Small Consolation from A.E. Housman

In memory of Ryan Shay.
"To An Athlete Dying Young"

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields were glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.

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It's Been a While But We're Back in Style...

We apologize for our extended absence. We’ve been very busy over the past few months: some of us have expanded their family and taken the LSATs, while others have relocated to a secure location deep in the mountains. All the while we’ve been hoarding material and subject matter to post. For example…

The Spring/Summer issue of Arion has a fairly surprising piece by Camille Paglia arguing for the central role of religion in a revitalization of arts in America. Paglia reminds us that she’s “a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian Democrat”; nonetheless, she contends that “a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion.” In either a totally deft or tone-deaf rhetorical move, she targets both the left and the right for the divorce of art and faith:

For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people's faiths is boring and adolescent….To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture. Every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the arts.

Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school—which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy. Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art—whether in marriage or divorce—can reinvigorate American culture.

Though we here at Mahwah obviously agree with her general argument, we find it a bit condescending. Her tone is a sort of pat on the back, reassuring religion that even though it’s wrong, it sure is a nice, “complex symbol system,” and darn it, people like it! That said, we much prefer this approach to the alternative offered by evangelical atheists like Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, et al.

What makes it hardest to stand by her argument is this embarrassing mischaracterization of world music:

In popular music, the spasmodic undulations and ecstatic cries of camp-meeting worshippers were borrowed by performers like Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and the late, great James Brown, whose career began in gospel and who became the “godfather of soul” as well as of funk, reggae, and rap. Gospel music, passionate and histrionic, with its electrifying dynamics, is America 's grand opera. The omnipresence of gospel here partly explains the weakness of rock music composed in other nations—except where there has been direct influence by American rhythm and blues, as in Great Britain and Australia.

Umm, Ms. Paglia—haven’t you ever heard of Sweden? You know, the nation that gave us ABBA? The Cardigans? Roxette? Ace of Base? The Hives? Scorpions?

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A Prediction

Posting will be even more sparse than usual for the rest of the month and probably into early August. We're moving and we're traveling. Bide your time by reading Andre Dubus's "Miranda Over the Valley," about which we plan on writing when we get the chance.

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Richard Wilbur's Religious Poetry

We haven’t been posting lately because sinister forces, scandalized by The Crytogram of Caravaggio, have silenced us. But we have escaped their deadly grasp…for now.

In other news...the other day I was flipping through the Library of America’s American Religious Poems, an anthology whose title is a bit misleading, since many of the poems are actually anti-religious...sort of like including Hitchens in a collection of great religious thinkers. But there are good poems in it, including several by Richard Wilbur. Here’s “The Proof”:

Shall I love God for causing me to be?
I was mere utterance; shall these words love me?

Yet when I caused his work to jar and stammer,
And one free subject loosened all his grammar,

I love him that he did not in a rage
Once and forever rule me off the page,

But, thinking I might come to please him yet,
Crossed out delete and wrote his patient stet.

In the fantastic collection of interviews Fourteen on Form, Dr. Baer talks to Wilbur about the role of religion in his poetry. Baer notes that much of Wilbur’s work--including “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” (one of my all-time favorites—Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry!), “A Christmas Hymn,” “Matthew VIII, 28ff.,” “Peter,” “A Wedding Toast”--has “the sense of a part of the world that goes beyond just the material.” Wilbur responds:

Probably I can, in a loose way, be classified as a religious poet. It’s harder nowadays to write poetry that lies comfortably and coherently within the boundaries of some particular faith, than it used to be. There is nothing limited about George Herbert’s poetry, but it is poetry which cheerfully accepts the whole vocabulary and vision of Anglicanism. I’m an Anglican, I guess, but because I’m three centuries after George Herbert, I don’t write in an Anglican vocabulary, or always with a governed vision that specifically belongs to any one faith. (13-14).

That remark says so much about how religion has faded in the public sphere and the creative mind. His reference to “the vocabulary” of a religion is particularly interesting to me, because it suggests that we just don’t know how to talk or write about what we believe, that we’ve lost a shared way of communicating about these things. That said, Wilbur manages pretty well for somebody without a “whole vocabulary.”

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The Cryptogram of Caravaggio

Since Wednesday's post, we've heard from many readers who've been eager and anxious to view the manuscript fragment retrieved by Randal Bufton and sent to us. We want to warn you once again, though, that its contents are very controversial, and are liable to offend, provoke, and otherwise shock many of your most deeply-held beliefs. But we believe that beliefs are most believable when their very believability face unbelievable doubts.

A final prefatory note before the feature presentation. Mr. Bufton notes that in the manuscript's margins, the un-known author has written: "Insert this during scene in museum, while Lincoln and Marie are in London." That we do not have the rest of the novel, or even the scene, is a great loss that calls to mind the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

And so, if you are ready to forget all you know...and all you think you know, click below.


From The Cryptogram of Caravaggio:

For several moments they stared at the painting before them. Finally, Lincoln’s voice broke the silence.

“Truly remarkable,” he said.

“What is it?” Marie’s voice rose as if she were excited to know the answer to her question.

“I don’t know how I’ve overlooked this.”

She asked again, “What?” Her anticipation came through in the way she spoke.

“What I’ve observed is quite interesting!”

“I can’t wait to find out what it is.” If you could have heard her, you would be able to tell that she was very excited, and you would have believed it when she said, “I can’t wait to find out what it is.”

Lincoln directed her attention to the center of the canvas, on which Caravaggio had placed variously hued paints in a deliberate manner.

“Do you notice anything peculiar about the hands of Jesus?”

Marie observed the painting more carefully. Though this was her first time seeing this painting, it looked like many others by Caravaggio. She’d adored Caravaggio’s work since she was a little girl, when her grandfather, who—she would be shocked to learn much later—was also the father of one of her own parents, used to show her around the art museums of the remarkable European city in which she grew up. Even as a child she knew that Caravaggio had literally given birth to paintings that, metaphorically-speaking, amazed people to this day. You’d recognize many of these works, even if his name doesn’t ring a bell. He’s sort of like that band Three Dog Night—when you mention their name, everyone’s like, “who’s that?” Then you say, “You know,” and start singing “Jeremiah was a bullfrog!” and “Celebrate! Celebrate! Dance to the music!” and “Momma told me not to come!” and “American Woman!” Then the person’ll say, “oh yeah, I know them! They’re awesome!” But you’d be wrong, because the Guess Who does “American Woman,” but they’re another band like that. In fact, the Guess Who’s a better example, because Three Dog Night didn’t write their own songs, but the Guess Who did, and Caravaggio painted his own stuff.

He was very successful in his own lifetime, but one day he killed a person and had to flee Rome. He spent the rest of his life on the lamb, which was a strange form of transportation even then. Still, the Italian continued to paint nice things until he died suddenly of very mysterious causes, joining Keats, Dickinson, and Cobain in the pantheon of visionaries too soon lost to this world.

She’d memorized every detail of the painter’s greatest works. So she was delighted to be staring at an un-discovered masterpiece, but frustrated that she was unable to answer Lincoln’s quiz. No matter how much she squinted her eyes or blurred her vision, no image hidden in the background gradually appeared in the forefront. It remained a typical Caravaggio, with a single light source, dramatic action, and an event that was probably based on some book, maybe a play by Shakespeare or Chaucer or someone like that.

“I can’t see what you’re talking about,” she articulated. Her voice was now sad, almost unhappy. “Everything looks fine to me.”

Though they’d only spent a few hours together, Marie had the impression that she knew Professor Rupert Lincoln fairly well. As soon as she met him, Marie sensed that Lincoln was about six feet tall and had an athletic build, rare among scholars of his stature. She could tell that he liked to wear a sports coat, cotton Dockers, a checkered dress shirt and a solid tie. With his charming demeanor and full head of hair, peppered with salt-colored gray streaks, she knew he had no trouble attracting women. As a professor, he was popular among his students; as a scholar, revered by his peers; as an author of popular-yet-respected art history books suitable for the classroom and coffee-table, successful.

Perhaps she knew him so well because their hours together were exceptionally exciting: first the discovery of the body in that strange place; then the phone call at an odd hour; a couple of people whom neither of them trusted very much; that one person who she trusted but he didn’t, and whom she shouldn’t have and he was right not to; the woman he trusted and she didn’t, and once again he was right because it turns out that woman was only speaking Portuguese, not in anagrams as Marie had suspected.

“Are you sure?” he asked. This was in response to her statement that everything about the painting looked just fine; she’d said that just a moment ago; it only feels like longer.

“Yes. It looks just like any other Caravaggio. What do you see?”

“Let me put it this way: I’d love to give you a hand.” Then he pointed at the canvas, directly at the hands of Jesus.

“They’re closed,” she said. “So what?”

“Remember the painting we saw in Rome early this morning?”

Of course she did. Its image was seared in her consciousness like a strong memory. “He was pointing right at St. Matthew,” she said.

“Yes, he was. The position of his hand gesture was based on Michelangelo’s painting of the creation on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. There both God and Adam are gesturing that way.”

“Then it’s quite appropriate,” she ventured, “that Caravaggio would have Jesus pose that way, since the Sistine Chapel is such a masterpiece.”

Lincoln shook his head ruefully. “If only it were that simple, Marie. If only.” She could tell by the way that his second sentence repeated a key phrase from his first that this regret was sincere.

“This is not a matter of mere art history,” he continued. “No, I’m afraid it’s much more than that. This painting may change everything we ever thought about Caravaggio, and even Christianity.”

He paused for several seconds.

“My interest is piqued,” she said.

“As you probably know, the world used to be a crazy place, thanks in no small part to the invention of the printing press in 1492 or thereabouts. Before the printing press, very few people could read. Those few who could read were easy to identify even when they weren’t reading. You see, people who read a lot become reliant on visual gestures for communication. Hearing is no longer enough; they must also see the information they want. Because before the printing press very few people could read, hand gestures were a mark of refinement and education. Just as you can now identify a person’s personality by the car they drive and the clothes they wear, before the printing press the extent of their gesturing was a fair barometer of wealth.”

“Only an idiot would not find this fascinating,” said Marie.

“I know. But with the advent of the printing press, more people read; as more people read, more people gestured. Soon it was like a popular dance move: everyone was doing it. Chubby Checkers would’ve written a song about it. So by the time Caravaggio was born, gestures were not an upper-class symbol, but a lower-class one. Consequently, to represent their distance from the masses, the rich began to gesture less.”

“I think I can see why representations of Christ would be so significant. But please explain to make sure I’m right.”

“Of course. It was important for painters of the time be as theologically accurate as possible, so when gesturing became a mark of poverty, the Vatican insisted that paintings represent Jesus as a gesturer, like the poor people he served. That explains Caravaggio’s painting of St. Matthew. And do you remember the one we saw in the millionaire’s mansion in Paris this morning?”

“Yes! He was raising Lazarus from the dead with the same gesture.”

“Precisely. And the postcards in the airport in Egypt this afternoon?”

“He was blessing the bread with the same gesture. He does it again in the later version of the painting we saw in Beijing just before dinner!”

“Yes. And in some of the works, saints make the same gesture. Like the one of St. Thomas hanging in Reykjavik we saw during desert.”

“And the one of St. Andrew in Cairo.”

“Precisely.”

“And when St. Peter denies Jesus, he makes the opposite gesture—he points inward!”

“Let’s not get carried away. The point is that Caravaggio’s paintings conveyed the party line of the Vatican. And thanks to his paintings, Christians continue to believe that Jesus was a poor man; and as a result, Italians still gesture emphatically when they speak!”
But around this time arose an underground, heretical sect called the Society Not of Belief. Basing their opinions on ancient scrolls and apocryphal texts, the SNOBs argued that Jesus was, in fact, rich. Not only had Mary’s parents been loaded, but Joseph’s carpentry business didn’t do so bad for itself. When Joseph died, Jesus inherited the family fortune.”

“So that’s why the Bible doesn’t even mention that Joseph died!”

“Precisely. With that money, Jesus retired early and traveled the Middle East before getting mugged at Calvary.”

The truth dawned on Marie, casting its light on her mind the way the sun casts light on the horizon at the end of the day. “So if the Society of Not Belief is right, then much of the Bible is just wrong, right? All that talk about the poor inheriting the earth?”

“Rubbish.”

“That last shall be first, the first shall be last?”

“Not so much.”

“What about it being easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than the rich to enter Heaven?”

“That one just doesn’t even make any sense!”

“And you’re suggesting that this painting means that…”

Suddenly a door slammed upstairs. They stayed as still as possible. They could recognize the heavy footsteps of the murderous nun with the acne problem.

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The Cryptogram of Caravaggio: Preface

Several years ago, The Da Vinci Code radically altered the way we think about the Catholic Church and how we use the English language ("Monet literally gave birth to the Impressionist Movement"). Now a mysterious new novel promises to pick up where Dan Brown left off, and that's bad news for Catholics everywhere.

A reader named Randal Bufton, whom I don't know but who is apparently pretty smart because he likes this site, sent us a very strange, very troubling manuscript. After reading the document myself, I've decided that it's so important it merits a double-post. Today I'll post his explanation for how he got hold of what he sent us. Later this week I'll post the amazing text itself.

Without further ado, here's Mr. Bufton's preface:

"I was at my neighborhood franchise of a national chain of coffee shops last week, reading the Times and listening to the incredible new Paul McCartney album (fyi, it really is as good as his Wings material!) when I was distracted by the commotion at a nearby table. Two men were having a quite heated exchange. One of them looked like a student, the other was a priest (I'm basing this on his attire -- he was wearing a habit or whatever you call it) in his middle ages. The priest was saying, 'You don't realize what this means! This could do irreparable harm to everything we know!' The student was shaking his head vigorously and waving sheets of paper, saying, 'No Father, I DO know what it means, which is why I'm writing it -- the truth must be told!'

"At that, the priest reached over the table to grab the manuscript, but was only able to seize a few pages before his adversary drew them out of reach and ran out the door. Rather than giving chase, the priest cursed in frustration, then crumpled the papers and stuffed them into his half-finished grande latte. He sat there and shook his for a few minutes before leaving, and once he was gone a mob of patrons and baristas rushed to his table to see the document that had so upset him. I managed to get there first to retrieve the cup and its controversial contents.

"After shaking the excess coffee and cream from the sheets, I saw no no name attached to the document, nor was there a date. It was handwritten in black ink on looseleaf paper, apparently college-ruled.

"Though I'm not Catholic, I found the fragments quite shocking, and it indeed did upend all that I knew about Christianity. Knowing that yours is one of the most [important] and [interesting] websites around, I thought you'd be interested in reading and posting this."

Indeed we are. Stay tuned for the manuscript itself...

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Douthat on Hitchens

Earlier this month I complained about Christopher Hitchens, particularly how his anti-religious bigotry affects his abilities as a book critic. Ross Douthat (who, like Hitchens, often contributes to The Atlantic) has a great review of Hitchens’s God Is Not Great in the latest Claremont Review of Books. The first paragraph is classic:

Every talented writer is entitled to be a bore on at least one subject, but where religion is concerned Christopher Hitchens abuses the privilege. For years now, he has supplemented his prolific punditry and criticism with a stream of anti-theistic diatribes, and now these rivers of vituperation have pooled into a single volume, an omnium gatherum of God-bashing (although he insists on using the lower-case “g” throughout) that exceeds most of its predecessors in the felicity of its prose, but matches them in the tedium of its arguments. “I have been writing this book all my life,” Hitchens declares in the conclusion to God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, “and intend to keep on writing it.” One hopes that someone near and dear to him will have the courage to firmly suggest that he stop.

Here’s the whole thing.

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Jersey Mark Fights Back!

At long last, here is Mark's thoughtful response to my post from last week. We thought enough of it to integrate a new "Read More" feature to accommodate its loquaciousness, which explains all the technical difficulties of late, but please be warned that toward the end Mark has some critical words for everyone's favorite Peacock farmer. Viewer discretion is advised.

"Well, any position which puts me in disagreement with both C. Seamus and Jacques Maritain is a position which requires defending, so let me see what I can do.

The first argument I would offer in response to C. Seamus is the historical argument, to which I have already alluded; the "fragmented/irregular/anti-narrative forms" he mentions were the creation of the modernists (there are some precursors to these things before the modern era - Tristram Shandy comes to mind - but their establishment as a style or movement is unique to modern times). They were the creation of men who generally did not believe in God and who generally subscribed to various ideologies either explicitly (Nietzsche, Freud) or implicitly (Sartre) hostile to Catholicism. These "anti-forms" they invented were, so I would argue, created in order to be at once the vehicle and the formal metaphor of those ideological convictions. The evidence for this assertion can be blatant - as with the Freudianism of Joyce's Ulysses - or rather more subtle, as in the concept of freedom implied in "free verse," which is far more akin to the non-essentialist freedom of later existentialism than the freedom of Catholic tradition, which is, as F.P. Seamus explained it somewhere, "the ability to do what we ought to do."

Yes, serious Christian writers did subsequently adopt the modern styles (Eliot probably being the most notable example), but this does not change the fact that these styles originated with authors whose convictions were decidedly inimical to the traditional beliefs of the Catholic, and originated as expressions of those convictions; of those Christian authors who work or have worked in modernist styles I can only say, without questioning their sincerity at all, I think that they are working according to an aesthetic standard which belies the substance of their belief. But in order to offer proof of this, I need to move on to a more substantial line of argument.

In answer to the question: "should we as Catholic artists write about the world as it should be, or as it is?" - I answer, with C. Seamus and Flannery O'Connor, "as it is." I am all for reality, but let me say a few things about reality, and about how art represents reality. Let me begin with that venerable critical distinction between form and content. I am claiming that Catholic theology does imply certain formal norms; I am saying nothing whatsoever about that theology in relation to content. I do not think Catholicism implies any definable limits concerning what an author may represent in his work.

But the form of a poem does not represent anything at all; it delights. Form is there to delight, and it does so by appealing to our common instinct towards "unity and harmony" which F.P. Seamus called to our attention. Horace's old dictum was that a poem should "teach and delight," but I think it would be more accurate to say that a good poem teaches because it delights; when we take pleasure in the harmony of a well-constructed poem, we learn through reflection that a love of harmony is one of the fundamental parts of our nature. It is a lesson that a formless poem quite simply cannot teach, or at least, cannot teach very well.

Form delights; form also reveals. What it reveals is a shared understanding of human nature between poet and audience, an understanding that the instinct towards unity and harmony is at the center of what it means to be human. In a sense, the adoption of formal techniques is an assertion by the poet of his belief in the integrity of the human mind. It is a huge mistake - and one made with great regularity by the opponents of formalism - to claim that formal poetry cannot represent the most profound depths of evil and suffering; to my mind, the most terrifying literary depiction of the nothingness of human existence is Oedipus Rex, Sophocles' elaborately formal tragedy. The random nature of fortune, the inextricable corruption of our souls, and the unmitigated brutality of violence, can, and have, all been represented quite powerfully by formal poetry. But, even when these elements are present in a formal work, there is something else present as well, and that is (simplistically redundant as it may sound) form, which becomes an assertion of man's rational soul over the chaos of irrational nature, and the melody of spiritual beauty running in harmonious counterpoint to the harsh, grating ugliness of circumstance.

The form of a poem is a kind of protest of man's better self against the deficiencies of nature, and that protest is at the heart of Catholicism. A quote from Pascal might be helpful here; he wrote, "Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed...even though the universe should crush him, man would still be nobler than what kills him since he knows that he dies...all our dignity consists then in thought." I would say the form of a formal poem is quite simply the manifestation of that dignifying thought, which does not prevent or even mitigate, but which still mysteriously conquers, the evil of the world; I would contend that to practice the art of formal verse is to believe - consciously or unconsciously - that man is a creature torn apart by irreconcilable desires, enslaved by his weakness, irretrievably perplexed by his ignorance of the final things, and subject forever to "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," yet with an inalienable sense of truth and beauty abiding in his spirit in the midst of its corruptions and its sorrows. This appears to me to be the true conception of man, and it also appears to me to be the Catholic conception of man. To write with this conception in mind seems to me to be very much writing about the world "as it is."

What of the practitioner of those "fragmented/irregular/anti-narrative forms?" What is he asserting about the nature of man? Here I would suggest that neither C. Seamus nor Flannery O'Connor is quite grasping the full philosophical implications of these formless forms. What is unique about these works is not their depiction of suffering or human corruption, since, as I mentioned, formal poetry is just as capable of depicting these things; what is unique about formless poetry is the lack of that assertion of man's rational integrity, and this implies, so I would argue, a lack of real belief in that very rational integrity. The incoherent melange of images in Eliot, for instance, seems to imply an incapacity of the mind to achieve an ordered comprehension of sensation; the plotless dramas of Beckett appear to suggest the impossibility of recognizing continuity or purpose in human life; the illogical twaddle of Ashberry very clearly manifests a lack of faith in the ability of language to convey any meaning at all. These certainly seem like "distortions that destroy", and what they destroy is that belief in the integrity of the human soul. The conception of man implied by the manner in which these writers worked is not simply that of a creature beset by irrationality and corruption, but a creature wholly overcome by these things; a creature not merely foolish and perverse, but one incapable of anything but folly and perversion; a creature without reason or language, entirely impotent in the face of the world's arbitrary cruelty, and his own persistent sinfulness - in contradiction to Pascal, a weak and entirely unthinking reed.

Now, whatever else we want to say about such a conception of man, it is certainly not true that it is the conception of man contained in the Catholic doctrine of original sin, as we come to understand that doctrine either from its exposition in theology, or from its effects in our everyday lives (if something like this conception of human nature can be found anywhere in theology, it is in the thought of Luther). The modern styles manifest the modern philosophical conception of man as fundamentally irrational and brutish; whatever else it means to be a creature of a fallen nature, surely it does not mean this. No, the true conviction revealed by the formlessness of modern poetry is not original sin, but nihilistic despair. C. Seamus talked about calling our attention to the instinct for unity and harmony by representing their absence, and this is fair up to a point, but when unity and harmony are completely absent from a work of art - as is in fact the case with so much modern poetry - the effect is nihilistic.

Well, I don't believe in nihilism. I do not think that human nature, however fallen, is genuinely devoid of language and reason and the enduring desire for beauty. To write in a manner that implies such a conception of man appears to me to be writing about the world neither as it is, nor as it should be, but quite simply as it is not.

Let me conclude by adding - though I know this is an admission bordering on the heretical from a member of the Southwell - that though I enjoy some of O'Connor's stories, I would not consider her work to stand in the ranks of the very best literature, and her explanation of the principles which informed the composition of her stories, while helpful in understanding those stories, does not to my mind offer the best guidance to Catholic writers intent on creating the very best literature."

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Solution

The technical difficulty appears to have been solved...

...by Hansonius.

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Technical Difficulties

We're having some problems today, which is why the site looks a little funky. I'll be posting Mark's response to my post as soon as we get things taken care of.

UPDATE: The technical difficulties have been resolved, but I'm still figuring out a way to post Mark's long message...Stay tuned.

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Toward a Catholic Aesthetics, Part II: The Devil's Advocate

Thanks to Mark for a very thought-provoking post. Thanks also to the mysterious F.P. Seamus for his response, though I should warn him that the administrators of this site, Hansonius and C. Seamus, disdain pseudonyms.

But to Mark’s question, “Is there a danger of stultification in attempting to limit the range of stylistic options available to a sincere Catholic?”, I have to answer yes.

For the record, I prefer formal poetry. It’s more musical, more accessible, more memorable, and generally more interesting than free verse. It demands greater craftsmanship. And I certainly agree that formal poetry has a lot to offer those who want to write in the Catholic tradition. I also agree that “the aesthetic standard which we employ as artists implies certain ethical and metaphysical commitments on our part.”

Still, I think that free verse, and (as long as we’re at it) fragmented forms of fictional narration can fit within a Catholic literary framework. The central question is: should we as Catholic artists write about the world as it should be, or as it is? Maybe one way to think of the problem is to distinguish the way we are called to live and the way we live now, between what we want to see and what we do see. These approaches probably require different forms. As Mark suggested, the fragmented nature of narratives by Faulkner and Joyce may be reflective of a fragmented personal identity. But a novelist can use that form to suggest that’s how we are without suggesting that’s how we should be.

F.P. Seamus has a point when he claims that the Catholic “seeks to bring unity, integrity, and harmony to a soul wounded by sin.” But must a work of art accomplish this by representing the presence of unity, integrity, and harmony? I think it is actually possible to bring these three things by showing their absence. No surprise that Flannery O’Connor has written some tremendous stuff about this, and she was smart enough to agree with me. In “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” she claims that “If the Catholic writer hopes to reveal mysteries, he will have to do it by describing truthfully what he sees from where he is. An affirmative vision cannot be demanded of him without limiting his freedom to observe what man has done with the things of God” (150-51). In “The Novelist and the Believer,” she describes writing Everything that Rises Must Converge, a novel whose central scene is a baptism. The problem for her was that most readers don’t consider baptism a big deal, so she had to write about it in a way that would draw their attention to its significance. She did this by distorting the novel’s form:

I have to bend the whole novel—its language, its structure, its action. I have to make the reader feel, in his bones if nowhere else, that something is going on here that counts. Distortion in this case is an instrument; exaggeration has a purpose, and the whole structure of the story of novel has been made what it is because of belief. This is not the kind of distortion that destroys; it is the kind that reveals, or should reveal. (162)

In other words, a Catholic writer can underscore the importance of his project by distorting forms and narratives. There’s more than one way to do this. She expands on this idea in “Catholic Novelists”:

[The] Catholic writer often finds himself writing in and for a world that is unprepared and unwilling to see the meaning of life as he sees it. This means frequently that he may resort to violent literary means to get his vision across to a hostile audience, and the images and actions he crease may seem distorted and exaggerated to the Catholic mind” (185).

I interpret “violent literary means” to mean not only violent action, but also violent or disturbing/unsettling forms. But the two can be connected—what we’re discussing re: form also applies to content (as is often the case). Here’s one more from Fanny O.:

When we look at the serious fiction written by Catholics in these times, we do find a striking preoccupation with what is seedy and evil and violent. The pious argument against such novels goes something like this: if you believe in the Redemption, your ultimate vision is one of hope, so in what you see you must be true to this ultimate vision; you must pass over the evil you see and look for the good because the good is there; the good is the ultimate reality.

The beginning of an answer to this is that though the good is the ultimate reality, the ultimate reality has been weakened in human beings as a result of the Fall, and it is this weakened life that we see. (178-79)

All of these arguments challenge Mark’s claim that formal poetry is the default mode for the Catholic writer. It is certainly a possible mode, and again it’s the one I prefer, but free verse specifically, and fragmented/irregular/anti-narrative forms more generally, can be the “violent literary means” or revelatory distortions that help us draw attention to “the ultimate reality [that] has been weakened in human beings.”

If the wisdom of the Hillbilly Thomist isn’t enough, maybe Jacques Maritain will convince you: “It would therefore be futile to try to find a technique, a style, a system of rules or a way of working which would be those of Christian art. The art which germinates and grows in Christian man can admit of an infinity of them.” (By the way, a little twist of irony for you…The title of Rebel Angels, the great collection of New Formalist verse, refers to a Satanic thought by Keats: “I feel confident I should have been a Rebel Angel had the opportunity been mine.”)

Mark and the mysterious F. P. Seamus, what do you say to those apples?

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Toward a Catholic Aesthetics

Our friend and fellow Mahwahvian Mark S. has contributed a thought-provoking guest post about the formal and aesthetic implications of our faith.

"Now that the second annual Southwell Conference has drawn to a close, and the Mahwahvian movement can celebrate its one year anniversary, I thought it might be time for a little reflection on "the movement" and what its all about. Specifically, I want to consider Mahwahvian poetics.

Those of us who participated in the Southwell poetry seminar will probably realize that we have become a part of two discernible "movements." The first is the larger effort of the Southwell Institute to revive the literary arts among Catholics, and the second is the effort to help revive the formal techniques of poetry which have largely gone out of use over the last several decades. The thesis I wish to propose is that these two movements are not coincidental, but rather, we value and seek to revive the tradition of formal poetry because of what we believe as Catholics.

This is an enormous topic, and I can only hint here at the shape of an effective argument, but what I am asserting is that the aesthetic standard which we employ as artists implies certain ethical and metaphysical commitments on our part. Isn't this evident throughout the works of the twentieth century? Aren't the fragmented narratives of Joyce and Faulkner a reflection of the fragmentation of personal identity which is such a consistent theme in modern philosophy? Aren't the syntactic abnormalities of an Ashberry or a Graham a reflection of post-modernist doubts concerning the efficacy of language? Isn't the vulgarity of Ginsburg's poetry a perfect analogy for the vulgarity of Ginsburg's politics? Isn't the bleakness of so much modern poetry a consequence of the bleakness of so much modern thought?

So, in what way does our Catholicism dispose us to value the tradition of formal poetry? The first and most obvious answer is simply that it is the tradition that has prevailed for millenia in the Western world, and we as Catholics are inclined to respect tradition, particularly the traditions of the West. Then there is the fact that a poet who is using formal techniques is very deliberately and sincerely pursuing a kind of beauty, and an affection for beauty has always been one of the distinctive elements of Catholicism. I would think the clarity and coherence that generally characterize formal verse are more congenial to the Catholic mind, with its respect for man's rational faculty, than modernism's tendency towards obscurantism, which is always the handmaiden of irrationality.

Most fundamentally, the appeal of meter and rhyme and stanzaic pattern stems from human nature - human biology, even - which is drawn to rhythm; a poet working with meter and rhyme is a poet respectful of human nature and willing to gratify it through his art. Well, isn't it true that as Catholics we consider human nature a wonderful, though tragically deficient, thing? And don't we understand the divine will to be in the most profound sense gratifying to our nature - as Dante wrote, in His will is our peace? So as Catholics, we are accustomed to consider spiritual growth, in some sense, a matter of satisfying human nature, and as poets working through form, we are attempting just such a thing. A Catholic and a formal poet are both people who regard human nature to be a proper and adequate vehicle of divine grace, or divine inspiration.

The argument is scant, as it must be here, but I wanted to put the thesis out there. So, fellow, Mahwavians [and anyone else who's interested! -- ed.] what do you think? Is there truly a significant relationship between our creed and the aesthetics involved in formal poetry? Or is there a danger of stultification in attempting to limit the range of stylistic options available to a sincere Catholic? I invite your thoughts on this topic. "

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Dryden on the Eucharist

Today the Church in America celebrates the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, so it seems appropriate to offer some more thoughts on the Eucharist. These come from John Dryden, who converted to Catholicism in 1686. It was at first seen as a bit of a political move, as the new king, James II, was himself a Catholic, but Dryden and his children stayed Catholic even after James was deposed. His first post-conversion poem was The Hind and the Panther (1687), a beast fable that presents a conversation between the Panther, representing the Anglican Church, and “A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged,” representing the Catholic Church. It meditates on a number of political and theological issues, including the consequences of the Church of England’s attempts to steer a middle course between Rome and the Lutherans and Calvinists.

Our Panther, though like these she changed her head,
Yet, as the mistress of a monarch’s bed,
Her front erect with majesty she bore,
The crosier wielded, and the mitre wore.
Her upper part of decent discipline
Show’d affectation of an ancient line;
And Fathers, Councils, Church, and Church’s head,
Were on her reverend phylacteries read.
But what disgraced and disavow’d the rest,
Was Calvin’s brand, that stigmatized the beast.
Thus, like a creature of a double kind,
In her own labyrinth she lives confined.
To foreign lands no sound of her is come,
Humbly content to be despised at home.
Such is her faith, where good cannot be had,
At least she leaves the refuse of the bad:
Nice in her choice of ill, though not of best,
And least deform’d, because reform’d the least.

Talk about damning with faint praise. Dryden contends that the middle-road approach of Anglicanism leads to a fuzzy theology of the Eucharist:

In doubtful points betwixt her differing friends,
Where one for substance, one for sign contends,
Their contradicting terms she strives to join;
Sign shall be substance, substance shall be sign.
A real presence all her sons allow,
And yet ’tis flat idolatry to bow,
Because the Godhead’s there they know not how.
Her novices are taught that bread and wine
Are but the visible and outward sign,
Received by those who in communion join.
But the inward grace, or the thing signified,
His blood and body, who to save us died;
The faithful this thing signified receive:
What is’t those faithful then partake or leave?
For what is signified and understood,
Is, by her own confession, flesh and blood.
Then, by the same acknowledgment, we know
They take the sign, and take the substance too.
The literal sense is hard to flesh and blood,
But nonsense never can be understood.

I love that last couplet. The poem also includes a more personal meditation on Dryden’s conversion, one that doesn’t get enough attention from Catholics anymore.

What weight of ancient witness can prevail,
If private reason hold the public scale?
But, gracious God, how well dost thou provide
For erring judgments an unerring guide!
Thy throne is darkness in the abyss of light,
A blaze of glory that forbids the sight.
O teach me to believe thee thus conceal’d,
And search no farther than thyself reveal’d;
But her alone for my director take,
Whom thou hast promised never to forsake!
My thoughtless youth was wing’d with vain desires;
My manhood, long misled by wandering fires,
Follow’d false lights; and when their glimpse was gone,
My pride struck out new sparkles of her own.
Such was I, such by nature still I am;
Be thine the glory, and be mine the shame.

Dryden then defends Catholic teaching of the Eucharist by pointing out that it is consistent with the most basic tenets of Christianity, shared by Catholics and Protestants alike. Those who believe in the Trinity and the Incarnation are in no position to posit the impossibility of transubstantiation.

Good life be now my task; my doubts are done:
What more could fright my faith, than Three in One?
Can I believe Eternal God could lie
Disguised in mortal mould and infancy?
That the great Maker of the world could die?
And after that trust my imperfect sense,
Which calls in question His Omnipotence?
Can I my reason to my faith compel,
And shall my sight, and touch, and taste rebel?
Superior faculties are set aside;
Shall their subservient organs be my guide?
Then let the moon usurp the rule of day,
And winking tapers show the sun his way;
For what my senses can themselves perceive,
I need no revelation to believe.

Dryden also defends the consistency of Catholic belief in the Eucharist with scriptural accounts of Christ’s nature:

Can they who say the Host should be descried
By sense, define a body glorified?
Impassable, and penetrating parts?
Let them declare by what mysterious arts
He shot that body through the opposing might
Of bolts and bars impervious to the light,
And stood before his train confess’d in open sight.
For since thus wondrously he pass’d, ’tis plain,
One single place two bodies did contain.
And sure the same Omnipotence as well
Can make one body in more places dwell.
Let reason, then, at her own quarry fly,
But how can finite grasp infinity?

And later, on the importance of resisting the urge to rely entirely on the senses:

Why choose we, then, like bilanders, to creep
Along the coast, and land in view to keep,
When safely we may launch into the deep?
In the same vessel which our Saviour bore,
Himself the pilot, let us leave the shore,
And with a better guide a better world explore.
Could he his Godhead veil with flesh and blood,
And not veil these again to be our food?
His grace in both is equal in extent,
The first affords us life, the second nourishment.
And if he can, why all this frantic pain
To construe what his clearest words contain,
And make a riddle what he made so plain?
To take up half on trust, and half to try,
Name it not faith, but bungling bigotry.
Both knave and fool the merchant we may call,
To pay great sums, and to compound the small:
For who would break with Heaven, and would not break for all?
Rest, then, my soul, from endless anguish freed:
Nor sciences thy guide, nor sense thy creed.
Faith is the best insurer of thy bliss;
The bank above must fail before the venture miss.

As much as I enjoy this poem, it also depresses me a bit because I can’t imagine a Catholic writer capable of defending this faith so vigorously and creatively. In some ways, that could be a good thing—maybe nobody in the English-speaking writes like this because we don't feel persecuted enough to have to justify our beliefs. But would we even be able to articulate them like this?

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If It's a Symbol, to Hell With It

Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi, though we don’t celebrate it in America until this coming Sunday. The solemnity makes me think of a letter from Flannery O’Connor that a lot of people have quoted lately, but that's so good it deserves another run. It's from a letter written in December 1955, in which she describes a dinner with the “Big Intellectual” Mary McCarthy, as well as Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and others.

Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.

This is O’Connor at her best: unpretentious, sharp, and right. Of course there are better ways to explain the Eucharist, but this is about as good as you're gonna get in ten syllables. (And give her credit for ending with two iambs!)

By the way, that anecdote comes from a longer letter that also includes an explanation of her most sacramental story, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” The last sentence is powerful even out of context: “The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees.”

For the poetically inclined, this here site has a timely hymn by Aquinas and Hopkins's translation.

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William Baer, "Adam"

The second annual St. Robert Southwell Literary Workshop has been going on this week in the scenic and musically-named hamlet of Mahwah, New Jersey. To commemorate the occasion, here's a sonnet from the Wizard of the Workshop, the Master of Meter, the Emperor of Iambs, the Dean of Dactyls, the Father of Forms, the Sultan of the Sonnet, & c., Dr. William Baer.

Adam

He'd seen this thing before, of course, but never
like this. After Eden, he'd found a swan
lying motionless and silent, forever
rotting, irretrievable, and gone.
But now, it's his boy, the brother of Cain,
the shepherd son, the kind and faithful friend
of He-Who-Is, lying quiet and slain:
finished, futureless, at the end of his end.
Once, Adam had named the names, and named his own
two sons, and named this curse, which nullifies
and terminates, as: "death." But he who'd known
the awesome power of God looked to the skies,
knowing, without a doubt, though nothing was said,
his God both could and would undo the dead.

The poem is from "Borges" and Other Sonnets, as well as this here collection.

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Hitchens on Waugh

This week's New York Times Book Review includes a review of Fathers and Sons: An Autobiography of a Family by Alexander Waugh, the grandson of Evelyn Waugh. When American editors want somebody to review Waugh or Greene, they seem to seek out Hitchens because a) he's smart b) he's English. But he's also virulently anti-religious, and particularly hostile towards Catholicism, so he's generally dismissive of central facets of Waugh's and Greene's work. He simply cannot see religion as anything other than a dangerous or foolish influence.

In a review from a few years ago [subscription needed for access to the full article], Hitchens said of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh's most explicitly Catholic novel and perhaps his greatest work: "the narrative is made ridiculous by a sentimental and credulous approach to miracles or the supernatural." He uses this shortcoming to support Orwell's claim that "One cannot really be Catholic and grown-up." Yes, it's true that at the end of Brideshead, Charles Ryder seems to have become Catholic; and the novel is certainly sentimental, a sort of elegy for English pre-war nobility. But to say that the book's approach to the supernatural is "credulous" is just nonsense. The novel's characters constantly doubt or challenge their faith, and those who don't doubt are made to look ridiculous. But Hitchens either doesn't remember this, or he associates all religious belief with gullibility.

This week's book review also shows this blind spot. Hitchens presents this passage that Arthur Waugh wrote his son Alec:

“The nails that pierce the Son’s hands pierce the Father’s also: the thorn-crowned head of the Dying Savior is seen to be lying upon the Father’s bosom. And it is always so with you and me. Every wound that touches you pierces my own soul also: every thorn in your crown of life tears my tired head as well. Be sure of that, as you are also sure (for you must be that) that when your hour of redemption comes, the first to share it will be the father who has never doubted or given way. ... With deep love and unfaltering trust, still and always, your ever devoted and hopeful Daddy.”

Somebody with any level of sympathy for Christian theology or symbolism would be moved at least a little by this admittedly dramatic expression of love. Not Hitchens: "One notes here not just the absence of stiff upper lip but something verging on the creepy: it is almost as if the man believes himself to be his boy’s mother." Eh?

I don't doubt that Hitchens is very, very smart. But his aversion to religion often damages his interpretations and reviews. Yes, religious belief can regress into superstition and credulity -- but the excessive skepticism and prejudice of Hitchens's atheism is just as foolish and limiting.

(But at least Hitchens uses the term "Wavian," which is almost as good as "Mahwahvian." And the similarity is a happy one, because most Mahwahvians are Wavians.)

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More Powers to Ya!

John Derbyshire also wrote a thoughtful essay about Powers's work in 1999. (The archived link doesn't load, so I'm sending you to a cache. Be patient, it takes a while to load.) It's very different from Bottum's because Derbyshire is English and not a Catholic, but he still appreciated Powers. This passage complicates Bottum's reasoning about Powers being too clerical for the modern reader:

Peter De Vries thought that Powers was not really a religious writer at all. I don’t agree, but I see what he means. There are no angels in Powers, no miracles, no sudden shafts of light breaking through overcast skies. The supernatural, in fact, is entirely absent. The world of Powers's books is the world we all inhabit: the world of bills and assessments, of irksome duties, comforting habits and tiny pleasures, of tiresome colleagues we have no choice but to get along with, of dead-wood subordinates who must be found something to do and cloth-eared superiors making all the wrong decisions. The work of these priests resembles very closely, in fact, the work most middle-class Americans do in corporate offices or public bureaucracies.

Sounds about right to me.

The novel for which Powers won the National Book Award, Morte D'Urban, is very funny, unlike "Lions, Harts, Leaping Does," but in its final chapters it too becomes a moving treatment of mortality, perhaps a more moving one because it comes so suddenly. Father Urban is another great character because he's very likeable, but his single-minded desire to raise funds is troubling, and unlike Didymus he doesn't seem to have much of a spiritual side. The novel suggets that Powers was really troubled by the place of money in the Church and priestly life, a problem to which he returns in his final novel, Wheat The Springeth Green. (Note to self: start a literate Catholic rock band, the Smiths meet Jars of Clay meet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Name it Wheat That Springeth Graham Greene. Speaking of Christian rock, here's a link in case the allusion in this post's title is too obscure, which I really hope it is.)

Some other bits from Derbyshire's essay that make me appreciate Powers even more:

If he is ever canonized, Powers could serve as the patron saint of slow writers. Katherine [his daughter] said, “He had powers of procrastination that went far beyond the merely amateur.”...Powers took infinite pains with his work. He deplored writing that was careless or inflated, or even just verbose. He did not like the great English novelists of the last century because he thought they used too many words to say what they wanted to say. God, said Powers, has demanding standards. “We couldn’t have art unless there were some higher authority that says, ‘Yes, that’s right’. God gave us that mentality, that kind of judgment. I don’t think God likes crap in art.”

I can't help but think of Chris Ofili when I read that last line.

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Some Thoughts on J.F. Powers

Most discussions of great Catholic fiction writers of the 20^th century revolve around Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, yadda yadda yadda. They really should also include J.F. Powers. In the 50s and 60s especially, he was the man, winning the National Book Award in 1962. (The winner the previous year was The Moviegoer by Percy the Papist.) Though he’s still celebrated by fiction writers (and not just Catholic ones), few others read him. Joseph Bottum (who praised him at last year’s Mahwah workshop) offers this reason for J.F. Powers’s lack of staying power:

His specialty was scenes of clerical life, especially at mid-century, especially in the bleak, wind-swept parish houses of the Midwest. And the major reason for the fading of J.F. Powers is the decline of his topic once the reforms of Vatican II took hold—or rather, once what was perceived in America to be the “spirit” of Vatican II had destroyed the setting of his fiction. Powers had a uniquely talented eye for the little negotiations, compromises, and squabbles of bachelors living together—but such things cannot in themselves carry a story. What gave his fiction its force was the contrast between those little foibles of priestly life and the constantly looming reality of what a priest actually does in the sacraments.

That seems as good an explanation as any. In the piece (and at last year’s workshop) Bottum praised the story “Lions, Harts, Leaping Does.” He’s right to say that it “can stand beside anything by Flannery O’Connor,” and that it is a very “moving interior description of dying.” It’s about a lot of other things, including the concern of the main character (a Benedictine named Didymus) that he does not sacrifice enough, and the consequences of his attempts to compensate. And like many of O’Connor’s best characters (very few of whom are explicitly Catholic), Didymus struggles with pride. There’s a great moment when he wonders whether he’s right to have chosen to teach geometry when other vocations were more obviously humble.

Was Didymus wrong in teaching geometry out of personal preference and perhaps—if this was so he was—out of pride? Had the spiritual worth of his labor been vitiated because of that? He did not think so, no. No, he taught geometry because it was useful and eternally true, like his theology, and though of a lower order of truth it escaped the common fate of theology and the humanities, perverted through the ages in the mouths of dunderheads and fools.

He also worries that the three vows of the Franciscan order just aren’t difficult enough: poverty in the modern world “was no heavy cross,” and chastity and obedience were no longer difficult for him in his old age. So when he received a letter informing him that his brother (also a monk) was dying, Didymus to resist his desire to visit him. “Therein, he thought, the keeping of the vows having become an easy habit for him, was his opportunity—he thought! It was plain and there was sacrifice and it would be hard. So he had not gone.” Of course he regrets his decision. When he learns that his brother has died, he goes to the chapel to pray…and falls asleep. (The scene is explicitly compared to the apostles falling asleep in the Gethsemane, but without being heavy handed.)

After this, the story becomes more about Didymus’s own mortality. As a result of what his doctor diagnoses as just “one of those things,” he is confined to a wheelchair, and concludes that the confinement was God punishing him for having “gloried too much” in not visiting his brother: “The intention—that was all important, and he, he feared, had done the right thing for the wrong reason. He had noticed something of the faker in himself before.” He also ruminates on how to deal with his sickness: “Humbly he wished to get well and to be able to walk. But it this was a punishment, was not prayer to lift it declining to see the divine point?...By some mistake, he protested, he had been placed in a position vital with meaning and precedents inescapably Christian. But was the man for it? Unsure of himself, he was afraid to go on trial.”

It’s an incredibly rich story (and beautifully written, though too many sentences begin with adverbs), and I could go on with examples of the depth, complexity, and frustrations of Didymus’s faith. He’s a great character because he’s both very devout and very flawed. Most of Powers’s best characters are like this, including Father Burner (more on him in later posts, I hope) and Father Urban of Morte D’Urban.

Fortunately, his short stories and two novels are back in print, in nice-looking but very fragile editions published by the New York Review of Books.

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Mark S. on Difficult Poetry

This contribution comes from fellow Mahwahvian Mark S. It's a good one:

In an article recently published in Slate, former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky takes issue with what he calls "the stupid and defeatist idea that poetry, especially modern or contemporary poetry, ought to be less 'difficult,'" arguing that difficulty constitutes a significant part of the pleasure which poetry brings, and citing a number of poems which illustrate this idea. I think he is a little bit right, but a little more wrong.

No doubt, the general decline in literacy in recent years has made comprehending the sophisticated structures of poetry increasingly difficult to the common reader. I wish I could find the precise statistic, but I remember reading somewhere that the length of the average English sentence has decreased 60% since the early twentieth century, and all one has to do is read the periodic sentences of Burke or Gibbon to see how much complexity the English language has lost over the years. I find even relatively simple works like the ballads of Wordsworth or the epigrams of Housman are equally impenetrable to my students as the grandest passage in Milton, so there is a serious case to be made that the contemporary reading public simply does not possess the necessary linguistic tools to appreciate fine poetry.

On the other hand, I think it is equally unquestionable that modern poetry can be characterized by a unique reliance on obscurity. Tolstoy was one of the first to call attention to this phenomenon, complaining that "haziness, mysteriousness, obscurity, and exclusiveness...(are) elevated to the rank of a merit and a condition of poetic art" and that "obscurity (is) elevated into a dogma among the new poets." And since obscurity remains a common feature of poetry right up to our time, the modern reader also has a case to make against the difficulty of contemporary poetry.

It might be helpful to distinguish between two types of obscurity in poetry, what might be called verbal obscurity and conceptual obscurity. Verbal obscurity might be defined as a lack of clarity caused by an intricate syntactical structure or exotic diction. So for instance, an example of verbal obscurity would be the following lines from Shelley: "there are spread / On the blue surface of thine aery surge,/ Like the bright hair uplifted from the head / Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge / Of the horizon to the zenith's height / The locks of the approaching storm." Here, the subject and verb are separated by five lines of phrases, and the image of the Maenad is, at least to the modern reader, not immediately recognizable. On the other hand, conceptual obscurity might be defined as a lack of clarity resulting from the indecipherability of a line's reference, such as Eliot's "behaving as the wind behaves / no nearer" or Dylan Thomas' "I must enter again the round / Zion of the water bead / And the synagogue of the ear of corn." Here, I would contend, even once we recognize the syntactical structure of the line and the significance of individual words, the proposition of the sentence has no real reference to the world of objects or ideas, or, perhaps more precisely, the sentence makes no real proposition.

Both types of obscurity may be vicious, but, to my mind, conceptual obscurity is always so; verbal obscurity can sometimes accompany real technical virtuosity and so be conducive to artistic pleasure in the way that Pinsky asserts. The difficulty that results from verbal obscurity may be fairly said, at least on occasion, to be the responsibility of the reader, but the difficulty that results from conceptual obscurity is generally the fault of the poet. And since it's practice has relied so heavily on conceptual obscurity, the serious reader does have a legitimate complaint to make against modern poetry.

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Get Over Yourself

As the second annual St. Robert Southwell Literary Workshop approaches, here’s a tip for the new class on how to avoid Baer attacks. Nothing is more likely to bring out the claws and fangs than a maudlin, self-absorbed confessional poem. The Mahwahvian Movement prefers the iamb to “I am.” (This poetic dictate has Biblical precedent, as Christ once said to an aspiring poet, “It is you who say iamb.”)

Dr. Baer is not the only so-called New Formalist with this aversion to confessional poetry. In an interview from The Formalist a few years back, Dana Gioia complained of confessional poems “that were, in some sense, sexual self-advertisements of [the authors] as sensitive, caring lovers. I always found that distasteful and dishonest. I strongly dislike any kind of self-congratulatory, moralizing poetry in which the author advertises his own moral perfection. Yet that type of poetry is still quite common. It’s a kind of new didacticism with a narcissistic bent.”

Anyone who has every taken a creative writing course will know that this anti-solipsistic perspective is rare nowadays, but there is great precedent for it. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot insists that “the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career. What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

Even in the romantic period, which our friend Helen C. White complains is to blame for excessive individualism, saw a couple of great defenses of un-confessional poetic theory. The most famous one is John Keats’s claim that his “poetical character…is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing—it has no character….A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence, because he has no identity, he is continually in for—and filling—some other body.”

A similar remark comes from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1817, which takes exception to the “absurd self-elevation” of Coleridge and Wordsworth in particular. As opposed to their solipsism, most men of genius, living or dead, rarely write about themselves.

It would seem that in truly great souls all feeling of self-importance, in its narrower sense, must be incompatible with the consciousness of a mighty achievement. The idea of the mere faculty or power is absorbed as it were in the idea of the work performed. That work stands out in its glory from the mind of its Creator; and in the contemplation of it, he forgets that he himself was the cause of its existence, or feels only a dim but sublime association between himself and the object of his admiration.

For more recent and very entertaining critiques of the solipsism of modern writing, particularly poetry, check out The Reaper Essays.

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Why Don't We Write About Science?

Earlier in the week, we posted remarks by Archbishop Chaput about the threats that science and technology pose to our spiritual lives. Helen C. White recognized some of these same dangers, but she believed that there was also a danger in over-reacting against science. In 1944, she wrote about "the role of poetry in a world of science, naturally submerged for the present in a world of war."

It is a topic on which humanists have in general been understandably somewhat on the defensive. The achievements of science have been so genuinely impressive and demonstrable that it is hardly surprising that a materialistic age, avid of short-cuts around the labors of thought, should have concluded that here was the answer to man’s ancient quest. There is no question that the popular faith in the omni-competence of science has been excessive, but Catholics of all people should know the perils of meeting superstition with iconoclasm.

In the next paragraph she actually criticizes Spirit, the poetry journal for which she's writing this essay. Apparently she thinks that the poets writing in it are wrong to ignore science as a subject:

Science as a method has its undoubted place if it is not taken for the only method, and its discoveries are endlessly stimulating not only to the appetite for fact, but to the imagination as well. I have often wondered if the great scholastic doctor who transformed Aristotle from a menace to a buttress of the faith would not have known how to meet modern science in a larger and more confident Spirit than some of his contemporary followers. And I cannot imagine Dante maintaining such a complete immunity to some of the most dramatic constructs of the contemporary mind as do most of the poets of Spirit.

One of the reasons religious writers are "immune" from science is that, unlike when Dante was writing, science is now perceived to be contrary to a belief in God. This is obviously a flawed perception, but it's prevalent. (On a recent sitcom, a character is asked whether he believes in God, and he replies, "No I don't believe in God. I believe in science." If Extras doesn't reflect the state of society, what does?!) And it holds for both sides of the debate -- Catholics, and I think most Christians, have perhaps un-intentionally bought into the God-versus-Science dichotomy. This is the "iconoclasm" she mentions in the first paragraph. We tend to think of science exclusively as a force against our faith and human dignity, something to be fought rather than what Helen C. White is promoting, a positive stimulant for the imagination.

To be fair, though, this imaginative blind-spot isn't unique to Christian writers. As she's suggesting in the first sentence above, it's "the humanities vs. science" as much as it is "religion vs. science." So maybe it stems from how we're educated -- perhaps our educations are so specialized now that the sort of person interested in writing can go through life never having to really engage with any scientific ideas. And when humanities courses do explore science, it's always in negative terms (the threat of the nuclear bomb, but not the development of penicillin).

Then again, maybe we want to avoid the humiliation of having our books in the Science Fiction section of Barnes & Noble.

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On Tradition

I'll just let Helen C. White speak for herself when she discusses “the value of a knowledge of literary tradition for the poet.”

Tradition gives a poet perspective, standards; it gives him discipline. The contemporary poet needs to be reminded of this for, like most contemporary men, he shares the contemporary illusion that the present has a reality, a validity that never was and probably never will be again. This is instinctive, I suspect, to untutored humanity. But the poet is not instinctive and untutored man or, if he is, there is no need of his remaining so. For in the works of his predecessors he has access to a sympathy and a support which his own immediate world may not always afford him.

The past is not a prison house to which he dare not return. It is the treasury of the past experience of men from which any intelligent man may draw. It is an arsenal of techniques, of imaginative resources, of hints and suggestions, of insights, and warnings, and reassurances, from which the man not imprisoned in his own moment may draw at will. Its vitality is his own surest pledge of future sympathy and helpfulness. For tradition is the continuing and deepening and widening stream of human experience. Not to enter into its mighty current is to be becalmed in a backwater, however turbulent. Not to be aware of its existence is to live and to die without ever entering into one’s human inheritance and to leave the world poorer than one found it. Tradition should be presented to the poet, then, not as something monitory or disciplinary but as something creative and fructifying and dynamic. It is that dynamic, creative function of tradition that should be stressed. And the loyalty to be invoked is not to the past but to the future.

For more along these lines, read T.S. Eliot's essay if you haven't already.

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Helen C. White, Part 2

During another interesting passage from the introduction to Drink from the Rock, White compares the writing of poetry to prayer, both “how they are alike and the ways in which they are different.”

For the first, they belong to the same realm, to the realm of contemplation. Both are based on the recognition of a reality in which truth and beauty have, to put it as generally as possible, very intimate relations. From the point of view of Spirit both are concerned primarily with the God Who is to be worshipped both in truth and beauty.

Her reference to “truth and beauty” recalls the final lines to Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, / ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Keats wasn't working from a Christian framework; the charge is probably even greaterwhen truth and beauty are meant to represent God and His creation. But that's Maturin territory, and I should probably save that for later.

As for the differences she identifies:

But the techniques of prayer and poetry are different, and their objectives are different. A great prayer may be a great poem, as the hymns of the Church like the Dies Irae and the Stabat Mater so well demonstrate. But two separate and distinct kinds of excellence have gone in their making.

I wish she said more about what kinds of excellence go into each, but I suppose one difference relates to the fact that a prayer can be a powerful, efficacious prayer without being original or even eloquent -- the spirit of the prayer-giver is what makes the difference. On the other hand, there's nothing worse than an earnest unoriginal poet.

Not only are there similarities between poetry and prayer, but poetry can also benefit from prayer. And I don't mean that one can become a great poet by begging God for help breaking through writer's block. The form of prayer can inspire great poetic innovations...In The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961, Ian Ker argues pretty convincingly that Hopkins's sprung rhythm was influenced by the litany.

(Pedants among you will have noticed that when I quoted Keats, I closed the internal quotation at “truth beauty” -- there is some controversy as to whether the quotation should actually run through the end of the poem, so that the urn, not the speaker, says “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Either way, a loquacious vase.)

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Chaput: America's Faith is Kaput!

Mark passes along a piece he thinks our vast readership will find interesting. Here's a teaser:

Americans now face the same growing spiritual illness that J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, Romano Guardini, and C.S. Lewis all wrote about in the last century. It’s a loss of hope and purpose that comes from the loss of an interior life and a living faith. It’s a loss that we can only make bearable by creating a culture of material comfort that feeds—and feeds off of—personal selfishness.

As I read the article, I was thinking that I'd mention a Flannery O'Connor line that tied in nicely with the theme, but unfortunately great minds think alike and Archbishop Chaput beat me to it. (It's actually a line she uses in more than one story, uncreative hack that she was.) Is it my imagination, or does the article (along with Bernanos's essays) seem a bit harsh in its criticism of technology? Surely the dangers of the light bulb and the Internet shouldn't be compared to the atomic bomb! Still, I like this from the same section: “Christianity sees the most important moments of the human story to be the past event of the Incarnation and the present moment of my individual opportunity to love.”

The Archbishop also mentions a company that makes mints called “ImpeachMints” and “National EmbarrassMints,” all with pictures of Bush et al. I've seen those all over the place, and am surprised they haven't lampooned Bush's tax policy with “ImpoverishMints.” But what's the company going to sell if a Democrat wins the White House? “Save the EnvironMints”? “Her Husband Was Actually Impeached Mints”?

(By the way, I don't really think Flannery O'Connor was a hack.)

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How to Write with Helen White, part 1

Our friend Hansonius has been generous enough to invite me to post on his blog. Thanks Hansonius, whoever you are! I thought I’d start with a series of posts about an essay written by Helen C. White, about whom you could read more all the way over here. She wrote the introduction to Drink from the Rock (1944), which is a collection of poems from Spirit, a Magazine of Poetry published by the Catholic Poetry Society of America. I confess that I haven’t read much of the poetry from the collection, so I can’t say how accurate her assessment of Spirit is. But her short essay offers some provocative insights into the creation of not only Catholic poetry, but all sorts of Catholic writing, and religious art more generally. Many of her points anticipated issues we discussed last summer in Mahwah: what makes literature Catholic? What should religious poetry do? How do religious artists reconcile their faith with their artistic responsibilities? There are so many interesting bits that rather than offering them all at once, I’m going to milk them for what they’re worth over the next week or so.

First things (no allusion intended) first. She begins her introduction by discussing the tension between the poet’s responsibility to his individual consciousness and the world at-large:

“Spirit in its very basic undertaking of encouraging the writing and reading of poetry grounded in a spiritual approach to the universe, met head-on some of the most important challenges of its day. It challenged, first of all, the unrestricted and uncontested individualism of the romantic movement. [I'll bite my tongut about why I think she's being unfair to the romantics...] It did not deny the preeminence of the individual for the creation of poetry, but it challenged the insulation and the self-sufficiency of romantic individualism. On the other hand, the Editors of Spirit defended the integrity and significance of the individual against that rush to lose the individual consciousness in the imagined consciousness of the mass of humanity in which so many disillusioned individualists of a decade ago sought to recover a sense of moral significance. It tried to do justice to two realities, both indispensable to poetic creation, realities which never should have been set in opposition to each other, the individual consciousness and the relation of that consciousness to the world without.”

But here's the rub:

“In doing so, Spirit faced squarely the burning issue of poetry and propaganda. With the critics of romanticism it agreed that the individual owed an allegiance beyond himself, that the content of a poem could not be a matter of light concern to either the poet or his reader. But it insisted no less firmly that poetry was something more than a medium for expressing ideas. It maintained this basic position against the proletarian school, that advanced the propagandist view of poetry on behalf of a materialist ideology which Spirit could not accept.”

Our ears should really perk up with the next paragraph, which reminds us that parroting catechesis does not compensate for a lack of technical and artistic ability:

“But with even more courage and independence Spirit maintained the distinctive character of poetry against the propagandists of its own point of view. As Spirit was quite historically oriented enough to know, this was a much older foe and a much more dangerous one. For the notion that correct theological ideas and praiseworthy sentiments would redeem any rhyme and lay an obligation upon the pious reader has long been the curse of religious poetry. Spirit saw clearly that the pious platitude might be a poetic blasphemy, and from the first it has waged unremitting war against the substitution of piety for poetry.”

“Pious platitude”—good stuff, isn’t it? She later calls the tension she’s describing “a confrontation of unworldly and unpoetic sanctity.” And it’s something that Flannery O’Connor discusses often in her letters and prose.

I wonder if the religious devotion and artistic excellence she’s talking about here go hand-in-hand. If a Catholic writer cannot express Catholic ideas and beliefs originally or creatively, it could very well be because he does not quite understand the ideas and teachings to begin with well enough to make them part of his individual consciousness. It’s the same with any idea: the quality of the writing very often depends on the depth of the knowledge and the strength of the understanding.

That's it for now. Now do me a favor and post a response. And stay tuned next week when Helen C. White tells us how poetry is like prayer.

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