Jabberwocky in the City

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to make sense of the city around me, especially the nonsensical, nonlinear nature of events, whether that’s a ‘light’ rush-hour coupled with a sudden spring-like day or a five-alarm apartment fire sparked by a welder’s torch; an artist painting the crape myrtle trunks blue on the parkway or thieves bashing in car windows night after night along my street. Then things get tricky and hard to put into words—ineffable. This is the impossible task that writers grapple with fairly regularly. How do we get at ‘the beyond’ part of a scene we have just encountered, a conversation we have just had, in words that will do the thing justice?

For me, I have to circle around the ineffable. The complexity of emotion and details of scene get me tongue-tied. So I have to let the experience settle in my mind. In effect, the thing becomes like a piece of grit in a sock—something that’s present, that’s felt, but not always acknowledged. Eventually, I’m aware of its significance and start jotting ideas on the page, pinning down the details. This draft makes a collage of the visual, the tactile, the sonic, noting features that loom large, and aspects that seem too small to even notice. And I discover ideas that might encapsulate the thing—a rhetoric for the poem. Sometimes I can get away with stating an idea plainly; more often, I want the idea to exist in the details, without being stated at all.

I am especially fascinated with some lines in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnet, “Hurrahing the Harvest,” the section of the poem in which he is not explicit with ideas, in which meaning circles around the ineffable, while the words are jolting:

Now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behavior Of silk-sack clouds!

Hopkins has conveyed the scene just as he must have felt it—astounded and thrown off balance. I love these lines. Hopkins’ words carry a rich, sonic quality to allow a listener to know the scene “by ear.” The words fairly hum through the body. The poet has created an experience of synesthesia, which I think encompasses the totality, the awe of the scene. Of course, “Hurrahing the Harvest” also contains a rhetoric in succeeding stanzas; the speaker wants to tell us more plainly about his experience. Yet the more powerful lines of the opening stanza—of “barbarous beauty,” “stooks arising / Around” and “wind-walks,” are substantial and unexpected. It is this kind of expression that I am after when I want to express an aspect of the ineffable, a way to make the poem felt, in addition to being heard.

(Painting by Pat Rocha)

- Guest Blogger, Rebecca Spears (Read more of her work in Relief 7.2. Purchase here.)

At the Table

“Then the baker sat down at the table with them. He waited. He waited until they each took a roll from the platter and began to eat. 'It's good to eat something,’ he said, watching them. 'There's more. Eat up. Eat all you want. There's all the rolls in the world in here.’"

     —from “A Small, Good Thing” by Raymond Carver

When asked, I told the editors of this blog that my next post would be about “technology and human flourishing.”But I’m afraid I have nothing so grandiose to say. In fact, I had just one single image in my mind when I named that topic: people setting mobile devices on the dinner table. I know, what a super uptight and grumpy thing to discuss. Still…

When I consider my family and friends and eating together, I want to aim not for some idealized foreign film culinary-religious experience, but for a space where we can genuinely devote ourselves to one another. After all, it was nothing more or less than a supper where the bread and wine of the New Covenant were given for us.

In my experience, the presence of devices on the table, and the ubiquitous expectation that they will be employed at the first sign of wandering attention, can preclude the kind of intimacy that sustains me.

You know how you visit a business in person, then the business’s phone rings while you’re being helped? Often the salesperson makes you wait while he completes an entire transaction with the caller, and you think, “Glad I bothered to show up.”Watching people use devices when I’m at the table with them feels like that. Except worse, because ours is not a business relationship. We can do so much better than profit-driven corporate standards.

I’m not interested in building and defending traditional rhetorical arguments here. But I would like to present one more image to consider. (If you are looking for a compelling argument that touches on some similar themes, read Wendell Berry’s “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,”along with the follow-up letters that Harper’s readers wrote to him, and finally his response to those letters. These can be found in What Are People For?.

Back to my image: I’m picturing Ann and Howard Weiss, the parents of Scotty in Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing.” You’ll recall that Ann had ordered a birthday cake for her son, who then died after being hit by a car. The disgruntled baker, having no idea what had happened to the boy and only anxious not to lose money on the cake, calls the Weisses with irritation multiple times to tell them that they forgot to pick up their order. Finally, Ann and Howard go to the bakery to confront the man, whose calls seemed inexplicably cruel.

When the baker learns what has happened, he expresses deep remorse to the Howards. Then he senses, in an unspoken and profound moment, the rightness of eating and giving attention, which ultimately lead to the beginning of healing—not only for the Weisses but for the lonely baker, too. From that moment, nothing precludes them from entering an unusual, even frightening, depth of communion. (Ironically, it was a phone that led to misunderstanding and isolation. In person, they can break through.) The covenant has to do with presence—embodied love.

The final paragraphs of the story, for me, comprise one of the most spiritually poignant passages in 20^th century American fiction:

"You probably need to eat something," the baker said. "I hope you'll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this," he said.

He served them warm cinnamon rolls just out of the oven, the icing still runny. He put butter on the table and knives to spread the butter. Then the baker sat down at the table with them. He waited. He waited until they each took a roll from the platter and began to eat. "It's good to eat something," he said, watching them. "There's more. Eat up. Eat all you want. There's all the rolls in the world in here."

They ate rolls and drank coffee. Ann was suddenly hungry, and the rolls were warm and sweet. She ate three of them, which pleased the baker. Then he began to talk. They listened carefully. Although they were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker had to say. They nodded when the baker began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle years. He told them what it was like to be childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. The party food, the celebrations he'd worked over. Icing knuckle-deep. The tiny wedding couples stuck into cakes. Hundreds of them, no, thousands by now. Birthdays. Just imagine all those candles burning. He had a necessary trade. He was a baker. He was glad he wasn't a florist. It was better to be feeding people. This was a better smell anytime than flowers.

"Smell this," the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. "It's a heavy bread, but rich." They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light. They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.

I would suggest that each one of us is perpetually Ann and Howard. Each of us is the baker. When we break bread together, we bring our hurts and fears, loneliness, the very stories of our lives, to the table. Let us partake while giving one another the attention our communion needs in order for each of us to flourish.

(Painting by Jan Steen)

Wordsworth and Learning Through Nature

When You send out Your

breath, life is created,

and the face of the earth is made beautiful and is

renewed.

- Psalm 104:30 (The Voice)

I once had the words "To Lucy" embroidered on a notepad for a friend's birthday. He's been a lifelong fan of Narnia, so I had the salutation stitched on the book to inspire the childlike wonder, receptivity to beauty, and spiritual heroism of Lucy Pevensie in his own writing.

I had mostly forgotten about that notebook until I recently returned to the Romantic poets, specifically Wordsworth. While reading the Lucy poems, I was reminded of the embroidered name and began thinking about what was to be learned from the Lucy of Wordsworth's poems.

In the fourth Lucy poem, “Three Years She Grew," Nature recognizes something extraordinary in the small rural and solitary child named Lucy. In the first three stanzas, Nature speaks of how she will instruct the tender child in the ways of glee, gentle grace, and sympathy. Nature says that she will teach Lucy about the sportiveness of the fawn and the tranquility of insensate, or inanimate, things.  Through her relationship with Nature, Lucy will acquire the "state of floating clouds" and be shaped by grace through sympathetic storm watching. By submitting herself to Nature's guidance, she'll learn to be attentive enough to recognize and admire the dimmest of midnight stars and tune her ear to the obscure and quiet places where rivulets murmur and brooks make gentle whisperings. What’s more, her internal receptivity to beauty will be mirrored in external loveliness, for “beauty born of murmuring sound/ shall pass into her face.”

And then, there it is. The first three lines of stanza six and I am truly stilled.

               And vital feelings of delight

               Shall rear her form to stately height,

               Her virgin bosom swell

In Wordsworth, it is in "vital feelings of delight" that Lucy is brought to the "stately height" of true and admirable maturity. And, I too am reminded of the fruit of living in wonder and delight as Lucy does; I wish to daily live in the maturing gratitude that "the land is satisfied by the fruit of His work," as the Psalmist says (104:13). And while my notion of Nature may be closer to St Francis’ (the patron saint of ecology) “Sister Nature” than Wordsworth’s “Mother Nature,” I still wonder if Lucy could be an exemplar of the reciprocal relationship of ministry our Creator has set up between us and the natural world. As we, in following our Father’s example, minister to Nature through attention and care, Nature, through God's bounty, ministers to us.

Angry at Andalusia

All my pilgrimages are improvised en route –– last minute treks to hallowed sites I never expected to discover along the way. The pilgrimage to Milledgeville, conceived while passing through Georgia the instant I glimpsed the town’s name on a highway sign ––“That’s where Flannery O’Connor lived. We’ve got to go!”–– couldn’t be researched adequately during the twenty-minute detour owing to a weak cellular signal, but no matter. There would be a bronze statue, I figured, probably in the town square, and a bookstore in which to purchase yet another copy of the collected works. Would there be souvenirs, trinkets –– a Misfit t-shirt, peacock keychains, Made in China ball caps bearing the author’s image? I certainly hoped so. Kitsch is not my thing, but for O’Connor kitsch I will make an exception.

We arrived in the rain and had to scour the city for any sign of her. Up and down the stately streets, through downtown and across the glistening cobbles and genteel columned buildings of the university campus, we could discover no indication, however minor, that Flannery O’Connor had ever set foot in the place. No statue, no square, no cottage industry catering to literary tourists. What Milledgeville wants you to know is that it was once the state capitol. That it was once home to the state’s greatest author appears to be a matter of relative indifference.

Eventually we came across Andalusia, the O’Connor homestead, out on a highway across from a car dealership, its location pinpointed by several mismatched signs. By now it was past six and the front gate was locked, so we contented ourselves standing on the muddy drive, gazing down the curved path until it disappeared in the trees.

Ours was the sort of pilgrimage that might have pleased Flannery, I suppose. She might have made a story of it, with myself the object lesson. Still, I grew frustrated, resenting the town for not taking more decided measures to honor the great writer’s memory.

“If this is what she gets,” I told myself, “you can’t hold out much hope for yourself.”

In a parking lot a week later, still unsettled by the abortive pilgrimage, I sat with the engine running and listened to a recording of O’Connor reading her short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Her accent is divine, and the 1950s audience laughs in the right places, a comedy club crowd right up to the moment the story takes its turn, at which point an awkward silence descends. Police sirens echo in the background of the recording, and I felt annoyed (as Flannery herself must have at the time). Couldn’t they have been more considerate, these cops? Bank robbery or not, it was hardly worth spoiling a rare recording of the author’s voice.

My silly anger spilled over onto Milledgeville, which could also stand a lesson in consideration, then spread to encompass the whole state of Georgia past and present, then the nation. (“This country doesn’t honor its literary greats. Those sirens would never have sounded in France.”) Eventually I was mad at the world.

“Why are you so worked up?” I asked myself, but myself was not forthcoming. It had nothing to do with the sirens, anyway, or with the closed gate or the statue that isn’t in the town square. I suppose I was angry at history more than anything, the way the marks we leave –– regardless of how large they loom in the mind –– don’t make much of an impression on the actual world. They’re as easy to miss as a sign opposite a used car lot marking a muddy path down which, an hour earlier, you had no intention of traveling.

Other People's Stories and My Own Meaning

I keep a personal blog in which I sometimes quote part of a good book, and then I write a brief comment on it. When I read a novel by Pearl S. Buck called The Time Is Noon (1966), I knew I couldn’t write about it. I loved it, but I wasn’t going to admit that publicly. A few weeks later, the story festering on me, I wrote about this quote from The Time Is Noon:

“She was making her life, shaping it about the children. One had to take life and make it, gather it from here and there–yellow curtains, carrots, a bed for a little boy, milk for a sick baby, sheets of music to write, her unfinished child, a house–out of such and everything she would make her life. And underneath was the strong sustaining web of love unspoken. What if it were unspoken and unreturned? A phrase came flying out of her childhood, her father, from the pulpit, reading, “And underneath us are the everlasting arms.” She had caught the phrase then because it was lovely, listening to him idly in the careless fullness of her childhood. But now when all childhood was gone she could take the beautiful words, like an empty cup, and fill them to the brim with her own meaning, her own secret meaning.”

You see, the book is about Joan, a pastor’s daughter, and the beginning of her adulthood. Though her relationship with her devout father grows, even beyond his death, her relationship with God stops. She denies there is a God. She chooses to change the meanings of spiritual things to suit herself. The problem with all this… I sympathize a great deal with Joan. And that makes me uneasy because I do not deny God. I don’t know if I ought to admire and relate to Joan so much.

And yet, the book has its charms, drawing me into the story, into Joan’s life and her family. Perhaps I can take the story, like an empty cup, and fill it to the brim with my own meaning. I don’t have to remain true to the unfaithful spirit of the book. I can bring my own faith to the story and see how despite trials and deaths and unwise choices, my story differs from Joan’s. My triumph is everlasting, while her triumph is something lovely but fleeting.

- Guest Blogger, Amy Krohn / Read more of her writing in Relief 7.2. Purchase here.

The Holy Going, Writing as Exploration

Annie Dillard’s essay “Expedition to the Pole” takes two threads— observations from a real or imagined Mass at her local church and details she culled from historical records of failed expeditions to the North and South Poles—and begins winding them together in alternating blocks of prose. Her deft juxtaposition creates a third thread, at first invisible, to make a remarkable weaving which turns its nose up at the flattening simplification of allegory and rises above the common mystery of metaphor and seems to strain for the hallowed ground of the parabolic.

God knows one of the last things we need in the world is another reductive division of humanity, one more faulty ‘us vs. them’ delineation to add to the heaping bag we are carrying around. Just for a minute, though, and just for fun, let’s say there are two kinds of writers: those that adhere to the ‘write what you know’ creed and those that are in the ‘write what you want to know about’ camp. There are fine and enjoyable writers on either side of that fence, but my favorites are those skilled (and brave) enough to take both imperatives in hand and set off blazing a different track in the wilderness.

Early in the essay Dillard references the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility. Wikipedia tells us it is “a location that is the most challenging to reach owing to its remoteness from geographical features that could provide access. Often it refers to the most distant point from the coastline. The term describes a geographic construct, not an actual physical phenomenon. Subject to varying definitions, it is of interest mostly to explorers.” Her essay becomes, right in front of us, a writer’s travel diary of her expedition toward that Pole. With what she has known and lived in one hand, and what she believes is out there and wants to know in the other, she goes, and asks us to join her, not just as readers, but as fellow explorers.

At one point she makes the aside: “There is no such thing as a solitary polar explorer, fine as the conception is.” So, shall we let her lead us, or would you like to cut drifts in the snow for the rest of us awhile?

Our Violent Muse

The universe is no narrow thing. - Cormac McCarthy, from Blood Meridian

Violence is a fitting theme for depravity. It paints lavish images of darkness in books like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and NBC’s new drama about Blackbeard, Crossbones. I've been following Sundance’s Rectify since last year, its first season. While the violence makes it difficult for me to stay with it, I keep returning because the characters and story are intriguing, the same reason I stayed with the other titles I mentioned.

In Rectify, Daniel Holden has just been released from death row after 19 years for the death of his 15-year-old girlfriend, Hanna. New DNA evidence clears him and he awkwardly attempts to re-enter relationships with his family and small community. At the end of season one, a group who knows the truth of Hanna’s murder leaves Daniel beaten nearly to death.

I look for something redemptive in a violent book or show and I wonder if the writers of Rectify will use the violence to point to something beyond itself. But do they need to?

When Harold Bloom speaks of the violence in Blood Meridian, he doesn't talk about it in redemptive terms. Bloom says, “The violence is the book. The Judge is the book, and the Judge is, short of Moby Dick, the most monstrous apparition in all of American literature. The Judge is violence incarnate...the book is the ultimate dark dramatization of violence.”So he says the book dramatizes violence, but he doesn’t unpack any insights for us about the violence.

Violence can point to something greater, and artists have used it in this way for centuries. In his book Faith, Hope and Poetry, Malcolm Guite talks about the Old English poem The Dream of the Rood. The poet was intent on explaining the gospel to Saxon warriors. He used a myth his audience was familiar with (about violence Odin endured on the tree Yggdrasil) to shed light on the violence Christ suffered on the cross. By doing this he in a sense redeems the violence for a significant purpose.

David Lynch did a masterful job of bringing redemption our of violence in Twin Peaks. I’ll try not to give away the story, but the rescue of the last victim in a line of serial murders involved sacrifice. Does sacrifice have to occur for violence to be considered redeemed? Maybe the writer/director doesn’t exactly have spreading the gospel as a goal, but is the gospel inherent in a myth or story that shows sacrificial rescue?

I love this phrase the Anglo-Saxon poet uses in his poem: “forwunded mid womum.”Guite translates it as “deeply wounded by defilement.”Mankind’s defilement does wound, very often through violence. The violence of prison life and violence done by a handful of the town’s people in Rectify is a fitting frame to see not just Daniel who is wounded by defilement, but his family, and the ones who are wounded by their own violence against Daniel. Should the use of violence in Rectify be redemptive? Is it enough for it to be a metaphor for depravity? If so, is there a line between gratuitous violence and violence that portrays depravity?

Freedom Summer and Poetry

In 1964, the Civil Rights movement was in full swing. The summer before, Martin Luther King Jr. had led his famous march on Washington. And in Jackson, Mississippi Medgar Evers, the head of the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP was shot and killed outside his home. His children were in the house.

That summer, in a civil rights fervor, college students from around the country were bussed into Mississippi from Oxford, Ohio to break Jim Crow’s strangle hold on Mississippi. The 300 students were in their mid-twenties, black and white, self-educated and college-educated.

This summer marks 50 years after Freedom Summer.

I moved to Jackson, Mississippi 8 years ago. I had studied the Civil Rights movement in high school, had read MLK Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. But nothing prepared me for the stark contrast between white and black in the Deep South.

So much has changed, but also nothing has changed. Everybody can ride the bus and sit in whatever seat they would like, but in Jackson, mostly African-Americans ride the bus. The schools are not segregated, but the public schools of Mississippi’s capital city are comprised mainly of African-American students.

50 years ago, the Freedom workers established Freedom Schools throughout the state to teach disenfranchised people their rights. They came to register voters, but they also came to educate. Many of these freedom workers taught poetry.

One such worker wrote in her journal about a student in Indianola on August 17, 1964: “I can see the change. The 16-year old’s discovery of poetry, of Whitman and Cummings and above all, the struggle to express thoughts in words, to translate ideas into concrete written words. After two weeks a child finally looks me in the eye, unafraid, acknowledging a bond of trust which 300 years of Mississippians said should never, could never exist.”(110).

Poetry, but more importantly, the ability to understand the power of words and naming, the subtlety of language that kept so many African-Americans locked in slavery years after it was abolished, broke chains.

Here is one such poem:

A Negro Condition

by Lillie Mae Powell, Pilgrim’s Rest Mississippi

On a day while I was visiting a certain

City this is what I saw. A Negro

Soldier with a broken arm who

Was wounded in the war.

The wind was blowing from the

North; there was a drizzle of

Rain. He was looking from the

Last place; his arm was in a sling.

The Negro soldier didn’t go

Home. He was looking to the east

And to the west. His broken arm

Was in a sling.

I live in a state that struggles with its past, tries to reconcile wrongs done generations ago. The battle lines have been smudged. Fifty years ago, bravery was found in walking across picket lines, in refusing to move, in silent (and sometimes not silent) protest. And in poetry. Always in poetry.

Naming the Silence

Tuesday, I give my junior high ESL classes a simple homework assignment. As you speak English, I say, pay attention to where you fall silent. Notice the words you don’t have English for. Then choose one of those that you think you really ought to know and look up the English definition.

I assign this mostly because my students, who speak Chinese at home, are having trouble wanting to speak English. I want them to start listening, and to be a little curious.

The next morning, the students remind me that they are ready to share their words. For once, everyone has done the homework. Their words are scribbled on small bits of paper: bride, executioner, honesty, forgive, ensue, barrette, vacuum cleaner, voodoo.

Lilith has brought in phenomenon. She says she means a word for “the strange and beautiful clouds.” Phenomenon fits, sort of, but I suspect that her Chinese word is more casual, less scientific. There are so many words like that. Words that fit perfectly in the shells of their original sounds. Words that resist being pried out and served up in just any language.

I help each student pronounce the English they’ve chosen. After I do, the students teach me their Chinese word.

Or rather, they try. Chinese has always been hard for me. My students wave their hands like orchestra conductors, trying to signal the up and down inflections of the Mandarin tones that fit so naturally on their tongues.

It takes a long time for all 19 students to share words. I keep expecting the class to get restless, but they stay focused, listening in a sort of reverent silence.

I’ve been thinking about that silence ever since. That’s just not an everyday mood in a junior high classroom. What made that assignment so different?

I had asked my students to teach me something very personal about their learning, and about their lives. It was something that allowed us to step into each other’s experience. Together, we were naming the silence between us—now we could both say the word in our home language.

Really, poetry is a similar act. As poets, we learn to listen for moments in life for which we don’t yet have language. When we find these unnamed spaces, we translate them for others. It’s not always a perfect translation, but in the act of naming what was a silence, we are drawn together.

- Guest Blogger, Christina Lee (Read her poetry in Relief 7.2. Purchase here.)

Photo by Mikko Lagerstedt

Lessons from a Lusty Toad

I haven’t always been partial to George Orwell. But, curmudgeonly, chauvinistic and often prone to hyperbole as his work can be, he has become somewhat of an earthy voice of exhortation for me. True, certain phrases and images like, “if you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face- forever”from 1984; or, the unjust and deeply troubling shipment of Boxer, the loyal and lovable workhorse, to the glue factory in Animal Farm; or, Gordon Comstock, the nonconformist protagonist from Keep the Aspidistra Flying, who is characterized by sentiments like, “this is the life we live nowadays! It’s not life, it’s stagnation, death-in-life…we’re all corpses. Just rotting upright ”are hardly uplifting. However, to limit our vision of Orwell to Room 101 or vague announcements of “oh, how very Orwellian”is to miss out on something really important.

Perhaps my appreciation for Orwell began sprouting its first buds when I encountered his essay entitled “Thoughts on the Common Toad.” In this short(ish) first-person narrative, he describes his profound pleasure at the discovery of spring’s first amber amphibian: the unassuming toad. He relishes in its voracious appetite and transformation from scrawny to strong and delights in its big chrysoberyl eyes. (I’m not sure I appreciate the comparison of a rather emaciated look being a “spiritual look”in his essay; and, I am certain G.K Chesterton would have most heartily and robustly disagreed with it. Nor do I enjoy his use of the term “sexiness”in reference to a mere rapacious libidinal impulse which characterizes the toad’s attempts at breeding anything and everything he comes in contact with. However, these are small detractors compared to the spiritually significant impact I find in this piece.)

Perhaps I liked that he decided to write on something as banal as the toad because, as he says,“[the toad] never had much of a boost from poets.”More likely though, it is because of his conscious decision —and I think it must often be conscious—to nurture a capacity for delight: “people, so the thought runs, ought to be discontented, and [people mistakenly believe] it is our job to multiply our wants and not simply to increase our enjoyment of the things we have already,” Orwell warns. He adds, “…if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves?”Sure, Orwell simply can’t resist the urge to politicize his enjoyment of spring’s miraculous treasures, framing his delight in terms of resistance to the hegemony which is, in his opinion, in perpetual league to stamp out nature-derived pleasure whenever possible. But his message isn’t just political.

His admonition to find beauty in the toad’s gargantuan golden-globe eyes ennobles everyday enchantment with the perceived commonplace. And if, as Wendell Berry believes, “the world was created and approved by love… [;] it subsists, coheres, and endures by love…[; and,] insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love”(The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays), I can’t help but think that as children of heaven, part of our privilege is to meaningfully and lovingly delight in the flourishing of a good creation, knowing full well nothing is ever merely commonplace.

What are heroes for?

27 phoropter_big_o

I hope it’s no spoiler to consider for a moment how the structure of BBC’s Sherlock has become more self-aware. To be sure, Doyle’s original mediated our view of Holmes through Watson’s frame. (“As readers, we are always aware of Watson,” Mark Gatiss, one of the show’s creators, said in a recent documentary). The new series, in one sense, simply increases the frame rate: stories collapse into other stories, or rather, they hurtle out of one another, like the creation of an erupting phoropter, before being unified to a single point of focus in the thrilling final moments, when the truth is seen. 

I wonder if the dizzying ramification of the embedded narrative technique is another expert way that Gatiss and Steven Moffat have stayed true to the original text by finding analogues in today’s climate for the conditions of Doyle's Europe (as they have done with the technology Holmes and Watson employ).

After all, a few years after Doyle studied ophthalmology in Vienna, as he was crafting his stories of precise detection in southern England, a man back in Vienna was also hard at work creating a systematic way to interpret the apparent so that latent cause could be seen. In his seminal book on the structure of the mind, TheInterpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, Freud stresses the importance of “nodal points” (images and concepts emerging from the process of psychoanalysis that contain the greatest concentration of causal meaning). To describe the formation of these points, he summons Goethe’s Mephistopheles, who, in Faust, describes the "fabric of thought”:

The little shuttles to and fro
Fly, and the threads unnoted flow;
One throw links up a thousand threads.

Isn’t that just what happens at the end of the second episode of Sherlock’s third season? With a sudden flick of his mind’s wefting power, Sherlock links every narrative thread that, until then, was warping our perspective.

But Freudianism, along with the flying shuttle, is now largely obsolete. His methods, as Jeremy D. Safran wrote last year in Psychology Today, have come to seem "limited [in their] appreciation of the social and political factors that affect [our daily] lives.”That appreciation is, of course, one of the defining characteristics of our age, as we have become aware of myriad frames that condition our lives and perspectives: geography, race, gender, nationality—the list goes on. Macolm Gladwell even makes the case in Outliers that a significant percentage of professional hockey players in Canada can trace their success to being born in the first half of the year.

With its multiplication of embedded narratives, Sherlock takes as proven the claim literary critic Roberta Seelinger Trites makes in a recent article: nested narratives demonstrate that "life, as well as novels, is constructed through frames, and that it is finally impossible to know where one frame ends and another begins.”

And that is what makes Sherlock as thrilling—and as consoling—to us in 2014 as he was in 1900.  Our awareness of determinant frames that exist in the world, and of the overlapping number that exist within each of us, continues to grow at a dizzying rate. Making sense of just how many narratives our story is composed of and embedded within—personally and as a society—can seem impossible, and thus make meaningful action, whether to change our own course or to prevent others from harm, seem beyond the reach of our crude abilities. That is what heroes are for.

Linen Closet Theology

“‘Do you know I like this room most of all in my baby house,’ added Meg, a minute after, as they went upstairs and she looked into her well-stored linen closet. Beth was there, laying the snowy piles smoothly on the shelves and exulting over the goodly array.”

Long before I had a linen closet of my own, the “snowy piles” of a “generous supply of house and table linen”in Little Women captured my heart. I imagined damask tablecloths, pressed linen napkins, bed sheets with sprigs of dried lavender layered between lace-edged pillowcases, and masses of soft white towels, folded in threes. I had a similar appreciation for a passage in Little House in the Big Woods:

“The little house was fairly bursting with good food stored away for the long winter. The pantry and the shed and the cellar were full, and so was the attic . . . The large, round, colored pumpkins made beautiful chairs and tables. The red peppers and the onions dangled overhead. The hams and the venison hung in their paper wrappings, and all the bunches of dried herbs, the spicy herbs for cooking and the bitter herbs for medicine, gave the place a dusty-spicy smell.”

More than a century after the Ingalls family, my parents also spent many late summer days growing and preparing food for the winter. Bins in the basement contained bushels of bright orange carrots and homegrown potatoes. Gleaming glass jars of tomatoes, peaches, pears, grape juice, and homemade mincemeat lined the shelves. My mother kept meticulous records of her work, and in one of her best years, she announced that she had prepared over 500 containers of canned and frozen foods. We showed our friends the cellar shelves and smiled with satisfaction at the homely beauty of the neat rows of Mason jars.

I admit to a great love for home and hearth, but I wonder if there is more at work than just the appreciation of the domestic in the resonance of these images. Perhaps it has something to do with abundance. Meg’s linen closet is bountifully supplied, and so is the Ingalls’ attic. The Marches and the Ingalls have what they need—and more. One clean white towel is nice, and necessary, but stacks and stacks of clean white towels and napkins and tablecloths is arresting. One pumpkin is rather ordinary, but an attic full to the bursting with orange pumpkins, “dusty”green spices, and bright red peppers is astonishing. The sheer number of things makes me smile, and, like Beth, I “[exult] over the goodly array.”Is the distinctive sensual appeal of images like these due, in part, to the bounty of the display? We like to see big groupings of the same object: the repetition of a single element in an artist’s design creates emphasis and draws our attention, àla Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans.

Perhaps these images of plenty remind us that that we have been provided for, even that we are loved. Not only will there be enough, but great abundance has been stored up for us as well. This earthly extravagance reminds me of the abundance of love, the “plenteous grace” lavished on us by the lover of our souls. And on the occasions when life’s circumstances dull my perceptions of his great love, reflecting on literary and artistic images of plenty provides a helpful reminder that he has come that we might have life, “and have it more abundantly.”

Fairy Tales, for Life

It was a hot summer Saturday when I uncovered a book of fairy tales at a vintage shop. It sparked a conversation with the shopkeeper, who asked me to recommend fairy tale books for her two young daughters. They wanted stories about fairies, princesses, dragons, witches — stories about adventures and quests for true love and truth.

Not until later, as I mused over my nephew playing in the darkening yard, did I realize how precious that conversation had been. It seems a rare thing, now, for children to want fairy tales. In a world full of iPads, structured play dates, and a relentless focus on academics and test scores, it seems that fairytales are being crowded out of everyday life.

And what a shame that is! Academia certainly has its place, but the lessons to be learned from fairy tales are not lessons often found in test tubes or classrooms. Fairy stories lend us a belief in the magical, in the un-provable. They teach us that bad things happen to good people but good will triumph; that things are not always as they seem; the value of love, and bravery, and kindness; that dragons, as G.K. Chesterton once beautifully put it, exist and that they can be killed.

In a skeptical world, fairy tales foster a sense of wonder, an appreciation for the unexplained and the magical. They’re morality tales, practical warnings, glimpses of the magical world that exists in the “black boxes”science and logic can’t explain. Princes and witches and dragons aren’t just frivolous stories; they teach us to love, and to hope, and to fight for truth, and to make your own way in an uncertain world.

I hope my nephew reads fairy tales. I hope he looks under bushes for gnomes and into streams for sprites and pixies. I hope he seeks redemption in desperate situations, that he dreams of magic and of eucatastrophe -- the sudden, inexplicable happy ending. I hope he fights dragons and quests for Fairy only to discover, as Tolkien phrased it, “that sudden glimpse of the truth…a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us."

Telling the Depraved: Cormac McCarthy's Hard Stare at Evil

I don't think anyone paints evil like Cormac McCarthy. Part of what I mean is that I don't know of another author who has looked that deeply and clearly into what evil is, and what it does, and how it works itself out in our time. I think he's telling the way-down truth about what greed looks like, and what it does, when I watch The Counselor. I think he is speaking most honestly and most earnestly about lust when I read Child of God. I think he sees the darkness of life untethered from what is true, good, and beautiful more clearly than anyone when I try and take in The Road, or am afflicted with what I remember of Blood Meridian. That would all be horrifying and weighty enough, but I read The Sunset Limited, and I saw it played out (thanks, HBO) about as well as it could be since Michael Clarke Duncan couldn't be cast as Black. And it is dramatically more horrifying to realize that McCarthy, to a degree, gets it: he understands and can write the hope of the Gospel of Jesus Christ more compellingly than most pastors I listen to.

The list of things I am not, or not much of, is unbelievably long. I don't make bones: I'm no theologian. Or literary critic. But I do know a lot about work. And I know this about prophets: their work, their job, is to speak for God, to us. And I believe McCarthy is prophetic. See? I can't even say it straight, I have to edge up to it. I believe Cormac McCarthy is, perhaps unwittingly or unwillingly, but in actuality, acting and writing at the insistence of the God of the Bible, my beloved Papa, our worshiped and rejected Abba. We could try and talk (here, below in the comments thread) about epistemology, or eschatology, or a proper understanding of false prophets, or my literary pedigree, or my story and how I've come to believe I know Jesus when I hear Him. But what I really want to talk about is the mystery of how and when, and through whom, God chooses to speak.

Van Gogh and Victor Hugo Meet “in the center of the starry night”

“I dream of painting and then I paint my dream,” Vincent van Gogh reportedly said. In the case of his most famous painting, The Starry Night, he may not have dreamed it, but may have found it in the words of Victor Hugo. Victor Hugo and  Vincent van Gogh never met in person. However, an avid reader of fiction, Van Gogh was extremely moved by a passage in Hugo‘s masterwork, Les Miserables. This is, according to William J. Havlicek, Ph.D., author of the marvelous Van Gogh's Untold Journey, the passage from Les Miserables which inspired Van Gogh:

“He was out there alone with himself, composed, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart to the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts that fall from the Unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart as the flowers of night emit their perfume, he lit like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding in ecstasy the midst of creation’s universal radiance, perhaps he could not have told what was happening in his own mind; he felt something floating away from him, and something descending upon him, mysterious exchanges of the soul with the universe.”

We often think of Vincent van Gogh as a nut job: a reckless artist who cuts off his ear as a gift to his lover, a man in so much pain he offs himself. If we take the time to actually glimpse the pentimento beneath the true portrait of van Gogh, we might find a very different painting. This portrait might show the artist as an avid reader, a thoughtful writer (writing over 1000 letters in his brief lifetime),  an artist devoted to evoking the divine in his work, and a follower of Jesus.

In a Letter to Emil Bernard on June 26,1988 van Gogh wrote,

“Christ lived serenely, as an artist greater than all other artists, scorning marble and clay and paint, working in the living flesh. In other words, this peerless artist, scarcely conceivable with the blunt instrument of our modern, nervous and obtuse brains, made neither statues nor paintings nor books. He maintained in no uncertain terms that he made…living men, immortals.”

This letter was written a year before van Gogh checked into the asylum in Saint-Remy France. He moved into the asylum for sleep disorders and fits. The latest information points to van Gogh suffering from chronic sleeplessness due to a combination of genetic epilepsy and brain damage from absinthe abuse. New information gathered from Pulitzer Prize winners, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, indicates that Van Gogh did not commit suicide, but that he was killed by some local town ruffians when a gun malfunctioned. In a pointed assumption by the writers, they believe because of van Gogh’s “Christian nature,” he kept the incident from the authorities. It took several days for the artist to die, and while he was dying Van Gogh told the authorities that the wound was self inflicted (he was terribly sick anyway). The theory is that he did not want the accident to destroy the young lives of his assaulters.

As a culture, we are fortunate that Hugo and van Gogh met not in real time, but “in the center of the starry night”. For without Hugo’s writing, van Gogh may never have been inspired in the way that he was to paint what has become one of the most beloved and recognized paintings of the modern epoch.

(Painting by Vncent van Gogh)

The Good Apocalypse

When doomsday literature goes highbrow, you might expect real-life survivalists to cheer. My favorite criticism of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, however, comes from a popular survivalist forum, where the book and film were taken to task for presenting an apocalypse with “no hope for the future.”

But wait––Isn’t hopelessness the whole point of the apocalypse? Doesn’t the popularity of end-of-the-world stories (whether the end is brought about by zombies, nukes, aliens, or melting ice caps) draw back the curtain on a bleak cultural death wish? If you’re one of those cultural critics always looking to trace our pleasures back to our pathologies, the answer is probably yes. Threatened by the pace of change, powerless to adapt, we find solace in fantasies of apocalypse, misanthropy writ large.

Maybe so.

I’ve always been fascinated by these stories, however, and find them shot through with a perverse optimism. They appeal to people who, for whatever reason, want the end to come. Environmentalists cheer as nature takes out the human trash in The Day After Tomorrow. Social Darwinists cheer as the niceties of so-called civilization are stripped away in favor of survival-of-the-fittest reality. Religious conservatives cheer the punishment of the wicked. After the cataclysm a better––or at any rate, more honest––world emerges. The coming fire, as it destroys, will also cleanse. Once the decadence of the old order is purged, the apocalypse, paradoxically, brings hope. We envision an end of the world which does not encompass our own end.

Survivalists may daydream about living in their own version of 1990s Bosnia or modern-day Syria, but they don’t move to such places, or to Haiti, to live the fantasy. The dream is not to suffer, but rather to live in a world better suited to people like you. It’s important for such dreams that the disaster befall your world, not someone else’s.

The society you want to see destroyed by the good apocalypse is your own.

The greatest apocalypse is that of St John, which has had Christians longing for the world’s end since the inception of the faith. In some ways the anticipation of a final reckoning that persists in our culture seems like a distorted echo of that ancient eschatology, which might explain why hand-in-hand with the orgy of destruction comes a ray of light.

“The end is nigh,” proclaims the street preacher’s placard in so many doomsday films, leaving this question unanswered: the end of what? What Christians long for is not the end of the world but the end of the world under sin. Not an end to existence, but an end to captivity. The rule of sin is creation’s ruin, but the Savior’s reign restores the world.

(Photo is a still from the film The Road)

Building Barns and Bridges

They should never have built a barn there, at all – Edward Thomas

In “The Revolt of Mother” New England wife Sarah Penn learns that husband Adoniram plans to build a barn on a piece of land set aside for a new house. Sarah speaks directly to her husband later that same day, imploring him to build the new house instead of another barn. Adoniram is unmoved by her eloquent and reasonable argument, and says several times: “I ain’t got nothin’ to say.” The issue is unresolved, and the construction of the barn takes place without further discussion.

When Adoniram is called away on an errand, Sarah takes action. She moves the entire household from the old cottage to the empty new barn. Upon his return, a shocked and then remorseful Adoniram finds Sarah and the children living quite comfortably in the barn.

In Sarah Penn, writer Mary E. Wilkins Freeman gives us a model for conflict resolution. When confronted with the knowledge that Adoniram has decided to build his barn without including her in the plans, Sarah refuses to criticize, telling her daughter, Nanny, “You hadn't ought to judge father.” There is little evidence of smoldering silences, nagging, or family discord. Sarah goes on with her work----baking, cooking, sewing, cleaning---until eventually she takes advantage of Adoniram’s absence to move the household to the barn.

What might have happened if a resentful Sarah had badgered and hectored her harried husband, and then taken over the barn? Adoniram might have set the hired hands to moving things right back to the little house, and he may have felt perfectly justified in doing so. Or what if Sarah had ignored her needs, stayed in the little house, and lived out the remaining years of their marriage in silent resentment? Think Ethan and Zeena Frome.

Sarah Penn refuses to criticize her husband, and she refuses to set aside her own real needs to languish in self-imposed unselfish silence. Refusing to rebuke Adoniram for his barn building, she effectively preserves her husband’s dignity and the dignity of their marriage. She bridges the gap between the two of them with virtuous behavior. There is no accusatory tone in Sarah’s voice when she explains the move to the barn:

"We've come here to live, an' we're goin' to live here. We've got jest as good a right here as new horses an' cows. The house wa'n't fit for us to live in any longer, an' I made up my mind I wa'n't goin' to stay there. I've done my duty by you forty year, an' I'm goin' to do it now; but I'm goin' to live here."

Finally, Adoniram understands. He yields the barn and weeps as he experiences real remorse at his own unjust action. He even agrees to build partitions and buy new furniture. I suspect he will find life in the large new house with a contented wife rather pleasant after all. If Mother ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy!

(Painting by Arline Kroger)

Chiasmus

Watch what happens in this lovely poem by Karen An-Hwei Lee:

Dream of Ink Brush Calligraphy

In prayer:

quiet opening,

my artery is a thin

shadow on paper—

margin of long grass,

ruderal hair, sister to this

not yet part of our bodies

your lyric corpus of seed

in rough drafts of pine ash,

chaogao or grass calligraphy

in rough drafts of pine ash—

your lyric corpus of seed

not yet part of our bodies:

ruderal hair, sister to this

margin of long grass,

shadow on paper,

my artery is a thin

quiet opening

in prayer.        

Do you see? The end mirrors the beginning. It is a palindrome working phase by phrase.

Poems like this require considerable forethought for the writer as the reading transforms the way the reader reads. There is a moment in the middle when everything changes as punctuation and comparative meanings remake both sides. There is instant engagement with the formation and transformation of the content. It takes on a spatial quality. There is continuity and contrast. There is the rise and fall of story. Memory and discovery are integrated. Even more, a conversation starts. A way is lit. Details expand and time slows. The ordinary is made extraordinary.

A story is told in which the post-resurrection/pre-ascension Jesus is talking to a couple of disciples, but they do not recognize him. He explains the events of his crucifixion in light of Old Testament history and later breaks the dinner bread as he had at the last supper. At this, the disciples knew him, and then he disappeared. Is it because the the disciples couldn't see him, or rather in that moment, they were suddenly seeing everything through him? Do you ever think about what is written in the middle of your story? How it lets you see?

(Photo by Bruce Kirby)

Radical Correspondence

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We are happy when for everything inside us there is a corresponding something outside us.

– William Butler Yeats

I was twenty when I learned what is essential about metaphors. The poet Albert Goldbarth asked his introductory class to open the bundle of photocopied poems he'd made, and directed us to a page that lay, purposefully out of time, between Wordsworth and Sappho. Upon it were twenty words by Gregory Orr:

Washing My Face

Last night's dreams disappear.
They are like the sink draining:
a transparent rose swallowed by its stem.

I well recall the pedestal sink and pipe that Goldbarth drew with chalk to ensure we saw the shape the poem made. And I remember the way he drew the shape within the shape: surface petals made of water draining into a moving column of its making. And surely then he must have noted the iteration of that shape within us, for it comes so readily to mind: atop a column, the wakeful brain, an outgrowth of a stem. Further and further, he led us into the poem even as he led us deeper into ourselves. We talked of the cleansing agency of dream life, of the ways water and dreams relate. Only the clock stopped us.

Though I did not know Emerson's work at the time, I was starting to see what that cheerful visionary said was "easily seen": metaphors "are not the dreams of a few poets, here and there," but essential offshoots of our nature. Man, he said, has been "placed in the center of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him." He described this relationship as a "radical correspondence," root-level connections that allow the world and ourselves to feel "full of life."

Wakeful life is draining; it can come to feel empty. That is why I read, and why I write, and why I try to teach. It is twenty-four years since first I felt a ray arriving from Orr's transparent rose. Now I am the teacher with the bundle of poems, endeavoring to draw the water.

Under the Overpass

“For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor.” (2 Cor 8:9)

Mike Yankoski’s Under the Overpass recounts the story of how he radically took these words to heart, taking the reader on quite a journey. It is the tale of the experience of an upper-middle-class young man who has an existential crisis of sorts. After hearing a sermon on the necessity that Christian action match confession, manifesting itself in truly caring for a needy world, he was powerfully struck with a crisis of whether his faith in Christ was weighty enough to genuinely identify with the poor in their suffering. An idea began to form in his mind that compelled him on a journey deep into the existential reality of the poor among us: he became homeless. For five months, along with a friend who decided to take the journey with him, he wandered the streets of several of America’s cities with no place to call home and no idea where his next meal was going to come from. While Yankoski might not exactly be an excellent writer (he’s a young guy), and the dialogue between him and his companion sometimes leaves something to be desired, in the end the idea acted out and some of the experiences he has are so compelling that one can’t help but be affected.

The book is a journal-like account of his experiences on this inglorious adventure into the sewers of America. Though he runs into a lot of interesting, and sometimes disturbing, characters, the picture that emerges is not at all pretty. The world from this perspective looks altogether different, with different priorities and concerns. The reader is hit strongly by the impression that the homeless don’t quite have the status of human beings in the consciousness of America, whether Christian or otherwise. It’s the underbelly of civilized reality we’re all tacitly aware of, but which seldom registers for long in our living consciousness (fleeing with rapid speed as soon as the traffic light turns green).

The essential message of the book is that Yonkoski’s experience is extremely dehumanizing, which is the common lot of his fellow sufferers who have sunk still further. But Jesus entered into the suffering of the lowest of the low, and the church needs to follow Him there. To be sure, the world is big, with many problems and battles to be fought in various arenas of life. But as the apostles summon, “They only asked us to remember the poor” (Gal 2:10). It’s amazing how many of the destitute have ears to hear the good news of Christ’s death for the sinful and broken. The vacuous thoughts and concerns of middle-class consumer culture drift away like mist in this context because they are familiar with the abyss of this fallen world—the need for the gospel is not theoretical but palpable in this context. But for my sake, does my present rhetoric have meaning if the result is not faith working itself out in love towards the poor? When we see the poor, are we like those who have eyes but do not see that we look as in a mirror at our own spiritual condition? Do we not know wherein true poverty and true riches lie?