Sunday Morning Meds from the 57th psalm

“He sends from heaven and saves me, 

rebuking those who hotly pursue me. . .”

 John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, calls the error “frigidity,” and then suggests that writers who show frigidity have something wrong with them. That may be pushing things a little.

 The first stories I gathered from my students in any semester contained more than their share of icy frigidity. I don’t think there was anything wrong with the students; they were always a sweet, wonderful bunch, and they worked hard.  They just had to learn.

The problem Gardner refers to comes in spades in their first stories because young writers tend to think too much about craft and not enough about the psyches of their own characters.  I remember a cute little error in frigidity, but I’m not sure if they caught the chill or not. It normally takes a while. It was a Twilight Zone-ish story of a man who picked up a tattered young woman hitchhiking in a national forest, only to have his passenger mysteriously disappear a few moments later from his motorcycle.  It’s an old urban myth. When the guy stops to report what so strangely happened, the ranger tells him such an event occurs annually, on the anniversary of a murder which took place in the park. That kind of story.

The student did a great job of keeping us within the man’s mind.  We felt what he felt and heard what he heard. We were well into the story until she wrote something like this.  “The ranger spoke with a Southern drawl.”  No one in the story or out was thinking about the biker’s drawl at that point, no one but the author.  As Gardner might have said, with that line she “broke the dream,” pulled us right out of the scene. He calls that error “frigidity” because it seems to refuse to touch the character. 

Psalm 57, I think, has a species of frigidity in it, although not exactly the same thing.  We hear an intense cry for help, something from the depths of David’s soul:  “have mercy, have mercy.” The passion is obvious, begun even before the song begins by the story of the psalm’s biographical roots. David is in a cave, the insanely jealous King Saul determined to kill him.  Have mercy, David says, twice.

And then he says, “I will take refuge,” which David’s closest readers might well understand to be the kind of “let’s make a deal, God” the poet/King does quite often, as do we:  “save me, Lord and I’ll change.” I think it’s a bad reading, but let’s go on.

Verse three shuts the door on the potential for suspense: “He sends from heaven and saves me, rebuking those who hotly pursue me. . .”  End of story.  Before it even gets good, it ends. The rescue is here in 2 ½ verses. David the writer seems frigid--there’s something wrong with him, Gardner might say.  He jumps out of the dilemma way, way, way too fast, taking us with him, and that’s it. The END. We can hardly feel anything but cold.  Couldn’t have been all that bad.  Are you kidding?  No big deal. 

Sometimes I think the Psalms discriminate because I’m just not sure this one communicates to those who don’t believe in God.  Maybe it’s not meant to. 

Only believers can feel the absence of a God we know is there. 

 I know: that makes no sense.  But I know. 

And truth is, of course, we’re not just talking about any old ordinary story. No sir, and no ma’am.