Methinks and Middle-English

I still remember the first time I heard the word dullard. “Here,” I thought, “here at last is the word I have been searching for all my life.” To call someone a dullard is not so brazen as to call them an idiot, but neither is it so unsophisticated as to call them stupid. It sounds cleaner, like a sharp note on queue.

Anyone with an inkling for poetry will find this easy to follow. One peculiar word or a harmonious alignment of phrases excites some of us the way the first visage of a grand piano excites a musician. Something fundamental in our nature shivers with delight at the color of language.

The gift, vaguely dubbed an ear is, on the Christian view, part of the way God has formed some of his children. To some He gave apostles, to some prophets, and to some a man crush on John Keats. Without patting my own back, I think I can safely hoist my flag among the big eared, Dumbo-like personages with whom I find camaraderie. Of course, it does not follow that I have Millay’s or Dickenson’s talents, but it certainly follows that I’d take them both out on a date--so long as they promised to whisper their lines in my ear.

But dullards, if you remember its perfection in sound, is made even more perfect here as a description of those impoverished souls whose aesthetic range scarcely surpasses that of a block of cheese. There are two main types of dullards: those who can and don’t and those who don’t because they can’t. I’m not upset at the lame for losing marathons, so I’m not upset with those who have no tongue for tastes. What irks me are those who, for whatever reasons, disengage themselves from aesthetic experiences they are capable of indulging.

We listen to music because the aesthetic experience requires no effort, external instruments manipulate the internal self. Poetry, on the other hand, sometimes requires an effort akin to reading philosophy. The mind must actively engage, the imagination must be set loose like a dog on a leash. But we are lazy.

The resultant tragedy is the death of an artistic mode. Those outside of poetical circles will not consider this very tragic; they will probably prefer it, as they consider language in its use its only relevancy. But this trend is symptomatic of the whole modern tendency to strip a thing’s value down to its utility. In truth, calling Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14 valuable because it is efficacious for producing piety among Christians is like calling caviar valuable because it fills our stomachs. You simply miss the point. Holy Sonnet 14 produces piety because it is beautiful; it is not beautiful because it produces piety.

Poetry’s not all methinks and middle English; it is a mode through which we engage reality. We who have a knack for it know this best. But we also know we are like the man with two arms trying to convince a one armed world that there’s more to the world than a handshake and a high five. There’s patty cake, and eating cereal while reading, and full embraces. It’s not until we demand a little creative effort on their behalf, and not until they break through their excuses, that they will partake in the tones and tastes, the amplifications and secrets of poetical ecstasy.

"Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever,
And do not listen to those critics ever
Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books
Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks
As though the Muse preferred her half-wit sons:
Good poets have a weakness for bad puns." -W. H. Auden

the K. H.

Nonsense Ought To Be Suggestive

Few moments deserve more attention than the one in which your primary goal is to make it to the toilet on time. That first realization and the reckless dash following it surmise the tragi-comedy of the human condition. No, i'm not talking about the fact that you shouldn't have had Chinese food for the 2nd time this week, i'm talking about the fact that you shouldn't have had McDonalds at all. I'm talking about food poisoning.

I spent the long hours of yesterday with my arms wrapped tightly around my porcelain savior. But snug as we were, i'm glad it's over. I only bring it up because 1) it's funny and 2) because, given the history of my attitude toward suffering of any kind, i'm surprised that i find it funny.

There's more psychology than i care to relate, and more philosophy than i know, but as far as the observable facts of my life go, no issue has caused more relational strife between God and i than the existential problem of pain. Of course, i have no room to talk about suffering; i am the quintessential poster-child for bratty Christians. My only excuse is that, having been given so much, i am more sensitive to ailments. Now trust me, i’m not justifying myself; if anything, I’m condemning.

But let me pause before you think i'm indulging in an episode of self-loathing. Public confessions shouldn't be public unless the goal of said confessor is to benefit consciousnesses external to himself. I have a serious disagreement with several theologian's take on the book of Job. They are under the impression that God provides the man from Ur an answer to his probing question. In point of fact, without hermeneutical gymnastics I cannot find within the text a clear, definite, and most importantly, satisfying answer.

Frost puts our modern formulation of Job’s sentiment accurately, "I'd give more for one least beforehand reason than all the justifying ex-post-facto excuses trumped up by You (God) for theologists." Who cares to grow if growing requires suffering? In those bleak moments, ontological standings matter little when ignorance is bliss. The values of comfort and stability rule when a man desires no change. But just because the sentiment is accurate, it does not follow that it lasts.

Chesterton distinguishes between the kind of paradox upon which the mind can build, and one which kills thought. The paradox inherent to Job, the paradox inherent to the existential problem of pain, is of the first order, requiring the whole man to participate. God hurting us to heal us is nonsense, but it is paradoxical nonsense which suggests something.

And to suggest is exactly the point. As a poem and drama, subconscious suggestion is all Job is. It suggests something alien, on the parameters of consciousness—something alive. Job’s existential problem of pain is answered only by God’s existential derailment of Job’s question. “The answer is in the full drama.” The meaning of the event is, of itself, nonsense, as no event can have meaning. We can, if we like, abstract meaning from it (and here our ambitious theologians go too far), but Job’s moment by moment conscious engagement with the Divine is pure experience. Nevertheless, it was here, in the unmeaning, that Job found his answer. Not that he found an answer to his question, only that he discovered, certainly to his wonder, that he no longer had a question. As Orual put it, “Before Your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice”?

All that to say something rather simple. Whether it be upchucking, nose two inches from the same place all manner of evil abides, or angst of the most violent kind, the point is that sometimes there is no answer. Sometimes the point is that you aren’t asking the right question.

the K. H.

Preliminary Remarks

I've avoided blogging--and its ugly step-sisters--to save myself the potential embarrassment inherent to saying anything in public. Mistakes revealed in whispers, or hid beneath layers of hard-drives and paper stacks are easy to keep private. Life is like poker, the idea is to seem like you know what you are doing at all times. Keep it up long enough, and people start to believe you--or so says Machiavelli, a man who, with a cigar in his left hand and seven/deuce in his right, would have you believe he doesn't smoke and is sitting pretty with a couple of ladies.

But alas, i grow weary of charades. What i think and how i feel are in motion, and motion is part of being human. We're not all pith and vigor, and i've come to terms with the fact. So what if what i think today will seem childish tomorrow; who cares? Not i, at least not any longer.

What am i going to write about then? I haven't the faintest. I'm sure my reasons for involving myself in the social anomaly we call blogging are reminiscent of everyone else's. There are times we like the attention, times we want to discuss, or times we want to communicate something exciting. So long as things are kept in right proportion, i can't foresee any dangers. All in all, blogging is useful for someone who finds writing a natural mode of communication.

the K. H.


"Let us inspect the lyre, and weigh the stress
Of every chord, and see what may be gain'd
By ear industrious, and attention meet:
Misers of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage."--John Keats