Awe

As you may have seen, Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris has been revived after a devasting fire almost six years ago that sent its iconic spire tumbling to the ground.

Amazingly, it’s been rebuilt, mostly using the exact same materials and techniques that were used when construction began in 1163. Some of this is unseen, such as the oak support beams, and much of it radiates to the eye, like the erasure of time’s grime to the stone, stained glass, and pipe organ. 

About the restoration, Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times architecture critic, wrote:

For a wider world, it underscores that calamities are surmountable, that some good and true things endure—that humanity may not yet have lost touch with its best self.

This past year, I read Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame for the first time, a breathtaking tale that takes you high and low through the cathedral, often following Quasimodo the bell-ringer who scales and descends the building both inside and out with muscular arms and deaf ears. At the end, I gasped when I discovered where Quasimodo ended up. If you’re in the mood for melodrama mixed with history, give it a go.

The cathedral comes alive in the book, a place of sin and sanctuary, as here:

Only the great rose window of the façade, whose thousand colors were steeped in a ray of horizontal sunlight, glittered in the gloom like a mass of diamonds, and threw its dazzling reflection to the other end of the nave.

Hugo partly intended the book, published in 1831, as a cri de coeur for preserving the cathedral, which had fallen into disrepair. The story so captured the public’s imagination that the King ordered a major restoration, which goes to show the power of a good tale.

I’m also reminded of Raymond Carver’s short story “Cathedral,” which I often revisit, about a closed-off man who finds his life cracking open when he draws a cathedral on paper with a blind man’s hand atop his, to give the blind man a sense of what a cathedral looks like. The story is included and deeply analyzed in Gotham’s book Writing Fiction.

And why this matters to you and me…

Creating a work of art—be it a painting or poem or pyramid—is a miraculous event. People have been doing it for, well, who knows how long? You may be doing it now… or hoping to. It can be done. The results may be magnificent. Yet even if they fall short of that mark, there’s an overpowering beauty in the act of aspiring.

Alex Steele,

Gotham President

Some Stories Need Time

The song “The Show Must Not Go On” by the band Harvey Danger, has this couplet:

You can bash your head against the wall, forever, the wall will never change

But if you start to like the bloody bruises, the wall cannot be blamed.

It cracks me up every time I hear it, but it also puzzles me. Is it about reveling in your own stubbornness? Or is it about persistence?

Recently Gotham teacher Teresa Wong suggested an answer, when she visited my class recently to talk about her new memoir All Our Ordinary Stories, because writing that book took her 20 years.

She wrote the first draft when she was in her mid-20s, after taking a trip to China and Hong Kong with her parents. She knew there was a story there, about that trip and her parents, but she couldn’t find the right way to tell it.

“It was just fundamentally flawed in a way that I couldn’t understand at that point and that I do kind of understand now 20 years later,” Teresa said

She put it away, came back, put it away, came back, trying out new approaches, none of which worked.

Meanwhile, Teresa did some other things:

  • She became a mother.
  • She became an artist and cartoonist.
  • She experienced post-partum depression and write a book about it, which became her memoir Dear Scarlet.
  • During the pandemic lockdown of 2020, she started her Substack, Closet Dispatch, where she draws and tells a story about one item of clothing in her closet.
  • She became an Artist in Residence at the University of Calgary.

“I needed to add that extra layer of my having my own kids before I could understand my parents as well as I could in the book, to add the depth and perspective to everything,” Teresa said. “I needed to become a cartoonist, because I really needed the imagery and the interplay between image and text to really bring out my parents’ experiences in vivid detail.”

No doubt, trying and failing to write All Our Ordinary Stories helped Teresa write Dear Scarlet. And completing and publishing Dear Scarlet helped her solve the riddle of how to write All Our Ordinary Stories.

For some stories, when we say they need time what we’re really saying is they need you to keep living your life. You need to go to Hong Kong, have one more conversation with your mother, drive cross country, take and quit that job with the crazy boss, write other essays or poems or scripts or books. You need to come back again and again and hit that wall again. You need to fail.

And then, the miracle happens.

“What I ended up doing was just listing out all the stories that I wanted to tell, and then trying to group them into loose themes,” Teresa said. “Once I had that, it made it doable in a way that I hadn’t figured out for the many years I had been working on this.”

Persistence sometimes feels like bashing your head against a wall. But it’s not. It’s a vigil you hold for your story, so that when the right way to tell it finally shows up, you’re there, ready to usher it in.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty

Disorientation

I’ve never quite understood Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which is probably the point because it’s pretty much an exercise in nonsense. Alice follows a white rabbit with a pocket watch through a rabbit hole where a potion shrinks her to the size of a doll then a cake makes her nine-feet-tall and she cries a lake of tears and…

It gets crazier from there. Ever play croquet with a flamingo?

But I’m reading it now with my daughter and it’s resonating for me. Alice becomes totally disoriented—and lots of people (including me) are feeling disoriented by the weather and the world and what not. And sometimes disorientation becomes the norm for a while. 

Feeling disoriented can be unsettling in life, but it’s great for stories. For example…

“Cathedral” – a short story by Raymond Carver in which a curmudgeonly guy is thrown off balance when his wife invites an old friend, a blind man, to come stay with them.

Coming to America – a movie in which a pampered prince from Zamunda comes to NYC to search for a bride, posing as a commoner, a classic fish-out-of-water story. 

The Year of Magical Thinking – a memoir by Joan Didion in which Joan’s husband of 40 years suddenly passes away, leaving her very much alone. 

Think of the really disorienting times in your life, like…

You bring home that baby from the hospital and you’ve got no earthly idea what to do and hopefully it doesn’t turn into a pig like the baby in Wonderland. 

You’re driving along and the sky is an eerie pastel shade and the radio tells you to stay away from a certain intersection because a tornado is heading right there and you realize you’re at that very intersection. 

You travel to Marrakesh and you’ve been told repeatedly not to let a stranger act as your guide, but you’re wandering through the labyrinthine medina jet-lagged and you do just that and who knows where this guide is leading you?

Yeah, those things happened to me.

What’s really interesting is how your characters handle the disorientation that overtakes them. Do they find themselves drowning, or learn to ride the waves, or discover how to reach a saving shore? Or…something else?

And, hey, we have the perfect contest for these disorienting times: Invent a Word. Words help some of us make sense of things, and we’re giving you permission to add something entirely new to our language. Lewis Carroll was quite good at inventing words. Like galumph.

And as the Mock Turtle in Wonderland says, “Why, if a fish came to me, and told me he was going a journey, I should say ‘With what porpoise?’”

Alex Steele

Gotham President