Exit, Pursued by a Bear
Some critics, theater-goers, and directors enjoy this scene simply because it seems so random: here we are in a very serious play about jealousy and power imbalance, rage and injustice, gift-economy and indebtedness and now this crazy bit of text suggesting, what exactly?
Why I Go to Church
Church is a lot of things for me: the center of my social and artistic life, the place I practice my actual talents, for music, for leadership—but I love it in part because I’m a weakling who can hardly stand to stand up most mornings and the church was made for, and needs, people like me.
Raven Steals the Sun
Being a myth, the raven story can change its contours with each telling, but so long as certain events take place, it remains the raven cycle. It is still itself, you might say, in whatever form it takes.
Preston Singletary, Raven cover image
THE STORY GOES LIKE THIS:
A long time ago, the raven looked down from the sky and saw that the people of the world were living in darkness. The ball of light was kept hidden by a selfish old chief. So the raven turned itself into a spruce needle and floated on the river where the chief’s daughter came for water. She drank the spruce needle. She became pregnant and gave birth to a boy which was the raven in disguise. The baby cried and cried until the chief gave him the ball of light to play with. As soon as he had the light, the raven turned back into himself and carried the light into the sky. From then on, we no longer lived in darkness.
In many ways it really is the first story, a redemption narrative that also includes creation, incarnation, transubstantiation, and apocalypse, but it’s also the first version I heard of a story I would hear again many times.
The trickster-raven cycle is a kind of ur-story for tribes native to the Pacific Northwest, as ubiquitous among those groups as Noah’s ark is among some others. I first encountered it in junior high after my family moved to Washington State. It has traveled well beyond those bounds too, wandering in and out of other stories like some curious bird.
In poems, every word matters. In holy Scripture, the Word is what matters. But here, though the language and idiom may change with time and taste, the cycle is what matters. Being a myth, the raven story can change its contours with each telling, but so long as certain events take place, it remains the raven cycle. It is still itself, you might say, in whatever form it takes.
At the Tacoma Museum of Glass, when I saw Preston Singletary’s Raven and the Box of Daylight, a show that has since traveled to the National Museum of the American Indian and earned heaps of praise from critics, the feeling I had was of what E.T.A. Hoffmann would have called the uncanny: the familiar in the strange, or the strange in the familiar. It’s what we feel when looking at a stranger we think we recognize or hearing a remixed version of a song long cherished. I walked through the show enraptured, but with a constant nagging sense of déjà vu.
It wasn’t that the raven cycle so beautifully maps onto the Christian story of self-sacrifice and redemption—a mapping that is not, I think, a matter of cultural appropriation so much as of two cultures working toward and finding the same truth about the structure of the universe and the human heart. Rather, between those glass monoliths, the words of the familiar raven story were there, and they were different. Singletary had taken a story I’d cherished for twenty-some years, one that I’d memorized, and made it fresh.
Read the essay over at Image…
The Life and Afterlife of "Festus"
Philip James Bailey’s Festus is the most popular poem most people have never heard of.
Philip James Bailey’s Festus is the most popular poem most people have never heard of. An epic in twenty cantos about the end of time in the Faustian mode, it all but dominated literary conversation in the early Victorian period and was hugely influential on authors now widely revered.
Early critical discussions of the poem were concerned not with the fact of its influence so much as the scope. F. B. Money-Coutts pleads, for example, in the periodical The Academy in 1901, that “not from any audience chamber ought this great, this conscientious prophet-poet to be dismissed without being fully heard” and that “Mr. Bailey’s life-work deserves, not an ephemeral comment, but a volume of earnest analysis.” The Athenæum avers in 1876 that “in the study of English poetry, it is always necessary to consider the influence of . . . Festus . . . upon most subsequent poetry.”
Always necessary? Most subsequent poetry? For readers like these, the quality of the poem was obvious and all but guaranteed it a place in posterity. An issue of The Saturday Review from 1889 contends, “the fact remains that schools of poetry rise and fall, one influence yields to another influence, and Mr. Bailey’s . . . poem rides every storm and survives every revolution of taste.” Festus achieved a reach the English-speaking world had not seen since Byron and has rarely seen since. The modern critic Richard Cronin writes that Festus “was recognized . . . rather widely, as the great poem of the age.” It is safe to say that most readers now, even most educated readers, have never so much as heard the name. What happened?
Remembering Frederick Buechner
Just about every artist of faith I know — photographers, poets, actors — all count his books as among their dearest treasures.
I don’t think Frederick Buechner believed in saints, not exactly. The holy people he depicts in his novels are resolutely what he himself called “clay-footed,” which is to say, earthbound. No ethereal light here. No gauzy angelic presence. In both Godric and Brendan, the reader encounters figures who, for all their historical and cultural remove, we might have known and might know still. But still, I thought of Buechner, who died earlier this month, as a kind of patron saint, one particularly for artists.
Just about every artist of faith I know — photographers, poets, actors — all count his books as among their dearest treasures. The outpouring of affection in the days since his death has been enough to convince a great many people, who meant to read his works, that they were missing, or had missed, something. They had. And what that was — and what of course he still can be, though it feels different now — was a confidant. Someone who had seen it. Whether artistic fame, childhood trauma, family troubles, struggling friends, inspiration dead ends, or the highs and lows that accompany the life of religious faith, Buechner had been there, and more importantly still: he told us.
That act of radical self-disclosure across several autobiographies is quite distinct from the TMI memoirs writers seem to deal in these days. His writing is closer to Augustine because in every library nook, garage, pulpit, and darkened room there lingers this … what? The big other? You’ll have to read his books, really, any one of them, to see what I mean, but it is there, as real as anything: a hovering over the face of the depths into which he plunges us, nothing spared from view, because for Buechner, every thing in its thing-ness is saturated with God-presence. Nothing isn’t holy for him if we pay attention to it aright. And since the artist’s work, in any genre, is primarily an act of paying a kind of attention, a great many of us found him a guide to a certain way of being in the world.
The other part of it though, is that I owe him personally.
Changes and Chances in Literary Pedagogy
English departments at Christian liberal arts institutions have faced a broadband array of economic and cultural challenges in recent years, but I’m optimistic.
During the dark, early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I attended one of those live-stream, artist-in-their-living-room events with a group of musicians, and during the talk-back, pointed out a number of references to lines of poetry in their songs, asking “were some of you English majors?” The lead singer and principal songwriter confessed that he had been one at Toccoa Falls College and that the Rilke, T.S. Eliot, and Maya Angelou references in the songs were his fault. A man after my own heart, I thought, and a win for English majors everywhere! But then he quickly disclaimed: something to the effect of, “Yes, I was an English major; it was a pointless waste.” My rising reverie was, as can probably be guessed, short-lived.
His disavowal put me in mind of a comedy sketch I saw earlier in the year that featured a similar distancing gesture. In it, the stand-up comic John Mulaney recounts his decision to major in English in college, saying:
What did I get for my money? What is college? . . . I went to college, and I have no idea what it was. . . . By the way, I agreed to give them $120,000 when I was seventeen years old, with no attorney present. That’s illegal!… They pulled me out of high school; I was in sweat pants, all confused. Two guys in clip-on ties are like, “Come on, son, do the right thing. Sign here and you’ll be an English major.” I was like, “Okay.” That’s right, you heard me: an English major… I paid $120,000 for someone to tell me to go read Jane Austen, and then I didn’t. That’s the worst use of 120 grand I can possibly fathom.[i]
Now, I happen to think, with many others, that getting a humanities degree from a private liberal arts university is one of the wisest investments a person can make, but the irony of Mulaney’s tarnishing his degree thus may be instructive for those considering the present and future of literary studies because I take it to be reflective of the general culture’s recent disposition toward our work. What I mean is, though humanities degrees are not primarily (and thank God) utilitarian, Mulaney is one of those rare cases of a graduate who secures a job in exactly their field of study and makes a fortune from doing so. Here he has built an empire made only of words. He tells stories for a fabulous living. That’s it. He organizes his lived experience into language, polishes the syntax and timing, creates pacing and narrative force and structure, and then delivers his composition in front of people who pay to hear him do it. That’s not only adjacent to his English degree, or a case of his “using his degree” in a novel manner unplanned for by its architects; it’s straight down the middle of the plate. Mulaney does exactly the things we professors of English train people to do. But what’s odd to me is that he uses those skills to say the people who gave them to him conveyed no value.
Obviously, this reminds me of Shakespeare’s Caliban…
Small Letters and Sparrows
What qualifies as a miracle worth recounting? And how far beyond the probable does an event need to be before we consider it miraculous?
4 Simple Ways to Help Your Most-Disconnected Students
Faculty members have a key role to play in retaining students, to the benefit of both.
At my university, I teach in a program designed to help new students who are least likely to persist in their first year and who tend to have trouble graduating on time or at all. We do all sorts of activities — teach them email etiquette, explain what a provost is, help them identify academic challenges they’ve faced and may confront again in college.
It’s called the Ascent program, and it’s been wildly successful. We retain Ascent students at a much higher rate than their counterparts in the same academic and demographic categories. The program is growing but small, so retention remains a challenge for us — as it is across higher education, especially after an undergraduate’s first semester. For many students who choose to leave, their stated reason is my least favorite one to hear: They feel disconnected.
That’s frustrating because it’s a problem we can do something about, and I don’t mean just the student-success specialists. All of us — as faculty members, administrators, and staff members — shape campus culture, intentionally and inadvertently. And we can mold it in ways that will help students of all stripes feel more connected to us, to one another, and to our campuses. Here are some practices I use to that end:
Joy of Every Longing Heart
But what if we think about a different shape for Advent, one that builds slowly toward Christmas in a gradual way–she’s pregnant! There’s the star!– that Christmas day is a punctuation, the celebration, all our hopes come true at last, and then Christmastide is the season of reflection there-following?
Still Life with Wine and Occasional Fires
Normally, though still a frenzy, my writing has built-in speed bumps, to keep the crystal from jittering around.
Humanities Research with Undergraduates
Admissions brochures routinely tout the benefits of small class sizes, with pictures of lab-coated undergraduates doing beaker work alongside science professors in safety goggles. I’ve always wondered: Is the research, like the image, staged or real?
6 Black Protest Poets
In times of increasing racial tensions, it can be difficult to know what to do with one’s anger, righteous or otherwise. And it can be just as difficult to know where to get an honest picture of the worldviews of people we may consider, for whatever combination of reasons, “other.”
The Life-Changing Magic
I want for them a sense of super-abundance borne not of the horde of possessions on which they rest, but of the competence and creativity they are even now developing, the sense that they can do without some things, can toss whole essays into the rubbish bin if they need to.
5 Contemporary Poets Christians Should Read
I’m always a little sad after a poetry reading when someone comes up and tells me they’re “really into Christian poets,” and when I ask excitedly “which ones?” they rattle off a short list that ends with Gerard Manley Hopkins or George Herbert
The Christological Vision of Pirates of the Caribbean
The curse, the risen dead, the rightful captain, the man who does the waking, the island, and the great adventure all exist independently of her belief. She doesn’t get to create her reality, as none of us do, but is instead a character in someone else’s high seas adventure.
Mistrusting C.S. Lewis
I suspect that, casting about for firm ground on which to stand in the absence of a reliable canonicity of taste, scholars hold up as a final source that one source they take to be originary as the end of discussion.
The Quietest Painting in the Room
Matthew is about to get created in the exchange just the way Adam was, is about to come alive to himself and to history in a way no one, least of all this poor, pantalooned sop, had imagined a few coins ago.
David’s Dropped Stone
David’s body is one machine, a man full of God’s might — of faith so strong he can wield it like a sword.
Near where the peasant girl is being raped, and in the same room as another attempt, there stands in the Villa Borghese, a stone David facing a Goliath we can’t see. In a city where the classical and Christian collide, bristle, fizz, and even combine, these galleries, and this sculpture stand out as strange for that monstrous marriage.
I knew Gianlorenzo Bernini was a great sculptor — one doesn’t escape Rome without being marked by that belief, especially if one’s rooms are situated across from the Ponte St. Angelo, bedecked as it is with 12 life-size marble angels of his making — and I knew he was devout (see: St. Theresa in Ecstasy), but this David bothered me. Not for the reason Donatello’s David does: the effeminate and small boy an imp gloating over a victory not his, and not for the reason that Michelangelo’s impression of classical perfection used to do. I was irritated that the hands hanging lazily about his body seemed lazy themselves, out of all proportion with an otherwise perfect rendering, until I realized that they’re too big because they’re God’s hands about to sling the shot, not his, and outsized because outsourced, appropriately. But Bernini’s David has a more difficult formal problem, that wouldn’t let me walk away from it to find all the other treasure in that great collection in the Borghese gardens.
He seems hunched. He’s built like an athlete, like a contender at a Greek games, but is poised nothing like one. I’ve spent considerable time imitating his stance, drawing suspicious looks from museum security guards, as I try to figure out how a move like that would work. He’s bent as though he’ll fling the stone backhanded across his body using only his tricep, or perhaps over his head, using only the shoulder muscle as projection: either way, these are two of the weakest muscles in the male upper body. Put your back into it, I think. Get your torso involved. He looks like the very antithesis of the discus thrower for whom nothing is at stake but a gold medal or an amophora of oil. Here David is, with Israel’s reputation, the lives of his family, and even his God’s good name on the line, and he’s looking like he couldn’t even skip a stone across a pond, let alone knock out a heavyweight.
The biblical account has it that he’d practiced. When his father, Jesse, outfits the boy with battle-gear, young David puts them off, saying “I cannot go with these, for I have not tested them” (1 Sam 17:39b). Apparently, he’d even warded off lions and bears with his little slingshot, which, to put it lightly, takes some doing (34-35). Bernini has it that he hasn’t.
Any farm boy knows how to throw stones. My brother and I could hit any tree in our yard at a distance of 30 paces (measured albeit in the steps of 11-year-old’s) 4 out of 5 times, consistently. When I was 13, I decided that a man should know how to throw a knife so that it would stick in the tree like an arrow. The problem was that I was 13, and my mother didn’t let us play with knives. So I improvised. Finding a razor blade (who knows where?), I split a stick and fastened it to the end with twine. Presto: throwing knife. I enlisted my brother, and we spent the afternoon — it must have been summer: why does it seem there was time for anything then? — making a target.
I got to go first since it was my idea and I was older. I grasped the make-shift blade-side like I’d probably seen in an action movie I was too young to have been watching, took the carefullest aim I could, centered my breathing, and let it fly. I didn’t really feel anything, but by the time my knife reached the target (I missed), blood was covering my forearm and dripping down my elbow.
As is typical (I have since come to find) of young boys, my first thought was not I wonder if there’s an artery in my hand that’ll bleed me to death (there is), nor was it to wonder if one of those shots I got was for tetanus (they weren’t), nor even Will it scar (it does), but, Oh man, now Mom’s gonna find out and we’re gonna get in trouble. Despite the blood ruining my T-shirt and cotton shorts, it was my brother’s first thought, too.
I mention this story because I’m writing these impressions with a pencil held against that scar over twenty years later, and because this sculpture makes me nervous. Every kid hates the admonition, and statistically I still think it strains credibility to believe you’ll actually put someone’s eye out, but I think this David just might, and it won’t be Goliath’s. Even though I know the outcome of the story as well as I know anything, I worry, seeing him there: for his mother, for his sheep, for God’s people. His face looks determined, even angry compared with Michelangelo’s cool defiance, or Donatello’s wry, self-satisfied smile, but his anger doesn’t look controlled. It’s the sort of bit-lip, screwed brow, clenched teeth that seems to help at the time, but that isn’t actually a good idea, if you want to win a fight. I think it’s a good thing the Olympian gods were around to save Daphne, fleeing in the next room, because if she had someone like this to defend her, Apollo would’ve had his way, and we wouldn’t have any poetry.
But if I could sling a stone better than this shepherd, and even, despite his neoclassical musculature, take him in a fight, he’s still a better candidate for saving Israel than I would’ve been because his faith is bigger than mine. “You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin,” shouts the young, ill-equipped boy, “but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head” (v. 45-46). David’s body is one machine, a man full of God’s might — of faith so strong he can wield it like a sword.
I think this is Bernini’s point: he’s not coiled around the column of his torso — spring-loaded and ready to fire — because God’s strength is different from man’s. He has thrust out his jaw, and bothered gathering the stones, and turned, though he doesn’t know what he’s doing, as if in wind-up because he has to do something, but he knows better than I can usually remember that God is the one who puts it through the uprights, between the eyes. The thing about that stone is that he could’ve dropped it, or even thrown it in the wrong direction and it still would’ve gone winging like a bullet into the forehead of the Philistine champion, because while he’s setting the stage for a blessing, God is the one who delivers it.
It’s the same story as Elijah and the sacrifices: you gather the firewood; I light it, because ultimately, it’s a story about God’s faithfulness, not about a man or a rock, which I seem to keep forgetting. Or, it’s a story about both, which is my real problem: I keep splitting the world and this story and the art I see into separate modes — God’s work vs. mine, David’s aim vs. God’s, my story vs. David’s, David’s vs. Goliath’s — when really, what’s beautiful about Bernini’s David is that, even if clumsily, he’s gathered all that into himself as God’s agent, and rolled it into a ball the size of a stone whose trajectory was laid at the same time as the foundations of the earth he’s standing on, and so am I.
The Breaking Towers: on Hart Crane’s Crumbling Muses
Say even that Crane is a decent poet and a dozen thinkers will write in to say that you’ve finally lost it; will wonder even whether you’re being sincere, or simply provocative.