THE INTRICATE INVOLUTED SHELL

Dear fellow bus travelers: Lori and I would like to ask the subscribers to this site to participate in a literary experiment, that of opening the book we are reading to a random page, paying close attention to what is read, and composing a short account in the comments section.

The novelist Ann Tyler believes she has found the perfect cure for writer’s block. She opens her copy of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling and reads pages at random. “Whatever page I turned to , it seemed,” she says, “a glorious wealth of words swooped out at me.” This is a more generous account of MMMD dipping than that of her fictional character in The Accidental Tourist who uses the book as a prop, opening it at random pretending to read when he is beset by bothersome people. Tyler writes of this “accidental” tourism expert reading this gargantuan novel, “It had the advantage of being plotless, as far as he could tell, but invariably interesting.” There is another more profound approach to the act of attending to random pages in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling beyond curing writer’s block, and protecting privacy—one rooted in the notion that the random page trick divulges to the reader the hidden powers and mysteries of being where one is.

I was first introduced to Miss MacIntosh, My Darling by Wayne McEvilly, a philosophy professor at Montana State University in 1968. He regarded the novel not simply as “interesting” or as a cure for writer’s block, but as a novelistic version of the Chinese book of Changes and Divination: I Ching. By manipulating yarrow stalks or coins, the seeker after information that truly matters is directed to a series of hexagrams which offer advice appropriate to the moment of concern. Most widely used as a form of divination, or fortune telling, I Ching, Professor McEvilly argued, had other less mundane objectives, the main one being the revelation of the curative powers of the present moment where everything interconnects. Using primarily the a-causal Eastern philosophies of Buddhism and Vedanta, McEvilly found that a seemingly incoherent and interminable novel detailing the journey of a young woman in search of her missing nurse-maid had more to offer than the whole of Western philosophy.

This “Tyler trick” is extremely simple and has but a few rules. Closing your eyes, open Miss MacIntosh at random and let your finger find a stopping place. Then begin reading. The first rule is inviolable: DO NOT CHEAT. If you find yourself at a page that doesn’t appear to have interest or value to you, do not do another trick in order to find a more compelling or interesting passage. Stick with your first attempt if for no other reason than it was done in a moment of time that will never be repeated. It is the “truth” of that moment. Begin reading slowly and carefully. Don’t try to “understand” what you are reading in any conventional way. Pay strict, close attention. The more focused you are the more the words will reveal whether they are those of a typical set of symbols or , in this case, the signs and symbols of an intricate seashell with involutions in constant motion, constantly changing but revealing, however dimly , ideas of order you never dreamed of previously. The third rule is to write something about your experience with the “Tyler Trick.” Try to articulate what has happened (or not). Perhaps you will find, as did Ann Tyler “a glorious wealth of words,” or perhaps you will find the whole experiment mildly “interesting.” At the very least you will have an inkling of what has been said over and over again in these pages: that this book is not a “page turner,” where the reader follows the clues and evidence and discovers who “done it” at the end. This book, we have been saying emphatically, isn’t to be read in order to finish it so that you may put it on the pile of books you have “completed” so far in the year. Miss Young, we have insisted, uses tricks and techniques in order to retard or slow down the reader’s compulsion to find out what happens next. What matters is not where you’re going but where you are. One trick to understand that is to pay close, strict, and complete attention to where you are—not being concerned with whether it is exposition or description or itemizations or lists or repetitions but rather with echoes and rhythms, and perhaps inchoate feelings and thoughts that generate not clarity but immersion in a fecund strangeness which you happily accept, having willingly suspended disbelief, a strangeness some might refer to as “interconnectedness.” Being where you have always been but never knowing it until now. Or, in the poet’s words, “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. . . a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything.” An enfolding like the multifoliate architecture of the seashell.

We are looking forward to your contributions——Michael Sexson