Take Home Essay: Stephen Crane, The Open Boat

As always, I apologize for any formatting issues. HTML is not condusive to block quotes, and I typically can't be bothered. Blessings, JB J. Broussard
English 344
J. Ladino
Take Home Essay


GLEE! the great storm is over!
Four have recovered the land;
Forty gone down together
Into the boiling sand.

   Ring, for the scant salvation!
         Toll, for the bonnie souls,—
Neighbor and friend and bridegroom,
Spinning upon the shoals!

   How they will tell the shipwreck
When winter shakes the door,         
Till the children ask, “But the forty?
Did they come back no more?”

   Then a silence suffuses the story,
And a softness the teller’s eye;
And the children no further question,
         And only the waves reply.

–Emily Dickinson


"When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters."


So ends Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat." Lovely as a forest in flame, it is a stark, terse story spanning fewer than twenty-four hours, gracefully sliding from the first person perspective to the omniscient narrator and back again, the prose wry as a Scotsman, dry as a desert and spare as a tree in winter, and it is the account of Crane's own experience in a ten foot dinghy off the coast of Florida, having survived the shipwreck of the Commodore. He and three others (including the captain) were among the last to leave the sinking ship, and when their dinghy capsized off the coast of Daytona Beach all four men attempted to win the shore. Three were successful. One drowned in water that, had he the strength, he could have walked ashore in. 

 
One of the first rules of writing is to write what you know, and Crane follows this. My contention is that his chief aim in this story is to posit a worldview with an utterly indifferent natural universe. I'll assume, for simplicity's sake, that he was writing what he believed, as well as the necessary assumption that he is the correspondent in the (obviously at least somewhat autobiographical) story. But first, let's look at the text:

"When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no brick and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers."

This is easily one of the most blatant of all of his references to the indifference of nature, and it's pretty self-explanatory: the universe doesn't care about you. You are not essential. Were you to die tonight, the sun would still come up on the morrow. And if this makes you angry, there's nothing you can do about it. Your greatest attempt at blasphemy (for—you should note—you are looking for a temple to desecrate),your greatest attempt at blasphemy born out of whatever depth of volcanic rage, can do no more to offend indifferent nature than throwing tissue-paper can bring down the sun. It doesn't even help if you wad it up. But the text continues even more starkly:

"Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: 'Yes, but I love myself.'

A high cold star on a winter's night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation."

Here, with more religious terminology, prayers are nullified and the supplicant is left wholly alone with the unsympathetic world. "A high cold star." Pathos indeed. Though we are the center of our world, reality and our versions of it do not often converge. The final text that I'll use here is the correspondent's thoughts upon seeing the wind-tower.

"This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual—nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent."

Flat indifference. Man is of no central importance—no, man is of no importance at all. Nature needs him not. And there is no court of appeal, no anthropomorphic god will answer his prayers: he is alone. And nature is entirely unconcerned. This is the greatest insult that a man can receive: glacial apathy.
So the correspondent's perspective is obviously that of an indifferent nature, but demonstrating this obvious fact is not demonstrating that this is the principle aim, the end-all of the story. But further study makes the centrality of this view clearer. For example, Crane never mentions the ship. We are dropped into the ocean with the correspondent, out of all context. Nor does Crane mention more than a few moments after their salvation. He intentionally flattens the characters: did they get onto the dinghy to save themselves at the expense of other lives? Were they the first off the sinking ship? The last? We don't know. And afterward, did the Captain get another commission? Was the wreck his fault, and did it ruin his career? Did the oiler have a family? At least he's given a name—a singular courtesy in a story rife with anonymity. The story is intentionally abbreviated to the time frame in which the dinghy is sailing to shore. Man at sea at the mercy of nature, and nature doesn't care. 

 
The shipwreck would have been fascinating. The history of the life of the oiler would have deepened the pathos of the situation, would have made him seem more real. The segué to life after such a near-death experience for the correspondent would have been amazing—Dostoevsky at least gave us a short story when he got his reprieve five minutes before he was to be executed. But not Crane. These are all entirely outside the scope of his interest. He gives us four men in a floating bathtub off the coast of Florida; he gives us the incessant waves and the endless sky. And, for good measure, he throws in a shark or two. We know of little outside of this,—just a scene or two of shoreline. But this is the story he is telling: man vs. nature. And nature does not care. Nature does not care.

The argument could be made that this interpretation is too grand an interpretation, that Crane had no intention of presenting us with a worldview to walk away with. The story was just a narrative without a moral, which is plausible: I mean that if you are a writer struggling to make a living then surviving a shipwreck might just be the kind of thing worth writing about. It couldn't hurt, and it would probably sell. And of course that is at least one of the primary reasons he was writing (as Dave Barry puts it, "the alternative is gainful employment"). But it doesn't explain why the main view of the main character is "indifferent nature." Moreover, not only is this the main view, but it's the entirely unchallenged view—can you imagine how fascinating a Jack London Sea Wolf-esque dialogue would be here? Further still, this view of the world is also attributed to the other characters:

"A high cold star on a winter's night is the word he feels that she (nature) says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation.

The men in the dingey had not discussed these matters, but each had, no doubt, reflected upon them in silence and according to his mind..."

No doubt. Also, if Crane had no intention of leaving us with this worldview—this central, unchallenged, universally held worldview—why is he, famed for being niggardly with his prose, suddenly a spendthrift when it comes to this? We are given repeated sections reiterating the same thought from different angles. If Crane was not aiming to leave us with this thought, that "Nature will not pity, nor the red god lend an ear," then why does he? It seems out of character for him.

But, it can be argued, hitting a target you didn't aim for doesn't necessarily mean you didn't hit the one you did aim for. Better yet, you may have had more targets than just the one, and this interpretation of Crane's story—to demonstrate the indifference of nature—may be too limited. It may be that he had a far grander scope in mind. We've demonstrated that pointing pitiless nature out is at least part of his scope—it's too often presented, too unchallenged, too central to be accidental—but what if it's a minor part of his scope? Then the obvious question is: what's the major part? 

 
The most noticeable feature of the story is the thrice-repeated "If I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned—if I am going to be drowned, why, in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far?" But how is this anything but yet another demonstration of the indifference of nature? Had nature cared at all, it would not have drowned the oiler and left him in water that wouldn't have hit his ankles if he'd had the strength to stand. But it did. Nature did not care. And what other theme will the story support? Nothing political, nothing religious. There's a magnificent section about the brotherhood of men, but it's by no means central. There is no other theme that's as recurrent as the flat incomprehensibility of the situation, explained only by the fact that nothing cares.
The final argument to be made is that the correspondent seems to love nature, and he appends beauty to it, even when it is about to kill him. "There was a terrible grace in the move of the waves, and they came in silence, save for the snarling of the crests." Or:

"Viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtless have been weirdly picturesque... The sun swung steadily up the sky, and they knew it was broad day because the color of the sea changed from slate to emerald-green, streaked with amber lights, and the foam was like tumbling snow."

Lovely indeed. But it makes it no more gentle, no more cautious for the sake of man. A man can love the thing that kills him—it's not uncommon—and it's no proof that the thing loved him. Nature, Crane would argue, is just as indifferent as a bottle of Jack or a pack of cigarettes. This argument falls flat as well.
So the central theme of this story is that nature is indifferent to these little man-beings, these upright, bifurcated mammals. Man is very small. The world is big, and it doesn't need me, and it doesn't need you. Nature is not, as (pre-Christian) C. S. Lewis asserted, "red in tooth and claw," nor is nature some type of pantheistic benevolence. Nature is, and there's an end on it. This is the argument presented by Stephen Crane. 

 
But why should we care about any of this? What does it matter what Crane thought? Well, what you believe determines how you live. So ask yourself: was he right? We each have our own views on this, but we ought to recognize what has shaped them. As the great medievalist Dorothy Dunnett says through her main character, "We are each our nurses' turn of speech, our sword master's dead men, the courage of our first horse..." Everything in our lives makes up who we are and what we believe, including, now, Stephen Crane, who here makes a tremendously compelling case for the indifference of the world:

"In the shallows, face downward, lay the oiler. His forehead touched sand that was periodically, between each wave, clear of the sea...The welcome of the land to the men from the sea was warm and generous, but a still and dripping shape was carried slowly up the beach, and the land's welcome for it could only be the different and sinister hospitality of the grave."

Most of recorded human history up through the present disagrees with Crane's thesis; most humans have at least professed to believe in some type of a benevolent force behind nature, whether the Faeren of the Druids or the Christian God of the Bible or any of a host of others, but, I suspect, even most of these people don't like to think about it: it's a nice thing to occupy a Sunday (save Super-bowl Sunday, of course). Dillard, ever potent, agrees:

"On the whole I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry set, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return."

I posit that we prefer to view nature from a house rather than a hill-top, in a coat rather than a coracle. We build very expensive boxes to shut out the world, and seeing stars as you're going to sleep is so rare an occasion that everyone cherishes a memory of it. So it is good for us, every so often, inside our climate controlled little box, with our hot cup of tea, our warm, purring cat, a fire in the fireplace—in a word, our life as we like it, temperate and tame—it is good for us to come across a Stephen Crane with his worldview as inexorable as the waves he describes, disquieting as Donner Pass on a dark night, nihilistic as Nagasaki. It is good for us to notice his worldview. And we ought to know if we agree. We ought to care. We ought to care. Or we just ought to avoid large bodies of water.

Good Country People: Review

Well, due to scheduling issues (a conflict arose between my personal tendencies and my hope of future gainful employment), I just wrote this. I started at 1:30 am and went till 5:50 am, and I'm now posting it. The story is well worth reading (it is, after all--but after all what, I wonder? Anyway, it is O'Conner, and she had peacocks), and the review will make a bit more sense if you're familiar with the story (theoretically, but I won't really know till I read this when I'm actually conscious).

Enjoy.

P.S. "From tonsure to toenails" was fun to write.



J. A. Broussard J. Ladino, English 344 Short Paper, Flannery O'Connor



Flannery O'Connor: The Violent Take it by Force

My argument is two-fold, and goes from a broad general claim to a nice little pointy one. First, I'll demonstrate that Good Country People is, from tonsure to toenails, a story about a girl whose sense of identity consists solely in being different than anyone else being shown exactly how normal she really is. Her difference from the others is chiefly demonstrated in three ways: her atheism, her education, and her pursuit of ugliness, and in reverse order. My second argument is that her wooden leg stands as the foundation of her relied-upon uniqueness in this, her tiny little world, and that without it, she is no different from any other human.

Joy is introduced somewhat late in the story—as it is about her—but her role upon entering is quite significant: she is the "large blonde girl who had an artificial leg," and she lives with her condescending mother even though she is "thirty-two years old and highly educated." This is all the description given to the main character: she is a bulky, blonde spinster with one leg and a Ph.D. We later find that she also has big glasses, a constant scowl and a weak heart. Both Glynese and Carramae are contrasted to her by both being beautiful and being thought beautiful, and they (and their mother) are constantly praised to the skies by Joy's mother, who, in the contentedness of her nescient oblivion, fails to mention her own daughter. But so does the narrator, for quite some time. But then Joy is remembered, and the narrator makes the only reference to her father, informing us that he isn't dead, but Mrs. Hopewell (such a telling name) divorced him, and he appears to have made no further incursion into the lives of his former family. Now Mrs. Hopewell often needs her daughter Joy to walk the fields with her, a task that Joy ironically takes no joy in. But then the irony is undone with the name, as well as any beauty that we could have stubbornly managed to cast over Joy as a veil: Joy is Joy no longer; hello Hulga.

Joy, at twenty one, achieved her crowning ugliness in changing her name. We aren't led to believe that she was innately ugly--at least, her mother thinks that "if she would only keep herself up a little" she wouldn't be, but Hulga is smart enough to know that she could never be as pretty as girls like Glynese and Carramae, so instead of being rejected as a third-rate beauty, she decides to preemptively reject beauty entirely. Again and again and again and again we are given the same type of adjective; whether it's describing her attitude, her expression, or even the noise she makes, it's the same type of adjective; it's always the same type of adjective: it's an ugly adjective. Awful, lumbering, bloated, rude, squint-eyed, bad looking, hulking, stout--on and on they go. She was plain, but plain is normal, and instead of joining the throng trying to be like the "Southern Belles," she decided to despise them all. From her first entrance into the story she mocks the pretty girls, as if beauty itself were a sin. And she takes pleasure in dressing in a rather hideously eclectic outfit, rather as if she were walking through a thrift store when a tornado struck. But there's a security there: if you don't try, you can't fail. So she can't have beauty? Fine. She didn't want it anyway. So none of the nice young men want her? Well she could "smell their stupidity;" why would she want them?

Bierce defined erudition as dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull, and true to form, Hulga gets her doctorate in philosophy. Not out of any love of Boethius or fondness for Plato (though she seems to have adopted his maxim that true genius largely consists in being intelligible to fools), but because it further alienates her from the world that didn't want her. So, she who desired nothing so that she could be denied nothing has now achieved superiority for superiority's sake: she has constructed an ivory tower, the better to despise all those pathetic beings on the ground with. And despise them she does, for she leaves academia, where her knowledge would have been nothing special, returns home and quotes Malebranche to her condescending (and rather dense) mother, which seems somewhat akin to performing a quantum physics equation for the benefit of a june bug.

The natural result of this arrogant ascendency alienates her yet further. In this world of religious pretensions she declares her furthest removal yet: atheism. After all, her mom is a "good Chrustian;" what further distance could she possibly travel? Her mom prizes beauty; she seeks ugliness. Her mom adores "good country people;" she goes to the city to get her Ph.D. in philosophy. And now she openly rejects the same thing that her mom professes to believe, though her reason for it is not so much a profound, personal belief in atheism as it is a product of her liberal and progressive education, designed to set her apart from all the hidebound religious people where she lives. For, as it turns out, she is a hypocrite in her unbelief the exact same way that her divorced, lying mother is a hypocrite in her belief: each use their "beliefs" in an attempt to deceive the same person. She may use a different method, but it's to the same end of impressing and gaining the approval of the Bible salesman.

So, I've unpacked the character and motivations of Hulga-Joy: she must be different, and she must be superior, like every fourteen-year-old girl who gets a belly-button ring. Now it's time to turn to the final, climactic scene, in which all of her defenses are undone in a single stroke, in which the tiny world that she lives in is crushed in an impact with a totally alien world: the world that she thought she lived in. Here, the statue meets the man, the shadow meets the object, the imitation meets the model. Here, Hulga meets the man who truly is who she falsely claims to be, and she realizes that she is no different than anyone else.

She sets out to seduce the childlike salesman, though she's never so much as kissed anyone before. She gets him to take her to the desired seclusion of the barn-loft (or he gets her to get him to take her there), but then the tables are turned: she is prepared to seduce him so that she can give him a deeper understanding of the world but she was not prepared to actually expose herself to him. But then he asks to see her soul: he asks where her leg attaches, and in such a way that she can't really back down without losing her chance of seducing him. She asks why he wants to see it, and he responds with the absolute truth: " 'Because,' he said, 'it's what makes you different. You ain't like anybody else.' "

This is the crux of the entire matter: her leg is what makes her different. But being different is all that she is. She has always simply sought to be unlike the other people, so that is her entire identity, her superiority and her strength. Her leg was to her what Sampson's hair was to him, and in surrendering it, she surrendered herself.

She allows him to remove her leg. "It was like surrendering to him completely. It was like losing her own life and finding it again, miraculously, in his." Her own life was the life of being different, being in control, being smart and independent and opposed. Now she has surrendered her leg as another would surrender his soul, and she is fully his. But his life truly is that life that she had tried to live. He truly is an amoral atheist, and he cheerfully goes ahead with their mutual "seduction;" she's suddenly the puritanical prude who proceeds to accuse him of hypocrisy. He responds with a hilarious unrighteous indignation that he is a perfectly consistent sinner who doesn't believe in any of that Bible "crap" that he peddles.

The fascinating thing in all of this is her volte face: he is willing, yea verily eager to be "seduced" by her. But she doesn't seduce him. She can't. She can't seduce him, because his seduction of her is wholly and irrevocably complete. He has done to her what she was going to do to him, and the remorse she has to deal with is not his, but her own. She wanted to give him a deeper understanding of the universe; instead, he gives her a deeper understanding of herself, and she realizes she is not the amoral, untouchable, high and mighty intellectual she'd thought she was. She went to seduce a child, and ends up a child: their roles are fully reversed. He is revealed to her as a man truly is who she falsely claimed to be, and she is revealed to herself as a woman who truly is who he falsely claimed to be. Then, in his final words to her, he makes a profound statement. He says "you ain't so smart. I been believing in nothing every since I was born!" He had thought, a few moments before, that she was "some girl" because she professed to believe in nothing. But now she is brought to the edge of nothing—as McCarthy would say, "as close to nothin' as you can get without fallin' in," and she doesn't fall in: she isn't willing to go any further. Before, she had something and believed in nothing. Now she believes in something and has nothing. Nothing but normal, run-of-the-mill humanity, and the knowledge that she never had nothing to begin with.

Son of Morris

Beloved by Toni Morrison


As always, spoiler alert. If you don't like spoilers, just read the book, not a review of it. Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer with the novel Beloved, and there is no denying it is compelling. Compelling as a horror film is compelling. Complete with bestiality, child murder, semi-incestuous relationships, the physical incarnation of the wronged, long dead coming to visit, slavery and torture, yes, this has all the fixings of Texas Chainsaw Massacre save two: no chainsaw—there is a handsaw, but no chainsaw—and there is no protagonist. 

 
The story is told via the semi-omniscient narrator, as the omniscient, we feel, must have declined the offer. So, the event, the occurrence, is uncovered through reminiscences as a body bag unzipped in jerks from feet to head: two charred, toeless feet and we feel ill, but then are given twenty pages for the nausea to subside, and as we catch our breath the legs are shown to the hips and we are retching on hands and knees, on and on until the entirety lays, in all its naked, mangled gore, open to our uncomprehending eyes. 

 
But then, somehow, the known abomination, like the first bubbles of a pot coming to boil, no longer scalds, no longer repels us with the vehemence we had assumed we would have, and only then is the full horror realized: we are in the mind of the mother of two girls who would tear her toddler's head off with a hand saw, who would take her infant by the ankles and smash her skull against a doorway, and we, appallingly, astoundingly, inhumanly, can—but how can we?—sympathize. The only abomination that exists is an unexplained abomination; when explained it becomes no more than a horrifying, but understandable, sacrifice, complete with the innocent, opened throat purchasing the life of the sinner.
Scripture speaks of the "spirit of restraint" being removed from men in the last days. Suddenly hell seems merely to be earth given over: we are the demons that freely roam; we are men unrestrained; we are devils incarnate. It is a tremendous testimony to authorial skill that any reader ever finished the book; it is a tremendous testimony to human resilience that the myriad readers that did finish the book are not mad; indeed, the entirety is a tremendous testimony to the human ability to steep oneself in nescient oblivion. For this is based on a true story.

Well, if you didn't find anything above that would have convinced you not to read it, you won't find anything here. First off, I was biased from the beginning: this is just not the type of topic that any artist can safely touch. Obviously no white author in his right mind would approach it, and honestly, I don't think the man exists that's dense enough to put his hand to this particular plough. So that leaves a black female. Intrat: Toni Morrison. But this has a whole host of problems itself: how can this story be written without bringing the PC crowd to collective rut-rut-rutting orgasm like so many bitches in heat? For the benefit of the dense child in the back of the class, it can't. If a black authoress is going to write a story about a black slave woman killing her child, she could do so in Morocco where black people had white slaves without me batting an eyelash. But if she's here, in America, where we white people had black slaves and "we all feel real, real bad 'bout it; shore are sorry," then I will undoubtedly view the entire thing as a guilt trip. If Morrison doesn't care (and she shouldn't), then kudos to her; I'm never reading another page she wrote if I can help it. 

 
Then there's this lovely culmination of events. First, she doesn't win the Pulitzer. Fine, leave it there and we're all okay. She's already on Oprah's bleeding-heart book club, so she's going to make bank off of a bunch of upper class white women who want to feel good about doing good things (so long as it doesn't involve actually, say, buying dinner for the homeless guy ten blocks from their gated community), and people like me might eventually read her book on purpose, of all things. But no, the art society was too deeply offended: was she not a woman? Was she not black? Why, then, did she not get the Pulitzer? Because she was a black woman? So the Pulitzer commission group thingy gave it to her the next year, and I think she should feel insulted: her book ought to stand on its own two feet, regardless of whose picture is on the cover. Either it's good enough to win the Pulitzer or it isn't, and we ought to treat her the same as all the white male authors; it's not like she's handicapped. But then, to make things even worse, she ends up winning the Nobel Prize for literature.

The argument could be made that the book was actually that good. But it had too much baggage for any American to make that claim without a bias in one direction or the other. I, sick of the "save the third-world starving AIDS infected Eskimo Lesbian whales" crowd, will write it off out of hand (which is unfair, but I don't particularly mind: as I'm going to snub one book or another, I might as well snub in such a way as to offend the maximum number of people that annoy me as is humanly possible), and all of the people that like lying to themselves that they're doing God's work by destroying sweatshops (really? God wants all those families that got a dollar a week to starve?) and forgiving third-world debt (because God definitely wants all those dictators to have more money for weapons with which to commit genocide) will praise the book regardless of how good or bad it is. The only way they'd praise it more is if Morrison had made Sethé, the lead character, into a lesbian who had rebelled against her master, who just happened to be a rich, white, Presbyterian Minister. Cause they're just evil.

But c'est la vie. The book was dark, depressing, and only had one semi-main character that I could bring myself to semi-like, and that was Denver, the swinging infant. Everyone else just sucked: you've got a woman that murdered one daughter and completely ignored the other one for twenty years because she loved them so much, then a former slave guy that liked calves more than he ought to and sleeps both with Sethé and her ghost-daughter Beloved, and then you have Denver. There are two noble characters that appear occasionally, and each gets a page or two toward the end. Everyone else is simply vile.
Possibly worth having read, but definitely not worth reading.

View all my reviews

100 Something I Can't be Bothered About.

Ah, here it is: 100 Quotes to Make You Think.

Well, half of the title was accurate, and I don't want to say which, but I'll give you a hint: he's decent at counting.

Some of the quotes were worth reading, and some were funny, but if you spend more than five minutes reading this book, you read way too slowly. To sum it up, I got it for free, and feel slightly ripped off.

Austenian Sarcasm

Probably not surprising to anyone who has read ten sentences of Austen together, but in Emma, Miss Harriet Smith asks Robert Martin to get and read The Romance of the Forest, a doubtlessly priceless little gem that just so happens to be written by none other than the inimitable and all too often imitated Ann Radcliffe. I'm sure that you, my faithful reader* are saying "Oh, but of course, Ann Radcliffe; I should have known" or some other such rot, but I'll just go ahead and spoil the surprise. She is the inventor of the Gothic novel, and the authoress of a book of no less fame than Udolfo. I suddenly like Robert Martin a good deal more.


*(or readers; let's be optimistic, shall we?)

Dylan

I feel quite justified. I have a few favourite poets that few people have heard of, and chief among those that are recent is Henry Timrod. Well here's the justification: I've long loved Bob Dylan's album Modern Times, but thought that some of it seemed extremely familiar. Come to find out, Timrod is actually a huge source for the album. Uncredited, yes, but Dylan can get away with it. Half a century of culture-defining music covereth a multitude of forgotten / ignored footnotes, regardless of what Mr. Appel says to the contrary.

So Lovely a Desolation

Every Riven Thing: Poems by Christian Wiman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Wow.

Cautions first: some language. Basically, here's a litmus test: if you can spend ten minutes in a store decorated by Thomas Kinkade without wanting to put a chair or small person through a wall, you may not like this book. If you can have a sober, intelligent conversation with a man about his imminent death and remain unaffected by it, you will be unimpressed. If you use the English language to convey points the way the federal government uses money to fix the public school system (just use more until something gets better) then this book will downright annoy you. But if you don't fit these categories then this book may well level you like Hiroshima. It's hard to maintain cotton-candy illusions about the world in the face of a reality so stark as terminal cancer. It's hard to see any real beauty if you keep your eyes desperately shut for fear of catching a glimpse of something that may be harsh, for fear of seeing beauty born of blood. For not all loveliness is gentle, and mercy's scalpel cuts deep as any sword. This book, to steal from N. D. Wilson and Jeffers, is as beautiful as a forest in flame; the sky merciless blue, and the earth merciless black. And there's nowhere to hide.

But Christian Wiman's main topic is not death. It's rarely even mentioned. No, his topic is life, and its wonder; life, and its absurdities; life, and its approaching end. The book is full of lines such as the following:



I loved his ten demented chickens
and the hell-eyed dog, the mailbox
shaped like a huge green gun.
I loved the eyesore opulence
of his five partial cars...

(which is in my opinion one of the best opening lines ever written for a poem)

And the engine-eyed atheists screaming reason

It should, while evoking eternity, cry time,
like a priest at meat.

his antic frantic penny-ante-Ahab stabs of madness

two cloudminded miles over Iowa

and made of the air an unguent made of them

A shadow on the water soft as thought

rock's archaic ache

an inchoate incarnate thought

Welcome to the hell of having everything.



and so, so many others. And these are biopsies, snippets extracted to be studied, not the overarching bodies (how unmodern a poet, to write poems about things). This is a man who writes, not like Dumas, not like Chesterton, birthing brilliance and trusting it to raise itself, nor like Lewis, ever forgetful of the words he had written. This is a man that writes with the desperation born out of a dying desire to leave one lasting impression on this earth beyond his tomb, a man that writes as if far more than merely his life were resting on his words, a man who bestows upon every ink-splash on the page more tumultuous meaning than most poets could wrestingly extract from their own lives. Facing death. To illustrate, I'll leave you with two final quotes, one of them a complete poem.


2047 Grace Street
(excerpt)

I do not know how to come closer to God
except by standing where a world is ending
for one man. It is still dark,
and for an hour I have listened
to the breathing of the woman I love
beyond my ability to love. Praise to the pain
scalding us toward each other, the grief
beyond which, please God, she will live
and thrive. And praise to the light that is not
yet, the dawn in which one bird believes,
crying not as if there had been no night,
but as if there were no night in which it had not been.



The Mind of Dying
(entire)

God, let me give you now this mind of dying
fevering me back
into consciousness of all I lack
and of that consciousness becoming proud.

There are keener griefs than God.
They come quietly, and in plain daylight,
leaving us with nothing, and the means to feel it.

My God my grief forgive my grief tamed in language
to a fear that I can bear.
Make of my anguish
more than I can make. Lord, hear my prayer.




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Islam

Islam And Terrorism: What the Quran really teaches about Christianity, violence and the goals of the Islamic jihad. by Mark A. Gabriel

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Well, mixed feelings about sums it up. On the one hand, the guy knows his stuff. On the other hand, his stuff is about all he knows: his book (in places) tends to read like it was written by sixteen Pakistani immigrants attempting to compose a cookbook. But that is okay. I can deal with that. What I have more difficulty with are the weighted questions, straw-man arguments, and the carefully applied makeup and lighting to make something look as bad as is possible. If he even attempted to come across as a balanced individual who weighed evidence and offered his opinion, I could gladly recommend this book to anyone interested, but he doesn't, and I can't. No, he comes across as the brother of the victim in a murder trial: willing to convict the defendant upon any evidence whatsoever, so even the virtues of Islam (and they are there) are cast in the worst possible light, effectively assassinating his argument. It doesn't really help that he opens the book with the story of his arrest, imprisonment and torture by the Egyptian secret police: that would have been the perfect way to close a balanced book, but anytime you lead with the pathos, ethos goes out the window, and that is absolutely crippling in this case.

However, the book has a great deal of good information, particularly toward the end (the culinary inclinations of the composition notwithstanding). So, if you are interested in finding out how terrorism started and spread, this could help. If you are interested in the philosophy behind it, this wouldn't hurt. But it had the potential to be excellent, and instead the author led with Islam and how horribly evil it is, and how much damage it did to him personally, so by the time he gets to the connection to terrorism you don't have to be a short, fat, finicky Belgian with an mustache that only speaks in an outside voice to be more than a little bit skeptical about his motives.



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A Comparison: Why I am Religious

Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus


And the response:

Why I Love Religion, And Love Jesus

Piper and Chesterton

Here is an excerpt from Piper's The Sovereign God of "Elfland", a delightful little essay on Chesterton.



It is a great irony to me that Calvinists are stereotyped as logic-driven. For forty years my experience has been the opposite. The Calvinists I have known (English Puritans, Edwards, Newton, Spurgeon, Packer, Sproul) are not logic driven, but Bible-driven. It’s the challengers who bring their logic to the Bible and nullify text after text. Branches are lopped off by “logic,” not exegesis.

Who are the great enjoyers of paradox today? Who are the pastors and theologians who grab both horns of every biblical dilemma and swear to the God-Man: I will never let go of either.

Not the Calvinism-critics that I meet. They read of divine love, and say that predestination cannot be. They read of human choice and say the divine rule of all our steps cannot be. They read of human resistance, and say that irresistible grace cannot be. Who is logic-driven?

For forty years Calvinism has been, for me, a vision of life that embraces mystery more than any vision I know. It is not logic-driven. It is driven by a vision of the ineffable, galactic vastness of God’s Word.

Let’s be clear: It does not embrace contradiction. Chesterton and I both agree that true logic is the law of “Elfland.” “If the Ugly Sisters are older than Cinderella, it is (in an iron and awful sense) necessary that Cinderella is younger than the Ugly Sisters.” Neither God nor his word is self-contradictory. But paradoxes? Yes.

We happy Calvinists don’t claim to get the heavens into our heads. We try to get our heads into the heavens. We don’t claim comprehensive answers to revealed paradoxes. We believe. We try to understand. And we break out into song and poetry again and again.

Lee Strobel

The Case for Christmas: A Journalist Investigates the Identity of the Child in the Manger by Lee Strobel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a very quick little read, and immensely worthwhile. I differ with him on a few points--I would guess that Matthew was written before Mark, and as far as a "Q" existing, I fail to see why it wouldn't be Matthew instead of some other source that's no longer extant. But other than this and a few other wholly non-essential points, I thought it was nearly flawless.

However, I did go into it with a slightly different view of what I'd be taking away: I was expecting something defending the date of Christmas, not the fact of Christ being the Messiah and the Gospels being accurate. But it is excellent for what it is, and is a great introduction to one of the great apologists of our time.



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Princess

The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Well this was just great. "I do not always do what I ought, and I don't always try." I am now fully convinced that I will be reading a great deal of MacDonald for many, many years to come. It is the perfect book to read as a family, and I recommend it highly.



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Boniface Journal Intro test #1

This is the first draft of an intro to the Boniface Hill Journal, which if you want, you can ask me and you'll probably never get it. But if you email me at my new official email, editor.boniface@yahoo.com, then I'll send you one. It'll be published monthly. I think. All input is greatly desired, and welcomed. 

It was an accident--the decimal kept scooting over, and I think Marty sat on the "print" button. So now, here we are. Unfortunate, I know, but it can't legally be helped, and, like thank-you letters or the plague, ignoring us just makes it worse. You might as well go ahead and meet us (for we are the men of Boniface Hill). I am the editor, and my gravity-defying hair makes me almost as tall as a male of the species. Marty of the Rectory is the one holding hands with the redhead: my stunning sister, his stunning wife, so that if either of them falls through a street-grate, the other can pull them out. Steve is furrier than the rest of us, and our initial experiments have failed to ascertain why. We think he might be a heretic, but when fed he usually behaves. And Cameron? Well, he appears to be some type of Dancing Roman Lobster. In any case, he is as majestic as a meerkat silhouetted in the sunset. Next issue we shall introduce Jeremiah "Hobbit" Thompson, of whom descriptions are redundant, and the ever impressive Alwyn Swanepoel, who raises the average maturity by some occasionally tangible amount. He's from that continent with a desert, and he was singing bass long before I was born. We're also bringing in David "Davey" Jones. He has his own iPad and can grow a scary prophet beard. We plan on showing up each month, and we welcome input and short selections of poetry and prose. We read them aloud at dinner parties in bad French accents and they're often great hits. We are here to be enjoyed, to provoke thought, and to exhort, and all of this to the Glory of God. We are the Christians of Boniface Hill, and we play with axes. Contact us at editor.boniface@yahoo.com.

Miscellaneous Prose

“I’ve got his,” she said to the girl at the register, and placed the drinks on the counter. “He’s a regular. It’s three bucks, and he never takes his change. Sixteen ounce chai and an ice water, not too much ice?”

“Well obviously, but is the chai hot or cold—that’s the real question” the two-dollar tipper replied, with a cocked eyebrow and a crooked grin that revealed a couple of even more crooked teeth.

Sara faked deep thought and responded, “Well, it’s Thursday, which would indicate cold, but it’s misting outside, so I’d say hot, although it is the ninth, isn’t it? And you seem to have some absurd fascination with the number nine, and you got a cold one yesterday, so…”

“So which did you give me today?”

“Look at the cup. Definitely hot, with a bit of extra foam, but not so much that there’s only a shot of chai underneath a cup full of bubbles. Don’t you hate it when they do that?”

“Hot? You gave me a hot chai? And I was so hoping for cold. I’ve been looking forward to a cold chai all morning, and you made it hot?” He sighed with mock despair, and continued, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to reclaim my two-dollar tip from the very lovely—although rather confused—girl who’s still trying to figure out which button to push. New, are you, Gorgeous? About a week?”

Sara interrupted the half-formulated answer, “Oh, ignore him Hannah, he flirts with everyone. But I don’t think he’s ever really forgiven me for going and getting married to someone else, have you?”

“Forgiven you? When you give me a hot chai even though I wanted it cold? When you find fault with my brown mare and won’t buy my high flier?”

“And what’s that from?”

With a deeply injured air he responded, “Sense and Sensibility, the Emma Thompson one. Although that would make you Colonel Brandon. You might look good in a giant, floppy hat. Do you by any chance play piano?”

“Wait—isn’t Willoughby the one that says that?”

“You do know it—I’m impressed." He grinned. "You know I’ll never forgive you now, don't you? Isn’t your husband tall? So terrible: already a shortage of short girls for me to choose from, and then you go and marry some six foot two behemoth. It’s not natural; you obviously were intended to marry someone who was right around five six or seven. God will judge you for your rebellion. Unless Hannah there is wearing three inch heels.” Peering over the counter, “No chance of that is there, Freckles?”

The white skin of her face blending into her rusted hair, Hannah assured him that her shoes had no heels at all.

He sadly sighed. “And a red-head, too. Tragic.”

“Oh, go sit down and read your book. I’ll take my break in twenty minutes.”

Done With This Semester

Epistle to Professor Victoria Arthur


A grade! My Teacher, leave all C’s and D’s
To trochees failed, or iambs that don’t please.
But first, since school demanded that I pay
Attention, you now have to read; I’ll pray.
Must I explain the words that soon you’ll see?
Why not. The final that was given me
Should demonstrate quite simply that I’ve learned:
Within the past four fortnights, have I earned
An A? A B? Or have my words, so frail,
So weak, so wrong, condemned me now to fail?
For learned I’m not, but have, for this next line
Does not have ten dull words, but only nine
(Although the one before it had one more).
The question, I suppose, is do they bore?
It’s hard for me to say; I’ll let you choose
For whether I say yea or nay I lose,
For if of God above and man below
Naught can be reasoned but from that we know,
I fear that I know naught. My reas’ning then
Had better far be bowed to other men,
Or even women, as the case may be.
But bore or no, my final is but three
Small poems. To justify myself unto The Man:
It took forever to make sure they’d scan.

It’s really not complex: I imitate
An author from each “age” that I would rate
As best in style, skill or simply fun:
An Irish monk, A. Pope and Satan won
(And if the Cath’lic monk can’t seem to cope
I’m sure he’ll damn the devil to the Pope).

And, now that that’s been said, I think I’m done;
Though with the wiser dead, I’ve just begun.





Blessings, and sincerest thanks. Class was great.

Jesse A. Broussard

Beowulf, Finalish Form

Herein To the Mead-Wench Words are Writ

My lady list, from my word-hoard hear
Of the spear-armed Dane, Scyld Scefing’s son,
Of Scandian shores the savior strong,
Swinger of swords whose shield shall not shatter,
The breast of my boat beats the whale-road white,
The tale of my triumphs the storm riders sing:
How the Wyrd Wielder Wise has clothed me with strength,
The Slinger of Seas that enfold the fair fields
Has hallowed my heart and my sword stained with gore.
A Wielder of Wonders, a Welkin-warrior,
A ring-giver great, weregild winner:
My enemies mighty my arm has hewn down,
My flag home a haven, my borders unbattled,
My mead freely flows and well-roasted the meat
In the hall of my fathers. There grow faithful sons;
Liegemen are loyal, the bane of my foes,
But bane of the sea wyrm, bane of the land wyrm,
The sky wyrm’s bane is the blessed Bear.
Bone cage of demons my sword split assunder
And heart of Hrothgar by my battle-boast hoisted:
That Heorothealed would be of the kin of Cain,
That house wild wight haunted, high on the hill.

Night walker was wary, dread death-dealer doughty,
Wan under welkin was the whelp of Cain.
Lief was he my liege to kill, my thane he lifted his maw unto,
Rent his bone-cage, blood ran rivers,
Swallowed him whole, even head and hands.
But my hand grasped him grim, my fingers fast held him—
No battle brand bore I, no war weapon wielded,
Yet still his soul stole I, his blood did I spill,
But deeds of might were far from finished.
Grendel’s arm I hoisted high, his hand on Heorot
A welcome sign was made. But he was naught to what was next;
The viler, viscious dam, the water wight, the elfin evil.
Beneath the abyss she dwelt, deep under the depths,
But swam I swift to her home, the hell-born hoard,
And fought her with a sword that there I found,
A mighty blade that hacked her hide, her life blood freed,
And with her perished, the greatest of its deeds done at death.

So now I stand here, and what ask you of me,
A slayer of demons, of dragons death-dealer?
Mightiest of men, king over coasts?
Full twenty men’s might in each of my hands,
And this is the task you are asking of me?
“Tell you what I’ve learned in class this semester?”

Where be the brood of Cain?
Where the enemies that plague thee?
Where the house that’s haunted? Where the demon spawn?
Is there no dragon in this domain? No hell-born beast?
No task worthy of my prowess? No death walking in darkness?
Ask not of my aid in this trifling task,
This womanish work, this infant’s assignment.

My lady noble: my flagon fill, my mead let flow—
A dearth of beasts must be in this land
For my platter’s bottom I now perceive—
Mayhap another cow to his maker and our meat-board
Might be sent. And I? My sword I shall sharpen
And of the sea-born serpents that slew I Nine—Nine!
Of the tally of ten my tale lacks but one—
Of the sea-born serpents that slew I nine
In the years bygone shall I speak to thee.

And a Lewis-Flavored Milton, Wrecked by Me

The Dyscorses of Satan and Other Fallen Beings, Recorded Upon Hys (Satan’s) Dyscouery of God Hauing Asyned Unto Mere, Mortal, Fallen Man Thys Fynal Asynment. Wryten in Unrhymed Iambic Pentameter as a Fool’s Attempt to Imitate John Milton, The Endyng Being Signyfide by the Introduction of a Septametrycal Fynal Lyne.


(Spelling has been modernized for the 2011 ed.)

Satan to the Fallen Host:
My Rebel Angels, down-cast, desolate,
Imprisoned deep within this frozen hell,
Removed from life and light by rage of Him
‘Gainst whom no power in heaven, earth or sea
Has yet His iron throne from Highest Heights
Thrown down, or rent the scepter from His hand;
‘Gainst whom nine nights, nine days we strove and failed
To win; and from Whose wrath we now so fain
Would flee, were there a realm in heaven, earth or sea
Wherein we from his Adamantine rage
Would loosed be. In vain. For I alone
Am second to Him to Whom no second else
Be known; am fire enfolding fire, Tenth
Hierarch, am Ahriman, The Morning’s Son,
And even I this end couldst not foresee.
But wiser I have grown, and if from bliss
We banned forever be, then let us
Now remove from Him who us removed
From where we fain would be. If unto earth
He us has cast, then we shall make it ours.
But now, this moment gather farther from
That scarlet city where the God that knows
Not ruth still mocks the broken beings that
Pray round his iron throne. Now come: for from
This day eternal war we shall begin
With that Almighty Foe and all His works.
Immortal our revenge: our yearning hate
Of Him and all He loves shall no end slake.

Now first for men—those vicious fools whose throats
Can bark for slaughter, cannot sing—that He
More foolish still is rumored more than life
To love (long since we cast them down to deep
Rebellion; hate. Indeed: to love the hate
Of Love Himself we taught him. Her? Deceived;
Both far have fallen. Now the fires of hell
Their feet shall singe, and soon their souls shall flame).

But now, today, what can we do? What war?
What plague? What cup hold we? What wine of wanton
Lust to wet their lips? What envy, strife,
Or drunken deep debauch shall fit our need?
What height of pride, or fool’s abyss, to what
Vile end shall man be flung? The battle’s filth
And strain? The bomb, the falling death? The moon,
A pallid green to break his worthless mind?
I fear that war will fail: Cuchulain’s bride is death;
No more shall Roland’s sword hew helm and bone,
And Arthur sleeps far hence in Avalon
While Helen’s eyes and Iseult’s lips are dust,
And dust the shoulders and the breasts of snow.
No, no war can kill all men: some win.
The plague is past, their God gave them a cure.
But, license, lust and lech’ry well we use,
And envy Cr'esus killed and killeth still
While strife lays low the hero’s home: no man
His bride well understands; far less his seed.
Still pride and folly walk as lovers lie:
Soft, intricate, entwined their limbs and lips.

But more we need—a deeper depth to delve,
A height that’s higher yet from which to fall
And then mankind will fully finished be—
And so we turn at last to lethargy:
The student’s bane—the final’s due today,
And last night Phil and Cait took John “Bones” Jones
And then his lethal elbow did to foolish,
Lazy Jesse introduce (till morning
Was at five, the hill with frost lay slain;
No slug was on the thorn, and God His wrath
Revealed). And now what hope has man? To death!
Destruction! Madness! All for naught! His endless
Labour lost! A final he shall fail
From lack of sleep (and for we wicked? Rest.)
Upon his bed he now does fling his form,
And in a heap his clothes about his fallen frame shall lie.

Students With Funny Haircuts Making Ugly Art

White Oleander by Janet Fitch

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book I've found difficult to review. First off, I would not recommend it: there is rather pervasive language and several sexual scenes, but far more disturbing is the overall theme, which is the reason that I absolutely love it, and usually revisit it once every couple years. Also, Janet Fitch can really write, with a prose style reminiscent of a less dense Dostoevsky packed with unusual metaphors that are enough to catch a reader off guard without distracting him. A rare "gift" indeed, and one that is usually far from free.



The story centers around the twelve-year-old Astrid Magnussen, and takes place over the course of about seven years, chronicling her fall from a sweet, open, (relatively) innocent child into a dark, bitter, amoral young woman, and the beginning of her rising again. This story goes from grey to black to black with a glimmer of grey, as N. D. Wilson would say. Yet, it is a very realistic, very chilling account of the utter devastation that a parent can wreak upon the life of a child, as well as a fairly accurate, if brutal and somewhat selective, account of the California Social Services



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Beowulf Draft 1

My final assignment in English class was to simply demonstrate that I learned something this semester. It had no form required: it could be lesson plans for teaching, a paper on anything; I was given loose reins, free reign, a bit betwixt my teeth and a whole mountain to fall down.

I decided that I didn't want to do a final project. So I didn't. But, not daring to simply refuse, I instead assigned it to three other characters, and am turning in their responses to the teacher. The first is Beowulf, to be followed by John Milton's Satan, and Alexander Pope shall scathingly bring up the rear.

Here is the first draft of part 1; input is desired.


Beowulf is Assigned this Final Project


My lady list, from my word-hoard hear
Of the spear-armed Dane, ScyldScefing’s son,
Of Scandian shores the savior strong,
Swinger of swords whose shield shall not shatter,
The breast of my boat beats the whale-road white,
The tale of my triumphs the storm riders sing:
How the Wyrd Wielder Wise has clothed me with strength,
The Slinger of Seas that enfold the fair fields
Has hallowed my heart and my sword stained with gore.
A Wielder of Wonders, a Welkin-warrior,
A ring-giver great, weregild winner:
My enemies mighty my arm has hewn down,
My flag home a haven, my borders unbattled,
My mead freely flows and well-roasted the meat
In the hall of my fathers. There grow faithful sons;
Liegemen are loyal, the bane of my foes,
But bane of the sea wyrm, bane of the land wyrm,
The sky wyrm’s bane is the blessed Bear.
Bone cage of demons my sword split assunder
And heart of Hrothgar by my battle-boast hoisted:
That Heorothealed would be of the kin of Cain,
That house wild wight haunted, high on the hill.

Night walker was wary, dread death-dealer doughty,
Wan under welkin walked the whelp of Cain.
Lief was he my liege to kill, my thane he lifted his maw unto,
Rent his bone-cage, blood ran rivers,
Swallowed him whole, even head and hands.
But my hand grasped him grim, my fingers fast held him—
No battle brand bore I, no war weapon wielded,
Yet still his soul stole I, his blood did I spill,
And when his dam to avenge him came,
Her home her tomb was made by my right hand.

So now I stand here, and what ask you of me,
A slayer of demons, of dragons death-dealer?
Mightiest of men, king over coasts?
Full twenty men’s might in each of my hands,
And this be the task you are asking of me?
To “Tell you what I’ve learned in class this semester?”

Where be the brood of Cain?
Where the enemies that plague thee?
Where the house that's hight haunted? Where the demon spawn?
Is there no dragon in this domain? No hell-born beast?
No task worthy of my prowess? No death walking in darkness?
Ask not of my aid in this trifling task,
This woman’s work, this infant’s assignment.
My lady noble: my flagon fill, my mead let flow—
A dearth of beasts must be in this land
For my platter’s bottom I now perceive—
Mayhap another cow to his maker and our meat-board
Might be sent. And I? My sword I shall sharpen
And of the sea-born serpents that slew I Nine—Nine!
Of the tally of ten my tale lacks but one—
Of the sea-born serpents that slew I nine
In the years bygone shall I speak to thee.

Anniversary

How is it that time continues to cycle a full five years after the world has ended?