There's Beauty in the Bellow

The royal wedding (or sort-of sub-royal) is old news but I want to add my little 2 cents to the non-gushing side of things. Bishop Michael Curry made quite a stir with his sermon. The Americans have been raving about it. I noticed a line featured on the cover the People special wedding edition. It seems that most of the "love" is simply patriotic fervor because Curry is American. There are plenty of churches in America where similar sermons are given -- perhaps with less flair -- with little publicity. Hillsong, for example. I'm pretty sure that exact sermon gets trotted out every so often. Maybe Bieber finds it inspiring. It should be noted that Bishop Curry smooshed together all the various kinds of love into one amorphous mass. He spun the Song of Songs as puppy love; it had as much depth as a Beatles song but four times as long.  It had little in common with the mighty unquenchable love that Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of. He did happen to mention Jesus. There...

Update: rereading the title page . . . I read an abridged version! Should have followed Mortimer Adler's advice and read the informative bits more closely. Trying to spend less time lost in the swamp of social media, I've been trying to read more. Specifically books. Specifically in codex form . . . book books. Our library has few titles that I recognize these days. I rarely go to the library and more rarely still to the fiction because it seems so difficult and tiresome to wade through all of the best sellers from 2007. The "biography" section is similarly afflicted: if it's not about JFK, FDR, MLK, or Marilyn Monroe, it's a memoir by a celebrity. How the memoir of an actor or performer could be more interesting than their wikipedia page, I really can't imagine. For instance: Tina Fey does not strike me as a pleasant person. Therefore I avoid her company, even on the written page. Same for any Clinton. Or Barbra Streisand. Or Elizabeth Taylor. And thus...

In Princess Mononoke, we see humans and gods at war. The forests and rivers and mountains are the domain of the gods and when humans farm or build factories, they cannot help but trespass upon sacred ground. How can war be anything but inevitable? Lady Iboshi employs prostitutes and lepers turning them into skilled laborers and giving them stable room and board. She defends them and cares for them and they give her unshakeable loyalty. But this utopia depends on the iron ore found under the mountain inhabited by gods and Lady Iboshi is willing to wage that costly war. We see not only men and gods in conflict but war between one human tribe and another. While Iron Town functions for the good of its people just as the gods seek the good of the trees and rivers, human greed willingly destroys both for short-sighted achievement. Prince Ashitaka comes from a tribe that has apparently lived peacefully amongst nature but his tribe is dwindling. He suggests at the end that there is a bette...

I'm reading Richard B Sewall's biography of Emily Dickinson and I have particularly enjoyed the attention that he gives to her education. Dickinson may not have had a multitude surrounding her telling her that she could be anything she wanted but she was far better educated than most people today. Regardless of whether her father, Edward Dickinson (Sewell disputes this), cut a foreboding figure, he believed that his daughters ought to receive an education. He doesn't appear to be particularly unique in this matter. Emily attended Holyoke with her cousin. Sewall offers no hints that the young women at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke were a controversial presence. Emily had several textbooks written by women -- and not on embroidery either. On botany . Science . Emily and the headmistress of Holyoke College, Mary Lyon, probably received a more rigorous education in a shorter period of time than we, for all our 16+ years of schooling. When Mary Lyon died (only a few mo...

History is the people's discipline—the only academic subject that demands no special professional training. Some of my favorite history books are by lawyers, journalists, scientists and nuns. To write well about history you do not need a Ph.D., just a few rare but accessible qualities: insatiable curiosity, critical intellect, disciplined imagination, indefatigability in the pursuit of truth and a slightly weird vocation for trying to get to know dead people by studying the sources they have left us. . . . . . . . . . I suspect, however, that the very virtues of my discipline are responsible for the vices of the writers who abuse it. Because history is the people's discipline, books about it are relatively salable—invitingly so, to indolent cupidity. History's accessibility to non-specialists makes it seem dangerously, delusively easy. From " Faulty Navigators ," a review and entertaining rant on four (inadequate) books on Columbus by Felipe Fernández-Armesto...

The eye, O priests, is on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, that also is on fire. ~Buddha Well, first off. This speech by the Buddha has great rhythm. The rhythm sets me on fire. Which he would disapprove of. Secondly, I like the picture that it creates: a world scorching with beauty, music, flavors and colors. Mr. Buddha implies that all this profligate glory is a very bad thing. He forbids getting fired up about anything Think of all the other pictures associated with fire: a face burning with any number of emotions: anger, joy, passion, love; burning eyes, blazing eyes. "Fiery" is often a complementary adjective . . . . except when applied to "pit," of course. Dorothy Sayers said: "If I had found a man to my measure, I would have set a torch to the world." Not to be confused with watching the world burn. You ca...

Critics depend upon structured arguments to make their points. A novelist primarily structures not arguments for the reader but experiences. Unlike our more random encounters with the actual world, the experiences we find in a novel are entirely verbal in origin, and they are shaped by their creator specifically with us, the readers, in mind. As we progress through a novel, we live in its world with an intense, imaginative participation very rarely, if ever, generated in us by any kind of purely expository writing. Thus somewhere--exactly where, no artist and no critic has ever discovered--between the immediacy of a lived, concrete encounter, and the limited intellectual engagement created by expository prose, exists the mysterious participatory experience offered by imaginative literature. The Religious Dimension of Jane Austen's Novels , Gene Koppel, 122.

Her method was just that: the intensification, or concentration, if meaning in words until they glowed "as no sapphire"---until, that is, they became, in mutually supportive combination, the Word, a poem that could "dwell among us," alive, a corporate fusion of meaning and (like human life) mystery. This sense of life is the most difficult of all things to create---and she knew that, too. This is one reason, surely, why many of her poems seem cryptic, incomplete, barely reducible to coherent statement, as if she was conscious of an element of the ineffable, even in usual things, like hummingbirds of sunsets. ~ The Life of Emily Dickinson , Richard B. Sewall

Then I was beside Him, as a master workman; And I was daily His delight, Rejoicing always before Him, Rejoicing in the world, His earth, And having my delight in the sons of men. Proverbs 8:30-31 Isn't this what poets, artists and writers are supposed to do?

447 This was a Poet — It is That Distills amazing sense From ordinary Meanings — And Attar so immense From the familiar species That perished by the Door — We wonder it was not Ourselves Arrested it — before — Of Pictures, the Discloser — The Poet — it is He — Entitles Us — by Contrast — To ceaseless Poverty — Of portion — so unconscious — The Robbing — could not harm — Himself — to Him — a Fortune — Exterior — to Time — 455 TRIUMPH – may be of several kinds – There’s triumph in the room When that Old Imperator – Death – By Faith – be overcome – There’s Triumph of the finerMmind When Truth – affronted long – Advance unmoved – to Her Supreme – Her God – Her only Throng – A Triumph when Temptation’s Bribe Is slowly handed back – One eye upon the Heaven renounced – And One – upon the Rack – Severer Triumph – by Himself Experienced – who pass Acquitted – from that Naked Bar – Jehovah’s Countenance –

Essays into poetry: Let me fill this pot -- Roots thickening, moist, whitish flesh-- Then move me, make me face The shock of Transplant Then grow again-- Moderating my sun, Spritzing my leaves. Master Gardener: Prune me, let me thrive; Tend me, let me live. Star-gazing Warm hood-- Watching the darkness: Bright foreigners Stare back. The leaves bleed out their chlorophyllic green Flutter to the ground in gold, parchment-brown litter-- The old strews the stable for the new, mulch and fruit Somehow-- Something grows underneath Pressing the earth. Maybe that's it: The leaf leaps precipitous from the branch to meet it. The arbor lifts and sun shines direct into the nest For a short time. I think it was Ted Kooser in his Poetry Home Repair Manual who defined poetry as words with funny line breaks. I'd like to discipline my lines more. But since these are not assignments, I'm not squeezing my brain to push the words around. (And when you are doing ...

Like countless educated women in the late nineteenth century, Vinnie (Lavinia Dickinson, sister to Emily) faced the problem of vocation, as finance capitalism and the Industrial Revolution did away with the domestic economy that had dominated colonial and early national life. With the middle-class home transformed into a center of consumption by the mid-nineteenth century, the home because the "women's sphere," but what was a woman to do in it? If, as Vinnie said late in life, "Austin had Amherst" and "father believed," what were the women to do? In assuming her role as a poet with "title divine," Emily found her vocation and made her home, at least for herself, a center of production in a unique, new form of domestic economy. Mrs. Dickinson took upon herself the work of love, ailment, and complaint. That left Vinnie with the job of looking after all of them. ("I had the family to keep track of.") ...

We are expected to be broadminded about literature, to put aside prejudice or conviction, and to look at fiction as fiction and at drama as drama. With what is inaccurately called 'censorship' in this country--with what is much more difficult to cope with than an official censorship, because it represents the opinions of individuals in an irresponsible democracy---I have very little sympathy; partly because it so often suppresses the wrong books, and partly because it is little more effective than Prohibition of Liquor; partly because it is one manifestation of the desire that state control should take the place of decent domestic influence; and wholly because it stems from custom and habit, not from decided theological and moral principles. Incidentally, it gives people a false sense of security in leading them to believe that books which are not suppressed are harmless. Whether there is such a thing as a harmless book I am not sure: but there very likely are books so utterl...

Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina with one of the falsest first lines of literature; he writes that "happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." With novels and memoirs full of dysfunctional families of perverse individuals, perhaps we are congratulating ourselves in our unhappiness that at least we are not like those boring happy folks. But perversion, being parasitical, is capable of only so many permutations. Every happy family has found its own way of creating an organic being from a few vagrant individuals. "Dysfunctional family" must be a cliche by now. The "Books" section of The New York Times is probably the most boring part of the paper after "U.S. News." But I love invites to family dinners, to watch the members speak to, and listen to them speak of, one another, to see their different methods of life. Last night, I listened to a wife talk about her husband's annual spring itch to drive to Washing...

To enjoy life rquires some husbandry. I enjoy it twice as much as others, since the measure of our joy depends on the greater or lesser degree of our attatchment to it. Above all now, when I see my span so short, I want to give it more ballast; I want to arrest the swiftness of its passing by the swiftness of my capture, compensating for the speed with which it drains away by the intensity of my enjoyment. The shorter my lease of it, the deeper and fuller I must make it. Montaigne, "On Experience."

says a writing teacher to his students. Let's see. Two weddings. Two funerals (and another one coming this week). My brother getting ready to leave home; for us, a complicated process. Many friends moving away. Difficulty finding a job (along with plenty of my peers). Biblical Horizons conference. A ridiculous number of engagements. A family reunion. Grandfather with cancer. His wife with a brain hemorrhage . A wrongful arrest. A suicide. Real life is not wished, it is lived; stories and novels, whose subject is human beings in relationship with experience to undergo, make their own difficult way, struggle toward their own relationships. Instead of fairy immunity to change, there is the vulnerability of human imperfection caught up in human emotion, and so there is growth, there is crisis, there is fulfillment, there is decay. Life moves toward death. The novel's progress is one of causality, and with that comes suspense. Suspense is a necessity in a novel because it is a mai...

From ND Wilson's blog: As is the case with most things that I say, this is stolen. But this isn’t stolen from another writer, this is stolen (and adapted) from a music video/film guy friend. If you want to be a writer (professionally and not just as a hobbyist), here’s a litmus test for your dedication. Can you get up early and write a short creative sketch of the sunrise (oh, say, 250 wds)? Then can you do it again tomorrow? And the next day? Can you write 30 descriptive sketches of 30 consecutive sunrises? The simple exercise in discipline is hard enough, and it will tell you just how much you actually want to write. But on top of that, the writing component is quite difficult as well. How do you see the sunrise in a new way every morning? How do you express it in a new way? Can you get through the verbal cliche-flailing, and actually create 30 distinct scenes? Adapt the exercise if you want. Stand in the same place every night and try to sketch 30 consecutive midnights. I have o...

This is a poem my professor read the other day; we're studying Thomas Aquinas and he thought that the poem rather echoed some of Aquinas' metaphysics. (Mr. McIntosh stated that he thought that good metaphysics and good poetry are essential to one another . . . could I say essential to one another's existence?) Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman God goes, belonging to every riven thing He’s made Sing his being simply by being The thing it is: Stone and tree and sky, Man who sees and sings and wonders why God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing He’s made, Means a storm of peace.Think of the atoms inside the stone. Think of the man who sits alone Trying to will himself into the stillness where God goes belonging. To every riven thing He’s made There is given one shade Shaped exactly to the thing itself: Under the tree a darker tree; Under the man the only man to see God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made The things that bring Him near, Made the mind that makes ...

From Ovid: the giant, Polyphemus of Homeric fame, tries to woo the recalcitrant Galatea: A forest of hair towers over my strong stern features and shades my magnificent shoulders. Don't think me ugly because my body's a bristling thicket of prickly hair. A tree is ugly without any foliage; so is a horse, if a mane doesn't cover his tawny neck; birds are bedecked in plumage, and sheep are clothed in their own wool. Men look well with a beard and a carpet of hair on their chests. Metamorphoses 13: 845-850