What Metaphors Are Used in Pop Art by Brian Doyle
My bang-up friend Brian Doyle—"BD" to me for a quarter century, and so pardon my addiction to calling him that still—was always an unusually fast and proficient author. Simply from the 2010 publication of his start novel, Mink River, until his fatal brain-tumor diagnosis late in 2016, he caught fire. During that period he published two collections of short stories, 4 collections of the prose/poem hybrids he dubbed "proems," seven collections of the power-packed short memoirs, epiphanies, and reflections he too reductively chosen simply "essays," and v more novels. Over the same span he edited Portland magazine, under BD's tenure the most heavily awarded alumni mag in the land every bit he helped resurrect, for Americans, the ancient and invaluable genre we now phone call "spiritual writing." Information technology strains my sense of the possible to add that BD was simultaneously giving public readings and talks by the dozens, writing recommendation letters, visiting grade schools, high schools, colleges, and book groups to regale what amounted to thousands of people of all ages, writing rivers of the more than entertaining emails on the planet, and privately mentoring, entertaining, and consoling more people than we will ever know. Similar any practiced man or woman dedicated to compassion in a post-fact, postal service-democratic corporate country, he likewise kept decorated abrasive the hell out of a few worthy enemies. I tin can't resist adding that the typing portion of all these achievements was accomplished with precisely 2 fingers. I challenge the world's pianists to run into what they can practice with the same 2 fingers. Brian's nonfiction appeared in scores of America'southward finest magazines, won iv Pushcart Prizes, and was regularly reprinted in every major nonfiction album in the country—including seven times in Best American Essays. His writing won many more honors than I take space to listing here. Just the responses from other writers, many of them renowned, are so remarkable I must include a few. The great Ian Frazier said that Brian "wrote more powerfully about religion than anyone in his generation." The peripatetic and contemplative Pico Iyer: "Almost nobody has written with the joy, the galloping energy, the quiet beloved of censor and family unit and what's all-time in us, the living optimism." Renowned boundness savior Hob Osterlund: "He knew the strength of women without reduction, without fearfulness or pretense, without the need to saint." The belatedly Mary Oliver on his essays: "They were all favorites." (And for a Catholic author to have his work chosen for All-time American Essays by Mary Oliver and by the famous atheist Christopher Hitchens bespeaks BD'due south farthermost range of appeal.) "We love him," writes philosopher and earth defender Kathleen Dean Moore: Brian gets fan postal service, sure, but also dear letters. . . . People beloved his work, merely more than that, they truly beloved him. We dear him because he spreads his arms and lets us into his astonishing mind and dizzying heart. . . .The moments he shares with u.s. sing of adoration for all the whistling, sobbing, surging cosmos. . .[and] past opening our hearts without breaking them he answers our deepest yearning for significant. Which is joy. Which is gratitude. How in heaven'southward proper name did i man win such strikingly intimate praise? I would suggest that the extreme intimacy of his nonfiction was non simply delightful but highly contagious. BD saw his stories as "diving boards, non news reports." He was interested less in "ostensible fact and nominal accuracy" than in "the bends and layers and implications and insinuations and shimmers of retention." Within those shimmers, he said, were "the seeds of stories to which other people tin connect." A far less subtle feature of Brian's judgement-making: when he intuited the approaching roar of a whitewater rapid in his imagination, he paddled steady on, refusing to portage round fifty-fifty the wildest h2o. The prose that resulted made timid readers feel as though they'd been thrown into a kayak and sent careering downward a literary equivalent of Idaho's Payette River during leap runoff. But sentences that alarm the timid past enkindling them to the wilder possibilities of language are heightened, not inept. BD played fast and loose with sentence length, rhythms, grammar, alliteration, and diction to disburden a eye and mind burgeoning with empathy, quickness, joy, wit, and dearest of "the sinuous riverine lewd amused pop and song of the American linguistic communication." Calling a foul on such phrases is like disallowing sure three-point shots of BD's Golden State Warrior hero, Steph Curry, because they were launched then ridiculously far from the basket. If the ball goes through the hoop and if the sentence sings, both of them count, and I'thou giving BD himself the last word on this thing, his ten exclamation points included: From: Doyle, Brian Subject: a ha!!!!!!!!!! Date: January 2, 2015 at 11:34:43 AM MST To: David Duncan Have y'all ever paid attention to Tolstoy'southward language? Enormous sentences, one clause piled on top of some other. Do not remember this is accidental, that it is a flaw. It is art, and it is accomplished through hard piece of work. –Anton Chekhov Brian Doyle lived the pleasure of bearing daily witness to placidity glories subconscious in people, places, and creatures of picayune or no size, renown, or commercial value, and he brought inimitably playful or soaring or aching or heartfelt language to his tellings. When he finished a nonfiction gem he stacked it in his study until he had built upwardly a modest just serviceable book manuscript, which he mailed off without fuss, usually to very pocket-size religious publishers. Many of BD'southward friends, myself included, felt that by handful his best nonfiction through thirteen modest volumes over the years, he prevented his nonfiction from winning the national repute it deserved. This, coupled with his financial fears for his family after his tumor was diagnosed, is why, shortly later his commencement devastating brain surgery, I asked BD's permission to consolidate, in a single book, the kind of nonfiction that earned the extreme praise I've quoted from friends, fans, and editors of magazines, with all proceeds to go to his family unit. Brian did non say yes. He said, "Sweetness Jesus, YES! . . . Take whatever you lot want and tell whatever stories you desire." With that blessing in paw, I fix about assembling a collection with ii magnificent co-editors: the editor-in-principal of Orion mag, H. Emerson (Chip) Blake, and the writer Kathleen (Katie) Yale. BD's nonfiction appeared more than whatsoever other author's in Orion, and Chip and I had worked together on my Orion writing for years. Katie also worked for Orion, including on many of the BD pieces, and she knew his piece of work more widely and securely than Chip and I did, making her the perfect guide in our efforts. To commune with our friend on this project became a joy to all three of us. * Speaking of my ain friendship with Brian: when we met 25 years ago we each experienced, without overtly acknowledging it, a flame in each of united states that we could always detect burning in the other; a flame we both held to be inextinguishable. We recognized our shared willingness to speak of nigh annihilation we perceived equally spiritual truth. We besides loved, during our afternoon work doldrums, to share stuff and nonsense of no redeeming social or spiritual value whatsoever. In response, for case, to a random baseball notation from me most how terrifying it must have been for batters to face the six-foot-ten-inch bullpen Randy Johnson, whose wingspan was and so wide and fastball and then fast he seemed to reach out and set his pitches in the catcher's mitt by hand, BD instantly replied that Johnson towered atop a mound "like a stork on acid," whereas Roger Clemens, since our topic was terror, " hulked on the mound, similar a supersized wolverine with hemorrhoids." I received 530 such emails and 200 snail-mail notes and missives from BD in our last ii years lonely, and sent back close to the same. Nosotros shot "riverine lewd amused pops and songs" back and forth the way tournament table tennis players exchange shots: for the high-speed joy of it. That joy was and so important to us both that, a few weeks afterwards BD'south death, it felt perfectly natural to sit down down and write him yet another letter. In this one I recalled an exchange, via our usual email ping-pong, in which we marveled that the bodies of copse are built by their downward hunger for world and h2o and by their upwards yearning for lite. How wonderful, nosotros agreed, that these paradoxical aims, instead of tearing a tree in two or causing it to die of indecision, cause information technology to abound tall and potent. And just as wonderful, I wrote to my flown friend, is how, "during the tree's afterlife, its quondam hunger and yearning transmogrifies into the enduring structural integrity known as wood. Wood is a tree's life history become something so solid that nosotros can hold it in our easily. This is not but some solitary cry or mournful eulogy. Right hither in the earth where every living thing dies, a fallen tree's integrity remains so literal that if a luthier adds strings to it, nosotros can turn the departed tree's dominicus-yearning and thirst-quenching into the sounds nosotros telephone call live music. And if a seeming lunatic smashes wood's integrity to a pulp, and so makes that pulp into newspaper, our ink can bring to life stories that multitudes can perform like symphonies in the sanctums of their very own depths and heights." It's a great solace to me to imagine how many readers accept washed exactly that with Brian's stories, and how many more will have that experience in this volume. * In a tribute in Christian Century, Jonathan Hiskes quotes Brian calling his writing "the effort to stare God in the eye." Equally BD's spiritual intimate over his concluding six years, I feel this touches the very heart of his aim. Brian's work, Hiskes writes, was a mystical project built-in of both joy and desperation.… The whirling adjectives, aphorisms, metaphors and paradoxes were his method of using every tool he could to excavate the rich seams of the examined life. He wanted more than than to stare God in the eye. He wanted to tell God a few things, and listen too. I picture him as a songwriter-king dancing earlier his Lord, pouring out words, intermingling praise, grief, fury and laughter. The brazenness makes me blench. Then it draws me in. Me also. Brian was a born cultural Catholic who cheerfully observed the rites of his inherited tradition. He also, sometimes audaciously, challenged his tradition, and he and I often whispered of our reverence for certain annihilation-merely-orthodox humans and mystical texts. 3 such for him were His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Thomas à Kempis's The Fake of Christ, and the counterfeit Gospel of Thomas, in which Jesus's mysticism is so overt it's impossible for the Church to apply information technology to imperialistic ends. Three such for me are the excommunicated mystical genius Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century Zen master Eihei Dogen, and that aforementioned Gospel of Thomas. During his last years, BD bravely bore intimations of an early deviation from this life. During the same years he experienced always more than frequent visitations of what I can but telephone call epiphanic joys. In the concluding lines of his last book, Viii Whopping Lies and Other Stories of Bruised Grace, BD summons his combined desperation and joy when he does not merely quote but lives à Kempis's recommended fake, making Jesus'southward words in the Gospel of Thomas his ain, praying to get, as a posthumous mystery, an unending prayer for his family. What greater souvenir tin can a mortal begetter peradventure offer? "Nosotros're simply here for a infinitesimal," Brian one time reminded usa. "We're here for a little window. And to employ that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the smashing story." How supreme he was at telling that story, and what a marvelous companion he was to then many. "I desire to write to you like I'k speaking to you lot," he said. "I would sing my books if I could." I say he could, and he did. Watching Brian's middle songs pour out, relishing his whitewater sentences, also, I witnessed a daring writer and friend embodying the sublime paradox that Dogen described in these words: "The path of water is not noticed past h2o, it is realized by water. . . .To study the style is to study the self, to written report the self is to forget the self, to forget the cocky is to awaken into the ten thousand things." As much equally any man or woman I've ever known, Brian James Patrick Doyle reveled in the human activity of awakening into the ten m things. __________________________________ Brian Doyle'sOne Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder is out now from Little Dark-brown. 
Source: https://lithub.com/on-brian-doyles-mystical-genre-exploding-work/
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