Spoilers alert!!! Many of the key facts, climaxes, plot events, resolutions (and not), and conclusions of As Earth Without Water are mentioned and discussed below. You are urged, strongly encouraged, to read the story before you read on.
A variety of things have been written about Katy Carl’s first novel, As Earth Without Water [Wiseblood Books, 2021; “AEWW””]. There is a good sampling of them on the cover, on the first unnumbered page of the book, and on the back cover. One quote is from Jennifer Frey. In your present commenter’s opinion, she is spot on when she says: “Katy Carl gives us a vision of love.”
(Every substantive assertion, surmise, and statement in what follows implicitly begins with, “In your present commenter’s opinion.” The numerous, and sometimes extended, quotations from AEWW below may be skimmed or skipped).
The Story
AEWW is the story of the love of Angele and Dylan, each of them a painter, an artist. Angele – who throughout AEWW is presented as an unbeliever – tells the story and, as we find out near the very end, is telling it to a “Mother” who appears to be a nun [a mother superior?]. Angele is first a postulant and then, story-end time, an aspirant who has not yet taken perpetual vows.
Angele presents this story to us achronologically over the time period from July 2004 to October 2017 with allusions to various times and events before 2004. She moves between the past and the present, telling “Mother,” (and her readers) the Angele/Dylan story. Neither Dylan nor anyone else serves as a narrator.
Catholic faith is a non-omnipresent, sometimes context-providing backdrop or grounding for some happenings in the story. Catholicism is not Katy Carl’s (“KC”) meaning-enlivening paradigm for her literary AEWW world. (More on this later). Although there is some passing reference to God and to questions about why certain things happen, AEWW has no in depth treatment of theodicy, the subject area that deals with the so-called “problem of evil.”
Readers learn that Dylan had entered a monastery as a novice monk, Brother Thomas Augustine, but that he has left it before taking vows and has returned to the world and his art. Angele lets us know that Dylan was assaulted by a priest at the monastery. Other than to say, “I had grown up without church or religion,” and “I explain . . . that I’m not a believer,” Angele tells us precious little about any faith journey of hers or about any serious personal hurt, injury, or trauma.
Search For Self
In Angele’s view, and in the view of Dylan as she presents him, they each believe they are searching for “self.” Initially, they consider painting works of art as a means of revealing or finding this self.
Angele has her “own work to do,” and she has Dylan tell us, in a conversation with her, that he “never had a reason before not to be self-centered and fickle.” They each believe they can find a self in their work, but this turns out to be an epistemological dead end and a spiritual black hole.
Each of them expresses feelings of failure in the personal search for self – although they spend the 17 plus years of AEWW, off again, on again, apart and then back with each other, like the separate, yet periodically intersecting alternate waveforms on an oscilloscope screen. Works of art are made by both of them, using gifts which set them apart from other painters; but these works do not concomitantly “make” or unveil a self that satisfies their longings.
Angele leaves from a meeting with Dylan, during which he shows her a portrait he has done of her, naked, on display in an art gallery (which she had asked him not to exhibit publicly). As she walks she looks in the mirror of a building’s plate glass window at herself and she says: “I watched my own reflection . . . I saw nothing.”
At another time, when she is again together with Dylan, she says to herself: “We have cast ourselves in roles and we are choosing now to play them, but we could drop the scripts at any moment and be who we are. And how would that work out? Could we ourselves even tell the difference?”
While at the monastery Dylan has entered, there because he asked her to come, Angele reflects on each of their efforts, each focused on himself or herself, and how they have been unsuccessful:
“Although I have in theory traveled to support a friend, I have been unable to escape from myself: helpless to free him from the cell he carries with him, too firmly trapped in my own. All this time, neither of us has been able to give the other any permanent gift, so much too concerned with what we lacked: The measure with which you measure shall be measured out to you.”
“Who am I, when what I am is stripped away like a garment and set aside? Can I be who I am, can I do what I do, without being destroyed by what I am, drowned in the ways I can be put to use? . . .Is there any way on earth to be free from all this I want, I want? . . . if it means anything to say that my self exists.”
Still, they go on over the years in what they perceive as this failure – failing to comprehend they are forming and delineating a “self” in terms of the other and defining a self – one’s own and the other’s – through their actions toward the other.
[Angele] “We are both such insufferable people.”
[Dylan] “Not to each other we aren’t.”
In loving the other, they implicitly tell the other who they truly are, who the other is. Angele comes to know, and grow, knowing she is the person whom Dylan loves.
“Yet to be fair, he could be so much more than he ever showed himself to be in his parents’ presence: and it was this so much more that I loved, this so much more in myself.”
The same for Dylan. He knows that Angele knows who he is, his self, and he knows that she loves this self of his as does no one else.
[Dylan] “The only person I’ve ever met who saw me completely the way I am . . . was you.”
In their search for self, neither of them does what so many artists do, a self portrait. They paint each other. Angele tells us in great detail about Dylan’s painting the portrait of her. She also lets us know that she has painted him (“We had been working on our portraits – I had painted him too, catching rare unguided moments to sketch, from which I made still more canvasses I would later destroy . . . ”). We are not told that either of them ever painted or drew anyone else identified by name for the entire 17 years of AEWW (except for one sketch by Angele of an art professor of hers and a painting by Dylan of another woman).
Several times we are informed that “Art is from the soul,” originally presented as a statement of Dylan and then repeated by Angele. Each of them from his or her soul, produces an artistic work (Dylan painting of Angele) or works (Angele’s sketches and paintings of Dylan), which are images of the other. In their lives, each of them, in the actions from their souls, molds the other’s self and tells the other this is your self, the you that I love.
Certainty
Angele’s and Dylan’s attempts to find a “self” are hand-in-hand with each of their individual efforts to discover something that they know as certain. Their often plaintive words of doubt are spoken to the other in an implicit admission that the other could provide the sought-after certainty. In doing this they each dance around the fact, a fact that they both know to their very cores, that no matter if they doubt everything, no matter if they know nothing else is certain, they know that the other is there, being, loving, and loved.
They let each other know – and almost no one else – that they are looking for this certainty. Certainty with or about any other person is of no importance to either of them. Dylan tells Angele:
“I still don’t know . . . I don’t know. I don’t know whether I’m supposed to know. It could be that not knowing is a gift. But I’m desperately tired of not knowing. Desperately tired. I want to know something. I almost don’t care what the something is that I know. I just want to know it and to know that I know it.”
Angele has told us about Dylan’s search, beginning with doubt (what some philosophers refer to as a thoroughgoing “hyperbolic” doubt); and Angele describes both of them as having gone down a road of such doubt. Without realizing it, for many years they both seek this certainty with the other.
Augustine and Descartes, in a search for certain truth, both imagined doubting everything, other persons, the material world, even what is sensed with the five senses; and they came to think they had found something true, something that could not be doubted, one’s own self [Augustine: “If I am mistaken, by this same token I am;” Descartes: “I think, therefore I am.”].
Still, both Augustine and Descartes realized that there was nothing to guarantee the truth, the certainty of this “I” to whom they had logically reasoned. Each of them, after this “inward turn” to self, came to the conclusion that only a good God could be the certainty warrant, the epistemological cornerstone for any truth, including the truth they had arrived at about self. This one truth, for both of them, was God. From the necessity that truth demanded a good God, it was easy peasy to logically continue to the existence of the world outside themselves, which included the existence of others.
The logic of these thinkers in arriving at the certainty of the existence of other persons is theoretical and antiseptic compared to the real world choosings over the years by Angele and Dylan, choosing the other, choosing to be together, and choosing to love each other.
By the end of the story, Dylan has pursued the doubt-I-certainty-God-others path and has arrived at the truth of his love for Angele. He tells Angele that he would like to start fresh. When she responds that she is not ready for that, he tells her that they might have built a new world together. Angele tells him she cannot do this. She has not gotten to the “other” in the doubt-I-certainty-God-others progression – she has, somewhat precipitously, without explanation, arrived at the God point, but has not yet gone any further. She is in a convent at the end of the story, but she has not taken final vows.
AEWW is not a Bodice Ripper, but . . .
Hooked, a book by McIlhaney et al, has as its subtitle, New Science On How Casual Sex Is Affecting Ours Children. It is a scholarly review of scientific research that summarizes neuroscience, biochemistry, and other current research directed to what happens in a human brain during and after sexual activity. Its main conclusions are:
emotional bonds are created by chemicals released in the brain of both partners during sexual activity;
the breaking of such bonds can damage the brain, causing, e.g., depression and difficulty in the future in trying to bond with someone else; if the relationship is ended, this can permanently affect the brain;
addiction can follow the release of these chemicals;
these releases can have positive effects for those in permanently committed relationships;
there can be critically damaging effects for those who engage in casual sex without an ensuing, committed relationship; and
achieving happiness in a personal relationship is directly related to an expectation of exclusivity and long-term commitment.
In the beginning of the Angele/Dylan relationship, there are some aspects of it that are like those things listed above related to casual, uncommitted sex. But fairly quickly Angele and Dylan are cohabiting, going far beyond a casual-sex, one-night-stand hookup. Still, according to the results of the research presented in Hooked, cohabiting has its own dangers for a relationship, even if it is long-lasting; and these perils are part of the Angele/Dylan prolonged, periodically-together, sometimes for years apart, relationship.
KC deftly interweaves times Angele and Dylan are happy together and the times they are apart from each other. It is no coincidence that bonds are formed between her characters and then, when they are not together, the bonds still intact, they doubt themselves and everything else. KC makes the depth and permanence of the bonds that form between them evident in the romance of Angele and Dylan, a romance that at times subtly and at other times overtly dominates and overshadows every other theme, subject, symbol, and motif in the story.
AEWW is true romance (the “do-you-think-this-happens-every-day?” kind). Choose any definitions you like, AEWW is a real romance, in the good sense of the word, “real,” and in the best sense of the word, “romance.”
KC does not feed us the sweet treacle of sappy puppy-love crushes or lusty juvenile infatuations. This story is a real-world, enduring, star-crossed, palpable romance of folks who are, after their first encounters, truly in love. KC gifts us with the entire spectrum of romance from sweet caressing to skyrockets-in-flight.
In her genius, KC pulls this off so well that the real romance of AEWW can go unnoticed and unquestioned, so much so that it can be missed like a sky unseen when one walks outside with a loved one or when a person is unconscious of one’s own smile when the loved one smiles. More than empathy, more than sympathy, more than a been-there-done-that feeling about the actions of Angele and Dylan, the reader – at times without knowing it – is contented, convinced, and happy when the romance is front and center in the story.
KC’s words-from-her-soul artistry is nowhere more evident, more incisive, more “To you, reader, enjoy,” than in the romantic words of Angele and Dylan to and about each other. For example:
“The green of his eyes was the fire of meteors burning through the upper atmosphere.”
“As the elevator sped down to the lobby, all my good intentions dropped away . . . My palms left damp marks on my skirt’s hip seams. The voice on the phone had stirred up, like moths from old fabric, weaknesses I thought had been washed away: worry, fear, desire, anger. And underneath, and worst of all, this abject, this irrepressible delight. Dylan called. He wanted to see me. This shamefully credulous yearning. This little tongue of fire, asking only to be fed.”
“We fell silent. He leaned over against my shoulder and, before long, fell asleep to the rhythm of the train’s wheels. Though I relished him there, out of consciousness and all control, his heat on top of the afternoon’s soothed me to sleep; I remember waking, much too warm, to the sight of grey and ochre buildings stacked on both sides of a golden river, under hills shadowed purple in the late light from a raging orange sunset. “Look,” I said. Dylan woke, too, and saw, and his eyes met mine, and we saw it together, and this was the first moment in which his eyes said, silently, not ‘I am seeing this with you’ but instead I am seeing this with you.’ ”
“ . . . we shot ourselves across the Italian night, effervescent arcs the glow-stick green of shooting stars burning sulphuric in the upper atmosphere, riding such great heights. The hope of others has its shape and it limits, but to us it felt infinite. How real time feels when you revel in its openness, as if wasting it could make you more eternal, hour after hour of horizon without sphere, fearless. No sight of downturn, of death. An expanse that stretched before us like clean water, inviting us to swim. Its freshness, its splash.”
“His smile has deepened since I last saw him. His arms are open and then closing around me; just as quickly, I’m wrapping mine around him; a breath of cooler air in the wake of the departing bus flashes by us, floods my lungs. The blood speeds through my veins. My eyes sting. Be still be still. “Hey, you,” he murmurs into my hair. “Hey.” We both burst into laughter for no reason I can name.”
“When we both woke in full morning, when we repeated the caresses of the night before and whispered love to one another in unconsidered words, we did so with a sense of restoration to the living world. For a moment it felt as if no time had elapsed between this and the first morning we awoke entangled together in the Florence studio.”
These quotes present only a taste of the romance that permeates AEWW.
In the “real romance” vein, KC has Angele, and Dylan, speak explicitly about their love for each other. Angele relates that Dylan has told her he loves her:
“I’m starting over with you,” he said, not that night but the next, into the multifarious darkness. “I never had a reason, before, not to be self-centered and fickle. This is different. This is. . . I mean, you’re my friend. This is worth taking care of.” Angele replies: “I echoed the words. ‘This is worth taking care of.’ ” Dyaln then tells her: “Angele, I . . . I think I love you.”
She never tells Dylan “I love you.” Yet despite the several denials and protestations to herself (about which she has informed us her readers), she does say:
“ ‘And yet you do love him.’ My failure to answer told Omar he was right.”
. . . ‘But you, you could still be in love with him, couldn’t you. Are you? Tell me you are, Angele. It’ll make me feel better. But don’t lie, tell me really’ . . . ‘Really? No.’ The sly curve of his smile told me Omar could still spot my bullshit, as ever.”
[At Dylan’s request she has gone to a monastery to see him as Brother Thomas Augustine.] “I came to visit the monastery as Thomas Augustine’s friend, wanting . . . the best for him, whatever that might mean. As unmoored as this emotion leaves me, I still believe I love him. Whether anything good can ever again come from this love, what if anything I can do for him in this crisis, I feel less certain.”
But romance, as real and as engaging as KC makes it, is not the literary paradigm of AEWW.
[Part II to be published soon].
