All Saints Day

"They have all gone into the world of light" --Vaughan
Candles for the dead at York Minster.

A dash of the long-dead Henry Vaughan in honor of the day--

They are all gone into the world of light! 
And I alone sit ling’ring here; 
Their very memory is fair and bright, 
And my sad thoughts doth clear. 

It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast, 
Like stars upon some gloomy grove, 
Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest, 
After the sun’s remove. 

I see them walking in an air of glory, 
Whose light doth trample on my days: 
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary, 
Mere glimmering and decays. 

Read the whole marvelous poem here. The star in the tomb is perfection!

Thinking about my dead in Vaughan's "world of light," and about the past, so full of nightmares and riotous, seems to adjust the scenery of the world for me, and that is good. Is there an election? Will one of the candidates, both quite problematic but in different ways, win? Like the prophet's Daniel's nightmare visions of four great beasts (i.e. rulers), these ill dreams too will pass away.

For some reason (don't know why, truly), I have stopped mid-novel and am having a burst of sonnets. It started on the 22nd, and by All Hallows, I had eight, a mix of Shakespearean and Petrarchan. So far. Or maybe I am done. Who can say? Some things are pleasing mysteries. Like light in the darkness on All Saints Day.

Diminishing language and culture

Clive Hicks-Jenkins vignette for Glimmerglass

No one in the English speaking world can be considered literate without a basic knowledge of the Bible. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., James Trefil, Joseph Kett, The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (Houghton Mifflin, 1993)

Late night and early morning exchange...

Me: I would say that if you can read Shakespeare, well, then you can read anything else in the English language.

RT (who is teaching at the college level in what used to be called the Bible belt): Students, however, remain convinced that Shakespeare did not write his plays and poems in English. It is, apparently to students, a foreign language that no one speaks in the 21st century. Really.

Me: Part of the problem for current students from the deep South is that many used to grow up with the King James Bible or some early translated version (and some with the 1928 revised or the Cranmer Book of Common Prayer.) Accustomed to those, they could read anything. But we can't count on any Bible literacy any more, and we choose to reduce that gorgeous language full of rhetorical tropes to pablum. And now I hear so many complaints that many young people cannot read language that is beautiful and contains depths and long-established rhetorical figures.

    Older translations refreshed the target language (English) by bringing in the Hebrew as much as possible. The KJV enlarged not only the language but also the conceptual apparatus of English speakers, as more or less common words and concepts like table and cup and staff took on the religious aura of the psalm.
     If we were talking about poetry, it would be a tragedy to keep texts from surprising us, to tell Lear to be just one thing, to do as little as possible.... Clive James' lament returns: translation and linguistic theories emasculate Scripture, depriving it of much of its linguistic, cultural, and political potency, and perhaps even of its religious power...
     --Peter J. Leithart, Deep Exegesis (Baylor University Press, 2009)

"Authentic" language--

One of the many things that I need to tuck into my day is a going-over of this May's underlinings and scribblings in Peter Leithart's Deep Exegesis because on Thursday morning I am an invited guest at a regional priests-and-pastors study group--I think that it will be fascinating. Leithart's book focuses on exegesis of scripture but continually embraces poetry as well. And writers tend to be allured by the idea of peeking inside private worlds.

Here's a bit about Milosz, Clive James, the Bible, language, and civilization from an early chapter, "The Text is a Husk":

Picking through the rubble of postwar Poland to find something worth keeping, Nobel laureate poet Czeslaw Milosz came upon the Bible. Though he could not believe the Bible was literally true, he concluded that it was the "common good" of both believers and unbelievers. For intellectuals in the West, the Bible has "provided a standard of authenticity against the pervasive falsehoods of advertising, social engineering, moral uplift, demagogic politics--all the verbal corruptions of democracy, the language of illusion." For Milosz, "the scriptures provided a standard of authenticity against a much more dangerous language, the language of legalized murder."

In his brilliant collection of essays, Cultural Amnesia, Clive James reflects on Milosz' remark and wonders if the Bible's importance can only become clear when civilization is collapsing. In our more comfortable surroundings, we fool ourselves into thinking that "the eternal can become outdated, and safely forgotten." Forgetfulness, James argues, is not confined to unbelievers. He chides Christians for the ease with which we have "let the bible go." Though himself a lapsed believer, James laments the "successful reduction of once-vital language" to the "compendium of banalities" of modern English translations.

That's just a nibble from a complex, rich meal. I'd better make time to read through my notes...

Morning thoughts: on making

Interior decoration by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Glimmerglass, out in September.
A lion, a leaf, and a crown--surely they are
nothing if not realistic. And yet, put them together...

AB OVO

Often I'm startled by my own absurd temerity in saying anything about books. What do I know? Why don't I stick to my own narrative and lyric frolics and words and keep my mouth fast shut otherwise? A writer is always making things up, beginning at the very beginning--knowing nothing about how to make what she must make next. It's yet another thing about being a writer that enforces (or should enforce) a kind of humility, whether a writer wants it or not. Having revised a poem or novel or story, I hold an amount of strange knowledge . . . and yet it all flies out the nearest window, never to return, when I sit down with the blank page, the not-yet-born next.

Yet I do persist in this mania of having and changing opinions, thinking that I know things about what I do. For example, I've long felt that the roots of our literature in English are quite other than what is often praised--this thing called realism that so dominates much of our thinking about books. And I've felt, in fact, that there is no such thing as realism, just as there is no such thing as the fantastical or irrealism. These words are but handles, convenient ways of describing points on a continuum. As I've said before, if a book could be perfectly and wholly "realistic," it would then replace reality in one Borgesian swoop. All works of literature are made from nothing, or from Yeats's "a mouthful of air." That is the nature of creation and the sub-creation that is literature.

From Beowulf to Gawain and the Green Knight to The Tempest to Tom Jones to Bleak House to the latest narrative in prose or verse, what matters in poetry and fiction is energy. Is the work alive? And the answer to that question has little to do with where a work falls on the continuum between realist and irrealist, and everything to do with whether it captures something of the energies of life.

* * *

ON RESOLVING TO SHUT UP (AGAIN)

It occurs to me (once again) that I have already said these things before, in some way or another. These morning thoughts, written before the dawn . . . Waking, making. Making is a kind of waking, isn't it? And a maker desires to be awake, to wake others.

* * *

OUR BORING, MODERN OBSESSION

Here's Jacob Bacharach, author of A Bend in the World, at Huffington Post:

Sometimes I think that all the really great works of surrealism predate our boring, modern obsession with dividing the real from the unreal, truth from fiction, the conscious mind from the dream. I'm using surrealism in its common and not specific sense; a lot of the works I'm going to mention are what you might call magical realist, or experimental, or postmodern, or just plain weird. I'm actually a fan of weird fiction myself. If my own writing ever spawns a genre, that's the name I'll lobby for. Anyway, in working on a current unfinished writing project, I've been rereading the Bible, and it's reminded me that of a friend of mine who once said that Revelation was his favorite science fiction novel. I'm a fan of Job, myself, which would give Burroughs a run for his mugwumps, although for true weirdness, you really ought to reread Genesis, in which the utterly ordinary and the utterly otherworldly coexist and commingle in a manner totally alien to the modern ear and imagination; the poetry of creation gives way to genealogy, and God flits between instantiating His word and dickering with little humans over the specific price and measure of disobedience...
I tend to think that all great literature has an element of the fantastical and the surreal: Bolaño, Melville, Djuna Barnes, Anne Carson, Laurence Sterne... Each era throws up writers who take their elbows to the way we're supposed to see things, and these are the ones I come back to when I am bored with being bored.

Via that interesting young seminary professor and writer, Wesley Hill

The Book of the Phoenix, 1: 1-40: The Prophet Fed by a Raven

Clive Hicks-Jenkins has posted a piece I wrote for his big, beautiful monograph, a knockout book with chapters by Simon Callow, Andrew Green, Rex Harley, Kathy Koja, Anita Mills, Montserrat Prat, Jacqueline Thalmann, Damian Walford Davies, and me.

Lund Humphries monograph

This fragment from my chapter is channeling the modes and techniques of biblical poetry. It is a kind of reply to one of Clive's paintings, "The Prophet Fed by a Raven."

And if you want more Clive-and-Marly interaction, slide down one post in Artlog, and you'll find his response to a recent post, plus remarks from us both in the comment section. Growing up, God, Spirit, ruin, building a world, and more...