IMAGINATION AGAINST INDIFFERENCE: EVIL CONSTRUCTS, ‘REAL PRESENCES,’ AND MASTERED MONSTERSI) ABSTRACTIONS THAT DESTROY

“But there is evil?”“You tell me that you doubt the existence of God, but you want me to tell you to believe in evil?...I do think there is evil. But it is very rare. It is as rare as true goodness. And just as true goodness produces rare saints, true evil produces rare monsters.” --Davie and Father O’Mahoney in David Almond’s Clay1

He seemed a rare saint. And he would know—Elie Wiesel—worn

king reading his lecture, seated but no less authoritative. That

night his edict summoned Satan, made the monster kneel before his

memory. And stilling the hungry courtiers, the questions of a

holocaust, he concluded simply: “Evil is easy. Satan is the easy

choice that cheats humanity.”2

He made this claim in the context of a lecture on Job, but

Wiesel’s definition of evil grows from a lifelong ache. His work

summons the questions of immediacy, posed always in his radical

calls toward engagement. According to Wiesel, this difficult

threshold—where we encounter the suffering of the other, in all

their humanity—is where Satan arises, where evil lives, to keep

us at ease, at bay, detached. In his 1999 lecture at the White

1 David Almond, Clay (New York: Delacorte, 2006), 235.2 Elie Wiesel, “In the Talmud and Other Sources: Satan in Ancient Memories” (Lecture given November 2, 2009).

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House, Wiesel attuned nations to this inhibiting inhabitant,

calling it a “tempting” and “seductive” abstraction:

What are [the] courses and inescapable consequences [ofindifference]? Is it a philosophy?...Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at timesto practice it simply to keep one's sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as theworld around us experiences harrowing upheavals?3

In some way, philosophical abstraction—the boundaries that

make sense of wonder and systems of disorder—would seem not

unlike the artistic product. At least since the musings of Plato,

art has fallen under similar accusations of remove. For example,

agreeing with Plato’s distrust of theatre, Augustine of Hippo

asserts that the emotional stirring of an imagined world serves

as “an insidious form of self-indulgence; it relieves us of the

need to act, and so feeds our passivity and narcissism.”4 Is it

so that the catharsis of communication let us ‘off the hook’? Do

we vicariously experience “harrowing upheavals” only to relegate

them to artistic product or abstract premise? Institutions of

art, religion, and academia can hold practices as more sacred

3 Elie Wiesel, “The Perils of Indifference,” The History Place: Great Speeches Collection,http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/wiesel.htm (accessed November 13, 2009).4 Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 54.

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than people: establishing exclusive rites, creating art for art’s

sake (as if only art attends itself), proliferating discourse

around the immediacy of despair (as if despair will tend to

itself).

At the start, these questions require some linguistic

unpacking. How is it that we can link, conceptual constructs, art

objects, and institutional infrastructures under the same

category and criticisms of “abstraction”? Abstraction, from the

Latin abstractus, literally denotes something “drawn away”; or in

the case of its root, abstrahere, to abstract is to draw away via

detachment or diversion.5 Since at least the 16th century,

“abstraction” names what is removed from practical matters or

withdrawn from the concrete. This notion continued to evolve in

the Dada Movement of “abstract expressionism.” Ironically, both

institutional infrastructures and the anti-institution Dadaists

claim to be engaged responses to societal ills. Despite their

intents at inception, both have been critiqued as abstract to a

fault.

5 “Abstract,” Etymology Online, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=abstract&searchmode=none (accessed November 15, 2009).

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On each linguistic implication-application of “abstraction,”

we could find cause for critique. Marx and his adherents have

shown how institutions can remain removed from the realities of

those nearest the ground (humilis). Platonic suspicions still

arise to evidence how the artistic luxury distracts from ethical

action. In turn, philosophers and theologians wage internal wars

for/against the speculative abstractions of metaphysics. We can

play the game of pass the blame: whose abstraction is most

apparent, whose construct is least indifferent?

However, it would seem that all our creations have the

potential to remove even as they serve to engage. Therefore all

abstractions, as formal creations (material and conceptual), must

be reinstated to a fourth notion of the abstract. This definition

of abstract, known to us in the call for ‘submitted abstracts,’

originally held that “a smaller quantity contain[s] the virtue or

power of a greater.”6 Therefore, here, abstraction serves as an

allusion, a method of engaging what lies outside the particular

form while not denigrating its particularities. The abstraction

6 Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, Vol. I (London: J.F. and C. Rivington, 1785), 85. Fittingly, Johnson explicates this notion of abstract through the writings of Shakespeare and Dryden.

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previews, giving us a choice to pursue its further contents. It

creates a gap for our imagining, and arguably leaves a terrain

for our chosen action.

So what then marks this distinction between the gap of

initiation and the remove of indifference? I would argue that

art’s ability to facilitate imagination, attention, and

intentionality remains its contributive factor. Its gaps welcome

involvement, and perhaps thus equip audiences to perceive

openings for action in the world. While Wiesel’s novels and

lectures are abstractions of a sort, his artful blending of

memory and imagination resist indifference.7 In vivid imagery and

provocative words, Wiesel engages his audience through dynamic

creativity, not destructive coercion. Ideally, the art of

storytelling asks our attentiveness in a ‘suspension of

disbelief.” The abstraction animated by imagination is

recollection in service of hope, information toward

transformation. The abstract, in this sense, converges the

concepts of sacrament and incarnation.

7 See his Nobel Prize speech: http://www.pbs.org/eliewiesel/nobel/index.html (accessed November 13, 2009).

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But so as to avoid an abstract reading of ‘the infinite’

possibility in the ‘finite’ actuality, I will concretize how

creativity plays out in ethics. I will begin by considering how

imagination contributes to empathetic readings of literary

characters, and by extension, fellow human beings. Combining the

theories of Walter de la Mare, George Steiner, and Maria Tatar, I

will suggest the unique role of literature in ethics as

sacramental ‘poiesis’ (Steiner): ‘summons’ (de la Mare) that

facilitates ‘transformation’ (Tatar). These voices dialogue with

Elie Wiesel’s definition of indifference as easy abstraction.

Despite early suspicions of a similar ‘remove’ in theological

education and the arts, I use David Almond’s Clay to demonstrate

how fiction and faith can serve one another to produce “rare

saints” in the face of “rare monsters.”

II) CREATIONS THAT ANIMATE

Our words and imaginings, our dogmatic assertions and

philosophical speculations, are constructed that we might

participate in an exchange with one another, not erase the need

for otherness. What can be done to keep the tools of engagement

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from becoming mere avenues for indifference? The difficult task remains:

how to nurture an empathy that not only notices evil and frames it in our arts and

arguments, but also seeks its transformation.

Imagination need not become a matter of distraction, but of

faith; abstraction need not end in indifference, but in

understanding. And yet, for all the strivings of religious

education and the liberal arts, human creations are connections

that necessarily sever. We extract in order to communicate; we

distinguish in order to discern, like Elohim separating light

from darkness, this from that. But what happens when the choices

create formidable boundaries: when our creativity, our stories,

our rituals become self-preserving structures that bear the fruit

of indifference; when our constructs (be it art or idea, episteme

or techne) end in abstraction; when we objectify humanity,

rendering humans voiceless or inanimate?

In her assessment of Eckhart’s Mary-Martha interpretation,

Stephanie Paulsell rescues us from these spiraling questions. She

reminds that educational and artistic pursuits need not disengage

us from the world, “Certainly, reading can be used to anesthetize

us to the pain of the world. But it can also…lead us into

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service.”8 Rather than viewing the literary world as ether,

rendering us unconscious to the literal world, we see these two

domains as benefiting from the same raw material. In this sense,

to read is to dive into the sea of meanings and mysteries, to

sift through its treasures, to rise again with gratitude for air

and the secret thrill of discovery: epiphanies that illumine the

land of the treasure’s origin and return.

As reader-retrievers we navigate dual citizenship: in the

text/world, but not of it. 9 We are “travelers” of flesh and

spirit, abstraction and imagination, precept and practice,

“enchanted hunters” of the word and world.10 As Miss Taroone

explains to young Simon when he comes upon the books of Nahum

Tarune (human nature):

Wherever you may be in that body of yours, you feel youlook out of it, do you not?...But even if tomorrow you are thousands of miles distant from here on the other side of this great Ball, or in its bowels, or flying free—you will still carry a picture of it, will you not? And that will be within you…In your mind…Your duty

8 Stephanie Paulsell, “Indoor Exploration: Reading as a Spiritual Practice forChildren and Youth,” Princeton Lectures on Youth, Church and Culture, http://www.ptsem.edu/iym/lectures/2005/Paulsell-Indoor.pdf 9 See George Steiner’s comments on the “common rubric of the mythological.” George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 219.10 Maria Tatar, Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2009).

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is to keep your senses, heart and courage and to go where you are called. And in black strange places you will at times lose yourself and find yourself.11

The created world (people, places) and human creations (our

arts, our choices) thereby become spaces where we can play hide

and seek.12 Miss Taroone claims that Nahum’s imagined world

enters Simon’s mind and is held there. But just as the book’s

world need not end with its final sentence or image, its elliptic

effect need not end with imagination. A story is not only a

beautiful incantation, creating an interior space that welcomes a

wondrous world, a mysterious God; it is also a spell intruding

its magic upon our living.13

In order for literature to effect its transformation, its

intrusion must be like a god dwelling in our paradise, summoning

us from our hideaway. It must begin by asking, “Where are you?”14

As literary critic, George Steiner proposes in Real Presences:

11 Walter de la Mare, Come Hither: a collection of rhymes and poems for the young of all ages (New York: Knopf, 1957), xx.12 See this significant play as it occurs in theology and speculative metaphysics via Steiner’s analogies of erotic and aesthetic encounter (Steiner, 154).13 See Michael Gurian’s remarks on experiential knowing via creativity. Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys (New York: Penguin Group, 2006), 215.14 NRSV, Gen. 3:9

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The voice of intelligible form, of the needs of direct address from which such form springs, asks: ‘What do you feel, what do you think of the possibilities of life, of the alternative shapes of being which are implicit in your experience of me, in our encounter?’ The indiscretion of serious art and literature and music is total. It queries the last privacies of our existence. This interrogation…is no abstract dialectic.It purposes change…Again, the shorthand image is that of an Annunciation, of “a terrible beauty” or gravity breaking into the small house of our cautionary being. If we have heard rightly the wing-beat and provocation of that visit, the house is no longer habitable in quite the same way as it was before.15

Like Wiesel, Steiner suggests that literature, despite being

an inanimate text, has the capacity to animate its readers. As a

created form that invades “the last privacies of our existence,”

the encounter necessarily bears upon our choices; the call

necessitates a response.16 What we choose to hear in the “wing-

beat and provocation” of the created (the human, the idea, the

text, the ritual) becomes an artistry of ethics: ideally, an

imagination against indifference.

As one dramaturge observed of Wiesel’s God on Trial, “[The

character of] Berish gets to the heart of our humanity and

morality when he declares that ‘to be free means to be able to 15 Steiner, 142-143.16 “…any thesis that would, either theoretically or practically, put literature and the arts beyond good and evil is spurious.” (Steiner, 142).

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choose.’ The act of choosing is the act of creativity and the act

of creativity is our act of choice.”17 It is not simply enough to

be a created being; we are called to creative becoming. As

translator between word and world, imaginative exploration and

ethical action, the human being becomes humane. This process is

what Steiner’s calls poiesis: “meaning made form…the processes of

transformation which the aesthetic sets in motion.”18

This is not to say that life is reduced to art, or that

literature’s role is reduced in its translation to living. They

are in mutual service to one another, in incarnation’s dialogue.

Thus, the prescriptive approach to ethical living cannot sustain

because it constructs a one-sided conversation. Alone,

prescription cannot train the imagination. Thus, Larry Rasmussen

hails imagination’s role in ethics: “We can imagine different

worlds—and better ones. This means we live our lives across a

certain gap…we live in the tension between ‘what is’ and ‘what

17 Matthew Fox, “The Trial of God, The Trial of Us,” http://people.bu.edu/trialofg/article1b.html (accessed November 3, 2009).18 Steiner, 187.

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ought to be,’ a tension that gives rise to deliberate choice,

act, and responsibility.”19

While William Bennett writes of fiction’s capacity to effect

responsibility via moral literacy, his ‘show and tell’ approach

resists tension and deliberation.20 Though his aims are laudable,

his preface to The Book of Virtues focuses on literature as

prescriptive word to the neglect of its descriptive world.

Prescription may suit the realm of policy, but it is deficient in

the world of poiesis. Yes, story-coated, didactic spoons can

effectively shove lessons into resistant children. But more

desirable is Miss Taroone’s tactic: noticing Simon’s

investigative hunger, she sets a feast of worlds before him. She

does not loom over his tasting, or speed his feeding. Rather she

creates a safe space for his experience, his imagination, his

witness.

This remains an essential task of theology and the arts

alike: to create a space for witness. Steiner would suggest that

19 Larry Rasmussen, “Ecology and Morality: The Challenge to and from ChristianEthics,” Religion and the New Ecology: Environmental Responsibility in a World in Flux, ed. David M. Lodge and Christopher Hamlin (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 247.20 William J. Bennett, The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 11.

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in our religious and aesthetic witness, we should model De la

Mare’s understanding of the child. Against indifference, the

child practices imagination and seeks immediacy in spite of its

perils:

The story told to a child, the tale read, the ballad committed, perhaps unawares, to memory, are taken to heart. Literally. In most adults, this immediacy tends to diminish. The entrances and alarms of the fictive run up against the cluttered, cautionary domesticities of rationalized, disenchanted response. It is in intimate commerce with the vitality and substance of his imagined callers that a child tests and assembles his components of the nascent self. And ‘callers’ or ‘summoners’ is the correct term. The child follows after…He is initiated to delight as well as to fear. When there is night in the house or, as masters of whispering such as Walter de la Mare know, when noon istoo still, fictions will introduce the child to the magnetism of menace. To starve a child of the spell of the story, of the canter of poem, oral or written, is akind of living burial.21

According to Steiner, engaging the (empirical or literary)

world like a child involves risk and response. But to deny the

story is even more dangerous: it leads to living burial. In

intimate exchange with this “real presence” of created forms, we

work against disenchantment—the ‘living burial’ of indifference.

Considering Steiner and Wiesel: it would seem that the ability to

21 Steiner, 190-191.

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imagine and sense the living summons in art objects (in this case,

literature) necessarily prohibits the tendency to ignore and objectify the

summons in living art (in the broad sense, humans). If an

imagination can animate a text, perhaps its empathy can likewise

prize the human life. Against indifference, imagination requires

empathic attention, in turn providing a foundation for ethics.22

The responsibility of responding to imaginative readings of

the real is an endeavor of artists and religious educators alike.

Whereas some (Bennett) would discourage ‘magical realism’

detached from overt pedagogy; others (De La Mare) would encourage

magical realism as meta-pedagogy. Gertrude Stein marks this

difference in her concept of performative poiesis—emblematized in

the lines: “Let me recite what history teaches. History

teaches.”23 Let me tell you what the story teaches. The story

teaches.

Especially confident of the latter (non-directive approach)

is author David Almond. Summoning imagination, self-reflection,

22 Michael Stauffer, “Building Character while Developing a Character: An Investigation of the Integration of Faith and Theater,” The Journal of Religion and Theatre (Summer 2004): 40.23 Gertrude Stein, “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” Gertrude Stein: Selections, ed. Joan Retallack (Los Angeles: University of California Press,2008), 193.

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and discovery, he urges, “We need to keep reminding ourselves and

our children: slow down; wander through the wilderness inside

yourself…Take the time to dream, take the time to imagine.”24 In

this commission to his readership, Almond conflates the doubts of

a Sinai desert with the luminosity of a burning bush. Readers

travel between his wilderness of sparse language and peaks of

supernatural encounter in order to explore questions wrought by

reality.

Almond conjures a “space that encourages a multiplicity of

interpretations.” 25 In doing so, his magical realism not only

fosters the same rich reading necessary for sacred texts; it also

acknowledges the multifaceted nature of ethical discernment. In

the space between the magic and the real, questions can play out

beyond abstraction into modes of imagination. Unlike abstracted

ethics, imagination requires the empathic meeting of self and

other, a negotiation where ease, evil, and indifference have no

proper place.

24 David Almond, “The 2001 Michael L. Printz Award Acceptance Speech,” Journal ofYouth Services in Libraries 4 (2001): 14-15, 23.25 Don Latham, David Almond: Memory and Magic (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2006), 10.

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But the benefits of empathy are in no way easy gifts. En

route to the promised land of presence, the wilderness must be

met. Though imagination can potentially ward off indifference, it

is often tested against the darkness of doubts and ambient

destruction. Imaginative faith embraces risk; arguably, so do the

best of ethicists, artists, and religious figures.26 In a scheme

not unlike the artist’s play or the prophet’s path, Wendy B.

Faris reveals five markers of magical realism, the space where

imagination is experienced and tested before it can be applied:

1. An irreducible element of magic2. A grounding in the phenomenal world, i.e., the

realistic world3. The reader’s experience of unsettling doubts because

of this mixture of the real and fantastic4. The near merging of two realms or worlds5. Disruptions of traditional ideas about time, space,

and identity27

In this “near merging,” ethics are pressed by doubts,

creations are born of mystery; the luminosity of life and all its

questions prove unsettling. Likewise, the unsettling capacity of

art, literature, and divine encounter intrudes upon traditional

26 Cheryl A Kirk-Duggan speaks of the imaginative quality of hope. Lisa Cahill, “Theological Ethics, The Churches, and Global Politics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 35 (2007): 377.27 Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), 7.

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ideas. And (ideally) by the same unsettling power, these

encounters house a capacity to collapse indifference. The

otherworldly disrupts: like Steiner’s “Annunciation” forces, like

De la Mare’s “summoners.” And the worldly evils made larger by

otherworldly disruption, the doubts made deeper by the

supernatural, are yet made conquerable by the faith necessitated

in the encounter.28 But how can this occur—in a world where we

imagine beautiful ends as often as we create destructive means?

Arguably, weapons, texts, and religious platforms created for

justice can also kill for justice. The same mind that can carry a

belief in God can also carry an equally real sense of Satan.

This is the delicacy: in the ethic against indifference, our

abstractions and imaginative efforts confront realities that

range from the ineffably luminous to the inexplicably dark. Our

words, creations, and hopes mingle with our hurts, destructions,

and fears. The imaginative story as animating catalyst not only

mirrors this spectrum; but also, as if born of its trappings, can

motivate horror and beauty alike. In order to effect

transformation, religious beliefs, aesthetic renderings, and

28 Tatar, 141.

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literary worlds complicate the ethical imagination (empathy) with

bursts of “radiant beauty” and “jolts of horror.” Bloody

sacrifices for beautiful redemption. Macabre paintings of

stunning form. Horrific monsters with innocent intentions. Maria

Tatar believes that these juxtapositions and their frictional

boundaries ignite us toward transformation:

Radiant beauty, combined with jolts of horror, can produce a form of ignition power….Michel de Certeau hasargued that, as readers, we are not passive beings, molded, marked, informed, or imprinted with cultural products. Instead… as we read, we engage, interpret, and improvise, creating new narratives with the same catalytic power and transformative energy of words on apage.29

Maria Tatar argues that the magic of imagination ignites

necessary transformation. She stands in a theoretical chorus with

De La Mare, Steiner, and Almond. And Wiesel would join, but

looking to my post-lecture peers, he hesitates. For a moment all

are silent: does the magic of imagination stand to scrutiny

against its neurotic and horrific forms? The same imagination

that makes room for hope also makes space for horror;30 and in

29 Tatar, 89.30 As Geordie and Davie discuss: “You don’t believe in that ballocks do you…All that devil and exorcism stuff.” “But if you believe in all the other stuff….Like God and goodness. Then mebbe you got to believe in the devil and badness.” (Clay, 32).

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some particularly horrific instances, imagination can be employed

to create destructive abstractions, no less fatal weapons.

Winking at Wiesel, Almond pulls out Clay. Clay takes place in

the 1960s, set in Almond’s hometown of Felling-on-Tyne. The

novel’s protagonist, Davie, shares several parallels with his

author: Catholic upbringing in Northern England; altar boy in St.

Patrick’s Church; friendships with Geordie and Maria; encounters

with “crazy Mary” figures. 31 Almond interpenetrates the worlds of

his own experiences and his fictional writings.32 He confesses,

“I love working with a blend of the real and the imagined…I guess

I’m forever working out my feelings about many things, including

faith and religion.”33 Thus, Davie becomes a vessel for author

and audience alike to explore the difficult questions of

indifference, faith, and creativity ushered in by the catalyst

character (and creations of) Stephen Rose.

III) DEEDS OF EASE AND DESTRUCTION

31 David Almond, “In His Own Words: A Conversation with David Almond,” Clay (New York: Delacorte, 2006), 5.32 “There are no final answers, and we keep on searching and questioning and being amazed and mystified. Maybe writing fiction is my way of doing this.” (“In His Own Words…,” 6). 33 “In His Own Words…,” 5.

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“What things will we create…when our ability to create intensifies? What monsters will we make?...I believe that the forces of good will defeat the forces of evil…But could it be…that the end of creativity will be to make a thing that will turn back upon us and destroy us?”34

Creation, as an act of engagement, works against

indifference: Wiesel’s novels rouse us against atrocities; De La

Mare’s poems encourage exploratory investment; Steiner’s

elucidations of art’s ‘real presence’ creates a space for

encountering otherness. But what happens when a literary

‘summoner’ is “irredeemably evil”—or worse, masquerades in holy

rhetoric?35 What happens when a creative task seeks destruction

as its “just” act against indifference? After all, destructive

choices can be creative impulses: what “evil” figure did not

believe they were creating a better society—or at least,

establishing their imagined ideal?36

Creation and destruction alike allow imagined ills to move

from abstractions into actions, from stereotypes into sacred

right. Unsettling. Political and religious militancy problematize34 David Almond, Clay, 174.35 Don Latham, “Gods and Monsters: Clay” in David Almond: Memory and Magic (Lanham:Scarecrow, 2006), 115.36 As Miroslav Volf observes, even religious parties can coat violent impulsesin righteous intentions. See Miroslav Volf, “Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Justice: A Christian Contribution to a More Peaceful Social Environment,” in Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy, and Conflict Transformation (Radnor: Templeton Foundation, 2001), 34.

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Wiesel’s understanding of evil as “indifference;” however, they

exemplify his understanding of evil as “easy.” (In the obvious

case: creative advancements in weaponry have made it easier to

take lives when difficult diplomacy fails). By way of

clarification, it is important to keep both components of

Wiesel’s definition of evil: the easy choice as inevitably

indifferent to someone.

The antidote is empathy. Again, the question remains: how do

we nurture an imagination that not only discerns the evil choice,

but also sensitively seeks its transformation?

Yes, imagination has the capacity to engage and transform

reality via: empathy, mystery, and magic. But David Almond’s Clay

obscures this dreamy, hopeful view by steeping it in the

nightmarish presence of Stephen Rose.37 Stephen disrupts the

ordinary life of Davie and promises (threatens) to transform it.

He not only interrupts Davie’s sleep, he intrudes his days.

Mimicking the “summons” of Steiner and the “hither” of De La

37 Chapter two renders Stephen in Davie’s dreams, revealing the nightmarish shift from creativity to control. In the dream, Stephen no longer forms clay but seeks to form Davie, asking, “Who is thy lord, Davie? You cannot hide. Whois thy lord?” (Clay, 61)

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Mare, Stephen calls his disciples, “Come.”38 Davie and his friend

Geordie follow the call toward Stephen; they first find him

whittling wooden saints. Foreshadowing his aim to winnow away at

Davie’s innocence, Stephen explains: “[Father O’Mahoney] says the

devil makes work for idle hands so I got to keep busy” (23). Idle

hands and idle imaginations are available to both creative and

destructive endeavors. The mind is malleable as the potter’s

clay, the author’s tale, the believer’s faith.

Whereas empathy honors the living presence in matter,

Stephen sees Davie as object. He senses the inanimate parts in

Davie as he does the deadness in wood; he seeks clay to animate—

literally in his project of the creature, and figuratively in

desiring to control Davie.39 Stephen later explains that he

recruited Davie because he was “dead ordinary, dead innocent, dead big

imagination. This lad might be just the lad I need” (215). With Davie, Stephen

could disguise his lies in magical truths—because Davie yearns

for the extraordinary. And Stephen calls him to it, whispering,

38 “Aye! He says come to him!” (Clay, 22)39 As David Almond affirms, “I don’t think that [Stephen] really does need Davie to create Clay. But he wants to tempt and to disillusion and to corrupt Davie. And he wants to test out and to demonstrate his wicked powers.” (“In His Own Words…”, 7).

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“You know you’re a boy who can do wondrous things. Don’t

disappoint me” (177).

Before Stephen, Davie’s “ordinary days” consisted of

generally benign worldliness: serving (and profiting) as an altar

boy with his friend, Geordie; smoking stolen cigarettes; name-

calling; occasional lusting over Noreen; fawning over Maria;

fighting with protestant boys; teasing and warding off the

delinquent alcoholic, Mouldy. And though Geordie and Stephen

imagine what they might do to Mouldy, they ultimately acknowledge

that, “There’s a good side to everybody” (81). They temper their

violent imaginations with empathy, exchanging their destructive

plans for reconstructed schemas, “There’ll be a truce…[Mouldy’s]

had a really tough life…I feel really sorry for him” (81).

Geordie and Davie arrive at this empathic response after

witnessing Stephen’s violent choice. When Stephen injures

Mouldy’s friend, Skinner, they are able to imagine the living

presence that Stephen’s knife was indifferent to acknowledge.

Geordie is first to seek peace with Mouldy. Davie agrees, but is

slower to carry out the truce. His mind is distracted by his

creative project with Stephen; his awareness is in some sense

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hypnotized by Stephen’s provocative pursuits and strange past.

Davie takes the longer path of self-actualization—mostly because

he creates ethics while molding changeable beliefs. His delay in

the truce with Mouldy mirrors his vacillating relationship with

God. Flickering between agnosticism and earnest prayer: one

moment he whispers, “Let me believe in nowt…Let there be life and

nowt but life. Let the body be nowt but clay. Let God be gone…”

(137); and yet, he later desires belief in a God more powerful

than (or at least as real as) the “devilry and madness and death”

he sees (242). He prays for indifference, but finds that a world

devoid of God leads to an imagination denied of life.40

For much of the story, Davie finds a deeper (perhaps

subversive) religiosity in his project with Stephen. They play

the part of priests and attempt the privileges of God: while

animating Clay they say prayers, wear sanctified garments, even

instill Clay with Eucharist elements. Their faith in the

animation process awakens Clay; but the ritualized

transfiguration of Clay does not awaken Davie’s spirit. Their

imagination and spirituality, when misapplied in creating Clay 40 See Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: The Ethics of Fiction (Berkley: University of California Press, 1988), 488-89.

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toward destructive ends, does not ignite but increasingly

empties. Davie becomes an object under Stephen’s control,

gradually aware of the monstrous potential rising within.41

While it is true that Davie comes to taste the monstrous

quality of life in Mouldy, it is ultimately Stephen who opens his

eyes to the knowledge of darkness. Stephen’s background (his

hypnotist grandfather, his absent parents, his trouble with the

priesthood) and strange presence (his curious solitude, his waxy

skin, his revolting smell, his demonic creations) bring Davie to

the surface of supernatural inquiry. Is belief a matter of

superstition (Geordie), hypnosis (Stephen), neuroses (Mary), or

inner light (Prat)? And what is the difference between believing

in abstractions of evil (Satan) and actualizing our imaginations

of evil (Stephen’s Clay)?

Stephen and Davie join in their abstraction of evil (Mouldy)

and their actualized imagination—the clay boy made living (and

thereafter named “Clay”). When later Mouldy is found dead,

Stephen initially blames Clay (ah, the ease of pointing to

abstracted evil); but he later admits to killing Mouldy himself 41 As Prat warned, “Some would say, of course…that what the artist does is to give an outer form to his inner self.” (Clay, 78).

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(imagined evil actualized). He claims that Clay would not kill

Mouldy because “there’s too much of the Davie in [Clay]” (189).

Stephen finds that his true “Clay”—his ability to bring to life

his imagination—occurs when he molds his own choices into action.

In this discovery, he pushes Mouldy over the quarry’s edge. And

pushing Davie over the edge of his guilt, Stephen reminds that

Davie is no better, “You that stole the things you thought were

the holiest things in the world. You, that butchered a dog, You,

that wanted Mouldy dead. You, that helped to make the thing that

helped to kill Mouldy…If you’d not run back like a baby to your

bed that night, your Mr. Mouldy could be with us still” (219).

Considering his transgressions and Clay’s limitations, Davie

comes to realize his art teacher’s (Prat’s) distinction: human

creativity is not equated with God’s creation.42 Unlike God,

human art cannot create responsive, free moral agents. Like God,

they have the power to return Mouldy and Clay to the dust of

death; but they will never be able to raise death to life.43 42 “I think an artist is simply human, a human with an astonishing skill, a skill that may indeed be God-given, but nevertheless…human…We cannot like God,create a soul. We cannot, like God, create life. But who is to say what the limits of our creativity might nevertheless be.” (Clay, 80).43 Davie laments this to the unresponsive Clay, “I wanted to believe that dustto dust might mean death to life just as it means life to death. But you don’tunderstand me do you? This is all beyond you, just like it’s all beyond me”

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Davie eventually sinks into the realization that metaphysical

realties were perhaps never intended for his hands, for the

molding of his mind. Though the supernatural could once breathe

in his imagination, his imagination is weak. Crawling, stumbling,

calling, he is unable to even imagine “what God [he] can pray to”

(220). He slinks into nothingness, confessing, “I feel like Clay—

stiff, heavy, dull—like I’m something at the very edge of life. I

feel that I could be washed away, that I could disappear….I look

out into the endless night. Who thinks all this? Who believes all

this? Who dreams all this? Then nowtness overcomes me, and I

sleep” (221). The created form without ‘real presence’ is as dead

as the human without soul. Davie has become object to himself—and

now imagines the entire world as indifferent. The world has

become an abstraction, and he an abstraction within it (194).

Steiner interrupts, “Ah! He is but in the Friday moment

without hope of Sunday. Our best creations are in the Sabbatarian

moment. Wait.”44

(Clay, 207).44 Steiner, 231-232.

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De La Mare nods, calling, “Let no night/ Seal thy sense in

deathly slumber/ Till to delight/ Thou have paid thy utmost

blessing!”45

Eyes fixed, Wiesel urges, “…take hold of yesterday’s images

and transform them into a bridge, into a connection, a burning

connection.”46

Tatar whispers, “Surely Davie can be ignited by the horror

of life and be transformed to its beauty.” Enchanted, Almond

smiles, and recounts…

By partnering with Stephen in the “ultimate artistic act,”

Davie discovers the dangerous hubris of striving to be as God.47

Encountering Stephen’s desire to create man out of dirt, Davie

imagines his own capacity to be as God: “I thought of God making

us. I wondered if artists were like God, if they had a bit of God

inside themselves. I wondered, Is it only God who can breathe life into the

world, only God who can create?” (73). Davie discovers: humans have the

45 Walter de la Mare, “Farewell,” Collected Poems: 1901 – 1918 (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1920), 222.46? Elie Wiesel, Elie Wiesel: Conversations (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2002), 149.47 David Almond, “In His Own Words…”, 6.

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ability to imagine clay into existence—and further still into

deeds of destruction. But as Clay continually calls, “You are my

master…What shall I do?”, Davie finds that his creation does not

desire relationship, so much as command (177). Clay as mere

abstraction, mere product, has no imagination; he simply awaits

dictation.

Unlike Stephen, Davie is unsatisfied with this creator-

creature relationship. He senses that a creature is truly alive

when creating its own beautiful existence, its own choices.

Unlike Stephen, who commands others but remains indifferent to

his own responsibilities, Davie says simply to Clay, “Just follow

me” (198). In the spirit of De La Mare’s Nahum Tarune, Davie

guides Clay to explore the other world. He takes Clay on his

“enchanted hunt” through Felling, recounting to him the essential

people and places. Throughout his narrative he creates a

dialogue, asking Clay if he’s listening, thinking, seeing. Davie

models to his creation what Steiner suggests all created forms

should do: construct an “interrogation” that moves beyond

“abstract dialectic” by “purpos[ing] change.”48 In dialogue with

48 Steiner, 142-143.

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Clay, Davie begins to change: he begins to know himself and his

ethical boundaries. Though his questions surrounding God and

creation are not resolved, he understands that he must be a

creator of his choices—an actor, not a spectator. In seeking

God’s mysterious nature, he must participate in his story, the

poiesis of his life.49

IV) INSTITUTIONS OF CREATIVITY AND COMMUNION

So we went on making clay figures out of the body of Clay, each one betterand more lifelike than the one before. We named them as we worked…Dad came up behind us, looked down and laughed. “Haha!” he said. “It’s acongregation of Saints!” (243)

In this poiesis of performative narration, Davie finds his

voice50 and even discovers his true creative act: his choices

functioning within a community.51 By entering the town and

imagining the people in his life, he realizes that his creative

commission is ethical—making choices and taking risks in dark and

vibrant places, beyond indifference, among living presences.

49 For a summary on the epistemological benefits of performance: Rowan Williams, “Balthasar, Rahner and the apprehension of being,” Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology (London: SCM, 2007), 96.50 “We walk in silence, deep in gloom; then I find my voice…” (Clay, 198).51 “You’re just a lump of clay. I can’t do this!” (Clay, 207).

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Before laying Clay to rest, he exclaims, “I’ve got my own bliddy

life to live!” (208).

As if restored to God’s commands for creative living, he

turns to master the evil crouched “in the garden, coming closer”

(209).52 Stephen arrives, commanding Clay to kill; but Davie’s

pleas to Clay are heard. Clay understands. He softens his grip

and crawls away. Davie likewise pleads with Stephen, encouraging

him to understand an alternative creativity: to care for his sick

mother, to mold his own choices against indifference. Stephen

resists, provokes, spits, and dares Davie to kill him; but Davie

cannot choose what is easy. He lets fall the rock from his own

hand.

In order to further master the monster within himself (and

the monstrous sway of Stephen’s memory), Davie begins to be

fruitful. He multiplies his experience: he tells Maria the story;

he asks Father O’Mahoney its questions; he creates replicas of

loved ones out of remnant clay; and in the end, he offers all of

this to his readers, “So now I’ve written it down, all of it. I

52 I invoke here not only God’s original command to Adam and Eve (“be fruitfuland increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it”), but also the command to Cain to master evil “crouching at [his] door.” NIV, Genesis 1:28, 4:7.

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don’t care if there’s craziness in it. I’ve learned that crazy

things might be the truest things of all. You don’t believe me?

Doesn’t matter. Tell yourself it’s just a story, nothing more”

(247).

Wiesel’s sense of ease hisses: “It is, after all, awkward, troublesome,

to be involved in another person’s pain and despair.”53 By closing his story

this way, Davie tempts us toward indifference: to make the story

a mere abstraction, mere clay to command—a tale that could not

possibly make any claims on us. But in truth, the horror and

beauty can ignite us; the story can invade the “last privacies of

our existence;” it can “summon” us to “lose and find ourselves”

within its questions, delights, and dilemmas. To close the book

easily would be a “living burial”—a return from livingness into

dust, from ethical examination to ease.54

So how is this prevented? Poiesis: abstraction, imagination,

and action joining together in lived faith. Through imagination,

we enter into the story’s characters (the “congregation of

saints”); we can participate in their choices and create our own.

Like Maria, we can: embrace people and their stories with 53 “The Perils of Indifference.”54 Steiner, 190-191.

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nurturing reassurance; provide a place of trust and credulity;

listen and walk with people, honoring their experiences (232);

point to the luminosity of ordinary life (96-97). Like Prat

Parker, we can: redefine ordinariness; know that to live is to be

an artist, mixing “crazy wildness and tough discipline;” exude

“inner grace” and notice the “inner light” of others (36-37).

Like Father O’Mahoney, we can: proclaim the grandness of life;

see the potential light in darkness; delegate others to deal with

particular mysteries (72); briefly evade theological questions;

listen, while not purporting to have all the answers; admit to

our ministerial shortcomings (234-237). Like Stephen, we can:

seek to control, to kill, to deceive; practice indifference to

our own pains and those of others (154); desire to be as gods to

the destruction of human sacredness (179-183). Or like Stephen’s

aunt, Mary, we can: refuse to see the monstrous quality of

humanity (192); hold out in hope for returning goodness; perceive

angels in emptiness; encounter God through prayerful living and

sacramental awakening (245-246).

David Almond’s Clay dares us to “Move. Live…” within its

characters that we might move empathically towards others in our

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living (69). As educators, artists, believers, readers, and human

beings, we are commissioned toward this creativity and communion.

Against the monstrosities of evil, we must move from graveyard to

garden (205)—from indifference to imagination—with ethics that

seek not to bury alive the dead, but to lift the living from

dust.

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