44: Willful Direction and Purpose

44 

Willful Direction and Purpose 

“Discovery itself is not enough. It’s not enough to find out what things are.

You’ve also got to find out where they come from,

where each piece fits in the wall.”

 

You Can’t Go Home Again

Thomas Wolfe 

Thank God that God is merciful, or we’d all be in big trouble; that’s the thought that came to me as I sat in our friend’s reclining armchair in Thunder Bay on our Labor Day weekend holiday visit as I read several short stories from The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs” and Joyce Carol Oates’s “Ghost Girls,” two starkly disquieting stories about people living on the edge of life without willful direction and purpose; and that’s what has inspired today’s spiritual musing.

Although the seed for today’s musing sprouted with the two stories that I read, the seed was planted in the fertile soil of my creative unconscious with something that Thomas Wolfe said in his novel You Can’t Go Home Again that I had just finished reading the day before. I read You Can’t Go Home Again for personal reasons, because like Wolfe I had also written a novel that alienated me from my hometown of Nipigon, Ontario like Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel had alienated him from his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina; and in You Can’t Go Home Again Wolfe explained to his friend Randy Sheperton that what he feared as a writer was not drying up and becoming like a camel “living on my hump,” but something far deeper and infinitely enticing.

“No, that’s not what bothers me. The thing I’ve got to find is the way!” exclaimed Wolfe. “The way! The way! Do you understand?”

“But how?” Randy asked.

George Weber (Thomas Wolfe’s fictional self) fell silent for a moment, and then replied: “I’m looking for the way. I think it may be something like what people vaguely mean when they speak of fiction. A kind of legend, perhaps. Something—a story—composed of all the knowledge I have, of all the living I’ve seen. Not the facts, you understand—not just the record of my life—but something distilled out of my experiences and transmitted into a form of universal application. That’s the best of fiction, isn’t it?”

What Thomas Wolfe implied with his creative dilemma was what all writers seek with their fiction—the truth that the bare facts of life add up to (the “wall”); or, as I came to see this morning in our friend’s cozy recliner, “willful direction and purpose.”

In other words, the “why” of life, which Wolfe presciently called the “way” and which I spent the best years of my life looking for and found in what Carl Jung called the “secret way” that lies buried deep in the human condition that only the most gifted writer can discern and which in his creative genius Thomas Wolfe finally sensed and spent the rest of his short incandescent life (he died at 38) trying to capture in his fiction.

Coincidentally (not to my surprise, because this is how the synchronicity principle of life works), our friend’s thirty year old bachelor son (who has a twelve year old son of his own) was floundering in the spiritually desiccating quandary of his rudderless life when, magically, his spiritual need for willful direction and purpose engaged my transcendent function; and out of my mouth poured the necessary wisdom that he was looking for to shift his center of gravity from his irresponsible puer aeternus self to his responsible adult self, because that was the only way he could transcend the irresponsible pattern of his fun boy life and willfully synchronize with his destined purpose. A tall order; but that’s the moral imperative of the secret way of life which in God’s mercy always finds us when we are ready to take the next step on our journey to wholeness and completeness.  

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