Guess post by Jacob Bender
On the autumn equinox of 2004, I arrived home from my LDS mission to Puerto Rico, only to be shocked by the ghostly visage of my mother in the terminal stages of cancer. I was caught off guard in part because the last picture I had seen of her was from her birthday just 3 months prior, when she still looked relatively healthy and flush with life; but I was also genuinely unprepared because when my Mom began chemo just before I entered the MTC two years earlier, I had been assured and reassured by numerous well-meaning people that Priesthood blessings of health had been pronounced upon her, that she would recover from this ailment and “all others.”
Now, I’d had too many spiritual experiences on my mission to lose all faith and hope when confronted by the wasted sight of my dying mother; in fact, I considered myself spiritually to be in the best shape of my life, and so decided to follow the lead of my Biblical namesake and wrestle the angel all night till I received the blessing I desired—in this case, for the Almighty to make good on his promises and restore the life of my mother.
I won’t go into detail of all that prayer entailed—that is, in fact, what my book And All Eternity Shook is about, and you’ll have to read it if you wish to know more. Suffice to say for now, by the end of that prayer—the longest and most passionate of my life—I was no longer praying for her life to be spared, but that if it be her time, for her to go peacefully in her sleep. She passed away that very night.
Not that I wrote any of this down at the time; my journal entry for the day merely reads, “I suppose I should note the irony of me preaching the Resurrection and the Life for two years only to come home to death, but it just hurts too much.” I was lost in the task of grieving. It honestly didn’t occur to me to maybe transcribe the experience till three years later, when I was a senior at BYU-I interning at an English-language newspaper in Guadalajara, Mexico. I wrote the first rough draft evenings in my apartment in Zapopan.
I was prompted in part by the old saw (sometimes attributed to Toni Morrison) that if there is a book you want to read that hasn’t been written, then you should write it yourself—and certainly no one had yet documented the severely under-reported yet very real phenomenon of missionaries losing loved ones while serving. Indeed, I knew of at least two other missionaries who lost mothers just in my mission alone; yet there were virtually zero sermons, talks, articles, books, or poetry on hand to help any of us process the experience. Someone had to do it, and in the arrogance of undergrad, I decided it might as well be me.
This only began years of me working on this impossible project off and on. Throughout my MA and PhD programs in English, I gravitated towards the experimental works of the Modernists and Postmodernists, in part because I was privately trying to find cues for how to write the unwritable—to take seriously the idea that, if the “unspeakable gift” of the Holy Ghost manifests in “groanings beyond utterance,” then we must find radical new ways to express it. I became especially enamored with the Irish and Latin American modernists (on whom I eventually wrote my dissertation), seeing in their wild audacity on the cultural margins a potential model for Mormon letters.
But the biggest influence on my writing ultimately came not from literature but from music (who was it that said, “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music”?)—namely, the “slowcore” Indie-band Low, whose two central members are an LDS married couple. As I once wrote in a Sunstone article on the band (that was later shortlisted for a criticism award by AML), “It is specifically their minimalism, their fearlessness in embracing the silences between notes, that allows them to create a space for the things that can’t be said, that can’t be represented—the ‘unspeakable’ thing outside discourse that is most responsible for Mormon spiritual conversion. Low does not fear the silence; for them it is not nihilistic void, but the space where religious experience lies.” The essay itself also played with these same silent spaces in its paragraph breaks—as does And All Eternity Shook much more radically.
In fact, if I might be so bold, I would highly recommend getting the print version, since the novel engages in a series of bold typographical experiments that the ebook version only reproduces imperfectly. You can see some of that spatial play in the CHAPTER 1 EXCERPT that Ships of Hagoth posted with its initial book announcement–and more especially in the CHAPTER 3 EXCERPT. (For that matter, a stealth excerpt from the book can be found in my post on PATTI SMITH AND CHRISSIE HYNDE). Even the book’s stark, austere, tomb-white cover engages with these empty spaces. As both Emerson and Elder Bednar have declared, the words unspoken are often the most important part of the sermon.
I am of course keenly aware that the Venn Diagram overlap between Mormon Lit and Experimental Lit (already two very niche fields) is so infinitesimal as to be observable only by quantum physics; but such is also the sacred space that And All Eternity Shook seeks to manifest. This is my message in a bottle. Whosoever hath ears to hear, let them hear.
About the author: Jacob L. Bender is also the author of Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), a critical study similarly influenced by his Puerto Rican mission service and his mother’s passing. In LDS studies specifically, he has previously written for Dialogue, Sunstone, Peculiar Pages, Ships of Hagoth, the Eugene England Foundation, and The Association of Mormon Letters. He is currently an English Professor (tenure-track) at Middlesex College in New Jersey, where he lives down shore with his wife and two children.