Thomas Merton writes of teaching a writing class at Columbia University . . .
That was also the season in which, three nights a week, I taught a class
in English composition, in one of the rooms in the School of Business at
Columbia. Like all Extension classes, it was a mixture of all flesh. There
was a tough and bad-tempered chemist who was a center of potential
opposition, because he was taking the course under duress—it was required
of all the students who were following a systematic series of courses in
anything at all. There was an earnest and sensitive Negro youth who sat in
the front row, dressed in a neat grey suit, and peered at me intently through his glasses all the time the class was going on. There was an exchange
student from the University of Rome, and there was one of those middle-aged ladies who had been taking courses like this for years and who handed
in neat and punctilious themes and occupied, with a serene and conscious
modesty, her rightful place as the star of the class. This entitled her to talk
more than anybody else and ask more unpredictable questions.
Once, after I had been insisting that they should stick to concrete and
tangible evidence, in describing places and things, an Irishman called
Finegan who had been sitting in bewilderment and without promise in one
of the back rows, suddenly blossomed out with a fecundity in minute and
irrelevant material detail that it was impossible to check. He began handing
in descriptions of shoe factories that made you feel as if you were being
buried under fifty tons of machinery. And I learned, with wonder and fear,
that teachers have a mysterious and deadly power of letting loose
psychological forces in the minds of the young. The rapidity, the happy
enthusiasm with which they responded to hints and suggestions—but with
the wrong response—was enough to make a man run away and live in the
woods.
I love Merton's description of giving writers nudges and suggestions, and said writers launching into descriptions of shoe factories and Himalayas of machinery. Unpredictable questions that make the future monk want to flee to the forest and live like John the Baptist on grasshoppers and pinecones. For me, that is writing at its best--when it slaps you in the face like a startled pigeon wing.
A couple nights ago, I finished reading Flight of the Diamond Smugglers: A Tale of Pigeons, Obsession, and Greed Along Coastal South Africa by Matthew Gavin Frank, a book that is part Homeric odyssey/part memoir/part contemplation on loss and grief. It's the sort of story that defies categorization, refuses to be pinned down. Like its titular diamond-smuggling avians, the pages fly off in wild pursuit of mysterious destinations, guided only by a kind of inner mytho-magnetic GPS system.
On the surface, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers is a historical and contemporary exploration of the ruthless De Beers diamond industry in South Africa, from infancy to violent conglomerate monstrosity. Yet, the book begins with Frank and his wife, Louisa, huddled on the edge of the Big Hole, "a gaping open-pit and underground diamond mine that was active from 1871 to 1914 . . . a man-made Grand Canyon." It is into this abyss that they empty a thermos containing the ashes of a lost child. Their sixth miscarriage. Frank recites Kaddish, and his wife whispers "Amen," as this tiny ghost swirls to the bottom of the hole.
From this ceremony, Frank launches into a narrative that spans the wasted coasts of South Africa, to Orpheus and the Underworld, to Krishna's cursed Koh-i-Noor diamond. It's a ride that takes wild turns. Isaac Newton and a wooden pigeon. Middle school Champagne Snowball dance and midnight meeting with a security demigod. Just when you think you see the destination ahead, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers finds an updraft or trade wind, and you go sailing into another gleaming facet or bottomless mine.
Stitching the book together, like a recurring motif in a symphony, are lyrical "Bartholomew Variations," Frank meditating on a particular diamond smuggling pigeon (Bartholomew) owned by a young mine worker (Msizi). The veins of these small sections carry the blood of the book to its heart. Through Msizi and his bird, Frank is able to humanize a story that, most of the time, seems inhuman, even otherworldly. And, by doing this, he transforms the book into something personal, alive, heartbreaking.
Matthew Gavin Frank is a master of juxtaposition, throwing all of these disparate elements--grief and greed, desperation and diamonds--into a tale that, ultimately, ends the way all stories about carrier pigeons end. With another long flight, another winding journey, through a dung-beetle night, toward a distant, waiting home.
Saint Marty thinks you should book passage on this trip. You won't be disappointed.
