A Shaping Power
“I am moved to write essays,” Scott Russell Sanders says in his introduction to The Force of Spirit, “not because I understand so much but because I understand so little.” Characteristic is the humility of that assertion, and consonant with it is the modest voice in the fourteen essays that follow. However, that modest voice is also intrepid; it frames ultimate questions, “Where are we, in what sort of universe?” for example, then probes for answers, all the while recognizing that an “obvious risk is that my answers will be too small, too clumsy, an amateur's raid on mystery,” but in the same breath concluding: “that is less of a risk than to leave the questions unasked.”
One such question wonders what binds together “the seeming scatter of things.” Sanders' answer, if answer it is, has him “pointing to an elusive energy, a shaping power that flashes forth in nature, in gesture, in human speech and action. And when I glimpse it, I can do little more than cry, 'There it is!'” How to name such a power; God, Yahweh, Creator, Allah, Manitou, all such names are charged in that they are “freighted with a long, compromising history.” In the end Sanders opts for spirit, “because the word seems to catch the lightness, radiance, and wind-like subtlety of the power that I seek.” Such seeking is at the heart of all of his personal essays, it seems to me, those in this collection as well as those in his many other collections. All those personal essays are “offerings of words,” and each is made at the altar of life itself.
In the title essay Sanders seeks this power as he stares at the face of human mortality, visiting his dying fathering-law whose “heart is simply wearing out,” recalling the recent death of his mother-in-law, “whittled away for half a dozen years by Alzheimer's disease.” Each body had collapsed “like an empty sack,” leaving one to wonder what had been inside all along. “Yet who can accept that we are merely meat?” Sanders exclaims, making clear that he can't, and won't. Instead, he ponders the force that keeps his father-in-law "asking questions while the tide of life withdraws from him," the force that "abandoned the body of [his mother-in-law] and left it like a piece of shrouded furniture." Even if that force is nameless, he says, "Wherever it flows--in person or place, in animal or plant or the whole of nature--we feel the pressure of the sacred, and that alone deserves our devotion." But he does name that force, that pressure, names it spirit, and he uses it "to speak of the current that lifts us into this life and bears us along and eventually lets us go."
Subsequent essays reflect on one aspect or another of that life and that current. In "Amos and James," Sanders recalls how Biblical voices helped him as a child to reckon with "family turmoil, dread of death, and fear of my own rebellious body," then helped him as a young adult to articulate his position regarding his draft eligibility for the Vietnam War. In "Learning from the Prairie," a recounting of a visit to the Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas, he quotes Wes Jackson, a visionary who explains a “new paradigm [in agriculture] that believes less in human cleverness and more in natural wisdom,” a paradigm that places its trust in a land that has known for ages how to nourish its residents and sustain itself. In “The Power of Stories,” Sanders elaborates on the ten ways he sees stories benefiting humans and thereby being a source of hope, including their capacity to “teach us how to be human.” And in “Hawk Rising,” he describes the moment when he “looked up to see the bird swerving in the air, and I knew it was my father,” a lesson from a red tail that led him to feel his kinship to a universal genetic family “no longer merely as an intellectual notion derived from the study of biology, but now as a truth of the heart.”
Truths of the heart resonate as well in the elegant pair of essays Sanders wrote for his two children on the occasions of their respective marriages, one “To Eva,” the other “To Jesse.” The former builds thematically on the etymology of “wife,” the latter on that of “husband.” The former reflects concern for the world's “constraints that apply only to women,” the latter for the weight of “the history of men's mistreatment of women.” The former describes a father trying to raise a daughter without gender bias; the latter describes a father walking with a son to reaffirm a love tested by “heartache and anger.” So they are different essays for different children. But they are both full of fatherly devotion, and they both contain wise words about marriage that stem from his own with the mother of those children, that it is “the trading of a cheap kind of freedom for a richer and more durable kind” and that it is “a life's work, as demanding and rewarding as anything you will ever do.”
I don't know if my students would be as moved as I am by this pair of essays; I am experienced in both marriage and parenthood, and they are experienced in neither. But they are children of parents raising them in their own ways, and I suspect that the specifics of Sanders' wedding gifts of words would interest them if not move them. And I suspect as well that his thoughtful definition of spirit in the collection as a whole would intrigue even those who professed themselves atheist or agnostic. An essay on the writing of personal essays and another comparing the work of a writer to the work of a carpenter, as well as “The Power of Stories,” would, I believe, shape their sense of how powerful language can be. Even if that weren't to happen consciously, reading Sanders' exquisite prose, so intricate and elegant in its syntax, so precise and potent in its diction, so sure-handed in its structure: reading that prose could only make them better writers. I have previously used personal essays from two of Sanders' other collections; I find myself eager to use some from this collection as well.
I want to end this review by quoting Scott Russell Sanders himself in two comments about his writing. “I bear in mind an audience as I write,” he says in “Wood Work.” “I think of my family and neighbors and friends, I think of my students, I think of people whom I've met on my travels, I think of writers living and dead whose books have nourished me. They are my cloud of witnesses. Hoping that the words I lay down will speak to them, I write with a feeling of responsibility and love.” In “Cabin Dreams” he adds: “The books that stand on my own shelves year after year…are those that speak to my condition, that help me pay attention to the inward and outward realities, that guide me toward a meaningful life. Why open any book, after all, if the reading does not return us to the world with a richer sense of who and where we are?” Reading The Force of Spirit generated in me just such a sense, and responsibility and love, along with humility were conspicuous in the heartfelt voice of its author. I felt that I had been witness to a most meaningful life.
Review © by Peter C. Greer and RSiSS
Phillips Exeter Academy
2004