An obscure writer looks at Borges' "Secret Miracle"

A few years ago, a friend of mine shared his draft novel with me, the one he's been trying to find a publisher for for years. I didn't think it was very good; it was a Christian novel that also had vampires in it. Just because I didn't like it doesn't mean it wasn't any good, of course: I thought all the Twilight stories were terrible, but millions of thirteen-year-old girls can't be that wrong. I think he realized that he was fighting an uphill battle trying to merge Christian themes and vampires in a way that would appeal to any audience an agent could sell the book to. But when we were talking about the odds of getting it published successfully, he told me this: "I can't give up. If I gave up, I don't think I could go on with my life."

I can relate to that feeling, as can a lot of writers who don't write fiction as our main gig. Fiction gives us a feeling that we exist for something more than our day jobs, much like every waiter/waitress in Hollywood is really an actor or every waiter/waitress in Nashville is really a singer. Certainly, in my case, after several false starts in life, when I really started to write seriously, it was a moment in my forties when I was asking myself if the life I was leading was really all there was to it.

Like dreams of making it as a singer or actor or professional athlete, one could find fulfillment in the activity even if one never really "makes it." For simplicity, let's say "making it" means being able to make a living entirely off the activity. Even if you can't sing on Broadway or at the Grammy Awards (is that still a thing?), you can sing at Karaoke nights or in churches. You can act in community theater. You can play basketball in a rec league. Even on this much smaller level, talent and hard work will produce better results, so you can still use it as an outlet for your desire to better yourself.

But what if you knew that was as far as you were ever going to get? I suppose it's easier to realize this at an earlier stage as an athlete. For one thing, sports gives us more objective feedback about our ability; zero points in a game means something in a way editors quickly winnowing down the slush pile doesn't. There's also the age factor in sports (and, let's be honest, in acting and singing to a great extent), which doesn't really exist in writing. This makes it possible for a writer to follow a false hope for much longer.

This is a subject I've possibly beaten to death already, but it continues to weigh heavily on my mind. I've had some success in the writing equivalent of community theater, but I haven't had my big break yet. I wrote some stories this year that I really felt were my best yet, and I sent them to the top journals I'd been avoiding. I've had zero breakthroughs. The "right" thing for a writer is probably to just roll with those disappointments and not give them another thought, but I've never been one for doing things the right way. It doesn't seem like an overreaction after four years to doubt that the big IT is ever going to happen for me.

Borges' Secret Miracle

I've referred to this story before, because I can't stop thinking about it. If you haven't read it, there's a decent-ish translation here, but the synopsis goes something like this: Joseph Hladik is a literary critic in Prague of mixed Jewish ancestry who is arrested by the Gestapo in 1939 when they take over. He is condemned to death and spends a little over a week contemplating his life and impending execution. His life hits home for me:

Hladík had passed forty years of age.  Apart from some friendships and many habits, the problematic study of literature constituted his life; like every writer, he measured the virtues of others by what was done by them and asked that others measure him by what he glimpsed or outlined.  All the books he had given to the press infused him with utter remorse.  In his examinations of the oeuvres of Boehme, Abenesra, and Fludd, he had essentially taken part in mere application; in his translation of Sephir Yezirah, in negligence, fatigue, and conjecture.  The Vindication of Eternity he judged to be perhaps less deficient; the first volume recounts the diverse eternities that men have devised, from the motionless Parmenidean One to Hinton’s modifiable past; the second denied (with Francis Bradley) that all the deeds of the universe integrate a temporal series.  It argues that the number of man’s possible experiences is not infinite and one sole “repetition” would suffice to demonstrate that time is a fallacy... Unfortunately, the arguments that demonstrate this fallacy are no less false; Hladík used to go over them again with a certain scornful perplexity.  He had also written a series of Expressionist poems; these, to the poet’s embarrassment, figured in an anthology of 1924, and no anthology after that failed to inherit them.  From all of this equivocal and languid past Hladík wanted to redeem himself with the play in verse The Enemies (Hladík praised verse because it impeded spectators from forgetting unreality, which is the condition of art).

So he's had some small successes, and he's been able to glimpse some big ideas, but hasn't really realized them. And now it's too late, because he's about to die.

So Hladik asks God to help him finish the one work he thinks will justify his existence. "In the darkness, he spoke to God: If I exist in any way, if I am not one of Your repetitions and errors, I exist as the author of The Enemies.  To come to the end of this play which can justify me and justify You, I require one more year.  Grant me these days, You who are the centuries and time.  It was the last night, the most atrocious, but ten minutes afterwards, sleep had washed over him like dark water."

In the end, God grants the miracle, but it is known only to Hladik. As Hladik stands before the firing squad, God halts time, but only Hladik is aware of the miracle. Hladik cannot move, but he can think, and, helped by the metrical nature of his play, he is able to write the play entirely in his head. It is slow going, but he keeps at it--what else is there to do?

Interestingly, he is not writing the play for God, who created the miracle: "He did not work for posterity, nor even for God, of whose literary preferences he knew little." For whom is he writing it, then? I think the answer is in Hladik's prayer: to "justify me and justify (God)." Merely to have written the play will accomplish justification. It is not necessary that anyone should read it.

That's a nice story, but do I really believe this?

A good friend of mine keeps telling me that since I seem to have a predilection for writing fiction, I should just accept that the odds are always going to be long that I'll "make it" and write for myself. Joseph Hladik, standing secretly in an alternate reality before the firing squad, would probably agree with my friend. But is this just mystical hogwash? What difference does it make if I write a story in my head, or--as has really happened--a novel and other stories I'm having a hard time getting published? Does this really justify my existence?

I've often stuck to the line that if I knew, through some divine messenger, that nobody would ever read what I wrote, I'd stop writing. Although I wonder if this is true; I write on this blog without a terribly large audience. I get between fifty and a hundred hits after each post, more or less. I assume half of those are bots or some other kind of Internet weirdness. Maybe there are a few silent folks from my target audience of struggling writers out there, but if I quit writing this blog tomorrow, the world wouldn't notice. For some reason, though, that really doesn't bother me with the blog. I write the blog to help people if possible, but also just to put words to thoughts stuck in my brain so I can then move on to other thoughts.

When I write non-fiction for this blog, I write like my friend would want me to: for the sake of writing itself. But when I write fiction, I take things personally. Rejections hurt--every damn time. Does that mean that I'm actually a non-fiction writer mistaking myself for a fiction writer? Since I can do the former without really caring about the results, is that my real "calling," the real thing that justifies me and the clunky creator who made me?

That's a possibility that occurs to me more and more as time goes by, but I still keep feeling compelled to write one more story. Blog posts generally feel breezy and--with some exceptions--come without me chasing them too hard. Most of the stories I write seem to run from me like Jonah ran from God. They cost me a lot of work to write, which is why I can't help but wonder why I write them when I fail so often to get anyone to read them.

The world seems a graver place to me every day, and I continue to get older. I may not be sentenced to die tomorrow, but the end will come sooner or later--sooner today than yesterday. In 2018, I'm moving in one direction or another with writing. I'm either going to take a long break from it to see if I still want to do it, or I'm going to double down and write a lot more. I haven't decided yet. Eighteen months ago, when I finished my novel, I thought I had already had my moment of justifying myself and God. Maybe God is just taking a long time to decide what to do with what I made.