The technical difficulty appears to have been solved...
...by Hansonius.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Friday, June 22, 2007
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.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
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?
Saturday, June 16, 2007
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. "
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Dryden on the Eucharist
Today the Church in
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.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
If It's a Symbol, to Hell With It
Today is the Feast of Corpus Christi, though we don’t celebrate it in
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.
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
Adam
He'd seen this thing before, of course, but never
like this. After
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.
Saturday, June 02, 2007
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.)
Friday, May 25, 2007
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.
Some Thoughts on J.F. Powers
Most discussions of great Catholic fiction writers of the 20th 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
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
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.
Monday, May 14, 2007
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.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
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.”
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.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
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.
Friday, May 04, 2007
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.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
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.
As for the differences she identifies:
Monday, April 30, 2007
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.)
Friday, April 27, 2007
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.”
“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.”
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.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Stations of the Cross
Chris sent these in with this to say:
They're a few sonnets from a Catholic poetry journal called "Spirit," published in the 1940s through (I think) the 1960s, and which included contributions from a young Thomas Merton and a woman named Helen C. White, who was the first female English professor here at UW-Madison (in fact, the very ugly building that houses the English department is named after her). The sonnets I'm attaching were written by a Jesuit priest named William Donaghy.
I. He Is Condemned
Pilate must heed the public pulse and poll,
As every politician quickly learns,
The multitude that smiles, as quickly spurns,
And so he shrugs his shoulders and his soul;
His fingers flutter in the brazen bowl;
The guilt is off his hands and head; he turns
To take the spotless towel; in him burns
A doubt; but Caesar's favour is his goal.
"Sub Pontio Pilato"--down the years
Before a man may truly live, reborn
Of water and the Holy Ghost, he hears
Caught in the Creed, those words of pitying scorn
For him whose heart was meagre, not malign,
Who used ironic water for a sign.
II. He Carries His Cross
No parable my heart so cruelly cleaves-
The Prodigal among the snorting hogs,
Nor Lazarus doctored by the kindly dogs,
The stranger beaten, stripped and bruised by thieves,
The thorn-torn Shepherd seeking, as he grieves,
Some lost sheep bleating in the briars and bogs-
Sadder to me than all these analogues,
The fruitless fig-tree stands with leathern leaves.
For this is all the kingly city 'gives,
A cursed fig-tree; and a tree of blood
Denuded, ribald, it no longer lives,
Bereft of branches, shorn of bark and bud;
And yet its roots are slumbering, vital still,
At Nagasaki, Tyburn, Auriesville.
III. He Falls
The crowd is thrilled to see a fighter downed,
Battered and bloody, sprawled upon the floor,
Like multitudinous surfs upon the shore
Its shout arises; so the sickening sound
Of splintering wood upon the flinty ground
Brings from this mob a swelling, bestial roar.
What though the fall renewed the wounds and tore
His flesh, and jarred His head so crudely crowned.
These worthy citizens are men of name,
Respectable, judicious, just, discreet;
I cannot bear to have them know my shame-
My brother dying in a public street-
And though I hear our mother's choking sob,
I turn and shout "My brothers!" to the mob.
IV. He Meets His Mother
This afternoon in loud Jerusalem
They meet and part once more; no touch nor kiss
Can ease their anguish; while the mockers hiss:
"And he's the fool who thought his streaming hem
Could cure the woman. See the two of them,
The son and wife of Joseph come to this."
Two hearts cry out-abyss unto abyss,
And Jesse's flower is cut from Jesse's stem.
Perhaps she thinks of Nain-of all the land
Where wonders blossomed as He walked three years;
Of Jairus, Lazarus, the withered hand,
Of flowing mercies and of drying tears;
And still she knows her bitter place and part,
He will not heal her withered, widowed heart.
V. Simon Helps Him
Poor Simon's back was aching, and his legs
Were weary from the kicking of the plough;
And he had many worries-for his sow
Was sick; his prize hen was not laying eggs;
His crops were far behind; and floating dregs
Had spoiled the profit on his vines; and now
As he is hurrying home with heavy brow,
The soldiers seize him, though he brawls and begs.
He burns the Romans with a look of hate,
Then lends his grudging rhews to this doomed Man,
He grasps the rough-hewn beam, but feels no weight,
Though he is straining, taking all he can.
And from the Stranger, down the cross's length
There flow to Simon peace and tranquil strength.
VI. Veronica's Veil
Stout Peter struck one blow with blundering aim,
But now his futile sword abandoned lies;
Tumultuous Thomas shakes his head and sighs,
Beset with doubts and fears, and sick with shame;
The whispering Boanerges mock their name;
But in this shrilling street where valor dies,
Veronica cleans His face and wipes His eyes
And shares forever Magdalen's fragrant fame.
That screaming mob is muted; drowned in blood,
The curse has fallen on those unbent heads;
And Peter's sword has melted into mud,
The Temple veil hangs sundered into shreds;
But still her tiny veil survives, unfurled,
A banner and a bandage for the world.
VII. He Falls Again
It is too much! His watery sinews yield,
He sags and slumps; the wavering cross goes down;
Gethsemane, the night, the lash, the crown- Could one poor heart bear these,
though triple-steeled?
The hard-faced Roman legionaries wield
Their whips to drive Him out beyond the town
Where Calvary rises bushless, burned and brown;
While Judas festers in the Potter's Field.
And still no one remembers; Pharisees
And Scribes are smiling as they watch Him squirm,
Befouled and scoffed at, beaten to His knees,
Exhausted, panting, weaker than a worm.
And Jeremiah's keenings fail and fade,
Isaiah is an echo and a shade.
VIII. He Meets the Women
Last Sunday all Jerusalem had cheered,
But now the hushed hosanna's ringing note
Has soured to snarling in each fickle throat,
And all His followers have disappeared
Except these wailing women, jostJed, jeered,
Unwavering still, like her who sought the groat
And loyal yet, while priests and people gloat-
This is a day of shame for brawn and beard.
Jerusalem, O town of stupid men,
These tears will be your testament; the Lamb
You slaughter will not guard your doorposts when
The tearless Titus sets his battering ram;
Because this Victim vainly dies alone
There shall not be a stone upon a stone.
IX. He Falls the Third Time
They leave the city now; the blood and sweat
Are caked upon Him; and the clustering flies
Are crawling on His blackened wounds; His thighs
Are veined with lire; and now His torturers fret
Lest He may die and thwart them even yet;
For while they watch He stumbles, falls and lies,
Then heaves and struggles weakly to arise
And looks toward Calvary's somber silhouette.
Upon this very road will Godfrey spur,
Leading his knights-a charge of flaming swords-
Against the foemen of the carpenter
Who is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords;
His strong voice hurling, like a catapult,
The thunder-breathing war-cry, "Deus vult."
X. He Is Stripped
Through rolling clouds no shaft of sunshine gleams,
A bitter breeze is stirring, sharp and chill,
The crowd sways in, blood-lusty for the kill,
Rough hands rip off the robe which has no seams,
And from reopened wounds the tired blood streams;
He stands among them, without word or will,
A shorn lamb, naked on this stunted hill,
While in the distance Tabor looms and dreams.
There was a man went down to Jericho-
See! parable is prophecy in part-
Here is the victim, scarred from head to toe,
Here are the thieves who have no heed nor heart;
Here are the proud who spurn a broken man,
Levite and priest-but no Samaritan.
XI. He Is Nailed to the Cross
This sound had echoed back in Nazareth,
The thudding hammer on the singing nails,
When Mary hastened off in flying veils,
With eyes like violets, and quickened breath,
Her Babe within her, to Elizabeth.
Now Mary winces, clenches hands, and pales,
Her dauntless spirit cringes, twists and quails,
And at each jolt she dies a double death.
The soldiers need not force Him for He lies
Patient beneath them; as the nails tear through,
His shining prayer is piercing inky skies,
"Forgive them; for they know not what they do."
And even now the arms which they transfix
Would guard them as a mother bird her chicks.
XlI. He Dies
The bleeding hours drag on; His drooping head
Sinks lower; and His parched and swollen lips
Can speak no longer; now a black eclipse
Extinguishes His eyes; the buzzards tread
The air above Him, waiting to be fed.
Once more He shifts on dislocated hips,
And cries aloud; His last vein bursts and drips-
He hangs upon His wooden monstrance, dead.
This is the triumph of the Sanhedrin,
To snare Him with its little traps and tricks,
To make Him scapegoat for all human sin
And build the first immortal crucifix.
Adoring ages, while the Scribes sneer,
Reply, "O Salutaris Ifostia."
XIII. He Is Taken From the Cross
Now you may have Him, Mary, they are done,
The shepherd stricken lies; His little flock
Had fled before the crowing of the cock;
Now Caiphas is happy; he has won;
He does not heed the frightened crowds that run,
Jerusalem is shaken; shock on shock
Llpheave the temple sanctum, rive the rock;
Now you may have the Thing that was your Son.
He cannot hear you, darling, He is dead-
Come, now, and we will hide Him from their sight;
He cannot feel your kisses on His head-
See-Nicodemus waits no more for night.
Look-he and John and Joseph stand in grief
And look to you for refuge and relief.
XIV. He Is Buried
The mourners slowly bring Him through the gloom,
The valiant women, and three faithful men;
Her shoulders shaking, stormy Magdalen
Is weeping as in Simon's dining room;
But she who felt Him moving in her womb,
Who wrapped and laid Him in a manger then
Is still His handmaid, ready once again
To wrap Him up and lay Him in His tomb.
Once Delphi was the navel of the earth,
But now this sepulchre, which blackly yawns,
Becomes the point and center of all worth,
The focus of all sunsets and all dawns;
Within this cavern, could the world but see,
Mythology yields place to mystery.
WILLIAM A. DONAGHY.
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Stephanie's Peregrinations
Stephanie has sent in this photograph of Beatrice's tomb in Florence.
Joe Hemmerling has subjected it to a severe linguistic analysis. He claims that it contains a secret code, a code that makes reference to "gli mahwahviani" and a "bear attack" that will end "il modernismo." Oh that Joe and his Dan Brown books!
Chris's Poem about Pumpkins and Poetry
Here's a timely poem for the advent of Halloween. (Dr. Russell would kill me if he saw those quasi-Christian terms tossed together so carelessly.)
Smashing Poetry
The pumpkin’s collision with the sidewalk shocks me
into silence—I stand mute and inglorious,
although I’d watched the stranger climb the balcony
and grab the décor. Hollering, he shook his fist
in conquest, as if to declare, “Man over gourd!”
I’m a coward before this minor injustice,
and act as though his hatred for a carved fruit bores
me. Truth is, I despise his malice and want to
tackle him, rub his grinning face in the orange gore
he battered from the well wrought squash. (His girlfriend, too,
who watches from below and giggles her support
for his success at turning artifice to goo.)
I nearly tell him, “you’re an asshole,” try to thwart
the thug with the obvious. But there’s a paper
due tomorrow; I should start it. Time’s always short
On Halloween. Turning my cheek, loving my neighbor
In deference to this sacred Christian holiday,
I head for home to write (and pray I get an A for
a change). As assignments go, this one is okay.
It has me digging through defunct British journals,
unearthing obscure poets, like this “E.S.J.,
Author of William and Ellen”—no eternal
bards here, just sickly scribblers confined to brown sheets
that crumble at your touch. In these, my nocturnal
musings, I trickily treat Henry Pye’s complete
works, or enough of them to conclude that the long-dead
laureate’s a hack. Critical hindsight is sweet
And I’m passing it out in handfuls to well-read
visitors. I condemn the style of Pye’s instant,
what Wordsworth so wisely rejected. Why—instead
of panegyric dreck to a royal infant,
odes to Albion’s peace—didn’t Pye ignore trends,
Write something timeless, like me and Billy Collins?
It’s late by now. Somewhere outside, my vandal friends
are looking for targets, eager to strike again.
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