FACETS OF A JEWEL

Jon Ferguson's Farley's Jewel: A Novel In Search of Being

Review

M.C. Gardner

Farley’s Jewel: A Novel In Search Of Being--has found one.   I am delighted to disclose that I was the author’s room mate during a fondly remembered college year, early in the 1970s. Jon Ferguson is not Professor Larry Farley, "PH.D.D.E.F.G.H.I." but rather the “omniscience” behind Farley’s thoughts and the thoughts of his students as he poses the many questions that Farley asks each to consider.  Farley’s lectures and his student’s interior monologues provide one of the delightful structures of the novel.  When Farley wonders if “things” exist outside of their “appearances,” he elicits the great Kant’s “Thing-in-itself.” One student is contemplating his lust for another in a confused litany of CAN’T, and KANT, and CUNT; a second is admiring the Professor’s curly hair, while yet a third is pondering why Farley appears to make the world more complicated than it “appears.”

 Late in our college career, I remember Jon musing about the absurdity of discussing Being and Time with a pregnant classmate.  This same absurdity dogs his Professor during a sabbatical taken to produce a computer program of Heidegger’s Dasien and in most of the conversations he has with his wife, Carol.  Times change but absurdity abides.

 Dasien is a term which Heidegger likens to a “...clearing in the forest,” a nothingness which  allows the features of the trees to manifest to consciousness. Heidegger’s conception of Dasien is one of the pristine constructions of early Phenomenology and a nascent Existensialism.  Its gemlike quality is Farley’s jewel.  Beyond judgment, morality, and guilt-- it simply “is.”

 One of the most startling moments of the book concerns his dog Freda’s encounter with a small rodent in the red desert of southern Utah :

 "Around the dog’s head the earth turned to a halo of dust. Then the dog sauntered back with the taupe snug between her jaws.  She stopped on a spot that was somewhere beyond good and evil and let the warm little body fall in front of her master’s feet.  One of Farley’s jewels, he thought genuflecting and for a moment he watched death glisten in the light of noon ."

 Farley comes to see that his being in the world is the world in his being.  The Jewel that he polishes is both interior and exterior for he can find no logical distinction between the two.  Peering out into the crimson vastness of Bryce Canyon:  “... he watched lizards scuttle and small birds loop between the shale totems, and he heard the hole in the earth below him whisper infinity into the horses ears.”

 The Upanishads and esoteric Buddhism have long predated these same eternal echoes.  The Hindu’s Net of Indra, Tu Shun’s Ocean Wave and Fa Sang’s parable of the Golden Lion are each encounters between the infinite and the quotidian. Farley asks us to think of people as waves on a shore or birds in flight. “Just try. See if the world feels different. See if you feel different in the world.”

 Throughout the book Farley questions the priority of what man takes to be his grasp of the world. Farley is not as certain as Pinzias and Wilson that cosmic microwaves are evidence of galactic evolution: “Farley stared at Freda in a curl on the kitchen floor.  He wondered how many light years there were across the galaxies inside her skull.”

  It is clear to the Professor that self-conscious thought is only a sliver of consciousness and perhaps the most confused and worst part of it. The naming of names is the disease of Adam. He quotes an unnamed citation (Nietzsche?) to his students.  “Even what is here called usefulness is in the end only a belief, something imagined and perhaps precisely the most fatal piece of stupidity by which we will one day perish.” One thinks, as well, of Wallace Stevens: “Throw away the lights, the definitions /  And say of what you see in the dark.”

 Whitman often heard immortal longings in the call of a wood thrush or saw the infinite in the wings of a gander. Here is Farley on the flight of a hawk:

"When the hawk looks over the land is it in itself or is it a mere looking? Not looking out and then back in, but just out.  Looking out builds no I. Looking out lasts until it stops looking. Until the light goes out and it retires to nest.  Here is no death."

 Jon’s novel is one of great and enduring riches. No where is this more apparent than in his handling of Farley’s mother’s Alzheimer’s. Farley’s wife challenges his cold acceptance of his mother’s loss of identity:

 "Lost it. No. Lost what? Lost the right to order lunch in a restaurant? Lost what time it is? What day it is? Who’s  coming to dinner? ...Who decreed that these things need to be known in the first place?... There never was an it.  My mother’s relation to the world has never been a constant.  Ditto for everybody.  A cloud isn’t an it.  It’s a big whirl...My mother’s world now is a new whirl, a different whirl, a less common whirl, but it she hasn’t lost.  It was never there in the first place.”  

 In the book’s most experimental pages Ferguson conjures Faulkner’s Benji of The Sound and the Fury to make us feel the disconnect of an Alzheimer’s patient.  He then continues the disconnect in dialogue between Farley and an old student to suggest that the distance between his mother’s world and our own is closer than we would otherwise comfortably suppose.  

When my own mother passed away in the twilight of Alzheimer’s I recalled Proust’s description of his grandmother’s mortal remains. Had I, at the time, read Farley’s Jewel I would have, as well, recollected the jewel of Farley’s singular moments with his mother, at the novel’s end:  

“You see her eyes slowly close and you rise and pull the curtains then you return to the bed and sit with your right hip near her head.  You watch your right hand lay itself on her silver-blue hair while the fingers feel for scalp and you watch them curl and uncurl and gently dig.  You see her eyelids cringe but you doubt it is pain; you imagine they are working toward sleep.  You watch her and now feel the fingers of both your hands rub the heat that is her head and you see the body and at the same time you feel the tears in you swell and pop and drip.  They come warm and fine; you know you won’t be talking together any more that day.

There are days when you stay on a bed with a head in your hands like an opal until you feel it sleeps."

The book is published by Cincus Puntos Press, El Paseo , Texas . I purchased it for a penny on the internet. It is easily worth one thousand one-hundred and ninety-five times the price I paid--which is to say the $11.95 of the publisher’s asking price. Seek it out. It is heartily commended.