Stonework Issue 6

The village of Dissa in the Wadi Rum desert of southern Jordan is breathtakingly beautiful, with towering mountains of jagged rock cut harshly by wind and sand and sloping dunes of radiantly pink and orange sand. Dissa is home almost exclusively to the Bedouin, the most direct descendents of the original nomadic peoples who populated Transjordan, and who still identify foremost by their tribal ancestry, followed by their Jordanian nationality. The harsh, isolated, desert-dwelling way of life is no longer prevalent, but despite the visible effects of modernization, including cell phones and a remarkable, pervasive commitment to university education for both boys and girls, the community retains many distinctive characteristics of their past nomadic life, such as raising goats and eating without utensils, seated on the floor around communal platters.

While modernization in Jordan is increasingly altering the desert life of the nomadic Bedouin, their rich oral tradition of stories, poems, and songs is one method by which they preserve remnants of their traditional culture. During a semester of study in the capital city of Amman, I arranged to spend two weeks living with the Al-Zawaideh tribe in Dissa, hoping to collect stories, songs, poems, and proverbs from their distinctly Jordanian-Bedouin oral tradition.

There has been virtually no discussion or documentation of the oral literature of the Bedouin peoples of Jordan. In light of this dearth, and with the dramatically shifting structures of Bedouin society due to modernization, I believe documentation is increasingly necessary, particularly since knowledge of the oral tradition lies increasingly with the older generations. Yet while children do not know these stories by heart, the way they may have in past generations, I found that oral literature’s variation, adaptability, and improvisational nature grant it longevity, for it can also be altered and modified to incorporate modern content, ideas, and language within the established framework of traditional Bedouin forms, narratives, and ideals. For example, the Al-Zawaideh told me of a local, blind poet who composed verses about a helicopter, which he clearly had never seen, as had few others in the area.

Indeed, the perpetuation of these stories, songs, and poems is contingent upon their resonance within a community of listeners. If the Al-Zawaideh family is any indication, however, even modernizing Bedouin are still connected to and take great pride in their oral roots. On my final night in Dissa, two adult brothers who had been instrumental in the transcription process told me my interest in their oral tradition had rekindled their own passion for these traditional stories, poems, and songs. They had exchanged stories among themselves even when I was out visiting other family members, and they had begun to document the works, with the intention of gradually compiling many stories, poems, and songs from various family members.

Oral literature remains within the collective memory because, despite the passage of time, the ideas are still meaningful, even when families like the Al-Zawaidehs are, in many ways, divorced from the traditional society out of which the works evolved. If the Al-Zawaidehs themselves actively seek to continue the oral tradition—telling and retelling for each other and their children—these stories, poems, and songs will indeed endure.

A House Into Which the Wind Blows[1]

If my heart were a stone, Song told by Malihah Al-Zawaideh

If I tell you the secrets of my heart, Poem composed and told by Salam Sabah Al-Zawaideh

The Honor of Al-Mahadi, Story told by Muhammad Al-Zawaideh

Bedouin Lullaby, Song told by Khadra Al-Zawaideh

The Poet’s Wager, Story told by Muhammad Al-Zawaideh

Song for the Wheat Harvest, Told by Khadra Al-Zawaideh

A Clever Man, A true story told by Salam Sabah Al-Zawaideh

Proverb told by Shata Al-Zawaideh

The Bedouin Girl and The Prince from Damascus, Story told by Ali Al-Zawaideh

Old woman who comes from the south, Song told by Najah Al-Zawaideh

●

In this mournful song, the female protagonist describes the surrounding mountain both literally and metaphorically, for the language also seems to articulate her own sense of loss, absence, and loneliness. The metaphor of the young woman’s heart as a stone not only expresses her fervent wish to be with her family immediately—as swiftly and effortlessly as one would toss a stone--but also conveys the sadness she experiences from their separation. The tree and woods at the top of the mountain may represent her loneliness and isolation or, conversely, they could reference her family as that which is desirable and yet distant and out of reach. The gazelle perhaps signifies the girl herself, for her happiness and contentment are dormant in the face of her longing. The hollow yet gentle sound of the rain seems to mimic her inner sadness, and just as rainfall, though expected, comes only seldom, so the speaker longs for her family in the face of a separation which is manifest and inescapable. The final line of the song expresses a very different sentiment and tone, and is spoken by the removed, objective voice of the singer rather than the girl. Along with the two love poems, this song stands as the work with the most heightened description, imagery, and emotion of all the pieces I documented.

If my heart were a stone

Song told by Malihah Al-Zawaideh^{^[2]}

Oh my family, I miss you

If my heart were a stone it would drop down to meet you

Oh you tree on top of the mountain

The gazelle is sleeping in the hot hours of the day, the sound of the rain knocks against

the trees

Oh woods on the top of the mountain

She is very beautiful, all the men track her steps like wolves following the goats

●

Many although not all of the works I documented were recited by elderly members of the family, but eighty-five year old Salam Sabah Al-Zawaideh, said to have been one of the first to settle in the area and a local authority on all matters, was the stalwart authority. After reciting his poem If I tell you the secrets of my heart, Salam communicated through gestures that since his last wife died three years ago, he had not recited anything until my arrival, but was beginning to share his poems and stories again.

The heightened, classical language of Salam Al-Zawaideh’s love poem participates in a canon of descriptive idiom. For example, the metaphor of the lover as a strong, noble animal is a familiar device, and “my saliva is dry and sour” is a common phrase that suggests the speaker’s anxiety that his lover will reject him. Yet despite these archetypal features and the disciplined rhyming pattern at the ends of both columns, the poem is infused with moving, vivid poetic imagery, such as the poet’s comparison of the violent abandon of passion with the tumultuous sea—a particularly powerful comparison, given the desert landscape the Bedouin call home.[3]

If I tell you the secrets of my heart

Poem composed and told by Salam Sabah Al-Zawaideh^{^[4]}

Salam speaks these words from a heart / which is as turbulent as the sea when it is rough

Because I have many things tossing inside my heart / my hair^{^[5]} is becoming grey

I am striving to find the way to reach this girl / who bewitched me with her eyes

It’s as if she kills me with a knife / and shoots me with a gun

Shattering my bones / so that I can no longer stand

My saliva is dry^{^[6]} and sour / and my lips are chapped

If I tell you the secrets of my heart / maybe you will see everything written on my face

I love the young girl / with small breasts

She is like a roan mare / who runs at the front of the herd

No one is like the girl that I love / she is like the highest, brightest stars^{^[7]}

●

The communal impact and repercussions of honor become apparent in the story of Al-Mahadi, wherein the neighbor’s son's decision to go against standards of proper conduct not only reflects poorly upon him, but also threatens the girl's honor, and, subsequently, her marriagability, as well as the good standing of both families. This associative quality of honor and dishonor in Bedouin society is yet another explanation for the relative lack of explicitly emotional or personal works. To expose one’s feelings or opinions openly before the tribe is to be vulnerable. If these sentiments do not align with societal expectations, the speaker risks bringing dishonor upon him or herself and the family as a whole. In the story of Al-Mahadi, however, the son’s guilt is redeemed by the respect the son’s father pays to the wronged Al-Mahadi. By disowning his son, the neighbor honors Al-Mahadi above his own familial bonds. Al-Mahadi then exhibits even greater respect for the neighbor by allowing the boy to marry his daughter, essentially obliterating his dishonorable deeds. Overcome with gratitude by this tribute, the neighbor commemorates the patience, respect, and honor of Al-Mahadi in a poem. Indeed, Al-Mahadi’s honor, as it is represented in his interactions with his neighbor, defines him as a person. The integral role of honor—the performance of honor in daily life, decisions, and interactions with others and its manifest presence in ones’ control of oneself in accordance with societal principles—is demonstrated in this story more clearly than any other in this collection.

The Honor of Al-Mahadi

Story told by Muhammad Al-Zawaideh^{^[8]}

The Bedouin move from place to place, following the water and the grass. At one time, there were two families who had a strong relationship between each other. The Bedouin hold a great respect for these affiliations--especially between neighbors.^{^[9]} One family was called Al-Mahadi; the father of this family had three daughter, and his neighbor had three boys.

One of the girls was very beautiful, and one of the neighbor's boys loved her and tried to win her love. He wanted to take the chance to love her, even if it was not customary or proper. The girl told her mother of his intentions, not wanting her family to be shamed, and the mother told Al-Mahadi. Al-Mahadi understood the nature of the situation, so he visited his neighbor to play sejah.^{^[10]} Al-Mahadi told his neighbor, "Move, or I will move."^{^[11]} The neighbor understood that something bad had happened, although he didn't know what. He decided to move his tents and herds, and they left in the middle of the night. Al-Mahadi did not know that they had left until the next morning.

When the neighbor reached a new settling ground, he called each of his sons to him individually, asking them, "What happened to cause a problem with my neighbor? Be honest." The son who loved Al-Mahadi's daughter admitted his error, saying, "Oh my father, I had a relationship with one of the girls." When his father heard this, he angrily declared, "I am not your father anymore; you are no longer my son. You have brought our heads down low.^{^[12]} You may not live here anymore. Leave now." So the son fled.

Al-Mahadi heard news that the neighbor had forced his son into exile, and Al-Mahadi recognized that this was a sign of respect to Al-Mahadi. Because the neighbor valued his honor and their relationship so highly, and because the boy and girl were in love, Al-Mahadi decided to give his daughter to the neighbor's soon in marriage. This gesture demonstrated even greater respect to his neighbor, who had the honor to respect Al-Mahadi first. In recognition of this noble gesture, the neighbor sang a poem praising Al-Mahadi's honor:

I have had patience, but Al-Mahadi has even greater patience than I, for he saved

my son from many years of guilt

When he saw that his neighbor had an improper relationship with his girls, he

instructed his women not to talk about it amongst themselves^{^[13]}

If the rain water streams down from the hills into the valley, you will have this

richness, and we will not.^{^[14]}

You have the water for you and not for us^{^[15]}

After the rain, the flats are covered with grass, and your camels can stay and

graze, no one will capture them,^{^[16]} because you are strong as a sheikh^{^[17]}

Everyone knows that you are like a noble sheikh, you have an excellent

reputation, and our families will have many years together

●

While often manifested in behavior such as bravery in battle, the Bedouin notion of honor is sometimes symbolized by other objects such as the camel. In this song sung by mothers to put their children to sleep, the seven camels signify the mother’s desire to protect, honor, and provide for her child.

Bedouin Lullaby

Song told by Khadra Al-Zawaideh^{^[18]}

Ya, ya, seven camels we corral like a caravan for him

Those people who wish bad things upon my child, may these bad wishes go back to

them^{^[19]}

●

The symbolism of coffee and its role in the performance of hospitality is another common thread throughout the Al-Zawaideh’s oral literature.

The Poet’s Wager

Story told by Muhammad Al-Zawaideh^{^[20]}

Bedouin poems always begin by describing the beauty of camels, the desert, and nature. Yet one time, a Bedouin man dared his friend to write a poem that did not describe any of these typical topics. He challenged the poet to write a poem just about coffee.^{^[21]} The man of the house had a beautiful sister who lived with him in his bait-sha9ar.[22] "If you succeed," the man of the house announced, "I will give you my sister in marriage." In love with the sister, the poet agreed to the challenge:

Please pour the coffee three times for each guest and be generous

When you roast the beans on the fire, do it slowly, but do not let them burn, and

everyone nearby will smell this delicious scent

Then you must place the beans in the nigir^{^[23]} and grind it; all people love this

sound of the pestle pounding the beans

The dalih^{^[24]} is white as a mushroom, and when one pours coffee from it, the

stream of liquid from the spout looks like the curve of a smile

The coffee should be a color between brown and red, like blood flowing from a

wound

The man of the house realized that the poet was very clever and would surely win the bet. So he summoned his sister and asked her to dress in her most beautiful clothing and then come before them. The man of the house hoped that the poet would be so dazzled by the girl’s beauty that he would not be able to concentrate and would allow his composition to wander from the topic of coffee. When the poet saw the sister, he was filled with love for her, but he continued to recite his poem:

I miss my lover, and I wish that I could drink coffee with her at this moment When we sit together, it’s as sweet as picking a rose from the bush

The man of the house accused the poet, saying, “You are not abiding by the rules of the challenge. You are describing a lover.” Yet the man of the house recognized that the poet truly loved the girl, so in the end, he gave his sister to the poet in marriage.

●

This song for the wheat harvest demonstrates a progression of different sentiments regarding romantic love and honor. The speaker utilizes the power of romantic love to incite the workers, but also references traditional conceptions of honor by comparing the threshers to soldiers who must “conquer” the crops and the scythe to a powerful sword. Desire can be a temptation which ultimately leads to dishonor, yet love can also serve as an incitement for action.

Song for the Wheat Harvest

Told by Khadra Al-Zawaideh^{^[25]}

Collect the crops, don’t be concerned that the stalks are tall

Thrush many bundles, remember that you are gathering these crops for the sweet girls

We are the enemy of the crops and we will conquer them

My scythe is excellent, it shines when I clean it, its name is Abu Ruza,^{^[26]} I brought it from

Gaza

The stalks are very tall

We must lift up our feet and work hard

This pretty girl is for the shepherd, not for you, so just focus on your work

●

While the Al-Zawaidehs’ stories touch on diverse issues, including courage, morality, familial loyalty, and romantic love, all are permeated by a core sense of personal, familial, and tribal honor. The perpetuation of societal expectations and ideals, such as this dominant conception of honor, re-enforces cultural practices and principles, even as the rich content and function of oral literature not only enriches the creative imagination, but also provides an accepted mode of expression within the confines of often rigid social standards.

Generosity is an emblematic signal of an individual’s honor. Even if the guest is an enemy, the host is required to provide food and shelter without question. If a poor man does not have food to offer his guests, he is allowed by custom to take the necessary amount of food from a neighbor without having to repay this debt, so that he might be able to enact this ritual role as host.

A Clever Man

A true story told by Salam Sabah Al-Zawaideh^{^[27]}

A rich Bedouin man had many goats and camels, but his fortunes turned and he lost all his herds. Everyone left him except his wife. They continued to live in the desert, completely destitute. All the people of the tribe knew of their poverty, so they went to visit the poor man and his wife. They left their camels far away, though, and approached the bait-sha9ar^{^[28]} on foot, for they didn’t want the man to see their camels and take them.^{^[29]} Yet the man noticed that the guests’ dish dashs^{^[30]} were loose, so he realized that they must have ridden camels.^{^[31]} The man followed their footprints in the sand back to where they had left their camels at a distance. He took one of the camels, killed it in the traditional way,^{^[32]} and served it to them. The guests realized that the man had killed one of their own camels, and they recognized the error of their behavior, so they gave him a number of goats. Therefore, the next time he received guests, he would be able to exercise the full extent of traditional Bedouin hospitality.

●

In this proverb, the import of honor is insinuated through the distinction drawn between a brave man—represented by the proud power of the falcon—and the coward—symbolized by the owl’s elusive timidity.

Proverb told by Shata Al-Zawaideh^{^[33]}

The falcon always soars in the sky

While the owl always darts in the burrows

●

Repeated recitations of oral literature are often part of the composition process itself, for while brief verses as well as extensive epics are sometimes memorized exactly, the definitive, unchanging, memorized work is much less common than the rich variation that typically arises over time from adaptation, improvisation, and subtle as well as dramatic changes. This story is one example of a conventional tale that has changed over time even as it retains a recognizable core narrative.

The tale presents an unusually frank expression of romantic love between man and woman. Love in Bedouin oral literature is rarely an articulated desire and emotion, in part because of the severe repercussions that confront romance that exists outside the permissible bounds of Bedouin culture, as seen in the story of Al-Mahadi. More commonly, love is expressed indirectly; within stories, songs, and poems, love tends to be a symbolic token, a temptation that threatens honor or a trial through which the male protagonist emerges victorious.

The Bedouin Girl and The Prince from Damascus

Story told by Ali Al-Zawaideh^{^[34]}

A young prince from Damascus^{^[35]} was traveling in the desert when he caught sight of a very beautiful Bedouin girl and fell in love with her. The prince asked her father for her hand in marriage, and the girl’s father agreed, so the prince took her back to Damascus with him. They lived in a magnificent palace, and he gave her fine clothing and expensive jewelry. By and by, though, he was walking outside the palace when he heard the girl singing to herself:

A house, into which the winds blow / is better to me than a fancy palace

And the packs of dogs barking on the road / are better to me than a sweet, tame

cat

And wearing an aabaya[36] and sleeping well / is better to me than wearing fine

chiffon

And eating a single piece of bread / is better to me than eating an entire loaf

The prince realized that the girl was not truly happy with her life in Damascus. He loved her and wanted her to be happy, so he took her back to her father in the desert. The prince gifted her with more fine clothing, camels, and other wealth, and they parted ways peaceably. The Bedouin girl returned to her previous life in the desert and the prince to his life in the palace because he loved her enough to let her go.

●

Women almost exclusively shared songs and proverbs with me, whereas the men recited stories and poems. Many of these songs relate to women’s domestic duties, and the songs intended for celebrations, such as circumcisions and weddings, would primarily be heard by other women, given the traditional gender segregation that occurs at these events. I noted a clear distinction between the nature and style of the works I received from women and those from men. This is also reflected in the attitudes of the Al-Zawaideh themselves, for the men tended to dismiss the value of these songs. This piece is a common lullaby that women sing as they comb their children’s hair.

Old woman who comes from the south

Song told by Najah Al-Zawaideh^{^[37]}

Old woman who comes from the south—

She will solve the problems tangled in my daughter’s hair

Old woman who comes from the north—

She will solve the problems tangled in my son’s hair

[1] I am extremely grateful for the remarkable hospitality, generosity, and openness of the Al-Zawaideh tribe, which was in itself the first gift, before I even heard the first songs, stories, and poems. While I assisted with the translation of each of these pieces, I am also grateful to Rima Akermawi, for her additional translation assistance.

^{^[2]} Transcribed and translated by Najah Al-Zawaideh

[3] Although Wadi Rum’s proximity to Aqaba does allow for some first-hand experience.

^{^[4]} Transcribed by Salam Sabah Al-Zawaideh, translated by Harb Al-Zawaideh

^{^[5]} Sideburns

^{^[6]} Implies fear

^{^[7]} In the original Arabic, the words at the ends of both columns of lines rhyme

^{^[8]} Transcribed by Najah Al-Zawaideh, translated by Harb Al-Zawaideh

^{^[9]} There is a Bedouin saying that "Neighbors are still neighbors even when they fight."

^{^[10]} A traditional Bedouin game, similar to chess and mancala, wherein two players move pieces (usually stones, olives, or camel droppings) among forty-nine holes in the "board" drawn in the sand.

^{^[11]} Refers both to the turn-taking of the game, and also subtly implies that something has happened and therefore the neighbor must move his tents elsewhere, or Al-Mahadi himself will move.

^{^[12]} Brought shame on the family

^{^[13]} By preventing gossiping among his household, and thereby striving not to make a big issue out of the problem, Al-Mahadi is honoring his neighbor

^{^[14]} Meaning that Al-Mahadi has great patience and has shown the utmost sensitivity and respect to the neighbor

^{^[15]} Meaning that Al-Mahadi is in every way a braver, more noble man that the neighbor himself

^{^[16]} Which sometimes occurred among different Bedouin tribes

^{^[17]} Typical name for Bedouin tribal leader

^{^[18]} Transcribed by Najah Al-Zawaideh, translated by Harb Al-Zawaideh

^{^[19]} In an interesting parallel, Rima Akermawi noted that a similar lullaby is sung by women in the area of Amman, the capitol of Jordan, with the reference to camels substituted with a reference to "butter and honey"

^{^[20]} Transcribed and translated by Najah Al-Zawaideh

^{^[21]} Coffee plays a significant symbolic role in a host’s reception of guests and at weddings and parties. Further, when two men have a disagreement, they drink coffee together when they have reached a resolution, honoring the agreement.

[22] Arabic name for the traditional tent in which the Bedouin live

^{^[23]} Traditional Arabic mortar and pestle used to grind the coffee beans; the rhythmic sounds of the grinding also have traditional significance, and the skill of the grinder to produce a musicality of sounds is regarded as a signifier of a strong and noble man.

^{^[24]} Traditional Arabic coffee pot

^{^[25]} Transcribed by Najah Al-Zawaideh, translated by Harb Al-Zawaideh

^{^[26]} Means “shining, sparkling”

^{^[27]} Transcribed and translated by Najah Al-Zawaideh

^{^[28]} Arabic name for the traditional tent in which the Bedouin live

^{^[29]} Generosity is so important in Bedouin culture that social etiquette dictates that if guests arrive to a man’s home, and he has no food to offer them, he may take just enough from his neighbor—usually one or two goats—to provide a meal for his guests.

^{^[30]} Traditional long, loose tunic worn by Bedouin men, usually white or grey

^{^[31]} The dish dashs would be loose so that they could ride astride

^{^[32]} A knife drawn swiftly across the throat

^{^[33]} Transcribed by Aislam Al-Zawaideh, translated by Harb Al-Zawaideh and Rima Akermawi

^{^[34]} A well-known, traditional Bedouin story. Transcribed by Najah Al-Zawaideh, translated by Ali Al-Zawaideh and Rima Akermawi

^{^[35]} In present-day Syria

[36] Traditional long, loose dress, typically black, worn by Bedouin women

^{^[37]} Transcribed and translated by Najah Al-Zawaideh

An Interview with Lori Huth

2008-05-31T23:20:00.001-07:00

~Mari Lamp

In May of 2007, several weeks before walking across a stage in my cap and gown, I sat down with writing professor Lori Huth in the writing commons and asked her a few things that had been on my mind. Lori had been my professor and friend for all four of my years at Houghton, and this wasn’t the first time we’d discussed some of these topics.

Mari: Well, Lori, in preparation for this interview, I’ve been trying to figure out what it is people actually each other in interviews. I did some research and thought about what writers ask people they respect. I hope this will be a conversation that just happens to have been recorded. So, to begin, I’m going to steal the question that began the most recent interview in Image, because I thought it was a good one.

Lori: (laughs) Ok, shoot.

Mari: The question is: What brought you to writing? And, my further addition to that question: When you think about your childhood, were you the kind of kid who was constantly making up stories and always wanted to be a writer? Did you have that kind of stereotypical writer’s childhood? Or, was there some other way you came into this activity, this vocation?

Lori: That’s a really good place to start. My initial response is that reading is probably what brought me to writing. That’s the part of my childhood that’s most relevant. I started reading early, before I went to school, and I loved it. I followed my mom around the house with books, reading them to her. Now, of course not all readers end up being writers. I think for me, though, being a reader helped me become a curious person, someone who was interested in the world. I became invested in these characters' interior lives -the thing that story is ultimately about.

It had something to do with looking around and seeing that the world is a mysterious place, and is overwhelming. I felt that the world was chaos, and I wanted to write in such a way as to make it something understandable, if only for a moment. I’m not sure that I’ve ever really succeeded in this, but I know that’s what led me into it.

Mari: And there’s a lot of irony in this. I think it was Czeslaw Milosz that said we write to express the inexpressible.

Lori: Yeah, there’s that too.

Mari: We are surrounded by things we can discover through creative means. I find that if I want to know about something, I write about it.

Lori: For me, it’s a little bit more about just simply being overwhelmed by the world. I want to find a way to comprehend something, which is probably just another way of saying what you just said. And that’s part of why it's inexpressible, I think. You work to articulate something and it might be true for that moment, yet it doesn’t stay stable. Time moves on, things change, it’s confusing. I find life, the world, God, all very confusing and overwhelming. I write to try and make some sense of it all.

Mari: What books had an impact on you as you tried to understand the chaos? When I think about my childhood, I tend to think in terms of specific books I was reading at the time. As in, those were the “Anne of Green Gables years” or the “Laura Ingalls Wilder years”, etc. Those characters had so much impact on me. Do you have series or books like that? Did these characters shape how you thought about people?

Lori: That’s interesting, I haven’t thought much lately about what I read as I kid. And I have to be honest –I think a lot of what I read as a kid was not good literature. I think it was just whatever was around sometimes. But as far as impact, I think more of what was happening for me was the language itself.

Mari: It’s impressive that you would have an awareness of language so early on!

Lori: Well, at the time I’m not sure how much I realized what I was learning. But I know that’s part of what engaged me –the way the words fit together, how one can express things in words. I loved that, and found it fascinating. In some ways this makes me think, “Why am I not a poet?”, but I never really read poetry, so it didn’t become a part of my sense of the world. Language through story became foundational, and that’s what makes me what to write in that form now.

Mari: So, then, it was always fiction for you, from the beginning?

Lori: Yes. Well, ok no. I started out with poetry, I’ll admit. But you know, it was very bad, 7^th grade girl poetry.

Mari: (laughs) Well, that’s partly why I ask. I wrote almost exclusively poetry in high school, and it was that angstful teenage poetry. I feel like we all kinda go through that phase.

Lori: Because we have all these emotions. And fiction is very emotional, but I think it’s easier as a 7^th grader to look at poetry and say, “Oh, I can do that.” At that age, though, I didn’t know a single other person who wrote poetry. And after awhile I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. There was no guidance until I went to college, and by that point I’d sort of shifted and was writing fiction.

Mari: What would you say is the best thing that fiction can do for someone? Or, what is the best thing that fiction has done for you? Or do you not think of it in those terms?

Lori: I do think of it in those terms, partly because I’m still in the process of justifying this vocation for myself. I have a lot of anxiety, I think, about wanting my life to be one that really contributes something important to the world. That’s part of why I am a teacher, because in some sense it’s easier to justify. I’m always in the process of asking ‘Why does this matter?’ ‘How does this shape people?’ 'How can it make the world a better place?’ Some writers might say those are the wrong questions, and maybe they’re right, but I can’t help but ask them.

There’s a book called Poetic Justice by Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum teaches literature to lawyers, and she wrote this book about the novel as a moral form. She made the argument that fiction is important for helping people develop into moral beings. And one of the primary reasons for this is that it develops empathy in us. Through fiction, the writing of it especially, you have to try and cast your mind into another person’s existence and image how they experience where they are.

So, often I think about this question in those terms- that writing is helping me to experience and develop empathy as a person. And also, I think that’s really a very Christian idea. For me, it relates to my faith in that way. If you think about the stories of Jesus told in the Bible, he’s often with broken people, and he’s serving them. Maybe this is too abstract, but it helps me to think that maybe I’m trying to get out there and understand people who aren’t like me. Through words, through stories, and hopefully in the end understand each other better.

Mari: It’s interesting to me that there’s this trend of rewriting the Bible stories as fictional accounts. Because we’re trying to see it. In some ways those stories are so sparse, so there’s an impulse to want to try and pack it in with sensory details and narrative so we can feel the empathy you’re talking about.

Speaking of the Bible, and how you use story as a way to process the world, do you read the Bible this way? I feel like there is a lot of discussion about reading the Bible as story, as opposed to reading it as a book of theological treates or statements of doctrine, etc. What can you say about how that might affect the way you read the Bible?

Lori: I think it does affect how I read the Bible, and I think I do read the Bible mostly as story. As you say, that’s not that uncommon now. In recent years, there’s been a trend among emerging-church theologians to look at the Bible in terms of narrative, so in some ways I may read it that way because it’s something I’ve been culturally trained to do. But in another way, it really does help me. As I said, it’s been hard for me as a Christian to articulate and justify spending my life writing fiction. This is something I’ve struggled with from the beginning. Part of me thinks I should be out serving the poor and helping the needy in some tangible way. But it helps me to think that a lot of the Bible is told in story, and I think God accepts us understanding him that way. And I see God himself as a storyteller. If God tried to show himself to us through story, then he must think there’s something really valuable about stories. They must be a way that we can show ourselves to others and understand each other.

Mari: Interesting. I’m wondering what you think about this idea of “Christian fiction” or “Christian” writing in general? We’ve talked about writing as moral, writing as responsibility, but there’s also the ideas of books written to be published by Christian publishers, marketed to Christian audiences, maybe even sold in Christian bookstores. Does this phenomenon have anything to do with your writing?

Lori: I think, for me, the issue of Christian fiction is almost seperat from what I do. It’s a publishing industry, a way of making money, possibly entertainment, but I’m mostly interested in what I call ‘literary fiction’. I would call a lot of Christian fiction ‘genre fiction’, meaning that it’s defined by certain pre-set parameters, a certain style. Literary fiction is about the beauty of language, the exploration of difficult questions, and I’m not sure that’s what Christian fiction is doing. So, in some ways, as a writer I don’t care that Christian fiction exists, but it’s not what I’m doing.

Now, maybe as a Christian I’m frustrated that there’s this label attached. As a Christian, I wish that all Christians were interested in and associated with beautiful language and complex stories that try to understand the human condition. The perception that Christians as a whole are mostly interested in the genre of ‘Christian fiction’ is frustrating, yes. But, for the most part, I set it on a shelf. I’m not going to concern myself too much about it.

Mari: Ok. I know that you are interested in the moral implications of fiction. I remember on the first day of your Fiction class, you posed a question. The question was, simply, “Can fiction be moral?” Am I getting that right?

Lori: Yep. Well, probably, I don’t remember that precise day, but it sounds like the kind of thing I would ask.

Mari: Now I have a chance to ask you what you meant by that. And maybe this will help me understand how you approach being a reader and a writer. Have you come to any kind of personal realization about fiction as moral? And maybe not an answer, but a better grasp on the discussion surrounding the question. Also, is this related to how you justify your life as a writer?

Lori: Well, it’s a complex question, and I image that’s why I asked it. It was something I wanted the students to be thinking about as they wrote. In some ways, I think I asked the question because there has to be a distinction made between being didactic and being moral. I see the tendency sometimes, with students, to be didactic. If they are writing about God, it may end up being a didactic story rather than a moral story. Going back to Martha Nussbaum, she says that the novel is a morally controversial form because the author is trying to shape how the reader thinks about things. You are in some ways trying to impose a certain view upon the reader. You’re trying to get them to think about your topic in a certain way, about your characters in a certain way. So, what is the moral responsibility of a writer in telling stories like this? We want to shape reader’s views, but how can we do that without being didactic?

Mari: And the other issue is seperating yourself from your message. In my own writing, I have to fight against the temptation to think that everything is justified because it's my view of the world, and I have a right to represent that. But, I also hate reading didactic writing.

Lori: Well, you're trying to shape the reader's view of the world of your story. But there's an overlap between the world of your story and the real world. In order for them to understand your story, you have to get a reader to a certain interpretation of your characters and their choices. And the question is, to what extend does this translate into shaping how people then think about the real world? This is how a writer can have a lot of influence and power, and has to be aware of that. I don't expect that I'll ever have that kind of influence, but it's a question that writers should ask.

Mari: So then, tell me about what kind of stories you write. You have this manuscript for a book that you've finished, but are also still working on.

Lori: Right.

Mari: How did you come to give birth to this story? I mean, where do these things come from?

(synopsis)

Lori: Two things I think of right away. First, usually for me a story starts with some kind of question, something I don't understand. Writing the story is the process of exploring some of the possible answers. It doesn't necessarily mean finding the answer, but it means exploring. This particular story started with the question “What does it mean to believe something?” I was interested in knowing if belief is something that you can't resist, something that's sort of inherently built-into you, or if its more like something that you choose and decide. Does someone decide they are going to believe, and then simply do? Or is believe something that overwhelms you in a way that makes it impossible for you not to believe, even if you try?

And I still don't know the asnwer to those questions, but its where the story started. I was trying to find out what would happen if a character who didn't believe something was put into a situation where they felt like they had to believe. Also, many of my stories start with brokenness. I often explore brokenness in humanity, in people's lives, and how they respond. That's sort of my personal set of interests, I think.

Mari: I think everyone has those questions.

Lori: Well, yes. The reason I say that is because I have a tendency to really like stories that other people find too depressing. I enjoy films that really explore brokenness and the ways people hurt each other. Maybe enjoy isn't quite the right word, because it's often a painful experience too. But I find those stories meaningful and rewarding to watch and read because they help me understand the world more. I find myself drawn toward something that helps me understand the pain of our lives.

Mari: And I think that's almost the task of the writer. Maybe not all writers feel this, but I think that writers need to go to those places sometimes, even if they don't necessarily want to, to make an honest story.

Writing can be lonely. Part of me thinks it would be wonderful to have huge chuncks of time on a regular basis to devote to writing. You read about Annie Dillard, who goes to these remote locations in seclusion, and part of me longs for that. But then, another part of me knows I would have nothing to write about after awhile. I have to be stimulated by living life.

Lori: Yeah, one of my graduate professors, Jeanie Macken, used to refer to it as feeding the well. She imagined that you have a well of creative energy. If you're sitting in a room by yourself all day, eventually it gets dry. She talked about finding ways to get into the world and fill it back up again. And that's true for me. If I sit in front of a computer screen all day trying to write, I go a little bonkers to tell you the truth.

Mari: Well, that brings up another interesting phenomenon. I've found, as I write more and more and take on this identity as 'a writer', that sometimes I have this person in my head that sort of writes my experiences to me as I live them.

Lori: (laughs) mm-hmm.

Mari: And I'm not exactly sure what to do with that. Sometimes I feel guilty, like I need to not be thinking about important experiences I'm living through as material! But, for me, material is how I process my life too.

Lori: I know what you mean. In order to be a good writer, you need to be really experiencing things and living your life fully. And yet, in order to write about your experiences some part of you has to remain detached from them, sort of taking notes. It reminds me of that David Sedaros essay we read in Writing About Cultural Issues. Do you remember that one?

Mari: The one we listened to on tape?

Lori: Yep, called “Repeat After Me.” In the essay, Sedaros is visiting his sister, who doesn't want him to write about her life. He's trying to be comforting to her as she goes through a difficult experience, but at the same time he's got his little notebook out and he's taking notes. I feel like that sometimes. I always have a notebook and pen when I go out. So, you don't want to seperate yourself from the experience, because then you can't write about it, but in that sense it's almost like you have to be divided into two people.

Mari: I also remember reading, I believe in one of your classes, an essay by Lorrie Moore about her baby going through cancer.

Lori: “People Like That Are The Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onc.”

Mari: That's the one. I remember being so moved by her courage in writing that. It could have been seen as an unfeeling act, her detaching herself from the situation in order to use the good material.

Lori: And in the story the narrator's husband says “Take notes, we need the money.” I don't know if that actually happened in real life, but she does- she takes notes and writes the story.

Mari: Right. It's almost as if she knew she would write it anyway. I feel a great tension about this issue. I want to find a way to be comfortable with this internal voice that I have.

Lori: For me, I think it actually makes me more comfortable in some ways. I'm a rather retiring, introverted person, so when I'm in a social situation I'm often awkward and uncomfortable. In some ways it gives me a grounding to have in my head a little extra person, as you put it, a homunculus, who's thinking about taking notes and kinda of paying attention to what's happening. If something goes catastrophically wrong, like you say something stupid, of course there are ramifications in your real life. But on some level you can think 'Oh, I definitely need to remember this. I need to write this down and figure out what went wrong.'

Mari: Maybe it's like a coping mechanism.

Lori: Yeah, it's partly that. It also makes me think of a Mary Oliver poem, which says “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” I like that about writing. The sense of being this other person who is always keeping track of things makes me feel, ironically, that I can experience my life even more fully. Paying attention helps you invest more fully in experiences because you're really trying to keep track of what's happening, what things sound like, what words people are using in a certain situation. It's a paradox.

Mari: And it becomes more than just the sum of the details, it becomes a narrative. And there's something really comforting about feeling like I'm living in a narrative, as opposed to a series of random chaotic happenings. I can look at events and moments in my ordinary life and find metaphors, and how things relate to each other.

Lori: Yes. I experience life as chaotic, and writing helps me give it a shape as I'm living it.

Mari: On that note, we’ve come to the end of our time. Thanks so much for talking with me, Lori.

Lori: You’re welcome.

Sketch of a Woman Dreaming

2008-05-31T23:14:00.001-07:00

~Joanna Vance

She is afraid of the rising moon,

shrinking from its searchlight

which moves within the universe

at an unfathomable speed,

and then settles on her skin.

Sometimes she dances,

or throws her body onto long grasses,

levitating above each blade’s insistency.

And the wind, when it moves her to leap,

loosens her worries; she falls asleep.

Dreams come parading in the form of

diminutively shaped hopes:

He boards the airplane, it shudders into sky,

and, later, finds her walking home.

He pleads for mercy on knees

that once allowed him to swagger.

For it was a February day

(now she is covered in a darkening room –

light is blue, light is grey)

and she had not loved,

but she was pressed to the edge, that month,

when he was the knife.

Receding from reach, an elusive phantom

and she startles, lights the lamp:

The glow focuses on her face.

Not on the black-eyed night

or the thousands of birds

that fly into the room, crying.

Yearly Slaughter

2008-05-31T23:12:00.000-07:00

~Joanna Vance

I have no choice but to take the headless, writhing bird

and dip it into a vat of boiling water, once – twice.

I must pull and pluck its sodden feathers away to reveal

a pocked skin, varicolored, strangely warm.

The pin feathers still hide like small darts, my fingers

search for their pointedness.

I abstract its life: creating a formless shape,

reminiscent yet anonymous.

My heart is sunken: the long afternoon light

highlights the mess of feathers and blood in the barn.

The smell has permeated my clothing,

my hair, my fingers.

Even after washing my hands continuously,

allowing the soap to pool in my palms before the water

streams it away, even still do my fingers remember.

Persephone

2008-05-31T23:09:00.000-07:00

~Elisabeth Wenger

Only twelve, and innocent as roses are

of the way they load the air with their heady scent:

I was playing in fields of

the endless summer we had then,

though we did not know it was so until after the first awful snow,

When, suddenly, a crack, a yawning,

and the ground split like an old wound

pulled apart at still-tender edges,

Death rolled out in his chariot,

purple and gold like my favorite crocus.

A grabbing, a throwing,

sudden violence of unknown hands.

Oh I was so cold.

Rowed over a frozen river to the icy

Palace, and I had to tear off my clothes,

Ice-splinters in my fingers, to keep myself warm.

Later, I told my mother I was hungry—

Child belly-rumblings that yearned for those three

Ruby seeds she so mourned.

She was my mother, I did not tell her

About the three red nights;

The first to chain me there,

The third to bring me back (a birth,

The concept of spring for the first time),

But my mother—still wishing me

A child in automatic summer—I didn’t tell her.

Lament for Winter at the Beginning of Spring (after Merton)

2008-05-31T23:07:00.000-07:00

~Elisabeth Wenger

We’ve waited for this so long, ever since fall,

that when we still expect to slog through winter

the sun comes out and surprises us with spring

breezes, that we, startled, think of boundless grace

and hope it’s not yet the end of the world. Discontent

sets in and the coldness of monkish cells ripens without wind.

We fail. No longer in service to the icy wind

old lacy leaves, worm-eaten in trees fall,

leaving behind cracked branches, beating their discontent

against each other, after being frozen in place all winter,

a monastic restraint, a smallness of grace

that grows curly tendrils in the warmth of spring.

After Lenten fasts, the engorged spring

rips down the side of the mountain like wind.

A damn could not hold it back, even one of grace,

And we find it easy to forget the prayers of ice, falling

apart, loosely growing on the ground, the stakes we used in winter

to comfort our failing hearts pulled out. The hole of discontent,

a room we prayed in all winter, filled up with too much, discontent

driven out. License is given; go walking in the soft air of spring,

and bring back for us bird feathers, dropped at the end of winter

when new wings were caressed by the concupiscent wind.

Enjoy the paths under umbrageous trees that scatter green shadows. Fall

in the new mud, relish and wallow. You will come clean in a shower of grace.

But for us the heady cup overflowing, a superfluity of grace

brings nothing but a restlessness, unquiet discontent.

We preferred the meditation of always falling

into depression, and forcing ourselves out with promises of spring.

Bracing our limbs for the few steps between cell and chapel, killing wind

against our chanting chests made us strong to accept winter.

The bones of landscapes half-alien we made our own, geography of winter

in the fields and soul, now hidden with the burgeoning of grace,

made pregnant with a quivering, with a warm hovering, a holy wind

over water, so recently the ice we froze our unholy thoughts in. Discontented

with this arrangement—It is too soon! We are not yet ready for a swelling spring!—

we shuffle in the garden, afraid we will discover the world’s edges and fall.

Now is the winter of our discontent:

The boundless grace of this warm spring

that winds around our limbs, the serpent of the fall.

Mining John Milton’s Poetry for the Devotional “paradise within”

2008-05-31T22:52:00.000-07:00

~James Wardwell

As the writer of Paradise Lost and the primary cataloguer of the person and works of Satan, John Milton may not immediately seem a source of devotional inspiration. However, in as much as great devotional writing leads us to praise God and inspires us toward an ever deepening relationship with Him, a wealth of blessing can be mined from closely reading Milton’s works. Although from the first line Paradise Lost is “Of Man’s First Disobedience,” it carefully proceeds through twelve books not only “to repair our first parent’s ruin” but to also instruct them and the reader on how to by loving and obeying God gain “a paradise within, happier far” (12:587). By meditating on Milton, we might with his character Adam confess:

Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best,
And love with fear the only God, to walk
As in his presence, ever to observe
His providence, and on him sole depend,
Merciful over all his works, with good
Still overcoming evil, and by small
Accomplishing great things, by things deem’d weak
Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise
By simply meek; that suffering for Truth’s sake
Is fortitude to highest victory,
And to the faithful Death the Gate of Life. (Paradise Lost 12:561-571)

Toward an ever deepening relationship with God by thoughtful choice

Oddly, John Milton has been viewed by some as if he were not a person of faith at all, as if Christianity were just the vehicle by which he delivers his humanistic message and not the core of that message. Plainly, this is not the case. Throughout his writing, Milton intersperses clear indication that the faith he speaks of is personal. It is a matter of choice. Milton’s God says “Man shall not quite be lost, but sav’d who will” (PL 3:173). In the end, salvation is for “all who will believe” (PL 12:407). We choose to be in relationship to God, or not.

Although Satan in Paradise Lost suggests that God threw him out of heaven, the Archangel Raphael when retelling the story to Adam makes clear that the truth was otherwise. On the third day of the war in Heaven (Book VI), the Son of God in God’s chariot drives Satan and his rebellious crew to the edge of Heaven and then stops. With the invitation of returning penitently to the fold implied as on offer, Satan chooses to throw himself “headlong” “from the verge of Heav’n” (865). Another time as the stairway to Heaven is let down toward him, Satan sidesteps and continues toward Earth to “spite” God. Most poignantly, while recognizing that his Creator gave him “bright eminence” and required no “hard” service of him other than deserved “praise,” Satan chooses to bid Hope and Good farewell and pursue a new motto: “Evil be thou my Good” (4:42-110). Pointedly, Satan opts out of an ever deepening relationship to God by his choice.

Even though Satan employs his god-given freedom of choice to break faith with his maker, for Milton freedom is essential to our salvation, for it is by choice that we accept what God provides. Speaking of Adam’s ability to “stand” against the temptation by the Devil, God asserts,

. . . I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Such I created all the Eternal Powers
And Spirits, both them who stood and them who fail’d;
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.
Not free, what proof could they have giv’n sincere
Of true allegiance, constant Faith or Love,
Where only what they needs must do, appear’d,
Not what they would? what praise could they receive?
What pleasure I from such obedience paid . . . ? (3:97-107)

Without choosing to follow Jesus, a possibility even Satan was endowed with, we serve “necessity” and leave God ungratified. The archangel Raphael attests that God created us with this ability to accept Him but left doing so up to us. “Our voluntary service he requires / Not our necessitated” (5:529-530).

. . . freely we serve,
Because we freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall. (5:538-540)

Certainly one of the most moving passages of Paradise Lost comes when after having eaten the forbidden fruit and before the Son of God has come to judge them, Adam and Eve choose to prostrate themselves upon the ground and confess their sin “with tears / Watering the ground, and with sighs the Air / Frequenting . . . from hearts contrite, in sign / Of sorrow unfeign’d, and humiliation meek” (10:1097-1104).

Milton maintains this inviolable necessity of freedom because of an abiding faith

in our ability to reason and in the inevitability of the Truth being known. For Milton,

“reason,” our ability to think and act logically, is a corollary gift from God that enables

humanity to use freedom wisely and worshipfully. Adam recognizes “Reason he made

right” (9:352). In Areopagitica, Milton equates reason with the image of God in us. He

writes, “he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it

were, in the eye” (720). He praises the triumphant martyrdom of Samson in Samson

Agonistes as the “heroic magnitude of mind.” In Paradise Regained, the Son of God

overcomes Satan’s temptations and thereby sets the path to salvation by out thinking the

Devil in debate. To summarize Milton in one colloquial admonition, in all of his thoughts

and writing he seems to be shouting “Use your head.” We sometimes seem to want to

compartmentalize our experience and live as if thinking and imagining were not spiritual

activities. To the contrary, Milton suggests again and again that God has given us minds

to be used in our quest to know Him. He recognized that Jesus had added “mind” to the

great commandment—“You shall love the Lord you God with all your heart, and with all

your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind”—thinking it an essential

agent in loving God (Matt. 22:37; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27). Subsequently, experts in

spiritual development like Richard Foster celebrate “study,” the employment of our

intellects, as a means to an ever deepening relationship with God. Milton is of like mind

also. His characters—the archangel Uriel, Adam, Eve, the angel Abdiel, Satan, and even

God Himself—must use reason to understand information and experience and then

choose an active response thereby.

Inevitably, the use of “right reason” will discover Truth because there is one truth and it cannot be other. Milton argues for this “singleness of form” in his oratorical exercise written while at Cambridge, “PARTIAL FORMS ARE NOT FOUND IN AN ANIMAL BESIDE ITS WHOLE FORM.” Therein he concludes:

However the affair may conclude, even if I lose my cause, the cause shall not be lost, for the Truth is unconquerable and more than able in her own strength to defend herself. Nor does she need any trifling outside help to do so. And even though sometimes she may seem to be worsened and to be crushed to earth, nevertheless she maintains herself forever inviolate and intact from Error’s claws. In this she is like the sun, which often reveals himself to men’s eyes wrapped up in clouds that befoul him, nevertheless gathers his rays to himself and summons all his glory to him, and blazes forth in perfectly stainless brilliance. (612)

Milton’s confidence in Truth may be further confirmed by recognizing in the closing image the common seventeenth-century sun/son play on words (which Milton also more clearly employs elsewhere) where the word “sun” stands for the star that lights the earth and for the Son of God, the light of the world. This belief in the power of Truth and in reasons ability to uncover it, leads Milton to argue in Areopagitica for the freedom to publish anything written and against any censorship. Not only is he confident that Truth will emerge by reasonable consideration but by like processes untruth will be exposed and eventually disregarded. Sure that “To the pure, all things are pure” (Titus 1:15), Milton takes as imperative that we “Prove all things” (1 Thess. 5:21). Paul, Milton says, has set before us the responsibility to consider widely and judge, even as he and Moses and Daniel read both sacred and secular texts (726-727). Milton recalls Dionysius Alexandrinus’s “vision sent from God” as recorded in Eusebius: “Read any books whatever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright and to examine each matter” (727). Famously he concludes: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary” for “that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary” (728).

Perhaps the most telling of Milton’s tales of freedom, reason, and truth in action is the experience of the angel Abdiel in Books 5 and 6 of Paradise Lost. Hearing that Satan and a third of the angels in Heaven are assembling in the north quarter of Heaven—leave it Satan to think that there is a space in Heaven where he cannot be seen by God—to plan “fit entertainment” in celebration of the Son’s exaltation, Abdiel goes to participate. He has that freedom and the plan sounds holy. However, hearing Satan complain of “knee-tribute” and “prostration vile” being endured by creatures “ordained to govern, not to serve,” Abdiel’s reason begins to sense a ruse (5:781, 802). He attempts to reasonably argue the rebellious angels back to worthy submission: “By experience taught we know how good, / And of our good” God is (826-827). Perilously, Satan counter argues that because he cannot remember “when we were not as now,” he must be “self-begot” (5:859-590). Abdiel correctly thinks this a damnable blasphemy and denounces it.

Then who created thee lamenting learn,
When who can uncreate thee thou shalt know. (5:894-895)

“Faithful found, / Among the faithless,” Abdiel returns to God “Unshak’n, unseduc’d, unterrifi’d” in the truth (5:896-897, 899). He is greeted with applause and granted the honor of striking the first blow in battle with the rebellious angels.

Toward an ever deepening relationship with God by feeling

In spite of the decidedly cerebral approach of most of Milton’s writing, he is still occasionally able to inspire his readers to an ever deepening relationship with God by the piercing emotion of his expression.

Perhaps by the nature of the form, Milton’s sonnets yield multiple moments of emotional inspiration. Sonnet 7 whines with the frustration of arriving at the age of twenty-three without feeling he has accomplished anything in grateful response to God’s goodness. The sonnet ends confident in God’s ability to do through the young poet all that needs to be done.

All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great task-Master’s eye. (13-14)

Still a subtle unease reflected in the designation “task-Master” echoes in the tangle of the rhyme of the last six lines. More surety of future success might have been elicited by leaving the struggle in God’s hands instead of simply observing that he is watching, expectantly.

In Sonnet 19, Milton considers the spiritual trauma of the physically afflicted, in his case by blindness. Having felt God calling him at a young age to write an epic poem and a tragic play in the prophetic vein “doctrinal and exemplary to a nation” (669), Milton went blind long before writing his epics, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d, or his tragedy, Samson Agonistes. Compounding his complaint, he suggests that he went blind from overusing his eyes in preparation for these God-given tasks. As Samuel Johnson would observe nearly a century later, these were tasks ill-suited to a blind person. The pity of Milton’s plight resonates in the length and emotion of Samson’s reinflicting his own wound as “eyeless in Gaza” (SA 40). The ancient Hebrew hero describes the affliction as

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,

Irrecoverably dark, total Eclipse

Without all hope of day! (80-82)

The pain of physical blindness is reiterated at the end of Milton’s last Sonnet, “Methought I saw my late espoused Saint,” where in a dream he sees his newly deceased wife, “Rescu’d from death.” The clipped phrasing of the last line, “I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night,” drives home the dagger twisting poignancy of his only being able to see in his dreams.

Aggravating the physical handicap are the spiritual implications. Milton mouths Samson’s complain, when “Light the prime work of God to me is extinct,” I am “Myself my Sepulcher” (70, 102). In the opening to Book 3 of Paradise Lost, like he did with Samson, Milton seeks inner illumination. Although “thee I revisit,” he moans, “thou / Revisit’st not these eyes” (3:20-23). The apparent injustice of his service with his reward seems to goad the poet. Yet he prays “Shine inward . . . that I may see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight” (3:52, 54-55).

The tone at the beginning of Sonnet 19 might be labeled strident. The poet complains in passive voice how only halfway through his life his “light is spent,” that is, he’s blind. Alluding to the parable of the talents and the fear he has of not fulfilling the master’s expectations, his plight is compounded by the high calling he feels to write and the seeming impossibility of doing so as a blind person. He’s “useless.” Yet he feels “more bent” to present a “true account” to God, balancing his gifts with his accomplishments. Exasperated, he sarcastically queries “Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?”

The real inspiration of Milton’s experience of blindness comes with the reassurance that matches his anguish. In Sonnet 22 to his blind friend Cyriack Skinner, Milton encourages his former student:

Yet I argue not
Against Heav’n’s hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer
Right onward. (6-9)

In Sonnet 19, after the persona’s aggressive opening salvo toward God, “patience” pacifies him with the assurance that God is in control and lacks nothing that we must provide. In the service of this God, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” While prepared and desiring to do his bidding, his servants, even those without physical afflictions, may actually do nothing and still please Him.

Leading the reader in Praise and Worship

In addition to helping the reader to an ever deepening relationship with God, as a poet of devotional value, John Milton writes expressions of worthy praise and worship to God which the reader can join in with. He writes hymns, prayers, and descriptive passages so endowed with the beauty of the Creator as to inspire appreciation for the poet and gratitude to God. Milton has the ability to take what we think and feel about our Lord and say it as we wish we could, and better. In Alexander Pope’s words, Milton’s praise and worship is “what e’er was thought and ne’er so well expressed.”

Milton honed his skill at hymn writing by translating nineteen psalms into English meter and rhyme. His first great poem, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” is a hymn of praise. Written at the age of twenty, it is “a present to the Infant God” (16). It admiringly extols the convergence of the season, the peace of the Roman world, the primary elements and all of the natural order to facilitate the entrance of “Our great redemption from above.” After dismissing the shepherds’ “silly thoughts,” he praises the Savior’s birth with music and light. He does all this with a playful youthfulness fitting to the divine comedy of incarnation. Most of the poem champions the “smiling Infancy” as already claiming superiority to the plethora of alternate gods.

Our Babe, to show his Godhead true,
Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew. (227-228)

Although addressed to Eve, Adam’s first words in Paradise Lost tellingly extol his Creator’s goodness.

Sole partner and sole part of all these joys,
Dearer thyself than all; needs must the Power
That made us, and for us this ample World
Be infinitely good, and of his good
As liberal and free as infinite,
That rais’d us from dust and plac’t us here
In all this happiness, who at his hand
Have nothing merited, nor can perform
Aught whereof hee hath need . . . (4:411-419)

After even somewhat wistfully praising God for the “one easy prohibition” to not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as their only opportunity to show grateful obedience, the first man is awestruck by the overbalance of “Dominion giv’n” them. He concludes “let us ever praise him, and extol / His bounty” (4:436-437).

In addition to hymns of praise, Milton writes prayers that praise. He peppers his epic with invocations to divine assistance. Books 1, 3, 7, and 9 of Paradise Lost each opens with one such prayer. Although this repetitious is not, the practice of seeking the aid of the nine Greek muses of writing is conventional. Milton, however, makes clear that the ancient muses are “an empty dream” (7:39) and that what he has to say is so important that only the aid of the “Heav’nly Muse” who inspired Moses to write the Torah can proffer him aid (1:6-10). In the opening to Book 7, Milton prays to Holy Spirit who he says is the meaning behind the name Urania: “still govern thou my Song, / Urania, and fit audience find, though few” (30-31). For the believer, this prayer inspires. Milton has invoked our God to empower his words. Such a prayer cannot lay void. “So fail not thou, who thee implores” (38).

It would be hard to exceed in beauty and power Adam and Eve’s Edenic prayers. Their evening prayer in which they give thanks for “this delicious place,” their productivity, happiness, “mutual love,” “abundance,” and “promis’d” posterity impresses with its economy (4:724-735). Their morning prayer, which they utter in unison, displays at some length “prompt eloquence” (5:153-208).

These are thy glorious works, Parent of good,
Almighty, thine this universal Frame,
Thus wondrous fair; thyself how wondrous then!
Unspeakable, who sit’st above these Heavens
To us invisible, or dimly seen
In these thy lowest works, yet these declare
Thy goodness beyond thought, and Power Divine:
Speak yee who best can tell, ye Sons of Light,
Angels, for yee behold him, and with songs
And choral symphonies, Day without Night,
Circle his Throne rejoicing, yee in Heav’n;
On Earth join all ye Creatures to extol
Him first, him last, him midst, and without end. (153-165)

Continuing, they praise God for the elemental created order as that which teaches them His praise and ask that He correct them if they miss an opportunity to praise Him. They conclude,

Hail universal Lord, be bounteous still
To give us only good; and if the night
Have gather’d aught of evil or conceal’d,
Disperse it, as now light dispels the dark. (205-209)

Finally, Milton leads the reader in praise and worship by describing our God’s creative actions with detailed admiration. Noteworthy of such passages is first description of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. Although arguably misogynistic in the gender roles Milton ascribes to the pair, “The image of thir glorious Maker” shines in them both (4:292). “Truth, Wisdom, Sanctitude” appear in both. The carefully detailed description of their hair beautifies them both (301-311).

So hand in hand they pass’d, the loveliest pair
That ever since in love’s imbraces met,
Adam the goodliest man of men since born
His Sons, the fairest of her Daughters Eve. (321-324)

When Milton first describes Eden, the beauty of that “delicious Paradise” “to the heart inspires / Vernal delight and joy” (4:132, 154-155). The “odorous sweets” that rise therefrom stupefy and momentarily incapacitate even Satan at the onset of his destructive mission. But perhaps the most stunning of Milton’s descriptive praises come in Raphael’s creation account burgeoning in Book 7. The words pronounced by God in Genesis recur almost unchanged but the archangel elaborates in such detail as display the beauty of creation and the Creator. For Milton, God’s providence is manifest in beauty. His augmented creation account climaxes on the sixth day with the creation of “the Master work, the end / Of all yet done; . . . ”

. . . a Creature who not prone
And Brute as other creatures, but endu’d
With Sanctity of Reason, might erect
His Stature, and upright with Front serene
Govern the rest, self-knowing, and from thence
Magnanimous to correspond with Heav’n,
But grateful to acknowledge whence his good
Descends, thither with heart and voice and eyes
Directed in Devotion, to adore
And worship God supreme who made him chief
Of all his works: (7:505-516).

Before the reader can rush to judgment, thinking this descriptive praise too high for even a prelapsarian human being, Milton brings in his God to remind us that the creature is so highly revered because he was created “in the image of God / Express.”

A Surprising Conclusion

In spite of the suspicion that Milton held a slightly lower than orthodox view of the person and work of Jesus, some of Milton’s words concerning the Christ serve as a fit conclusion to an examination of his inspirational value as a devotional writer.

Hindrances to this conclusion abound. The fact that Milton rarely refers to the second person of the Trinity as Jesus or designates Him with the title Christ may reflect the poet’s discomfort with the fully God, fully man puzzle. In Milton’s thought, Jesus often seems more an ethical example to be followed than a God/man whose sacrificial death and resurrection expiates the sins of the world. As a young man trying to write a poem on the passion, perhaps as a companion piece to his nativity ode, Milton found himself “above the years he had” and never finished the poem. Paradise Regain’d is about the Son of God’s victorious verbal joust with the Devil, not His death and resurrection. And, although His incarnation is referred to there, in Paradise Lost the Son comes to earth only to judge Adam and Eve and expel them from Eden.

Nonetheless Milton does on occasion inspire with his portrayal of the Son of God. In Book 10 of Paradise Lost, near the only use of his name in the poem, the gentle “Jesus,”after judging the guilty pair, takes the form of a servant and compassionately clothes not only their outward nakedness but also their “inward nakedness, much more / Opprobrious, with his Robe of righteousness” (183, 221-222). Too often Michael’s mission in Books 11 and 12 has been denigrated as an unnecessarily overextended dénouement to Paradise Lost. His essential, two-fold mission is to impact the pair with the consequences of their sin and to buoy them with the hope of the “History of the seed,” so that they may leave Eden choosing their way to a new “paradise within.” That History culminates in the Christ event, “Proclaiming Life to all who shall believe / In his redemption.” It is a full scale, kerygmatic declaration of the gospel, “A gentle wafting to immortal Life” (12:356-465) and leaves Adam “Replete with joy.”

When, in Book 3 of Paradise Lost, God sees Satan headed to tempt “frail” humanity and by His omniscience knows that they will succumb, He asks who will go on humanity’s behalf. Heaven is hush until the Son of God volunteers.

Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life
I offer, on mee let thine anger fall;
Account mee man; I for his sake will leave
Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee
Freely put off, and for him lastly die
Well pleas’d, on me let Death wreck his rage (236-241).

This plan by which “Heav’nly love shall outdo Hellish hate” so moves the poet that when the angelic chorus celebrates Christ’s act in song, he throws off epic constraint and joins in the worship.

No sooner did thy dear and only Son
Perceive thee purposed not to doom frail Man
So strictly, but much more to pity inclin,d,
Hee to appease thy wrath, and end the strife
Of Mercy and Justice in thy face discern’d,
Regardless of the Bliss wherein hee sat
Second to thee, offer’d himself to die
For man’s offense. O unexampl’d love,
Love nowhere to found less than Divine!
Hail Son of God, Savior of Men, thy Name
Shall be the copious matter of my Song
Henceforth, and never shall my Harp thy praise
Forget, nor from thy Father’s praise disjoin. (403-415; emphasis added)

Milton rarely veered from this commitment to celebrate God’s praise in writing. Perhaps through the sacrificial death of Jesus, he too found as he offers to his readers a “paradise within, happier far.”

Work Cited

Milton, John. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes.

Indianapolis: The Odyssey Press, 1957.

Excerpt from Beggars in Heaven

2008-05-31T09:28:00.001-07:00

~Daniel Bowman Jr.

God is like a person who clears his throat while hiding
and so gives himself away.

-Meister Eckhart

What else should I be? All apologies.

-Kurt Cobain

They are large and crisp and brilliant, Vera’s books that surround me. One is open to illustrations of sea creatures, all blues and purples like her blanket.

It’s April 2nd, opening day in Cincinnati, a day for hope and a parade. But I’m in old New York again, living among the ghosts. I’ll tell you about them. I want to get this down, mostly for my daughter who likes stories and someday might want to hear this one from the beginning. I know that when I was a kid, I wanted someone to tell me why things were like they were.

For example, the time I broke the cellar window with a baseball. My father came home from work, found me cowering on the top bunk, and beat the hell out of my scrawny eight-year-old behind.

A few hours and many beers later he called me into the living room between innings of the Yankees game and put me on his lap. He was crying and said, “I never had a father. What am I supposed to do?” adding, “He loved the Dodgers,” the line that to my surprise invoked the hardest sob. And I would try in vain to answer the question of what he was supposed to do, and to find the link between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the pain, even to understand why my father’s father killed himself in 1957.

But that’s another story.

This one starts when Kate and I met as freshmen at Jacobs College, a place that promised “Education for Character” (and, often despite itself, seemed to deliver). Of her journey to Jacobs Kate once said, “I got in the back of my parents’ car and fell asleep. When I woke up, we were there.” Mine’s a little different.

I like to think of something Pastor Williams of Grace Bible Fellowship in Mohawk told me the first time I stepped foot into his church. “You need to get yourself obedient, son. Don’t you know,” he explained, “that there’s beggars in Heaven? If you don’t start storing up treasures, you’ll be one of ‘em.” Years after getting over (sort of) the guilt and shame and attendant psychological damage, I can laugh about it.

So Kate and I might be a couple of beggars in Heaven. Only I’m guessing that Heaven is reasonably warm. The first time I met Kate, it was very, very cold.

PART ONE

December 1993, Jacobs College

Chapter One: How I Ended Up at Jacobs

It was the middle of the night, Saturday night, and I was walking back to Pierce Hall from the Townhouses, crisply buzzed. It was the first time I’d had a drink since coming here. The early weeks were bliss—the song circles, card games, and never-ending cups of coffee had not lost their appeal of refreshing innocence and wouldn’t for a while yet.

Almost a foot of snow had fallen and it was still coming down, making the walkway barely visible and, as it does, making everything strangely quiet. My breath formed thick clouds. The lake wind picked up, blowing the snow in little whirlwinds. I squinted so my eyes were almost shut but smiled a big, dumb smile with my mouth. My belly was warm. My joints moved fluidly in the moonlight.

I passed the Quads, allowed myself a moment to agonize over the plump, beautiful girls sleeping in their carefully arranged rooms. I pictured fuzzy brown buttons the size of half-dollars holding together their pink pajama tops. I imagined one, half asleep, climbing down from the top bunk to use the cold, bright bathroom down the hall, goose bumps on her thighs as she peed with her eyes closed. I wondered where she was from, who she was.

I wondered, too, who I was and what God wanted with me.

I had come to Jacobs practically on a stretcher, but ready to get cleaned up and think on whatsoever things were pure and lovely. It would be like a sneaker commercial—I’d wear a hooded sweatshirt and run the streets punching fog at six in the morning. At night I’d find a warm corner of the library and study. All my habits would change. Old things would pass away. All things would become new. But let me back up to the old things for a moment.

My bender started on a humid night in late July with friends of friends I barely knew. I was stoned when we left but thought I heard talk of the southern Adirondacks. It would be a last hurrah before something else, anything else; at the time I’d been thinking of joining the military.

We came to a lake, skinny dipped, drank from jugs of sweet wine, and smoked a lot of pot. I fell asleep, then woke to a breakfast of warm beer and hot dogs. I fell asleep again. The next time I woke up I was in a moving van, my mouth dry and legs numb. The pipe was passed when I opened my eyes.

By the time we got to Saratoga, things had taken on strange new meanings. While the landscape remained familiar, I felt I’d lost something along the way (later I would recognize it as the very context in which I had always understood people and events). The last hurrah was looking more like a bridge to some other place, a place I had not meant to go.

We danced in the fields of Saratoga, fields that seem to go on forever. Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers played on the stage below. A hefty guy wearing a long beard and dirty white t-shirt came around, walking toward us but looking off in the other direction, saying blankly, “Doses. Doses.” The girl from the lake took a walk with him. When she came back she held her index finger near my mouth and told me to stick out my tongue. I did. She put her fingertip on it.

Things got very weird very quickly. I walked a lot, crisscrossing through people until I was thoroughly lost. I became paranoid. I remember thinking that at least I was in a field, on a rolling hill even. How could someone out in a field be in very much trouble? I reasoned. At one point I felt I was being held, or fought against. I couldn’t tell from moment to moment if I was dancing or just kind of rolling around on the ground. For the first time since I was little, I prayed. I made an effort to focus. When I did, I saw five girls standing around me in a perfect semicircle as if in some children’s playground game. Their heads were bowed, hands covering their faces. Then they raised their heads slowly in unison. Each girl was crying. I wanted to cry too but couldn’t. All I could do was go back down to the ground, which I did in a wild animal-like maneuver I can’t describe, other than to say it was the maneuver of my salvation. There was no sinner’s prayer, no organ riffing with every head bowed and every eye closed. There was just a great deep silence, the smell of cool earth, and the terrible knowledge of my redemption, mixed with a feeling you might call joy. Looking up, I saw the stars and said, “Thank you, God,” not quite knowing what I meant. Then I got the idea to go to a Christian college. So that’s how I ended up at Jacobs.

And those early weeks were bliss.

The nights were everything. If you were up at all during the day, then each word and look carried the promises of night, the presence of God. Worship was driving down the back roads to a Phish bootleg. Our cobblestone alley downtown was cold and smoky; our fellowship was in the dark.

Sleepy Friday morning chapels—look past the clean-cut breakfasters in front, arms raised up, eyes closed, necks craned toward Heaven, lips mouthing the words—look in small pockets in the back of the middle and see the dreamy faces under ball caps. You woke to your secrets and in them you knew God and sang mysterious words like “Holy, Holy, Holy.”

Through the sermon you played out the chatter of the night before, open fires in the corners of your eyes. You saw the curly-haired trumpeter dripping sweat, playing piano with one hand, horn with the other, sound flooding into the alley, the tall girl with the shaved head and thin, tattooed shoulders avoiding the crowd as she puts too much cream in her coffee in the dark and someone on stage is praying for you now and it’s all blurred together, it’s all the same energy. Back to your room after chapel, get undressed, put on music, climb into your loft, sleep until dinner when it it’s dark again.

Chapter 2: Jack

Jack Mary was one of two tall Canadians who lived next door to Noah and me in Pierce Hall. His self-assurance was magnetic in a place where guys seemed to equate being humble with smiling a lot and holding doors for you, and sometimes clinging to a dress code from the ‘80’s.

Jack fashioned himself direct heir to a line of kings and the promises that accompany such a pedigree. I thought of myself in much the same way. While I book-ended my royalty with Woody Guthrie and Kurt Cobain, however, Jack’s promises were handed down by the likes of Leonard Cohen and some guy known as Ukulele Ike, with whom Jack was enamored. This struck me as particularly unusual and exciting.

Jack projected vigor, pitch-perfect wit, and a certain world-weariness buoyed by a secret love affair with the poor in spirit. He could relay this to you in the first thirty seconds of your acquaintance. I don’t know if he believed in all of it exactly—although if I had to guess I would say he mostly did. He believed heartily in performing it, though, which enabled him to refine it beautifully and wield it as a sword, shield, filter, church, or whatever would become necessary.

The first night I met him he was playing guitar and singing in his high tenor something about a bird and trying to be free.

Jack had recorded “experimental” music with a friend in Toronto: They looped a melody played on a broken toy xylophone from the Goodwill, then sampled a tape of his family singing “How Great Thou Art” at a nursing home. His oldest sister was tone deaf and hesitant; his father was missing a finger from a boyhood farming accident so one note was off on some chords. A lady in the background yelled things like “Where’s my baby!?” and “You sons-of-bitches!” Then it cuts to a scratchy beep and a baritone narrator from an elementary school filmstrip starts talking in measured tones about how maple syrup is made…meanwhile the xylophone loops back in. The whole thing repeats three times.

We listened in the dark. While contrived, it felt raw and original; more importantly, it signaled something powerful for me. I had come only to clean up, to work out my salvation with requisite fear and trembling. I had not expected a spirit of invention—least of all, of freedom. But that was how I would understand grace in those early weeks.

Jack should’ve qualified for the automatic deference awarded to any guy over 5'11'', but that merit was compromised by his almost extreme skinniness. He compensated in part by gaining a reputation as one of the smartest students on campus. He’d walk to lunch with Dr.’s L. Scott Nichols and James Casey and you’d never know he wasn’t one of them. Casey was a history professor with whom I took Western Civ first semester. Here’s the difference between Jack and me: After class, I might have images and ideas swirling around in my head and maybe take a walk and smoke a cigarette or try to write a poem. Jack wanted to talk.

He’d approach Casey on the way out of class: “Say, Dr. Casey. You mentioned that Richelieu’s politics were driven in part by his belief in natural reason. But how did that relate to his Catholicism? I mean, he was tolerant of the Huguenots but only until they became a political problem.” Casey would eat it up and off they’d go. I was sure Jack did this just to be a wiseass. I was equally convinced that he craved a deeper understanding of Cardinal Richelieu and the Huguenots and ten thousand other things.

Jack was a very good guitar player, probably the best at Jacobs—quite a feat considering the legions of praise-chorus-acoustic-slingers who dominated the campus. You’d think a few of them would get really good since all they seemed to do was sit around and “jam.” Jack was not to be found among the ranks, though. It was a point of pride with me that he and I played together quite a bit; Jack played alone or with me, and that was about it. He played a Norman, a Canadian brand that neatly excused him from the unspoken guitar competition on campus. Your axe had to be unique: a good brand or a different color or a suitably beat-up classic, maybe sporting a bumper sticker of an obscure band from the Northwest or a line from a Phish song, like “Smell My Mule."

(One acknowledged winner of said competition was Mike Flanagan, a PK (Preacher’s Kid) who lived below us and could be heard strumming and singing, in his average but absurdly overconfident voice, any one of hundreds of praise choruses or “secular” songs granted they had a kind of Methodist Youth Group stamp of approval. That list, at the time, was lead by “Brown-Eyed Girl,” and I recall there was a rather unfortunate version in circulation in which the verse that mentions making love in the green grass was dropped in favor of repeating the innocuous lines about laughing and running, hey, hey.

To make it worse, Mike wreaked his sanitized havoc on us by way of a gorgeous Martin D-28, originally his grandfather’s. “It’s like Elvis’s,” he said. It came complete with missing wood, a broken tuning peg, and admirable scratches to prove its authenticity. What an instrument. I hated him for it.)

My own guitar was a Korean-made toy-like instrument licensed through a department store that had since gone out of business. My mother bought it for seventy-five dollars when I was fifteen. I was always embarrassed, as it represented a sacrifice and she had no idea it was a piece of shit. Since I had no choice, I restrung the thing to accommodate my left-handedness and learned some chords out of a book my father had gotten from a guy at work who played bass in a local band in the ‘70’s.

The pick guard on top was enough to raise the eyebrows of the casual observer: Um, do you know you’re playing that thing upside down? And the action was half an inch high. But play it I did. I started to love the thing, and since it wasn’t worth a case, I walked around campus with it hanging off my back. Crunching maple leaves underfoot, I fancied myself all hobo.

Chapter 3: Kitty

Back to the walk. I was getting close to Union Avenue; in the distance I could see its single traffic light flashing yellow. The wind stopped for a moment as if to let me understand the deep freeze behind it. The parts of me that had moved fluidly were now bitterly cold and mechanical.

To my left was a small field where the wind returned to make swirls of snow leap into the air and disappear in the dark. I thought of my mother and the incident with the windshield wiper. My mom’s a nurse. One time she was on call and had to go out to the country in the middle of the night. We have this rusty blue Chevy van and at some point on the way to her patient’s, along a dark country road, the driver’s side wiper flew right off. It was snowing like crazy. She had to stop and get out and look for it. My mother can’t see anything, especially at night, even with her glasses on.

The next morning I was lying in bed and heard her in the kitchen crying, telling my father what happened. To my surprise he yelled at her as though it were her fault: “Jesus, you’ve got to be more careful.” She cried harder but now she was mad, too. Someone had dropped me off in the driveway just an hour or so before; I was hung over and sick and turned on the radio so I wouldn’t hear any more. I didn’t know how she got home and I didn’t want to know. I knew she never found the wiper, though, because I could see the van out my bedroom window and the wiper was not on it.

Since winter had come to Jacobs, the image of her out in the storm haunted me with the force of something ancient. I felt ashamed, not the kind of shame one feels for having done wrong, but the kind one feels over what he isn’t or can’t be. I had always hated being poor, and I had always felt guilty for hating it. I blamed it for everything, including the wiper incident, only the most recent in a long string of vehicular issues that plagued us throughout my childhood.

And the comforts of that elusive “upper middle class” were well represented at Jacobs, inspiring new bursts of jealousy in me. My first day on campus, I went to registration to find out if I’d been approved for the loans I needed. I saw a guy and his wife standing with their son. The father asked, “What’s the balance, then?” The registrar said, “Fifty-five hundred.” He mouthed the figure silently as he wrote the check while the wife smiled at the registrar. I was astonished. I felt like I was watching something illegal, like a drug deal going down or a mafia hit being commissioned. I imagined my father, how, if he’d been told that a balance for which I was responsible was fifty-five dollars (never mind fifty-five hundred), he would give my mother that familiar look meaning, “Is this gonna bounce?” then proceed to be stressed out for the rest of the night—often, the rest of the week.

Later I met the kid, beneficiary of the gaudy sum, who lived on the third floor of my dorm. His name was Andy Sitwell and he had a brand new Saab (pronounced “Sob,” I would learn—where I grew up, there were two types of car: Chevy or Ford). I went to the store with him once and I couldn’t figure out how to work the seat. Unprovoked, he explained: “Yeah, this was my graduation, birthday, and Christmas present.” Again I thought of my dad, sitting in the parking lot of Mohawk Tool at lunch, eating a pickle-and-pimento-loaf sandwich in his LTD, the closest thing our family would ever have to a boat. As if to distance itself from the inevitable comparison, however, it stalled when the underside got wet.

At last I reached Pierce Hall, stopping at the top of the stairs to steady my breathing and warm up. The wind in that little lake town made your bones ache.

The sign above our hallway read, “How excellent when brothers dwell together in unity.” I unlocked the door. The guys were playing Jersey Pitch. We had lately formed a little group. My roommate Noah sat on the floor; he put his long hair behind his ear with what was a popular gesture of our generation. Ryoji was in the Low-Rider, a very comfortable but legless chair we’d found on a curb downtown.

Ryoji had recently arrived from Tokyo. Despite the language barrier, his first act was to initiate a weekly walking-on-your-hands race—not for speed, but for distance. (I’ve since heard that it remains a tradition in the new dorm that was built when they demolished Pierce.) He won the first week. The following week, however, I harkened to my experience as a child gymnast and not only equaled his walk to the fire doors, but actually opened them with my feet and continued down the east hallway until I reached the staircase. I had half a mind to try walking down the stairs, too, but decided against it. The walk, as it stood, amazed several onlookers standing in their doorways and irked Ryoji to no end. When someone mentioned it he would give me an exaggerated scowl.

Jacobs, although not known for anything in particular, was not a top choice for the sciences. Ryoji was studying to be a physicist, making his choice of schools a little strange. He said it was the brochure: It was written in the plainest English of all the American college brochures. Ryoji, because he was still learning it, liked his English plain, supplemented from time to time by pop film exclamations such as his favorite: “I have the need—the need for speed.”

Jack and his roommate Steven were there, too, sitting on upside down milk crates by the window. Steven was on the basketball team. He went about 6’ 3’’ like Jack, only he was muscular—perfectly toned and proportioned, to be exact. I discovered this when I walked in on him shaving his legs in the bathroom late one night. We were both surprised and embarrassed. He said it was for biking and swimming, two things he did all the time.

Steven was a PK, which was the extent of my knowledge of his personal life at that point. His skin was pale and his eyes sat deep in his face. He almost never smiled. I assumed he was always at the gym—he would rarely hang around the dorm or join us on late night adventures.

Jack was holding the stub of a cigar between his thumb and index finger. He gave a quick wave while blowing a stream of smoke toward the propped-open window, absorbing every ounce of the juvenile pleasure one receives from smoking in a place where it’s not allowed.

A trumpet player went into a solo; the speakers shimmied. Noah dealt me in. We spun records and played cards. I was glad. I had things to think about.

I’d been on my way to the mailroom, which is why I was out walking to begin with. I ran into a girl who works at the library with me. Well, she works at the front desk, and I clean the place on a work-study through the Custodial department. Anyway, she was headed to the Townhouses for a party and asked me if I wanted to go. I was taken by surprise and felt I couldn’t say no; after all, she was cute and she was a Sophomore.

We went in together but it became clear that we wouldn’t be talking. Feeling nervous and out of place, I grabbed a beer and slipped into the deep cushions of the couch. After another beer (and a wholly undesired shot of Kentucky Sour Mash Bourbon—the result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time), I managed to sneak away, looking forward to the rather long walk alone back to Pierce, the walk I’ve been telling you about, the walk where it all started, and the walk where, I don’t mind saying, I would become thankful for the warmth of the liquor in my throat.

Toward the end of that walk I nearly got hit crossing Union Avenue. A crowded Jeep flew by, then did a full donut in the middle of the intersection. I recognized it as belonging to someone in Greek Village. It was always parked by the door to Alpha House. The crew inside was laughing, blowing smoke. They were known for partying. The girls danced at the clubs downtown. From the back window of the Jeep, one of them looked right at me, her huge eyes filled with something like regret. Her name was Katherine Bachmann. At Jacobs, they called her Kitty.

Chapter 4: The Caretaker’s Daughter

I was holding both the nine and five of clubs but no face cards. I thought about bidding them but instead got up, measured out sixteen teaspoons of coffee, and brewed it. Upon percolation, the room filled with the aroma. Characteristic of those nights, our senses became properly saturated—scratchy Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club playing a little too loud, coffee brewing, the faint smell of cigar smoke, waves of heat visible off the radiator, heavy snow coming down in the dark, wind audible through the open window, dim light shining on cautious young faces.

“Let’s get out of here,” Noah said. He was the only one with a car, so we looked at him for direction. “I’m hungry.”

“What did you have in mind?” Jack asked.

“Nick’s, I guess. You guys coming? Ezra?”

“Sure,” I said. Ryoji didn’t have any objections. To my surprise, Steven, too, would be joining us.

When I opened the door to the back parking lot, the wind whipped it out of my hand and a gust of snow blew into the brick hallway.

We jumped into Noah’s car and headed east toward the city, Jack in front and Steven and I in the back on either side of Ryoji. Jack played a Phish show. They were into a rather atmospheric twenty-minute version of Icculus with a long refrain of Fluffhead in the middle. We drove past mostly dark houses; a few had a light on and I was happy not to know or care who was doing what in that light, happy for once in my life to be exactly where I was. I closed my eyes and took in every note.

Nick’s was an all night eatery that had been around forever. It was home of the Garbage Plate, which consisted of a bottom layer of home fries and macaroni salad with two cheeseburger patties or hot dogs on top, mustard and onions, then a ladle of Nick’s “Special Sauce,” a mixture of grease and Nick’s Hot Sauce that was displayed on the counter for sale in bottles.

If you dared to stand in front of the counter and look at the menu board, they’d yell at you and act pissed off, which was disorienting the first time but much fun now that I knew the game. I scoffed at rookies who got caught in the neutral zone.

Nick’s was no place for indecision. The cook would shout out of the corner of his mouth, without looking up, a syllable resembling “You.” And you’d damn well better have an answer—the right one. Clarity was chief among virtues: You had to speak loudly enough to be heard, but not be so loud as to be appear ungrateful for what you were about to receive, and fast enough to keep things moving, but not so fast that you mumbled. “Cheeseburger plate, mac/home fries, no onions.” “Hot dog plate, all mac, float it” (extra sauce). Several other variations were acceptable; a question or concern was not. And they never wrote down anything. I was always a little awed but acted properly bored.

We took a booth and got started. An unwritten code in Pierce specified that you were expected to finish every bite, including both pieces of bread they pulled out of a giant garbage bag sitting on the floor by the counter. The punishment for not complying was that guys would no longer invite you on Nick’s runs. The whole thing was like a bizarre test: Can you finish all that food? Can you deal with the cook while he stands there, inked arms crossed, waiting for you to be stupid? What about the bathroom—could you endure the perpetually sticky floor and rancid odor?

(I should mention that Nick’s was a test worth taking; a Garbage Plate is a good and perfect gift).

We talked idly, led by Jack’s musings. I said something about the Cohen album he’d lent me. It was hard to contain my admiration, though I knew I’d draw his sarcasm. “Do you view God as the sum total of all art?” he asked. “Truth from the top down?”

“No, maybe that’s me,” he continued. “Let’s think about you, Ezra Holleran, who waited patiently for someone to come along—a hero to dethrone his big brother’s hair bands. Someone whose thoughts were above firing up motorcycles and chasing women; someone not so easily amused. Is your Jesus just another longhaired twenty-something kicking around Seattle in a cardigan? Think about it,” he implored with his squinty eyes and a quick nod of the head. Jack was good at this—couching a cultural observation in a kidding tone, in case someone decided to take the point up with him, I guessed. Not that anyone ever did.

Jack stuffed a forkful of potatoes into his mouth. I had thoughts but needed time to sort through them. Noah, always action-oriented, bailed me out.

“Hey,” he said. “You know the President of Jacobs? Have you guys been up to his house?”

We’d only passed by the place, and Noah said you couldn’t see it well from the road.

“I took a walk up there the other night. It’s cool. Want to go?”

“Now?” I asked. I was happy to be warm and full.

“When we’re finished,” he said.

“Of course,” Jack said, and somehow it was as if he had thought of it himself.

Into the car again. Jack popped in a tape of his favorite, Ukulele Ike:

I know that Babe Ruth makes home runs
And Dempsy is the champ.
Marconi made the radio
And Cleopatra was a vamp.

I know that Spark Plug is a horse—
I'm a smart guy, there's no doubt.
But there's one thing that I don't know
And I'm dying to find out:

Who takes care of the caretaker's daughter
While the caretaker's busy taking care?
Gee, oh gosh, oh gee; that's what worries me.
I know that the caretaker must take care
And while he's taking care, she's alone somewhere.
Who takes care of the caretaker's daughter
While the caretaker's busy taking care?

Tired, drifting, I thought of Kitty Bachmann and the way she looked at me. I wondered if it had really happened. Since coming to Jacobs I’d felt in a way that I was only a witness to those who experienced this new life, those recipients of looks from girls like Kitty. For me it was always more like a dream. But there was no way around this one: She looked exactly at me, and not, I could tell, just because I happened to be out there walking. Her eyes held a meaning I needed to discover.

I should tell you that Katherine Bachmann and I went to high school together, sort of. We were both from Mohawk, a small village in the valley between Syracuse and Albany, once called Leatherstocking Country. Katherine was one of a handful of people I didn’t know at all. We’d passed each other in the school hallways for years but had never really met.

A natural beauty, she was the kind of girl who looked every bit as good jogging in sweatpants as she did in a dress. And those eyes—those huge green eyes might’ve been more animal than human.

Everyone in town knew that the Bachmanns were strict Pentecostals. Katherine and her sister never participated in school functions like the Halloween parade, and even in high school she was not allowed to go to the dances. But something happened in the winter of our junior year. People started talking. At first she was just absent for a few days, but she ended up missing over a month of school. When she got back I think she looked different but I wasn’t sure how.

Her cousin thought she’d gone to New York to sing with a band. This was believable, as Katherine was a gifted musician—she’d made All-State for both voice and cello every year since ninth grade, an unprecedented run as far as I knew.

I had heard her name come up at Jacobs, but the only other time I’d seen her was the day her family dropped her off. I was walking by and noticed them in the parking lot. Her father, a tall, imposing man, had “laid hands” on her and was praying in tongues, a thing I’d never heard before.

But I didn’t really know anything about her, and that bothered me. I knew we were the only two people here from Mohawk. I knew she was associated with Greek Village. And I knew that her smile made you want to live. But she wasn’t smiling in the back of that car.

Chapter 5: Dance

“Alright, boys, it’s truth time,” Jack said. The President’s driveway was all uphill and the fresh snow made the climb difficult. But we made it. We pulled into the regal circle and the first thing I saw were four enormous white columns running from the roof to the ground. I thought about our school’s founder, Edward Whitacre Jacobs, the great 19th Century Free Methodist preacher who had built the house and who was buried in the cemetery down the block. We had watched a film about him in Freshman Orientation. The sense of history began to overwhelm me. Our spirits had been high, but now as the wind howled and the snow continued to pile up, I for one was scared.

Jack, on the other hand, didn’t miss a beat. Without warning, he took off all his clothes. Noah turned around and looked at me, and with a laugh and good-natured shrug, began to undress, too. I did the same. Ryoji looked unsure but took his clothes off and, in his limited space, folded them into a neat little stack on the seat and pushed his thick glasses back up the bridge of his nose using just an index finger as was his habit. And Steven undressed as well, pale knees and elbows everywhere. We put our shoes back on, lacing them carefully while sitting in the buck.

There was no time to wonder how this would work because Jack opened his door and bolted out of the car. We were not far behind. He led us in a jog around the front yard, then headed for the duck pond. The ice was covered with snow but he managed to glide across it rather smoothly. “Ha, ha!” Jack laughed at the moon.

We celebrated, yelling and whooping. We danced like idiots. Steven wore a huge smile now. He was leaping around like some giant flightless bird that suddenly believed it could get off the ground. I danced until I stopped caring what I looked like. I danced for God. I was sure I was dancing for the love of humankind, on the idea that all the pain would someday be transformed into beauty. But mostly I was dancing for Kitty Bachmann, as if the act would draw her to me, as though if I were true to the dance, she would find me.

I was pulled out of my trance by the barking of a dog and a floodlight that tried in vain to illuminate through the storm. We laughed, we patted each other’s backs, we sprinted to the car, which was still running, got in, barreled over the crest of the hill, into the black night. In the snow, in the wind, in the dark, they would not know who we were or what we were doing, or why.

Chapter 6: Lipstick

Skip ahead a few days to finals week. The weather had let up a bit; the sun even came out once or twice, truly a gift in the ever-gray Decembers of Lakeview, New York. Noah and I went to The Towpath, an all night burger joint on the Erie Canal where Jacobs kids often went to study. The baskets of fries were extra large and they’d refill your coffee as many times as you held out your mug. It was a bit crowded; I recognized some faces from campus.

We had just sat down at a booth in the corner when I saw her walking from the ladies room to the back exit. She wore a tweed fedora and a long black scarf. The hat cast a diagonal shadow across her face, but I saw the red lipstick glistening from her mouth. She had the presence of a silent film vixen. It was Kitty Bachmann, all right.

Then I saw the same red lipstick on a white coffee mug sitting right in front of me. In the dim diner light, the lovely grooves were shining like stars.

“Sorry, guys, let me get this stuff out of your way.” Our waitress placed the mug on a brown plastic tray—rather recklessly, I thought. The lipstick side was still facing me and I watched it all the way through the kitchen doors.

A few seconds later, the waitress came back. “You guys know what you want?”

“That girl who just walked out—was she sitting in this booth?” I asked.

“I don’t know who you mean, honey.”

“The girl with the hat.”

“Oh, yeah, she sat here; why?”

“Nothing, I just maybe needed to talk to her…” I fumbled.

“Well, looks like you’re too late tonight, kiddo,” she said. “Did you want some fries?”

Later that night Noah and I sat up in our lofts studying. I was supposed to memorize a passage from the book of Acts for my Early Church final.

“I know where they were going,” he said.

“What?”

“Kitty Bachmann. They were going to the Genesee Valley Museum.”

“What do you mean? It’s two in the morning.”

“You know Rick Barnes? I heard him talking about it at dinner.”

I recoiled at the name of Rick Barnes, who, I’d learned, was Kitty’s boyfriend and owner of the red Jeep. He was tall and had long, curly hair. It seemed there was nothing this guy couldn’t do: He worked on his Jeep in the parking lot, rebuilding the carburetor, I was sure, and doing other manly thing I’d heard my uncles talk about. Plus he was supposed to be a good snowboarder (at the time, this was an estimable nail in the coffin of any rival for the affections of a Christian college girl).

“What do you do in a museum at this hour?” I remarked.

“You hunt for ghosts,” he said as though it were common enough.

I could hear Mike Flanagan playing “Lord, I Lift Your Name on High” in the stairwell below us. I was not in the mood. “I’m going out,” I said.

I took off for the athletic center, which contained our student union as well as the mailroom. Once inside, I glanced at my mailbox and saw through the tiny window what appeared to be a crumpled up piece of paper. People did that a lot—sent each other messages through campus mail—but I had never gotten one. Flying through the combination, I found a scribbled note: “Will you ride the 4:00 with me tomorrow? –Kitty.”

I’d call my mom first thing in the morning; she’d be happy to save a trip. I sprinted back to Pierce, my mind racing through the possibilities. Tomorrow afternoon, I’d be on a train with Kitty Bachmann.

Chapter 7: Ghosts

As we stepped onto the platform, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror across the aisle. I was short and awkward. I thought of Greek Village and its swaggering inhabitants. I could not match their ease. They were everything they were supposed to be, nothing less and nothing more. I, on the other hand, had no idea what I was supposed to be.

We sat across from each other. Her hair was in two plum-black braids hanging down to the top of her chest. I felt completely incapable of being with her. I could feel the seconds adding up—15, 30—slipping away already. Now I would have to talk to her, which was a little like asking me to talk to my dreams.

But she would go first. Digging through her book bag, she grabbed a piece of paper and handed it to me, saying, “Look at this.” It was a few minutes after four but getting dark already. I began reading.

The paper was an obituary from the Batavia Evening Telegram. This is what it said:

December the 24th, Christmas Eve, the Year of Our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Eighty-Two:

To the great relief of those who cared for her, Miss Vera Peacock entered Eternity early this morning at the Genesee County Insane Asylum, due to pneumonia. She was 40 years of age, but mentally was an idiot. Dr. Seguin’s definition was most appropriate: “One who does nothing, thinks of nothing, cares for nothing.”

Her life was best explained by the irony contained in her own name, for Miss Peacock’s appearance surely stood in perfect opposition to the fine plumage of that well-known bird. The patient’s personal habits, would, I can attest, disgust you, gentle reader, to the brink of nausea. Her vile hair and fingernails, the cumulative result of an aggressive refusal to accept hygiene administration, were considered a source of contagion and pestilence. Dr. Benjamin Little, head of treatment at the Asylum, allowed Miss Peacock the benefit of the smoke of burning tar, recently discovered to be a powerful disinfectant, to which she responded with hostility of a fierceness that could only be demonic in origin.

Since her arrival at the Asylum as a ten-year-old child, Miss Peacock caused her caretakers unimaginable horrors, due to her aforementioned personal habits, along with her shrieking voice, which was never heard lest it was screaming all manner of atrocity, often in unintelligible sounds which, I can attest, carried a uniquely despicable quality unusual even among lunatics. The keen observer should, upon consideration of this writing, take note that our Lord and Savior in His Wisdom has indeed granted Lucipher dominion, for a time, over this fallen world. We must double our efforts in prayer in order to remain unspotted. One is reminded that the end times of which Saint Paul spoke are rapidly approaching: Upon my last visit, I stooped to bless her, and Miss Peacock reacted with a gnashing of teeth, betraying a mixture of blood and froth in the mouth. Let her serve as an example of the ravages of sin, which, left unchecked, consumes the sinner as Hellfire itself will surely do in the hereafter.

It is no wonder that the patient was not permitted to leave her room on the basement floor, located next to the morgue, from the day she arrived until the day she finally succumbed to the state befitting occupants of her neighborly chamber. It is a great mystery of Providence why, when so many of our finest and most potent die young and without explanation, this one should be allowed to linger, to burden society in such a loathsome manner for too many years. May the stench of that burden be forever extinguished by her death.

By the Reverend Dr. Elijah B. Miller of the First United Methodist Church, Batavia, NY

How do you respond to something so bizarre? I looked at Kitty. She was almost asleep, but her shoulders shivered and she looked at me like she was lost.

“Is this thing real?” I asked.

She said, “ It just makes me feel completely crazy, you know?”

“Where’s it from?” I asked, holding up the paper.

“Well, you’ll probably think this is stupid, but my friends heard about a ghost hunt? It was out in the country at this museum, so we went and they were taking us on a tour of the building and telling us about the ghosts, like ‘Sometimes people get their hair pulled or get kicked in the shins in this room, because it was part of the orphanage,’ so it was supposed to be the ghosts of children, you know?” She paused, shook her head, and closed her eyes again.

“I’m sorry, this is so fucking horrible…God, I’m so tired, are you tired?” she trailed off.

I gave a look of earnestness to show I cared. She continued, looking from side to side and sometimes closing her eyes. The rhythms of her speech were irregular. “They brought us to a room where people had electroshock therapy…and there was this recreation room and they said somebody sat down at the piano once and started playing swing music and all these spirits started dancing or whatever—they kept talking about ‘activity…’” She trailed off again, looking like she might cry. “I hated it and I never wanted to go there and I don’t want to know about ghosts or activities.”

“No,” I said, feeling I needed to jump in. “No, I mean, it’s not your fault.” I didn’t know what I meant by that, or what to say next. It was not how I’d pictured our train ride. “So, Vera Peacock. Jesus,” I said quietly.

“I am so tired, I never sleep—everyone was walking around on the different floors—it’s all abandoned and the owners won’t do any repairs or anything, to keep it original. Vera Peacock.” She blew her nose with a single Kleenex that had been far beyond its intended parameters.

“There’s this tiny room by the door where you come in? And it’s supposed to be a museum or whatever, and these pictures of the residents from when it was a nursing home and I was standing there looking at them and I was kind of high but, plus I’ve been sick, you know, I’ve been taking this Cold and Flu stuff all the time and I was thinking how I hated Rick for bringing me to this horrible place, no, I mean, but just everything, you know…I don’t even know what’s going on.”

She slowed down considerably now. “It’s like half my life I’m just riding in the back of somebody’s car and end up wherever and there was this rusty baby carriage in the corner that was supposed to be like an artifact but it was just sitting there looking so disturbing…” Kitty closed her eyes again and made a long snorting sound.

“And on the wall by the pictures was that paper,” she said. The pitch of her voice had climbed high, but her rhythm slowed to a crawl. She shifted continuously from side to side. “No one else even went in that room and I felt like a little kid, you know?” She started crying.

“But you’re from Mohawk”—her voice was barely above a whisper now, as though the rest of this were a secret—“and I remember you from 1st grade because you had a purple book bag with a turtle patch!” Kitty smiled. “Don’t you remember me?”

“Yeah, of course,” I said.

“Really? You remember me?” With that, the tears burst through her wide smile and she started crying and laughing nervously at the same time. Her cheeks became deep pink, snot ran down her nose, and her ears twitched. She was more beautiful than ever.

“I danced naked on the President’s lawn,” I said.

Without looking up she laughed in a little start. I dug through my book bag where I found some napkins and a box of raisins. I handed her the napkins. She cleaned up her face. It was pitch black out now. The dim lighting and the carpet, scarlet with green diamond patterns, made me feel like I was in an old movie. Perhaps Cary Grant would emerge from the snack car.

“No way,” she said.

“Seriously,” I replied, nodding my head.

“What’s that all about?”

“Well, it’s complicated. Want some raisins?”

“Sure.” I handed them to her. She craned her neck and emptied the entire contents of the box, chewing slowly on the left side of her mouth. Then she cozied up to the window, using her coat as a pillow, and closed her eyes.

“Katherine?” I was going to offer her my jacket for a blanket.

“Nobody calls me that,” she said.

I didn’t have an answer. “Katherine,” I repeated.

But she was asleep.

-------

Who Takes Care of the Caretaker’s Daughter

Written by Chick Endor and Paul Rebere

Used by Permission of Shapiro, Bernstein & Co., Inc.

Madeleine as Writer and Friend

2008-05-31T08:58:00.000-07:00

~Luci Shaw

We were sitting in the old wicker chairs, having tea on the screened-in porch at Crosswicks Cottage, Madeleine L’Engle’s home in Connecticut. It was a warm summer day in 2002, with the Litchfield Hills carving a silhouette against the late afternoon sky. Our conversation had slowed, become desultory, in the kind of relaxed manner of friends who know from long experience how to be together, what the other person may be thinking, and for whom silence is comfortable, even comforting. I was knitting. Madeleine seemed preoccupied.

Suddenly she looked up and asked, “Is your journal there in your knitting bag?”

“Yes,” I answered, rescuing my battered notebook from a tangle of yarn.

“Write this down for me, will you?”

Madeleine dictated this poem, speaking slowly enough for me to scribble it onto a blank page, but without a break in thought or rhythm.

...Purple shade
Smudges the spill of light from the late day sun.
The ink will run if I cannot remember
To keep the darkness new—so easily forgot.
The night provides more light than blatant day.
What can I write that keeps the morning fresh
That hid the young cat in the row of wheat?

The reaper lacks the eyes to hold him back;
Unseeing, his sharp blade carves the damning cut
That kills without a conscious, caring thought.
He does not hear the harsh cry of the cat;
And spurting blood, and life gone like the wind.

The event of the poem was clearly a vivid memory, one that had long been at work in Madeleine’s subconscious, ever-fruitful mind. It was as if the image finally found an outlet, and a place on a page.

Re-reading this poem later, I kept discovering things. Like its human author, a good poem is layered, not revealed all at once.

For instance, the need to keep memory fresh and re-freshened by writing it down: “The ink will run/if I can not remember to keep the darkness new.” Madeleine’s personal journal and daybook, in which she wrote daily for most of her adult life, helped her to “keep the darkness new,” and “the morning fresh” and guarded her ideas, and their sharp particularities, from blurring into mere abstractions. The long-ago stunning moment in its beauty and terror inform the poem as if it had just happened. The detail of “the young cat in the row of wheat” is stark and simple enough to paint a picture and prepare us for the violent conclusion of the second stanza.

The contrast between light and darkness, and the paradoxical power of darkness to clarify the truth, to inform even through anguish and suffering, reminds us of the phrase Madeleine often quoted about “the deep but dazzling darkness” of God and of supernatural reality that we struggle to understand and enter.

The vast importance for Madeleine of clear vision, and of sight and insight, is utterly absent in “the reaper” who “lacks the eyes to hold him back” from bloodshed, and because of indifference and lack of awareness, is unable to avoid snuffing out a life.

And “life gone like the wind”; in the age bracket where, of late, Madeleine and I found ourselves, our mortality and the diminishment that comes with aging must be faced. All of us who were close to Madeleine in the past months are painfully aware that her life seemed to be passing like the wind.

Madeleine has always had a powerful, instinctive sense of rhythm and rhyme. Read some of her sonnets and note how the flow of words and unforced, easy rhymes and rhythms sound as if that was exactly what they were always meant to be. Read aloud, these poems, some deeply moving, some full of humor, come to life as if they had somewhere always existed in their present form and only needed a mind and a mouthpiece and a page to bring them to our attention.

Her ability spontaneously to speak poetry into existence made driving with Madeleine, on our travels together with our friend Barbara Braver, a lot of fun. We’d compose “Trinitarian poems” in which each of the three of us in turn would contribute a line or a stanza to an ongoing poem. Sometimes they were zany, pure buffoonery or raucous nonsense, especially the limericks. Sometimes they made surprising, remarkable sense.

Our partnership in words is of long-standing. Madeleine and I met as speakers at a writer’s conference at Wheaton College over forty years ago. Her reputation as a novelist and essayist was legendary, even then. A Wrinkle in Time had received the Newbery Medal, and the Crosswicks journals had just been published. We exchanged books, and began a correspondence. Her first book of poetry, Lines Scribbled on an Envelope, had recently gone out of print, and since my husband Harold and I had just started our publishing house, I asked her “Why don’t we reprint the volume in a new edition, along with some of your more recent poems?” Madeleine jumped at the idea, and next year The Weather of the Heart was released and later A Cry Like a Bell. Madeleine welcomed my suggestions for minor revisions to her poems, and, tit for tat, was never reticent to comment constructively on mine. One of the last things she asked, in a phone conversation last January, was “Why haven’t you sent me your new poems?”

Of course, there were often disagreements. We never actually fought, but we regularly entered into vigorous differences of opinion. We both considered this one of the great advantages of our friendship, growing as it did out of a working editorial bond. We learned astonishing things from being honest and forthright with each other (“as iron sharpens iron...”). Coming as we did from opposite ends of the Christian spectrum, we nearly always met in the middle, benefiting from rich interchanges and discussions. “Book talk and God talk” formed continuing themes in our letters, phone conversations, manuscript revisions and face to face dialog. I remember our standing up and singing the Doxology when a particularly difficult conflict had been resolved.

As we all know, Madeleine loved to jolt her readers out of their conventional ruts, gaining their attention by presenting radical ideas. They didn’t always agree with her, but her fresh ideas set us all thinking in new and fruitful ways, opening up new horizons.

Walking on Water, Madeleine’s best-selling work on the complex, mysterious connections between faith and art came about early in our relationship. I had asked her to write about her philosophy of creativity, and months later she handed me an untidy pile of typescript, saying rather dismissively, “Can you do something to make this work? Right now it has no shape!” For several weeks I cut and pasted (on my living room floor, this was pre-computer) making piles of pages with ideas that seemed related, then re-combining them into what I hoped was a coherent sequence, the kind of statement that would reflect what Madeleine believed and practiced about God and writing in her life. Both she and Hugh were pleased with the result, and the trust between us deepened as we continued to work together to bring more of her non-fiction books to publication.

We shared much more than manuscripts. Our friendship blossomed ‘way beyond the writer-editor relationship. Mutual support in times of crisis, such as the year both our husbands died of cancer, or when I was depressed enough to be near-suicidal, and Madeleine talked me down, like talking the pilot of a failed plane to a safe landing. After a serious car accident I was able to be with her in San Diego for a week of telling jokes, and singing hymns and telling bed-time stories as she healed. There were visits back and forth between East and West Coasts. Travels by car in the U. K. and Canada, lectures together at Regent College, Calvin College, and at Oxford and Cambridge. Parties at “924” her home in Manhattan, her famous roast leg of lamb dinners, proof-reading sessions on her dining room table, supervised by Terrible and Kelly, the literary cats. Sunday worship at the Church of All Angels, where I remember her, one Advent, suddenly standing up to a commanding height, like the Angel of the Annunciation, and declaring “Fear not!” Visits to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for noon Eucharist. Saying Compline together with Barbara from the New Zealand prayer book at the end of a day.

Then there were the Ping Pong games at Laity Lodge in Texas. Madeleine won by intimidation, bearing down on any helpless opponent like a ship under full sail. Star-filled nights in the hill country. I wanted to title our book on friendship The Table of Friendship, celebrating Madeleine’s dinner table, the Lord’s table, the editorial desk and the ping-pong table. Madeleine thought that sounded too much like the multiplication table, to which we were both averse. So it ended up as Friends for the Journey, aided and abetted by Barbara.

Friendships for Madeleine were not just “relationships” or networking opportunities, but companionships of heart and mind and spirit. That’s what we can still celebrate today, all of us together in loving and each other, and each remembering the luminous moments with our loving, faithful friend. We’ve been grieving for months, years, as she was slipping from us into another sphere. Now we keep her alive in our hearts, our God-friend as she is now “knowing as she was known,” by her heavenly Father.

Why I Am Not A Theologian

2008-05-05T11:46:00.000-07:00

~Steve Slagg

Sometimes

I think things like

"Saxophone is far

from safe, you know?”

Like, “Saxophone

is all the blue in Chicago

siphoned out with

a syringe and shot up

straight into my veins,

which the saxophone plays

from within." But I know

if it were me I would arrange

the blue in ordered rows,

by size and shape

and typology of blue, and I

would ask the blue, "What hue?"

and "How deep are you?"

and "Can there really be

that many different shades of blue,

if God is good?" And blue

doesn't really have that kind of patience,

so instead I ask Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Germany, Phone Calls From

2008-05-05T11:43:00.000-07:00

~Natalie Lam

Germany well enough: here there was rain,

hauptbahnhof, everyplace-strasse, vodka

and blood cherries carried six blocks home

or somewhere, narrow skylights—

enough that you

closed your eyes (past 5000 miles

of airspace and the transatlantic pause)

and saw it, fragile and exact as my spine

climbing stairs. That you found in stones

and smashed glass nothing of body

or blood, only how your flesh

might wrap my journeyed bones

like false fruit: the shiny you were there

shipped snug around me to America—

love is not more

than transparency, of the small unsaid across oceans.

In the Byzantine Chapel Fresco Museum

2008-05-05T11:41:00.000-07:00

~Rachel Alsdorf

This space is built to be a relic-box:

the fragments of a chapel sleeping here

in a perpetual twilight of gray sun,

benches of silk stone laid for worshipers.

Here, I could sit forever, hour on hour,

but twenty minutes from now it will close.

This chapel, after all, is a museum.

Oh God, where have you been for all these days?

You linger just beyond my whirring brain.

A thousand conversations never cease,

but those are spoken with myself, not you.

And if at last I lose myself in sleep,

your hands don't come to heal me even there.

Only your mother's face, half-turned away.

This summer's been all iconography.

I know what the lean, stern, bronze faces mean;

the strange angular hands; the color scheme.

Hodegetria—“she who shows the way”—

I love, but as a scholar loves a book.

I've never painted anything, and I

have never prayed except with words and words.

In Cyprus, once, the bandits cut Christ down

and packed his body secretly in crates,

and raped his mother while she stood at prayers.

The plaster wounds of both are bandaged now,

and they may calmly rule and intercede.

But only during listed viewing hours.

And no one dares to kiss the face of God.

Power Outage

2008-05-05T11:40:00.000-07:00

~Eric Winter

Our eyes can’t adjust to this darkness

Thick and heavy

As a dictionary.

We have all suddenly begun to dream,

We have all suddenly begun to fill our mouths

With excuses,

Like a red-knuckled husband

Standing over his wife.

Thumbs hover above flashlight switches.

We are an audience unsure of when to clap,

Clouds waiting for weight enough to rain.

Outside, branches lay on their sides

Like a train wreck.

Voices scream as the wind fidgets,

Pollen in the air, bags of flour dispersed

Like love flowing through two hands.

A clock on the wall.

But in this room things are different.

We don’t dart about like fish,

Instead our heads droop like weak flowers

And gather as a garden.

We desire energy

Electrolytes to liven up our lives.

If only things were normal,

Like a book on a shelf

Or a child on a swing.

Our eyes won’t adjust to this darkness.

We will spend this time sitting in corners,

Our fingers raking our hair

As we cower beneath hums of wind

And needles of starlight.

James Taylor Gray

2008-05-05T11:38:00.000-07:00

after Charles Harper Webb

~Taylor Gray

James, my mother told me,

was the name of both my grandfathers,

though we called one Bill and the other Frank.

It precedes me with a staunch formality,

stiff with unsaid shapes, and bitter,

a second generation standby.

“Wait,” I am told, as if by my moving

some mystery would remain forever folded,

“Your first name is not Taylor?”

This is always a surprise,

upsetting, even,

that so easy an exchange is made:

no form, no fee, no notice,

not even a bowl of lentils,

and the “first” is resigned, its place

taken without so much as an attempt

at biblical reference, and no relation, even,

to the popular folk musician.

Gray has remained neutral to their feud,

too busy with official paperwork,

shuffling cards and applications.

They all meet on weekends,

bringing their respective dishes:

salads, drinks, deserts.

James sits aside, arguing semantics,

Taylor has brought his guitar, and

Gray, who’s been waiting all week to relax,

stands drinking between the other shades.

Tuesday

2008-05-05T11:36:00.000-07:00

~Taylor Gray

Tuesday is around ten in the morning,

near the second day of the week.

It is stationary near an open window,

perhaps some dried roses.

Tuesdays are gardens and lattice, especially lattice,

painted white and shouldered by a tall, stately shrub.

It is brass teapots on deep window ledges,

cobblestones and the large white pillow

napping in the sunlight on your bed.

It is the yellow of old photographs,

and the book you’ve been reading on the grass.

It is a beautiful woman alone,

smiling to herself,

thinking about the date she has with Thursday,

a rendezvous of lampshades, musty books,

and the soft fall of rain on the leaves outside.

And of course there are weeks when he comes over,

and his thick veil of clouds waits at the door,

raining to pass the time,

strolling softly along the path by the house,

peering through the windows at her bright Sunday flowers.

The Artist at Work

2008-05-05T11:33:00.000-07:00

~Hannah Steensma

He’s so far away, I can’t even reach him

As she wanders his mind in a low-cut blouse

And I leave him alone with the muse

Angling her shoulders just so, a terrible shame

If he didn’t know the curves and depths

Of that flesh, so welcoming and other.

I can see in his eyes when he’s been with her

Stealing and embellishing each memory-walk.

I fear what she whispers to his heart

As he strolls the spring-like cement path

With perfect words so well devised

She offers what he won’t refuse

So safe behind his eyes she hides

While I am stuck inside that gaze.

Does my lover see only her

This distant other-figure sprawled

Across imagined marriage bed?

Eyes locked on me as he wakes

From that glazed stare, starting,

Her figure dissipating in air

So solid and thick between us.

Preface to the Exploration of Life

2008-05-05T11:32:00.000-07:00

~Sarah Swenson

Up from the kitchen drift

sounds of life, echoed in a memory

of long ago

hungry summer mornings,

padding in on small bare feet,

push the tangled bed-knots

from your eyes

and smile.

Grandma’s there with

orange juice waiting.

Climb up in a

heavy wooden chair,

lean your elbows on the table

where you find

the jar of sugar,

waiting- it is yellow

like the rising sun

and the windowsills.

Sugar crystals tumble, fumble,

melting in the hot,

cereal, and milk. Together it is

grainy on you tongue,

oh-so-sweet but

full of lumps, like

being a kid all summer long with

chocolate malt-o-meal for breakfast.

Three Pleasures

2008-05-05T11:30:00.000-07:00

~Sara Swenson

I
In a park in Wisconsin in early spring
These green-budding maples
Draw from the pith of every supple twig
To taste the sun’s returning warmth--
And beneath them children play.

II
From these eager faces winter’s quiet
Flies away like startled birds from the treetops
In Wisconsin.
Children tumble, one by one,
Through the raw spring grass
And pick the clover.

III
It is a joy, also, to be walking
Towards home, through the cold, near nightfall,
And see the silhouettes of birds
Against a golden sun diffused across the skyline
And the windows of each home ablaze
With a private glow.

Dreams of My Father

2008-05-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

~Thom Satterlee

1.
Most notable of all, his weight is back.
A good, rounded beer gut stretches his sports shirt
like a bull half-hidden under a cape.
He is all and all energy,
standing tall on the summer grass.
I know: we are at my grandmother’s house,
the home he grew up in.
And I know: I am looking up at him.
I am a boy and he is my father
telling me some bullshit story
to make both of us break out laughing.

2.
On the sidewalk on Main Street in Batavia, NY,
I walk several steps with him before realizing,
my God, he’s walking, he’s walking
as if he’d never had those operations!
I turn to him and tell him
how amazed I am.
I ask him how.
He says he just decided to walk.
It’s easy once you make up your mind.
I believe every word he says.
I believe my own damned dream.

3.
I must carry my father up this flight of stairs.
They lead to a bedroom, but there’s no bed.
I have to carry that up, too.
The mattress buckles, gets stuck between walls,
but I yank it free; I wrestle it into the room.
Then the bed’s on the floor and my father’s on the bed.
I sit in a chair, pull the lever to recline.
That instant, I hear my father scream.
Somehow his leg had gotten stuck in the chair.
When I leaned back, I broke his leg.
Now I’m kneeling in front of him.
He looks at me with a look to calm me.
But the cast on his leg has split open
and through the plaster I see what he doesn’t:
a gash in his leg clean to the shinbone.
When I look up at him again his face is sweaty.
Others have arrived. They will take him
to the hospital, quickly. I want to help
but am told, no, I can carry the bed.
I follow after them, shoving the mattress
down the stairs and through a doorway
that opens onto a lawn with one tree.
My father, changed into a boy, crouches on the grass.
He holds out his hand. On his fingertips
a green insect perches, its wings folded.
My father, this boy, takes a few steps
and as the insect begins to fly away
he jumps, he throws back his head and laughs.
When I wake I will tell myself
this is a beautiful dream,
but while I’m inside of it I feel only
a sadness that passes understanding.

Oedipal

2008-05-05T10:57:00.000-07:00

~Thom Satterlee

When is a mother ever lovelier
than now to the sleepy eyes
of her seven-year-old son,
who sees her in the lighted hall
between their bedrooms, walking toward him
to place on his lips the goodnight kiss?
Everything she touches, touches him—
the blue hem of her satin robe
brushing the carpet brushes his cheek.
He feels it tickle.
Turning his head on the pillow,
he waits for her to bend over him,
then the blurred world of them
lasts a second, less, and leaves
a wetness on his mouth
that troubles him.

Sympathetic Pain

2008-05-05T10:53:00.000-07:00

~Thom Satterlee

What I can imagine
I can feel.

Though my bones
stay whole,

and my skin is
not even scratched,

still, dear God,
the vicarious aches

that have visited
this unbroken body.

Tell me a story
of someone’s accident.

Let me see the girl fall
off her bike.

Like that the ghost-pain
spreads up my legs,

and something vibrates
at my elbows.

I am a human
tuning fork

for the hurts of others,
made as any

to shake at the sound
of suffering.

Excerpt from the novel Reckless Belief

2008-05-05T10:29:00.000-07:00

“I told you Granny, didn’t I,” Catie said, back at the kitchen table, “that there’s a healing service in March? Not at my church, but, like, this other one over in Urbandale. Pastor Dittweiller says, prayer works. In the Bible, it says you can move mountains. ‘Ask and you shall receive’ it says”

“Catie, stop. There’s no cure for Parkinson’s.”

“But you haven’t even tried. I’ve heard – .”

“You can’t always be trying to fix up the world, bring back the dead. You just do the best you can. And when you can’t do that….” Some tomato sauce dribbled out my mouth and down my chin. I wiped it off with a dish towel. “When you can’t do that, you go on.”

“But I’ve heard some amazing stories.” She lifted her bare foot over her knee and scratched the bottom of it with a table fork. “There was this one woman with Multiple Sclerosis. For years it just kept getting worse. And then after the healing service, she had a revelation from an angel, saying she didn’t have MS. So she convinced her doctor to do more tests, and it turns out she doesn’t have MS. She has a brain tumor!”

“What kind of healing is that?”

“The kind you can operate on. They took it out, and now she’s cured! Did you ever go that Parkinson’s support group dad told you about?”

“Once.”

“And?”

“Everyone was so – sick.” It made me feel too much like them. They kept talking about how they’d found out they were sick, wondering what had caused it.

Was it that time I went swimming on vacation in Minnesota, in that creek where there were dead fish then later a big fish kill nearby? Was it all my life around farm chemicals? Was it too little sunblock? Too much sunblock? Should we have had our water tested more often? Did I eat the wrong thing? Plastics in the microwave? Was it the cleaning products I used, not plain concoctions of vinegar and bleach, like my mother, but modern convenience products with chemicals and pungent smells?

We scour our memories for anomalous moments where we might have been exposed to something unusual, or common moments when we were exposed to something the consequences of which we hadn’t really thought about. Not only us, but our daughters. My daughters who walked with me down the soybean rows, no gloves, squirting Round-up, inhaling its fumes across the winds. My girls, teenagers, who weren’t as careful maybe as they should have been with those chemicals but who I didn’t bother to chide.

Like Sandy, the daughter I lost, who tried to fix the Round-up tank when it clogged out in the south field by herself, a fourteen year-old sent alone with a plastic vat of poison across the farm to learn the value of labor. In attempting these repairs, she accidentally opened and tipped the vat so that she immersed, she soaked herself in poison. Even then, before we had adequate warnings about how to use the chemicals and what do to in case of accidents, my daughter knew that soaking in them probably wasn’t a good thing and came straight home, leaving the bean buggy in the field, to hose herself down at the old well and then take a long hot shower. And later I yelled at her. For having left the equipment in the field for so long while she took a shower. I thought she was just being a vain and fussy girl.

It had seemed the height of indulgence for her to soak herself in so much water, the height of histrionics to dump all her clothes, including her sneakers, in front of the washing machine as if she expected me to wash them, which of course I was the mother so why wouldn’t she expect that, but I was in stage of wanting the girls to do more for themselves, maybe even more for me, hadn’t I taken care of them for so long, cooking and cleaning and chauffeuring them around, and weren’t they getting old enough now to drive (Sandy had just got her school permit), to cook, to wash their own poison-soaked clothes?

She walked a mile and half from the south field to the house with poisons soaking in her skin, stopping to pull a patch of cockleburs and button weeds on the way. And then I shouted at her for taking a too-long shower. Herbicides and maternal fury, the recipe for cancer.

Was it the food I fed her? The vacations we took? The camps I let her attend? The clothes I let her wear – I read now they say that the plastics in elastics, in women’s undergarments, could cause breast cancer. That every woman should wash new undergarments before wearing them to dispel the toxins. Well I never knew, never washed my girls’ underwear before they wore them.

Now Catie thinks she can undo what’s already been done, with praying to angels and faith-inspired healing. She wants me to pray to Saint Raphael for healing. She’s not even Catholic, I’m not even Catholic, and she wants me to pray to a Saint. Ex-Presbyterians just don’t do that. She can’t bring her mother back, so I don’t know what she thinks she can do for me. She says that God would heal me, that she’ll pray with me if I want. But I’ve just about been prayed out in this life. The prayers I concocted when Sandy was sick, I tell you, they were doosies. Help her. Heal her. Make me sick instead of her. Give her at lest a few more years so she can watch her daughter grow. Take away her pain. Take away my pain. Give me peace. At least, for God’s sake, give me some peace.

None of which were answered, I might add. Not a single one.

There should be a word for people who still believe in God but think he’s a mean-spirited, irresponsible misanthrope.

The Fourteen Steps

2008-05-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

~ Linda McCullough Moore

I’m in this group. I won’t say it’s Alcoholics Anonymous, but I won’t say it’s not. These people are over the moon when it comes to secrecy, protecting everybody’s privacy all over the place. I’d go so far as to say that your average member of A.A. knows more personal information about other people’s lives than your average shrink. The organization is an untapped personnel resource for the CIA; you could torture these people and they’d take a deep draw on an unfiltered cigarette and blow smoke in your face as you applied the thumb screws. It’s dogged and fierce loyalty, or, it could be that they didn’t pay a great deal of attention to the stories when they heard them in the first place.

I do. Pay attention. I practically memorize other people’s lives. I take these mental photographs that I develop after dark, enlarging them to double/triple size, and, I colorize like crazy.

Take this new girl today. She says her name is Nancy – this outfit has more Joes and Nancys than a person would believe, unless of course the name creates a chemical imbalance: I rule out nothing. Anyway this Nancy tells the eleven men, a full half of whom are homeless or have been or will be, that she grew up in a house with five-and-half bathrooms, the half appearing when I print that mental photograph, as half a room with half a toilet, half a sink and this monster claw foot bathtub sawn in two. She doesn’t realize half the men assembled think that she describes a rooming house where the bathrooms are shared - though not without complaint and yellow stains and dripping lingerie - by fourteen families.

“How many people precisely used these bathrooms that you mention?” I ask the question during the Q. and A. with which I have single-handedly embellished the twelve step program. I call it STEP THIRTEEN. I’m hoping it might catch on nationally. It is by far my favorite part of the proceedings. And I am quite convinced I’m not the only person in the world who might just have a few unanswered questions. “How many people would you say shared these five-and-a-half bathrooms?” I say.

“Three,” she says in a voice that suddenly betrays the slightest vestigial tinge of aristocracy. “Three, on paper.” And I have this image of a tinkling trio of not-yet-house-broken, but potentially very aristocratic, dogs, tinting the paper she describes.

“Three people for five-and-half bathrooms?” This hardly-veiled disgust issues forth from a man who to my knowledge has not spoken once before, not here, perhaps not anywhere.

“Well,” this Nancy says. “In fact the half bath was shared among the maids,” a fact which conjures up an image of young, nubile bodies, three at once, attempting ablutions in the flow of warm and hard-won bath water leaking from the truncated tub.

“You’re still talking one-and-two-thirds bathroom per person,” another Joe chimes in, no effort wasted on attempts to hide his frank disapproval.

Personally, I’m not unhappy with the direction this exploration of Nancy’s plumbing history is taking. It’s never made a large amount of sense to me that if you are a declared drunk then it necessarily follows that the road to your sobriety lies in regular discussions of the kind and quantity of booze that other drunks so religiously once drank, and might again. I’m a big fan of reinvention, starting with the wheel.

“I think,” Nancy is saying, “that I do not exaggerate when I say that at no time during the 24 years I lived in that house were all five bathrooms in working order at the same time.”

“No wonder you took to drink,” one of the more laconic Joes says.

“Give her a break,” Joe Three says. “Don’t judge till you’ve walked a mile in her shoes.”
“Or pissed five times in her five bathrooms.”

Nancy giggles. She may be the child of well-plumbed privilege, but my guess is she might well have suffered from a dearth of brightly colored speech.

“How big was the house?” a new Joe seems to want to know.

“Pretty big,” she says. “My grandfather knew a lot of famous people and they used to come to stay for months at a time. They had some pretty wild parties.”

“Booze flowed free?”

“You betcha’,” Nancy says.

There is a moment of respectful silence, while each of us imagines our brew of choice inhaled from bottomless vats through straws of 14-carat gold.

“I don’t suppose there was any sort of wine cellar on the property.” This Joe’s voice is soft with hope.

“Two,” she says. “One deep, one deeper. I used to play in them and throw pebbles at the bottles. It was like a cave, only with shelves and lights. I haven’t thought of it in years.”

“What happened?” Joe five says.

“I don’t know, I guess I just grew up.”

“No, no, I mean what happened to the wine?”

“Oh, I don’t know. . . .”

“So it might still be there.”

“I guess. I went away and never came back home, and then the place was sold to some lady writer. They said she was from Argentina, was a dancer.”

“So the wine might still be there?” This Joe voices hope for everybody in the world. “We could go there. We could see it. We could go together. You could take us in your car. We could start right now. We’re skinny, most of us, we could crowd in.”

The Joes all nod, except for one who says, “We could not drink any of it, so why go?”

A few Joes agree.

“A wine tasting.” I speak for the first time. “Did no one ever hear of that? Not drinking, tasting, smelling, sniffing, inhaling, rolling droplets on the tongue, allowing tiny drips to trickle down.”

“And cheese,” a Joe says. “Stilton to test a strong wine’s mettle, cheddar to give a red a real run for it’s money, running Brie for the Chablis.”

“And crackers, I suppose,” the one particularly chubby Joe chimes in.

“Of course crackers.”

“And meatball grinders.”

“And hundred year old brandy.”

“To sniff.”

“To sniff.”

And reverie settles in, it drifts down like the lightest covering, a silky down and no one speaks. We drink in what we drink in.

“We’ll go there together one day.” A Joe reads an official proclamation.

“We will.” An oath is taken.

“We will sit in the drawing room and let the servants fetch and pour and carry.” I say this. I’ve always be a big fan of the servant thing.

“And before we’re done,” the old Joe says, “we’ll flush every blessed toilet in the place.”

“We will,” the Joes all say. “We will.”

And just like that we make a covenant, attest that we, to a man, to a woman, will never, never, rule out, not entirely and forever, the wild sweet possibility of that amazing grace.

The Signpost

2008-05-01T13:56:00.000-07:00

~ D.S. Martin

Along the gravel shoulder by the guardrail
the wind whips the signpost & brown-grey grasses
as each transport passes

Every driver has blind spots
concerned with changing lanes or the goal
of his eventual destination

The preoccupied miss the implication
of this arrow this icon of direction
this serpent lifted upon a pole

O to simply fulfill this need
to stand & point beyond myself
a wind-shaken reed

Chasing the Blues

2008-05-01T13:55:00.000-07:00

~ D.S. Martin

Search for what you've never seen trace
rumours of the bluesman said to play
in front of that delta five & dime lug
your microphones and recording machine
to catch & set free an endangered bird
Like grabbing an echo in your hands
grasp in the field what you've never heard
a beauty undervalued in the eye of its holder

Whisper to street corners what versions you know
of the shifting name of Blind Willie McTell
perhaps you'll hear near some Atlanta hotel
a voice in the wilderness an insightful guide
leading through the labyrinth of life's hard side
Within his lap is a dancing twelve-string
& a perfect map is within his mind
of every blind street he's ever wandered

Strain to hear the hum of the guitarist
straining strings over fast fists in an Arkansas
dance hall A toppling kerosene drum
clangs flowing flames dance to his rhythm
& the screaming crowd rushes out He runs
in for he can't afford to lose that guitar
now named for the girl they fought about
You follow strange routes chasing the blues

Caedmon

2008-05-01T13:49:00.000-07:00

~ D.S. Martin

a poem for the first poet of English

There are certain times you're as comfortable
as the babe settling down in the sweet hay of the manger
& others when you see the harp being passed hand
to hand getting closer to you song
by song & as the music continues to swell
the hands that are sure upon the hay fork become
wet & tingly so you wipe them on your breeches
& swallow a little of the monks' warm ale
but it doesn't steady you or do anything for your swollen
languid tongue & still the harp moves closer
so you slip out to the stable to be sure everything's
right with the horses though why wouldn't it be seeing
you've already rubbed them down & picked their hooves
clean although fresh clumps steam in the stalls
as a large shape shivers in the darkness
recognizing the way you move As his tail swishes & hooves
clomp on the clay floor you reassure the beast
& tell yourself as you settle in the straw
you'll return to the glaring lamplit clamour of the feast
as soon as you find your breathing
But that's when the angel appears lifting
you from a sleep you've fallen into like from a dark well
& he calls you to sing
You stammer a protest as Moses did
but he calls you to sing
a song of the creation of all things
& that is the beginning

The Advent Calendar

2008-05-01T13:46:00.000-07:00

~ Brett Foster

Through the ear the Word of God,
pressed on cardboard, impregnates
with dignity the sleeping Mary,
whose child, the creed says,
"was conceived by the Holy Spirit."

So the Church Fathers saw it,
and for portraits such as this you love
their resourceful escapes, the saving
image in the face of language.

It's true, mystery is captured
by the world we know, but does it
then diminish? No clever gesture meant
to cover, no Vatican fig leaf,
these constructions drive belief

to necessary crisis. They give dimension,
savagely, and manifest the questions
given up on. Take away the stars
and glitter from this Advent calender

(found along a sidewalk sale in June,
dollar-ninety-nine), what remains
are rows of squares. You're left
with only days, bare and perforated,
a liturgy of doors, perfect symbol.

Don't days, after all, amount to this,
lined up, surreptitious? You open
and examine them, you count them
and you count them down.

– previously published in Radix

Spiritual Excercises in a Cellar Bookstore

2008-05-01T13:39:00.000-07:00

~ Brett Foster

Hide me within Thy wounds, Memory,
ennoble these afternoon passions—
a busy day, register down, down on my luck,

and in the corner of the store
at the back of the Spanish section
lies my dust-covered method perfectly

at home in perused silence. The thin leaves
composing the folio barely conserve
the fading Imprimatur of Paul III.

Last Sunday just before closing
I considered his cave meditations
to rid myself of "disordered tendencies."

I sought the divine Will, and at least found
some thrill of discipline; the physical
act channeled the spiritual like a funnel,

steered everything toward a single gesture:
each time one falls into that particular
sin or defect, let him put his hand

on his breast, grieving for having fallen.
I locked the store early and knelt
below its shoebox of a window, the sky

reminding me of our peculiar kingdom,
heirs of time and eternity, a dual dominion
shared not even with angels, a "singular privilege."

After the prelude, evacutatio sensuum,
the mind spilling through the body to clear
itself, vacuous, then the terminal flare

of Conscience, applicatio sensuum, the fiery
iron of the senses branding the composition.
Each heartbeat spans eons. The halted moment

elevates my small Understanding: the smell
of sweat and blood in the midnight garden,
the vinegared sponge of Golgotha—

and I can see you too, Ignazio, fallen
soldier, leg twice broken. Last sacraments
administered at Loyola castle,

you convalesce by reading legends
on the Bay of Biscay. On the altar you hang
your sword before the Virgin and pronounce

the vow, a celibate among the emerald
fields of Monserrat, clothed in a hemless
pilgrim's robe, voice robbed by your colloquy,

then turned to sterling. Your Society
proclaims you "trainer of men." The drama
of one body's cosmography—immediate world

willed from a little book—: heart, brain, vapors;
I burst before the mass of history . . .
gold silence of the shelves, dialogue of flowers

sprouting from marrow, and the mind
like white manna resplendent in the window,
the sweet stars of Manresa moving swiftly

– previously published in Mars Hill Review

The Country Raconteur Defeats Cliche

2008-05-01T13:36:00.000-07:00

~ Brett Foster

Paring his nails as his wife mends,
he makes it sound like yesterday.
Her smile from the rocker portends
the outcome of what he means to say.

He swears he's old and not much good,
legs won't hold for coalers' dances.
But there's fire behind what occurred
within the Church of St. Francis,

where they met and planned their hard life.
She desired what he was, homegrown
son of a mining clan, whose waifs
packed the parish in Morgantown.

When I saw her I thought my heart
had stopped. Mouth open, he stares wildly –
here, now – beyond the davenport
down some phantasmal, pew-lined aisle.

I, while he folds his army blade,
decide he said that worn-out phrase
free of all dullness, but instead
reverently precise. Amazed,

he captured it well and realized
everything the moment meant: bright
covenant and him paralyzed,
made speechless, almost, by the sight.

Ursa Lake

2008-05-01T13:34:00.000-07:00

~ Paul Willis

On this shore, red mountain heather
tops a rumpled field of boulders,
just as flowering bergs of ice
make silver gardens on the deep.

One layer enfolds another:
bees enter the heather blossoms,
shake the anthers with their pulse.
Snow cracks,

and now a long vessel of glass
revolves and breaches on a stone,
breaking its tender prow in two.
So heedless of change, this—

a gleaming ship that seeks and finds
its own demise. Bubbles spill out
from its side and across the waves
like lifeboats, carrying the air we breathe.

—John Muir Wilderness

Curlieu Falls

2008-05-01T13:33:00.000-07:00

~ Paul Willis

Mid-May in the Sierra—
this is when the water knows
to fling itself

from cliffs and ledges,
spray through chartreuse
alder leaves.

Then it curls in granite
channels, licking the moss,
and calms the shade

below the live oak terraces,
the bleeding heart, the nodding
heads of saxifrage.

Sierra Springs

2008-05-01T13:32:00.001-07:00

~ Paul Willis

No storms since February, then two burning
weeks of March, winter snowpack going fast.
The hutkeeper at Pear Lake said eleven feet this year:
the lodgepole by the door marks four feet,
maybe six, depending how you rim the well.
The surface dense with cones, twigs, branches,
needles—my skis a wax museum of flora.

Streams flowing, bursting through. We took
a chance on a rotting bridge over Silliman Creek,
got lucky. Granite slabs shedding their scarves.
In the afternoon, the slope settles, unsettles,
the hollow whomp of layers collapsing underfoot
like the heartsick shock of love dismissed,
Ophelia returning her tokens.

—Sequoia National Park

Madeleine

2008-05-01T13:27:00.001-07:00

~ Paul Willis

Groves of avocado patch the hillside
under the monastery—I drove her

to that doorstep on a windy night. We paused
to watch the moon rise over Rincon Mountain,

then she tottered resolutely up the steps
against the gusts, her long coat flapping,

Mrs. Whatsit out of the dark, another end
of another chapter to reach in her relentless way.

Psalm 24: A Pacific Northwest Meditation

2008-05-01T13:14:00.000-07:00

~ Paul Willis

Established on the rivers.
Dams, yes. But salmon too.

They were first—the fullness,
those who dwell.

Then those who float
in hollowed cedar,

those who reach
their nets from shore.

Who shall stand?
Who has clean hands?

O dams.
Lift up your gates.