Much Ado About Noting

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2008-05-16T21:06:00.002-04:00

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"Measure for Measure" by Jonathan Gottschall, Boston Globe 11 May 2008

2008-05-12T21:26:00.016-04:00

In his recent article on the state of literary criticism, Jonathan Gottschall keenly perceives some of the field's real and pressing problems. He writes that contemporary literary criticism combines, "obsolete theory, inadequate methods, unbridled theoretical bias, and a spirit of surrender to 'unknowability,'" an apt description of the broad state of affairs. Yet his proposed panacea to these academic ailments, that literature must adopt scientific theory, method, and ideology, misses the mark. Science is neither a remedy for present nor an innoculation against future outbreaks of poor literary criticism. The remedy is not science but art. The two are essentially different modes of knowledge which both aim at truth, approaching it from different directions. The cure for literary criticism, then, must emerge from within its own discipline by a cultivation of the arts of language. (In an upcoming series of posts, I will be reviewing several books which attempt just such a cultivation.)

As evidence in favor of marrying science and literary studies, Gottschall cites two obviously tenuous yet nearly unanimous tenets of contemporary literary studies: a feminist reading of beauty as male dominance and the death of the author, a la Roland Barthes. He then demonstrates how science can debunk such soft thinking. To refute the notion of a "beauty myth" as male dominance, Gottschall cites his own scientific analysis of the descriptions of physical attractiveness in folk tales from around the globe. What did all that scientific analysis discover? "Female characters in folktales were about six times more likely than their male counterparts to be described with a reference to their attractiveness." Conclusion: the beauty myth does not say something unique about Western culture, but rather it says something about human nature. To refute the notion that the author is dead, Gottschall again cites his own work, an survey of "the emotional and analytic responses of 500 literary scholars and avid readers to characters from scores of 19th-century British novels." Conclusion: "rumors of the author's demise have been greatly exaggerated."

Based upon the examples Gottschall provides, we are meant to understand the value of this innovative cooperation between literary studies and the sciences. Such a partnership would end the "epochal loss of confidence" in American English departments that William Deresiewicz recently described. But for those of us who never bought into the conclusions of late 20th-century literary theory in the first place, its collapse is merely the inevitable result of its own shoddy construction, not a demolition project that we should contract out to science. The question is not how to demolish poor criticism; it is already crumbling under its own weight. The real question is whether literary critics can construct anything better, and I think Gottschall's own examples demonstrate that partnering with science is not the answer. After what I am sure was hours and hours of strenuous research, his scientific method produced conclusions that merely reinforce common sense: 1) Feminine beauty has its roots in human nature and is not merely a social construction, and 2) A reader's experience of a novel does not "vary profoundly from reader to reader." Is this the "new and durable" knowledge that science would offer us? Unless I were to blind myself to criticism prior to 1960, I fail to see anything new in Gottschall's examples.

I also fail to see anything durable either for the literary profession or for the broader culture. Consider the difference between an encyclopedia article on eagles and Tennyson's poem, "The Eagle":

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sky in lonely lands,
Ringed by the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt, he falls.

We have to ask ourselves whether at this cultural moment the average person needs Encyclopedia Brittanica more than Tennyson, i.e. factual description more than essence. If we choose the former, we will be left "a little disappointed, as though we had grasped the feathers of the eagle but not its soul. True, we have learned many facts about the eagle, but we have missed somehow its lonely majesty, its power, and the 'wild grandeur' of its surroundings that would make the eagle a living creature rather than a mere museum specimen. For the living eagle we must turn to literature" (See Perrine and Arp). Adopting scientific methods, theory, and ideology would provide scholars with verifiable data of a certain kind but at what cost?

Finally, literary criticism may, as William Deresiewicz suggests, be dying. But surely those who suppose themselves members of that field must also understand that a field is not always in harvest; sometimes it must lie fallow. If current literary scholars and teachers desire another literary renaissance, and not just more funding, we must remember the words of Martin Heidegger:

To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy. This is why, in Hölderlin’s language, the world’s night is the holy night ("What are Poets for?" 94).

As with poets, so with literary critics.

We ought not merely to lament a poor harvest with our collective head in our hands. Instead, we ought to cultivate the soil by teaching the arts of language, namely grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Committing to such a recovery effort will mean less innovation and more repetition, less prestige and more perspiration, less research and more teaching. It will mean tilling soil and planting seeds, and it will mean only small profits from a harvest we will not reap fully. But it is nevertheless what must be done if the literary profession is to contribute to the broader culture and not just leech short-term gains from other supposedly successful disciplines in a faddist melee for relevance.

Later this week, I will review The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric by Sister Miriam Joseph, an example of the gritty scholarship combined with classroom application that I think literary criticism needs. It is a real alternative to the predominance of science, without the esotericism that Gottschall correctly identifies and rightly decries.

Review: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

2008-05-07T22:33:00.005-04:00

I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight last night before bed. It is a short book, first written down around 1400. The first and only other time I read Sir Gawain, in the 10th grade, I also ingested it whole, and after reading it a second time I am led to believe one should always read it in a single sitting. The tale still retains the original vitality which arrested me as a youth, compelling me to enter a world of chivalric knights, deeds of valour, and beautiful maidens. The Gawain-poet's delightful capacity for description makes that world even more alluring than it already would be for a young man remembering what it was like to be a young boy. For instance, the Gawain-poet portrays the Green Knight when he interrupts King Arthur's banquet:

For he was clad all in green, with a straight coat, and a mantle above; all decked and lined with fur was the cloth and the hood that was thrown back from his locks and lay on his shoulders. Hose had he of the same green, and spurs of bright gold with silken fastenings richly worked; and all his vesture was verily green. Around his waist and his saddle were bands with fair stones set upon silken work, 'twere too long to tell of all the trifles that were embroidered thereon--birds and insects in gay gauds of green and gold. All the trappings of his steed were of metal of like enamel, even the stirrups that he stood in stained of the same, and stirrups and saddle-bow alike gleamed and shone with green stones. Even the steed on which he rode was of the same hue, a green horse, great and strong, and hard to hold, with broidered bridle, meet for the rider.
The knight was thus gaily dressed in green, his hair falling around his shoulders; on his breast hung a beard, as thick and green as a bush, and the beard and the hair of his head were clipped all round above his elbows. The lower part of his sleeves were fastened with clasps in the same wise as a king's mantle. The horse's mane was crisp and plaited with many a knot folded in with gold thread about the fair green, here a twist of the hair, here another of gold. The tail was twined in like manner, and both were bound about with a band of bright green set with many a precious stone; then they were tied aloft in a cunning knot, whereon rang many bells of burnished gold. Such a steed might no other ride, nor had such ever been looked upon in that hall ere that time; and all who saw that knight spake and said that a man might scarce abide his stroke.

But aside from the sheer beauty and delight of reading this finely crafted legend, I was struck by the relevance of its moral teaching. In the story, Gawain repeatedly upholds the chivalric code, despite many opportunities privately to transgress and with no apparent consequences. Gawain acts in accordance with what he perceives is a divine order that compels him to remain virtuous despite any idea of "getting away with it." For Gawain and the Gawain-poet, there is no getting away with anything, not simply because God views our deeds, but because every deed is an extension of character. To be a knight is to act according to chivalry and valour; therefore, to act differently is to reduce one's being and, after death, one's legacy.
However simplistic this medieval sensibility appears to the modern mind, with its sophisticated notion (most poignantly expressed by Shakespeare) of the difference between appearance and reality, Gawain's troth, chivalry, and gentilesse still cry out for a people who cannot "smile, and smile, and be a villain."

Review: The Sacred Wood by T.S. Eliot

2008-05-05T15:30:00.004-04:00

The Sacred Wood is a collection of literary critical essays by T.S. Eliot, a modern poet and new critical literary scholar. The single best essay is "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in which Eliot describes his organic understanding of tradition as an evolving order that adapts to incorporate new works:

The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist afte the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.

[Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.

He also defines the individual talent, i.e. the impassive and keenly intellectual mind of the poet, as the necessary catalyst for the shaping of a work of art:

. . . my meaning is, that the poet has, not a 'personality' to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

The Sacred Wood also contains several fine essays by Eliot on Euripedes, Marlow, Rhetoric, Hamlet, Ben Jonson, William Blake, and Dante. In nearly every case, Eliot engages in a secondary critical debate esoteric to his time and discipline, but there remain enough moments of timeless brilliance to make the book worthwhile for any reader.

Review: The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

2008-05-03T17:38:00.007-04:00

I just finished reading The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco last night, and I thought I'd write down a few thoughts for anyone else interested in reading the book. I read the novel for pure enjoyment, mostly at night before bed, and pure enjoyment it was. The story takes place over seven days in 1327, in an abbey. On its surface, the book is a mystery novel. William of Baskerville and his novice, Adso of Melk, are summoned to the abbey to solve a murder. William's keen observations and calculated logic direct him into the heart of the abbey, its labyrinthine library, and the secrets contained therein.

The tale is told through Adso's narrative voice, from whom the reader is cleverly distanced by an additional frame of narration indicated in the prologue. Much like Robert Walton in Shelley's Frankenstein, an unknown speaker introduces Adso's account, telling about his translating into Italian what was in fact a copy of Adso's original manuscript, written in 1842 by Abbe Vallet in Paris. This narrative framing alerts the reader to the novel's second level of meaning: it is a book about books. More specifically, it is a book about time's fading effect and the small triumph against it that books represent. This truth is best encapsulated in the novel's final lyric statement, a haunting line, written in latin, for which the entire book is prerequisite:

"stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus."
The ancient rose is pristine by its name; naked names are all we have.

Kant Attack Ad by Friedrich Nietzsche

2008-04-24T22:54:00.000-04:00

Somebody Stole My Myths-XJ Kennedy

2008-04-23T23:15:00.003-04:00

Somebody stole my myths,
Stole all their gists and piths.
Somebody pinched my Juno and Pan,
Crooked Dionysus
And caused my spiritual crisis.
Some no-good no-account
Made my centaur dismount.
Some bugger in a laboratory coat with test-tube in hand
Mixed nitrogen with glycerin and poof! went my promised land, oh,
Hear me crying,
Don't much like forever dying--
Somebody stole my myths.

Decision: The University of Dallas

2008-04-15T16:38:00.002-04:00

I have been offered admission to the IPS doctoral program in literature the University of Dallas, and I have decided to accept. For those of you who know me well, you know just how much this means.

Thank you, Lord, for this gift. Help and enable me to carry out my duties in this new office with efficiency, joy, and peace, and to do so to the satisfaction of those for whom and with whom I study. May I see this work as my participation in Your providential design of creation and preservation. It is also my expression of my solidarity with my brothers and sisters in the pilgrimage of life.

Help me Lord to work with a spirit of self-sacrifice. Bless the fruits of my work. At my time of retirement, may I be able to look back with joy, peace, and gratitude. Accept this offering, through Christ our Lord. Amen.
~ Francis Cardinal Arinze

Review: Inspiration and Incarnation by Peter Enns

2008-04-14T06:51:00.007-04:00

Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, by PETER ENNS. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005. 197 pp. $17.99

In light of the recent action of Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia to suspend Peter Enns, and to promote a more informed dialogue regarding that action, I offer the following review of his now infamous book. I do so as a layman quite unfamiliar with Enns’ field of specialization, but I hope that my lack of expertise should be functional below, since my amateur status places me at the level of many bloggers, updaters, whisperers, and second-hand-opinion-getters that make up the evangelical and reformed “public.” During the past week or so, I found myself wondering what in the world it was that Enns actually wrote to stir up such a hullabaloo, and that question led me to acquire the book and read it. For those of you who do not have the time or desire to do the same, the following review provides a small taste of the whole. After a synopsis of the book are a few questions designed to facilitate further (constructive) discussion about the book.

If you decide to read Inspiration and Incarnation, you will be delighted to find that Enns is writing with folks like us in mind; namely, lay-people without scholarly expertise in biblical studies who still have questions about how our commitment to Scripture intersects modern scholarship. Enns is careful not to assume a knowledge of his field. His style is clear and engaging, allowing even an amateur like me to follow his cogent argumentation. He often pauses, for example, to define technical terms and to recapitulate ideas. In other words, Enns demonstrates careful scholarship without losing his audience. The argument of the book is organized around three problems of OT scholarship: 1) How does one explain the remarkable similarity between the OT and other Ancient Near Eastern texts? Is it really unique? 2) How does one explain the contradictions in the OT? Is it really whole? 3) What about the way NT authors interpret the OT? Do they not take it out of context? Enns suggests a Christological analogy as a way forward from each of these vexing problems. Just as Christ, the Word, is fully human and fully divine in His person, so Scripture, the Word, is fully human and fully divine as a revelatory text.

In a chapter titled, “The Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern Literature,” Enns tackles the first problem. During the past 150 years or so, archaeologists discovered many ancient texts such as Enuma Elish, Atrahasis, Gilgamesh, the Code of Hammurabi, and the Instruction of Amenemope. These texts offer insight into the cultural life of the ancient near eastern (ANE) world. They also contain accounts of creation, and a flood, codes of laws, and epithets of wisdom that are strikingly similar to the OT. Enns points out that liberal critics of the 19th century improperly employed these parallels as evidence against Scripture’s divine authority, while 20th century fundamentalist and evangelical engagement of modern scholarship, in an effort to preserve the divine authority of the Bible, was selective at best. Dissatisfied with both trends, Enns promotes a rigorous, scholarly interaction with ANE texts, not as a way of debunking Scripture, but as a way of developing a Christological parallel. As Christ took on the customs, dress, and language of his first century world, so God’s revelation took on the culture of the ancient near east. Yet this was no mere accommodation, says Enns, but an incarnation that called the Hebrew people to a heritage, ethics, and wisdom radically different than their ANE counterparts.

In “The Old Testament and Theological Diversity” Enns addresses a tension not between the OT and its ANE counterparts, but between the OT and itself. For example, Enns notes a tension between Samuel-Kings and Chronicles: 1) “Chronicles greatly diminishes the sins of David”; 2) “Chronicles emphasizes the unity of God’s people”; 3) “Chronicles strongly emphasizes the temple and Solomon’s role in building it”; and 4) “Chronicles emphasizes a theology of ‘immediate retribution’” (84). These different emphases reflect the situation of Israel at the time Chronicles was written, after returning to the land from the Babylonian exile. Samuel-Kings, on the other hand, was written “to explain the exile to an exilic audience,” and hence its emphases differ (83). According to Enns, then, modern critical anxieties concerning the disparity between Samuel-Kings and Chronicles only exist because of historical and scientific assumptions not possible until after the Enlightenment. The OT authors simply did not think in such terms, and we as interpreters must learn to think from their perspective, not ours.

“The Old Testament and Its Interpretation in the New Testament” is a discussion of apostolic hermeneutics and its implication for contemporary interpretation of the OT. As in previous chapters, Enns is careful to emphasize an awareness of our own culturally conditioned interpretive framework, namely the grammatical-historical method. He then differentiates our method from the method of the apostles. While there is no grammatical-historical reason to read “out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11:1) as an allusion to Christ, for example, Matthew 2:15 demonstrates that the apostles had no problem with doing just that. For Enns, this interpretive method cannot be explained as only a function of apostolic authority without consequences for our own hermeneutic, and though he offers a way forward, Enns seems least sure of himself at this juncture of the book. One can hardly blame him, for the problem is quite sticky: How does one uphold the grammatical-historical method on one side, acknowledge apostolic divergence from that method on the other, and still determine an acceptable hermeneutic for contemporary readers and scholars? His suggestion is a christotelic and ecclesiotelic reading that both rigorously employs the grammatical-historical method but simultaneously asks, “What difference does the death and resurrection of Christ make for how I understand this part of the Old Testament?” (159)

For many evangelicals, Inspiration and Incarnation presents a shock, perhaps even a scandal. But for others, like myself, it is a ray of light, a genuine engagement with modern scholarship for a lay audience that is intended to revere Scripture rather than debunk it. Whatever happens at WTS, I am truly grateful for Enns’ work, and I hope he will continue to produce scholarship for the benefit of the Church. Along that vein, below is a list of questions and thoughts about the book. They are written as though we were chatting over coffee, not as though I knew the answer.

Questions I would ask Dr. Enns over a cup of coffee:

- Your audience for the book may not have required a full explanation, but doesn’t your incarnational analogy assume the divine inspiration of Scripture rather than demonstrate it?

- What about the old axiom: Scripture interprets Scripture? Do we need to adjust our understanding of WCF I.IX in light of ANE texts, many of which were discovered 200 years after WCF was written?

- If oral traditions existed prior to written accounts, then do we need to adjust our understanding of the “original autograph?” i.e. Did inspiration occur when the story was first told? When it was first written? Was it rather a process?

Nota Bene: Quotes from Sidney's Defence of Poesy

2008-03-05T13:43:00.002-05:00

"for until they find a pleasure in the exercises of the mind, great promises of much knowledge will little persuade them that know not the fruits of knowledge."

"[Nature's] world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden."

"This purifying of wit--this enriching of memory, enabling of judgement, and enlarging of conceit--which commonly we call learning, under what name soever it come forth, or to what immediate end soever it be directed, the final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of."

Nota Bene: Quotes from Horace, Ars Poetica

2008-02-28T01:00:00.004-05:00

"So I'll play the whetstone's part, which makes steel sharp, but of itself cannot cut. Though I write naught myself, I will teach to poet's office and duty; whence he draws his stores; what nurtures and fashions him; what befits him and what not; whither the right course leads and whither the wrong."

"A poem is like a picture: one strikes your fancy more, the nearer you stand; another, the farther away."

"What you have not published you can destroy; the word once sent forth can never come back."

"Who saves a man against his will does the same as murder him."

"If you ever read aught to Quintilius, he would say: 'Pray correct this and this.' If, after two or three vain trials, you said you could not do better, he would bid you blot it out, and return the ill-shaped verses to the anvil. If you preferred defending your mistake to amending it, he would waste not a word more, would spend no fruitless toil, to prevent your loving yourself and your work alone without a rival. An honest and sensible man will censure lifeless lines, he will find fault with harsh ones; if they are graceless, he will draw his pen across and smear them with a black stroke; he will cut away pretentious ornament; he will force you to flood the obscure with light, will convict the doubtful phrase, will mark what should be changed, will prove an Aristarchus. He will not say, 'Why should I give offense to a friend about trifles?' These trifles will bring that friend into serious trouble, if once he has been laughed down and given an unlucky reception."

Ash Wednesday by T.S. Eliot

2008-02-06T19:49:00.000-05:00

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is
nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

II
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been
contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

III

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jaggèd, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond
repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind
over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.

Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy

but speak the word only.

IV
Who walked between the violet and the violet
Whe walked between
The various ranks of varied green
Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour,
Talking of trivial things
In ignorance and knowledge of eternal dolour
Who moved among the others as they walked,
Who then made strong the fountains and made fresh the
springs

Made cool the dry rock and made firm the sand
In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour,
Sovegna vos

Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking,
wearing

White light folded, sheathing about her, folded.
The new years walk, restoring
Through a bright cloud of tears, the years, restoring
With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.

The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but
spoke no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile

V
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny
the voice

Will the veiled sister pray for
Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose
thee,
Those who are torn on the horn between season and season,
time and time, between
Hour and hour, word and word, power and power, those who
wait
In darkness? Will the veiled sister pray
For children at the gate
Who will not go away and cannot pray:
Pray for those who chose and oppose

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Will the veiled sister between the slender
Yew trees pray for those who offend her
And are terrified and cannot surrender
And affirm before the world and deny between the rocks
In the last desert before the last blue rocks
The desert in the garden the garden in the desert
Of drouth, spitting from the mouth the withered apple-seed.

O my people.

VI
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the
garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 1

2008-01-28T20:59:00.000-05:00

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

Shakespeare's initial sonnet hazards a thesis for all 154: we desire increase. Whether this thesis is more or less influenced by Shakespeare's patron is of little interest, and for now so is the fact that the speaker's argument shifts endlessly throughout the entire sequence. All that will come in time, but for now we must simply contemplate the speaker's opening statement. Procreation is a form of immortality, he asserts, perhaps the closest form which human beings can achieve. Time is the mortal's enemy, and the speaker attempts to communicate this truth to a young man. He exhorts him to carpe dium and reinforces his argument by comparing the fair youth's beauty to a rose. We might even consider Sonnet 1 itself as a rose, as Helen Vendler suggests: "Its indexing function for the sequence allows it to be seen as a packed bud from which many subsequent petals will spring" (47). So if this sonnet concerns itself with the sowing of the fair youth's seed, then the reader can also perceive immediately the connection between biological procreation and poetry, between sex and the word, and that connection will be expanded throughout the sequence.

There are a few troublesome words in Sonnet 1 that strike the 21st century ear as somehow strange, but which we should assume would have been entirely comprehensible to Shakespeare's readership. "Churl" in line 12 means a base man of the lowest societal rank, the opposite of a nobleman. Katherine Duncan-Jones suggests that the word could be used affectionately, however, as in "Juliet's reproach to the dead Romeo, 'O churl! Drunk all, and left no friendly drop' (RJ 5.3.163)," and one can certainly read "tender churl" as gentle teasing in apposition with "tender heir" in line 4. The other word is "niggarding." A niggard is a miserly, stingy person; think Shylock from The Merchant of Venice. The speaker employs both "churl" and "niggarding" to explain a paradox to the fair youth. Though he believes that beauty can be preserved by keeping it within himself, the only way to preserve beauty against the scythe of time in the speaker's cosmology is through procreation. By giving away his "content," both in the sense of biological material and a contented life of self-absorption, the fair youth paradoxically ensures its continuance. The paradox is, of course, natural to every human being and so it hardly strikes us as paradoxical. This naturalness furthers the speaker's powerful insinuation: the fair youth's churlish gluttony is itself an affront to the natural order.

The speaker's argument for the naturalness of this desire for increase requires another word. Returning to the opening line, we desire this procreation "from fairest creatures." And so the speaker's argument also begins with a compliment. He considers the young man one of the world's most beautiful creations, "the world's fresh ornament" and "herald to the gaudy spring," whose beauty exists in "abundance." But the compliment only serves to accentuate the need for procreation, for the speaker's cosmology again insinuates an obligation on the part of the young man: the need for procreation increases in proportion to the creature's beauty. His assertion that beauty be credited to the fair, and implicitly not to the dark, furthers a conventional understanding that Shakespeare will interrogate in sonnets 127-152. For now we need only to note the assumption.

Sonnet 1 has many good things to say about beauty, mortality, nature, the struggle against time, and a myriad of other topics. But what makes it a poem is not simply what it says but how it is said. Consider, for example, the subtle metrical chiasmus shared by "increase" and "decease," or the slight alteration from the otherwise logical and anticipated rhyme, "decease" rather than "decrease," which engages our minds in a subconscious interaction with the poem. A recent NPR radio program on the sociology of animal play provides a helpful analogy. The program dealt with the topic of play, and an interviewed guest explained that if two animals are playing a chasing game, and one is decidedly faster than the other, this one will intentionally slow down so that the other almost catches up, then he darts off in a different direction. The fast animal does this in order to prolong the game of chase and ensure the playful pleasure of both parties. Part of Shakespeare's genius, which the incomparable Stephen Booth has shown in his modestly titled Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets, is that he engages one's mind in the same way the faster animal engages the slower. He speeds up and slows down, then darts in another direction only to return to the same spot. Readers engage in a subconscious linguistic game, and this game teaches by pleasing the mind, as Dr. Johnson once wrote. As Helen Vendler observes, the Speaker constructs his argument through catachresis, or mixed-metaphor, "a candle which refuses to bud forth" (48). While readers are capable of subconsciously eliding these dissonances, they affect a mental chase between reader and poet in which the poet is always just barely out of reach.

Plato on Poets

2008-01-17T12:48:00.000-05:00

I haven't the time for any of my own comments, but here is another section of Plato's Ion, in which Socrates comments upon the nature of poets. Not that we should necessarily trust every philosopher's opinion of poetry, but here it is:

"For the poet is a light and winged and sacred thing, and is not first to compose unless he also becomes inspired and out of his senses and his mind is no longer in him; as long as he should have possession of these, man is wholly powerless to compose and to chant an oracle."

and the Greek:

κοῦφον γὰρ χρῆμα ποιητής ἐστι καὶ πτηνὸν καὶ ἱερόν, καί οὐ πρότερον οἷός τε ποιεῖεν, πρὶν ἄν ἔνθεός τε γένηται καὶ ἔκφρων καὶ ὁ νοῦς μηκέτι ἐν αὐτῷ ἐνῇ· ἕως δ᾽ ἄν τουτὶ ἔχῃ τὸ κτῆμα, ἀδύνατος πᾶς ποιεῖεν ἐστὶν ἄνθρωπος καὶ χρησμῳδεῖν.

Education: Plato on Rhapsodes

2008-01-10T02:06:00.001-05:00

Below is a passage from Plato's Ion that lifted me from my chair this evening:

Indeed I have often envied you rhapsodes, Ion, for your art. For it is fitting to your art for you to be always conspicuous and to appear as beautiful as possible, but at the same time it is necessary [for you] to rub with other poets (in both numbers and quality) as well and especially with Homer, the best and most divine of the poets, and to learn his thought thoroughly, not only his words; such is an occupation to be envied. For the good rhapsode would not arise, if he should not be present with the words of the poet. For the rhapsode it is necessary to be an interpreter of the thought of the poet for his audience; and to do this well without having known that which the poet says is impossible. And so all these things are worthy to be envied.

Καὶ μὴν πολλάκις γε ἐζήλωσα ὑμᾶς τοὺς ῥαψῳδοὺς, ὦ Ἴων, τῆς τέχνης· τὸ γὰρ ἅμα μὲν τὸ σῶμα κεκοσμῆσθαι ἀεὶ πρέπον ὑμῶν εἶναι τῇ τέχνῃ καὶ ὡς καλλίστοις φαίνεσθαι, ἅμα δὲ ἀναγκαῖον εἶναι ἔν τε ἄλλοις ποιηταῖς διατρίβειν πολλοῖς καὶ ἀγαθοῖς καὶ δὴ καὶ μάλιστα ἐν Ὁμήρω, τῷ ἀρίστῳ καὶ θειοτάτῳ τῶν ποιητῶν, καὶ τὴν τούτου διάνοιαν ἐκμανθάνειν, μὴ μόνον τὰ ἔπη, ζηλωτόν ἐστιν. οὐ γὰρ ἄν γένοιτό ποτε ἀγαθὸς ῥαψῳδός, εἰ μὴ συνείη τὰ λεγόμενα ὑπὸ τοῦ ποιητοῦ. τὸν γὰρ ῥαψῳδὸν ἑρμηνέα δεῖ τοῦ ποιητοῦ τῆς διανοίας γίγνεσθαι τοῖς ἀκούουσι· τοῦτο δὲ καλῶς ποιεῖν μὴ γιγνώσκοντα ὅ τι λέγει ὁ ποιητὴς ἀδύνατον. ταῦτα οὖν πάντα ἄξια ζηλοῦσθαι.

Notice the subtle combination of exhortation and inquiry in Plato's compliment of rhapsodes. Yes, he's slapping Ion on the back: "Boy, you rhapsodes have it all! Temporal fame and a real understanding of poetry!" But this passage also begins a dialogue of inquiry: "You do really understand poetry, right?" And as I thought about this passage during translation, I began applying the passage to my own profession. In fact, I think Plato (er, Socrates) offers us a sound pair of pedagogical principles: Know the material and interpret it for your audience. Plato asserts that the latter cannot exist without the former. In a time when heavy emphasis has been placed upon teaching methods, to the extent that teachers now earn degrees in education without ever learning a particular discipline, I think we need to hear these words more than most. To simply repeat words without comprehension is dangerous, and I wonder whether that is exactly what our schools are doing.

Review: At War With The Word by R.V. Young

2008-01-04T09:59:00.000-05:00

I've been doing quite a bit of genuine pleasure-reading this holiday season, serendipitously deciding to pick up C.S. Lewis' Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. My only real comment about these novels is that I had forgotten how much Iiked Reepicheep.

But I've also had a chance for more "serious" or "academic" endeavors, such as the featured book for this entry, R.V. Young's At War with the Word. Though originally written as separate essays, the book holds together well and essentially attacks the hegemony of literary theory since 1960. That's right, Toto, we're not in Narnia anymore. Young defends to the teeth the "Old New Criticism" of T.S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, et al and the "Common Sense" interpretative model pooh-poohed by scholars such as Catherine Belsey and Jonathan Culler. Firmly establishing himself as an embattled minority struggling against a corrupt monolith, Young's style is frequently abrasive. Sometimes this struck me as hilarious, but occasionally it was just plain contentious. Both reactions, however, enlivened my reading experience. Perhaps the best moment in the book occurs in its final chapter:

The Latin educare means to "rear or bring up (children or young animals," adn it in turn derives from educere, "to lead forth" or "to lead out of." Implicit in the term is the idea that education consists in leading the young out of something, and the something out of which everyone must be led is the peculiar, self-interested ego; stifling subjectivism that is the universal prison of all human beings. A great work of literature is, then, a book that extends our horizons, that alters our perspective, that makes us take notice of something beyond our immediate needs and desires.

Banished Words

2008-01-02T22:50:00.000-05:00

CHECK THIS OUT

"The Little Match-Seller" by Hans Christian Andersen

2007-12-31T17:56:00.000-05:00

It was terribly cold and nearly dark on the last evening of the old year, and the snow was falling fast. In the cold and the darkness, a poor little girl, with bare head and naked feet, roamed through the streets. It is true she had on a pair of slippers when she left home, but they were not of much use. They were very large, so large, indeed, that they had belonged to her mother, and the poor little creature had lost them in running across the street to avoid two carriages that were rolling along at a terrible rate. One of the slippers she could not find, and a boy seized upon the other and ran away with it, saying that he could use it as a cradle, when he had children of his own. So the little girl went on with her little naked feet, which were quite red and blue with the cold. In an old apron she carried a number of matches, and had a bundle of them in her hands. No one had bought anything of her the whole day, nor had anyone given her even a penny. Shivering with cold and hunger, she crept along; poor little child, she looked the picture of misery. The snowflakes fell on her long, fair hair, which hung in curls on her shoulders, but she regarded them not.

Lights were shining from every window, and there was a savory smell of roast goose, for it was New-year’s eve—yes, she remembered that. In a corner, between two houses, one of which projected beyond the other, she sank down and huddled herself together. She had drawn her little feet under her, but she could not keep off the cold; and she dared not go home, for she had sold no matches, and could not take home even a penny of money. Her father would certainly beat her; besides, it was almost as cold at home as here, for they had only the roof to cover them, through which the wind howled, although the largest holes had been stopped up with straw and rags. Her little hands were almost frozen with the cold. Ah! perhaps a burning match might be some good, if she could draw it from the bundle and strike it against the wall, just to warm her fingers. She drew one out—“scratch!” how it sputtered as it burnt! It gave a warm, bright light, like a little candle, as she held her hand over it. It was really a wonderful light. It seemed to the little girl that she was sitting by a large iron stove, with polished brass feet and a brass ornament. How the fire burned! and seemed so beautifully warm that the child stretched out her feet as if to warm them, when, lo! the flame of the match went out, the stove vanished, and she had only the remains of the half-burnt match in her hand.

She rubbed another match on the wall. It burst into a flame, and where its light fell upon the wall it became as transparent as a veil, and she could see into the room. The table was covered with a snowy white table-cloth, on which stood a splendid dinner service, and a steaming roast goose, stuffed with apples and dried plums. And what was still more wonderful, the goose jumped down from the dish and waddled across the floor, with a knife and fork in its breast, to the little girl. Then the match went out, and there remained nothing but the thick, damp, cold wall before her.

She lighted another match, and then she found herself sitting under a beautiful Christmas-tree. It was larger and more beautifully decorated than the one which she had seen through the glass door at the rich merchant’s. Thousands of tapers were burning upon the green branches, and colored pictures, like those she had seen in the show-windows, looked down upon it all. The little one stretched out her hand towards them, and the match went out.

The Christmas lights rose higher and higher, till they looked to her like the stars in the sky. Then she saw a star fall, leaving behind it a bright streak of fire. “Someone is dying,” thought the little girl, for her old grandmother, the only one who had ever loved her, and who was now dead, had told her that when a star falls, a soul was going up to God.

She again rubbed a match on the wall, and the light shone round her; in the brightness stood her old grandmother, clear and shining, yet mild and loving in her appearance. “Grandmother,” cried the little one, “O take me with you; I know you will go away when the match burns out; you will vanish like the warm stove, the roast goose, and the large, glorious Christmas-tree.” And she made haste to light the whole bundle of matches, for she wished to keep her grandmother there. And the matches glowed with a light that was brighter than the noon-day, and her grandmother had never appeared so large or so beautiful. She took the little girl in her arms, and they both flew upwards in brightness and joy far above the earth, where there was neither cold nor hunger nor pain, for they were with God.

In the dawn of morning there lay the poor little one, with pale cheeks and smiling mouth, leaning against the wall; she had been frozen to death on the last evening of the year; and the New-year’s sun rose and shone upon a little corpse! The child still sat, in the stiffness of death, holding the matches in her hand, one bundle of which was burnt. “She tried to warm herself,” said some. No one imagined what beautiful things she had seen, nor into what glory she had entered with her grandmother, on New-year’s day.

Sonnet at Christmas by Allen Tate

2007-12-24T12:45:00.000-05:00

Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky
And I must think a little of the past:
When I was ten I told a stinking lie
That got a black boy whipped; but now at last
The going years, caught in an accurate glow,
Reverse like balls englished upon green baize--
Let them return; let the round trumpets blow
The ancient crackle of the Christ's deep gaze.
Deafened and blind, with senses yet unfound
Am I, untutored to the after wit
Of knowledge, knowing a nightmare has no sound.
Therefore with idle hands and head I sit
In late December before the fire's daze,
Punished by crimes of which I would be quit.

Heidegger on Poetry in a Destitute Time

2007-12-11T15:51:00.000-05:00

"To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world's night utters the holy. This is why, in Hölderlin's language, the world's night is the holy night."

The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord

2007-12-09T23:00:00.000-05:00

Folks, here is an excellent poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's one of the best poems I know for teaching the musical nature of poetry. The diction is so alliterative that you can almost taste the words. It's a great poem, and I would enjoy any comments you might toss in my direction regarding its merits.

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

We are God's Poem

2007-12-08T19:25:00.000-05:00

αὐτοῦ γάρ ἐσμεν ποίημα, κτισθέντες ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ ἐπὶ ἔργοις ἀγαθοῖς οἷς προητοίμασεν ὁ θεός, ἵνα ἐν αὐτοῖς περιπατήσωμεν.

For we are his poem, composed by Christ Jesus for the purpose of good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we should live by them.

Symposium at the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture

2007-12-03T13:18:00.000-05:00

I just learned that my paper, "Perdita: The Fulcrum of The Winter's Tale," has been accepted for presentation at the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture. In the paper, I argue that Perdita functions as the catalyst for Hermione's transformation in 5.3, and that her capacity to redeem her father has implications for the function of the daughter figure in the tragic and comedic genres. I am very excited to present, especially since this means I will get to see the Drs. Allums again!

The New Evangelicalism

2007-12-03T12:45:00.001-05:00

I recently listened to an interview of Jim Wallis on Krista Tippett's Public Radio show, Speaking of Faith. Krista consistently provides excellent programming on a variety of issues, focusing specifically around meaning, ethics, and ideas. A podcast of her entire show, including archived interviews, is available here. Just follow the on-screen instructions. The reason I mention this particular interview is that Jim Wallis represents a new breed of evangelical leaders whose concern is not merely private morality but social reform. Wallis' new book, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It appears to be a very timely publication. We all anticipate the inundation of election campaign material that will herald the next Presidential election year. It's a time when evangelicals across our nation should pause and consider our what our faith means in the public square. Jim Wallis' approach seems helpful, and I encourage you to listen to the interview.

P.S. What are the most important moral issues facing us as a nation?

Original Sin: A Short Story by Robert Penn Warren

2007-11-28T16:52:00.000-05:00

What follows is a marvelous poem by Robert Penn Warren, "Original Sin: A Short Story." I am currently writing a brief analysis of the poem for class. For now, here's the poem in its entirety:

Nodding, its great head rattling like a gourd,
And locks like seaweed strung on the stinking stone,
The nightmare stumbles past, and you have heard
It fumble your door before it whimpers and is gone:
It acts like the old hound that used to snuffle your door and moan.

You thought you had lost it when you left Omaha,
For it seemed connected then with your grandpa, who
Had a wen on his forehead and sat on the veranda
To finger the precious protuberance, as was his habit to do,
Which glinted in sun like rough garnet or the rich old brain bulging through.

But you met it in Harvard Yard as the historic steeple
Was confirming the midnight with its hideous racket,
And you wondered how it had come, for it stood so imbecile,
With empty hands, humble, and surely nothing in pocket:
Riding the rods, perhaps--or grandpa's will paid the ticket.

You were almost kindly then, in your first homesickness,
As it tortured its stiff face to speak, but scarcely mewed;
Since then you have outlived all your homesickness,
But have met it in many another distempered latitude:
Oh, nothing is lost, ever lost! at last you understood.

But it never came in the quantum glare of sun
To shame you before your friends, and had nothing to do
With your public experience or private reformation:
But it thought no bed too narrow--it stood with lips askew
And shook its great head sadly like the abstract Jew.

Never met you in the lyric arsenical meadows
When children call and your heart goes stone in the bosom;
At the orchard anguish never, nor ovoid horror,
Which is furred like a peach or avid like the delicious plum.
It takes no part in your classic prudence or fondled axiom.

Not there when you exclaimed: "Hope is betrayed by
Disastrous glory of sea-capes, sun-torment of whitecaps
--There must be a new innocence for us to be stayed by."
But there it stood, after all the timetables, all the maps,
In the crepuscular clutter of always, always, or perhaps.

You have moved often and rarely left an address,
And hear of the deaths of friends with a sly pleasure,
A sense of cleansing and hope, which blooms from distress;
But it has not died, it comes, its hand childish, unsure,
Clutching the bribe of chocolate or a toy you used to treasure.

It tries the lock; you hear, but simply drowse:
There is nothing remarkable in that sound at the door.
Later you may hear it wander the dark house
Like a mother who rises at night to seek a childhood picture;
Or it goes to the backyard and stands like an old horse cold in the pasture.

Be Ye Poets

2007-11-28T11:29:00.000-05:00

Γίνεσθε δὲ ποιηταῖ λόγου καὶ μὴ μόνον ἀκροαταὶ παραλογιζόμενοι ἑαυτούς. ὅτι εἴ τις ἀκροατὴς λόγου ἐστὶν καὶ οὐ ποιητής, οὗτος ἔοικεν ἀνδρὶ κατανοοῦντι τὸ πρόσωπον τῆς γενέσεως αὐτοῦ ἐν ἐσόπτρῳ‧ κατενόησεν γὰρ ἑαυτὸν καὶ ἀπελήλυθεν καὶ εὐθέως ἐπελάθετο ὁποῖος ἦν. ὁ δὲ παρακύψας εἰς νόμον τέλειον τὸν τῆς ἐλευθερίας καὶ παραμείνας, οὐκ ἀκροατὴς ἐπιλησμονῆς γενόμενος ἀλλὰ ποιητὴς ἔργου, οὗτος μακάριος ἐν τῇ ποιήσει αὐτοῦ ἔσται.

Be ye poets of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves, because if anyone is a hearer of the word only and not a poet, this one resembles a man who contemplates his natural face in a mirror; for he contemplates himself and leaves, and at once forgets what sort he was. But he who looks at the perfect law (the law of freedom) and remains, not being a hearer who forgets but a poet who forms, this one will be blessed in his poetry.

An Onion

2007-11-25T14:06:00.000-05:00

Today's sermon passage was Titus 3:8 "The saying is trustworthy, and I want you to insist on these things, so that those who have believed in God may be careful to devote themselves to good works. These things are excellent and profitable for people." It reminded me of a passage in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

It's only a story, but it's a nice story. I used to hear it when I was a child from Matryona, my cook, who is still with me. It's like this. Once upon a time there was a peasant woman and a very wicked woman she was. And she died and did not leave a single good deed behind. The devils caught her and plunged her into the lake of fire. So her guardian angel stood and wondered what good deed of hers he could remember to tell to God; 'She once pulled up an onion in her garden," said he, 'and gave it to a beggar woman.' And God answered: 'You take that onion then, hold it out to her in the lake, and let her take hold and be pulled out. And if you can pull her out of the lake, let her come to Paradise, but if the onion breaks, then the woman must stay where she is.' The angel ran to the woman and held out the onion to her. 'Come,' said he, 'catch hold and I'll pull you out.' And he began cautiously pulling her out. He had just pulled her right out, when the other sinners in the lake, seeing how she was being drawn out, began catching hold of her so as to be pulled out with her. But she was a very wicked woman and she began kicking them. 'I'm to be pulled out, not you. It's my onion, not yours.' As soon as she said that, the onion broke. And the woman fell into the lake and she is burning there to this day. So the angel wept and went away. So that's the story, Alyosha; I know it by heart, for I am that wicked woman myself. I boasted to Rakitin that I had given away an onion, but to you I'll say: Tve done nothing but give away one onion all my life, that's the only good deed I've done.'

I love the image of angels pulling sinners up by our deeds. I love it as a literary image, but I confess that it's personally harrowing as doctrine. Even so, I think Dostoevsky's vision is instructive. Our deeds indeed matter for salvation. Yet I take great comfort in the sagacity of the angel in the story, who finds something good in a wicked person, even something as small as an onion. Although the onion breaks, the way I see it the onion has enough strength to pull up every sinner in hell, if only the woman would share her good deed. As Christ said, "For to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”

Two Reviews: Culler and Belsey

2007-11-24T23:41:00.000-05:00

In an attempt to become at least a bit more familiar with contemporary debates about critical theory, I recently finished reading two introductions recommended by one of my professors, Dr. Scott Crider. They were Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Culler and Critical Practice by Catherine Belsey. Both were accessible (a quality rarely found even in an introduction), yet neither appears to oversimplify. So what is theory? Jonathan Culler includes the following items:

1. Theory is interdisciplinary--discourse with effects outside an original discipline.

2. Theory is analytical and speculative--an attempt to work out what is involved in what we call sex or writing or meaning or the subject.

3. Theory is a critique of common sense, of concepts taken as natural.

4. Theory is reflexive, thinking about thinking, enquiry into the categories we use in making sense of things, in literature and in other discursive practices.

Culler also includes a very helpful appendix, which offers brief paragraphs on each of the major theoretical movements from Russian Formalism to Queer Theory--quite a handy little reference. Catherine Belsey's Critical Practice is a bit less accessible than Culler, but effectively traces the challenges to what she terms "common sense criticism."

One major question in literary theory concerns meaning. What is meaning, and how does it function? Is it within or outside a text? Does it dwell with the author or the reader? Here's a crude illustration of "meaning" I made while reading Belsey:

So meaning lies at the intersection between these four criteria: 1) Authorial Intent; 2) The reader's perception; 3) The text itself; 4) Historical and Traditional Context. Though I am sure more criteria exist (perhaps the graph should be made three-dimensional?), I find the above illustration quite helpful. I also made a similar illustration for the human self, one that is equally crude yet somewhat helpful:

Like meaning, the self lies at the intersection between two dichotomies: Individual/Social and Made/Given. Again, this graph is taken from my reading of Belsey, who handles the issue of the human self with a great deal more subtlety and precision than my illustration.

Review: Beloved

2007-11-23T18:43:00.000-05:00

A few months ago after I had finished Flannery O'Connor's Collected Short Stories, I decided to pick up another American author, this time 1993 Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. This was my second time to read Beloved, and honestly, I still feel very conflicted about it as a novel. Perhaps this is at least part of my rationale for writing about it -- so that I can make up my own mind. The novel contains several graphic scenes in which unspeakable atrocities occur in the lives of southern slaves. For many, these scenes are a deal-breaker that make it impossible to engage the novel as an important work. I sympathize with that position, and in at least one sense, it is right. Morrison herself writes at the end of the novel, "It was not a story to pass on." Perhaps our horror at the monster of slavery should keep us hesitant, even unable, to analyze such a story. At the same time, however, I believe that Morrison's novel needs to be taken seriously and tested against the received "canon" of literary masterpieces. I am not sure what my final evaluation of Beloved would be in such a scenario, but the process would be worthwhile all the same. In that vein, here is a tentative thought that suggests the importance of Beloved in American and Western Literature.
I spoke with a friend yesterday about something totally different from Beloved, but he mentioned the Platonic idea of anamnesis, in which the acquisition of new knowledge is actually a remembrance of things already known about the world. Anamnesis thus explains the phenomenon of that moment when one says to oneself, "Of course that's true. It makes perfect sense." Plato would have us recognize that newly acquired knowledge makes sense because we recollect what we already knew. A similar sensibility emerges in Beloved through Morisson's anachronistic plot sequencing, in which readers perceive impressions, mere fragments of memory that remain in the subconscious. Here's some particularly interesting dialogue; Sethe (the protagonist) is speaking with her daughter Denver, who has seen her through a window:

"What were you praying for, Ma'am?"

"Not for anything. I don't pray anymore. I just talk."

"What were you talking about?"

"You won't understand, baby."

"Yes, I will."

"I was talking about time. It's so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened."

"Can other people see it?"

Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it's you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It's when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It's never going away . Even if the whole farm--every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there--you who never was there--if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can't never go there. Never. Because even though it's all over--over and done with--it's going to always be there waiting for you. That's how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what."

So Beloved depicts a cosmos akin to Aeschylus' Oresteia or Sophocles' Oedipus. For Morrison, the gods inhabit the human realm so indelibly that one need not pray as if divinities dwelt elsewhere. No, the daemon exists in the earth beneath our feet and in the dark memory of the past, haunting and ever-present.

Review: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

2007-11-21T23:06:00.000-05:00

I recently finished reading Sylvia Plath's only novel, The Bell Jar. The protagonist is Esther Greenwood, a young student and writer who steadily descends into insanity, simultaneously expressing Plath's own autobiography and the social status of women in the 1950s. But more importantly, it also portrays the perilous fragility of genius, particularly the genius of an artist. It is as though Greenwood spends the entire novel walking along a taught rope, below which lies the abyss of death and at the end of which she will reach some unknown destination. Throughout the novel the questions only accumulate and become not merely personal to Greenwood or Plath, but existential for the reader. What is the reason for my existence? Why not merely end it all? Plath's depiction of Greenwood's character unveils the utter absurdity of existence, not only chastening mid-20th century social conventions but also deeply questioning the convention of life itself.
Even more harrowing is her ability to fashion her character's downward spiral as a calm, perfectly logical phenomenon. The reader nods his head in agreement every step of the way, only pausing to cringe at the most jarring moments--and there are more than a few such moments in the novel. What follows is a quote from a rather innocuous passage, but it was one of those rare moments one enjoys while reading a novel, where a glimpse of the author's whole vision distills into a single page or so. Esther is skiing with a friend, Buddy Willard:

I looked up from that churning amphitheater to the view beyond it.

The great, gray eye of the sky looked back at me, its mist-shrouded sun focusing all the white and silent distances that poured from every point of the compass, hill after pale hill, to stall at my feet.

The interior voice nagging me not to be a fool--to save my skin and take off my skis and walk down, camouflaged by the scrub pines bordering the slope--fled like a disconsolate mosquito. The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower.

I measured the distance to Buddy with my eye.

His arms were folded, now, and he seemed of a piece with the split-rail fence behind him--numb, brown and inconsequential.

Edging to the rim of the hilltop, I dug the spikes of my poles into the snow and pushed myself into a flight I knew I couldn't stop by skill or any belated access of will.

I aimed straight down.

A keen wind that had been hiding itself struck me full in the mouth and raked the hair back horizontal on my head. I was descending, but the white sun rose no higher. It hung over the suspended waves of the hills, an insentient pivot without which the world would not exist.

A small, answering point in my own body flew toward it. I felt my lungs inflate with the inrush of scenery--air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it means to be happy."

I plummeted down past the zigzaggers, the students, the experts, through year after year of doubleness and smiles and compromise, into my own past.

People and trees receded on either hand like the dark sides of a tunnel as I hurtled on to the still, bright point at the end of it, the pebble at the bottom of the well, the white sweet baby cradled in its mother's belly.

My teeth crunched a gravelly mouthful. Ice water seeped down my throat.

Picturing the Bible at the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth

2007-11-21T23:00:00.000-05:00

Click here to check it out.

Turkey Day

2007-11-21T21:40:00.000-05:00

Not to be a damper on the Thanksgiving festivities, but a recent Greek class sparked some thoughts about American consumerism I thought I should share. The Greeks had several words that connect the accumulation of wealth with a virtually inevitable devolution into spiritual blindness. The progression is first olbos, then koros, then hubris, and finally, atê. The first word, olbos, means wealth or prosperity. It has no pejorative connotations, and basically implies that one is without want. But olbos leads to koros, which means surfeit or satiety or excess. A symptom of koros is overweening insolence and arrogance. From koros, one declines into hubris, which is more than mere pride; it is a callous inattention to one's own finitude as well as a cold indifference toward the suffering of others. The final stage, atê, takes hubris even further, meaning a total blindness to reality commensurate with Marie Antoinette's declaration: "Let them eat cake."
Now why do I mention all this? Simply as a reminder as the holiday season commences that we are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, and that the Greeks understood wealth as potentially perilous for one's soul.

Sophocles, Antigone 334-375, “Hymn to Man”

2007-11-21T21:21:00.000-05:00

α) πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.
τοῦτο καὶ πολιοῦ πέραν πόντου χειμερίῳ νότῳ
χωρεῖ, περιβρυχίοισιν
περῶν ὑπ᾽οἴδμασιν.
θεῶν τε τὰν ὑπερτάταν, Γᾶν
ἄρθιτον, ἀκαμάταν, ἀποτρύεται
ἰλλομένων ἀρότρων ἔτος εἰς ἔτος
ἱππείῳ γένει πολεύων.

α´) κουφονόων τε φῦλον ὀρνίθων ἀμφιβαλὼν ἄγει
καὶ θηρῶν ἀγρίων ἔθνη πόντου τ᾽ εἰναλίαν φύσιν
σπείραισι δικτυοκλώστοις,
περιφραδὴς ἀνήρ·
κρατεῖ δὲ μηχαναῖς ἀγραύλου
θηρὸς ὀρεσσιβάτα, λασιαύχενά θ᾽
ἵππον ὀχμάζεται ἀμφὶ λόφον ζυγῶν
οὔρειόν τ᾽ ἀκμῆτα ταῦρον.

β) καὶ φθέγμα καὶ ἀνεμόεν φρόνημα καὶ ἀστυνόμους
ὀργάς ἐδιδάξατο καὶ δυσαύλων
πάγων ὑπαίθρεια καὶ δὺσομβρα φεύγειν βέλη
παντοπόρος· ἄπορος ἐπ᾽ οὐδὲν ἔρχεται
τὸ μέλλον· Ἁιδα μόνον φεῦξιν οὐκ ἐπράξεται·
νόσων δ᾽ ἀμηχάνων φυγὰς ξυμπέφρασται.

β´) σοφόν τι τ῀ο μηχανόεν τέχνας ὑπὲρ ἐλπίδ᾽ ἔχων
τοτὲ μὲν κακόν, ἄλλοτ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἐσθλὸν ἕρπει,
νόμους γεραίρων χθονὸς θεῶν τ᾽ ἔνορκον δίκαν,
ὑψίπολις· ἄπολις ὅτῳ τὸ μὴ καλὸν
ξύνεστι τόλμας χάριν. μήτ᾽ ἐμοὶ παρέστιος
γένοιτο μήτ᾽ ἴσον φρονῶν ὅς τάδ᾽ ἔρδει

Many things are extraordinary, but none is more extraordinary than a man. This thing even goes beyond the grey sea with its southern storm; although it swells all around him, man survives under the waves. And the best of gods, Earth, immortal, indefatigable, even he is worn out with the back-and-forth of plows, year after year by the ploughing of the horse-like race.

And man captures by ensnaring with woven nets the race of lighthearted birds and the nation of wild beasts and sea-creatures in the open sea, man the thoughtful. And man holds sway using instruments of the field over both mountain-ranging beasts and shaggy-maned horses, reigning them by yoking across their necks, and the tireless mountain bull.

Man has taught himself speech and windy thought and a sense of civic law and to flee the arrows of inhospitable frosts and storms. Man always finds a way. No way he intends to go is impassable; from Hades alone man cannot flee. But he has contrived an escape even from incurable plagues.

Having something of skill, inventive, beyond expectation at something crafty, and at one time he tends to evil, while at another he creeps toward nobility by honoring laws (both the deep-soiled laws of the gods and the oath-sworn laws of custom) which lift cities up. And city-less, man joins with the ignoble out of sheer daring. Never may he be at my hearth, nor considered my equal who does these things.

Translating Poetry

2007-11-20T19:09:00.000-05:00

University News

Film Review: No Country for Old Men

2007-11-19T01:32:00.000-05:00

I thought about beginning this little blurb about Joel and Ethan Coen's latest film, No Country for Old Men, by calling it a masterpiece and by telling everyone that it is the best movie I've seen in years. But that wouldn't quite capture what happened to me tonight when I saw this film. There in the theater, surrounded by friends and strangers (a microcosm of humanity in an audience), I suddenly felt overwhelmed by the reality of death. I was not thinking philosophically; it was visceral. If John Wesley's heart felt strangely warmed, mine felt an eerie chill. Looking back, I hadn't been analyzing the film at all, but after that moment I realized that the film had been slowly gnawing at my subconscious, forcing me to face my end. I left the theater stunned, still dwelling in the cosmos created by the Coens. I won't elaborate any further about plot, character, themes, etc. Just see the film for yourself; I'd love to discuss it with some people.

Kinkade: For Wes and his Readership

2007-11-17T21:43:00.001-05:00

Well, I've finally dropped off the keys to my old apartment and moved everything into the new one. It took longer than I anticipated, but at least now the process is complete. Apologies to everyone for the delay; I hope that my response will still be interesting and relevant despite my tardiness.

I suppose there are several things that require my response. First, I noticed that somebody objected to my calling Kinkade’s work “not art,” which brings this discussion around to the very relevant and very difficult question: What is art? Others have already asked this question and have offered various answers; I’ll offer my own in a moment. Before that, however, I have to admit that whether one calls Kinkade’s work “not art” or “bad art” seems a rather small semantic distinction to me. I think I’ve used both designations already in my few brief comments on Wes’ blog, comments which were probably too polemic to generate any real discussion. Fortunately, it seems that Wes and his readership have directed the conversation well and with a great deal more charity than I originally extended to Kinkade’s art. But although my critique of Kinkade is admittedly harsh, it is because I care deeply about the arts, and I believe that they deeply affect both our individual souls and our collective world.

Now to the question: What is art? Here are a few answers I hope we would all find ultimately dissatisfying as the single determiners of art. We could use the word to mean anything made in a particular medium. Slap some paint on a canvass, and it’s art. Or we could use the word to distinguish between very particular media: painting is art, and sculpture, film, poetry, music, et al is something else. Or we could say that art is determined by an elite oligarchy of those with distinguished taste and inaccessible to the rest of us. Or we could be very democratic and assert the opposite: Art is whatever happens to remain popular with people. Or we could designate art as whatever an individual thinks is beautiful, i.e. a trash bag floating in the wind (a la American Beauty) or the Sistine Chapel. We could say that art must move our emotions. Or our minds. We might say it should reflect culture or challenge it.

I’m sure there are more answers out there, but now I’d like to attempt my own. Art is the expression in a particular medium of what Coleridge called “the repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” As such, it requires more than craftsmanship or technical skill. An apocalyptic vision or divine inspiration or penetrating insight is needed as well. Both have to be present in the creation of a work of art, and that is why art is so extremely difficult, rare, and hence precious. Art must also be aware of two audiences: its own contemporary situation and an older tradition. Yet art cannot be merely derivative, a reiteration of what others have already done; a work of art is innovative.

Now let’s turn to Kinkade and the juxtaposition Laura brought to our attention. There are similarities in color palette, and Kinkade has been compared with other impressionists. But Monet’s impressionism depicts an in-between reality: between the object itself and our sense perception of it, hence challenging the factuality of Enlightenment science. Monet’s works force audiences to look though a haze, as if the atmosphere were skewing one’s ability to see. (Monet’s vision degenerated throughout his life from cataracts). So his art chastens the exactness of factuality, but it also points toward the fact that things are still recognizable even when “out of focus.” That type of statement seems quite a bit deeper than anything Kinkade depicts, for Kinkade himself understands his art as offering a nice alternative to our depressing world, at best a reminder of better days gone by into which nice folks can escape. And even if he were to achieve Monet’s insight, Kinkade would still be derivative and hardly timely. But now I’m castigating Kinkade again, and so I’ll simply offer one of Monet’s later works, which is part of the permanent collection at the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth:

Ryan Adams - Sylvia Plath

2007-11-08T18:04:00.000-05:00

Solon, fragment 1 (=13W)

2007-11-08T02:17:00.000-05:00

Μνημοσύνης καὶ Ζηνός Ὀλυμπιου ἀγλαὰ τέκνα,
Μοῦσαι Πιερίδες, κλυτὲ μοι εὐχομένῳ
ὄλβον μοι πρὸς θεῶν μακάρων δότε καὶ πρὸς ἀπάντων·
ἀνθρώπων αἰεὶ δόξαν ἔχειν ἀγαθήν·
εἶναι δὲ γλυκὺν ὧδε φίλοις, ἐχθροῖσι δὲ πικρόν,
τοῖσι μὲν αἰδοῖον, τοῖσι δὲ δεινόν ἰδεῖν.
χρήματα δ᾽ ἱμείρω μὲν ἔχειν, ἀδίκως δὲ πεπᾶσθαι
οὐκ ἐθέλω· πάντως ῞θστερον ἦλθε δίκη.

πλοῦτον δ᾽ ὅν μὲν δῶσι θεοί, παραγίγνεται ἀνδρί
ἔμπεδος ἐκ νεάτου πυθμένος ἐς κορυφήν·
ὅν δ᾽ ἄνδρες μετίωσιν ὑφ᾽ ὕβριος, οὐ κατὰ κόσμον
ἔρχεται, ἀλλ᾽ ἀδίκοις ἔργμασι πειθόμενος
οὐκ ἐθέλων ἕπεται, ταχέως δ᾽ ἀναμίσγεται ἄτη·
ἄρχὴ δ᾽ ἐξ ὀλίγου γίγνεται ὥστε πυρός.
φλαύρη μὲν τό πρῶτον, ἀνιηρὴ δὲ τελευτᾷ·
οὐ γὰρ δὴν θνητοῖς ὕβριος ἔργα πέλει.

ἀλλὰ Ζεύς πάντων ἐφορᾷ τέλος, ἐξαπίνης δέ
ὥστ᾽ ἄνεμος νεφέλας αἶψα διεσκέδασεν
ἠρινός, ὅς πόντου πολυκύμονος ἀτρυγέτοιο
πυθμένα κινήσας, γῆν κατὰ πυροφόρον
δηῴσας καλὰ ἔργα θεῶν ἕδος αἰπύν ἱκάνει
οὐρανόν, αἰθρίην δ᾽ αὖτις ἔθηκεν ἰδεῖν·
λάμπει δ᾽ ἠελίοιο μένος κάτα πίονα γαῖαν
καλόν, ἀτὰρ νεφέων οὐδὲν ἔτ᾽ ἔστιν ἰδεῖν—
τοιαύτη Ζηνὸς πέλεται τίσις, οὐδ᾽ ἐφ᾽ ἑκάστῳ
ὥσπερ θνητός ἀνὴρ γίγνεται ὀξύχολος,
αἰεὶ δ᾽ οὐ ἑλέληθε διαμπερές, ὅστις ἀλιτρόν
θυμὸν ἔχει, πάντως δ᾽ ἐς τέλος ἐξεφάνη·
ἀλλ᾽ ὅ μὲν αὐτίκ᾽ ἕτεισεν, ὅ δ᾽ ὕστερον· οἵ δὲ φύγωσιν
αὐτοί, μηδὲ θεῶν μοῖρ᾽ ἐπιοῦσα κίχη,
ἤλυθε πάντως αὖτις· ἀναίτιοι ἔργα τίνουσιν
ἤ παῖδες τούτων ἤ γένος ἐξοπίσω.

θνητοὶ δ᾽ ὧδε νοεῦμεν ὁμῶς ἀγαθός τε κακός τε·
εὐθηνεῖν αὐτὸς δόξαν ἕκαστος ἔχει,
πρίν τι παθεῖν· τότε δ᾽ αὖτις ὀδύρεται· ἄχρι δὲ τούτου
χάσκοντες κούφαις ἐλπίσι τερπόμεθα.
χὤστις μὲν νούσοισιν ὑπ᾽ ἀργαλέῃσι πιεσθῆ,
ὡς ὑγιὴς ἔσται, τοῦτο κατεφράσατο·
ἄλλος δειλὸς ἑὼν ἀγαθὸς δοκεῖ ἔμμεναι ἀνήρ
καί καλὸς μορφὴν οὐ χαρίεσσαν ἔχων·
εἰ δέ τις ἀχρήμων, πενίης δέ μιν ἔργα βιᾶται,
κτήσεσθαι πάντως χρήματα πολλὰ δοκεῖ.

σπεύδει δ᾽ ἄλλοθεν ἄλλος· ὁ μὲν κατὰ πόντον ἀλᾶται
ἐν νηυσὶν χρήζων οἴκαδε κέρδος ἄγειν
ἰχθυόεντ᾽ ἀνέμοισι φορεύμενος ἀργαλέοισιν,
φειδωλὴν ψυχῆς οὐδεμίαν θέμενος·
ἄλλος γῆν τέμνων πολυδένδρεον εἰς ἐνιαυτόν
λατρεύει, τοῖσιν καμπύλ᾽ ἄροτρρα μέλει·
ἄλλος Ἀθηναίης τε καὶ Ἡφαίστου πολυτέχνεω
ἔργα δαεὶς χειροῖν ξυλλέγεται βίοτον,
ἄλλος Ὀλυμπιάδων Μουσέων πάρα δῶρα διδαχθείς,
ἱμερτῆς σοφίης μέτρον ἐπιστάμενος·
ἄλλον μάντιν ἔθηκεν ἄναξ ἑκάεργος Ἀπόλλων,
ἔγνω δ᾽ ἀνδρὶ κακὸν τηλόθεν ἐρχόμενον,
ᾧ συνομαρτήσωσι θεοί· τὰ δὲ μόρσιμα πάντως
οὔτε τις οἰωνὸς ῥύσεται οὔθ ἱερά·
ἄλλοι Παιῶνος πολυφαρμάκου ἔργον ἔχοντες
ἰητροί, καὶ τοῖς οὐδὲν ἔπεστι τέλος·
πολλάκι δ᾽ ἐξ ὀλίγης ὀδύνης μέγα γίγνεται ἄλγος,
κοὐκ ἄν τις λύσαιτ᾽ ἤπια φάρμακα δούς·
τὸν δὲ κακαῖς νούσοισι κυκώμενον ἀργαλέαις τε
ἁψάμενος χειροῖν αἶψα τίθησ᾽ ὑγιῆ.

Μοῖρα δέ τοι θνητοῖσι κακὸν φέρει ἠδὲ καὶ ἐσθλόν,
δῶρα δ᾽ ἄφυκτα θεῶν γίγνεται ἀθανάτων.
πᾶσι δέ τοι κίνδυνος ἔπ᾽ ἔργμασιν, οὔδέ τις οἶδεν
ᾗ μέλλει σχήσειν χρήματος ἀρχομένου·
ἀλλ᾽ ὅ μὲν εὖ ἕρδειν πειρώμενος οὐ προνοήσας
ἐς μεγάλην ἄτην καὶ χαλεπὴν ἔπεσεν,
τῷ δὲ κακῶς ἕρδοντι θεὸς περὶ πάντα δίδωσιν
συντυχίην ἀγαθήν, ἔκλυσιν ἀφροσύνης.
πλούτου δ᾽ οὐδὲν τέρμα πεφασμένον ἀνδράσι κεῖται·
οἵ γὰρ νῦν ἡμέων πλεῖστον ἔχουσι βίον,
διπλασίως σπεύδουσι· τίς ἄν κορέσειεν ἅπαντας;
κέρδεά τοι θνητοῖς ὤπασαν ἀθάνατοι,
ἄτη δ᾽ ἐξ αὐτῶν ἀναφαίνεται, ἥν ὁπόταν Ζεύς
πέμψῃ τεισομένην, ἄλλοτε ἄλλος ἔχει.

Radiant daughters of Memory and Zeus of Olympia, Pierian Muses, listen to my prayer:

Grant me the prosperity of the greatest gods and to always have a good reputation with all men, and to be sweet in this manner toward my friends, and bitter to my enemies, and to be seen with both respect and terror. I long to have money, but I do not wish to gain it unjustly, since certainly justice comes later.

Wealth which the gods give is present with a man, unmoved from the extreme bottom to the extreme top. But wealth which man claims because of pride does not come according to the proper order, but yielding to unjust deeds, it does not wish to follow and is quickly mixed with delusion. But the beginning of many happens just like fire: it is slight at first, but distressing at the end. For it is not so long ago that deeds of pride happened to mortals.

But Zeus oversees the end of all things, and it comes suddenly, just as the spring wind suddenly scatters the clouds, which, making many waves in the wheat-less sea, stirs up the bottom, cutting down the wheat-bearing earth and noble deeds, it comes up to the high seat of the gods, heaven, and he grants us to see brightness again;
and the strong sun shines beauty down on the rich earth, yet still nothing of clouds is there to see—such is the vengeance of Zeus when it happens, not at each thing, like mortal man is quick to anger, but always nothing continually escapes his notice. Whoever has a wicked heart, certainly it is revealed in the end; but some pay it back instantly, some later. And if someone flees it, and the approaching fate of the gods does not find him, certainly it comes again: the innocent pay the deeds back, whether their children or generations thereafter.

This is how we mortals think, noble and base alike: Each one has the impression that he is progressing well before he suffers something, and then he wails again. But until we are yawning because of this, we take delight in vain hopes. Whoever is oppressed by grievous sickness, this one thinks he will be healthy. Another man, being vile, thinks he is noble and beautiful, though his form has no beauty. If someone lacks money, and deeds of poverty oppress him, assuredly he thinks he will acquire much money.

One hurries somewhere, another elsewhere; one wanders the fishy sea in a ship, desiring to lead profit homeward, being carried by grievous winds, he places no regard for his life. Another slaves away for a year cutting thick-wooded earth, this one cares for the curved plow. Another, having been taught by both Athena and Hephaistos of many crafts, gathers in a livelihood with his hands. Another, having been taught the gifts of the Olympian Muses, he knows the lovely meter of wisdom. Another has been made a seer by lord Apollo who works from afar, he knows of evil coming upon a man when it is yet distant; the gods witness with this one. And as for the things that are fated, certainly neither a bird of augury nor sacrifices ward it off. Others, doctors, have the deeds of Paion of many medicines, and for them nobody approaches the end; but often out of a little pain great grief happens, and giving someone gentle drugs might not destroy him; but one is being tossed by a grievous illness and palpitating with his hands again is restored to health.

But Fate brings evil and even good to mortals, and the gifts of the immortal gods are inevitable. And certainly there is risk in all deeds: Nobody knows that which a beginning thing is about the have. But the man who is attempting to do good, unaware he falls into great blindness and difficulty, while to the man acting badly the gods make everything a happy accident, redeeming his thoughtlessness. For those of us who now have the most life, they hurry twice as much. What satisfies everyone? Certainly immortals add profit to mortals, but out of them blindness is revealed, which whenever Zeus sends avenging, now one has it and now another.

OVSC: Follow Up

2007-10-17T02:10:00.000-04:00

Well, I definitely enjoyed my first conference. It was the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference at the University of Akron in Ohio. While the regional plane from Atlanta to Akron was none too pleasant, the conference itself was very nice. There were plenty of friendly folks, many were graduate students, who discussed various Shakespearean topics. It was a good starter conference, one that I hope to build upon for the future.

After returning from the trip, I learned that I had won the M. Rick Smith Prize for the essay I presented. The essay was titled, "Love's Resilience: Shakespeare's Linguistic Alternative to Bandello." I was quite honored to receive the award. I suppose my only regret was not being able to attend more of the conference; I had to cut the trip short due to financial constraints. I also really wanted to stay for Dr. Cowan's lyric class.

Here's a photo of me in my apartment before heading to the airport at 5:30 am. I wonder what I was thinking about?

Update: University of Dallas Notables

A Poem by Constantine Cavafy

2007-10-11T12:19:00.000-04:00

Οἱ ἄνθρωποι γνωρίζου τἀ γινόμενα.
Τὰ μέλλοντα γνωρίζουν οἱ θεοί,
πλήρεις καὶ μόνοι κάτοχοι παντῶν τῶν φώτων.
Ἐκ τῶν μελλόντων οἱ σοφοὶ τὰ προσερχόμενα
ἀντιλαμβάνονται. Ἡ ἀκοὴ

αὐτων κἄποτε ἐν ὥραις σοβαρῶν σπουδῶν
ταράττεται. Ἡ μυστικὴ βοή
τοὺς ἔρχεται τῶν πλησιαζόντων γεγονότων.
Καὶ τὴν προσέχουν εὐλαβεῖς. Ἐνῷ εἰς ὁδόν
ἔξω, οὐδὲν ἀκούουν οἱ λαοί.

Men know the things that are.
Gods know what is yet to come,
Full and sole owners of all light.
The wise what is coming from what is yet to come
Perceive. Their hearing

Sometimes in hours of serious study
Is disturbed. The mystic cry
Of looming events comes to them.
And they heed it with reverence, while in the street
Outside, the people hear nothing.

From Camus: The Fall

2007-09-30T23:13:00.000-04:00

Covered with ashes, tearing my hair, my face scored by clawing, but with piercing eyes, I stand before all humanity recapitulating my shames without losing sight of the effect I am producing, and saying: "I was the lowest of the low." Then imperceptibly I pass from the "I" to the "we." When I get to "This is what we are," the trick has been played and I can tell them off. I am like them, to be sure; we are in the soup together. However, I have a superiority in that I know it and this gives me the right to speak. You see the advantage, I am sure. The more I accuse myself, the more I have a right to judge you. Even better, I provoke you into judging yourself, and this relieves me of that much of the burden.

Solon, fragment 3 (=4W)

2007-09-25T23:51:00.000-04:00

ἡμετέρη δὲ πόλις κατὰ μὲν Διὸς οὔποτ᾽ ὀλεῖται
αἶσαν καὶ μακάρων Θεῶν φρέντας ἀθανάτων:
τοίη γὰρ μεγάθυμος ἐπίσκοπος ὁβριμοπάτρη
Παλλὰς Ἀθηναίη χεῖρας ὕπερθεν ἔχει:
αὐτοὶ δὲ φθείρειν μεγάλην πόλιν ἀφραδίησιν
ἀστοί βούλονται χρήμασι πειθόμενοι,
δήμου θ᾽ ἡγεμόνων ἄδικος νόος οἷσιν ἑτοῖμον
ὕβριος ἐκ μεγάλης ἄλγεα πολλὰ παθεῖν:
οὐ γὰρ ἐπίστανται κατέχειν κόρον οὐδὲ παρούσας
εὐφροσύνας κοσμεῖν δαιτὸς ἐν ἡσυχίηι
. . .

πλουτέουσιν δ᾽ ἀδίκοις ἔργμασι πειθόμενοι
. . .

οὔθ᾽ ἱερῶν κτεάνων οὔτὲ τι δημοσίων
φειδόμενοι κλέπτουσιν ἐφ᾽ ἁρπαγῇ ἄλλοθεν ἄλλος,
οὐδὲ φυλάσσονται σεμνὰ Δίκης θέμεθλα,
ἥ σιγῶσα σύνοιδε τὰ γιγνόμενα πρό τ᾽ ἑόντα,
τῶι δὲ χρόνωι πάντως ἦλθ᾽ ἀποτεισομένη,
τοῦτ᾽ ἤδη πάσηι πόλει ἔρχεται ἕλκος ἄφυκτον,
ἐς δὲ κακὴν τάχεως ἤλυθε δουλοσύνην,
ἥ στάσιν ἔμφυλον πόλεμόν θ᾽ εὕδοντ᾽ ἐπεγείρει
ὅς πολλῶν ἐρατὴν ὤλεσεν ἡλικίην.
ἐκ γὰρ δυσμενέων ταχέως πολυήρατον ἄστυ
τρύχεται ἐν συνόδοις τοῖς ἀδικέουσι φίλους
ταῦτα μὲν ἐν δήμῳ στρέφεται κακά: τῶν δὲ πενιχρῶν
ἱκνέονται πολλοὶ γαῖαν ἐς ἀλλοδαπὴν
πραθέντες δεσμοῖσί τ᾽ ἀεικελίοισι δεθέντες
καὶ κακὰ δουλοσύνης ἔργα φέρουσι βίᾳ.
οὕτω δημόσιον κακὸν ἔρχεται οἴκαδ᾽ ἑκάστωι,
αὔλειοι δ᾽ ἔτ᾽ ἔχειν οὐκ ἐθέλουσι θύραι,
ὑψηλὸν δ᾽ ὑπέρ ἕρκος ὑπέρθορεν, εὗρε δὲ πάντως,
εἰ καὶ τις φεύγων ἐν μύχωι ἦι θαλάμου.
ταῦτα διδάξαι θυμὸς Ἀθηναίους με κελεύει,
ὡς κακὰ πλεῖστα πόλει Δυσνομίη παρεχει.
Εὐνομίη δ᾽ εὔκοσμα καί ἄρτια πάντ᾽ ἀποφαίνει
καὶ θαμὰ τοῖς ἀδίκοις ἀμφιτίθησι πέδας:
τραχέα λεαίνει, παύει κόρον, ὕβριν ἀμαυροῖ,
αὑαίνει δ᾽ ἄτης ἄνθεα φυόμενα,
εὐθύνει δὲ δίκας σκολιάς, ὑπερήφανά τ᾽ ἔργα
πραύνει: παύει δ᾽ ἔργα διχοστασίης,
παύει δ᾽ ἀργαλέης ἔριδος χόλον, ἔστι δ᾽ ὑπ᾽ αὐτῆς
πάντα κατ᾽ ἀνθρώπους ἄρτια καὶ πινυτά.

But our city cannot be destroyed, according to the dispensation of Zeus and the minds of the immortal blessed gods; for certainly Pallas Athena, great-hearted guardian and daughter of a mighty father, has her hands over it; but some citizens wish to ruin a great city by foolishness and desiring money, and the mind of the leaders of the people is unjust, who are certain to suffer much pain from their great pride; for they do not know how to check insolence nor when present, how to govern a feast of merriment in peace . . . And they grow rich yielding to unjust deeds . . . sparing neither from the sacred killings nor anything from the public, they steal, some plundering from somewhere, others from elsewhere. Nor do they guard the holy foundation of Justice, who keeps silent council to the happenings before being, and who at the right time certainly comes avenging, this wound will now come inevitably upon the whole city, and it has quickly been embroiled in evil slavery, which awakens civil insurrection and sleeping war, which ruins for many their lovely prime. For from the hostile ones the beloved city is being quickly consumed in battles with the friends of injustice. These evil things are twisted among the people; and many of the poor come to a foreign land having been sold overseas into slavery and having been placed in shameful chains. And [their]evil deeds bring bondage with violence. Thus, in the name of the state, they bring evil homeward to each person. And the courtyard gates still do not wish to restrain it, but it leaps over the high wall, and it certainly finds one, even if he flees into the inmost corner of a chamber. These things the soul calls me to teach to the Athenians, because Lawlessness allows the greatest evil. But well-ordered lawfulness even reveals all things that are proper and often puts fetters around the unjust; it smooths the rough, stops insolence, weakens pride, and withers the growing flowers of wickedness, and straightens crooked judgements, soothes overweening works, and stops the wrath of grievous strife, and under her all things according to men are proper and prudent.

Solon fr. 24 (=36W) [Quoted by Aristotle in Constitution of Athens 12.4]

2007-09-15T02:47:00.000-04:00

And I, of the reasons why I assembled the people, which of them did I halt before I struck upon it? Let the large noble Mother of Olympian gods, black earth, bear witness to these things in the court of time: I myself once tore up the mortgage-stones that pinned her down everywhere, so she who was formerly in bondage is now free. And I led many who were sold away—some justly, others unjustly—into Athens, the divinely-founded homeland, and I led those who fled from crushing debt, never speaking the Attic tongue (so far they wandered), some who were right here in shameful slavery, fearing the whims of their masters. I have given these freedom. I did these things by force, joining together both the power of law and court, finishing as I promised. And I wrote the same direct laws for both peasant and noble, each into their appropriate court. But had another taken the whip as I took it, a nasty and materialistic man, he would not restrain the people. For if I wished to please one of these opponents at one time, and then whatever another intended at another time, the city would already be bereaved of many men. Hence, I was making defense on all sides, as a wolf surrounded by many dogs.

Doubting Shakespeare

2007-09-10T01:28:00.000-04:00

I recently discovered that a certain group of people are once again raising questions about Shakespeare and authorship. What a load of hooey.

My First Conference!

2007-08-28T20:02:00.000-04:00

I just learned that my paper was accepted to The Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference. I am honored to participate, and I am very excited since this will be my first presentation at an academic conference. Here is my abstract for your perusal. I would appreciate any input you might offer:

Love’s Resilience: Shakespeare’s Linguistic Alternative to Bandello
Shakespeare consulted many sources as he composed Much Ado About Nothing, a comedy whose symbiotic plot traces the wooing of young lovers. For the Claudio-Hero plot, Shakespeare’s imagination was informed by Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Another source influencing Shakespeare’s craft was Matteo Bandello’s novella 22, La Prima Parte de la Novelle. The 1554 work tells the story of Timbreo and Fenicia, which parallels the Claudio-Hero narrative. Bandello’s story contains many of the same actions as Much Ado: Both involve returning soldiers wooing young ladies; both address the vulnerability of women to the accusations of men; and both explore the possibilities of love’s endurance in the aftermath of such indictments. The most notable difference, however, is the addition in Much Ado of Benedick and Beatrice, two of Shakespeare’s most enduring and endearing lovers. Benedick and Beatrice do not just oppose one another with their entertaining wit; their linguistic skill contradicts the plot of Bandello and Claudio-Hero, thus offering Shakespeare’s answer to the stock characters of his sources. My paper will engage in a close reading of the Benedick-Beatrice plot in order to reveal Shakespeare at work, rebutting his sources’ understanding of love by providing readers and audiences with an alternative pair of discriminating lovers who calibrate their love through verbal play. As Russ McDonald writes, “Shakespeare’s language functions as a symbolic register, an instrument for recording, transmitting, and magnifying the fictional world that the play represents.” Shakespeare thus offers a unique possibility: the mediatory function of language in the lover-beloved relationship, which mitigates the immediacy of passion, the fear of cuckoldry, and the suffering of rejection found in his sources.

Elementary Greek II: Finis

2007-08-20T15:06:00.001-04:00

I took my final this morning. Now I have intermediate in the Fall!

Exultet

2007-08-10T20:23:00.000-04:00

I'm reading a great article by Arthur Lovejoy called, "The Paradox of the Fortunate Fall." In it, he cites a portion of Catholic liturgy from the Easter Even service:

"O certe necissarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est! O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere redemptorem!"

Bret, a little help with the translation?

T.S. Eliot and the Perfect Tense

2007-08-10T00:08:00.000-04:00

"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone, you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new."

I read the above lines from Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" this morning, and was struck by their significance. Eliot imagines not only a present shaped by the past, but a past shaped by the present, a continually evolving organic form that has the capacity to incorporate the new. The idea resurfaced in my Greek class later this afternoon, when my professor lectured on the perfect tense. He conveyed the aspect of the perfect tense by telling us that the perfect is an action begun at some point in the past, and just now completed. For Eliot, history operates in just such a fashion, or at least should for the poet. The poet must comprehend the manner in which all of history's multitudinous threads have just now come to completion. They are formed in the present as much as they inform the present, and that immediacy allows for the poet's panoramic vision, a vision that (because of its perfect tense) will be forever immediately accessible in future moments of presentness.

Contra Nietzsche on Language

2007-08-09T23:48:00.000-04:00

"Language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the Primal Unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and before all phenomena."

While reading from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy today, I found the sentence above, which indicates in my mind the antithesis between Nietzsche and Fr. Lynch's understanding of language.

Perhaps I am merely oversensitive, given my recent reading of Christ and Apollo, to the tendency to grasp after the ideal, the ethereal, the heavenly. What Nietzsche seems to be saying here, advocates just such a position. Language is proclaimed inferior because it is a symbolic imitation of the musical "Primal Unity." But ought we not consider the matter differently if we hold to the incarnational principle? Is it not the "definiteness" (to use Lynch's term) of language as opposed to music that is its unique glory? Although writing is merely "scribbling hieroglyphs," as Carlos Fuentes points out, is it not those concrete scratches that bind the logos to the earth?

As You Like It

2007-08-06T12:11:00.000-04:00

Kenneth Branagh's latest project comes to HBO Tuesday, 21 August at 9.

Yes!

Christ and Apollo: The Definite

2007-08-02T13:19:00.000-04:00

I purchased Christ and Apollo some time ago, and have just now gotten to reading it. I have only read the first chapter, but already I can tell that this is a book that deserves my closest attention. In the book, Fr. Lynch essentially alters a Nietzschean dichotomy, Apollo and Dionysus, and alters it in order to emphasize the particularity of Christ. A little background may be helpful here. One of Nietzshe's early works was a piece of literary criticism called The Birth of Tragedy. In that short but dense book he established a binary represented by two Greek gods, Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo represented structure, Dionysus the spiritedness beneath -- and for Nietzsche superior to -- the external structures imposed upon any work of art. In a similar fashion, Fr. Lynch uses Christ and Apollo as figures, not for structure and creativity, but for immanence and transcendence, earth and heaven, particularity and generality, image and idea. In doing so, Fr. Lynch begins a powerful argument for what Aristotle termed, "attending to the particulars," and for the significance of doing so for the Christian. As Fr. Lynch writes himself, "Beginning with the first battle between the gnostic and Hebraic imaginations there has been a long war between the two forms of the imagination, between the men of the finite and the men of the infinite. This book takes up the case of the men of the finite and for the power of the definite" (10).

What is the definite?

Perhaps the best place to begin is Fr. Lynch's own categories for speaking about possible attitudes toward the definite. He notes four common errors:

1) "Exploiters of the real." This imagination, says Fr. Lynch, merely uses the real, the finite, the earthy, in order to rebound into the metaphorical sky of transcendence. In a biting example, he notes the tendency to be "more interested in baptismal statistics than in people" (17). I am reminded of a remark my father once made, poking fun at this same attitude: "I love mankind; it's people I can't stand!"

2) "Psychologism." Rather than rebounding toward heaven from the real, some rebound into the self. Poetry, art, music, relationships, and religion become significant in their ability to trigger a response from the self. Symbols are mere symbols, meaning occurs when the self breathes life into them.

3) "Double Vacuum" Here Fr. Lynch borrows Karl Barth as an emblematic figure for this contradictory scheme of the imagination. The imagination plunges partially into the finite, then recoils into "indefinite bliss" (19). Fr. Lynch returns to the double vacuum later in his chapter.

4) "Facers of facts." A prototypical existentialism, in which the absurd courage of the individual triumphs over and against the stark void of reality, characterizes this mode of the imagination. The finite is understood quite literally as a hellish realm, and the infinite may or may not be genuine.

By posing these four postures of the imagination toward the definite, Fr. Lynch successfully emphasizes the general lack of attention to particulars prevalent in modern thought. In contrast to all the above views, therefore, he argues, "We waste our time if we try to go around or above or under the definite; we must literally go through it" (16). Doing so, really entering into the finite world, "causally generates the plunge up" into the transcendent realm (22). Paraphrasing Heraclitus, Fr. Lynch offers another explanation: "The way up is the way down" (23). And here is where we can return to Karl Barth and the "double vacuum" problem. For Barth, the ascent into the heavenly in spite of the definite, whereas for Fr. Lynch, the definite is the path to the transcendent. Barth's imagination perceives the earthy things of this earth, the particularities, and says neverthelessthe transcendent. Fr. Lynch would have us view the particularities and say therefore the transcendent. This is what he means by going through the particulars.

As I considered this first chapter in Christ and Apollo I was first struck by its resonance with an artistic sensibility. Think about what artists do: they form transcendent things out of material things. Paint. Ink. Cat guts. Even further, think about the movement of descent and ascent found in Christ, the reason why Fr. Lynch chose him as the emblem for the definite. The movement is toward the real first and only after Christ has descended into hell, as the creed says, can he ascend into heaven. What we often miss is the causal relationship there: the descent thereforethe ascent. And this is what Christ would have us do if we are to be his followers. We must descend into the earthy, the real, the definite, the particulars. The key to that descent is love. Yet we cannot simply love mankind. Loving mankind is too easy; we must love our neighbor.

In light of Fr. Lynch's chapter on the definite, let me ask you to consider again a passage from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov in which Alyosha realizes this movement through the earth, therefore into the heavens:

The fresh, motionless,
still night enfolded the earth. The white towers and
golden domes of the cathedral gleamed out against the
sapphire sky. The gorgeous autumn flowers, in the
beds round the house, were slumbering till morning.
The silence of the earth seemed to melt into the
silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one
with the mystery of the stars. . . . Alyosha stood,
gazed, and suddenly threw himself down on the earth.

He did not know why he embraced it. He could not have
told why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to
kiss it all. But he kissed it weeping, sobbing and
watering it with his tears, and vowed passionately to
love it, to love it forever and ever. “Water the
earth with the tears of your joy and love those
tears,” echoed in his soul. What was he weeping over?
Oh! in his rapture he was weeping even over those
stars, which were shining to him from the abyss of
space, and “he was not ashamed of that ecstasy.”
There seemed to be threads from all those innumerable
worlds of God, linking his soul to them, and it was
trembling all over “in contact with other worlds.” He
longed to forgive everyone and for everything, and to
beg forgiveness. Oh, not for himself, but for all
men, for all and for everything. “And others are
praying for me too,” echoed again in his soul. But
with every instant he felt clearly and, as it were,
tangibly, that something firm and unshakeable as that
vault of heaven had entered into his soul. It was
as though some idea had seized the sovereignty of his
mind -- and it was for all his life and forever and
ever. He had fallen on the earth a weak youth, but he
rose up a resolute champion, and he knew and felt it
suddenly at the very moment of his ecstasy. And
never, never, all his life long, could Alyosha forget
that minute. “Someone visited my soul in that hour,”
he used to say afterwards, with implicit faith in his
words.

Encouragement from Hesiod

2007-07-30T01:16:00.000-04:00

σοὶ δ᾽ ἐγὼ ἐσθλὰ νοέων ἐρέω, μέγα νήπιε Πέρση.
τὴν μέν τοι κακότητα καὶ ἰλαδὸν ἔστιν ἑλέσθαι
ῥηιδίως: λείη μὲν ὁδός, μάλα δ᾽ ἐγγύθι ναίει:
τῆς δ᾽ ἀρετῆς ἱδρῶτα θεοὶ προπάροιθεν ἔθηκαν
ἀθάνατοι: μακρός δὲ καὶ ὄρθιος οἶμος ἐς αὐτὴν
καὶ τρηχύς τὸ πρῶτον: ἐπὴν δ᾽ εἰς ἄκρον ἵκηται,
ῥηιδίη δὴ ἔπειτα πέλει, χαλεπή περ ἐοῦσα.

For your own good, I tell you, Perses, you silly fool,
Badness by the barrel-full one can lay hold of
Easily; the way is smooth and quite close at hand.
But the immortal gods have put sweat before excellence.
The path to that is long and steep
And rough at first, but when one nears the top,
Then it gets easy, though it is still difficult.

Hesiod, Works and Days

Review: The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor

2007-07-28T16:45:00.000-04:00

I recently finished reading The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor. It took me quite a while to finish the 550 page volume, which conveniently obliged my intermittent reading habits with ten or fifteen page stories. I highly recommend the book for its memorable depictions of the American south, its incisive portrayals of sin and redemption, and the artistry of its story-telling. These are tales that will comfort and disturb you; if you attend to them, you will have gained a chorus of friends with the potential to continually teach the deepest spiritual realities. Buy this book, and read it.

I also recently listened to a podcast on O'Connor and her Catholic literary contemporaries: Dorothy Day, Walker Percy, and Thomas Merton. The episode is called Faith Fired by Literature, and is from the American Public Media program Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett. The show is consistently excellent, and Krista's exploration of faith and literature is particularly well done. Check it out!

Love's Labors Lost

2007-07-22T15:09:00.001-04:00

It was so fun to join Mike and Rachel Vendsel & Family at Samuell-Grand Park in Dallas this past Friday. We watched a performance of Love's Labor's Lost, an excellent early comedy that I had not had the privilege seeing before. Rachel's brother played Ferdinand, King of Navarre, and it was a marvelous performance. For those readers who are not familiar with the play, here is a very brief synopsis from the Shakespeare Dallas website:

"Shakespeare entertains audiences through exuberant physical comedy and witty wordplay in Love’s Labour’s Lost as the King of Navarre and his cohorts vow to spend three years devoted to study only to find themselves tempted by ladies and love when the Princess of France and her entourage arrive in Navarre on a diplomatic visit."

Mike and I spoke after the performance about the connection between the final two songs, "Spring" and "Winter," and the meaning of the play as a whole. Taken dialectically, the two seem to encapsulate the play's argument. Here are both:

SPRING.

When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he, Cuckoo;
Cuckoo, cuckoo: O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!
When shepherds pipe on oaten straws
And merry larks are ploughmen's clocks,
When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws,
And maidens bleach their summer smocks
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he, Cuckoo;
Cuckoo, cuckoo: O word of fear,
Unpleasing to a married ear!

WINTER.

When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp'd and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit;
Tu-whoo, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow
And coughing drowns the parson's saw
And birds sit brooding in the snow
And Marian's nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl, Tu-whit;
Tu-whoo, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

The poem is iambic tetrameter with alternating rhyme scheme. The songs juxtapose two birds in their refrains, the cuckoo and the owl. This comparison is significant, because the Spring bird, the cuckoo, is "unpleasing to a married ear" because of its acoustic association with "cuckold" The cuckoo's song is indicative of the play's underlying social fabric, in which men fear cuckoldry by women, and women fear that men's oaths of love will prove empty. Such fears exist during the spring-time, in which young men and women test their sexuality via flirtation. In "Winter" we hear the haunting call of the owl, whose refrain is both onomatopoetic and a pun. But what exactly, does the owl's call mean? There are many viable options. "Tu-whit, Tu-whoo" could be "to wit, to woo," indicating the alternation between the profusion of witty speech and flirtatious but sincere speech. It could also indicate an exclusive comparison: one must either to wit or to woo. One might also view wit as a flaw that must be overcome for love to begin, as in "too wit to woo." Or one could hear "to what, to who?" a question that indicates the confusion caused by both profuse speech and insincere wooing. However one hears the owl's call, the inquisitive sound of his voice leads audiences, now brought into the bitter cold of winter, to question the reasoning behind love's labors, which have been lost. Given these two songs, then, the play can be taken as a bitter warning against the unfruitfulness of love's labors, because wooing merely leads to winter. Or the play could be advocating carpe diem, teaching that one must find genuine love in the spring to be warm in the winter.

aspect, ἀρετή, and the sacrament

2007-07-22T13:00:00.000-04:00

It's funny how the relevance of my studies crops up on serendipitous occasions. During one of the the lessons from this week's Greek class, my professor emphasized the importance of aspect in translating participles. (Apparently, there is an ongoing debate regarding how to translate Greek participles. One set of grammarians argues that participles lack true tense, while the others argue that they do.) Aspect refers to either the duration, completion, repetition, or quality of a verb in question. This concept seemed particularly relevant in today's sermon, which focused upon the dual nature of sanctification in its progressive and completed aspects. Though one would have to double-check the usage, it seems from the sermon that ἁγιάζω ("I sanctify") has both present and aorist usage in the NT, indicating both continuous action and completed action.

I also noticed the word ἀρετή used in 2 Peter and one other passage that I can't recall now. The ESV translates the word "excellence" with a footnoted translation "virtue." The translation seems apt, but I wonder how often we recall the Homeric usage of the word, in which "excellence" or "virtue" had a very specific meaning, namely excellence in martial combat. We are reminded, then, of the Achaian sack of Troy alongside the meekness of Christian virtue. What do we make of the conflict within this word?

Lastly, I was reminded again during the sacrament of the metaphoric significance of the elements: Bread is Body. Wine is Blood. We maintain these metaphors because they hold our unity with Christ, transcending the physical and temporal distance between us. Through the sacrament we gain his presence with us and ours with him; we are located in heaven. Through the sacrament we arrive at the eschaton. Such is not possible if the Church does not maintain the metaphor of Bread and Body, Wine and Blood.

Johnny Cash, "Hurt"

2007-07-17T21:36:00.001-04:00

I bought American IV: The Man Comes Around by Johnny Cash today. Included was a bonus DVD with the video shown above. The CD is amazing; I highly recommend it. Cash exudes the tragic wisdom that one achieves through suffering. As the Chorus of the Elders at Argos observe in Aeschylus' Agamemnon:

"Zeus has led us on to know,
the Helmsman lays it down as law
that we must suffer, suffer into truth.
We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart
the pain of pain remembered comes again,
and we resist, but ripeness comes as well.
From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench
there comes a violent love."

Such is the essence of Cash's insight into the human soul. The brilliance of his invention is that the song is itself a revision, an alchemy more like, which transmutes the lead of Trent Rezner's Nihilism into the purest gold of eternal truth. To borrow another example from antiquity, Cash is an American Oedipus at Colonus. He contemplates a life lived in strife with the gods, his experience of the abyss, and the inevitable end of his existence.

Dostoevsky and the Eucharist

2007-07-15T13:30:00.000-04:00

Two scenes from novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky came to
mind this morning as I took communion. The first came
as I took the bread. As I held that morsel in my
hand, I looked around at the congregation, and had a
realization: this is the body of Christ. The people
in this room with me right here, with all their faults
and foibles, they are Christ’s body. It was the kind
of moment that Dostoevsky depicts often in his novels,
when his heroes prostrate themselves and kiss the
earth. The following is an example from The Brothers
Karamazov, in which the hero of the novel, Alyosha,
performs the ancient and holy ritual:

"He did not stop on the steps either, but went quickly
down; his soul, over flowing with rapture, yearned for
freedom, space, openness. The vault of heaven, full
of soft, shining stars, stretched vast and fathomless
above him. The Milky Way ran in two pale streams from
the zenith to the horizon. The fresh, motionless,
still night enfolded the earth. The white towers and
golden domes of the cathedral gleamed out against the
sapphire sky. The gorgeous autumn flowers, in the
beds round the house, were slumbering till morning.
The silence of the earth seemed to melt into the
silence of the heavens. The mystery of earth was one
with the mystery of the stars. . . . Alyosha stood,
gazed, and suddenly threw himself down on the earth.

He did not know why he embraced it. He could not have
told why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to
kiss it all. But he kissed it weeping, sobbing and
watering it with his tears, and vowed passionately to
love it, to love it forever and ever. “Water the
earth with the tears of your joy and love those
tears,” echoed in his soul. What was he weeping over?
Oh! in his rapture he was weeping even over those
stars, which were shining to him from the abyss of
space, and “he was not ashamed of that ecstasy.”
There seemed to be threads from all those innumerable
worlds of God, linking his soul to them, and it was
trembling all over “in contact with other worlds.” He
longed to forgive everyone and for everything, and to
beg forgiveness. Oh, not for himself, but for all
men, for all and for everything. “And others are
praying for me too,” echoed again in his soul. But
with every instant he felt clearly and, as it were,
tangibly, that something firm and unshakeable as that
vault of heaven had entered into his soul. It was
as though some idea had seized the sovereignty of his
mind -- and it was for all his life and forever and
ever. He had fallen on the earth a weak youth, but he
rose up a resolute champion, and he knew and felt it
suddenly at the very moment of his ecstasy. And
never, never, all his life long, could Alyosha forget
that minute. “Someone visited my soul in that hour,”
he used to say afterwards, with implicit faith in his
words.

The second scene came to mind as I took the wine. It
is one that has occurred to me many times before, and
it is from Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov, the
novel’s protagonist, enters a tavern and meets a drunk
named Marmeladov. Marmeladov tells the story of his
daughter, who must prostitute herself to support her
step-family. Her only blood relation, her father,
drinks away the money she has earned. Marmeladov
relates all of this to Raskolnikov:

‘This very bottle, sir, was bought with her money,’
announced Marmeladov, still addressing himself
exclusively to Raskolnikov. ‘Thirty copecks she gave
me with her own hands, her last, all she had, as I saw
for myself . . . She said nothing, she only looked at
me in silence. . . . A look like that does not belong
to this world, but there . . . where they grieve over
mankind, they weep for them, but they do not reproach
them, they do not reproach! . . . but it hurts more,
when there are no reproaches! . . . Thirty copecks,
yes, sir. And surely she needs them herself now, eh?
What do you think, my dear sir? Now she must take
care to be always neat and clean. And that neatness,
that special cleanness, costs money, you understand.
Do you understand? Then she must buy rouge as well,
it’s absolutely essential; starched petticoats,
coquettish little boots to set off her little foot
when she has to step across a puddle. Do you
understand, do you understand, sir, what that
smartness means? Well, sir, and I, her own father,
took those thirty copecks of hers for drink! And I am
drinking it, sir! I have already drunk it all! . . .
Now, who could be sorry for a wretch like me, eh?’

I am reminded of this particular scene in Crime and
Punishment again and again, because of the sacrificial
nature of Sonya’s actions. She takes on a life of sin
so that her father can drink. Holding the cup of wine
this morning, I knew that Christ had taken on sin so
that I could do the same.

Metaphors Matter

2007-07-09T21:31:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about metaphors. The word "metaphor" comes from the Greek cognate "μεταφέρω," which means "carry across" or "transfer." I find the concept of metaphor fascinating because it offers a sophisticated alternative to the rationalistic thinking that has seemed to mark the modern period. Though we might sometimes wish that friends or colleagues would structure their words with greater precision, it seems to me that metaphor opens doors that formal logic can't. Metaphor also seems to be embedded deeply into our language and thought. Consider, for example, the close relationship between perceiving and seeing (i.e. "Now I see what you mean").

Metaphors function because we transfer meaning between two otherwise unrelated things. Think about it for a moment. Why does seeing have to be connected with perceiving? Yet the connection has been made metaphorically, and so we gain a linguistic connection that transcends the individuated concepts. Consider another powerful example from Christian theology, that of the eucharistic sacrament. "Bread and Wine" transfers meaning with "Body and Blood." Think about that for a moment; it's beautiful. Without that transference, that metaphor, none of the individuated elements would have the transcendent meaning they now share. That works for "Body and Blood" just as well as for "Bread and Wine." I mean that without the metaphor of the eucharist, we could not have an immanent Christ. In the same way, we could not have transcendent eating. The metaphor extends to all of life, sacramentally transforming the mundane into the sacred, and the sacred into the mundane.

Metaphors matter.

Psalm 137

2007-07-07T17:25:00.000-04:00

After posting "Kubla Khan" and "Dover Beach", which are both lyric laments, I thought we might take a gander at a Hebrew poem that demonstrates the same sentiment. Arguably, the Hebrews (and Psalm 137 in particular) are the fountainhead of poetic lament in western culture. Unfortunately, I am not a Hebrew scholar, and so we will have to read the poem in translation. In another way, however, this exercise will be fortunate for us, because we will have the opportunity to read from the KJV, a book paralleled only by Shakespeare in its poetic importance for the English language. Let's read the poem and discuss.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee,
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

***

Notice the many parallels between this Psalm and the two other poems we have discussed thus far. Like Kubla Khan, which laments the loss of the "dome of pleasure," the Hebrews lament the loss of Jerusalem. Like "Dover Beach," the Hebrew poet clings to his beloved (God, Jewish cultural identity, Jerusalem) in a time of chaos. Like Arnold's speaker, he mournfully evokes a remembrance of the golden past. Like Coleridge, the Hebrew poet struggles to retain a remembrance of the beautiful. I hope that from these few observations, you are beginning to appreciate the harmonic resonances that intertexts share with one another, and the manner in which those harmonies deepen our readings.

What do you notice about this and other poems?

Kubla Khan

2007-06-27T23:38:00.000-04:00

Ok folks, time for another superb poem, this time by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Let's read it together and discuss our reactions. I will include Coleridge's own note published along with the poem.

***

Coleridge's Note:

The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], and, as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits.
In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in Purchas's Pilgrimage: ``Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.'' The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

***

"Kubla Khan"

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

***

As with "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold, Coleridge's Kubla Khan anticipates an euphoric grandness that cannot be attained. Coleridge was apparently inspired by a line from Purchas his Pilgrimage during an opium-induced vision. Kublai Khan was the founder of the Mongol Dynasty in China in the 13th century (Norton Anthology of English Lit., 1596).

Coleridge wrote his poem in iambic tetrameter. His rhyme scheme seems loosely based upon couplets, but with a high degree of alteration. These are organized into four distinct stanzas, which I neglected to indicate in my post. I'll clarify now:

Stanza 1 begins on line 1: "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan . . ."

Stanza 2 begins on line 12: "But oh! that deep romantic chasm . . ."

Stanza 3 begins on line 31: "The shadow of the dome . . ."

Stanza 4 begins on line 37: "A damsel with a dulcimer . . ."

***

Stanza 1 exemplifies the technique of alliteration: "Kubla Khan"; "dome decree"; "river ran"; measureless to man"; "sunless sea"; and "sunny spots." These tiny details of the poem's euphony acclimate the reader to this new world of Xanadu. The coherence of sounds imitates the coherence of nature, and assures us that although Xanadu is foreign, the building of the "pleasure-dome" is somehow important for us. The content of the stanza mirrors its technique, as Kubla Khan makes his decree, and we imagine various artisans constructing an enormous structure, something like a national monument or a royal palace. Throughout this first stanza, we sense that, like the pleasure-dome, the poem itself is building, picking up steam with every line. As readers, we respond to that momentum, anticipating the lines as each propels us toward the next.

The second stanza presents a complication to the building of Kubla's pleasure-dome, which jars us from the momentum of the first. Coleridge alerts us to this hiatus with a sequence of exclamations. "But oh!" is perhaps the most jarring. We learn that a chasm, a dreadful holy place, has flung up rocks and changed the path of Alph, the sacred river. All this geological hullabaloo is understood as a sign of impending war. Also notice the erotic undertones in this stanza, which reminds us that the earth's seismic activity is an act of procreation. Thus far, Coleridge masterfully provides us with the beginning of a great poem, but as you know from reading his note, he was interrupted and could not finish the 300 or so lines he wrote in his vision.

While the first and second stanzas indicate that Coleridge is building toward something great, I read the third stanza as a moment when Coleridge's recollection of the vision had faded, but during which he refused to give it up. Though the stanza remains pleasing to the ear, it lacks the coherence of the first two stanzas, it is significantly shorter, and it ends abruptly. Yet the lines are important, for in them we discover the process of Coleridge's struggling to remember, and we are reminded of the transience of our own finite memories and thoughts.

The last stanza is perhaps the most memorable of the entire poem, which is perhaps ironic because it is a lament. In it we sense the longing and regret that Coleridge must have felt when he tried to recollect his original vision. We are also made aware of the need to not only invoke the muse, but to surround her with protection from foreign invasions. The last lines, then, refer to the poet, whose work paradoxically requires physical isolation to make spiritual kinship possible. "Kubla Khan" thus serves as an excellent poem for introducing the concept of poetic inspiration.

Dover Beach

2007-06-25T22:45:00.000-04:00

This is a great poem! Let's discuss it a bit shall we? There are few pleasures equal to reading a poem, so let me invite you to read "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold now:

DOVER BEACH

By Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Ok, now please (oh please!) read it again. Be sure to read it out loud, it's so much better that way!

Alright alright, now that you've had the indescribable pleasure (I really am serious about that) of experiencing the beauty of a poem (twice), tell me about that experience. What did you notice? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

***

Here's a few things that I enjoyed while reading "Dover Beach":

1. Notice that the poem's stanzas do not follow any recognizable pattern. 14-6-8-9. The rhyme scheme and meter follows suit, having no pattern either. At first we might think that this is the mark of an inferior poem, but wait! Let's think about why Matthew Arnold might have chosen to write the poem in this way. When we do so, we realize that the lack of conventional patterns actually serves the purpose of his poem, which is to lament the world's cultural chaos. If Arnold had written the poem within a tightly formalized scheme, a sonnet for instance, it would actually lack continuity. Even so, the words of the poem are obviously chosen with care and precision. Consider, for example, the line "Begin, and cease, and then again begin," which could have easily been rendered "Begin, and cease, and then begin again," but without the symmetry that Arnold includes when he starts and ends his line with "begin".

2. Notice the way that Arnold utilizes imagery to surround us with the feeling of chaos, which contrasts with the "tranquil bay". We remember that he is standing on the Strait of Dover in England, gazing across the English Channel with his beloved. One of my professors told me in a class that if you visit the Dover Straits, the "pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling," are decent sized stones, maybe about the size of half-a-fist. So imagine yourself gazing across the English Channel, hearing the surf crash against the high walls of the straits, with thousands of these stones randomly smashing into one another. What Arnold has masterfully done, in other words, is to provide not simply a powerful image, but a metaphor that encapsulates the mood of his entire poem: chaotic conflict. Quite an accomplishment!

3. Notice also what many others point out concerning the poem, namely, sea as a metaphor of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern culture. Sophocles, a Greek tragedian of Athens in the 5th century B.C., is most famous for his Oedipus cycle, which set the standard for tragedy ever since. By gazing upon the English Channel, then, we discover a spiritual kinship that transcends space and time. Though physically on the Straits of Dover, we are also in Athens; though temporally in the 19th century, we are also in the 5th century B.C. The Sea provides this mystical connection.

The same things apply to "the Sea of Faith," a reference to Christendom's Medieval dominance, which Arnold describes as "the folds of a bright girdle furled." But consider the continuity that Arnold attributes to Christianity, as it provides a beautiful garment that covers the entire world. But again, the poem is a lament, and so we discover that this garment, like the tide, is "Retreating, to the breath / Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world."

3. Arnold's last stanza contains a beautiful statement of love's defiance in the face of a world devoid of "joy", "love", "light", "certitude", "peace", and "help for pain." In such a world, Arnold suggests, one must cling to one's beloved. Arnold's stanza thus becomes an eery existentialist prophecy that seems to intuit the coming of World War One, when disillusionment followed the clashing of "ignorant armies."

***

See what I mean when I say that poetry is one of the greatest pleasures we can enjoy? Through a poet's eyes, we can take a single moment and actualize the potential of its multivalent significance. In other words, we do not just see the picturesque, we perceive the sacramental.

Death

2007-06-22T19:24:00.000-04:00

One reason that I love reading is those occasional moments when you stumble across a passage that lifts you out of your seat. Yesterday, I read a passage like that from an essay by one of my professors, Scott Crider. He writes, "Ultimately, [The Winter's Tale] discloses to us the character of our own faith, compelling us to live a question about ourselves: Can we awaken our faith in the presence of death?"

I've been doing some walking/running lately to lose some weight, and during that time I have repeatedly pondered my own mortality. How will I face my end? It seems a strange thought. I am about to turn 25, certainly nowhere near old age. Yet as I continue my graduate studies, this question seems increasingly relevant because it is a question we all must answer: Will I die well?

I listen to a podcast called "Speaking of Faith" that fascinates me every time I tune in. The show features guests from various religions, and they discuss anything and everything. A recent guest was Mariane Pearl, a Buddhist whose Jewish husband was beheaded by Islamic extremists in 2002. During the interview, she spoke of her husband's courage in the face of certain death. I wonder, would I be so courageous? Would any of us?

Perhaps, in a paradoxical fashion, death can actually provide a potentiality for transcendence, for if we consider daily the fact that one day our bodies will stop functioning, perhaps we would live differently while they are. How would that change our faith? How would that bind humanity together in one sacred kinship? Maybe our whole lives are one long preparation for that single moment when we face death. Will we cower or laugh in the face of it?

GREEK!

2007-06-11T00:01:00.000-04:00

I start my classical Greek intensive summer class tomorrow! I took two years at Covenant College, but I'm out of practice. Hopefully I can get back into the swing of things rather quickly, though. I'll be translating Thucydides in no time! Right?

Paradise Lost

2007-06-08T02:16:00.001-04:00

I am currently writing a paper on Milton's Paradise Lost. I am treating the work as a representation of the epic genre and tracing the image of the garden throughout it and other epic works such as Homer's Iliad/Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Melville's Moby-Dick.

Below is my tentative thesis for your perusal:

"The garden is an image of what must be sacrificed, violated, or abandoned in order for the epic struggle toward a new order to begin. Such an action in an epic work is never easy, nor is it pleasant, for the garden represents an idyllic good, an isolated order of love, consummation, wholeness, and innocence. And yet if the heroic goal of forming a civilization is to be accomplished, the natural state of the garden must be undone."

Keep in mind that the above thesis refers to literature, and not philosophy or theology. I welcome your insights and seek your refutations.

PW

Worship

2007-05-31T20:24:00.000-04:00

My recent trip to Colorado with the CCA high school brought to light many issues surrounding worship and the camp experience. One thing that frustrates me with contemporary evangelical approaches to worship (especially in youth settings) is the psychological manipulation that can take place. Everything seems to direct itself toward an emotional experience, but sometimes I doubt whether that experience is God or just sleep deprivation. We've gotten pretty good at finding the formula for reaching that worship high, however, and I think Brian McLaren does a good job of critiquing that problem in a web video I saw today.

CHECK IT OUT

Review: The Demon and the Angel

2007-05-29T02:56:00.001-04:00

I took Edward Hirsch's book on my trip to Colorado. Compared my alternative (Milton's Paradise Lost) it seemeed like light reading. As the subtitle to the book states, Hirsch attempts to find the "source of artistic inspiration" and outlines two basic fountainheads: the demon and the angel. Like Nietzsche's Dionysian/Apollonian binary, Hirsch meditates at length upon the darker side of the artistic imagination. In fact, he relies heavily (at times merely paraphrasing) upon the work of Federico Garcia Lorca, a 20th century Spanish playwright. Lorca popularized the Andalusian idea of duende in many of his public lectures. The one I am familiar with is titled, "Theory and Play of the Duende." He argues that if the artist's imagination can be inspired by an angel, muse, or the Holy Spirit, then so too can it be captivated by the demonic spirits of the dead. Hirsch seems fascinated by Lorca's theories, and dwells upon them at length.

To be honest, I find Lorca's ideas to be quite fascinating myself, but I thought Hirsch's book came up short. He does little more than simply repeat in 200+ pages what Lorca managed to condense into around 10. He mentions several interesting connections with other works of literature which exhibit duende, but often left me wondering where his book was heading. In other words, if you asked me to tell you the book's thesis, it would be something vague like "exploring Lorca's idea of duende," which is considerably less than even the title promises. Several hasty chapters address the angelic side of inspiration, and though I don't blame Hirsch for focusing on Lorca (he is fascinating), I wish he'd been more even-handed.

Still, Hirsch offers interesting food for thought regarding inspiration by reminding us of the Andalusian observation: death is a powerful force to activate the artistic imagination. But if you are really interested, then just read Lorca.

My Trip to Colorado

2007-05-25T15:16:00.000-04:00

I recently returned from a school-sponsored trip to Colorado. It was a blast, but I'm glad to be back home.

VIEW MY COLORADO VIDEO

Also, I made an "A" in my Shakespeare class . . . Yay!

Cakes get done; people get finished.

2007-05-17T17:29:00.000-04:00

Wow. You may have noticed my lack of blogging recently. Sorry about that. Here's an update:

I finished my Shakespeare class on Wednesday. It was such a blast taking that class; I'm actually going to miss it quite a bit. Hopefully, I will be able to do some further writing on Shakespeare this summer. There is a conference at Baylor in October, and the theme is friendship. I plan to submit an abstract. Perhaps I will write on Hal and Falstaff from the second tetralogy? Who knows? Before I do that, I need to finish a paper on Milton's Paradise Lost.

Just now, I finished grading my last final exam for CCA. Yes, I've cracked open a celebratory cervesa. Now I just need to hop on a bus and travel to Colorado for our school trip tomorrow. I'll be back on Wednesday, hopefully with pictures (maybe even some video).

Also, I do plan to continue my series on De Rougemont's Love in the Western World and other such interesting books. Perhaps I will also post my recent paper on Much Ado About Nothing. We shall see. At any rate, I will be blogging more often now that school is done, so look forward to lots of interesting posts!

Ooh! I just remembered something interesting that happened a few weeks ago. I picked up my sister from Oklahoma! Here are some pics.

YEAH! OKLAHOMA CITY!

Wow. Gas is not cheap.

I'm there!

We ate at Ted's Cafe Escondito, which is quite possibly the greatest Mexican restaurant on the face of the earth.

Yum!

Decision

2007-04-24T23:56:00.000-04:00

After receiving the decision from UD to decline my admission to their doctoral program, I myself had a decision to make: should I continue teaching at CCA or pursue full-time graduate study? Each option had its advantages and disadvantages. Teaching would provide me with an honest income, but limit my ability to finish my M.A. and seriously pursue doctoral work. Full-time study would provide me with the time I need, but leave me with some significant debt.

Ultimately, I decided to take a calculated risk and study full-time next year.

I'm very pleased with my decision, and excited about the path ahead. Here's the plan as it stands right now for this summer:

1) Move to Irving
2) Complete Essay on Milton
3) Summer Greek
4) Shakespeare Reading
5) GRE Prep
6) Research doctoral programs

That already seems like a lot to do! But I am so excited about it! I love school!

Review: A Generous Orthodoxy

2007-04-16T18:57:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading Brian McLaren's book A Generous Orthodoxy while at the UD library. I was impressed, perplexed, and stretched as I read his thoughts on the various facets of Christian thought and practice. Some of the time that I was reading, I felt affronted: this guy is outrageous! Can he really mean that? But then certain tones and phrases felt strangely resonant. These agreements only gained momentum as I kept reading. McLaren's point of view will most certainly remain provocative for years to come, but I think it will also remain vitally important. He seems like the type of person I would like to sit down with for a nice long chat. To give you just a brief idea of his thought-provoking (dialogue-promoting?) ideas, here's a smattering of quotes, beginning with his reformulation of T-U-L-I-P.

T - Triune Love
U - Unselfish Election
L - Limitless Reconciliation
I - Inspiring Grace
P - Passionate, Persistent Saints

Christianity is "a religion that Jesus might consider about as useful as many non-Christians consider it today . . ." (89).

Concerning universalism, McLaren cleverly evades the question altogether: "Isn't this God's business?" (112).

Concerning Scripture: "Hardly anyone notices the irony of resorting to the authority of extrabiblical words and concepts to justify one's belief in the Bible's ultimate authority" (164).

Concerning world religions: "Just as Jesus' incarnation bound him, not just to the Jewish people, but to all humanity, his incarnation links his followers to all people -- including (WARNING: here's the kicker. . .) people of other religions (249).

and later in the same chapter, "I don't hope all Jews or Hindus will become members of the Christian religion. But I do hope all who feel so called will become Jewish or Hindu followers of Jesus" (264).

Despite (or because of) these and other provocative and insightful statements, McLaren's book offers an orthodoxy that values tradition, text, and culture, but also beauty, experience, and practice. It's worth a read, and since it reads quickly, you won't have to suffer long if you don't enjoy it. In my opinion, though, it is an important book with much to offer in particular to a new generation of evangelicals.

Disappointment

2007-04-05T08:08:00.000-04:00

Devastated? No, that's not the right word. God is still on his throne. I'm still a middle-class American living a decent life. The sun will rise.

Annoyed? Slightly, but I am also annoyed if there is traffic on the interstate. This word isn't strong enough. I've hit a year-long traffic jam, not a 30 minute delay.

Angry? Bitter? No. I don't think so anyway. It's hard to tell with those two, but I don't think so.

Insecure? Probably. Was it me? Am I that guy on American Idol that only thinks he can sing? But God's call on my life really remains the same: when I take a hard look in the mirror, I still see that call and know my purpose.

Yep, I'm disappointed. I didn't get into the Ph.D. program at UD. Now I have to wait yet another year in purgatory.

Please

2007-04-03T00:46:00.000-04:00

Every day I check my mailbox. Every day I pray for God to send me the letter. Every day I pray for the letter to accept me into the loving arms of the Ph.D. program at UD. No letter yet, but I'm still praying.

Review: The Shakespeare Wars

2007-04-02T01:02:00.000-04:00

Ron Rosenbaum's survey of recent Shakespeare scholarship draws readers into a fascinating world of textual, performance, and linguistic debate. Readers find themselves in conversation with notable Shakespearean luminaries such as Stephen Booth, Stanley Wells, Peter Brooks, Peter Hall, and Harold Bloom (although Rosenbaum's critique of Bloom is scathing). Througout the rather large volume, Rosenbaum demonstrates a keen ear for Shakespeare's vision (gotta love synaesthesia), and a nose for rotten theories and phony performances. In an entertaining and accessible style, Rosenbaum convinces his audience not just of Shakespeare's importance in the western canon, but of the continuing importance of Shakespeare studies. For anyone needing an introduction to Shakespeare, this book is a must have for your library.

Review: Shakespeare and the Arts of Language

2007-03-31T23:52:00.000-04:00

Russ McDonald's book, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language offers a perspective on the bard that is as fascinating as it is rare in contemporary Shakespeare studies: a close analysis of Shakespeare's linguistic techniques. An important contribution to the excellent Oxford Shakespeare Topics series (edited by Peter Holland and Stanley Wells), McDonald's volume invites readers to seriously contemplate the stylistic mastery of the English language that Shakespeare developed from his youth and exhibited in his plays. Further, McDonald reminds his audience of the inherent enjoyment that wordplay has to offer, writing, "To reflect on the arts of language is to recall and learn to relish again the pleasures that attracted us to the theatre in the first place" (9).

The first and second chapters focus on the development of English as a language during the early modern period. McDonald reminds readers that English teemed with potential in the period surrounding Shakespeare's life. Though earlier authors viewed English as inadequate for expressing the full range that Latin could provide, McDonald traces the gradual acceptance of English as a viable language for drama and poetry. This linguistic transition allowed Shakespeare to invent or appropriate vocabulary, syntax, and spelling creatively, uninhibited by the codification of classical languages. The first two chapters also examine the rhetorical tradition Shakespeare inherited as an influence on his plays. Of particular interest is McDonald's citation of a Ciceronian pedagogical method prevalent during Shakespeare's time known as disputatio in utramque partem, which required young students to affirm and deny a historical interpretation (48). Through such excercises, the young Shakespeare (and other early moderns) learned to enjoy rhetorical perspectives, a practice which extended into Shakespeare's drama.

Chapter three deals with Shakespeare's imagery and its development out of the bourgeoning English language, while chapter four continues the discussion by offering examples of a few of Shakespeare's favourite figures: the stage, the sea, the garden, the eye, and the ear. By dedicating two chapters to the topic of imagery, McDonald makes a convincing case for the importance of closely reading such textual subtleties, which, far from being extraneous, lie at the heart of Shakespeare's art.

The following two chapters focus upon Shakespeare's development of verse and prose throughout his plays. McDonald asserts the interesting thesis that Shakespeare's skill increased as he increasingly varied the rigidity of iambic pentameter. To demonstrate his point, he cites passages from the first tetrology and the early comedies, noting Shakespeare's tendency to adjust his thought to the conventional endstopped, ten-syllable unit. In his middle and later plays, Shakespeare began experimenting with a more natural style, in which he varied meter, enjambed lines, and added extra syllables. McDonald's subsequent chapter on prose also traces Shakespeare's gradual emancipation from conventionality toward an inventive, organic form.

McDonald's last two chapters examine Shakespeare's development of wordplay as expressive his own intense criticism of his art. Noting the pun as a figure which breaks down the signifier/signified relationship, McDonald provides citations from many of the plays, where Shakespeare questions the nature of his own profession, particularly the possibilities and dangers of artifice. The discussion offers insights into Shakespeare's unique vision, not by investigating his biography or theorizing about his philosophy, but by closely reading what Shakespeare wrote.

Shakespeare and the Arts of Language is an important work that calls much needed attention to the words themselves. My only criticism is one of scope not content: I would have appreciated an additional chapter on the sonnets, which arguably represent Shakespeare's most mature and subtle use of the English language. If you are at all interested in Shakespeare studies, or simply desire a deeper knowledge of Shakespeare as wordsmith, you must buy this book.

Education: Time in Silence

2007-03-29T22:53:00.000-04:00

Serendipity is a wonderful thing.

I woke up this morning to teach, only to be informed that the water main outside our campus had burst, and school was cancelled. Yes! An entire day was mine for the taking, only, what would I do with this new-found time? Sleep? Laundry? A film perhaps?

I decided to head to the UD library for some good old-fashioned research. Sound boring? Well, actually I made an interesting discovery while at UD's Blakely Library. It had nothing to do with my paper on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing(though I did accomplish quite a bit). Instead I simply put a few thoughts together on education.

Every day in my profession I hear someone bemoan the state of American education, particularly secondary education. These concerns are warranted, but how to fix them? Pouring money into the public schools? Education technology? Improved curricula? Standardized testing?

How about a thoroughly impractical strategy: time in silence.

While at UD today, I found repose in a silent library. I accomplished more in three hours than I could have done in three weeks if I had been in my classroom. Silence. Long periods of uninterrupted silence. Perhaps education might improve drastically if we collectively closed our mouths.

"The unspoken word is capital. We can invest it or we can squander it." - Mark Twain

Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougemont: Book I

2007-03-27T00:34:00.000-04:00

Like so many other things in my life, I've found someone else's good idea, wished I had though of it first, and then decided to go ahead and do it anyway. Mike, you've inspired me to begin posting summaries and sundry thoughts about the various books I'm reading. Most likely I will use blogging as a forum for secondary critical material, since I anticipate outlining might increase my comprehension of such texts. A corollary benefit will be the interaction I gain from the few readers of this blog, whose opinions I deeply respect.

De Rougemont introduces the "Tristan Myth" in the first book of Love in the Western World, a work that focuses upon the intellectual and cultural development of love and its function as a myth in the West. The book was recommended to me by Louise Cowan, and so I purchased it several months ago, only to place it on my bookshelf until now. I should say a few words about the way de Rougemont employs the word "myth." Myth often has the connotation of falsehood, as opposed to its supposed antonym, fact. But when de Rougemont uses the word myth, he means something different. Myth for him (and others) denotes a cultural milieu, or the story of a civilization. It is that which we collectively assume in our subconscious. He writes, "A myth stands forth as the entirely anonymous expression of collective -- or, more exactly, of common -- facts" (19). The Tristan Myth, as he calls it, is thus more than a "piece of literature;" it is "typical of the relations between man and woman" in the aristocratic society of the 12th and 13th centuries (19). De Rougemont then argues that the Tristan Myth, which originated in Medieval Europe, remains in our collective, mythic subconsciousness as a perversion of authentic love.

De Rougemont continues by describing the story of Tristan and Iseult. Tristan is an orphan taken under the care of King Mark of Cornwall, and early in his life he defeats the Irish giant Morholt (Iseult's uncle). While in combat with the giant, Tristan receives a mortal wound from a poisoned barb and is cast adrift to sea with his sword and harp, to die. Landing again in Ireland, Tristan discovers a cure for his wound, which Iseult uses to restore him to health. Years later, King Mark determines to marry Iseult and selects Tristan to quest after her on his behalf. Wounded by a dragon in the process, Iseult again nurses him, this time discovering Tristan killed her uncle. She nearly kills Tristan, but spares him when she learns King Mark desires to make her queen. While on board a ship to Cornwall, both accidentally drink a love potion given by Iseult's maid Brengain that leads them to "fall into one another's arms" despite Iseult's betrothal to King Mark, Tristan's lord. Despite their passion, Tristan delivers Iseult to King Mark, but Brengain takes her place in the marital bed. Following the initial enchantment of the young lovers, two scenes exemplify their relationship. In the first, King Mark's nobles attempt to prove Tristan's adultery by sprinkling flour between he and Iseult's beds. Tristan leaps across the beds in order to embrace his mistress, but in doing so reopens a leg wound, spilling blood upon the sheets and convicting himself and Iseult. In the second scene, the lovers have fled into the woods, and King Mark happens upon them sleeping. Tristan has placed his drawn sword between them, and King Mark replaces it with his own. After 3 years the love potion loses its effect, and Iseult returns to King Mark, whereupon she and Tristan continue their meetings in the woods. Though Tristan marries another, he longs for Iseult. Once again wounded by a poisoned spear, Tristan calls for Iseult to save his life, but she arrives too late. When she does arrive, she lays beside Tristan and dies.

Ok, if you are still interested in De Rougemont's thesis, then that's good. Remember, he's arguing that the Tristan story represents the perversion of love that has polluted our western myth of love. In the case of Tristan and Iseult, the conflict occurs between loyalty to one's lord vs loyalty to one's lady. It is this thrilling contradiction that both Tristan and Iseult enjoy, not because they are really in love with the other but because they are in love with love. Even more, the two lovers essentially seek peril for its own sake, because at the root of their love of love is actually a love of death (42-46).

The influence of Tristan and Iseult upon the western world, therefore, is to equate "passionate love" with "a radical condemnation of marriage" (54). True love, it is now supposed, is "profoundly connected with our liking for war" (55). De Rougemont clearly laments the current myth of love as a lie that needs correction. Although he has not offered a way forward just yet, I am anticipating one near the end of the book. The next section is titled, "The Religious Origins," and I will be sure to post another summary as soon as I've completed it.

Response to Wes on Drama and Scripture

2007-03-21T23:38:00.000-04:00

Wes Vander Lugt raised some interesting questions on his blog the other day, and I'd like to engage them because I think he's on to something. His recent musings on drama and doctrine (undoubtedly influenced by the work of Kevin Vanhoozer) offer possibilities and challenges. Being a sympathetic participant in the discussion, I'll survey some of its possibilities in the hopes that Wes will respond with insights and critiques.

Shakespeare's play Hamlet remains relevant in today's culture precisely because of its glaring ambiguities. Does Hamlet love Ophelia? Is Hamlet insane? Was Ophelia pregnant? Why was Hamlet not crowned King following his father's death? Is the "ghost" really his father's spirit? These uncertainties provide delightfully entertaining points for discussion, but when it comes down to actually performing the play, one has to make choices. Consider a textual ambiguity for example. In one version of the play, Hamlet turns to Horatio and says, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." But in another version, Hamlet says "than are dreamt of in our philosophy." In another example, King Lear, Lear's last lines differ from text to text. Holding a feather over his dead (or seemingly dead) daughter, Cordelia, Lear either says, "Break, heart, I pritthee break!" or "Look there, look there!" One version of the play ends in complete despair, the other in a beatific vision. Textual variants aside, actors must make all sorts of decisions about how to perform a given script each time they grace the stage.

1) Scripture as script requires performance

All this talk of discrimination on the part of a reader/performer of Shakespeare allows an analogical comparison to Scripture that may be helpful. If God is our playwright, then he has offered us a Scripture (script) that we must perform in order to fully understand. Interpretation requires a performance, even if one's performance is speculative. In other words, exegesis requires experience. Orthodoxy requires orthopraxy. These binaries dialogically inform one another, asymptotically approximating the truth much like an actor refines his/her idea about a play or character, then alters his/her performance accordingly. Such a paradigm (I think) works for one's individual sanctification, but may also properly analogize the development of theology in the universal Church. Perhaps we might say that the Church must continually perform the script of Scripture in order to revitalize its cultural relevance. Further, we might say that each time we do so, we (hopefully) engage in a deeper conversation with the text at hand. i.e. we become better and better readers and actors of God's script.

2) Scripture as script allows variant performances without conclusive interpretation.

As I probably hinted above, Scripture as script allows (even requires?) that the text as text remain polysemous. When text becomes performance, such represents an interpretation that must be understood contingently, with the realization that other possible performances exist and may provide additional insights. Evaluation of one's orthodoxy/orthopraxy then becomes a matter of aesthetics.

3) Performance requires submission to Scripture as script

To fully understand a given work, Coleridge suggested that one must undergo a "willing suspension of disbelief." In other words, one must submit to the mimetic world created by the author/playwright/poet. Although actors offer a variety of interpretations of Shakespeare's Hamlet, for instance, each does so (if they are any good) not because they have simply taken on a role, but because they have had an experience with a text and a character that demanded a change in them, that required they become someone else. One might say then that our performance of Scripture as script is a version of what Aristotle called mimesis, "the imitation of an action," and the action is Christ's incarnation-death-resurrection.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 65

2007-03-20T23:19:00.000-04:00

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

O how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wrackful siege of battering days
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?

O fearful meditation! Where, alack,
Shall time's best jewel from time's chest lie hid,
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back,
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

O none, unless this miracle have might:
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Sheesh

2007-03-19T01:56:00.000-04:00

Danny Patterson preached at Colleyville Presbyterian this morning, and his sermon reminded me of Dante and Dostoevsky. He was speaking about bearing one another's burden's, which got me thinking about mount purgatory in the Divine Comedy. The saints travelling up mount purgatory must begin with the first circle, which is Pride, and bear such awful loads upon their backs that their faces are smashed against the ground. Yet when just a single saint rises above the mountain and enters heaven, the whole mountain shakes and every saint shouts in praise. It's a beautiful image Dante has given us of communal sanctification.

Perhaps an even better image is given to us by Dostoevsky, who inherits the cultural history of his native Russia and the Orthodox church. The Russian peasants, whom Dostoevsky seems to love intensely, are said to have offered food, clothing, and New Testaments to all prisoners marching north into Siberia. Behind their actions was more than mere kindness, it was an act of repentance for the community's failure to prevent the prisoners' crimes. Theologically, this translates into a communal understanding of original sin: each person is responsible for the sins of the whole world. Perhaps the Russian's mentality accounts for their tremendous capacity for suffering (i.e. the Mongol Invasion, Moscow 1812, and Stalingrad). With that cultural background, Dostoevsky provides Sonya Marmeladov, the prostitute-scapegoat of his novel Crime and Punishment.

Let me try and set the scene for you. Raskolnikov (the protagonist) strike up a conversation with Marmeladov (a drunk) in a tavern. Marmeladov guiltily tells the story of how his alchoholism continues to ruin his family because he does not work. He describes one particular night in which there was no food for any of the children because he had spent it on booze. "And towards six o'clock," Marmeladov says, "I saw my little Sonya get up and put on her kerchief and her pelisse and go out, and at some time after eight she came back. She came in and went straight to Katerina Ivanovna [her cruel step-mother] and laid thirty silber roubles on the table in front of her without a word. She looked at her, but she did not utter a single word, only took our big green woolen shawl (we have one which serves for all of us), wrapped it round her head and face and lay down on the bed, with her face to the wall, and her little shoulders and her whole body were trembling . . . And I was still lying there, in the same state . . . And then, young man, then I saw Katerina Ivanovna, also without a word, go to my little Sonya's bed-side, and she stayed there on her knees all the evening, kissing her feet, and would not get up, and then they both fell asleep with their arms round one another . . . both of them . . . both of them . . . yes, sir, and I . . . lay there tipsy."

Not only does Dostoevsky provide a powerful image of one-anothering; I think he metaphorically offers a unique perspective on the cost of our justification.

Camping

2007-03-13T16:29:00.000-04:00

Some friends and I went camping this weekend at the LBJ Grasslands, a reserve area managed by the USDA Forest Service. It was loads of fun, and only about an hour away from my apartment. The first night we found a nice spot with plenty of pine trees and a ravine, where we built a fire. Some of the guys decided to "meadow crash." The rest of us set up our tents above the ravine. We explored a little bit that night, but mostly just stayed near the campfire.

(Here's myself, Matt Wilson, and I think some Campbells in the background.)

After staying up late that night enjoying our Bacchant carousing, we all cheerfully woke up and celebrated the start of a new day . . .

During the day Matt and Zach enjoyed playing a prank on me . . .

For the rest of the day we did a lot of shooting each other with airsoft guns and exploring the area around us. A few of the guys went to find a "lake" that ended up being more of a swamp. It was good times!

Lyric

2007-03-11T19:14:00.000-04:00

A colleague and I recently had the enormous privilege of chatting with Dr. Louise Cowan, a retired professor of English at the University of Dallas. It was truly a time I will remember for the rest of my life. The occasion for our conversation was the difficult task of defining lyric, a process Dr. Cowan and others are currently engaged in themselves as they prepare the last of a book series on literary genre. The three others already available are: The Terrain of Comedy, The Epic Cosmos, and The Tragic Abyss.

I team teach an AP English class designed to emphasize Dr. Cowan's vision of literary genre, and so we read and analyze books (and films) that best represent the four genres. Here's what we read in the class:

Crime and Punishment, The Iliad, Exodus, The Oedipus Trilogy, Hamlet, Death of a Salesman, Job, Metamorphosis, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, Psalms, Shakespeare's Sonnets, selections from Ovid, and poems by Donne, Spenser, Dickinson, Keats, Yeats, Coleridge . . . ( I think there may be a few other poets but my mind is drawing a blank right now).

We try to thematically organize the works according to their generic landscape. The only trouble is that the forthcoming book on Lyric has not been published yet -- hence our conversation with Dr. Cowan. Here are some questions I asked her and her responses (based on my recollection and notes).

1. Your genre series contains memorable titles: The Terrain of Comedy, The Epic Cosmos, and The Tragic Abyss. How do you describe the landscape of lyric?

The landscape of lyric is a garden, the lost garden of Eden that lives in the memory of humanity as a timeless realm of love.

2. What is the role of the divine in lyric? How does it function?

Unlike tragedy and epic, where the divine is transcendent, lyric mirrors the divine immanence found in comedy. The divine is sacramental, so that it suffuses itself into humanity incarnationally. The focus of lyric is thus upon the two lovers, not the divine.

3. Is it possible that a poem could fit the necessary criteria for being a "good poem" but still not reside in the lyric genre? In other words, does some poetry belong more to epic, comedy, or tragedy than lyric?

Rather than excluding some works of poetry from lyric, I would expand our definition of lyric to include any work that employs the single authorial voice, which distinguishes lyric from drama or the novel. An essay, for example, is on one extreme pole of the lyric scale.

4. What is the relationship between the formal elements of poetry and the lyric genre?

Knowing a poem fully requires three steps. First, one must experience the poem, without need for analysis. Only after one has grasped the poem experientially can the second step be taken, in which the structure of the poem is considered. The mapping of the poem takes place at this stage, and one should utilize all the formal elements of poetry in the analysis. In the third stage, one puts all the pieces back together and takes a panoramic view of the poem, seeking to understand its form. In other words, the reader makes the poem again in his or her mind.

Wow, that's a lot for me to think about over this spring break . . .

One other interesting detail from our conversation was Dr. Cowan's statement that the Jews gave lyric to Western Civilization. It is an interesting claim, and I leave you with her example, Psalm 137.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?

If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.

If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.

Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.

O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.

Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

Almost there . . .

2007-03-08T21:06:00.000-05:00

I am almost done with a paper I am writing on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing (will post on that later). I need to finish that tonight so that I can be ready to visit Dr. Cowan in the morning. Afterwards, we have a teacher appreciation lunch, and then I am travelling to Decatur for some camping fun. Hopefully I will have some good pictures on Monday of all our Rabelaisian festivities.

Unfortunately, the paper writing will necessitate me foregoing the opening night of 300, a much anticipated film based on Frank Miller's graphic novel. I was really looking forward to viewing this new interpretation of the Battle of Thermopylae. I'll get to it soon and provide a review.

Reading and Writing

2007-03-07T12:50:00.000-05:00

Wham! Rowan Atkinson, who has travelled back in time, slugs William Shakespeare right on the chin. "That is for every student for the next 400 years!" I love it.

Seriously though, I'm working on a paper for my Shakespeare class. It's on Much Ado About Nothing (hence the name of this blog). Things have been slow going, however, due to my lack of a computer. I've always loved apple computers, and touted them for never crashing. Well, this week I am eating my words because my laptop finally crashed. Now I am without a computer, bumming off of friends and living by my USB keydisk. Thank goodness for AppleCare; it should be fixed fairly soon.

The topic I am writing on is very interesting to me. I am examining Beatrice and Benedick's wooing via insult as Shakespeare's alternative to both the Hero-Claudio plot line and its source, Matteo Bandello's novella about Timbreo and Fenicia. It really is fascinating to dwell on a single passage for long periods of time and continually find new insights. On the other hand, there are so many other interesting directions that I would like to explore in the play, that sometimes it is hard to focus! Well, back to the grindstone . . .

Attempting to Reconnect . . .

2007-03-06T18:58:00.000-05:00

After many months of wayward backsliding, I've decided to return to blogging. A few of my friends made the same effort within the last couple of weeks, and so I made the choice to rededicate my life to blogging and once again accept it into my heart.

By way of catching up, I'll offer a quick update on the goings on of my life. I've been teaching at Covenant Christian Academy; this is my third year. My classes this year are AP English Literature 12, AP U.S. History 12, and Honors History/English 11. So basically, I read and write quite a bit for my job, whether that's preparing for class or grading essays.

In addition to teaching, I am taking graduate classes at The University of Dallas. I got started at UD through the encouragement of the faculty at CCA. Many of them had been through the program, and so one summer I attended the Teacher's Academy at the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture. There I met with fellow teachers to study Tragedy and Comedy, and returned again the next summer to study Epic. My experience at the Dallas Institute and at UD has come very close to being a religious experience. Really and truly, God has helped me to find my calling through these institutions and through the mentors I've found here. Example: this Friday another teacher at CCA and I are meeting with Dr. Louise Cowan. She is the founder of the Dallas Institute, founder of the doctoral program at UD, and a distinguished lecturer and author. We will be discussing approaches to the Lyric genre -- Amazing!

So yes, UD has been great. In fact, I've applied to the Ph.D. program here, and I am really hoping and praying that I get in. If I do, then I get to become a starving student again, which actually sounds extremely appealing.

That's pretty much where things stand in my life, professionally at least. At the moment though, I need to start working on a paper for my Shakespeare class, and so I bid you adieu.