And there’s dust on every rose

And there’s two things in the shadow

Thrown by every thing he shows

And the things that I’m not sure of

Are what everybody knows

Please somebody tell me how the story ends

“If Mary Karr showed up at your cave in sack cloth and ashes and asking for a word, what would you say to her?”

To which the Mystic replied:

“In the cave absolutely nothing. The cave ain’t for talking. The cave is for listening. In the Denny’s, I would encourage her to user her fiction writing talents to bring hope to people.”

In the Denny’s, yes!

Then, on my way to work this morning, I heard a story about a guy, possibly a friend of JOB’s, who walked into a Denny’s in Madison on Fat Tuesday and cooked himself up a burger.

But the story within the story is about writing:

DeSpain, a public information officer for the department — and former CBS affiliate employee — writes up many of the most important police reports each day. Sometimes, he said, he can’t help but stray from the often tame and boring narrative style of police reports.

“This one kind of wrote itself,” he told The Huffington Post. “Most days I’m knee-deep in stuff that’s not so humorous. But occasionally we’ll get one like this.

So my question is: What would you say to this guy — in Denny’s — Cubeland Mystic?

- Brendan Gill, writing on Andre Kertesz in A New York Life:  Of Friends and Others

“There is so much information online, that if writers don’t filter their own words, then readers will. And readers can be much less forgiving.”

This sort of ties into the discussion about Mary Karr. If I published a best selling book. I would not give interviews, or do book tours.

I heard this several years ago during Lent as a podcast. I kept it ever since, but it was impractical to send around to friends because it was so large. Well I found the podcast on-line after all these years. The story of St Mary Of Egypt is very edifying. I think she is a Saint of our modern times. It is over 30 minutes, but it is worth the time. It is a great Lenten meditation. If you prefer reading click here.

UPDATE: This could have easily been entitled “Today In Porn”

It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus? It is impossible to say.

–Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

(Parental Guidance Suggested)

Working in a corporation is a purgatorial experience. You have be at high state of alertness, and you have to know when to hit the floor when the goons apply the bludgeon. The working title of my memoir is The Corporate Ladder of Divine Ascent. I offer up my days in reparation for my sins.

Last remaining privately held “Scream” coming up for auction.  Let’s all pool our resources.  I’ve got $10 and this cool-looking rock…

Also:  I didn’t know that there were four versions.

Also:  I did this fun diorama when I was in high school.  It was marvelously high-flown.  Part of it included a wall that was bursting forth into Munch’s scream.  He was reacting to a fellow sitting in contemplation of the three crosses on Golgotha.

More…

“He looked at me without batting an eye and said, ‘How do you do what you do?’ Enough said.”

More

So what does it mean to write about faith in a way that speaks to nonbelievers? I haven’t read her work, but that quote caused a set of filters to go off in my head.  I am suspicious. She seems to be good discussion fodder right now so maybe she deserves her own post.

Lady MacKona:

But soon they will come for a pound of thy flesh,
And thy little ones will be unhoused.
Lent descends upon us like darkest night,
And thou are bewitched by this most unnatural and loathsome sloth.
Screw your courage to the sticking place, and write something! Book Two!
Me thinks thou art afraid of hard work my lord.

Lord MacKona:

Screw? Screw!?!?
Nay Lady you vex me with such imagery, and hold my manhood cheap!
I fear no man save Death, and of all things, I fear no hard work!
See I lay b’couched, supine, next to hard work and sleep.
But no! Thou dost murder sleep.
Methought I heard your voice cry ‘Sleep no more!,
MacKona will never sleep,’ the innocent sleep in which the writer toils,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of plot,
Balm of creative minds, great nature’s second edit,
Chief nourisher of story.
You see madam, all the world’s a couch, and all the men and women merely writers;
And through sleep, per chance to dream beyond these hoary walls,
I travel to yet undiscovered countries,
The full length and breadth of this azure world,
Where ambition takes me to the vaulted heavens,
And the arc of which I bestride like a colossus.

So here I lay I can do no other.

Lady MacKona:

Yeah, right. To your deaf pillow, you discharge your secrets.

Letter 52 To Christopher Tolkien (his son RAF South Africa) November 29th 1943
“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) – or to ‘unconstitutional’ monarchy . . . Anyway, the proper study of man is anything but man; and the most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. And at least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is. The medievals were only too right in taking nolo episcopari as the best reason a man could give to others for making him a bishop. Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier (or whatever you care to call him) if he does not like the cut of his trousers. And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that — after all only the fatal weakness of all good things in a bad corrupt unnatural world — is that it works and has worked only when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way.”

Then there is this. If anyone wants to join me in the desert let me know. Storm’s coming.

By many indicators, Greece is devolving into something unprecedented in modern Western experience. A quarter of all Greek companies have gone out of business since 2009, and half of all small businesses in the country say they are unable to meet payroll. The suicide rate increased by 40 percent in the first half of 2011. A barter economy has sprung up, as people try to work around a broken financial system. Nearly half the population under 25 is unemployed. Last September, organizers of a government-sponsored seminar on emigrating to Australia, an event that drew 42 people a year earlier, were overwhelmed when 12,000 people signed up. Greek bankers told me that people had taken about one-third of their money out of their accounts; many, it seems, were keeping what savings they had under their beds or buried in their backyards. One banker, part of whose job these days is persuading people to keep their money in the bank, said to me, “Who would trust a Greek bank?”

Taking a cue from Percy’s philosophizing at the beginning of The Second Coming, at what point do these statistics on depression and suicide become a concern? Obviously they’re way past that point in Greece, but we shouldn’t be surprised to see those numbers tick steadily upwards in the years ahead—if, as they say, we really are going the way of Greece. The existential crises faced by nations do not happen apart from the existential crises faced by citizens of those nations. Suicide isn’t just an indicator of a crisis; however poor, it’s a solution.

I’d also like to take credit for predicting, in a typically drunken ramble, the devolution to a barter economy at one of the summits a few years ago. Here’s another prediction: in five to ten years, after Washington state and California has crumbled into the sea, survivors will begin migrating to places like Wisconsin and Texas to take part in secession movements and constitutional conventions.

Oof.  See what happens when you invite the incarnation of the Kollektiv Unconscious? Now, then, Kollektivites, which of the following is true:

a)  Half of these bottles came out only after Angelico told me that he found Chapter One’s extensive use of footnotes precious like Precious Cheese, mannered like a Downton Abbey dinner table, and distracting like a Brubek rhythm line at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

b)  Half of these bottles came out only after JOB began reading The Six-Hundred, a Tennyson homage in which each of the members of the Light Brigade received his own sonnet-stanza, each correlated to an Old Testament description of war.

c)  Half of these bottles came out only after the other half were empty.

d)  Potter!  Where did you come from?

e)  Lent is coming.

It should come as no surprise to you that you are watched in very general seemingly benign ways. We are consigning ourselves to management by the machines. Beware.

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells

I subscribe to the Tolkien worldview. I find it rooted in truth, and it is very hopeful even though he was described by his biographer as a pessimist. How could he not be? He was a devout Catholic living in England. He was orphaned at twelve years old, he fought in WWI, and then two decades later sent two sons to fight in WWII. Then there are the broader events of his time that would have influenced his worldview, industrialization, socialist revolution, the depression, and all the other 20th century satanism too numerous to mention here. History shows that mankind informed by expediency when making moral choices, inevitably has difficulty choosing the ones that have the best possible outcomes for society. How could one not be pessimistic in light of all that? He certainly saw materialist thought applied during his lifetime. If he was pessimistic it was only a reaction to his personal experience, and the times in which he lived. I call him a realist, but I will accept his biographer’s characterization. However despite his difficulties he wrote so beautifully about hope. He infused hope through all his works, and it is one of the greatest themes of Lord Of The Rings.

This is one of my favorite passages in LOTR from The Return of the King:

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”

He uses transcendent beauty as the means by which Sam finds hope in a moment of despair. Sam did not call out to God, but God found him in in the desolation piercing his soul, and giving him the will to resist. Pessimistic? Maybe in real life, but not in his work. Two reactions to the pain and brutality that he experienced in life would be to either fall into despair, or to resist despair by imparting hope. I am certain that in his case it was the latter. We cannot hide from death or history, and we all have to face them. There is no doubt his worldview was shaped by them. It is widely known that he disliked allegory in all its manifestations, and preferred history to allegory. With history the reader was free to take what they liked from the story. It is this preference that makes me believe he wrote in some sense as an act of resistance against the malice he saw in the culture, and that is evidenced by the hope he infused into his work. It is through hope that we are enabled to resist evil.

He knew that hope was the key. He was well grounded in his Catholic faith. He may have been pessimistic about what he experienced and saw in the world around him. He knew that Christian civilization succumbed to materialism and all its despair, and that it would over time play itself out to its bitter end. Rather than to do nothing, he created characters who resisted it in their world, and through hope and great effort overcame it for a short while. This is not to say that LOTR is allegorical in this sense, but we as readers are free to take from this world what we will.

If Tolkien was pessimistic in his personal life he certainly had good reason. If you read his personal writings they are not very hopeful unless he writing about his sub-creation. He writes quite a bit about the source of his pessimism in his personal writings. He must have pondered the question at some point, how do we resist the domination of something that is antithetical to our worldview? A lot of his work was intended for his children, and whatever benefit they would gain from it. In my opinion he answered the question in his account of Middle-earth. Resistance builds hope, and hope fuels resistance. He created a fictional world in which hope prevails over evil, so that these stories would help them (and us) to resist the culture and live as free persons.

Maybe he was a pessimist and struggled with despair. Perhaps he could not overcome the scars left by the deaths of his parents as a boy, and his best friends in WWI. We find in the Appendices some backstory that might lead us to an answer. After his father was killed, Aragorn was taken to Rivendell as a boy, and was given the name Estel which means Hope. Perhaps there is a clue here to his state of mind in the parting words of Gilraen, Aragorn’s mother:

“Onen i-Estel Edain, u-chebin estel anim.”
(I gave Hope to the Dunedain, I have kept no hope for myself.)

Soon after their parting Gilraen died in her despair. It is probably a stretch, but I want to believe that he was revealing to all of us through Gilraen’s parting words to her son, his state of mind. He said that LOTR was written in his “life-blood”, and in many ways it captured on the page the Hope that was given to him–if one can do such a thing theologically. What is self-donation then if not a giving of all that we are, including all that which was given to us? All of his characters who resisted the evil speak of hope through their actions. Personally I think he left all that he had on the page, and that to me is very very optimistic.

Krista, a reader of Korrektiv, is searching for hope, and her comment got me thinking about this subject in the first place. I wrote this little introduction to my worldview with her and others like her in mind. I try to read his works every year, because I find new nuggets of hope. It is the hope that keeps me coming back year after year. His work has always been a guide to me, and has given me spiritual tools to resist the malice of our times. So now we’ve been introduced . . . off to Mordor.

One day Shakespeare lost a sonnet full
Of metaphors made out of leather and dye
Writ in blood on a graveyard skull
Before his pen and ink and mind ran dry.
The time I wrote a poem to you, you saved
It as a monument to incinerate
Your dreams in the fire of while you paved
A sacred cow path through a narrow gate.
Now the sounds of slaughter filter down
From the ivory tower to the silver mine
To where you stand in blood-stained cap and gown
In line at the cafeteria where devils dine.
You wander halls and corridors like Cain,
Cradling your pound of flesh exchanged for pain.

Recommended.

(We’ve been waiting for word on this since our own Matthew Lickona (formerly a Friend of Korrektiv, now fully assimilated (resistance is few-tile BadCatholic cum Existentialesque blogosphere)) posted this postmortem, prepublication teaser).

Okay. Take it away Mr. Burrell:

But the Chesterton that I most admire doesn’t make it into Hitchens’ essay at all; indeed, the overall portrait he draws is strangely sullied and partial, as though viewed through a blackened window. Chesterton had a big heart. He loved life, was full of joy and good humour, and lived with a sense of wonder that most of us lose in childhood. His life exemplified the beauty of the virtue of humility, which he always claimed was at the heart of any just appreciation of the goodness of the world. To Hitchens all this is apparently “frivolous”.

While I was considering, a question occurred to me, if I were to post a few snippets of my writing is that out of line? I could use some feedback from smart people, and would be grateful. Nothing major. Been reading a lot about the Inklings lately, and they read their stuff to each other.