Surprise!

In Wendell Berry’s novel Andy Catlett, young Andy says “I had begun to be surprised by the extent to which life consists of surprises.  I don’t know, but what it consists of is mostly surprises.”  Marcus Aurelius says “How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life.”  One wonders if, as Andy grows older, he will, like David Copperfield, come to channel that flinty Roman Stoic: “I know enough of the world now,” David says, “to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything.”

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Surprise measures abnormality, an incongruity between expectation and outcome, the gap between a coherence we infer and an incoherence we experience.  We can’t help being surprised.  It springs from part of our brain’s standard equipment, an automatic, unconscious, and corner-cuttingly quick use of perception, intuitive thinking, and knowledge of the world to make connections, to fit parts together into cohesive wholes.  Should a burly Hell’s Angel on a Harley hog say, in a Boston Brahmin accent, “I do so enjoy tatting lace,” we almost instantaneously register an associative discrepancy.  Which is to say, we have a surprise response.

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I like language that surprises me, that traduces the rules governing how words are aligned, grouped and related; that in pushing against and beyond the parameters of linguistic structure pushes us out of the deep-channeled groove of thought and into mindful experiencing.  This, for example, from e. e. cummings’s “Cambridge Ladies”: “. . . sometimes in its box of/sky lavender and cornerless, the/moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy.”  Or this, from Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”: “And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves/Trail with daisies and barley/Down the rivers of the windfall light.”  Or this, from Gary Lutz’s short story “Divorcer”: “These were quelled girls with queering glowers, older young women unpetted and inexpert in dress, sideburned boys who were uglifiers of their one good feature . . .”  Who can read these words without an embodied jolt, without being startled into the well-appointed but constricted souls of the Cambridge ladies, the innocent wonder of childhood, the abjection of postmodern youth

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When she was four-years-old, my granddaughter overheard me make a snide and dismissive comment about the Disney princess phenomenon.  She came and stood right before me.  “Grandpa Jerry,” she said, “don’t step on my dreams.”  I was surprised by the precocious sentiment, and I was stung into shame.  Can a heart throb with self-abjection?  Can a heart break with self-recriminatory sadness?  Can it fracture, shatter?  Can it be smithereened,  be big-banged into pieces?  Mine did, and was.

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In Poe’s story “The Cask of Amantillado,” the narrator,  Montressor (“my treasure”), an aristocrat  who no longer commands wealth or respect, the last of his line—an aristocrat whose only remaining treasure is his aristocracy—devises a meticulously planned act of vengeance against the wealthy arriviste Fortunato (“the lucky one”) for his having “ventured upon insult.”  He lures an inebriated Fortunato to the catacombed cellar of his palazzo and walls him alive in a crypt’s recess.  Fortunato quickly sobers up.  “For the love of God, Montressor,” Fortunato begs.  “Yes,” Montressor mockingly replies as he mortars the last stone in place, “for the love of God.”

I suspect Fortunato was surprised.  I would be.  But that surprise enfolds a horror, for Poe ambiguates what we think we know: the difference between sanity and insanity.  If Montressor is sane, he has directed a highly rational intelligence toward a hideously deranged purpose.  If he is insane, insanity is not babbling idiocy but, rather, wears the mask of cool, calculating reason.  And precisely there is the horror: how can we tell what self-animating purpose harbors itself in those among whom we move?  Do you think that, in Poe’s day, a neighbor of someone who has committed some heinous act, stood before a reporter and, stupefied by surprise, said, “But he was such a nice guy.”

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In the half-light of a dawn this past summer, as I waited for the Mr. Coffee machine to deliver enough bracing brew to begin my day, I looked out the kitchen window and was surprised to see a fully antlered deer nibbling on the Pauls Glory hostas in the garden.  As I stood there, he suddenly stopped and looked right at me.  I raised my hand, palm outward, and said “hi.”  It was all I could think to do.

One winter afternoon I watched two sparrows standing in the snow, facing each other.  One would puff itself up, take a step forward, and utter such a harsh chirp that the other hopped backwards.  Then it puffed itself up, stepped forward, and blared a chirp that sent the other skipping backward.  They repeated this display of avian machismo for five minutes before flying off in separate directions.  Alpha-maled stalemate, I suppose; Passeridae gridlock.

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I dislike surprises that disrupt my routines.  Now, I realize that routine is routinely denounced, habitually vilified, and uniformly maligned.  Emotional anesthesia!  Spiritual quarantine!  A perpendicular fall from the intellectual firmament!  That Yankee scold Thoreau says, “It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. . . . How worn and dusty, . . . how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity.”  For Thoreau, routine is essentially passive, a half-life: we “insensibly” “fall” into it.

I wonder, though.  Routine can be sensible and active.  Routine is how my classes get prepared and tests get written and papers get graded; it is how books and articles and blog posts get read and essays get written; it is how grass gets mowed and the house gets painted and snow gets shoveled; it is how meals get prepared and clothes get laundered and carpets vacuumed.  There is much to be said for spontaneity, but routine is the conduct by which I conduct my life.  Routine makes time.

The world besets us with its clamor and clangor, its clatter and claptrap.  It musses and messes us up.  It grates and abrades with the blistering friction of the here-and-now.  We are beleaguered by its 4G-ed haste, frayed by its unsparing demands on our attention; impinged upon, continually, by its helter-skelteredness.  Routine tames that world, patterns and familiarizes it, slows it down, domesticates it; it enabling us to exert some control over it, to dwell in it, to write our lives in it.

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I especially dislike being the featured guest at a surprise birthday party.  The deer-in-the-headlights stare of initial incomprehension; the dope duped feel; the stuttering struggle to say something equal to the occasion, to be coolly glib and buccaneeringly witty, and managing only a feeble “Wow, what a surprise;” the mildewed comments about age and its debilities; the forced performance of it all; the perplexed and implacable self-consciousness of it all; the contrived responsiveness of it all.  Surprise party?  More like surprise attack. 

Still, someone cared enough about me to arrange that party.  That’s pretty surprising.

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But birthdays themselves, I do not mind.  As the anniversaries of my initial appearance on the planet, they remind me of the most surprising thing of all: my natality.  I was born.  And while I occupy but a moment’s moment in the 13.7 billion history of the universe, while I comprise but a minor hieroglyph in the story of humankind, I am, and that small conjunction of subject and verb is so huge I am compelled to predicate it with nouns and adjectives that corral it and make it, if not fully understood, at least partially comprehensible.  Birthdays are ambassadors from a far, far country, bringing the news that the earth has once again spun its way around the sun, and I am here to observe it.