Life's Work
some reflections on David Milch's memoir and a thought or two on aesthetic Christology and the good work of healthy self-understanding
The Un-Hidden Self
I’m on the plane flying back to Tulsa from LA after teaching a preaching class there at Angelus Temple, Sister Aimee’s church. I just finished David Milch’s memoir and no surprise to any of you who know me even a little I’m crying. Not quite weeping. But more than tearing up.
To be clear: I don’t know that everyone should read this book. And certainly not everyone should watch his shows. But everyone should have a voice like his in their lives. I’ve been blessed to have a few, some of whom, like him, never knew they were speaking to me or about me. They were, nonetheless. And I’m the better for it.
A few years ago I heard Rowan Williams give lectures at General Theological Seminary. (Fr Kenneth has never forgiven me for failing to invite him to join us. Mea culpa, my friend.) Williams said at the beginning of his first talk that week that he’d never write a memoir because he didn’t want to subject anyone to the details of his life. I hope he was lying. Or at least I hope he changes his mind. Because right now, only minutes after finishing Milch’s book, I’m pretty much convinced that everyone should write a memoir or die trying. I know we’re not all David Milchs or Mary Karrs, but I suspect what Chesterton said about getting drunk is even truer of writing perceptively about our own lives—if doing it isn’t good for you, the ache it creates the morning after certainly is.
The Body Electric
In one of my favorite passages from the book, Milch is talking about Paul the Apostle, a man he considers “arguably the most commercially successful writer that ever lived.” I first heard Milch tell a version of this story years ago, at some lecture I watched online. Since then, I’ve thought of this as his own personal Damascus Road experience.
In the middle of shooting that season, the Humanitas Prize comes back around. Jimmy’s last episode, “Hearts and Souls,” wins. I was still pretty new in sobriety. And the whole time during the ceremony I’m looking at Father Kieser and I’m thinking how I had always hated this guy, how he would look at you and smile with his buckteeth and his close-set eyes, and that night I’m noticing he’s got a bit of amblyopia going too, a lazy eye. I’m thinking when I get up there I’m going to call him out. So I get up and I’m looking at Father Kieser, who’s right next to the podium, and I say, “I’ve never liked Father Kieser. In particular, I have taken offense at this smile which is chronically on his features, and which he evinces even now as I speak. It’s like he’s saying he knew something about me that I didn’t know about myself. But recently I have been relieved of certain obsessions. I thank God that I have lived long enough to have come to understand that that darkness in which I believed I must move, and in which my characters must live, is in in fact cast by God’s sheltering hand. And that’s what Father Kieser knew about me that I didn’t know about myself.
This moment, and what he did in it, took him by surprise, he says. Totally off-guard. And it opened on an unexpected future.
None of that was what I planned to say. I had planned to say I suspected him of child abuse. The idea that we understand and control what we’re doing, and therefore ought to have a plan and guide our steps accordingly—of all my gratitude I am most grateful to have been relieved of that sense of necessity.
A month or so later Father Kieser called me and said, “I’m dying. Would you come and sit with me?” And I did. It turned out he’d been quite ill at the time of that dinner and in fact his amblyopia was a manifestation of a brain tumor. As I sat with him, sometimes he was delirious, and he kept saying to me, “You must write about Paul. You must write about Paul.”
So, he did. Or tried to.
Deadwood’s Rev. Smith (acted by Ray McKinnon, who later made Rectify) became “a sort of avator for Paul.” And his eulogy for Wild Bill Hickok realizes Milch’s vision “in its purest form”:
Mr. Hickok will lie beside two brothers. One he likely killed, the other he killed for certain, and he’s been killed now in turn. So much blood, and on the battlefields of The Brothers’ War I saw more blood than this, and asked then after the purpose and did not know, and don’t know the purpose now, but know now to testify that, not knowing, I believe. St. Paul tells us, “By one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jew or Gentile, bond or free, and have all been made to drink into one Spirit. For the body is not one member but many.” He tells us, “The eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee; nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of thee. Nay, much more those members of the body which seem to be more feeble, and those members of the body which we think of as less honorable, all are necessary.” He says that “there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care, one to another, and whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.” I believe in God’s purpose, not knowing it. I ask Him, moving in me, to allow me to see His will. I ask Him, moving in others, to allow them to see it.”
“Talk Through Me”: Milch’s Aesthetic Christology
Milch swears he’s no theologian. “I don’t have a concept of God,” he says. But no sooner are those words out of his mouth than he immediately offers this— exactly the thing he’s just said he doesn’t have to give:
I feel as though there is some sort of pulsing thing. And the state of grace is for that thing to inhabit something else. I wish to hell I knew how to make that happen. I don’t know how to enter that state as an act of volition; I just have to stay available. One thing you feel is that if you ain’t there, it ain’t coming. So I’m still in the process of finding out what His part is.
In one of episodes in the fourth season of NYPD Blue, the lead detective, Sipowicz, suffers a series of dreams, which Milch explains were drawn up out of his own sufferings, dreams of his father.
In the show, the first dream comes right after the credits, and you see Sipowicz walking into this crowded diner, so for the first few beats the audience doesn’t know it’s a dream. Sipowicz sits down at the counter next to this trucker, but then in the seat beyond he sees his dead son:
SIPOWICZ: Could I switch seats with you? It’d be a big favor.
TRUCKER: Yeah.
SIPOWICZ: Appreciate it. (To Andy Jr.) Son?
ANDY JR: Hey, Pop.
SIPOWICZ: Aw, Andy. Can I give you a kiss?
ANDY JR: Will they throw us out?
SIPOWICZ: Oh my God. (Hugging) I can’t believe it’s you.
ANDY JR: How you been? How’s Theo?
SIPOWICZ: Oh, God, he’s—he’s wonderful. He had some health questions, but he—he’s fine.
ANDY JR: And Sylvia’s good?
SIPOWICZ: She’s wonderful. She’s a wonderful mother. You know, I’m trying to understand what’s going on.
ANDY JR: You know, I’m—I’m dead, but I’m—I’m doing all right.
SIPOWICZ: I, uh—I wish we’d have seen you sooner. We had a lot of sorrow with your death.
ANDY JR: Pop, we didn’t see each other too much when I was alive.
SIPOWICZ: What’s your inference with that?
ANDY JR: No, I’m just saying?
SIPOWICZ: Nobody says I didn’t make any mistakes.
ANDY JR: I would’ve liked to have seen the baby and Sylvia too. That’s all I’m saying.
SIPOWICZ: I took you for breaking balls, my not seeing you growing up.
ANDY JR: It’s a little late about that, Pop.
SIPOWICZ: I wish to hell they’d let you come over there, Andy. The little guy, huh, well, he’s a real pisser. And in forty ways he reminds me of you. I never say that to Sylvia ’cause of the upset. Did I just ruin something now with my nature?
ANDY JR: No. Anyways, um, I gotta go.
SIPOWICZ: If I offended anybody, let ’em know I try to curb it.
ANDY JR: Yeah, I—I don’t know how it works. I love you, Pop.
SIPOWICZ: Any opportunity, any modification on my part—
ANDY JR: Love to Sylvia and the baby.
SIPOWICZ: Take good care of yourself as you can. (To the trucker who had been between them) My son.
TRUCKER: He’s a good-looking boy.
SIPOWICZ: I did something here. They pulled him.
TRUCKER: Is that it for him, or is he coming back?
SIPOWICZ: I can’t talk no more.
TRUCKER: Should’ve talked across me.
SIPOWICZ: I can’t talk no more. I’m finished.
Milch explains what we’ve seen:
Sipowicz is the audience’s surrogate in the scene, trying to figure out what’s going on. The trucker is this third seemingly benign presence, first obliging Sipowicz, noticing how good Andy Jr. looks, asking if he’ll come back. “Should’ve talked across me,” that’s the line that leaves open the chance there’s something else going on, though I didn’t know what it was. You can use surrogates that way too. You give the audience a place to identify, then you introduce another variable and it leaves a way to open the whole thing up.
Sipowicz has another dream, a second one, which continues the first but does not resolve it. Milch says he knew he could not sentimentalize the ending.
One temptation as a storyteller might be to give the audience the satisfaction of Sipowicz learning from the first dream and changing, being different with his son this second time, not getting caught up in the same stuff. And Sipowicz wants so badly for his old son and his new son to meet.
I found in writing it that I couldn’t satisfy that wish, for Sipowicz or for the audience. In the second dream he still can’t let go of that fixation, that Andy Jr. be with Sylvia and Theo, and so he and Andy Jr. get into it again. Andy Jr. says, “Think seeing me murdered is gonna make a happy memory?” Sipowicz realizes that’s where they are, the bar where Andy Jr. was murdered, and then his son’s dead again in front of him. Then the trucker from the first dream is there, and Sipowicz starts in on him, “We’re gonna be lifetime companions?” You hear Andy Jr. say, “That’s Jesus Christ, Dad. Congratulations pissin’ off Jesus Christ.” The trucker takes Andy Jr.’s body on his shoulder, carries him, and says to Sipowicz, “What did I tell ya? Talk through me. Talk through me.”
That is aesthetic Christology at its best. Playful, but discerning. Touching, but unsentimental. Painful, but healing. And it bodies forth electrically the truth that Milch came to see so clearly.
Bonhoeffer saw it too. In Life Together, he criticizes our attempts to seek out “direct contact” with others, seeking to love them in ways that bind rather than free them. He sees that we want to be irresistible for those whom we love—irresistible and indispensable. But we are not meant to love or to be loved this way, “directly.” We need a transcendent mediator, what Milch calls the “third seemingly benign presence,” an otherness that allows for resistance and relinquishment. The infinitude and givenness of that transcendence affords us the strength to embrace our finitude. Without it, we’re never going to be at peace. If we can recognize it as someone, however, if we can engage him gratefully, we’ll not only rest, we’ll shine.
Completion Dreams
I’m not sure how Bonhoeffer learned this truth. But Milch learned it because he was true to his art:
When I write, I go back and I read everything again the next morning, to say, “Does that feel right?” Does that feel right? Does it feel like he would’ve said that, even if I don’t know why he said it? When I had that dream and tried to write out of the feelings that came from my dream, I didn’t know what the dream meant. Then, in writing the first dream, I didn’t know who the trucker was, other than he was a trucker who was between Sipowicz and his son, which was good for the scene with the audience. If your emotional commitment to the materials is genuine, you trust that somehow a meaning will come to all the characters. You simply try and get the people right, because if you get the people right, everyone is connected. I felt that that truck driver had a right to be in the bar because he’d been in the diner, and I had no sense of him other than that. These are elements of Sipowicz’s consciousness talking to themselves, and it’s he who chooses to assign the identity of Christ to this random figure from the first part of his dream. It wasn’t until Sipowicz’s son said “that’s Jesus Christ” that I knew that’s who it was. The actor who plays the trucker is Jim Beaver. He would later play the character Ellsworth on Deadwood. The “talk through me” becomes like a call for acceptance—accept the space between, that your first son is gone, that you must keep going now with your new baby without him. That’s your chance for happiness now, it’s not going to come by wishing you got to have them together.”
Realizing what had happened to Sipowicz, and why it had to happen as it did, Milch also came to terms with his own dreams.
In the process of writing that story, I came to a much fuller kind of emotional appreciation of what had gone on in the dream with my dad. It was simply a way of being with him again, a way of being present with him. In psychology, those are called completion dreams and they are a kind of forgiveness. My dad never met my kids. I’ve never been with my dad and my children. He never saw a single thing I’ve written on television. It doesn’t do me any good to wish it were otherwise. Even though the content of the dream seems to express a continuing alienation, in fact what you’re doing is recalling in forgiveness the way things were and not letting it destroy you, just remembering it the way it was. Writing that storyline for Sipowicz allowed me to appreciate that. That’s what art lets you do.
Dementia is taking Milch’s mind away from him. And from those of us who’ve learned from him, who’ve delighted in his art. But the way in which he’s losing his mind not only testifies to the greatness of his soul but also affords us the chance to gain from our inevitable losses, as well. And this book has in it something of the power of a completion dream. How? Because Milch has become more and more one with “that space between” that we have to talk “across.” A member of the Body Rev. Smith eulogized. An answer to Fr Kieser’s prayer.
I’d say that’s a good life’s work, is it not?
Thanks for this, Chris, from great plane heights and the depths of real tears. The True One is true every and anywhere, and so very much in the liminal spaces we don't attend to very well but that art can't help but inhabit. Thanks for recognizing and drawing our attention here.
This dream sequence is a powerful testament to the fact that wisdom and understanding are not accessible "beforehand" as commodities to be gained and accessed in the right moments. They are events, mediated by the (often) unrecognized one in between. They are discoveries, revelations, given in relation, for the other.
My brother recently said to me in passing, " I didn't know it, I never thought it, until I wrote it down." I didn't realize how true that was until I heard him say it and wrote it down myself. It's the risk of vulnerable art-making, of truth-telling. We won't "know" or see until we're most honestly in it, until we've submitted to the otherness of it, until we are honest about its honesty and let it be what it is. No matter the context, the Word makes possible all saying, and knowing, and love beyond knowing, as the One speaking, and bringing forth life, in the between. This first and last word who helps us tell all our stories in his own. "I just try to stay available," says Milch. What a call to discipleship. Bonhoeffer might agree.
This: You hear Andy Jr. say, “That’s Jesus Christ, Dad. Congratulations pissin’ off Jesus Christ.” The trucker takes Andy Jr.’s body on his shoulder, carries him, and says to Sipowicz, “What did I tell ya? Talk through me. Talk through me.”
Yes. And again yes.