John

Leaving Us

2009-05-26T00:06:06Z

The necessary road to happiness
Goes on through suffering;
As you must, follow,
Until pain dissolves illusion.

Ahead shall you be as now you are not (yet are)
Selfless and as bright as light;
For evil has no existence
Separate from imagination

And is full grown
Only when sorrowing ends.

Synesthesia

2009-05-13T02:02:55Z

The ignorant man was at the mercy of his fever.
Fever burned its way through his goodness.

In the small of his heart, a clear understanding stirred, as if gathering help.
Help came from the darkness of clouds.

The Children of Hurin

2008-09-25T22:16:53Z

In the remote time of the First Age of the World, the Dark Lord is called Morgoth. Hurin, a leader of men, challenges Morgoth to battle, but Hurin’s forces are defeated by the Dark Lord’s, and in The Battle of Unnumbered Tears, Hurin is captured. Rather than slay the captive, Morgoth curses his children and binds Hurin to a rock, where he must watch the curse fulfilled.

The tragedy that unfolds could be mistaken for Greek drama, but for its Old English morality. Hurin’s son and two daughters will all die, before Hurin is released. The narrative’s protagonist is Turin, honored son of Hurin, hope of the many whom Morgoth causes to suffer. In his role as savior, Turin undergoes a series of calamitous events, furthering doom rather than the sought for deliverance from Morgoth’s malice. Although accomplished in warrior skills and fearsome in battle, Turin acts recklessly and impulsively. He ignores proffered gifts of elfin wisdom and magic and offers bad counsel and banditry in their place.

A number of years go by, and Turin’s despair over his failure deepens. He changes his name in a bid to escape his ruin, and he is called Master of Dark Shadow at the time his one surviving sister sets out to find him. When brother and sister meet, Turin neither guesses her identity nor reveals his, and they wed, even as Morgoth sends Glaurung, Father of Dragons, to pursue him. Turin goes off to meet the dragon, and is victorious over him, but this, the greatest of his deeds, brings no change in fortune. His sister learns of his identity and swiftly takes her life, and Turin turns his sword upon himself. Morgoth then releases Hurin, who goes to the site of his son’s death, where his wife has also made her way. In the night of their reunion she will die, grief-stricken, by his side.

The completeness of the loss deepens the reader’s feeling for the hopelessness Turin endured. Before taking his life, Turin describes himself as “groping since childhood in a dark mist of Morgoth.” The inevitability of doom, however, seems wrought as much by Turin’s choices as by Morgoth’s curse. The reach of Morgoth’s curse covers Middle Earth, but we are not to believe that it extends unaided inside the person of Turin, whose character flaws contribute to the outcome of events. The reader has the sense that Turin is repeatedly given the opportunity to act otherwise than he does and that even the malice of Morgoth would fail to withstand right choices. At no point, however, does the reader believe Turin capable of making those right choices.

The outcome of the tale’s events is what might be expected from a Greek tragedy, but the working of evil by the Dark One is unlike the operation of fate. In his imagination of Middle Earth, Tolkien has juxtaposed the hopelessness of fate with the medieval Christian’s hope of salvation. In the First Age of the World, the way to salvation reveals itself through elves. The struggle that Turin does not engage in is the very struggle that could save him: the heroic struggle to submit to the saving will outside himself.

Shape-Lifter

2008-08-23T20:01:26Z

Other ways, for sure,
guarantee their efforts
to completely support
the non-conformer

whose melancholy
could still lift bones
through steps beyond
belonging, well-past

ambition's half-lives
and the dust
of amorous tradesmen
pocketing decent authority.

Life might make much;
clumsily articulated
peeves are no end.
Against is with.

Ideas attributed to me
can seem so foreign
as must be some other’s,
and what I may have
felt permission for,
I now retract.

Williams and Lewis: A Single Thought

2008-08-20T22:34:45Z

I read two novels over the course of the summer, C.S. Lewis’s THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH and MANY DIMENSIONS, by Charles Williams. Noting Lewis’s use of some of Charles William’s effects to burnish his narrative, I realized that it was scarier for me to read C.S. Lewis than Charles Williams. This wasn’t due to his use of effects, however, but to the application of doctrine underlying their uses.

Charles Williams depicts a Necessity that compels the choices made by his characters. Consequently, Williams pictures Judgment not as an event of individual damnation or salvation, but rather as the illumination of the reconciliation of the entirety of choices made by all his characters. C. S. Lewis, on the other hand, renders the stark contrast between choices motivated by goodness and those that are not. In Lewis, Judgment is the inexorable consequence of the individual’s choice, and the individual’s culpability is inescapable.

THE IMAGINATIVE NARRATIVE OF CHARLES WILLIAMS

2008-08-04T23:20:55Z

The promise of THE DESCENT OF THE DOVE is that it will narrate the European history of the church so as to illumine the presence of the 3rd Person of the Trinity. For Williams, this presence is most clearly evident in the instances of co-inherence that uniquely characterize Christendom.

The first instance of co-inherence is found within the Triune Being, where the fullness of Love is revealed through the relationships amongst its Persons. A second instance is provided by the participation of all human persons in Adam’s sinful pride. Baptism supplies a third instance: the Christian co-inheres in the death and resurrection of the 2nd Person of the Trinity, “He in us and we in Him.” The church is a fourth instance: while of this world, it is yet not, for it is of the Kingdom; and the Kingdom, a heavenly image, is yet present in the church.

This last is a vivid example of Williams’ abiding concern: sanctification of matter. Williams identifies this sanctification as the work of the Holy Spirit, and he is therefore unusually attentive in his narrative to figures outside the usual theological tradition that gather experience in images. Galahad and Dante serve as exemplars of the Way of the Affirmation of Images, whose shadow is the Way of Negation. Williams point to Athanasius as the first of the great affirmers; in the line of the negators, he places first Dionysius the Areopagite.

As Rome takes its precedence over Constantinople, Williams speaks of the city, the Eucharist and the icon in terms of the Union of the two Natures of the Christ: human and divine, flesh and spirit. The thread is more difficult to follow on a grand scale through schism, crusade, and scholastic, and afterwards we find Williams focused more upon the inspiration of individuals than the collective: Elizabeth of England, Montaigne, and William Wilberforce.

The initial going of his tale has a charm that wears thin toward its end, where Williams discusses Kierkegaard at length, to illustrate the return and strengthening of dogma in the late nineteenth century. “The position of Christendom in Europe,” Williams writes, was then “much like it had been after the conversion of Constantine.” The differences, he says, are two: “ the movement of the intellectual fashion of the day had set against Christendom, as in that earlier period it had set for Christendom,” and, “as the many problems of social justice tended to concentrate on…property… Christendom was largely identified…with the owners of property.”

The ensuing moments of Communism and Nazism seem to leave Christendom apart from the Spirit, and Williams concludes with hope for a renewal of contrition, humility and doctrine that will re-engage the Dove. “It is at least arguable,” he says at one point earlier in his narrative, “that the Christian Church will have to return to a pre-Constantine state before she can properly recover the round she too quickly won.”

THE DESCENT OF THE DOVE is, finally, a book that promises more than it delivers. Worthwhile though the effort, the narrative left me without a robust feeling for the presence of the Holy Spirit within the various and fractured images of the church post-Renaissance. Unfortunately, Williams writes here without his characteristic sure-handedness at disclosing the operation of Necessity that underlies and unifies apparent conflict. However, the writing is often poetry, lovely for its surprises, and its recurring emphasis on contrition instructive. “The declaration of Christendom,” Williams writes, “is that Repentance is Freedom.” Co-inherence is the reality discerned in the turning of both church and individual.

The Abolition of Man

2008-08-01T03:22:43Z

Religio=traditio: "the lore of the ritual of one's ancestors," that is, knowledge acquired through education that is in harmony with Nature.

A definition, cribbed from various sources, that fits here, for Lewis argues, on the occasion of his having received for review a schoolboy’s guide to composition, the imperative for education to teach that “certain responses to nature can be more 'just' or 'ordinate' or 'appropriate' than others."

Lewis quotes with approbation Orbiilius, "We must learn to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate figurative statement." The legitimate conforms to Natural Law; the illegitimate does not.

Natural Law, which Lewis calls the Tao, is the objective basis of all values and is discerned by the faculty of Reason. The most chilling moments in THE ABOLITION OF MAN are those that describe the consequences of the intellectual effort to supplant the traditional values of the Tao with subjectivism about values. Lewis locates this effort within the more general effort to control Nature.

“What we call Man’s power over Nature,” Lewis writes, “turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” This power is ultimately exercised by earlier generations over later generations; “the last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.”

The “great planners and conditioners” are those for whom conscience must be re-made outside of the Natural Law of tradition. For Lewis, this outside is a void incapable of supporting human life. He likens the surrender of a dogmatic belief in objective value to the “Magician’s bargain.” The result of man’s effort “to subdue reality to the wishes of men” results in the final triumph of nature over man.

I find it frightening to consider how the injudicious use of language, particularly language used to convey technique rather than wisdom and virtue, advances, perhaps unwittingly, the tyranny and slavery that culminates in the loss of human nature.

The Great Divorce

2008-07-20T02:35:29Z

While a bit impatient at times with the uneven quality of the writing and instances of damnation that Lewis chooses to dwell on in his fantasy, I find his comments on art to be interesting and instructive, particularly what he has to say about "art for art’s sake," natural affections, and universalism.

1.
A Spirit refers a Ghost back to its original artistic impulse: “You loved paint only as a means for telling about light…the light’s the thing.” And its ruination: “Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn’t stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower – become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.”

2.
The Dreamer queries the Teacher about Keats: “Keats was wrong, then, when he said he was certain of the holiness of the heart’s affections?”

“I doubt if he knew clearly what he meant. But you and I must be clear. There is but one good: that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels. It’s not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels. The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.”

3.
MacDonald says to the Dreamer, “Ye can know nothing of the end of all things, or nothing expressible in those terms. It may be, as the Lord said to the Lady Julian, that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But it’s ill talking of such questions.”

“Because they are too terrible, Sir?”

“No. Because all answers deceive.”

And later on: “Time is the very lens through which you see…something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture…It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise. Neither the temporal succession nor the phantom of what ye might have chosen and didn’t is itself Freedom. They are a lens. The picture is a symbol: but it’s truer than any philosophical theorem (or, perhaps, than any mystic’s vision) that claims to go behind it.”

4.

So what is the artist to make of his life’s work? It can’t be held back from the refining fire. Eliot, in his FOUR QUARTETS, has said something similar, though much differently. The choice is perhaps more difficult than we would like.

In his Preface, Lewis writes: “We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of these into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on a biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good…

If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell…

Earth, I think, will not be found by anyone to be in the end a very distinct place. I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell: and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.”

5.

Lewis’s fantasy seems from the first orientated more toward the individual than the collective, and it is perhaps true that Eliot’s vision is more inclusive and in this sense richer. I have a quote from a source I can no longer place, which says, “In the old way of thinking, the beginning and end of my particular life is a relatively unimportant event compared to life itself.” And from Bishop Seraphim’s Journal: “The personal is the neutralization of the antinomy individual/collective.”

East Coker

2008-07-06T02:23:28Z

I have been reading Eliot’s FOUR QUARTETS, and having just celebrated my 56th birthday, I am particularly taken by "East Coker." The poem’s last stanza begins with this line, “Old men ought to be explorers,” and concludes:
“Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.”
The last sentence was embroidered by Mary, Queen of Scots on her cloth of estate as, faced with execution, she anticipated her restoration in the Kingdom of the life to come.

Eliot had begun the poem with the thought reversed, “In my beginning is my end,” a line that would echo later in the poem: “Home is where one starts from.” There is nothing in this of the circular, however; one puts away youthful knowledge as one moves in a direction, and among the youthful ways of knowing Eliot notes ecstasy and the “intense moment isolated, with no before and after.” Elders, in their turn, must not put confidence in their experience, for there is
“At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been…”
For Eliot, “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire/Is the wisdom of humility.”

Eliot describes a dark night of the soul, “the agony/Of death and birth,” from which one emerges in a “waiting” state, without hope (“For hope would be hope for the wrong thing”) and without love (“For love would be love of the wrong thing”). One’s faith, like one’s love and hope, must be in the waiting, and the waiting without thought (“for you are not ready for thought”). It is through this waiting that “the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”

In the penultimate section of the poem, Eliot writes the vision of salvation with contemporary imagery in a traditional lyric form, which is, as one essayist puts it, “lacerating.” The world is likened to a hospital where the Eucharist is the only substantial flesh and blood and where, “to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.”

Some of the most moving passages of the poem have to do with Eliot’s reflections on his practice of the craft of writing. All the effort of poetry, he says, “is only the fight to recover what has been lost/And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions/That seem unpropitious.”

Ultimately, I think, Eliot regards the necessity of things as beyond our ken. It is enough, perhaps, to make the effort to do that which is somehow there all along for us to do, though the effort be great, and what is appropriate for the seasons of the child and the youth being other than what is appropriate in a later season. As we become old men, however, we should not look forward to “calm, the autumnal serenity/And the wisdom of age.” The reality of what awaits us is the darkness of God.

The photo below, which I took of St. Paul's Cathedral, London, last week, is included here as a suggestion for Eliot's line, "If we obey the dying nurse."

Reading

2008-06-21T22:33:46Z

Last night, at an open reading in the Flynn Dog Gallery in Burlington, Vermont, I read the seven poems (in reverse order, from earliest to most recent) that precede this entry in my journal. The poems, a few of which have been slightly altered since their original posting, seemed to be well (though for the most part silently) received.

I first read at an open reading in Burlington during the fall of 1972. Bud and Barbara Lawrence, who were in attendance that evening in the Unitarian Church at the head of Church Street, were also present last night, along with several others from those early days, including Michael Breiner (last night's host), Anna Blackmer, and Dan Rosen.

I was away from Vermont from 1979-1984, while I was in graduate school, first in New Mexico and then in Oklahoma. When I returned, the poetry community had expanded, and among the newcomers were David Cavanagh, Sharon Webster, Pam Ellis, Monica Hawkes, Karen Driscoll, and Steve Goldberg. It was a joy to see all of them last night, also.

During the past several years, I have visited New Mexico with increasing frequency and stayed in touch with Joe Somoza, Bruce Holsapple, and Bobby Bryd. Burlington and Las Cruces have emerged as the principal geographical focuses of my experience and consciousness. In each place I have found an enduring community of poets that has encouraged me to participate in an expression of the person that gains in significance as it succeeds in transcending the personal.

For all, I am deeply grateful.

Exchange

2008-06-20T02:09:33Z

Nothing thickens in the Grail.
Fractional American measurements

square the merchants' enterprise
with likenesses that render

the elevated stature and finery
of successful substance

posed in an oblique landscape's
subjective physicality.

Realist industry divides engagement.
Placed in the path of electron beams,

structure becomes information
as necessity is wanted.

Reasons

2008-06-19T02:13:38Z

light and color
atmospheric
mapping form
and politics

full of reason
for each thing
brilliance over
everything

Suitcase

2008-06-17T03:02:43Z

I asked, What is the essence of teasing?, and she said, Power. It is never good.

I considered the comb. Animals, for instance, tear flesh and aren't self-reflective. The Tree of The Knowledge and the Tree of Life
might have joined in, for the company, playful in the garden.

The Tree of Teasing would slow you down; slow you down to where you could pass through a guard, undisturbed.

When you get across the border, surprisingly, the towns are as dusty as the ones you left. The burros know you, they just don't make
much of a fuss.

Still, the light is different, brilliant, really, but without the familiar edge.

Then, it had been outside, with all the to do of a going face: momentum.

Threshold

2008-06-16T03:40:34Z

from any fact, the moment

one world imposes on another

images of forms

unshadow its restrictions

Doors

2008-02-10T01:28:28Z

water in the shower's pipes

a liberty of sound -

meanings that happen to be

in the air

how long would the ghosts hang?

that face of yours

reflected -

an old blue sky

looking out

Nothing

2008-02-07T02:57:16Z

Things that do not exist
make and keep with them
memories.

The committed
are lost
in their own hands.

Persons

2008-01-21T03:33:08Z

All disparate things
form a cosmos,
closing the gapes,
which is the natural response
to governance,

for feeling aims at unity,
turning motivation
and conditions
into one great life
of persons.

from a symposium, What the Cross Means to Me, 1943

2007-10-20T16:41:36Z

Charles Williams wrote his essay “The Cross” in 1943. Much of the darkness

of his writing can be found in this succinct presentation of his ideas.

Williams believes most of all in the absolute power of God, and refuses to blanch

from attributing to the will of God the obscenity and sorrow we experience as life.

The situation as it is, he calls it. Creation always in distress,

and “human feeling” always needing “to have the act of creation justified.”

“It is not tolerable (to us) that the Creator should deliberately maintain and sustain

his created universe in a state of infinite distress.”

Human choice, Williams says, is also God’s choice,

and Williams will not have the state of creation justified

by Adam and Eve’s “gratuitous choice.”

What we will is what God wills, for in giving his creatures the freedom to will

he has also affirmed their choices as His.

So every act of creaturely will is also an act of divine will.

And the distress of creation “is revolting to our sense of justice.”

The Cross accomplishes at least three things.

First, it justifies creation, for “Just as He submitted us to His inexorable will, so He
submitted himself to our wills (and therefore to His.)”

In the Cross, God shares the horror of our existence; He “accepts His own terms

and endures the justice He decreed.”

Second, the Cross confirms what we already know; the good is destroyed not only

by our sins, but also by our efforts at goodness. Williams argues that the people
involved in condemning Him to death thought their actions were for the good.

The Cross, writes Williams, “relieves us of optimism. Life is unendurable.”

Third, the Cross exposes the physical body “to the complete contradiction of itself.”

And Williams does not pretend to enjoy the prospect of immortality. The most he will

say for it is that as one ages, the prospect of annihilation becomes less attractive.

Perhaps the darkest aspect of William’s thought is the finality his understanding

assigns to the present state of things. Easter, for Williams, is not only “a consequence

of the Cross; it is also almost an accident of it.” Accident because Easter begins

only after all of creation is finished, when He and the Cross are inseparable.

The entirety of creation, Williams says, had been maintained for just the moment

of death in the Cross, and “His providence overwatched it for no other end.”

This is the picture Williams gives us: the divine in our midst, gripped by the vice

of that midst which is creation: and for us, no wiggle room. “It is in the Gospels,”
Williams writes, “that the really terrifying attacks on the Gospel lie.”

The mineral and vegetable and animal worlds are come to their end, as is the human.

We place our faith in what is done, and the accomplishment of things is not as we might
desire but as He wills. Williams sees our lives as “necessary ceremony.”

In what sense then are we saved by His death in the Cross? Seeing that God

has known us as we know God, our knowledge is finished. We are reconciled

to Creation, enabled to praise and bless. We recognize the otherness of authority,

and are withdrawn, both good and evil, into His Resurrection.

Finally, for Williams, to bless is to be in a state of salvation, while yet the glory

seems intolerable and “release from our unhappy state as unbearable as the state itself.”

Remarkably, his faith subsumes his desire, illuminating the darkness of his writing

much as God illuminates Creation, by centering and energizing the everyday events

of experience no less than the cosmic aim of all things.