Many will prophesy in my name

It's easy to be disheartened by the religious right, especially since they seem to get so much air time, and especially now that Michele Bachmann is a surprising frontrunner in the 2012 GOP field, bringing the extreme and the mainstream ever closer. Unlike Bush, whom Alan Wolfe calls ‘capable of finding God on his side no matter which side he was on,' the new breed seem less supple, with their sights on full blown theocracy. Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Beast employs the useful term ‘Christianist' to distinguish these advocates of a Christian jihad from followers of Christ. While Christianists are befouling and befuddling the air waves, I would rather find refreshment in other channels than give their nonsense the credit of rational attention. Instead, I'll be looking for thoughtful and literate commentary from people like Rowan Williams, who gave this lovely explanation of grace in a recent address to a conference on Christianity and literature:

“If the text of a native language is to be in some sense hospitable ... it must be a text with a shadow or margin, conscious of a strangeness that surrounds it and is not captured by it, a strangeness that interprets it or at least offers the possibility of a meaning to be uncovered, on the far side of questioning. And the paradoxical conclusion is that the person who 'inhabits' with integrity the place where they find themselves, in such a way as to make it possible for others to inhabit it in peaceable company with them is always the person who is aware of the possibility of an alien yet recognizable judgement being passed, aware of the stranger already sensed in the self's territory. To be, in the Augustinian phrase, a question to oneself is what makes it possible to be oneself without anxiety and so with the possibility of welcome for the other.”

Or from novelist Tobias Wolff, a Catholic, who described his own sense of grace at work:

“The things that touch me are not sectarian. What are they, then? Gracious, I guess. I respond to something gracious in the writer. That doesn’t mean nice, or kind, or consoling, though it can have that effect. It has to do with a certain courage and verve and even sense of play in facing things as they are ... To the extent that I can feel the presence of grace—the operation of some kind of grace in the world—I often feel it in music ... where the words God or revolution or even soul are not to be heard. And what does music accomplish, after all? Can it be said to offer a plan for improving us, can it be said to give us new political visions, can it be said to make an argument for this or that faith? No. It is a good purely in itself, and that is a sufficient justification for its existence.”

Amen.

Little stalk without wrinkle

Today I'm going to Melbourne to meet my small nephew, now three weeks old. I probably won't find Sylvia Plath's poem “Child” in a Hallmark card, but it has a truth and troubled joy about it that I find moving. It ends uneasily, but it has said something astonishing about childhood.

Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new

Whose names you meditate ---
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little

Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.

Related news

Another busy week in which my Google Reader threw up more than I could blog about, so here’s a quick digest.

1. Publisher Melville House is releasing a hybrid of book and ebook. Point your smart phone at a barcode on the book’s back to get what they're calling “illuminations”: essays, extracts, maps, cartoons, recipes, photographs, paintings that relate to the text. Great, but I worry that more and more at our fingertips means less and less in our heads. An illuminated book might spell a darkened intellect.


2. Speaking of darkness, “It was a dark and stormy night” seems to me a fine way to begin a novel, but the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest, named for the author who pioneered this opening gambit, disagrees. Its annual challenge to better (worsen?) this corker has produced some great (awful) first lines.


3. Speaking of opening gambits, according to this article the junk we've left in space includes some zany 1970s attempts at intergalatic diplomacy. My favourite is the Pioneer probes’ golden plaques, which advertise our whereabouts in space, and have a picture of a naked couple raising their hands in a gesture (we assume) of friendship. You have to admire their wild optimism.


4. Speaking of optimism, I’ve noticed that when you type “synonyms for...” into Google, it suggests “nice,” “good,” “happy,” “amazing,” “beautiful” as the words you’re most likely to be looking for. What does this say about our state of mind? Or our vocabularies?


5. Speaking of vocabularies, I'm thinking of taking a leaf from Darryl Campbell, who rejects book review cliches in favour of more imaginative superlatives. Among other things, he advocates using past presidents as adjectival modifiers: a book might have “Taft-like excess,” “Cleveland-esque genre-bending”or “Clintonian eroticism.”


6. Speaking of presidents, as well as a shiny new debt ceiling, and a new credit rating, America has a new poet laureate. A small reassurance that poetry matters, even if money matters more.


7. Speaking of money, in yet another example of the soulless insensitivity of banks, my bank won't let me put exclamation marks in the description field for a funds transfer. I protest against this stifling of creativity, emotion, exuberance, this suppression of a simple expression of human joy, in my transferring of funds.

Thank you and good night.

Unresting, unhasting and silent as light

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation…while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

The Book of Job opens Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, and its questions and choruses inhabit the whole film. In particular, “Where were you?” echoes. It is the question asked of God, and it is also God’s answer. Other questions, whispered, intimate, draw lines through the film’s chaotic beauty. Where are you? What are we to you? Why should I be good? How can I get back to where they are? These questions resonate through the life of an ordinary family, reckoned in aeons, honeycombed with oppositions: grace and nature, mother and father, innocence and knowledge, music and silence. One brother’s death brings memories throbbing to the surface and makes the questions urgent. The response, flung across the heavens, is a shout of joy.

For me the film has a correlative in a well-known nineteenth-century hymn by Walter Chalmers Smith. Without the chaos and silence of the film, the hymn enacts the same truths: to grow is to die, yet life’s mystery is bright, not dark.

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most blessèd, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty, victorious, thy great Name we praise.

Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light,
Nor wanting, nor wasting, thou rulest in might;
Thy justice like mountains high soaring above
Thy clouds which are fountains of goodness and love.

To all life thou givest—to both great and small;
In all life thou livest, the true life of all;
We blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree,
And wither and perish—but naught changeth thee.

Great Father of glory, pure Father of light,
Thine angels adore thee, all veiling their sight;
All laud we would render: O help us to see
’Tis only the splendour of light hideth thee.

Cracked

Since posting about creativity versus health, I've been feeling some misgiving, deepened by reading Virginia Woolf. Because it's not exactly a choice, is it? Whether to be mad or not. And mental health and good behaviour are not always what they're cracked up to be.  They are guarantors of happiness only insofar as happiness is constituted in conformity, in treading the via media. I think as I get older I'm growing less tolerant of social transgression, more plaintive about disturbance of the peace. This happens, no doubt, when we get comfortable, when we become elder to the new generation. But when we become elder still, we face the final unravelling of everything we've woven so tightly, so decorously round ourselves.

Dementia, the long goodbye, is a horrible darkness, but in some cases that darkness is ever so slightly illuminated by creation. Dementia patients can find in themselves a sudden sensitivity to art, a sudden ability to paint or compose that they never had before. Ravel's Bolero is the notable example: a piece made by a demented mind that has a driving rhythm and a strange, lurching magnificence. We would be poorer without it. Oliver Sacks has been criticised for exploiting his patients' stories of neural anomaly, but I think he's added immeasurably to our stock of human experience. Experiences on the perilous edge of human consciousness, which we might never know except by reading about them, challenge our notions of what it means to be human, what it means to be healthy or happy or good, how much our notions of normal are constituted in perception. And Woolf, gifted and afflicted, lyrically afloat in the full-fed stream of her consciousness, wrote at a depth few of us reach. We would be poorer without her.

She's one of many artists - the ones Sonya Chung was harking back to - that embody Shakespeare's compounding of the lunatic, the lover and the poet. And of course, as the poets would testify, we would be poorer without a spectrum of experience that involves the unconforming, the unbodied, the inexplicable. Keats saw it in Shakespeare, but the coinage, ‘negative capability,' is his. “When man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." When experience of all kinds is welcome evidence of existence, and the fuel of creative fire. While I might personally fear an exile from the middle way, collectively we need the experience of these border rangers. We need the negatively capable to testify to the enduring mystery of existence. To find the hard shell of normal and crack it open.