The longer I'm an American, the more I'm convinced of the centrality of a certain, perhaps unduly neglected, feature of our modern work ethic. Modern, I mean, as distinct from our American work ethic of 60 years ago. Or 40 years ago. Or even as recently - if I dare nitpick further holes in the reputation of our once-vaunted New Economy - as 20 years ago.
As usual I'm not exactly sure what's going on here. But I get the feeling that, were this particular feature ever to be accurately enshrined in a tenet, precept or injunction, it might go something like this:
"Remember: Speed isn't just an important thing - it's EVERYTHING. And doubly so when it comes to those bonuses that are the rightful reward of jobs completed well in advance of deadline. In short, it really doesn't matter all that much how often a job gets done over, so long as you do it really, really, really, really fast the first time. Or the second. Or the third. Or . . ."
31 May 2012
27 May 2012
A Spirited Rejoinder
Pentecost: Outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
And why HOLY Spirit? For three reasons, mainly.
First, because there are certain creatures in this universe who are, and always will be, and never shall be anything other than, spirits. And yet they are not in the least holy. Or rather, more precisely, they have ceased to be holy - mostly because they think they have found something better than Divine holiness. (And of course there's always something better than what one has been Divinely given - until one finds that the "better" is actually an outcome far worse than one could ever have bumped into round the corner of one's most nightmare-haunted despairs.)
Second, because there are other kinds of creatures in this universe, who are not and will never be spirits, and yet - such is the Divine humility - who can be made holy. And indeed must, if they are ever to find wholeness (which process can be made immeasurably easier by one simple procedure: namely, by firmly shutting one's ears to the entreaties of the first-mentioned sort of creature).
Lastly, because everywhere in the universe there is a ravenous need, across every category of creature however high or low, for One who (a) has all the power that inheres in being spirit and not flesh, (b) stores holiness in unasked-for abundance, and (c) actually shares and even sheds this same holiness to all who ask for it (as opposed to our human custom of hoarding and rationing it). This One also has a very curious kinship with human beings in that, while He is wholly unlike the convoluted mess we've succeeded in making ourselves, He is also like us enough to be the slaking of our every human thirst, and the satisfying of our every human desire.
Upon discovering which, our most common initial response, at this point in the Journey, is to bid the chauffeur a hasty "Drive on!" We humans long ago became much too mature, too ironic, and (ironically enough) too heroically self-determining, ever to be resigned to any merely happy ending to our story. And yet not only is this incorrigibly happy Door still open, but lo, One - upon whom depends the salvation of the entire universe - has already passed through it.
And why HOLY Spirit? For three reasons, mainly.
First, because there are certain creatures in this universe who are, and always will be, and never shall be anything other than, spirits. And yet they are not in the least holy. Or rather, more precisely, they have ceased to be holy - mostly because they think they have found something better than Divine holiness. (And of course there's always something better than what one has been Divinely given - until one finds that the "better" is actually an outcome far worse than one could ever have bumped into round the corner of one's most nightmare-haunted despairs.)
Second, because there are other kinds of creatures in this universe, who are not and will never be spirits, and yet - such is the Divine humility - who can be made holy. And indeed must, if they are ever to find wholeness (which process can be made immeasurably easier by one simple procedure: namely, by firmly shutting one's ears to the entreaties of the first-mentioned sort of creature).
Lastly, because everywhere in the universe there is a ravenous need, across every category of creature however high or low, for One who (a) has all the power that inheres in being spirit and not flesh, (b) stores holiness in unasked-for abundance, and (c) actually shares and even sheds this same holiness to all who ask for it (as opposed to our human custom of hoarding and rationing it). This One also has a very curious kinship with human beings in that, while He is wholly unlike the convoluted mess we've succeeded in making ourselves, He is also like us enough to be the slaking of our every human thirst, and the satisfying of our every human desire.
Upon discovering which, our most common initial response, at this point in the Journey, is to bid the chauffeur a hasty "Drive on!" We humans long ago became much too mature, too ironic, and (ironically enough) too heroically self-determining, ever to be resigned to any merely happy ending to our story. And yet not only is this incorrigibly happy Door still open, but lo, One - upon whom depends the salvation of the entire universe - has already passed through it.
26 April 2012
The Oldest Obsolescence of All
As we all know, these are unprecedentedly fast-moving times.* Hardly a month goes by without some age-old realm of human interest, passion or endeavor - one we might have assumed would be part of of the human landscape for centuries if not millennia to come - being suddenly pronounced redundant (or worst and most mysteriously of all, "irrelevant"), and therewith relegated to the heap of obsolescence and eventual uselessness and utter disgrace.
* Though as I recall we were saying much the same thing about the 1990s, and even more so about the 2000s - until one fine late summer's day everything came to not only an abrupt but a largely unexpected halt (and nowhere, I'm told, was it more unexpected than among those who'd been beating the drum of unprecedentedness the loudest).
But I think it will be an especially sad day when the experts consign poetry to the dustbin once and for all. I say that because for me poetry continues to have an irreplaceable and impregnable niche all its own: Not only are there still so many things it can do with words - to say nothing of ideas - but it goes on doing them so much better than other forms of knowledge or learning. Or even literature.
I'm not sure I can explain exactly what I mean to everyone's satisfaction. Let alone every Christian's. But I will try.
To me, what makes poetry a unique and even peculiar language is, first of all, what it does not do. Or at any rate not very well, or very convincingly. Poetry talks about a great many things; some might even say an illimitable universe of things. But what makes poetry different from other kinds of language we use is not so much the things it talks about, as what it does with them. Poetry does not primarily speak things into thoughts and ideas; or into opinions and heated emotions; or into use and useableness. The way, for instance, our treatises and editorials and training-manuals do. Nor does it principally speak things into abstraction or categorization or manipulation, as do our philosophy, science and engineering. Instead, what poetry does is to take a vast, indeed all but limitless variety of things, and speak them into a rather strange kind of being. Poetry understands, in a uniquely specific and individualizing and even sympathetic way, what it means for anything - or anyone - to be. With all that that implies for every level, degree and kind of creature. Being not just in some theoretical or metaphysical sense, or in the lowest common denominator sense of an atom or quark, but being as it fully encompasses creatures of every sort, including those at the most developed levels of sentience. And pretty much everything about them, too - and particularly those things that are of most absorbing interest to the creatures themselves. In other words, not just their most rudimentary or workaday goings-on, but their most pressing concerns of all. And not only at their birth or point of origin - though that usually is of definitive importance - but at every point and turn of their lives. And most powerfully of all at their point of death.
* Though as I recall we were saying much the same thing about the 1990s, and even more so about the 2000s - until one fine late summer's day everything came to not only an abrupt but a largely unexpected halt (and nowhere, I'm told, was it more unexpected than among those who'd been beating the drum of unprecedentedness the loudest).
But I think it will be an especially sad day when the experts consign poetry to the dustbin once and for all. I say that because for me poetry continues to have an irreplaceable and impregnable niche all its own: Not only are there still so many things it can do with words - to say nothing of ideas - but it goes on doing them so much better than other forms of knowledge or learning. Or even literature.
I'm not sure I can explain exactly what I mean to everyone's satisfaction. Let alone every Christian's. But I will try.
To me, what makes poetry a unique and even peculiar language is, first of all, what it does not do. Or at any rate not very well, or very convincingly. Poetry talks about a great many things; some might even say an illimitable universe of things. But what makes poetry different from other kinds of language we use is not so much the things it talks about, as what it does with them. Poetry does not primarily speak things into thoughts and ideas; or into opinions and heated emotions; or into use and useableness. The way, for instance, our treatises and editorials and training-manuals do. Nor does it principally speak things into abstraction or categorization or manipulation, as do our philosophy, science and engineering. Instead, what poetry does is to take a vast, indeed all but limitless variety of things, and speak them into a rather strange kind of being. Poetry understands, in a uniquely specific and individualizing and even sympathetic way, what it means for anything - or anyone - to be. With all that that implies for every level, degree and kind of creature. Being not just in some theoretical or metaphysical sense, or in the lowest common denominator sense of an atom or quark, but being as it fully encompasses creatures of every sort, including those at the most developed levels of sentience. And pretty much everything about them, too - and particularly those things that are of most absorbing interest to the creatures themselves. In other words, not just their most rudimentary or workaday goings-on, but their most pressing concerns of all. And not only at their birth or point of origin - though that usually is of definitive importance - but at every point and turn of their lives. And most powerfully of all at their point of death.
In short, poetry understands uniquely the language of need. And that even (and sometimes embarrassingly) in those most remarkable and apparently self-sufficient of all God's creatures we know of: Angels and men. Nothing speaks, as the language of poetry speaks, of every creature's need, however "tiny" its capacity, to be loved, to be understood, to be heeded, to be saved. And of course, who can know the utter direness of these needs, or indeed know any of these creatures in themselves, better than their Maker? And after Him, Man - at least in those rare moments when graces, events and circumstances conspire to make him co-operative?
Right now, though, I want you to look again, a bit more closely, at the short catalogue of need I compiled in my third to the last sentence. Review each of these needs in its turn, and see what you make of them. Is it just my personal pique, or are these precisely the same needs in any created thing - the same little rooms, as it were, in each and every one of us - that the proud and prosperous world tends to deem most lowly and humiliating? To say nothing of (most damning of all modern sins) unproductive? To be loved, to be understood, to be heeded, to be saved . . .
"Now you listen here," I can imagine some irreplaceably important person arguing, who's been having all this up to here by now. "It just so happens that I've done and made do WITHOUT these things all my life. And see what I've produced and achieved! Go ahead, search my accomplishments from top to bottom, and see if you find a counterfeit, or even so much as a mere 'credential,' among any of them! Nor did I ever wait for, much less ASK, anybody to understand, or love, or even listen to me. To be honest, whatever I needed I either found a way of getting, or else frankly just went and took. And to my mind, there's no reason on God's earth why every other creature He made can't function in more or less the same way. In fact, if you'll bother to look 'a bit more closely,' you'll notice that most of the SURVIVORS among them do."
(If I may interject, sort of makes me wonder how many breathtaking deeds of extreme productivity - not to mention extreme oppressiveness [and that not just of the shirkers, but even more often of the workers] - have been justified in the pursuit of that modern Holy Grail, survival uber alles.)
But now imagine what may in fact be the supremest of ironies. Imagine these same lowly, yet in their own way lovely, rooms being also the place of our most direct contact with God, and of our most immediate closeness to God. If so, then for me certain conclusions follow. It follows that poetry, at least so far as it succeeds - as it issues in actual poems, and not mere versified prose - can only be a most curiously humble and intimate thing. Certainly in the place where it starts, if nowhere else. And of course, as in everything, it is the freshness of the wellsprings that best ensures the freedom of the stream. My point is that poetry, wherever we find it - and not least where we find it dwelling someplace farthest from verse, and most deeply imbedded in prose? - is a speech unto itself, precisely because it touches us in those places where no other speech can. Not only closest to where we live, but closest to where, it may be, we are least conscious of living, or most in denial of living. Or most apt to have forgotten we ever lived there at all. As with a certain Garden. At all events, regardless of where we stumble on it, or unexpectedly dig it up and dust it off from, poetry always consists of words that have a lilt, music and magic all their own, quite independent and irrespective of the things they talk about. This lilt, music, magic are themselves rooted, I believe, in the poet's power to stir up in us the remembrance of "places" - indelible states of mind and feeling - that we have perhaps largely forgotten; or fled from; or fallen so far down off of that we no longer know how to get ourselves back up. And this power is nowhere more potent than when the words themselves are, as it were, most fresh, and crisp, and clean with the savor of the breath of God. That is, when they're most concerned with those things about us - or rather, with that Everything about us - that our Maker is most concerned with: not our whims, or our wants, or even our supposedly most sovereignly self-creating wills; but rather with those needs in each of us that are at once most basic and primordial, and most final.
To sum up: Poetry is either the language of ultimate need, or it's nothing at all in its own right - nothing that can't be found in some ranting, pontificating newspaper comment or editorial. Or blog. Of all our various languages, poetry is the one most of us and like us, because like us it can no more escape from need than it can escape from God. And - lest anyone think I'm making an exception of the plentiful atheists and agnostics in the field - I believe that's true of any poet's words, whether she knows it (or Him) or not.
You may come up with all sorts of exceptions to my rule. Or even rules of your own that seem to make of my rule one big exception. My question is, in any given creative moment, how can one be sure that the Poet hasn't also gotten through, in one guise or other? A particular writer may hate, or thinks he hates, God. That doesn't mean his Maker is not stirring up His own ancient tongue in some forgotten cupboard of that author's being. I said poetry is the language of need: it doesn't follow that every poet is happy with or reconciled to this need, even as he exhibits or illustrates it. My point is that when it comes to a God as unpredictably persuasive as the One attested by both our Scripture and Tradition, nothing is humanly certain, much less humanly impregnable. Vehement denial of or even opposition to God are no guarantees of immunity to His influence. I've known people whose, as they see it, irrefutable experience of Satan is also one of their most unshakeable testimonies to both the reality and the love of his Enemy. And I imagine even the Devil must bear some trace of his Divine origins; else where would his powers of persuasion be? And if one irrevocably banished from the presence of God can still show marks of His influence and nature, how much more one, like any human poet, whose fate still hangs in the balance?
All the more reason, it seems to me, why we shouldn't be too eager to cast the better part of our poetry into the dustheap just yet. Or even to delete it permanently from every corner of our frantically "Preparing for Tomorrow" curricula. It may just yet have something more to teach us about the finer - or in any case the more serious - things of life. And maybe - who knows? - even be of some last use to us in our more patiently discerning attempts at survival.
Right now, though, I want you to look again, a bit more closely, at the short catalogue of need I compiled in my third to the last sentence. Review each of these needs in its turn, and see what you make of them. Is it just my personal pique, or are these precisely the same needs in any created thing - the same little rooms, as it were, in each and every one of us - that the proud and prosperous world tends to deem most lowly and humiliating? To say nothing of (most damning of all modern sins) unproductive? To be loved, to be understood, to be heeded, to be saved . . .
"Now you listen here," I can imagine some irreplaceably important person arguing, who's been having all this up to here by now. "It just so happens that I've done and made do WITHOUT these things all my life. And see what I've produced and achieved! Go ahead, search my accomplishments from top to bottom, and see if you find a counterfeit, or even so much as a mere 'credential,' among any of them! Nor did I ever wait for, much less ASK, anybody to understand, or love, or even listen to me. To be honest, whatever I needed I either found a way of getting, or else frankly just went and took. And to my mind, there's no reason on God's earth why every other creature He made can't function in more or less the same way. In fact, if you'll bother to look 'a bit more closely,' you'll notice that most of the SURVIVORS among them do."
(If I may interject, sort of makes me wonder how many breathtaking deeds of extreme productivity - not to mention extreme oppressiveness [and that not just of the shirkers, but even more often of the workers] - have been justified in the pursuit of that modern Holy Grail, survival uber alles.)
But now imagine what may in fact be the supremest of ironies. Imagine these same lowly, yet in their own way lovely, rooms being also the place of our most direct contact with God, and of our most immediate closeness to God. If so, then for me certain conclusions follow. It follows that poetry, at least so far as it succeeds - as it issues in actual poems, and not mere versified prose - can only be a most curiously humble and intimate thing. Certainly in the place where it starts, if nowhere else. And of course, as in everything, it is the freshness of the wellsprings that best ensures the freedom of the stream. My point is that poetry, wherever we find it - and not least where we find it dwelling someplace farthest from verse, and most deeply imbedded in prose? - is a speech unto itself, precisely because it touches us in those places where no other speech can. Not only closest to where we live, but closest to where, it may be, we are least conscious of living, or most in denial of living. Or most apt to have forgotten we ever lived there at all. As with a certain Garden. At all events, regardless of where we stumble on it, or unexpectedly dig it up and dust it off from, poetry always consists of words that have a lilt, music and magic all their own, quite independent and irrespective of the things they talk about. This lilt, music, magic are themselves rooted, I believe, in the poet's power to stir up in us the remembrance of "places" - indelible states of mind and feeling - that we have perhaps largely forgotten; or fled from; or fallen so far down off of that we no longer know how to get ourselves back up. And this power is nowhere more potent than when the words themselves are, as it were, most fresh, and crisp, and clean with the savor of the breath of God. That is, when they're most concerned with those things about us - or rather, with that Everything about us - that our Maker is most concerned with: not our whims, or our wants, or even our supposedly most sovereignly self-creating wills; but rather with those needs in each of us that are at once most basic and primordial, and most final.
To sum up: Poetry is either the language of ultimate need, or it's nothing at all in its own right - nothing that can't be found in some ranting, pontificating newspaper comment or editorial. Or blog. Of all our various languages, poetry is the one most of us and like us, because like us it can no more escape from need than it can escape from God. And - lest anyone think I'm making an exception of the plentiful atheists and agnostics in the field - I believe that's true of any poet's words, whether she knows it (or Him) or not.
You may come up with all sorts of exceptions to my rule. Or even rules of your own that seem to make of my rule one big exception. My question is, in any given creative moment, how can one be sure that the Poet hasn't also gotten through, in one guise or other? A particular writer may hate, or thinks he hates, God. That doesn't mean his Maker is not stirring up His own ancient tongue in some forgotten cupboard of that author's being. I said poetry is the language of need: it doesn't follow that every poet is happy with or reconciled to this need, even as he exhibits or illustrates it. My point is that when it comes to a God as unpredictably persuasive as the One attested by both our Scripture and Tradition, nothing is humanly certain, much less humanly impregnable. Vehement denial of or even opposition to God are no guarantees of immunity to His influence. I've known people whose, as they see it, irrefutable experience of Satan is also one of their most unshakeable testimonies to both the reality and the love of his Enemy. And I imagine even the Devil must bear some trace of his Divine origins; else where would his powers of persuasion be? And if one irrevocably banished from the presence of God can still show marks of His influence and nature, how much more one, like any human poet, whose fate still hangs in the balance?
All the more reason, it seems to me, why we shouldn't be too eager to cast the better part of our poetry into the dustheap just yet. Or even to delete it permanently from every corner of our frantically "Preparing for Tomorrow" curricula. It may just yet have something more to teach us about the finer - or in any case the more serious - things of life. And maybe - who knows? - even be of some last use to us in our more patiently discerning attempts at survival.
21 April 2012
The Gift That Keeps On Taking
Whenever you hear people tell you that love is something either done freely, or not at all, listen to them, for they know what they're talking about. It means they've been round the block with it more than a few times.
Whatever else love is or may be, it is not simply (and brutally) a matter of doing more for somebody, and then more and more and more. I can go, as they say, to the ends of the earth for another human being, and then back again, but if I'm doing it chiefly in order to maintain their good opinion of me, or to maintain myself in their good graces, then it's hardly a free act. At least not in the oldest and noblest sense of that word. Which is to say, something done free of charge.
Of course people can play all sorts of games with my conscience: they can try to turn what I could have sworn was a gift into a debt, something I thought I desired to do from the bottom of my heart into something else that was really owed all along. But my love shall dry up at a dismaying rate, if I find myself doing one favor for someone, and then another and another and another, simply in order to assure them I'm not quite as bad as they're always on the verge of thinking I am. And as I know they will think I am, sooner or later. Unless, of course, I keep on doing that thing they expect which I thought was a free act of service, but which "in reality" was merely partial payment for services they rendered "to me."
I'll say it again: Love is either a free thing or it is a miserable thing, which very soon will cease to bear even a shred of resemblance to love. So that, soon enough, I'll have all I can do to keep from hating those who keep escalating their expectations of me. Even as I continue to try to meet those same expectations. Just to maintain my self-respect, of course. Or to ease my conscience.
And needless to say (or it ought to be), the fact that I must be prepared for other people's games with my conscience doesn't mean I'm not playing them myself.
Whatever else love is or may be, it is not simply (and brutally) a matter of doing more for somebody, and then more and more and more. I can go, as they say, to the ends of the earth for another human being, and then back again, but if I'm doing it chiefly in order to maintain their good opinion of me, or to maintain myself in their good graces, then it's hardly a free act. At least not in the oldest and noblest sense of that word. Which is to say, something done free of charge.
Of course people can play all sorts of games with my conscience: they can try to turn what I could have sworn was a gift into a debt, something I thought I desired to do from the bottom of my heart into something else that was really owed all along. But my love shall dry up at a dismaying rate, if I find myself doing one favor for someone, and then another and another and another, simply in order to assure them I'm not quite as bad as they're always on the verge of thinking I am. And as I know they will think I am, sooner or later. Unless, of course, I keep on doing that thing they expect which I thought was a free act of service, but which "in reality" was merely partial payment for services they rendered "to me."
I'll say it again: Love is either a free thing or it is a miserable thing, which very soon will cease to bear even a shred of resemblance to love. So that, soon enough, I'll have all I can do to keep from hating those who keep escalating their expectations of me. Even as I continue to try to meet those same expectations. Just to maintain my self-respect, of course. Or to ease my conscience.
And needless to say (or it ought to be), the fact that I must be prepared for other people's games with my conscience doesn't mean I'm not playing them myself.
29 February 2012
A Day of Small Things
Many of us, I think, at least once or twice in our lives have been stopped dead in our tracks - almost as if we'd been cut to the heart - by a truly great painting. The kind that makes you forget what you were thinking the moment before, or about to think the moment after - and that simply, quietly, decisively draws you into itself. As if nothing else in the world mattered. As if this, say, 3' x 4' space encompassed by a frame was not only bigger than your whole life, but bigger than anything you could ever have imagined life to be. Almost as if it had made you expect that, even if your life couldn't be, nonetheless it ought to be, something radically different from what it had been up till that moment.
And yet you'd hardly expect even the most arrestingly "living" canvas to step out of the wall and start painting pictures of its own. It is an example of art, maybe even the highest art. But it will never, no matter how it tries, ever succeed in becoming an artist. What you experienced just then was admittedly a grand moment, and yet - from the standpoint of what the artwork itself was capable of doing or not doing - it was also a dead moment.
Which brings me to the matter of a very different kind of art. The kind that is able to step out of the canvas, and which can, by the grace and good pleasure of its artist, itself begin to paint. The kind of art that is spoken, and yet also speaks; that comes to us boldly as a song on the wind, yet can also make a secret music of its own, in the depths of its heart. I mean, of course, the kind of art that is you and me. Because in a sense each one of us is an artist, as well as a work of art. Certainly we are so in the eye of the one vision that matters: the sight of God. You see, unlike certain other kinds of creator, our maker does not deny or efface or suppress any part of Himself when He makes a human soul. Or even a human mind and body. He's got this strange habit of leaving all sorts of not just random or superficial, but telltale, significant, autographed pieces and traces of Himself in us, if you will: and not just in the things that we are but in the things we do, and create. Now I'll grant you this can be a very different exercise from our normal human business of creating. We humans can and have tried - usually by means of a kind of brutalizing, stultifying discipline - to create works of art in which you'd swear there was no trace, either of our common human nature or of our personal, individual selves. Works that seem as if they were not only only made but conceived by a machine. Or a monster. But God has no reason to make any human creature in whom there is no imprint - however much effaced by its own perversity and "independence" - of His most precious, loved and crucified Image. Which is to say, of His own very heart. After all, our God is not just a but the creator: why should He make the very summit of His creation into something the express opposite of Himself?
Nonetheless it may sound strange - even to many Christians - to hear that, because God made each of us in, and through, and by means of His Image, therefore we humans are each one of us a kind of artist. Taken literally, it goes against the grain of much or even most of our everyday experience. But we must never let the surface facts of so-called everyday life get in the way of our apprehending certain deeper truths: truths of who we are, and could be, and yearn to be. Which three things aren't nearly as different from (much less opposed to) each other as the loud, strident beat of Modern Life would try to convince us. It is a fact, of course, that most of us never descend to that ineffably pure yet rich depth - that lichened, ivied soil we call humility - which alone enables us to ascend into the right mode and means of expression: the kind, I mean, which culminates in art. And especially good art. For instance, at this moment I don't think I could write a good poem if my life depended on it. And that limitation, I more than suspect, is at bottom due not so much to any lack of ambition as to a certain petty pride: a kind of pompous self-consciousness, and fear of failure, or of sounding (even more) foolish, that prevents me from getting deep enough into either myself or my subject to bring a really good poem up to the surface. But the fact that most of us are timid, or shamefaced, or impatient, or much-too-proud-busy-and-important-to-be, poets doesn't mean we are not all of us real poets, creators, by nature. And that means that what's true of visible, active, public poets is also true of the never-published, and even of us might-have-beens and can't-be-bothereds.
Indeed I have little doubt this point would be apparent to almost everybody, if only we cared more often to put first things first. No matter how bad a poet I am at the start (or even at the finish), the only way to start getting better is not by ranging ever higher or farther or later, but by dwelling deeper, and quieter, and closer to the beginnings, as it were, both of myself and of all things. Of course there is no point in my aiming if I don't aim to be perfect. And yet there is no perfection to which I can attain that is not rooted in, and bounded by, another, much older, vaster, humbler Perfection than I could ever conceive, much less create. And there is, as I hope to show, reason to believe that that part of me which is receptively still, deep and quiet is closer to It - at least in the process of creating - than that part of me which is ever-hastening on to the next level of "my own" perfection.
Not that each of these modes - the closer and the farther, so to speak - is not both possible and necessary. To take a familiar example from the realms of both poetry and painting: Each one of us, however poor or limited his technical level of achievement, has in the works he longs to create both a grand, impersonal, "public" manner, and a manner that is more private, intimate, "domestic." A mode, say, of high drama, or momentous tension, or of pomp and "stately" occasions - and a mode so homely, so unpretentious, that there hangs about it a quietude more "composed" than the stillest still life ever painted by one of the Dutch masters. Or even by de la Mare's especial favorite, Chardin.
Now of the two modes, it may seem obvious which one is the more quickly mastered, and which takes more time; or even which is the more labored or spontaneous. It may even appear easy to conclude which of the two modes is the more consciously self-created, and which one comes, as it were, like pollen on the air, from sources not only unconscious, but untraceable and inexhaustible. We humans are small - at least quantitatively - and from that it seems reasonable to suppose that our most effortlessly characteristic works are likewise small in scale, modest, unambitious. And that anything "bigger" must come from somewhere else. But not necessarily.
Think of many if not most of the greatest writers humankind has known. Are these commonly the ones who've tended to be most impatient and dismissive of lowly, inconspicuous individuals, situations, surroundings? Or who've been most "in their element" when depicting human beings in the grand manner, or human life on the grand scale? Or are these "greatest," rather, precisely those who've been better than the others at delineating, and making delightful - and even discerning something of the exquisite mystery and artistry implicit in - visibly ordinary people, places and acts? And these no less than the loudly and busily extraordinary? To take a few random examples from just one century: Dickens, Tolstoy, the Brontes, Melville, Mark Twain, Dostoevsky, Hardy - even Henry James, or Joseph Conrad. Are these the sort of authors who had neither time nor patience for simple folk, or simple things? To say nothing of that piece de resistance of all great writers: Shakespeare himself. A consummate master of "simplicity," I daresay - at least of those realms and moments of life in which we are all most "simple," and most alike. And that even in his "grandest" high dramas. Indeed, who better than Shakespeare could decipher the dream-haunted, or nightmare-hounded, child hidden in an Othello or a Hamlet? Or that lost-and-never-to-be-found child locked away in a Macbeth? Perhaps even in an Edmund, or an Iago?
Or take again the example of painting. Think of Rembrandt and Van Gogh. You may easily come up with others you prefer, or even whom you might regard as greater. But even of your most particular favorites, can you think of anything they've done that surpasses, in either vision or technique, the right rendering of the face on a tired, beaten-down, bedraggled old woman? Or of the wistful, mysterious smile on a little girl standing in a doorway? Note how often, in our human experience, being "great" connotes an eye for the minute as well as the immense, the "less" as well as the "more". Almost to the point where the gift lies not just in seeing but in a kind of going inside the infinitesimally small, or delicate, or fragile, or transient. Almost as if the bigger the writer, the smaller she is able to become. And the deeper she is prepared to go in.
My point is neither to exaggerate nor to diminutize the dignity of Man as the one creature made in God's image. The fact remains that, speaking Scripturally (and of course symbolically), we humans are sheep as well as goats, plants as well as animals. The point of which fact, I believe, is that there remains in our nature something not just "pre-modern," or ancient, but primordial: something in us that longs, not merely to receive from, but in a small, utterly dependent way even to become, that Soil in which all things thrive both seen and unseen. Nor do I think this is an unreasonable or prideful hope on our part. What most distinguishes us from the lower animals - and herein, I suspect, lies the Image at His most indelible - is that we too can become something of that presence in which every living thing, however "insignificant," finds its peace; something of that silence in which every sound, however faint and tremulous, finds its voice. And even its music. But for that to happen, both our compositions and our arrangements may need to be on a humbler, yet also much more intimate and intricate scale, than those to which our usual impatience and self-importance have accustomed us.
Now I'll grant you this pattern among writers and artists that I've noted - however common - may hardly be consistent enough to be elevated to a principle. And even if it could be, it's far from clear how far that principle might extend, whether in range of time or of space, or even of Being itself. We can't know whether, and how far, solicitude and care for the individual and the particular is of the very essence of Greatness. But there is something we can know, and perhaps already do.
Just consider for a moment, in comparison to all the powerful things that exist in nature - or even compared to not a few things Man himself has made - what a frail and passing thing the individual human being is. Or at least has been, up till now. (And if the modern individual remains a comparative nothing, how much more so was her counterpart of 2000 years ago?) And now consider, not just the peculiar point in time (c. AD 30) of that same individual's redemption, but the lowliness, the vulnerability, the sheer unfiltered, unclouded, unaffected intimacy of the manner in which she's been redeemed. Humanly speaking it would be hard to imagine a familiarity with our condition more penetrating of who we are: - one that goes the whole length and breadth, depth and height of what it means to be human, more than this one strange Life, bounded by a pauper's birth and a criminal's death. Think of, not just the grand highways the Son was prepared to travel, but the lowly cellars, closets and cupboards he was prepared to enter, and not merely to know us, but to enable us to see, and know, and love, ourselves and each other, even with those same eyes with which He is loved by the Father. And then ask yourself which of these two modes of our human art - the farther or the closer - is best revealing, not just of the nature but of the art, of our Poet?
And yet you'd hardly expect even the most arrestingly "living" canvas to step out of the wall and start painting pictures of its own. It is an example of art, maybe even the highest art. But it will never, no matter how it tries, ever succeed in becoming an artist. What you experienced just then was admittedly a grand moment, and yet - from the standpoint of what the artwork itself was capable of doing or not doing - it was also a dead moment.
Which brings me to the matter of a very different kind of art. The kind that is able to step out of the canvas, and which can, by the grace and good pleasure of its artist, itself begin to paint. The kind of art that is spoken, and yet also speaks; that comes to us boldly as a song on the wind, yet can also make a secret music of its own, in the depths of its heart. I mean, of course, the kind of art that is you and me. Because in a sense each one of us is an artist, as well as a work of art. Certainly we are so in the eye of the one vision that matters: the sight of God. You see, unlike certain other kinds of creator, our maker does not deny or efface or suppress any part of Himself when He makes a human soul. Or even a human mind and body. He's got this strange habit of leaving all sorts of not just random or superficial, but telltale, significant, autographed pieces and traces of Himself in us, if you will: and not just in the things that we are but in the things we do, and create. Now I'll grant you this can be a very different exercise from our normal human business of creating. We humans can and have tried - usually by means of a kind of brutalizing, stultifying discipline - to create works of art in which you'd swear there was no trace, either of our common human nature or of our personal, individual selves. Works that seem as if they were not only only made but conceived by a machine. Or a monster. But God has no reason to make any human creature in whom there is no imprint - however much effaced by its own perversity and "independence" - of His most precious, loved and crucified Image. Which is to say, of His own very heart. After all, our God is not just a but the creator: why should He make the very summit of His creation into something the express opposite of Himself?
Nonetheless it may sound strange - even to many Christians - to hear that, because God made each of us in, and through, and by means of His Image, therefore we humans are each one of us a kind of artist. Taken literally, it goes against the grain of much or even most of our everyday experience. But we must never let the surface facts of so-called everyday life get in the way of our apprehending certain deeper truths: truths of who we are, and could be, and yearn to be. Which three things aren't nearly as different from (much less opposed to) each other as the loud, strident beat of Modern Life would try to convince us. It is a fact, of course, that most of us never descend to that ineffably pure yet rich depth - that lichened, ivied soil we call humility - which alone enables us to ascend into the right mode and means of expression: the kind, I mean, which culminates in art. And especially good art. For instance, at this moment I don't think I could write a good poem if my life depended on it. And that limitation, I more than suspect, is at bottom due not so much to any lack of ambition as to a certain petty pride: a kind of pompous self-consciousness, and fear of failure, or of sounding (even more) foolish, that prevents me from getting deep enough into either myself or my subject to bring a really good poem up to the surface. But the fact that most of us are timid, or shamefaced, or impatient, or much-too-proud-busy-and-important-to-be, poets doesn't mean we are not all of us real poets, creators, by nature. And that means that what's true of visible, active, public poets is also true of the never-published, and even of us might-have-beens and can't-be-bothereds.
Indeed I have little doubt this point would be apparent to almost everybody, if only we cared more often to put first things first. No matter how bad a poet I am at the start (or even at the finish), the only way to start getting better is not by ranging ever higher or farther or later, but by dwelling deeper, and quieter, and closer to the beginnings, as it were, both of myself and of all things. Of course there is no point in my aiming if I don't aim to be perfect. And yet there is no perfection to which I can attain that is not rooted in, and bounded by, another, much older, vaster, humbler Perfection than I could ever conceive, much less create. And there is, as I hope to show, reason to believe that that part of me which is receptively still, deep and quiet is closer to It - at least in the process of creating - than that part of me which is ever-hastening on to the next level of "my own" perfection.
Not that each of these modes - the closer and the farther, so to speak - is not both possible and necessary. To take a familiar example from the realms of both poetry and painting: Each one of us, however poor or limited his technical level of achievement, has in the works he longs to create both a grand, impersonal, "public" manner, and a manner that is more private, intimate, "domestic." A mode, say, of high drama, or momentous tension, or of pomp and "stately" occasions - and a mode so homely, so unpretentious, that there hangs about it a quietude more "composed" than the stillest still life ever painted by one of the Dutch masters. Or even by de la Mare's especial favorite, Chardin.
Now of the two modes, it may seem obvious which one is the more quickly mastered, and which takes more time; or even which is the more labored or spontaneous. It may even appear easy to conclude which of the two modes is the more consciously self-created, and which one comes, as it were, like pollen on the air, from sources not only unconscious, but untraceable and inexhaustible. We humans are small - at least quantitatively - and from that it seems reasonable to suppose that our most effortlessly characteristic works are likewise small in scale, modest, unambitious. And that anything "bigger" must come from somewhere else. But not necessarily.
Think of many if not most of the greatest writers humankind has known. Are these commonly the ones who've tended to be most impatient and dismissive of lowly, inconspicuous individuals, situations, surroundings? Or who've been most "in their element" when depicting human beings in the grand manner, or human life on the grand scale? Or are these "greatest," rather, precisely those who've been better than the others at delineating, and making delightful - and even discerning something of the exquisite mystery and artistry implicit in - visibly ordinary people, places and acts? And these no less than the loudly and busily extraordinary? To take a few random examples from just one century: Dickens, Tolstoy, the Brontes, Melville, Mark Twain, Dostoevsky, Hardy - even Henry James, or Joseph Conrad. Are these the sort of authors who had neither time nor patience for simple folk, or simple things? To say nothing of that piece de resistance of all great writers: Shakespeare himself. A consummate master of "simplicity," I daresay - at least of those realms and moments of life in which we are all most "simple," and most alike. And that even in his "grandest" high dramas. Indeed, who better than Shakespeare could decipher the dream-haunted, or nightmare-hounded, child hidden in an Othello or a Hamlet? Or that lost-and-never-to-be-found child locked away in a Macbeth? Perhaps even in an Edmund, or an Iago?
Or take again the example of painting. Think of Rembrandt and Van Gogh. You may easily come up with others you prefer, or even whom you might regard as greater. But even of your most particular favorites, can you think of anything they've done that surpasses, in either vision or technique, the right rendering of the face on a tired, beaten-down, bedraggled old woman? Or of the wistful, mysterious smile on a little girl standing in a doorway? Note how often, in our human experience, being "great" connotes an eye for the minute as well as the immense, the "less" as well as the "more". Almost to the point where the gift lies not just in seeing but in a kind of going inside the infinitesimally small, or delicate, or fragile, or transient. Almost as if the bigger the writer, the smaller she is able to become. And the deeper she is prepared to go in.
My point is neither to exaggerate nor to diminutize the dignity of Man as the one creature made in God's image. The fact remains that, speaking Scripturally (and of course symbolically), we humans are sheep as well as goats, plants as well as animals. The point of which fact, I believe, is that there remains in our nature something not just "pre-modern," or ancient, but primordial: something in us that longs, not merely to receive from, but in a small, utterly dependent way even to become, that Soil in which all things thrive both seen and unseen. Nor do I think this is an unreasonable or prideful hope on our part. What most distinguishes us from the lower animals - and herein, I suspect, lies the Image at His most indelible - is that we too can become something of that presence in which every living thing, however "insignificant," finds its peace; something of that silence in which every sound, however faint and tremulous, finds its voice. And even its music. But for that to happen, both our compositions and our arrangements may need to be on a humbler, yet also much more intimate and intricate scale, than those to which our usual impatience and self-importance have accustomed us.
Now I'll grant you this pattern among writers and artists that I've noted - however common - may hardly be consistent enough to be elevated to a principle. And even if it could be, it's far from clear how far that principle might extend, whether in range of time or of space, or even of Being itself. We can't know whether, and how far, solicitude and care for the individual and the particular is of the very essence of Greatness. But there is something we can know, and perhaps already do.
Just consider for a moment, in comparison to all the powerful things that exist in nature - or even compared to not a few things Man himself has made - what a frail and passing thing the individual human being is. Or at least has been, up till now. (And if the modern individual remains a comparative nothing, how much more so was her counterpart of 2000 years ago?) And now consider, not just the peculiar point in time (c. AD 30) of that same individual's redemption, but the lowliness, the vulnerability, the sheer unfiltered, unclouded, unaffected intimacy of the manner in which she's been redeemed. Humanly speaking it would be hard to imagine a familiarity with our condition more penetrating of who we are: - one that goes the whole length and breadth, depth and height of what it means to be human, more than this one strange Life, bounded by a pauper's birth and a criminal's death. Think of, not just the grand highways the Son was prepared to travel, but the lowly cellars, closets and cupboards he was prepared to enter, and not merely to know us, but to enable us to see, and know, and love, ourselves and each other, even with those same eyes with which He is loved by the Father. And then ask yourself which of these two modes of our human art - the farther or the closer - is best revealing, not just of the nature but of the art, of our Poet?
Intimations of Deity?
The Linnet
Upon this leafy bush
With thorns and roses in it,
Flutters a thing of light,
A twittering linnet.
And all the throbbing world
Of dew and sun and air
By this small parcel of life
Is made more fair;
As if each bramble-spray
Of mounded gold-wreathed furze,
Harebell and little thyme,
Were only hers;
As if this beauty and grace
Did to one bird belong
And, at a flutter of wing,
Might vanish in song.
- Walter de la Mare
No doubt I've said something much like this before. But there are poets whose command of language is so instinct with magic - so imbued with a mastery and a delicacy that is more than human - that in their company words like "uncanny" and "preternatural" become the tiredest of cliches.
I've been reading, studying, savoring de la Mare for going on 12 years, and I still don't know how he does it. He can speak of some frail wisp of a bird, not just with enraptured interest, but with such attentiveness to loving, and loved, detail - to shaded breast, and impossibly round head, and tracery of wing - it's as if he were decoding isolated fragments of the very sentence that first spoke it into being. Yet not just as naked words hanging in the air, but rather as if clothed with something of that first fresh smile, and deep breath, and gleam in the Eye.
(Economic) Culture Sores
Alright, so I was off by two months.
As best I recall, sometime this past
December, I rashly confided to a select handful of friends (as if I have that
many to begin with) how I thought the Dow would top 13000 before the year was
up. Not, mind you, that I’m expecting it to remain there for any length of time.
Or even, necessarily, anywhere near it again anytime soon. But what if it does,
and more? Suppose this was the first jolt of a really
sustained recovery, complete with jobs, rising home prices and (my imagination
is staggering) negligible inflation. What would that mean? Would it prove that
Quantitative Easing was working? That it had been the right approach all along? Or
would it merely stand as evidence that, however secure any upturn produced by
stimulus might seem, we’d be enjoying that much stronger and more lasting a recovery had we embraced policies
of austerity a la Britain’s David Cameron?
One thing is all but certain to me. If recovery does take hold, Democrats will chalk it up to the enduring wisdom of Old Man Keynes, and
Republicans will blame it on the enduring profitability of domestic fossil
fuels.
That’s the problem with wars of
ideas. And especially nasty ones like our current orgies of
self-congratulation on both sides. Truth isn't so much the first casualty as he is an
unwanted guest sentenced to take all his meals with the children and the
servants.
Which, now that I think of
it, is not at all a bad place for Truth to start re-disseminating.
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