tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15313045375442444262024-02-07T12:46:23.237-08:00Failed HermitI am a 80-year-old,grandfather of 15, great grandfather of 10, a traditional Catholic now in the Byzantine (Greek) Ukrainian Catholic Church, a former college professor (34 years), Ph.D. in English and Philosophy, academic exile, lousy gardener, lousy fisherman ("Anything worth doing is worth doing badly"--G.K. Chesterton). Pilgrim, peasant, and hermit at heart.kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.comBlogger43125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-60902069651331917682017-12-13T12:59:00.001-08:002019-03-14T09:07:10.676-07:00Moving on the Earth<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Moving
on the Earth</span></b><b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Ken
Craven<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> </span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;">Nathaniel walked
on into the fall of the year, gathering twigs and thistles and cockleburs on
the ancient winter frock coat his father had worn when he walked in the
fields. He moved deliberately through
the wasted, scrubby knob farms that lay to the east where James said the land
was so damned poor with juniper and man-high anthills that jackrabbits carried
packs when they crossed it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> Nothing and no one stopped him. Sometimes he walked right through tenant
yards and cabins, striding through hog killings and marble games and wood
chopping and the putting up of jams and jellies and whatnot. Before people had time to react, he was out
of the yard and the house and into a field or down a road or railroad
track. There were some small eruptions—<i>whup! what!</i> this one or that one starting to take
offense—before people sensed that from this gaunt, bearded strider with the
wide eyes there was none. Most saw that
he was a man of troubles and let him be.
Once in a while he would stop in a house or barn—walking right through
kitchens or milking pens—and pick something up, a pan or a sickle, and turn it
over in his long fingers as if he’d never seen anything like that before. Children and dogs gave way quietly, showing
neither fear nor threat, guessing he was bout some serious and necessary
business. When women looked up from
their shucking or sewing or soap making, they saw sorrow trailing from him like
broken cobwebs.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> Sometimes he was gone from home for a few days—sleeping
in ditches and barns, Aunt Ish said, like he had no home, like a common
tramp—and some Salt River farmer, figuring someone ought to fetch him where he
belonged, would take him by the arm and haul him into Bardstown and leave him
by the slave auction block beside the court house, where he would stand like a
penitent, staring across the square, until someone got word over to Woodlawn
and James, clicking his tongue, would come for him. Other times the monks at Gethsemane would see
him cross their lands, a stalking partner in their silent work, his gangly arms
swinging slow and his thin hands dangling from his wrists; or he would go
thirty miles the other way, to the big mother house at St. Catherine’s or the
priory of St. Rose, and the nuns or Dominican priests would see him—ghastly and
sallow and so miseried of face that he rivaled the big Jesus hanging in the
apse—standing up in the middle of the aisle during the consecration, his arms
at his sides, his head bowed, “as if he was trying to find a place to turn
himself in,” James said, “and I wish to hell he would. I’m tired of hauling him around like a sack
of feed.” “He’s walking it out,”
Jefferson on the dock at the feed store said, “whatever it be, whatever they
done to him over in that place, him and God walking it out.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> When he had first come back from France it was still deep
summer—mindless days when the land steamed in haze, warm nights when people
slipped out in their yards to sleep on quilts under big moons—before the late
thunderstorms brought the creeks back up.
They didn’t know he was coming. The foreman at the section house sent a
colored boy up the road to say Marse Nathaniel was come home from <i>over there</i> and was <i>sot down</i> on a bench where the milk train from Louisville left him.
When James got down there the foreman said the train had put him out like a
piece of freight, the baggage tag was still tied to one of his button holes,
and he was just sitting on the bench, staring off somewhere. Miss Carrie came over to help James clean him
up and after struggling with him for a day—handling his arms and legs was like
folding and unfolding a large scarecrow—they laughed and cried at the same
time, hugging each other and the bearded ragdoll brother and cousin and joking
about where to prop him up next. James
said put him in the cornfield to get them crows out but then he choked and went
to the barn, cussing every rock on the way. For a while Miss Carrie stayed and
sat by her cousin’s side and did her piece work. After coming over to James’s porch and trying
this a few days and spooning soft-boiled eggs into Nathaniel and watching them dribble
down his shirt front, she would sit by his side and do her piece work as
neighbors walking down the street waved with that attitude that says what, I
don’t know, Carrie told James, but I hate the worrisome solicitude. Go home and take care of your own, she
hissed, with all this flu going around, you’ll soon enough have troubles of
your own. After a few days, she tried
putting some of his books in his hands but he let them fall on the floor. She played the mandolin and sang songs and
fussed at him, “Nathaniel, you could at least speak or look at me.” But he stayed where he was, staring into some
other place.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> It puzzled them that Nathaniel showed up at the station
wearing what looked like mission barrel hand-me-downs instead of his army
uniform. And if he was sick or wounded,
how come he wasn’t in some hospital?
There were no answers. James went
down to the county newspaper but all he could find out was that the hospitals
in Lexington and Louisville were choked with veterans and influenza victims and
he came back home more disgusted that he usually was. Maybe, someone said, he was already in a
hospital and they put him out too. He
can walk, can’t he?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> For weeks he sat wherever James put him. He would eat enough to keep bone and fat together,
he would do his necessaries, James told Dr. McCarty who was too busy with the
flu to do more than nod, but he would not speak or give any sign that he
heard. When led, he went; when stopped,
he stood or sat. His face was a mask and
his eyes in a deep study. But when the
late summer rains came and the creeks swoll out of their banks he suddenly got
up in the middle of the “worst straight-down flood of the goddamned century,
walked out of the house and into the fields behind the tobacco warehouses,
moving like he had somewhere to get,” James told the farmers at the sorghum
mill. “At the first I tried to stop
him. I’d throw him down in the street
and Carrie would get ahold of him. He
wouldn’t fight us but when we let go, he’d spring up and walk away from us like
a shot, rain notwithstanding, sense notwithstanding, not a damn thing
notwithstanding. So we followed and watched him for a while and then let him
go. He stopped for horses and Fords and
trains, so we figured somehow he knew what he was doing.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> “Or,” he added, looking down at his boots and tugging his
ear, “so I reckon.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> Nathaniel walked.
He walked from first light until after dark, getting drenched in the
heavy cloudbursts that ended the parched summer and drying out in the sun like
the stubbled fields and dirt roads. Carrie saw him pass the L&N section
house by Aunt Sukey’s spring three times in one day, each time from a different
direction. He walked steadily through
late August and September but he would stop sometimes in barns and on people’s
porches and sit, looking away somewhere as if he were expecting something, until there were bowls of soup in his hands
or shawls on his shoulder where this one or that one would coax him by a stove
to steam off his clothes. He still said nothing. One man found him fallen in a ditch by the
cheese factory and “howling out these long despairing wails that sounded like
no pain I’d ever want to know.” So they said to each other, the ones that heard
him. But quiet, guarded, nodding, they
let him be, and tended him as much as he would let them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> In October the hunting for rabbits and quail started and
more than one hunter told of the wild-haired, wild-eyed man in a long coat who
walked up and snatched the shotgun from their hands and threw it away. James followed this trail for a while,
explaining, making peace, talking it out on his haunches with a piece of straw
in his mouth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> Then there was a silence.
After a week during which no one came forth or brought Nathaniel back,
James went looking, cussing and snorting.
He went east and west, asking, but no one had seen his brother. The goldenrod was blooming in the meadows,
and heavy washboard clouds made him look up and shiver. Got to get him laid up for the winter, he
found himself thinking. Finally he went
south and east through Gravel Switch to see if the Prophet—his new name for his
brother—had gone back into the knob country.
At last he found him in a colored shanty town by an unused railroad
siding.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> The tale James told the stove sitters at the McCabe
General Store in Woodlawn was, generally, this: that he heard a strange white
man “with the promise” in a long coat and beard was living with the niggers and
figured, yes, why the hell not, he’s done everything else. It was a Sunday when he got there, a cold November day with a little sleet
tatting on the shanty roofs, and the first thing he saw when he opened the door
to the little church was Nathaniel sitting up next to the preacher and the
barrel stove, slapping his hands on his knees and singing in a croaky baritone,
“Walking in Jerusalem Just Like John,” and smiling around. When the service was over, “Nathaniel came
out with niggers handing all over him and petting him like he was Jesus
himself.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> “I walked up and said, ‘Nate, time to go home now,’ and
he looked at me right in the eye for the first time since he got back, and said
‘this will do for now, Brother James, this will do for now.’ And then, just
after I got back in the T, he came over and patted me on the leg. ‘My books,’
he said, ‘please send my books. And give
my love to Carrie.’”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%;"> That was it, James told them in Woodlawn. “I reckon he
knows what he’s doing down there. But
anyhow, he’s got a warm place for the winter even if he is eating hog parts and
drinking chicory like any jig.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;">©Copyright 1992 Ken
Craven<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 200%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-44168397207422238822016-06-14T16:46:00.000-07:002016-06-14T16:46:13.893-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL0SOG64piYYB-VM99xm9iknAlYdMBjDhOgfHJcx1ijvEcXO5RfuoLHIUEmmWUR8DGBZ_rZthJPaZLBg4NtgGnQ6qmOPALdK8YSe2mnDj6qeSVpcXj1YFnnKczqzDAkJustgdE7TrpZrx8/s1600/black+madonna.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL0SOG64piYYB-VM99xm9iknAlYdMBjDhOgfHJcx1ijvEcXO5RfuoLHIUEmmWUR8DGBZ_rZthJPaZLBg4NtgGnQ6qmOPALdK8YSe2mnDj6qeSVpcXj1YFnnKczqzDAkJustgdE7TrpZrx8/s1600/black+madonna.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><i>The review below was written in
1979. Young readers today may have
difficulty recognizing many in the cast of characters, but I hope they will see
that the nightmare of the present time has been with us for a long time, and
the issues of our day are monstrous, putrid blossoms from sick seeds sown long
ago. Our Lady, pray for us!</i><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<b><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Dark Night, Black Hopes<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></b>
<i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The Death of Christian Culture</span></i><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">, by John Senior. Arlington House, Publishers:
165 Huguenot St., New Rochelle, N.Y. 10801. $10.00.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Reviewed by Dr. R.
Kenton Craven<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<div style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The last year has
brought us a number of books that ought to serve as town criers to the West.
While we have had a veritable tradition of such warnings throughout the
modernist era--Chesterton, Benda, Ortega, Eliot, Tate, Voegelin, Burnham, et
al.—I don't believe that there has been a time since the Thirties in which
alarums have been sounded more insistently or in such happy profusion. The
recent crop, taken together, is reminiscent of the coalition that formed the <i>American Review</i> (1933-37); it includes
the subject of this review, John Senior's <i>The
Death of Christian Culture</i>; Jacques Ellul, <i>Betrayal of the West</i> (Seabury,1978); Arianna Stassinopoulos, <i>After Reason</i> (Stein & Day, 1978);
Joan Colebrook, <i>Innocents of the West:
Travels Through the Sixties</i> (Basic Books, Inc., 1979); and Russell Kirk, <i>Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning
</i>(Gateway, 1979). The points of view differ greatly. Senior is a Catholic with medieval
foundations, Ellul a Calvinist, and so forth, but each has glimpsed the future that
is already here, and seen its desolation of spirit, and each calls for a return
to the values of the West.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Ordinarily,
such a statement might seem jejune, to be marked by the teacher as
"generalization! which West?" But the point is that in these
extraordinary times, when the threat is to the very existence of the West, with
all its inner contradictions, the crisis must be stated in Tolkien's terms: the
Men of the West v. Eastern Mordor. Though he disagrees with them radically,
Senior can find Hume and Voltaire closer to his basic assumptions than Kung or
Russell. The question is, can the West survive? Have we gone so far that we
cannot return? In <i>To Jerusalem and Back</i>,
Saul Bellow wondered whether we do not all "go about lightly
chloroformed," while a "dark power" enslaves our thinking. This
loss of perception of what we are now in relation to what we have been
exercises the wits of each of the authors, and summons apocalyptic moods and
rhetoric. Belloc had laid it down that "Europe is the Faith, the Faith is
Europe." The New Humanists were willing to reform the proposition to
"the West is a set of moral standards and limitations," though they
were mightily_ excoriated by the late Allen Tate for this reduction. But even
this rarefied formula has become increasingly repugnant or incomprehensible
before the triumph of a night-marish modernism which seems, as both Senior 'and
Ellul observe, to have seized the minds of even the· best thinkers with a
perversity that looks upon everything Western as outmoded and discredited.
Colebrook and Stassinopoulos join Senior and Ellul in wondering at what James
Burnham called "the suicide of the West,” while Kirk drolly reviews the
self-destruction of the intellect in a disintegrating culture.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">It is
against this background that Senior writes, his academic concerns at one with
his life as a teacher. Since the book first appeared last January, it has been
taken to task by several reviewers, as well as some readers, for what is
perceived as a difficult, annoying, even perverse style. I confess that I have
not had this problem in reading him, perhaps because I can identify so readily
with the spirit of anger and exasperation which informs his lively prose: daily
in my teaching I encounter the same problem which exercises both his and
Ellul's wrath-a matter-of-fact assumption that "all that" has been
left behind us in the kitchen-midden of the West, that now we are embarked on a
new journey in spaceship Earth, or in in a new lifestyle in the global village
commune, where all the religious, and epistemological assumptions of the past
are obsolete or quaint. Perhaps some of my readers can identify with the urge
to clenched fists and battle cries in the spirit of Roland. In <i>The Way Down and Out</i>, a much earlier
book by Senior, he wrote “perhaps in the end we shall be reduced to a set of
clenched teeth." While no means been so reduced, he has (like Ellul) been
angered, and his prose has an urgency about it born of trying to contend with
epidemic error and general fog. When one is encircled by Dark Riders, it is no
time for the polite nothings of the university presses.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Nevertheless,
Senior's book is not hysterical; quite the contrary, its arguments are cogent
and sound. It is what he has the audacity to say that is unpalatable to
reviewers. He commonly returns us to first principles in the spirit of his
mentors, Belloc, Cardinal Newman, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Plato. In relation
to the seriously confused ecumenical movement, he offers Aristotle's Principle
of Contradiction; to those hankering after Eastern mysticism, a clear
discussion of the metaphysical opposition of East and West; to those confused
about Church and State in education, a refreshing discussion of the difference
between true and false liberalism. Beginning with a question, "What is
Christian Culture?" Senior examines the idiocies of the current scene for
topsy-turvy revaluations of all values and a perverted sense of compassion, and
begins a contrast which he uses effectively throughout the book, between the
jaded decadence of fashionable thinking and the basic premises of Christian
Western man, grounded in love, work, family. realist metaphysics, prayer, and
God. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Perhaps
the best and most needed section of the argument is the pursuit of the
"modem" at its roots. For Senior, the Modernist movement in literature
and culture begins precisely where it ends—Rimbaud and Baudelaire do not differ
essentially from Ginsberg and Co.—for they commence by rejecting and hating the
West and, with inexorable predictability, proceed to a love of the East which,
as Senior analyzes with skill, is nothing but a love of the nothingness that is
not there. Historically we may observe the accuracy of Senior's thesis, from
Plato's struggle with the sophists to Paul's with the Corinthians to the
romantic's pursuit of the lotus to the streetcorner gurus and befuddled
theologians of the 1970s. What is characteristic of the East is gnosticism, and
disbelief in the concrete individual thing or person, and when the West falters
in its first principles, it opens itself to that invasion of that spirit in every
dimension of its existence—religion, family, art, education, work, language—which
men like Augustine and Voegelin have fought so well. Senior challenges the
comfortable orthodoxies of the "modern tradition," and the scriptures
(Joyce, Proust, Lawrence, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Rimbaud, etc.) on which it
founds its anti-church. We have not seen such literary irreverence since
Chesterton: it is delightful to have it from a professor of classics who knows
the modern world very well indeed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> Senior's attack on the popular
assumptions of the time proceeds through many topics, but his progress is also
a regress—to the first principles of philosophy and the Christian Catholic
Faith, and its greatest exemplification in the medieval period, which he
opposes to the current corruption in the Church as in the "philosophical
imbecility of Hans Kung." The cure for this latterday nonsense Senior sees
as no different, for church or society, from what it has always been when the
Dark Ages threaten—monastic centers of contemplation and education. Drawing on
the basic principles of monastic education, he makes an eloquent plea that
centers based on these principles be at least permitted existence in the modern
university, a gentlemanly allusion to his own embattled Integrated Humanities
Program at the University of Kansas (see Russell Kirk's report in <i>Decadence and Renewal</i>, pp. 325-328). As
for the church, it too must return to its monastic center. In “Dark Night of
the Church,” he remarks that there is little hope for the Visible Church, that
we have no reason now to be Christians except the right ones, the true ground
of hope.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"> While I agree generally with the
conclusion as with the mood of the argument, I wonder if the bulk of the book
was not written before the accession of John Paul II. As I write, the Pope is
in Poland, that beautiful country that has survived Munich, Yalta, Potsdam.
Addressing his fellow countrymen, John Paul argued that Poland is of the West
because it is Christian, and he called for a reuniting of the Christian West.
Turning from the TV, I found this passage in <i>GK's Weekly</i>, No. 2, March 28, 1925: <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<div style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Certainly
that nation has proved itself perpetual under conditions when it was thought
that anything would have perished. And if indeed we come to a chaos in which it
seems that everything has perished, if this Semitic sophistry does link up the
Teutons with the Slavonic hordes, if there returns that welter of barbarism
which Europe has often seen, many who do not now understand may find themselves
saying, if only under their breath, "there is always Poland.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Thus Chesterton.
We may observe that, as far as Poland was concerned, the Germans and Russians
did unite to crush it, and crush it again. To Senior's witty chapter,
"Black is Beautiful," in which black becomes symbolic of the real
thing, we may add the hope of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa. Malachi Martin
has written that the future of the Church is in the East, not in the West,
where Christianity has been trivialized or diluted, to which Senior would, I
believe, reply—“of course, where the West is clearly understood to be on the
front lines, and knows its enemy."<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;"><br /></span>
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Reprinted with the permission of
Gerald Russello of the <i>University Bookman</i>. Thanks to Robert Craven for computer
assistance in rescuing the text.<o:p></o:p></span>kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-74629300415042253392016-06-08T14:07:00.000-07:002016-06-08T14:07:41.904-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6c6BK3E9vad5Hq2sjOxReCv8EznEjg1xpIfS59lTTQ_SmeAGuLArU7p7aRNv0c5YDvKtdTbrA9qBWBbetMSuuvQ-Nb45ALvTkwWrrsD1epLhlU5AaSwRDgOfOhLGi4xznf9M_L0uu_uxs/s1600/rosary.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6c6BK3E9vad5Hq2sjOxReCv8EznEjg1xpIfS59lTTQ_SmeAGuLArU7p7aRNv0c5YDvKtdTbrA9qBWBbetMSuuvQ-Nb45ALvTkwWrrsD1epLhlU5AaSwRDgOfOhLGi4xznf9M_L0uu_uxs/s1600/rosary.jpg" /></a></div>
<h2>
<b><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">A Writer’s Litany</span></span></b></h2>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">by Ken Craven</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lord, that we may pray like brooks and books,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Our words
and wishes clear and wild,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
pray in Spirit and in Truth<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In pebbles
cracking down in streams<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In words in
tongues in improbable shouts<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lord, have
mercy upon us<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
A serpentine
tribe of Dan mingled with your people,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Poets whose
vindictive hearts long for thee<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Poets who
need thy lightning and thy terrible silence.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
kneel down in the street in the rain<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Mad and
prayerful as Kit Smart<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
(Lord bless
his cat Geoffrey and his whisking)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Doomed
Doctor Johnson at our side<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Dour and
holy in his written prayers<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Surprising
in love with the chained madness he feared<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
My we kneel
with them, doctors of raging hope,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Streams of
cool grace running down our faces<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lord we pray
for simplicity of mind<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
chirp tune like Cary—Joyce—<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Rejoicing in
the foolishness of literary crickets<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
worry less about small sins<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Like Gulley
Jimson, genius and good thief,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Hot for new
canvas and for her<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And pray
hard running from the Law<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Laughing in
flight from Pharisees<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
For the
forgiveness of the large sins<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Of art its
presumption and pride<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lord we pray
for merriness of heart<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
listen hard for angels<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Clinking in
tea things and engraver’s tools<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Like Bill
Blake mad hungry for vision<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
For a gift
God will not give<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Prophetic
freedom from the law<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
(Lord, bless
his hubris and his delight)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
listen for the grace of tiger roar<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
establish Jerusalem green and free<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
speak with angels in our living rooms<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And watch
for devils in the streets and malls<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lord we pray
for poems acid-deep on copper plates<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lord we pray
for poems sure as swords of iron<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
sit on florid streets and watch<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
For the
right license plate<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The right
true sign before we turn and amble<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In our white
linen suit up the steamed verandah<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
To write of
power and glory and dark Scobied hearts<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And tangled
vines of sin and grace<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Greene,
generous green in knowledge of the cross<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Where he
wrote and watched<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Men rage
into the Jesus arms outstretched<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In unimagined
ways and wretched jokes<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Where he saw
men scheme destruction<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Like boys
after wars, hungry for evil<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In the
falling towers and bombed streets<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lord we pray
for the heart of the matter<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
sling stones and curves<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
At death,
carve firm letters spelling<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Out our
graceful doom in holy prayer<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
One eye
cocked at sex in eternal joy<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Fixed in
stone, fecund words,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Dominic
preaching in Eric Gill<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Rough street
man from Nazareth<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Whence comes
nothing smarmy good<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
But only
necessary rules and few<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lord we pray
for poems that stand and prophesy like tombs<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
sweep forth on swing<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
With Hopkins
priest, his lilting hope and loss—<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Hang heavy
hard hammers on cynghanned and crack<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Unstopped
unEnglish lines like rattling Welshland wagon tongues,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Unleash
all-colored all-efflorescent prayers that<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Open buds
and hearts and greyveiled storms where<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Dying nuns
affirm their King, Hope-hefting,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Storm
walking on all-apocalyptic waves<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Saving each soul, each, with words wrung hard<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
From saw and
awl and awe-struck pins<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In a small
shop, at dawn, in a poor town.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
follow Lord in fallow days<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lord let us
pray for words that buckle like diving birds.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
pound tables in the dining halls<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And settle,
unsettle Manichees and monks <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
With
sentences that spell doom and resurrection<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
be wholly one in tongue and mind<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Deep as the
water that pours out the words of wave<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Hot as the
iron brand that Thomas burnt into the door<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Spurning all
enticements to turn and write<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Of worship
small or meretricious<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
always measure by the Monstrance<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And test our
tiny offerings against<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The words
that make us kneel and sing<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>O Salutaris Hostia, Tantum Ergo, Panis
Angelicus<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Golden
honeyed eternal poems<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
write such and sing such<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lord let us
learn speech in silence let us learn<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
in heart and soul hear the <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Sagas of
Undset, wry tales of O’Connor<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Know the
endless turnings of the demons’ ways<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And
feel them turning in subtle coils<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
In every
move we make, in every prayer<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We dare to
offer: that in tales of Olaf and <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Kristin and
Lavrans and Hazel and Tarwater<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
We see
ourselves, good country people of<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The fijords
and backwaters of kudzu and lime,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And know the
first country, the slithering<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Come-ons of
the first serpent, the taste<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Of fruit
that concealed the blade of razor bite<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The ringing
of the axe of revenge<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
wilderness of the South and North<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Nazis
come to Sweden, Sherman to Georgia<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lord, that
we may pray not to be taken by surprise.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
learn heart from connatural men<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Who trusted
in the line, the word, the taste and touch<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Of time, who
held sentences like guns and rods<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And felt the
pull of old men and the sea, of tigers<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And
rhinoceri, of the tough wrenching of sails and rope,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Of the big
guns and dazzled eyes and red dawns<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
learn from Hemingway and Campbell<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
From Pound
and Kipling, Buchan and Faulkner,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Conrad and
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Melville<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And miners
and sailors and cowboys and men of steel who<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Left letters
or journals or scrawls on underground walls<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
All who
wrangled with dust or felt the thwart of wind<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Whose
forbears axed the tree that made the cross<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
And were
loved by the carpenter who graced the tree<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
know the earthly sacraments<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Of tried and
true and plank roads to the fort<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Prophetic
emptiness in gated openings for grace<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
astonishment of loss, the fields of rotting soldiers<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
That we may
know the love of sentences like taut wire<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lord, we
pray for honesty like men lost on rafts at sea<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
©Copyright
2014 R. Kenton Craven <o:p></o:p></div>
kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-52275332976423706012016-05-04T13:53:00.000-07:002016-05-04T13:53:00.837-07:00Once Upon a Time<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><span id="goog_1608895199"></span><span id="goog_1608895200"></span>Once Upon A Time</b><br />
<br />
Ken Craven<br />
<br />
<i>Love’s feet are stained with clay and travel-sore. </i> Francis Thompson, “House of Bondage.”<br />
<br />
<i>I could never conceive or tolerate any utopia which did not leave me the liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself </i> G.K. Chesterton, <i>Orthodoxy</i><br />
<br />
Once upon a time—how soon? I can’t say—a steam locomotive rolls down the track in the heavy morning fog, spraying a morning rime of frost into the half-frozen creek and screeching to a stop just before an old C&O tunnel. In other days, it would have been an odd place for a stopping, just between two ridges so steep that the railroad cut had probably taken a year to carve sometime in the Unholy Past, as the people here call it. The creek turns aside at the tunnel mouth and runs off into an old field of boulders where it disappears. It has not come far, only from the next community two miles down the track. Wooden flats, really old mine elevators, descend on swinging cables and the unloading goes quickly. We are on the end of the line, not much left in the cars. Soon the flats disappear upwards and the train, an old coal-fired switch engine and three cars, one of them a caboose, rolls slowly into the tunnel and shuts down. There is time for the smoke to pass off before the fog goes. A successful run, using the night and the mountain fog as cover from the rare spotter plane. <br />
<br />
Only a few flats are needed. There doesn’t seem to be much food or much else coming lately from the friendly guerrillas who scour the Interstates. Probably too many patrols. Even the Pakistani truckers or their shotguns are carrying shoulder-fired missiles now. That may be just as well, as I told Father Penance last night. We must become more self-reliant this year. For the time being, at least, the World State has too much on its hands in dealing with <i>Islamia</i> to worry about a few Christian cranks in the hills. Their chief concern is making their own world. Later, they may have other plans.<br />
I walk back to where Brother Gregory ministers to the handful of refugees that were brought up in the caboose. Most of the others up that came up on the train from the Kanawha River left the boxcars in the lower communities where they are better equipped to deal with young families—traditional Catholics, Orthodox, and evangelicals—fresh from the other states. Here we specialize, as I had learned when I first came ten years ago, in helping refugees who have escaped from processing centers of World State V, those still in partial shock from the aggressive retraining. As usual, they all look healthy and perfectly normal. Even their eyes betray little terror or anxiety. <br />
<br />
A bright-looking young man approaches. The others, two men and three women, seem to regard him as their spokesman. We introduce ourselves, I tell them I’m Father Schall. The spokesman is Ted; the other men Ben and Simon; the women Frances, Cheryl, and Dawn. I explain that I usually walk newcomers back up to the settlement, built on the site of an old coal company town, which is now accessible only by a path. The road is long since gone from strip-mining, and it’s not even on most old maps. I don’t tell them that the walking has a purpose, maybe several. For one, I want to watch their reactions.<br />
<br />
After we cross an abandoned narrow gauge railroad bridge over Decision Creek, I invite them to sit on some boulders.<br />
<br />
“Why have you come here?” I ask.<br />
<br />
The others look at Ted, who gives the first sign of his emotions.<br />
<br />
He looks around as if the small hollow contains thousands of watchers. The others exchange looks with him.<br />
<br />
“I can tell what you’re doing, Ted. You’re wondering what you’re supposed to say.”<br />
<br />
“Supposed to say?”<br />
<br />
“Yes, what is the correct thing to say?”<br />
<br />
“What would that be?” Ted nearly growls, then lowers his head.<br />
<br />
I laugh softly. “Anyone else?” <br />
<br />
“You might have had better food on the train,” the small one named Dawn says suddenly.<br />
<br />
“Might have,” I say.<br />
<br />
“Look, we can go back you know,” Cheryl says. She fairly spits at me.<br />
<br />
“Yes, I know. And that is why I have stopped here. I always stop newcomers here so they can consider their decision. If you wish, you can start walking down the track. It’s only a hundred miles to the first federation outposts on the Ohio. I repeat, why did you come? You would not be here if you had not given a sign to one of our people up North. And given it more than once. Something must be wrong with your existence up there.”<br />
<br />
“You’re asking us a question, aren’t you?”<br />
<br />
The broad-shouldered one named Simon cuts in. “I’ve heard about that. “A question,” he says again, as if saying a new phrase in a foreign language. “Socrates asked those,” he says with some satisfaction.<br />
<br />
“You’re the one who attended one of our secret classes in Boston,” I say quietly.<br />
<br />
“Your people didn’t tell us about that. They said we would have freedom down here,” Cheryl shouts at me. “They said there would be choices in our lives if we came with you.” She shivers and clutches her jacket.<br />
<br />
“There is only once choice to be had here,” I say, glancing briefly at Frances, who is pulling her coat down and scratching her tattooed shoulder. <br />
<br />
I looked down at the rushing creek. “Last summer here I saw a hummingbird hover over a flower at the water’s edge. Like the bird’s movement to the flower, its sweetness and color and taste. That’s not choice exactly, but it carries its inner similitude.”<br />
<br />
“That sounds like something I heard once. A friend of mine who is here no more said it was some kind of Zen poem,” said Simon.<br />
<br />
“Something like that.”<br />
<br />
“I don’t care about that s___. I care about the freedom you guys promised. Hellooooo???? Wasn’t that the deal?” It’s Cheryl again, turning and making as if to leave, squinting back across the bridge into sun, which is burning the last frost off the tracks.<br />
<br />
“Let me ask a question. Dawn, let me ask you.”<br />
<br />
She stops and looks at me as if I had made a proposition.<br />
<br />
“What is marriage?”<br />
<br />
It is like pushing a button. Her eyes become pinpoints.<br />
<br />
“Marriage, if by that you mean the outmoded practice of one person of the male gender mating for life with one person of the female gender, often under some sort of neo-fascist religious authority, is an artificial mental fiction used by the power classes for the purpose of social stability. This artificial union provided a legitimacy for sex and often resulted in high-risk offspring.”<br />
<br />
“Now you have told me what you have been taught by the deconstructionists. Do you agree with that proposition?”<br />
<br />
“I told you, what’s to agree?”<br />
<br />
“I’m asking whether or not you think that definition of marriage—or rather that non-definition—is true?”<br />
<br />
I can tell that there is restlessness in the group, as if I had thrown a small bomb in their midst, so I change tack.<br />
<br />
“Okay, let’s go back to the first question. What do you want here? What do you want from me? Our Father Richard told me that you really wanted to try this . . . .”<br />
<br />
“Wait.” Frances speaks for the first time. “That stuff about marriage. Marriage is only a metaphor. We live by metaphors. Everything is only a metaphor. That’s what she said, my teacher.”<br />
<br />
“That we can see into things by virtue of metaphor, I would agree,” I reply. “That things are only metaphors and only mental fictions is a symptom of the radical disease of relativism from which the World State—and your teachers—are suffering. And you. The 20th century author Susan Sontag wrote many books on cancer and AIDS as metaphors and when she realized that her bone-marrow cancer transplant had failed, she screamed in outrage, ‘but that means I am going to die!’ As death came near, she told her son, ‘this time, for the first time, I don’t feel special.’”<br />
<br />
“Gross,” Cheryl says. “We don’t say ‘death’ anymore. We just go into the Oneness.”<br />
<br />
“So I’ve heard.”<br />
<br />
“It‘s getting on toward our prayer and mid-day meal,” I say.<br />
<br />
“Briefly, what we offer here is not teaching so much as un-teaching. We try to get you out of the diseased state of mind you’re in and lead you into the real. All I can promise you is that it’s hard, that freedom comes with a price that costs not less than everything, and that includes pain and suffering. If you’ve read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, you have a choice to make now between the life of the World State—a life based on forgetting, pleasure, and general mindlessness, a life based on acedia, one of the seven deadly sins first catalogued by the Desert Fathers in the 5th century AD—and a life that is more like that of the Savage, who in his self-accepted pain discovers Time, Death, and God.” To Ben’s questioning eyes, I add, “acedia means without care, or not caring. It is the sin of sloth.”<br />
<br />
“That’s why I came,” Ben says. “Because I am tired of not being able to care about anything except the next fun thing. Because it’s like there is a hole in me somewhere, bit I don’t know what to do about it. Sometimes it seems as if I am supposed to do something, but I don’t know what. That’s why I ran, I got tired of the constant watching, and them saying over and over, ‘nothing means anything except what the World State says.’” <br />
<br />
“If you have discovered the hole in yourself, you are ready for change,” I tell him. “When some people in the early 20th century glimpsed what was coming in the Unholy Age, they retired to a community very much like ours. Like a famous poet they prayed, ‘teach us to care/and not to care. Teach us to sit still.’ What one must learn is what to care about and what not to care about. That is the whole of true education. That is what you have not learned.”<br />
<br />
“You mean we don’t know anything now?” The voice is that of Frances, and plaintive now.<br />
<br />
“What is worse, you think you do. What we have in the community on the other side of the ridge is a little University of What Is and What Is Not. Unless you want to turn back now and go back to the nation you came from, let’s continue the discussion after prayer and a meal. Maybe a little rest.”<br />
<br />
No one moves until I do. Then, slowly, like men condemned to a life sentence, they follow me up the path. I can hear Cheryl and Ben exchanging the kind of peevish comments tired travelers make.<br />
“You’ve brought me to an effing monastery?”<br />
<br />
After a few moments, a light snow begins to fall, the fog moves back in, and there is only the sound of our boots crunching the snow.<br />
<br />
In the chapel, the monks are chanting Terce in Latin as I lead the refugees into the back rows. I recognized the passage in Psalm 119:<br />
<br />
<i>Instruct me, O Lord, in the way of your statutes,</i><br />
<i>That I may exactly observe them.</i><br />
<i>Give me discernment, that I may observe your law,</i><br />
<i>and keep it with all my heart.</i><br />
<br />
After a light meal of bread, soup, cheese, and apples, I make sure that several of the brothers take the refugees into one of the bunk houses and stow them away for a nap. After Vespers, I have them brought to our classroom building. <br />
<br />
“I know you’re still tired from the journey and unsure of why you’ve come here. I’m simply going to accept that you had some reasons for leaving the world you know. You’re all in your twenties, so you were born after the collapse of America and the inception of World State V. It’s all you’ve ever known, and all you’ve been permitted to know. If I understand correctly, soon you will be the last remnants of the last generation in World State V to be born of natural parents, and in the natural way. That, by the way, will make you dangerous, and could mean a shorter life. Soon they will want no one around who can remember having parents.”<br />
<br />
“Father—is that what I am supposed to call you? —that’s right. I heard that the first wave of the new babies are hatching in the experimental nurseries, all in vitro, and that an alternate experiment is underway in which babies are, um, being carried by surrogate mothers. These will all be raised by gay couples in closed communities and educated in special nurseries. I’m afraid some of them may be my children. You see, they took my sperm in a special collection program based on selected parents . . . .”<br />
<br />
It’s Ben again, hanging his head slightly. <br />
<br />
“And the idea is . . .?” I muse, waiting for someone else to speak.<br />
<br />
“Perfect breeding, perfect children, disease-free, ready for a complete values program that will begin even before they’re out of the womb,” Dawn recites perfectly, as before. “The final destruction of all the vestiges of Western so-called civilization.”<br />
<br />
“Then let me ask you again, what is marriage? What is the true nature of marriage?”<br />
<br />
“Look, let me say this again,” Cheryl says. “I came here for some vague promise of freedom. Like, I don’t know what all this crap is about definitions and marriage and the nature of things. Nature is nature, period. You sound retarded, Father. Can’t we get to the freedom part?”<br />
<br />
“No, we can’t. You’re still in prison, and it sounds as if you would like to stay there.”<br />
<br />
“Prison? How am I in prison?”<br />
<br />
“Do you think that marriage is, as Dawn said this morning, a purely artificial social construct?”<br />
<br />
“Well, why not? It makes just as much sense for two women to marry each other, or two men, as it does for a man and a woman.”<br />
<br />
“And for three women to marry each other?"<br />
<br />
“Whatever.”<br />
<br />
“The whatever could include a man and his dog?”<br />
<br />
“Like I said.”<br />
<br />
“And that all sounds perfectly reasonable to all of you?”<br />
<br />
There is a moment of silence. Cheryl picks at her nails and does a good imitation of a lost soul.<br />
<br />
“Cheryl, I don’t think it can be perfectly reasonable to you because I don’t think you believe in reason,” Ben said suddenly. “If you believed in any form of reason, you would see that there are some contradictions in our official versions of things in the World State. Like things having natures.”<br />
I am surprised, but I had heard from Father Richard that Ben was the most promising candidate he was sending up. <br />
<br />
“Why are homosexuals the way they are, Cheryl? What do we say about that in the processing centers?”<br />
<br />
“Come on, Ben, because it’s the way they are, the way they’re made, everyone know that.”<br />
<br />
“Well, I’m not so sure that’s true, but what is certain is that in this case, you think that it’s because they have a certain nature, isn’t right?”<br />
<br />
“So?”<br />
<br />
“It’s a contradiction. A flat-out contradiction. Like so much of what we’ve been taught to think. If one thing has a nature, why don’t other things?’<br />
<br />
“Hold on,” Frances breaks in. “Homosexual, that’s a physical thing. Marriage is still a social construct people make up, isn’t it?’<br />
<br />
“Last time I checked, when a man and a woman have sex with each other, that’s pretty physical,” Ben responds. “And if nothing interferes, the physical result can be a child. Isn’t that the nature of marriage? Or part of it?”<br />
<br />
“Look,” Cheryl said, “all these definitions and stuff, that’s old Western Civilization crap, right? Like this stupid monastery or whatever it is. And what marriage is, that’s all relative, don’t you know?”<br />
<br />
“And that answers everything for you, doesn’t it?” I say. “When do you break out of the prison of relativism?”<br />
<br />
They all begin to talk at once. I let them wind down.<br />
<br />
“Where did you think you were coming?” I ask, glancing at Ted. <br />
<br />
“I thought it was like a wildlife refuge for thinking and stuff.”<br />
<br />
“So think. Do things have natures, and is any action right or wrong?”<br />
<br />
“It DEPENDS,” Cheryl fairly shouts, “can’t you people get that?”<br />
<br />
“On what?”<br />
<br />
“On your point of view."<br />
<br />
“So I’m asking your point of view. Is anything right or wrong?”<br />
<br />
Silence.<br />
<br />
“A man named Scalia once said, if it all depends on the individual’s point of view, nothing can be said to be right or wrong, and the rule of law is superfluous. If the definition of marriage depends on your point of view, then there is no such thing. There would only be as many such things as you wanted to hypothesize. For example, you can say marriage is a joining of dirt and water. And in that case, you cannot be free because you have no real choice, only a selection of equally fictitious imaginings. A choice is of something other minds can recognize as real. And more: when you make a genuine choice, something happens inside you.”<br />
<br />
“I’m tired,” Cheryl says. “And I don’t even know why we came all the way down here to talk about marriage, which isn’t even something I’m interested in, and if I were, it would be, like, very personal, you know?” <br />
<br />
“Bedtime,” I said. “Class for those who are staying meets in the morning after Lauds. By the way, the reason that the question of marriage is being raised is that that is all we have to offer you by way of education and reality. Unless you want to enter the monastery. Goodnight.”<br />
<br />
“WHAT?”<br />
<br />
I walk briskly across the yard to Compline with Brother Gregory, who has been sitting in on the discussion. After the Nunc Dimittis, I ask what he thinks of the group.<br />
<br />
“Two will stay, the others will head back North.”<br />
<br />
I suspect that he is right but try not to give up on hope. I know that those who get back to the World States can slip back into their state of perpetual <i>anomie</i> tempered with drugs, no doubt, with a great sigh of relief. Courage is in short supply, and the odds are so great. In the spring, they say, the World State may reach of its many uneasy alliances with<i> Islamia</i>, and let slip the dogs of war against us. If the World State allows the Islamists to exercise Sharia Law in the areas they conquer, many of us will be put to the sword, or become slaves. Others may journey south toward <i>Justicia</i>. What I think of as I try to say my rosary is the madness of our times. The “remaking of all values” that was called for in 1967 has swept over the West with a vengeance, and there are only a few pockets of sanity left in the world. I console myself that it has happened before. During the Dark Ages, the Benedictine monasteries arose as centers of learning, farming, shelter, and hope. Without them, we wouldn’t even have the Bible. But this thing, this new thing, this attempt to “go beyond good and evil” and remake human nature itself, is an unspeakable monstrosity. And here I have with me, these walking wounded, prisoners, burnouts.<br />
<br />
<br />
Morning breaks with some hope. Without being prodded, Ted and Simon somehow make it into Matins at 4 AM and sit there quietly. Dawn and Frances catch me before breakfast and say they want to stay and hear what I have to say. “Stay for a while,” I say, “we’ll keep you warm and feed you as best we can, and if it’s no go, we’ll help you back on the train next month.” Cheryl opts out of everything and stays in her bunk, then approaches Brother Gregory and asks him for some food. She is out of here, as clueless as she came, and I am sorry for that. I suspect she will think she has escaped from a madhouse but will always wonder, just what was all that about? It’s a long way North. Maybe she will come back.<br />
<br />
As planned, several families have walked up from the first village down the track, and the children are chattering in the dining hall. Our refugees gape.<br />
<br />
Frances explains that where she lives there are no children and that she hasn’t seen any since her childhood. The children peer around their mother’s long skirts at the strange clothing of the visitors. I have selected Tom and Mary Therese Preston to make the presentation. They explain they will speak briefly and then answer questions. “They look like the pictures I’ve seen of Mennonites or something like that,” Frances whispers to Dawn. “Check out those skirts!”<br />
<br />
Brother Gregory shoos the children into a makeshift nursery by the kitchen. Tom begins with a prayer and grins broadly, saying “welcome, Father Schall has asked us here as sort of exhibit families, I guess. We’ll make a few points and then let you ask questions, and then we have to get back to the goats and cows. Mary and I have been married for ten years and we have seven children, five boys and two girls. She escaped from a conditioning center in Delaware and I jumped off a troop train in Virginia. We met up here and we both soon joined the Church and were married. I like animals and hunting and growing things, and we teach our children ourselves together with other parents, sort of pooling our talents. Both our moms and dads were incinerated in one of the cleaning waves that came right after the second World State Congress and the New Laws. All I knew about anything I could believe in was an old book of Fairy Tales I found in a recycling bin, and the words that meant the most to me were ‘Once Upon a Time,’ which kept my mind free when the Conditioners worked on me in school. The Fairy Tales taught me that something had to be real, somewhere, and that it had something to do with absolute law and fidelity and purpose. And I knew that I was something much more than what the teachers told me. So here we are.”<br />
<br />
Mary stood and smiled. “I know you will have many questions, so I’ve decided to keep it short. The most important things in my life are God, my children, my husband, my marriage. I’ll say one more thing. In the World State, I began to feel completely closed off, locked up. I’m sad to say that I had sex with many men, and I was always on the pill. I had no idea of what love was, but I somehow knew that wasn’t what I was having with those men. I didn’t know that marriage was a sacrament and the way into true freedom. I didn’t know that love is an absolute commitment in which we must always be open to each other, to God, and to new life.”<br />
<br />
I can tell that Tom and Mary had stirred something in our “patients,” as I sometimes call them.<br />
I listen.<br />
<br />
BEN: What does that mean, always being open to new life?<br />
<br />
TOM: It means no contraception. As long as a couple practices contraception, they are withholding love from each other. If they are not open to new life, they’re shutting out God and, frankly, each other. It’s like having a big Maybe in your lives, all the time. It would be like spraying all the garden seeds with plastic.<br />
<br />
SIMON: But, I mean, how does that work?<br />
<br />
TOM: Well, with seven children, I’d say it works very well.<br />
<br />
DAWN: But you can’t, you just can’t do that all the time, can you?<br />
<br />
MARY: Well, it does take that old thing, discipline.<br />
<br />
TOM: She means I sometimes chop a lot of wood.<br />
<br />
FRANCES: But what if your feelings change? Maybe you won’t love each other forever.<br />
<br />
MARY: You must think that love means going on having the same feelings forever. No, feelings change. Love isn’t a feeling, though it sometimes comes with feelings. Our mistake is to confuse the two. Love is an act of the will. That’s why it’s a vow. That’s where true freedom comes in.<br />
<br />
DAWN: It sounds like the opposite of freedom to me.<br />
<br />
MARY: Your child won’t think so when he or she knows that you love them forever. It’s knowing that that gives the child the inner freedom of feelings. He or she can hate you, be angry at you, and so on, just because they know that the vow is still there—the vow to each other and to God. Once I make a genuine vow, it’s like God’s covenant with Israel, it will not fail.<br />
<br />
TOM: And if I have to worry that your love of me depends on your feelings of the moment, then there is no security for anyone, including the children. What a great thing that is, the fidelity of the vow. The whole society and its sanity depend on it. That’s why you will find our communities very happy places, where people know who they are, and where they know what is and what is not. <br />
<br />
MARY: And going back to the contraception, placing that “maybe” or “not now” between the man and the woman, that is the destroyer. It means always holding oneself back, no trust, no love. The poet Ezra Pound wrote a comparison of usury and the sterility of contraception. He said that with usura as the dominant principle in society—that is, with the constant anxiety over making money, there is no good art and no good love. “It lieth between the bride and the bridegroom, CONTRA NATURAM.” That is, both capitalism and contraception are unnatural and destructive. Both of them place that awful maybe, that anxiety, that lack of trust at the center of every human relationship.<br />
<br />
FRANCES: Surely in these communities you have here, there must be some other principle at the center. It can’t work unless there’s more tolerance, more gray areas.<br />
<br />
TOM: Have you found that tolerance works in the World State? From what I hear, the result of the Universal Toleration Act is that no one is allowed to say, or even think, anything that is not politically correct. Just about every thought is hate thought or thought crime. And since all things are worthy, nothing is worthy. Isn’t that so? The world has been reduced to ashes in the mouth?<br />
<br />
MARY: But to answer your question, Frances, life is not a gray area. The value of individual life from conception to birth, that’s our central principle, and that’s why marriage is sacred and contraception not practiced among us. It seems to be that everything in the World State—money, power, pleasure—is absolute except human life, which can always be manipulated or disposed of.<br />
<br />
SIMON: It sounds good, but I am not sure I get it yet. It sounds so hard.<br />
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<br /></div>
<br />
MARY: You won’t get it in just the class room from Father. You have to get it from being here, from talking to the children. And frankly, from just being in the hills with us, even despite all the threats and danger. Because here you are away from the media that has glutted your minds and hearts with lies and trash. It took me a year just to be able to sit under a tree and read good books and listen to the birds. You might begin asking yourself what your nature as a human being is. The World State considers you a bundle of constantly changing feelings and appetites to be manipulated for its ends. It rules out and even forbids knowing, willing, choosing, loving. It has robbed you of your very existence as a person for it denies person altogether. Think about it, yes, but also come with us and just learn to BE for a while. <br />
<br />
As the days go on in this hard winter, I cannot be more pleased. Ben and Simon have decided to stay, as have Dawn and Frances. Ben is thinking of entering the monastery as a novice, and Simon is thinking of Dawn. Ted has indicated to me he wants to stay and talk about his “homosexuality.” Faith, hope, and love grow in good soil, and that is what we are trying to build here, good soil. And yes, it may be necessary that the good soil be moistened with martyrs’ blood as well as sweat and tears. I walk down the path under the rising moon and hope I will see Cheryl walking back to us with that most precious of all things, a question seeking an answer. I don’t see her, but I know she cannot be untouched by her short time here, that is how grace works. The really sad thing about “the dictatorship of relativism” in the World State is the way it kills hope, which is a virtue that appreciates reality in its fullness and roundness. I know. I, too, was one of the walking wounded, a prisoner of doubt and fear, and I still carry the inward scars. They nearly had me, the conditioners and the sophists. Now, here in the West Virginia hills, I look down the tracks and pray for the next train to roll in bearing pilgrims for the True West.<br />
<br />
END<br />
<br />
Copyright 2005 R. Kenton Craven<br />
4961 words<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span> In footnote
62 of Roe vs. Wade, Chief Justice Blackmun favorably cited an article called
“The New Biology and the Future of Man.” The article says:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Taken together, [artificial gestation, genetic engineering,
suspended animation] constitute a new phase in human life in which man takes
over deliberate control of his own evolution. And the consequence is arresting:
There is a qualitative change to progress when man learns to create himself. .
. . For our appropriate guidance in this new era, a reworking of values is
required, which will take into account the new, and which will be as rapid and
effective in its evolution as are the new techniques. . . . Our task will be
easier if we regard value systems as complex adaptations to specific sets of
realities, which adaptations must change when the realities change. . . .
Chastity is not particularly adaptive to a world of effective contraception. .
. . Respect for elders is less and less adaptive to a world in which life-spans
greatly exceed the period during which great-grandchildren find their senior
progenitor’s wisdom of any interest. Submission to supernatural power is not
adaptive to a world in which man himself controls even his own biological
future. . . . High regard for the dignity of the individual may prove difficult
to maintain when new biologic techniques blur his very identity. . . . What
counts is awareness of the unmistakable new fact that in general new biology is
handing over to us the wheel with which to steer directly the future evolution
of man.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-5641913337712032972013-06-13T11:10:00.001-07:002013-06-28T11:23:03.459-07:00The Mad Hermit Remembers the Reel Things<br />
<br />
<i>For My Grandson, Hunter Michael Guire, now being graduated from High School (Home School), and working as a theater usher in a very different era. The Mad Hermit continues his story</i>.<br />
<br />
On the plane returning from Oman and my defunct island hermitage, I watched a movie and mused. The movie brought up the smell of popcorn, and suddenly I was standing in the popcorn roo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJyeIseRrtlcwHsTaUUKFU9vqnI5uifmdWsIBd0jOp67KAmb-RcfHRoOPgU4ZHItWWE9GDPilfDmCpWN1Z8_uHftA76RVqV4fxT2XpdpkQGH3bZUTNCAib8EEs3575J0kut_LPZAuK9G2I/s1600/projector.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJyeIseRrtlcwHsTaUUKFU9vqnI5uifmdWsIBd0jOp67KAmb-RcfHRoOPgU4ZHItWWE9GDPilfDmCpWN1Z8_uHftA76RVqV4fxT2XpdpkQGH3bZUTNCAib8EEs3575J0kut_LPZAuK9G2I/s320/projector.jpg" /></a></div>m with my Dad in the early 1950’s. The smell of popcorn was rich with the odor of hydrogenated coconut oil, now on the forbidden list in the politically and dietetically correct days of the 21st century, a time I had never guessed could exist back then. <br />
<br />
Then, when I walked to school or carried the newspapers, I would often try to figure out if I could live until the year 2000. Nah, I would always conclude, not possible. My Dad was born in 1903, so he was still in his early 50’s then. So, how could I, Kenny Craven, make it to 2000? Born in 1938, I would be 62, ancient. It wasn’t the arithmetic so much as imagining myself as an old man, like the old winos that walked the street below the popcorn room. “Jake legs,” Dad said of their funny walk, “from drinking cheap wine.” Nevertheless, he would toss dimes through the exhaust fan, and laugh when a wino saw money fall from the sky. “They get seven, they can get a bottle of wine from the liquor store.” Both of us tossed kernels of popcorn the fan to watch the pigeons scrambling for it on the street below. This memory came back to this old Hermit fresh, like the smell of popcorn. I didn’t know then that Dad would die at the age of 55. Nor did I understand that not only would I achieve ancient years, but that I would enter, in a series of scudding shocks, a strange time called the Post-Modernist, Post-Christian Era.<br />
<br />
The popcorn job was an extra one his Dad had taken on at the movie theater where he was a projectionist. In that time, all the popcorn was popped at night and stored in five gallon cans. It was usually one to three days old before it made it to the customer. When it was poured into the glass frame of the concession stand and heated up, customers would say it was the best popcorn ever, much better than fresh popped. It was.<br />
<br />
After Dad finished the last show, especially on weekends when big movies were on the bill for the next day (Alan Ladd held the popcorn sales record, even passing up John Wayne and Clark Gable), I would wait for him in the popcorn room backstage. Originally designed as a dressing room for stage plays like Tobacco Road, the room had been converted into a popcorn production factory. Another backstage room held thousands of pounds of South American hybrid popcorn in fifty pound bags and tons of congealed coconut oil, which had to be melted in a large cauldron that held fifty pounds of the stuff. Two popcorn kettles with revolving agitators popped a can of popcorn each, thirty-three cans, or 165 gallons of popcorn an hour. Each kettle load poured into “shakers,” which allowed the unpopped kernels to be shaken into refuse trays underneath. Once we finished shaking, we carried the tray and dumped it down a large metal funnel, where the popcorn fell into a can waiting underneath. In three and a half hours, we filled some 110 cans, all neatly stacked and ready for hauling. After a can was loaded, we reloaded the kettle. A quart of popcorn kernels, a handful of salt, and a half-pint of coconut oil, and a new batch was soon on its way, while the other kettle was just finishing. A real production line, which frequently occasioned stories of Henry Ford from Dad, who lived in awe of the technical marvels of his time. <br />
<br />
I loaded sixteen cans on a wooden hand cart with wheels (called “the truck”) and hauled them either to a storage room near the Granada Theater concession stand or to a similar room a block down the street at the company’s other theater, the State, where Class B movies, endless westerns, and re-runs dominated. I loved walking that rattling thing down the street: important me, on a mission. On a busy Sunday, both theaters would start running out of popcorn in the early afternoon and my Dad and I would be back in the popcorn room. I gobbled popcorn, smelled popcorn, hauled popcorn, and contrary to the food gurus of the present time, stayed small and skinny. When one of the “colored” janitors went on vacation, I substituted, and after the last movie ended at 11, I swept tons of popcorn and cardboard popcorn boxes into huge barrels for hauling to the city dump where thousands of birds would peck at the kernels. We fed the multitudes and the birds of the air. <br />
<br />
I had the feeling that I lived in a kind of mystery of which ordinary boys had no notion. Dad and I popped the popcorn, sometimes until three in the morning, and then walked home through the cool or cold Appalachian night, listening to the never-ending sounds of the railroad, the hissing of steam, the clanking of coal cars being assembled into a train, the long steam whistles up and down the valley. <br />
<br />
Sounds: after smells, the next part of the mystery. In <i>Walden</i>, Thoreau harkened to the sounds of the forest and the pond, but he also listened for the trains that ran past one end of the pond. Now that I grow increasingly deaf, this old Hermit misses the sounds of the world, even as he jokes that he is glad he cannot hear annoying sermons or speeches or rap music. Thoreau knew we were sensual beings who first knew the mystery of the world through smells, sounds, sights, and touch. Standing next the popcorn kettles, I warmed to the rat-a-tat popping of the corn, one kettle machine gunning to the max while the next waited to begin with single-shot detonations. Quiet in their metal cans, the popcorn slept until shoveled into boxes, and soon hundreds of people would be sitting in the theater munching away and waiting for the sights and sounds of movies. <br />
<br />
At certain times, when the sound track went soft, what could be heard was the clicking of the sprocket wheel from the projection booth at the back, which sat up high, above the colored section, and its carbon-arc beam of light poured forth from one of two small, square windows, and through them the constant chatter of the sprocket wheels ratcheting down the 35 mm film, one frame at a time. These formed the metallic background of the motion picture mystery. <br />
Blissfully unaware that the screen where they were watching the movie was totally black every 1/48 second, the audience munched their popcorn and candy bars and beheld the story they came for, sometimes with their own sounds of hah! And ah! And ooooh! In those days there were “shorts” that asked the audience to sing along as the bouncing ball marked the lyrics, which they did, belting out “Come along with me Lucille,” “Casey would waltz with the strawberry blonde,” or “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do,” with unabashed gusto. Or they laughed, and sometimes I could see and hear real sobbing, maybe in a war movie or <i>Gone with the Wind</i>. (not likely in the 21st century, but then people were more easily given to genuine emotion; now they seem to live in hard, coruscated shells impervious to joy, and “ooh” is reserved for images of chainsaws cutting into bodies). <br />
<br />
I knew about the screen being totally black because my father was the movie Wizard, and he inculcated in me a sense of wonder at the magic of the movies. Somehow our popping popcorn and watching the movies—and just as important, watching the people watch the movies—gave us an extra dimension, as if we were Olympic gods looking down on it all, as Shakespeare clearly enjoyed looking down on the audience watching Elizabethan plays. Mostly my Dad and I shared all this silently, as part of our being father and son, but occasionally we remarked on this or that. And yes, when you watch the same movie a dozen times, you have favorite scenes, and as I carried emergency cans of corn out to the mezzanine, I would pause in the dark and not so much to watch the scene again, but more important, to watch a different audience reacting to the same scene.<br />
<br />
I don’t know what kind of voyeurism this is or if it has been classified, but it is also possible to step quietly behind the big movie screen. Those screens are not like white sheets, they have millions of holes in them, which the light comes through. Standing in the dark, I could hold out my arm and see movie images floating across. And standing behind the screen and the big speakers made it possible to enjoy a movie in yet another way. I could see the picture on the screen from behind, hear the characters talking as if in an echo chamber, and I could see the first ten or so rows of the audience as well. Silence, darkness, secrecy—those aspects of movies defined part of my being. And I was alone, enjoying something none of my friends could ever know by experiencing the mystery of the movie theatre (in West Virginia, we never said “cinema,” and most people called it the “pitcher show”) from a secret angle. In all the old stories from ancient cultures, secrecy is the guardian of mystery. Today, the Hermit thought, in the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, in the confession prayer we promise not to reveal the secret of the Eucharist to non-Christians.<br />
<br />
It was very, very rare in those days for a movie to come to town that we were not allowed to see. Father Burke (RIP) kept us aware of the Legion of Decency ratings that appeared weekly in Our Sunday Visitor, our major print link with the Church Universal, and we all dutifully stood in church to take the Legion of Decency Pledge. Remember, in those days it was a shock to audiences when Clark Gable said, “frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.” The worst moment came when a torrid and buxom actress named Jane Russell appeared in a movie called <i>The Outlaw</i>, in which someone ripped her dress and one breast was exposed for a gasping millisecond. That one earned Father Burke’s jeremiad that ended, “any man who respects his wife, his mother, or his daughter cannot see this film without risking his soul to hell fire.” A Friday night boxing fan, Father Burke never went to movies, but at my Dad’s urging, slipped into the colored section to roar laughing at John Ford’s <i>The Quiet Man </i>when John Wayne beat the stuffing out of his father-in-law.<br />
<br />
Soon it was not only sexy images that were disturbing, but content and message. Otto Preminger produced a movie called <i>The Moon is Blue</i>, which was whispered about. I was not allowed to see that one, but I never could figure out why. And I began to hear my Mom and her friends speak in hushed tones of scandals, actresses getting divorced (shocking!), like Ingmar Bergman. But never, by the way, of anything “gay,” not even a hint. I was becoming aware that the movies, once a pure delight of heroes honored and villains crushed, were becoming a danger zone, and that we Catholics were somehow separate from the rest of society. About that time I was graduated from Sacred Heart school and had to go to the public high school, where one shock followed another and my peers laughed at my tender sensibilities about sex. <br />
<br />
But the mystery of the movies was not altogether gone. The sights, the sounds, the smells, and the mystery of the big carbon-arc 35mm machines: they formed the backdrop for my growing up in the movie theater with my Dad, working with him, walking with him, laughing with him, and sensing when he was sad or scared about money and politics. He was the president of his Union Local of the IATSE—the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, one of the unions that made up the AFL-CIO, in days when unions really worked for people. Any time you watch a movie, any movie, you can see the IATSE Logo in the credits. His identity as a union man and a Democrat (before the Democrat Party became socialist baby-killers and perverts) kept me aware at all times that we were different, under suspicion and fire from the Republican businessmen who ran our town, and also part of something rather grand. When stage shows or operas or the “Ice-capades “ came to town, they snubbed the local electricians and called for union stagehands. I could tell that my Dad beamed quietly with pride when that happened. That the Catholic Church supported the right to unionize deeply impressed him. He was raised as a Methodist but became a Catholic a few years before he died.<br />
<br />
All that gave my childhood and youth a different dimension and permanently affected my life and, I am sure, my imagination. As a theater usher through most of high school and college, I must have watched thousands of hours of movies of every kind. Several times in my life I have become bloated with movies, and true to my addictive personality, swore off, sometimes for several years. <br />
<br />
The carbon-arc projectors emitted a slightly blue haze in the projection room and made my Dad cough constantly. He was a heavy smoker, yes, but he was also aware something was wrong in the hot booth where he spent thousands of hours. Many times he begged the management to install an exhaust fan to carry out the millions of tiny carbon particles that seeped into his lungs. True capitalist Republicans, they always refused. Doctors diagnosed him repeatedly as afflicted with chronic bronchitis. Finally, struggling to breathe, he was moved to the University of Virginia where he was pronounced the worst case of emphysema they had ever seen., and where he died gasping for breath. The day before the ambulance took him away, he raised himself on one elbow and rasped, “what’s playing?” I answered, “<i>Darby O’Gill and the Little People</i>.” He smiled and slept, perhaps dreaming of colorful leprechauns. <br />
<br />
Two things dominated my childhood and youth: the traditional Catholic Mass and my life in it as an acolyte, and the movie world my Dad and I lived in. From his death on, the two worlds grew more and more apart until they have become two planets. The traditional Catholic Mass is now a rarity, hidden in small parishes in poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods when one can find it. And the movie world--?<br />
<br />
Well, it’s not difficult for sane people to measure the distance to this alien planet, because it is the one we inhabit, ourselves the aliens, with most people unaware of how completely the culture of death , drugs, and demons enters into virtually every story on the cinema or TV screen. The movies permanently affected my life and, I am sure, for both good and ill, my imagination. As a theater usher through most of high school and college, I must have watched thousands of hours of movies of every kind. Several times in my life I have become bloated and disgusted with movies, and true to my addictive personality, swore off completely, sometimes for years. I confess I always come back for this or that flick, hopeful that it will be at least acceptable. I am rarely pleased. The culture that produces the movies is sick, and even when people imagine they are seeing an acceptable movie, they usually miss its underlying assumptions, just as they miss the silent and seductive ambiance of relativism in the public schools. For what it’s worth, I list some of my own favorite movies below. <br />
<br />
In the days of my Dad and me and the movies, audiences often applauded really good movies. When was the last time you did?<br />
<br />
<br />
Casablanca<br />
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre<br />
The Mission<br />
Lawrence of Arabia<br />
Apocalypse Now (original version)<br />
High Noon<br />
African Queen<br />
The Quiet Man<br />
A Man for All Seasons<br />
The Shawshank Redemption <br />
The Family Man<br />
A Bridge Too Far<br />
The Great Escape<br />
On the Waterfront<br />
It’s a Wonderful Life<br />
The Exorcist<br />
The Passion of the Christ<br />
Paths of Glory<br />
Schindler’s List<br />
Man Who Shot Liberty Valence<br />
Rain Man<br />
All Quite on the Western Front<br />
Song of Bernadette<br />
Hotel Rwanda<br />
Stalag 17<br />
To Kill a Mockingbird<br />
Das Boot<br />
Ben Hur<br />
The Third Man<br />
Gran Torino<br />
Cool Hand Luke<br />
Groundhog Day<br />
The Fugitive<br />
Bridge on the River Kwai<br />
The Bicycle Thief<br />
The Kite Runner<br />
Singing in the Rain<br />
Braveheart<br />
No Country for Old Men<br />
The Road<br />
Grapes of Wrath<br />
Twelve Angry Men<br />
Life is Beautiful<br />
Enemy at the Gates<br />
Sophy’s Choice<br />
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<br />
© Copyright R. Kenton Craven June 2013<br />
kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-70630424937117306952012-12-19T10:32:00.000-08:002012-12-19T10:32:13.153-08:00CATHOLIC POEM IN TIME OF WARCatholic Poem in Time of War: The Lord of the Rings<br />
<br />
KEN CRAVEN<br />
<br />
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In <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>, I believe Tolkien does exactly what he said he was doing, communicating a religious, Catholic vision through a Secondary World.<br />
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A great Catholic poem, <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>, a poem about a great war, was born from three great wars. As any essay is an explication of its title, this one will sound out the meanings of poem, Catholic poem, great wars, and J.R.R. Tolkien's story of Faerie. In a time in which language itself has been destroyed, recovering the true meaning of words is a difficult , wizardly task. High meanings must be unfolded, as they are to Frodo, with the sense of reverence demanded by true tales of old things that are ever new in the telling. So I begin with apology.<br />
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First, the word apology. It does not mean an admission of guilt or even regret, but rather is an explanation or defense of a position or point of view that justifies what has been said. Thus, John Henry Newman's <i>Apologia Pro Vita Sua</i>, his great explanation of the basis for his conversion to Catholicism from Anglicanism, is in no way an "I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings." It has, more, the quality of Pauline thunder, born of trying to explain the wisdom of one era to the confusion of another.<br />
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This business of unfolding the words of the title is characteristic of Tolkien himself, who was an ancient living in modern, horrible times. Ancient — he was a word man living in a world that does not care about the spellbinding mystery of the right words. As <i>The Hobbit </i>and <i>The Lord of the Rings </i>were close to publication in the culturally dangerous world of America, the ancient poet Tolkien chaffed and spluttered to his publishers about the blurbs, the cover art, and the mouthings of critics. He was already aware that anything he said or made was about to be taken awry by the uninitiated, prompting him to guard against the critics, especially the academicians, "who have their pistols loose in their holsters." Simply put, he did not want his great work profaned, and sometimes regretted that he had published it.<br />
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J.R.R. Tolkien was an Ancient in the sense that he never wanted to live in the present time, but in saner ages and in eternity. He was a traditionalist who saw himself in the great tradition of English poetry beginning with Anglo-Saxon poems, including his beloved Beowulf and all its Scandinavian kin in Eddas and Sagas and Icelandic myth. He did not cotton to much after Chaucer, and he could be dismissive even of Shakespeare. Tolkien is as ancient as Treebeard, a mossy poet who lived in the languages and poems of the Dark Ages. About as modern as he allowed himself to go was the medieval poems prior to the so-called Renaissance. As a scholar, he left us his superb translation of <i>Sir Gawain and the Green Knight</i>, a poem close to his soul. <br />
<br />
Called a Luddite by the cognoscenti of today, he didn't like automobiles, trains, planes, or for that matter, any kind of machines that separated man from his work and life. He loved trees and became angry when they were cut down needlessly. He walked, conversed, wrote, sang, smoked his pipe, and went to Mass as often as he could. And he had the high sense of dignity of his generation — he remarked that he could not remember himself or C.S. Lewis ever calling each other by Christian names. The entire garbage truck of modern culture and materialism left him only with disgust. He preferred archaic lore and language. And he believed that a rational man could arrive, independently, at the condemnation of modern machines and war tools that 'escapist' works achieved implicitly. "Many stories out of the past have only become 'escapist' in of their appeal by surviving from a time when men were as a rule delighted with the work of their hands into our time when many men feel disgust with man-made things."<br />
<br />
It has been my good fortune to live and be taught among ancients, from whom I learned to care about right words and right things. Arvid Shulenberger (<i>The Orthodox Poetic</i>), Frank Nelick, A.C. Edwards, and John Senior (<i>The Death of Christian Culture, The Restoration of Christian Culture</i>) were giants in an age of hostile pygmies, and elfish Dennis Quinn, who is now publishing a book on the nature of Wonder, is the last of that generation at the University of Kansas. The story of how Sauron destroyed the bower of bliss that was the Integrated Humanities Program has been well told by one of their students, my friend and ex-student Bob Carlson, in <i>Truth on Trial: Liberal Education Be Hanged</i>). Listening to them — and that is the first thing one does with great teachers, listen to them as the monks listened to St. Benedict — taught me about a handful of words. <br />
<br />
From my time with them, I began to speak words like poem in a different way because they used it in the ancient way of the Greeks, in the way of Aristotle, who set poetry against history and philosophy as a third way of knowing characterized by symbol and myth, or metaphor and story. A poem — lyric, epic, or dramatic — is an imitation of reality through metaphor and story. Whether it is comedic or tragic or elegiac, or expressed in verse or verse narrative or prose tale, is accidental to its nature. Metaphor and story are the souls of poems as vegetative and rational souls are the essential principles of broccoli and men. To enter into the deep nature of a story requires deep listening to a poet, a maker (that's what the word poet means), who says, "I will you a tale unfold." The Lord of the Rings is such a tale and such a poem, a long story that unfolds something that "imitates" reality. Tolkien called this act of the poet "sub-creation," as distinct from the Creation of the first poem by the first Maker, which is the world and the story we live in, and he knew that if his tale worked for hearers, it would put them in touch with high and holy things. Just as I came from one of the seminars of these Ancients in elder days, an ancient mariner placed in my hands <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>, just then (October 1965) appearing in paperback in America. He might as well have repeated Dante, "enter these enchanted woods ye who dare."<br />
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II <br />
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I read the tale with wonder, and my son soon read it through himself at the age of nine. Like most people who read it, we knew that we had touched something very different from the tone of most modern popular literature, and entirely different from the flood of pallid, perverse Tolkien imitations that we have seen for half a century. W. H. Auden, an early admirer, wrote that he would no longer trust the literary judgment of anyone who disliked The Lord of the Rings. From its appearance it was a loved poem among the millions, who return to it time and again. Predictably — as predicted by Tolkien himself — it was often handled by the cognoscenti like beads and mirrors given to natives. That in itself is not a bad thing. Like spells placed on things and words to keep them from evil doers, the air of mystery is entirely suitable to great poems, and protects them from the wreckers of salons and English departments, who still snarl and snap when the world's readers prefer Tolkien to the modernists. In 2001, polls of English readers showed that they ranked <i>The Lord of the Rings </i>as the greatest work of English literature of the 20th century, followed by Orwell's <i>Animal Farm </i>and <i>1984</i>, a fact that drives the deconstructionist literati nearly mad (they call Tolkien a racist, fascist, sexist Luddite) rending their garments. Imagine: a white traditionalist male writing a patriarchal tale that smacks of sexism and morality that both children and adults want to read. It is, rather, a traditional poem that depicts things, including male and female, in their right relationships (good) and wrong relationships (evil). Like the defeated Sauron, the postmodernist wizards will suffer the worst of fates, allowed to hit the road as themselves.<br />
<br />
American culture's — I use the word with some hesitation — refashioning of Tolkien began in 1965 when <i>Time</i> magazine observed that no freshman would go off to college without his Hobbit books and Tolkien shibboleths. Since that time, the tale has been processed by the usual suspects, Freudians and Jungians and all their New Age progeny. The Lord of the Rings is back again, this time in three movies made with all the machinery (Aristotle's term for stage magic) Hollywood can muster, together with sexuality and the usual plot meddling, though this is (I understand) lighter than expected. As Tolkien wrote in his famous essay, "On Fairy-Stories," fantasy is a great human right that allows us to enjoy making because we are made in the likeness of the First Maker, the Creator. It is a fundamental process that offers us the human necessities of Recovery, Escape, and Consolation. The true road of escape is recovery of the real — that is the mystery of imitation — or "a regaining of a clear view," or "seeing things as we were meant to see them." "Escape" for Tolkien was, far from being the negative thing the literati view with "scorn or pity," is a return to real life from the false life most call real. "Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?" he asked. "The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it." Here, as throughout Tolkien's writings about his own tales and fairy-stories in general, is an echo of the Gospels themselves, what he called, in the same essay, "a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world."<br />
<br />
Introducing this thought at the end of his essay, Tolkien realizes that he has touched on a "serious and dangerous matter," and in a way, as the ancient poet leaning over to confide to the most serious of his listeners, he has let the veil slip slightly, a comparison he himself jokingly used to describe the screen between his creative soul and the world. And when the veil slips, what do we glimpse? I have called it a Catholic poem. <br />
<br />
In saying that <i>The Lord of the Rings </i>is a great Catholic poem, I do not mean to say anything but this: it is a great poem about the ultimate things made by a Catholic imagination steeped in the greatest of Western traditions. It is a poem that unites the two great passions of Tolkien's life, Northern Germanic mythology (Tolkien included England and all Scandinavia under "Germanic"), and the sacramental mysteries of the Catholic Church. Who could have predicted such a poem, such a uniting of North and South cultures? When I first read it in the 1960's, I knew nothing about the author, but I knew intuitively that the writer was a Catholic, and when I said this to literary friends, I was immediately dismissed as a reactionary crank. There is something deeply immanent in the made things of traditional Catholic minds that cannot be had any other way, even if those minds — like the mind of Joyce — are in rebellion against Catholicism. For one thing, Catholicism is a religion, a fact that even many of its modern adherents do not grasp. That means, as Chesterton observed in <i>Orthodoxy</i>, it is a religion like all other religions on the earth in having "priests, scriptures, altars, sworn brotherhoods, special feasts." While there are no altars or religious ceremonies in the world Tolkien has created, the reader will hear the echoes of traditional Catholicism on every page. But, as Chesterton also observed, though these features are universal to all genuine religions (as opposed to the anti-religion born in the Reformation), Christianity tells an entirely new story that radically transforms them.<br />
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By Catholic, I am not using the term as modern theologians do, as sort of a horizontal "we are the world" theology in which all cultural truths end up in a tasteless — and useless — stew. JRR Tolkien was a Catholic who had traditional Catholicism, the Catholicism of altars, feasts, fasts, heroic suffering, rituals, saints, miracles, doctrines, and mysteries, in his very bones. The Trinity and the Mass are as familiar to him as his garden or his beloved Beowulf; nay, more, because these Catholic things, as he saw it, are parts of the one true myth, expressed in the Apostles and Nicene Creeds. Real Catholics (and most other Christians) believe in this story as the foundation of their souls. Tolkien breathed it. He was a frequent Mass-goer who rarely received the Eucharist without first confessing. But he was an English Catholic, and like Evelyn Waugh, he early learned in life that as a Catholic he was something less than a Jew in England, despised and distrusted. He suspected one of his best friends, C.S. Lewis, of being a covert anti-Catholic, a reasonable suspicion based on Lewis's shameful treatment of the South African poet Roy Campbell. And, he wrote to his son, "Hatred of our church is after all the real only final foundation of the C[hurch] of E[ngland]." As an English Catholic, he knew that he saw the world in a secret, fundamentally different way, and he withdrew into the making of myth — a huge myth that by the very circumstance of its origin, could never fail to echo the Catholic myth.<br />
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III <br />
<br />
I well understand the objections people make to any suggestion that there is "meaning" in The Lord of the Rings. They object, rightly, on two grounds, 1) it's a wonderful story, and 2) Tolkien himself resisted allegorical interpretations of his poem. Tolkien resisted such interpretations because he meant no allegory and, in fact, detested allegory. An allegorical interpretation of any of Tolkien's works fails because he did not write allegories. What most people mean by interpretation is "what does Gandalf mean? What do the rings mean? What do this and that mean?" They want the story they assume to lie just under the surface of the story. There is not much help for this point of view; until people learn to love story again for its own sake, they will miss the mark or go off disgusted. These are the same people, by the way, who attempt to apply allegorical interpretation to Christ's parables. These attempts fail because Christ did not make allegories either, he made parables, a distinctive literary form like no other that is probably closer to reverse Zen koans than it is to allegories with their one-to-one correspondence between elements of the story and things or concepts outside the poem. He was particularly upset when people assumed that the rings represented nuclear power. As it became evident that people wanted such instant meanings, Tolkien resisted all such readings and did all he could to discourage them. After all, he confessed that sometimes he had no idea what his imagination was unfolding. At the same time, when he looked back at his work, he was often willing to "find meaning" or to make comparisons of things in the tale to things happening in the world. He wrote that he did not "invent" the tale but received it, and was even elected for it. As such, Tolkien is merely one reader of the tale he has been given. Like any reader of a mysterious tale, he can be ambivalent or self-contradictory, sometimes in relation to the person he is addressing in a letter, and sometimes by the times as they unfolded. In many of his letters, he first dismissed any suggestions that "this means that," and then flip flops.<br />
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For example, when Strider appeared in the tale, the author did not know who he was. He had to discover the answer like the little old lady writer who said, "How do I know what I mean until I see what I say?" Tom Bombadil first appeared in a separate story where he embodied, for Tolkien, the spirit of countryside vanishing from England, but he found his way into <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>. It is interesting to follow Tolkien's musings about this. "He is just an invention," he writes, <br />
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but: he represents something important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in if he did not have some kind of function. I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object except power, and so on; but both sides want a measure of control, but if you have, as it were taken a 'vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but there are in fact things with which it cannot cope; and upon which its existence nonetheless depends. Ultimately only the victory of the West will allow Bombadil to continue, or even to survive. Nothing would be left to him in the world of Sauron. <br />
Reading Tolkien's comments on other aspects of the tale, it's as if he is looking into a separate universe and trying to make sense of it in reference to his own, but never in a reductionist way. Reductionism and scientism, as well as a kind of fundamentalist Biblical approach, forever deny mystery; as approaches to The Lord of the Rings, they invariably contradict each other or become so ingenious that they mystify rather than illumine mystery. Giving up on that mechanical approach, people then resort to, "it's only a wonderful story." Precisely, Tolkien would say, but nothing wonderful is "only" anything. That is the curse of scientism in our thinking and beholding — the curse of Ramus, Descartes, Bacon, positivism, and video games. A wonderful story doesn't mean anything except being full of wonders, which ought to be enough. It is meaningful in the way a human person is meaningful, inexhaustibly rich, never caught by the factory machines of univocal interpretation, and richer as it draws closer to God. A wonder is meaningful because it is an opening into seeing, into truth.<br />
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Tolkien knew precisely what he was doing when it came to the kind of story he was making and what that kind of story could do. Because he is carefully staking out his turf for people who know little about the subject, he takes his time in explaining what a "fairy-story" is and isn't. It isn't a child's story in the usual sense, he says, and it is only accidentally, by reading them to children, that it is thought of so. If such stories relied on mere credulity, they might so be considered. They do not. Instead they rely on "literary belief," which both children and adults may share. Such belief occurs when the maker of the story is a successful sub-creator who gives us a "Secondary world which your mind can enter." Such stories, do not respond, Tolkien says, to the question of belief. They respond to the human desire to know. To the extent we believe that Fantasy — an act of desiring truth — is good for people, we will value it. Faerie, the mysterious land from which such stories come, is the product of deep human desire to know "other worlds."<br />
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Knowing other worlds is the activity such stories elicit from us. For what reason? The modern psychologist, a reductionist at heart, can only make comparisons downward, as Robert Frost says. He therefore regards fantasy as a matter of wishing, not belief. We are not seeing the world as it is through fantasy, but as we would wish it to be. For that reason stories are regarded either scientistically, as machinery for interpretation, or psychoanalytically, as clues to the psyche. In his poem, Mythopoeia, Tolkien mocks this failure to understand poetry: <br />
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Yes! Wish-fulfillment dreams' we spin to cheat <br />
our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat.<br />
Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream, <br />
Or some things fair and others ugly deem? <br />
The poem makes clear that the "wish" is in fact desire for the Blessed Land, where the real is no longer broken or bent by Evil. There, all true poets will draw directly from the Pure All, enjoying the direct poetry of seeing face to face.<br />
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Mythopoeia is a poetic manifesto in the form of a prayer. "Blessed are the makers" is the theme, "who shall see God." Partly a litany of blessings on legend makers and minstrels, the poem is also a prophetic declaration of independence from the mind of modernism and all its works:<br />
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I will not walk with your progressive apes, <br />
Erect and sapient. Before them gapes<br />
the dark abyss to which their progress tends —<br />
if by God's mercy progress ever ends, <br />
and does not ceaselessly revolve <br />
the same unfruitful course with changing of a name. <br />
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By contrast with the meddling of progressive apes, "Salvation changes not, nor yet destroys/garden nor gardener, children nor their toys." The salvation of things in true poetry is the opposite of the diminishment of them in reductionism, which demands that we follow a "dusty path and flat,/ denoting this and that by this and that." In this hell on earth man has made, "your world immutable" has no part for the "little maker or the maker's art." Outside that hell, poets on earth voyage on a "wandering quest beyond the Fabled West," where common activities can bring "the image blurred of a distant king . . . . a lord unseen." In Paradise, however, the poets "shall have flames upon their heads" like the Apostles at Pentecost, and "there each shall choose for ever from the All."<br />
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<i>The Lord of the Rings </i>is a tale from the land of Faerie. As such, it harkens back to that "serious and dangerous matter" mentioned above. "Danger" is another special word for Ancients like Tolkien. It does not merely mean a hazardous condition; the "daungier" of old romaunce suggests a spiritual peril, like that faced by knights on their quests. The serious and dangerous matter grows, for Tolkien, from the sudden turns that occur in fairy-stories, when the reader or hearer experiences "a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart's desire." These moments Tolkien calls "Eucastrophe."<br />
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That glimpse of joy, he says, results from a turn in the story that allows us to glimpse underlying reality or truth. At this point, "true" is no longer "true only in that world you have made." This is perilous, and Tolkien knows it. He is, in effect, claiming that the well-made story is an occasion of grace, an opening into the infinite for finite man. The Gospel is the perfect story, a true Fairy-Story, which begins and ends in joy, and at its core is the "Great Eucastrophe," the joy of the greatest moment in time, the Resurrection, that is also the greatest entry into eternity, the moment at which all heaven and earth break into a Gloria in excelsis Deo! Because the Christian story is the ultimate fairy-story, all tales, especially those with happy endings, are thereby hallowed, made holy. Everything, no matter how humble, has now been redeemed, and therefore all tales that prefigure or portray participation in happiness are true. Art has been verified because the art of the maker can carry us into moments of joyous truth of the highest order. Echoing Thomas Aquinas on why truth is first communicated in story and symbol, Tolkien's poetics centers on the heart of the common man, on tales that, in the words of Sir Philip Sidney's <i>Defense of Poesy</i>, "call children from their play and old men from their chimney corner." A serious and dangerous matter, indeed; <i>The Lord of the Rings </i>may lead through the baptistery into the gates of heaven. <br />
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When Frodo and Sam have completed the Quest to destroy the Ring and all seems lost in the wastes of Orodruin, the Eagles rescue them and carry them to Ithilien where Sam wakes in a blissful state under Gandalf's eye. Sam wonders how long he has been asleep and asks where he is. The past seems like a long dream, and he is surrounded by softness and fragrance. "I'm glad to wake." When full memory floods back, Gandalf tells him that the Shadow is dead, he is in Ithilien and in the keeping of the King. Sam exults in the recognition that things have been restored in music and joy and laughter and tears, and that there is at last a good King ruling over all the Western lands. It is heart-healing Eucastrophe, and it is not too much to say that it is a prefiguring of Heaven.<br />
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Tolkien is a great Catholic Christian poet for modern times because he has made a myth about a world in which Creation, the Fall, Sin, Guilt, Redemption, Forgiveness, the battle against Evil, and Grace are major themes that speak to anyone. The Numenoreans, who are men, know God in Eru, but they fall more and more under the spell of Sauron and desire immortality as they move farther from Numenor, "the True West," and into the Fall. Tolkien said simply that he did not think it was in his poetic power to write directly about the Incarnation. The poem yearns for salvation, but beautiful as it is, neither Middle Earth nor Numenor can offer more than a blessed preternatural state achieved through love of beauty and wisdom. Like the world before Christ, Tolkien's world contains high virtue and a longing for something else, spoken cryptically in its tales and cultures. Only the Incarnation can bring the hope that fulfills that longing. Both Elves and Men in Tolkien's world view death as an enemy, and the Numenoreans can fall when they do not see and accept dying as a gift of Eru. Such individuals want to reverse the order of things to achieve immortality. The most dangerous road to immortality is the Ring itself, whose power enslaves the soul, giving it power but robbing it of life.<br />
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For those Evangelicals and other fundamentalist Christians who find Tolkien threatening or foreign, <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>, with its dragons and demons and monsters, may appear as forbidding as the Potter books. The fundamental difference is, in a world in which magic is a given, the whole issue is how to use it and for what ends. True power grows from sacrifice, renunciation, and love, as exemplified by Frodo and Sam. At the center of Tolkien's vision lie the Mass and the Blessed Sacrament. Listen to what the elder Tolkien says to his son Michael:<br />
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Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament . . . . There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death, by the divine paradox, that which ends life and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexity of reality, eternal endurance, which every man's heart desires. <br />
Those who do not accept the sacramental life of the Catholic Church may enter Tolkien through a lesser door, through his moral vision of good and evil. Take, for example, Tolkien's constant reminder that the Machine (the Ring) is magic which uses power to gain domination over wills and gain ultimate control of all souls. It is this kind of Magic that Tolkien's work warns us against on every level. No other tale can awaken hearts to pure goodness and pure evil as Tolkien's can, and if you view it as a pre-Gospel work, well and good.<br />
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Tolkien was quite clearly, in everything he wrote and said, a Catholic Christian whose mother suffered greatly after her conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, and whose education under the Birmingham Oratorians was redolent of the founder of that second home Tolkien found after his mother's death, Cardinal Newman, whose own conversion from the Church of England to Catholicism shook 19th century English society. From both he learned a particularly English version of Catholicism, one inspired by Saints More and Becket, the Catholicism of three hundred years of hidden chapels and martyrs like St. Edmund Campion, executed for treason because they celebrated the Mass on English soil. Myths grow in the imagination from such a soil. Tolkien's myth grew from remembered and experienced suffering, and from a profound sense of loss of all things sacred. Though the myth that informs The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings takes place for the most part in a monotheistic but, for the most part, pre-religious world, it nevertheless turns on the temptation of sin and the lure of power. The Elves fight evil but are also drawn by it, and the upheavals of the Second and Third Age point to the end of both the high kingdoms of the Elves and the vestiges of the Numenorean True West. There is an air of melancholy about it all, a deep melancholy that yearns for the joy of Eucastrophe and laments the passing of all that is good and beautiful. That rhythm of joy and lamentation is at the very root of the Psalms and of Christian life.<br />
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The reductionists and fundamentalists among us may be taught something by Tolkien if they learn to listen to the resonance of such mythic rhythm. "Mythos" in Greek means story or plot, not something false. Both the poorly thought-out scientific reductionism and literalist fundamentalism unite to destroy a proper appreciation of story in the sense Tolkien meant it. Even C.S. Lewis, certainly a classically educated man, originally thought of the Greek and other primordial myths as "lies," until on a walk with Tolkien, the latter suddenly turned in one of those great moments of revelation and firmly said, "they are not lies." The "true myth" of the Gospel is "a myth that has really happened," Tolkien said, but because it is through God's gift that men are story tellers, every story is a partial reflection of the True Light that has come into the world, from man's beginnings to the present. God expresses himself through the minds of poets. The difference was that God is the poet who made the true story of the Gospel. This revelation, a personal word from Tolkien to Lewis, was so earthshaking that shortly after, Lewis became a Christian and began his own famous mythmaking about the great war at the heart of all myths. <br />
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Before New Agers and Jungians get excited about this, they must see that believing that all myths are true does not mean that all myths are equally true nor that all religions are equally true. Believing this, like Joyce and Jung, they move in an endless Circean circle of titillating doubt. One of the greatest Catholic writers of the 20th century, G. K. Chesterton, had already dismantled the arguments for the endless Jungian maze that many wander in now by pointing out that though all the stories point to a truth, there must be a Truth for them to point to, and that new story of Christianity is a new poem of joy unlike anything the Pagan world, trapped on the wheel of sorrow and suffering, had to offer. Classical and primitive myths could strain toward truth as echoes harken back to the original. When men sense or experience glimpses of truth in such stories, the perennial annoying question of "is it a true story?" is answered. Yes, it is. You have had a moment of truth — and of grace, the"eucastrophe," "a sudden joyous turn representing a miraculous grace never to be counted on to recur." Such a moment can occur in many stories and fairy tales, but all such moments depended on the ability of man to count on the very thing itself. The Gospel is, in fact, Tolkien argued, a Fairy Story in itself; in the Incarnation, we see the ultimate Eucastrophe of the Resurrection and enter into a kind of real joy the world before Christ did not have to offer.<br />
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IV <br />
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The deep myth that Tolkien made was his inner home for most of his adult life; indeed, it may have be said to have begun in his childhood, when he first began to play with words. But if his poetic life began in the Shire, first in South Africa, and then in England, it found its focus and drive in war. He had written of dragons as a child, but it was battle which gave birth to the first glimmerings of the vast tale of which <i>The Lord of the Rings </i>is only a part. On March 2, 1916, while in the trenches of France in the First World War, he wrote his newly wed wife that between military lectures he was improving his "nonsense fairy language." "I often long to work at it and don't let myself 'cause though I love it so it does seem such a mad hobby!" The mad hobby was the germ of his life's work. Years later, when he wrote his essay "On Fairy-Stories," he confesses that "a real taste for fairy stories was wakened by philology on the threshold of manhood, and quickened to full life by war[italics added]." Later he recalled that a particular peninsula in France inspired the "kernel of the mythology," resulting in the tale of The Fall of Gondolin. In the letter in which Tolkien recalls this, he writes movingly of his own story as if someone else had written it, admiring, and being moved by, particular events, even particular sounds. <br />
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As he struggled with bouts of trench fever, Tolkien's love of faerie and language led him to begin creating the great cosmogenic myth that is the <i>Silmarillion</i>, which began in notebooks in 1917. Though its story of the history of a world was the center of Tolkien's vision and the mythical force behind his other writings, it was not published in its final form until four years after his death. It as if Tolkien had to write a Bible before he could create a derivative tale. Early on, after the success of The Hobbit, he attempted to get publisher Raymond Unwin to publish the whole as a single unit, partly because he thought no one would understand the one without the other. <br />
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Tolkien began <i>The Lord of the Rings </i>in 1937, as the dark clouds of Mordor were again gathering over the West, but he often said that neither of the World Wars had anything to do with it. Again, he was usually resisting allegorical interpretations when he so demurred. Privately, he knew that these wars of the West generated much of the vision of the wars of his Secondary World. Writing to son Christopher in May 1944, Tolkien urged his son to write to find a way to deal with the horrors of war, and said he generated Morgoth and the History of the Gnomes in "grimy canteens, at lectures in cold fogs, in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in the dugouts under shell fire." In the same letter, he commiserated with the soldiers who found themselves in stupidity and scarcity caused by "planners" and "organization," and lamented war as an inevitable evil due to "humans being what they are" short of "Universal Conversion." The war was an "evil job, for we are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn men and elves into Orcs . . . . and we started out with a great many Orcs on our side . . . .Well, there you are, a hobbit among the Urukhai. Keep up your hobbitry in heart, and think that all stories are like that when you are in them. You are inside a very great story." <br />
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Having grown up in a non-Catholic and anti-Catholic landscape, the southern West Virginia coal fields, I learned like Tolkien to love Catholicism "and the very great story" as the one secret road of adventure and to loathe industrial wastelands as the product of the Machine. The tiny stone Sacred Heart Catholic Church a block from our house was a way into a different world, and perched over the endlessly banging, huffing, whistling, smelly, cinder-spouting, coal-laden railyards, it offered God rather than coal dust. "Anyway all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine," he wrote of his myth, firmly asserting that the Machine was a kind of enslaving black magic. The detestation of industrial magic and his experience in World War I came together in a military hospital where, after becoming the only survivor in his unit of the horrendous Battle of the Somme, he began to write the "Fall of Gondolin," which details the brutal destruction of the fabled city of Gondolin by the dark power of Morgoth. Wounded in a similar war which drained and spiritually depressed a generation, Tolkien, as one writer put it, had turned in his hospital bed toward the wall and begun dreaming of another world and another war of good and evil.<br />
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As we read <i>The Lord of the Rings </i>during the beginnings of what is said to be another great war, it is worth listening to Tolkien's own thoughts about the two great wars he lived through. He fought as a soldier in WWI and served in the reserves in WWII, he helped designed a curriculum for naval and air cadets at Oxford, and he agreed to assist in cryptography if called upon. He despised the Nazis against whom he could be colossally angry and said he wished he could fight Hitler personally. There can be no questioning of Tolkien's patriotism, which he considered a high virtue. He knew evil when he saw it and knew it had to be defeated — but defeated, not destroyed, for even hurling the Ring into the crack of doom ends only one chapter, and vigilance is ever required of the protectors of the West. The letters also reveal that Tolkien never saw either of the wars in popular ways or believed government propaganda, which he despised. At this point, Tolkien knew that no war can be properly understood apart from the larger war in which we are engaged until the Last Judgment. Because human beings are under the Fall, he observed, there will be no end to wars, and it is folly to think so. We cannot, he said, truly win a war nor enjoy or even estimate outcomes, nor can the victors enjoy the fruits of victory, "not in the terms that they envisaged; and insofar as they fought for something to be enjoyed by themselves (whether acquisition or mere preservation), the less satisfactory will 'victory' seem." <br />
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Because of the Fall, at every point of battle, we must know that the real battle is like the battle that goes on inside the individual nation and soldier, like the battle that goes on inside Frodo — and Frodo loses the fight, succumbs to temptation, but is saved by Grace. He gains a great wound from his struggle and the healing of that terrible wound requires exile, suffering, and higher powers. "The Quest," Tolkien wrote to the editor of the <i>New Republic</i>, "was bound to fail as a piece of world-plan, and also was bound to end in disaster as the story of Frodo's humble development to the 'noble,' his sanctification." Frodo 'apostatized,' Tolkien says, and until he read a 'savage' wartime letter from a reader insisting that Frodo should have been executed as a traitor, he did not realize how the story, conceived in outline in 1936, would appear "in a dark age in which the technique of torture and the disruption of the personality would rival that of Mordor and the Ring and present us with the practical problem of earnest men of good will broken down into apostates and traitors." The ultimate judgment of Gollum, Tolkien says, must be left to what medieval poets called "God's privatee," but Frodo's pity and forgiveness of Gollum is what saves him in the real world of good and evil. His succumbing to power of the Ring, like Smeagol and Saruman, must be understood, like the weaknesses of the inhabitants of the Shire, from the perspective of the Gospel. Because the power of the temptation is so great, the final scene of the Quest, when Frodo fails and Gollum falls, the catastrophe of the tale, can only be understood from the Lord's Prayer: "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."<br />
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One may compare the quest of another soldier by another Catholic writer. In Evelyn Waugh's <i>Sword of Honour </i>trilogy of World War II, Guy Crouchback, sickened by the evil of the Nazis and Fascists, hears of the fall of Prague to the Germans, knows that war is inevitable, and understands with joy that he can now be a Christian soldier. Seven days earlier, Russia and Germany had pledged to split the spoils of a world ripe for plunder, plunging European communists into despair and opening a window for those who hated both totalitarianisms. "He [had] expected his country to go to war in a panic, for the wrong reasons, or for no reason at all, with the wrong allies, in pitiful weakness. But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in Arms. Whatever the outcome, there was a place for him in that battle."<br />
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Like one of his ancestors, Crouchback pledged his quest at the tomb of a Christian crusader who fought the evil of Islam. After Germany changes sides and attacks Russia, and when it becomes clear to him that England has united its cause with atheistic Soviet Communism, he is greatly disillusioned and crushed, and can only fall back upon his personal honor as a motive for soldiering on. The insanity of war and the absurdity of his own army and government finally reduce him to a numb disillusionment. At the end, his personal pity for a small community of Jews in Yugoslavia, where he is stationed, is the only motive for action. The question of joining a Christian West against evil, except in spirit, is now dead. Crouchback returns to England where, as a Catholic, he can devote himself to the only thing he can now understand, his family. <br />
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Like Guy Crouchback, in the thick of the realities of war, Tolkien found it impossible to maintain a simple desire for revenge or a jingoistic correctness. Though he never seemed to lose his anger against the Nazis, his feelings did not extend to the country of Germany, the Germanic tradition, or the defeated soldiers and helpless civilians. In 1945, he lamented the destruction of the commonwealth of Europe "which will affect us all." "Yet people gloat to hear of the endless lines, 40 miles long, of miserable refugees, women and children pouring West, dying on the way. There seem no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination, left in this dark diabolic hour." While he acknowledged that Germany created the situation, and knew the suffering "necessary and inevitable," he asked, "but why gloat? We were supposed to have reached a stage of civilization in which it might be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat or to hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted." And if that was something to be sad about, Tolkien also saw the present catastrophe against the unfolding story of a dying planet. "The War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter — leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful. What's their next move?" When the next move came about, atomic bombs, he was stunned by lunatic scientists calmly plotting the destruction of the world. "Such explosives in men's hands, while their moral and intellectual status is declining, is about as useful as giving out firearms to all the inmates of a gaol and then saying you hope 'this will ensure peace'."<br />
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In hating the enemy, he did not lose perspective, just as he did not lose respect for the virtues of the Germanic tradition and its mythology, which he valued far above the Classic tradition and classical mythology, and counted England and Scandinavia in that tradition. The Germanic virtues of obedience and patriotism and courage, he rated as stronger in Germany than in England. The ancient Germans gave to Europe the "noble northern spirit." "Nowhere, incidentally, was it nobler in England, nor more early sanctified and Christianized." Such words were, one may imagine, best uttered privately in 1941. <br />
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The reason that Tolkien was able to maintain such perspective on the enemy was twofold. First, because he lived in myth, not allegory. The same people who wanted to see all stories as allegorical wanted a neat dualism. "Wars are derived from the 'inner war' of allegory in which good is on one side and various modes of badness on the other. In real (exterior life) men are on both sides, which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, and angels." The second reason for the perspective was that the myth he lived in was the Christian myth, which sees things such as sin and evil in a radically different way. As Tolkien explained to the New Republic, the final evil deed done to Frodo by Gollum was made possible by Frodo's forbearing to kill Gollum — which pity looks like "ultimate folly" — and in the Divine Economy, it is this loving the enemy that makes Frodo's salvation possible. At the beginning of the tale, Frodo declared that Gollum deserved death. Gandalf relied, "Deserves it? I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that dies deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the wise cannot see all ends."<br />
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<br />
V <br />
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As readers of Tolkien at the end of 2001, we too cannot see all ends. We are told that we are in the beginnings of another great war against another great enemy. After 1400 years of sporadic assault from Islam, it is not difficult, though it is politically incorrect, to know who that enemy is. If an enemy is a force and a mind, however inchoate, that insists on dominating or even destroying you, then Islam is an enemy, as it has always been. A priest friend from Nigeria, who was brought up in a Muslim-dominated area and has no illusions about the nature of that religion, said to me angrily, "if the enemy is not Islam, what is it?" Like Tolkien with German culture, today's Catholic can appreciate points of agreement between Catholicism and Islam and can admire strengths in Islamic and Arab cultures. We can also take a cue from Tolkien in recognizing that if there are terrible orcs among the Islamists who kill us, we must also be aware that there are orcs, and orc spirits, on our own side. Fighting what is called "terrorism" is, as with the war against the Axis powers, "necessary and inevitable," to use Tolkien's words. Not letting the spirit of that necessary conflict grow into something evil is the perilous part.<br />
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At the same time, Western Catholics today are subject to a kind of theological fog machine that began to blow some forty years ago when the Second Vatican Council completed whatever its work was. Tolkien himself — as did Evelyn Waugh — abhorred the changes in the Mass and the prevailing Catholic mind. He knew that his imaginative and spiritual roots were in the Ancient Church, and he was bewildered by the theological wreckers who would, as he put it, pull up a tree to discover its roots. No matter how scandalized, he reaffirmed his Faith in the Church and the Pope because they defended the Blessed Sacrament and kept it in its prime place as the center of our worship. He well understood that the entire "Reformation" was an assault on what the Reformers called "the blasphemous fable of the Mass." Today, as many Catholics know, the assault has continued within the Church under fables and lies generated by orc-ish priests, theologians, and Bishops, so much so that upwards of 30 percent of Catholics today no longer believe in the Real Presence, which Tolkien would have died to protect. In churches that are more like gymnasiums and malls rather than reverential sanctuaries where He abides, the Catholic Faith that Tolkien knew is often reduced to kindergarten games. One is sometimes tempted to ask, what is the point of going to Church if the culture inside is no different from the one outside?<br />
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The enemy within, the anti-culture we have allowed to develop, is as important as the enemy of Islam, and though we cannot agree with the Muslims on every point, we can certainly agree with them that Western culture is now so decadent that it can no longer even understand what is wrong with itself. From World War II, in which we flattered ourselves that we were the victors, we brought home the Nazi spoils — abortion, infanticide, elimination of the unfit, euthanasia, assisted suicides, eugenic experimentation, and State determination of personhood, all of which now dominate our hospitals and threaten our homes as much as any buzz bombs or Panzers ever did. Today, moderns in the "media" always utter the word Nazi with horror and loathing, blithely unaware that the evils we said we were fighting have taken up residence in our very hearts, a kind of series of interlocking Rings of Power that we use to deny the realities of sex, love, family, and community. <br />
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Tolkien feared that arriving anti-life anti-culture, though he could not imagine how far it would, Saruman like, seize the Western soul. Writing in 1944, he asked, "when it is all over, will ordinary people have any freedom left (or right) or will they have to fight for it, or will they be too tired to resist? The last seems the idea of some of the Big Folk. Who have for the most part viewed this war from the vantage point of large motor-cars. Too many are childless. But I suppose that the one certain result of it all is a further growth in the great standardized amalgamations with their mass-produced notions and emotions." "You and I," he wrote to son Christopher as The Lord of the Rings neared completion, "belong to the ever-defeated never altogether subdued side. I should have hated the Roman Empire in its day (as I do), and remained a patriotic Roman citizen, while preferring a free Gaul and seeing good in Carthaginians."<br />
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The literary republic constituted of writers like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers, and Evelyn Waugh — as well as the larger Catholic tradition of Augustine and Aquinas, exists now only in scattered individuals and scorned enclaves. Indeed, the teachers and exponents of traditional Catholic culture are even hunted down like terrorists, as happened in the last year with the closing of St. Ignatius Institute by the Jesuit priest who heads the University of San Francisco, whose mission statement sounds more like a UN document than anything Catholic or Christian. What is so enormously sad about this, the kind of sadness that often enters Tolkien's tales, is that true culture is not something that happens or is manufactured. As John Senior used to say, it takes three generations to make a farmer or agri-culture. It takes a whole Dark Ages to make a Catholic culture. What begins in monasteries, deserts, and caves must be lovingly transmitted by people who know it and exemplify it. The kind of sensibility that can make a Lord of the Rings takes centuries of learning, suffering, and living to create. The notion that a multimillion dollar movie — the kind of Faerian Drama Tolkien imagined the Elves as producing for men — can substitute for reading or hearing is of itself suspect. Tolkien speculated that such a drama, like the Wish Fulfillment dreams he condemned in Mythopoeia, would come too close to Enchantment. To the extent that such a performance deludes, it threatens to have the force of a Primary world, becomes too potent, and is easily used as a technique for domination. <br />
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Nevertheless, though modern anti-culture has a way of destroying what it celebrates and undermining the very thing it portrays, it just may be that because of the hoopla, The Lord of the Rings may seep into both naïve and jaded imaginations, drawing some people to read and wonder. At the present time, engaged in a terrible war with evil, we may be forgiven if we grasp at any hope of being serious about genuine culture, which is the handing on (traditio) of the love of good words, good deeds, and good beliefs. "Whatever enlarges hope, exalts courage," Dr. Johnson wrote, "after having seen the deaf taught arithmetick, who would be afraid to cultivate the Hebrides?" If we had a map of the Christian world a century after St. Augustine's death, a map of true Catholic culture would look like tiny points of light in a sea of barbarian darkness. Two centuries later, there would be many more points. But even in the period of medieval greatness, the points of light, now more numerous and often much larger, would be threatened all around by the incessant lapping of the violent waves of Islam.<br />
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The difficulty is, of course, starting institutions that will be the good ground the seeds fall upon, as in Christ's parable of the Sower. St. Benedict started the monasteries, St. Augustine the schools, with the blessings of the teaching Church. Now the "pastoral church," as it is fond of calling itself, uses its shepherds' crooks to keep the fields fallow. Roving Gandalfs are few and far between; Saruman and his dupes, the defectors, abound. This is all well and good for those who know the difference. If there is cause for lament, it should be for the hundreds of thousands of young people who honestly ask and seek but who have no true teachers among them and, in Milton's words, are "hungry sheep that look up and are not fed." Here and there a few may be tapped for adventure, for one thing we can learn from Tolkien about a time of war is that adventure is something that comes to you. It is there, and suddenly you are in it. Grace works that way. Let us pray that it does and that the unlikely Frodos among us will receive the grace they need to make a culture that will grow. One such Frodo was Karol Wojtyla, who built a Catholic cultural community in backstreets and side paths under the very noses of the Nazis and Communists. <br />
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My hope is that Tolkien will be read as what he undoubtedly is, a great Catholic poet of the post-Christian era. If Dante created the Catholic poem of the Middle Ages by explicitly telling the Christian story from top to bottom, Tolkien has created the great Catholic poem of the anti-Catholic age by embodying the catholic imagination in a not-quite-parallel universe of hobbits, elves, dwarves, wizards, orcs, and men. He has, because of his own love of pure story, discovered and revealed a way to speak unmentionable things to a post-Christian culture. In the trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter, Nobel prizewinner Sigrid Undset was able to do this by casting her story in medieval Norway in a great explicit Catholic poem of the last century. In his fiction, Evelyn Waugh was able to render the beauty of Catholicism through hints and gestures, suggesting its nearly concealed presence in a progressively secular world. In The Lord of the Rings, I believe Tolkien does exactly what he said he was doing, communicating a religious, Catholic vision through a Secondary World that radiates something vital for souls on perilous quests in a world of wars and War: the holiness of high calling.<br />
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Those who follow that calling today will know from reading and absorbing The Lord of the Rings that adventure is unexpected and may cost not less than everything, that risk is what makes home and family and country secure, that small fellowships based on truth give birth to courage, that the truly dangerous things are the powers we cannot see, that conspiracies against the truth run are deep and live on visions dangerously seductive and completely alien, that the East is always an anti-truth woven of lies and the True West is always to be built, that a Quest demands you know who you are and what you seek, that every point in time intersects with eternity in free choice, that history is a long defeat and glory is elsewhither, that the mass of men will never appreciate or remember the great deeds of those who die for them, that evil always returns in new clothes and is always ready to destroy the old fashioned verities, that vigilant watching is ever needed, that home is something you make with sacrifice and love, that the telling of true tales in dark times is the succor of the brave, and that without Grace there is no salvation.<br />
<br />
ENDNOTE<br />
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This TrueWest celebration of Tolkien, written partly in answer to questions from others and greatly as a love of a book that brings healing to weary souls, is a personal essay and is therefore, in that tradition, free of academic machinery. As is evident from section I, I am writing from the vantage point of what C.S. Lewis called "Old Western Man" and what the late Allen Tate referred to as the remnants of true education. In the company of either of those men, I am a bit like Samwise Gamgee left behind at the Grey Havens, most of my masters gone West, a few of my like-minded friends scattered throughout the smoking ruins of Middle Earth.<br />
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This meditation on Tolkien is nevertheless in debt to other writings about Tolkien, and these I would heartily recommend to the reader. The essence of the matter is this: there is a wonderful book called <i>The Lord of the Rings </i>which has been left behind on the docks where Frodo and his friends departed. It is a wonderful book which millions have enjoyed but which is not easily accessible to folk who are outside the Western Tradition, Christianity, or Catholicism. "<i>The Lord of the Rings </i>is fundamentally a religious and Catholic work. The religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism," Tolkien wrote, and he doubtless hoped that those who entered its enchanting realms would be wakened to something above them.<br />
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Now the movie is upon us, a new wave of Tolkien curiosity and speculation is washing through the media.. Most of what I have seen are journalistic puff pieces for the movie, often filled with errors and misconceptions. A more earnest, but absolutely depressing, piece is Jenny Turner's "Reasons for Liking Tolkien," which appeared in <i>The London Review of Books</i>, 15 November 2001. Turner has done enough homework to spout pseudo-scholarly commentary. She seems to specialize in turning up the right evidence and then missing the point by burying everything good with psychobabble, deconstructionist blather, and New Age spirituality — the kind that likes to sniff the odor of serious things but never takes them seriously. Turner's uncomprehending piece ("this curious murk") is exactly what I feared when I first learned about the imminence of the super movie. She can see LOTR only through a Sauronian fog of popular culture and postmodernist dervishing. Ultimately she sees Tolkien's world as a kind of vacation in virtual reality, another item in the endless, superficial menu of cafeteria culture, to be sampled and dismissed. Anything else she would seem to find intimidating.<br />
<br />
I recommend that anyone who wants to follow the threads I have laid down here turn to the following, which will delight and instruct: Joseph Pearce, ed., <i>Tolkien: A Celebration: Collected Writings on a Literary Legacy </i>(1999); Joseph Pearce, <i>Man and Myth: A Literary Life </i>(1998); and most especially, <i>The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien </i>(1995), edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien. In addition to these, of course, any of the many writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, and the multi-volume work by his son Christopher. Finally, <b>if any serious young people are stirred by Tolkien to wonder</b> if they have received anything approximating a genuine education, I can do not better than recommend you purchase a manual for living in a new Dark Ages: James V. Schall, <i>Another Sort of Learning: Selected Contrary Essays on How to Finally Acquire an Education While Still in College or Anywhere Else . . . ." </i>(Ignatius, 1988). (Yes, he is a Jesuit priest but he won't bite you, and he will induct you into the great questions, without which a human being cannot live in the delight of wonder.) <br />
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT <br />
<br />
Ken Craven. "A Catholic Poem in Time of War: The Lord of the Rings." True West.<br />
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Reprinted with permission of the author.<br />
<br />
THE AUTHOR<br />
<br />
R. Kenton Craven earned an A.B. in English at Wheeling College (Wheeling Jesuit University) with minors in Philosophy and Dramatic Writing Arts, an M.A. in English at Marshall University, and a Ph.D. in English with a minor in Philosophy at the University of Kansas. He has taught at Southeast Missouri State University, the University of Wyoming, Muskingum College, Universidad InterAmericana, the University of Louisville, Wartburg College, West Virginia University, Kuwait University, Fairmont State College, and Sultan Qaboos University (Oman). A generalist in western literature, he wrote his dissertation on the literary criticism of the 1930's, with special focus on the Christian theory of art. Dr. Craven has received many scholarships and grants before and after graduate study, including the John Hay Whitney Fellowship for minorities. In addition to twenty-seven years of college teaching, he has been a social worker, mental health therapist, magazine editor, newspaper columnist, and technical writer. In 1994, he was awarded the Mississippi Short Fiction Prize. <br />
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Copyright © 2001 R. Kenton Craven <br />
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kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-28317510151776008052012-01-11T07:55:00.000-08:002012-01-11T08:07:41.596-08:00Wisdom from St. Macarius the GreatSt. Macarius was once asked by a pilgrim how to find salvation in the world. He told the man to go to the cemetery and insult the dead people who were buried there. This he did and returned to the saint. The saint then told him to return to the cemetery and sing the praises of those who were buried there. This he did and returned.<br />
<br />
The saint then asked the pilgrim: “What did the dead people do when you insulted them?”<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6CHtS6pYyjbptpZDhmq_64-gIszA3bBlYZn19Lg4YVMatEvX4UyrsJ2Y8mBS-OmrWWXjAk-_Z4ZLH5TlSP09iIekhzQjyvxKlN3_lX6g0YILiHnQhgbrk4mNOr0aQnaT6xlfRuAbHNkif/s1600/Mount+Athos+skulls.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="217" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj6CHtS6pYyjbptpZDhmq_64-gIszA3bBlYZn19Lg4YVMatEvX4UyrsJ2Y8mBS-OmrWWXjAk-_Z4ZLH5TlSP09iIekhzQjyvxKlN3_lX6g0YILiHnQhgbrk4mNOr0aQnaT6xlfRuAbHNkif/s320/Mount+Athos+skulls.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<i>Skulls of monks at Mount Athos<br />
</i><br />
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“Why, nothing, of course, Holy Father,” the man replied.<br />
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St. Macarius continued, “What did the dead people do when you praised them?”<br />
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“Why, nothing, of course, Holy Father,” he replied again.<br />
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“Go and do the same, and you will be saved. Be dead both to the praises and curses of men and you will obtain salvation.”<br />
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--From <i>Ascending the Heights: A Layman’s Guide to the Divine Ascent </i>(St. John Climacus of the Egyptian Desert), by Father John Mack (Conciliar Press, 1999). Pointed out to me by Father Richard Armstrong, http://www.saintthomasknoxville.org/index.shtml.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOfoLtlI95mQVkvUvBg_LToP2cNuzhx6zY07tgluejpiKlUg7OVu3kWN5Vl7nHxZKX_5njO-1zacCUmi4dlMCQxxec6YQwbYdxxtGq83dxf8yq_9o65pwSSWDRIngfq9mzTCPMyxLc-mSE/s1600/st+john+climacus" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="203" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOfoLtlI95mQVkvUvBg_LToP2cNuzhx6zY07tgluejpiKlUg7OVu3kWN5Vl7nHxZKX_5njO-1zacCUmi4dlMCQxxec6YQwbYdxxtGq83dxf8yq_9o65pwSSWDRIngfq9mzTCPMyxLc-mSE/s320/st+john+climacus" /></a></div>kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-44338985990707274822012-01-09T09:20:00.000-08:002012-01-09T09:20:30.771-08:00The Last Election--AgainAs another election approaches, the Hermit looks back to 2008. What was he thinking then? And who in the world was P.Diddy? Not much has changed, except that the Hermit had a great garden in 2008. <br />
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<br />
<b>MUSINGS FROM THE WATCHTOWER: Election 2008<br />
</b><br />
As I write, I am half-listening to two men dither about what to do about the current “global economic crisis.” It is like listening to two dapper passengers on a sinking five-master debating the causes on the sinking; nearby, two experienced sailors in a dinghy who know the sea, the ship, the captain, the weather, the first principles of navigation, and a lifetime of sailing in difficult seas, roll their eyes heavenward and, as much as they can, laugh at the fools who are debating as the ship goes down. John McCain and Barack Hussein Obama are like those gentlemen, well-dressed rats, who do not even begin to perceive the etiology of economic disaster and its roots in spirituality, history, politics, and, yes, theology. <br />
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As the poet John Donne wrote in the <i>First and Second Anniversaries</i>, when we ponder human existence in crisis and grief, it is necessary to “get up to the watchtower” and see things from a larger point of view. I was fortunate in the other day to receive <i>The Intercollegiate Review</i>, published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, of which not a few of us are now members. This issue contained an essay by M.E. Bradford (1934-1993) called “A Teaching for Republicans: Roman History and the Nation’s First Identity.” It is an inspiring look at where we came from, our original conception of ourselves as citizens of a Republic in analogy to the old Roman Republic. I urge my readers to read that essay because it covers important ground usually omitted in university literature and political science courses—omitted because most of the teachers have no classical roots or sensibilities or are so imbued with deconstructionist antipathies that any mention of hierarchy, authority, virtue, military strength, or personal sacrifice causes them to go into anal implosion. I would suggest that Senator Obama would be at a complete loss to understand Bradford’s point; his 1960’s rabble rousing education appears to be the mélange of sociological confusion that neo-Marxism inspires in third-world minds—which seems to be the kind of mind he has. That is the reason his views resonate with young people today who have the same “education.” As for John McCain, he appears to have slept through Annapolis.<br />
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Bradford suggests that we can best understand those Roman roots and the way they profoundly affected the quite different education of Adams, Washington, Jefferson, Dickinson, and other formers of our tradition, who thought sitting up at night and reading Cato (the Elder and the Younger), Tacitus, Pliny the Elder, Sallust, and others, an important business for the founders of a new nation. From their studies, and more, from constant imagining of themselves as Romans, our founders formed certain views and attitudes that lay at the root of their constitutionalizing: 1) Distributism: the view that a general distribution of property made for a sane society; 2) Piety as the basis of polity: the view that the ancestral religion of Rome, with its emphasis on the centrality of hearth and home and the memory of the past, must feed the virtuous education of youth; 3) Nationalism: a constant sense of the worth of what Michael Savage wisely calls “language, borders, and culture,” that is, national identity and pride of origins, together with a distrust of foreign values and the corruption they can bring (multiculturalists need not apply); 4) Agrarianism, with its grounding of culture in agri-culture, in which the pater familias knows how to use a plough, a sword, and the language. These attitudes, and they are, at root, attitudes, or what Edmund Burke called “prejudices,” foster a living culture in which character-building is central, teaching and guiding the young to exemplify “honesty, thrift, patience, labor, and endurance,” while reverencing the “home place.”<br />
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Scan the debates of Tuesday night, and hold this Roman mirror, this Romanitas-derived American mirror, up to them. Does anything either candidate said ring true? Bradford notes that after the defeat of the Romans by the Carthaginians at Cannae, “Roman women were forbidden to weep. . .no man (soldier, planter, or merchant) charged the state for his goods or service, [and] no one took political advantage of his country’s distress.” Out of this kind of ethos came the defeat of Carthage and the greatness of old Rome. I could not help comparing such an ethos to the behavior of Wall Street in the last week: a spectacle of CEOs bloated with billions, pitifully or defiantly saying “I’m sorry,” but unwilling to lift a finger or donate a dollar to help their country. <br />
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As we know, the Roman Republic did not last, and the Empire came. Why? The decay of this healthy nation, Bradford says, follows from these causes: “(1) the removal of the Roman armies from the category of citizen-soldiers into the classification of fulltime military professionals; (2) the consequent decline of home agriculture and village life; (3) the growth of a large, slave-operated, absentee-owned estates; (4) the large concentration of wealth in a new group of imperial managers and international traders; (5) great dependence on foreign food and the skills of educated foreigners; (6) a sharp decline in character among the plebeians of the city—the emergence of a useless, dishonorable proletariat.” Bradford summarizes: “Without a rural nursery for virtue or a necessary role for all citizens, and with Romans in the army detached (and almost in exile), the ground had been cut from under the institutions of the old Republic. Add to these harbingers of disaster the decline of the official Roman religion and the concomitant ‘passion for words flowing into the city,’ the foreign rituals and forms of speculation [my emphasis added], and we can understand why old Cato drove out strange priests and philosophers.” And stock analysts and currency traders?<br />
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Good old Cato the Censor, as he was called! Can you imagine his response to the Obama-McCain debate? Or to a culture sick on speculation, credit cards, hatred of life, contempt for virtue and religion, pornography, and luxury. I would suggest that in the list above there is food for thought on what has happened in America since 1865 and 1932, which is also echoed by Bradford’s characterization of what the Empire did to Rome: “The spread of wealth unconnected with merit or the spirit of public service . . . the substitution of ‘nobles’ (rich men) for patricians (men of good birth); of proles (faceless members of a mob) for plebeians (plain but solid fellows).” And more, as lamented by Sallust: “Yet there were citizens who from sheer perversity were bent upon their own ruin and that of their country.” As a result, Sallust continues, “in every community those who have no means envy the good, exalt the base, hate what is old and established, long for something new, and from disgust with their own lot desire a general upheaval. Amid turmoil and rebellion they maintain themselves, without difficulty, since poverty is easily provided for and can suffer no loss.”<br />
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Is it any wonder that John Adams feared a spirit of innovation for its own sake or that he distrusted Alexander Hamilton’s rootless, abstract drive for federal control of the country through banking and borrowing? And no wonder agrarian Jefferson hated Hamilton as well. The sage of Monticello could resonate to those chapters in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in which “the bank” devours land and people.<br />
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What Bradford emphasizes most in his essay is that the early founders of our—since deracinated and derided—Republic understood that a new nation does not begin in an ideological tosspot. They were men of the West and for generations had been living in the same culture as the nations which sent its pilgrims, exiles, and seekers to our shores. They knew that a citizen is formed by a commonwealth, and that his sense of bond and debt to that commonwealth is the condition of civilization, that is, of being a citizen. “Citizens. . . depend upon each other for their individual liberties. . . . Confederation for liberty . . . . liberty, meaning collective self-determination and dignity under a piously regarded common law [which is] a check upon ideology, not a source. For modern regimes the alternative is the hegemony of an ideal as an end, not condition [emphasis added]. And the arrangement finally becomes the hegemony of a man, a despotism which makes a noble noise. Between 1775 and 1787, we discovered no new doctrine [emphasis added]. We left that to the English. Self-defense was our business. . . .Courage and discipline . . .self-sacrifice.” One may contrast this heritage with the false ideology it has become by reading Phillippe Beneton’s brilliant <i>Equality by Default </i>(ISI Books 2004).<br />
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P. Diddy, are you following me, baby? Do you grasp that you are a citizen of a commonwealth? Diddy says he is afraid of Sarah Palin because she does not read the right media publications (good for her!) The word citizen in its full Roman Republican sense does not ring with us as it should and must. I heard it in that sense when Father Joseph Kennedy, S.J., roared with anger as he locked me out of my dorm room in 1956: “I thought you were a citizen!” A citizen was one who accepted his existence in a commonwealth which, like St. Benedict’s order, was a school for virtue. Father Kennedy taught history straight from the shoulder; he was a man who revered the West and revered old Rome. He did not care a fig for the fact that I paid for that room or for any two-bit regulations cooked up by MBAs or for my “civil rights.” He did not accept the contemporary sense of “citizen,” which I would suggest means only taxpayer, regulation-follower, servile PTA member, political kool-aid drinker, lottery-ticket-buyer, and government teat-sucker. Got that P. Diddy? Barack Obama? John McCain?<br />
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Reading Bradford and listening to the debate back-to-back arrested me with a huge sense of distance, the same great sense of distance I experience when I face a classroom these days. It is like entering the cave of winds. Or a distortion chamber in which nearly every opening word or sentence cries out for Socratic exploration. That is one reason why I address students as Mister and Miss. It is one small teaching gesture I can use to break with the “therapeutic culture,” as Phillip Rieff called it. I could not do that with the Obama-McCain concert, nor could anyone else. The media saw to that. <br />
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Distance. The distance from the real and the true and the good and the beautiful. Even minor contact with the flow of culture in which one now swims strikes one with a sense of distance. I was listening yesterday to radio right-winger Phil Valentine in one of his riffs about Barack Obama, this one about Obama’s childhood formation as a Muslim. Phil Valentine never realizes how much he is only a liberal with a reactionary coat. “I don’t care if he is a Muslim,” Christian Valentine rants. “Being a Muslim is perfectly all right with me. What’s wrong with that?” Thereupon Mr. Valentine shows he was an attentive little bugger as he soaked up the fundamental ideology of multiculturalism. What’s wrong, Phil, is that Islam is the wrong religion, a false religion, an alien culture, antipathetic and hostile to Christianity and the True West. Yes, there is something wrong with being a Muslim, and the true missionaries of Christianity—St. Francis and Ramón Lull, for example, knew that. Now I know Phil is arguing this way because he wants to get to Obama’s political views and away from what he regards as character assassination. But to accept his reasoning is, well . . . to accept his reasoning. Poor Phil does this on subject after subject. A few minutes later he was raving about the need for a law requiring sterilization of women as a precondition for welfare because these women are hatching children which will deprive him of . . . you guessed, it, money. Poor Phil. Not only a liberal without knowing it, but a Nazi in the bargain, as many are today. In the past I have argued with him over his denunciation of home-schooling. He doesn’t get that either. So where will his own children get the deep sense of virtue and civitas? P. Diddy and Co.?<br />
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As I listen to this accursed debate, I am struck, as I often am, by deeper things. Yes, the audience listening knows deep down that neither of these men can do a damn thing about the “problem,” but they persist in their desperate seeking for answers because they are either incapable or unwilling to pursue the problem to its origins. They know something is deeply wrong, but they are ill equipped to begin to understand the depth of that wrongness. To solve a “problem,” one must grasp its roots. They do not know who they are or where we are.<br />
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<i>I think we are in rats’ alley where the dead men lost their bones.<br />
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So wrote T.S. Eliot in <i>The Waste Land </i>when he very clearly grasped the spiritual crisis that we landed in as the last of Old Europe broke up in the trenches of World War I. In that great poem, Eliot focused on the minds and souls of the common people of England and Europe in the jazz age. I marvel that few now really understand what the poem is about: it takes place in Spring when things and persons should be born, but throughout the images of the poem, the emphasis is on sterility, promiscuity, usury, birth control, and abortion: the prescription list for Western despair. That is why it is a waste land, a land of death, a culture of death. <br />
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If we lose that sense of distance, our distance as a culture from everything good, true, and beautiful in life, we have lost everything. Right now conservatives and Christians are working themselves into a fever over the upcoming election. The pressure builds. Pro-lifers again surge to the front with fears about the Supreme Court. “My friends,” if I may mimic John McCain, the one thing we know about the Republican candidate is that on every major issue that comes up, he wants to know what the liberal majority is thinking before he decides. On illegal immigration, campaign finance reform, stem cell research, “global warming,” and the bailout, his position is indistinguishable from those of Biden and Kennedy and Pelosi. He is on record as having said that Alito was “too conservative for my taste,” meaning that his Senate Democrat buddies would not like him anymore if he seemed too “conservative.” So what would McCain do if there was a Supreme Court vacancy? My friends, you know, you know. Yes, yes, he was a great war hero, but so was Benedict Arnold, whose name was subsequently scratched off the wall at West Point. <br />
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For young Chestertonians, it is worth remembering that conservatives have been seeing each election in my lifetime as a defining one for our existence as a society, and as Christians, we have been lured time and time again into the same trap by a party that represents itself as the party of life and morality, but which in fact turns out to be the party of the wealthy, just as my father warned me it was. That party has been in power for the better part of half a century and our country has declined in morality steadily, before Roe vs. Wade, and after. Republicans have presided over a holocaust of unborn children, and Republicans, including the slippery John McCain, push us further into the anti-life culture, which I now prefer to call the pornographic culture. <br />
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As Christians and especially as Catholics, we should know that the ages of darkness can be very long and that the greatest causes usually go down in glorious defeat. Votes are very small things, maybe the smallest thing we do. The insistence of the leftists that it is the most important thing we do in life is the biggest lie of all. If we are truly concerned about the future of our nation, our political actions should begin at home, with what we are doing in our families and our immediate environment. A few years ago I voted for Alan Keyes for President and after the election, I and a radio talk show host in West Virginia tried to find out how many votes he got. We could not. I do not believe they bothered to tally them. Who remembers that? As Thoreau noted, a vote merely indicates a vague wish that your will will prevail. Already a month before the election, thousands of homeless people will have been trucked to the polls to vote for Obama and a spot of gin.<br />
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Every family of home schoolers I meet, Catholic or no, I approach to tell them that they are doing the most important thing in the country. I believe that, short of what we do in prayer and self-denial, that is the best we can do: the cultivation of the old virtues of the polity, the cultivation of the new virtues of faith, hope, and charity. An hour on the knees counts for infinitely far more than an hour of standing in line. And—are we ready? Obama or no Obama, the rush into a socialist, godless, pornographic, anti-life future is going to require the heroic virtues of enduring persecution and martyrdom for, and with, Him.<br />
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Finally, I report that the Chestertonian garden on the Craven plantation yielded great fruits and called forth good fellowship. Over a thousand Roma tomatoes, a few hundred Brandywines, hundreds of peppers of many varieties, corn, squash, watermelons, a half bushel of beans, and Mr. Jones’ celebrated tobacco crop. As far as I am aware, none of these fruits have any speculative or stock market value beyond their substantial, real, manifest existences as benefits from Our Father. You can pick them. You can hold them in your hands and eat them. A depression is coming. Pray. Fast. Plant more beans and potatoes, and a few flowers for glory on the altars. That is a true economy.<br />
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<i>The Hermit in Winter<br />
</i>kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-20805220474371761282012-01-02T07:38:00.000-08:002012-01-03T07:34:29.202-08:00One of Us: A Paean<i>Yes, a paean, a hymn of thanksgiving and gratitude. When I finished reading Steven Faulkner’s </i>Waterwalk: A Passage of Ghosts (2003), <i>sitting on my worn couch in my Tennessee hermitage, I was flooded with a wave of enormous gratitude, a metaphor that will seem more apt when you have finished his marvelous tale of a thousand-mile canoe journey. Trying to put words to what I felt, I suddenly said “yes,” quoting Joseph Conrad’s Marlow, “he is one of us.”</i><br />
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It is enough to make one believe in magic, I thought. <br />
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In Hans Christian Andersen, a boy is given a withered seedling and finds himself in a choir of angels singing God’s praise. Near a century ago, a professor at Columbia University hears a young man complain “but I can’t read all those books,” and says, “Well, then, here, read this one,” and hands him a copy of Plato’s <i>Dialogues</i>. And a traditional Benedictine monastery that will last a thousand years rises on the scrubby hills of Oklahoma. A tired student at the University of Kansas finds a copy of the journals of Pere Marquette in the basement of the library and we are given <i>Waterwalk</i>, which, to use Chesterton’s words, “touches the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment.” In the world in which everyone has forgotten who he is, Faulkner’s book makes us sit up and bristle like porcupines.<br />
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The connections between these things stirred deep recognitions of my participation in events that now not only awaken wonder, they tell me who I am. I am, among many other things, a man who can read Steven Faulkner’s tale with the knowledge that I am in a community of fellow pilgrims. A fellowship of “those who know.” These are the fellows one sees on the other side of a canyon, upward bound on a parallel trail, to whom one shouts out with a wave, halloo! Our tracks are separate and unequal because we are not the same persons, but we sense that we are one from our shared destination.<br />
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A few months ago, I decided to contact an old friend who was a fellow graduate student at the University of Kansas in the early 1960’s. What followed , magically, was the appearance of a newsletter from the KU English Department. Usually disgusted by reading of the doings of the tribe that has taken over the Humanities—the multicultured band of postmodernists, feminists, Marxists, and what have you—I nearly tossed the thing. Then I saw a photo of Dr. Dennis Quinn, who died in this past year, and a reminiscence and tribute by one Steven Faulkner, who said he had taken every course Quinn and his friend, Dr. John Senior, had to offer. Faulkner’s praise brought a flood (another metaphor you will appreciate more after reading Faulkner’s book) into my aging brain. The tribute was read by the Chestertonians assembled, a small but doughty crew. Suddenly there was a fellowship in the room: we knew he was “one of us.” It was a connection.<br />
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The connections, say, between the blowing of a horn and the falling of an ogre’s castle, as Chesterton tells us in <i>Orthodoxy</i>, are the connections of <i>fairie</i> or elfland. They are not the connections of cause and effect, as in science, but the mysterious connections “deep down things,” as Robert Frost puts it. A man says the right word, and Sesame opens. A girl fails to do what is commanded, and all is lost. In the world of elfland, in which we really dwell, all this makes sense. The connections are not nonrational or irrational, as new age religions would have it, but rational, as reality is rational and mysterious at the same time. These acts of giving and receiving are called teaching. Enter these enchanted woods ye who hunger for true teaching.<br />
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In my first year of graduate study at KU, I was already world weary and mystified. Poor and beleaguered, having given, as Francis Bacon said of marriage, “hostages to fortune,” I had a wife and child and a Master’s degree from very nice folk at Marshall University in West Virginia, I also had the beginnings of a real education from pre-Vatican II Jesuits, who had given me a foundation in Thomistic philosophy and a love of literature and the arts. Suddenly I found myself among savages and barbarians who taught literature as a kind of apprenticeship in demonic power arts. Hankering to be a real teacher of literature, I felt trapped and hungry for something, I knew not what. I needed to hear the sounding of a horn. I needed to hear the reassuring words of Aeneas to his followers that all this travail must make sense somehow. <br />
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Several fellow convicts passed me a copy of Arvid Shulenberger’s <i>Orthodox Poetic: A Literary Catechism </i>(see March 31 and August 10) and pointed me to classes taught by Dennis Quinn, Arvid Shulenberger, and Frank Nelick. Soon I was in the presence of men who understood the connections, and who knew that good literature was actually about something: reality. The horn had sounded, the bells had rung, and like fairy tale heroes, I had been touched and awakened again. In Dr. Quinn’s class on the Metaphysical poets, the connections were the deep analogies of love and death in the poetry of John Donne. In Shulenberger and Nelick’s seminar on literary criticism, I knew the grasp of natural law that informs the best fiction of Hemingway and heard with rebellious chuckle the irreverences they committed against the idols of the academic theater.<br />
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The man who finds and celebrates these connections deep down things is called a poet—and all true teachers are poets, even if only by hankering. <i>Waterwalk</i> could as easily been titled <i>Connections</i>. No mere academic Steven Faulkner, a man who spent years on working with his hands before he met the fancy tribes, many of whom have never touched a tool or labored for bread and beer(here one may consult this blog on Oct 24), this fellow more than meets the low-rung standard I heard in paean of a teacher at Marshall University. With awe, the young man from the back hills of West Virginia said, “He knows more than one book!”<br />
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<i>Steven Faulkner, waterwalker</i><br />
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More than one he knows indeed. As he carries us along his epic canoe trip from St. Ignace, Michigan, to the levee at St Louis, Faulkner touches docks and sandbars named Marquette, Belloc, Hemingway, Josef Pieper, Wendell Berry, Walker Percy, Lord Tennyson, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Robert Louis Stevenson, T.S. Eliot, Dante, Virgil, Graham Greene, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Twain, Wordsworth, Goldsmith, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Reading Faulkner’s tale, I am at home with many a book and passage I first heard from the true teachers at KU. “He is indeed one of us!” I sighed as I put the last page aside, with deep gratitude for the connections, like epiphanies and kinship lists invoked around a campfire.<br />
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Like many poets, Faulkner has chosen to write the story of a journey, not one merely imagined but one lived, a long, arduous journey by canoe through beauties and horrors—the horrors of modern life, the bleakness of destroyed towns and farms, the crudeness of savages—as well as the moments that allow us to see ordinary people at work and play, many of whom are extraordinarily kind to the sometimes hungry and exhausted travelers. As we follow Steven and his son Justin—for this is also a powerful father-and-son tale—through swamps and sloughs and rapids, we have the constant company of Virgil, Homer, Dante, and the vivid reports of Marquette and Joliet, the first Europeans to brave a journey from the Great Lakes toward the Mississippi which, as Indian tribes warned them along the way, was a place of lurking disasters and monsters. Picture Steven and his son by a campfire on a sandbar, reading aloud from the <i>Odyssey</i>. Picture Steven and his son on the Mississippi, now among the monsters of locks, oil barges, motorboats, and strange, uncivilized tribes of rowdies and, yes, nudist colonists.<br />
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It is sometimes a sad and inglorious tale in which we are brought up against what has become of America in the ages of industrialization and post-industrialization—the trash age, we could call it. Faulkner refers to Goldsmith’s <i>Deserted Village</i>, where we may read—<br />
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<i>Ye friends to truth, ye statesmen, who survey<br />
The rich man’s joys increase, the poor’s decay,<br />
‘Tis yours to judge how wide the limits stand<br />
Between a splendid and a happy land.<br />
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</i>And—<br />
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<i>Even now the devastation is begun,<br />
And half the business of destruction done;<br />
Even now, methinks, as pondering here I stand,<br />
I see the rural virtues leave the land . . . .</i><br />
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Faulkner does not lecture or sermonize, but his well-drawn pictures make us aware that there is indeed a distance between a “splendid” and a “happy land,” an opposition that would be lost on many a pilgrim soul if a Faulkner were not there to show us. He has listened well to Conrad’s words in the preface to <i>The Nigger of the Narcissus</i>: “My task . . . is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, above all, to make you see.” To these imperatives, Faulkner could be said to add, “to make you smell and to make you taste.” <br />
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But he goes a step further, as a poet should. To Conrad’s goals he adds the imperative, “to make you glimpse eternal things at the edges of material things.” Along the way, there are churches in small towns, where a scruffy, brushed-up poet and son sit in the back row and hear sermons, one of which tells the story of the Basilian priest of Lanciano, who was privileged to see the bread and wine of the Eucharist turn visibly into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, so that twelve centuries later the bloody flesh can be tested to show that the blood type is AB, just as it is in all the ten similar Eucharistic miracles world wide. "What are the chances of that?" Faulkner asks, just as he asks the same question when he sees a tugboat on the Mississippi named the <i>Marquette</i>.<br />
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<i>Pere Marquette teaches the Indians. By Wilhelm Lamprecht.</i> <br />
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True teaching. True poetry. True adventure. And soon a movie of the book will appear, premiering on April 7 in Green Bay. Also, the author tells me, another book is nearing completion, "'Bitterroot: A Father-Son Journey into the Wild West,' which includes bits of Francis Parkman's 'The Oregon Trail,' which I read with the professors, as well as accounts of Father Pierre Jean De Smet's two first journeys along the Oregon Trail to establish the first Catholic missions in the Rocky Mountains."<br />
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The Chestertonians of Middle Tennessee await.<br />
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<i>Note: I welcome comments below. If you don't want to fight all the computer fol de rol, you can just choose the "Anonymous" option.</i>kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-10237530755883633122011-12-13T13:03:00.000-08:002011-12-14T10:21:16.841-08:00A CHRISTMAS TAIL IN HEATHEN TIMESThe following tale is my Christmas gift to kith an kin, including children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and friends. If any enemies happen upon it, be merry!<br />
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<b>A Christmas Tail for Heathen Times</b><br />
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It was December 12, the morning of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of the Americas. As usual, I was talking to my cat Luthien. We were standing in front of my statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe which I had decked with Christmas lights to honor her and to astound my Baptist neighbors.<br />
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“It was cold then, too, in the mountains,” I said, “that is why the blooming of the roses was such a miracle.”<br />
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“What blooming miracle?” Luthien said. She has a touch of limey on her Tolkienish side.<br />
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“When Juan Diego of Mexico saw the Blessed Virgin on Tepyac mountain above Mexico City she gave him the roses in his tilma to show to the Bishop, who had demanded a sign that Juan Diego was not another Aztec fruitcake. When Juan carried the roses to the Bishop, the Bishop knelt in wonder as he beheld the image of Mary as a young Aztec woman somehow emblazoned into the tilma, a very humble cloak made of cactus fiber. Though these tilmas usually decay into dust within twenty years, this one, dear furry friend, is still in perfect condition after six hundred years or so, and no scientist can understand what the colors are made of or how the tilma resists decay. ‘Who painted it?’ So the bewildered Hilary Clinton asked a priest. “God,” the priest answered to her bewilderment. Or, for that matter, how this image converted a million Aztecs and, later, won the battle of Lepanto, but those are stories you don’t want to hear. . . . though you could read about them in the book in the house called <i>God-Sent: A History of the Accredited Apparitions of Mary</i>.”<br />
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I paused, suddenly aware that I was probably talking to myself, an affliction of the aged. But I heard a feline yawn.<br />
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<i>Our Lady of Guadalupe</i><br />
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Cats normally have an attention span of about thirteen nanoseconds, so I was surprised to see Luthien listening and raising one paw in question.<br />
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“Books, those things that get in my way when I want to find a nice nook to curl in?”<br />
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“That’s all you have to say? I figured—”<br />
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<i>Luthien questions me</i><br />
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“No, wait a minute, I have some questions. All this talk of miracles and Christmas.”<br />
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“Yes, must be a puzzle to a mere cat.”<br />
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“Don’t be insulting, I am not a Meerkat. My honest line of domestic cathood runs back to Egypt and Babylon.”<br />
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“I’ll try to ignore the fact that I am talking with a cat and chalk it up to lonely hermit visions, but for the sake of . . .”<br />
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“Of St. Alzheimer, no doubt.”<br />
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“No, for the sake of wonder, the seed ground of faith, I’ll hear you out.”<br />
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Luthien leapt up on the bannister. “Not until we go inside where it’s warm.”<br />
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I knew an old ploy when I saw one, but it was a feast day and I was shivering too. <br />
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Inside I had to wait for her to go through her seemingly endless ablutions—cats make Muslims look like pikers— before she consented to go on.<br />
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“A cold coming we had of it,” she started.<br />
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“That’s from T.S. Eliot’s 'Journey of the Magi,' the lines he appropriated from Lancelot Andrewes. Stop playing around.”<br />
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“You are missing it. You humans have no patience. That was my purr-lude.”<br />
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“Go on, I’m trying to pay attention.”<br />
<br />
“Okay, you think I don’t attend, but I do. All this purring sound is really a different level of perception; we cats kind of hum into knowledge. Now, you have this silly Mexican statue you bought from Wal-Mart, if truth be told, but some of your neighbors have manger scenes in their front yards, right?”<br />
<br />
“I didn’t know you observed anything but squirrels and birds.”<br />
<br />
“I’ll let that pass as a specie-ist insult. If you were as observant as I am, you would notice that in Eliot’s poem and in all these manger scenes, there are camels and oxen and sheep and even horses, but not a single cat. Not one. Not ever."<br />
<br />
“Well, Saint Luke only mentions flocks of sheep, so . . .”<br />
<br />
“My point exactly. All the rest about oxen and camels is ex-trope-olation by tradition, eh?”<br />
<br />
“That’s ex<i>trap</i>olation . . .”<br />
<br />
“Not very wise in Scripture study are you? A trope is . . .”<br />
<br />
“All right, I get it. The animals kneeling, as in Hardy’s poem, are poetic tropes invented by Christian tradition.”<br />
<br />
“And if that’s so, there’s my species-ism proof, your whole Christian culture leaves out cats, creatures of God, but not only are they left out of manger scenes, there’s not a single cat in all of Scripture. One stinking dog in the <i>Book of Tobit</i>—and that’s left out of the Protestant Bible—but not a single—”<br />
<br />
“Stinking cat?”<br />
<br />
“We are superbly clean, cleaner than thou, you . . .”<br />
<br />
“Mangy hermit?”<br />
<br />
“Thou hast said it, not me.”<br />
<br />
“So what do you want to do about it?”<br />
<br />
“I have purr-poses you have not even begun to guess, white boy.”<br />
<br />
“But I am about to learn, I suppose.”<br />
<br />
“Furs-t, you have to suspend your disbelief a bit. I have a true story.”<br />
<br />
“You’re not about to try to add to Scripture, are you?”<br />
<br />
“Well, think a minute, what temperature was it on the night Christ was born and what were the constellations in the sky?”<br />
<br />
“Errrr—”<br />
<br />
“Exactly, but if astronomers and other scientists could tell us those things, would that detract from the Sacred Book? Neither will what I have to tell you, not one whisker.”<br />
<br />
“And the source of your story?”<br />
<br />
“At last, we’re getting to the tail I have to tell.”<br />
<br />
“Tale.”<br />
<br />
“In your <i>lingua franca</i>, not my Cat-alonese.”<br />
<br />
By this time I was lying on my back with a cup of cocoa by my side and approaching the region some romantic poets must have visited after a good puff on the pipe. But no matter, I had the secret of true culture—leisure, which means time that is like sleeping and love: “the leisure of man includes within itself a celebratory, approving, lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation,” as philosopher Josef Pieper puts it in <i>Leisure: The Basis of Culture</i>, the wisest and most illuminating little book of the whole twentieth century.<br />
<br />
<br />
Outside my window cars were rushing past, cars full of frenetic Christmas shoppers desperate for sales and purchases and mad with the peculiar madness of capitalist activism. I was in the proper mood to hear a story, even one from Luthien, a story in which I could wander and know as one knows from true stories. <br />
<br />
“This story is a secret story handed down in my cat family—<br />
<br />
“There was a cat and he had a boy. . .”<br />
<br />
“Don’t you have that backwards? A case of puss-lexia?”<br />
<br />
“No, it’s you that have it backwards. Think outside your human box for a minute, and no more interruptions!” <br />
<br />
“So this cat, followed by his boy, was on his way up a road in Judea to a town called Beth-le-hem, when he heard angels singing--I said don’t interrupt! Cats can hear things you can’t—as a matter of fact, we hear them singing all the time, not just then. Why do you think we sleep so happily while you are grumbling and grousing around? <br />
<br />
The boy, of course, heard nothing, he just followed my great-great-great-great(x times 2,642) great-grandfather Judah Ben-jamin Cat—”<br />
<br />
“Hold on a minute, this cat was a Jew? You’re really spinning a yarn, Luthien—”<br />
<br />
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<i>Judah Ben-Jamin Cat<br />
</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
“I told you, we are very, very clean. Where do you think we got that? Okay, now we have to do a flashback. If you can lie still for it. Though cats are not mentioned in the Bible, that is because they were originally pagans in Egypt. They were even worshipped and mummified, you know, there were festivals in their honor and temples and all kinds of federal entitlements. It was high times in Egypt, I tell you, the cats thought it was the promised land. Then the Jews came in. For a while that was good too, they had their fleshpots and the pickin’s were easy in their camps. Cats everywhere, stealing everything, and nobody allowed to touch a hair on their sacred heads. So you wonder why the Jews weren’t too hot on cats when they wrote all their histories and stuff? <br />
<br />
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<i>An Egyptian cat . . .</i><br />
<br />
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. . . and an Egyptian cat god.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
“But then these Jews refused to worship any of the Egyptian gods, including us, and wanted their own religious ceremonies, which really riled the Pharoah, or the Fur-oh, as we called him then. Fur-oh, he say stop all that Jew stuff! But they had stiff necks, same as you got some days, and they wouldn’t bend. Then this guy named Moses and his sidekick Aaron got feisty and told Fur-oh, let my peoples go home! Fur-oh, he would say yes, then he would say no, and every time he said no, bad stuff happened. Locusts and hail and pesty things striking the crops and cattle and frogs getting in the food bowls and lice in our fur and all the fish stinking dead in the river and even the children falling down dead. Down at ground level, things were bad for the cats, nothing to eat and nothing to steal and the Gyp-shuns stopped putting sacrifice food in the cat temples. Entitlements dried up and you couldn’t find a dog-fly to snack on. Most of the rats all died and the mice too and the kitties were lean as Somalis. It was hard times in the cotton fields. So our great (all the greats x 3765) ancestor cat, Al-Furry-oh , called all the cats together and jammed about this.<br />
<br />
“’Hissss!’ he said. ‘Fur-oh’s wise guys have lost all their mojo, so it would appear, and these Jew guys going out of here to a land of milk and honey AND looks like the rats and mice that are left goin’ with ‘em too. It’s time to fish or cut bait and we don’ have no fish and no bait nuther.’<br />
<br />
“Well, to make a long story short—”<br />
<br />
“Puh-lease, Luthien—”<br />
<br />
“They went with the Jews into the desert and griped a lot along with the Jews and ate the hard tack and listened to a lot of hard talk, but they survived and came into the Promised Land.”<br />
<br />
“So why aren’t there any cats in the Jewish scriptures then?”<br />
<br />
“I didn’t say they loved us. They have long memories and no patience with fur-i-ners. But we stuck in, and even today—”<br />
<br />
“Yes, I fed bits of my Argentine steak to kitties under my table in an outdoor Jerusalem restaurant—”<br />
<br />
“You never gave <i>me</i> anything like that to eat—”<br />
<br />
“Let’s not get off on that. So finish the story—”<br />
<br />
“Huffffggghhh. There you go again, away from the contemplative mode of catness, back into demanding quickie results and rushing to conclusions, the whole protestant work ethic and spirit of capitalism. I’m purring contemplation here, beholding, not snacking. The picture of the cat and his boy walking toward Beth-le-hem upon a midnight clear is a picture worthy of the master painters and hours of simple beholding. But in de-fur-ence to your sick impatience, I will go on.<br />
<br />
“It was a cold night and everyone on the road was rushing to find a meal and a bed in the crowded town. There was this census thing on and all the Jews who were of that city had to register or get in trouble with the Roman feds, who wanted total control over the peoples they ruled. Fortunately, there was no rule on cats, so my great (X 2642) grandfather Judah Ben Cat sniffed opportunity—all those people, all that food—and went straight for the inn, which was packed. His boy, a very poor fellow without a name even, who wandered the roads of Rome looking for food himself, trotted behind him. Then they heard—<br />
<br />
’Please, sir, my wife is about to give birth, if you could find a place for us. I am a carpenter, tomorrow in payment I could fix something for you.’<br />
<br />
‘Do you have a reservation?’<br />
<br />
‘No, I am a simple man seeking a place where my wife can give birth, we are on the road because of the census, please for the love of Yahweh, do not turn us away.’<br />
<br />
‘I’ve already told you, all our rooms are full and besides, we don’t take barter, only Roman Express cards. Now for the last time, scat.’<br />
<br />
“Being told to scat,” Luthien continued, “well, that’s talk Judah Ben Cat had heard before from every people on the planet. And being without a place to stay, Judah knew what that meant, though he prided himself on being homeless and beholden to no man. <br />
<br />
‘I saw a bunch of shepherds outside town,’ the boy suddenly said to the man, who said his name was Joseph and he was of the House of David.<br />
<br />
‘No house of David here, sir,’ the boy said, ‘just this Holy Day Inn, but it’s packed with rich merchants who can pay the high price. But maybe the shepherds outside town might know a place, maybe a cave.’<br />
<br />
“This Joseph went back to his wife, Miriam I think she was called, and held her in his arms. It was clear she was having birth pains every few minutes.”<br />
<br />
‘There is no time, we must do something now. The baby is coming fast,’ Joseph told the boy.<br />
<br />
“Then,” Luthien said, “Judah Ben Cat saw Joseph kneel down in the street and lift up his hands in prayer and ask his Father God for help. All his ancestors that had come through the desert knew this strange behavior and respected it because it often brought food and with the food, which fell out of the sky, tasty mice and rats.”<br />
<br />
“Typical cat thinking,” I interrupted,” always the food.”<br />
<br />
“Did you not know that smells and food and eating are important in the Divine Plan? Judah Ben Cat and the homeless of the earth know that God relates to food more than you can know. But that’s a secret that comes later, a very big secret. <br />
<br />
“Anyway, Judah’s boy saved the day. ‘Sir Yusef, quick, there is a stable behind the Inn where we can at least find some shelter and straw.'<br />
<br />
"Actually he knew this because he had seen Judah Ben Cat disappear around the corner in that direction, but humans always fail to credit the wisdom of cats. Straw? Stable? That’s cat heaven.<br />
<br />
“Imagine the place, a crowded dirty stable, half shed, half cave, noisy with the honking of camels and the noise making of horses and donkeys and geese and chickens cackling in cages, and the animals crowding around the food troughs—mangers, you know—and poor Joseph and Miriam looking around for a place. Finally the boy and Joseph pulled one of the troughs to a corner and put as fresh straw as they could find in it. When the baby came, Miriam wrapped it in some clean rags and laid it in the rough straw. About that time the shepherds showed up and knelt as if this baby were God Almighty and Judah Ben Cat knew that something big was happening, something <i>very, very </i>big, and he heard Miriam and Yusef discussing the name for the baby, which was to be JESUS, a name they said had been given by an angel when the baby was conceived.<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
“The word that has come down to us from Judah Ben Cat is that that is a name at which every knee should bend, and so, when all the other animals knelt on the stable floor, Judah knelt too, even though, as he said, he didn’t quite understand the why or wherefore. It’s something deep, he said, very deep in all creation, that all animals know, even the mice and rats and stupid dogs. Judah’s great grandson followed this family to Nazareth and back into Egypt when the baby-killers came after JESUS and spread the word to his kin that were still there. Something big had happened, so big the baby-killers wanted it stamped out, but wouldn’t you know it, this big new thing in the world traveled by word of mouth among exiles and homeless and back streets and prisoners and the poor and some soldiers, not by billboards or proclamations in the street.<br />
<br />
“Later, my kin tell me, that baby grew up and preached the Truth and got killed for what He said. There were cats at the foot of the cross, weeping. For they had heard JESUS say to his followers, ‘Go forth and preach the Gospel <i>to every creature</i>.’ That is our faith, and we do not know how it will work out for us when the kingdom He promised comes, but we cannot believe we will be left behind, for we too are followers, as best as we can be.”<br />
<br />
“And now,” I said to Luthien, who had now perched on my couch with one closed eye, “I suppose you will tell me you are a Christian cat?”<br />
<br />
“A Cat-lic Christian, not baptized of course, but blessed and touched by the Spirit. That is why when you play music in the house, if it’s liturgical, I purr along, but if it’s not religious, it sounds like cats yowling and I demand to go out. Especially if it’s that Muslim, Cat Stevens, the horror! But mostly, as you know, we prefer silence; some of my fur-bears were Desert Fur-thurs, keeping the mice out of hermit caves and such.<br />
<br />
“In the Divine Economy we keep to our place and our own purr-ishes, we preach without words but show necessary disapprobation with flicks of our tails, we mind our own business but we will cuddle anyone who needs warmth, and we mew our thanks to the baby who is God, to whom our fur-bears knelt in the straw. We keep the Occupiers—infidos and hare-e-tics—out of the gardens. And we honor all the feast days by feasting! And when the fasts come, we beg in the streets like the saints. And oh yes, we have a patron saint, St. Gertrude, the patroness of cats . . .”<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
“Forgive me, Luthien, if I find all of this a bit hard to take, some of it seems so comic, cats in the stable, cats following Moses into the desert—”<br />
<br />
“Hufff! All good Christian stories are comic in nature, just as comic to me as you standing there and thinking you own me. Ever read the comic exchanges between Our Lord and the Pharisees? And think back to poor Juan Diego and Our Lady on the mountain. There he was trying to get back from the Bishop to take care of his sick uncle and he was afraid that the mysterious Lady would snag him again, so he went around the other side of the mountain hoping she wouldn’t. Like all true comedies, it’s Divine, even cats know that, and you, sir, are a very funny fellow with strange views. As for comic, have you ever looked at a camel? The missionary who would preach to that creature must be a case for the books.”<br />
<br />
My cocoa was in need of replenishment, and it was time to turn on the lights I had strung around Mother Mary, time to open the door and let Luthien go on her mysterious missions, time to rejoice and strain my ears to hear the angels singing. Purr-haps if I would raise my old paws in prayer . . .kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-90748813266637984732011-12-05T08:47:00.000-08:002011-12-06T10:06:47.741-08:00IT AIN’T SCIENCE FICTION NO MORE: CONCLUSION<i>I think we are much more like the Nazis and Dachau than we imagine</i>.–Walker Percy<br />
<br />
<i>If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin</i>–T.S. Eliot<br />
<br />
<br />
“I have heard of dead men walking. What of blind men walking? That is what I see when I look at your Western Culture, so-called.” <br />
<br />
Thus said Jabar Al Jabar to the Mad Hermit the day after their discussion of the Penn State sex scandal. The Hermit was on his usual afternoon perch, astride the burnished head of the sperm whale skeleton, ready for a skirmish with the Arab philosopher. Around the tip of Masirah Island, a small pod of whales was turning to the south. <i>Playing in God’s eyes, Who made them for his delight</i>, the hermit thinks silently, <i>just as the psalmist sang</i>.<br />
<br />
“Blind men walking to doom in their pride,” Jabar continued, walking impatiently up and down the beach, “and carrying the rest of us with you, like as not.”<br />
<br />
“And what of your people, you Muslims, Jabar—Pakistan, Syria, Iran—you have enough nuclear weapons to incinerate us all. What of your insane pride and blindness?”<br />
<br />
“The better to scare you with, my friend, to awaken you to the inner truth of Islam. Remember, we are all Muslims, that is, children of Adam; you post-Christians simply are not awakened to the fact. Perhaps we can wake you up with fear, though I personally doubt it. Even on the brink of total destruction, the real message of Jihad will not penetrate your brains sick with lust and materialism. That was the point of hitting the World Trade Center, to strike at the heart of your usurious and luxurious culture.”<br />
<br />
“So you have come here today to continue the jihad and perhaps push me into the ocean? Come, Jabar . . .”<br />
<br />
“I will leave this topic in a moment. Permit me to remind you that your rationalist madness opened the secrets of nature and gave us Hiroshima and the new world of fear. We did not make it, we have only sought to defend ourselves as a sane man would in a prison of madmen. No lectures please.”<br />
<br />
“I have none. Remember what you call my culture and the West is not the Kingdom of Christ. Throughout the world we are poor exiles driven into enclaves where we are persecuted by socialists and Muslims alike. Many in my world—especially in my own country of America—would seek to identify the political causes of governments with the Gospel.”<br />
<br />
“You said yesterday that we are enemies and should remain so—”<br />
<br />
“You are my enemy because you serve a false god and a false religion—”<br />
<br />
“But you are commanded to love your enemies—”<br />
<br />
“And love you I do, because true love desires the good for its enemy, which is Christ the King and Creator, which you reject—”<br />
<br />
“Hold! You are on the soil of Islam and Allah!”<br />
<br />
Properly steamed, Jabar paced back and forth, his hand on his khanjar. For the moment, the hermit thought it prudent to retreat into the desert silence and pray a few Jesus prayers. <br />
<br />
“No,” Jabar finally said, assuming a more philosophic mood. “No, that is not why I came here today. <br />
<br />
“Remember, we were on the deep contradictions and ambivalences of your culture. Not only about sex and love, but about the value of life itself. For some decades, since West accepted the fiction foisted on your minds by Max Weber and the sociologists, that life is not inherently and intrinsically valuable because created by God but a sort of malleable stuff that you ‘place’ value upon, like tying a price tag on a product. You drifted away from the solid vision of the high middle ages. As your poet T.S. Eliot put it, you experienced a ‘dissociation of sensibility,’ which in very plain terms . . .”<br />
<br />
“Means a Cartesian separation of body and soul, spirit and flesh . . .”<br />
<br />
“Exactly. This whole business of talking about where you ‘place’ your values has even entered the ordinary conversations of so-called Christians. If I may say, it has become a cardinal principle of your culture as much as usury and luxury. Catholic priests and protestant pastors and Jewish rabbis parrot it every day. And that is why you are rushing to a doom greater than nuclear attack. Said Qutb saw and smelled it in your streets and homes. Who, dear hermit friend, are you to decide what is the value of anything God has made? I hear the women chattering in your marketplaces, ‘I have issues with that, I am deciding what my values are, it all depends on where you place your values,’ et cetera ad nauseam.”<br />
<br />
“Ah, Jabar, you cut deep with your philosophic sword.”<br />
<br />
“I have found that the best place to know a culture is to listen to ordinary speech in marketplaces and coffee shops. For instance, I hear this as a common question now, ‘what will you do with your parents when they get old?’ Do? Do with? Do you see the underlying world view here? On all the earth, in tribes and villages on every continent, this is not a question for civilized people, who keep their parents with them as naturally as they breathe.”<br />
<br />
“Yes, it is the same question that is asked now when a woman has been given the gift of life in her womb. What will we do with it? You are right, we are become as gods.”<br />
<br />
“Let me put it as simply as I can. What I hear is that the disposal of individual lives has become the automatic response of a technocratic culture that sees everything as products that become outmoded and must be eliminated. The emperor ‘I’ is the autocratic disposer.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLfQHOawFVtjGwbPJ1BA6B5gLC_zXxpNXYZBKAi7uBRgZy80FqccdX8wn9aDWuK-bWyXVohEPwS8YFpOiJIJ8x0-SQmjbXZYVnflcrs51uZAnGbW44h4tJ1nd56a8lZ3fE_J0t1Uw_UJZF/s1600/gas+van.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="209" width="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLfQHOawFVtjGwbPJ1BA6B5gLC_zXxpNXYZBKAi7uBRgZy80FqccdX8wn9aDWuK-bWyXVohEPwS8YFpOiJIJ8x0-SQmjbXZYVnflcrs51uZAnGbW44h4tJ1nd56a8lZ3fE_J0t1Uw_UJZF/s320/gas+van.gif" /></a></div><br />
<i>A friendly Nazi neighborhood extermination van<br />
</i><br />
<br />
“Then there’s the official language, the false language adopted on death as it is on sexual abuse. This is a phony language of tenderness and sympathy; it fills the brochures of the nursing homes, hospitals, retirement communities. It pretends to be a language of reverence for life, whereas in fact it is the language of murder and death, in the melodic tones of ‘choice,’ just like the language of the abortion clinics, so called. There is only one premise in all this: suffering and inconvenience must be eliminated for everyone at all costs. At all costs, mind you. The price tag has been placed, is placed, because that is the lingua franca of the death factories—the <i>Soylent Green </i>Industries, if you remember the movie. ‘Your suffering is my inconvenience, your death my solution.’ The poets . . .”<br />
<br />
“The poets? What?”<br />
<br />
“Your poets—a few of them—have prophesied for your people but few listen. I am still struck by the fact that millions of people have watched <i>The Lord of the Rings </i>a dozen times, but have missed most of its meanings, including the evil of Mordor, the archetype of State madness.”<br />
<br />
“Yes,” the hermit sad sadly. “I know. I taught an Honors seminar on Tolkien a few years ago in which the students—most of them—absolutely resisted knowing what Tolkien meant. It is incredible that this major poet has been such a successful failure.”<br />
<br />
“But let me point to two poets (I use the word in its traditional sense) who have gone to the heart of the matter on the direction of humanistic and anti-religious societies. These are two poets whose prophetic messages have been ignored by your intelligentsia, who mark them ‘odd’ or ‘mad,’ and turn away. <br />
<br />
“The first is <i>The Canticle of Leibowitz</i>, by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959); the second is <i>The Thanatos Syndrome </i>by Walker Percy (1987). A pivot point between them is “Rediscovering <i>A Canticle for Leibowitz</i>,” an essay by Walker Percy written in 1971, during the period in which Percy was becoming more aware of the depth of cultural sickness in America and beginning to shape his fictions as messages wrapped in comedic strategies to elude the literati. With his last novel, <i>The Thanatos Syndrome</i>, the message was all too clear, and the critics opening that package were horrified to find that their pet Catholic novelist was up to the same game as Flannery O’Connor, writing in giant letters and grotesque plots the meanings that the West needed to hear, like warnings shouted on a sinking ship.”<br />
<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOklxNnFzdRog0bZ_mwrbTc8rY4yw2q5ZyZFSqsY5CwI-lxxVsM_iSea1GYDHpLaeRafe_hrfM7vOxajIyLUaBstsGpcZ3HbxvsivIbOGTAj8oFw0q8iY0BCk_5d2OMMtdp-jADF1DC5OW/s1600/200px-WalkerPercy_TheThanatosSyndrome.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="296" width="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOklxNnFzdRog0bZ_mwrbTc8rY4yw2q5ZyZFSqsY5CwI-lxxVsM_iSea1GYDHpLaeRafe_hrfM7vOxajIyLUaBstsGpcZ3HbxvsivIbOGTAj8oFw0q8iY0BCk_5d2OMMtdp-jADF1DC5OW/s320/200px-WalkerPercy_TheThanatosSyndrome.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
“I remember these strange, powerful novels, Jabar,” the hermit responded. “Remind me, how do they reveal the deep ambivalence of our culture toward death?”<br />
<br />
“Simply, that the West has nothing to believe in any longer except death itself. Death is the solution, the only solution that makes any sense, release from the suffering of life. Instant Buddhism, if you will, cloaked in a lying reverence for life. No matter how much the secular humanists prate about the value of life, they can only define it as the power to exterminate—in euthanasia, abortion, infanticide, or nuclear war. After wildly hinting at his vision for four or five novels, Percy risked spelling it out—a sort of ‘Life and Death Issues for Dummies.’”<br />
<br />
“Yes,” the hermit recalled, “he reveals one of the best kept secrets of the twentieth century, the roots of the Nazi holocaust in the left-wing politics of the Weimar Republic, in which the State took on the mantle of savior by redefining the value of life. The doctors of liberal Germany spelled it out in <i>The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value </i>(Life Unworthy of Life) (1922) by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, and the legislators proceeded to pass the laws that would allow the government to forcibly sterilize the ‘feeble minded’ and euthanize anyone who did not fall without the parameters of ‘meaningful’ life. Hitler’s Nazi government did not need to pass a single law; the statutes were already in place. The friendly vans from the government could begin euthanizing mental patients wholesale. This deep interconnection between the leftist view of life and the Nazi view of life . . .”<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVf7aYyzV10t2YsS1V9RTuUoGGZyNU3a20mRT20X4vCQ0vpyF0vD7mBO2TPH9onyb2uMaRGg8DjQSkodzu1WzCTNJELCTlJaRaUoxHRjPZGjZ1ukUNmjSq_qfn2ra8dX7eB9vxvUsB8tRR/s1600/250px-EnthanasiePropaganda.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="319" width="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVf7aYyzV10t2YsS1V9RTuUoGGZyNU3a20mRT20X4vCQ0vpyF0vD7mBO2TPH9onyb2uMaRGg8DjQSkodzu1WzCTNJELCTlJaRaUoxHRjPZGjZ1ukUNmjSq_qfn2ra8dX7eB9vxvUsB8tRR/s320/250px-EnthanasiePropaganda.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<i>Life devoid of value with a price tag<br />
</i><br />
<br />
“Yes,” the hermit agreed, “is definitely hidden in the left’s educational syllabus today, while Peter Singer is taught as a respectable philosopher and Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, clearly a neo-Nazi with a particular animus against black people, is celebrated as a savior of society. I wonder why abortion ‘clinics’ do not have little Sanger shrines and pass out Sanger holy cards.”<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU_kRdW6WvT2LfLeYiopsCukOrVZ-_QKJaUeh3JAGDJnJodc2FNitc6K-n2PL8aotLK-Y1Bl8OCioIIapQjS-3GL_QN5w7IlwVc_C7D1qXFYiQkQAX6G3l7VkfsTi47PWQfMG6k4asTPI9/s1600/sanger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="238" width="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU_kRdW6WvT2LfLeYiopsCukOrVZ-_QKJaUeh3JAGDJnJodc2FNitc6K-n2PL8aotLK-Y1Bl8OCioIIapQjS-3GL_QN5w7IlwVc_C7D1qXFYiQkQAX6G3l7VkfsTi47PWQfMG6k4asTPI9/s320/sanger.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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<i>Saints Sanger and Singer: Prophets of Death<br />
</i><br />
<br />
<br />
“Walter M. Miller was a real prophet. He saw where things would go. In <i>A Canticle for Leibowitz</i> he pictured earth in the third millennium as a place where a second nuclear holocaust would leave millions dying of radiation exposure and where a small band of Benedictines would be the last line of defense against the euthanizing Mercy Camp crematoria of the government. Abbot Zerchi and his monks protest the smarmy government murders that are committed in the name of mercy—”<br />
<br />
“Yes! And in <i>The Thanatos Syndrome</i>, Percy’s ‘science fiction,’ it is a Catholic priest, thought to be mad by most, who preaches a sermon at the opening of a hospice—in which he startles his hearers by saying that the Great Prince Satan is ruling the earth and that ‘tenderness leads to the gas chamber.’ ‘Beware, tender hearts,’ he says, ‘don’t you know where tenderness leads? To the gas chambers . . . . More people have been killed in this century by tender-hearted souls than by cruel barbarians in all the centuries put together. . . .Listen to me, dear physicians, dear brothers, dear Qualitarians, abortionists, euthanasists.’ Then, like Mother Teresa, he invites these doctors to send all the ‘suffering, dying, afflicted, useless, born or unborn, whom you for the best of reasons wish to put out of his misery’ to his hospice.”<br />
<br />
“So both these poets point to the central lie that the State should be allowed to define who is worthy of life and to act accordingly.”<br />
<br />
“Yes,” Jabar replied, “but note that it is the citizens of the State who rush to embrace this evil philosophy. And that is why I say that the culture of the West is eaten up with a love of death disguised as a love for life.”<br />
<br />
“Yes,” the hermit said sadly, “in my last years of teaching, I was astonished to hear students defending every unnatural thing. From homosexuality to involuntary sterilization to a preference for animal rights over human rights. In particular they reacted with revulsion to the mentions of large families, virginity, chastity, traditional marriage (the only kind), and cheered on abortion, euthanasia, birth control, eugenics, cloning, you name it. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8Fm1oJt5DN-Uf6y8D4f88bsWpHlMf3StSd0VcrMLgty1AsoaPOOKx2XhTKNilJcrj9zFoc6JChqjBHzz5_o_cJQps90eWbOws7xnFyj5dOJPoseKVFZbWkZKthUDft3ETvpkocMOPgSM0/s1600/Margaret+Sanger+and+KKK.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="295" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8Fm1oJt5DN-Uf6y8D4f88bsWpHlMf3StSd0VcrMLgty1AsoaPOOKx2XhTKNilJcrj9zFoc6JChqjBHzz5_o_cJQps90eWbOws7xnFyj5dOJPoseKVFZbWkZKthUDft3ETvpkocMOPgSM0/s320/Margaret+Sanger+and+KKK.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<i>Saint Margaret, Mother of Mercy, speaks to the KKK</i><br />
<br />
“The current enthusiasm for socialism among the occupiers is all of a piece: the first thing a socialist society does is to deny the worth of, even the existence of, the human person. When I was a college student in the last century, I read Pope Leo XIII’s denunciation of socialism as a philosophy in which the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the ‘socio-economic mechanism.’ In other words, life has a price tag. All those who follow the wonderful celebration of painless death now popular in medical and nursing schools will perhaps be surprised when they themselves hear the hiss of the gas chambers. Nazis R Us, but we don’t see it and, like Ann Frank, wonder that the Nazi philosophy could so completely surround us.”<br />
<br />
When the hermit heard no reply, he turned to see the figure of Jabar Al Jabar moving steadily away from him into the desert, as if he were suddenly seized with a fear that the hermit himself carried the Western contagion, and needed to purify himself in the burning hot sands. With an added ironic gesture, Jabar shook the dust from his sandals.<br />
<br />
<i><br />
Note: I welcome comments below. If you don't want to fight all the computer fol de rol, you can just choose the "Anonymous" option.</i>kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-87126122896733370702011-11-21T15:41:00.000-08:002011-11-21T15:41:35.269-08:00IT AIN'T SCIENCE FICTION NO MORE: PART ONE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmaxVatdm7xy-rMhJhG7loH5ZXE_csKO0q2MVHRjsC0Wxhyphenhyphencm_HBZGRhFKJbz3PowqCf3WBsgmAUlYe72LKwJn3prEvrXguQrmTOnwLBPxTRqwGwYHLKq_Zbnx-rpwrkkZB-v_UZfwNsk-/s1600/desert+father+paul.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="116" width="86" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmaxVatdm7xy-rMhJhG7loH5ZXE_csKO0q2MVHRjsC0Wxhyphenhyphencm_HBZGRhFKJbz3PowqCf3WBsgmAUlYe72LKwJn3prEvrXguQrmTOnwLBPxTRqwGwYHLKq_Zbnx-rpwrkkZB-v_UZfwNsk-/s320/desert+father+paul.bmp" /></a></div><br />
<br />
<br />
The Mad Hermit was interrupted in his musings by Al Jabar Jabar, a professor of Islamic philosophy at the Sultan Qaboos University in Oman. He came by to check on our hermit friend from time to time to discuss issues of the day though, as he always said, the issues of the day are always the same. This time he brought the news of the Penn State sexual child abuse scandal, and wondered about the Hermit’s thoughts.<br />
<br />
“An evil,” the hermit said, “always a great evil. But what is new about that?” <br />
<br />
“Yes, I believe you are sincere in this, Hermit friend, but I wonder at the sincerity of the horror expressed by most people in your country. Why are they so horrified by something that their culture is also busy endorsing?”<br />
<br />
“Eh, what’s that, Jabar?”<br />
<br />
“Everything is always upside down in your culture. Your people are always busy denouncing the very thing that they really support. Now that the Internet god allows everyone in the world to see what’s going on in your so-called culture, we know you are frauds pure and simple.”<br />
<br />
“Explain, please.” The Hermit idly poked a stick at a hermit crab.<br />
<br />
“How many clothing ads do I see in your media that show very young people dressing provocatively? How many discussions do I see among parents that agree that even pre-teens should be dating and going to dances? It would appear that you are encouraging young people to enter the sexual phase of their development at the first possible opportunity, and not for the sake of starting families, but for its own sake, as an end in itself, which is, of course a good definition of sterility as well as of perversion.”<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
“But Muhammad and his child brides, Jabar, don’t forget that.”<br />
<br />
“Yes, Hermit friend, all true, but that was for marriage and children, not for the encouragement of promiscuous behavior as what you call a life-style. Do not confuse the sacred and the profane.” <br />
<br />
“But I don’t see how . . .”<br />
<br />
“The connection with really promoting sexual child abuse while condemning it? I also understand that the seculars and the liberals in your culture—the very ones who are calling for errant football coaches to be hanged and emasculated—ordinarily take their daughters to the doctor and have them outfitted for birth control at the first sign of puberty. What kind of message is your culture sending thirteen-year old boys and girls? Not only with this kind of behavior but with an entire media—yes, I have seen your movies—blasting away daily to encourage children to think of their sexual lives. Worse, remember the little girl in Colorado? Jon Benét Ramsay? The one who was murdered? Her parents routinely dressed her like a prostitute and displayed her in public as a sexual object.”<br />
<br />
“And your point is . . .”<br />
<br />
“I’m not through. One more element of my evidence. I see that there are Man-Boy sex organizations in your country, and yes, I know they represent a small minority, but what interests me is the conflict of values among your liberal middle class. When they have to think about this, they experience what you call a brain freeze. <br />
<br />
“On the one hand it seems they are outraged at the idea of grown men exploiting young boys for sex, but almost immediately . . . yes, imagine how the levers in their brains operate. . . ‘I am certainly against that, but wait, those men are homosexuals and I must not be a homophobe . . . and they have equal rights. . .perhaps the boys are consenting… but then, what, after all, is consent? . . .. .I don’t want to be like the Boy Scouts . . .that would be fascist and I must be for freedom . . .but some of the members of the Man-Boy-Love thingy are Catholic priests, and that is an outrage …but don’t they have equal sexual rights too that are being frustrated by not being allowed to be married by the guilt-ridden Catholic fascist homophobes?’ <br />
<br />
“Interesting to see how moral ambivalence operates, isn’t it? Especially on your networks and National Public Radio. Perhaps that is one reason, other than football dollars, that there was no great revulsion and stampede to inform the authorities. Before you ask, my point is that there is no clarity in your culture about what it calls 'values.' How can there be when the culture is simultaneously pretending to be horrified at the sexual abuse of children while doing everything it can to turn children into promiscuous adults? And things for use?”<br />
<br />
“I see what you mean, Jabar. I guess I have been in this country for so long that I have lost any sense of the western attitudes toward children and how to dress them and teach them. I guess I am so upset by it that even when I see it—as I sometime do on the televisions in the hotel lobbies in Oman—I write it off to a small minority in our culture—how strange, after all this time, to say those words, ‘our western culture,’ because it isn’t any more and hasn’t been for at least a century, and now it seems that the young ladies I had in my classrooms at SQU, all dressed modestly in black, are more a laudable norm than what I see in glimpses on television—girls nearly naked, in tattoos and facial jewelry—and yes, I have caught glimpses of them in the tourist hotels here . . .why do you think I have become a hermit fleeing to the desert?”<br />
<br />
“Welcome to the desert, my friend, the home of the birth of prophecy and religion. But I am sure you know we are developing some of the same problems in Islam? The Internet, the DVDs, everything you have is creeping into our world. Why do you think there are such things as Al Qaeda and the Taliban and the Muslim Brotherhood? And more such things form by the hour in the streets of Yemen and Iran and now, the back streets of Egypt again. Because from the time of Sayid Qutb’s visit to the United States, when he saw the West for what it is now, there has fermented a widespread rebellion against the notion that one can mix cultures like cuisines or have a fruitful relationship with the enemy culture. As he put it, the choice of a culture is absolute: it must live in accordance with a system of morality and law that corresponds to the nature of reality. If it does not, it is a society of <i>jahiliyya</i>, that is, ignorance of religious truth. The West, he said, which became great on the strength of its religious values, has turned against its very roots. Your Dostoevsky would agree. And as Kipling put it . . .”<br />
<br />
“Yes, The Gods of the Copybook Headings are unforgiving . . .”<br />
<br />
“The purpose of all culture is to teach the virtuous life. That is what your culture has forgotten, and why you are dying of your own internal contradictions.<br />
<br />
“I visited your country recently. Out of curiosity I visited various places including a suburban Catholic church where I saw altar girls smacking chewing gum and trying to look sultry in makeup. The young women and girls in the pews were also following the sick culture of the day, their skirts and shorts and tattoos and way of walking . . .”<br />
<br />
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<br />
“Please, do not help me to imagine it. I am here to burn out such things.”<br />
<br />
“So where is your culture now, including your Catholic culture?"<br />
<br />
“I am afraid since the wrong turn of Vatican II—the idea that the way to save the world is to become like the world— it has been driven into tiny enclaves. The Society of Pius X, small traditionalist parishes barely allowed but definitely not encouraged to exist by the Vatican, and the small parishes of Byzantine Catholics still keeping to Orthodox ways and Orthodox theology. So yes, there is a parallel here with Islam, except that in Islam those faithful to Islamic roots are winning, while in the West . . . I recall hearing of one parish where a traditional Latin Mass was permitted, and the modernists joked about the traditionalists as dressing like Mennonites.”<br />
<br />
“Your thoughts?”<br />
<br />
“Perhaps the Mennonites and their offshoots the Amish saw what was coming from the so-called Renaissance . . . but let’s not get into all that, Jabar. I know you have deeper things on your mind with all this talk about sex and culture.”<br />
<br />
“Indeed. These minor conflagrations of false or diluted conscience over the Penn State scandal point to deeper ambivalences and contradictions in your culture. The lie about sex is paralleled and underwritten by the lie about the value placed on life itself.”<br />
<br />
“Before we get to that, would you suggest that those in the West would be wise to be friends with those in Islam who call for a return to the roots of Islam?”<br />
<br />
“Quite the contrary, dear hermit friend. Since you are a devout Chestertonian and a lover of paradox, I would suggest that the best way we can be friends is by being enemies. The best service an enemy provides for me is by showing me what I must fight against, and what I must return to. The enemies of true Islam were the modernizers in the Nasser era. The enemies of true Christianity are those who want to compromise with the devils of secularism.”<br />
<br />
“But Jaber, I saw the face of the Islamic radicals when I taught in Kuwait, and I must say I did not like them very much.”<br />
<br />
“Excellent, Hermit friend, a very just and honest response. You should continue not to like them, even to hate them, and ask yourself, what is it in your modern culture that they hate so much, and to what extent have you yourself bought in to it?”<br />
<br />
There was a long silence from the Hermit. He remembered wondering what message the burning towers of the World Trade Center really carried for the West. <br />
<br />
“Every time I talk to you, Jaber, you turn me back to my task. You are like the followers of Muhammad raging in the marketplaces of Mecca.”<br />
<br />
“Thank you, my enemy and friend, and tomorrow I will rage again, here, if you will have me.”<br />
<br />
“Come, and come armed. It is what I need. It is so easy to forget truths, and so hard to remember them. And that, after all, is what a hermit is supposed to be for.”<br />
<br />
“Tomorrow, <i>in sh’Allah</i>, if Allah permits.”kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-52482388568544965892011-10-31T11:41:00.000-07:002011-10-31T11:48:23.802-07:00WHISTLING IN THE DARK AND CALLING IT DAWN<i>Note: the Mad Hermit does not usually take on a Vatican document and it is unlikely he will do so again. Somewhere in Catholic land “liberals” are chortling and cheering over the latest Vatican document, which calls for the creation of a world banking authority; in other places, “conservatives” and “orthodox” writers are twisting in agony and biting their nails as they struggle to endorse the proposal and square it with right thinking. Well, you get neither from the Mad Hermit for, after all, he is mad. Very mad.</i><br />
<br />
<i>A shocking, horrible thing has happened in the land: the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests teach as they wish; yet my people will have it so; what will you do when the end comes? --Jeremiah 5: 30-31.</i><br />
<br />
The document in question, “Note on financial reform from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace,” has created a stir by calling for a central world banking authority of some sort. Such an entity would have the absolute authority to set everything right in terms of money. As usual these days (i.e., post Vatican II), the major appeals of the writers are to <i>Pacem in Terris </i>and <i>Populorum Progressio</i>, as well as to statements by Blessed John Paul II and the present Holy Father’s <i>Caritas in Veritate</i>. As one could have easily predicted, the document does not concern itself with the saving of souls nor does it refer to any Papal Encyclical such as Pope Pius XII’s <i>Mystici Corporis </i>that does so. <br />
<br />
On a promise to some friends, I have actually read this latest document, just as I read the encyclicals above. When I was an undergraduate we read all the major encyclicals of the 19th and 20th century, many of which had real and practical social implications, such as the endorsing of the labor movement and the right of people to organize themselves into unions for the sake of justice. While recognizing the palpable reality of the political movements of the times, the Vatican called out specific injustices (such as the Nazis and Communists) and pointed to the need for resistance to them. If I am not mistaken, prior to Vatican II, the Popes and the Vatican did not take on the remaking of human society under a single secular global authority. True, St. Thomas Aquinas seemed to want such a thing in the 13th century, but then his globe was much smaller than ours.<br />
<br />
I will, however, leave to others the task of chasing the documents and confine myself to my reaction to this one. As I write, I see that the Obama administration has sent soldiers to yet another African country, proceeding unilaterally and unconstitutionally toward that very world authority our president seems to ardently desire as long as we are in charge of it and as long as the leftist newspapers will like it.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Wall Street and the streets of cities from Nashville to Nome are crowded with thousands of (mostly young) people holding signs calling for the ending of greed and selfishness and pollution and capitalism. If a thousand of these people are questioned about their aims and goals, they will give a thousand answers ranging from “I am hurting” to “somebody’s got to do something about this.” Like Bill Clinton, I feel their pain; I hurt too, hobbling along on low income; and even if I could join them (no car, no money), I am not sure I could add much rationality to their grief and rage, other than to point out that their major cheerleader—opportunista Obama—is largely responsible for the particular nadir we find ourselves in. His chief solution, absurd on the face of it to any Swiftian or Orwellian or Twainist, has been to fire money like shotgun pellets in all directions, money we do not have, money which he is, like the archons of the Weimar Republic in Germany, printing with mad abandon. One might observe that these same left-wing archons passed the eugenics and euthanasia laws which allowed the succeeding Nazi government to murder the weak, the Jews, and the Christians, for the surest way to eliminate social problems in a society is, well, to eliminate them.<br />
<br />
Ay, there’s the rub, which is the central point of my response to the Vatican document. In addition to sounding like a commencement address that urges the graduates of today to go forth and serve justice and peace and nice stuff, it ignores the fact that no matter how often you overturn the tables of the moneychangers—something, indeed, that does need to be done on a regular basis—the money changers will not as a class be deterred until the Roman Legions come in and destroy the temple where they do their business. That, indeed, was a world central authority straightening things out. Most of the graduates listening to the commencement address will stampede out of the auditorium bent on the usual economic rape and pillage. Who, besides a totalitarian government, will stop them? Is that what the Vatican wants?<br />
<br />
The document refers frequently to the United Nations and its importance in pointing the economic directions the Vatican itself espouses—a central world authority with the power to end abuses. Pardon, but are the writers of such documents insane or only wilfully ignorant? The one non-religious central authority the planet has at present is dedicated more than anything else to, among many other evil things, universal abortion and euthanasia. The various appeals by the Holy Father and the limp protests of the American Catholic Bishops have had no effect upon this tendency other than to strengthen it. From the time of H.G. Wells, the utopians of our culture have been able to see no solution to human problems other than the elimination of most humans.<br />
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<i>The Nazis call for the elimination of useless life on the basis of economics.<br />
</i><br />
<br />
The “world political authority” called for by Pope John Paul XXIII is, for the writers of this document “the road that must be taken,” regardless of whether it will lead to a sane society. It will be “a new model of more cohesion, polyarchic international society that respects each people’s identity with the multifaceted riches of a single humanity.” (Good grief, who can write such abominable prose?) The writers go on: “It is the task of today’s generation to recognize and consciously to accept these new world dynamics for the achievement of a universal common good.”<br />
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<i>Jesus drives the money changers from the Temple </i>(Giorda)<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
And what is that common good? The whole principle of the Gospel is that there are common goods in God’s universal laws. Nowhere in the Gospel, as Dostoevsky saw clearly, is there any room for misty-eyed statism that delivers justice with a fist or a Comintern. Whether justice is delivered by a fist or a massive mind control, as in <i>Brave New World </i>or <i>1984</i> or <i>We</i>, it is still a false justice based on a central socialist authority that knows what’s good for us. Dostoevsky, by the way, predicted the marriage between the Roman Catholic Church and international socialism. <br />
<br />
The “institutions with universal competence,” which the Vatican writers imagine to be the guardians of the new world bank against corruption—where are they? All the evidence is that the world is racing madly toward an anti-life totalitarianism, a “brave new world” of eugenics, abortion, infanticide, mind control, and a political correctness that outlaws all dissent as well as all common sense and individual expression. The solution to this apocalyptic nightmare is not a new world government, calling for which is like sending gasoline trucks to put out a fire, but the one offered in <i>A Canticle for Leibowitz</i>—building small Benedictine communities as the centers for sanity and holiness and continuing in the virtue of hope while resisting anti-life evils.<br />
<br />
St. Thomas Aquinas, despite his fantasy about world government, said that a society with few but necessary laws would be the best; for this reason, he agreed—much to the shock of modern day Jansenists and Puritans-with Ron Paul that laws against prostitution and drugs will only make matters worse and take our eyes off our need for conversion and individual charity. <br />
<br />
Of course capitalism stinks; global capitalism stinks even more—the gift the Protestants gave the world (R.H. Tawney, <i>Religion and the Rise of Capitalism</i>; Max Weber, <i>The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism</i>) does, in fact, rage over the surface of the earth like a genetically re-engineered plague virus. Tamed occasionally by individual state governments, it does not respond dutifully to law (remember Prohibition?). But a bigger zoo and a more powerful zoo keeper will give us, precisely, that: a bigger zoo and a more powerful zoo keeper.<br />
<br />
The writers’ appeals to subsidiarity—a basic ethical and social doctrine of the Catholic Church—are fatuous and, on the face of it, absurdly contradictory. Genuine subsidiarity calls for authority to be exercised at the lowest possible social level, only moving to the next level when that is impractical or ineffective. Calling for a world economic authority seems more an act of despair. Like some of the most vicious critics of the Catholic Church today, I would call for the Church to follow its own doctrines, to mend its seminaries and parishes and families, before holding itself up to scorn with documents of this kind which, as a Catholic, I know that I am permitted to ignore.<br />
<br />
When I was in high school our parish priest (R.I.P.), a good man and a good priest in most respects, preached that the parish needed more money to build a new gymnasium and a new convent for the nuns. To effect this fund-raising, he announced that each year his office would print and distribute a record of what each family gave by week and year. I was scandalized and angered, for each year thereafter, my father’s donations (those cursed little numbered envelopes) never exceeded a dollar a week, the amount he earned for an hour at union wages. Meanwhile the big wigs of the parish outshone all the working families who cursed the meat and went without the bread. The gymnasium now stands empty, the nuns are gone, the school closed, and the bell tower—which really does need to be fixed—leans dangerously, a good symbol of what wrongheaded solutions can bring.<br />
<br />
I’d say—but no one asks—empty the Vatican of committees and idle priests. Send them out to preach the Gospel and live on the charity of those in the pews. I think there is something about this in the New Testament.kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-6925504556571102692011-10-29T10:40:00.000-07:002011-10-29T11:42:25.592-07:00STARTING OUT<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWXMJbh04zRUonQuoHJOltE74fXNX_bMXm1ahvavqq4ESAMKmBj7oiGG6-pLtw1aa_9eLaVqNEHwflBuOP7BLCuSiJrWzlHvyqUMBHrkC-V9cGjK3SpErRdL-fc5eB41tlGeVmbkvVzuSd/s1600/LOCO%252520TUN-1.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWXMJbh04zRUonQuoHJOltE74fXNX_bMXm1ahvavqq4ESAMKmBj7oiGG6-pLtw1aa_9eLaVqNEHwflBuOP7BLCuSiJrWzlHvyqUMBHrkC-V9cGjK3SpErRdL-fc5eB41tlGeVmbkvVzuSd/s320/LOCO%252520TUN-1.bmp" /></a></div><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
There is a place before the use of words, a place of smoke and mist and fog. It is the place of starting out. <br />
<br />
People talk about what is universal to humans but they miss this point: even if you have no formal religion and baptism or initiation or whatever, you know what starting out means. I know. <br />
<br />
Starting out—there is nothing like it. The southern West Virginia winter morning is a fog bank of low cloud smothering the world in secret. <br />
<br />
It hangs over the rail yards down past Sacred Heart Church and school and the smoke of the trains roll up into it and the whole white and brown brume covers me. I breathe it in, icy and stale and sour at the same time. And that is the world, the whole world. <br />
<br />
When I step out on the porch at five it is still murky dark; the street light just opposite is like a dying punk that can barely light itself. Our house, like most houses in the town, hangs on to a steep bank on the hillside. I can barely make out a few more streetlights, big bulbs with tin saucers over them, muffled and bluish yellow, down by the convent. And out past that, darkness and more fog, but I have to guess at that.<br />
<br />
I stop for a moment on our high porch which leans out over the street below like the quarter deck on a sailing ship in <i>Two Years Before the Mast </i>or <i>Treasure Island</i>. I go in the basement below the porch—I told you the house is on a hill side—and rattle the grates under the coal fire, then shovel in coal and punch it with a poker, then take out the “clinkers” (coal burned into a hard, shiny rock) with a tool like a claw, and pile them into a rusty can for the garbage man. I stand for a moment with the furnace door open and watch the new coal catch and feel the heat on my face. Then, it’s time to go back out: icy cold razor wind sharp up the nose and chill trickling down the back of my neck. Everyone inside asleep above me, everyone down the hill asleep too, including Father and the nuns. If anyone is awake it’s a few engineers and switchmen, maybe a few coal miners in vans on the way to the shafts down south, but I don’t think about that yet. I just want this, the quiet emptiness. It’s just me, I think, me and the world, and the world hasn’t started up.<br />
<br />
The empty canvas newspaper sack rides my shoulder. Like the cassock and surplice at Mass, it makes me official, but this is different: I am in charge. I get to decide to go or not go, to go the way I want, I can even start from the other end of the route and come back if I want to, I can even skip a house and lie and say sorry I missed it, I can go fast or slow, I can stand anywhere I want along the way and listen to hissing and ding-dong of the switch engine bells in the yards. For at this moment no one is looking at me. No one is watching me, no one is seeing if I make a mistake or make faces or drag along or peek in windows or dawdle or dance or waste time or throw rocks or dream or stop and swing on the butt-cold swings or not pay attention or go off somewhere in my head or daydream or think about something I’m not supposed to think about or ain’t allowed to think about (or say, like “ain’t”) or didn’t ask permission for or have to account for. No, I can stop right in the middle of the street—it is dizzying to walk right down the middle of all the streets, swinging my newspaper bag—“like a fool,” Mom would surely say—and think about something that often comes to me, that there is somewhere in the hills and mountains a place where no one but me has ever been, where there is a cold spring pouring out of the rocks and ferns and I can kneel down, cup my hands, and drink the pure stream all I want to. Thinking about it, I swing the paper sack madly around my head. “In the beginning,” I recited from <i>Genesis</i> in a school program, “God created . . . .” “What a rush,” the druggies would say in later days. He could do whatever He wanted. Perfect freedom. I stand on the porch and step out into the fog of the world unfettered and unafraid, to taste that freedom for the first time, and I love it beyond all hope and all reason.<br />
<br />
Or, I think about old Stony Ridge on the other side of the tracks, where the torrents of fog come rolling down its long slopes, and where the mortar shells land just where I put them when I squeeze the steely in my pocket. I may fire off a few before I start down the stairs, just to scare the gooks, even if I can’t see the bursts. Watch out, I say with grim determination, we have the power, we will beat you in the end. Squeeze, fire, silent wait, <i>whoomp</i>. <br />
<br />
Down past the school, the convent, the rectory, the church, wisps of fog swirl under the street light at the corner. I turn down past the filling station to the bridge. This is the gem, the downtown morning route I earned after slogging through two crummy afternoon routes. Yes, that’s right, turn left at the church where all that black murmuring is sleeping inside with the single red sanctuary lamp hanging by its chain over the cold stone floor. He’s there in the closed tabernacle watching me, flits across my mind; no, He’s asleep. There’s a tiny chill as I dare to wonder if it’s true, and I am down Monroe Street through the neighborhood of decaying houses built by the railroad for its bosses. The railroad people are mostly gone except for an older couple slumbering in the house with the grand white columns; their daughter, a blond lady gym teacher, is sleeping too. Later, she will walk her two Irish setters, Pat and Mike, wearing her horsey jodhpurs. Let her sleep, let her walk them in her sleep. Let Mrs. Keen in the apartment house next door sleep before she teaches steel-clad grammar without ever a smile on her heavy face. Let everyone sleep. I am awake and walking down the middle of the street. <br />
<br />
Then I come to the downtown. I can go one of three ways now, my choice. Left over the hump and past the colored Catholic church where I serve Mass sometimes and down past the movie theatres where my Dad works, straight past the auto showrooms and garages, right and down the main street by the railroad. I can feel my feet twist in the fun of making up my mind. There is a moment of grinding, like when the big Mallet engines drop sand on the tracks to keep from sliding; so I go that way, where the steam and coal smoke rise up brown and orange into the fog cloud, and I can hear the big engines breathing hard as if they are waiting for something. Above the wall that separates the street and the yards, I can see the smokestacks and the top of the boilers, hear a switch engine pushing an extra sleeping car down the siding for when the morning passenger train comes in from Norfolk. I don’t see anyone on the street except a few brakemen coming off their shift like tired ghosts, their lunch pails dangling empty. Then an engine lets out a long sigh of steam as if it’s tired and old and I can smell the coal smoke warm and brown settling down over the street and dropping hot cinders on my face. Somehow I feel I am part of all this, that I with my canvas sack on a mission to get and deliver the newspaper am part of something much bigger than myself, that I am the brakemen and the engineers and the silent dark buildings with the coal smoke from their chimneys, all moving toward something called the dawn. <br />
<br />
But I don’t want to hurry it. I saunter some, looking in the windows of Woolworth’s and the movie posters at the Colonial. That movie will run today, but right now Clark Gable is frozen on the poster, grinning serious and thoughtful, one gun pointed skyward. But I will bring the news to the sleeping town. At the newsstand across from the passenger station I see the wired bale of newspapers sitting in the doorway and think, no, I will beat you, I will have the papers all over the downtown before you open your doors, Mrs. Goulasch. <br />
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<br />
A police car sails smoothly past. A warning. Get on before this is all lost and changed and there are people on the streets, lights coming on. At the newspaper building, I come up the back where the trucks are loading more newspaper bales for out in the county. Here they come, the morning papers rolling down the conveyor belt and I’m in line waiting for mine. Crawfish counts them out with his huge ink-stained thumb, ten at a time, but I count them over, I am tired of being shorted. Back out of the shouts and the grumbly motors rumbling, I am in the silence again, carrying the words. At the corner I stop a second and look at the front page, the news I will take from office to office and house to house, what the people are waiting for, Panmunjom and the 38th parallel and the Choisin reservoir and President Eisenhower and the communists in our government. At school, I will know all these things as if I had lived a life earlier than everyone else. I will be old and wise and secret. I will know.<br />
<br />
The silence is an ocean of waiting, despite the train noises and the occasional shout or starting car. I float back into it, the bag of papers on my hip, the bill of my earmuff hat over my eyes. Monday let’s say, a light load today, the paper slim and serious after the weekend, and this a school morning again. I have not said any prayers and don’t even think about it. I will hear about all that later, that is part of the day that hasn’t started yet though Mass will start in about an hour now. I don’t really think about this as I breathe in the fresh day of fog and smoke but I do think about words, especially strange words I don’t know the meaning of. They are like the box cars on the railroad, the freight train racketing along with its announcements: Susquehanna, Lackawanna, Rock Island Line, C&O, B&O, New York Central, Chicago and Northwestern, Virginian, Chessie. Peace Talks, Dogma, Arbitration, price controls, OPA, liquor, sex, extreme unction, brain washing, salamander, permanents, icebergs, blizzards, persecution, displaced persons, divorce, atom bombs, salt rising bread, girdles, griddles, grits, bump and grind, boogey woogy. I say them out loud and watch my breath make more fog with the words. <i>Hic Est Meus Corpus Meum</i>. But if I say it nothing happens. Why?<br />
<br />
I am <i>in</i> why, which is better. The answers I get when I ask questions never satisfy me, so I am better in why. While it is still dark and foggy with the great smoke clouds rolling up off the yards, the billows—there’s a word!— rolling in on themselves and trailing away behind as the engine moves down the tracks, the thunder of the wheels on the track pounding the earth below like a mighty hammer, and the long whistle of death as the coal train announces the sorrowful news of the long lonesome valleys that stretch forever in both directions. I stop to listen. I can feel it as the rumbling of the Mallet wheels rolls under the street and passes up into my legs. The only other time I feel like this is when I’m reading and I hit something that shakes me inside, a terror or a wonder. But the trains make reading better because you can look up from the book and know the words have that kind of power and loneliness. I wouldn’t want to read up in our attic if I could not see and hear the trains.<br />
<br />
Which is another place and time where you have that freedom, the toasty warm attic at the top of the two storey-house (all the heat goes up there) down by the rail yards, just you and a stack of <i>Life</i> or <i>Look</i> magazines and some old books and some things your uncles brought back from the last war, a sharp shell fragment, an ash tray made of an ammo casing. The engineers of the switch engines wave, even sometimes the engineers or conductors of the coal trains. You don’t know them and they don’t know you but there is a kind of friendship there that makes me feel good. Best is when a caboose is heading off west and the conductor in his red kerchief waves with his lantern at you leaning out the cupola window and waving like you know him, especially at night or in the early morning, like something great and important is happening that you cannot begin to understand and it will never happen again the same way.<br />
<br />
Then comes the time when the sun begins to burn off the fog and the street lights switch off and the grey noises and people begin. The last paper has been plopped on a porch where they probably won’t pay up, some of the people standing out waiting for it and looking at their watches. They irritate me, I don’t even count them, they are day people, part of the world ending my time alone. Traffic is picking up, the first busses stop at the bank and rumble black exhaust, waiting to fill up. Delivery trucks bring the milk and bread to the restaurants, which turn on their neon signs to lure the railroad men and the passengers from off the first train, soldiers and sailors from Norfolk, salesmen, big shots followed by redcaps and hopeful winos cadging for dimes. Sometimes, before heading home, I cross over the avenue and walk through the train station, hoping to sell the extra paper I have left over.<br />
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For no reasons except my own, I stand on the platform and look at the Pullman cars and the dining car that pull in under the sparsely lighted steel canopy next to the ticket window. Red caps, some of them with baggage wagons, hurry around, ready to sing out to the people getting off. Here it comes. The passenger train eases in magnificently, stops with bursts of steam that flood the platform; I wait until it will start out again with an occasional slipping of the big wheels on the steamed tracks. Inside the dining car there is another world, a bright lighted world I am outside, will never be a part of. Big men with cigars reading newspapers and finishing breakfast, fancy ladies in furs primping and looking out cold at me, a sad, hopeless being who can never bother them. Watching the cars move slowly out with important, staring conductors standing at the doors makes me feel I am dying and alone. The cars rock over the rails, couplings squeak and groan. Slowly, slowly, the world of the train floats out and I get the sensation that two worlds are moving, mine and theirs, but then, no, the morning news is this: I am stuck here and they are gone, the rickety- rickety-rick fading down the line. And the whistle sounds, one blast long and slow, a few short, as if the train is saying something I can’t grasp.<br />
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It’s all grey now, my sack is empty, the day has started, no one cares what I have done but me, but I don’t know for sure if that’s bad or good. It’s like when you start to tell somebody of something great that happened to you and you can see in their eyes they are a thousand miles away, just waiting for you to stop talking and you wish you hadn’t started. I cross the street back where the newsstand and the restaurants are coming alive with sailors and soldiers and whores. I walk back up the hill to our house and creep in to read the newspaper by myself before anyone else gets up. Years later, I miss the feeling of those mornings and want it back. I want the smell of my socks dried out on the hot radiator or hung on a chair by the coal fire grate when I get ready to go out in the morning. My socks, warm for my feet. <br />
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Starting out. It’s what I want again. It’s what we all want.<br />
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Copyright 2011 R. Kenton Cravenkencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-30838174224642637952011-10-24T12:11:00.000-07:002011-11-21T15:16:20.700-08:00Confessions of a Redneck English Teacher<i>In a previous life, the Mad Hermit was what is called “an English Teacher.” From his perch on the head of the sperm whale skeleton on Masirah Island in the Indian Ocean, he muses on that long chapter of his life. </i><br />
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<i>The classroom today</i><br />
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When I think about it, I, too, am a bit taken aback. While skimming the internet recently I could see that many of my former colleagues, those still alive, retired from careers at a single institution in a single place where, presumably, they were rooted and loved, or at the least, rooted. Some of their careers seem unremarkable, but perhaps like Mr. Chips, some were revered by several generations of students, and God bless them, had I not been such a difficult man, such could have been my fate. If a man casts himself as a chip on the waves, he cannot complain of storms and tides.<br />
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When I reflect on my classroom career, I count the states in which I have taught, nine in all, one of them twice: West Virginia, Kansas, Missouri, Wyoming, Ohio, Kentucky, Iowa, Tennessee, and Texas. In addition, the territory of Puerto Rico, and two foreign countries (The Emirate of Kuwait and the Sultanate of Oman). That is not the full story, since in these places I have managed to teach (full- or part-time) in a total of sixteen colleges and universities: Marshall University, West Virginia University, the University of Kansas, Southeastern Missouri State University, Muskingum College, Universidad InterAmericana, Wartburg College, Our Lady of Corpus Christi (now defunct), the University of Louisville, Bellarmine College, Spalding College, Jefferson Community College, Nashville State Community College, Tennessee Technological University, Kuwait University, and (trumpets!) the Sultan Qaboos University of Oman. It is tiring just to type these out. I will not add all the addresses I had during these years—I lost count at thirty-five.<br />
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One may ask why, and I will not answer. Those are stories, mostly personal, for another time, if at all. I will say I was never fired or dismissed and was several times asked to stay on, though the decidedly frosty exit I was given from Tennessee Technological University—after five rewarding years teaching as a full-time part-timer (adjunct)—strongly resembled a deconstructed bum’s rush. And my exit from Our Lady of Corpus Christi where I was a happy volunteer with delightful students was, as is said in a certain kind of place, by strong mutual agreement. Students helped me load my possibles into my pickup truck, and a kind Catholic family lent me their cabin in the hills to recuperate from the charade.<br />
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The regrets I have about this career are now several and odd. After my experiences in the Middle East, I wish I had stayed longer in Oman (I still miss that boundlessly strange country and have recurring memories of Indian roller birds diving at my head, strolling through the markets in Muttrah, and the sense of the first day in walking the tops of glistening dunes in the early dawn).<br />
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I do wish the medieval Charles University of Prague had offered me a position, if for no other reason than the possibility of living in the very medieval Prague. The interview in 1991, was Kafkaesque: the mini-skirted policewoman who arranged the interview at my side, the Chair a gaunt gentleman who appeared not to have had a solid meal for the entire Soviet occupation. As I looked up at the huge oil painting on the 18-feet-high wall, I recognized with a shock the Scots poet Edwin Muir. Idiot! Muir was the subject of my Master’s thesis at Marshall University and, as I had forgotten, he had been the chair of the ancient Charles University English department for some years before WW II. Despite that credit on my cv and the pleasant reminiscences with the Chair, I was told my best bet for a position was a Fulbright, Prague just then being overrun with subsidized Americans happy in a new Paris. Not a tenured or published professor, I had slim chance of that. <br />
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<i>The poet Edwin Muir</i><br />
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And I wish I had had the opportunity of teaching at the University of Papua New Guinea, Goroka campus (in the mountainous interior), despite the rude and exhausting four-hour interview—more like a tribal roasting—that I had there [sample question: “do you <i>really</i> know these things, or do you just <i>say</i> you know these things?”]. Imagine teaching Shakespeare there! In fact, had I my druthers, I would have started my overseas experience long before I was over fifty, and would have taught in many more out-of-the-way places, such as Brunei, or at the cheery American University of Bulgaria, where I was also interviewed with much kindness and ceremony. Though I found many things to like in most places I taught in America, I found somewhat too late that the Midwest stifled me and that I needed the stimulants of travel and the unexpected—such as hearing Arab students puzzle over the guilt of the Ancient Mariner, pushing a department putsch in Kuwait, or being shot at by Arabs as I rode my bicycle in the desert of Oman. <br />
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<i>A sing-sing in Papua New Guinea</i><br />
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In this itinerant career, I also came to understand, by way of circumstance and my own adventurous fecklessness, the queer desirability of teaching as an “adjunct professor,” a curious institution that came into its own after the Vietnam years. During my protests of that unconstitutional war, and in the cultural havoc of the 1960’s, I left the tenure track and set out on the academic hobo road, much as my Dad had ridden the rails in the 1930’s. In those unsettled days, thousands of teachers, especially PhDs in the Humanities, found their only option in university teaching was as part-timers, which brought about economic conditions similar to those Jack London found in London’s East End in 1902. The new scenario created the outrage of teachers contracting at two to four institutions at the same time, wearing out cars and minds by teaching as many as eighteen, even twenty-one, credit hours a term to earn a pitiful income, all the while dreaming of that big break into tenuredom. <br />
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At the University of Louisville, I happily taught English, Humanities, and Philosophy while also teaching courses in philosophy at Bellarmine and Spalding colleges and at (lamentably) Jefferson Community College, where I started an Introduction to Philosophy class with 50 students and ended with three. Much later in Tennessee, I had the great pleasure of teaching mostly Honors sections of World and British literature, as well as special seminars, in courses of my own make and choosing. The value of being an adjunct, despite the constant uncertainty, is that one is not “in” a department, is not involved in any aspect of filthy academic politics or even incestuous academic society but is, in fact, an exile in one’s profession with no greater hazard than an occasional nasty department secretary. For those who have done such teaching, one knows that the adjunct professor is the lowliest person on any campus, something akin to perpetual novice monks or to Orwell’s hop pickers, lucky to have a part-time desk and (sometimes) parking privileges, if that. Perhaps, I have thought in my rambles, all professors should be in this situation. We might have more pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, more love of learning, less ideological correctness, and more enthusiastic teaching, as if we were all Abelards in the snowy fields.<br />
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The curious relationship of the adjunct to the regular tenure-track professor may be illustrated by an incident in the Washington, DC, area. While working in the corporate world (more on this below) in the 1980’s, I hungered to keep my mind on something besides hacking out government documents and proposals. I applied to the prestigious George Mason University in Fairfax, rated as one of the best in the country sub specie Ivy League. Here I received the offer of teaching two sections of World Literature for, I think, $1200 a course per semester, not much more than I had received at the University of Louisville several decades earlier (adjuncts are usually paid about as well as janitors and prison guards). Now, as I could see from the posted schedule, I would be teaching the same literature course as a visiting Nobel Laureate just down the hall, who would be making well in excess of $80,000 a year for teaching two courses a term. Mind, the student signing up for such a course would see my name and the laureate in the same catalog column and choose one, probably in the blissful ignorance students usually enjoy. I would have liked to think that the students who would choose me would have the best teaching, but, alas, the unwillingness of the chair to schedule me for evening sections prevented my taking the assignment. On the way out, I also learned that (sorry!) the post carried no parking privileges, which would have required my walking at least a mile to get to classes. <i>O tempora! O mores!</i><br />
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You may well ask, why and how on earth did you get into this business in the first place? And why stay in, despite the money and the madness? As for getting in, I had the reading disease from the time of cereal boxes and comic books, plus Huck Finn and the other classics on our home bookshelf. I had four excellent English professors as an undergraduate when I never had a serious thought about the morrow but was living in the pleasures of reading, reading, reading; dialogues on walks and in beer halls; and hearing my teachers speak hours of interesting stuff about literature. Tough Jesuit (pre-Vatican-II) sequences of philosophy, history, and the arts added to the <i>ratio studiorum </i>mix. I wrote a Bachelor’s thesis (imagine that these days) on <i>The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe</i>, and along the way I was introduced to the best current thinking in literary criticism from Cleanth Brooks to William Empson. One day my wife-to-be asked what I was going to do when I was graduated (notice the correct verb usage). Blank. “You have to go to graduate school,” she said, many, many, times. This required a great stretch in my thinking, just as great a stretch as when I was in grammar school and tried to imagine being in high school. My professors were as gods, high above my plebian, West Virginia imagination. Be one of those? But, poor as a scrawny alley cat, with small Latin and no Greek, I went, first for a Master’s in West Virginia, then for a doctorate at the University of Kansas, known popularly as “the Harvard on the Kaw.” It was still the post WW II heyday of graduate study in English, and the state universities were churning out doctorates like Fords and Chevrolets. The race, I soon found, was not to the swift but to those willing to conceal their giggles and true nature.<br />
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Graduate school from the beginning was a constant experience of having the wind knocked out of me. Fresh from a traditional Thomistic education, I was nothing if not logical and questioning. In every class and conversation, I heard absurdity, contradiction, nonsense, from professors as well as students. At first, I assumed that much of what I was hearing was a coded language to which I lacked the key, that the wily Jesuits had somehow neglected to give me the whole story. Queer, supercilious questions were asked for which I had no answer. Superior smiles and ironic comments made me feel like a backwoodsman in a Parisian salon. Gradually, however, I began to perceive that I had not entered the seminary of higher learning but an increasingly byzantine game of catch and get caught out. Poor old souls on the tail end of 19th century attitudes—that, for instance, as Dr. Samuel Johnson would have it, biography is the most important part of literary criticism, or that historical accuracy was a necessary perquisite to literary scholarship—were being crowded out by the sleek, the prissy, and the unnatural. While the sometimes worthwhile “New Criticism” was all the rage when I entered graduate school, day by day the goose-step ideologies were on the march. After the backwash of Freudianism and Jungianism came, like creatures leaping out of Satan’s head in <i>Paradise Lost</i>, the dull, perverse parade of Feminism, Marxism, Maoism, Multiculturalism, Levi-Straussism, Deconstructionism, and what-have-you: all nasty machines through which poetry is ground to produce academic sausage.<br />
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During these years after I had scooted across the finish line with a doctorate, I began to meet teachers of literature who seemed to have no idea of what literature is. Fortunately for me, I had not lost the philosophical habit of mind the Jesuits gave me, nor the traditional legacy of the band of brothers (Shulenberger, Nelick, Quinn, Senior) I was fortunate to have met along the way [see the entries for August 10, 2011, and March 31, 2010, as well as www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/alo127.htm]. Also, during graduate student days, I was also blessed to meet others equally inspired by the KU traditionalists who were excited to enter the classroom with nothing more than fundamental questions, a 3x5 card, a fellow teacher with whom to dialogue, and a good or great book. And, I might add, a sense of wonder arising from the perennial questions about the nature of reality, best expressed in Chesterton’s <i>Orthodoxy</i> and other writings, wherein sticks, stars, riddles, walks, fire places, tales, and friends are the panes through to view the madness of the world.<br />
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Something else, something very important, gradually entered my awareness of what was happening in the academic world. Literature teachers who had no personal history outside academe—hothouse plants raised on thin, watery foods—were more cloistered than any monk ever was. Just as Orwell recognized of his middle class world, I became more aware of who these ideologues were that dominated Humanities departments in the latter half of the 20th century. Imagine a teacher shaped through twelve years of public school—that first nursery of Huxley and Orwell’s imaginations—then rolled through the dark satanic mills of graduate school and thrust upon the classroom stage, <i>sans</i> sweat, <i>sans</i> labor, <i>sans</i> calloused hands, <i>sans</i> everything. If literature is about life and the teacher has hardly a wisp of that, he can only do what the academics do from the Sophists to the French perverts: fall back upon systems, <br />
-isms, and –ologies. <br />
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In the coal fields of West Virginia, I had dozens of jobs and occupations before I ever got to graduate school from carrying newspapers, hawking on the street and at ball games, shining shoes, washing dishes, short order-cooking, janitoring, and all the rest of the growing-up jobs of the blue collar family. Those roots served me well when I read the great books and poems, and helped me find more kinship with the real-world literary criticism of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the natural wisdom of Ernest Hemingway, and the earthy writings of the Russian writers than with the effete poets of France. “’Sophisticated?’ Professor Arvid Shulenberger, a rough-and-ready World War II aviator, asked, and answered, ‘more complicated than it needs to be.’” After I left the academic track in 1970, I spent years as a social worker, mental health and family therapist, night clerk, editor-writer, writer-editor, technical writer, magazine editor (twice),cashier, bureaucrat, and, again, janitor. Like George Orwell, I saw society from the underside and the backside. When I re-entered the academic world for the third time in 2003, I did so with zest and the old delight. A classroom is a classroom, after all, and once inside those doors, it’s back to the great and good books and the fundamental questions, which have always made good teaching from Socrates to Thoreau to Senior and Shulenberger.<br />
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<i>Dr. John Senior</i><br />
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<i>Dr. Arvid Shulenberger</i><br />
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Or so I thought when I signed on last year to teach courses at a community college here in Tennessee. Besides the now universal replacement of blackboards and chalk (O Chesterton!) with white boards and stinking Chinese markers, the other changes that had been arriving while my back was turned had reached demonic proportions. In sum, there are no teachers now, only programmed processors using ideologically correct texts chosen by ideologically correct committees backed by eternally present and vigilant computers. Soon, they will videotape all classes, and the censors will come, if they have not already. The idea of Socrates in the street or “Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and me on the other,” or Thoreau bothering his neighbors with real questions we have—what? The Nanny State and the Nanny Teacher. The students, God help them, are ready: they’ve been playing the game since first grade. They speak a different language, if it is a language at all. Maybe one in fifty has doubted the sophistical doctrines of the day, and that one usually has enough redneck or hillbilly left in him (or her) to be open to something other than the poisonous pabulums of the time.<br />
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Over the years I have met retired university English teachers who confess that they no longer read. In some cases, I wonder if they have ever read, really read, a poem without a crib or a study guide. Even at 73, I devour books, new and old, from Homer to Coetzee. And my summary conviction? Abolish English and Humanities departments altogether; teach languages only; and let the young discover literature on their own terms with the secret libertarian delight of thieves and prisoners. But then, I also believe in the abolition of public schools altogether. They only feed the growing tendency toward the Absolute Nanny State.kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-21393333767502187642011-08-28T12:48:00.000-07:002011-10-23T12:59:54.781-07:00First Primitivist Church of the Planet Earth: Part Two<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9mLWb7I36vphE3jFByZuDqNXzobhsIeWyoTdhUEsx5iN9yLTT1mBFuT2oSGC5_xbeLCVexakW4CBELhQWeMpecZVt7rm3HKqJ-PWj67g60uMaoHoOc41sapUuvjX820CqsyGxkoYjNJbl/s1600/copticmonkincense.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="217" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9mLWb7I36vphE3jFByZuDqNXzobhsIeWyoTdhUEsx5iN9yLTT1mBFuT2oSGC5_xbeLCVexakW4CBELhQWeMpecZVt7rm3HKqJ-PWj67g60uMaoHoOc41sapUuvjX820CqsyGxkoYjNJbl/s320/copticmonkincense.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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<b>The Third in a Series of Mad Hermit Visions<br />
<i></i></b><br />
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GRAND CONTESTED ELECTION FOR THE PRESIDENCY OF THE UNITED STATES.<br />
WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.<br />
BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.<br />
--Herman Melville, <i>Moby Dick<br />
</i><br />
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I troubled myself for weeks for a way to render this third vision by the Mad Hermit, but my granddaughter Audrey mentioning <i>Moby Dick </i>and a re-reading of the first chapter of that work of pure genius gave me the plagiaristic clue I needed. Plagiarism: the etymology suggests as snare or net, which I am happy to broadcast to catch, through Ishmael, what I can. But you’ll have to judge the value of my strategy for yourself. One more element in prompting my musings: Tolkien and trees. Night before last I decided to read up on the fifty-foot high American Beech tree in my yard. I found that such trees can grow to eighty feet and live four hundred years. Given its size, this one has already been around, say, since 1811, the year of the first Luddite uprisings and the Great New Madrid earthquake. I also found that the words for beech and book are the same in Old English, German, and the Scandinavian languages, probably since the beech tree was a source for paper pulp. This coalescence of meaning and my memory of Tolkien’s reverence for trees prompted me to wander out at midnight, kerosene lamp in hand, to simply touch this mighty old living thing with a druidic sense of reverence. Reverence, aye, that’s the theme. . .reverence for the things of the earth . . .which point to heaven . . .<br />
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<i>Midnight on Masirah Island, Oman, sometime or other, the Mad Hermit speaks aloud (yes, he’s talking to himself again):<br />
</i><br />
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Sitting on this sperm whale’s burnished head, and listening to the soft waves of the Indian Ocean (there’s only one ocean on the planet earth really, ain’t it?), I’m remembering what Ishmael said about our mystical reverence for water, and why we sit and stare at it and hunger for water wherever we be. Here in the desert, men seek the small springs in oases or make their way to the sea, an image of eternity. The largest icon we have. And I, sitting on the sperm whale icon, wondering.<br />
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What I wonder about is religion and things: air, earth, fire, water. I confess: I love religion, the thing itself. If Christianity is true—which, like Pascal, I wager with my life it is—it must have to do with these things, not just with words. While I was still teaching in Oman, I looked into some things, and in these reveries, they come back to me. Tonight I dug into my little cache and pulled out my stash of frankincense and myrrh. Easy to buy here, piles of it lie in the marketplace, fresh from the trees of Oman. <br />
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<i>Let my prayer be set forth as incense before You, the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.<br />
</i><br />
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So wrote David in his poem-prayer. Hard to imagine that he prayed the words only, a metaphor in words. What of a metaphor in things as well? So I prayed tonight as my clouds of frankincense rose from a clam shell filled with home-made charcoal from acacia wood. So, every night, for morning prayer. In the last year of my teaching days, I poked about in things, thinking about the camels of the <i>magi</i> travelling up the Arabian peninsula, bearing their precious cargo from here, the main source of frankincense and myrrh.<br />
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The books say it is a “symbol of prayer”; I say no, it <i>is</i> prayer, prayer in things as we have prayer in words. There is all this confusion about symbols and metaphors, as I have found in my literary studies. People would rather run to those confusions than look at, feel, know things themselves, in which the religions of the earth are replete. Incense—in Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Native American religions, Judaism (before the destruction of the Temple)—is a universal in human experience. Does God smell only the incense of one group. Caution! Old hermit, will you veer into heresy?<br />
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What set me off on this thread of reflection was reading among the “experts” the view that a religion is a “belief system.” A belief system! That reduces religion to ideology, which is something your neo-Marxist deconstructionists love to do to everything. They ignore the great Romanian Orthodox anthropologist of religion, Mircea Eliade, who understood that all religions from the Australian aborigines to the Hopi seek to “live in a sacralized cosmos” which links heaven and earth, and in which the things of the cosmos—air, water, earth, fire—are involved in the prayer of religion. This is, Eliade wrote, the basis of the “religious nostalgia, [which] expresses the desire to live in a pure and holy cosmos, as it was in the beginning, when it came fresh from the Creator’s hands.” Through ritual, dance, sacred music, chant, repetition, smell, sound, sacrament, pictures, icons, temples, the peoples of the earth sacralize time and space to enter the religious experience. <br />
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Incense brings together air, fire, plants, and ritual offering. Little wonder that it is one of the oldest religious things.<br />
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I can hear the yammerings now: paganism! devil worship! catholic ritual! Yammer on, dear gnostics. <br />
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Protestantism and semi-gnostic modernist Catholicism cut the Gospel from the earth and brought in a religion of words, words, words—and talkers with endless talking. During the Reformation preachers were known to preach for five hours. Some of the Catholic priests these days . . . well, it <i>seems</i> like five hours. <br />
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The Byzantine priest I met . . . never mind where . . .re-minded me in a fundamental truth of religion: we pray with our bodies, our whole bodies. In the West this has become reduced to a reflexive genuflection in which the knee barely brushes the floor, and now the post-modernist Catholics are building churches with no kneelers or space to kneel . . . Upright are they! Righteous and correct! Paying by credit card!—As the architect of Clear Creek said, the best part of a church is the shadows, where the humble pray. When the winds of evil blow through bland, hygienic churches, I fall to the ground like my Muslim brothers, who got it from the early Christians. . . In the East, the old truths hold, with metanies and full prostrations , prayers standing with arms raised, deep bows from the waist, signs of the cross . . . prostrations? Falling on the ground before the Father? If it was good enough for Abraham, Moses, the disciples, and Jesus himself, well . . .Pride was always thought of as the refusal to kneel, bow, or fall on the ground before God . . .when one falls to the ground, forehead to the earth, he knows his true position in the cosmos.<br />
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Gnosticism: fear and hatred of the physical world, Manichean pride. And when I hear such things dismissed as “externals,” I hear the old-new pride, Cartesiansism. Or what Walker Percy called “angelism, abstraction of the self from itself . . .envy of the incarnate condition and a resulting caricature of the bodily appetites.” Or, in short, Jansenism Deluxe.<br />
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The one true religion must necessarily reflect and in some way incorporate all the previous ones . . . that is why the one true sacrifice of the Mass completes and supersedes all the sacrifices of all the other religions . . .<br />
Our whole bodies must become prayers . . .<br />
That night in the desert years ago when I went to a student’s village near the mountains. How can I forget that? It was the feast of <i>Eid</i> at the end of Ramadan, and he took me away from the village where I heard the sound of the drums, the men of the village dancing under the light of the new moon. “They don’t want you to know,” Hani the writer told me on a walk in Kuwait (we stayed carefully to the path, all the mines and bombs were still not found), “but look at the mosques, at the crescents, they have always and still worship the moon.” The Lah, the new moon was just up, and the men of the village were chanting and swaying to the drums. Dumfounded, I swayed as well . . . part of me had become Muslim . . . not altogether a bad thing, given the choices nowadays . . .but only because Islam is. as Hilaire Belloc said, the religion of those who have not lost their religion, unlike us, who have . . .I loved them drums . . .<br />
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How sad that the Christians after Constantine were consumed with a passion to destroy the shrines and groves of the Roman pagans. Surely if our Gospel is true, it could overcome those things by force of truth, and let people come to us by grace . . .<br />
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Now, listening to the surush (new word, coined here and now) of the brownish waves from India and smelling the incense, I return to the water Ishmael spoke of , and his comment on Starbuck: “Uncommonly conscientious for a sea man, and endued with a deep natural reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his.” Ah, kinfolk seamen, “all these things,” as Ishmael says elsewhere, “are not without their meaning.”<br />
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The meaning of things, including of water, which baptizes and sustains the globe, and prompts our universal “deep natural reverence,” awakens the memory of a priest breathing (hahhhh!) upon the new water of Holy Week, and stirring it with the Paschal candle, or water washing the bodies of the baptized in a baptismal trench in Ephesus . . .<br />
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Hear the Russian Orthodox <i>Book of Deeds </i>for the Sanctification of Water:<br />
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“Yea, thou didst with clay restore the eyes of the blind, and didst bid him wash, and by a word didst make him see, O thou that breakest the waves of adverse passions, and driest up the salt sea of this life . . .who hast given unto us to be invested with a snow white robe by water and the Spirit . . .send down upon us thy blessing.” I saw another Byzantine priest bless the waters of a creek flowing past our parish church. “How far downstream does the blessing go?” asked a scamp.<br />
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Forever and ever and ever.<br />
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So, before I fall asleep here, let me say that my religion must be earthy and incarnate, and I wouldn’t give a plug nickel for any religion that isn’t rich in created things . . .<br />
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and that if a religion contains all the earthiness of all religions crowned by the Divine Liturgy of the Eucharist, Christ Jesus himself, well then, I will be happy to breathe and taste and feel its blessings until the last chrism on my forehead and the last sign of the cross closes my blabbermouth . . . too many words for a hermit.<br />
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<i>Boris Kustoviev: Consecration of the Waters at Theophany<br />
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</i>kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-65610721506614353722011-08-10T11:09:00.000-07:002011-08-15T18:49:28.084-07:00First Primitivist Church of the Planet Earth: Part One<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXEIyn5qxWCs1ceUun_P8_XWrM6wjP5ifQPj_YiTOQ6nUtg1ttmDfhHnoToAbLqq8PpWVEWdvQohDz47JcftTaTeijwC7570XTAOHt5T7Gv-sTQZr_h4bIsTxmtYwmvnMhrgxSC_eyeCtV/s1600/crew.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="259" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXEIyn5qxWCs1ceUun_P8_XWrM6wjP5ifQPj_YiTOQ6nUtg1ttmDfhHnoToAbLqq8PpWVEWdvQohDz47JcftTaTeijwC7570XTAOHt5T7Gv-sTQZr_h4bIsTxmtYwmvnMhrgxSC_eyeCtV/s320/crew.jpg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfeKyKTrN0Gr4VjE50OKYp5JADHl7eF_Ldxxigft1X79TVQYyG8_b5-a9MrnNSwrZW8XPO0olOFdNxiK9hVpRTCvPJ2JP-OH8xl3rG6gyQArIe88yNMkVfGqgG0ggM7G4BpttJYtTPes5H/s1600/new01-Arvidportrait%255B1%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="200" width="148" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfeKyKTrN0Gr4VjE50OKYp5JADHl7eF_Ldxxigft1X79TVQYyG8_b5-a9MrnNSwrZW8XPO0olOFdNxiK9hVpRTCvPJ2JP-OH8xl3rG6gyQArIe88yNMkVfGqgG0ggM7G4BpttJYtTPes5H/s200/new01-Arvidportrait%255B1%255D.jpg" /></a></div><br />
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Photos of Arvid Shulenberger (1919-1964) from his WW II days. Photos published with permission of his son, Dr. Eric Shulenberger.<br />
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In this and the next installment in the Mad Hermit series, the Mad Hermit remembers some fundamental doctrines (teachings) of the <i>First Primitivist Church of the Planet Earth</i>. The heresies of this church are one, which is called Forgetting. Apostasy from the First Primitivist Church is called Postmodernism, which is also a new kind of forgetting. Followers of certain sects of Protestantism, or modernist Catholicism, both of which are known in the desert as Protestantism Enlightened or Gnosticism Lite, as well as all sorts of people who no longer have any idea what they are, are sure to be offended by the Mad Hermit.<br />
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<b>The Second in a Series of Mad Hermit Visions<br />
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The Mad Hermit can elude much of the world, but he cannot escape memory. He is seeking God in contemplation, but he has lived a life, and he knows he must allow times when he goes back into the memories and wonders what to think now. Here on Masirah Island he climbs on the sperm whale’s skeletal head and stares at the ocean to the south. There are over 8000 miles of uninterrupted ocean between the whalebone head and the icy wall of Antarctica. That is why the Anglo-Saxon poets called it the “<i>hwalrade</i>,” the whale road. It is a kind of blankness, like the blankness of Melville’s white whale, which is what the contemplator needs, but today he has a reckoning with what humans can do in the face of that blankness. The answer, he realizes, is one of the fundamental principles of what he laughingly calls, with some redundancy, the <i>First Primitivist Church of the Planet Earth</i>. In this installment and the next, we will listen to his musings. So let us hear from the Mad Hermit as he suns his aches on the whale’s warm bones:<br />
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I dozed and woke stretched out on this massive blank cranium. I dreamed that I was in a long and annoying (they all were) discussion in graduate school in English, fifty years ago. The argument among the faculty (the gods who controlled our academic destinies) was over what the Ph.D. program I was in should be called. A Ph.D. in Rhetoric was what the department was leaning toward; another was a Ph.D. in Hermeneutical Phenomenologies. Other names were proposed. A mere graduate student, I suggested a Ph.D. in Poetics, which drew silence. In the ensuing nightmare discussion one professor said (for what reason I cannot recall) that a Muslim once told him that going to the mosque is “a blaze of glory in a dying light.” In my dream a light went on in my own mind and I awoke to the sound of waves and said “that’s what great art is!” I remember, in my exultation of insight, leaning over to taking a cigarette from a scurrying crab . . . and then I awoke before inhaling. But the teacher’s words, slow and deliberate, came back in a blaze of glory:<br />
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<i>Art?<br />
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</i><i>Art is making, or if good art is meant, right making. The word poetry derives from the Greek for to make. Law, medicine, bricklaying, teaching are arts. Art (a making) is distinct from science (a knowing), although it presupposes science in the maker (artist).<br />
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He was a tall and lanky ex-Air Force radar officer named Arvid Shulenberger, and when he stretched out his long arms, he reminded me of Frost’s image from “A Mending Wall” of an old farmer carrying a small boulder “like an old stone savage armed,” for he was earthy and elemental in his thinking as in his presence. I was terrified of him, for I knew he knew something about life and learning. In the whirl and blur of graduate school nonsense with this prof saying this and that prof saying that, suddenly there was a blaze of glory in the dying light. Shulenberger was a writer who had sought answers to perennial questions, answers he always referred to as the <i>philosophia perennis</i>, a phrase attributable to Leibnitz but also found in substance in St. Augustine and Al Farabi. It was popularized by Aldous Huxley in his book of the same name.<br />
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In class after class, Shulenberger talked on as some of us wrote down and drank in every word, which we discussed afterwards over home brewed beer, a particular West Texas version calculated to inspire robust discussion and headaches that would crack granite. Gradually, Shulenberger unfolded all the principles of the <i>Orthodox Poetic</i>, a chief virtue of which was, he said, that not one word or idea in it was original. It was the truth of the ages, carved in stone. Over the semester this seminar in literary criticism aroused anger and prompted notoriety among graduate students and graduate faculty, a few of whom began to slip into the room and take notes for themselves. <br />
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We asked questions and we listened. It was as though the man had been to the mountain top and come down with the answers. Something was going on that did not go on in other literature seminars, in which no one ever said anything they considered true or real. It is called teaching. As we sat as his students, we began to learn just how Shulenberger came by this wisdom. Fond of saying that the primary purpose of criticism was pointing, he pointed us to the sources he had used to distil these questions and answers, which he had then put into a slim mimeographed document in the form of brief, concise questions and answers: <i>The Orthodox Poetic: A Literary Catechism</i>. <i>The</i>, not a. As we learned, the sloppy seas of relativism receded and we stood on what we knew was hard, firm rock. I now say a prayer of gratitude for him and his teaching, which then informed my teaching for the next fifty years.<br />
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I sigh again, remembering the joy of those days, the joy of reaching an island while exhausted by intellectual storms. Then I sigh yet once more, tears coming to my eyes, for all the failures of my own teaching, of always feeling on the edge of communicating some of the great traditional answers to the great perennial questions and never quite getting there. “You must form your whole person into a question before you can begin to find or understand the answer. You must live in questions,” I would say time and time again. Looking back now, I see that I and Shulenberger and a handful of others were <i>isolatoes</i> in the crowd of post-modernists, who were just then coming into existence—though their next of kin had walked the streets of Athens, Rome, Alexandria, London—<br />
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<i>What is the city over the mountains <br />
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air <br />
Falling towers <br />
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria <br />
Vienna London <br />
Unreal</i> <br />
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The Old Possum—T.S.Eliot—had it pretty well figured, I guess: the towers of the West were collapsing. The time had arrived when all belief has disappeared and when the primal things have been forgotten in the ruined cities. The makers of poems now saw only their own reflections in mirrors of despair, now machines threw pots only for money, now the last cathedrals were crumbling into dust or, worse, into museums and <i>salons des refuses</i>, another variety of consumer junk for ego bolstering.<br />
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Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Shulenberger told us, was Curator of the Boston Museum of Fine Art and yet he believed that museums were unnatural frauds and should be abolished. In <i>Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art </i>and <i>The Transformation of Nature in Art</i>, this great Orientalist argued cogently for the medieval view of art—Christian and Oriental—that art is making for a purpose, and that purpose is truth through beauty—beautiful and useful poems, cathedrals, pots, swords, dresses—for our lives. Otherwise he said, art is merely superstition, even an idolatry. I think of the railways trains full of paintings hoarded by the Nazis in their belief in “kultur.” I think of a thousand inane conversations overheard in art galleries and bookstores: “but is it art, my dear? How do you know?” <br />
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Shulenberger, with his grasp of Aristotle, Coomaraswamy, St. Thomas Aquinas, Jacques Maritain, Dr. Samuel Johnson, and the nature of writing itself, blew the academic fogs away. Now, sitting on this desert beach and staring south, I remember what a delight came from the simple statement, <i>art is making</i>, and the consequent understanding that when we spoke of art, we were not talking about the estoterica of museums, salons, and classrooms, or the romantic delusion that art is creation, but of a fundamental human activity Aristotle and other Greeks had defined in the principle, <i>art imitates nature</i>. More, as Shulenberger explained, <i>art as a process of making imitates nature in the process of becoming</i>. A man making a pot ten thousand years ago and a poet in Greenwich Village making a poem last night and a computer brain crafting a new program in Iceland and a gunsmith in Kentucky making a long rifle are all engaged in one fundamental human activity: <i>art imitating nature</i>, which is the foundation of culture. <i>Homo faber </i>we are, art is what we do.<br />
<br />
Further, there is no division between the “fine arts” and the “servile arts,” an artificial division fostered by some of the romantics. Works of art have a purpose: a poem should be able to hold water or hit a target. All great art is religious and its purpose is to glorify God or the gods or at least to depict the world in reality and truth. One of Shulenberger’s favorite words was “phony.” “Faulkner is a phony academician” (gasp). His other zingers—like “Northrop Frye[a new critic much admired then] is a poop”-- which he fired in between explaining the doctrines struck the devotees of the academe like thunderbolts. And pissed them off royally. But they inspired thought and discussion that brought fresh air into the university.<br />
<br />
I sit here laughing just to think about the uproars he caused. One of his students proposed to write a Master’s Thesis on “the truth of Hemingway’s fiction.” “<i>The</i> truth?” one committee member sputtered. “<i>All</i> his fiction?” another sneered. And, finally, “you, a Master’s degree student, are going to do all this?” The doughty student: “Sir, I thought that was what we were here to do.”<br />
<br />
No, no, no, the precious (another Shulenberger curse word, like “queer,” “academic,” and “sophisticated”) committee maintained that the purpose of the study of literature was to analyze, analyze, analyze, never to judge or reach conclusions. Shulenberger taught that the purpose of education was precisely to learn to judge things, even if we made mistakes. Education, like art, had an end, and that end had something to do with becoming fully human in the classical sense.<br />
<br />
In his classes, we learned that we were sitting in a vast colloquium with the greats—Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Socrates, Johnson, Cervantes—and that we had a right to be there and participate in the great dialogue.<br />
<br />
Ah, the winds blow in off the Indian Ocean. An older dhow rounds the tip of the island and chugs north on its ancient diesel. The night is coming on, in more ways than one. Even Masirah is now being sucked up into the world of phoniness. Back to prayer, before they find I don’t have a current passport or visa and ship me back to the country where mind has lost its moorings.<br />
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Some time ago The Mad Hermit made a list of the works any aspiring student of literature or the arts in general should know. The first, of course, is Shulenberger’s:<br />
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http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~wagner/creative_writing/shulenberger.pdf<br />
<br />
If that link does not work for you, try the link here: http://failedhermit.blogspot.com/2010_03_27_archive.html<br />
<br />
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. <i>Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art</i>. New Delhi, 1994 (reissue).<br />
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. <i>The Transformation of Nature in Art</i>. New Delhi, 1995 (reissue).<br />
Maritain, Jacques. <i>Art and Scholasticism</i>. New York, 1934.<br />
Maritain, Jacques. <i>Art and Poetry</i>. London, 1945.<br />
Johnson, Samuel Dr. <i>Preface to Shakespeare </i>(1765) and <i>Lives of the English Poets </i>(1781).<br />
Bate, Walter Jackson. <i>The Achievement of Samuel Johnson.</i> New York, 1961.<br />
Aristotle, <i>Poetics</i> (330 BC).<br />
Plato, <i>The Republic </i>and other dialogues (c380 BC).<br />
<br />
Note: Arvid Shulenberger also wrote a novel, <i>Roads From the Fort</i>; a study of James Fenimore Cooper’s fiction; several volumes of poems; and this delightful piece: http://flightjournal.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=&nm=The+Magazine&type=PubPagi&mod=Publications%3A%3AArticle+Title&mid=13B2F0D0AFA04476A2ACC02ED28A405F&tier=4&id=A0ACE92D17FF40D7ABE80D04D77FDA7B<br />
<br />
His son, Dr. Eric Shulenberger, has written a major account of his father’s WW II flight squadron: http://www.amazon.com/Deny-Them-Night-Sky-Squadron/dp/sitb-next/0976735504<br />
kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-25260766708630975052011-07-28T09:45:00.000-07:002011-07-28T09:56:46.319-07:00Eruptions of the Mad Hermit: Tweeting on Masirah<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4ZdS7EvljLxieMPTcQl98x0i0w7RjRHaHWthg_yuktMx82kChyphenhyphenh8mbT-qHlBmExAgtolPhfl7hJejXGgM1hroQYTXLuk2eQlWBhQ7j1B7UXCMq_NO_7uxlHD4ThYs5LPPHm1SwH9fm2W9/s1600/92444034_MyAB3ps4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="268" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4ZdS7EvljLxieMPTcQl98x0i0w7RjRHaHWthg_yuktMx82kChyphenhyphenh8mbT-qHlBmExAgtolPhfl7hJejXGgM1hroQYTXLuk2eQlWBhQ7j1B7UXCMq_NO_7uxlHD4ThYs5LPPHm1SwH9fm2W9/s400/92444034_MyAB3ps4.jpg" /></a></div><br />
The above is a photo of the only public cross in the entire Arabian desert. It is located at the northern end of Masirah Island.<br />
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<i>A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us.'</i> –St. Anthony of the Desert<br />
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<i>[Raskolnikov] dreamed that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. In this dream, each thought that he alone had the truth, and each was at war with all the others, slaughtering them in a rage of destruction.</i> -Dostoevsky, <i>Crime and Punishment <br />
</i><br />
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There are stories of truly mad hermits, even amongst the holiest of the Desert Fathers, though as the Russian peasants know, it’s not always easy to tell the difference between the holy and the mad. As Chesterton pointed out, by any worldly standard, Christ was mad. One might say, a homeless mad vagrant. But, of course, according to Christians <i>Nouveaux</i>, the whole enterprise of the Desert Fathers was mad and best left behind. These disgruntled chaps should have joined a Peace and Justice Group or posted little notes on the parish bulletin board. <br />
<br />
Nevertheless, the movement of thousands of people to the deserts of Egypt and Israel was one of the most important convulsions in Christian history. From the third century A.D. until as late as the seventh, a great reaction took place against a worldly Christianity that had lost its bearings in the post-Constantinian relaxation. It gave birth to Christian monasticism, another species of madness the modern Christian fears and despises.<br />
<br />
But where did you think Jesus, Elijah, and John the Baptist slept and dreamed? In the Jerusalem Hilton?<br />
<br />
There is a Mad Hermit who dwells in the desert zones of this blog. Which kind of madness does he have? Which kind do you have? You be the judge.<br />
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<br />
The Mad Hermit awoke in the usual desert dawn of Oman, the hottest nation in the world, when the sun finds billions of tiny mirrors to magnify its rage against water. Ah, he thought, the light that burns out the madness of the world. He had come here as a teacher in 1994, seeking a refuge from modernism. And from all <br />
–isms and –ologies of the cities of the world. <br />
<br />
Late in 2002, his last two-year contract had expired and there was no promise of another. The University has expelled him from his campus home, and escorted him to the airport for his official exit. He had left the plane at Dubai and re-entered the country by land, slipping past the border guards on an old track he had used for camping. He recovered his aging Land Rover, already loaded with his camping gear, from a friendly Pakistani mechanic, and with sunburned face and a worn <i>kumma</i> on his head, stealthily moved about the country, easily mistaken for an ex-pat oil worker.<br />
<br />
In the grim Omani summer he knew no better refuge than one of the thousands of coves on the Arabian Sea, in one of which he pitched his tent and dangled his feet in the waters of the Gulf. [In my original manuscript there follow a great number of other details people who read nowadays, pass over. “Too much information!”] Thinking of his classroom days, the mad hermit remembered this desperate cry of the modern, and watched sardines nibble at his toes.<br />
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The world looked different from Oman when he first arrived. It was still one of the least known and frequented countries of the world. He began to enjoy camping in the desert weekend after weekend, where the only sound was silence. And by chance, he began to read books about the Desert Fathers.<br />
<br />
At any rate, if the reader is still with me (a 10-90 shot), after two months of Arabian Gulf summer, the hermit had nearly baked out of his head the millions of strands of argument and association that frustrate any attempt at contemplation. The great Cloud of Unknowing was just beginning to form when, drat it, the Mad Hermit discovered that his last tin was gone and his last bottle of water emptied.<br />
<br />
At the old suk in Muttrah, he looked about for the least modern shopping center he could find. But as he eased into a ramshackle grocery, past the sign reading “Moslems not Permitted in the Pork Room,” he spotted a sight he had first encountered in 1988. In the center of a spacious area surrounded by shops, there were Arabs in disdashas sipping their espressos and talking on cell phones. They were all facing each other but talking with someone not present. “Checking up on their wives, like as not,” an Aussie muttered. <br />
<br />
Then, in the twinkling of a camel’s eye, the world had changed for <i>Arabia Deserta</i>. In the same year a nation that had as yet only three paved highways, had entered cyberspace, via fiber optic cables and cell phones manufactured in Finland. The immemorial desert scene of men gathered around an evening charcoal fire and roasting their goat kebabs was still common after the last <i>Allah Akkbar!</i>prayer call, but the desert night now rang with the sound of cell phones across the dunes and salt wastes.<br />
<br />
Gradually, the mad hermit discovered stratagems for living in desert places, in the mountains and on the coast. From time to time he was forced to use visit suks and villages to replenish his stores. Like Father Foucault, he found that it was possible to live on little else but palm dates, which Oman supplied in abundance twice a year. Once a week he slipped into a Catholic church for prayer and the sacraments. He particularly enjoyed Mass (and the sermons) in Marathi, Konkani, Malayalam, Arabic, Tagalog, Sinhala, or Tamil, so that he did not have to listen to the cretin English of the modern church. When he was within reach of a mosque, he knelt on a mat and prayed the Angelus at prayer calls.<br />
<br />
Torn by a lust he could not conquer, his visits to the shopping centers continued every few months, and by 2004 he had found himself loitering around a an internet café, where dozens of young men were clattering on the keys and giggling at porn sites. What madness! he thought. As far as he could tell, the planet had been consumed by a huge beast named the Internet. Back in the desert, he prayed to be freed of the demon of <i>curiositas</i>. <br />
<br />
By 2010 he had turned seventy years of age, and was as thin as a young date palm. The Land Rover, held together by the wiles of the Pakistani mechanic, now chuffed along like an aging camel, and he himself had become a legend, especially among the Bedouin bands that moved about in Toyota pickup trucks. He thumbed his prayer books, hurled rocks at black scorpions and camel spiders, and fought the demons that pulled him away from God. He prayed that there would be another hermit whom he might meet once a week, as the Desert Fathers did. None came.<br />
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A garrulous Filipino priest counseled him in confession to join the parish charismatic community, but he ran from the church and ploughed back into the dunes, screaming “no!” until his throat was too dry to scream any more.<br />
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It was time to retreat farther, and he remembered his visit to Masirah Island in 1990. The ferry carried him and the Rover to the ninety-mile long desert island just off the coast of Oman, at the southern tip of which was the sun-bronzed skull of a sperm whale, facing south across the thousands of miles to the Antarctic. Here he pitched his tattered tent, watched the whales swimming south, and blessed them on their journey.<br />
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After a year, he drove north on the Masirah road to find a suk where he could stock up on rice and canned hummus. He was astonished to see the night sky lit up with lights from luxury hotels. A ragged beggar boy met him outside the blazing Al Sultan shopping center. <br />
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“What?” he burbled in poor Arabic, only to learn that the hundred-year curse on Masirah had recently come to an end and the place was now to become a tourist paradise. A two-mile-long bridge would soon link with the mainland.<br />
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In a café inside the center there were a dozen tables, and at each young Arabs were frantically doing something with their thumbs. “What is this?” he burbled again.<br />
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“We are tweeting, Sir” <br />
<br />
“What?”<br />
<br />
“It is sending messages, Sir.”<br />
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“What messages?”<br />
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The young men laughed. After a chat among themselves, one said with a laugh, “we are all saying ‘I am on Masirah!’”<br />
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The horror was dawning on the rattled hermit. The desert itself, that vast emptiness between Muscat and Damascus, was disappearing, and instead of hermits and herds of camels, there were now only thundering herds of solipsists, each frantically tweeting, "I am, I am!"<br />
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<i>The interested reader may find more about Masirah Island and the hundred-year curse on this site at </i>http://failedhermit.blogspot.com/2010_04_01_archive.htmlkencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-37031838755705868182011-07-23T09:40:00.000-07:002011-07-23T09:54:40.884-07:00Half a Hermit is Better Than None<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg13xTA3UMatR38skpIdtcsQpf5H93XHdCZYFX-lCx-iP6L7cxXz43Bi4wmyBYidKrXLAXl_hKEmaKCeAsa-2YbuxsIT3hqyH-Ng_eh-ECpL7tUlMV7dANM14Jnd89r1xtSqBlmcgCWIF-y/s1600/desertfather1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 245px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg13xTA3UMatR38skpIdtcsQpf5H93XHdCZYFX-lCx-iP6L7cxXz43Bi4wmyBYidKrXLAXl_hKEmaKCeAsa-2YbuxsIT3hqyH-Ng_eh-ECpL7tUlMV7dANM14Jnd89r1xtSqBlmcgCWIF-y/s320/desertfather1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5632588910048408914" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />A new series is on the way. Devotees of this blog will recall my series on the Mole, which may be groused out on this site. The new series will focus on the Mad Hermit. In preparation for this series, to which I commit myself with mad eremetical abandon, I pass on the thoughts below--from G.K. Chesterton's <em>The Well and the Shallows</em>-- on the merits of the hermit way. My first Mad Hermit piece is underway, and is called "On Tweeting." Interested?<br /><br /><em>St. Jerome lived with a real lion; a good way to avoid being lionised.<br />But he was very sociable with the lion. In his time, as in ours,<br />sociability of the conventional sort had become social suffocation.<br />In the decline of the Roman Empire, people got together in amphitheatres<br />and public festivals, just as they now get together in trams and tubes.<br />And there were the same feelings of mutual love and tenderness,<br />between two men trying to get a seat in the Colosseum, as there<br />are now between two men trying to get the one remaining seat<br />on a Tooting tram. Consequently, in that last Roman phase,<br />all the most amiable people rushed away into the desert, to find<br />what is called a hermitage; but might almost be called a holiday.<br />The man was a hermit because he was more of a human being; not less.<br />It was not merely that he felt he could get on better with a lion<br />than with the sort of men who would throw him to the lions.<br />It was also that he actually liked men better when they let him alone.<br />Now nobody expects anybody, except a very exceptional person, to become<br />a complete solitary. But there is a strong case for more Solitude;<br />especially now that there is really no Solitude.<br /><br />The reason why even the normal human being should be half<br />a hermit is that it is the only way in which his mind can have a<br />half-holiday. It is the only way to get any fun even out of the facts<br />of life; yes, even if the facts are games and dances and operas.<br />It bears most resemblance to the unpacking of luggage. It has been said<br />that we live on a railway station; many of us live in a luggage van;<br />or wander about the world with luggage that we never unpack at all.<br />For the best things that happen to us are those we get out of what has<br />already happened. If men were honest with themselves, they would<br />agree that actual social engagements, even with those they love,<br />often seem strangely brief, breathless, thwarted or inconclusive.<br />Mere society is a way of turning friends into acquaintances,<br />rhe real profit is not in meeting our friends, but in having met them.<br />Now when people merely plunge from crush to crush, and from<br />crowd to crowd, they never discover the positive joy of life.<br />They are like men always hungry, because their food never digests;<br />also, like those men, they are cross. There is surely something the<br />matter with modern life when all the literature of the young is so cross.<br />That is something of the secret of the saints who went into the desert.<br />It is in society that men quarrel with their friends; it is in solitude<br />that they forgive them. And before the society-man criticises the saint,<br />let him remember that the man in the desert often had a soul that was<br />like a honey-pot of human kindness, though no man came near to taste it;<br />and the man in the modern salon, in his intellectual hospitality,<br />generally serves out wormwood for wine.<br /><br />In conclusion, I will take one very modern and even topical case.<br />I do not believe in Communism, certainly not in compulsory Communism.<br />And it is typical of this acrid age that what we all discuss<br />is compulsory Communism. I often sympathise with Communists,<br />which is quite a different thing; but even these I respect rather<br />as bold or honest or logical than as particularly genial or kindly.<br />Nobody will claim that modern Communism is a specially<br />sweet-tempered or amiable thing. But if you will look up<br />the legends of the earliest Hermits, you will find a very<br />charming anecdote, about two monks who really were Communists.<br />And one of them tried to explain to the other how it was<br />that quarrels arose about private property. So he thumped<br />down a stone and observed theatrically, "This stone is mine."<br />The other, slightly wondering at his taste, said, "All right;<br />take it." Then the teacher of economics became quite vexed<br />and said, "No, no; you mustn't say that. You must say it is yours;<br />and then we can fight." So the second hermit said it was his;<br />whereupon the first hermit mechanically gave it up; and the whole<br />lesson in Business Methods seems to have broken down.<br />Now you may agree or disagree with the Communist ideal, of cutting<br />oneself off from commerce, which those two ascetics followed.<br />But is there not something to suggest that they were rather nicer<br />people than the Communists we now meet in Society? Somehow as<br />if Solitude improved the temper?</em>kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-58180891867335477842011-07-11T12:30:00.000-07:002011-07-13T14:15:10.304-07:00No Begins at the Schoolhouse Door<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy9asnEjO-MIjEmXqdLlxe5Ylmy9BSup26dT0wXqW8-gXc_0KIzwA_4Rb7KnIuLLBzkIjire5L8ayperfWzK4R_Z_9j9luM8jm7KZAoIOlmjxw0_BO5BLhPP4JOBUXhCcIOgj6NXsdUh_b/s1600/Tolstoy+as+teacher.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 213px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy9asnEjO-MIjEmXqdLlxe5Ylmy9BSup26dT0wXqW8-gXc_0KIzwA_4Rb7KnIuLLBzkIjire5L8ayperfWzK4R_Z_9j9luM8jm7KZAoIOlmjxw0_BO5BLhPP4JOBUXhCcIOgj6NXsdUh_b/s320/Tolstoy+as+teacher.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5628182024852127826" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-qi9TPhohC2XUlWf1RWVTYp5k6aa__3A2QfftTmnfK977YBK-OLORDdmPxRL2UpCBFW32Qi_n84mX3pRSmc_3PtuUaWtSoN48Fs4aBvZ3KvFWO5wSOY_xCFiJU7OfH__v5w8jbeSidpTy/s1600/one+room+school.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 230px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-qi9TPhohC2XUlWf1RWVTYp5k6aa__3A2QfftTmnfK977YBK-OLORDdmPxRL2UpCBFW32Qi_n84mX3pRSmc_3PtuUaWtSoN48Fs4aBvZ3KvFWO5wSOY_xCFiJU7OfH__v5w8jbeSidpTy/s320/one+room+school.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5628181780132139602" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />I have not made it a practice of using my blog to respond to news or controversy. The Hermit tends to think long and slow thoughts, and will continue to do so—though he is now pledging himself to blog once a week as a remedy for <em>acedia</em>. I was engaged in writing the piece below when I happened on this piece of news: http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/1102732.htm <br /><br />For what it is worth, let this little history lesson be my reflection on the Almighty State of California’s Totalitarian Plan. <br /><br /><em><strong>A Tale of Two One-Room Schools</strong></em><br /><br />In November of 1858, my great-great grandfather met with a few parents in the small village of Poplar Flat near the slightly larger village of Woodlawn, near Bardstown, county seat of Nelson County, Kentucky, for a momentous event in the history of civilization. The purpose of the meeting was to sign an agreement that would launch a new school. No lawyers, educationists, psychologists, or bureaucrats were present.<br /><br />His name was Nathaniel Hamlet Marks, a fitting name for a member of the schoolteacher tribe, those of us who doubt ourselves on the world stage of action and turn to teaching. I know nothing about him but I have a photocopy of a tattered document sent me by a now-deceased cousin. It is one of my few connections with a family past, and since photocopies fade and die, I have copied it here. <br /><br />It is a “common English school” contract, dated November 1858, between Nathaniel Hamilton Marks (1828-1864) and several parents. The term “common English school” was an ordinary one in America from Revolutionary times and did not have a fixed curriculum. We may assume that it included reading, writing, and arithmetic, but probably also history and geography. The paper is written and signed by Mr. Marks in a beautiful hand, and by the “subscribers,” seven parents with what appear to be seven or eight “scholars.” There are holes in the document, and some scrawled notes attesting to some of the “autographs” of the parents.<br /><br /><em>The undersigned proposes to [illegible] a common English School at Poplar Flat in Dist. No. 10 Nelson County Ky. for the term of three [illegible, possibly “spring”] Months, wherein will be taught various branches of an English education as usually taught in our common schools. =and make up any lost time should any occur.<br />November 1858 X Nath. H. Marks <br />For which services to be rendered we the undersigned subscribers bind ourselves to furnish the house prepared and fuel for the accommodation of said school and pay the said Marks at the expiration of said term the sum of three dollars for each scholar {not clear, could be schoolchild] annexed to our several names.</em><br /><br />He was twenty-nine, and had seen the birth of two of his three children: William Kenton Marks, my great grandfather, who was just barely three years old, and Nancy Mabel Marks, who was eight months old. George Reuben would not be born until 1864, the year of his father’s death. <br /><br />In those days, the winds of change blew hard. A fierce struggle was under way between President Buchanan and Congress on the constitution of the new state of Kansas. The Utah War was underway, as Federal troops sought to put down the Mormon rebellion led by Brigham Young. The fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate was underway in Illinois. Arguments about slavery filled the pages of the New York <em>Times</em>. The country was in a deep depression sparked by the bank panic of 1857. More than half the citizens of Louisville owned slaves, but anti-slavery newspapers were published in the city, and debates raged. There were nearly five thousand black slaves in Nelson County, some owned by some of the seventy-nine free blacks in the county, but slaves were escaping daily into the North. Doubtless the citizens of Poplar Flat read about these things in newspapers, but more than likely harvests and preparations for winter were their main concerns that October day.<br /><br />I mention these things to suggest that the times were inauspicious for beginning new things—but perhaps they always are. Much of C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy and Tolkien’s <em>Lord of the Rings </em>were written as Nazi bombs fell on London. George Orwell was then gestating <em>1984</em> on his hospital bed in Jura. Serious people are serious in the teeth of history, not because of it.<br /><br />So this event in October of 1858 may seem tiny. But another tiny event was occurring in that October, apparitions of the Virgin Mary to the peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous in rural France. [A year later, October 1859, Our Lady appeared to a woman in what was to become Champion, MN--note added on July 13, 2012]. The smallness of events—like a birth in Nazareth or a skirmish at a bridge in Concord—is not a measure of their reality. It can be said that the founding of a one-room schoolhouse is as serious as any other in the scale of things, perhaps more so. For the education of children in any time lies at the very foundation of society. And we are often given to deceiving ourselves that we must wait for the times to change before we can launch important enterprises—to marry, or have children, or build a house, or found a state. Waiting until the times are ripe could be one of the deadliest poisons we drink.<br /><br />I picture my great-great-grandfather, who would not live for more than five years after starting this school, and his wife, Eliza Davis Mock, a strong lady who would not die until 1899, gathered with the other parents. Where exactly, I don’t know. The contract below mentions “the house prepared” for the school premises, but we don’t know where or by whom or if it had already been used as a school. Schools of the time throughout America, and their teachers, could come and go. This ad was placed in a McKeesport, Pennsylvania, newspaper in 1827:<br /><br /><em>A Teacher Wanted – A person capable of Teaching a common English School, will meet with a situation by applying to either of the subscribers, residing in Nippenose Twp., Lower Bottom. James GIBSON, William BRADY, David HERRINGTON, Trustees.</em><br /><br />It is certain that such teachers did not have extensive training themselves, and especially they did not have extensive training in ideologies or the manipulation of student minds as became the norm following the monstrous innovations of John Dewey and the consequent development of the federal system of, not education, but control and indoctrination. For more on this, see my essay: “Welcome to the Relativism Factory,” http://www.newoxfordreview.org/article.jsp?did=0510-craven.<br /><br /><br /><br />Approximately one year later, in the autumn of 1859, Leo Tolstoy opened his one-room school in his own manor house at Yasnaya Polyana on the steppes of Russia. To this school he invited the children of peasants. Within a year he had fifty students and, Tolstoy-like, was already developing grand dreams of a public education system for Russia. Soon he was touring Europe, visiting schools of all kinds, and talking with educational “experts” of the time. Within a year, he opened a three-room schoolhouse and attracted other teachers. <br /><br />Tolstoy concluded many things from both his own experience as a teacher and from his studies abroad. Firmly resistant to the ideological currents of his time, he rejected the notion that civilization was either evolving of advancing. Like his hero Pierre in <em>War and Peace</em>, he was deeply skeptical of such meta-views, and as far as schooling was concerned, he decided that life was the best teacher, and that education should be free and voluntary. Over his schoolhouse door, he posted the slogan, “Enter and Leave Freely.” Through his somewhat anarchical approach to education, Tolstoy became the enemy of Germanic pedagogy and all its offshoots and copies, which would include the cancer nurtured by John Dewey and the U.S. Department of Education.<br /><br />From intense experience in working with peasant children over a few years, and from his collision with all the experts, Tolstoy reached an extremely important conclusion: <strong><em>the State—any State—should never be given power to dictate what children should think. </em></strong> Teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, or other skills—that was as far as any government-supported education should be allowed to go. The rest should come from the home. Teachers were meant to be, as he was, awakeners who challenged children to cultivate their own natural curiosity and creative powers. In other words, Tolstoy soon realized that the power a good teacher can exercise over a child’s mind was fraught with danger, and must be guarded against. For him, “compulsory education” was a contradiction in terms.<br /><br />Obviously, I have no idea whether the school started by Nathaniel Hamlet Marks in any way resembled the school at Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy quickly came to understand that elementary schools were only as good as their teachers, and that only through natural relations between enthusiastic teachers and curious students could anything good happen in schools. I don’t know how long my great-great grandfather’s school lasted or if it achieved its goals. Just down the road, in Springfield, Jefferson Davis attended the short-lived College of St. Thomas Aquinas under the Dominicans before moving on to other matters. There, we can be sure, the federal government of the Northern States was not permitted to interfere with the development of his mind.<br /><br />The impression of a school teacher, whether Nathaniel Hamlet Marks or Leo <br />Nikolayevich Tolstoy or a Dominican priest is a great and powerful thing on the mind of a child. In the 19th century and even in the 20th, there were many who were wary of the powerful impression of the State on the least of these, our children. Those of the 21st century who have their parental wits about them will keep the No we must give to tyranny at the schoolhouse door.kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-22985304840145063892011-06-18T15:19:00.000-07:002011-06-18T15:45:40.860-07:00Flannery O’Connor and The Necessary Dragon<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLqTaKjtoJR0et9OSDPToxnLhZkd8mUBr5QBpJN12nh7fo1U9wexeYup345Zfg_aqLAEjWRQW2EUvCKvi0rYJqk1eAo4EjSlHChOUV4uFKUaCEXt9z1Yq5O5Q6ma-2MR9bWogovrlFsARF/s1600/oates_1-040909_jpg_400x500_crop_q85.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLqTaKjtoJR0et9OSDPToxnLhZkd8mUBr5QBpJN12nh7fo1U9wexeYup345Zfg_aqLAEjWRQW2EUvCKvi0rYJqk1eAo4EjSlHChOUV4uFKUaCEXt9z1Yq5O5Q6ma-2MR9bWogovrlFsARF/s400/oates_1-040909_jpg_400x500_crop_q85.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5619688743734518754" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><em>St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.</em><br /><br />— Flannery O'Connor (<em>Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose</em>) <br /><br />Halfway into writing this little piece on Flannery O’Connor, I realized that I have a dragon to face. My anger at those who distort or fail to understand her fiction almost outruns my own deep appreciation of her work, which speaks to me with power every time I revisit it. My experience in reading any of her stories resembles the moment of revelation experienced by Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation.” <br /><br />After an extremely humiliating experience in the doctor’s office, Mrs. Turpin is having a vision of all the saved marching into heaven. Ahead of her and her husband are a vast horde of “white trash, niggers, lunatics, and freaks shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and [her husband] Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they always had been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.” It is this kind of shocked recognition of oneself that Flannery, who described herself as a Thomist hillbilly, delivers without apology in everything she wrote.<br /><br />Dozens of sites on the internet recite the life and enumerate the works of Flannery O’Connor, the fierce and saintly little peacock-raising lady from Georgia whose stories shake the soul. In this essay, I want only to accomplish two things: to entice readers into actually reading her work, and to suggest why her stories have the effect they do. In a word, to return to the authentic purpose of literary criticism, which seeks to understand how the poetic vision achieves truth. <br /><br />Writing anything about Flannery O’Connor with any other purpose is absurd. Briefly, ninety-five percent of the work of what Joyce Cary called the “literary crickets” is misleading because the critics fail to see what Flannery saw or to listen to what she said about what she saw. This is the case, despite this clear warning from the lady herself: <br /><br /><em>The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures </em>[emphasis added for the sake of emphasis].<br /><br />Very simply, Flannery O’Connor is that bugaboo radio talk show hosts claim not to exist: the Christian terrorist, busy making bombs which will explode in your face. For this reason, her work is disliked and shunned by Catholic and Protestant sentimentalists (and relativists). At the same time, her work is praised, fawned over, and cleverly ignored through tiresome academic gobbledygook by modernists who admire the technology of her bomb making but deny the effect of the bombs. I speak as one who knows: in a previous century, I earned my doctorate in literary criticism and know these critters, as Huck Finn says, “by the back”; have lived and taught amongst them; and like Flannery O’Connor, see them as they probably are: tormented, frightened souls who need God as much as any southern sentimentalist.<br /> <br />Literary criticism as the art of judgment (Aristotle, Samuel Johnson) or as interpretation (the New Critics and their kin) is dead. Since western culture passed into the extermination ovens of the French nihilists (Foucault and his tribe), it has been replaced entirely in the academic world by a variety of ideological programmes for mental and spiritual destruction. Whether feminist, Marxist, post-structural, deconstructive, or multiculturalist in disposition, they are united in vitiating literature of any universalist value it has. Even law (constitutionalists, take note), medicine, and classics schools are infested with their antinomian rage against meaning. A friend of mine signed up for a course in literature only to meet a professor who described herself as a “post-Christian feminist.” Enough said.<br /><br />Nevertheless, though my anger may very well point to my own deep flaws, permit me to inspect its cause. All those who find the fiction of Flannery O’Connor disturbing use the same word to describe their response: “disturbing.” Poor things, they are disturbed, which is precisely what Flannery O’Connor wanted them to be.<br /><br />In addition to the literary witchdoctors, who avoid religion by avoiding religion, there are the religious naysayers. For Catholics who are no longer Catholics but say-hey glad-handers of the peace-and-justice variety who enjoy the Mass as group therapy, a plaintive note on the internet from a distraught parishioner may suffice to characterize their literary blindness. This poor soul said she wanted to donate some Flannery to her parish library but feared the “violence and the ‘n’ word” would disturb the parishioners. My goodness! A southern writer who uses the ‘n’ word! But we have left all that behind! For the other religious types who shy away from O’Connor, Peter Kreeft’s characterization of them in <em>A Refutation of Moral Relativism</em> is both succinct and apposite. They are members of an “American religion”—Protestant and Catholic—that “wants to make you feel good and comfortable, not to shock you or scandalize you.” In short, they are members of a religion that has become “as relativistic as society” and are, indeed, in need of being disturbed.<br /><br />Finally, Flannery O’Connor’s fiction is misunderstood through a congenital cultural disability I will call Yankeeism, a sub-species of Modernism. Yankee readers (including the” New” Southerner) approach her fiction in pretty much the way anthropologists approach tribes that still have real religions, with fascination, disbelief, and a desire to exploit. When Flannery O’Connor approached Paul Engle, head of the Iowa Writers Workshop, she said, “My name is Flannery O’Connor. I am not a journalist.” She then explained that she wanted to be accepted into the Workshop. Engle’s first response was to ask her to write down what she said so he could understand her English. Well, she did write it down and continued to write it down, and the literary establishment, which adopted her as a sort of pet Southerner (but so disturbing!), has continued to miss her message until the present day. <br /><br />In the museum devoted to twentieth century writers, they will have a special wing for exhibits devoted to the strange and forbidding, similar to the mummy Enoch Emery finds in the museum in O’Connor’s first novel, <em>Wise Blood</em>. Such displays might be: <em>O’Connor, Flannery. 1925-1964. Primitive Catholic Christian gothic fictionist. Violent, God-obsessed. Rare, hopefully extinct</em>. Next to the O’Connor exhibit will be one devoted to <em>Undset, Sigrid, 1882-1949, Norwegian Catholic Medievalist, religious fanatic anti-Nazi, out-moded</em>. And then, <em>Waugh, Evelyn (male), 1903-1966, Crank Catholic Novelist, possibly a dangerous psychotic</em>.<br /><br />There is deep kinship here. These disturbing geniuses absolutely distrusted and rejected the modern world. Like J.R.R. Tolkien (now a pet fantasy writer profoundly misunderstood by damn near everybody) who, wounded in the first World War, rolled toward the wall by his hospital bed and turned his back on the modern world, they take us into visions of reality profoundly different from the ones the modern world pays obeisance to. All four hold in common a complete devotion to holiness as essential to human life and to the traditional Catholic Church with its sacraments as the way to obtain that holiness. In a word, they understood sin and salvation. Lacking their literary credentials, they all may very well have been clocked up in asylums.<br /><br />As for Flannery O’Connor, what is most shocking to modern Catholics, Protestants, and literati alike, is constant underlying suggestion that certain grotesque southern characters may be closer to reality than the reader is, and that their opposites—with whom the modern reader might automatically feel kinship—are on the side of the devil. It’s that simple. In her very realistic portrait of the South (or stories about Original Sin, as she described them to a friend), O’Connor’s emphasis on violence is both physical and spiritual—a violent acceptance or rejection of the Word of God. The title of her final volume of stories, published posthumously, is <em>The Violent Bear It Away</em>, words taken from Jesus in Matthew 11:12 (Douai): “And from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and the violent bear it away.” When asked about this, Flannery explained that “you got to press hard against the age that presses hard against you.” This is similar to the explanation given by St. John Chrysostom, who says that the violent “are those who have such an earnest desire for Christ that they let nothing stand between themselves and faith in Him” [<em>Orthodox Study Bible</em>]. <br /><br />O’Connor’s grotesques tend to divide into those who, like Francis Tarwater and Hazel Motes, struggle with that absolute desire to reject the modern world and choose God, and those who, like Hulga, Rayber, and the Misfit, violently reject God and Gospel because they fear the Truth.<br /><br />The Christ-haunted figures the modernists reject as “grotesque” and “disturbing” represent everything that the modern secular humanist fears or despises. They believe in miracles; they take the Bible seriously; they believe in the reality of sin and the necessity of repentance; they absolutely distrust and reject psychology, sociology, and educationism (see note below); they consequently fear and distrust psychologizing and the manipulation of people’s minds; they are moral and metaphysical absolutists and sneer at relativism; and they are contemptuous of the materialism of modern American “culture.”<br /><br />Thus far, the Protestant reader may sense a real affinity with O’Connor’s vision. But, dear descendants of Luther and Calvin, there is more. Over and over O’Connor suggests that her Christ-haunted characters evince a deep desire for the penitential way of the Cross and for the sacraments of the traditional Church. Her characters desire real baptism, real penance, and real Communion. They are like the “pole-sitters” and hermits of the desert era, as she suggests many times. Hazel Motes puts rocks in his shoes, wraps himself in barbed wire, and blinds himself as he struggles to realize the kingdom.<br /><br />That is why, I believe, O’Connor deliberately chooses characters from the fringe movements in Southern Protestantism, from among the Bible-beaters, tent-revivalists, healers, and snake-handlers. In short, from the Pentecostalists of the backwoods, people who want to “get real” and are not likely to be happy amongst respectable conventuals of any denomination. They probably would not be happy amongst <em>Novus Ordo </em>Catholics with “nuanced” views. On a road trip in the 1990’s, I caught a Sunday broadcast in West Virginia on which I was astonished to hear a Pentecostal preacher issuing a challenge to the listener: “does your church give you the body and blood of Jesus Christ? Is your preacher saying the words that Jesus said and turning the bread and wine into His Body and Blood? Are you receiving the actual presence of Jesus like he said you needed to so you could have life within you?” He went on in this vein for many miles, making it clear that in his church, people had come to believe in the sacrament of the Eucharist as taught by the catholic churches. And as usual in Appalachia, I lost the station on a curve and could never find it again. <br /><br />Like her disturbing characters, Flannery O’Connor believed and lived in the truth of Christianity. She was, as much as she could be in her illness, a daily communicant and a person much attracted to the spirituality of the desert fathers. My suggestion is, if I have piqued your interest at all, avoid the critics and the study guides which, like the devils, are legion. Instead, read “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” “Good Country People,” “Everything That Rises Much Converge,” <em>Wise Blood</em>, and <em>The Violent Bear It Away</em>.<br /><br />Prepare thyself to be disturbed. <br /><br /><br /><br />[For Flannery’s acid views on modern educationism, see my article in the <em>New Oxford Review</em>: http://www.newoxfordreview.org/article.jsp?did=0510-craven.]kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-75640283416471283712011-04-11T18:47:00.001-07:002011-04-12T11:38:54.661-07:00On Opinions and Other Worthless Things<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm_mEaNeHThnwLR6ffm-Hse3TyzSaG9CeQvVICSpqMcvz-ZsKkqay-vJGEqLSgvmJul3ZVASdmGv09hgQsXMiC-k7TxIfwcLd33lxgYiiuFl6tdArwlDYkDfdqgYxoa0SLQBUIbz5GCzT1/s1600/plato.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 203px; height: 248px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm_mEaNeHThnwLR6ffm-Hse3TyzSaG9CeQvVICSpqMcvz-ZsKkqay-vJGEqLSgvmJul3ZVASdmGv09hgQsXMiC-k7TxIfwcLd33lxgYiiuFl6tdArwlDYkDfdqgYxoa0SLQBUIbz5GCzT1/s400/plato.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5594508645466976562" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr_j_8jSe-R8sUPM1dAnk5Z7u8KwBpZhc3ZzahXjVrsOSoGvHlRoRT16meg7jm_gIxcGTzz2nnX6GwXOUrQLmtnKW7egx2Z5i1QrIHsVzua2rY9Fbmp-hIoNPGl6-LxgSwKfL5nHjyFPeB/s1600/Z+generation.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 235px; height: 215px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr_j_8jSe-R8sUPM1dAnk5Z7u8KwBpZhc3ZzahXjVrsOSoGvHlRoRT16meg7jm_gIxcGTzz2nnX6GwXOUrQLmtnKW7egx2Z5i1QrIHsVzua2rY9Fbmp-hIoNPGl6-LxgSwKfL5nHjyFPeB/s400/Z+generation.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5594508048771083090" /></a><br /><br />“Senor, I speet upon your opinion” –imaginary character in an imaginary story.<br /><br />Since I started teaching writing (1961), I have assigned essays and heard students ask, as if taught by some mythical parrot in the student subconscious, “you just want our opinions, right?”<br /><br />Well, no, it is the last thing I want. Why would I? Opinions are worthless, including my own. Each of us can manufacture opinions by the second on any topic whatsoever. What, for example, is my opinion of aliens in outer space or of the latest ramblings of a demented movie star? My opinions of most things in physics, other than the verifiable pull of gravity on my body, are worthless. Endless coffee chats on such topics may be entertaining, but we know, we do know, do we not, that we are blowing air?<br /><br />At present in class, we are considering one kind of truth, moral truth, the kind of truth we speak of when we are thinking about things as just or unjust, good or evil, right and wrong; in short, on all those things that have to do with moral choice, or the way we live. On the very foundations of civilization, in fact. Hammurabi, Moses, Muhammed, Confucius, Charlemagne, Lycurgus, Solomon, Sequoyah, and our own founding fathers—all were moral absolutists who handed down moral laws by which peoples live in societies.<br /><br /><em>Truth</em>. Generations of teachers have now mocked the word, just as did the sophist philosophers in the streets of ancient Athens. “What is truth?” asked Pontius Pilate. And as Sir Francis Bacon wrote, “what is truth, asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.” The answer was, of course, standing right in front of him, and he sent Him off to be whipped.<br /><br />One can, a bit, sympathize with Pilate. He had seen the streets of Jerusalem and Rome jammed with teachers from a hundred nations, each claiming to have the truth. And when a starry-eyed or drug-glazed neighbor or friend shows up in our kitchen late at night with the breathless announcement that he or she has found “the truth,” we want to run for the hills.<br /><br />Our response to that neighbor, under our breaths, may be like that of Ecclesiastes, “all is vanity,” or as one translation has it, “all is breath.” And we try to talk them into coffee or sports talk.<br /><br />Fact is, the greatest philosophers spent most of their thinking in knocking down falsehoods. And false definitions. The great philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas followed the path of <em>via negativa</em>, that is, he was busy defining away things that were not true. Philosophically he knew that we could not say that we know God, we could only be intellectually sure of what is not God, which is a very useful thing indeed.<br /><br />Earlier, the father of philosophy, Plato, created the myth of the cave, in which opinions are shadows on the wall, vague and erroneous copies of copies of the real truths, which we can know only by long study and ascetical lives. Those who live in the cave are prisoners and slaves to these false images, these mere opinions. In his other dialogues, such as the <em>Meno</em>, Plato distinguished radically and sharply between opinion and knowledge. Opinion is also shifting and false, real knowledge gives us certainty.<br /><br />“Opinio” comes ultimately from Latin, but in English via a medieval French version of that word which means “believe.” In this sense of the word, we “opine” that something is true, possibly because it accords with our wishes or desires. (“An opinion is a subjective belief, and is the result of emotion or interpretation of facts. “–Wikipedia article on “opinion.”)<br /><br />This purely subjective element may therefore run exactly counter to truth, for the latter may be experienced as limiting, constricting, unfair, harsh. A prisoner sitting in a prison may be there for a lifetime of theft, and may now be reluctantly coming to the conviction that thievery is wrong. As Plato saw it, if the prisoners of the cave are led into the bright light of the sun, they will experience shock and pain. Only later may they come to delight in the truth.<br /><br />There is such a thing as the experience of truth. One may compare the kind of certitude delight in absolute “rightness” that one gets from learning the axioms of Euclidean geometry, as in “Two planes perpendicular to the same line must be parallel to each other.” There is no disputing these truths.<br /><br />Dr. Samuel Johnson, the great 18th century English writer, loved certain truths. As the author of the first English dictionary, on which all subsequent dictionaries have been based, he also loved precise definitions. Like the philosopher discussed above, he knew the importance of knocking down false definitions in order to get at the solidity of truth. Listen to him:<br /><br />“. . .to see things as they are. . . .the consolation which is drawn from truth, if any there be, is solid and durable; that which may be derived from errour, must be, like its original, fallacious and fugitive.” --Samuel Johnson, in a letter to his friend, Bennet Langton, 1758.<br /><br />“The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight awhile, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.” –Samuel Johnson, <em>Preface to Shakespeare</em>, 1765<br /><br />“The mind can only repose on the stability of truth,” he says. This great moral philosopher (read his short novel <em>Rasselas</em>) did not speak lightly.<br /> <br />I would suggest that you test your thinking in Essay # 6 against his standards: is the absolute truth you are defending one that gives you a sense of stability, solidity, durability? Is it universal, for all time?<br /><br />Otherwise you will not be able to write about it with conviction, sincerity, and logic.kencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-12974028315577669522011-04-11T18:24:00.000-07:002011-04-12T02:03:12.580-07:00Preparation for Essay # 6<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2K8ZVtPGtCp05-_Gy_m-Uqstz50MDlh4ciF2syVIlV_9gdq92sgVwA0LqdLz7HKkqNXHUXo-VhyqmzPJp6jfhYSiYJ99mT-BJJD8j-Ra6R1WAdasFkd-jf-JCIRLimfVLolzoxhJ_CRqr/s1600/relativism.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 160px; height: 243px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2K8ZVtPGtCp05-_Gy_m-Uqstz50MDlh4ciF2syVIlV_9gdq92sgVwA0LqdLz7HKkqNXHUXo-VhyqmzPJp6jfhYSiYJ99mT-BJJD8j-Ra6R1WAdasFkd-jf-JCIRLimfVLolzoxhJ_CRqr/s400/relativism.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5594503003199347186" /></a><br /><em><br /><br />The following essay and the preceding one were written for my "developmental" writing students at Nashville State Technical Community College in Cookeville, Tennessee. Their meaning may be transferable to many other contexts in the spiritual and cultural wasteland of the dying West.--RKC</em><br /><br />This little essay is entitled “preparation for essay # 6,” but it is also a sort of farewell to the college classroom. After thirty-some years of teaching in colleges and universities across the country and around the world, I am hanging up my professorial hat with these desultory thoughts on the “Z” generation, the students that currently sit in front of me and who, I believe, are fairly representative of college students across the country and in western countries generally.<br /><br />As to their ignorance, I have little to add. Scores of articles have been written on what they don’t know. For example, many born in 1992 have never heard of the Soviet Union or the fall of Communism or the Gulag Archipelago or the Cold War or Pol Pot. For that matter, few of them know of even the basic rules of English grammar, logic, or rhetoric. They cannot read, and do not read. They are not entirely at fault for this. Their parents, as well as the country at large, are responsible for the state of the family, for the extremely poor public education system and, moreover, for their own failure to offer massive resistance to the nonsense that now passes as culture in the West. Instead, they send them to college for one reason only. Not to become genuinely educated, to develop as human beings, to learn to think about the great and important things (the good, the true, the beautiful), but only to get a good job and make money.<br /> <br />If you are one of my students and are already angry at what I have said, good. If you are not yet angry, read on and I will do my best to make you angry. If I fail altogether, I shall have proved my major points about how you think and live; you will shrug off what I have to say; and you will pass out of my class secure in willful ignorance, apathy, <em>acedia</em>, and complacency. <br /> <br />I know that already. Last semester when I asked one student an important question, she responded this way, “I don’t know, and I don’t care.” Not caring is <em>acedia</em>, listed by early Christians as one of the seven deadly sins. In the 1960s, an editor of the <em>New Republic </em>wrote a book on the <em>Seven Deadly Sins </em>as they applied to our society. He was not a Christian, in fact anything but, but he knew the society was crashing down around his ears.<br /><br />Early in this semester I distributed to you what I called a “secret document” about education and about how you might go about getting one in these mindless and barbarous times. I am willing to bet that few of you have read it or will read it. <br /> <br />If you can sense my anger, you are on to something at least, though you may only care about it to get a good grade on essay # 6. You have heard it said over and over that you should not take things personally. I won’t say it. I <em>want</em> you to take my remarks personally because you are a person, a state and vocation of being that requires the full engagement of your emotions and faculties to begin asking radical questions about human existence and your own life. Frankly, if you are interested in a genuine education as described in the secret document, you would be well advised to leave college and find a place where you can take only technical courses to get a job. The last thing you should do is take courses in English or the Humanities as they are currently taught in 99% of the colleges and universities in the Western world.<br /><br />All that by the by, my main concern is with the state of your minds. Last year I published an essay about the state of a certain Honors program in a Tennessee university where I recently taught. My simple contention then (http://www.newoxfordreview.org/article.jsp?did=0510-craven) was that that program and the minds of university students generally are so permeated by the doctrine of relativism that it has become impossible to teach and learn with the ancient goals of studying the good, the true, and the beautiful. More than that, the doctrine of relativism is so deeply engrained in both student and faculty minds that it has taken on, beneath its fake pretense of universal tolerance, a ferocious hostility bent on eliminating anything and anyone that challenge its cultural supremacy. As a writer named Joseph Ratzinger noted recently, “we are living under the dictatorship of relativism.”<br /><br />I can hear your long yawn from here. Relativism? Who cares? What is it anyway? There is a simple synonym for relativism in our culture: “whatever.” In the Kingdom of Whatever, where Queen Relativa rules, the motto is, “I don’t want to go there, man.” As in many Fairy Tales, the key or the secret or hidden entrance or magic word is missing; the difference is, in the Kingdom of Whatever, it is forbidden to find it. This is a Kingdom of human beings who are willing to be slaves to any power that tells them what to think. That, I think, would be you. Most of you have already proved this to me.<br /><br />The relativist says, “all propositions are relative except this one,” thereby contradicting himself by making an absolute statement, the only absolute statement the relativist permits in the Kingdom of Whatever. By relativism, by the way, we ordinarily mean moral relativism (there are other kinds). The moral relativist believes that Hannibal Lecter’s moral views are just as valid as the moral views of Jesus Christ or Socrates. In ordinary conversations or discussions, relativism is usually expressed as, “it’s all relative, isn’t it?” Or, “people have different opinions; any one opinion is just as good as any other.” <br /> <br />What is the Kingdom of Relativa like to live in? It’s like living in constant fog in a world without roads or road signs. In such a world, the only way in which “value” can be established is through power.<br /><br />Relativism and relativists have been around as long as there have been human beings. Socrates met them in the streets of Athens where they called themselves Sophists, and spent his life (and death) refuting them. If you want to read an excellent modern refutation, see Peter Kreeft’s <em>A Refutation of Relativism</em>, which is written in a lively dialogue style anyone can follow. (Don’t everyone rush to the bookstore at once). If I could have, I would have chosen it as reading for this course, but the postmodernists who rule the Humanities departments of NSCC and most colleges will not permit it. When I chose an excellent text called <em>Being Human </em>for a course at Motlow College, I was told I was not allowed to do that. So I did not teach the course. Like Socrates, I went back to the streets.<br /><br />Postmodernists? Though relativism has been around as long as humans (I fancy that Cain was one), it is only recently that they have seized the domain of philosophy and from there, an entire culture. Beginning with the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and extending into modern French writers like Foucault, the relativists have subverted the entire western tradition of literature and philosophy with their view that written texts mean nothing but attempts to gain power. Very simply, that. A rant by Hitler and the <em>Book of Genesis </em>differ only in style. Most English teachers today have been thoroughly indoctrinated in postmodernism, which is a bit like majoring in nothingness. Culturally and educationally, postmodernism has meant a constant indoctrination in multiculturalism, radical feminism, and Marxism. To the end of turning students into pliable relativists—and, incidentally, amoral hedonists who view traditional institutions such as marriage and the family as fascist plots.<br /><br />As I have suggested in class, the Kingdom of Relativa finds its perfect expression in Aldous Huxley’s <em>Brave New World </em>(1931) which prophesies a society without love, marriage, natural procreation, or the desire to know truth, and which controls the human person from test-tube birth to euthanized death through narcotics and propaganda. Though this world is already well on its way, I don’t think most of you will offer it any resistance.<br /> <br />As a teacher, I have fought relativism and all it represents since I started teaching. Since I returned to the American classroom after six years in the Middle East and a number of years in the corporate workplace, I found that the Kingdom of Relativa had progressed geometrically; one might even say, infectiously, as if a great plague had settled on the culture.<br /><br />Ironically, those who think of themselves as nihilists, enemies of religion, and relativists are often given to absolutist rages. Witness Bill Maher in his recent (and admirable) tirade: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/04/08/maher_islam_only_religion_that_kills_you_when_you_disagree_with_them.html<br /><br />Essay # 6 is designed to do two things: one, to help you write a good, solid, interesting essay in which you are fully engaged as a thinking person; two, to help you experience what it’s like to unapologetically argue for a truth to which you are absolutely committed. That alone can be a gift to those living in the fogs of Relativa. Does that teach you writing? Yes, it does. That plus reading, reading, reading.<br /><br />Dr. Ken Craven, exiting Academekencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-11474028538342944992011-03-30T08:01:00.000-07:002011-03-30T14:25:04.580-07:00<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJpE309iFoWMkNw3J9fqjayVjPAbuJqdl36_LxWRq-6eoXylw10PbdL6MDtxFUNzcmbRGuNuB3u4lsofwsVucjbL71DEfd0jIl_Jy0j_2tXuPkpD6mLxj_OsZkUf5VE9cBIE4dtoBDQHwm/s1600/the-tale-of-peter-rabbit-20.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 305px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJpE309iFoWMkNw3J9fqjayVjPAbuJqdl36_LxWRq-6eoXylw10PbdL6MDtxFUNzcmbRGuNuB3u4lsofwsVucjbL71DEfd0jIl_Jy0j_2tXuPkpD6mLxj_OsZkUf5VE9cBIE4dtoBDQHwm/s400/the-tale-of-peter-rabbit-20.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5589888376885922930" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />March 29, 2011 1655 words<br />Sparta, TN<br /><br />Dear Miss Potter,<br /><br />I know you have a married name, but I and the world know you as Beatrix Potter, writer of famous children’s tales, and so I write you in that character. I have not seen the movie about your life starring Rene Zellweger, so that will not muddy up my image of you, which is of a young woman who had the courage to write and self-publish an illustrated children’s tale, <em>The Tale of Peter Rabbit</em>. You also loved nature and the country side of the Lake District in England, which you spent much of your life and income trying to preserve from the ravages of industrialism. <br /><br />I did not, however, know all this when I carried a tattered, much thumbed <em>The Tale of Peter Rabbit</em> home from the public library sometime in the 1940s. What a wonderful thing, a new book to read, ponder, and drowse over, with pictures that stirred my imagination. In those days children could do that—grow in heart and imagination by exploring tales that had no reason for being other than being good tales! I know now that unlike many of your counterparts in that time, you did not write lecturing, moralistic stories designed to shape little kids into priggish adults. If you lived now, I am sure you would be equally horrified to find that children’s literature today has been taken over by equally priggish adults intent on creating stories that inculcate political correctness. Publishers create iron grids of expectations, and the writers of children’s literature follow them slavishly to win prizes and the endorsements of politically correct magazines. Your stories, I might add, as well as the stories of Joel Chandler’s <em>Uncle Remus</em>, which you very much loved, would not pass editorial muster today. In fact, children are now denied the beauty and wisdom of those stories because they are “offensive” to some people, probably the same people who want to burn <em>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.</em><br /><br />How sad, and even, how predictable. Soaked in the political correctness of public school and the daily drumbeats of the ”media,” children today do not have the escape that old tales and fairy stories gave me—and great minds like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote compelling stories that continue to intrigue the minds of the young. You followed the poetics of Aristotle, and in a few broad brushstrokes created imitations of life that carry images that go straight into the heart.<br /><br />Dear Miss Potter, it is about that very thing that I now write you. Over and over I read the <em>The Tale of Peter Rabbit</em>, and I have remembered it ever since. To set the stage for the image I want to focus on—the one that has stuck with me more than any other—let me recall the way you begin your story. The four little rabbits—Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter—live with their mother in a sand bank. Right away we learn that these child rabbits are fatherless and that they became fatherless when their father ventured into Mr. McGregor’s garden where, as the mother tells it, he had an “accident” and was “put into a pie by Mrs. McGregor.”<br /><br />Mrs. McGregor does not linger on this grisly detail, which undoubtedly would be expunged by today’s super-sensitive theorists of child-raising. These are the facts as she tells them, though it is interesting that she calls it an “accident,” but nevertheless warns the young rabbits against going into that garden and getting into “mischief.”<br /><br />Now all four rabbits heard the warning and three of them obeyed. Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail—the kind of horrible names one now sees on name cards at Walmart—are immediately good little bunnies who “went down the lane the gather blackberries.” When I read this now, two bells go off for me. In my perhaps jaded view, I immediately dislike these good little obedient bunnies. The other bell went off in Peter, “who was very naughty,” and who immediately “ran straightaway to Mr. McGregor’s garden and squeezed under the gate. “<br /><br />Peter, who has a good solid Christian name and not a simpy Walmart name, immediately captured my sympathy as someone like me, who would do the stupid but naughty thing and risk punishment to pursue the momentary attraction of freedom and adventure. Most often in my childhood and youth, I did not follow the lure Peter follows, but it was always there, and I believe it is always there in most of us, eh? Freedom isn’t freedom unless we have the possibility of breaking the rules or trespassing the boundaries set for us. At the moment, I am not interested in pursuing the theological truths that lie behind this. Suffice to say, there would be no good stories if heroes and heroines did not often resemble Peter and his mad dash for the forbidden fruits and vegetables.<br /><br />These soon pall since, as is very real also, Peter eats too much and becomes sick. Rounding the cucumber frame, he meets Mr. McGregor head on, who calls out, “stop thief.” Miss Potter, you portray Mr. McGregor as neither a bad man nor a rabbit-hater. He’s simply a farmer guarding his hard-earned produce. He is <em>nemesis</em> for Peter, but simply because that is the way things are: rabbits are thieves and gardeners are people much put upon and who defend themselves by every means possible. Peter, following his father’s footsteps, is about to meet some realities he had not figured on: i.e., the hardness of an unforgiving world that enjoys carrying rabbit’s feet on key chains and would be happy to bake him into a pie.<br /><br />As a child reader, I am in complete identification with Peter: crying, lost, worried about his torn clothes, and terrified. To make matters worse he hides in a watering can and is soaking wet. McGregor gives up the chase but Peter is desperate, having no idea of which way to go. Like Dante at the beginning of the <em>Divine Comedy</em>, he finds himself alone and confused, unable to find the way. Dante is fortunate, however, in meeting his guide Virgil, while Peter has no such luck or grace at the moment. <br /><br />Instead—and here, Miss Potter, is the point at which you most engaged my imagination—Peter is really lost and miserable. Looking all around, Peter cannot find a way. Who, as a child, has not found himself in such a bind? Some story writers would immediately introduce a miracle or happy happenstance, and Peter would be delivered, though he would most likely be lectured to for the benefit of every child that ever tried the boundaries set by his home and parents. O bad Peter! <br /><br /><em>An old mouse was running in and out over the stone doorstep, carrying peas and beans to her family in the wood. Peter asked her way to the gate, but she had such a large pea in her mouth that she could not answer. She only shook her head at him. Peter began to cry.</em><br /><br />Miss Potter, this image of Peter made a profound impression on me when I was a child, an impression made deeper by the accompanying picture of a fat old mouse too busy with her own life to even respond to a question. As children we are always seeking answers to our questions and demands, but don’t always get them. But that does not explain the real depth of response I had to this brilliant image. That would simply be “interpretation,” and God be praised, young children’s imaginations are spared of that literary curse. <br /><br />In appreciation of what you did in creating that image, what I can say is, simply, true! True right down to my imaginative toes! My life has since been filled with meeting mice with peas in their mouths, but I have had to learn that there is nothing malevolent in them as there was no malevolence in Mr. McGregor. Both were busy trying to feed their own families, and sometimes I, like Peter, am a nuisance to them. <br /><br />Peter does have learn the hard way (and it is interesting in a later tale you showed Peter as the manager of his own garden!) but not by being beaten to death with easy moralisms. He learns directly from his experience that one has to be smart in other people’s gardens. Nor is Peter made immediately a good little bunny like his siblings. In <em>The Tale of Benjamin Bunny</em>, he is coaxed into another venture into McGregor’s garden by the guileless Benjamin (he’s the kid down the block who is always trying to talk you into something), but he is very wary and afraid this time. More, there is a very telling detail: when Benjamin assures Peter that there is no danger because the McGregors are not at home, and Mrs. McGregor went off wearing her best bonnet, “Peter said he hoped it would rain.” <br /><br />That’s not a sadder but wiser Peter, but a Peter that is, well, capable of a bit of honest rancor. Peter had also gone along with his crony Benjamin because, for one thing, he thought his mother was about to give him another dose of chamomile tea. In the end, Peter is able to recover the clothes Mr. McGregor has used for a scarecrow and is forgiven by his mother despite the fact that he has again been naughty in getting those clothes back. No great moral final scenes, no nostrums!<br /><br />No wonder, Miss Potter, that you have been hailed as a “modern” writer and classed with Ernest Hemingway. While not exactly an anti-hero, Peter is definitely “one of us,” in Joseph Conrad’s terms, a fellow we know because we know what it's like to be him, instead of those goody-goodies Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail. Let them eat their blackberries and milk and prattle about Peter’s misfortunes.<br /><br />We Peters, we may be exhausted and unwell after a forbidden adventure, but we know a thing or two. As did you, Miss Potter.<br /><br />Sincerely,<br />Ken Cravenkencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1531304537544244426.post-57580701821183294732010-12-09T12:56:00.000-08:002010-12-09T16:51:00.758-08:00Refuse<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4FmxVMZM0_8wYCWIbry9w_m6Y1f828HPiYivy8FWdlgUUlUA2ADK6TFGeqQkWAHAcxbJP3N_JzEEIdQQA7Ols8Yi8fb1Nm9E5WleuvXLnxtJPgUmMo64a0FYC-8nSkg-uML6HQrW2-tIH/s1600/coal+miner.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 183px; height: 276px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4FmxVMZM0_8wYCWIbry9w_m6Y1f828HPiYivy8FWdlgUUlUA2ADK6TFGeqQkWAHAcxbJP3N_JzEEIdQQA7Ols8Yi8fb1Nm9E5WleuvXLnxtJPgUmMo64a0FYC-8nSkg-uML6HQrW2-tIH/s400/coal+miner.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548789399931681282" /></a><br /><br /><em>Note: the following is a reflective autobiographical essay, written as an example for my students in an English composition class at Nashville State Community College. It may be read in conjunction with the blog entries for October 4 and September 16, which were written for the same purpose. Together they form a window into my life as a child and young man.</em> <br /><br /><strong>Refuse</strong> <br /><br />By Ken Craven<br /><br />He dreaded going back home. But he was going.<br /><br />“Back home,” a bite too big to swallow. Then he smelled the burning, as if he were buried neck deep in an ash heap, unable to move his arms. The smell of burning bituminous coal, especially in its cheaper grades and even cheaper relations—gob, tailings, sludge, slurry, and slag—was a memory path back into home, which was a place hard to focus. They had lived in several houses, all close to the railroad. All close to coal.<br /><br />There was that day when a garbage truck blundering through the alley behind the coal pile where he was playing knocked over the heavy fence, pinning him between two beams. He lay there, his lungs heaving through tears, the bugs crawling over his eyelids, his face jammed against the coal dust and cinders. That was home too.<br /><br />He held the wheel tight as his pickup rolled around the curves. He did not know if he could swallow home whole this time but he knew the roads he had chosen would take him deep into the unavoidable memories. <br /><br /><em>He could not recall asking many questions of his parents. It was more a constant hungry feeling of questions he did not know how to ask. Why is fire? If God is all power, what is the thunder of the steam locomotive? The trains that carry the tanks and cannons and soldiers and sailors east to Norfolk, what do they have to do with my uncle sweating with malaria in a hotel? <br /> <br />One night they stared out the window through the lace curtains his mother tried so desperately to keep white and ungrimed by the cinders from chuffing smokestacks. Sitting warm by the clanking radiator with her and his sister, he watched balls of fire burst upward from the burning Sunbeam Bread bakery on the north side, across the railroad yard, one at a time, like the shells of war.<br /><br />“When will we go to Kentucky?” was the closest he could get to a real question.<br /><br />“In the summer,” his mother would answer, but the answer made no sense, for summers here and there were different things, like smoke and flowers.</em><br /><br />Now, driving up past the breaks of the Big Sandy, he could not recall that St. Augustine, the philosopher of memory, had much to say on the memory of smells. His “burning, burning, burning, to Carthage then I came” was the burning of lust, the destroyer of his soul. Somewhere ahead, in the very center of the coal kingdom, a small church in Spanish gothic style, was another of the centers of his soul. The two burnings somehow converged for him, the one having awakened as he, daily, inhaled the choking brown smoke of the hell that coal produced. And envisioned the fires of hell that the priest and nuns pictured as endless and sure punishments for mortal sins. The image the nuns enjoyed giving was a mountain of sand, one tiny grain of which was moved by a bird each day, and after a million years of this, hell would have just begun. But sand or slag, they were mountains in his nightmares, and when he was found sleep walking, he had to be waked from his counting. <br /><br />The decision to turn came with the sudden force of a magnet. The quickest and best way from central Tennessee was north through Kentucky on the interstates, but at Lexington he suddenly turned east on the Mountain Parkway and drove grimly toward Pikeville. From there it would be a hundred miles on two-lane roads through one hollow after another until he entered the dark world of southern West Virginia. Dark, end of the world. He could think of it no other way. Even growing up on the streets of Bluefield, West Virginia, the railroad hub of the coal fields, the area south and west of the city was always black and harsh and evil. When he read the <em>Lord of the Rings </em>decades later, he already knew Mordor: it was southwest of Bluefield. The old wizard of Middle Earth came out the industrial wastes of his youth and the trenches of WW I knowing the twentieth century would be a story of refuse and refusals. <br /><br />The road home would pass near Buffalo Creek, where a mountain of slag collapsed from sheer exhaustion in 1973, releasing a furious 30-ft-high wall of of slimy, oily sludge into a long hollow, and washing hundreds of homes and people into oblivion. On a return home that year, he came from technicolor Puerto Rico to meet a capitalist version of sin: the refuse dam created by neglect and denial. Refuse: refusal.<br /><br />Once a year his parents would take him at eleven at night to the Norfolk & Western station to catch No. 3 to Cincinnati, a hundred or so miles west through the coal mining lands. A hundred tunnels. Towns black except for a few yellow street lights. Rattling bridges over the black waters of the Coal River. The red glow of thousands of coke ovens. And in the morning, from the great Union Station in Cincinnati, either the L&N or the Southern (The Southern Serves the South) into the bluegrass of Louisville or Danville, a bright, sunny world of green rivers and tobacco fields. Heaven.<br /><br /><em>The yellow GMC bus came down the street, early morning, when he was out to deliver papers on the east side. Where Boone turned into Wyoming, he could see them, miners in work hats with lights, their faces grimy. White eyes and teeth. Like black-face minstrels, like Silas Greene from New Orleans, whose train car came once a year to do shows. <br /><br />“How come their faces are dirty in the morning?” “I guess they figure there’s no need to wash until Saturday,” his mother answered. <br /><br />He wondered what their sheets looked like. When he collected for the paper at their houses, the insides smelled yellow and sour. He could imagine these miners entering the mine elevator, going down into the blackness of the earth. Across the valley, a Mallet engine was struggling up the grade, a hundred seventy-five ton cars in tow, westward bound. The question in his mind would not form into words. So he imagined shell bursts on the ridge on the north side. It was something to do, lob a newspaper, imagine a shell burst.</em><br /><br />In Kentucky, everything was different: the sky, the hills, the smells. Nothing was jagged or grinding. Back then he would have been hard put to say the differences. In Bluefield there was always the sound of the trains, the billowing clouds of smoke from the smokestacks, the night glare of fireboxes, the chuff-chuffing of engines on the long-haul grades, the clanging of bells and shrieking of steam whistles, the endless banging of couplings, and always the gritty cinders hitting your eyes as you inhaled the smell of burning coal.<br /><br /><em>Sometime when he was four or five the whole family sometimes crouched in the living room by the Westinghouse radio. They called it a black out. They said Hitler had placed the railroad center of Bluefield on his bombing list. They listened to the news on the local radio station while they could still hear the switch engines on the tracks ding-dinging their small bells as they hustled cars into long lines, making up trains for east and west. Finally, after an age of waiting, the steam whistles blew on the rail yard and the lights were back on.</em><br /><br />When you passed the church, you were supposed to cross yourself and if you wanted to, to “make a visit.” Inside it was dark but in the sanctuary the red lamp was always burning. The church was cold in the winter, sometimes you could see your breath. He was there in the Tabernacle, waiting for you. On All Souls Day if you prayed five Our Fathers and five Hail Mary’s and five Glory Be’s, a soul in purgatory could be released into heaven and the angels would sing. The pews were hard wood and your knees hurt in the November cold. He felt guilty for only staying a while. But the rustle of coats and coughing did not obscure the one thing: <em>He</em> was there if the sanctuary lamp burned, and He knew what was going on inside you. When he passed the church to deliver his newspapers, he knew the red lamp was lighted in the dark church. In the rail yard, you could sometimes see the fires burning hot and red in the locomotive fire boxes. At home, he crept out in the morning and lit the fire in the fireplace grate; first the newspaper and wood crackled, then the coal caught fire and smoked, then the red warm glow of heat reached the clothes, which he and his sister hung on chairs to heat before they dressed for Sacred Heart school where, in every room, the heart of Jesus burned in <em>His</em> chest.<br /><br />When he drove into Bluefield from the southeast, passing Cinder Bottom where the whorehouses and honky tonks had served the coal fields for generations, he went right up to Giles Street. It was early morning and as usual the fogs rolled down into hollows or rose up in mists from the springs and creeks. The railroad was still there and still busy with long coal trains but the great Mallet locomotives were gone. In their place the dull, boring diesels throbbed without poetry or steam. <br /> <br />It’s a short, twisting street, a few city blocks long. Mostly railroad workers once lived here, brakeman and conductors, their houses neat with small gardens and grape arbors. Now it looked like an apocalyptic movie. The house where he had lived until he was eleven, a grand old three-story with attics and mysterious cellars, was mostly gutted, trash piled in the yard, abandoned car bodies half-buried in the ground. Farther up, a line of houses that appeared to have been bombed from the air. Crack dens, rat-infested apartments. When he got out and tried to walk the street to collect memories, a few homies jangled out, their bodies shaking and jiving, and shouted obscenities at him. “What you doing up here, honky? Get your ass out, now, white boy.” A few rocks and beer cans flew past his head. The lore he knew from his sister was that this was a lost zone, even the cops would only drive through once in a while. The yard where he had played and where his dad had built a large chicken coop to feed them during WW II was gone. The neighbors were gone. The streetcars were gone. Sanity was gone. There was only the dull, hopeless throbbing of the diesels and the hatefulness of the people who lived there. <br /> <br />He stopped at Sacred Heart Church which was, barely, still there. When he had been an altar boy, he had heard Bishop Swint preach one Sunday. Pointing to the columns and the soaring apse, he said “don’t ever let anyone change this church. This church is one of the most beautiful specimens of architecture in the diocese.” Did he know something in the early 1950s we didn’t know? After Father Burke, the parish had been afflicted with a series of priests who cared nothing for the Spanish gothic and less for the Church Universal. Like many other desecrators and wreckovators in the wake of Vatican II, they had thrown beautiful vestments and chalices and other sacred things into trash heaps. He was only able to enter because a few people were cleaning, talking at the top of their voices in a church that had always been hushed with reverence when he was growing up.<br /><br />“Isn’t the Blessed Sacrament in the Tabernacle? The lamp is lit.” <br /> <br />A man with a vacuum cleaner laughed. “There’s no liturgy now. We’re cleaning.” What a joke. He knew there would be no silence during the “liturgy” either, for the happy-clappy moderns detested it as a medieval relic.<br /><br />He made a quick tour. He already knew the story. The magnificent carved wood confessional had been turned into a bathroom, the ornate altar rail where he had knelt for Holy Communion was gone. Atrocious banners covered up what was left of art. What had threatened to be the worst had been averted when one of the priests was found to be unfaithful to his vow of chastity and had been moved to another parish. A flaming “charismatic,” he had desired to completely renovate the church by placing the altar in the center of the nave so that he could spin about on stiletto heels, communing with the faithful in all directions like a dervish. He had also removed the huge crucifix from the apse, though a few irate old-timers had restored it while he was out of town. <br /><br />The bell tower was sealed off as condemned,the bell ropes he had seen lift old Joe the Sicilian janitor off the floor on Easter dangled uselessly amid cobwebs. A whole series of priests had confused the parishioners with theological cobwebs as much as they had garbled the liturgy and wrecked the architecture. The four panels on either side of the Tabernacle were still there, though, ignored and isolated: the angels held tablets reading “I have loved, O Lord/The Beauty of Thy House/And the Place/Where Thy Glory Dwelleth.”<br /><br />There are many kinds of refuse, he reflected as he drove toward his sister’s decaying house. The industrial waste and the strip mines. The human waste he knew on the streets, the sick and wounded from the mines, the wounded from the church, the wounded lands. He thought also of his father, dead at 55 of acute emphysema. Like hundreds of thousands of miners, he had been viewed as expendable by the corporation he worked for. <br /><br />Refuse. The story of the Appalachian highlands—but also the story of modern man. Soon, with abortion and infanticide at one end and euthanasia at the other, human beings would be unable to tell the difference between life and death. Heaps of fetuses and aged bodies for the crematoria.<br /><br />He wanted to kneel in a real church and pray to Him, Lord, have mercy on us.<br /><br />©Copyright 2010 R. Kenton Cravenkencravenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509434343829971383noreply@blogger.com0