You and Tobias are hopping around in the sprinkler. The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine. That does occur in nature, but it is rare. When I was in seminary I used to go sometimes to watch the Baptists down at the river. It was something to see the preacher lifting the one who was being baptized up out of the water and the water pouring off the garments and the hair. It did look like a birth or a resurrection. For us the water just heightens the touch of the pastor's hand on the sweet bones of the head, sort of like making an electrical connection. I've always loved to baptize people, though I have sometimes wished there were more shimmer and splash involved in the way we go about it. Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.
--from the novel Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Christ is being baptized. The one who is Christ is there, and the one who is John, and the dim other poeple stadning on cobbles or sitting on beach logs back from the bay. These are ordinary people--if I am one now, if those are ordinary sheep singing a song in the pasture.
The two men are bare to the waist. The one walks him into the water, and holds him under. His hand is one his neck. Christ is coiled and white under the water, standing on stones.
He lifts from the water. Water beads on his shoulders. I see the water in balls as heavy as planets, a billion beads of water as weighty as worlds, and he lifts them up on his back as he rises. He stands wet in the water. Each one bead is transparent, and each has a world, or the same world, light and alive and apparent inside the drop; it is all there ever could be, moving at once, past and future, and all the people. I can look into any sphere and see people stream past me, and cool my eyes with colors and the sight of the world in spectacle perishing ever, and ever renewed. I do; I deepen into a drop and see all that time contains, all the faces and deeps of the worlds and all the earth's contents, every landscape and room, everything living or made or fashioned, all past and future stars, and especially faces, faces like the cells of everything, faces pouring past me talking, and going, and gone. And I am gone.
For outside, it is bright. The surface of things outside the drops has fused. Christ himself and the others, and the brown warm wind, and hair, sky, the beach, the shattered water--all this has fused. It is the one glare of holiness; it is bare and unspeakable. There is no speech nor language; there is nothing, no one thing, nor motion, nor time. There is only this everything. There is only this, and its bright and multiple noise.
--from Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard
Monday, September 19, 2011
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Books. MANY Books.
Solomon:
"Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh."
--Ecclesiastes 12:12
John:
"And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written."
--John 21:25
(A bit of difference in the tones, eh? And with good reason.)
(Both verses from the King James translation, just because I love the style.)
"Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh."
--Ecclesiastes 12:12
John:
"And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written."
--John 21:25
(A bit of difference in the tones, eh? And with good reason.)
(Both verses from the King James translation, just because I love the style.)
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Knowing, Naming, and Wonder
T.S. Eliot:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
--Four Quartets,"Little Gidding" ll. 239-242
G.K. Chesterton:
I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas . . . There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? . . . What could be more glorious than to brace one's self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales. This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers . . . How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? . . . how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?
--Orthodoxy
T.S. Eliot:
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
And easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning . . .
--Four Quartets, "Little Gidding" ll. 216-224
Annie Dillard:
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood-carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new terriotry. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year . . .
The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool.
--The Writing Life
Walker Percy:
I remember hunting as a boy in south Alabama with my father and brother and a Negro guide. At the edge of some woods we saw a wonderful bird. He flew as swift and straight as an arrow, then all of a sudden folded his wings and dropped like a stone into the woods. I asked what the bird was. The guide said it was a blue-dollar hawk. Later my father told me the Negroes had got it wrong: It was really a blue darter hawk. I can still remember my disappointment at the correction . . .
The first notable moment occurred when [the boy] saw the bird. What struck him at once was the extremely distinctive character of the bird's flight--its very great speed, the effect of alternation of the wings, the sudden plummeting into the woods. The so distincitive and incommunicable something--the word which occurs to one is Hopkins's "inscape"--the boy perceived perfectly. It is this very uniqueness which Hopkins specifies in inscape: "the unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, selving."
The next moment is, for our purposes, the most remarkable of all, because it can receive no explanation in the conventional sign theory of meaning. The boy, having perfectly perceived the flight of the hawk, now suffers a sort of disability, a tension, even a sense of imminence! He puts the peculiar question, What is that bird? and puts it importunately. He is really anxious to know. But to know what? What sort of answer does he hope to hear? What in fact is the meaning of his extraordinary question? Why does he want an answer at all? He has already apprehended the hawk in the vividest, most plenary way--a sight he will never forget as long as he lives. What more will he know by having the bird named? . . .
. . . Everyone has a blue-dollar hawk in his childhood, especially if he grew up in the South or West, where place names are so prone to poetic corruption . . .
But the question on which everything depends and which is too often assumed to be settled without ever having been asked is this: Given this situation and its two characteristics upon which all agree, the peculiar presence or distinctiveness of the object beheld and the peculiar need of the beholder--is this "need" and its satisfaction instrumental or ontological? That is to say, is it the function of metaphor merely to diminish tension, or is it a discoverer of being? . . .
. . . We come back to the "right" and "wrong" of the blue-dollar hawk and blue darter hawk . . . [The boy's] mind, which had really suffered a sort of hunger (an ontological hunger?), now has something to feast on. The bird is, he is told, a blue-dollar hawk. Two conditions, it will be noticed, must be met if the naming is to succeed. There must be an authority behind it--if the boy's brother had made up the name on the spur of the moment, it wouldn't have worked. Naming is more than a matter of semantic "rule." But apparently there must also be--and here is the scandal--an element of obscurity about the name. The boy can't help but be disappointed by the logical modifier, blue darter hawk--he feels that although he has asked what the bird is, his father has only told him what it does . . . Blue-dollar is not applicable as a modifier at all, for it refers to something else besides the bird, a something which occupies the same ontological status as the bird. Blue darter tells us something about the bird, what it does, what its color is; blue-dollar tells, or the boy hopes it will tell, what the bird is. For this ontological pairing, or, if you prefer, "error" of identification of word and thing, is the only possible way in which the apprehended nature of the bird, its inscape, can be validated as being what it is . . . This is why, as Marcel observed, when I ask what something is, I am more satisfied to be given a name even if the name means nothing to me (especially if?), than to be given a scientific classification. Shelley said that poetry pointed out the before unapprehended relations of things. Wouldn't it be closer to the case to say that poetry validates that which has already been privately apprehended but has gone unformulated for both of us?
--"Metaphor as Mistake," in The Message In The Bottle (italics in original)
(Orthodoxy--San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995. Quote is from pp. 13-14.
The Writing Life--New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Quote is from p. 3.
The Message In The Bottle--New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. Quote is from pp. 64-72.)
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
--Four Quartets,"Little Gidding" ll. 239-242
G.K. Chesterton:
I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas . . . There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? . . . What could be more glorious than to brace one's self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales. This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers . . . How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? . . . how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?
--Orthodoxy
T.S. Eliot:
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
And easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning . . .
--Four Quartets, "Little Gidding" ll. 216-224
Annie Dillard:
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood-carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new terriotry. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year . . .
The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool.
--The Writing Life
Walker Percy:
I remember hunting as a boy in south Alabama with my father and brother and a Negro guide. At the edge of some woods we saw a wonderful bird. He flew as swift and straight as an arrow, then all of a sudden folded his wings and dropped like a stone into the woods. I asked what the bird was. The guide said it was a blue-dollar hawk. Later my father told me the Negroes had got it wrong: It was really a blue darter hawk. I can still remember my disappointment at the correction . . .
The first notable moment occurred when [the boy] saw the bird. What struck him at once was the extremely distinctive character of the bird's flight--its very great speed, the effect of alternation of the wings, the sudden plummeting into the woods. The so distincitive and incommunicable something--the word which occurs to one is Hopkins's "inscape"--the boy perceived perfectly. It is this very uniqueness which Hopkins specifies in inscape: "the unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, selving."
The next moment is, for our purposes, the most remarkable of all, because it can receive no explanation in the conventional sign theory of meaning. The boy, having perfectly perceived the flight of the hawk, now suffers a sort of disability, a tension, even a sense of imminence! He puts the peculiar question, What is that bird? and puts it importunately. He is really anxious to know. But to know what? What sort of answer does he hope to hear? What in fact is the meaning of his extraordinary question? Why does he want an answer at all? He has already apprehended the hawk in the vividest, most plenary way--a sight he will never forget as long as he lives. What more will he know by having the bird named? . . .
. . . Everyone has a blue-dollar hawk in his childhood, especially if he grew up in the South or West, where place names are so prone to poetic corruption . . .
But the question on which everything depends and which is too often assumed to be settled without ever having been asked is this: Given this situation and its two characteristics upon which all agree, the peculiar presence or distinctiveness of the object beheld and the peculiar need of the beholder--is this "need" and its satisfaction instrumental or ontological? That is to say, is it the function of metaphor merely to diminish tension, or is it a discoverer of being? . . .
. . . We come back to the "right" and "wrong" of the blue-dollar hawk and blue darter hawk . . . [The boy's] mind, which had really suffered a sort of hunger (an ontological hunger?), now has something to feast on. The bird is, he is told, a blue-dollar hawk. Two conditions, it will be noticed, must be met if the naming is to succeed. There must be an authority behind it--if the boy's brother had made up the name on the spur of the moment, it wouldn't have worked. Naming is more than a matter of semantic "rule." But apparently there must also be--and here is the scandal--an element of obscurity about the name. The boy can't help but be disappointed by the logical modifier, blue darter hawk--he feels that although he has asked what the bird is, his father has only told him what it does . . . Blue-dollar is not applicable as a modifier at all, for it refers to something else besides the bird, a something which occupies the same ontological status as the bird. Blue darter tells us something about the bird, what it does, what its color is; blue-dollar tells, or the boy hopes it will tell, what the bird is. For this ontological pairing, or, if you prefer, "error" of identification of word and thing, is the only possible way in which the apprehended nature of the bird, its inscape, can be validated as being what it is . . . This is why, as Marcel observed, when I ask what something is, I am more satisfied to be given a name even if the name means nothing to me (especially if?), than to be given a scientific classification. Shelley said that poetry pointed out the before unapprehended relations of things. Wouldn't it be closer to the case to say that poetry validates that which has already been privately apprehended but has gone unformulated for both of us?
--"Metaphor as Mistake," in The Message In The Bottle (italics in original)
(Orthodoxy--San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995. Quote is from pp. 13-14.
The Writing Life--New York: Harper & Row, 1989. Quote is from p. 3.
The Message In The Bottle--New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. Quote is from pp. 64-72.)
Friday, December 10, 2010
Memory, Love, Desire (and the World)
T.S. Eliot:
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time is time conquered.
--Four Quartets, "Burnt Norton," ll. 83-90
. . . This is the use of memory:
For liberation--not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
--Four Quartets, "Little Gidding," ll. 156-165
Annie Dillard:
He knows he can't feed on the wood he loves, and he won't.
But desire walks on lean legs down halls of his sleep,
desire to drink and sup at mahogany's mass.
His wishes weight his belly. Love holds him here,
love nails him to the world, this windy wood,
as to a cross. Oh, this lanky, sunburnt cross!
Is he sympathetic? Do you care?
And you, sir: perhaps you wish to feed
on your bright-eyed daughter, on your baseball glove,
on your outboard motor's pattern in the water.
Some love weights your walking in the world;
some love molds you heavier than air.
Look at the world, where vegetation spreads
and peoples air with weights of green desire.
Crosses grow as trees and grasses everywhere,
writing in wood and leaf and flower and spore,
marking the map, "Some man loved here;
and one loved something here; and here; and here."
--"The Man Who Wishes To Feed On Mahogany,"
ll. 19-36
(Eliot comes off sounding almost Buddhist, and Dillard almost pagan, by comparison. Remarkably, neither can be quite crammed into those respective molds, even in these short excerpts.)
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time is time conquered.
--Four Quartets, "Burnt Norton," ll. 83-90
. . . This is the use of memory:
For liberation--not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
--Four Quartets, "Little Gidding," ll. 156-165
Annie Dillard:
He knows he can't feed on the wood he loves, and he won't.
But desire walks on lean legs down halls of his sleep,
desire to drink and sup at mahogany's mass.
His wishes weight his belly. Love holds him here,
love nails him to the world, this windy wood,
as to a cross. Oh, this lanky, sunburnt cross!
Is he sympathetic? Do you care?
And you, sir: perhaps you wish to feed
on your bright-eyed daughter, on your baseball glove,
on your outboard motor's pattern in the water.
Some love weights your walking in the world;
some love molds you heavier than air.
Look at the world, where vegetation spreads
and peoples air with weights of green desire.
Crosses grow as trees and grasses everywhere,
writing in wood and leaf and flower and spore,
marking the map, "Some man loved here;
and one loved something here; and here; and here."
--"The Man Who Wishes To Feed On Mahogany,"
ll. 19-36
(Eliot comes off sounding almost Buddhist, and Dillard almost pagan, by comparison. Remarkably, neither can be quite crammed into those respective molds, even in these short excerpts.)
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