Of Beauteous Saints

I find something indescribably haunting about the “woman most beautiful of all” in George MacDonald’s Lilith, for on her “stately countenance” rests a “right noble acquiescence” and “assurance, firm as the foundations of the universe, that all ... [is] as it should be." For me, the white-haired woman who captures the intrigue of the protagonist, Mr. Vane, is an image of what a physically and spiritually mature approach to being human might look like. In the gallery of my mind, her resplendent repose reflects an organic and wholesome response to her world rather than a hasty effort conceived in restlessness. Ultimately, when I think of the portrait of this pulchritudinous lady, I think of an individual who has overcome our inborn resentment of time; she is one who, as Byron penned, “walks in beauty.”

Indeed, the more I think of the characteristics of this unnamed lady, the more I am reminded of the saint which Gordon T. Smith depicts in Called to Be Saints: An Invitation to Christian Maturity. For Smith, in a saint, we encounter “beauty, integrity and congruence." He suggests these characteristics are not achieved by merely trying to emulate Christ’s life on earth. Nor are they attained by adhering to some sort of a moral code. In fact, he suggests that in striving for rigid perfection, we dislocate ourselves from a spiritual life that genuinely flourishes. Instead of toil, Smith advocates humble response; instead of fear, Smith draws our attention to hopeful faith; instead of proving ourselves through our work, Smith reminds us of Love’s work. Ultimately, he reminds us that He is the vine and we are the branches; there is great rest in understanding that instead of trying to be like Christ, our call is to realize we are in Christ.

Which brings me back to MacDonald’s lady: in her stately countenance, I see the reflection of a wisdom grounded in an understanding of interdependence and borne out in humility. In her noble acquiescence, I envision an approach to work that glorifies the divine; she is not frenetic or flustered, but rather content with what time she has been gifted to live in and work with. In her assurance, I visualize a life of joyfully ordered affections because she has an inkling of the depth, width, and breadth of the creator’s love. And so, in “this woman most beautiful of all,” I see a portrait of Smith’s saint; for at the marrow of Smith’s invitation is the reminder that our creator’s call does not only save us from, but saves us to: to an abundant life which results from restfully abiding in our maker.

Maybe, for me, she is an image of Smith’s saint because in time she has grown wiser, not just older. She has employed her minutes, hours, days and years not in despising time, but embracing its facilitation of her growth.  In nurturing a life-affirming delight in God’s good creation she has not indulged in ignorance of the horrific evil at work in the world. Rather, her peaceful gaze assures me that, like a true heroine, she has lived out her days in a grace and gratitude and wonder that holds fast to a belief in an impending Eucatastrophe: a swiftly advancing redemption so beautiful its event will bring forth tears of joy.

Trusting Dante

I grew up in a poor town along the Elk River in West Virginia. Elkview had no leash laws, and flea-infested mongrels ran free. We lived beside a garbage truck garage and a busy stretch of US Route 119. Dogs found the hot reek of trash irresistible, and I saw many of them ripped open by cars and strewn down the road. Hunting was also big in Elkview. It was also a town of hunters. The sight of a boy hiking toward the woods with a gun slung over his shoulder was common—also the sight of gutted deer. Memories of these things come to me every time I return to Dante’s Divine Comedy.

I think if those mongrel dogs when I read Dante’s description of souls writhing in the seventh circle of hell, plagued by fire from above and burning sand from beneath: “They were in fact, like a dog in summertime / busy, now with his paw, now with his snout, / tormented by the fleas and flies that bite him.” In reading this passage, I can imagine Dante as a boy watching, just as I did, a dog continually scratching and biting at its relentless parasites.

I think of shot and gutted deer when I read his description of one who sowed schism in life, ripped bodily in half, “from his chin to where we fart…. Between his legs his guts spilled out, with the heart / and other vital parts, and the dirty sack / that turns to shit whatever the mouth gulps down.” I know what a physical body looks like when split open and the innards dumped out; I believe our poet knows as well.

Dante intended for his writing to work on four levels: literal, allegorical, moral or didactic, and anagogical. While he saw his art this way, what makes me trust him is the fact that he has so carefully observed the literal. His descriptions are so concrete and physical that, though his characters are in this fantastical hell, they have real flesh.

In On Moral Fiction, John Gardner goes as far as to claim that a writer’s failure to pay close attention to the literal amounts to a moral shortcoming because the writer “is not deeply involved in the characters’ lives.” He maintains that, “what truth the writer might have discovered if he’d carefully followed how things really do happen we will never know.”

In my experience, though you cannot tell immediately what a fiction writer’s worldview is from her fiction, if she has cared enough to pay close attention to concrete reality, you can be sure that, whatever she tells you will contain truth and have value. The same goes for any artist—any human being—who wants to communicate with other human beings. Are you concerned with truth? Look at what is in front of you and describe what you see.

things-to-be-grateful-for

Lately I’ve been reading and rereading Jane Kenyon’s poem Otherwise. It’s a very short poem and you can read it here and many other places online. It might have been otherwise is the refrain in what is essentially a list of blessings. Like a shadow, the words sidle up to each bright moment Kenyon names.

People like this poem. On one level, it’s a simple reflection on gratitude. Given what we know about Kenyon’s adult struggle with depression and her battle with the leukemia she knew would one day take her life, the poem’s simplicity makes it all the more poignant and powerful. Kenyon was suffering when she wrote this quiet prayer of thanksgiving.

This is part of the reason I like this poem, and I think it’s why I’ve been returning to it often recently. There are times when the struggle to reconcile gratitude with sorrow can feel like an impossible task. That Jane did it so beautifully and with such tender precision brings me comfort. That she found little comfort from her faith and yet persisted in her hope and her longing for God is remarkable to me.

“Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus,” Paul reminds us. All circumstances—not just the easy ones. My family keeps that old Thanksgiving tradition of going around the table, everyone naming their gratitude for the past year. Some of the younger cousins think it’s corny, but I love it. I love this window into our lives, this frame around each person’s story that gets us to say what’s important. I love this frame because it often gets us to name and embrace the difficult things, too.

That’s the extra layer to the poem for me—or rather, its negative image. In this world, perhaps, it could not have been otherwise. The reverse of the poem is also part of the full mystery of gratitude. This life of small pleasures is also this life of struggle and darkness. The circumstances of Kenyon’s life included this “ripe, flawless/peach” and this walk in the woods, and also this depression and this leukemia.

When I read “Otherwise”, I see the concrete realness of the things-to-be-grateful-for in my own life. My husband’s laugh. Snowy cherry blossoms. The purring cat. But in the space outside the poem, or maybe, in the silence surrounding Kenyon’s voice, I hear my own not-knowing. If I am grateful for my life because of the joy I feel in my marriage and work, should I not also be grateful for my life because of the grief I’m feeling after incomprehensible loss?

Yes, “it might have been otherwise.” Though I’m ignorant of so much, I am aware of my many privileges: the simplest things I take for granted are extravagant luxuries for others. Even those in my own city. Probably my own block. Yet I want also to be grateful for what I don’t understand, for every part of the life I’ve been given.

(Painting by Norman Rockwell)

Douglas Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus!: A Challenge to Christian Supermen

Hey Nostradamus! is Douglas Coupland’s most theologically complex novel, an exploration of questions about the problem of evil in the context of a Columbine-like school shooting. The first part of the story is recounted by Cheryl, a young victim of the absurd massacre, as she speaks from an unnamed, mysterious purgatorial space. In one particularly poignant section, Cheryl, a sincere and devout convert to the Christian faith, speaks frankly (and perhaps even prophetically) about many of the Christians that she has encountered:

“It always seems to me that people who’d discovered religion had both lost and gained something. Outwardly, they’d gained calmness, confidence and a look of purpose, but what they’d lost was a certain willingness to connect with unconverted souls…”.

Cheryl’s involvement with an oppressive, judgmental youth group named “Youth Alive!,” as well as her relationship with her legalistic father-in-law, leads her to these conclusions. Yet she remains faithful, convinced that there is something beyond religious posturing, something in the Christian narrative that actually points to wholeness, depth, and meaning rather than pompous superficiality. Cheryl’s clarity of vision as she critiques the “religious” is rich and biblically informed:

“There can be an archness, a meanness in the lives of the saved, an intolerance that can color their view of the weak and the lost. It can make them hard when they ought to be listening, judgmental when they ought to be contrite.”

Cheryl’s comments are poignant and instructive, a call to self reflection; and they bring to mind the moments when Christ himself expressed the most visible righteous anger. In both Matthew 21: 12-17 and Matthew 23, we see Him rebuking religious hypocrites because of their exploitation of the weak, their self righteousness, their shortsightedness.

In The AntiChrist, Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1888 polemic tracing the roots of our supposed misuse of the concepts of “good” and “evil,” he spends a large amount of time denouncing the sacrifice of Christ, an action that is repulsive to him because it supposedly “thwarts the law of evolution,” a law that propels us to follow our desires for power. But some of Nietzsche’s unrestrained insults are strangely beautiful and truthful descriptions of Christ:

“But this god of the “great majority,” this democrat among gods, has not become a proud heathen god: on the contrary, he remains a Jew…a god of all the dark nooks and crevices, of all the noisesome quarters of the world!... His earthly kingdom, now as always, is a kingdom of the underworld, a souterrain kingdom, a ghetto kingdom.”

Cheryl’s concern that religious self-righteousness can harden us to the concerns of “the weak and the lost” remind us that Christians can so easily posture as sad Nietzschean supermen, using the motions of “faith” as a means to power and pride rather than a call to serve. Nietzsche’s description of this “god of all the dark nooks and crevices”... whose “earthly kingdom” is a “ghetto kingdom” reminds us that Christ’s act of great strength (which Nietzsche reads as weakness) was to empty himself of the very power that was rightfully His as a way to both save and identify with the “weak and the lost.”

Neither Douglas Coupland nor Friedrich Nietzsche are Christians. One carefully and respectfully critiques Christian culture; the other hatefully and blasphemously bludgeons both Christ and Christians. But the writing of both can, on careful reflection, cause us to think about what a life of faith actually means. Coupland’s Cheryl laments the notion that “the religious” lack “a willingness to connect with unconverted souls.” Is this a call for us to begin looking more closely for the God-given truths that can be revealed even in “the dark nooks and crevices”?

The Eyes the Window, The Mind the Poem

The Eyes the Window by Marci Rae Johnson (Sage Hill Press, 2013)

I'm a smart guy, but I'll admit to liking poets who tend to take a little more direct approach to their work. If I feel a poet intentionally creating obscuring prisms or building brick walls of her erudition, I tend to lose interest. Such poets are either engaged in some other conversation than that which interests me, or they are not trying to engage in a real conversation.

Marci Rae Johnson's The Eyes the Window is a rare exception. One actually senses that Johnson is literally feeling through the poetry, and yet she remains always just out of reach. It's a fascinating collection that makes you feel at once a witness to intimate moments and a stranger outside of true intimacy.

The first of the book's three sections introduces the "thought problem" of existence, or, more specifically, of consciousness. In the tradition of the Modernists, and before them the modern philosophers, Johnson begins with the mind reflecting upon itself, alone and therefore unable to substantiate its own existence:

To be. Infinitive. From the Latin infinitas as in the mind of God, the universe the space before and after. —"Showing Existence or Condition"

The self cannot, it seems, be in the infinitive. Memory, for instance, is too spotty and changeable. Johnson's search for the stable places of the self recall Stevens's "poem of the act of the mind." This is a book of somewhere's, maybe's, and could be's. Significantly, it is a book of desiring, and of desiring relationship. "To be loved" seems an attractive, plausible way to be.

But again, Johnson's work is so ambivalent. She writes in impressions and isolated thoughts that read something like watching Persona or L'Avventura, somehow working together into a whole through the desiring self. The reader stands right beside the speaker of her poems, breathing on her neck as she watches the waves on a lake outside her window. She confesses her desires, confesses her ambivalence, and then seems to recant her faith in everything she just said.

Is existence possible? Is love possible? In the second and third parts Johnson develops two journey narratives, one by car and one by train. Are these metaphors for the stale motions of a disintegrating love, or play spaces where love is possible just before it is impossible again? There is a heaviness to it all, and so many episodes of missed opportunity that I want to read it as the former, but there is such pathos in the desire that I want to believe these poems attempt to honor the brief moments of connection rather than mourn all the absence.

Johnson unabashedly commits the affective fallacy and contorts the world to projections of her own mind or emotions. These are poems in search of a real outside the self, after all, so it is appropriate that they presume a hyper-subjectivity. But this also allows her to playfully turn the banal into the beautiful. Quantum physics serves to multiply the possibilities of romance, road signs become subtle metaphors for poetry or for stages of relationship, and even Google suggests the conceptual poem, "28 Results for 'I.'"

Get this book and read it on a quiet morning with a cup of coffee. It will get inside you and linger and, what would not be the worst thing, unsettle you.

(Painting by Rene Magritte)

The Fifty Year Sword

In Mark Z. Danielweski’s novella The Fifty Year Sword, a recently-divorced seamstress named Chintana attends a 50th birthday party for her husband’s mistress, Belinda Kite. A storyteller at the party tells Chintana and several orphans the story of his epic quest for a mysterious weapon, the Fifty Year Sword. The invisible sword cuts every victim just like a non-magical sword, but with one catch; the wounds inflicted by the blade don’t manifest themselves until the victim turns fifty years old. Belinda Kite, in a bid to prove to the frightened children that the story is hogwash, slashes herself repeatedly with the sword. Later that night, as she and her guests toast her 50th birthday, Belinda falls apart piece by piece, a victim of her bravado and the Fifty Year Sword.

The story is full of images pertaining to the cutting, slicing, and severing of threads while characters try ceaselessly to bind up the pieces. Chintana heals a gash on her thumb and the wound of her recent divorce, the storyteller goes on a dark quest to heal an unknown grudge, and Belinda Kite falls to pieces while Chintana tries desperately to hold her together. The characters flounder in the aftermath of violence, haphazardly stitching themselves together before the next round of chaos or despair. Their efforts invariably fail.

It is interesting that Danielewski’s book deals so extensively with stitching and sewing. For millennia, mankind has been preoccupied with weaving, stitching, and mending. Some of the earliest recorded gods and goddesses in history were dedicated to those arts; the goddess Ixchel from the Mayan civilization, the Greek Muses, Frigg and the Norns from Norse legends, and the Navajo’s Spider Woman are all mythical weavers. They wove men, their destinies, and the universe itself. Thread and fabric are ancient symbols of life, and the severing of threads is symbolic of death or chaos. In myth, managing the fabric of a man’s life was the responsibility of his deity.

In the story, though, the act of binding and mending is left to the characters, not to any higher power. If art and literature are windows into the human experience, what does Danielewski’s novella say about our fears and beliefs? Chintana and the others are scarred by violence -- physical, spiritual, or emotional -- and they alone are responsible for mending their wounds. The fabric of their lives is repeatedly slashed and torn, but no intervening higher power helps them bind up the gashes. The cycle is exhausting and never-ending. They are truly alone.

And don’t we often feel alone? Our lives are often disrupted by our own actions or by circumstances beyond our control. The slashes come again and again; it’s easy to get caught in the endless battle to sew ourselves up again, alone, before we try to battle on. It is easy to forget that we are not alone; it is easy to forget the promises made by Jehovah Rapha, the Great Physician, who said, “Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.” How much more hope we have than Chintana! We must strive to not forget it.

Coming Undone

Just the other day I was paralyzed by these words:

“What would you do differently, you up on your beanstalk looking at scenes of people at all times in all places? When you climb down, would you dance any less to the music you love, knowing that music to be as provisional as a bug?. . .If you descend the long rope-ladders back to your people and time in the fabric, if you tell them what you have seen, and even if someone cares to listen, then what?”

The words are from Annie Dillard’s essay, “How to Live,” which first appeared in Image in 2001. I had been thumbing through the Bearing the Mystery anthology in the few minutes I had with my coffee before the kids came home. Now I heard the bus’s diesel engine rounding the corner and didn’t know what to do.

Writing that moves us, we say, makes us laugh or cry. It may even compel us to fight for justice, reach out to a stranger, say a prayer, or otherwise turn our lives around.

But this essay, this essay about my miniscule passions in “the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through,” rendered me helpless. I wasn’t so much overwhelmed with sadness or questions but numb, frozen-fingered in my ability to grasp anything. The fact that such a concept as eternity existed was enough, for the first time in my life, to make the floor tiles spin.

Some art does that—shifts the tectonic plates of our perceptions. It doesn’t inspire us but undoes us, haunts us until we view the image, listen to the piece, or read the essay again. I didn’t want to read it again. It made my stomach hurt, my breath shallow. But I went back to it later that day. Then again the next night. And the next. “Then what?” Dillard asks. Then what, then what, then what?

I still have no idea what to do.

But I know I would like to create something—even just one essay, poem, flowerbed or gingersnap—that leaves someone gaping like a caught fish.

Be still and know that you know nothing, the essay (Spirit? tiles?) seems to be whispering to me. Then work out of that.

Reading Milton. Out Loud. In the Car.

The journey began as many tandem road trips in the modern world do, with two husbands behind the wheel of their respective vehicles and each wife beside him texting back and forth and pinning images to Pinterest. At a roadside Starbucks near Austin, the configuration changed. My wife Laurie and Mike’s wife Lisa hopped in my station wagon, freeing me to sit in the passenger seat of Mike’s rental car with a paperback edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which I started reading aloud. Bumper stickers in the Texas capitol encourage passersby to “Keep Austin Weird.” That January afternoon, we did our part.

Mike would be teaching Books 1 and 2 to a group of thirty-odd students the next morning, and while he’d taught the poem before, a refresher never hurts. For me this was the first reading since a hasty grad school skim. Paradise Lost is much better than I remember. For one thing, I actually follow most of his references. (Half of them, anyway.) All my reading life was preparation, it seems. I’ve been training for Milton the way runners train for a marathon.

Milton is bold. Virgil appropriated Greek culture for The Aeneid, and Milton does likewise, claiming the whole of the classical world for his epic––only in place of Odysseus or Aeneas he casts none other than Satan, that bad eminence, and treats him very much like a hero. Book 2’s council in Pandaemonium, the city of devils, is straight out of Homer––or perhaps Tolkein, ending as it does with Satan embarking on a quest none of his peers have the courage to undertake. (When we reach that part of the story, I actually substitute Frodo’s words for Milton’s: “I will take the ring, though I do not know the way.” It works.) This sleight-of-hero calls into question so many ideas that resonate: The desire to be free, to be captain of our souls, to rule rather than serve, and to make a name for ourselves. These are noble virtues, but coming from Lucifer, you have to wonder.

The next morning in class the story of our drive-time reading comes out. The students are embarrassed for us. They worry, too, that this pair of middle aged men is a warning: continue down the path of literature, and this is what you will become, a declaimer of verse, out loud and unashamed.

Somewhere toward the end of the class discussion, Mike puts me on the spot. Do I have any thoughts to share? “Maybe Milton is giving us a reason to ask whether the things we admire most,” I say, “are a testament to the fact that something’s gone wrong with us.” The story of the fall, in other words, is written in the tales not just of our sinners, but of our heroes.

And then I tell them to read next week’s assignment out loud the way blind Milton intended. They look back at me, doubtful. Twenty years from now they’ll understand.

(Art by William Blake, Satan Addressing His Potentates)

Isolation in a Virtual Waste Land

When I teach T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, I often start out playing this video that dismantles a track from Girl Talk, highlighting all of the secondary texts that the artist combines to create something “new.” My point is that Eliot’s 1922 masterpiece, just as postmodern as it is modern, is a mashup itself. Both Eliot and Gregg Michael Gillis (Girl Talk) are, as Roland Barthes would tell us, forming something supposedly “original” from “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” In The Waste Land, an anti-epic poem if there ever was one, the heaps of fragments indicate that in a world where “God is dead”, a world devastated by the nonsensical cruelty of war, there is no meaning or even ability to communicate. Eliot continually emphasizes human isolation, that the inhabitants of The Waste Land are “each in his own prison.”

A large part of the disorientation one experiences when reading The Waste Land comes from Eliot’s intentional failure to translate foreign languages or cite his sources. The definitive sacred and secular texts of powerful Western and Eastern civilizations are decontextualized and remixed, pointing to the meaninglessness of life without any defining narrative, a life in which the Author God is dead.

But anyone who takes the tedious trouble to really spend thoughtful time in The Waste Land will track down Eliot’s sources, read them in context, and finally see that Eliot’s poem has complex meaning via the connectedness of the themes in these carefully selected fragments; in a sense, the poem betrays itself. In tracking down sources, we begin to get a sense of the whole, we long more and more for connectivity.

But in the age of google, my students and I have all of these secondary sources at our fingertips; there is not much hard work required as we can even find hyperlink versions of the poem that instantly translate the texts for us and briefly summarize the entire plot of the multiple narratives alluded to in the poem. The internet allows us to move from the poem’s decontextualized fragments to disembodied, virtual explanations of fragments. Rather than going to the library (a communal experience), we can sit in our pajamas and google it all. What would Eliot think of this isolating, perhaps “unreal” (in his eyes) research? He has removed “original” ideas from their contexts, yet we depend on an invisible network of replicated images to give us knowledge, almost always out of context.

At the beginning of the poem, Eliot envisions one of Dante’s circles of hell as a picture of living but dead (“unreal”) Londoners walking home from work over London bridge: “Each man fixed his eyes before his feet…”. I often ask my students what they think Eliot would say today if he went to London bridge, rode on the tube, or sat in a restaurant and saw our eyes not “on our own feet” but on our iPhones. Would he say we have we created a rich new access to knowledge and community, or would he conclude we have simply mastered the art of distraction and isolation? Or would he say we have somehow accomplished both?

Relief Issue 7.2 Thinks You're Pretty Smart

As we get ready to print 7.2 (debuting at the Festival of Faith and Writing next week), I've been noticing how many of the pieces ask so much from the reader. If art is, or can be, a difficult pleasure, then I think you'll enjoy issue 7.2, but in that Relief-y way that isn't satisfied with pat answers or disingenuous questions.

Of course, this means that the issue as a whole, which is to say our authors, think that you as readers are pretty smart and can handle some uncertainty, some openness, and some unrestrained wonder—if you're into that kind of thing. The teacher in me wants to make sure you're not among those who sell themselves short. Most people are better readers than they think; as often as my students say they're "not smart enough" for the poems or short stories we read, but when I ask them for their responses, their questions and gut reactions are often right in line with what the piece invites and evokes.

I'll highlight just our Editors' Choice recipients to give you an idea of what to look forward to. In fiction, Amy Krohn's "Master of Light" reads like memoir, it's so full of those inarguable facts that are so indifferent to its heroine's fantasy. Not only that, but Krohn manages to pull off an entire story in second-person narration without it feeling in the least like a cute gimmick. Her story asks "you" to think about what it would mean if your farmer husband suddenly turned missionary and left you behind. The answer "you" come to is both easier and harder than you might expect.

In CNF, Angi Kortenhoven shares an encounter with one of her own students, years later, seeing all his potential being rubbed away by the banalities of daily life. Kortenhoven ends on a bitter note, clinging to hope almost in a plea to the reader to nod in affirmation. She's not offering hope, but asking you whether you can find it in yourself.

Finally, in poetry, Bob Denst adds a subtle twist of playfulness to scenes that are ultimately about great beauty and sometimes sublimity. His "Wildland," in particular, powerfully reverses the normal questions we ask about God's actions or will when natural disaster strikes.

These authors represent some of what I love most about what we do at Relief, finding the stories and memories and metaphors that represent the mysterious or ineffable without trying to tame it.

(Painting by Henry Lamb)

The 59th

27 swans

In the fall of 2000, as part of my work for a literary magazine in Boston, I visited William Meredith in the home he shared with his partner, Richard Harteis, in a wooded community near Uncasville, Connecticut.

Nearly two decades earlier, at sixty-four, Meredith had suffered a stroke that had immobilized him for two years. As he recovered, it was found that he had expressive aphasia, a condition that arrests the ability to render into words what one perceives or thinks. Until then, William Meredith had made his living as a teacher and as a writer. He was Poet Laureate of the United States from 1978 to 1980.

Before we went inside, Richard showed me the view from their back yard. He said that he and William had been working on writing haiku. One image at a time, he said.

When I finally met Mr. Meredith, he was still in his bathrobe, eating cereal. I was early. He told me so. Then he told me to sit down.

There at the kitchen table, I asked my questions—veiled versions of "How should I live? How should I write?"

With each one, he watched me acutely, and then disappeared as he grappled toward utterance. "A good man," I remember him telling me over the course of half a minute, "is a useful man."

The first poem of his I ever read was called "Poem." My teacher, Albert Goldbarth, had handed copies of it around the workshop table one evening, and read it aloud to us.

The immaculate, stately phrasing of the first stanza immediately compelled me. I knew at once that those words were committed to my memory:

Poem

The swans on the river, a great
flotilla in the afternoon sun
in October again.

In a fantasy, Yeats saw himself appear
to Maud Gonne as a swan,
his plumage fanning his desire.

One October at Coole Park
he counted fifty-nine wild swans.
He flushed them into a legend.

Lover by lover is how he said they flew,
but one of them must have been without a mate.
Why did he not observe that?

We talk about Zeus and Leda and Yeats
as if they were real people, we identify constellations
as if they were drawn on the night.

Cygnus and Castor & Pollux
are only ways of looking at
scatterings of starry matter,

a god putting on swan-flesh
to enter a mortal girl
is only a way of looking at love-trouble.

The violence and calm of these big fowl!
When I am not with you
I am always the fifty-ninth.

In the years to come, I would see the justice of the poem's title, how the work gathers much of what is essential to his work as a whole: public speech about private matter, arising from kinship and deep reverence clarified by strict observance.

Daniel Tobin, in an essay in the Yeats/Eliot Journal in the summer of 1993, notes that for Yeats, "Man was nothing... until he was wedded to an image…Still, it took him many years of arduous labor…to realize fully personal utterance in his poetry."

Yeats was fifty-two when he imagined in Coole Park that he was wedded to a lone swan that would, with all the rest, one day fly from him, to build life on another's waters.

The desolation of his imagining that his imagination would one day disappear is of the kind Tobias Wolff describes for Mary in his short story "In The Garden of the North American Martyrs," when she finds that the words for her thoughts "grew faint as time went on; without quite disappearing, they shrank to remote, nervous points, like birds flying away."

Yeats died in 1939. Meredith wrote his poem in 1980.

Before Richard turned to open the glass door of the kitchen, he followed where my gaze had long since alighted. He lamented the power plant that had been built on the far banks. But the power plant was not visible to me. For there, on the river, were the swans.

Look at Everything Close Up

In Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby, journalist Carl Streator is just getting by. He copes with the stress of his job. He copes with his finances. He copes with the accidental death of his wife and his child, whom he killed with a culling spell. He copes with his mission to find and destroy every copy of the spell. He copes with the fact that he can’t stop thinking about it.

He copes.

Most of us feel the need to cope, to escape our big picture. Work is stressful. Money is tight. Cholesterol is too high. Deadlines are approaching. There’s an illness in the family. There’s a fire. Or a flood. The electricity has just been shut off. We agonize over the minutia of our schedules, the humdrum routines that give structure to our daily lives. Everything is spiraling out of control.

“The trick to forgetting the big picture,” Streator says, “is to look at everything close up.”

So we bury ourselves in the latest game to top the iTunes charts. We throw ourselves into the dramas of the latest group of Housewives. We obsess about sports. We count calories. We distract ourselves.

But if we change our perspective a bit, looking at everything close up can be an exercise in meditation and mindfulness, instead of a distraction. Looking at everything close up can be a powerful way to see the big picture. We come to  understand that our big pictures -- the bills, the jobs, the finances -- are really only tiny details in our collective Big Picture. Close up we see things that are quintessentially human, actions that tie us to generations of men and women through millennia. We knead and bake bread, just like we have for thousands of years. We steep tea. We fall in love. We worry about our children. We sow seeds and pull weeds. The tiniest details of our lives and our routines and our habits bind us to an innumerable host of people who worry just like us. These ubiquitous activities place us in the framework of a shared humanity.

Perhaps if we look at these daily responsibilities close up, if we squint, if we work really hard, we can avoid many of our daily stressors.

So go ahead. Try. Look at everything close up.

What are we going to do?

How do you tell the story of the end of the world without bothering to tell us how it ended? We get is a series of low concussive sounds, ash, fires, and cannibals. But what caused it all? Readers of Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Road are often troubled by absence of a clear explanation for what caused the disaster, something McCarthy has commented on:

"A lot of people ask me. I don't have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I'm with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteor to them. But it could be anything—volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do?"

"What do you do?" Near the end of The Road, the father asks his son a similar question: "What are we going to do?" And the son replies, "Well what are we?" That answer cuts to the marrow of our modern anatomy. What you do at the end of the world is remember who you are. And by that I don't mean the collection of social and commercial preferences we identify with, or our gender, or our personality type. At the end we have no choice but ask what it means to have being.

This kind of deep questioning is hard for modern readers because we are so terribly good at being distracted all the time. Its a good day when I don't wake up and immediately reach for my phone and fall asleep with it in my hands. The electronic buzz of being (as I've called it elsewhere) sweeps us up in continual checking and embeds us thoroughly within culture. It's difficult to think of ourselves as distinct beings with weight and purpose. Our identities are culturally defined so we can't quite imagine what it means to be a person made in the Image of God.

Had McCarthy identified the disaster, he would have distracted his readers from issues surrounding their existence. Instead of having to ask, "Why bother living in a world filled with suffering and lacking all hope for the future?" we would be asking how we can stop climate change, or a nuclear war, or an asteroid.

I think for some readers, the desire to know what caused the end is itself a form of escapism, a desire to avoid the anxiety which arises when we accept the startling world McCarthy portrays, one in which our very existence is questioned. It is easy to read a book and be chastised to recycle or advocate for nuclear disarmament; it's quite another to be asked to strip away everything that seems to make us who we are, so we can see our place and our being, truly. Yet, perhaps that's exactly what the best of Christian writing will do: help us see God's grace anew.

Negative Space

As a poet, I devote a sizeable portion of my writing time to thinking about form. Where do I break the lines? How many lines to this stanza? A poet is always trying to find the edges of the argument, the geography of the line. We are wary of saying too much.

Throughout high school and college I played violin in the symphony orchestra. Over and over again I was told to “play the rests.” Zipping through a 32^nd note run in a Shostakovich symphony, what difference could one small rest really mean? But when I took a moment to lift my bow from the string, to let the string hum a bit, the difference was noticeable. The measured space of silence buzzed with solitude.

Beryl Markham, in her wonderful memoir, West with the Night puts it another way: “There are all kinds of silences,” she says. “And each of them means a different thing.” If we take the silence and give it form what are we left with but the silent white of the page? This is a sound the writer knows well. It is our siren song; it is what calls us in the evening to our desks and windows. It is a silence we try again and again to make mean a different thing.

Simone Weil wrote, “the poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.” I come back to this over and over again, because what does “real” mean, i.e. what is the form of real? When Weil says “real” I don’t think she is talking about reality, not what is physically in this world. Weil is talking about Real in a platonic sense. A real that walks in the garden with the Real.

The artist/makers’ responsibility then, is to create something beautiful. We are meant to find the beautiful among the Real.  Tomas Transtromer, Nobel Prize winner and Swedish poet, wrote that “through form something [can] be raised to another level. The caterpillar feet…gone, the wings unfolded.” In order for the moth to be, the caterpillar must first rest.

To write (and to be a “maker”) is to live with the paradox of filling and emptying. It is one of the numerous paradoxes that give our lives form—to be both forgiven and in need of forgiveness, to live because of death, to learn what is already known.

So perhaps when it comes to space, the form of our work must be one of respecting the silence. We must fill in the blank white of the page with not only what is beautiful, but also something that nudges at the essence of God and his creation. The poet must speak in order to make room for more silence.

Simone Weil also wrote “we can only know one thing about God—that he is what we are not.”

(Photo by Hiroshi Sugimoto)

Passion Is Not Enough

“I see you’re a writer,” a friend messaged me. We had just reconnected via Facebook, after being out of touch for almost twenty years. She asked if I would be willing to critique a story. “Be honest,” she told me. “Don’t pull any punches.” I was honest. Her story was full of passion and longing. It dealt with family and belonging, hurting the ones we love most, forgiveness, redemption.  It was not a very good story.

I never heard from her again, and the other day I noticed that somewhere along the way, we had stopped being Facebook friends as well.

I’ve had a number of similar experiences with amateur writers, and two things are inevitably true: the writer is wrestling with real and important subject matter, and she does not want to put in the long, hard hours required to make it something great—she wants to take a short cut.

In an interview recently, Ira Glass, talking about an artist’s apprenticeship, said, “there’s a gap, that for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, OK? It’s not that great. It’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good.” He went on to say most people quit before they’ve gotten through this stage of making bad art.

In the novel My Name is Asher Lev, the naturally talented Asher goes to study craft under a master painter. The gruff old man warns Asher that it is not going to be an easy apprenticeship. It will be rigorous and often not much fun—but it is the only way. He tells Asher, “Only one who has mastered a tradition has a right to attempt to add to it or to rebel against it.” You can break any rules you can get away with breaking, to paraphrase Flannery O’Conner; but you have to be doing it for a good and apparent reason, not because you don’t know any better.

Short of being born a genius, there are no shortcuts. You have things burning to be expressed? Important things to say? Be serious about your apprenticeship—learn your craft. If your passion is true, this will not extinguish your fire. It will refine it, focus it until it burns white hot and pure.