Hopkins Again

A couple of quotes from Gerard Manley Hopkins, and an early poem that I'd not seen before.  Enjoy!

(I capitalize pronouns referring to God though GMH does not, simply to avoid any confusion.)

"It is sad to think what disappointment must many times over have filled your heart for the darling children of your mind.  Nevertheless fame whether won or lost is a thing which lies in the award of a random, reckless, incompetent, and unjust judge, the public, the multitude.  The only just judge, the only just literary critic, is Christ, who prizes, is proud of, and admires, more than any man, more than the receiver himself can, the gifts of His own making . . . ."  (letter to R. W. Dixon, 15 June 1878)

"Also in some meditation today I earnestly asked our Lord to watch over my compositions, not to preserve them from being lost or coming to nothing, for that I am very willing they should be, but that they might not do me harm through the enmity or imprudence of any man or my own; that He should have them as His own and employ or not employ them as He would see fit.  And this I believe is heard." (Retreat, 8 September 1883)

"The Habit of Perfection"
(sometime during 1864-1868)

Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorled ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent.

Be shelled, eyes, with double dark
And find the uncreated light:
This ruck and reel which you remark
Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.

Palate, the hutch of tasty lust,
Desire not to be rinsed with wine:
The can must be so sweet, the crust
So fresh that come in fasts divine!

Nostrils, your careless breath that spend
Upon the stir and keep of pride,
What relish shall the censers send
Along the sanctuary side!

O feel-of-primrose hands, O feet
That want the yield of plushy sward,
But you shall walk the golden street
And you unhouse and house the Lord.

And, Poverty, be thou the bride
And now the marriage feast begun,
And lily-coloured clothes provide 
Your spouse not laboured-at nor spun.

On Seeking a Net to Catch the Days

A distinctly rambling consideration of the use of time when others are no longer telling me how to use each minute.

In Chapter Two of The Writing Life, Annie Dillard contemplates the place of routine in our lives, noting that it "defends from chaos and whim":  

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.  What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.  A schedule defends from chaos and whim.  It is a net for catching days.  It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.  A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order -- willed, faked, and so brought into being; it a a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.  Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern."

I have had such a schedule for some 35 years now as a teacher of college literature and writing.  The semesters form the underlying structure, with their predictable beginnings and endings and breaks, and the days themselves move hour to hour, five days a week precisely scheduled from class to meeting to class to prep to class to grading to class to conferences . . .   Then summers to recuperate a bit and prepare for another year.  Day after day, semester after semester, year after year indeed blend into one another in a pattern both blurred (individual details must be sought within the pattern; they don't stand out immediately) and powerful (this was a good life; it held meaning every moment of every day).  

Now what?  If schedules keep our lives productive -- and if the family genes hold true I may have a significant span of life left to me -- how shall I form a schedule that allows me the peace and rest that I need while creating a new pattern that will lend significance to what I do?

I am finding that being able to sleep until my body tells me it is ready to get up has already made a difference -- I still tire easily (I tired easily when I was a child), but I do not begin every day utterly weary and drag myself through each week never feeling well.  So part of my new schedule will not be "arise at X time every day."  Nor will it be "go to bed at X time every night" -- chronic pain is better or worse on any given day and largely dictates when it is likely I'll be tired enough to fall asleep without hours of tossing and turning.  Nor will I avoid naps if my body cries out for sleep; rest during the day often helps control pain.  This is the greatest boon of retirement: beginning to find physical rest far more often than has been my wont.  (That and not grading papers.)

I let myself have this summer to simply live moment by moment.  I had tasks on a list, but I never planned on accomplishing them more than a day in advance, and I didn't hold myself even to that plan; maybe my husband would suggest an outing, or I'd be in more pain than usual, so I'd let it go.  But the tasks, clearly in mind and needing to be done, have mostly been accomplished.  (We can find things in the kitchen cabinets and drawers now, for example, without having to take everything out.)  There's a bit more of this kind of thing to be done, but there is no urgency to it; it will get done as I am ready (probably when I wish to procrastinate from something else . . .).

And I finished a special cross-stitch project recently, just awaiting a frame to be sent to its destination.  I learned one new minor technique in the process, and I'm looking forward to designing more projects and learning more techniques I've admired for years.

Other than that, it has mostly been reading -- visiting new novels I've had on my list forever, and re-visiting dozens of old favorites.  I've not challenged myself a great deal -- except that every time I read, even books I've read a dozen times, I am finding something new about the characters, the plots, the themes . . . I read for pleasure, but not mindlessly, because the understanding alongside the storyline is what makes reading most pleasurable for me.

I've started turning to the more challenging books now -- Roger Scruton, Matthew Arnold's prose, Josef Pieper, Alan Jacobs.  I have to re-attune my mind to this level; exhaustion for the last several years has kept me lazy for this kind of reading.  But the benefits of course will be more than I will ever be able to explain.  

I've not done a great deal of writing yet, but am easing myself back into it.  The problem is not lack of ideas; the problem is far too many, and being unclear as to where I want to focus my energy.  I can count four very different directions without thinking, and more with a little contemplation.  But all I've done so far is revise a short essay about my friend who died in the spring, write a short review of a book new to me, start an essay in response to questions someone posed, and work on a presentation I'll give in a colleague's class next week.  And some journaling along the way.  All very different forms and subjects.

 I hear so many people say they are bored when they retire.  And so many of my colleagues kept asking me, "But what are you going to do when you retire?" as if life is made up of grading papers.  My problem is the opposite: I have so many things I want to do I can't settle into them.  I'm not concerned about this yet; I'm still recovering from the past few years of physical and mental exhaustion and I'm fine with that for now.  But it's time to start figuring things out, and I'm wondering what kind of schedule might help me do that.

Domestic tasks, needlework, reading, writing, rest.  I like being able to take off with my husband when he appears at the study door and asks if I want to go here or there with him, so I don't want to schedule myself out of spontaneity.  I intend to take care of my need for rest, so hourly schedules are going to end up as mostly mere suggestions anyway.  I've been told that I must act in retirement as I've always done, with a schedule to keep to as if it were imposed from outside -- but that seems counterproductive to my greatest needs.  But the need for rest cannot take over the need to give -- to keep learning and growing and to offer what I can to my neighbor.  

Unreality TV

I rarely watch even milliseconds of Nikita, but I caught the first scenes of the latest episode this evening.  And I found that she talks like too many of my students write:  in vague generalities that tell the listener nothing of value.

Man whose people have multiple machine guns trained on Nikita and crew:  "You have 10 seconds to give me a reason not to kill you."

Nikita:  "We're not here to interrupt your opium smuggling.  We're here to make a deal, but we need to be here temporarily." The end.

If I am the man governing the machine guns, they are now dead.

Not here to interrupt my operations?  Words are cheap.  How do I know this is true?  Why should I believe you?  How did you even know I'm a smuggler?  Who else knows this now that you know it?  Who -- the law or other smugglers -- might have followed you to this location and right now be moving in on my territory?  What is any reason whatsoever that I should trust you on this?  Here to make a deal?  What kind of deal?  With whom?  For what purpose?  What's in it for me that you need this location and no other?  Need to be here temporarily?  Why here, specifically?  Why not any of the other airports you could have chosen?  What's so important about this location for you?  In what way does it serve your purposes -- oh, and what, again, were those purposes?  Why in the world should I believe anything you just said, as it tells me exactly NOTHING OF ANY SUBSTANCE?

Yeah, dead.  Time's up and I didn't hear a single actual reason not to kill you.  Sorry.

On Style

One of the books I'm perusing this break is Richard Weaver's Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time, a book which is third in a trilogy about culture along with Ideas Have Consequences and Language is Sermonic.  Visions is his last work, published after his death in 1963.  It is, as the subtitle suggests, a definition of culture, an exploration of what has gone wrong in 20th century America, and how we can pursue the resurrection of a true culture.  The following passage, however, is a sort of side trip (to the point but not straight on it) having to do with style -- an issue writers and readers discuss and debate continually.  (I have added boldface.)

"True style displays itself in elaboration, rhythm, and distance, which demand activity of the imagination and play of the spirit.  Elaboration means going beyond what is useful to produce what is engaging to contemplation.  Rhythm is a marking of beginnings and endings.  In place of a meaningless continuum, rhythm provides intelligibility and the sense that the material has been handled in a subjective interest.  It is human to dislike mere lapse.  When one sees things in rhythmical configuration, he feels they have been brought into the realm of the spirit.  Rhythm is thus a way of breaking up nihilistic monotony and of proclaiming that there is a world of value.  Distance is what preserves us from the vulgarity of immediacy.  Extension and proportion in space, as in architecture, and extension in time, as in manners and deportment, help to give gratifying form to these creations.  All style has an element of ritual, which signifies steps which cannot be passed over.

"Today, these factors of style, which is of the essence of culture, are regarded as if they were mere persiflage.  Elaboration is suspected of spending too much time on nonutilitarian needs, and the limited ends of engineering efficiency take precedence.  Rhythm suffers because one cannot wait for the period to come around.  In regard to distance, there is felt that there should be nothing between man and what he wants; distance is a kind of prohibition; and the new man sees no sanction in arrangements that stand in the way of immediate gratification.  He has not been taught the subtlety to perceive that what one gains by immediate seizure one pays for by more serious losses.  Impatience with space and time seems to be driving the modern to an increasing surrender of all ideas of order.  Everywhere there is reversion to the plain and the casual, and style itself takes on an obsolescent look, as it belonged to some era destined never again to appear."

The Christendom Review: New Issue

The Christendom Review has released its newest issue, which is (if I do say so myself) worth some time to peruse.

Lydia McGrew does her usual excellent work on pro-life issues in an essay on human exceptionalism.

Thomas DeFreitas and Lee Evans offer delightful poetry.

Millie Sweeney reflects on her first year of marriage and the beauty of children.

And, yes, I have an essay on the value of close reading.

Please visit, and don't forget to look them up and "like" them on Facebook!

Tension

In his 1974 essay “The Specialization of Poetry” (anthologized in the collection Standing by Words), Wendell Berry describes how poetry has become “a seeking of self in words, the making of a word-world in which the word-self may be at home”; this is in lieu of poems being “a point of clarification and connection between [poets] and the world on the one hand and between themselves and their readers on the other” or “an adventure into any reality or mystery outside themselves.” 

In the course of developing this theme, he quotes a line from Yeats that asserts a choice between “[p]erfection of the life, or of the work,” a dichotomy Berry sees as defining the modern state of affairs, which is the choice to make poetry itself life instead of life being the ground from which poetry grows.  There should be no such dichotomy, no such choice, Berry insists:  instead, “the tensions between life and work [. . .] would ideally be resolved in balance: enough of each.  In practice, however, they probably can be resolved [. . .] only in tension, in a principled unwillingness to let go of either, or to sacrifice either to the other.  But it is a necessary tension, the grief in it both inescapable and necessary.  One would like, one longs in fact, to be perfect family man and a perfect workman.  And one suffers from the inevitable conflicts.  But whatever one does, one is not going to be perfect at either, and it is better to suffer the imperfection of both than to gamble the total failure of one against an illusory hope of perfection in the other.  The real values of art and life are perhaps best defined and felt in the tension between them.  The effort to perfect work rises out of, and communes with and in turn informs, the effort to perfect life, as Yeats himself knew and other poems of his testify.”

Words to learn to live by.

Sabbatical is Here

I am now officially on sabbatical. The last things I did before leaving the office last Friday were to set my college phone and email messages to refer callers and correspondents to someone else. The phone I won't check (no one calls anymore anyway with email so convenient); the email I'll take note of just in case there is department or college business I actually need to attend to or want a voice in, or a personal message I want to respond to.

So far:

I have cleaned up, polished, and refurnished my desk. I can now get to the top of it for more than just charging the computer and phone. Pens and legal pads are within easy reach, and a bit of chocolate, of course, and a new box of printer paper for the new printer.

I have placed the books I brought from work neatly on top of the small bookcase that also holds the creative nonfiction books, collections of familiar essays, and drafts of my Inscapes and Essaying posts.

I have printed out the last few of those posts and placed them in their chronological order. I'll be going through them all to sort them into categories soon, but not just yet.

I have made a calendar of January-March creative nonfiction contest submission dates and placed it on my computer desktop and on a hard-copy calendar. I may not enter any of these particular ones, but they still provide incentive; if not, then perhaps some a bit later in the spring.

I have had 3:00 a.m. connections made between ideas and drafts I've not before connected, and remembered them in the morning.

I have, finally, read and enjoyed almost all of Cleanth Brooks' essays in his collection Community, Religion, and Literature -- a book I've tried to concentrate on for months now. I have only a couple left for today or tomorrow. (I highly recommend this book to my lit-teacher friends, by the way.)

I have gone to Chattanooga with K when the Young Man returned his rental car to bring him back home for a two-week leave. I've even made dinner one night. (Okay, it was a chef salad, but I still made it and we all sat down together to eat it!)

I have slept till I wanted to get up and taken naps if I felt like it -- and I am beginning to feel less exhausted and more refreshed than in a long time. It helps to know that I needn't be working on syllabi and schedules for January.

Now for the writing.

C. S. Lewis on Literature

Several of us read and discussed quotations from C. S. Lewis in chapel this week; here's what I wrote:

We often forget that C.S. Lewis made his living as a literary critic and teacher of literature. Teachers of literature today do not only use his literary works, such as Screwtape Letters or Till We Have Faces, in our classes, but also his works of criticism, such as The Discarded Image on medieval and Renaissance literature or Spenser’s Images of Life on the Fairie Queene. And his writings on the philosophy of literature, found in books such as On Stories and numerous essays in various collections, provide a framework for an approach to writing and reading that is invaluable to the serious Christian.

In his essay “Christianity and Literature” (which can be found in the collection Christian Reflections), Lewis writes about the contrast between modern criticism, which aggrandizes the self as the source of “creativity, originality, and spontaneity,” and the Scriptural understanding that we are to be “as little as possible ourselves,” and instead become “clean mirrors filled with the image of a face that is not ours.”

He writes, “pride does not only go before a fall but is a fall – a fall of the creature’s attention from what is better, God, to what is worse, itself.” Because of this, he asserts that “the basis of all critical theory [should be] the maxim that an author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody, in terms of his own art, some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom.” He further claims that “all the greatest poems have been made by men who valued something else much more than poetry”: in other words, art created merely for its own sake can only be shallow, frivolous, and self-important; art for the sake of the other – God and neighbor – has the potential to attain sublimity.

In other words, Christians are meant to be only reflected light – just as the moon has no light of its own but can only reflect the light of the sun, we have no light of our own but can only reflect the light of the Son of God. We cannot create ex nihilo: all that we make is drawn from what has already been given; it is discovery of that which already exists.

As both a writer and a teacher of literature, these claims guide my philosophy.

As a writer, this leads me to seek first to serve my readers rather than to focus on my uniqueness as a writer; the work I produce must not be intended to draw attention primarily to me and my ability to be “different,” but rather it must be intended to serve those who read it by reflecting the beauty and wisdom that God has revealed. I must be in the business of seeking truth before all else, desiring to make that truth accessible to others for their benefit. If I do this, I can be confident that the unique personality God has given me will be carried in the works – but only to the extent that it is helpful in serving to point others to its Source. “He must increase; I must decrease” must be the Christian writer’s motto as it is that of all believers.

As a teacher of literature, I desire for students to find the wonder and beauty of the works they read, and to glorify God for such gifts – that fallen men can show us the beauty of God’s creation and the hope of redemption in a broken world. We can and should love such writers, but we honor them most when we recognize that they point us to a greater One, to the One who is the Source of all beauty and wisdom. Even secular literature often does this, of course, because every writer is made in the image of God and able to reflect some truth about the world he observes and records and reflects upon; whether he knows it or not, his compass is set to true North whenever he writes with honesty. And even what he may miss reminds us of the world’s brokenness and the need for God’s message of redemption to inform it.

In these ways, Lewis’s professional and Scriptural understanding of the place of literature in the life of the Christian informs all that I do and – even more importantly – challenges me to always remember my own purpose in the world: to “become a clean mirror filled with the image” of the Lord who lives in and through me.

Sabbatical

I have been approved for a sabbatical for Spring 2012, an opportunity to spend concentrated time writing. Here’s what I wrote for the application to describe my goal for the time:

My intention [for the sabbatical] is to complete a book-length collection of familiar essays. For many years I have explored this genre: reading, studying, and teaching it; creating bits and pieces, starts and half-finished attempts. I have published a few reviews that fall to some degree within this genre, but would like to revisit some of these to make them less “reviews” and more “essays.” Since 2005, I have written nearly 400 posts at my personal weblog, well over half of which are actually beginnings and drafts of full-length familiar essays which need only development for breadth and depth to be complete. My recent discovery of G. Douglas Atkins’ work in the familiar essay genre reminded me yet again of its value and potential and of how I long to become adept in its achievement. Atkins in particular notes how the familiar essay can transcend the merely personal and earthly, how it can become incarnational in nature, ultimately suggesting to its readers the reality of the Incarnation itself. Whether I have the ability to do this, I don’t yet know . . . but I believe the trying – the essaying – is in itself work of value, both as it changes and challenges the writer and as it offers thoughtful considerations for the reader.

The topics on which I write are widely varied, but all circle back to themes of seeking what it means to live well, day by day, moment by moment, in this fallen world. Because I am a writer and a teacher of writing and literature, my essays often arise from and address works of literature and reflections on the writing life, as well as concerns about education and the lives of young men and women struggling in an increasingly chaotic and relativistic world. Because I am a woman and therefore a daughter and sister, a wife, mother, and grandmother, my essays also often derive from these roles and relationships, as well as from the sharpening iron of friendships forged over the years. Inevitably, my sufferings and trials underlie my writing choices and perspectives as I seek joy and hope in their midst. Since the familiar essay uses the particulars of the writer’s life to connect with, comment on, and illuminate the universality of human experience, this personal approach places my work solidly within that genre. I wish to bring these varied subjects and perspectives together under the concept of reflected light: as the moon has no light of its own but only reflects the light of the sun as their separate positions dictate, we should strive not to create our own light but to reflect the light of Christ in all we do and are.

I plan to spend this summer and fall gleaning from the work I’ve started those idea drafts that look best suited for this project, beginning to organize them, and starting the reading that I’d like to do alongside the writing. It’s an exciting and scary prospect, certainly, and I’m anticipating learning as much (or more) about myself as about anything else.

The Pursuit of the Absolute

Here's a piece I wrote to help my freshmen understand the final chapter of Annie Dillard's The Writing Life a few years ago. I ran across it today and thought some of my readers might enjoy it.

We can live comfortably, coming to very little harm, Annie Dillard tells us in Chapter 7 of The Writing Life, or we can risk our lives for the freedom and exhilaration of seeking God in His creation.

Dillard attended the Bellingham air show “with a newcomer’s willingness to try anything once” – not because she likes air shows, but merely to try out the local culture. Several pilots did some interesting stunts – then Dave Rahm flew. Dillard first noticed him, as she might a book on a subject in which she had little inherent interest, “idly, paying scant attention,” then found herself interested “reluctantly” – until at last she was drawn completely into Rahm’s “inexhaustibly glorious line” and “[began] to learn about beauty.”

What so impressed her was not merely the quality of the individual stunts Rahm performed – the other pilots had done these too, and well. It was, rather, the way he did them one after another without pausing to straighten out the plane between them: “he never quit,” she writes; “the music had no periods, no rests or endings; the poetry’s beautiful sentence never ended; the line had no finish; the sculptured forms piled overhead, one into another without surcease.” Rahm was using the plane as a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe, to explore the limits of beauty that can be created in his form of art, even as master composers, poets, writers, sculptors use their tools. He was not content to do the same things that others do in the same safe way; rather, he combined the stunts he had learned from others in original ways in order to “move back the boundaries of the humanly possible.”

When Rahm took Dillard up in the plane, she discovered the depth of physical pain and disorientation a pilot experiences, the fact that this work, this art is not one that “feels good.” Yet Rahm chose it and pursued it with a passion that made him the best there was; he became the master that could inspire the very swallows to imitation.

As the writer uses the line of words to discover meaning and articulate for others something of the vision he finds, Rahm thought of the air as a line which he followed from end to end, paying attention to the light so that his audience wouldn’t have to stare into the sun, considering the effect of the plane’s line on the audience’s senses. Dillard describes him as reticent, a “figure,” a stereotypical “strong, silent type” who appeared perfectly ordinary, maybe even boring – but, she adds, “the machine gave him tongue.” His art allowed him to express beauty as he could not with words, and that expression was worth the risk of the fiery death that ended it.

This, Dillard implies, is the task of the writer. Anyone can keep out of harm’s way by refusing risk, by staying on the surface of life and thought. But there is gain – for both the artist and his audience – in taking the risk.

Why are we here? Dillard asks, and answers: “for the sake of the choir” – to offer praise. We cannot praise what we know only superficially; we must “penetrate the universe,” “ride the point of the line to the possible,” seeking truth, seeking beauty, following the vision where it leads us. And that vision we follow, that truth we seek, is, ultimately, the “Absolute” who “fills the world” – the knowledge of the Creator whose life and love are evident in His creation. The pursuit of the Absolute is the only life worth the sacrifices, worth the risk of danger and death – because these are a small price to pay for the exhilaration of that freedom available only in the glimpse of Truth offered us along the way.

Falling in Love Again . . .

. . . this time with Hilaire Belloc. An essayist I should have known long ago, and so I see the utter inadequacy of my education once again.

Atkins refers to Belloc's "The Mowing of a Field" often, and I enjoy it, but in the collection On Nothing and Kindred Subjects, arrived from amazon recently, I discovered the perfect essay. The problem with essays, of course, is that they are like poems -- in that you can't just summarize them, because the craftsmanship is part and parcel of the meaning -- but they are longer than poems and do not lend themselves to being copied full text. You can, however, find this one in the book I linked to above (just search the contents): "On the Pleasure of Taking up One's Pen."

Belloc notes the controversy over whether there is a "tangible pleasure in the mere act of writing: in choosing and arranging words." But this, he goes on, is not his subject: he is writing on "the pleasure of taking up one's pen, which is quite another matter."

"You are alone," he writes, no matter where you are, the moment you lift your pen, "and that is the beginning." He then writes that you are going to "create" -- which leads to a delightful digression on how we cannot create, followed by "anyhow [. . .] you are going to do something devilish pleasing: there is a prospect before you. You are going to develop a germ: I don't know what it is, and I promise you I won't call it creation -- but possibly a god creating through you, and at least you are making believe at creation. Anyhow, it is a sense of mastery and of origin, and you know that when you have done, something will be added to the world, and little destroyed [only a bit of paper, ink, and quill]."

Then another digression as he imagines his audience exclaiming: "Affectation! Affectation! How do I know that the fellow writes with a quill? A most unlikely habit!" And the admission that he actually writes with a "Waterman's Ideal Fountain Pen," whose gold nib leads to a lovely sally into describing Charlemagne's throne and his journeys with it, ending with wondering if the reader has read these stories: "No? You must read about these things."

Next a blessing on the pen, which he promises that he will write a poem with someday, or at least copy out someone else's with it, because the pen is deserving and will someday "live in a glass case with a crowd of tourists round [it] every day from 10 to 4." He ends, logically, with the lovely thought that you may lay down your pen any time you choose. You cannot stop whenever you please at bridge or public speaking or conversation or life itself -- but to lay down your pen? "At any moment: without remorse, without anxiety, without dishonour, you are free to do this dignified and final thing (I am just going to do it) . . . You lay it down."

Well, go read it, and you will see. Why is it perfect? Because it carries the essay form -- its loose structure, its sense of exploring a topic and inviting us to come along, and yet everything really to the point -- perfectly. Because it has what Phillip Gerard calls the apparent and real subjects intertwined perfectly: in writing about the simple act of picking up a pen, Belloc is really writing about the power of the written word. Because every "digression" is not really digressing, but is integral to both the apparent and real subjects, if we attend carefully. Because he obviously took delight in it, delight in which we share with every word.

Where were you, Mr. Belloc, in my misspent youth?

Tracing the Essay

I have just finished reading G. Douglas Atkins’ history and description of the “fourth genre” – Tracing the Essay – and I hardly know where to begin. Certainly I won’t do it justice in this brief review, but I can at least offer you some of the ideas that most excited me. I selected it for a class in creative nonfiction after a quick skim; I knew it would be excellent because of the author.

Doug was the graduate coordinator in the English Department much of the time I was pursuing my M.A. and Ph.D. I never had the privilege of taking classes with him – at the time he mostly taught courses in areas I was not pursuing, such as literary theory. But he was a good advisor and I enjoyed the occasional conversation with him. On one of my return visits to KU, I stopped by his office for a few minutes to catch up, and he mentioned that he was no longer “doing theory” (he had written what I believe was the first “layman’s guide” to deconstruction in English), but had turned his attention to the essay. I knew that attention would be detailed and accurate and worthy.

I did not, however, come across any of his books when I first began teaching creative nonfiction – the essay. I found helpful texts and anthologies, and I loved the form and the class. Then I received the yearly department update last spring, and there was mention of a new book he'd written. I hit the web and found four on the essay, all of which I immediately ordered, two of which I then put on my course list for fall. I am joyfully making my way through them this summer. (Titles: Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth; Reading Essays: An Invitation; On the Familiar Essay: Challenging Academic Orthodoxies; and Literary Paths to Religious Understanding: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and E. B. White.)

I can’t begin to summarize Tracing the Essay, a book which you must read if you love this form. You will learn to value the essay all the more highly as you delve into its origins and its tensions and its potential, all explored and explained with a deep love and respect for the form that does not preclude criticism of its excesses and shortfalls. I fear that my underlining and marginalia are not as helpful as they might be: there is more marked than unmarked. Here is a taste of what Atkins explores about the essay (in a list of its qualities near the book’s end): it is “exploratory, experiential, ‘lay’ [amateur] in texture, un- (and even anti-) dogmatic, modest in approach, conversational in tone (and address), personal and brilliantly artful, deeply reflective and intensely moral, and celebratory of the via media [. . .].”

Atkins makes much of the need for contemplation, reflection – time. Time to observe, time to read, time to reflect, time to write. We live in a culture which prides itself on its efficiency, and we take in that world through sound-bytes and google searches and think we know it – and ourselves. Yet we cannot know without reflection. Against this frenetic pace of “efficiency” the essay works, both in the writing and the reading, because it demands that we slow down, attend, explore, listen. “In providing reflection,” Atkins writes, “essays remind us of the urgency to slow down and savor life, certainly, but also to measure and weigh it, to try it and test it. Understood this way, reflection comprises an essential aspect of our ordinary living, part of the whole rather than addendum or supplement, and an aspect without which our lives are sorely diminished.”

Tension is a byword of the book, and much of it is an exploration of how the tensions Atkins describes are resolved (or not) in many different essays. Neither merely personal nor academic, neither fiction nor philosophy, the essay “hangs between” such “sturdy poles.” Because the essay begins with experience, one danger of it is self-absorption; because it teaches, another is the complete loss of self and experience in abstract theory. The self, Atkins explains, becomes the mediator of experience, not the subject of experience. He most highly values the familiar essay, because it moves farther “away from the perceiving self and toward the perceived world” than today’s more celebrated personal essay. “The familiar form of the essay,” he writes, “edges more than the personal toward the meaning the writer extracts from experience. Because the focus rests ‘on’ books or morality or friendship, self-consciousness is tempered and the temptation toward self-centeredness is challenged.” Elsewhere he says that the essayist “becomes the crucible in which experience is tried and tested and meaning extracted. The essay’s subject is not, then, the self, contrary to popular opinion, although the essay’s soil, or laboratory, is nothing but the self.”

Another byword of the book is incarnation. The essay, Atkins explains, is incarnational in form. It embodies – incarnates – experience in order to offer meaning, and he notes often the connection between incarnation as a universal principle and the Incarnation which is its ultimate example. In the final chapter, he addresses the tension inherent in exploring and celebrating the Ordinary at the risk of idolatry, of beginning to worship the creation, the Ordinary, instead of its Creator. The Christian understands that “the Extraordinary [. . .] appears in the person of Jesus Christ, God become man.” This does not, however, make the Ordinary and the Extraordinary equivalent, he warns us, “[any] more than meaning is identical to (mere) experience. There is an extra dimension to which experience, including experience of the Ordinary, gives us access. The trouble is, essays often do not [. . .] reach for that dimension [. . .]. Essays derive meaning, all right, but it is that meaning that remains on the level of the Ordinary and so does not attain that transcendent level, meaning that, in other words, does not transcend the Ordinary. Meaning is, in such an instance, etiolated and falls short of its potential – it is reduced.” Later, he adds, “Through this world we are – or should be – led upward to God.”

If you love the essay, read this book. If you wonder why the rest of us love it, read this book. If you write the essay, let yourself be challenged by this book in matters of form and subject and purpose.

Writer's Meme

Stolen from LuCindy

1. What's the last thing you wrote? A course syllabus, sad to say.

2. Is it any good? It has to be; it’s a contract.

3. What's the first thing you ever wrote that you still have? I still have a couple of pieces from grade school, for what it’s worth (which isn’t much). I have been a bit startled to see how many of the same themes have arisen in my work in later years that were there in my K-12 years.

4. Favorite genre of writing? Creative nonfiction.

5. How often do you get writer's block? It would be easier to tell you how often I don’t.

6. How do you fix it? Depends. Sometimes I just pretend that I don’t want to write anyway, which has the advantage of not having to fix the block. However, when I begin to go so insane that no one can stand to be around me, I will usually try to write a post for Inscapes that has at least some merit; sometimes just quoting someone else helps get the gears grinding. Of course, the main problem is time . . . or, rather, the lack thereof. One needs time to reflect to write anything truly meaningful, and that time is exceedingly hard to come by. There is also the most annoying phenomenon of being exceedingly busy and sitting in a meeting somewhere and the ideas suddenly flowing like lava . . .

7. Do you save everything you write? Unfortunately, yes. I fear dying before I’ve gone through it and gotten rid of at least the worst. LuCindy, I hereby appoint you my literary executor, with strict orders to get rid of at least 99% of it, and perfect freedom to get rid of 100%!

8. How do you feel about revision? “Writing is rewriting.” Getting words on the page is a great feeling and a good start, but if those words are not revised and edited with great care as many times and for however long it takes, then they are nothing more than that – words on a page, useless for any worthy purpose. Any writer who wants to make a mark takes the time to serve his readers by revising and revising and revising again, until he gets it as nearly right as is humanly possible.

9. What's your favorite thing that you've written? Probably my tenure essay, on the value of literature to life.

10. What's everyone else's favorite thing that you've written? I haven't a clue; not enough people read my work to get a take on it!

11. What writing projects are you working on right now? Course syllabi and comments on student essays and exams – ooh, lovely! A review of John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction for The Christendom Review (on spec). A book(let) for possible use in our composition classes on the writing process. Ongoing notes for a takeoff from the tenure essay.

12. What's one genre you have never written, and probably never will? The romance novel or its sanitized Christian version called “inspirational fiction.” It seems to me fundamentally untrue in its premises and conclusions and thus a disservice to readers. I love mystery novels, but haven't the mind to plot one out myself, as I lack the imagination to create a sci-fi world of the sort I also love.

Writing is Survival

Deciding to eat breakfast in the cafeteria today, I caught up Ray Bradury's Zen in the Art of Writing to take with me, as I am teaching Fahrenheit 451 again next semester. The preface reminded me of the need for writers to write: "[W]riting is survival," Bradbury writes. "Any art, any good work, of course, is that."

Restlessness sets in when a writer fails to write for any length of time. And so, a few minutes this morning to exercise the writer's means of knowing the world.

Life is, of course, too busy. Urgency upon urgency demands moment after moment until one's days are filled with a frantic attempt to get it all done while perhaps failing to ever approach the truly important. In light of this reality, Thanksgiving break was a true break for me this year. Tuesday after collecting the last essays due, I went shopping for a turkey and all the "fixins," as my grandmother always said. Wednesday I thought to do some grading but ended up taking off altogether, reading, napping, surfing my favorite websites to catch up on the reflections of writers I've come to know and appreciate. The Young Man had declared his intention to cook for the holiday meal, so I took the turkey from the fridge before I went to bed so it would finish thawing overnight and went to sleep without a thought to the next day's work.

I woke Thanksgiving morning to the enticing odors of cornbread, sauteeing onion and celery, pumpkin pie -- and the lovely feeling that there was no rush ahead of me. It was only the three of us; we could eat any time. I ensconced myself in the living room LazyBoy with my laptop and notes for the online course I'm designing, dispensed a bit of requested advice about the cranberry-apple dessert, and got a couple of hours of relaxed work done. Once the dessert was out of the oven, I did my bit -- put the turkey in and washed and sliced the sweet potatoes to boil and mash just before time to eat. The next four hours I worked a bit, watched UP and cried like a baby -- and simply relaxed. Dinner was a delight (except for the occasional infelicity resulting from my failure to be a sufficient civilizing influence on my barbarians' dinner conversation), the men cleaned up the kitchen, and I got some more work done during the evening after a nap.

Friday was another lovely day, waking when I was ready, working on the online course, napping, a trip downtown to the antique store where K. bought me a set of rings (finally I can wear a wedding band that fits again!) and a necklace, Thanksgiving leftovers. Saturday was more of a strain, simply because commenting on freshman essays took longer than I had anticipated. But Sunday morning I was able to finish them, and, surprisingly, completed the advanced comp essays before dinner time with the evening to work on the online course again.

Five days, almost all my planned work completed, and completely relaxed except for a panicked hour Saturday evening when I knew I wouldn't finish the freshman essays and despaired of having time for any rest on Sunday. But the rest was provided, the panic unnecessary.

The details aren't what's important, of course. It was the taste of a few days of the way I think life should be. Accomplishing work but without the constant sense of harried desperation that permeates our culture. Resting without a frantic need to do something and the sense of real leisure for reflection. Surely this is something, however remotely, like what we were designed for?

Last night, K. took me out for a hamburger after work. As we walked to the car from the restaurant, I looked into cold and threatening clouds, darkening into late evening, to be greeted with the nearly full moon faithfully lighting the sky. Hope to hold on to.

Connections, Connections

The past couple of weeks have been filled with connections in literature and discussion. It’s driving me a bit crazy because there’s no time to sort them out, write them down, make more than vaguely intuitive sense of them.

So I’m recording impressions today, just for fun (or, more likely and more seriously, for sanity).

Elocution: I’m teaching Charles Williams’ Descent into Hell in freshman comp this semester. The action (if it can be called that) takes place within the scope of a play production, a pastoral comedy written by the eminent poet-dramatist Peter Stanhope. The leader of the chorus, Pauline, is working on her lines one day and enters a discussion with her grandmother, Margaret, who notes in passing that the play’s producer, Mrs. Parry, has always thought a little too much of elocution and not enough of the poetry itself. She goes on, with infinite kindness, to also note that Pauline has been rather like this in her relation to Margaret: more concerned with the outward care of duty, of appearance, than the give-and-take of Love. Pauline, duly rebuked, finds this a help along her way to understanding and living in Love.

Then we read the “Night” section in Goethe's Faust for World Lit 2. And lo and behold, here is Wagner, Faust’s student, prating on about the importance of elocution to public speaking – if one speaks with the right tones and gestures, one will be effective. Faust decries this: what is needed for effective persuasion, he says, is to speak from the heart, not to study form. I am not sure, however, that his understanding and advice is really the same as Margaret’s – I want to bring them together and explore the similarity and what may be some key difference in the ideas.

Negation: This has been cropping up everywhere, it seems. We read Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “Flowering Judas” in Intro to Lit recently; the main character, Laura, lives by negation – saying “no” to every possibility for life and love. This negation leads her, she seems to know, to be as cruel as the socialist/Marxist revolutionaries she works alongside, yet she cannot bring herself to say “yes” to any hopeful possibility.

We also read Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” in that class, another tale of negation. The man wants only to have his footloose, fancy-free life without responsibility; the girl, it appears, finally gives in to him, choosing the death of her unborn child, still intangible to her, to keep the tangible security of his presence – yet knowing, even as she chooses, that this too will be another death.

And Descent is a story of negation. Wentworth is given the opportunity to choose love, again and again, and each time he refuses, despising everyone and everything that keeps him from being the one in the limelight. I would, again, like to look at these and other pieces I’ve been reading to find the connecting threads.

The serpent in Eden: This one’s been cropping up all of a sudden, too – the Cupid and Psyche myth, Lily Sammile in Descent, somewhere else recently that refuses to come to my exhausted mind on this Friday evening at the end of another lovely but tiring week.

Connections. I’ve always looked for them; they are everywhere in literature. But somehow these are haunting me just now, and I hope to find out why soon.

New Literary Magazine

A friend who is an assistant editor has drawn attention to a new online literary magazine, The Christendom Review. What I've read in the first issue so far is excellent, and I highly recommend a look. For some of you who are writers, this may be a good place to submit.

Yes, yes, I know, I haven't posted the new post about Charlie. Chalk it up to too tired to think coherently. It's in progress, though.

Charlie Peacock, part 2

No, I didn't get lazy over break; I finished the grading and got domestic -- a bit of embroidery on a baby gift, a new hem for a favorite coat, watched a movie with the family . . . and now it seems I've a moment when I'm rested enough to think about something besides class prep and grades.

Today, snippets I especially appreciated from Charlie:

* In giving his testimony, he referred to "the relentless tenderness of Jesus" -- what a wonderful image, and one we so often don't understand (the heavenly hound, "terrible goodness").

* Several times he urged us to be "interested in what God is interested in -- which is everything."

* Ask yourself each morning, "What kind of creative person will I become today?" (And he reminded us that all people are creative; creativity is not a gift solely of the artist. The church is "God's gifted ones gathering as communities to do God's work.")

* Read the Old Testament to learn what it means to be human, to understand the glory of man and his shame -- then "bring both the glory and the shame to God and use it in creative work through Him."

* When a student asked an especially insightful question, his face lit up, he pointed to her, and said, "You have wisdom, Little Sister!"

* And I loved this: Take your creative work and offer it to God: "Look what I made, Father!"

Tomorrow, God and grading willing, what Charlie said about the tension between being Christian and being an artist in today's culture.

Charlie Peacock

This week we’ve had a star on campus – singer, songwriter, pianist, producer, author, and more. Yet you wouldn’t have known it to see him walking the campus in jeans and sneakers, and a sweatshirt to hold off the sudden cold, with a quiet word and a warm smile for anyone who greets him: self-effacing and God-honoring, humble – and yet confident in his identity as a child of the Father called to be a musician for His glory in the created world.

I’ve appreciated Charlie’s wisdom these past three days. I hope to give more specifics when grading subsides (or I give up pretending that I might get caught up), but one thing I especially appreciated is his emphasis on story. The gospel, of course, is a story, from Genesis – “I am making all things” – to Revelation – “I am making all things new.” Can you tell this story, beginning to end, he asked us – with or without reference to Scripture – to anyone? Can you apply the story to the world – all the world? because the Creator is interested in everything He has made, contemporary church life, yes, but all the rest of His world just as much.

Creativity is a spiritual labor, Charlie reminded us: submit your creative work to the Holy Spirit and tell the story to point people to the truth, to leave the world a better place than it was when you arrived. He spoke of this gospel story as the “controlling story” of the world, of our lives, and reminded us to wake each morning with thankfulness for His new mercies, then step into the story and live out our roles, wherever God has called us.

I kept thinking of the Willow Tree angel LuCindy gave me, the one holding a book, called the angel of learning. But LuCindy wrote this for me on the accompanying card: “She’s called the angel of learning, but to me she is a constant reminder [. . .] to turn loose and trust my Abba to write my story, moment by moment, in faith that He will make it more light-filled and wondrous than I ever could.”

So a bonus blessing from Charlie’s time with us – a reminder of my friend’s loving generosity and of her message through his. Blessings abound; if I can remember that the story is His, I will better see them as I walk through each day in His grace.

Taunted Again

My muse had hidden herself for quite some time until the recent full moon. That morning she greeted me in soft ivory, lighting up the rag-tag remnants of clouds that had made their way across the South from the latest hurricane . From the day after that to the last visible sliver two mornings ago, she taunted me with icy brilliance in a star-studded sky, beauty to take the breath and deepen all known and hidden longings to follow her call . . .

But taunting it was, as ideas flooded my mind with no energy, no time, no space physical or emotional, to pursue any of them into more words on a page than now-illegible or incoherent notes. And so, the urgent still filling my days, helpless hopelessness has led to lassitude, with its familiar omens of the lurking darkness that always haunts me . . .

Worldview and Art

From Joyce Cary, in Art and Literature (quoted in the anthology The Christian Imagination, edited by Leland Ryken, which was recommended to me by LuCindy):

All writers [. . .] must have, to compose any kind of story, some picture of the world, and of what is right and wrong with that world.

(Yes, Bryan friends, I'm teaching at Summit this week . . . and what a privilege.)