Peter, I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed talking about this book with you! It's been so much more fun for me, and I bet a lot more interesting to our readers, than if either of us just wrote about it alone.

In college, I had lots of people to talk to in depth about books, and we were all equally excited -- I remember long dinner-table conversations that migrated to one of our dorm rooms, and went on into the night. Adult life isn't like that, but blogging does offer some great opportunities for communication. I'm grateful to our commenters here for their contributions to the conversation and wonder if any of them have additional thoughts about this form of book talk.

But mostly I want to thank you for helping me think more deeply about this remarkable book; it proved to me how our human minds really do thrive on input from others. I'm also keen to go on reading and talking about Faulkner, who seems to occupy a unique place in American arts & letters.

Beth

° ° °

Beth,

That was right slick, rereading one of my favorite novels and then learning the next day that you had just reread the same novel and wanted to exchange letters about it. The exchange felt even fuller on a blog with the comments people were kind enough to make. I especially appreciate Lorianne’s frequent, rich contributions.

I wonder if you or other readers have any thoughts about how someone wanting to try out Faulkner might best do so, generally speaking. I’ll take my answer off the air, as callers often say on the NPR talk shows, and see what develops in the comments.

Peter

Dear Beth,

Thomas Sutpen is a monster, but Grandfather learns what makes him tick. “Sutpen’s trouble was innocence,” Grandfather says, an innocence that Grandfather believes he never loses.

It’s hard to see what Grandfather was talking about at first.  Sutpen ruins four women’s lives in progressively more dishonorable ways.  At the last, he sires a child out of wedlock by his longtime companion and flunky Wash Jones’s granddaughter, who is forty-four years his junior.  (“‘He chose lechery,’ Shreve says.”)  When Sutpen learns that the child is a girl, though, he decides to treat his mare, who has just given birth to a male, better than Wash’s granddaughter, and tells her so:

“Well, Millie, too bad you’re not a mare like Penelope.  Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable.”

It’s then that Wash kills him.

Shreve is correct, strictly speaking.  When marriage doesn’t produce a suitable male heir, Sutpen chooses lechery.  But he’s never a lecher, never someone interested in women for lust’s sake or even love’s.  He’s even a virgin when he first marries at age twenty, and he admits to Grandfather that he “could neither have suffered temptation nor offered it.”  He’s virile enough, the reader knows, but his sex drive like everything else takes a back seat to his design to acquire a plantation owner’s respectability.  Only after the Civil War ends and respectability is no longer an option does Sutpen get the granddaughter pregnant so he can at least have his design’s bare bones, the male heir.

Sutpen innocently hatches his design as a young teen in reaction to being slighted by the Tidewater plantation slave (and, through him, his master).  But his innocence is the rigid innocence of childhood that makes monsters of adults who never grow out of it, “that innocence which believed that the ingredients of morality were like the ingredients of pie or cake and once you had measured them and balanced them and mixed them and put them into the oven it was finished and nothing but pie or cake could come out,” as Quentin says.

I think today’s religious fanatics, no matter what their persuasion, suffer from Sutpen’s brand of monstrous innocence.

Peter

° ° °

Dear Peter,

It's fascinating to me that Faulkner called Sutpen an almost-perfect tragic hero. I could possibly agree with that assessment of Joe Christmas, in "Light in August," but for me, a tragic hero has to have a very clear good side, a nobility of character, as well as fatal flaws. I never felt that with Sutpen, and part of the reason for that is Faulkner's own way of conveying his character: at a very great distance. So great in fact, that we cannot warm to him because (like all the characters, much more real because we hear them speak, see them move and interact as they also try to figure the man out) we're never close enough to really feel him in the flesh.

I think this distancing is a further reason why we can see Sutpen and his downfall as an allegory of the South itself. Faulkner, speaking about this book, said that the South labored under a curse - the curse of slavery. Curses, in the Old Testament style, affect not only the king/patriarch but his progeny and the entire tribe or nation-state under that leader, who refuse to "turn away from their wickedness;" the curse can extend "unto many generations." Faulkner seems to carry this out as he kills off all of Sutpen's descendants except for the feeble-minded Jim Bond; his slaves; even the old spinster Rosa who once ran away from him. Our poor narrator Quentin, grandson of the Grandfather who professed Sutpen's "innocence," doesn't escape either; apparently he knows too much and came too close to the source of the curse.

Which brings up a larger question about innocence itself. If slavery was indeed a "curse," -- or an evil -- did the entire South deserve what happened to it? What level of participation in a communal sin -- and we can think of many of these that societies have participated in and still do -- is required before an individual is guilty of complicity? Sutpen was certainly a willing participant; I doubt we could say such a thing about his West Indian slaves or his wives. Is he excused by the fact that he was born into a world where his "design" would be not only acceptable but admired, and where acquiring and exploiting slaves and women was behavior shared, to at least some extent, by all the adult males at the top? At what point does an adult, even one steeped in the prevailing culture, bear the responsibility of seeing it clearly and choosing for him or herself?

But going beyond the individual, since the book is also an allegory of a society, we have to ask what, if anything, can stop the curse and expiate the sin. If slavery was an expression of racism, we certainly can't claim that the elimination of slavery eliminated racism. Neither can we claim that the white male claim of superiority and privilege over all other groups was, or is, confined to the South; as subsequent history and even current events are proving, racism infects North American society as a whole, and has been present since white people first came to these shores.

I have to wonder if our continual collective "moving on" from one oppression to another -- Native Americans, blacks, women, Japanese, Vietnamese, gays, Muslims -- it's a long sad list -- without true self-reflection, justice for the victims of hate crimes, trials of leaders, or reparation for victims -- has contributed to the perpetuation of racism as an endemic and largely acceptable trait that repeatedly bubbles violently to the surface of American society. We have had prophets, too, calling us to truth and repentance, but have we really listened? It doesn't seem that way to me. Faulkner, writing this book in the 1930s, was trying to speak about the South as he saw it approximately sixty years after the Civil War. That's the same distance we now have from World War II; not long, but not short either. When we look at our history since 1940, what can we say about innocence? Who are the tragic heroes of these subsequent chapters? Who are the victims? Who are we? And where does it end?

Beth

Beth at The Cassandra Pages and I are exchanging correspondence about our impressions from our second readings of William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom!, which each of us, unbeknown to the other, recently completed.  We're publishing the correspondence on both blogs.  The following is our fourth exchange; click here to read our first, second, and third.

Dear Peter,

My freshman year in college, I became friends with an engineering student from the South who lived near me in the dorm (yes, co-ed! 1970!) and was dating a close friend of mine. Like Quentin, he had a southern name previously unknown to me, and he had grown up in a totally different society of teas, lawn parties, cotillions and clear gender roles for both young men and women. He had had a sweetheart with another unfamiliar name - Marleve - and told me how she and all her friends used to get up an hour early to do their hair and put on their makeup before class. Meanwhile, we were burning our bras...if we wore them at all. He liked the university and did well, but he only lasted through his sophomore year, when he went home to be with his girlfriend, shaking his head when he said goodbye to me and saying, "I just could never quite get you Northern girls."

So what about Faulkner's women? If Thomas Sutpen is an archetype of a patriarch, desiring to create a dynasty through his male lineage (but definitely not chivalrous), what about the women around him?

We learn little about his first wife in the West Indies, the unknown octaroon who gave birth to his first son, Charles, repudiated because of his negro blood. His second wife, Ellen, perhaps comes closest to the idea of a "southern belle" - she's lovely, but fragile, and is part of a "deal" made between Sutpen and her father. Unhappy and unable to assert herself, but dutiful, she bears two children - Henry and Judith - before taking to her bed and dying after a slow, shadowy decline.

Then there's Rosa, the elderly woman whose long rambling narration, delivered to Quentin as a kind of verbal legacy, forms the "core" of the narrative. She's Ellen's cousin but much younger, who comes to live at Sutpen's Hundred with Judith and the negro servant, Clytie, after Ellen's death, and after Henry kills Charles and flees. Rosa, then in her early 20s, becomes engaged to Thomas after he returns from the Civil War (a shell of his former self), but breaks the engagement in outrage after he poses the condition that she bear him a son before the marriage to prove that she can; she goes back to town where she lives in miserable poverty, spinsterhood, and hatred for the next fifty years.

And perhaps the most enigmatic woman of all is the daughter, Judith, who resembles none of these women as much as her father. Peter, one of the most vivid scenes in the book for me is when we discover Thomas wrestling at night in the barn with his slaves, a sort of cockfight scene lit by lamps illuminating the faces of the men of the town, watching the spectacle and drinking whiskey. Henry, the son, can't bear it, but up in the hayloft we see Judith - a little girl then - looking down on the sweat and blood and violence with her implacable, unreadable face. Later, she becomes not a spinster but an archetypal widow, even though her marriage to her half-brother Charles is prevented, and later dies of smallpox. The only emotion we ever witness from her is a sudden gush of tears, almost instantly dried, when her father comes home and she tells him what has happened to his sons.

What do you think Faulkner is trying to tell us through the characters of these women? Are they stereotypes or true to the society he's portraying?

Beth

° ° °

Dear Beth,

The Absalom, Absalom! women seem locked into something tougher to break out of than the clear gender roles your disoriented Southern friend found missing at college.  To me, the Absalom women are closer to the earth – to something essential – than the men are, and they are more inclined to feel and to act not in furtherance of a design, as is always the case with Sutpen, but out of instinct (usually love) and emotion (usually hatred) alone.

To put it more negatively, the Absalom women seem subhuman.  But it’s a “subhuman” woman, Sutpen’s octoroon first wife, who follows her instinct (and a smart lawyer’s vague advice) to bring Sutpen down.

Women are like the novel’s blacks.  Funny how Sutpen tells Grandfather the story of his first marriage while Grandfather and he are waiting for Sutpen’s slaves and dogs to hunt down Sutpen’s French architect.  Quentin, who is telling the story of the story to Shreve, makes the blacks out to be as primal as the dogs.  They are better hunters than the dogs: their sense of smell is as good as the dogs, but they don’t get stuck barking up the tree the architect entered when they realize he's been hopping through the trees for acres with Sutpen-like tenacity.  Well, just when the architect is caught, Sutpen gets to the part of his story where he “puts aside” his first wife and (he believes) settles up with her.  Grandfather, maybe “hollering,” says, “. . . didn’t the dread and fear of females which you must have drawn in with mammalian milk teach you better?”

Sure enough, as Grandfather surmises, the octoroon (with the lawyer’s help) amazingly hunts down the story’s chief “architect” a few paragraphs later. (For Sutpen is an architect of sorts: he endlessly talks about his “design” to which women are merely “adjunctive.”  “I had a design,” he tells Grandfather.  “To accomplish it, I should acquire money, a house, a plantation, slaves, and a family – incidentally, of course, a wife.”)  The octoroon grooms her son Charles with “mammalian love,” and the lawyer sends him off to Henry’s university with a letter of introduction.  Through the octoroon’s primal love for Charles and her nursed hatred for Sutpen, Henry brings Charles home to Sutpen’s Hundred one Christmas, and Sutpen knows he’s caught.  His downhill slide starts there.

But the octoroon survives to enable her feebleminded grandson, Jim Bond, in turn, to survive the Sutpen family doom.  In contrast, none of Sutpen’s white lineage survives.

This sort of wretched and triumphant primitivism shared by the novel’s blacks and women – is Faulkner describing a problem or contributing to it?  I’m never sure with Faulkner.  This account of a talk Faulkner gave while a writer in residence at the University of Virginia reminds me of the endless debate over whether he was a racist or was someone who supported blacks’ equal rights:

He was not afraid to challenge his UVA audience, as became clear when he decided to commence his second Spring semester in “Residence” by delivering “A Word to Virginians,” a nine-minute speech urging them to help solve rather than exacerbate the growing crisis over court-ordered integration in the Jim Crow South. To 21st century listeners, his exhortations may sound more like temporizings, but at the time they were controversial, and to some in his immediate audience, as you can hear for yourself, unacceptable. (Faulkner at Virginia: An Introduction)

It’s the same with Faulkner and women.  I can’t tell what he really thinks about them.  But sometimes I believe I want to know what an author “really thinks” only because I find the topic’s richer treatment in his chosen genre to be so unsettling.

° ° °

The last question I’d like to raise about Absalom is the question of innocence.  Sutpen comes off as a monster – “the demon,” as Shreve is fond of calling him – yet Grandfather believes he is the victim of his own innocence.  Which is it?

Peter

[Photo by Ralph Thompson of Faulkner taking to students at the University of Virginia ca. 1957.  The school admitted its first black student in 1950 by court order, and it went coed in 1970.  Faulkner split his residence between Oxford, Mississippi and U. Va. from 1957 until his death in 1962.]

Peter, what was the experience of reading this book like for you?

Beth

º º º

Beth,

Faulkner's tragedies are the only works I can read half asleep and still not miss anything. I don't mean there's nothing to miss – on the contrary! At college, too: I dozed through most of my reading assignments, but I didn't have to turn the pages back very often for Faulkner. I think my conscious mind gets in the way with Faulkner. Faulkner gives it some bones to chew – all those big words to look up – but most everything else seems geared toward my subconscious.

Absalom is tough on the conscious reader. Its narrators, whether first person or third, pull him away from his regular reliance on plot and character development. Key plot details are buried in labyrinthine sentences. And characterization through dialog? Forget about it! All the characters sound the same: the dominant ones speak in short, objectively insignificant phrases, while the passive ones – Faulkner's Greek chorus – speak in those long sentences that process and repeat the dominant characters' phrases and put a kind of mental illness, or at least obsession and inexorable amazement, between the reader and the facts. No wonder we all relate to Shreve, who frequently tries to stop Quentin long enough to get a simple narrative point clarified: “'Wait,' Shreve said. 'For Christ's sake wait.'”

So Absalom examines reading, and Shreve is Faulkner's model reader. His conscious mind struggles with the narration, but his subconscious mind catches enough so that he's drawn into the sickness. Because he's a successful reader from outside the South – indeed, outside the U.S. – Shreve demonstrates the universal reach of Absalom's themes. I think it's also significant that Shreve survives, just as Faulkner, who's not known for hope, says in his Nobel acceptance speech that mankind will survive.

Peter

º º º

Well, Peter, in part 1 of this conversation you compared me to Shreve, but I doubt that I'm a model reader! For one thing, I tend to read very fast, and that's not helpful to Faulkner. I really like what you said about his books requiring us to use our subconscious mind; it feels like you have to somehow uncouple your normal intellectual, analytical, processing mind and submit yourself to the flow of words, which are at times almost dreamlike and quite often rambling or even completely crazy.

I also love books like this that force me to slow down and engage with the writing itself, while at the same time immersing me in a mood and place that feel foreign, dark, ominous, and yet somehow seductive. I'm a very visual person so I'm always constructing mental images while I'm reading. With Faulkner I always feel like I'm in an old black-and-white movie, shot without enough light, and definitely scary; I am out of my element here; there's little comfort or familiarity. That mental place haunts me all the days I'm reading the novel, and for some time afterward. I never realized before that this book belongs to the genre of writing known as Southern Gothic, and while it's not about the occult or ghosts or vampires at all, this "haunted" and demonic quality is palpable.

When I stopped reading this book each day, I kept thinking about what he was doing. I was stunned by the complex construction of this novel. Multiple narrators, not always clearly identified at first; a great deal of stream-of-consciousness writing; extremely long sentences; and a story that's gradually revealed through flashbacks from many different points of view. The sheer mastery of the craft of writing was pretty thrilling.

What I found especially impressive is that even though the construction is as dense as an overgrown swamp, he doesn't call attention to it, he's not showing off (like some other masters of the "modern" novel we might name) -- it simply becomes another part of the world he is creating for us to inhabit as we read, and this tangled, dark complexity contributes to the book's mood of violence, tension, murky confusion, and impending doom. If I had to use one word to describe the mood of the novel, I might choose "tense" -- what about you?

And from here, I wonder if we might talk about the female characters in the book next, and about women and the South!

Beth

Peter, it's hard to know where to begin with this book, isn't it? We could talk about it as one of America's first modern novels, and analyze its structure. We could talk about Christianity, Calvinism, and slavery, and the concept of the elect and the damned, and how that's still playing out in our culture. Or, as Lorianne mentions in her comment to the first post, about how it addresses southern notions of "ideal" womanhood, and the patriarchy. that supposedly "protects" it. I hope we'll get to all of that eventually. Maybe what I'll do first, though, is spring off your wonderful, Faulkner-esque glimpse at the characters to talk about a little more about the plot, and explain the title, so people who haven't read the book won't go nuts or give up on us all together!

Basically, Absalom, Absalom! is the story of Thomas Sutpen, a man born into poverty who gets money, goods, and slaves – we don't know exactly how – and comes into a small Mississippi town full of whispering, speculating inhabitants, acquires one hundred acres, and starts to build a plantation and mansion. His goal, beyond building this empire (on the backs of the slaves he's brought from the West Indies) is to establish a family dynasty, so he needs sons.

Faulkner himself said that slavery was the curse under which the South labors, and that Thomas Sutpen's major flaw was his belief that he was too strong to need to be part of the human family; those two curses and how they play out are the subject of the book. I'd argue that it goes even deeper, that what Faulkner explores here is racism itself, in the character of a person who believes himself to be elect while others – even his own flesh-and-blood – are cast aside because a tiny percentage of negro blood flows in their veins.

So – the title. In the Bible, Absalom is one of the sons of King David, but he rebels and fights against his father. His death occurs during a battle when his hair catches in the branches of an oak tree, unseating him and rendering him helpless (a clear parallel, I think, to the image of a lynched black man hanging from a tree.) Joab, the enemy, is told and comes back with a posse of soldiers and kills him. But when Absalom's death is reported to his father, David is inconsolable.

In many ways Thomas Sutpen is this kind of Old Testament patriarch; he has many human weaknesses and cruelties but he's also fascinating and exerts a powerful, some say demonic, force on everyone around him. Like the OT kings, he looms much larger than most of the other people on the stage, and affects them all, but he also causes his own downfall. Faulkner makes his story into an allegory not just about one family, but about the South and its downfall, just as the Books of Kings contain cautionary tales about rulers and justice, and what happens when they allow their human weaknesses to dominate their character and actions.

Faulkner may have doubled the name to "Absalom, Absalom!" because there are two sons in his story: Henry Sutphen, his legitimate and pure white son, and Charles Bon, whose mother was an octaroon (1/8 black) whom Sutphen married in the West Indies but repudiated and abandoned after he found out about her (and their son's) negro blood. Henry and Charles, unknown to each other as brothers, meet at university, and their paths toward self-discovery are an essential part of the book's plot.

Beth

º º º

Beth, that's a great summary. I'd just add the incest angle. The Bible's story of Absalom's rebellion against his father David starts when Absalom's half-brother, Amnon, rapes Absalom's full sister, Tamar. The narrator's not wild about the rape, but the incest is the big sin. Absalom plots his revenge for two years, has Amnon killed, and flees when David finds out. In this respect, Henry Sutpen resembles Absalom: Henry kills his half-brother Charles to keep him from an incestuous relationship with Henry's full sister Judith, and then he flees.

But Charles resembles not only the incestuous Amnon but Absalom, also. The Bible infers that Absalom seduces Israel because David doesn't lift a finger to see him over the two years following Amnon's murder. Similarly, Charles is frosted that his father Sutpen never comes to him, never speaks to him, even after Charles knows Sutpen knows Charles has designs on Judith – a match Sutpen tries to get Henry to stop. So Charles seduces Henry and Judith because his father slights him, just as Absalom seduces Israel because his father slights him.

So I could see how Henry and Charles are both Absalom, which might help explain the title. The title may also be shorthand for David's repetitious lament after Absalom's death: “O my son Absalom! O Absalom, my son, my son!”  We're free to draw our own conclusions, I guess: there's no reference to Absalom or David in the novel even though Faulkner alludes to some classical and other biblical texts in it.

Peter

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Did you know that twenty percent of Americans now believe that the president is Muslim? The polling took place just before he first spoke about the mosque last week. Does the remaining eighty percent correctly identify Obama as a Christian? Hardly. “The number of people who correctly identify Obama as a Christian has dropped to 34 precent, down from nearly half from when he took office,” according to today's Washington Post.

º º º

There are some sensible things being written about the Islamic community center, most of it written about the people who are trying to build the center and the people who live and work around where the center would open – the people who just want to be left alone. Here's are links to articles in this week's New Yorker and today's Washington Post about it. Turns out those people are human beings – Americans, even, if I may be so bold.

º º º

A new Time-SRBI poll found that 61 percent of Americans oppose building the center. Nearly twice as many people said the center, and the mosque inside it, would be an insult to Sept. 11 victims than said it would be a symbol of religious tolerance.

– Washington Post, Aug. 19, 2010, p. A4

The pollster put its participants on the horns of a false dilemma. The center is neither an insult to victims nor a symbol of religious tolerance. It is many other things, though, and mainly to those who intend to use it or who live or work around it. The pollster's false dilemma reminds me of Stephen Douglas's miscegenation argument, which Lincoln ably characterized in his response to it: “I do not understand that because I do not want a Negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone.”

º º º

Must the president get involved in this, too? Can't he just say, "They have the right to build it.  It's not my place to say whether or not they should – those parties in interest are defined by New York City ordinance.  It's my place – and the place of all Americans – to defend that decision on the grounds of the First Amendment and of religious toleration."

Can't we just leave the Islamic community center, the people that will use it or will live or work around it – leave the entire local legal process involved in approving it – alone?

º º º

There is no way to decide these questions [placing moral positions at odds with one another] other than by reference to some system of moral or ethical principles about which people can and do disagree. Because we disagree, we put such issues to a vote and, where the Constitution does not speak, the majority morality prevails.

– Robert Bork, The Tempting of America, p. 259.

Indeed, Madison, like Jefferson, argued . . . that a majority may do only those things “that could be rightfully done by the unanimous concurrence of the members.” Thus it is not simply the will of the majority that “rightfully” rules in a democracy, but the rational will of the majority. In the same vein, Jefferson wrote that “[i]ndependence can be trusted nowhere but with the people in mass. They are inherently independent of all but moral law.” Thus, it is clear that Madison and Jefferson viewed the people as a moral entity, not simply as a collection of discrete value-positing individuals. The positivism of both Bork and Rehnquist is predicated on a kind of moral relativism that ultimately leads to nihilism.

– Edward J. Erler, in his introduction to Harry V. Jaffa's Storm Over the Constitution, p. xxix

Bork's argument for majority vote as a substitute for an unachievable moral consensus – his “majority morality” – is precisely Stephen Douglas's argument for Popular Sovereignty. By allowing a majority vote to determine whether each new territory would permit slavery, the United States government through Popular Sovereignty treated its citizens not as a “moral entity” but “as a collection of discrete value-positing individuals.” The result was Bleeding Kansas.

The mosque issue is precisely the central issue of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Lincoln rejected Douglas's – and Bork's – notion that America cannot, as a society and through reason and difficulty, rediscover her first principles in the Declaration of Independence that animate the Constitution. As our Bill of Rights affirms, some things – like the Islamic community center and the president's religion – are not a matter of majority opinion or vote.

Adams and Jefferson were pals, then enemies, then pals again. When they were first pals, they got a vote for American independence through the Continental Congress, Adams leading the floor fight with his oratory and Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence at Adams's behest. When they were enemies, Adams and Jefferson headed America's first two political parties and ran against each other in what might still be the dirtiest American presidential campaign on record. When they were finally pals again, old age and time had worn away some of the vindictiveness, and they started a correspondence that became one of the richest in American politics. Adams and Jefferson were so in tune that they both died on the same day – July 4, 1926, exactly fifty years after Declaration of Independence's signing.

But they were very different men. Adams was more the orator, Jefferson the writer. Adams was more ingenuous, Jefferson more of a party operative. Adams was more crabby, Jefferson more cool. Adams wrote in his books; Jefferson did not.

That last distinction says it all, at least to one Oxford professor.

“What shall I say about Adams?” asks Daniel N. Robinson rhetorically in his Teaching Company lectures “American Ideals: Founding a 'Republic of Virtue.'” Robinson gropes for a way to get across how peevish and persnickety Adams was, and he comes up with this:

Adams and Jefferson had the two largest libraries in America. . . . Jefferson's books are in terrific shape. . . I shan't say that there are many volumes where the spine hasn't been cracked, but I just point out that they are in very good shape. Adams's books are in horrible shape. The margins are written up. He's got running arguments with authors who are identified as fools, louts, and dunderheads. His critics are addressed directly.

I'm an Adams man.

my son played
kick the can

he was never in the room

but he learned it
anyway

   or

my son is the carpet
I am his sky

it's not as bad as it looks

I try to stay clear
keep my nose clean

    or

my son is the seabed
I walk.  I am his surface:

a sky for fish benighted

shifting nets of sunlight
that pull a fish's eye
like stars

    or

he stood, nose
agaist the pane

waiting – never
in the room,
mind you –

for them to
take me out

Pop has read at least a hundred books on World War II, I'm sure, but I usually don't take to them except for biographies. But the Founders and Lincoln – I love that stuff. And Citizens of London, though set in World War II, features a fellow Lincoln lover, a boarding-school teacher who has the lads over evenings to discuss Lincoln and Jefferson. Despite his shy ways – his audiences are always embarrassed for him because of his long, awkward pauses during speeches – Gil Winant also becomes a World War I fighter pilot, New Hampshire's all-time favorite governor, the first head of the Social Security board under Roosevelt, and the head of the International Labor Office until 1941, when Roosevelt appoints him as Ambassador to Great Britain, a post he holds until 1946.

Winant, whom I had never heard of until this book, is Lincoln without the guile. Like his hero, Winant is a Republican who does as much as he can for labor, introducing legislation to limit factory workers' hours and winning passage of a state welfare program that prefigures the New Deal. He even has Lincoln's honest, keen face, his disheveled dress and hair, and his piercing gray eyes. Winant's speechifying has the same effect as Lincoln's at the end as well as the beginning, too: his audiences' embarrassment usually turns to wild cheers after hearing out his honest and well-reasoned idealism. But, while Lincoln's ambition is “a little engine that knew no rest,” according to Lincoln's law partner Billy Herndon, Winant gives up his political ambitions by turning his support for Roosevelt's Social Security program into a national crusade, to the consternation of his fellow Republicans. His unqualified support for Roosevelt's New Deal ends the nascent movement to nominate him for president in 1936.

Winant becomes Britain's all-time favorite American ambassador for the same reason he's New Hampshire's all-time favorite governor: he's humble, hard working, and connects with common people. He sometimes puts off meetings with dignitaries in London so he can finish talking with the lowest classes of people there. When Britain's war effort is threatened by a miners' strike, its government calls on Winant, who convinces the miners to return to work. But he's loved principally because he does not doubt Britain's ability to fend off Hitler, he does nothing to avoid the hardships and danger associated with the bombing that London is subjected to for much of the war, and he does what he can to relieve their plight. He even goes broke giving his money away to the British poor. Along the way, he does what he can to support Churchill despite Roosevelt's frequent coolness to the prime minister, and he champions the Mustang P-51B bomber, which turns the tide of the air war in Europe enough to help ensure a successful D-Day invasion.

I enjoy biographies of three or four people like Citizens of London and Team of Rivals (and two of my other favorites,Merton & Friends: A Joint Biography of Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, and Edward Rice and The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun). The author of such works usually contrasts her subjects to understand them better. Olson contrasts Winant (implicitly until the book's end) with fellow Americans Ed Morrow, the CBS broadcaster who revolutionizes radio news during his nightly broadcasts from London and elsewhere in the European theater, and Averell Harriman, the son of a railroad robber baron who serves as America's Lend-Lease administrator in Britain during the war. Murrow is almost as idealistic, almost as beloved in London, and just as uncaring about his personal safety as Winant. Harriman comes across as just has hardworking as Winant and Murrow, but he is more ambitious and cunning, marginalizing Winant before Roosevelt and doing what he can to look out for his own future.

Harriman blossoms in the tough, non-idealistic nationalism that takes hold of postwar America, emerging as a top-level negotiator and diplomat under Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. For Harriman, World War II is only a stepping-stone to a future in which he can finally escape the shadow of his father's success and reputation. Neither Winant nor Murrow transition well to prosperity- and Cold-War obsessed America, though. Winant suffers aimlessness and depression, and he commits suicide in 1947. Murrow gets rich and eventually leaves CBS after it treats its news division as something like a hobby in the 1950's, but he feels acutely the incongruity between the ideals and suffering he lived through in wartime London and the riches and insouciance of postwar America.

Citizens of London goes beyond its three principal protagonists, taking in many of the events and policies that define Anglo-American relations before, during, and after the war. It wasn't until the end of the book that I understood the book's entire scope, which should have been obvious to me from the title. The book is principally about London's citizens: a people who make sense of class distinctions even as they fight hand-in-hand for six years to repel and defeat Hitler, and a people whose suffering serves as a kind of chorus to sort out not only the book's protagonists but also Churchill, Roosevelt, and other actors in Europe's wartime theater.

Before Tuck begins his fleshed-out, OED-like romp through the history of natural rights, he puts his own book in the context of other modern treatments of the history of natural rights. Unlike the richly patterned rug of natural rights theories Tuck discovers woven under our collective, ignorant feet, the accounts of that rug are sparse and threadbare. Tuck finds it ironic that “the language of human rights plays an increasingly important part in normal political debate [since World War Two], while academic political philosophers find it on the whole an elusive and unnecessary mode of discourse” (1).

But our age's misty, bipolar approach to rights – frequent, vague assertions of “human rights” divorced from the West's considerable theoretical history of natural rights – already may be put in at least some historical context, and Tuck attributes this political vs. philosophical irony to the legacy of Samuel Pufendorf, a German philosopher and contemporary of John Locke. Pufendorf limited natural rights to only actionable claims, and his views were picked up on a century later by Jeremy Bentham and the influential Utilitarians; therefore, many current political philosophers find reference to natural rights unnecessary. Why talk about natural rights if such rights are more easily discussed in terms of the duties someone else owes to the holder of such rights? Tuck points out that our current, poorly understood, post-Utilitarian notion of natural rights has helped to support authoritarian regimes (161-62).

But natural rights theories themselves have been mostly a conservative undertaking, I was surprised to learn, and in this respect Thomas Hobbes was no aberration. John Locke's liberal natural rights theory was a notable exception, a kind of culmination of natural rights' second flowering. Tuck finds that natural rights have enjoyed two great eras in Western history, 1350 to 1450, and then circa 1590 to 1670. “Seen against a background of European thought as a whole, [the “two great floruits of rights theories”] are freakish and fitful, and their dismantling has been a matter of high priority for succeeding generations” (177). Our nation happens to have been founded in an age already reacting to the last great natural rights flowering, but was founded on principles worked out at the end of that flowering. It explains some of the dissonance I hear in almost every paean to Jefferson or Lincoln.

I've moved now to my own theme and not Tuck's, however. Tuck never mentions Jefferson or Lincoln and, unlike me, seems to have no ax to grind. But he writes about some pretty interesting and subtle ax grinders over the past two millennia, and I'll leave you with two groups I discovered in his book that I feel an affinity toward, groups that together hedged the first, late-medieval natural-rights flowering.

The first group are medieval glossators (16).  Check out this paragraph from Wikipedia:

The glossators conducted detailed text studies that resulted in collections of explanations. For their work they used a method of study unknown to the Romans themselves, insisting that contradictions in the legal material were only apparent. They tried to harmonize the sources in the conviction that for every legal question only one binding rule exists. Thus they approached these legal sources in a dialectical way, which is a characteristic of medieval scholasticism. They sometimes needed to invent new concepts not found in Roman law, such as half-proof (evidence short of full proof but of some force, such as a single witness). In other medieval disciplines, for example theology and philosophy, glosses were also made on the main authoritative texts.

I really was born too late.

The second group – the French nominalists and conciliarists – ended the first great natural-rights flowering by providing an easy target for both the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance to take down natural rights for a hundred and fifty years or so. One of them – Jean Gerson – to whom Tuck attributes the first “fully fledged natural rights theory” (25), based his theory in part on his theology of union, a kind of theosis by which “man could come to be the same kind of being as God.” “Gerson kept a distance between God and man,” Tuck states, “but it was not a categorical break between two different kinds of being, as it was to be in Luther's theology.” Here's how Gerson's theology influenced his rights theory:

This theology also led Gerson to see the relationship between God and man as a reciprocal one between equals. Thus he argued for a natural covenant between God and man, which – and this is the crucial point – generated rights on both sides. According to Gerson, men have rights against God as a result of God's promise to them. . . . Because of this, we can see how freedom became an important value for Gerson: like Ockham (though with a number of important differences) he elevated the free wills of both man and God together. The arbitrary freedom of God's will was necessarily matched by a similar freedom of man's will – there could be no opposition between them. (30)

There's something of both political and theological babies that the Reformation and the Renaissance drained with that bath water. If we could but risk another bath, perhaps Western civilization would be born again.

half a stone, still
stone, still the rock
whence I was hewn
as much as from our father

Petros, to you, sire
of Petra’s son, my ark
and gyre above it borne
on three wings, or maybe one,

I come, once Simon, too
much myself (a paradox
as chopped as Braque’s), your
still life, stillborn brother.

Inspired by Big Tent Poetry’s prompt about heroes, and in response to Via Negativa’s question, “Is half a stone still a whole stone?” Petros and Petra are the two Greek words for rock that Jesus employs in renaming Simon Peter (Matthew 16:18).  Petros can mean a stone broken from a larger one, while Petra can suggest the larger stone from which smaller stones are broken.

All the time. The spots and the more-irregular streaks make me think I'm always looking through a thunderstorm. But I guess we all get used to the weather.

You know how it is: you never visit your town's attractions until company comes. I haven't been to the National Gallery in about three years, and Victoria and our guests were nice enough to let me go there today while the girls went to the American Indian Museum and the rest of the boys hit the Spy Museum.

I've never gotten tired of an art gallery before, but with six hours on my hands, I finally left it for a long walk up the streets intersecting Pennsylvania Avenue. With the heat, I didn't make it to my destination – Adams Morgan, where the townhouses and streetscapes are on a human scale.

Not as hot today, really, but our streak of 90-degree-plus days lives on. A steady, unrefreshing breeze, but no chance of a thunderstorm. Walking through a welcome street market, I thought about how even the weather has been politicized around here. The Republicans gloated this past winter, and now it's the Democrats' turn. What, will a climate bill's content depend on what time of year it would pass?

Did you read that the sun has lost its spots, at least temporarily? The roughly speaking eleven-year cycle of spots should have started in earnest over a year ago. One far-fetched explanation for the late spots is that we're on the verge of entering another mini-ice age like the one memorialized in a couple of those seventeenth-century Flemish paintings I saw today. Can you imagine? A few years from now, with the earth no longer warming, the developed and developing nations might implicitly acknowledge their role in climate change - and turn vice into a virtue - by churning out even more carbon dioxide in an effort to keep warm.

And when the spots return?

The first is a photography field guide. It's my first book on how to take pictures. It's also my first field guide of any kind. The pull of a field guide's polished pages had never out-tugged my indifference to learning barks and leaves or feathers and nests. I always admire field guides – admire those who use them, too – but owning one seemed to confer a responsibility I didn't want.

The idea of a photography field guide may have come from its author's name. Brian Peterson shares his surname with the author of the most famous line of field guides. Like many good field guides, Brian Peterson's Understanding Photography Field Guideoffers bright illustrations, a soft hardcover, and bleeding edges for quick reference. Its organization invites browsing as well as cover-to-cover reading. Because of the book, I'm looking at photography as discovery for the first time. Hey, I'm not just heading out with my camera. I'm in the field.

Instead of bird or insect species, though, I'm discovering techniques and elements of composition. I wonder if this more subject-oriented approach to a field guide will make me more interested in objects over time or will at least make me accept a smidge of the responsibility I feel when I contemplate buying a guide book by that other Peterson. Right now, though, I need this more I and Thou field guide – one that has as much to do with me as with the objects and people I find to photograph.

Peterson's pictures and captions are as helpful as the two- to four-page sections they occupy. Each picture's caption gives me enough information about exposure, metering, composition, and lens choice for me to try a similar shot, but the captions' information also builds as I turn the pages. They also exemplify the technique or concept discussed in the surrounding text, of course.

Understanding Photography has a chapter on lenses called “Learning To See.” Each lens sees things differently, Peterson points out. I didn't know that a wide angle lens – the short one that comes with most camera kits – takes great close-ups within a broad, surrounding context. Reading through the advantages of each lens reminded me of the second book I wish to bring up – an anthology of poetry organized by form.

I've had the Norton Anthology of Poetry since college, and it was a bookstore clerk just out of college who recommended The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms to me last summer at an Outer Banks bookstore. The book describes poetic forms like Peterson describes lenses. Here's part of the editors Mark Strand and Evan Boland's description of how to use the sestina:

Besides the adaptability of the sestina to common speech, it often provides the formal groundwork for a circular narrative, often of questionable meaning and amounting to little more than variations on a theme – a theme dependent upon and perhaps developed around the six words chosen for repetition. (24)

Instead of photos, of course, the book has lots of examples of poems that spur me on.

When I write a poem, sometimes its content or subject matter or wording suggests a form. Sometimes, though, the form itself becomes a writing prompt. Same with Peterson's lenses: sometimes the subject matter or composition suggests a street zoom (18-70mm and the like), and sometimes playing with a particular lens suggests the composition and the shot. I'm finding that I often see more through my knowledge of a lens or a poetic form than I do with only my natural or intuitive eye.

I tried writing a villanelle last summer after falling in love with some of the book's villanelles, ones by Elizabeth Bishop and John Hollander, and my current favorite, Marilyn Hacker's "Villanelle," which is about how sex and the rest of life interact over a long-standing relationship. The form proved futile as a writing prompt for me, but the effort may have helped me see the potential of two lines I was playing with a month or so later. Those lines became my villanelle's repeating verses.

The last book about seeing involves a insight into people. Personality types are like lenses and poetic forms: they can limit, but they can also help me see things about someone I would never have otherwise understood. A few books on personality type, particularly Isabel Briggs Myers's Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type, helped me see more into the teenage version of my son recently than I have been able to see since he turned thirteen a year ago.

Victoria and I love to piece together friends' and family members' Myers-Briggs personality types ever since the system helped us objectify our personality conflicts and taught us how to develop neglected sides of ourselves. Our respective personality-type descriptions nail both of us as well as our daughter Bethany, but our son Warren never seemed to fit into any of the categories. Meanwhile, Warren has been driving us nuts, sneaking extra time on computer games at home and giving his teachers hell at school. He spends a lot of his free time teaching himself computer skills such as “modding” video-game characters, yet he underperforms at the school subject he loves the most: science. Our strategies have met with limited success; most of them have turned out to be based on a misunderstanding of what Warren's all about.

I woke up two weeks ago wondering what a friend's daughter's personality type was. As I read the description of the ISTP type, which indeed seemed to fit her, Warren unexpectedly came into focus. This after countless inconclusive discussions with Victoria over the years about what type Warren fell into! I called Victoria immediately; she had been in Tennessee with an ailing relative. She agreed with my assessment. Both of us were so excited that we got little sleep that night.

So, in a sense, my discovery of Warren was similar to my discovery of a photo composition: I was playing around with a personality type as I've learned to play around with a lens. In both cases, the form led to the object. (My discovery of Warren's type was the opposite process I used to stumble onto my villanelle since, in the latter situation, the object lead to the form.)

Here's a pretty good description of Warren from Gifts Differing:

Some ISTP's, especially young ones, are great believers in economy of effort. This belief can contribute to their efficiency if they judge accurately how much effort is needed and proceed promptly to exert that much effort. However, if they underestimate or underperform, economy of effort can come perilously close to laziness, and little may get done. (90)

And from the book Life Types by Sandra Krebs Hirsh and Jean Kummerow:

ISTP's prefer to learn alone, at their own rate and in their own time frame. . . . They are impatient with theoretical subjects and like their learning to be directed toward concrete and practical outcomes.

Teachers are not particularly important to ISTP's in the overall scheme, unless they can show ISTPs how to do things more easily.

Nontraditional programs or approaches often attract ISTPs, especially when they can learn about things that they see as vital and central to their interests. (88)

The opportunity to pursue their interests is very important to ISTPs. They will do what it takes to have the time and money to accommodate their leisure-time pursuits. (92)

When I read some of this stuff to Warren, he grinned with self-recognition. And I grinned too: by pigeonholing him, I gave him wings, at least in the atmosphere of our relationship.

A camera lens, a poetic form, and a personality type limit how I see something or someone. The more I learn about their strengths and weaknesses, though, the better I can express myself through them. Sometimes the form leads to the object, and sometimes it's the other way around. Either way – and I guess ironically – the limitations help me see.

Reflecting on 2 Corinthians 3:2-3 this morning, I first get the mechanics down. I could use a parent, Victoria, or a friend, but I'll use Michael, who has been a friend and father to me. Michael writes me with the Spirit onto his heart, and other people can read me. So Michael is the writer, the Spirit is his pen, his heart is the paper, and somehow I am the letter others read, maybe in their own hearts.

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the spirit of the living God, not on tables of stone but on tables of human hearts. [NRSV]

People are letters written on others' hearts and read in still others' hearts. They parade the talent and blunder and love and disregard of others. When I read someone, I'm reading someone else's heart, and maybe I can find my own heart in the reading.

Walter Ong was right in his criticism of Cleanth Brooks: literature is a cry, not an object. We can't escape the artist in her art.

Grant gets Locke. Her book gave me a way to understand him better by showing me how two of his primary works and a few of his secondary ones come together to make a coherent political theory.

That wasn't supposed to happen. At least, that's the message I've gotten from other things I've read. Locke appears a chameleon over his adult years, starting out acting like a reactionary, then a liberal, then something like a reactionary again. He had to survive the tumultuous English seventeenth century following Cromwell's dictatorship and the Restoration, and he fled England during Charles II's reign when he was suspected, without credible evidence, of participating in a plot to assassinate him. He returned to England soon after the Glorious Revolution and the ascension of William and Mary, published most of his major writing, and became a Whig legend. And over his long career, there are these inconsistencies in his writings and public acts, such as the discrepancy between his denunciation of slavery in his Second Treatise of Government and his possible role in helping to write the portion of the Carolina colonies' constitution legalizing slavery. In addition, historians have had difficulty tracking down when Locke wrote the material he published, and they have hoped that nailing down the political circumstances surrounding his writings might explain some of the inconsistencies among them.

Grant takes a different tack. She gets the history, but she reads Locke long enough until one part of his work starts to make more sense of another. Her primary approach is read Locke's epistemological Essay Concerning Human Understanding as a means of understanding his Second Treatise, the cornerstone of Locke's political theory. The Essaysets out what is possible for men to know, and Grant shows that Locke uses his own epistemological standards, as hopeful and as limited as Locke frames them, to demonstrate that mankind might just be mature enough for liberal government. Then she suggests the similarities of Locke's approach in both works:

Locke's attitude toward the political problem is the same as his attitude toward the problem of human understanding. Men cannot know everything, but they can know enough to govern their conduct rationally. (203-04)

Grant points out that, in setting out a political theory that is both idealistic and practical, Locke comes across in Second Treatise as an uneasy optimist. “Locke keeps the reader constantly aware of the gravity of the political problem and of the fragility of human solutions to it” (203). In pages filled with reflections on tyranny, insurrection, invasion, and usurpation, Locke seems like a teacher who expends as much energy controlling her unruly classroom as she does teaching. And Locke was teaching: the Second Treatise's audience was the general public; it was part of a pamphlet warto influence the public's understanding of government.

Locke creates no Utopia in the Second Treatise or elsewhere, no understanding of government that would make any political system impervious to tyranny. (He never lays out a specific political system at all, in fact, though he claims that democracies, aristocracies, hereditary monarchies, and tribal kingdoms can operate fully within his theory of government.) However, at each stage of a society's structure, he offers aspects of government that might help lessen problems associated with that stage. For instance, once a society uses money and thereby leaves what Locke refers to as its Golden Age, government should include a separation of executive and legislative powers in an attempt to prevent money from leading the government to serve only the rulers or to favor one segment of society over another.

From his critics' perspective, Locke's problem doesn't stem from the number of threats to liberal government by insurrections, usurpations, and the like, but is the problem of liberal government itself. “The change is made that a liberal community cannot sustain itself because it cannot justify the claims of the public good against individual self-interested claims . . .” (99). Locke's emphasis on individual rights leaves him open to the charge that, in a liberal society, the community is less paramount than individual rights. Locke answers by asserting that, though an individual has an inalienable property right in life and liberty, and though her rights precede and survive the community were it to perish, the individual's first duty is to act for the preservation of the community and all its members while the community exists. And, when that society has a legitimate government, the individual's first duty is also to that government and its preservation.

It may help here to outline what liberal government is. For Locke, to be a liberal (and to Grant, to be a liberal political theorist of any stripe) means to assert that man is “naturally free and equal.” “The direct implication of the liberal premise” is that no one has a natural right to rule another. In a state of nature, which is not a moment in history but “is nothing more than the name for the relation between any men at any time who have not established a common political authority” (66), there is no one to judge between two individual's or two nation's claims, so each individual or nation has the natural executive power to enforce his, her, or its rights under natural law. This was among the chief “inconveniences” of a state of nature, according to Locke, and the movement to society, at least in the case of individuals if not nations, is almost inevitable. In society, as a corollary to the individual's right to life, the individual has the duty to preserve the society and, to the extent it doesn't conflict with that preservation, everyone in it (99).

Locke distinguishes between society in general and political society. The latter occurs when a group decides to act as one body and a common authority is present “capable of judging and executing their common law” (101). Political society can disintegrate; in which case, “all obligation to the government ceases. Yet each individual member remains obligated to the society” to protect it and to help form a new government. Anarchy, on the other hand, is the state where both government and society are destroyed. A properly exercised right of resistance may bring down a government, but it would not necessarily lead to anarchy since society may be extant (201).

Locke is sometimes accused of borrowing his theories from Thomas Hobbes, the political theorist who wrote Leviathanearlier in the seventeenth century. Locke's utilitarian tone probably attracts the comparison, but the two philosophers are working from different worst-case scenarios and, from them, reach different conclusions. “By identifying the state of nature as the worst case, Hobbes teaches obedience to civil government. By identifying the state of war as the worst case, Locke justifies resistance” (72). For Locke, a state of war exists whenever one party (be it an individual, a nation, or a society's ruler) attempts to take away the right to life or liberty of another party (be it an individual, a nation, or a society). But Locke is at pains to balance this right of resistance in case of a state of war between a ruler and his society with the people's obligation to obedience:

Neither legislative nor executive is given sovereign authority [i.e., a natural right] within the government, and the obligation to obedience is not undermined by the right to resist. The right of resistance is exercised by the people acting as a political unit, and it is a carefully limited right. Resistance is justified only when the basic minimal standards for legitimacy are being threatened. Revolution is described not as a step toward realizing an ideal of justice, but as resistance to political degeneration.

But Locke's carefulness belies liberalism's core characteristic. Locke tries to clarify with examples when a society may rightfully resist its ruler, but the efforts suggest that, ultimately, “each individual must judge for himself whether the conditions are such that the government or the society has dissolved, and his obligations with them. This is the radical political individualism characteristic of liberal thought,” according to Grant (202).

An important foundation for the right to resistance (a.k.a., the right to revolution) as well as for liberalism's “radical political individualism” is the notion of natural rights. To liberalism's premise, which I mentioned earlier in the context of government, that “men are naturally free and equal,” Locke joins a right to life and to property (which is a necessary component to a right to life, since if my enemy takes my food, I may not live). As Grant points out, Locke's carefulness in separating the political and economic rights have caused commentators to extrapolate the importance of property rights as a separate category to Locke, but Locke seems more concerned with making the distinction between property rights and more abstract rights in order to demonstrate the differing property rights an individual has in her material property and in her right to life and to liberty. Grant has the illuminating insight that, for Locke, all natural rights are, in a sense, property rights.

Establishing a property right in life and liberty as well as to material property allows Locke to make important distinctions among the three rights. Grant summarizes three ways Locke describes how you can exercise your property rights in something:

(1) You can agree to transfer your right, for example, through a sale or a will. (2) You can retain your right but entrust the management of your property to another. (3) You can forfeit your right.

You may do any of these three with an ownership right in things, but you may only entrust or forfeit your right to life andliberty. You may not alienate (i.e., transfer) life and liberty. Grant notes the oddity of having the “power to rent but not to sell,” so to speak, one's right to preservation (i.e, the right to life and liberty). But one entrusts one's right to preservation when one consents to be ruled in a political society. The trust suggests that a ruler may forfeit his right to rule over a person or group. One may not consent to slavery, however, which would amount to a complete transfer of one's right to preservation. “Slavery cannot originate in consent,” as Grant puts it (69).

Why not? Why is the right to preservation inalienable? The reason involves the most overtly religious portion of Locke's political theory, I believe. Locke asserts that our property rights in ourselves have limits. “Although each man may be his own master in respect to other men, that is not the case in his relation to God. . . . Our right to our persons, our freedom to regulate our lives as we see fit, does not include the right to destroy ourselves. Since no man has the right to destroy himself, he cannot give that right to another; he cannot consent to his own enslavement,” Grant summarizes.

Just as man's property rights in himself are circumscribed by this distinction between God and man, so is man's property rights in beasts:

For however, in respect to one another, Men may be allowed to have a propriety in their distinct portions of the Creatures; yet in respect to God the Maker of Heaven and Earth who is sole Lord and Proprietor of the whole World, Mans Propriety in the Creatures is nothing but that Liberty to use them, which God hath permitted. (First Treatise §39)

Here, then, are the fundamental distinctions among God, humankind, and the rest of nature that Lincoln draws on in arguing against slavery from a human rights standpoint and that Harry V. Jaffa finds fundamental to an understanding of natural rights and Lincoln's political philosophy in his book A New Birth of Freedom.

For a second argument that no one may consent to slavery, Locke reinforces the distinction between humankind and “beasts” through the concept of reason. Man can rule themselves (and others when they have been consented the right to lead) by reason, but the rule of force “is the rule among beasts” (Liberalism 70). Only when one “abandons the moral rule of the human community, open to all who reason, and substitutes the rule of force [does he descend] to the level of the beasts and can justly be ruled as if he were a beast – as a slave. . . . To consent to place oneself in that position would be to renounce one's humanity . . .” (70 – 71).

Locke's liberalism, then, retains the Christian distinctions among God, humankind, and the rest of nature, and it precludes the argument that the Southern rebellion that precipitated the American Civil War was based on liberal theories of natural rights or a right of revolution. Not only is secession, which is the denial of the majority-rule principle, counter-revolutionary in a Lockean sense, but a rebellion explicitly aimed at protecting a positive law property right in slaves seeks to maintain or expand what Locke defines as tyranny.

The idea that no person may consent to his or her slavery also is fundamental to Locke's distinction between legitimate and illegitimate government, which I describe above. Because no person may consent to slavery, slavery – and tyranny, which Locke considers a type of slavery – is commensurate with a state of war between a ruler and his subjects.

Locke is sometimes incorrectly portrayed as a cynic who adapts classical and medieval natural rights theory to the Western world's governments that lack the old consensus about what the purpose of law is. Indeed, his Second Treatisedoes emphasize principles of freedom and preservation that seem to have little bearing on a teleological view of law. But Grant's method of reading the Essay and the Second Treatise together demonstrates that Locke hasn't forsaken a classical understanding of happiness and its role in natural law. The Second Treatise never mentions happiness, but theEssay and Locke's Conduct of the Understanding make clear that Locke's view of freedom, an unalienable right in theSecond Treatise, is connected with reason, which in turn is connected with self-mastery:

The freedom of the individual . . . has a natural basis, both in the capacity to reason and in the desire for freedom, a desire for self-mastery present in every human being. Men want to act independently and to be masters of their situation. A generalized desire for mastery over people and things could be seen as the root of all injustice. But when it is limited to a desire for self-mastery and controlled by the rational faculty, it becomes indistinguishable from a desire for freedom.

Locke therefore concurs with the natural law theorists who have preceded him that just government is more likely to be maintained under a something like a virtuous society. If the political theory in the Second Treatise is sewn among threats to good government, the epistemology in the Essay is sewn among threats to reason and self-mastery, such as passion, interest, and the uncritical acceptance of a party's partisan position. However, Locke is as nervously optimistic about man's individual ability to be led by reason over the long run as he is about government's ability to do so.

While Locke's emphasis on man's ability to reason puts him outside the circle of skeptics, his emphasis on man's and government's endless temptations keeps him also outside the circle of “those absolutists who rely on a doctrine of innate knowledge of practical principles” (49). Mankind is not so endowed, Locke knows, and reason itself, like Lady Wisdom in Proverbs, has many unsavory competitors in the marketplace. Locke recognizes that legitimate government is a fragile thing, ultimately dependent, as it is, on human nature, but he believes that pessimism alone would give it no chance at all. To me, Grant's book suggests that, beyond his liberal political theory, Locke's tone is what we need now in our polity.

I love those flags from the Revolutionary War era. The excitement of the times must have led some colonists to stay up nights on CorelDRAW (it was a while ago) designing flags to express why their people were fighting. “Everything is new and yielding,” Benjamin Rush enthused about his generation's time, and everyone may have had a fair shake at making his design into his local regiment's – or even his colony's – flag.

I didn't know until today that many Tea Party Movement members have appropriated one of our nation's early flags to represent the movement – the “Don't Tread on Me” flag, called the Gadsden flag. I think many Tea Partiers and I have at least this in common: we envy the Revolutionary Generation's opportunity to help shape a young republic.

I like movements as well as flags, and I'm glad the Tea Party movement is looking into our nation's founding documentswith the idea of turning the nation's attention back to something it has overlooked somewhere between its founding and now. I'd love to watch a series of debates by real authorities over what certain phrases and sections in the founding documents mean and how they might apply to us today. Wouldn't that be the best political theater? Maybe a separate session for each document, one, say, for the Treaty of Tripoli that the U.S. Senate ratified in 1797, giving the force of law to the proposition that "the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

Another Revolutionary-era flag better represents my own, one-man movement to reclaim our founders' natural law understanding: a variation of the Pine Tree flag known as the Washington's Cruisers flag. These two flags have always been my sentimental favorites: where I grew up, a few miles from where Cornwallis surrendered, it seemed like pines accounted for three-quarters of the tree population.

The Pine Tree flag is a simple jack of a green pine on a white field. The Massachusetts Navy pulled the idea for the flag's design from the more complicated Bunker Hill flag, which had a much smaller pine stuck in the flag's upper-left corner. Washington used the basic design of the Pine Tree flag for his own squadron of schooners in 1775, adding the words “Appeal to Heaven” or “An Appeal to Heaven” to it.

Perhaps the experts could debate founding flags as well as founding documents. Most sites I looked at attribute the origin of the words “An Appeal to Heaven” to a kind of prayer, to the American Navy's realization that, going up against the greatest navy in the world, they would need all the help from heaven that they could get. I had no reason to doubt this explanation until I started reading John Locke's Second Treatise of Government. He used the phrase “appeal to heaven” several times in it as a term of art.

For Locke, the state of nature was like the state of war: in both situations, individuals, groups, or nations are “without a common superior on earth with authority to judge between them” (III.19). The difference between the state of nature and the state of war is how the parties in such a situation relate to each other. If they live together “according to reason,” then they are in a state of nature. But if one party uses “force, or the declared design of force upon the person of another,” then they are in a state of war (id.). A state of war may exist between individuals or nations, or it may exist between people and their rulers who exercise “a power the people never put into their hands” (XIV.168). Because there is no “common superior” to appeal to in such a state of war, the aggrieved party may appeal to heaven. That is, they may resist their rulers based on an unwritten law superior to the rulers' law:

. . . where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of their power without right, and have no appeal on earth, there they have a liberty to appeal to heaven whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment. And therefore, though the people cannot be judge, so as to have by the constitution of that society any superior power to determine and give effective sentence in the case, yet they have, by a law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men, reserved that ultimate determination to themselves, which belongs to all mankind, where there lies no appeal on earth, viz. to judge whether they have just cause to make their appeal to heaven. (Id.)

Such an appeal would be ineffective if heaven were bound by the rulers' laws, Locke here says. Instead, heaven judges the people's case “by a law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men” – natural law.

So our nation's first navy sailed under a flag that proclaimed our rights under natural law.

References to God or heaven in our nation's founding documents, or even on its flags, are not necessarily indicia of its founders' intent to form a Christian nation.  Natural law, while it was coherent enough for a navy to grasp, was not as simple as that.

[The above detail is from an illustration in an 1885 American high school textbook.]

The Declaration of Independence contains hidden words! Shades of the Da Vinci Code. Using its new spectral imaging technology adapted from the military, the Library of Congress discovered this year that Thomas Jefferson erased – well, more like obliterated – the word “subjects” before replacing it with “citizens” in a draft of the Declaration, according to anarticle in today's Washington Post.

The change turns the phrase “fellow-subjects” into “fellow-citizens.” Though Jefferson dropped the sentence containing this phrase from subsequent drafts, he stuck with the appellation “citizens” to describe the colonies' inhabitants – at least its white inhabitants – in the Declaration's final version.

Scholars had puzzled for years about what word “citizens” replaced. Jefferson crossed out a lot of words in his drafts, but “subjects” is the only one he took the care to obliterate, the article says.

Within a minute of reading the article, I discovered a New York Times article about another hidden word in the Declaration: happiness.  Of course, “the pursuit of happiness” is smack dab in the Declaration's text, but the phrase's meaning has changed for us who are no longer that up on Greek philosophy, according to the article's author, Arthur C. Danto, an art critic and a Columbia University professor.

. . . the Greek word for happiness is eudemonia, which refers to what is fitting for us as humans — it rests on our essential qualities. The list of injuries Jefferson establishes rests upon a claim that the pattern of conduct laid at the feet of the monarch amount to violations of our humanity.

“Happiness” in the Declaration, then, is buried for us as effectively as Jefferson's “subjects” was buried in the earlier draft.

Danto points out that Jefferson substituted “happiness” for Locke's “property” in Locke's famous rights pantheon of life, liberty, and property. “Violating property rights would in effect have meant robbing them of the fruits of their labor, in Locke’s view. Putting aside the concept of property enabled Jefferson to table the problem of slavery,” Danto says. At first, I took Danto to mean that by not specifying a right to property in the Declaration, Jefferson was making a concession to his Northern compatriots by refusing to make a war aim out of a master's property rights in his slaves. But Danto is saying instead, I think, that Jefferson was making a concession to his Southern neighbors by not asserting an argument that any slave would make – in fact, an argument that Locke had made and that Lincoln would make against slavery.

Jefferson's substitution of the term happiness for property assured that America's understanding of natural law would include the teleological perspective of classical and medieval natural law. From Jefferson's point of view, to enumerate a right to property would have been redundant because Locke had seen the right to property mainly as an ancillary right – a means of assuring the greater right to life. If I cannot eat the fruit of my labor, after all, I might die. Instead of focusing only on mankind's basic needs for existence, as Locke mostly does in his Second Treatise of Government, Jefferson follows Aristotle, Aquinas, and the Anglican theologian Richard Hooker, all of whom defined natural law with respect to a person's telos – her end, her fulfillment or her reason for being. Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hooker each came to the conclusion that man's proper end was happiness. Jefferson's natural rights hierarchy therefore took his fellow citizens from cradle to grave, from beginning (life) to end (happiness).

Jefferson's switch changed Locke's list into something like a hierarchy of desire or of fulfillment. One might understand Jefferson's resulting list as a pattern for human development by comparing it with Steven Covey's famous hierarchy inThe Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: actualized people move from dependence (life) to independence (liberty) to interdependence (pursuit of happiness). Or, better yet, compare the breadth of Jefferson's list from life to the pursuit of happiness with Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which moves from the most basic, physiological needs (“These include the most basic needs that are vital to survival, such as the need for water, air, food and sleep.”) eventually to needs involving self-actualization (“Self-actualizing people are self-aware, concerned with personal growth, less concerned with the opinions of others and interested fulfilling their potential.”). (Quoting the About.com Psychology page “Hierarchy of Needs.”) One might think also of the New Testament's references to spirit, soul, and body (e.g., 1 Thessalonians 5:23) as a hierarchy similar to Jefferson's: body (life), soul (liberty) and spirit (pursuit of happiness).

Hooker's elaboration of man's end is along the lines of Paul's hierarchy of body, soul, and spirit, with the last something that can only be pursued but never fully attained before death:

Man doth seek a triple perfection. First a sensual, consisting in those things which very life requireth either as necessary supplements, or as beauties and ornaments thereof; then an intellectual, consisting in those things which none underneath man either is capable or acquainted with; and lastly a spiritual and divine, consisting of those things whereunto we tend by supernatural means here, but cannot attain unto them. (Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, I.11.4.)

Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hooker all believe that the “sumum bonum, which is the end that all men universally desire for its own sake, is happiness. 'All men desire to live in this world an happy life. That life is lived most happily wherein all virtue is exercised without impediment or let.' There is therefore no conflict between virtue and happiness since virtue is none other than the right ordering of desires so as to obtain happiness.” (Alexander Rosenthal, Crown Under Law, quoting Hooker, 57.)

With the classical concept of happiness bound up with perfection, virtue, and “the right ordering of desires,” it may be harder to recover “happiness,” at least as Jefferson understood it, than it was for the Library of Congress to recover “subjects.”

Happy Fourth, fellow citizens! And nothing herein should be construed as denying anyone the classic, if not classical, happiness of sticking a few Mentos into a bottle of Diet Coke. Enjoy your own fireworks.

Most of my information comes from reading Locke's Second Treatise of Government as well as Alexander S. Rosenthal's book Crown Under Law: Richard Hooker, John Locke, and the Ascent of Modern Constitutionalism, published in 2008. Rosenthal doesn't describe Hooker's and Locke's philosophies as a middle way, and he doesn't look for similarities between Hooker's opponents and Locke's as I do here, but he demonstrates the almost complete similarity among the natural law theories of Aquinas, Hooker, and Locke. Most of what some writers have found dissimilar among the writers has more to do with emphasis, which in turn has to do with the historical time frame in which each wrote and the particular audience and arguments each was addressing.

Hooker believed that the Calvinist conception of law threatened to overthrow English law and government. Hooker wrote his Laws as part of a pamphlet war with Puritans (English Calvinists) who were disappointed that Elizabeth's settlement, while outlawing the practice of Roman Catholicism, retained several Catholic practices, such as the use of priests' vestments, and more importantly for my purposes, asserted Parliament's authority over the Anglican church's ritual and government. The Puritans didn't believe the state should have any say over church affairs, even over “things indifferent” – the designation Elizabeth's backers used to describe church practices which the Scriptures seem to neither condemn nor condone. As Calvinists, Puritans believed that God was indifferent to nothing in his church; if a practice could not be discovered in Scripture, then it was anathema to God (18 – 20). This Calvinist argument was often applied to both civil and ecclesiastical government. Hooker's chief opponent, Thomas Cartwright of Cambridge University, argued that “the positive enactment of Scripture alone should be the guide of all civil and ecclesiastical affairs and whatsoever is without explicit warrant in Scripture is without warrant at all,” according to Rosenthal. Hooker feared that the Puritans would effect in England what the Anabaptists effected on the continent: “From this they proceeded unto public reformation, first ecclesiastical, and then civil,” he pointed out (88).

Hooker argued that the Scripture was only one of three forms of law binding on men (as opposed to God or beasts). In doing so, he was asserting what had been the basis of English law up until that point, taken from Thomas Aquinas:

In the Thomistic theory of law, man is not only under the divine positive law, but under a “three fold” subjection to the three orders of law – the divine positive law revealed in Scripture and known by the supernatural light of faith, the natural law discerned by reason and founded upon human nature itself, and finally the human positive law enacted by the civil authority. (20)

The middle of these three orders – the natural law – is best known to us from references to it in the Declaration of Independence, but it has been out of vogue since the end of the American Civil War. Aquinas discovered “first principles” of natural law, which he called “self-evident truths” available to all mankind through reason. An example would be that all things seek after good, that is, that all things seek to actualize how they were designed. “Second principles” are not as self-evident and may need Scripture (for instance, a lot of the Decalogue) or the teaching of the wise to assist men's reason in order to apprehend. Examples of secondary principles are honoring parents, not stealing, and not committing murder.

According to Aquinas, natural law is discernible chiefly through man's ability to reason, but reason is an ability that Calvinists believed man lacked after Adam's fall. It is therefore the Calvinists' pessimism concerning human nature that led them to reject natural law. From Crown Under Law:

Thus Calvin wrote that:

It cannot be doubted that when Adam lost his first estate he became alienated from God. Wherefore, although we grant that the image of God was not utterly effaced and destroyed in him, it was, however, so corrupted, that any thing which remains is fearful deformity.

With this conception of post-lapsarian man, it is not hard to imagine why the older conception of natural law – where man is able to discern certain ends within nature by his natural powers – comes under increasing skepticism among the Calvinists. (47)

Aquinas's view of post-lapsarian human nature was more optimistic:

A central Thomistic motif is . . . Grace strengthens and perfects nature but does not destroy it. The natural powers of human reason and will, though affected and disordered by the Fall, but [sic] still retain some of their natural potency and goodness. Man in Aquinas has two lights to guide him, the natural light of human reason, and the supernatural light of faith. (49)

Calvin's pessimism is linked not only to his understanding of post-lapsarian man but also to his famous views on predestination, which in turn colored his followers' views on whether a civil society existed before a political one and whether all men are created equal. Predestination, of course, is kind of a “Can God make a rock so big that he himself can't lift it?” controversy, but it was never considered to be reducible to such a simplistic formulation. Nevertheless, at the heart of the controversies surrounding predestination have always been the theological problems associated with either a yes or no answer to whether God ordains some souls to eternal damnation:

To answer in the negative might seem to question God's providence over all events and omniscience, since God being omniscient would certainly foreknow from before the moment of their creation that some persons would be lost . . . . But to answer yes might seem to call God's beneficence and justice into question, as well as God's desire to save all men . . . (24)

Aquinas nevertheless answered the question in the negative, threading the needle somewhat by reasoning that reprobation is “a consequence of the free rejection of God's grace and not of God's antecedent will for the reprobate. On the other hand, Aquinas does not hold that predestination to eternal life is conditional, but rather absolute, meaning that God's election of the predestined occurs without consideration of his foreknowledge of their merits.” God compartmentalizes his foreknowledge so that people have a choice.

Calvin, however, answered the question unequivocally in the positive:

All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to either life or death. (25)

Calvinist views on predestination and the complete depravity of man after the Fall colored the Puritan understanding of law. To the extent Calvinists believe in a natural law, it takes on a strain of natural law called voluntarism developed by fourteenth century Franciscans such as William of Ockham. A voluntarist view of law emphasizes the superiority of the lawgiver over the law. Therefore, the divine will expressed in natural law is more important than its teleological purpose. Rosenthal summarizes the debate:

If then the natural law proceeds from divine reason, then a given act may be good or evil in virtue of its own intrinsic nature. Since goodness belongs to the very nature of the divine essence, God could not will that an intrinsically evil act be good. If however the natural law proceeds solely from divine will, then there is nothing intrinsic to any given act to make it good or evil – it derives its moral character solely from the divine command. (290)

In contrast to Ockham's, Aquinas's and Hooker's notions of law start with God's divine nature and not with his superiority over the law. Under Hooker's expression of natural law, “the first law eternal lies within the divine nature and is that by which God determines His purposes and binds Himself to them. The second law eternal consists in the eternal law as mirrored in the purposes of nature and mediated through the hierarchy of being” (55). For Aquinas and Hooker, natural law is teleological as it was for Aristotle: its primary purpose is to allow each kind of being under its purview – human, animal, and plant – to become what it was designed to become. And God binds himself by his law – he creates the rock so big that he himself can't, or at least won't, lift it.

But for Calvinists such as the Puritans, natural law, at least this essence of natural law as it was developed by and handed down from Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hooker, was not possible. Man in his natural state is too depraved, and his reason is too much under the influence of sin, for him to have been guided by it.

Closely associated with the existence of natural law was the rights and responsibilities of the government enforcing the law. For political theorists in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, man's state before government determined whether rulers served with the consent of the governed or whether they ruled by right. Hooker and Locke believed that man was in civil society by nature and moved into political society by choice. In other words, civil society preceded government and is not coterminous with it. Rulers therefore serve by the consent of the governed and not by right.

Aquinas and Locke recognized a right of resistance when a ruler violates natural law. Hooker never addressed a community's right of resistance against a ruler because, in his pamphlet war with the Puritans concerning the extent to which the Crown could govern ecclesiastical affairs, the issue never came up. Like Hooker, Locke worked out his most important ideas on political theory as part of a tract war, but unlike Hooker, the issues Locke addressed directly bore on the extent of royal power over society as a whole. (Despite their different purposes for writing, however, Locke quoted Hooker extensively in his two treatises; well over ninety percent of the quotations he includes to support his material is from Hooker.) Locke's two Treatises on Government were in response to arguments by patriarchalists that rulers served by right as descendants of Adam. Patriarchalists applied the metaphor of a father's right to rule his children to a king's right to rule his people. (King James I was, more than any English king before or since, enthralled with patriarchalism.) Patriarchalists believed that men were not born free or equal since some were born to rule and the rest weren't. While Aquinas, Hooker, and Locke all acknowledged that people are not equal in the sphere of their talents, all three asserted that people were born with equal political rights. Although Aquinas's theory wasn't worked out in the direction of whether rulers served at the consent of the governed, he acknowledged a populace's right to resist its king if his positive law or his execution of that law violated natural law. Locke's Second Treatise of Government is in agreement with Aquinas's views concerning a people's right to resist its king but offers a lot more hypothetical situations to flesh out how that right would work in practice.

The recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission reminds us that conservative forces can alter tradition and precedent as easily as progressive forces, and such was the case with patriarchalist theory as well as the idea of absolute monarchy that it supported. In the pamphlet war in which he was engaged, Locke and the core of his natural law teaching were backing tradition, and his opponents were seeking to establish a modern innovation.

Contrary to a popular misconception, the absolutist conception of government where the sovereign or king is both the source of law and above the law is much more a product of early modern thinkers (e.g., Bodin) than the medieval tradition. The medieval political order rested on a delicate balance between kings, feudal princes, and the Roman Catholic church, with the whole structure conceptualized as a loose unity under the Pope as spiritual head and the Emperor as temporal head. By the sixteenth century, the Royal authority tended to gain in relative position – the federation of Christendom was giving way to a Europe of nations ruled by kings. On the level of practical power, the consolidation of the national monarchy in, for example, Spain, France, and England undermined the older feudal structure with the rise of centralized professional bureaucracies and armies. In England, Scandinavia, and elsewhere we see also the effort to bring ecclesiastical affairs under royal jurisdiction. The new power of kings made an absolutist system a practical possibility in the early modern period. (89)

Although on opposite sides of the ecclesiastical (and, therefore, political) spectrum, Puritans and absolute monarchists had some similar basic elements in their political theories: people were not born free, people were not created equal, and rulers served by right and not by consent of the governed.

Medieval natural rights theory, as it expanded slowly over the centuries, had to defend itself against modern innovations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries just as it did in the sixteenth century against the Puritan notion of a theocracy and in the seventeenth century against the patriarchalist notion of an absolute monarchy. Much in the American Constitution, including freedom of religion and freedom of the press – not to mention something close to pure representative democracy – were real innovations in European and American history. However, natural law, natural rights, and the equality of man enshrined in the Declaration of Independence were recognized aspects of political theory from at least medieval times. In some sense, the American Revolution was not a revolution but a war to apply rights under the English Constitution and medieval natural law to Americans.

The American Civil War, too, was a struggle between a conception of law that included natural law and one that involved only positive law. As I've discussed elsewhere, John Calhoun, the political theorist behind secession, argued that men were not born free, that men were born into a political state by nature, and that men were not created equal in any sense. And Stephen Douglas, Lincoln's opponent in both 1858 and 1860, argued for his doctrine of “popular sovereignty” by putting the natural-law notion of man's equality up for a territory-by-territory vote as if natural rights didn't exit or could be overturned by popular vote. (While natural law detractors – at least as natural law was applied to Americans – were royalists during the Revolutionary War, they were sometimes proponents of majority rule before and during the Civil War.) As the Gettysburg Address makes clear, Lincoln saw the war's central issue as whether a government dedicated to a central natural law proposition could endure.

Most people, I think, believe our nation is better off as it is now with only one order of law – positive law. I think we're worse off for it. I'll address four arguments I've heard against the idea of natural law. The first is the Christian-nation argument. Because we receive much of our understanding of natural law in Christian terms from the likes of Aquinas, Hooker, and even Locke, some believe that a return to natural law would be tantamount to becoming a Christian nation with a government dedicated to living out someone's or some group's understanding of the Bible. I believe a system of only positive law would run the greater risk of that happening. It was Hooper's notion of multi-ordered law – a system of law that included medieval natural law – that countered the Calvinists' single-order, positivist system of law. And today's adherents of something like a Christian nation see human nature, law, and government much more like Calvin than Aquinas.

Besides, self-righteous movements such as the Communists, Nazis, and Islamists that toppled governments over the past hundred years were rarely later accused of doing anything illegal under their own systems of law – systems offering no recourse from unjust positive laws. The Nuremberg trials faced this dilemma at their outset (Rosenthal 249).

A second argument concerns our national values. Some people think that never having to decide on the values that animate our laws and Constitution would serve to unite us, or at least, unlike natural law, not do anything more to divide us. But positive law cannot long be a means of uniting us, if the experience of the last twenty or thirty years is any indication. One group's legislation always seems to be another group's injustice and outrage – often an outrage not based on reason, facts, or history but on poorly-thought-through sets of values discovered or developed not by national debate but within intellectual ghettos – echo chambers where points of view are always reinforced and never challenged. Perhaps a national discussion of natural rights might help us look back clarify our nation's values again – values not voted upon but discovered in the political philosophy our Founders chose to enshrine in some our chief founding documents. Looking to history as a source of the Framers' political philosophy instead of only as a source of legal precedent sounds healthy, too.

A third argument against natural law is the perceived vagueness of the terms used by the likes of Aquinas, Hooker, and/or Locke – the end of man, happiness, life, liberty, and equality, for instance. I'm not sure if this vagueness is a good or bad thing. There's something via negativa about the via media – something that courts can't pin down the way they can the constitutions, statutes, regulations, and case law of the lex positiva. On the other hand, perhaps the jurisprudence of our liberal republic is well suited to apply such concepts in specific cases, having grappled over the years with rather vague notions such as due process, interstate commerce, and the establishment of religion.

A related argument is that courts would have to construe philosophical – yea, even theological – texts in order to flesh out natural law. As a trial lawyer in Virginia – the state with the least number of printed appellate opinions per year of its existence – I was sometimes in the position during property rights disputes of having to argue state supreme court opinions construing masters' ownership rights in their slaves. Surely philosophy and theology isn't as bad as that. Besides, as someone who as studied a little philosophy, theology, and law, I think the study of philosophy and theology might have a salutary effect on our jurisprudence.

Lincoln argued for the ascendency of natural law when he argued that the Declaration of Independence was the “sheet anchor of American republicanism.” We would do well to examine Lincoln's call for a “political religion” – not one involving just the adherence to positive law, as he seemed to emphasize when he first used the term in 1838 – but one that involves the mature political religion he developed over the last dozen years of his life. Few people today would understand Lincoln's political theory as calling for anything like a Christian nation.

I question whether a Constitutional convention – even one that would, upon its conclusion, be recognized by most as wildly successful – would go far to solve the fundamental problems of our republic. We'd still be left with a constitution and with only flawed strategies such as “original intent” and “living constitution” for interpreting it. Natural law, on the other hand, was recognized early on as a natural means of judging the validity of positive law.

I'm just beginning to work some of this stuff out, and I look forward to learning more about natural law and rights as time permits. As emphatic as I sound, I'm really just laying my thoughts' keel here. I haven't launched them, and I certainly haven't commissioned them.

º º º

Crown Under Law crystalized for me three misconceptions under which I believe many of my fellow citizens labor. The first – the misconception that reason is antithetical to faith – is mostly among Christians, though I believe they have managed to persuade many of their non-Christian neighbors that it is a tenet of Christianity. In fact, reason was far more prominent in medieval Christianity's cosmology than it is in Protestant Christianity's. The failure of many Protestants to acknowledge man's ability to reason about what matters most probably led to the cession of reason to more secular concerns. “The Age of Reason” may have been instituted in part by the Reformation's overall rejection of reason as a means of apprehending God's eternal law. Indeed, “reason” is still a naughty word today in many Protestant strands. For most pre-Reformation Christian theologians, though, faith was never opposed to reason; instead, faith and reason were means of comprehending different orders of God's law – faith for Scripture, and reason for natural law. Proper Christian theology has never left an “Age of Reason.”

The second misconception is the lasting notion that Locke and some other Enlightenment figures such as Thomas Hobbes invented natural law and natural rights – or at the least they put an entirely new secularist understanding on an already-outmoded medieval theory – permitting the Americans the necessary cover from the standpoint of political theory to rebel against English rule. Instead, the absolute monarchy is the modern innovation which threatened a balanced system of English government. Absolute monarchy is the modern innovation, and not the lion's share of the natural law explicated by Hooker and Locke.

The last misconception is similar to the second one, I think. It's this: Locke's natural law and natural rights theories are somehow a godless bastardization of classical or Thomistic natural law – a radical departure from the past and one that has led to a less virtuous American citizenry and nation. For this misconception I blame the twentieth century philosopher Leo Strauss's book Natural Right and History more than anything else. (I hope to blog about Strauss's negative impact on the struggle to understand natural rights before too long.) In truth, the nation's all-too-brief reconciliation with Locke's natural law and natural rights theories just before and during the Civil War helped to save the Union and led to a more just society.

& cardinals fly about ten feet & light –
puddle jumpers that never get you far.

The rest green: tendrils smile over signs,
one says only “horses” and “bridge,”

others lie sideways beside the bike path –
“Speed Limit 25” pulled like a weed &

grown over.  Green men spray & buzz
at tendrils chewing the chain fence &

slapping my helmet.  Neat how, after a
summer or two, your bike becomes you,

fits well within your hands, your legs like
plant life spinning in time lapse back

to moments after the firmament,
God just firm enough to smile.

But will generations hence view gatekeepers – the rich beneficiaries of the new trend to trade a measure of freedom for an easier, brighter, more uniform or at least more portable experience – as part of the Internet's downfall or as a means we used to extend its Golden Age for another few years or more? I'm not sure, but my curiosity over the experience was enough to make me finally try a gatekeeper I've considered off and on for years – one that bears little resemblance, I'll admit, to the iPad.

Yesterday I blew the dust off The Selected Writings of Walter Pater, a book I might read again this summer if school really ends. (Pater was an icon of England's earlier, fin-de-siècle Golden Age, and I've wondered how those Gay Nineties guys thought posterity would treat them.) The book's centerfold is a cardboard offer to join The Classics Club, a gatekeeper in the book-of-the-month line, which promises to send me “Plato's Dialogues; The Complete Works of Shakespeare; Ben Franklin's Autobiography; Walden by Thoreau; and other works that stretch your mind and sweep away the mental cobwebs that hold back most men.” As a fifty-three-year-old schoolteacher, I sometimes feel somewhat held back, and while I've read all of the above-listed books and have no current interest in reading them again, I've never sat down and read, cover to cover, any of the three introductory volumes: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey or More'sUtopia.

The offer itself is a classic, thirty-six years old at this point. (Selected Writings was on its first 1974 printing when I bought it during my college junior year in 1977.) I remember reading Pater and considering The Classic Club offer – buckram-bound, genuine-gold-stamped editions of The Illiad, The Odyssey, and Utopia for thirty-three cents each, and subsequent volumes for $3.89 each, plus a nominal shipping fee – when I was in college and concluding that I couldn't afford it. As a teacher, I don't make a lot, but my income has gone up quite a bit from my days of working summer jobs at the local shipyard between college terms. And, while this gatekeeper admittedly predates the Internet, at least its pages don't refresh for inflation.

So yesterday I pulled the trigger on The Classics Club offer and mailed off its perforated, postage-prepaid postcard from the center of Selected Writings. In the bricks-and-mortar spirit of the offer, I refuse to see what, if anything, The Classics Club may presently be offering online. If the books are as handsome and sturdy as the centerfold makes out, I may try out an actual online gatekeeper in another thirty years (barring an earlier-than-planned trip to St. Peter at the Golden Gate). Even if the Internet's Golden Age may have expired by then, I'll be well into my Golden Years and still cosseted enough, hopefully, to take the Internet's Wayback Machine as a gatekeeper to more than historical relics.

A spark will ignite a new mood.  Today, the same spark would flame briefly but then extinguish, its last flicker merely confirming and deepening the Unraveling-era mindset.  This time, though, it will catalyze a Crisis.  In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party.

– from William Strauss and Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning (1997)

Apocalyptic talk is lucky talk.  While describing the future in the 2000's, Strauss and Howe were, of course, also looking back at what sparked what they describe as America’s last three Crisis eras: the Great Depression / World War II (financial crash), the Civil War (a national election), and the Revolutionary War (a Tea Party).  We saw all three of these sparks flash again over a six-month period starting in the fall of 2008, and all three fires are growing.

More lucky talk, this time from Struass and Howe’s 1991 book Generations:

Terrorists and drug traders may or may not still be major problems by the 2010s, but Boomers will have grown accustomed to blaming this ilk for whatever goes wrong overseas. (405)

Like George W. Bush, Strauss and Howe are Boomers themselves, and they define the Boomer generation as an idealist generation, one of the four generational types.  Idealist generations are the most comfortable talking apocalyptic talk.  (“Historically, aging Idealists have been attracted to words like ‘exterminate’ and ‘eradicate,’ words of apocalyptic finality.”) (Generations 406)

Sometimes such apocalyptic talk strikes others as crazy talk.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

Steven Douglas used the first two of these famous lines from Lincoln’s acceptance speech to argue that Lincoln would sacrifice the Union to advance the abolitionist cause.  As a result, these lines probably helped Lincoln lose the 1858 senatorial election.  But Lincoln, himself a member of an idealist generation, wasn’t setting forth policy with his famous opening; he was just giving vent to his idealism, to his urge to talk that apocalyptic talk.

Strauss and Howe, too, believe that we will cease to be divided:

Republicans, Democrats, or perhaps a new party will decisively win the long partisan tug-of-war, ending the era of split government that had lasted through four decades of Awakening [1960’s and 70’s] and Unraveling [1980’s through ?].  The winners [e.g., 1860’s Republicans, 1930’s Democrats] will now have the power to pursue the more potent, less incrementalist agenda about which they had long dreamed and against which their adversaries had darkly warned. (Fourth Turning 275)

But will we unite behind that leadership in response to a common threat (e.g., the Great Depression / World War II), or will we end up fighting another civil war to determine who leads?

Apocalyptic talk is vague talk, as open-ended as a daily horoscope.  It’s the Magic 8 Ball’s “Reply hazy, try again.”  But the specifics aren’t the important things.

An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies.  The core elements of those scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. (273)

Apocalyptic talk is also prophetic talk spoken from one crisis generation to another.  Idealist generations read newspapers through Bibles, for insstance, finding, as my old church did, the U.S.S.R. in Gog and Magog.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats, who wrote these lines toward the end of an earlier Unraveling era, must have foreseen our current, Democratic-controlled Congress.

Brookings Institute fellows William A. Galston and Thomas E. Mann explain why Congressional Democrats seem to dither among themselves while the Republicans are united in passionate opposition:

More than 70 percent of Republicans in the electorate identify themselves as conservatives or very conservative, while only 40 percent of rank-and-file Democrats call themselves liberal or very liberal.  It is far easier for congressional Republicans to forge and maintain a united front than it is for Democrats. George W. Bush pushed through his signature tax cuts and Iraq war authorization with substantial Democratic support, while unwavering Republican opposition nearly torpedoed Barack Obama's health-reform legislation. When Democrats are in the majority, their greater ideological diversity combined with the unified opposition of Republicans induces the party to negotiate within its ranks, producing policies that not long ago would have attracted the support of a dozen Senate Republicans.

Galston and Mann in their May 16 Washington Post column call this phenomenon “asymmetrical polarization” and a recipe for gridlock.  (I think it also contributes to a general impression that a Democratic president can’t govern, much as Southern opposition made it unthinkable to have a president who didn’t sympathize with Southern interests in the years leading up to Lincoln’s election.)  In the near future, Congress may become as hopeless and uncivil as it was just before the Civil War.

Galston and Mann say that not only are self-identified moderates a vanishing breed among the electorate (the centre cannot hold), but purple counties and states are becoming a thing of the past:

In addition, because people increasingly prefer to live near others who share their cultural and political preferences, they are voting with their feet and sorting themselves geographically. Many more states and counties are dominated by one-party supermajorities than in the past. Contrary to widespread belief, reducing the gerrymandering of congressional districts would make only a small dent in the problem. And unfortunately, homogeneous groups tend to reinforce and purify the views that bring them together: Sorting not only reflects polarization but also intensifies it.

We’re starting to move to our own red or blue political ghettos, and not just online or in our choices of news media.  We’re doing it in moving vans.  Consequently, our local political discourse will sound increasingly like it’s hosted in an echo chamber, and the representatives we’ll be sending to Congress will be less civil to their colleagues, at least if they want to stay in office.  Because the national polarization is asymmetrical, most of the vituperation may continue to come from the Republicans.

As the Crisis catalyzes, [fears about the flimsiness of the social contract] will rush to the surface, jagged and exposed.  Distrustful of some things, individuals will feel that their survival requires them to distrust more things.  This behavior could cascade into a sudden downward spiral, an implosion of societal trust. (Fourth Turning 274)

My sampling of rural Tennessee’s political views, which I have taken annually over the past twenty years, has turned up increasingly distressing beliefs.  “That old boy [Obama] never went to Harvard.  Never spent a day of his life there,” an in-law confided to me this past Christmas, shaking his wizened head.  Some birthers are just getting started.

That trend toward relocating to geographic areas that share our political points of view concerns me more than any recent news I’ve heard.  We’ve already been reliving the antebellum period in other ways: a divided press, lots of overheated rhetoric, threats of secession, and impassioned and sometimes laughable arguments regarding the Founders’ intent.  Looking toward the 2000’s in their 1991 book Generations, Strauss and Howe foresaw “growing signs of tribalism, nativism, social intolerance, and just plain meanness.”  If we continue to align ourselves physically as we have politically, to listen only to those who agree with us, and to demonize people and leaders with opposing viewpoints – and if no international crisis serves to unite us – then we may be headed for secession movements or civil war.

Consider this “circa-2005” scenario that Strauss and Howe wrote “might seem plausible”:

Beset by a fiscal crisis, a state lays claim to its residents’ federal tax monies.  Declaring this an act of secession, the president obtains a federal injunction.  The governor refuses to back down.  Federal marshals enforce the court order.  Similar tax rebellions spring up in other states.  Treasury bill auctions are suspended.  Militia violence breaks out.  Cyberterrorists destroy IRS databases.  U.S. special forces are put on alert.  Demands issue for a new Constitutional Convention.  (Fourth Turning 272)

Things that made the news for a day or two during an Unraveling era may become an event that, in retrospect, would be seen to have precipitated a crisis during a Crisis era because of the extreme level of distrust in American society.

Apocalyptic talk is a weatherman’s patter.  Why waste airtime explaining how I got a forecast wrong and why it rained on a day I said would be sunny?  Before Obama’s election, I thought our next nation-threatening crisis, which Strauss and White figured might start around now and be in full swing around 2020, might unite us without dividing us further.  Now, circling back a year and a half later, I think it may divide us more before it unites us.

Apocalyptic talk is also a magpie’s call – the harsh, showy crowing of a collector who has scored.  I’ve got my eye out along my circuit for scraps of news with which I can later decorate my apocalyptic construct.  I’m a Boomer myself.  The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Things I learned from SoloPoMo:

1. Blogging “through” the same poem each day for a month gave me enough inspiration to write and enough flexibility to write anything.
2. I relearned how to write short posts.  All I had to do was lower the bar (see thing 1 above) and then – this is vital – jump.
3. It was fun editing photos for Longshots®™© again.
4. I got so desperate for material that I embedded my blog’s first video from another site.  It wasn’t so hard.
5. I never got tired of living with Charles Wright’s “Images from the Kingdom of Things” for 31 days.  I still repeat it to myself on occasion.

I’ll leave “Images” at the bottom of this post for the rest of June with links to last month’s posts.  The relationships some of these links suggest between posts and parts of the poem’s text probably don’t exist; I suppose it’s silly to give homage to a writing prompt, which, after all, is “Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be / Ere one can say 'It lightens.'”  (I should do RoMeOMo next year since I read that play five times each May.)

Sunlight is blowing westward across the unshadowed meadow,
Night, in its shallow puddles,
                                                      still liquid and loose in the trees.
The world is a desolate garden,
No distillation of downed grasses,
                                         no stopping the clouds, coming at us one by one.

 

The snow crown on Mt. Henry is still white,
                                                                 the old smoke watcher's tower
Left leaning a bit in its odd angle to the world,
Abandoned, unusable.
Down here, in their green time, it's past noon
                                     and the lodgepole pines adjust their detonators.

The blanched bones of moonlight scatter across the meadow.
The song of the second creek, with its one note,
                                                                                        plays over and over.
How many word-warriors ever return
                                                                       from midnight’s waste and ruin?
Count out the bones, count out the grains in the yellow dust.

But what membrane bisects a private journal and a blog?  One pours into the other.  When I write in my private journal, I’m often thinking of how it might work in my blog.  When I write a blog post, I make notes for thoughts I might develop in my journal.

Writing has porous borders.  What membrane, for instance, bisects a noun and a verb?  Every noun walks in fear of gangs waiting to press it into a verb's service.  We journal, we blog, we text. We verbalize, are verbalized.  And can one uncaramelize the crème brûlée?  Or can a noun or pronoun just be, considering be’s a verb?

Can I am?  What membrane bisects one person and another?

I am can’t
get on with
no verb.
Ay me.

I am cooked. I spoon inside for a noun, but I can’t isolate so much as an intransitive verb.

I am verbal, at once transitive and intransitive. I want to write you when I write, and I want to write when I write you.

This is my final post in celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month) using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.

I imagine someone, perhaps a writer, famous enough to understand that her private journals may be published one day.  Might her fame keep her from developing or, more likely, maintaining a satisfaction with herself as her own audience?  I think I benefit from a private and a public side, from a private journal and a blog, and for me, the journal should be paramount.

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

People like an audience because it listens.  One person never listens.  Even when he’s quiet, he fidgets.  And to get myself quiet before myself?

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

One of my best friends at school and I discovered today that we both love Indian food, that we both love the food and service at the same Indian restaurant, and that we both make a point there of asking for extra rice when ordering or as soon as the food arrives.

“Do you know how scary this is?” Victoria responded to me tonight after I told her about it.

Scary that she’d be facing more Indian food, which she’s pretty lukewarm to?  Scary that Greg and I, over the course of dining together, would grow closer and banter with each other and with Victoria and Lynette more than we do already?

“The four of us went to that restaurant for your birthday last year, and neither of you seem to remember it,” she said.

That rang a bell, but my nonchalance was unfeigned.  “Do you know what your memory is costing you?” I asked.  “Do you realize how many times over the course of our friendship Greg and I may delight in discovering our mutual love of Indian food?  For you, the number of such experiences is fixed.”

°°°

If history goes through cycles and if history is also speeding up, then no curve in a history graph is ascending faster; instead, a gyre is tightening.  With 2010 playing itself out politically much as 1994 did, for instance, a twenty-year-old may truly say, “I’ve seen it all before.”  But the shortness of the American public’s memory is matched only by the shortness of its attention span.  Over a few months, we may go through a full historical cycle that would have taken us several generations to accomplish years ago.  How many remember a few months back or, perhaps more to the point, care to?

°°°

May and June mean Romeo and Juliet.  The second week of June brings on a mild depression: I experience twenty suicides each year then: Romeo and Juliet die five times each by book and five times each by movie.  That’s 120 suicides by the same couple over six years of ninth grade English.  Plus we often act out a few suicides for good measure.

One couple attending a nearby high school killed themselves four years ago the summer after reading the play; their parents had disapproved of their relationship.  Employing the Romeo and Juliet story angle, local media covered the double suicide as if such a thing had never happened before.

But for me, Romeo and Juliet is like holiday liturgy.  I learn something new every year.  This week I realized that the religious theme of Romeo’s pickup line to Juliet when they first meet may shed light on how Rosaline’s vow of chastity is affecting him.  It had never occurred to me before.  I guess.

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

As I was filling up my journal’s last pages over the past two weeks, I thought about what kind of journal I wanted next.  I never cared much before; any size or shape would have been fine.  But now that I’ve been journaling more regularly, it seemed important.

I think part of my renewed interest in journaling has come from the journal itself.  For the past two years I’ve been using an 8 ½ by 11-inch journal, bigger than I’ve ever used before.  It seems spacious.  I can leave some real estate undeveloped and still pretty much fill up a page.  The white space makes a page more inviting to return to, and if I want to add to what I’ve written before, I have the space for it.  Even though I’ll start new entries with a day’s date, staying chronological no longer matters much to me.  My ideas build, so why shouldn’t I invite my future self to join in?

It makes revising more fun, too.  I used to do most of my revising on the laptop, but due to the journal's increased white space, I now do much of it there where the writing began.  There's something about those arrows and that sideways writing.  I've always thought that I wrote my best in book margins.  Why not write in my own books' margins?  I can respond to myself as well as to anyone else, I reckon.  My love for writing in margins may be why I usually feel more creative writing beside a previous day's journal entry than writing a new entry.

So I started seriously considering a journal with even bigger dimensions than a standard-sized notebook.

I knew I wanted a hardcover journal so I could write in it easily standing up, as I often do in the classroom.  I knew also that I wanted it to lay flat spread open because I do most of my journaling on the floor, and I often like to take in two pages at once.

But I wasn’t sure about the ruling as well as the size.  Each page of my then-current journal was ruled on the front and blank on the back.  This gave me my first feel for journaling on unruled paper.  I liked the freedom of it.  I couldn’t find another journal with that combination of ruled and unruled pages, and I think that’s fine.  Perhaps the hybrid journal was like training wheels, and I’m ready for an unruled journal.

Another reason for unruled paper – all of these art students who come to my classes with sketchbooks have made me more interested in trying my hand at some of the basic techniques they use.  I bought The Journal Junkies Workshop, a beautiful book released this month and coauthored by my friend Eric Scott.  The book describes lots of techniques to try in an art journal, mostly with some basic art supplies and stuff you’d find around the house, like bubble wrap and matches.  Eric incorporates a lot of journal writing and creative writing into his art journals, which I've enjoyed firsthand.  I’m going to use his book and some of Bethany’s art supplies to see how some visual effects might affect my journal writing.

I settled on a mammoth, 11 by 14-inch artist’s sketchbook, which I got for half price at a crafts store with its weekly coupon.  At first, I thought my writing might cower in the corner with all of that space around it and no lines to call it to the middle.  It doesn’t cower!  It feels at home.  And opening the journal may be like opening the realm’s chronicles, a great theatrical introduction to devotions, if you journal through that kind of thing as I sometimes do.

I've discovered a third benefit.  Leaning over the journal to write – it spreads to 22 by 14, of course – is like leaning over a large poster or canvas stretched over a floor.  I'm like the kids I see in my high school halls during classes, on their hands and knees, doing art on poster board or banner paper.

The writing experience is just a little more visceral, a little more involved, and the pages are a little more tempting to return to.

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

I love the funnies. Yesterday's was one of my favorite Doonesburies.

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

The sane ones fold their clothes
and watch their hands
put them in a drawer

They twist a knob and
watch the water turn out
of the spigot

They see a crow fly
and come to no conclusion

The sane ones go
nameless but return in
a turn of the hand or
a nod

The sane crows                wings
The sane ones fold their clothes
and put them in a drawer

In spring a snowflake
scrapes their names
on its points and melts

The sane ones tug the hose out
and twist it round again
as the old mind would
turn on itself

They hear a pen scrape
or a fly scrape
and come to no conclusion

They hear the paper
turn they watch the
turn of the letter g

Their heart is home
to any fly

The sane ones feel an avalanche
inter their charterhouse
They are as surprised as anyone
The white is like a blank page

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

Each day starts a story that later stops.

The paper hits the stoop. Each day, startled, starts.

I stand still.  The sun rides his circuit, his carriage clattering by my corner day by day.  I call a cab.

A poem is a loop, a double back.  Its carriage is a cylinder.

Days pile like papers.  Pull out the inserts, pull out the stops.

Is that an apostrophe I see?  Oh, Filthy Screen!  Scrolling helps, like when a bird moves in a bush.

Since cars, carriage rides stop where they start.

I scroll.  Scrolls are cylinders.

I know the specks on my screen like poets knew the night sky.

I scroll and call and put a stop on the paper.

I live since cars.  The sun rides his circuit, his carriage clattering by my corner day by day.  I call still.

A poem’s carriage is a cylinder.  Its c’s an s.  It sees an s.  It’s Season S.

The paper hits the stoop.  I, startled, stop.

Photo by Bethany; doctoring by me.  In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

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In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

Photo by Bethany; doctoring by me.  I'm trying to do photos that get across part of Wright's approach: "Landscape was never a subject matter . . . Language was always the subject matter, the idea of God," as he puts it in "The Minor Art of Self-defense," another poem in Scar Tissue.  I think "Images from the Kingdom of Things" demonstrates that approach. The photos' images may also echo images in "Images."

That my uncle would scream.

That he would scream at all hours with his grandchildren downstairs.

The curtains drawn, the dormers dark and alive with death and my uncle, restrained and unrestrained, working the limits.

º º º

At my aunt’s funeral, my uncle called my name. That was all.

It was spring when she died. My uncle lived to not see another spring summer fall, to not open a blind. We buried him in the cold.

Walking through the graveyard, the journeyman qua nurse, my cousin’s hire, regales us with my uncle’s last two years.

º º º

The silver cord, the golden bowl, the long home. The cord slips, the bowl cracks, the long home.

The silver chord, the scratched CD that plays a snatch of song again, again. Where will death’s foreplay scratch me, scratch me?

On what will I fix, what neuronal lifeline, my golden bowl at sea?

Nine old tweets.  The imagery in the last trilogy is mostly from Ecclesiastes (chapter 12).  In celebration of SoloPoMo(Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

Photo by Bethany; doctoring by me.  I'm trying to do photos that get across part of Wright's approach: "Landscape was never a subject matter . . . Language was always the subject matter, the idea of God," as he puts it in "The Minor Art of Self-defense," another poem in Scar Tissue.  I think "Images from the Kingdom of Things" demonstrates that approach. The photos' images may also echo images in "Images."

I’m not sure what we Protestants mean when we sometimes refer to God as “the God of the Harvest” – it may have to do with evangelism or the end of the world, I don’t know – but I sometimes see the sickle of God.  When something has been dragging on – some external thing with an internal hook in me – and something finally changes in me, something often immediately happens on the external side of things, too.  I don’t know if God changes the circumstances when he gets done what he wants to get done inside of me, or if the long, drawn-out change in me allows me to give the external circumstance enough space to change on its own.  But one way or another, things change.  God puts in his sickle.

Job saw the sickle, I think.  He spends almost his entire book longing for God to take his side against his three friends and to acknowledge that he had done nothing wrong.  When Job finally repents of his need to be right, God finally and immediately justifies Job before his friends. (See chapter 42.)

The sickle showed up in my three-part post “Letting Go” last week.  When I finally was willing and able to give Bethany the space she needed to make her own college decision, everything fell into place.  Bethany made a decision that excites her.  Letters from graduate schools began to arrive assuring me that she could choose a liberal arts college B.A. program and still get into an M.F.A. jewelry and metalworking program later if she wanted to.

The sickle may be what happens when a control freak like me gives up some of his control.  Life becomes an adventure again, and the world becomes a little more friendly and accomodating.

Here’s Jesus’ parable in Mark 4 (Geneva Bible), the source of my sickle analogy:

Also he said, So is the kingdome of God, as if a man should cast seede in the ground, and shoulde sleepe, and rise vp night and day, and the seede should spring and growe vp, he not knowing howe.  For the earth bringeth foorth fruite of it selfe, first the blade, then the eares, after that full corne in the eares.  And assoone as the fruite sheweth it selfe, anon hee putteth in the sickle, because the haruest is come.

I think Jesus was not just talking about the end of the world when he told this parable, if he was talking about that at all.  I think he was reflecting on the human heart.

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

Photo by Bethany; doctoring by me.  I'm trying to do photos that get across part of Wright's approach: "Landscape was never a subject matter . . . Language was always the subject matter, the idea of God," as he puts it in "The Minor Art of Self-defense," another poem in Scar Tissue.  I think "Images from the Kingdom of Things" demonstrates that approach. The photos' images may also echo images in "Images."

I had other responses:

1. I had forgotten that Rodney King and the ensuing L.A. riots were during a presidential election year and would end up hurting Bush's reelection chances. (The Washington Post reported its latest poll results: Bush maintained his slight lead over both Clinton and Perot.) It's funny how we segment the news and put it in different places over time, forgetting how it seems to interrelate with everything else over the pages of a single newspaper edition.

2. It was like the Post didn't even have to try back then. Passive-voice headlines, crowded layouts . . . The paper seemed gray and vaguely bureaucratic, as if it were the publishing arm of C-SPAN. (Of course, the physical color of the paper is a sort of sepia-yellow now.) Three front-page stories dealt with congressional “probes,” none of them important, I think it's fair to say, in retrospect.

3. When I remembered one of the stories yesterday afternoon – American Express's agreement to inform its twenty million cardholders “that it tracks their buying habits to compile marketing lists that it sells to other merchants” – I thought it was yesterday's news. (I mean, you know, the news of the day before today.)  Perhaps If I weren't so fast at recycling the paper, I could just replay an entire year over the course of a later year's mornings.

4. Back then, apparently, “too big to fail” was a good thing. The FDIC fund was $7 billion in debt eighteen years ago stemming from the recession's wave of bank failures. One of the Post's editorials backed the FDIC's decision to institute a spectrum of risk-based insurance premiums that, the Post acknowledged, might cause smaller banks to be subject to merger and takeover. But “the country has far more banks than it needs.” It made me see again how self-righteous editorial pages are. Just as weather reporters never take air time to explain their earlier, incorrect predictions, opinion shops rarely acknowledge their own shortsightedness. Instead, on to the newest outrage!
   

(Epilogue: Bethany never surmised the source of the discrepancies between what she usually found in the morning's style section and what she found in it yesterday morning. And the front page seemed to me as if it could all be current, except one might wonder what happened to the more dire news stories we're following now. Here were the Post's headlines eighteen years ago yesterday:

3 Spacewalking Astronauts Snare Elusive Satellite [I never keep up with who or what's in space anymore, not since the Apollo program and the Vietnam War kind of slowly folded up together, so that wouldn't have tipped me off.]

GOP Rule Blamed for Urban Ills [Isn't the GOP back in power with that 41-seat Senate majority?]

Across Two Centuries, a Founder Updates the Constitution

Probe of Federal Worker Group Sought

Some Saudis Won't Pay, U.S. Contractors Complain

Missing Patients Found Dead

Three Decades of Toy Store Joy to End

I finally suggested to Bethany that she look at the paper's date. She was very satisfyingly amazed!)

A recent post in Mole, "Planning for the Apocalypse," inspired me to write this, and a shorter version of this post appears as a comment to dale's post.  In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

Recognizing these calls helps me ignore them long enough to sit. Sitting is my response to a softer, less demanding call – the call of my father.

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

in which Bethany chooses a college.

In early April, after the college acceptance packages had come in, Victoria asked Bethany, “Which way are you leaning?"

Bethany wasn't completely sure yet – she wanted to visit the schools again – but she was pretty sure she wanted to go to the art college. The liberal arts college we had visited in November (hereinafter, “the liberal arts college”) was in second place, and another liberal arts college was in third place. She would visit them all in April, and a fourth college, too – the other out-of-state college – if her mind wasn't made up after visiting her top three colleges for the second time.

I started my campaign – a limited campaign, just a few remarks here and there – to push the liberal arts college despite my new insight into James' letter. I just couldn't help myself. When we visited the art school open house in April, Victoria and I found an opportunity to tell Bethany that she was too bright for the school. (Based on her grades and board scores, I had an argument, snotty and as flatteringly manipulative as it was.) But the rest of the time I wasn't disparaging; I simply highlighted the virtues I found in the almost-daily mailers the liberal arts school sent her or sent Victoria and me. Sometimes, when I said things, I knew I had gone too far. Sometimes, it felt fine. But my heart wasn't where I wanted it to be – solidly in favor of any decision Bethany would make. She needed to decide what college to go to, obviously: if she ended up hating the college and felt that I pushed her there, it would hurt our relationship for a long time. And it's her life. Right?

Victoria, who has a better read on Bethany than I do often, said that Bethany didn't feel pressured. “She just thinks you're being you,” she said. She meant that I'm always advocating something. That made me feel better. Maybe she could stand up to me. But that made me feel worse.  What if she stood up to me and made the wrong decision? When I'd go on about all of htis, Victoria would always tell me, “She'll figure it out,” meaning that she would figure out the right thing to do. Yeah, I thought, but what if the right thing to do isn't what I think the right thing to do is?

Around this time, and for the only time this year, our principal stumbled into my classroom. We were all reading silently. I came up to see what he wanted, and he asked me how Bethany's college search was going. I told him about her options and her upcoming campus visits. “She'll figure it out,” he whispered, and left the room. You would think I would have gotten the message.

I emailed my siblings about how I thought Bethany was going to make a terrible decision. I called my mother and told her about a plan I had hatched to have the entire family sign a congratulatory card with a new bribe in it that she could accept if she would go to the liberal arts college. (My entire family was in favor of the liberal arts college over the art college, too.) My mother wisely suggested that I drop the idea. There wasn't anything subtle or even funny about it, of course.

I talked with my close friend Michael a few weeks ago about Bethany's decision. Years ago, Michael tearfully told a few of us the story of how he tried to stand in the way of his own artistic daughter's career. He realized it in time to end up supporting her decision to go to a fashion school, and she's done very well. Michael, as usual, gave me some good perspective. “You'll make lots of mistakes, and she'll turn out fine,” is Michael's general outlook, and he's been accurate on both counts over the years.

º º º

Having ceded more than three months to the art college by accepting her in April instead of December, the liberal arts college began to make up for lost time. It offered an overnight visit and not just an accepted students' day that the other schools offered. It offered to fly its candidates to its campus at its expense and to feed them in its dining hall. The candidates even got luxury accommodations in sleeping bags on dorm-room floors.

But the college's travel agent I had to book the flight through to get the flight reimbursement was hopeless. By the time she called me back, the rates had gone up beyond what the school was willing to pay, and we ended up three airports from here, an hour and twenty minutes' drive one way. During the five days I was dealing with the agent, I was cursing the agency that threatened to spoil the conspiracy I had formed with the liberal arts college to persuade Bethany to select it. Then I thought to myself, “Remember, you are not in control!”

Victoria heard me fuming about the travel agency and said, “Remember, you are not in control!”

Some of Victoria's and my conversations with Bethany involved how a BA studio arts degree from a liberal arts college might affect her ability to go from college into an MFA program at a studio art school. These days, most young professional artists get, or want to get, a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree; the field is exceptionally competitive. Bethany was understandably concerned that the MFA jewelry and metalworking programs would require a BFA – an undergraduate professional degree – in jewelry and metalworking, something that no small, liberal arts school that I could find offered, so I emailed the liberal arts college's sculpture professor and the head of its studio arts department and told them about Bethany's dilemma. Both responded with long, thoughtful emails describing the advantages of small studio art programs at liberal arts colleges and assuring us that Bethany would be at no competitive disadvantage in four years if she wished to pursue an MFA program in jewelry, metals, or anything else. The sculpture professor had a daughter who had gone from a program similar to the liberal arts college's into a specialized studio arts MFA program, and the department chair herself had done so.

I read the letters out loud to Bethany. I also pointed out that half of the art college professors in its jewelry and metalworking program had gotten BA's in studio arts and not BFA's before getting their MFA's.

But just to confirm things, I also emailed the MFA jewelry and metalworking programs that U.S. News had ranked as the top ten in the nation, and I explained Bethany's dilemma to them. Would they accept students with BA degrees from studio arts programs, or would they accept only students with BFA degrees in jewelry and metalworking? Most of their web sites were not clear on this point.

I sent those out on Saturday, the day before I put Bethany on the plane in Baltimore.

By the time I took her to the airport, the first response had come in:

Wow I've never seen a letter like this before -- helicopter parent? (wonder where he went to school?)

This professor, I hope, thought she was responding to the other professor in her department whom I had addressed the email to, and not to me. (As far as the parenthetical query goes, I guess I did come off a little condescending about the art school. I didn't stop to think about how my attitude toward the art college might come across to professors at other art colleges.)

Bethany and I laughed about it on the way to the airport, and we theorized about how I might respond to the inadvertent email.

By the next morning, substantive responses to my emails were coming in. Here's the first:

First of all, this email should have come from your daughter. If she is mature enough to start college in the Fall, she should be asking these questions herself.

[Arts college] is an outstanding university with an outstanding art department and an outstanding metals program. If she wants to do graduate work in metalworking, I would recommend Bethany attend [Arts college]. We would not accept her into the MFA program in Metals without a metalworking portfolio. We prefer that applicants have the BFA degree, but if the portfolio is strong enough, we will consider the BA degree.

I hope this answers your questions.

If its any consolation, thirty five years ago I was a student much like your daughter. I was accepted into several Ivy League schools and even offered a full scholarship to attend Harvard as a math major (I got a perfect SAT score in math--very rare at the time). To my parent's chagrin, I attended a  much lesser ranked school because it had a good program in metals. (I had taken one summer class). It is a decision I have never regretted and one that served me well in my ensuing career.

Hope this advice helps

Professor X

I tried reading the letter to Victoria, but I couldn't because I was crying so hard. The letter felt like a direct hit, a much stronger version of what I felt God was trying to point out to me with the insight from James' epistle that had intrigued me earlier in the month. It showed me as being everything I feared – a helicopter parent (as the first professor had pointed out), and one who would let his pride in having his daughter accepted at some fine liberal arts colleges stand in the way of his daughter's decision. A father trying to shape his daughter in his own image and standing between his daughter and her God-given calling.

Three other letters came in while Bethany was visiting the liberal arts college. While none were as confrontational, all said the same thing about what kind of coursework and degree they would accept from prospective MFA candidates: only a BFA in jewelry and metalworking. They all suggested that Bethany go to the art college.

Perhaps things had changed since the liberal arts college department head and the other professor's daughter had gone to graduate school, I figured.

But I realized that I was now where I wanted to be. I didn't want to stand in Bethany's way. Really, after those letters, I could honestly say that I would be happy with any decision Bethany made. And Victoria, who has a great deal of insight into how Bethany's mind works, told me that she felt Bethany would have a decision when I met her at the airport.

After we picked up her bag and sleeping bag, I asked Bethany to sit down with me for a minute in some chairs by the baggage claim. I told her that I was sorry for pushing her towards the liberal arts college, and I reiterated, much more forcefully (and sincerely) this time, that she had a wonderful decision to make, one that her hard work and perseverance had presented to her, and that I would be thrilled and excited about any decision she made.

“Did Mom put you up to this?”

No, I assured her.

“Well, as it turns out . . .” Her voice trailed off.

Then she began what seemed like a minute-to-minute account of her two days at the liberal arts college. (She gets the need to provide every detail from me, of course.) Suddenly, I was thankful for the travel agent because the long ride back would give Bethany a chance to unwind her decision to me the way she wanted to before she had to face Victoria, who can be very to the point.

Bethany was obviously excited. She loved her hosts, and she described their different personalities as if she had been to summer camp with them for three weeks. They played some kind of game in the dorm hall that Bethany ended up winning. (I withheld my cynicism; the college selected these hosts, after all.) The kids were talking about the kind of things that Bethany loves talking about. At some point, the boyfriend of one of the girls came in, a philosophy major. He and the girlfriend, a sociology major, described to the group a paper they had written together the night before for the hell of it regarding some insight that involved both of their disciplines. It was the perfect thing for Bethany to hear. She loves doing things best when they're not assigned – well, who doesn't? – but it was the first time she has been with a lot of other kids that share the same approach to learning that she has.

I even got lost driving for about a half hour – I've lived in this area for only a quarter century – because I got so enthralled with Bethany's nonstop account of her trip. So the ride back took almost two hours.

Just before we got home, she told me that she thought she wanted to go to the liberal arts college (to "my [name of school]," as she began calling it that night).

When we got home to Victoria, Bethany gave her an abbreviated version of her experiences. We told Bethany about the four letters, but Bethany wasn't too concerned. She agreed with us: how could a BA degree in studio arts prevent someone from getting an MFA degree in jewelry and metalworking? She could approach those programs in four years and say, “Here's what I've done. What more do I need to do to get in?” Someone or something somewhere – an additional year at an art school, an apprenticeship, some summer programs, a job – would give her the experience she needed and the opportunity to build up her portfolio with jewelry and metalwork.

I asked Bethany not to act on her decision for a few days since she was in no danger of missing a deadline. I thought she should live with her decision, she how well it wore, before sharing it with the colleges.

After Bethany made her decision, four more MFA jewelry and metalworking programs responded to my helicopter-parent emails. They all came to exactly the opposite conclusion than the first four did, honest to God. Bethany should go where she wants to go, they said. A response typical of these four letters: “The only thing that we stipulate is the student must hold a Bachelor's Degree.  We do not mandate that it be a BS, BA, BFA, etc.”

Bethany accepted the offer of admission from the liberal arts college a few days later.

The night we got back from the airport, Bethany told us, “Whenever I picture myself at the liberal arts college missing the art college, I think of all that cool metalworking and jewelry-making equipment on the third floor. But whenever I picture myself at the art college missing the liberal arts college, I think of the kids, the dorms, the classes, the food, the buildings, the trees, the countryside . . . the whole thing.”

“Bethany, you're describing the art college kind of like I describe my law school when I look back on it. And you're describing the liberal arts college like I describe what made my undergraduate years special. It sounds to me as if you're saying you aren't ready to get a professional degree yet. It sounds like you want to go to college first.”

It was the wisest thing I had said in weeks.

Previous posts:

Part 1, in which I process Bethany's growing up

Part 2, in which God gets my attention through textual insight

[The first photo above is of Victoria and Bethany when the latter was one year old. The second photo above is of Bethany a few months ago.  The photo below is of Bethany, age two, and me.

Warning!  Bethany becomes an adult this week, graduates from high school next month, and leaves home in August.  It may stay a bit lachrymose around here for a while.]

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

in which God gets my attention through textual insight.

I love taking photographs just before or after early- or late-day sunshowers: the rich, angled light hits its subjects full in the face, and the sky is a dramatically dark backdrop. The devil is beating his wife, in fact, just now – the sun and its blue sky are full in my eastern window, but I hear the rain beating on my roof as I tap this out.

That Southern explanation for a sunshower played in me when I was a kid. I remember thinking that the devil probably didn't beat his wife that often despite the other bad things I had heard about him, so I thought I was witnessing an astronomical event as rare and as metaphysical as a solar eclipse.

It's the mind up to its tricks, wanting to find animals and people (and devils) in things. The poet Charles Wright, whom I've been enjoying recently, plays at it as he nudges the reader from the physical to a physical/metaphysical world.  Consider the hints at personification from the opening of "Images from the Kingdom of Things" (though these examples are really more zooidal than anthropomorphic):

Sunlight is blowing westward across the unshadowed meadow,
Night, in its shallow puddles,
                                                 still liquid and loose in the trees.
The world is a desolate garden,
No distillation of downed grasses,
                                   no stopping the clouds, coming at us one by one.

“Liquid and loose” makes me see night alternatively as a puddle and a panther; it sort of never settles in my mind into one or the other and therefore reverts back to language and sound, which I think Wright wants. And the inexorable clouds: person, animal, or thing?

It's like the biblical conception of wisdom. Wisdom is an abstract noun in the Bible, as it is everywhere you find it, but there's this overlay of personification from the Book of Proverbs's first section that can color wisdom when you're reading about it elsewhere in the Bible:

Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars: She hath killed her beasts; she hath mingled her wine; she hath also furnished her table. She hath sent forth her maidens: she crieth upon the highest places of the city, Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither: as for him that wanteth understanding, she saith to him, Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine which I have mingled. Forsake the foolish, and live; and go in the way of understanding. (Proverbs 9:1-6, King James Version)

Even more significant for my faith is Paul's assertion in First Corinthians that Jesus himself is my wisdom:

By God’s act you are in Christ Jesus; God has made him our wisdom, and in him we have our righteousness, our holiness, our liberation. (REB)

But it's been awhile since I've read those verses. It's been a while since I've seen the devil in sunshowers or seen Jesus in wisdom. But I started to see something I hadn't seen about wisdom in the New Testament's epistle by James, probably Jesus' brother and a practical guy who writes in a practical way and from whom I wouldn't expect to receive much new insight after a few readings.

James describes what wisdom looks and feels like. Here's the entire passage, taken from the King James Version of chapter 3:

Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? let him shew out of a good conversation his works with meekness of wisdom. But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth. This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle,and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace.

Until last month, I thought James was describing how I can know that a decision I would make would be a wise one. Maybe, but now I understand that seeing the passage only that way would not only take it out of context but make it into a decision-making tree or a kind of blueprint for a biblical Magic Eight Ball.  (One of my biggest hangovers from my Charismatic days is the notion that, as big as I claim God is, he puts his money on only one horse; he endorses only one decision. This passage back then was my way to know how that right decision would feel to me – was it pure? peaceable? etc. – so that I'd end up backing the right horse, too.)

While reading James last month, instead of the usual decision tree I've extrapolated from this passage, I began to see, flickering in and out Charles Wright-like, an animate wisdom. James is describing how a wise person interacts with others. (I don't know why I've never seen that before: the passage comes after James' remonstration against his readers for cursing other people and comes after a similar remonstration about fighting other people. So he's been talking about conduct all along.  The passage even refers to the “meekness of wisdom.” How can a decision be meek?)

Here's another translation of my chief text from the passage, this from the New Revised Standard Version:

Bur the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.

James is describing a way of interacting with others over an issue that wouldn't necessarily reach a single, predetermined end. If I have wisdom, I – I, and not the right answer – am “easy to be intreated” (KJV), “willing to yield” (NRSV), “reasonable” (NAS), “open-minded” (REB). The wisdom the passage refers to isn't in an answer or in a direction or decision. It's also not the fruit from having the the person I'm talking with following what I think is my wise counsel. The peace the passage refers to is in the relationship; it is in the faith that, even if the other person can't marshall enough wisdom or even see beyond the nose on her face, I am willing to yield to her. In other words, this passage isn't about getting the right answer or getting the mind of God on a subject, if God is indeed that singleminded about it. It's about how to lose like God.

I beat God frequently, and he takes it, just like the devil's wife. When the Spirit indicates something to me that doesn't make sense, I often go with what makes sense, and circumstances show me how things would have been better had I gone with my indication. More to the point, I'll also often do things I know are wrong. God, wise as he is, yields to me and loses every time.

So the wisdom from above is receiving other people's perspectives, getting out of their way, letting them win, knowing that God has been likewise willing to lose to me. “Easy to be entreated,” then, doesn't mean willing to have others grovel before me like supplicants before some kind of potentate. If I'm willing to be entreated, I'm willing to be persuaded, willing to give up my position, willing to let the other's perspective carry the day, willing to play God only to the extent of being willing to lose, willing all the more to lose because of my broken perspective.

The more I read this passage, journaled about it (a lot of this post is verbatim from my journal), and thought about it, I knew where this was going. When I get some insight into the Bible that I think is significant, I'm usually assured that I'll have to learn some hard lessons to get it functioning under my hood. I've learned that biblical insight (humble as mine is) comes with a price; theology alone is a parlor game. For the sake of our future relationship, I would have to put my heart behind my words: your college decision is your decision, Bethany, and not mine. I know you'll make the right decision, and I'll be thrilled for you whatever you decide.

God knows how to get to me. It was a bittersweet feeling – the excitement of being reoriented to one of my central biblical passages while knowing deep inside that the timing of that reorientation would require that I give up any claim I had to pushing Bethany toward a particular decision. I would have to be “willing to yield” – willing to lose like God. With three weeks to go before Bethany would have to accept only one college's invitation, I knew I was nowhere ready to do that.

Previous post: Part 1, in which I process Bethany's growing up

Next post: Part 3, in which Bethany selects a college

[Above photo is of Granny's farm just before a sunshower.  (Granny is Bethany's mother's mother's mother, now 92 years old.)]

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

in which I process Bethany's growing up.

Bethany and I have always been close. She wore a “Daddy's Girl” tee shirt to school in her middle school years, and she visits my classroom after school most days in high school, or at least she did until this year. She's a senior with lots of AP courses and art she's always having to finish afternoons in the school's art wing. She still comes by some, mostly to take my money or my food, but I'm fine with that, like most dads of seventeen-year-old girls.

Our relationship is changing, of course, and I haven't always seen the changes coming. At a recent school dance – I'm expected to chaperone dances – I left my self-appointed post by the snack table to foray onto the dance floor, and Bethany intercepted me immediately and explained that I made her date nervous. Victoria and she have assured me that I won't be attending this year's prom, and since my principal, whose oldest daughter is a year older than Bethany, is going through similar life changes, I expect I'm off the hook.

But no single event expresses the changes Bethany and I are facing as well as the the fifteen-month college search that ended a couple of weeks ago. I took a keen interest in this project early on, and I had definite ideas about where Bethany should apply to. I knew all along that her college was her choice, but I guess I wasn't willing to let her make it.

Years ago, I wasn't sure Bethany would have so many good college choices. Bethany struggled with elementary school. She was diagnosed with ADD, and she had special accommodations to help her through. I remember visiting her second grade classroom on some parent visit day. All the other students sat at their desks, and there was Bethany, shy as she was, standing up by her desk the entire hour, hard at work.

Bethany is a born artist and would have done well in a less structured setting. School did not play to her strengths, and she hated it for years and often came home crying. One day, though, a middle school guidance counselor visited her elementary school, painted a glowing picture of college, and warned her audience that they wouldn't get there without applying themselves in middle school and high school.

Bethany took the message to heart. She found ways to accommodate school just at the time the school was taking away its accommodations for her. She was diagnosed with anxiety in eighth or ninth grade, and she'll have to tell the story herself of how she has struggled with it and has largely overcome it in high school. She worked hard and took more and more challenging courses as the years went on. She learned the game of school and reconciled it with her perfectionism and her need to learn things her own way and at her own speed, which is slow.

Sometimes she had to be pushed. Her parents, uncles, aunts, and grandparents confronted her one evening at our annual beach vacation over her choice to eschew honors English during her upcoming ninth grade year. She ended up accepting a $5-a-head bribe to take the course. She's been in honors English ever since, and for three years in high school she was the top student in her English class. The girl who was placed in the lowest reading circle in elementary school got close to a perfect reading comprehension score on her SAT last fall.

Throughout most of middle and high school, however, art was her safety valve, the course that made most everything else palatable. She got really jazzed about pottery, metalworking and jewelry-making, and she began to understand that small, three-dimensional art of some kind would be part of her life's work. Most of high school art is of the two-dimensional variety, however, so Bethany put off the idea of developing her main passion until college.

Along the way, she discovered new interests that complement her art. She and I have always read a lot of books and poetry to each other, and her love of literature and writing has grown. She also loves biology and psychology, and she has done well in both of those fields. I love the social sciences and have no skill and little interest in science; literature is where Bethany and I intersect. But she has become interested in and proficient in many more areas of learning than I ever was, and her success contributed to the college-search drama that came to a head late last month.

We have visited a dozen colleges since spring of last year, mostly state colleges that seemed good matches for her interests, her temperament, and our limited teacher incomes. Most schools had something she liked very much, and it was fun to watch her process her experiences and refine what she wanted from a college. She went, for example, from preferring a medium-sized university to preferring a small college with some heritage and beauty to it. But her chief concern never changed – during each visit, she always took a long, hard look at the college's studio art program.

This past year's family beach week came in the middle of Bethany's search. Instead of bribing her we had done four years earlier, her extended family brainstormed with her about possible colleges. We poured over three catalogs of colleges we had picked up at the Island Bookstore at the beginning of our trip. It got Bethany, Victoria, and me looking beyond Virginia to colleges we couldn't afford without need-based grants and academic scholarships. My father suggested a strong, small liberal arts college that seemed to fit Bethany very well on paper. Earlier that day I had met a graduate of that school for the first time, a clerk at the bookstore, a young English teacher with whom I had talked shop and from whom I had accepted a recommendation to buy an excellent poetry anthology. I went back to the bookstore and talked with him about the school; he couldn't have been more informative or enthusiastic about his four years there.

We packed up the car and made the seven-hour drive to that college during a break in school this past November. Most college student bodies seem to develop a personality that can be caricatured; at least, the ones we read about did. This school's did, too, and it fit Bethany better than any one we had visited. The students there love to talk about what they're learning, and they learn for learning's sake with little regard for their eventual careers. They are a little nerdy, but in an endearing way, I suppose, and they are, as a whole, unpretentious. No formal dress and no overriding frat scene. The college has a high professor-to-student ratio, a very well-respected and friendly faculty, a strong writing program (one of the few colleges that has students write across the curriculum, as we pedagogues say), a gorgeous setting, fine facilities, and (this is unusual) good food, from the students' point of view. It also has fewer students than Bethany's high school. The students are not cut-throat but supportive of one another despite the school's academic reputation – a very important factor for Bethany, who withers in a competitive environment over the long run. She felt at home, she said – a feeling she hadn't had up to that point. But she went away disappointed with the college because its art facilities were nothing like the art college she had visited the previous spring.

Those facilities were unbelievable. Their art program spans seventeen buildings, most of them devoted to studio arts. They have a huge building dedicated to the BFA studio arts candidates' first year – the “foundations” year – and they have BFA degree programs for things as specialized as fabrics, jewelry and metals, glass, and ceramics. Bethany seemed so completely in her element when she visited there, and we visited that school three times. She had a long interview with one of the school's deans and several conversations with professors and an administrator, all of them responsive and friendly. And it is the top art school in the country for one of the fields of art Bethany is most interested in pursuing, and one of the top ten in all of the other fields she's interested in.

Bethany applied regular decision to six colleges and universities this past December, generally following the usual advice: apply to one or two “stretch” schools, one or two schools that fit your GPA and board scores, and one or two “fallback” schools. She first heard from the art school, which responded in December, long before the April 1 response date most colleges assign themselves. They admitted her into their honors program with a full tuition and fees scholarship. The excitement around here was unbelievable. Although the program wasn't as strong academically as the other colleges she had applied to, the other schools' studio arts programs and facilities paled in comparison to this one's. The honors program would help compensate for the school's lower academic standards since it had a limited enrollment, small classes, and the school's best professors teaching the classes. Bethany began to see herself going there, and the steady drumbeat of correspondence from the school raised her interest level even more. I was very impressed with the school and only encouraged Bethany's interest in the school.

We learned by late March that she was wait-listed by one school but was accepted by the others, including her top three choices besides the art school. The two private colleges she had applied to offered her significant financial aid grants, and one of them – the one we visited in November – offered her a nice scholarship as well. The excitement level around here was unimaginable. We knew she had done well in school and on her boards, but we didn't know, particularly in this year when the number of applications to many colleges spiked by five or ten percent or more, how Bethany would fare. She got in some colleges to which some of her friends had submitted strong applications based on prior years' admission statistics but to which they were ultimately not admitted.

Last month Bethany essentially narrowed her choice to a decision between the private, liberal arts college we had visited in November and the art college. The differences between the schools were significant, and they represented two large aspects of Bethany. The liberal arts college represented her late-blooming academic success and her newly understood interest in literature and science. The art college represented what she was born to do – to make art.

I was beside myself with joy that she had gotten into the liberal arts college, and I quickly decided that it was where she needed to go. I reasoned that she could always get her MFA metals and jewelry degree after graduating from there. Victoria agreed with me; she believed that, overall, Bethany would be happier in a small college where students loved learning for learning's sake. So I began implementing a propaganda campaign – subtle, by my standards, and fully in line with her prerogative to choose, I felt – to persuade Bethany to choose the liberal arts college.

Next posts:

Part 2, in which God gets my attention through textual insight

Part 3, in which Bethany selects a college

[Above photo is of Pine Cone, oil and pastel, by Bethany]

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

One day tells its tale to another, and one night imparts knowledge to another.

- Psalm 19:2 (from the Psalter in The Book of Common Prayer)

The song of the second creek, with its one note, / plays over and over.

- from “Images from the Kingdom of Things” by Charles Wright

I still find copies of Forward Day by Day in my sister’s bathroom in my parents’ house to which my wife and I return year after year, first each year as a layover on our way to the extended family’s annual beach trip on the Outer Banks and second for Thanksgiving, during which I always have seconds and not thirds but second seconds (seconds: didactic, even sage, like many Southern euphemisms: everything beyond the first is seconds; that is, everything is seconds).

Little by little and years ago, my mother took over the drawers and cabinet built around my sister’s sink, my sister having moved out long ago, married long before I married, and it probably wasn’t long before the feeling of sacrilege Mother felt at the notion of filling Sarah’s empty drawers was replaced by the understanding that the house was a house and not a museum.  We stay in Sarah’s old room because it’s the biggest, second in size only to my parents’.  I think of Mom reading Day by Day on Sarah’s can, not day by day but now and again, falling behind over and over, catching up bit by bit, the same way I do with the daily devotional I read year after year.

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

My first niece, who was born around Christmas, was heralded on Good Friday, and my mother, on her knees at St. Andrew’s, grinned madly as they stripped the altar.

°°°

The world is a desolate garden,
No distillation of downed grasses,
                                    no stopping the clouds, coming at us one by one.

°°°

Carter, Bethany’s boyfriend, loves to express his embarrassment over Bethany’s behavior in envi sci two weeks ago.  During the saddest, most tragic part of whatever picture the class was watching that day, Bethany began to cackle uncontrollably.

She was reading a book.

°°°

And the Lord said, Whereunto then shall I liken the men of this generation? and to what are they like? They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.

°°°

“Mr. Washburn offered to nominate you for the Caitlin Ratliff Scholarship,” I told Bethany this morning.

“What’s that?”

“An annual award for a senior who has overcome a lot of stuff.”

“He never taught me.  That’s nice of him.  Who’s Caitlin Ratliff?”

“A Stenson graduate who died of cancer two years ago during her first year at college.”

“That’s so sad . . .”

“Yeah.  She got a standing ovation when her name was called at graduation.  She had lost a leg by that point.”

“That’s so sad . . .”

“Yeah.”

The first italicized quote above is from Charles Wright’s “Images from the Kingdom of Things,” a poem in his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using this poem.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.  The second italicized quote is from Luke 7 (King James Version). 

Flowing water takes on form only when it meets resistance; then water shows its drapery-like curves. Form in poetry, too, has something to do with resistance. . . . Words resist being put into meter; language resists being set in parallel beat patterns; a thought resists being asked to ride on seven or eights sounds only. The more limits we set in the poem, the more resistance we have set up, and the more energy the poem produces to push against those limits. When the Anglo-Salon poets decided on two main consonants only in a line, they were laying rocks in the stream, and the language develops tremendous rhythmical strength to object to that decision.

                   -- Robert Bly, Selected Poems

My high school journalism teacher said that the reader’s eye wants to take a certain path around the front page. Our layouts were neither to fight the eye nor to surrender to it.

My eye is as rollicking as a silver ball propelled by Charles Wright’s bumpers. There’s enough space in “Images from the Kingdom of Things” to send my eye arcing from one word or phrase to another on the other side or end of the poem. On a good day I get at least two extra balls and three bonus rounds.  (In reading poetry, there are images and sounds you see and hear only by keeping your hands to the same hips for a long time.)

Bly argues that poetic forms -- sonnets, villanelles, and the like -- and consistent meter force language into places it doesn’t want to go, and that the language gains energy thereby. I feel the white water in “Images,” but it’s from the words hanging onto one another instead of onto an imposed-upon form. In “Images,” form follows function, and form is all the more elegant for it. Besides, “Images” looks like white water working through black rock, if you see the energy -- the white water -- in the white spaces instead of in the black words.. What sonnet or villanelle does that?

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

"Images"'s first couplet’s feminine rhymes catch my ear: “unshadowed meadow” and “shallow puddles.” And anapestic romp at the end of the second line resolving in a hard e that I can fully exaggerate: “liquid and loose in the trees.”

The last couplet, too. I count seven distinct r / w sounds in these four words: “word warriors never return.” I say them in as low and slow a voice as I can, trying to sound like the deep-throated Ents in the Lord of the Rings movies.

Wright creates the poem’s highest speed with short vowels in “Left-leaning a bit in its odd angle to the world,” in which “world” deploys the parachute. The sentence comes down to earth suddenly, settling after two bounces: “Abandoned, unusable.”

This poem lets you exaggerate as much as you like. It’s playfully over-dramatic, befitting a poem in which pines adjust detonators and broken cloud cover lets moonlight through in scattered, blanched bones.

I don’t let my kids bring in their music when we do poetry. It’s not that I don’t think lyrics can be poetry; indeed, I can’t tell if a particular song’s lyrics amount to poetry because the music drowns out all but one song. I just read the kids some poetry, have others read some poetry, have forensics students perform poetry, have the kids read good poetry sites, have the kids get their hands on small poetry volumes, and (just recently) have the kids memorize and recite poetry. They’ve got to hear their own music in the poems.

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

Night and winter and death are present in day and spring and life, respectively, and our distillations won’t hold up before time. Night is present mornings, “still liquid and loose in the trees.”  Winter is present in spring: the “snow crown on Mt. Henry is still white.”  (Time of day is even present in time of year: “Down here, in their green time [spring], it’s past noon.”)  And death is present in life: the “detonators” that release the pollen release the yellow dust representing the never-to-return word warriors in the final stanza.

The still in “still loose” and “still white” is the moving-still and the endless-still of repetition – the cycling days and seasons, the repetition of the clouds “one by one” and the stream’s “over and over.”  Our distillations (dis-still – get it?) – our funeral rites – for downed grasses?  We'd do nothing else.  Our distillation of the creek into a song?  Frustrated by its one note and its endless repetition.

Our distillation of poetry itself?

Bethany was in tears last night over her practice timed essay.  She was trying to follow the standard strategy: read the two poems once over, then read them more deeply looking for examples of and effects from the literary terms in the prompt.  Make a quick outline and a detailed thesis statement, and write an insightful, cogent, and interesting comparison essay based on them.

But Bethany can’t get over her insight.  When she starts writing, her insight doesn’t understand that it is relegated to the “prewrite,” and it increases and swamps the paper and its organization.  When she tries to fit the new insight into what she has written up to that point, it seems to want to take her paper in new and better directions.  The problem is, there’s no time for another draft.  The bigger problem is that she has her AP Lit exam in a couple of days.

The biggest problem, of course, is that timed writing has little to do with what writers do.  It counteracts skills that make for good writing, such as learning to use writing as a way of thinking and learning how to revise.

I remember writing disorganized essays in college.  Most of my English profs didn’t mind, though, because at least I had something to say.  My freshman comp TA gave me an A on my first assignment even though he wrote that I was “perverse and extreme in [my] manipulation of evidence.”  (I’m still that way.)  He liked my writing, and he often read it to the class with relish.  He didn’t care that I was a disorganized writer who couldn’t have written a five-paragraph essay if I had to.  He encouraged me.

I encouraged Bethany, and I commiserated with her about the premium colleges and, consequently, high schools put on timed writing.  I told her it was good and natural to find oneself in a wash of insight during the first draft.  (She really saw it as a fault she needed to rid herself of.)  I described to her my project to read “Images” deeply this month, and I described some stuff I had seen in “Images” that I had missed the first thirty-five or forty times I had read or recited it.

Then she got back on the clock.

After she finished her paper – well, after her time was up, anyway – she took me through the poems and showed me all of the cool stuff she had discovered in them that had been fouling up her paper’s organization.

In celebration of SoloPoMo (Solo Poem Month), I hope to blog every day in May using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I’m not sure how many of these posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some connection with the poem each time, if only felt.

Dave at Via Negativa read and blogged about a different book or a chapbook of poetry every day this past month.  It was his way of celebrating National Poetry Writing Month, or NaPoWriMo, which most adherents celebrate by writing a poem a day.  In his recap, out yesterday, Dave found that he had read six Pennsylvania poets and eight poets from other cultures over April, and he reflected on the value of both local roots and international influence to a sustainable national poetry:

Personally, I think poets and poetry readers need to become simultaneously more aware of diverse traditions from abroad and more rooted in our local and regional geographies if we want to stay engaged with the larger world, and want to have a chance at reaching those who don’t currently read poetry, and “die miserably every day/ for lack /of what is found there,” as William Carlos Williams put it . . .

Dave concluded his post by suggesting that others may wish to try his experiment next April as sort of inaugural InPoReMo, or International Poetry Reading Month, and even though I have no time for such a glorious thing, I signed right up.

Then dale’s comment on Dave’s post picked up and expanded on the idea of reading locally for a month, and I thought, yeah, I’m doing a little of that!  Charles Wright and Lisa Russ Sparr both live in Charlottesville, my old college town, which is only about a hundred miles of where I live now.  I could also learn about what’s going on in Loudoun County, where I live, and in neighboring Clarke and Fairfax Counties.

dale’s comment went on to suggest the importance of memorizing poetry for him, and I thought, hey, I’mmemorizing a poem or two for the first time in a while.  I can start my own way of celebrating NaPoWriMo, just as Dave did.  How about LoPoMeMo -- Local Poetry Memorization Month?  You memorize two poems during the month, each by a different local poet, and record or video yourself reciting it.  Or something of that nature.

The important thing is to get the best-sounding abbreviation.  I’ve never participated in National Poetry Writing Month because of the staggering amount of work writing a poem a day sounded like, yet the tone-deaf abbreviation NaPoWriMo may have had something to do with my lack of participation, too.  But I could do InPoReMo.  As I told Dave, the abbreviation sounds like my grandmother’s old clock chiming the half hour.  Or like a pretentious doorbell.  And my LoPoMeMo brings back warm memories of Topo Gigio, for whom I’d nod through forty-five minutes of acrobatics and music numbers to see each week on the Ed Sullivan Show when I was young.

But I don’t want to wait until next April to start SoloPoMo -- Solo Poem Month.  My plan is to blog once a day this month using Charles Wright’s poem “Images from the Kingdom of Things” from his 2006 volume Scar Tissue.  I just polished off memorizing it while cutting the grass this afternoon.  If Dave can read approximately twelve hundred poems in a month, surely I can read one.

I’m officially starting yesterday, May 1, by postdating my more recent post on Charles Wright three weeks.  I’ll scan the poem and post it here tomorrow.  Most of it is in what is now yesterday’s post, anyway.

This project has my fingerprints all over it: it’s derivative of another, more talented person’s better idea, it’s overly ambitious (trust me on this one), and it’s late -- a month late -- from the get-go.  My early exuberance may be my eventual downfall, too -- another hallmark of my projects.  If I follow through on this, many of my posts will be short.  I have a lot of schoolwork this month.

I think SoloPoMo could work because I won’t be blogging about “Images,” strictly; I’ll sort of be writing aboutwhatever through “Images.”  In other words, “Images” won’t be so much the object of my writing as it will be a lens, or at least a filter -- one of many, though one of the more obvious ones to me for being one of the latest ones -- through which I’ll see whatever it is I’ll be writing about.

When I was memorizing “Images,” I’d discover its lines in my conscious mind’s background.  When I was thinking about something else or nothing at all, I’d hear parts of the poem in my head like someone else whistling.  I wonder if the poem will have any effect like that in my writing.  I’m not sure how many of the posts will explicitly refer to the poem, but I hope there’ll be some implicit connections, some whistling of the poem through me.

I want to write and not write about “Images from the Kingdom of Things” perhaps the way Charles Wright in that poem is writing and not writing about nature.  “Landscape was never a subject matter,” Wright proclaims, coming from behind the curtain a bit in “The Minor Art of Self-defense,” another poem in Scar Tissue.  “Language was always the subject matter, the idea of God . . .”  So Wright isn’t writing in “Images,” in some sense, about Mt. Henry.  (I assume the second stanza is referring to the Mt. Henry in Montana, the crown of which would be “still white” in spring and which would have lodgepole pines growing on and around it.)  Wright is writing about the “word warriors” who never “return from midnight’s waste and ruin.”  He’s writing about language and about poets, about poets who write about a natural world, a “desolate garden” with “no distillation of downed grasses,” a world where no essence or meaning is compatible with the poet’s urge to distill.

With the poet (or her task) alluded to in the first and last stanzas, it becomes easier to see the poet as the middle stanza’s “old smoke tower / left-leaning a bit with its odd angle to the world, / Abandoned.  Unusable.”  The lodgepole pines’ detonators, adjusted this spring afternoon in disregard of the abandoned tower, implicitly produce the word warrior’s “yellow dust” at the end.  Nature -- the pollen of life and the dust and waste of death -- wins out, and how can even the finest poet hold up against that?

But was nature ever Wright's subject matter?

Maybe one shouldn’t write about language or God without deploying a decoy.  So what am I writing about this month?

 . . . At the base of [the approach of training poets to consider their poems from a reader’s standpoint] is the notion that the writer’s problems are literary.  In truth, the writer’s problems are usually psychological, like everyone else’s.

-- From the introduction to The Triggering Town, by Richard Hugo

. . . To write differently you have to change your life.

-- Robert Bly

A good poet may or may not write poetry, but a consistent poet would never write poetry.  So writes Nobel Prize-winning poet Juan Ramón Jiménez in his 1941 essay “Poetry and Literature”:

In reality the poet, when mute or when writing, is an abstract dancer, and if he writes, it is out of an everyday weakness, for to be truly consistent he ought not to write.  He who ought to write is the literary man.

Unlike poetry, literature is an imitative art tied chiefly to the sense of sight and linked in Jiménez’s mind to painting and sculpture.  As an imitative art, literature is full of contrivances and may attain a kind of perfection; indeed, it becomes more perfect the more artificial and contrived it is.  Poetry, though, is a creative art grounded in simplicity and tied to a poet’s intuition and not to the outward senses. (Because creation is God’s play, a poet is either a god or a god’s medium, Jiménez says; you may decide which.)  Poetry can never be perfect because in its perfection it would go beyond itself, beyond words and into the invisible world that poetry points to.  Presumably, the reader would go there, too, and maybe not return.

A poet traffics in the invisible world of intuition and spirit, which Jiménez defines as “immanent ineffability.” Jiménez has a religious sense of this invisible world, and he falls in with the Book of Hebrews’s formulation that “things which are seen were not made of things which do appear”:

Thus god can be a poet or a poet can be god.  And this is not saying that the universe of the poet is less than that of the god, if we assume that God created the visible and reserves the invisible for himself or as a reward for us and that the poet dispenses with the visible and tarries in the invisible giving what he finds to whomever [sic] may desire it.

I don’t know if Jiménez would find much difference between a mystic and a poet. Poets improve, Jiménez believes, not through writing poetry, necessarily, but through “restlessness and enthusiasm,” qualities that sometimes lead people to a life of mysticism.  Mystics often make fine poets, of course, and many people consider Hafiz, John of the Cross, or Blake, for example, as being both a mystic and a poet. 

But where does poetry fit into a poet’s poet-ness?  Jiménez believes that one is a poet not because one writes poetry, but because one is “an abstract dancer,” someone whose “eyes are not turned outward but within oneself.”  It is not clear from Jiménez’s essay whether a poet writes as part of participating in one’s “dynamic ecstasy” or as a deliberate means of offering the fruit of that ecstasy to others.  But a poet’s poetry is not necessary to his poet-ness; that much is clear.

A poem, then, is a concession to the flesh, an expression of the invisible world both as wonderful and as presumptively egotistical as a saint’s ecstatic levitation.  For his part, a poet who writes poetry risks becoming a kind of Balaam, a gifted mystic whose spirituality can tempt him to play “the literary men’s games, achieving more miracles than they!”

Keeping the calling ahead of the poetry helps the poetry, paradoxically.  Because a poem is secondary to a poet’s calling and experience, a poet learns how to let poems go, which seems to mean that she learns how to keep her hands off of her poem and to let it become a clean expression of the ineffable.  Jiménez likens a literary man’s failed literature to juggled plates that drop on others’ heads.  But a failed poem’s plates “are lost in the infinite because [a poet] is a good friend of space.”  The literary men can fancy that they can “catch poetry, possessing it body and soul, that they have found the heart, the core, and that they have ‘written’ it, ‘realized’ it.”  The poet knows better:

And fortunately poetry is never realized by everyone, it always escapes and the true poet, who is usually an honorable person because he has the habit of living with truth, knows how to let it escape since the state of poetic grace, the dynamic ecstasy, drunken rapture, the unutterable, palpitating miracle from which the essential accent arises, is indeed a form of flight, a passionate form of liberty.

I think Jiménez is saying at least that a poem has a life of its own, that it can take a poet places she never could have expected at the poem’s conception.  (This is not an uncommon idea, of course.)  Our poems are like our children: we are the delivery systems through which they come, but we can hardly lay claim to them.  In fact, poems can prove embarrassing as children, particularly if we insist on seeing them as extensions of ourselves.

A “state of poetic grace,” then, is the poet’s experience of her poet-hood that may neither involve writing a poem nor result in one.  I believe Jiménez would say that a state of grace, in general, is the discovery and experience of the invisible world in the visible one. Some people tend to find this unexpected grace in conversation, some in sex, some in prayer, and some in poetry.  The medium is not important; in fact, it is not even necessary to a mature bon vivant, lover, mystic, or poet.  I didn’t believe that when I was younger, but I think I believe it now.

˚˚˚

Some persuasive essays, particularly ones written by certain poets, must be read in a special environment, I think.  An essay that would melt on logic’s kitchen counter like a carton of ice cream must be moved to its own freezer.  If we bundle up and visit the essay in its dark, natural habitat, we’d feel its sinuous, internal logic the way one might feel, say, a poet’s experience and his reflection on that experience negotiating with each other into a poem’s structure.  In a persuasive essay, of course, such internal logic may indicate parody or (in Jiménez’s case)  resemble madness: flights of insight and respect for the unconscious replace airtight argument, and yet the poet-as-essayist has marshaled arguments instead of poem-like impressions.  But, in the poet’s case, he has created a world as he does when he writes a poem.

Jiménez’s notion that a poet with the highest respect for the invisible world she visits would never write a poem evolves from the essay’s internal logic.  Certainly Jiménez followed his own advice imperfectly, at best, considering how much poetry he wrote.  But his poems are often spare and generally benefit from a certain reluctance to do more than to point, almost mutely, at something ineffable or at least invisible. Jiménez’s paradox finds a certain home in me – maybe in my own freezer of internal logic.  Even though I can never thaw Jiménez’s paradox without watching it perish, I can keep it there with my snowballs I’ve collected over a childhood of winters.

[Jiménez’s essay caught my eye because of the extent to which it decouples poets and poetry and because of the religious or mystical approach Jiménez takes in decoupling them.  As my longtime (and sometimes longsuffering) readers know, I’m interested in – even obsessed by – the relationship between poetry and silence as well as the relationship between poetry and poet.  I found Jiménez’s essay “Poetry and Literature” in The Selected Writings of Juan Ramón Jiménez, translated by H. R. Hays.]

Compare Jeep’s new tag line – its content and order – with my favorite line from Paul’s speech on Mars Hill (Acts 17):

I guess if Jesus, CEO, has come, can Paul, CMO, be far behind?

*New American Standard’s version of the line, which I otherwise quote here, ends with “exist,” but the NAS acknowledges in its notes that the original word is literally translated “are."

In response to this.

Our soft voices must be a tonic to the dead,
                                                fading like kids on a long trip.
Those nights,
our parents spoke the tongues of angels, and headlamps
                             flickered across their dark necks.

Too still, I thought, the graveyards we passed fermented
           too still, too still the crushing dead.

My siblings settled, composted at my sides,
                  sopped scalps, hot rot.     I watched
our lattice of seat belts cross, uncross itself.

And I saw moths and streetlamps streak the windshield
ahead and trouble the black blades.

                             I heard the locusts’ and
the engine’s hum, love’s soft simulacrum, next of kin. And
I felt, I know, the stiff resurrections of railroad crossings.

My last drink was my parents’ thought, black,
                                                              burbling black water,
lifted on a stick from the front seat.

My honors classes are reciting poetry.  Each student had to pick a poem from PoetryOutLoud.org’s large collection, and she had to memorize it.  I memorized “Thinking of Winter at the Beginning of Summer” from Charles Wright’s volume Black Zodiac.  It’s the most memorizing I’ve done in a couple of decades, sad to say.  It’s also the first time I’ve ever made my students memorize poetry.  Here are some observations:

1. My daughter Bethany knows the poem by heart as well as I do though she’s never read it.  She just kept repeating it to herself as I repeated it to myself in her presence.
2. My son Warren told Bethany and me that it’s time for us to find a new poem.
3. As I expected, I woke up some mornings with single lines from the poem on my mind.
4. Walking around downtown Richmond Saturday, I found the poem running rather loudly in the background of my mind.  I didn’t expect this.  Discovering it there was like discovering that I had been listening to music in a store without realizing it.
5. PoetryOutLoud.org has two or three great lesson plans for getting kids into memorizing poetry.
6. None of my students complained about it, and I have some real complainers.  (I did make the assignment a minimum of seventy words, so students were free to memorize just a part of a larger poem.)
7. My brainier honors class rushed through their performances, on the whole.  My more talkative and less studious class did much better, overall, really throwing themselves into their recitations.
8. I was as nervous as the kids when I recited my poem to the class.  (I admitted it, of course.)
9. I really expect kids to thank me for this when I’m old or dead.  “I forgot everything else I learned in high school, but I can still recite Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ that that fussy English teacher – what was his name? – made me memorize.”

Awake, is all.

Rising without inspiration, revelation, recollection, premonition, venture, horror, or scripture is a gift.  I like to wake up empty & dull.

I like waking up with a soul of ice, undripping with dreams sloshed over the sluice of sentience.

I like to awaken blank and bare, without mother or father, past or future, book or speech, laurel or thorn.

You don’t see Jesus prancing around the flight deck after he rose.

The poverty of sunrise.  Last night evicted yesterday, dropped its shit on the street.

The orphancy of waking, the umbilical cut from a dying dream.

Yesterday is morning breath.

The screaming poverty of birth.  Every time I write, I’m born again.

Yesterday is afterbirth.

The poverty of resurrection: even the grave is empty.

1
A slab of cloud hisses on dawn’s gas stove. Across the vale and atop the steeple, an ornate, Latin electric chair glints.

2
All in white, the candidate knelt before the gallows, awaiting the bishop’s hands. Around her neck, a sterling noose, her godparents’ gift.

3
The megachurch tore out its cup holders and cushioned seats and installed 1,300 electric chairs. The service was amped that Sunday.

4
Our parish is low church. When we genuflect before the gibbet, we choke ourselves with just one hand.

5
“For the word of the firing squad is to those who are perishing foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is the caliber of God.” [SRV]

6
“If any will come after me, let him deny himself, shoot up his lethal injection, and follow me.” [SRV]

1

Bethany, a
tree, and I

2

The hum of
lines. The clipped
speech of pines.

3

pine :

bone

china

4

Time is getting out of hand.

5

Green hum
hangs off
wet gums

6

The pine is
the pine. I
am more
myself.

7

The clean
line of
pines

8

Birch, if
anything.

9

Pines clipped
by semis:
still pines

Ren (Katherine) Powell, an American and a poet now living in Norway, works there with Yemeni poet Mansur Rajih to translate some of his poetry, which is written in Arabic, into English.  Powell and Rashi both speak Norwegian as a second language.

The following is part of Powell’s account, given earlier this month to Dave Bonta on his Woodrat Podcast (episode 9), of their work together:

Powell:  What we wind up with – again, whether you call them translations or adaptations – I feel most of the time when I work with him, I’m translating his body language.  Very often, we do physical metaphors.  His word that he’ll pick in Norwegian would be a word that I could translate as “smother,” “strangle,” “suffocate” – all of those kind of things.  “Which word do you want?,” and I have to act them out for him, and then he acts them out for me.  So it’s very physical when we work together!

Bonta:  It’s very interesting . . .

Powell:  It’s a nice way to work, and I think it’s very accurate.  I work this way with my students, too.  I teach, and I don’t always have the vocabulary that I need, or they don’t have the vocabulary that we need to be able to communicate my ideas, and most of the time we wind up hopping around like monkeys.

“They say, ‘Write what you know.’ I wrote about what I wanted to know . . .” — Chris Bolgiano on Woodrat Podcast 7. 

We smile only in self-recognition.  We write because we don’t smile enough.

The right hand knoweth not, but writes of what’s left.

St. Paul distinguishes between an ignorant sin and a willful sin.  If you sin willfully, of course, you’re in more danger.

Even if I become blind
but I can see you

I use something like this distinction when my students question the need to learn syntax.  You can break the rules ignorantly or willfully, I respond.  If you break them willfully, you’re more dangerous.

Even if I become deaf
but I can hear your voice

“The more you are aware of the syntax you move, see, and write in, the better control you have and the more you can step out of it when you need to.  Actually, by breaking open syntax, you often get closer to the truth of what you need to say.” – Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

But it’s hard for most of my ninth graders to break the rules well.

I can walk to you without feet

Diane broke the rules well, and she did it ignorantly, so she broke my rule well, too.  She was an ESL student.  Diana submitted this poem two years ago for our class’s print-on-demand anthology.  When someone pointed out to her that her poem’s grammar or syntax or what-have-you wasn’t right, she asked me to remove the poem from the anthology’s proof.  I somehow persuaded her to let me print it.

I can say your name without mouth

These lines bristle with muscle from tearing the syntactical fiber, something she practiced every day.  In that way, learning English for her may have been like strength training.  So in each couplet, the first line hits me coming, and the second line hits me coming.

Even if my arms break
but I will catch you

I will catch you by heart like hands

I’ve lost touch with Diane.  I republish her poem here only as a means of critiquing it.  I don’t want to violate her copyright.

What power can sometimes come from forcing one language through another, from having to live that kind of violence.  Or how much we learn about diction and syntax from living around a toddler learning to talk.

I guess Diane will lose some of her muscle as she gets older, if muscle is the body’s way of recovering from training’s trauma.  But maybe she’ll develop a curveball and a slider to complement her heat.

Even if my heart stops
then my brain will sing for you

But how could you go back?  I just read The Catcher in the Rye.  I loved it.  How did he do that?  What was it like, living like that that enough to write that?

Even if my brain burns out,
then my blood will hug you

my lady.

What is it about the best writing from children?  It feels like mankind’s purity, like ethnic cleansing, like children’s armies to draw lessons from it for the betterment of adult writers.  Our ideas of becoming as children tend to exploit both children and adults.

Better to live in the poem, as I’d live in a house of any age.

Sometimes, hiking up a spring mountain, I slow through a cold presence, a ghost disassociated from any wind, the busy loam above me warm with ants.  It’s not old winter's residuum, either.

This cold has eyes, not menacing or even intent ones, but the limpid eyes of the cold dead, the kind of eyes that feel every nape’s tooth marks.  This cold moves as slowly as black water, silently as the far side of fish: unpied, canopied – the crosshatch of hawks.

My cold is a watcher and a gift, the grave’s tossed coin, the dispossession of stone.

Father Time, grant your servants grace to celebrate Leap Day this year when it has again become unfashionable to do so, and grant us strength to accept the world’s derision for our spending the long balance of another year, from our employers’ and teachers’ and perhaps the IRS's impious viewpoint, a day late.  You teach us that Leap Day is not a moveable feast, and that, assuming it were for the sake of countering the reformers’ sophistic arguments, no moveable feast is entirely removable.  For it is not for us, O Father, to repeat, remove, reorder, reform, or re-anything; it is given unto man once to die, and our days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle as the sparks fly upward.

Without Your Leap Day, the world loses an entire month since March becomes merely February’s long shadow and not worthy of its own calendar page because each date is assigned to the same days as in February; Tuesday, March second is just Tuesday’s second February second, Groundhog Day’s own shadow: the further extension of this year’s long winter and a judgment upon us for our second uncelebration of Leap Day in as many years.

We say "loses" and not "gains" a month, O Father, because the point of Groundhog Day isn’t that the day got repeated but that so many days didn’t happen – a month’s worth, it seems like; the movie seemed a bit long – and so a month’s days of our lives, as tiresome and repetitious as they may sometimes seem, went unspent and unremembered but by Bill Murray and by You, Father, and we cannot un-anything as easily as we cannot re-anything, as You know.

To gain even a day is to gain all days, O Father.  It is the day after, after all, that is after all – that is, that is eternity.  Shavout is seven weeks and a day after Firstfruits.  Sukkot, that mysterious feast celebrated by all nations at the end of it all in Zechariah, lasts a week and a day – eight days – as if the eight were reclining at Seder or at real analysis.  Let us cry out with Augustine for eternity “where the day shall not pass away but shall endure, a day which no yesterday precedes nor a morrow ousts.”  So a month and a day, Father.

Forgive the world for removing and uncelebrating Leap Day, the only uncelebrated feast that disdays and benights in its uncelebration.

Will I lament mulch sales,
           Girl Scout shortbreads, other
minor feasts I leave undone?

Still
the church -- a race that settled
oval tracks soon enough -- kept my calendar.

Beyond Safeway doors, mounds
of ringworm snow rot
           like the children's quail in February sun.

It's hard to be a moment's soil when your
concept of time erodes more each year.

A half word, a young word rising: the crumbs
           we leave the dead who flit
           past back yards
a half year ago or hence, when
           our backs are at the window.

The poets and painters I like best stand midway between day and night, between tight focus and unmitigated blur, between object and inspiration. Take Bonnard and Hopkins, for instance.

One might describe a painting’s emphasis on its object as a kind of daylight, as if the painter would have been pleased by a viewer’s remark about how realistic a face or an orange or a skyline was. On the other hand, one might describe a painting’s emphasis on abstraction – abstraction not in the stylistic sense but in the painting’s effect on the viewer – and intuition as kind of darkness, as if the painter would have been pleased by a viewer’s remark about how the painting conjured up a mood or insight seemingly at odds with the subject matter. Such a mood or insight may lead a viewer to see the subject matter in a new way or, even better, to transcend the subject matter and to join the painter in viewing the objects of the physical world as a palette for a more substantial world of intuition and feeling through the painting’s gateway of impression or intimation that leads from the object to the mood or insight.

Bonnard got the gist of his object but left it recognizable to compete with its own essence or, even better, with the painting’s own inscape. In other words, Bonnard’s viewer watches a struggle between the painting’s object and the painting itself. And this daylight and darkness fight it out in such a way that both win and that the viewer learns what it means to see and perhaps to participate in a physical world in harmony with a spiritual one through a kind of faith that leads to understanding.

For Bonnard, the painting’s execution was a struggle between its object and the painter’s original idea, or inspiration. According to Bonnard, “The presence of the object, of the motif, is extremely distracting for the painter at the moment of painting. Since the point of departure is an idea, the presence of the object invariably subjects the artist to the risk of being so influenced by the immediate view that he loses sight of the original idea . . .”

I see Bonnard working out this daylight and darkness in every painting I’ve seen of his, but it’s easiest for me to see this struggle in his interiors and his nudes. White Interior, an example of the former, permits the exotic exterior seen through the interior’s door and window in the painting’s upper-right corner to struggle to assert itself as an exterior; at first the outdoors could appear as some stuff in a cabinet or as part of the room’s décor made to balance the dark pot and plant in the upper-left corner. Likewise, the figure bending beside the table struggles to differentiate herself from the carpet. But neither the object nor the composition wins (at least, that’s how it seems to me); instead, the object and the inspiration are both enhanced.

Bonnard was a priest who had to live in his dark inspiration at the same time that his eyes were fully open to the bright, physical world. He protected his inspiration from his object even as he allowed himself to be overwhelmed by that object. For Bonnard, neither the spiritual nor the physical could win in any sense, for both would have shriveled if one were to preclude the other or if one were to serve merely as an adjunct of or prop for the other. As a result of this struggle, Bonnard’s paintings represent, for me, a mature vision.

Hopkins, on the other hand, was not a priest but a debaucher. Like Bonnard, Hopkins had equal respect for his bright object and his dark inspiration, but because he was a poet, he couldn’t have been a priest in the sense I describe. A poet doesn’t hold true to or harbor an initial, dark inspiration or idea while doing art (in their case, writing); instead, a poet loses his initial inspiration in the process of writing poetry. Part of the fun of writing poetry is discovering what the poem has to say, and that saying may have little to do with the poem’s initial calling or the poet’s first idea. The poet, then, is not faithful to his fillip.  The poet merely uses his initial inspiration to lead him inside the poem, which, unlike a painting, can have a life of its own in which darkness and light intermingle. The poet seduces his first inspiration and then leaves it in favor of the poem that inspiration brought on. My favorite poets are debauchers in this sense: men and women who compose verse in their heads during sex, people who pick up the pen at the onset of contemplatio.

As a sketch artist, Hopkins acted like a poet. Hopkins was an artist from a family of artists; two of his siblings were professional artists. But Hopkins’s art served his poetry, in a way, and his frequent and promising sketches were rarely if ever fully developed. “Having once discovered the secret inscape of what he has been observing, he is impatient to move on to the next subject,” his biographer Paul Mariani says in Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (47). Hopkins used his art to discover an affinity he shared with anything created, organic or inorganic. Hopkins didn’t hold his inspiration before his object as the priestly Bonnard did; instead, he sketched his object until he found its inspiration, and then he left off. His relationship with his subject matter was undeveloped and short-lived simply because he was an effective poet.

A painter’s object can distract him from his first idea, Bonnard warned. But poetry is itself distraction from the poet’s fillip, that is, from his first idea, from his inspiration, from his reason for picking up his pen. Bonnard’s inspiration came before he picked up a brush, and the rest was priesthood. Hopkins had to have two inspirations, though: the first would come before he picked up his pen and the second would come while he was inside his poem. He had to forsake the first for the second; he was a poet.

Hopkins pined after a certain kind of fillip. He found lots of it in the countryside and language of Wales where he wrote some of his most famous sonnets, but he found none of it in the slums of industrial Liverpool where he served as a Jesuit priest. He could only compose music in Liverpool, and he complained that his muse had otherwise forsaken him there. He longed for the fillip he found in unspoiled nature, of course, not for nature’s own sake but for the poetry that would result from it.

I do not mean to suggest that Hopkins was insincere in his paeans to nature or God. He wasn’t. His theology was built on a Scotist, incarnate view of God in nature that was not favored by his Jesuit superiors and probably cost him his fourth year of study and his career as a Professed Jesuit. He paid dearly for the views his poems get across.

But it was the inspiration within the poem that meant everything to Hopkins the poet, not the inspiration that led to the poem, as necessary as that was. In a letter to Alexander Baillie, a lawyer friend of his whom he had kept up with from his Oxford days, Hopkins made a distinction between the poetry of inspiration and what he termed Parnassian verse (not the French school of Parnassian poets). Inspired poetry comes from “a mood of great, abnormal in fact, acuteness, either energetic or receptive,” Hopkins wrote. Most verse is Parnassian, however, and is “not in the highest sense poetry”:

Parnassian then is that language which genius speaks as fitted to its exaltation, and place among other genius, but does not sing . . . in its flights. Great men, poets I mean, have each their own dialect as it were of Parnassian, formed generally as they go on writing, and at last, -- this is the point to be marked, -- they can see things in this Parnassian way and describe them in this Parnassian tongue, without further effort or inspiration. In a poet’s particular kind of Parnassian lies most of his style, of his manner, of his mannerism if you like.

To Hopkins, Shakespeare had the highest inspiration-to-Parnassian ratio of the major English poets; Wordsworth had the lowest. Hopkins, then, did not wish to develop his own style; he wanted, in accordance with his own poetics, to write inspired poetry.

I suggested before that Hopkins’s poetry, like Bonnard’s painting, stands midway between object and inspiration – that object and inspiration intermingle in Hopkins’s poetry, in fact – and I am almost ready to say what I mean by that. I’ve dwelt on Hopkins’s inspiration, but now I must address the object of his poetry. The object of Hopkins’s poetry is neither nature nor God nor despair but speech. For Hopkins the poet, nature, God, or despair is simply the fillip that leads to poetry. That fillip of nature or God or despair also survives as the meaning of Hopkins’s poetry (fillip rarely survives in any sense in most modern lyric poetry), but they are not the object of his poetry. Instead, speech itself is Hopkins’s object. (This is not true for all poets, though all poets deal in words.) Consider Hopkins’s definition of poetry:

Poetry is speech framed for contemplation of the mind by the way of hearing or speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning. Some matter and meaning is essential to it but only as an element necessary to support and employ the shape which is contemplated for its own sake. (Poetry is in fact speech only employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake – and therefore the inscape must be dwelt on. . . .

Poetry is “over and above meaning, at least the grammatical, historical, and logical meaning.” If the words become invisible in the transmission of the meaning, it’s prose and not poetry. Hopkins’s vision of poetry sounds like “art for art’s sake,” and it is. But it is an artistic struggle for humanity’s sake.

Applying Hopkins’s theory to his poetry, then, we find that its meaning is nature, God, or despair, but its object is language. Glenn Everett defines Hopkins’s idea of inscape as “the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things. . .” For Hopkins, a tree’s inscape is what makes it different from anything else and gives it its unique calling. A Hopkins poem about a tree, though, contains not the inscape of the tree but – borrowing from the above passage – “the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake.”

To say that object and inspiration intermingle in Hopkins’s poetry, therefore, is to say that speech and speech’s inscape intermingle in it. This is done through repetition of sound found particularly in rhythm, assonance, rhyming, and the repetition of words. Consider Hopkins’s entire parenthetical digression in his essay “Poetry and Verse”:

(Poetry is in fact speech employed only to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake – and therefore the inscape must be dwelt on. Now if this can be done without repeating it once of the inscape will be enough for art and beauty and poetry but then at least the inscape must be understood as so sounding by itself that it could be copied and repeated. If not / repetition, oftening, over-and-overing, aftering of the inscape must take place in order to detach it to the mind and in this light poetry is speech which afters and oftens its inscape, speech couched in a repeating figure and verse is a spoken sound having a repeating figure.) [Emphasis and broken syntax original!]

Hopkins treats his objects (language) the way Bonnard treats his objects (nudes, interiors, portraits, etc.). The objects struggle with the inspiration. Bonnard’s bending figure in White Interior is at once fully herself and fully integrated into – dissolving into – the composition. Hopkins’s innovations – his compound words, his broken syntax, his sprung rhythm, his Welsh consonantal chiming – all threaten to dissolve language; in fact, many of Hopkins’s first critics felt that he had done just that. But the language does not fall apart. It blends with its own inscape and thereby demonstrates that language can be as alive as any tree.

Experiencing an unfamiliar Bonnard paining may involve a few steps: enjoying its colors and composition, struggling to make out familiar objects that alternately assert themselves and collapse back into the painting’s overall impression, and then finally appreciating the participation with Bonnard with this struggle as a participation in Bonnard’s unique vision of the spiritual and physical world. These steps are similar to those taken in experiencing many of Hopkins’s poems.

Experiencing an unfamiliar Hopkins poem may involve enjoying the beauty of its language (As Hopkins repeated to his friends: read it out loud!), struggling with how the diction and syntax compare with “normal” diction and syntax, and then assimilating that struggle into an appreciation of the language’s inscape. Consider how not only Harry Ploughman but the English language itself struggles with its own inscape before coming out triumphant in this, the first stanza of “Harry Ploughman”:

Hard as hurdle arms, with a broth of goldish flue

Breathed round; the rack of ribs; the scooped flank; lank

Rope-over thigh; knee-nave; and barrelled shank—

                Head and foot, shoulder and shank—

By a grey eye’s heed steered well, one crew, fall to;

Stand at stress. Each limb’s barrowy brawn, his thew

That onewhere curded, onewhere sucked or sank—

                             Soared or sank—,

Though as a beechbole firm, finds his, as at a roll-call, rank

And features, in flesh, what deed he each must do—

                             His sinew-service where do.

After Bonnard and Hopkins, many painters and poets have gone over entirely to night and blur and pure inspiration. Twentieth-century American poetry especially has moved away from a full understanding of its object – i.e., language – and has often become obtuse and unapproachable. Without an object, poetry ends up frustrating readers and turning off entire generations of potential readers. A reader won’t bother struggling with a poem if she doesn’t quickly sense that the poem itself struggles and, further, that the poem’s struggle enriches it and promises also to enrich the slow reader.

Snow on snow, you
chariot of Israel:
glory or pallor?

As sugar masks spice,
so life masks life all life:
death to a dying saint.

The new snow
closed his father’s eyes
& bore him out.

An update: This morning, while reading the novelist and poet Mary Elizabeth Coleridge’s preface to The Last Poems of Richard Watson Dixon, which volume was published in 1905, I discovered a reference to Hopkins.  In her preface, Coleridge listed a number of well-known poets who had praised the unsung Dixon: Swinburne, Rossetti, and Morris among them.  Then this:

There was one who gave more than praise.  A young Oxford student of brilliantly original power loved the poems of Richard Watson Dixon with such devotion that, when he entered the ranks of the Jesuits and was forbidden to take any books with him, he copied out almost all those in his possession.  Such minds as these do not labor in vain; others trust in them, follow their lead.

The world was still pregnant with Hopkins’s fame almost twenty years after his death, and Coleridge did not bother to name him in her preface.  She apparently had had access to Dixon’s papers, though, since she seems to have had access to the letter from Hopkins that had meant so much to Dixon.  I wonder if she read Hopkins’s odes that he had sent to Dixon or if her assessment of Hopkins as possessed of “brilliantly original power” was simply borrowed from Dixon.

But I love how her “more than praise” echoes Dixon’s “more than fame.”  Hopkins’s dedication to Dixon’s poetry was more than praise, and his letter thanking Dixon was more than fame.

The editor of The Last Poems of Richard Watson Dixon was Robert Bridges, who later started his late friend Hopkins down the road to fame by editing The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, published in 1918 by Oxford University Press.  It would take twelve years for that 750-copy, first edition of Hopkins’s poems to sell out.

I wonder how Bridges viewed Coleridge's reference to his old friend in her preface.

1:0  Fillip

1:1  A poet finds his fillip in a poem’s flushed lips. She eats him, and he starts to work, carving psalms, like Jonah, in her taut, wet maw.

1:2  Poems’ lips are everywhere: in halls, on walls, at balls.  A poet who hears the lips a lot or who sees the lips part is a sort of sot.

1:3  A poem: part lips, part ways.

1:4  A painter’s subject can distract him from his first idea, Bonnard warned.  But poetry is distraction from the poet’s fillip, his first idea.

1:5  Poets in their ecstasy don’t channel poems.  Instead, poems in their lassitude channel-surf poets.

1:6  Poets think of parted lips, splayed legs.  But the urge to write, the fillip, is really for the propagation of poetry.  Poems understand this.

1:7  A poem is domestic, farouche. There’s nothing wild about a poem, even one through Whitman or Thomas.  Dickinson, a savage, understood this.

1:8  I recall dramatic poems at college, like Browning's & Eliot’s, but most were psych majors. (Never English; one dorm poem sniggered at my poetics paper.)

2:0  Silence

2:1  Poems part their lips, but they aren’t hookers. Many live chaste. In fact, the best poems aren’t spoken or written, & so it will always be.

2:2  Some poems are silent from the womb, some their recalcitrant poets silence, while others have gone ineffable for the kingdom’s sake.

2:3  Even a poem, if she holds her peace, is counted wise.

3:0  Shadow

3:1  A poem is apophatic, farouche.  The paper’s the poem.

3:2  The poet sculpts paper until the paper’s poetry.  A stodge of verse breaks down at his feet.

3:3  As a lawyer, I once deposed a guy at CIA headquarters. Afterwards, agents scissored the classified words from my notes. All I kept was the poetry.

3:4  The poem’s shadow is the poem.  And what’s the poem.

for lucas

1
Our writing exposes us to others.  It should.  It should.

Mention here that I teach ninth grade.

Dawn, and two feet of snow.  The sky mimes the earth’s blue.
                                                            Mines the earth’s blue.  Sapphire.
            I attribute the amber trees to sap fire or to laughing angels.  Maybe a
            stove metaphor.
                                                Minds the earth blew.
Shit.

What do docents say
when the painter leaves her lines or
her canvas showing?

Too late to say anything.  “Wait, you didn’t finish”?  ?”  (?)
Patrons ask all at the same time all
                                                          is he hiding or saying
                                                          is he saying he’s hiding
                                                          why
                                                          didn’t he finish?
She

An anchorite just prefers his own company.
Anchorites just prefer their own company.

                                                I dreamed night fell
                                                and I walked among the living.

                                                I wept.

My friend divorced.
My parents’ friend widowed.
I wept like Jesus.

An anchorite just prefers their own company.
A docent could learn something about crowd control.

                                    When I got off the bus
                                    I picked right up
                                    where I left off.

I wept openly along a boulevard of trees, extinguished.
                                    I felt the river, too.

I hide in plurals.  In readers.  I like crowds,
The many parts, of me.

           The Hubble.  A high hall of mirrors.
           WE put two men in harm;s way to 
fix a mirror!

2
A docent is not in the place to say anything.
A docent is not in a place to say anything.  All about the article
Allll about it, my friend.

I write articles: a, the. an
My characters are only slightly more developed: anne or better ann
No no my characters are even less developed: adhtoee0e0had
Writing is a sequence of bad puns.  Maybe not a sequence

your freakin t’s back: ttttt

A docent has so much to offer, like veterans
or retired people on fixed incomes.  Your blog could be more personal
          and by that I mean more revealing.

          With all the clocks and experiences
          With all the clocks and experiences
One's character is what one chooses to forget.
            With all the clocks and experiences
The sun can still rouse me.

                        I feel what my students think
                        when Paris tells Juliet “will I rouse thee.”
I know what they think.
                        I’ve taught for how many years.

My kids want to know if adults can fall for one another.
Teachers are caged leopards on the way to the Panda House.
            A mild curiosity.  Not enough to get you out of school.

                                    Is there anything left of the old sun rise?

The illusion of spontaneity
The illusion of sedulity

                       The blue, the white thickens, coarsens.
                       Readers always think more than I can imagine.

3
Writing is being stuck.  No living is the illusion of being stuck.  Writing is admitting, not creating just discovering or baking bread with or without a bread machine, heh, not without a bread machine now too late now

           hiding his saying?
             hiding his hiding?
                                                she

Don’t be offended.  Dogma can’t exist
in a poem anymore, not since Cleanth Brooks & ________ . & 87
% of all sentences are declarative, get over it.  I just made that up.  For example.

            & nothing a writer believes would show up in her character’s mouth.
                these days

                                    And poetry?
                                                         One more reference ips the scale, urns
                                                         he whole hing
                                                         black

How can I become
he holdout juror?
the go-to guy, the cavalry?
                                             the sun in the east?
                                                                                over
                                                                                        for rent
this is not how I really think, really.
How can I become

for lucas. to lucas. into lucas. by lucas. from lucas.
during & after lucas. prepositions can be sooo suggestive and overlapping but
they all overlap, really; they
all mean the same damn thing

The snow
                is white.  The sky
                                             is blue.
The poem

Your candidate knew the mic was hot.  No,
Your candidate knew the mic was hot.

but I could write like this whatever.  Docents.  Fragments & ruins.  Foreign words.

Notes

My neighbors are nice people and all, but I felt like screaming out the window just now, "Don't mar the snow!"

I mean, we've had two days' notice that this might get to thirty inches and be the biggest storm in our county's recorded history.  Wasn't that enough time to spin around in the almighty automobile?  Isn't nature trying to tell us to slow down right now?

But, at least today, I guess the snow can take care of itself.  (It's about four inches from the top of our picket fence in places so far.)

In a way, this blog grew out of Beaver Magazine, my seventh grade publication my teachers permitted me to circulate.  Other bloggers, such as Dave Bonta of Via Negativa, started out publishing among their grade-school acquaintances, too.

Blogging has eclipsed another childhood love – radio.  I used to listen to clear-channel A.M. stations skip off of the ionosphere in the evenings on my most-prized possession, a transistor radio, and I would write to the stations as far as New Orleans, Buffalo and Des Moines (I grew up in Tidewater, Virginia) to tell them what I had heard when on their stations. They would send me QSL cards verifying my clams, and I would tape them to my bedroom walls.

When I was twelve, a walkie-talkie stole my heart away from my radio.  It was called a base station, and it could broadcast a few suburban blocks.  A few of my friends had base stations, and we would take turns putting on half-hour radio broadcasts complete with music from our record players and neighborhood news.

I later became a member of our high school’s radio show club.  We would drive to a local radio station each Saturday morning and put on a quarter-hour program we had planned during the previous week.  The club introduced me to some fun characters who, like me, loved to get behind a microphone and play disc jockey or newscaster.  Then came college.

A friend of mine and I put on a kind of Jesus freak radio show every Saturday and Sunday morning on WUVA, one of the radio stations at our college.  It was back when the Charismatic movement was apolitical and contemporary Christian music was fresh and, with respect to at least its leading artists, very much its own sound.  I would prepare and give mini-sermons between the music – little inspirational tidbits, really – and I was always disappointed when my friends would tell me that their favorite part of my show was when I read the weather.

I secretly liked reading the weather: it made me feel more professional than anything else I did on the air.  It was probably the weather bits that led me to try out for a radio job during my senior year in Waynesboro, Virginia, not far from my college.  By the time they offered me the job, though, I had decided to forego radio for law school.

I haven’t returned to radio since.

But Dave at Via Negativa is making me think about radio again, or at least about podcasts.  (A podcast, after all, is radio you can schedule and carry around on an mp3 player such as an iPod.)  Last month Dave began hosting a delightful, evolving podcast that complements his blog very nicely.  For me, it’s like listening to Washington Post Radio, a service that must have been on for no more than a year.  On WPR, I could hear some of my favorite writers discuss what they were writing about, and I could hear some pretty good interviews, too.  I can do the same on Woodrat Podcast.  I hear Dave talking about his latest poetry series or interviewing his qarrtsiluni co-editor.  I hear his knockout interview with blogger Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi concerning the intersection of poetry and religious practice.  I hear a fascinating conversation among banjo players about their varying approaches to their craft mixed with recordings of them playing together.

I guess that, if you already like a writer (his subject matter, his mind, his “voice”), you’ll be predisposed to liking his radio, so long as the writer can make a decent transition from one genre to another.  (Think of the huge audiences many radio programs such as Amos & Andy and Jack Benny brought with them to television when they made that transition.)  Dave makes more than a decent transition from visual only to visual (blog) and verbal (podcast).  Dave is a gifted interviewer, affording his guests ample space to develop their answers to his thoughtful questions and adding enough of his own knowledgeable observations to keep the conversation moving in interesting directions.  Dave blogs and now broadcasts from the Pennsylvania hills, and his accent and inflection enhance the sense of place Dave’s blog has always carried.  Woodrat Radio, to me, is an oral blog.

(I don’t mean to suggest that Dave hasn’t experimented in other ways with orality at Via Negativa and elsewhere.  His videos and his recordings of his poems, most of which are accessible on or through Via Negativa, are high-quality fare, and he and Beth share such great chemistry on qarrtsiluni’s podcast episodes in which they describe the site’s visual art that you’d think they’ve been doing it forever.)

Woodrat’s Velveteen Rabbi interview is dear and informative.  Don’t miss it.

I discovered a while ago that I don’t have a voice for radio.  But Dave’s podcast demonstrates that I still have an ear for one.

You can try out Woodrat Podcast or subscribe to it at Via Negativa or on iTunes.  If you use iTunes, just type “Woodrat” in the search field.

1
A thin, blue dawn rims hills with orange corona, and a wound in youth is a rocket launch.

2
Dogma falls crisp as hoarfrost, but hormones open new worlds.

3
Aphorisms fall from an uncle’s lips like tough steak, but an artist’s life is lean.

4
Perennials die to see the sun, and the counsel of a father is magic.

5
What, my son? What, the son of my five fingers? What, the wet eye of our backyard springs? What? What?

6
Is that you, my son? Ache of my withers & rod of my stump? My son my son my seed my seed my son

7
I wave at black windows as the orange bus sets. My son, where do you sit? Do you see? look?

8
My son? My sleep’s discomfiture and my age’s disconsolation? Yes, my son? What?

9
You stare amazed from every bowl of stew, my son, (5) You die at the cry of every distant beast. I am the purblind Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob

10
Before you hung from an oak, three darts through your heart, you carved your pillar and spilled your seed, my son, my son!

11
A summer moon carves cold clouds, and windshield frost is the tombstone of stars.

Aphorisms fall from an uncle’s lips like tough steak, but an artist’s life is lean.

Perennials die to see the sun, and the counsel of a father is magic.

A summer moon carves cold clouds, and windshield frost is the tombstone of stars.

Dogma falls crisp as hoarfrost, but hormones open new worlds.

A thin, blue dawn rims hills with orange corona, and a wound in youth is a rocket launch.

___________________

Haiti

Haiti

H a i t i

h  a  i  t  i

h a  i    t    i

a  i    t     i

   i       t           i

              i

I have fallen into the bad habit of reposting.  Lucas Green's excellent Tweet inspired me in this instance.

I wonder if I would ever sit silently with a friend for seven days out of respect for his suffering.

I wonder if I would ever stay with him after he began to talk for the hours or days it took him to grieve his loss, to get in touch with his feelings, and to stand against his God.

I wonder if I would ever stay with him long enough to stand up for his God and to be rebuked by his God for it in the end.

I wonder if I would ever love someone enough to spend hours accusing him as a means of defending my bad theology against my friend's suffering that would, in the end, invalidate my theology. I wonder if I would ever love someone enough to risk the kind of abyss the loss of such a closely held theology might lead me down.

Would I love him enough to discover that I truly hate him, that the comfort I offer makes everything worse for him?

When I was younger, I tried to avoid hospitals, nursing homes, viewings, funerals -- anything that required me to get close to other people in their sufferings. I didn't know what to say to comfort the sick and the bereaved. Job's friends later taught me by their example that I don't have to say anything, and that it is important just to call, just to visit.

At one point, I also shared Job's friends' judgmental theology: suffering generally results from sin. My theology was another reason for my avoidance of hospitals and funeral homes. The sick and the dying pitted my heart against my stiff, sick understanding of God. Job's friends could have helped me here, too. By following their example, I might have stuck it out with others in tight quarters where, sooner or later, God would have shown up and challenged my thinking.

I see the same struggle I went through going on in each of Job's friends. The struggle plays out in their speeches to Job. They try to help Job by preaching to him about God's judgment and, in the process, making not-overly-subtle references to the tragedies that rocked Job's world. For example, Zophar, knowing full well that all ten of Job's children died when a great wind blew down the house where they were eating, is kind enough to remind Job that " . . . God shall cast the fury of his wrath upon [the hypocrite], and shall rain it upon him while he is eating." (Job 20:23)

The following may be only a partial list of remarks by Job's friends demonstrating how they connect Job's suffering with what they judge to be his sin:

I suppose one could read Eliphaz's, Bildad's, and Zophar's remarks in light of Job's tragedies and figure that these friends are simply somewhat insensitive. In this way, one might give them the benefit of the doubt, supposing that they might have added, "present company excepted" to each remark had the events of Job's trial come to their minds during their orations. It is difficult to believe, however, that these three friends would have so entirely forgotten the remarkable events that had led them to remain silent with Job for seven days. Surely the correlations in the above table are more than instances of insensitivity.

Why do these three friends act this way? Logically, of course, they proceed abductively from a faulty explanation. They believe that sin causes all suffering. At a certain stage of many people's spiritual life, this simplistic belief reinforces itself. At an immature stage of my spiritual life, I may judge others in order to feel good about myself. This makes me quite conscious of other people's faults. (Needless to say, my judgments are often quite inaccurate.) I am susceptible both to fixating on others' sins and to accepting the explanation that their sin causes their suffering.

But the root of Job's friends' behavior is really not logic but the unrecognized fear that drives the logic. Job's trials must have scared his friends. After all, if sin doesn't cause all suffering, what would keep these guys from fates similar to Job's? What good would their religion be if it ceased to protect them or even to make them feel comfortable or good about themselves? What good would their religion be to them if its essential purpose were not their well-being?

Before Job's friends show up, the third-person omniscient narrator points out that Job does not "sin with his lips" despite all of his losses. Later, though, his friends' fear drives them to remonstrate with him, and their attacks in turn drive Job to defend his righteousness. (His rebuttals against their accusations also include some snappy and sometimes sarcastic rejoinders:

Do you imagine to reprove words, and the speeches of one that is desperate, which are as wind? (6:26)

No doubt but ye are the people, and wisdom shall die with you. (12:2)

But ye are forgers of lies, ye are all physicians of no value. (13:4)

I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all. (16:2))

Job's friends stick around, and Job's stubborn penchant for justifying himself against God eventually causes them to lose all subtlety. By chapter twenty-two, for instance, Eliphaz no longer requires Job to put two and two together:

Is not they wickedness great? and thine iniquities infinite? For thou hast taken a pledge from thy brother for naught, and stripped the naked of their clothing. Thou hast not given water to the weary to drink, and thou hast withholden bread from the hungry. (22:5-7)

The narrator starts the book by telling us that Job is "perfect and upright, and one that feared God and eschewed evil." (1:1) The narrator returns after the speechifying to sum up everyone's chief faults. Job has "justified himself rather than God." Job's friends have "found no answer, and yet had condemned Job." (32:2-3)

Why do I and others I know feel like we have to have answers? What drives us to bright-line theologies that we will defend at the expense of old friendships and normal human kindness? My own experience tells me that fear is involved. Perhaps we have a premonition that, by pretending to possess God, we have grabbed a patient, powerful tiger by the tail.

Yet I have nothing on Job's friends. I'm not sure I would have goaded Job to defend himself, and I'm not sure I would have risked having my theology ripped away from me by the God it turns out I never knew. At once comfortable and vaguely uneasy in my piety, I'm not sure I would have shown up to comfort Job in the first place.

My Coolpix has a beach/snow setting.  The extremes, like Stalin and Hitler, meet with a handshake.

Editing in iPhoto, I turn my beach pics into snow pics by turning down the temperature.  When the sand turns white, the haze turns blue.

I live summer each winter, my frostbitten fingers on fire in a basin of water.

Sand crabs surface in backwash and burrow back next wave.

Wicker chairs bristle in the flaccid heat.

Sand fences, home security systems, and neighborhood watches promote dune protection.

For if snow is sand, then wind is water, eroding the snow it brings.

As kids, we’d build castles and dig ravines, and the tide would leave it all smooth. Time is tide, and memories are the shells we collect.

The moon keeps time, and each tide is noon.  All we build lies between the tides.

What border lies between darkness and light?  Where is it so light that one can’t see light?  And what light ever held a mirror to its light?

For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world.  The waves break and churn; the shoreline shifts but never snaps.

Where does driftwood grow?  Beneath the forested sea, far from the febrile shore.

Obama will win.  He will be an unpopular president during most of his term.  Republicans will gain seats in Congress during his administration. But Obama will help to reconnect our civic life with our constitutional values.  If he lives, he will be reelected.

Or he could lose this year.  Or win and be popular.  It just helps me to understand Obama by projecting him against a blank future.

Obama will be unpopular because he is chiefly concerned with reconnecting us with our national ideals.  This concern will cause him to take a very long time to make some important decisions, and many will view his protracted decision-making as evidence of a weak presidency.  His vacillation will be more pronounced in time of crisis, because he considers decisions politically (like all presidents), patriotically (like many presidents), and constitutionally (like few presidents).  By “patriotically,” I mean he cares how the decision will leave our nation in the long run.  By “constitutionally,” I mean he cares how the decision will leave our Constitution and our relationship to it in the long run.

Because our national ideals and constitutional values are often at odds with short-term politics, his decisions – when he gets around to making them – will often be unpopular.  But the process even more than the product will drive many crazy.

In other words, Obama will be unpopular because he will be slow.  But Obama might just be as slow as the best of them: Abraham Lincoln.

We’re familiar with most of the parallels between Lincoln and Obama, of course.  Both men are Illinois lawyers who never run anything, really, before becoming president.  (I refer to Lincoln in the present tense for ease of comparison.)  Both men grow up distant from their fathers, one emotionally and the other physically.  Both men are seen as theorists and orators whose talents arguably would be more suited for the legislature, but both men are drawn to the presidency not by ambition alone but by a desire to address fundamental discrepancies between what our nation was meant to be and what it is.  Before his presidential campaign really begins, each man becomes nationally known initially only for a single, electrifying speech he gives in the Northeast to party faithful.  The campaigns of both men emphasize their candidates’ humble origins and deemphasize their candidates’ careers in law.  Both men win their party’s nominations as dark horses against highly favored candidates from New York, favorites who many party leaders fear would be too divisive in a general election.  Each man benefits from running at the end of his rival party's unpopular administration in an election year favoring his own party's general prospects.

Some of these parallels are almost as meaningless as the ones I read as a child between Lincoln and John Kennedy (e.g., each had a secretary who shared the other’s last name).  For me, though, the most important parallels between Lincoln and Obama have to do with what makes them both slow executives: a driving desire to connect policy and public with constitutional ideals and broad principles.

Obama takes a long time to respond concerning important matters.  When he finally responds, he responds conceptually, sometimes to good effect and sometimes not.  He is slow to distance himself from Reverend Wright.  When he finally reacts to the public’s distaste for the clips of Wright’s sermons, though, it is in the form of a critically acclaimed speech that addresses race in America in fresh, constructive ways.  Then he is slow to respond to accusations that he is unpatriotic.  He finally reacts with a speech just before Independence Day this year that advocates a broader, less divisive concept of patriotism.  It is not a stirring speech, though, and it is not as well received as his earlier address on race.

Lincoln’s final speech is to a fired-up crowd that comes to the White House to celebrate the successful end of the Civil War.  Lincoln uses the occasion to offer an olive branch to the South and to outline a generous philosophy for admitting the succeeding states back into the Union.  Disappointed, the crowd starts to thin out before the speech ends.

Whether or not Lincoln’s and Obama’s more-important speeches are successful, they are usually theoretical in nature, connecting current events with broader themes.  Both Lincoln’s and Obama’s speeches generally make for terrible sound bites, since neither Lincoln nor Obama relies on cute turns of phrase.  Their rhetoric has a lawyerlike force that requires a longer attention span.  Fortunately, both men know how to keep their audience’s attention.  Both men are good writers, and one could use the best of both men’s writings as texts for teaching both rhetoric and prose.

But most of the force in both Lincoln’s and Obama’s speeches comes not from their literary and rhetorical skills but from the way they connect current events to constitutional values our government fails to live up to.  Indeed, both men know constitutional law well: Lincoln obsessively studied it late nights during the 1850’s in reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and Obama taught it for over a decade.

But this same felt connection to forgotten national values – values rooted in involved political and legal theory – that makes both men electrifying speakers also makes them slow executives.

Lincoln claims as president-elect that he “never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”  For sure, Lincoln is a political animal; Lincoln’s law partner and biographer William Herndon famously describes his political ambition as “a little engine that knew no rest.”  But Lincoln’s claim about his political thinking is a fair one.  As president, his decisions are generally made to advance a Whiggish view of the Declaration of Independence, a view that is best expressed in his Gettysburg Address. (See Allen C. Guelzo's Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President for an explanation of the Whig philosophy behind Lincoln's political thought.)

At the war’s outset, the North has one goal: preserve the Union.  After the Emancipation Proclamation, the North adds the destruction of slavery to the original war aim of preserving the Union.  The Civil War amendments, bracing in their simplicity, accept African Americans as citizens.  And, long after Lincoln is dead, the Gettysburg Address helps the nation coalesce its constitutional thinking around “all men are created equal” as a guiding principle.  Lincoln takes advantage of a war he never intentionally prolongs to fundamentally change our relationship to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence (not to mention the Northwest Ordinance and several other founding documents – heck, he helps change how we look at the Founding Fathers).  For Lincoln, a change in what we all believe is change you can believe in.

Lincoln is derided as slow and vacillating, and this perception is accurate.  During the first months of his presidency, for instance, he seems to take forever to decide how to respond to the South’s attack on Fort Sumter.  Like any president would, Lincoln considers his options from a political and military standpoint.  Like few presidents, though, Lincoln considers his options from a constitutional standpoint, too.  I do not mean only that he considers whether various actions he could take would be consistent with the Constitution.  Lincoln considers also whether his options would preserve the constitution and augment its role in our civic life. Changing a country’s constitutional viewpoint is slow work advanced only by an astute and principled politician with a cool temperament.

But his constitutional scruples make Lincoln come across as weak and slow.  Lincoln is slow by nature, too; someone who generally likes to weigh matters long past the time the country or the Congress wants him to act.  He is slow to fire generals and cabinet members, and he is slow to take offense, even when his failing, top general who despises him walks past his own study where he knew Lincoln is waiting to speak to him, and goes to bed.  He almost loses the war, and he almost loses the 1864 election to the same general who has a completely different view of the Constitution and of the North’s proper war aims than he has.

Obama’s responds to his opponents’ unfair attacks with preternatural patience – a patience that frequently drives me crazy.  Like Lincoln, Obama doesn’t respond in kind to many attacks, and he seems to believe that the public can be drawn to act by “the better angels of our nature,” to use Lincoln’s phrase.  Obama appears not to see the danger in his opponents’ unfair charges, even though he frequently says that he does.  This vulnerability attracts a following of people who wish to protect him.  Together, they give millions of dollars each time one of his opponents attacks him in a particularly unfair and potentially effective manner.  Lincoln also frequently finds himself explaining his failure to strike back at opponents, and his inside people are insanely loyal and protective of him, too, according to one of Lincoln’s biographers, Stephen Oates. People who know Lincoln or Obama well often describe a certain vulnerability they sense.

So maybe Obama’s slowness comes from his need to sound out how each of his options may square with broader principles, as I suggest here.  Or maybe he’s slow because he’s a listener and a negotiator, a problem-solver and a consensus-builder (perhaps, like Lincoln, starting with his powerful cabinet – see Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln). Maybe Obama is slow because he's stubborn: he’s not easily intimidated or goaded or tricked into reacting.  He could be slow also because he’s simply more comfortable weighing major decisions over a period of time.  He’s slow, though, for some or perhaps all of the above reasons. Even more than in the 1860’s, Americans today seem to prefer a take-charge, decisive CEO-type in the White House, and that’s neither what they got with Lincoln nor what they’ll get with Obama.

I wish she'd finish it, but she ran out of gas once she met the assignment's requirements.  She's busy with college applications and other senior stuff.

            My car crunched up the gravel driveway. It seemed oddly reluctant, managing to stall twice in twenty yards. I found myself coaxing it as if I had gone back several generations and my car were a horse and carriage. Indeed, as I approached the old manor, I had the oddest sensation of stepping back through time, as if those crumbling brick walls wanted to pull me back to the time of their youth when they proudly hosted all the flying colors of the flocking gentry, when the joyous sound of minstrels filled their halls and light and laughter spilled from every window, but all that remained of the manor’s fading splendor were grimy windows, peeling siding, and the moaning of the wind as it pushed against the dying edifice.

            I parked my car, grabbed my bags, and jogged towards the front door, my breath coming as smoke against the gray November day. The sky darkened as I drew near, and I instinctively slowed, taking in the skeletal appearance of the trees and the tarnished knocker whose shape oddly resembled that of a twisted creature in a reappearing nightmare. I shuddered and forced myself to focus on other features of the door. But its chipped paint put me in mind of dried blood, and its handle was old, worn, and ice cold.

            My great aunt, whom I had never met, lay dying in the old manor house. The house had been in our family for generations, but I had never seen it before. It was passed to the oldest son in each generation, and if there was no male heir it went to the eldest daughter and then to her eldest son. Such was the case with my aunt, my grandmother’s only sibling.

            Aunt Ethelinda was notoriously irritable and had never gotten on with anyone, even her own children. Rumor had it that her mind was going: she had been reporting ghosts and other strange and unlikely phenomena since the death of the gardener, her childhood friend and the only person she had ever been known to be close to. My aunt also had almost no fortune besides the house, and tradition had already dictated to whom that dubious property would belong. There was, then, little incentive for anyone to visit her on her deathbed. As I was the youngest adult in our family and was blessed with a moderate temperament, the task naturally fell to me.

I move in the quick
and the dead, and they move
in me, the quick and the
dead, even the long
dead dead.

the dead always live all
the dead live
always. the long
dead dead move
not in the quick
but in the dead
quick in the dead
quick in the
dead dead
in the quick.

Looking at its glitzy Christmas lights, Victoria, Betty, Granny, Bethany and I drove slowly the other night through a ritzy section of Betty’s town that I didn’t know existed until our present trip south.  The area’s nicest homes rest on top of a hill from which, along several bends of the road that connects its subdivisions, we could see the considerable lights of Columbia, Tennessee.  Looking down the hill, it occurred to me that the town’s expanse of lights was similar to what the traveling Magi must have seen, looking up at a Levantine sky not snuffed out by the kind of arrogant light pollution the homes and businesses of this typical American town generate all night.

We tended to flocks of reindeer and Santas and other recent holiday fabrications milling about most of the hill’s front yards.  Around the last curve, however, we saw it: the only crèche extant in this series of fashionable neighborhoods.  I felt like Charlie Brown in that presently ubiquitous Christmas special, finding a real, albeit feeble, tree among the shiny aluminum numbers his friends urged him to select from for their Christmas pageant.   Each sheep and shepherd and Holy Family member huddled around the suburban manger possessed a kind of inner light, most likely a sixty-watt incandescent bulb, that made the entire drama stand out among the inflatable Grinches and snowmen we had passed up to that point.

Bethlehem, the location of Messiah’s birth – exotic yet unassuming and off the beaten track – has inspired countless paintings, songs, and sermons over the past two millennia.  Bethlehem demonstrates that Heaven’s idea of good origins may not be our own; that great leaders may have humble, almost Lincolnesque beginnings; and that small, faraway places can impact the world.  Yet how can we really be sure that Messiah was born there?

In this age of rumors, unsubstantiated claims, and The Da Vinci Code, most of us still trust one or more of the Big Four to give us the Good News.  I thought it would be worthwhile this holiday season to see how each of the four dealt with the controversy surrounding where Messiah was born.

Luke’s broadcast of Messiah’s birth was as colorful as the peacocks that grace the grass in Northern European Renaissance paintings depicting that event.  If the Gospel is the greatest story ever told, Luke was the greatest at telling it.  Like Linus later in that special, I can still quote the King James Version of Luke 2 at least through the Gloria in excelsis Deo, including the famous, spare words that have helped Messiah’s lowly origins capture the world’s imagination.  Luke 2 first transmitted the understated subordinate clause that preachers have used for centuries to contrast this Ruler’s humble arrival with the advent of more imperious world leaders:

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

Luke told a beautiful, ironic story, suitable for a bestselling memoir, the kind of master tract Messiah’s followers would later use to support his candidacy.  And Luke gave no hint of a controversy over the location of Messiah’s birth.

Matthew spoke of no birth controversy, either, but the pains to which it went to document Messiah’s every childhood move make one suspect that it had a keen eye for an anticipated, future controversy long before more than a handful of people recognized the Messiah as such.

Matthew’s treatment of the circumstances surrounding Messiah’s birth was somewhat more prosaic than Luke’s.  Maybe it was the accountant’s by-the-numbers mindset; maybe it was Matthew’s aging, hard-boiled and higher-than-average Jewish audience; or maybe it was just Matthew’s slant: demonstrate how Messiah’s birth comports with prophecy.  Matthew doesn’t broadcast as much to capture the imagination; it’s designed to convince folks of Messiah’s bona fides.  And Messiah sure did a lot of traveling as an infant and toddler: Bethlehem, Egypt, and Galilee, each stop necessary to fulfill an Old Testament prophecy about where the Messiah would hail from.  Matthew tracked each stop, and along the way Matthew also helped Messiah explain his early-childhood contacts with the Magi.  Who knows what ideas Messiah’s later constituency might otherwise have assumed those agents of an enemy religion implanted in his head?

Matthew seemed to have anticipated what the Birthers would later focus on: if Messiah were not born where Scripture required him to have been born, then he would be ineligible to serve as Messiah.

Mark, the smallest of the Big Four, just didn’t cover Messiah’s birth.  It may have been an issue of resources.  With objective journalism falling on tough times, you can’t be everywhere.

The Big Four were only the Big Three for decades; John came late in the century.  The latecomer makes a point of marching to its own drum, and its different approach makes Matthew, Mark, and Luke look as if they share a common viewpoint, as if they were cut from the same cloth – the same unknown source that has been the object of a lot of conjecture among religious circles.  John delights in distinguishing itself from the other Big Four by describing itself “fair and balanced,” a barely concealed slight against its fellow networks.

Although Mark never mentions the location of Messiah’s birth, John wins the prize for being the least factual about where Messiah was born, “fair and balanced” or not.  John doesn’t usually publish editorials as news, but it supports its claim to unbiased journalism in part by broadcasting debates in which one side is, shall we say, under-represented.  John recorded two debates involving where Messiah was born, and though it never out-and-out said that Messiah was not born in Bethlehem, it always gave the Birthers the discussion’s last word as if they had the winning argument.  Here’s the first debate:

Many of the people . . . said, Of a truth this is the Prophet.  Others said, This is the Christ. But some said, Shall Christ come out of Galilee?  Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?  So there was a division among the people because of him.

At this point, John could have reported something like, “Of course, it’s established beyond any doubt that Messiah was born in Bethlehem.  We have a government record, the testimony of friends and strangers, a contemporaneous birth announcement, no evidence to the contrary . . .”  But it didn’t.  Ah, well.  Anyway, this people’s debate John recorded ends in something like a draw.

But a second debate broadcast by John – this one among the Pharisees – ends more definitively in favor of the Birthers:

Then came the officers to the chief priests and Pharisees; and they said unto them, Why have ye not brought him?  The officers answered, Never man spake like this man.  Then answered them the Pharisees, Are ye also deceived?  Have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees believed on him?  But this people who knoweth not the law are cursed.  Nicodemus saith unto them, (he that came to Jesus by night, being one of them,)  Doth our law judge any man, before it hear him, and know what he doeth?  They answered and said unto him, Art thou also of Galilee? Search, and look: for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet.  And every man went unto his own house.

This “Messiah” is from Galilee and not Bethlehem.  End of discussion.

Would it have been too much for John & Friends to have pointed out that the controversy isn’t real, that there’s not a shred of evidence to suggest that Messiah was born anywhere but in humble Bethlehem, and that Messiah is not disqualified to serve as Messiah?  I suppose not, but John’s role is not to clear up baseless rumors.  John reports; you decide.

I have written poems that advance ideas I’ve never held and that give into feelings I’ve never had or at least have never admitted to having had.  Is that bad?  I’m not sure why I do it.

Though maybe it’s the poem’s fault.  The poem takes over, and it wants to go places.  It binds and gags me and stuffs me in the trunk.

A better explanation may be Richard Hugo’s, found in his book The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing.  A poem has two subjects, Hugo asserts.  Your triggering subjects “ignite your need for words.”  I feel a poem somewhere in a triggering subject, but as I write I begin to discover the poem’s real subject, often quite different from the triggering subject, the one I set out to write about.

Often I have lived only a little of the ideas and feelings my poems advance.  Hugo has lived much of his, if the poems he inserts into a couple of autobiographical essays are any indication.  I think I’m using poetry to create imaginative rehearsals.  “Imaginative rehearsals” is a term I learned from a book by a high school teacher, Terry Gallagher, to describe a benefit from books to young readers.  If you live imaginatively through books, the idea goes, you’ll be better prepared to make decisions when you get older.  If you try things out vicariously through novels and narrative poetry, you don’t have to make the same mistakes the characters make.

When Bethany was three and four years old, we would play school with her small characters and blocks.  Bethany, whom no teacher has ever suspected of misbehavior, always had one misbehaving character who disrupted every class with a simplicity and joy that neither Bethany nor I often demonstrate outside of home.  Maybe these playtimes were imaginative rehearsals.  More likely they were our shared opportunities to express a side of us that we suppressed outside of play.

Poetry is play, and a poem becomes a playmate that surprises us.  Sticking with our play’s original rules causes a poem to sulk and maybe go home.  What pair of kids plays imaginatively and yet ends up doing what they had planned to do at the outset?  To channel the imagination is to send it home early.

Hugo grew up a staunch formalist and shared New Criticism’s disdain for judging a poem by how well it conveyed a moral or got across its ostensible subject matter.  His book amounts to a spirited defense of creative writing workshops in English departments as well as a summary of advice he gives his college students during his own workshops.

Part of that advice to young poets was to drop qualms over a poem’s morality:

It is easier to write and far more rewarding when you can ignore relative values and go with the flow and thrust of the language . . . . Doesn’t this lead finally to amoral and shallow writing?  Yes, it does, if you are amoral and shallow.  I hope it will lead you to yourself and the way you feel.  All poets I know, and I know plenty of them, have an unusually strong moral sense, and that is why they can go into the cynical world of the imagination and not feel so threatened that they become impotent.  There’s fear sometimes involved but also joy, and exhilaration that can’t be explained to anyone who has not experienced it.  Don’t worry about morality.  Most people who worry about morality ought to.

Hugo writes that the imagination is cynical in the sense that “it can accommodate the most disparate elements with no regard for relative values.  And it does this by assuming all things have equal value, which is a way of saying nothing has any value, which is cynicism.”  Like a classic cynic, the imagination is value-neutral.

A lot of the stuff I write on Twitter is about death.  Unless I am mistaken and am already dead, these posts are imaginative rehearsals, among other things. 

Hugo’s vision of poetry – poetry with a life of its own that the poet uncovers by pursuing or playing with the poem – a poetry of self-discovery, a psychological poetry hidden in mundane topics, a world in a grain of sand – is the essence of twentieth century lyric poetry, I think.  I generally prefer it to the more clever Metaphysical poets and the more ardent Romantic poets of previous centuries, but I am a child of the twentieth century.  However, I don’t think that many of my fellow American Evangelicals have ever reconciled themselves to some common practices and subjects in twentieth century art and literature, particularly the practice of using two subjects, as Hugo describes, and the subject of death.

Why focus on death? they may ask.  Instead of being preoccupied by death, why not write something uplifting?

I wonder if my imagination is taking me down roads I closed off to myself early in my religious years.  I remember our Charismatic church’s memorial service for its founding pastor who accidentally drowned on vacation in Mexico in 1979, the same year Hugo's book was published.  When the congregation permitted itself to show grief and even anguish in the middle of the service, the service leaders admonished the crowd and led it in some rousing songs of hope.  It felt like an emotional cover-up.

We American Christians sometimes cover up death today in more subtle ways, using phrases like “passed on” and “passed away” in place of “died,” as if death were something to fear or were some kind of sin or weakness that had overcome the Dear Departed.  We are complicit with our funeral industry in sanitizing death and in keeping it off our streets.  (I read Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One this past summer, a novella dripping with sarcasm of America’s notions of death and its funeral industry.  It’s fun reading if you get a chance.) Didn't the Preacher exhort us not to avoid the house of mourning but to hang out there?

But see how imaginatively New Testament characters and writers spoke and wrote about death in just these representative passages (all from the King James Version):

Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this? (John’s gospel)

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. (Colossians)

I protest by your rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily. (1 Corinthians)

For we which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh.  So then death worketh in us, but life in you. (2 Corinthians)

I'll never die?  I'm already dead?  I die daily?  Death works in me?  How can these verses’ conceptions of death be reconciled without some admission that their authors used death imaginatively, that death stirred their imagination?

There’s even a sense in which death belongs to us in the way that we belong to Christ:

For all things are yours; Whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; And ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s.  (1 Corinthians)

How can we fully possess death and whatever benefits accrue from death if we refuse to embrace it in any sense or even to speak of it without euphemisms?

Here’s my favorite verse about death (the first sentence from the New American Standard Version and the second from the Revised English Bible):

For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one an aroma from death to death, to the other an aroma from life to life. Who is equal to such a calling? (2 Corinthians)

Events and feelings trigger poems, but certain smells – different smells for everyone – trigger strong feelings and memories.  Paul claims here that he and his crew act like incense offered to God that triggers different feelings in different people.  An application of parallel construction leads to a surprising message: for those that “are being saved,” Paul & company are a scent of death that leads them to death. For “those who are perishing,” on the other hand, Paul’s crew offers a scent that leads to life.

Once a Christian is on his way to salvation – having his mind renewed and his perspective altered – Paul would become a walking challenge to him.  He would smell death around Paul and would be drawn to follow him into a life of self-denial.  Am I still too young a Christian to smell this about Paul?  Do I still reject the idea of death as something that was only at work in me when I was perishing outside of Christ?  Is my Christianity so stunted that I remain obsessed only with the life it offers me?

I love the obsession with death evident in many of the works of Flannery O’Connor, a religious and Catholic writer.  I love the full-bodied spirituality of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.  I’m on my third reading of this uplifting, Christian novel.  (I find that most novels that call themselves Christian aren’t; in fact, many novels by people of other faiths or of no faith at all contain more truth than most novels in Christian bookstores.)  The Brothers Karamazov is tragic, but as Oswald Chambers points out, life is “wild and tragic.”  Dostoevsky doesn’t do dishonest spiritual highs.  His characters walk through, and not around, the valley of the shadow of death.

There is an objectionable nihilism I find in some writings by Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire.  I do not say that poetry is good simply because it is about death.

What is religious imagination? If our religious mind must travel down only prescribed avenues, the phrase amounts to an oxymoron.  I suppose that, until a Christian finds himself well on the way to salvation, the imagination is largely an unredeemed instrument, at best a two-edged sword, scary as death.  But as we grow in grace and in death and life, we become more human – more like God designed us to be.  We find God all over the place, even in death.  I think the Desert Fathers and many other saints and poets discovered God at times at play in their imagination and poetry.  Not always, but at times.

1 P.M., and about 14 inches.  They promise us another 5 to 9.  I haven’t walked in a blizzard in a long time, but I couldn’t face the wind and snow for some of my walk this morning, particularly on the highway cresting the hill.

I graded all night long and got one out of five assignments I’ve saved for the holidays done.  I hope to take everyone sledding tomorrow at a distant cousin’s nearby hill.  In a couple of days, we’ll head to Tennessee to visit Victoria’s family for Christmas.  I’ll set up shop at a Duncan Donuts, her mom's town’s local wi-fi spot, for my grading and, hopefully, blogging.

The barbershop stretches long like a coffin, a final home lined with mirrors and furnishing time for honest reflection.

I don’t know how she wakes me, but she holds a big, round mirror behind my head.  Behind it, she smiles: a midwife.

My black and white hair drifts down in my shade, a peaceable kingdom of birth and death in the linoleum grass.  I live for birth and death.

She spins me half way.  Spin me until the mirrors finish and I leave as a tree, tall and cared for, a presence with no face or backside.

Edward Hopper’s Gas captures, for me, the American idea of frontier.  The setting has nothing to do with a frontier, I'll admit: a service station attendant in vest and tie performs an unknown act of maintenance on, or recordkeeping with, one of his three pumps.  Behind him is a country road and, beyond that, all of nature takes the form of uniform trees and seems to brood, somewhat menacingly as dusk advances, at the attendant and his brave station lights.  The attendant is alone with his back to this uncertainty, and there are no cars – despite the prominent road and service station – to assist him.

Up until the weather turned, Bethany and I have taken the W&OD trail to Purcellville.  Traveling back, we frequently see a large highway sign just beyond a small grove of evergreens.  The sign seems out of place, since the highway’s roads and cars aren’t visible (though we can hear the cars menacing below our raised trail), and the sign seems outlandishly close and large for the bicycles that travel by it.  The sign says only, “Gas,” and its arrow points in the direction we’re riding.

In my Gas, nature is in the foreground with civilization menacing her from behind.  Nature’s frontier seems to be advancing on her and threatening her way of life.

This contrast between Hopper’s Gas and my own struck me again today as I took my camera out in the snow to one of the few groves of trees left in our neighborhood. The grove survives only because of its utility as a buffer between the highway and the strip mall that enclose it.  I had to work hard not to get either of them in my viewfinder, but then I gave up and let the shots come naturally.

Snow acts like forgiveness, covering up some pretty scarred-up landscape and making it beautiful.  It gives sharp things soft, rounded edges; it makes dirty things clean again.  The more it falls, the more it erases.  But it has its work cut out for it the longer I live – maybe it seems that way because of how long I’ve lived – and it seems to snow less each year.

I haven't forgotten about slow reads.  I've been going day and night at school, putting together a lot of new stuff this year including a new multi-user blog and grading like a madman most waking weekend hours.

My heavy grading time is October through January because of the concentrated writing we do fall semester under a writers’ workshop model.  We move from predominately writing to predominately reading in the spring.  I gradually have more time to myself as the days gradually lengthen.

Here’s a link to my honors classes’ blog.  It’s not so pretty, but it sure beats what I had the last few years.  I built it with WordPress MU (“multi-user”) with a Buddy Press overlay.  (Buddy Press is a nice set of plug-ins that makes a wpmu install into something like a private social network.)  Though I turned off many of Buddy Press’s coolest features (e.g., friends, forums, the wall) to promote esprit de corps and to have the kids focus on blogging, what’s left is great: Buddy Press provides thoughtful site-wide navigation.  And wpmu is much better than I remember it from two years ago.  Plug-ins replace many of my old code hacks, the skins are much more plentiful and attractive.  They’re also more versatile because of widgets bloggers may drag and drop into their sidebars.

I blog as Alan this year.  I’m one of the worst bloggers there, about as infrequent there as I am here.  I’ve got to get my game on.

Some kids complain about the blogging, but they end up liking it better than my alternative, which is the same amount of writing but unpublished.  When we stop blogging in March, they generally don’t want to let go of it.  But, by then, I’m exhausted from keeping tabs on it.  (I have to read everything that eighty-plus bloggers post, including their comments!)

It’s worth it.  Blogging has done more than anything else to help my writing, and every year I see it helping many of my writers at school, too, over time.

Here’s a letter I sent to the editor of Newsweek this past week.  For the life of me, I can’t see why it won’t be published this week.  It’s short.  It's from soneone who lives in the subject state, and it brings up a major point the article overlooks.  It even gives into that requisite touch of petulance at the end.  Go figure.

Dear Sirs/Mesdames:

If next month’s Virginia gubernatorial election is “the first big electoral test of Barack Obama’s presidency,” as Steve Tuttle’s article “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town” states, modern history suggests that Mr. Obama will fail it.  No sitting president has seen his party win Virginia’s governorship since Richard Nixon saw Republican Mills Godwin win it in 1973.

We Virginians seem to want our state and national capitals in different parties’ hands, perhaps to keep Richmond, which is only two hours south of Washington, out of Washington’s orbit. Maybe Virginians also have a smoldering desire for these nearby capitals to remain at odds as they were when Richmond, like Washington, was the capital of a union of states.  Whatever the reason, the presidential election seems to vaccinate Virginians against the winner the following year.

Virginia and New Jersey hold the only gubernatorial elections during the years presidents are inaugurated, and every four years the national press frames these elections as early referenda on the newly elected or reelected president.  In Virginia’s case, at least, it’s quadrennial nonsense.

Like ringmasters pointing out the giant and the midget in an old-time circus's freak show, we English teachers teach the run-on and the fragment together in stark contrast. But I think our students sometimes get the mistaken idea from this pairing that we're concerned about the lengths of these famous non-sentences, and as a consequence, we tend to produce writers whose paragraphs are peopled with sentences that aren't too short or too long but are all just right.

From reading our students' writing, I believe that syntactical second place goes to short sentences, and last place goes to the long ones.  Why the prejudice against long sentences?  The misnomer "run-on" hurts, sure.  Who would know from its name that it involves two or more improperly joined sentences?  Also, long sentences increase the odds of misplaced modifiers and other forms of bad grammar, but that's hardly a reason to give them up.  Finally, almost a century of American writers have fallen under the spell of Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and others known for their spare syntax, but Hemingway was as proficient with long sentences as he was with short ones.  Great literature and good writing are made up of short and long sentences as well as the medium ones, but we've lost some of the art of writing the long ones.

My honors classes are learning how to write cumulative sentences, defined as a base clause and one or more modifying phrases.  (The previous sentence is a good example of a cumulative sentence: the clause precedes the comma, and a participial phrase follows it.)  The cumulative sentence is great for teaching phrases and clauses and their associated grammatical and punctuative rules.  Also, the sentence form emphasizes tone and description and therefore helps students relate syntax to good writing.

We're using cumulative sentences to help us explode moments – that is, to help us focus our readers on important moments in our narratives.  We're posting some of our sentences on Edmodo.com, a Twitter-like microblogging service for schools with the added advantages of enforced privacy (Twitter can be private, too, but one must rely on students to keep it so), unlimited characters per post, and threaded comments.  This month, my honors students are practicing cumulative sentences and replying to others' cumulative sentences with more phrases to make the sentences longer and richer.

This post is sandwiched by two instances of writers responding to this assignment.

When I learned that a South Carolina representative had been the man who heckled the president tonight, I thought of another South Carolina representative who breached decorum when our Union was even more divided between North and South: Congressman Brooks’s caning of Sen. Sumner in 1856.  I wonder if Rep. Wilson’s shout of “You lie!” will be defended as vigorously in some quarters as Rep. Brooks’s caning was in the Southern press.

Here’s a comment I left on an unrelated post last month:

I don't think there's been a time in U.S. history (I can't pretend to speak of other countries' histories, hubris or no hubris) when so many people's sources of news were so biased. I've read about the campaign of 1800, the newspapers leading up to the Civil War, and yellow journalism, but I don't think they rival today's media for misinformation and vituperation. One national poll this month found that only 42 percent of respondents who identify themselves as Republicans believe that Obama was born in America. (He'd be constitutionally ineligible for the presidency if he were not, of course.) That statistic amazes me. What does it take to come to that conclusion concerning Obama's birth despite all evidence to the contrary? One talks in terms of facts, but one puts more credence on what the party (or racial or media) line is than on the facts. Facts can be twisted, you know? But I know who I am and what team I'm on.

The ramifications of such thinking are frightening.

Some mornings, when the light grows and I set myself to grow still, I imagine that I am debating George Bush.  I’ve fallen into this daydream for years now: it digs at something, I believe.  So the moderator asks Bush to name the political philosopher or thinker he most identifies with.  Bush answers, “Christ, because he changed my heart.”

My place is to lose the election, to have historians view the best version of my answer – halting, unduly complicated, vaguely insincere – as the election’s turning point, and not even that, because I was losing before George Bush said Christ.

Stevenson could not win, Carter could not govern, and Lincoln, you know, governed, but only over civil war.

During long, two-term moonlit nights, we remember the reach of sunset, its sweet, spectacular defeat, its fire framed in an arched corridor where we shovel our dark ideals and reflect, demiurgical and orange-faced, an incarnate sun, a clear fabrication, a foundry of Fathers.

Late summer feels like late in life
when earth becomes a playhouse for my youth.
We built the house that made us man and wife.

I play a ghost, a haze of August sunsets rife
with blended pigments pantomiming truth.
Late summer feels like late in life

before the nimbus frost makes saints of white-
haired lovers.  Forty years of afterglow imbrue
a scrim of sheets that made us man and wife.

Old men like me try not to dream, to start the strife
Joel prophesied.  Let younger men envision youth.
Late summer feels like late in life

when histrionic children play my prime and I,
whom none consults, will build no ticket booth
against the house that made us man and wife.

She hugs me tight.  Old age, a patient knife,
has cut youth’s cast from those concealed from youth:
late summer’s bright ablation.  Late in life
we build the house that made us man and wife.

A read write poem.  The portion of Joel's prophecy alluded to is here and here.

The sink is full of tulips, six red and six white tulips, tulips quiet as the rest, tulips no longer bent to wind but to my hand.  I raised them, I loved them, but I recollect my office.  I cut them by my stoop.

I immerse the tulips and cut them again, a passion of the first cut, my hands pale and viridescent, my wrists refracted in broken solidarity, both wrist and stem (carpal and carpel) as outward signs of the plant’s circumcision, a circumcision instituted between spats between Abram and Sarai before they were fishbowled into Abraham and Sarah, their steps and words and connubial glances exaggerated into bas-relief by virtue of a written record.  All writing is Braille, coarse and exaggerated, and Sarah resented both pen and knife as if they were strangers or at least unexpected guests in a state of perpetual arrival, perpetually and absently kicking the sides of their sandals against the stoop.

I have trained only some of my flock to ignore the flowers and to array the stems, to array them as adroitly as Jacob arrayed his rods to help his flock conceive or as wonderfully as Aaron arrayed his that budded, the vasewater lipping the stems as if it were sucking a weathervane of wind, the filmy surface otherwise as flat and calm as altarpiece, and (I preach to them) the flowers will array themselves, but most of them care only for flowers.  And I myself must not reach for consolations beyond the beds beside my stoop.

One tulip does not survive its second birth, its head resting against its hollow torso like John’s on Jesus’, its vasal aspect one of studied humility like the deacon who hasn’t spoken yet, the churchman with the mind of God.  Well, dead of an aneurysm, is it? – the air it fragranted by my stoop rose up its throat like a penitent’s sob or like ecstasy in a close room, and the breeze that first bent it now lowers its voice and pushes against my kitchen screen like the rest of Sunday: “And his bishoprick let another take.”  I must make arrangements.  And I will step by my step with a knife; with a knife I will stoop by my stoop.

Clement of Alexandria “felt that high matters of theology should be treated with reverence as being concerned with divine mysteries, and it would be dangerous to put into writing a full and extended statement for all to read. . . . Religious language, he felt, is akin to poetry.  A certain diffidence is proper to it.”  Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, 94.

“Certain doctrines, never formally defined, are as yet held by the Church with an unmistakable inner conviction, an unruffled unanimity, which is just as binding as an explicit formulation. 'Some things we have from written teaching,' said St. Basil, 'others we have received from the Apostolic Tradition handed down to us in a mystery; and both these things have the same force for piety.' [On the Holy Spirit, xvii, 66] This inner Tradition 'handed down to us in a mystery' is preserved above all in the Church's worship. Lex orandi lex credendi: our faith is expressed in our prayer. Orthodoxy has made few explicit definitions about the Eucharist and the other Sacraments, about the next world, the Mother of God, the saints, and the faithful departed: our belief on these points is contained mainly in the prayers and hymns used at services.”  Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church, 204-05.

“Theology is poetry. Now a poet spends a great deal of time listening to his unconscious and slowly hauling up a poem, word by word, phrase by phrase, until something beautiful is brought forth, we hope, into the world that changes people's perceptions, and we respond to a poem emotionally.  And I think we should take as great a care when we write our theology as we would if we were writing such a poem instead of just trotting out an orthodox formula or an orthodox definition of God or a catechism answer so that when people listen to a theological idea, they feel as touched as when they read a great poem by, say, Milton or Dante.”  Armstrong, Karen. "The Freelance Monotheism of Karen Armstrong." 8 June 2008. Podcast. "Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett." American Public Media 6 Aug 2009.

1

You get labeled.  Some of these labels are accurate, and some are not.  Some are helpful, and some are not. All labels are true: they accurately describe how the labeler sees the labeled one or how he wants the labeled one to see herself or be seen by others.  All labels are false: even the best ones tend to diminish the one labeled.  The finest eulogies diminish the dead.

Names are labels, too, though not as much these days, as a whole.  Still, though the name “Brandon” means nothing to me, because of her past experiences Victoria will attempt to put anyone named Brandon on the trading block any September she spots one on her class roster.  Like any words, names absorb connotations.

We are more than the sum of our most veracious labels.  Some labels go deeply into who I am – some more deeply than I realize – but none of them goes deeply enough to be fair enough, to touch or much less to capture who I am, or to do anything more than adumbrate some installment of me.

But labels and names have hurt deeply enough, and they have helped deeply enough, to confirm my belief that I have an ineffable, unknown name that my life may be obscurely moving toward that may in some sense capture who I am, at least to the extent that I am captured by Jesus.

Cats understand something like this about themselves, or at least T.S. Eliot thought they did.  Every cat must have three names (though I’ve never known a cat to answer to any): an everyday name, a unique name, and an unknown name.  Concerning the last:

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
    The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
    Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
        His ineffable effable
        Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

(“The Naming of Cats” from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. (So all this “effan” talk (as in, “Man, that move was effanineffable!”) started with Eliot.))

One distinction between a cat and me is that, according to the poem, a cat already knows his ineffable name; it is unknown only to others.  But I attribute this difference to the cat’s higher spiritual attainments.

In Revelation, Jesus gives a new name, unknown to anyone but the person given it, to every person “who overcomes” (2:17).  How can I relate to such a gift?  Is it an hereditary title?  A term of endearment?   Since no one else would know the name besides the giver and the recipient, I think this name would constitute less of an honor than an expression of intimacy.

I never found this reward too appealing until recently.   Why would I want anyone – even God – to label or rename me?  As a teenager, I didn’t accept the rich identity my father offered me.  Instead, I pieced together my own identity.  The pieces that went down deep inside of me were of this order: “I am a Christian” and “I am better than you” and “I am a failure.”  I required my faith to support my ideas about myself, and challenges to my faith, whether intellectual or experiential in nature, felt deeply threatening.

A few hard knocks later, my identity is more wrapped up in another.  It is my experience – I can’t speak for others – that the deepest sense of self comes from being loved.  Jesus loves me after all.  “For the Bible tells me so” was never enough.  And, if things work out, he’ll call me by a new name no one else will know.

2

Why do Christians see themselves as Christians?  It’s just another label.  In the Bible, Jesus never called anyone a Christian.  God didn’t, either.  And either did any apostle or New Testament writer or any other Christian.

I mean, it’s a fine label and all.  It’d be hard to replace it, even if we wanted to.  (Could you imagine Christians trying to agree on a new name for the religion?)  But is the name helpful as a means of seeing ourselves, of identifying ourselves to ourselves?  “First and foremost, I am a Christian.  That is, I’m a Christian before I’m a father, a husband, a doctor, an American, or a Republican.”  (I couldn’t resist that last one.)  Speak for yourself.

More voices: “If someone accused you of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?”  I don’t know.  The criminal lawyer in me asks, what are the elements of the crime?  I’d have to find out what my accuser means since the label has picked up a lot of good and bad historical baggage.  It’s not even always clear in the Bible what people meant by “Christian.”  The word is used only thrice in the Bible, and on each occasion it’s a label used only by people outside of the church.

The Bible’s first two references to “Christian” are in the Book of Acts.  In one reference, the narrator explains the term’s origin (a label used by the people of Antioch for the disciples there), and in the other, King Agrippa refers to himself as a potential “Christian” when he came to Caesarea in order to judge Paul relative to the accusations made against him.

And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a large number who believed turned to the Lord.  The news about them reached the ears of the church at Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas off to Antioch.  Then when he arrived and witnessed the grace of God, he rejoiced and began to encourage them all with resolute heart to remain true to the Lord; for he was a good man, and full of the Holy Spirit and of faith. And considerable numbers were brought to the Lord.  And he left for Tarsus to look for Saul; and when he had found him, he brought him to Antioch. And for an entire year they met with the church and taught considerable numbers; and the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch.  (Acts 11:21-26)

Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.  And Paul said, I would to God, that not only thou, but also all that hear me this day, were both almost, and altogether such as I am, except these bonds.  (Acts 26:28-29)

It’s interesting to me that, while Paul didn’t object to Agrippa’s term “Christian,” he went out of his way to refer to himself in another way – “such as I am” – and so to adopt no label for himself in this context at all.

The last use of the term Christian in the Bible is in one of Peter’s letters to the church, where the label is at the bottom of a list of otherwise negative labels his readers might have been subject to have been stuck with:

But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men’s matters.  Yet if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God on this behalf.  (1 Peter 4:15-16)

(I added the bold font in the above excerpts.  The italics, which are part of the King James translation, indicate words not directly translated from the original but added to make the text more understandable.)

It should be noted that, while Peter used the term “Christian” to refer to the disciples, he used it only to describe it as an accusation other people could have made against the disciples.  One gets the feeling that “Christian” may not have been as positive a label for the people Peter was writing to, or for the people those people lived among, anyway, as it had been for the Antiochans or for King Agrippa.  In his book The Early Church, Henry Chadwick points out that, for about two hundred years after Nero, many Romans considered Christians to be both incestuous and cannibalistic (26, 29).  Nevertheless, it seems clear from 1 Peter that, whatever the negative connotations were that the general public associated with the term at that time, the Christians were to understand them as false accusations that would make their suffering them akin to Christ’s suffering.

Chadwick notes that, after Anticoch, the term "Christian" "quickly spread as the popular term" among the communities where the disciples lived (16).  There were also other labels other Biblical characters outside of the church used for the disciples.  Many Jews first referred to the disciples as “the Nazarenes” (Chadwick 16, 21).  The word “sect” appears twice (Acts 24:5 and 28:22).  I like “sect” because it emphasizes the church’s roots as an offshoot of Judaism.  But I can understand why “sect,” unlike “Christian,” doesn’t show up as part of any church’s name today.  It carries a sort of illegitimate and narrow connotation at a time when many churches, even very small ones, wish to associate themselves with denominations or “apostolic streams” and include phrases like “World Outreach Center” in their names.

I’m fine with