The Glory That Was Greece, The Grandeur That Was Rome #3

Here is part three of what is turning into my most challenging project. If i succeed at finishing 8 or 10 more, i will use these to apply to an MFA (Masters of Fine Arts) program. God knows if i'll get in. For those who know nothing of the story of Diomedes this should help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diomedes. Like all my poems, this one has already undergone serious revision, and will continue to until i either forget about it or die. The ends of stanzas two and three are particularly deficient. Nevertheless, i think the final two stanzas particularly poignant. As Paul Valery writes, "A poem is never finished, it is only abandoned." In all seriousness, your criticisms and or encouragements are most appreciated. The more feedback i receive, the stronger my presentation will be for the MFA committees.

Diomedes:

When i was young,
My Father sung
Me the formula for Immortality,
And i grew with its praises on my tongue.
"Serve only the gods," he sang,
"And etch for yourself a name.
Trust what just, and die, if you must
In battle, then you'll have your fame."

I am old now,
Waiting to die--
Bedding sheets and cold for company,
A pillow where once a helmet lie.
I pray you Muse. Pray against the twilighting bright
To enchant this solitary poem of mine;
Or a solitary word, or solitary me.
Was war, now paper ink begging the help of the Nine.

I remember the deep things and strong words,
How, once, i treated death coquettishly.
How i half-wished, i'd not half stepped,
But full stride teased out recklessly.
I'd not the strength of anger,
Nor the virtue of a son,
Yet i am Diomedes forever!
Toughed it through cleanly--untouched, and won.

Or are these just disconsolate dreams,
Flaky, withered legs kicking the sheets?
Have i died slow, conquered by cotton,
A man, next to none in all his feats?

And this harpist they keep sending to sooth me,
I hear only portent whispers in the tones,
Strummed omens, of visions,
Of wan bodies in drones.
Can i say that saying it never says the thing,
Say the stink off a corpse is much nearer the truth?
And all the while the harpist propped in his chair,
Singing at a dying man in need of proof.

When it comes,
When i die,
Will the high gods remember me,
What if they don't? What if? And I...?

"To glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome."--Poe

the K.H.

The Poem I Would Have Writ

Once upon a time, that time being myself at age 17, I spent two weeks in China smuggling Bibles. Though I don’t believe I was ever in any real danger, there was, perhaps, a small percentage’s chance I might undergo some kind of semi-serious interrogation. Of 22 boarder crossings, however, security only caught me twice, and I received at worst a scowl coupled with whatever the Chinese equivalents are to certain English explicatives.

My traveling partners were Jack and John, two rather corky and rather unlikely companions. Whoever discovers the exact dictionary word for wise, sportive, irresponsible, and altogether reckless old man, tell me so that I may rightly apply it to them both. Jack, age 74, had just had his second heart attack two months prior to the trip. And John, age 70, though in good health, lacked what one might call a sense of common sense. One might do them justice by thinking of the two old men from “Second Hand Lions.”

Only now do I question my parent’s decision to let me go along with these two. Having developed a keen obsession with adventure, I was only likely to provoke their already over-zealous nature.

But we had a grand ol’ time, the three of us. Sometimes we witnessed what may only be called a miracle; how at exactly the right moment, just as security was getting suspicious, some lady would scream at the top of her lungs or somebody would trip, diverting everyone’s attention. One time we found ourselves in an elevator hiding 200 pounds of Bibles from two armed guards. John and I had stuffed our pockets and suitcases with contraband, while the guards held AK47s in one hand and pressed floor buttons with the other. Another time our contact had been discovered, leaving the 17 year old to stay in the hotel room overseeing 3000 Bibles while everyone else rushed to save the contact’s life. There were many adventures. One of them includes being offered sex for the first time by a prostitute. Come to think of it, that may be the only time I have been offered sex at all. C'est la vie, I suppose. A man’ll take what he can get.

Ah yes, the good ol’ days when I was far too young, far too naïve, and far too perfect for the job. I don’t know how I forget the things God did in my life, nor fail to recall the things He is presently doing. To call me an exception to the rule would be less than exceptional and, in a way, downright irreverent. I am an amalgamation of graces, and it seems to me a miracle of sin that I ever act ungrateful.

I heard people telling stories at dinner tonight, and thought to myself “Kevin, you almost never tell your stories, and that is a problem.”

My life has been the poem I would have writ,

But I could not both live and utter it.—Thoreau

the K.H.

Three Ditties From the Paper Writing Cemetery

I recently purchased the complete poems of Dorothy Parker and Walt Whitman. In response to them, i've written these 3 little ditties. Dorothy Parker, by the way, now stands as my favorite American poet. Though she never achieves an incredible, epic pitch, she rarely, if ever, drops below par. Edna St. Vincent Millay's Renascene or Spring poems, and Frost's Mending wall or Nothing Gold Can Stay doubtless remain high favorites, and let's not forget T.S. Eliot (though he's part Brit)'s The Hollow Men and The Naming of Cats, but they succeed in the way an Olympic Gold medalists succeeds: with incredible flair and once every 4 years. Parker, however, is too practical, too down to earth to take herself too seriously. She succeeds in the way a lumber jack would, one tree at a time. Off the top of my head, i suggest you read "Coda" or "Poem in the American Manner" or "Song 4."

I won't be writing/existing for a little while, so i thought i'd send these your way so as not to be forgotten.

One life:

You live one time in your whole life,

There’s no exceeding the limit,

So find yourself a pretty wife,

Read all the best books and live it.

A Matter of Preference:

It’s a long commute to the stars;

Besides, the air is way to thin.

Leave the music to strum guitars,

I like the earthiness of sin.

Ode to Whitman

I have to grant you’ve some talent,

And grant you the right of way,

After all, I’m the one who’s silent,

On how to keep the life of what you say.

If only you’d some sense,

For a moment, for pause,

I’d serve you recompense,

In six-syllabled clause.

Basketball and Astrophysics

After speaking with an astrophysicist Saturday afternoon concerning string theory, what already seemed an inevitability, turned into a certainty: I shall never grow into a proficient theoretical scientist; I shall never so much as graduate to the level a shoddy theoretical scientist. The tragedy of being human is to have only one life, one brain, and a disproportionate amount of curiosity.

Alas, I am forced to construct a hierarchy of interests by the use of a little formula: Life span + Brain Capacity + Taste = psychology, religion, and philosophy. If by now you have yet to conclude that these are my primary interests, then either you’re a lousy listener and I need new friends, or I’m a bad communicator and you need new friends.

Yet despite of my frustrations, I found, to my pleasant surprise, that the astrophysicist is a Christian. And the meeting reminded me of what I think contemporary apologetics ought to look like.

If I may be permitted to repeat the platitudes of a basketball coach: sometimes the best defense is a good offense. Apologetics, I think, can no longer take a defensive form and hope to be effective. It often goes unrealized that there is a psychology to apologetics, not merely a discursive philosophy. The Modern, defensive methodology succeeded because, being the children of the Enlightenment, Western man impulsively sought for a certainty principle via which he could feel comfortable with what he knew. When apologetics defended Christianity’s first principles, it likewise appealed to the Modern comfort seeking psychology—hence the popularity of Lewis, Chesterton, Craig, etc.

I am afraid this won’t work for much longer. We are no longer Modern, and the number of people harboring this mentality dwindles with each funeral. Our generation is a stranger and more adventurous breed. We prefer novelty and eclecticism. We are diverse and autonomous. We have known the world through our laptop computers, and no longer believe in certainty nor comfort. Our psychology will be sated by nothing less than everything. Thus, or so i think, Christianity must be everywhere.

So if ever there were a time to take “and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it” seriously, now is the time. Defense apologetics now tends to have the opposite effect of making us uncomfortable. For to constantly defend is to constantly undergo attacks. It makes one wonder whether what he believes is true. The world is too big now; there are too many possibilites. One man cannot defend against Freud, Nietzsche, Russell, Sagan, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, culture etc. etc. (the list is as grand as the world), for the simple reason that he is one man.

The idea now, I think, is to appeal to the new sentiments. We must Christianize secular interests, infiltrate and manipulate; turn Freud's truth into Christian truth, take Nietzsche's wisdom and mold it. After all, whatever the sciences find, whatever philosophy articulates are little else besides instantiations of God's creation and God's truth. We must "be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” To use Eliade's terms, we need to reintroduce the sacred into the profane.

This is why I liked my astrophysicist: here we have a Christian advancing the gospel one ridiculously complex quantum proposition at a time. We must take science and philosophy, life and culture, and resituate them under the auspices of Christ. And we can only do this by altering our reactive defenses into proactive attacks. We must no longer merely say that Christianity is right, but that the world is wrong.

the K.H.

A Christian Imagination?

I do not believe in beginning a post with the pronoun ‘I.’ It grates against years of formal training. If my 9th grade English teacher, who once dressed me up as a girl with balloon boobs and ribbons in my hair, would have found out while dressing me that one day i'd commit a grammatical schism like the one above, she'd unhesitatingly pop my perky plastic. But since my fear of her swift retribution has long since subsided, and especially since i have created this example of rebellion on purpose, i will keep it.

Breaking the rules is a longstanding, American tradition. If you like, you may consider my recalcitrance here an act of patriotism. Yet it is not for my country that I say what follows, but for my faith. Protestantism in general and Evangelicalism in particular are little else besides revolutionary institutions. Nevertheless, I like the idea—given certain provisos— of rebelling against rebels.

Only where we find the most severe kinds of naivety, in the carbuncle regions of lower Mississippi or upper Amish country, do we still see that breed of Christian who manages to think the fiction of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien evil. Contemporary psychologists will not let me get away with sweeping generalizations, so I mention these folk and their intellectual kin only so that I do not have to mention them later. I do not concern myself with blockheads for the same reason i do not concern myself with blocks: they're boring and bad listeners. But moving beyond this group, Evangelical Christians in general suffer from a poor view of the imagination.

There is an orthodox principle concerning the well ordered man that should, I think, be applied to the imagination. Moreover, one that could, if employed much like Lewis or Tolkien do, change lives. In City of God Augustine combines a little of the Stoic, Academic, and Peripatetic traditions under a Christian heading--Christianity in general may have a knack for intellectual conflation. I will not go into great detail of how he goes about this (mostly because I do not understand it myself), but the gist of it may be explained best in an example: If a child shoots me with a squirt gun, soaking me in water, I may be tempted to return the favor by throwing the rascal into the sea. On Augustine’s model, reason should control my desire to retaliate. In other words, the head dominates the impulses; it rules over them. And reason should rule because this is how God originally intended things to be. Let’s call this, as the ancients, did Justice.

This Justice principle, this ‘the way things are intended to be’ should be, i repeat, applied to the use of imagination. Pascal warns that the imagination is both the most powerful and wayward of human faculties. Chesterton recapitulates saying “we do not know why the imagination accepts an image before reason can reject it.” I think in my next post I will enter into the grittier parts of the psyche to give examples of just what happens with both proper and improper uses of the imagination. My desire at present is merely to communicate the possibility that contemporary Christianity fails to recognize the dangers and wonders of the imagination, the horror and beauty it can create. More importantly, i think Christianity has neglected the formulation of a just view of the imagination, of its proper or improper action.

It is the one faculty that can dominate the psyche more effectively than the mind. Like other parts of us, it should sometimes be kept in a cage, and sometimes set loose. When and where and how are wholly different questions. My point is simply that, yes, “the head rules the belly through the chest, indeed.” But like Plato’s Republic, like Plato’s whole theory of art, Christians have no satisfying account of the imagination, and it's time we come up with something a little systematic.

the K.H.

Horse Beating

In order to set the proper tone for this blog, i have provided what i take to be an accurate description of my feelings toward certain Christianisms.




I hasten to clarify that i do not believe that 'to the glory of God' or 'what a blessing' or phrases as such are in their very essence evil things. Neither objective claims nor universal proclamations concern me at present. My point is an aesthetic one, and by implication, an affective one.

As it happens, Walker Percy agrees with me, at least provisionally, if i am permitted to recast his offhanded remarks with my own, religious preoccupations. His principles are two-fold: 1.) The poet revitalizes the meaning of an object simply by renaming it. And 2.) we are not conscious of a thing until it has a name. Therefore, the better the poet, the better the naming.

Take John Milton's description of God the Father on his throne:

"from the pure Empyrean where he sits enthroned far above all height"

This phrase supersedes the normal phrase "God sits on his throne" because the eccentricity of the language commands our attention. To be overbearingly precise, our affective states reflect our tastes, and our tastes pique whenever the language employed creates meaning. Humans are, on Percy's view, meaning mongers. We are not homo-sapien, we are homo-symbolificus.

Now, we have all enjoyed listening to our favorite song. And, in the same tone, we have all experienced the disappointment of listening to our favorite song too much. There is this universal phenomenon whereby repetition ruins the qualitative aspect of aesthetic experience. C. S. Lewis gives the best treatment of this phenomenon i know of in Surprised by Joy, but my concern with it at present is not why it happens, only the fact that it happens.

So what on earth does all this have to do with Christianisms? My fear is that in communicating 'the gospel' 'to the glory of God for 'the salvation of the world' we are sometimes not communicating anything at all. I am not suggesting that we tell a different gospel, i am suggesting that we tell the gospel creatively. I do believe that through the foolishness of preaching people will come to Christ. I do not believe that through the foolishness of bad preaching that they will. The Bible does act as a two-edged sword, Christ is the word precisely because of the relationship between language and humans. God chose scripture as a primary mode through which to reach us because he knew in creating us, that through symbolic interaction with the text, meaning is infused (whether consciously or no) into our minds.

This post, then, is only cautionary. The simple truth of the matter is that we should take something like ''to the glory of God' as seriously as possible at all times, and not merely participate in Christian mention-making-isms. Say it when it means something, say it differently to make it mean something, or don't say it at all. Else, i suspect we may be in danger not only being boring but of taking God's name and actions in vain.

Home Coming

I’m as much a fan of catch phrases as I am of catching pretty girls. “Home is where the heart is” seems as true to me now as it did the first time I heard it. The difference today is that I no longer think of home as a place.

Paul liked the idea of home too. Christians must treat their stay on earth as temporal: that we are aliens waiting for Paradise, waiting for home. But there is something we forget about his analogy, and that is that it is just an analogy. Paul treats home solely as a place, when, or so we all intuitively (and rightly) believe, it is something much more.

For my part, I doubt Paradise will resemble the physical universe. The fact that we will have new bodies does not mean that we will have new physical bodies. These overtly literal interpretations of analogues lack imagination. A new body might occupy a new space in a kind of new quasi-universe—none of which we could even begin to formulate a meaning save through analogy. Our categories may be as such that, come Paradise, we may laugh at our former, literal dogmas. The point of analogy is not to produce dogma, but to stimulate the imagination. And it is stimulation in the form of guesswork, the use of analogy, employed by men like Daniel and John which show an exemplary use of imagination. What they saw, they did not write, for, as they say, no utterance exists of which can give an accurate description. They were limited to metaphor and simile. Why else do you think we find the duel office of prophet as poet? Prophetic literature contains as many artistic principles as apocalyptic predictions. Daniel and John were not only prophets but artists, the office of divinator as aethetictician. Modern Christians might be better off if, like our prophets, they learned to treat “above all we could ask or imagine” not only as a promise but a challenge.

All of this to say that we mustn’t depend on analogies for anything beyond a provisional theology. Upon returning to South Carolina for a visit, I realized that I missed neither my old apartment nor desired to return to my new one. Home is where I feel safe. Some people believe this to be the wood paneling or smell of their kitchen when in reality it is the sentiments attached to these things, an association with past pleasant experience. In short, home is safety and familiarity. Home is when I laugh at Colin’s antics, or cry in Susan’s heartache, or hear my Mom’s voice on the phone, so long as i am safe around these people. In that sense, i need not necessarily go home, but home may come to me. But not even this is the whole truth. For, “our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.” Somehow our souls remember, or at least know that they should encounter the bliss of “dwelling under the shadow of the Almighty.” Paradise will be home not primarily as a place, for we cannot know what we mean by place. Paradise will be home because we will be safe and familiar, intimate and truthful with Christ.The idea of home attaches itself to the word 'in' in the phrase 'in Christ.' And home, in this sense, does indeed come to us; grace come down one might say.

“I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind — and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.”—Faulkner

the K.H.