Customer Reviews

In a Special Light

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Elroy Bode is a wonderful teacher. I use the present tense, even though he has retired from close to a half-century of school teaching, because one purpose of an essay is to teach, and Bode's essays--mini-essays, they mostly are--teach readers to see just as his artful methods in the classroom taught his English students to imagine. The methods of In a Special Light are precision, imagery, and a fastidious, understated style that fits the recurrent mood of almost trancelike concentration on people, animals, and outdoor objects ranging from grass blades to mountains.

Bode's writing has always drawn heavily on his walks around El Paso or in the Texas Hill Country but has also included sketches of people he has known or observed, and many of those work as vividly as good short fiction. This new book keeps on with that mix, devoting, for instance, a sometimes touching, sometimes amusing fifty-page section to classroom and school experiences. Other people who catch the Bode eye include one seen in an El Paso plaza, a man wearing a dirty jacket and a cap with a hood: "He limped along, leaving his monumental body smell in his wake. He was making his rounds, smiling to himself, chanting in a breathy whisper, 'The Ayatollah, yes ... the Ayatollah, yes ...' " (Some of the pieces in this book date from earlier decades. Others are obviously recent.) There is a warm reminiscence of camping with his twelve-year-old son, Byron. There is a glimpse of skateboarders: "With their turned-around caps, punk haircuts, droopy short pants, and old-fashioned black tennis shoes, they were like urbanized Huck Finns. I was surprised at how much I liked them." Bode, in fact, seldom judges anyone in these pieces. Still, his outspoken opposition to racial intolerance, as he relates, made him shun the lunchtime company of colleagues at the El Paso high school where he taught.

I mentioned imagery. Bode's figures of speech teach by illuminating, but the glow is soft, calling attention to its object rather than to itself. Sometimes it is mildly humorous. When he was recovering from Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Bode was finally able to sit up "and accept my reward of hospital food that smelled and tasted like Styrofoam that had been liberally seasoned with Styrofoam herbs." In a Hill Country field, a calf stood "with its nose touching a tree, as if receiving a blessing from its friend, the bark." On one of the many Bode walks, this one along a road, "ants made their way along the Ant-Autobahn of the bare roadside." Nearly all the images are precise and therefore evocative, like the one about goats moving in from a pasture at dusk: "I heard a brief snort, then a bell--faintly, like ice being shaken in a metal glass."

Bode once told a class that a Harvard professor doing research on them "could never learn as much about them as they already knew. They each had a PhD in their own lives." I doubt that he would award himself a doctorate in The Life of Bode, because life, to him, is not so much learning as pondering. "The meaning of human experience," he says, "is beyond the capacity of humans to understand." He examines everything, questions everything: "I could spend a lifetime just trying to understand the migration of birds, the incredibleness of the eye." That sounds like a mind that believes in a Reason, but if so, the belief is a long way from dogmatic. "I don't believe any human has ever had a clue about the origin of life or the meaning of life," Bode says. But that doesn't stop him, in many of these reflections, from trying to get a clue. What did stop him, he says in the final essay, "Looking for Byron," was the death of his son at the age of thirty, in 1999. Since then, he says, he can no longer look about him "valuing the sights of the earth," and he no longer listens to music but prefers "the blank emptiness of silence." Possibly the writing of this devastatingly sad essay, together with other new parts of the book, will begin restoring that sharp eye and ear and, eventually, the quiet joy that arose from using them with such distinctive skill.

I should declare at this point that I have a slight, pleasant acquaintance with Bode and that he generously contributed a cover blurb--a word he looks askance at--for a book of mine. I sought him out because I admired his writing. I hope many others will seek him out through his writing. It will be a joint endeavor, the other searcher being, of course, Elroy Bode.