very pole of benignity (after eons of anguish and rage). Perhaps Vincent and I merely thought that we did not care to witness the trashing of our acquaintance without further, more conclusive evidence of antipathy. Though it came to nothing and we met only one or two times more, the last hour of our conversation was an odd thing: constructive.
We worked together, in language and by fair trade, to conclude that it is a beneficial strategy to adhere to a salty execration of those persons with whom we disagreed, and never forgive them their trespasses, though under normal conditions they could blithely get away with all kinds of shit, uncontested. The corollary of this was that we excuse ourselves from meeting standards to which we hold others accountable, and it is in this way that I graft myself as stripling to sapling, to the idea that there is only one cardinal rule about good writing, and there is nothing I can do within my soul that will ever allow me to approximate that imperative.
Vincent and I declared that we would rather be certain (and badly-behaved), than polite (and pusillanimous).
Somerset Maugham famously remarked that there are only three rules to writing a novel, but nobody knows what they are. I have misunderstood this for forty-five years, for what he was really saying was that there are three rules; there are exactly three; and whatever they are, there is not one less or one more than three.

Cit: Good writing has lucidity, force, and ease. (Edmund Wilson, upstate New Yorker.)

With which compare: The rich, euphuistic satire by which sentences resemble brambles tying knots in brambles (this, is my pond).

We matured out of the time we realized we were of the language, or literary, or the bookish sort, into those who formed opinions to wield against feeling vanquished in nowheresville. With brutish book reviewers and literary critics like me I would board a sailing ship and hound white whales, but I don’t believe I’d share toast and jam with those of whom I am egregiously suspicious, those who offer comment on prose fictions without mentioning their own stakes. Reviews are about reviewers.

Nor was I born to kingly manners, or to play left at Wrigley. By character and habit I gathereth hordes and embrace mosaic stars. I choose environments in which there are fugues and flourishes, a thousand miles on the road, and thunderstorms.

Mark Reep makes constructs. Prose gem-boxes, by which I mean to commend them at the highest order. Conventions of elegant structure are acquitted purely (the selection of detail is unexpected and wise; the energy form is like breeze on pond; basic verities sculpt one another in a candy bowl) but these are the least of his accomplishments. A reader is granted access by detecting in her or his soul the sound of natural language, and before we deform English with artifice, its conveyance in our heart runs alongside a panther in the sunshine, and it is transparent, and it has the suppleness of a dancer, and no element of it is hard-driven or ridden, bandied or bopped: hence, lucidity, force and ease. The heart beats the rhythm of illumination; equivocation falls away, and we take this stuff personally.
Intelligibility is not a value any more than paraphrasability, or the knack of reducing an episode of “I Love Lucy” to fifteen words for TV Guide. The single point of access to Mark’s vignettes lives in the shadows, the spaces between the landmarks. It is there our sentiments of memory and association can thrive, not limited to but enhanced along the self-evident axis of the story line. His is the aesthetic of the glimpse. Ezra Pound’s haiku, “In a Station of the Metro”

The apparition of these faces,
Petals on a wet black bough

may tell you more about the Paris underground railway in 1912 than any extensive transliteration. In a sense, Reep’s prose is imagist in nature, but instead of being divorced from journalistic scene descriptions, it actually thrives in stories that can be elucidated by those with a pure grasp of expository prose. There’s a great trick in this, almost as if the author is asking you to look at horizontal and vertical black and white patterns, yet see with your inner heart’s eye, the colors and textures that are implied within. There is quite a long history of trusting the sensibility of the artist to reveal truth within, that may rest apart from intention, if intent was ever there in the first place. Mary Shelley, writing Frankenstein, knew she was plumbing aspects of the soul that no one could rightly understand until Freud and Jung and Marx came along to provide their coherent explications, and in the early 1960s Dylan told Baez he didn’t know what this shit means [his lyrics] but eventually somebody would figure it out. Nothing is so mysterious as the plain truth directly stated.
And so again the contradiction, aptly expressed by His Grouchoness, declining acceptance by standards that would embrace himself: this imagist writing defies the deconstruction literary theory with which I fuck the stars, and presents instead, without the bramble pits in which I tangle, the point of the exercise, which I will call for the moment, time-travel. Maybe a horse dies, maybe a girl drives a car, but a reader will have taken himself or herself to a place he or she may seem to have remembered, to a place that exists only in their deepest self-actualization: in their hands the gift of being able to understand yes, or to be able to understand no, the sensitivities that one writer has offered. The clarity of the truth (perception and expression inextricably one, and kind-hearted) should not be obscured by limpidity of prose, though that too has a value with which one may confront the rabble of crowds. The residing place of the works’ sensibility is in our assumption that a magnetic resonance imaging machine would reveal in the prose elements of kindness, and a sympathetic heart, without which it could not exist. With which compare the black evil beast of Paul Auster, for whom storyline alone is assumed to be enough to capture a walnut he has found and wishes to place in our (obeisant, obsequious) hand. Reep’s prose pieces convey so much more from the underwater: fishes, kelp beds, currents, and other evidence that craftsmanship here means what it did for many artisans in the 16th Century: this axe is meant to last my lifetime, and contains everything I know about form, expression, and function. This woodsman’s mentor is here, his wisdom and something that came to be known in later centuries as pride, a sentiment of which he had no knowledge at all. This axe was to be complete, and it could be nothing less than comprehensive; that is, it was rich with the inferences associated with his deepest memory of learning axecraft from men who had in turn derived the skill of axe-making from generations before. The Modern Age taught men shortcuts, and firms and companies and consortiums and rafts of wage-slaves made axes that barely eked themselves inside the definition, and the appearance of axehood was all that was required (hence Auster).
I happen to live in the satire of euphuistic embroidery, but what I admire more truly, is the Wilsonian prose Reep writes. Lucidity reveals the generous soul within, as well as the more fundamental truth behind the storyline; it also divulges the essential goodness of a writer who is making a gentle offering of a peek inside the Grail cup rather than scurrying legions of comedians around a picnic table. Force bespeaks the sinuous, natural beauty of a ballet dancer or a second baseman, for whom excessive movements or contemplation create only falls and outs. Ease is the vibrating tone that rhymes a true story with the beneficent hum of natural, human and stellar harmonics.