Charles Inouye introduces his new short fiction collection, Hymns of Silence (BCC Press).
I wrote the five stories contained in Hymns of Silence over many decades. “Homecoming” is the oldest. “Nick” is the youngest. The others came somewhere in between, in the order of “Stray,” “Fire,” and “Annie,” or so I recall. Most predated my memoir zion earth zen sky and with it share a common substrate of events.
All five hymns grew from my need to address the silence that I encountered growing up in Sanpete Country. Even though I’ve now lived more of my life in New England than in Utah, I still can’t separate myself from the stillness of Gunnison Valley, which has both haunted and comforted me.
Over the many years it took to write these five hymns, I learned to understand the people, animals, plants, and rocks of that dry place. I came to terms with the wind, the hot days and cold nights. But it was learning to love its silence that posed the greatest challenge. The quiet of that desert valley and its surrounding mountains had a powerful grip on me.
The silence was challenging and frightening. But it also made me honest and kept me from distraction. It focused me on what my father called “the stark reality” of life on a farm where we were one bad day away from economic disaster. It kept my attention on the water level in the canal and on a country town small enough to learn by heart.
My life now is punctuated with other kinds of silence—a Zen garden, a Japanese bathtub, early morning hours when I write, the syncopation of spent cups dropping into sacrament trays.
I now know the quiet of the Appalachian Trial and the sigh of the surf off Monomoy Point. But no silence is like what I experienced in Gunnison, Utah.
It grabs you. It holds you. It shakes you and tells you who you are—whether you want to know or not. The knowledge that comes of that muteness is often too honest to bear. I saw it drive the people of my hometown to God, to addiction, and to suicide.
I have this memory of my Aunt Helen. She’s driving her push-button Chrysler. I’m swallowed up in the huge back seat, listening to her tell my mother about the people in her life. I don’t remember the details. But I haven’t forgotten the question that formed in my mind at such a young age. “What is it about the stories that makes her cry as she tells them?”
I think I know now what Auntie Helen knew then. Our lives are incredibly tender, and talking about them brings us to our knees. When we know the truth about ourselves and our neighbors, we are moved, even devastated.
Failure, disappointment, injury. Say nothing of the judgements and condemnations we throw at one another. My own life has been a series of misunderstandings, misjudgments, misadventures, and misanthropies. Silence has made this clear. At the same time, it also brought hope, miracles, mercies, blessings, and knowledge.
In my repentance, I understand the need for hymns. Some of the songs in our green hymn books are a forced smile, a self-conscious handshake. Be righteous! Be thankful! Be saved! But there are also those that blend with the humility of silence. They sing of babies left on the prairie, love that failed, friendships that ended, brotherhood and sisterhood that were never accomplished, loved ones who have gone on.
It is not always the rousing progression of chords that moves us. At least as often, a whispering note brings us to who we really are, and to what we might be doing differently. Many of our hymns are filled with this deeply moving love.
But as a people, I fear we’ve come to prefer a state of constant melody. The soundtrack always on, our attention always off. Perhaps the silence is too hard to bear, so we cover it up with strings of harmonious notes that lead us to a future we don’t take credit for.
On the night Jesus met with Nicodemus, he spoke quietly of the past, present, and future. “The wind comes and goes. We do not see it. But we know what it has moved.”
Who shouts an apology and really means it?
“I’m sorry. All right! Didn’t I say I was sorry?”
Courageous and crushed, Nicodemus came around in silence to the tomb.
About the style of these five hymns. I appreciate truth but I am not a realist. I believe in things more than I appreciate how everything fits together and makes sense. Another way to put this is that I hold fast to the real but struggle against realism.
God is true, as real as can be. But the gods of these latter-days have personality and particularity. They are multiple and visible. For this reason, I reject the realism that modern symbols create. Those deceptive signs hide our differences of perception. They fool us into presuming a common understanding that we actually don’t share. Massive social groups form of this deception. But this unity that comes of symbol-driven organization has little to do with the togetherness of generosity that is ours whenever we take the time to listen, to pay attention, and to give of our time and substance.
We are people of the sugar cookie, of the timely visit, not of the cross and the steeple. Our best ways are skills of service. We are folding chairs as much as we are white shirts and ties.
Finally, a little about the haiku you’ll find in this volume. These brief 17-syllable poems teach us a similar lesson. I have dropped them into these stories, here and there. They serve as ma, as interludes of stillness. You’ll find the same sort of ma in the blankness of a Sesshū painting, or in the pauses of an Ozu film. They are quiet moments of slowness, a time to take stock.
The poetry of our lives is not word candy. Art comes not of creative genius but of the power of the things around us. The world is powerful. Our job is to listen, to pay attention, to feel. We honor the real by simply documenting our experiences with it.
To this end, I try to avoid description and other forms of interpretation. (Brevity also requires this.) I try to stay away from anything that limits the power that radiates from things.
The language of haiku is simple and quiet. They are words to overcome words.
Words are symbols, a necessary evil. But when we use them well, we can show their dangers and limitations.
A poem, a hymn. They give us an interval just long enough to acknowledge creation. During such moments of regret and renewal come our heartfelt tears. In gratitude and hope for a better world, we hear hymns in the silence.
Charles Shirō Inouye is Professor of Japanese Literature and Visual Culture at Tufts University. He is the author of The End of the World, Plan B; zion earth zen sky; and Hymns of Silence. He also writes on Japanese culture and literature, including The Similitude of Blossoms: A Critical Biography of Izumi Kyoka, Japanese Playwright and Novelist.
Blurbs for Hymns of Silence
I know of no Latter-day Saint I would rather read than Charles Inouye. He has returned again to the well of his upbringing in Sanpete County, this time to bring out of the shadowy vault of memory and from the silence of death the dignity of wounded lives and souls. He seeks to see, as he puts it, as God sees, to see the suffering and beauty of each life and to make from the ashes of life’s fires a monument that honors our passing human presence. Inouye teaches us the godly courage to see life as it was, as it is, even when we might prefer to turn away.
–George Handley, author of Home Waters and The Hope of Nature
How does a soul respond to the deep, truthful silence of the desert? Charles Inouye’s five beautiful vignettes of life in the agrarian desert of Utah honor those among us who have lived and died by that silence. Inouye’s poetic juxtaposition of people and place, of action and contemplation, of life and death, are rightly called hymns. The stories harmonize elegantly to communicate an abiding sense of wonder and pathos, or, in other words, worship. As I sat in silence at the conclusion of the book, I felt that God was in it with me.
— Rachel Jardine, associate editor at Wayfare Magazine, and daughter of a Utah farm boy
A gentle, generous, often lyrical collection of stories that also gives expression to haunting, sometimes disturbing spots of time that refuse to recede beyond the reach of memory. With great compassion and occasional irony, Inouye calmly gazes over people, creatures, and experiences whose outward plainness opens onto depths of mystery and dignity. Masterful and moving.
–Matthew Wickman, author of Life to the Whole Being
There is a pearl of earth wisdom here. It supplants the digital miasmas that tempt us away from our world’s vital natural offerings. Inouye does not shy away from looking closely at hard things–suicide, loss, and trouble in forms we all too often know by heart. Yet, in these reflections, a compassionate hope bubbles up. Like the haiku he uses to such fantastic effect in order to leaven the vignettes in this book, there is a joyous honesty and clarity here that captures the depths of a universe teeming with meaning.
–Steve Peck, author of Tales from Pleasant Grove and Heike’s Void
Charles Inouye’s Hymns of Silence brings the silence of the universe down to earth. The author’s empathetic insight into his characters, their evocative placement in the valleys and mountains of Central Utah, the intellectual pleasure of his words, and his deft handling of the stories make them well worth your time to read and read again.
–Susan Elizabeth Howe, author of Infinite Disguises is winner of the 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Mormon Letters. She lives in Ephraim, Utah with her husband Cless Young.
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Love the cover.