Black Friday 2015

How this empire will lie when

in a century or so

it laughs its last choking joke

and flies farther than angels ken.

The waves of both maria,

maria vestra, not mine,

bring sad legs to these templa,

shrines of strange gods with pretty shine.

Their tired missionaries

take the gospel of self to

other shores. After one, two

years, they take off, leaving us to ourselves.

In this particular mound

of brown and black, I wander

lone, and not one spoken sound,

one whiff of skin, is tender

strange, without being familiar.

How does one live the life

of self in a community of selves?

It is a severed life

in the land which these people delved,

in temples like these—convenient lives.

I realize in writing this

I am angry. I want in.

There is tension

in being intentional

against other good news.

(And you, reader, see 

my fingers in their

natural state.)

How does one be in but

not of this religious

swimming pool of all worlds?

Day before Thanksgiving, 2015

I am listening to The xx and Daughter. Daughter is a emo-folk-rock band, emphasis on “emo.” The xx is super minimalistic. Solo guitar intro most of the time. Singing in the lower register. Bass is intermittent. Not minimalistic in the sense of, say, Philip Glass: repetitive and relatively simple thematically; rather, a “stripped-down” minimalistic. Bare-bones. Minimum. The xx could easily be a perfunctory band, but what do you do when you get enthralled in a world of crepuscular understated-ness, and find that it’s beautiful, in a way? What do you do?

There are no bird’s nests outside,
not that I could see, and I see
for miles. The world is ready for
death again, as it has been ready
for floods and ages. In its little
microcosm of the grand story
of the quiet execution on
the bald hill, which was not
even a mountain, the ground
drinks up the promise of life,
and is dead for another
eternity. But not yet. And that is why

I guess the point of my writing this is that I am bored. Not just the everyday “Oh-I-am-so-bored-whatdoIdowithmylife” bored. It is boredom at a fundamental level. It isn’t like general boredom, which shows itself at the surface, but knows that there really is something to be done. This boredom, i.e. mine, stems from the palpable fact that there is nothing to do, and hence, everything to be done, if that makes sense. I suspect it doesn’t. How do you learn how to be at leisure?

I have been reading too many epics

He sits in his bathtub, Prince

Hector of the city, when

wind comes by to prick, a wince

threatens, he bites it off, then

pants grasping for the golden

rails on the gossip walls. Ten

minutes pass he is shaven—

first shave, Hecuba, would you

believe it. Clang! The workmen

clang in the unseen (but to

clang in the visible our

Prince has yet this task to do).

Breakfast: the grapes are too sour,

and he makes it known with one

swift reprimand, for such pow’r

breathes rapt in his hand (not won,

but born with) and after milk

the sand outside in white sun

eats his sandaled feet like silk

until his plastic will brings

him to the pavement’s light lilt

but its gray stony scalp thinks

the shod ankles of the boy

are better off inside. Since

Hector follows Priam’s ploy

(or follows a boyish plot,

treats the hammer like a toy),

Athene pales as if in rot

and her shield lies decomposed.

Hector trundles forward not

ready. He stares at his toes.

The hammer in his knapsack

flies to Zeus and back, a roast

handle holding its head. Hacked

to the brain and pink his heart

Hector sees the  billow, slack

in step. The smiths’ fiery art

stinks, offense to him, but that

excused by his mind-tongue, tart.

Still, his arrogance never fat,

he enters in, tardy now.

He drops his bag on the mat

and explains glumly Just How

he got late. He doesn’t get

to finish. “Prince, please you bow.”

Hector’s child-hair tastes helmet.

He sees himself mirrored, Troy's

Prince Hector, and the onset.

___________

This poem was birthed only because of my inability to stop reading epics this year. I opted for fixed syllables in tercets (although not metered strictly), since I find free verse's liberty intoxicating and overwhelming. A fixed syllable scheme is also more fun for me: you begin with a rule—not necessarily with a story or even an image—then get surprised where it takes you. The (cheating) terza rima scheme is actually due more to Derek Walcott's Omeros than to Dante, because I'm not reading Dante in the Italian, and it isn't the Sayers translation either. Omeros is a postmodern epic, written in quasi-hexameter-terza-rima-variation, the incipit of which:

"This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes."
Philoctete smiles for the tourists, who try taking
his soul with their cameras. "Once wind bring the news 

to the laurier-cannelles, their leaves start shaking
the minute the axe of sunlight hit the cedars,
because they could see the axes in our own eyes."

a-b-a b-c-d. Twelve syllables each line. Not Dantean terza rima, not Homeric hexameter, but a certainly more tractable fusion of both, and informed by free verse.

(Side note: Omeros is dazzling; not understandable entirely, but absolutely brilliant. I recommend it, if you have time to spare.)

The End (Midpoint) of Summer Reading 2015

The title is due to this period of time being singularly tricky to define. Well actually, no -- not if you consider the life of a pre-professional to be either During School or Not During School.

Oh wait, I forgot, I'm homeschooled. I could say it was Not During School for my on-off twelve years of homeschooling without a qualm, and still say it was very much School, equally without qualm.

Sure, that's just vacuous. And there is, even in the murky grid of the homeschool life, distinction between During School and Not During School and -- hah! there it is, I have been wasting time writing.

(*sigh* I am tired and bored a.t.m. No, actually not bored; writing is a stimulating activity, and I am just off reading David Foster Wallace, who is Caffeine. The two previous nights have been plagued by insomnia. Apologies if I am [exceptionally] incoherent.)

The point I'm trying to get at is I have an extended summer. I don't leave for school (read: College) til August. Extra reading this summer.

But it is borrowed time and it really feels like cheating.

Incipit the list:

1. Poems - Emily Dickinson
2. The Epic of Gilgamesh
3. The Lost World of Genesis One - John Walton.
4. Paradise Regained - John Milton
5. The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert - Rosaria Champagne Butterfield
6. The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes - trans. Robert Alter
7. The Chosen Ones - Alister McGrath
8. Lancelot - Walker Percy
9. Poems - Ranier Maria Rilke
10. Bach, Beethoven, and the Boys: Music History as It Ought to Be Taught
11. The Iliad - trans. Robert Fagles
12. Godric - Frederick Buechner
(Here's where my last post on summer reading ended, and thus resumit:)
13. The Hauerwas Reader - Stanley Hauerwas. Took me roughly a year to read. Provocative undeniably.
14. I Am an Impure Thinker - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. 50% of this book was miles over my head. The other 50% was kilometers.
15. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) - Jaroslav Pelikan. A very helpful account of the early development of Christian doctrine, and Pelikan isn't afraid to point out what he sees as problems in the nascent church.
16. Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is a hypnotist.
17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte. I had absolutely no idea that this novel was Gothic, and when I read it I was disabused of the (very embarassing [see? I misspel to make it even more so]) notion that all 19th-century fiction written by women is Jane Austen
6. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert. Confession: I was bored by Flaubert's realism; or was it the translation?
7. Silence - Shusaku Endo. The translation leaves something to be desired, but Endo's story of two priests who attempt to minister to kakure kirishitan (hidden Christians) in a time of persecution in 17th century Japan and his exploration of suffering, apostasy, and silence (the perceived Silence of God in particular) are terrifyingly powerful -- disregard the title. And I keep the image of the book cover as my cellphone wallpaper.

13. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz. Diaz left an acerbic aftertaste, although it was long in coming. 
14. Both Flesh and Not: Essays - David Foster Wallace. My first D.F.W., and it was like tasting coffee or Toblerone for the first time over again.
15. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson. The sort of writing in Gilead is something I've seen only in some Japanese novels I've read (not Silence): quiet, and speaking volumes; modest, and more than estimable; restrained, and highly emotional. The protagonist of Gilead is perhaps someone who can stand shoulder to shoulder with Atticus Finch as a *human* character who exudes a refreshing Goodness.
16. Some poetry by Keats. (I was very vague with this last post.) I did read some of Keats: "Lamia" and some other poems whose names I've forgotten. He is, I think, a consequence of Dryden. I found the frequent rhymed enjambed lines disorienting, but decidedly brilliant at the same time.
17. The New Life (La Vita Nuova) - Dante. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translation. The commentary between the poems feels really draggy. But the poems, as they are translated by Rossetti (brother of Christina Rossetti), are marvelous.
18. The Promise - Chaim Potok. I found much to relate with, although I daresay I enjoyed The Chosen more.
19. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe. Achebe is a dynamic chronicler of the profound change effected (yes, I use "effect" as a verb) by British imperialism. My first African lit ever (I think).
20. A Boy's Will - Robert Frost. Frost's first published collection of poetry, if I'm not mistaken. His poems have classicism (although an evolved one) and simplicity. Very enjoyable reads.
21. Collected Poems - Chinua Achebe. I revisited Achebe after Things Fall Apart. Achebe's verse on war conveyed effectively the harrowing experience of it all.
22. Death and the King's Horseman - Wole Soyinka. A play about a king's horseman in Nigeria who must commit ritual suicide but is stopped by British officials before he can finish. Soyinka dazzled me with his ability to Use Language. The tribespeople use poetry during the intricate ritual; the British imperialists use drab language all throughout. Soyinka effects (I'm going to harp on this) a striking contrast.
23. The Presence of the Kingdom - Jacques Ellul. Papa's notes and highlights are ubiquitous in this book (I think it is one of his favorites). (B.t.w. most of the books on this list are e-books.) Ellul wrote in this in the 1940's, but it is frighteningly relevant in 2015.
24. Girls at War and Other Stories - Chinua Achebe. That's a treble for Achebe on this list (novel, poetry, short stories). I still value Achebe as a chronicler of the African (Nigerian, specifically) colonial and post-colonial experience, but I am not impressed by his writing as much as I was by Soyinka's. Personal preference.
25. A Dance of the Forests - Wole Soyinka. This play lost me. It requires a degree of familiarity with Yoruba mythology, and w.r.t. this I am an ignoramus.
26. Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament - Christopher J.H. Wright. A fine, fine book on Jesus' OT identity, OT mission, and OT values, and how these affect our own identity, mission, and values. It was sort of like a confirmation of my other studies on similar subjects.

What I planned to read but did not (or haven't):
The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays - W.H. Auden 
How (Not) to Be Secular - James K.A. Smith
Imagining the Kingdom - James K.A. Smith
Dante's Inferno
The first part of Don Quixote
El Filibusterismo - Jose Rizal

What I am actually reading right now:
Selected Poems - W.H. Auden

Omeros - Derek Walcott

Noli Me Tangere - Jose Rizal. I "graduated" from high school in the Philippines without reading Noli. A reparative read.

Some Carlos Palanca Award-winning short stories

G.K. Beale's big fat New Testament Biblical Theology (at least 1000 pages! Not planning to read through.) 

thoughts on moving

we half a decade past
painted walls

we abraded our work
the paint today

we watched the walls
cry the orange green

red rivulets
tears run into and down themselves

we graffitists purged the walls
of our personal scribbles

extinguished the peculiar loudspeakers
we set up on those two insipid blank dimensions

we did not weep
with them

they stare out as they did before
we gifted them heartfelt impurities

those two dimensions are and will be enthralled
in themselves we did this to them we gave them back

we were not tinged
by dull and cutting regret

although we might have sometime wished we
hadn't bothered brushing keys onto their locks

we scraped their keys out of their faces
scraped them into their delapidated cells

do we have new walls
to paint we liberators perhaps no

Gilead's this-worldly Christianity

Reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead is a slow business. Much like Frederick Buechner's Godric, the style and the pace of writing (quasi-memoir, almost "confessional") force the reader to control his or her reading speed (that is, if the reader wants to get anything at all out of the novel). There are no chapter divisions; it is framed as a letter by an aged Congregationalist minister to his son, who is not yet ten years old, having been born in the winter of his father's life.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel evinces a breadth of Christian influence. Robinson herself was raised a Presbyterian, but is now a Congregationalist. One recurrent theme is the minister's admission that he will miss this life when he is in Heaven (and, at seventy-four, he is very aware of his impending departure). He hardly downplays cavalierly the joys of eternity, but neither does he deny that he is likely to remember, and perhaps "miss," if that is possible in the next life, the "fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us.

In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try."

It's an interesting remark. It may be something out of the vein of liberal this-worldly Christianity (although I'm far too ignorant about twentieth-century religious mainline history), but it does make good food for thought. (But I do hope that I won't miss this life too much once it's over.)

Narrative Animals

"And it's so true it's trite that human beings are narrative animals: every culture countenances itself as culture via a story, whether mythopoeic or politico-economic; every whole person understands his lifetime as an organized, recountable series of events and changes with at least a beginning and middle. We need narrative like we need space-time; it's a built-in thing." ~ David Foster Wallace, "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young"

Will be reading D.F.W. over the summer. Question is: Can he ever underwhelm?

Troas

Burned by the middle-sun, we came unto a city
Walled as if by thoughts, yet unwalled, bare,
Still awaiting the Sack, when she would
Scream. We came unto those unwalls and found
The Gate-elders, whose craniums were on the verge of bursting.

We approached those languid kings and
Inquired: "What is this city called? who rules it?
Who built it? who are you?
Where are we? do you understand us?"
So we said, to whom one swollen, wrinkled mouth:

"This city, we knew its name
Once. Who rules it, we know no longer.
This country, this strand beside the sea
Of the world, this earth: now it is as if foreign
To us, wizened into abstracted cadavers.

We understand your speech, but already I begin
To forget what you said: it dies away and the memory of its sound
Floats into that ancient Argive's void. We have lost
Our bearings; we are as children lost
In the undulations of faceless monsters,

We were consumed and excreted by the present,
Now ever pressed by the question: 'Where is mother?
Oh, where, where, where, is mother?'
We cannot retrace our steps, can only move forward,
Our god is Progress, whom we revile -- no other to protest.

The walls, I think, are sound, as your speech is.
A tune three thousand leagues away to the west hints
The foundations are sound also.
This city was built on terrifying rhythmic drum beats,
Or the blare of a mad poet's voice.

We are haunted not by sound -- the walls crumble -- but by
Black letters on pale parchment, and,
Of late, by pictures and by moving images,
The memory of movement, the soundless swells
Of torpid river-torrents of shields, spears, and scrolls."

His feeble voice resumed: "Before I forget entirely --
I am Priam, Laomedon's son, or was Priam;
Or was I Atrides Agamemnon?
Or Menelaus? or the father, Atreus, Pelops' son?
I am too old, too old."

His finger pointing near imperceptible to the right:
"This is Achilles, man-slaying son of Peleus --"

His once long and glorious beauty
The sorry hairs of an overused broom.

"He is Achilles, and look!
Look at his hands --" his voice's timbre was unchanged

"-- The blood on his hands!" We looked, but
Pelides' hands were the brown of ancient paper --

Whether it was the blood of Priam's sons, or the atrophy,
We could not tell. The smell gave away nothing.

We thought we saw a crystal tear run down
Priam's face, muddying itself in its course.

Pointing to the left: "Nestor, who has slept since, since..."
His pallid head was flung back, and his great mouth lacked every tooth.

Pointing farther: "Ajax the Giant, and Ajax the Lesser,
But who is who, I can no longer tell."

"That sea-faring king, Odysseus, left us long ago.
I miss him, I miss him, or do I hate him? Neither that can I recall.

That is Idomeneus, and that Aeneas --
But he left, too, didn't he? He left as well..."

We said, in reply: "Are you not all dead?
Why are you unsure of who you are?
Why do you sit side by side, who were
Warring enemies, who wept because of each other's
Brutal, bloody work?"

The decrepit megacephalic: "I am Priam. I am dying.
I would like to be dead and not dying -- indeed, all of us --

But that thread, a single capillary, has not run its span."
(A decade later, we realized we were the reason.)

"There," pointing to a figure sitting solitary, "is
Hector, breaker of horses," and, unprecedentedly:

"We are all overladen Hector,
Murdered, violated.

And we are all Achilles,
Murderous and doomed.

We are all Priam,
Ragged, filthy, and hungry.

We are all Agamemnon,
Slain by treacherous dagger.

We are all Menelaus,
Whose wife was stolen way.

We are all Paris,
Who is execrated by all.

We are all Aeneas,
All Odysseus.

We are every soldier
Whose blood poured itself forth in the sight of these walls.

No one who has stood on this cursed soil
Stands in and of himself.

I am vanishing --" he croaked an attempt at a laugh "-- We here all live
This lengthy and evil process of dying."

We stood silent, being able to do nothing else.
Priam's eyes glistened, as they did at Hector's rape.

"We all returned here, to this burnt land;
There was no other country who'd keep us.

We took the gods by the hand, we found
We were a match, we drove our spears straight through their mouths.

We slew the Olympians together, in the name of
Progress," said the king, who before our sight visibly wasted away.

"It did nothing. Father Zeus' brood were phantoms
In the end. Other gods had risen with the new sun."

"Proceed, if you wish," he continued.
"You will find multitudes inside."

After a solemn, motionless, darkening hour, we did so.
With a faint "Halt who goes there" dogging our steps, we walked
Into the fading, torn-paper streets, ascended
The hellish rungs of descent. After years, we found
Ilus, son of Tros, erector of the city, a skeleton on his toilet.

Summer Reading 2015

Of the reading of books there is no end. Now that the summer violin workshop I was teaching at is over, it is time to read. More.

First thing, I have been reading already this summer, since summer began. (When it began is hazy. I think it started sometime March, but then again maybe it didn't.) I have read about ten books over the last four weeks, depending on how you do the math and whether you think summer begins in March:

1. Poems - Emily Dickinson. The Project Gutenberg edition is the first published edition, which means that a lot of Emily's idiosyncrasies -- dashes, bizarre capitalization, unorthodox syntax -- are edited out.
2. The Epic of Gilgamesh and Gilgamesh - trans. David Ferry, and trans. Andrew George. Read the latter a week after the other. George's is leaps and bounds better.
3. The Lost World of Genesis One - John Walton. Introduction to Walton's theory of the functional ontology of Genesis One. No, I'm not sure I really get it either.
4. Paradise Regained - John Milton. A disappointment in light of Paradise Lost. Go read the gospels of the KJV or Douay-Rheims instead. (But it does have some very insightful asides.)
5. The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert - Rosaria Champagne Butterfield. A startling account of a lesbian English professor's conversion to Christianity, which sheds new light on issues I never thought much about before.
6. The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes - trans. Robert Alter. Alter, comp lit professor at UC Berkeley, has some valuable notes on the passages, chiastic structures, and ideas of the wisdom books. The translation itself doesn't meet expectations, though. (A telling example: he translates the verse in Job, usually rendered along the lines of "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him," as something like "He slays me; I have no hope.")
7. The Chosen Ones - Alister McGrath. An uneven wannabe Narnia book.
8. Lancelot - Walker Percy. The more I read Percy the more I think he wrote a lengthy Variations on a Theme of Existentially-Crisised Middle-Age Southern Chick Boy. Lancelot is funny, perceptive, almost prescient, but not as much as Lost in the Cosmos.
9. Poems - Ranier Maria Rilke. Nice ethereal, almost mystical atmosphere in this collection.
10. Bach, Beethoven, and the Boys: Music History as It Ought to Be Taught. Impertinent humor and an off-kilter focus on the details. A book has not made me laugh so much in a long time.
11. The Iliad - trans. Robert Fagles. See blog post three back.
12. Godric - Frederick Buechner. See previous blog post.

So that's it.

And here's what I hope to finish this summer:

1. The Hauerwas Reader - Stanley Hauerwas. Started it last year.
2. I Am an Impure Thinker - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
3. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) - Jaroslav Pelikan
4. Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges
5. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
6. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
7. Silence - Shusaku Endo. The book cover of which has to be one of my favorites:

On a side note, Martin Scorsese is currently making a film based on it.

Better read the book before it comes out.

8. The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays - W.H. Auden
9. Selected Poems - W.H. Auden
10. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
11. How (Not) to Be Secular - James K.A. Smith
12. Imagining the Kingdom - Jamie Smith, who is the same person as above.
13. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
14. Both Flesh and Not: Essays - David Foster Wallace
15. Some poetry by Keats
16. Maybe Dante's Inferno
17. Perhaps the first part of Don Quixote
18. Noli Me Tangere? In order to rectify one of the biggest failures of my high school reading life?
19. El Filibusterismo? See above.

And so ends this pessimistic idealist's reading list.

fin

Frederick Buechner's Godric

My book review from Goodreads:

This is without doubt the most important book that I've read thus far this year, perhaps that I've read as a teenager. Not that it's my favorite — it's too personally vulnerating for me to say it's my favorite — but that it's the book I need. There are full-blown theological treatises on sin out there; I daresay none of them are as effective as Godric. I have never read anything like it — and never read anything so slowly: it spans a measly 175 pages, with large font to boot, but took me nearly a month to finish. I never read more than ten pages in a sitting. Sometimes four pages was enough for a day. One chapter was so stunning and painfully relatable that I was left almost physically dazed and too scared to open to the next. What's more, the language Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian minister, uses is simply gorgeous, imitative, if only speculatively so, of English cadences predating King James:

Once in a while the sea would crest, but mostly it was great blue hills with foam for heather. A swell would rise and glitter in the sun, then slide and sink into a dale. A dale would heave into a hill.

Every sentence seems as if calculated with a poet's precision, and hardly one comes along that sounds prosaic, although prose is Buechner's chosen vehicle.

The book could be thought of as the confession of Godric to the reader, of an aged hermit to a novice monk. Godric dwells on his impiety, his wicked youth, the evil he did and does and the good he left and leaves undone, but Buechner manages to avoid all mawkishness. He even manages to avoid any allusions to an actual "Confessions", although Augustine is a rather obvious influence. But the monk Godric "confesses" to, Reginald, wishes to write a biography. It's the middle ages, and he doesn't conceive of Godric's recollections the same way. Reginald's final product, a hagiographic biography (a chapter of which is tacked on as a sort of epilogue), is nothing like the wizened Godric intends. Where Godric deprecates himself for his sin, Reginald the scribe writes of the unflinching piety of his subject. Godric often retorts with an explanation of his less than holy intentions and this leads to some of the best humor in the book, the beginning of Reginald's interviews being perhaps the funniest, yet remaining insightful, a la Flannery O'Connor:

"The god means God.... The ric is Saxon reign. So God and ric means God reigns, Godric....." 

"Fetch me a bowl to puke in," I tell him. He's got him such a honeyed way I'm ever out to sour it. 

"Godric will have his little jest," says Reginald. 

So then I teach him other ways to read my name. "God's god for sure. You hit that square. But ric is Erse for wreck," I say, not knowing Erse from arse. "God's wreck I be, it means. God's wrecked Godric for his sins. Or Godric's sins have made a wreck of God." 

... 

"There are other ways as well," I say. "Rip Godric up another seam, and what you get is goand drick." 

"What's drick?" says Reginald. 

"A foul Welsh word not fit for monkish ears," I say. 

"How great is your humilitas, Father," Reginald says. 

I say, "Yet, Mother, not so great as is my drick." 

Why is it that the best in him calls forth the worst in me?

You read that passage you've read all the conversations between Godric and Reginald.

Godric spends most of his hermit life praying, praying "the way he breathes, for else his heart would wither in his breast". His prayers are striking in style and content:

Gentle Jesu, Mary's son, be thine the wounds that heal our wounding. Press thy bloody scars to ours that thy dear blood may flow in us and cleanse our sin.

Dear Lord, strew herbs upon my hermit's dreams to make them sweet. Have daylight mercy on my midnight soul.

While on a parade through the streets of Durham, being touched by all sorts of people and being given all sorts of presents, Godric prays silent:

Dear Father, see how these children hunger here. They starve for want of what they cannot name. Their poor lost souls are famished. Their foolish hands reach out. Oh grant them richer fare than one old sack of bones whose wits begin to turn. Feed them with something more than Godric here, for Godric's no less starved for thee than they. Have mercy, Lord. Amen.

Buechner fosters a healthy irony throughout the tale. Once, when Godric uncharacteristically had no inclination to pray, lying on the grass and wallowing in sin's "drowsy peace so deep [he] hadn't even will enough to loathe [him]self", he receives a vision of a "man's green, leafy face". "When I deserved it least, God gave me most. I think it was the Savior's face itself I saw," he says, and you can see him shaking his hoary head in wonder.

Like Homer's Nestor ("Well might I wish, could mortal wish renew / That strength which once in boiling youth I knew; / ... But heaven its gifts not all at once bestows, / These years with wisdom crowns, with action those." Pope's translation), Godric, his head filled with memories of his youth's adventures, laments his infirmity in old age (but eagerly anticipates his death: "You're tough, old man," Godric is told, who responds: "Though I deserve it, God would never be so cruel."). He exerts titanic effort to move his decrepit arm. Sometimes he speaks for paragraphs, until he realizes that no sound has come out of his mouth. He still continues to pray, and becomes God's reluctant means of grace to many who meet him, although he says that his "war" is all private and inside himself. 

Godric is a saint, undeniably, but he is a saint who is not the superhuman holy man Reginald would have us imagine: he is a saint, weak, struggling, and human.

I had never heard of Godric of Finchale before. I have never read his Wikipedia page, and have no desire to do so (lest I be disillusioned; I am a romantic coward). The portrait of Godric Buechner paints might not resemble the Godric of history one fig; but I suspect Buechner wasn't out to be constrained by a historical-factual vice. With an earthy, sensible imagination, Buechner explores depravity, newness in Christ, and the Christian struggle against the flesh, the world, and the Devil; and does so without so much as an expressly theologizing or philosophizing passage. He chronicles a Christian life without resorting to allegory, and tells a story steeped in visceral and disarming honesty. I have a presentiment that this won't be my only read.

Age of Ultron and those pesky myths

Earlier today I watched Avengers: Age of Ultron. I will pass over my opinion of it (I think it's overstuffed and insubstantial at the same time: too much happens for too little to happen. Praeteritio.) and will only write down some thoughts triggered by a scene in the movie.

While looking at Captain America and Tony Stark, a character refers to the Avengers as "gods", and clarityclarencememe.jpg I realized that that was exactly what they are: the gods of our time. They are heroes whom we have exalted to godlike status. We've always considered myth a necessary component of life — we seem thoroughly incapable of ridding ourselves of it — and that need is fulfilled, in part, by comic book superheroes, who now attract copious worship through the present comic book film boom. Achilles and Gilgamesh have been interred in the graveyard of gods (or of godlike heroes), but their ghosts haunt the messy age of today: Superman and the Marvel Thor, gods in a world which expressly mirrors ours; Batman and Iron Man, superhuman men who by innate ingenuity stand shoulder to shoulder with gods.

I re-appreciated James K.A. Smith's notion of "cultural liturgy": the Marvel Cinematic Universe provides a new pantheon, the cinema the altar, the film schedule the church calendar. The weeks that a movie is screened is something that outclasses a revival crusade or a fiesta for a saint; millions flock to the church of Marvel, or, every now and then, to the church of DC, to participate, rather passively, with their eyes transfixed and popcorn melting on their tongues, Coke fizzling in their stomachs.

(Of course, the similarities between superhero-gods and epic-poetry-hero-gods and between the comic book film experienve and the yearly revival camp experience end at some point, but the extent of intersection is still considerable.)

I read in some Borges collection that "men need heroes". Yes, and men need gods.

fin

I finally finished The Iliad

Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing! (Book I. 1-2, Alexander Pope's translation)

Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles... (Book I.1, Robert Fagles' translation)

Just today I finally, finally! finished Homer's Iliad. I read the translation of Pope in part, and in full the translation of Robert Fagles, late Princeton professor of comp lit. Both translations are absolutely sublime: the former bearing Miltonic grandeur, the latter fluid and vivid. (Fagles' Odyssey was my first full reading of that poem, and it was just as good.) Fagles' rendering of The Iliad gives you a feeling of moving scenes, as if you were watching a grossly extended war film with 20-something intermissions, and at the end of it all your being lies battered. Fagles translates with visceral vigor and, when retelling the battles, unflinchingly conveys the horrific violence — throats are speared through, intestines spill out, brains splatter, 300 is put to shame, Pope is made to look like a prude. (By the way, Bernard Knox, in his introduction to Fagles' Iliad, says that Pope's translation is the finest ever. Fagles was totally cool with that, I'm sure.)

Homer begins with a prayer to the Muse that she sing the rage of Achilles, and the Muse willingly obliges — but not for another four, five hundred pages. Homer twiddles his thumbs a bit, taps his fingers on his tablet. ("How on earth can a man rage on forever?" Achilles asks. You tell me, Achilles. You've been sulking in your ship fifteen books now.) Finally Homer gives up waiting and goes ahead and sings something else: the puerile contempt of Agamemnon toward Achilles, the exhilarating exploits of Diomedes, "lord of the war cry", the ignominious pusillanimity of Paris, the camaraderie of the two Ajaxes, the heroics of Aeneas and of the "man-killing" Hector. Homer has very much enjoyed himself composing thousands of war-poem dactylic hexameter lines, waiting for Achilles to finally get out of his funk, when somewhere near the twentieth book, Patroclus, Achilles' best friend, overextends and gets killed near the walls of Troy, being speared by a rookie Trojan soldier and then finished off by Hector, and whatdoyouknow, after Achilles mourns Patroclus with abandon, the Muse finally gets around to singing about Achilles' fiery onset; and what brutality the son of Peleus is capable of! 

On his way to find and fight Hector, Achilles kills an enemy with the heartless words: "There — / lie there! Make your bed with the fishes now, they'll dress your wound and lick it clean of blood — / so much for your last rites! Nor will your mother / lay your corpse on a bier and mourn her darling son...." No one stands a chance against him, dead set on avenging the death of Patroclus. Hector is unwilling to face the Greek champion, but knows that it is his "to do and die" (Tennyson, not Homer), and goes despite the pleas of his father Priam ("Pity me... / ... a harrowed, broken man") and his mother Hecuba ("If he kills you now, / how can I ever mourn you on your deathbed?") Once Hector finally one-on-ones Achilles, the latter refuses Hector's request that the body of whoever dies be returned to his comrades to be buried properly. They promptly duel. Achilles stabs Hector "clean through the tender neck" and promises that "dogs and birds will rend [Hector] — blood and bone!" The other Greeks come over and have fun stabbing Hector's corpse. Achilles does further insult by attaching Hector's heels to his chariot and driving in front of Troy's walls, dragging the Trojan prince's corpse.

In the twenty-third book Achilles takes a break to hold funeral games in honor of Patroclus, and the festive air of chariot races and wrestling matches is probably the lightest that The Iliad gets. The book after, which is the final book, relates how the aged King Priam of Troy picks himself up from his mourning in filth (paralleling Achilles' mourning of Patroclus) and goes alone, without arms, to Achilles' tent to redeem Hector's corpse. This poignant scene elicits a terrible pathos from the reader. Priam implores: "[R]emember your own father! I deserve more pity ... / I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before — / I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son." (Fagles)

Or, as Pope much better renders:

"Think of thy father, and this face behold!
See him in me, as helpless and as old!
Though not so wretched: there he yields to me,
The first of men in sovereign misery!
Thus forced to kneel, thus grovelling to embrace
The scourge and ruin of my realm and race;
Suppliant my children's murderer to implore,
And kiss those hands yet reeking with their gore!" 

Priam's plea ignites the first spark of pity for a Trojan in Achilles, who is is "touch'd with the dear remembrance of his sire" (Pope) who Achilles knows will never see him alive again. Achilles and Priam both pour forth tears of mourning for their loved ones:

Now each by turns indulged the gush of woe;
And now the mingled tides together flow: ...
But great Achilles different passions rend,
And now his sire he mourns, and now his friend.
The infectious softness through the heroes ran;
One universal solemn shower began;
They bore as heroes, but they felt as man. (Pope)

Achilles, uncharacteristically magnanimous, promises to refrain from attacking during the burial process of Hector. Priam returns to Troy, to the wails of the Trojan women. Anromache, Hector's widow, leads "their songs of sorrow, / cradling the head of Hector, man-killing Hector / gently in her arms: 'O my husband ... / ... You leave me a widow, / ... and the boy only a baby, / the son we bore together, you and I so doomed.'" Cradling the head of man-killing Hector gently in her arms. Wow.

The poem that begins "sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles" ends: "And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses" (Fagles). ("Such honors Ilion to her hero paid, / And peaceful slept the mighty Hector's shade." [Pope])

My favorite character by far is Hector. I quite frankly think he is really the de facto protagonist of The Iliad. He carries with him a dignity and humanity alien to Achilles, and is a more interesting character in general; but that's just my poor and biased judgment. 

Many scenes involving Hector are shot through with pathos. The first scene of The Iliad to move me nearly to tears was Hector's final conversation with Andromache. Hector has just returned for a short while to the city in order to tell the Trojans to make sacrifices to Athena in hope that she will be more favorable to them (I believe; I may be recalling wrongly) . In response to Helen's invitation to rest from the fighting he refuses, explaining:

"For I must go home to see my people first,to visit my own dear wife and my baby son.Who knows if I will ever come back to them again?"

Andromache has rushed beforehand to the city walls, where her battle-weary husband meets her. She, "pressing close behind him and weeping freely now, / clung to his hand urge[s] him, call[s] him:

'Reckless one,
my Hector  — your own fiery courage will destroy you!Have you no pity for him, our helpless son? Or me,and the destiny that weighs me down, your widow,now so soon? ...... What ... warmth, what comfort's left for me,once you have met your doom? Nothing but torment!'"

She pleads:

"Pity me, please! Take your stand on the rampart here,
before you orphan your son and make your wife a widow."

Hector answers that he wouldn't be able to bear the shame of shying away from battle (as his brother Paris does for quite some time); and he speaks in a tone very tender yet very forceful of a time in a future that would be made possible if he didn't rejoin the war:

"And a man may say, who sees you streaming tears,
'There is the wife of Hector, the bravest fighter
they could field, those stallion-breaking Trojans,
long ago when the men fought for Troy.' So he will say
and the fresh grief will swell your heart once more,
widowed, robbed of the one man strong enough
to fight off your day of slavery.
   No, no,
let the earth come piling over my my dead body
before I hear your cries, I hear you dragged away!"

Hector removes, in a surprising, fatherly gesture, his frightful bronze helmet (the piece of armor he is most famous for) that terrifies his son, takes him, and kisses him, and prays to the gods:

"... Grant this boy, my son,
may be like me, first in glory among the Trojans,
strong and brave like me, and rule all Troy in power
and one day let them say, 'He is a better man than his father!'"

It is painful for the reader, who knows that this hope will never come to fruition.

Nestor, the aged Greek tactician, is another noteworthy character for me. He only rides in his chariot in the field, kept relatively safe from combat, but what he lacks in strength to participate in combat he makes up for in his smarts. Nevertheless, he dearly wishes to have youthful vigor again, and often recounts his deeds done in the past. In a dialogue with Agamemnon he says, with a shake of his "hoary locks":

"Well might I wish, could mortal wish renew
That strength which once in boiling youth I knew; ...
But heaven its gifts not all at once bestows,These years with wisdom crowns, with action those...." (Pope, italics mine)

I was taken aback by the staggering amount of pathos in The Iliad, which is a war poem par excellence. But perhaps that is what makes the war poem great: it infuses it with humanness.

"... good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night."

I sort of graduated today.

I look forward
with heavy melancholy:

No more Papa reading devotions
to the accompaniment of aircon din.

No more Mama, arms all up bewailing —
because I ironed badly — that I'm not prepared.

No more
siblings.

No more cat to greet me
meow at the foot of the stairs.

No more puppy to greet me
panting puppy glee.

No more quiet afternoons spent
reading in the torpid upstairs.
_____
I sort of graduated today.

The end of a decade-long walk
   on a now burnt beach.
The end of a quiet, violent conversation
   which seemed impossible to reach.

The end, the bittersweet close
   of a play you love, you live in, you die in:
   of a book you breathe, you cry, you sieze —
   the black, iron letters peeling your shy skin.

"You will understand, won't you?"
The little gray seacraft bobs away from the dock.
She stands at the edge, looks out from the cliff,
a subdued Dido, weeping on the rock,

crying out no name,
only crying inward
an inarticulate, trembling cry,
while another cry is heard

wafted by the winds
from the vanishing
little seacraft
till now wavering.
_____
I sort of graduated today.

A weight of sadness touched
my head, pressed down, and settled
in my heart which sputtered:

"O Lord
.
.
Lord
.
.
Lord
.
.
O Lord, please don't forsake me,
a child scared out of his wits.
.
.
Never let me go, Lord."
_____
I graduated. Thank you, dear mother;
Dear father, thank you. Thank you
for being willing to let me go.
I graduated — no, God graduated me:

the end, thank you so much, the end.

Because I cannot swim

Went island hopping on Maundy Thursday.

Look out onto the liquid sapphire breaking
Against the seacraft's whited hull,
    the marble swells
Glinting in benign tropical sun,
Scintillating, spurred to dance by unheard song.

Look out into the vast, consuming blue,
Azure hills by unseen children rolled.
Go, get up; see the tallowy tides —
And wonder: are you invited or repelled?

Decide:
To behold only —
Or to taste and
Bleed?

In the pendulous silence, the quiet thrill
Of that moment on starboard edge,
You see and think everything, and likewise
See and think nothing, peering into the void.

You breathe, forgetting all rationality — jump!
You drown in a microcosm
Of almost savage wonder, thinking nothing
Of thinking, for everything's paused.

Then as the impalpable tide above you rolls,
Waves of panic wax
And pound your plywood hull;
A fiery terror siezes your paper heart.

You scramble and flail to climb up and feel
Familiar footing — and the thought crushes you:
That you cannot calm yourself in the sea,
That you cannot control the current,

That you cannot swim or see underwater,
For fear of stinging salt and of a vice
And of a death delivered by an unfeeling element;
That you are a little child, lost.

You have no power in yourself
To rein in the waves
Nor even power to reign in your
Inner chambers, to know "Be still, my soul."

You are frail (so you think),
You are dust:
What are you doing, you wonder,
In water?

Good Friday communion

Meager white cloth on modest wood.
Two tin vessels; cross-topped covers.
Two loaves of bread; cuplets of wine.

The minister steps down, invites.
We approach the table, silent.
"The bread... body; the wine... shed blood."

Take and eat, drink — and remember
The broken, bloody body of
Our Lord: for you, battered, shattered.

clarityclarence.jpg

you can't lick the words

on the screen of a Kindle

Two unrelated quotes from awesome poets

From Milton, on books and prudent, character-ful reading:

... However, many books,
Wise men have said, are wearisome; who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior,
(And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys
And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge,
As children gathering pebbles on the shore. (Paradise Regained)

From the ever so clever Regina Spektor (nearly a full song, in fact), some technological metaphor for cold hearts:

You went into the kitchen cupboard
Got yourself another hour
And you gave half of it to me.

We sat there looking at the faces
Of the strangers in the pages
Until we knew them mathematically. 

They were in our minds
Until forever,
But we didn't mind
We didn't know better. 

So we made our own computer
Out of macaroni pieces,
And it did our thinking
While we lived our lives. 

It counted up our feelings
And divided them up even
And it called our calculation perfect love.

... 

So we made the hard decision,
And we each made an incision
Past our muscles and our bones,
Saw our hearts were little stones. 

Pulled them out, they weren't beating
And we weren't even bleeding
As we lay them on our granite counter top. 

We beat 'em up against each other.
We beat 'em up against each other.
We struck 'em hard against each other.
We struck 'em so hard, so hard 'til they sparked. 

Hey, this fire, this fire
I'm burning us up.

.... ("The Calculation")

"Would you write on a desert island?"

There has been a nagging recollection, about writing on a desert island with nobody to write to, that has till now eluded me. I knew that I would find some passage of that sort in a book I had read, but I couldn't put my finger down on which book. I did a quick Google search but found nothing. Pulling out David Foster Wallace didn't help; the essays he wrote were sublime but for the most part irrelevant.

Just this morning I finally remembered: Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea.

This excerpt contains a dialogue between the protagonist and narrator, Roquentin, and a "Self-Taught Man", whom I would not characterize as Roquentin's friend, no matter how much the Self-Taught Man might think himself to be so. The subject is brought up on account of Roquentin's writing on a historical figure. The excerpt begins with the Self-Taught Man — who has a penchant for piercing queries (although perhaps with the Self-Taught Man oblivious of his own irritating aquiline insight), astute and incisive enough to draw many a candid "ouch" or an "oof" from me — asking whether Roquentin shares his own sentiments about Socialism:

"Don't you feel as I do, Monsieur?"

"Gracious...."

Under his troubled, somewhat spiteful glance, I regret disappointing him for a second. But he continues amiably:

"I know: you have your research, your books, you serve the same cause [humanistic Socialism] in your own way."

My books, my research: the imbecile. He couldn't have made a worse howler.

"That's not why I'm writing."

At that instant the face of the Self-Taught Man is transformed: as if he had scented the enemy. I had never seen that expression on his face before. Something has died between us.

Feigning surprise, he asks:

"But ... if I'm not being indiscreet, why do you write, Monsieur?"

"I don't know: just to write."

He smiles, he thinks he has put me out:

"Would you write on a desert island? Doesn't one always write to be read?"

He gave this sentence his usual interrogative turn. In reality, he is affirming. His veneer of gentleness and timidity has peeled off; I don't recognize him any more. His features assume an air of heavy obstinacy; a wall of sufficiency. I still haven't got over my astonishment when I hear him say:

"If someone tells me: I write for a certain social class, for a group of friends. Good luck to them. Perhaps you write for posterity.... But, Monsieur, in spite of yourself, you write for someone."

 He waits for an answer. When it doesn't come, he smiles feebly.

"Perhaps you are a misanthrope?" 

Roquentin gives up the discussion after two paragraphs of internal monologue: "I am not a humanist, that's all there is to it."

This passage, or the memory of it, has been hounding me for about a month now, because I've often wondered whether I myself write for an audience, to try to better other people in any way, or merely for myself — and David Foster Wallace has some well-informed things to say on the subject, delivering with singular robustness and oomph.

However, having reread the passages that follow the excerpt above, I found that that question only uncovers a more pressing issue in Roquentin's life; and that issue is personally convicting, as Sartre deals with it using the naive Self-Taught Man's characteristically dazing verbal blows and the vulnerated Roquentin's insipid responses and acrimonious, exasperated thoughts. I am not prepared to cover it in writing yet.