he is holy; he is firm, pt. 4

Everything I see [...] looks brittle and unreal, a skin of colors painted on glass, which if you prodded it with a finger would powder and fall. A blank sky, perfectly blended with all other sky, has sealed over the crack in the world where the plane fell, and the air has hushed the matter up.

Clearly, something that had to do with eternity took place here where the plane fell. Something ripped time for a brief moment, a split second. To "fall from the dark" is, I suppose, to wake up. Our narrator fell from the obscurant light of the stars--visible light, which by itself is darkness--and she found the truer light of knowledge. But knowledge of what? Of good and evil? Knowledge of pain? Does pain split illusion like the plane split the sky? The millstones of time and space are illusory, yet the pain of their churning is "undeniably real." But if it's true that "only the good is real," what then does that say of pain?

But there's more here. She writes, "The pain [...] is real, for our love [...] is real," and in so doing almost equates pain with love. Yet we detect the even greater depth of this equation's significance in the subsequent revelation that those seraphs who are "aflame with love for God" are higher than those who have "perfect knowledge of him." The love they possess consumes them again and again. And here we have a culmination of the paradox we felt coming.

The flames that issue from the throne of God are themselves the conduit through which the seraphs are transported to their world. Presumably, the flames are also the material from which these angels are made, as well as the substance that destroys and returns them again to their source. All is one is God. For you, O Lord, are a sun and shield--the sun that scorches; the shield that guards. From him we have both everything and nothing to fear. Love and hate commingle. You know, we could contract ourselves to a point running to and from him at the same time.

It would take immeasurable faith to believe in a favourable view of things, because God seems so absent from this illusory present. His love is manifest in his abandonment of humans to the shackling laws of time and space. And the pain of it seems so much more real than the love--which we're told are one and we are confused. He treats us with pain as with love, and we seek to love him back in kind. So our love is a forgetting and, of necessity, a misinterpretation of everything in the universe. For now that creation, as predicate, has been slashed "loose at base from any roots in the real," it is effectively divided from its subject, and all is gibberish. We shuffle objects to make sense of it all.

Faith would be, in short, that God has any willful connection with time whatsover, and with us. For I know it as given that God is all good. And I take it also as given that whatever he touches has meaning, if only in his mysterious terms, the which I readily grant. The question is, then, whether God touches anything.

In creating the laws of the universe and in requiring that they be kept, does God also restrict his own power? Well... without messing with his omnipotence, she describes this restriction as "a contraction of the scope of his will." If that's the case, then the separation is complete, for wouldn't his of all wills be the most unbending? Even Christ's advent might be seen as succumbing to the laws of gravity, as he descends to his suffering, to his death. And he might have conquered the material experience on earth, but he can't have liked it any better than we, for he left again--abandoning us twice. Yet she (as I) searches for a trail he must have left, some significance in the ceremony of his returning at all.

Is there no link at the base of things, some kernel or air deep in the matrix of matter from which the universe furls like a ribbon twined into time?

Yes he might have saved our souls, but what of all this matter? Is there nothing that extends this redemption to the temporal, to our breakable bones and decaying teeth?

he is holy; he is firm, pt. 3

Didn't I fall from the dark of the stars to these senselit and noisesome days?

Our days are illuminated by our senses, for it is through them that we are connected to all that we experience. We see, feel, hear, taste, and smell our universe, and are therefore tethered to the notion that this is what's real. But "by what freak chance does the skin of illusion ever split, and reveal to us the real, which seems to know us by name?" And how does it know us, and why do we know that it does?

In The Writing Life Dillard briefly revisits this problem when she asks, “Why does death so take us by surprise?” The reality of being one day finished-- being "over"-- jolts us every time we look at it because there's something about us that simply expects to continue forever. We take immortality for granted, and are shocked every day to find out that it isn't granted. Even time's passage is enigmatic; we hardly even feel it. Of course, physics itself considers this arrow of time to be strange and perhaps illusory. In The Fabric of the Cosmos, Brian Greene writes this:

All the physical laws that we hold dear fully support what is known as time-reversal symmetry. This is the statement that if some sequence of events can unfold in one temporal order [...] then these events can also unfold in reverse. [...] Not only do known laws fail to tell us why we see events unfold in only one order, they also tell us that, in theory, events can unfold in reverse order (p. 145).

This passage isn't exactly referring to time travel, but in such a universe--this universe--the uncharring of Julie's face should be a definite possibility.

Still, what is this thing we call time and what are these its constraints? We feel we should be able to splash about in it as we do in space. Of course, space does have its own problems and it is spacetime itself that distracts us from what we intuitively feel to be real.

My niece at four inquired, awed, if I knew that everybody was going to die.

The Art of Fiction, pt. 1

No blog of mine could be complete (or even properly begun) without a discussion of Henry James. This will be an on-going project.

In The Art of Fiction, James takes an opportunity (afforded by the writer and critic Walter Besant) to speak on the subject to which he devoted most of his time: fiction writing. The introductory paragraphs demonstrate his belief that fiction written in the English language was at that time undergoing a change from the naïveté of such authors as Thackeray and Dickens to a more complex form. It appears that people began to require more of fiction. Prior to this shift in sentiment, James writes that "there was a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it."

He writes later: "That, I think, represents the manner in which the latent thought of many people who read novels as an exercise in skipping would explain itself if it were to become articulate." This is reminiscent of Ezra Pound's reference to readers of "habitually slack attention" who desire fiction that can easily be lapped up.

Yet James identifies the fact that no longer were people just "swallowing" novels, and this appetite for masticable prose apparently gave rise to such authors as James himself, whose fiction represents a psychological exploration. Other authors of this persuasion imbue their fiction with philosophy and thereby make the work "discutable."

James goes on to imply that this group of persons who demand more of their fiction might still represent a minority. He alludes to an idea that fiction was once even considered "wicked" in England--though wicked perhaps in the sense of being jocular and inconsequential. I believe that impression to be correct, because I remember reading such works by Jane Austen and perhaps the Brontës in which people would remark that they were only reading a novel. This activity seemed (chauvinistically) relegated to women, as if only a "feeble" mind would even consider engaging in such a mawkish activity as reading a novel.

Yet, he laments this pervasive idea that all novels should admit to being "only a joke." He also laments "certain established novelists [who] have a habit of giving themselves away which must often bring tears to the eyes of people who take their fiction seriously." He identifies Anthony Trollope who is often in the habit of reassuring his readers parenthetically that the events of his novel are only make believe. "He admits that the events he narrates have not really happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best." James considers this a "terrible crime." I do too.

In fact, it seems to me that any serious story does lead the writer as much as it takes its readers on a journey. According to my experiences, a writer is little more than a midwife who delivers each sentence as it is begot by its predecessor. A major difference is that the writer too feels the pangs of birth. Therefore, any writer who could be in such charge of the events of a story that he/she can make it take any turn desired has to be guilty of some kind of literary crime. Their stories usually end up lacking unity. No one could accuse Henry James of this.

He goes on to speak of the parallels between the novel and the painting, as both attempt to reflect life.

The artistic novelist is often spurned by the "public" who consider the goodness of a novel to lie in its ability to divert--perhaps through containing lots of action. Other such persons would denote such "goodness" as being dependent on a "'happy ending,' on a distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks." lol...

He continues: "The 'ending' of a novel is, for many persons, like that of a good dinner, a course of dessert and ices, and the artist in fiction is regarded as a sort of meddlesome doctor who forbids agreeable aftertastes." So true. I am not strictly opposed to happy endings myself, but unity and artistic integrity dictate that the author go where the work takes him. Or her. That seems a bit more important and noble than writing-the-happy-ending-at-any-cost.

he is holy; he is firm, pt. 2

The corner where eternity clips time must be the point at which life has any meaning at all, and if she has touched it, then hasn't she somehow touched God?

The sailor who helped her draw a key to the islands spoke with authority like Christ. Yet she comes upon a new thing, a new island whose name she does not know. She labels it "Waiting for Sailor," as (for some reason) a name is necessary to a thing. Why? Again, it was Walker Percy who brought up this question in his essay Metaphor as Mistake. He spoke of the charm he found in some inadvertent misnomers of his childhood. Whenever he found some new spectacle, he had to know what it was called--something about not being able to truly appreciate the innerness of the thing without knowing its name. I don't know about all that; I think you could more or less still appreciate a thing without having a name for it. But, something still compels you to pin it down. I think it might be the fact that names are containers that allow you to hold (and express) all that you do know and feel about a thing. It aids communication. I admire those Ents in The Lord of the Rings whose "words" were as long as the entire history of the thing to which they referred.

In our text, the significance of the word itself is in the way it concretizes idea, as though it had been a word--the same word for which she awaits the sailor--that had called forth her islands from the sea.

Yet we suspect the idea must be realer than these diversions: stones, trees, sky. So she, as I, suspects fraud in all this material--"the world, a dream forced into my ear and sent round my body on ropes of hot blood." She tries looking past the sky to see the real, as we all must in some way and at some point. Because we know there's something behind the facade, and it galls that the illusion forces itself so convincingly upon the senses and disguises the real when we try to see it. The mind betrays; it's in on the fraud, and pretends that the sky really is the blue canopy that it appears to be. But, avoiding our inquisitive eyes, the real peeps out behind our backs. Like wave-particles, they resist the probe.

The earth, she writes, "fizzes up in trees." Yes, trees are a visible frenzy. Yet Julie Norwich's father must have overlooked the one that felled their plane. This god--let's call him November 19--was a cruel day. How can we wish for God when he stands back and watches us suffer--or worse, has a hand in our suffering? Who would want to have anything to do with a god like that? She calls him as she sees him: a "hounding and terrorist" god.

But God is good. We have to take it on faith, don't we?

Time itself can trick us into thinking all is well here. Even our bodies join the illusion and betray; for some days are fun days governed by "heyday" gods. But when we hurt, the body mutinies by translating all the pain to us and taking for itself none of the agony. It is we who bear all. So it turns out we are periodically disillusioned--we who are "connected by cells right down to our feet, and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone." And it is then that we are reminded that we don't really belong here.

A Letter from Li Po

Conrad Aiken's genius is far too great to be completely unearthed here, but I'll mention some highlights.

I read this poem a few years ago, and just rediscoverd a note I made at the top of the page: This kind of poetry doesn't just happen, it says. The man was a slave to the English language.

The poem begins,

Fanfare of northwest wind, a bluejay wind
anounces autumn, and the equinox
rolls back blue bays to a far afternoon.

This is a delicate, almost elusive way of expressing that stretching of days to the breaking point which occurs at the height of summer. Like Annie Dillard's "hundred hollow and receding blues" it touches--even challenges--the temporal nature of the sea. Li Po communicates by stringing letters down generations, from his children's children all the way down to us. The "light" he possesses is of unknown origin, but though it may be "a slant of witch-light" on silk, when it hits the page, it becomes "a slant of genius." Light enables vision, and on the text promotes reading. Yet, this powerful melding of light and text seems to signify something more--even something incarnational. It marks words with greater significance; and the poet's words, thus strung, are evidence of this strange fact.

Who is this Li Po? A wine-loving Chinese Poet in the habit of considering time's passage.

Aiken expresses that time exists in a place "such as imagination dreams of thought." This is how we see things, isn't it? At least, it's how we see those elusive things that come to mean so much to us: inklings, epiphanies, limits. And it is, perhaps, the only way we can express those thoughts of which our imaginations can only dream: by expressing meaning in images directed at the sub-conscious, perhaps even by-passing the brain's logic.

"Yet to spell down the poem on her page [...] parsing forth the seven-fold prism of meaning [...] is to assume Li Po himself: as he before assumed the poets and sages who were his." This is interesting and powerful. It suggests that Li Po is somewhat like a guardian of all meaning and beauty. It makes him a central point or a prism into whom all meaning is poured and from whom it all later flows. Comparison to Christ seems inevitable, too, especially in light of the poet's subsequent claim that like Li Po, "we too have eaten of the word." Li Po's burden is that of the universal poet: to become master of all beauty hitherto expressed and somehow to reflect it all through her own (hitherto unexpressed) uniqueness, through her own singularity.

Here, constrained by (or in) the bottleneck of Time, we as lovers of literature must seek something divine in all this--and Aiken helps us when he declares, "all is text, is holy text." It passes into poet after poet...

Gertrude Stein's work is memorable, and gives off a similar vibe: text into text, text out of text... But Aiken hides meaning "individually" in every single line--and we find it. Whereas, with Stein meaning is a general impression we have of the text. Yet both make literature an event worth attending because we know that these writers will probe the questions worth asking. They are like the calligrapher Chang Hsu who "needed to put but his three cupfuls down to tip his brush with lightning," and on whose scroll "wreaths of cloud rolled left and right, [till] the sky opened upon Forever." For in this ephemeral span between birth and death, how can we be compelled to act without being moved? How can we endure our days without the kind of inspiration we can get only from those "intimations of immortality" that remind us of Elsewhere, which seems so much more our home than here?

Who knows but one day we shall find,
hidden in the prism at the rainbow's foot,
the square root of the eccentric absolute,
and the concentric absolute to come.

Marginal

Ezra Pound airs his wit in his book ABC of Reading.

When he writes, "Fenellosa emphasizes the method of science, 'which is the method of poetry', as distinct from that of 'philosophic discussions,'" I cringe a little. Because despite the fact that this idea rings true, it identifies a certain conflict in my interests. What soothes me, however, is my realization that the method of the dialectic is the method of weaving. And that means that philosophy might touch art at some level--as I do believe it has.

Pound's ideas on generalizations are both lucid and diverting. Here:

"Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it. If Mr. Rockefeller draws a cheque for a million dollars it is good. If I draw one for a million it is a joke, a hoax, it has no value. If it is taken seriously, the writing of it becomes a criminal act." hehe...

I was reading an essay on language this past week by Walker Percy. Interesting it was, as he marvels at the existence of language as a phenomenon in man and in no other animal. A Martian, he observes, (who would perhaps communicate telepathically and at the speed of light) would wonder at the constant chatter and gesturing in which man engages. Pound hits on the importance of language in ABC as well, observing that "Greece and Rome [were] civilized BY LANGUAGE" (his emphasis). Of course, the pressure arrives when he identifies writers as having "a definite social function exactly proportioned to their ability" and it increases when he says, "it doesn't matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the bad writer wants to do harm." So the primary way to be of use is to improve one's skill as a writer. How could I have forgotten?

Literary inertia is fuelled by those persons "who know a little more than the public, who want to exploit their fractional knowledge, and who are thoroughly opposed to making the least effort to learn anything more." Reminds me of a certain 20 year old aspiring writer in a book I once read, who didn't like sentences.

But it struck me that ABC of Reading included so little on prose. The sole reference was a pathetic, scribbled slip of a thing attached to page 61. He doesn't write prose so much, though, and maybe that's it. Here we go: "Had I written a dozen or so good novels I might presume to add something." As I suspected. But he says one only reads prose for the subject matter. Where did he get that idea? He continues: "Glance at Burton's 'anatomy' as a curiosity, a sample of NON VERSE which has qualities of poetry but that cannot be confounded with it." Should I be offended? His reading list: "Fielding; Jane Austen; the novelists that everyone reads; Kipling; H. James. James' prefaces tell what 'writing a novel' means." Yes, they do.

"Incompetence will show in the use of too many words." To live by.

More words: "The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain WHATSOEVER on his habitually slack attention." Vindication.

A friend was telling me of someone who left academia because of the influx of all the theories and critical methods that distract from the examination of the work itself. I didn't realize that other people disliked that academic tendency. I never spoke of it. How was I going to tell my other literary friends that I refrained from taking our literary criticism class because I didn't want anyone to tell me how to enjoy my literature? (I did do some reading on those theories later just for the sake of knowledge.) But here I find something that again speaks to this issue: "You can spot the bad critic when he starts by discussing the poet and not the poem." Thank you, E.P.

he is holy; he is firm, pt. 1

"Christianity [...] is not a system into which we have to fit the awkward fact of pain: it is itself one of the awkward facts which have to be fitted into any system we make. In a sense, it creates, rather than solves the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimately reality is righteous and loving." --C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

For years I have found daunting not the task but the responsibility that would attend making known my truest thoughts on Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm. Yet since this blog aspires to reflect at least some of the ideas which most compel me to live when I dare not, I think it appropriate also to begin by writing what I dare not.

If one considers "time" in its temporal aspect--that is, time as the materiality of the universe, it begins to become clear how holiness can be said to "hold forth" in it. But where? Christ himself called men "gods," who, according to the Bible, hold forth their own treasures in earthen ware. And men move in days. In fact, a day might be defined as the sum of all the movement it contains. This would make it immense. Of course, the whole is generally thought to be greater than the sum of its parts. So days--slivers of time long enough to contain man and all his haps--surely might be considered gods themselves.

But I'm intellectualizing it.

Do you know what a day does? It turns shadows--mere shadows, but whose shades add up to the difference between life (birth) and death. Reading Holy the Firm is almost like peeling from the background of Puget Sound the film of November 19 (and the days surrounding). It's unreal the way they're different, but the same.

"Each day is a god." And this one has to be, because, my God!--look at him!! He "lifts from the water" like a new creature: baptism not just by water but by earth, wind, fire and light; baptism into time and all its material. The day "clicks... into place" taking ownership of the earth. It is a fleeting ownership...

I love the way she describes her trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains, her reason for going: "And I read every night by candlelight." The "and" here is so instrumental, and the line itself takes you somewhere into the deep centre of a need. She read every night because she needed it. (To live?) And the rhythm!

I also like the synopsis of her moth story: "One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held." That about sums it up. Except, she (the narrator, "I") could now see colours. The moth gave herself to the light. And in probably the most poignant of all her runs she explains how the moth burned "like a hollow saint [...] while night pooled wetly at my feet." (This final image I saw as that watery iridescence of a flame's flicker, that continual trading of dark for light, like one hand washing the other...) Of course, the artist, too, must give his life. Someone recently pointed out to me James Joyce's idea that the artist does for the world something similar to what the Eucharist does for the Host.

The mountains held their weather aloft, she points out.

Could holding aloft and holding forth be similar? Being east of East Itself is eerie enough, but what of this mystery that she finds in the mountains that hold themselves up so effortlessly? Weather is partially the work of mountains. Do they hold their weather--their work--up as an offering to God in the same way that artists spin their time and offer it up holy as art?

Meanwhile time blows over us like the winds over the seas, or over pages of books, and our lives change. Those seas, those "hundred hollow and receding blues" I see every day from this corner of the planet (Montego Bay, Jamaica). Dillard describes time as that "film" mentioned earlier--that zero-dimensional outline of everything. It's funny how much it looks like its the wind that's blowing. She stacks eternity, time, and ... land, is it? Hmm. So eternity laps at time, and time laps at land in its poured fastness. So eternity is wispy (or fast, in its way), while time is faster, and land fastest? Of course, time is fixed (fast...) like the islands (or is it fixed upon them?), and eternity is fluid like the sea.

Well then, in all this serenity, how does the forementioned suffering figure? Well, there's no saying it better: "Nothing is going to happen in this [blog]. There is only a little violence here and there in the language, at the corner where eternity clips time."