Stonework Issue 3

Gallery of Shea Portraits

2006-12-10T14:28:00.000-08:00

Mud

2006-12-04T11:58:00.000-08:00

~Kevin Hart

I think it is the smell of mangrove mud

Caught as you pass Whyte Island, just before

The old refinery gets into gear,

That you love most,

The thick wild stench of that raw mud, oh yes

I think you wander there and drink it in

On days before those pipes and cylinders

Were ever thought,

And spend long hours with every slow rich curve

As my fat river deepens some and sleeps;

You lay right down in it and float away

Past squiggly creeks

(And yet, at night, I think you want to be

Where water threads those seventeen small rocks:

We met there, Dark One, all those years ago.

You smelled of mud).

~~~~~

Next: Prayer

Prayer

2006-12-04T11:57:00.000-08:00

~Kevin Hart

Break open my words,
Break them,
But only the words I speak to you alone

Those words at night

Old words

O let anything there is of prayer
Find you

Crack them like cloves, o Dark,
Let all the silences between my words go up
With a perfume of evening and wine

With the caress of my wife’s small hand
When she’s asleep, O
When all my thoughts are fraying fast

But let the bitter words stay in my mouth
Let them stay here
With the dark blood of daylight words

I offer up
Those nights I fall through dark for hour on hour
And wake o Lord
With death and love both preying on my mind

O rest your fingers there, between their claws,
And wrench me hard:

Don’t let me set around myself,
Don’t let me die as me

I feel the darkness moving round me now
O Lord
Let it be you this time, o Lord, let it be you

~~~~~

Next: Nights

John Donne's Bawdy Body Devotion

2006-11-29T06:25:00.000-08:00

James Wardwell

When savoring the devotional worth of John Donne, the wrestling of a divided devotee spices the mix in two ways. His neo-platonistic soul seeks to flee his body, and, while seeming incongruous at first, his secular and “Holy” poems actually inform and enhance one another.

The bifurcation of Donne’s body of poems certainly received initial credence when some twenty years after his death Izak Walton published a biography of Donne which suggested that prior to becoming a clergyman Donne had written his racy, secular poems then after having taken holy orders, only wrote poems explicitly focused on “holy living and holy dying.” The problem with Walton’s view of Donne is that it can’t be corroborated. Moreover, Walton can be contradicted on various points of fact. (David Novar’s The Making of Walton’s Lives suggests that for political reasons the biographer may have fabricated the chronology and details to make Donne appear a saint after the model of Augustine, that is, “so small the boy, so great the sinner” to seminal Christian Theologian.) All of Donne’s lyrical poems were published together two years after the poet’s death. For all we know he could have written Holy Sonnet 14 “Batter My Heart, Three-personed God” the same day he wrote Elegy 19 “To His Mistress Going to Bed.” Several of his contemporaries, Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick included, were known to write both religious and quite irreligious verse simultaneously.

While reading Donne, I find it most beneficial to let the religious and secular poems speak to one another. Together in them we hear voiced the crazed pleasure and simpering pain of known sin. In the seventeenth century, men were characterized by their friends with a single adjective attached to their names. Ben Jonson was “Rare”; George Etherege, “Easy”; George Herbert, “Holy.” John Donne had two such labels, perhaps reflecting his two poetic voices. He was known as Jack the Rake and Dr. Donne, Divine. I propose a new way to appreciate the two sides of his one personality as Dr. Jack Donne, the Divine Rake.

“A Hymn to God the Father” reflects the fear of one who has known sin past and present. And, he panics, future. Will God forgive the past? “Which is my sin, though it were done before?”(2). Although the sin(s) hadn’t originated with him, nevertheless the persona acknowledges that he [re-]created it/them for himself. In spite of the dire seriousness of this self examination, there is here the first hint at playfulness on his name, that these sins were “done” earlier. Perhaps echoing Paul’s quandary of doing which he hates in Romans 7:13-20, Donne “still” runs in the sin he deplores. This persona doesn’t sound like Walton’s new saint, but rather like someone who loves God and wants to follow Him, but continues to fail in the flesh. Because when God has “done” (that is John Donne) as His loyal devotee and is “done” (that is finished) forgiving his sin, God “hast not done,” neither finished forgiving nor possessing a devotee singularly focused on Him, because the poet/priest has “more” to commit and confess.

Perhaps some of Donne’s less religious poems authenticate the poignancy of the second stanza query.

Wilt thou forgive that sin by which I have won

Others to sin? And, made my sin their door? (7-8)

In the seduction poem “The Flea,” Donne’s persona suggests to a woman that because in having sex people exchange blood, and because the titular bug has bitten them both, thus mixing their bloods, it is as if they have already had sex so they might as well go ahead and have sex. In “Song: Go, and catch a falling star,” he proclaims that even if someone could find a woman “true,” he wouldn’t go meet her because she would prove “false” to “two, or three” before he got there. “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” suggests to me that the persona may wish to ease out of an intimate relationship at his convenience physically and emotionally. Donne wrote several graphic elegies and satires. It’s not impossible to imagine that he could also be self critical of his religious poems here, with their confused theologies and rampid doubts. “A Hymn to God the Father” may even indict itself and its author as leading the reader astray. The balance of time is against him: he may have shunned such sins a year or two, but he’s “wallowed in” them “a score” (9-10). He fears that God may/can not forgive such.

When thou hast d one, thou hast not done,

For I have more. (11-12)

There may be something even more complex in this at once somber and playful refrain. In the repeated done’s, Donne is obviously playing on his own name. But he had also married, against her father’s wishes, a woman named Ann More. In the hymn, the voice fears the efficacy of God’s forgiveness because he holds “more.” How is the poet’s wife the last bastion of his sin, the final test to God’s love? Does she rival the Almighty? Or are Donne’s sins with her and/or against her so egregious as to exceed the power of grace?

We can’t simply read Donne’s poems of pursuit as a biography of infidelity. He married Ann More, the niece of his boss, Sir Thomas Egerton, secretly in 1601. When the secret came out Donne lost his job and the blessing to find another one. Ann’s father, George More, refused to pay her dowry until 1609 because his daughter had married beneath her family status. The couple suffered for love, birthing twelve children and raising seven into adulthood, until Ann died in 1617. When he lost “she whom I have loved” (1), the voice of Holy Sonnet 17 declares “my good is dead” (2). So he “set” “his mind” “wholly on heavenly things,” but the sonnet reveals that even so there is a struggle to love God more than he longs for his dead wife. “[A]dmiring” her had been the “stream” that led him to their own “head,” but a “holy, thirsty dropsy melts [him] yet” (8) and he begs “more Love.” There is a “tender jealousy” in the divine-human bond that he still fears “Flesh” may extinguish (14). Jesus seems to have warned against injudiciously placing family before God (Matt. 12:46-50). Donne fears for he has “more.”

In the last stanza of “A Hymn to God the Father,” his fear becomes his sin. Believing that his sin is too great to be forgiven is an unpardonable sin. In a classically Donnean twist, the persona at last cajoles a commitment from God that Christ shall “shine” true as He has “heretofore” (in the poem as in his life), as He does now (in that moment of fearsome, inspired faith) and in the future at his “death.”

And, having done that, Thou hast done,

I fear no more. (17-18)

With God’s faithfulness believed, Donne asserts his own faith in the midst of contrasting doubt. For the first time in the poem the tee in “Thou” is capitalized. God now has all of Donne. Sins of the past, present and future included. His work is finished. And so “I fear no more:” not even the rivalrous love he bears his wife.

Another poem in which our understanding is deepened by its connectivity to Donne’s secular work is Holy Sonnet 14. Here again the voice cries: “I love you and would but loved fain,” but is “captived” by his sinful self. Instead of naming and exploring his “black sin” as he does in Holy Sonnets 4 and 5, in 14 Donne simply assumes his wretchedness as tantamount to betrothal to God’s “enemy” (10). Because he finds himself in such a miserable spiritual dearth, the basic argument of the poem pleads that God not be so nice, but rather bodily abuse him as to be corrective. His complaint that God just “knock[s], breathe[s], shine[s]” remarkably resembles the meticulous care a car lover lavishes on a favorite vehicle in waxing. This is not enough to reform the recalcitrant. “[B]reak, blow, burn” he pleads (4). In order for him to stand upright, God must first throw him down (3). He is like a “usurpt town” where his reason, God’s “viceroy” in him “proves weak and untrue” (5-8).

The last image of the poem strikes the loudest. It is downright bawdy. The sinner is an unfaithful lover who pleads for redress in sexual terms. The options are widely divergent from “divorce” to “break that knot again” which succinctly supplicates for revirginization so that that miraculous chastity may then be reviolated. “Take me to you” in the context is bodily bawdy (12). These are images that Donne has not shied from in his secular poems. In this “divine” poem, they suggest the intensity of his self loathing and his desire for God. The contrasts are pointed. He won’t be free unless “enthrall[ed],” a word which in the seventeenth century held strongly oppressive sexual connotations. He won’t be pure (“chast” 14), unless God “ravish[es],” that is rapes, him. God as rapist: this is the kind of metaphysical conceit that Samuel Johnson complained characterized Donne, “heterogeneous ideas yoked together by violence.” It is hard for us to reconcile such radically incongruent concepts. Holy Sonnet 14 is a prayer that not many of us will pray both for its extreme indelicacy and it bold submissiveness to our Lord’s authority. The challenge is to give up our nice relationship to God to seek the intimacy of his vigorous love.

In what are arguably Donne's best known devotional lines, he asserts in prose:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a PromontoryManor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s deathme, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. were, as well as if a diminishes

Earnest Hemingway, of course, took the title for his novel For Whom Bell Tolls , which ironically posits no human connectivity, from Donne’s Meditation 17 which here powerfully embraces our fatal incorporation. Fully titled this prose meditation appears in a collection of “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,” where something happens in the writer’s life to stimulate musings on his relationship to God. In 17, the author, amidst what he believes to be a fatal illness, hears the death knell traditionally rung as someone passes from the living to the dead, and he wonders whether the one who is passing or past hears the bell’s toll. Musing further, Donne considers that if, in his own state of ill health, the bell is for him, which he postulates it could well be, he doesn’t recognize it as such. Therefore, it is all one. Whoever the bell tolls for, by our commonality, it is for no one we know of for sure, but for every we know as well as those we don’t.

His own physical demise is something Donne took much occasion to speculate on. Having fallen seriously ill nearly ten years before his death, even after recovering somewhat, set about the project of dying well. At least metaphorically, in his devotional works, he represents death as the ultimate elevation of soul essence over fleshly body. Slightly ironically, in one remnant of his dying years, one of very few pre-Great Fire, pre-Wren artifacts from St. Paul’s Cathedral, Donne poses “grinning death” in his marmoreal effigy. Yet one thing most appreciable in Donne’s struggle with death and particularly in Meditation 17, is the glorification of God and his practices. In 17, “All mankind is of one Author, and is one volume.” When we die and our bodies corrupt, God does not tear our chapter out of the book and discard it. Rather, Donne writes, God “translate[s]” us into “a better language.” Death then is a necessary enhancement of God’s creative ministry. He employs various translators, including “age,” “sickness,” “war,” and even “justice.” “[B]ut Gods hand is in every translation; and his hand shall gather all our scattered leaves again, for that Library where every book shall open to one another.”

Donne typically views the body in antithesis to the soul. In Holy Sonnet 6, again he contemplates his own death, “my plays last scene,” when “gluttonous death, will instantly unjoint / My body, and soul” (1, 5-6). His goal that his “soul” might go “to heaven” even as his dead body “dwell[s]” “in the earth” with his sin (9-10), and ”fall[s]” “to hell” ends in direct address to God:

Impute me righteous, thus purged of evil,

For thus I leave the world, the flesh, the devil. (13-14)

Similarly, separation of body and soul may be intimated in the beginning of Holy Sonnet 5:

I am a little world made cunningly

Of Elements, and an Angelic spright (1-2).

Such distinctions and seeming gradations of human composition echo in Donne’s non-religious work as well. In “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” lovers who must be physically apart “endure” because, unlike lovers “whose soul is sense,” that is, whose relationship is based on bodily love making, their “two souls” are “one” (22, 14, 21). “The Exstacy,” the title of which etymologically means something like standing outside of, describes an all day orgy of souls joining outside of their bodies; thus, love “Interinanimates two souls” (42).

“Goodfriday, 1613, Riding West” is a dialectic of body and soul. On this day when his “soul” “bends” to the east where Christ suffered the crucifixion of his body, the persona finds himself riding and thereby facing west seemingly in cross purpose. He remembers the blood of the cross “which is, / The seat of all our souls” and the “flesh,” the apparel” of God that day, “torn” on the cross (25-28). These thoughts of great conflict are redeemed by the revelation that a back turned to Christ is ready for “corrections” in the flesh, flagellation style. To so “punish” the body is to “restore” the soul (39, 41).

Ultimately, beyond this, for Donne death to the body means life to the soul. Nowhere is this better articulated than in Holy Sonnet 10. Herein Donne mocks, (“poor Death,”) death’s false pride and might and dread. In actuality, in the poet’s view, death, which is foreshadowed in such common life experiences as “rest and sleep,” is an event of “much pleasure.” In his confidence, the persona both regrets and celebrates that “our best men” go “soonest” to death. The death of “their bones” is their “souls delivery” (8). He ridicules death as “slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desparate men” (9), whose ministers are the lessers “poison, war and sickness.” “Charms,” such sedatives and hemlock tea (“poppies”), can make us sleep as well “and better.” The rhetoric is sharp. The death of our earthly bodies is trivialized.

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

The Baby Screaming in the Back Seat

2006-11-29T06:23:00.000-08:00

Julia Kasdorf

screams because she cannot see her mother driving,

because it is night and every night she screams

before sleep because she knows our paltry fires mean

nothing next to the tigers that creep from dark trees,

screams because we will drop bombs for peace, screams

because a mother in Mexico sewed her pink sleeper

while her own baby slept in a heap of clean scraps

at her feet, screams because the car drinks gas like tea,

screams as if she already sees the griefs her life will gather,

screams as the stubborn symphony keeps getting louder,

screams when it snaps off and the car drifts into a lot

and the mother climbs beside that miserable traveler

strapped in her seat, offers a breast, then sneaks back

to the front, an arm reaching back to cup the head

still hot from screaming. The mother drives,

reciting details from the night this child was born --

snow blew across the moon, ski runs blazed

like great snakes on the ridge outside our room--

and still the baby screams because she can’t believe

anyone is driving this machine.

~~~~~

Next: Letter to Dad from New Danville, PA

Letter to Dad from New Danville, PA

2006-11-29T06:21:00.001-08:00

Julia Kasdorf

When I can no longer stand

to read or write in any chair

or couch in the house,

I bank the fire and head out

into the night, slither

between electric fence lines

and climb a ridge where you can see lights

from Lancaster city all the way

to the black Susquehanna.

I lie down there under Orion’s belt

until snow melts through my hair

to the back of my neck. This is the best

thing you ever taught me: to stop

and stretch out under tree limbs or clouds.

I almost forgot how good a pasture feels

beneath a sore back. And these evil days

when you can’t say who will sign your check

or for how long, as friends of thirty years

get canned or quit or just turn silent,

you must walk out onto that smooth swath

of Westinghouse lawn and lie down. Think

how the sky will open above you. Think

how the ground will hold you

as it always has, as it certainly will

until it takes you once and for all.

(Witness)

~~~~~

Next: Bat Boy, Break a Leg

Body Worship

2006-11-29T06:21:00.000-08:00

Terence Paige

“Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.”

--George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Thus George Orwell explains to the reader of Nineteen Eighty Four that the affair between Winston Smith and Julia is actually an act of resistance against the totalitarian state of Oceania. For the state’s oppressive control of its people is seen in this novel, in large part, in the “sexual puritanism” of Big Brother’s Party. Winston’s adultery with Julia symbolizes his individual freedom and attempt to assert his selfhood over against the ever-present Party. The effort is doomed, of course, and the Party ends up destroying the couple as human beings, anihilating their affection for each other and so, symbolically, the last shred of mental resistance to the Party.

Nearly half a century after this novel came out, Frank McCourt published his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Angela’s Ashes (1996). In it, McCourt describes the grinding poverty of his childhood in Limerick. At the very end of the book, he escapes the depravation of life in Ireland on a boat to America, fulfilling a childhood dream. The boat carries him away, not merely from one location to another, but out of his old life and into the new life of financial independence, hope and freedom. The freedom motif is concretized in a sexual encounter he has the evening that the boat arrives in America. Frank goes with an Irish priest to a party with complete strangers. “The priest whispers to me, These are bad women. We won’t stay here long” (p. 361). But they do stay too long, Frank has his first sex with a married woman, and exclaims two pages before the book’s end, “at long last I don’t give a fiddler’s fart if the Pope himself knocked on this door and the College of Cardinals gathered gawking at the windows.” Once again, the choice of free sex has become the symbol of personal freedom and the attempt to attain selfhood over against the forces of oppression—in this case, the Catholic church and Ireland.

These two works exemplify a trend in contemporary thinking which broods over us like a storm-cloud filled sky. It is not simply the frank acceptance of sexual immorality in these books. Extramarital sex is as old as civilization, and we know it goes on in Christian and non-Christian societies. The difference is that now a pervasive new ethic has appeared that not only excuses sexual freedom but has made it into a kind of sacred principle. According to this outlook, sexual freedom is elevated into the very definition of human freedom, the means of self-actualization, the goal of relationships, and a key to the meaning of life. We might think of it as a kind of sexual idolatry, tied to the more generalized body-worship of our culture. The former religous goals of achieving meaning in life by giving oneself in love to God and neighbor are now being replaced in the public sphere with an obsession with the body and idolization of sex. Post-moderns are being sold a new “beatific vision” to quest after: not union with God, but buns of steel and the perfect orgasm. To challenge the right of anyone to have any sort of sex they please is, with few exceptions, the new heresy. Talk about sexual morality is redefined (as in Nineteen Eighty Four) as oppression. This new outlook permeates every level of contemporary American culture, from popular magazines, books and videos to high-level academic discussions in university circles, even seeping into Christian leadership.

The evidence of this idolatry screams at us from magazine racks in the supermarket, mainstream movies, television and novels. A recent issue of Self magazine shouts from the cover: “Say Yes! to Sex,” while magazines like Glamour and Cosmopolitan are not embarassed to promise on their covers new erotic techniques. Sex is offered in many popular magazines as the panacea for a rocky relationship. Along with this trend a new kind of class-consciousness is emerging. At the top of this hierarchy are singles who have illicit sex as often as they want; at the bottom are those with none. On the sitcom Friends the most devastating put-down that Joey can muster is, “How lame is it that you haven’t had sex in six months?” In the 2005 movie Monster in Law the character played by Jennifer Lopez is told by her friends, “you’re turning into a freak … It’s because you haven’t had sex.” The message is clear: having sex distinguishes you as high class in the new social order; your life is worthwhile. A life without sex—especially casual or risky sex—is barely worth living. Sex with a complete stranger is better than no sex at all.

The irony in all of this is that our culture’s obsession with body-beauty and sex is itself the destroyer of bodies and persons. We can draw a straight line from this idolatry to national health problems, the spread of STD’s, and the result in lives wrecked. We can link this idolatry to innumerable divorces and the destruction of families. We can see its immediate corollary in the astonishing rise in the number of children born to unmarried mothers: over one-third of all births in America now. Secondary effects of this idolatry are incalculable, but include the social and psychological effects on generations of children who are abandoned by their fathers (and in some cases, mothers), who are the collateral damage of sexual freedom, never taught the goodness of spousal love and commitment. Or the devastation wrought on victims of child sexual abuse by people who have been inflamed by our culture. Or the psychological and spiritual damage done even to consenting adults who buy into the cultural lies about sex. In short, the most fundamental human relationships involving trust and intimacy are in process of being devastated by this idolatry. We can connect body-idolatry to young women’s self-loathing that is acted out in bulimia and anorexia. The measurement of self-worth in waist size and breast size is a stupid proposition when you put it in words like this. But when this valuation is expressed in an air-brushed photo of an apparently perfect model in a Victoria’s Secret ad, the message has a siren power. The feminists taught us to beware the “objectification” of women, and we should have listened: for now the idolatry of our age is slowly destroying the personhood of the other as both men and women are treated as bodies to use.

A few years ago a visitor to our home brought an issue of Seventeen with her, a magazine whose title announces it is targeted at high school girls. That issue contained an article on sex toys which surveyed various objects in the sort of graphic detail that one would expect from Penthouse or Hustler, not a fashion mag your child is reading. Another issue of the same magazine from this year had an article entitled, “Are You Ready for Sex?” in which there was really nothing about being “ready,” but plenty about “sex.” Like lemmings being led over a cliff, a new generation is being called to believe the lies that did not work for my generation. And the prophets of this body-worship believe no one is too young to be indoctrinated. Those who oppose them are the new heretics. What effect will this have on these children—their self-image, their values, their ability to form loving and faithful relationships? And what effect will these children have on their children?

Sometimes a ray of hope breaks through, the thought that our culture recognizes its own problem; but like an alcoholic bemoaning her addiction, the moments of honesty in the media only highlight how powerful the chains of body-worship are. Magazines may talk about the real importance of the “inner you,” yet the very same issues are filled with pictures of inner you’s who all have glowing skin, perfect hair and perfect thighs.

Does Christianity have anything constructive to say about the body? Contrary to popular myths, Christianity has a profound and positive view of the body. This begins with the Bible’s account of creation: our physical makeup is part of how the Creator intended us to be from the beginning, and humans with their bodies were declared “very good” (Gen. 1:). The body was meant from the beginning to be an expression of our personhood in relationship to one another and to God. The body is involved in our ultimate destiny: it is the hope of classical Christianity that God will one day raise up those who have died in faith, and give them eternal life with a body. Hence the body takes on “eschatological significance,” as theologians might say. Life in the body now is a pointer to future life with God.

Our relationship with God even now involves our bodies, because God designed us this way. This comes out in Paul’s words to the Corinthian Christians (1 Cor. 5:1; 6:12-20), who seem to have believed that they were “free in Christ” to do whatever they wanted with their bodies, which did not matter to the eternal life of their souls anyway. Some of them had no qualms about using prostitutes, and one was committing incest. Paul’s argument to them is interesting. First he asserts that they ought to remember that their bodies, like that of Jesus, will be raised. Our future should determine our view of the present: we will enjoy God in an embodied way in heaven, hence we anticipate that by the use of our bodies now. Secondly, he tells them that sexual union makes a person “one flesh” with another. In other words, sexual union is not something extraneous to our souls; it touches the innermost fabric of who we are and hence cannot be taken casually without damaging our own souls. Paul next reminds the Corinthians that Christian freedom does not mean bare autonomy. “You do not belong to yourself; you were bought with a price” Paul tells the Corinthians (1 Cor. 6:19-20). The price was the death of the Son of God. Calvary not only rescued us from the deadly results of sin; it redeemed us. And in antiquity, to “redeem” meant to purchase a person’s freedom from slavery and restore their life. Christians are also called “slaves of righteousness” (Rom. 6:18), which is another way of saying slaves of God—for slavery to him is the greatest freedom. Paul describes the Christian’s body as “a temple of the Holy Spirit within you” (1 Cor. 6:19). We often hear today that phrase apocopated into “my body is a temple,” which in turn becomes a motto for self-worship. But what Paul means is that God calls us to relationship with himself, and that relationship includes the use of our bodies. Immanuel is with us by his Spirit. We are precious to him; we matter—and not just our souls, but our bodies also. A temple is a place where people come to sacrifice, to pray to the god, to meet with the god if possible, and to view his or her image. But no image of the Spirit is shown to the world except us. No sacrifice is made except what Christ has already done. We represent the eternal one to the world, and what we do with our bodies should reflect that. It is not that we invite others to worship us; we are not a “temple” in that sense. But we are a temple in the sense that both temple and body are “holy places” that belong to God, and they are not to be desecrated. This idea is carried further in the book of Ephesians, where the church is pictured as Christ’s bride, dedicated to him and made holy by his death.

Finally, Paul calls on believers to “glorify God with your body” (1 Cor. 6:20). Normally we think of “glorify” as something we do with our mind or our mouth. It is to exalt, brag on God, praise him, and give him his due. We glorify God in reciting the creeds; or in singing hymns; or in giving thanks or witnessing to others. How does one glorify God with the body? The answer is that our very physical selves are to become hymns of praise to our maker and redeemer. It reminds us of the creed of Israel recited every day by pious Jews: “. . . You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Deut. 6:4-5). All we are, including our physical selves, is subsumed under the command to love God. It must be both mental and physical, both emotional and rational, both intangible and sensory. The daily tasks of muscles and organs all are psalms to the one who created and also redeemed them. It is not worship of the body, but worship of God by the body. And in this turning over of the physical self to God the paradox of Christianity is tested in our flesh, as the surrender of ourselves leads to finding ourselves: “whoever abandon their lives for my sake and the gospel will save them” (Mark 8:35).

Bat Boy, Break a Leg

2006-11-29T06:20:00.000-08:00

Julia Kasdorf

The student with two studs in his nose

and a dragon tattoo crawling from his collar,

who seems always ready to swoon

from bliss or despair, now flits

At my office door. I will look at his poem

drawn onto a music score and find nothing

to say about chance or HIV.

Only later I’ll think to tell him

the night before I left home, I slept

sadly in our old house until a wing

touched my cheek, tenderly as a breeze.

I woke to black fluttering at my feet,

and a mind fresh from the other side

said don’t turn on the light, don’t

Wake the man, don’t scream or speak.

Go back to sleep. The next morning

I remembered that people upstate

whack them with tennis rackets, that

the Chinese character for good luck

resembles the character for bat—

both so unsettling and erratic—

but it’s bad luck to say good luck

in China, as on stage where they say

Break a leg, so delicate bats

must be woven into silk brocade

and glazed onto porcelain plates.

Next morning, I found a big-eared mouse

with leather folded over his shoulders

hanging from claws stuck in a screen.

All day, my work made me forget, but

then I’d remember, passing the window

where he slept, shaded under the eves.

He was fine. I was fine. Then at dusk,

he was gone, suddenly. Pale boy dressed in black,

Maybe the best that can be said for any of us is that

once we were angelic enough to sleep with strangers.

He touched my cheek. I opened the screen.

He flew in his time. We did no harm.

(Shenandoah)

~~~~~

Next: After Birth, a Conversation with Myself

The World Needs Tuning

2006-11-29T06:19:00.000-08:00

William T. Allen

William Timberlake Allen was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota in 1926 and grew up there. After serving with the U.S. Army in World War II, he attended Northern State College from 1946-1948. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Music Composition from Northwestern University in 1950, and his Master’s degree from the same institution in 1951. In 1954 he received his Ph.D. in Music Composition from the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. He was a member of the music faculty of Houghton College from 1953-1991, and was “Composer in Residence” for many of those years. He has composed works for organ, piano, and choir, including the opera “Young John Wesley,” written in 1983 for Houghton College’s centennial celebration. Dr. Allen is also an amateur poet, and the author of several plays and musicals performed at Houghton College. The following essay was edited by Benjamin Walker from a talk delivered during a faith-journey chapel at Houghton College in the spring of 2004.

I come to you out of the past, from a country called Yesterday. My four grandparents were all born before the start of the Civil War. My father arrived in 1879—three years after Custer made his Last Stand. Dad, as a boy raised on the plains, was once allowed to ride his Indian pony 20 miles across prairie to visit his brother in town. Evening came, and street lamps made circle reflections of light on the main street. The pony had never seen such a thing, and—I want you to think of this charming picture—he hopped over each circle of light.

Civilization, however, was advancing: by the 1920s, many people had radios! Just to think of it! I remember sitting as a young fellow in front of a large, fancy console in 1932 hearing the presidential election news: Franklin Roosevelt was trouncing Herbert Hoover. It was a time of depression and dust storms and tumbleweeds piled high.

My home, though dust did seep in, seemed a secure place. We had a piano in our Music Room, and I took to it gleefully, realizing early on that I wanted to be a musician—a composer and piano player. While I was visiting school friends who were sons of the local Wesleyan pastor, I tried out their piano. It made their mother quite nervous, as my tunes were deemed by her inappropriate. Years later, one of those Wesleyan lads, hearing I had arrived at Houghton College where my piano playing sometimes got the same response, inquired, “Is he really saved?” My confident answer: “O blessed assurance—yes I am!”

My hometown church was what you could call “1930’s liberal.” I’ll explain it this way: our Sunday School paper featured a serial about a boy who was trying to break into radio announcing—radio, remember, was big in those days. Its nifty title was “Take It Away, Sam.” Week after week though, there didn’t seem to be any spiritual point. However, not to worry: missionaries had arrived! A Miss Beatrice Hollenbeck, a serious Christian (blessed be her memory)—along with her sister and another helper, took over our Sunday school program and urged gospel truth upon our hearts. The good old flannel graph was put to work. We saw a beautiful figure—a yellow angel—representing Satan in disguise. That cruel deceiver had fooled many, and he was ready to fool more she explained, sowing biblical truth in the soil of tender young minds. Goodly sprouts did appear, but still many a noxious worldly weed was ever ready to undo the harvest. False worldly glory, for example, tempted when, in a high school band uniform, I strode to the center of a basketball court at halftime, sat down at a piano, and offered a big-time blast of boogie-woogie. The applause of the cheering crowd was positively intoxicating.

A few years later, during World War II, the U.S. Army sent me a letter. They were taking piano players. They were taking practically everybody. I was there when Bob Hope entertained us soldiers on the island of Saipan. A young lady with his troupe played part of the Grieg Piano Concerto. I envied her, and sought keyboards wherever I went. In Tokyo, after the war, I came across a huge organ in the Mitsubishi Department Store—an instrument similar to the one in Wanamakers in Philadelphia. Somehow I was allowed to play it. I was perched at the top of a long staircase, and as I made a stab at the Hallelujah Chorus, I glanced down to see those stairs lined on both sides with curious citizens of Tokyo, dressed in both Western and traditional Japanese garb. Never mind that I wasn’t a legitimate organist. Ah, how cheap fame doth heighten the wretched ego.

After finishing up with the army, it was time, I deemed, for college and music study. In due time, I was invited to teach music at Houghton College. “If you love the Lord,” was part of the invitation. I wrote the Dean of the College that I had been brought up to believe in the Bible. A true, but rather inadequate testimony. Looking back, I am amazed at how little I truly knew of such things. A friend in retrospect pointed out to me: “You saw yourself as a Christian.” But he was too polite, or too wise to add, “An ignorant Christian, of course.” Well meaning and eager to please. I was unschooled in how to declare my faith, but they had hopes for me. I was signed on, and I’m forever grateful for the many prayers that were offered in my behalf.

What a new experience this community was.

Inch by inch, struggle, by struggle, Houghton began to change my life. The Lord, as told in Psalm 139, knew my frame before it was made, knew I would be drawn to Him, knew my life should change, and knew that someday I should stand here to declare His mercy and His glory. What a privilege it was for me to discover at this place faculty, staff, townspeople, and students who were not game-players but sincere believers! One of the greatest characteristics of the “old” faculty was the strong sense that, however academically gifted they might have been, they were first of all genuine and committed Christians who cared deeply about the spiritual life of others. Dr. Stephen Paine, President of the College, spoke in no platitudinous language as he said, with that familiar right arm gesture, and in vigorous words right out of Middle English: “Students, get glory for God!” His voice still rings in my soul. Dr. Charles Finney, Music Department head at the time, supported me in my Houghton pilgrimage. Indeed, I became a kind of Poster Boy that he used to ease administrative doubts about newly hired music faculty.

In the 1950s, dramatic attempts were confined pretty much to readings and short skits. Interested in producing something of more length, I joined with English professor Charles Davis in putting together a small musical called “Ardelia,”—a kind of quaint period piece. It didn’t hurt the show’s official acceptability that the Dean of Women and the Chairman of the Music Department were in the cast. The whole presentation took place in the old chapel on the top floor of Fancher Hall, with piano instead of organ accompaniment.

Our musical “Ardelia” broadened much later into a full production, but efforts reflecting the localany allowable action on stage. There were many others: “Everane” was a comment on Houghton weather, while “Selectra” was a zany spoof with classical overtones, starring hero “Jukus Bacchus.” scene were what was really desired at the time. What local scene, you may ask? Well, there was a campus snack shop, called at one time “The Bent Cent” and at other times “John and Charles Wesley Snack Shop.” And downtown, the “Twin Spruce Inn”offered meals and a juke box. After the twin spruces were cut down, it was renamed the “Twin Stump Inn.” Adventurous souls drove all the way to “Bob and Aggie’s Diner” in Caneadea to eat chili and watch the tube glowing at the end of the counter. For those without wheels, a coffee machine in the basement of Luckey Memorial became a social gathering place, and not surprisingly there subsequently appeared such dramatic turnouts as “The Coffee Machine” and “Coffee Machine Revisited.” These short musicals were entertainments, written for a society that in those early days was thirsting for

`“Coffee Machine Revisited” enjoyed a unique ending. All through the play we expected the return to Houghton of Bobby Blackjack, rambunctious young rebel, notorious dissident, and twisted purveyor of relativism learned at the University of Chicago. Finally, the great moment! Slowly drawing aside a curtain, stepping forward with a surly demeanor, and dressed sort of like early Marlon Brando (very early Marlon Brando) was none other than Houghton College President Stephen Paine!

But enough of these mere entertainments! Enter a serious production: Houghton’s Christmas Concert of 1961! The Houghton College Oratorio Society performed composer Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms—certainly not too far out for contemporary ears, but a bit of a shocker to listeners back then, accustomed to hearing Handel at Christmas. Conductor Charles Finney wanted us to reach out, “stretch our ears,” as he liked to say. After all, Stravinsky’s composition was over thirty years old. It was ever Dr. Finney’s goal to sing to the Lord a new song. Soon after the concert, however, the Music Faculty met with the Powers that Were, who encouraged us to perform something a little less new the next year. We followed the suggestion. But Symphony of Psalms is now seventy-four years old. Perhaps the Greatbatch School of Music is ready for a repeat performance— though maybe not at Christmas.

Meanwhile, in all of this time, how was my Christian journey? I was learning some extremely valuable lessons. The Lord takes you as you are. It’s all right if other persons are wiser, better informed, better trained, better teachers, better speakers, better theologians, better piano players, better everything than you. There’s still room for you in heaven. There was a point when I prayed to the Lord, “If I’m not saved, save me now,” though the journey is life-long, of course. Indeed, any past look at my life reveals, with increasing clarity, how God steered me away from potential disasters, and so, I praise the name of Jesus. I give thanks to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—quite often in the middle of the night. I know eternal life is mine, and that another Person paid the price for it. This is too wonderful to comprehend!

Finally, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and anything worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on these things.” Words of St. Paul to the Philippians: words for us. We are to dwell on good things, not only yesterday, but today! And not just today—always!

Exalt the LORD with the blessed jangle of heavenly praise!

Miriam of ancient days, take up your timbrel!

Trees, clap your hands exultantly!

Prophets, whirl ecstatically! Trumpeteers, blow up the trumpet in the new moon!

Worthy art Thou, O LORD, forever!

But also—we know it full well—there lives that blessed non-jangle of our lives, the non-jangle of calm faith, of quiet moments alone, of serene contemplation, of fervent, silent prayer, of the Spirit’s intercession— groanings too deep for words!

Non-jangle soothes our ears, and we are refreshed. It creates a space in which our minds can dwell on good things. My “serious” compositions, such as my piece Andante Cantabile, are meant as pleas for sensitivity and quietude in an inquiet world. It is music of meditation, of non-jangle, composed long ago by a 21-year-old dreamer, who is grown old, but is still dreaming dreams of that great and awesome day of the Lord’s coming, when, Prophet Joel tells us, those who call on the name of the Lord will be saved. Of course, we must always have Art. It is part of all of us, and we couldn’t be very happy without it. But Art cannot save. This world needs tuning, but Art will not get us all in tune. I firmly believe that only the power of Christ can do that.

After Birth - A Conversation with Myself

2006-11-29T06:16:00.000-08:00

Julia Kasdorf

The professor says, What’s the most striking thing

about giving birth besides the pain?

(I know she grades on participation.)

When I was so lonely I dove for the phone

and scraped both elbows bloody, I thought

thank God I wasn’t holding the baby. When

I finally went out, weightless, my breasts got heavy

and, dismal as night diapers, dragged me home.

When the radio said children are waging war

in Liberia again, I wept. Ribs never resume

their former shape. The womb bleeds for weeks.

I see that none of this strikes her: Grade C.

I wrote nothing and don’t care since this birth

which was as striking as death and common as dirt.

(The Journal)

Biographical Notes

2006-11-15T13:17:00.000-08:00

Kevin Hart is considered by many as one of the major living poets writing in English. He has published several significant volumes of poetry, criticism and philosophy. At present he is Notre Dame Professor of Philosophy and Literature at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Karen Knight has been widely published both overseas and within Australia. She has been the recipient of several awards and three writer’s grants from Arts Tasmania, where she lives. James Harrison is Head of Theology at the Wesley Institute in Sydney. His book, ‘Paul’s Language of Grace in the Graeco-Roman World’ ( 2003 ) won a major international award. Ivan Head is an Anglican Priest and Warden of St. Paul’s College at the University of Sydney. His poetry collection, ‘The Projectionist’, was published in 2004. Andrew Lansdown has published several books of verse, plus short stories and fantasy novels. He is currently a Baptist Pastor in Western Australia. Peter Stiles has published poetry, articles and reviews within Australia and the United States. He is the Australian representative for the Conference on Christianity and Literature.

Stigmata

2006-11-15T13:13:00.000-08:00

( from a walking track in the Blue Mountains on Good Friday )

~Peter Stiles

someone is hammering nails into timber.

across the eucalyptic haze of distant hills
descending cadences of impact slice the silence,
as each nail reaches deep into the grain.
someone is fencing a block or putting down decking.

my thoughts in nearby fern-lined paths are
pierced by a pattern of migraine throbs.
I see his hands on coarse hewn wood,
I feel his pain, my wrists in carpal tunnel agony.

~~~~~

Next: Long Weekend at Avoca

Long Weekend at Avoca

2006-11-15T13:12:00.000-08:00

~Peter Stiles

Early October, and the beach sings again
with the voices of little children.
Springtime comes in Kandinsky colours
splashed across each ultra violet day,
like parakeets blinding the ear with their screeching.
My words are stayed in this heat.
For the moment, warmth of the skin,
colour of youth, flick of water, a sandy limb,
there is nothing to shape but contentment.
Waves, memories from childhood, wash in.
A young woman, fair, with Celtic fairness,
photographs patterns traced by tides
on the rock face beyond the beach.
She steps closer and closer, while others, oblivious,
fish from the edge in their tanned silence.
Earnest, but peaceful, she reads the poems I cannot write,
poems about deep time
and the meaning of summers.

Halleluia

2006-11-15T13:10:00.000-08:00

~Ivan Head

‘Halleluia’, he shouted
and this spring-loaded
ball bearing of a word
fired itself into the sky,
bounced back and forth
from many small white clouds,
lit them up with flashing lights,
scored bonuses,
raised the number of the elect
and avoided Tilt
Awarded a free game
for delaying the apocalypse,
he said
I'll try that again!

~~~~~

Next: The Beach

Parable

2006-11-15T13:08:00.000-08:00

for Leroy Randall

~Andrew Lansdown

Plant a seed, reap a song:
such are the ways of God.

Jesus said his kingdom
is like a mustard seed

which when buried rises
to a tree, and the birds

alight in its branches.
So, from a grain, a surge

of sap and shade, a haunt
of gladness and surprise.

Oh, beyond all desire,
the tree of God abounds

with nests—and a choir!

~~~~~

Next: Kangaroo Haiku

Kangaroo Haiku

2006-11-15T13:07:00.000-08:00

~Andrew Lansdown

i
Out in the scrub
rising up then sinking down
kangaroo heads.
ii
First rain … an odour
of kangaroos in the hollow
between the blackboys.
iii
Slightly more solid
than the twilight—kangaroos
crossing the firebreak.
iv
The kangaroos—
gathering in the paddock
with the darkness.

~~~~~

Next: Sacred Kingfisher

The Beach

2006-11-15T13:06:00.002-08:00

~Ivan Head

I have decided
to take the beach
to be
the literal speech of God:
every grain of sand
considered
by the wave’s mouth,
by the lalic sea
that curls against the hard palate of reef,
the mumbles in the beard of weed;
that seeks to place
a template of precise speech
against the granite breakwall
and fails:
but in slow millennia
achieves
unutterable sighing
under moaned gulls
and dumps
the silent vocabulary of the sand
in unpunctuated dunes.
This
finely polished vocabulary
also touched
the emerald tongue of the sea
and glares at
the vain semantics of theology.

Sacred Kingfisher

2006-11-15T13:06:00.000-08:00

~Andrew Lansdown

If I draw too close
it flies away. Otherwise
it appears not to
notice me at all—the small
kingfisher that comes
to my garden at nightfall
and sets me fishing
for image and metaphor.
It is a brush-stroke
of blue, framed among apples,
famed among feathers.
Still against the shifting leaves,
motionless, it dives
deep into the pools of praise
and surfaces with
itself, conveys nothing else.
It shapes the sprawling
tree by reference to itself:
a lone focal point.
Without knowledge of self, it
enacts itself precisely.

Contributors

2006-11-15T13:05:00.000-08:00

Laurie Dashnau is Associate Professor of English at Houghton College. Her publications include an essay, "A Real Chicken Soup Story," forthcoming in The Wesleyan Advocate, teaching tips forthcoming in a reference book edited by Sheila Seifert, haiku published in Starfish, and a poem, "While Reading TETYC Over Morning Coffee," in Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Laurie Dashnau holds a PHD from Miami University of Ohio.

Sandra R. Duguid was born and raised in rural Western New York, outside Batavia. She graduated from Houghton College. She has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in English from S.U.N.Y./Buffalo, where she wrote her dissertation on the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe. She has taught literature and creative writing at colleges in the metropolitan area, and is currently Assistant Director of the Academic Support Center at Caldwell College.
Her poetry has appeared in anthologies, such as On Turtle's Back: A Biogeographic Anthology of New York State Poetry, and in magazines, such as Modern Poetry Studies, America, Anglican Theological Review, Christianity and Literature, Journal of New Jersey Poets, and West Branch. She was awarded a Fellowship in Poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and as a New Jersey poet, was invited to read her poetry in a division of the program, "Poets Among Us," at a Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. She and her husband, Henry Gerstman, have lived in New Jersey since 1983.

Mark Hijleh is Professor of Composition and Conducting at the Greatbach School of Music, Houghton College. He holds a doctoral degree in composition from the Peabody Conservatory, a master's degree in conducting and composition from the Ithaca College School of Music, and a bachelor's degree in composition from William Jewell College. His teachers included such noted artists as Karel Husa, Morris Moshe Cotel, Barney Childs, James Mobberley, and Thomas Benjamin.
Dr. Hijleh was named the winner of the 2002 National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) Vocal Composition Award for his work "O Ignis Spiritus." In 1994, he founded the Christian Fellowship of Art Music Composers, a national non-profit ministry. He studied conducting with Philip Posey, Arnold Epley, and Rodney Winther, and also worked with such noted artists as David Zinman, Erich Leinsdorf, Jorge Mester and Maurice Abravanel through conducting programs of the American Symphony Orchestra League. Mark Hijleh lives with his wife, soprano Kelley Hijleh, daughter Hannah and son Noah in Houghton, New York.

Julia Kasdorf was born in Lewistown, Pennsylvania. Her books of poetry include Eve's Striptease (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998) and Sleeping Preacher (1992), which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Award for New Writing. She is also the author of the biography Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American (2003) and The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, 1991-1999 (2001), which won the Book of the Year Award from the Modern Language Association's Conference on Christianity and Literature.
Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Poetry, as well as numerous anthologies, including the 2003 Pushcart collection. Julia Kasdorf was educated at Goshen College and New York University, and she now teaches creative writing at Pennsylvania State University.
The Poems used in this issue are republished with permission from Shenandoah, The Journal, Witness, and The Menonite.

Laurie Klein's essay "A Meeting of Waters" recently won the New Letters Dorothy Churchill Cappon Nonfiction Award. Her chapbook, Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh, won the 2004 Predator Press Competition. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including: The Southern Review, Mars Hill Review, Potomac Review, Mid-American Review, Ruminate, and others. She works as consulting editor at Rock & Sling: A Journal of Literature, Art and Faith.

Ted Murphy lives with his family in Houghton, New York, teaching art, art history, and the history of film at Houghton College where he is Professor of Art. He holds a B.A. from Mount Vernon Nazarene College and an MFA from Ohio State University.

Tom Noyes's story "The Straightened Arrow" first appeared in Ascent and is part of his collection manuscript Spooky Action at a Distance and Other Stories which was recently chosen as a finalist for AWP's Grace PaleyPrize in Short Fiction. Tom's first book, Behold Faith and Other Stories, appeared from Dufour in 2003. He currently resides with his wife and daughter in Erie, PA,where he teaches at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.

Terence Paige is Professor of New Testament at Houghton College. He holds a BA from Seattle Pacific University, an MCS and MDiv. from Regent College, and a PhD from the University of Sheffield (England).

Robert Siegel is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, including the Whalesong trilogy, which received the Golden Archer Award and the Matson Award. Paraclete published A Pentacost of Finches: New and Selected Poems in 2006. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and received awards from a number of sources, including Poetry magazine, The Friends of Literature, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
He has taught at Dartmouth, Princeton, and Goethe University in Frankfort, and for over twenty years at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he twice directed the graduate creative writing program and is now professor emeritus of English. He is married to the teacher Ann Hill Siegel and lives and writes on the coast of Maine.

James Wardwell teaches in the Honors Program at Houghton College. He holds an MDiv from Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary and a Ph.D from the University of Rhode Island.

James Zoller is Professor of Writing and Literature at Houghton College where he holds the Van Gordon Chair in Communications and Writing, which has allowed him to the time to complete Living on the Floodplain, a collection of poems to be published in 2007 by WordFarm.

Cook's Pacific Crossing

2006-11-15T13:03:00.000-08:00

Acts 17:26-27

~James Harrison

1. Rise of Morning Star, Bornubirr

To the beat of singing sticks our women dance in the moonlight

before Japara, Moon-Man, husband to all women. Girls, do not catch

Japara’s attention or look at him too closely,

or you will conceive. Collect his nautilus shells,

skeletons of dead moons,

from the dugong’s waters. Drink each month

Japara’s magic drink and you will be restored to life,

never to die in the dreaming. Girls, finish your dance,

Bornubirr, Morning Star, is coming,

his bag full of next day’s gathering for you to do.

2. Transit of Venus at Tahiti, June 3 1769

Observation of the transit of Venus by Lieutenant James Cook,

of His Majesty’s ship the Endeavour, and by Mr Charles Green,

formerly assistant at the Royal Observatory of Greenwich,

made by appointment of the Royal Society,

at King George’s Island, in the South Sea: eleven

black ink drawings of circles and crescents,

with hackles of pulsating light

above a singing horizon.

3. Admiralty Bay, New Zealand, March 31 1770

Hundreds of observations of the Sun and Moon

and one of the transit of Mercury had left Mr Charles Green

with no latitude for error: he tore up

Abel Tasman’s old parchment of one island

into two separate strips of land,

edges tattered with empty bays

and their new names scrawled

like Maori spirals across the dry skin.

4. First Contact, Anchor, Botany Bay, 1770

Sunday April 29. Wind southerly, clear weather, 2 miles in entrance, 5 fathoms.

Tree-bark huts clump around smoking fires on both points

of the shimmering bay. Our landing boats nudge

the dreaming continent and scatter the lank black-haired natives

from the empty shorelines to the dense woodlands.

Two men advance to oppose our party

with poisonous darts, inspect the glass beads and nails

we left for them, and return to collect their bundles of darts

strewn like driftwood on dappled sands. One man targets our midshipman:

three musket volleys intersect the silence of centuries,

announcing our Empire’s possession of Terra Nullius,

crimsoning with small shot the native’s shoulder. We reconnoitre

the native huts trembling with small wide-eyed children,

fresh mussels broiling on hot coals, three canoes

abandoned like empty oyster shells. Our axes begin

to numb the unyielding gum trees into submission.

5. Rock of Ages

The Endeavour nuzzles the east Australian coast,

skirts the feathered tribes of New Guinea,

and bears down on Plymouth

and the God-forsaken convicts of Governor Philip’s first fleet,

while at Uluru the night sky shakes with ragged lightning

as Japara’s people dance under warm rain,

the rock’s riven side

streaming with water,

spreading blood-red ochre

over the Great Southern Land,

till the bright Morning Star rises

to dispel the gathering darkness.

The Straightened Arrow

2006-11-15T13:02:00.000-08:00

~Tom Noyes

The Ten Commandments monument banished from Alabama’s state judicial building began a national tour on the back of a flatbed Saturday.
—Associated Press, 8/1/04

“Says you,” I say, downshifting to take the exit. “Thus sayeth Vance.”
“Not just me,” Vance says. “Thus sayeth the Apostle John. Thus sayeth the Alpha as well as the Omega.”
As we roll into Terre Haute, Indiana, Vance and I deliberate the subject of hell. In short, I’m against it, he’s for it. Since pulling out of Montgomery three weeks ago, we’ve been arguing to eat up the miles. Vance introduces a theological topic, brushes me up on the basics, describes his position, and then it’s up to me to raise questions, poke holes. Vance says if I ever get sick of driving truck, I could get advocate work with the Devil.
En route to our first stop in Decatur, Georgia, we batted around the concept of free will. Crossing Tennessee, from Gatlinburg to Clarksville, we tackled baptism, the immersion versus sprinkling debate. Last week, just outside Henderson, Kentucky, Vance introduced eternal security into the mix, and things got heated for the first time. Vance interrupted me to brandish the verse about no one being able to pluck us from our Heavenly Father’s hand, and I interrupted him right back with something I remembered from one of Pastor Jeffers’s sermons, the notion of God spewing us out of his mouth if we taste lukewarm. “Like mouthwash,” I said. “Like so much tobacco juice.” Vance raised his voice to call me dull-witted and vulgar, and in response I lowered my fist on the dashboard, accidentally swerving us into the passing lane and forcing a Nissan Sentra into the rumble strips.
Once I got us righted, Vance and I decided it best to call a truce, agree to disagree and take a break for the rest of the day. Vance took it upon himself to tune in talk radio, and we cooled off by listening to other people tangle about worldly issues like campaign finance reform, tax breaks for companies shipping American jobs overseas, and war. “Catharsis,” Vance said after a while, and I caught his drift.
The grind of the tour and the increasing fervency of our exchanges are beginning to wear on me. In the aftermath of a discussion, I can’t tell if my faith is blooming or withering. Vance tells me not to become disheartened, that untested faith is no faith at all. He may be right, but too often his words, even when meant to encourage, strike me as holier-than-thou, and I admit to having the urge sometimes to hit him hard enough to kill him and then tell God he died. That my wife, Misty, and I are long distance and going through a rough patch right now doesn’t help lighten my mood.
Terre Haute is the midway point of the 2004 Ten Commandments Tour. The order to remove the monument from the courthouse in Montgomery wasn’t even a week old when a group of local clergy and politicians began putting together the itinerary. We’re not drawing the crowds originally hoped for, but the people who do turn out are enthusiastic, and despite my being no kind of a salesman, the merchandise is moving, especially the t-shirts, which have a snazzy depiction of the monument framed by lightening bolts on the back, and the tour motto—Etched in Stone: From Moses to Montgomery—emblazoned on the front. We also have “Basking in the Son” sun-visors, “Living Water” water bottles, “I Appeal to the Supremest Court” bumper stickers, and free brochures which offer a scripturally-based critique of the court decision and warn of the dark days ahead if America continues as is.
Vance and I luck out by catching a green light off the exit, and it’s mid-day on the dot as we merge onto Third Street. Bob Evans’s parking lot is jammed, as is Denny’s, as is IHOP’s, as is Cracker Barrel’s, so we decide to get set up at the venue before eating. I haven’t lately had much of an appetite anyway.
“High ground,” Vance says. He smiles and opens his notebook. “Terre Haute translated. We’re taking the high ground.” Vance is a writer for 21st Century Christian, a monthly magazine for and about “Godly men and women living in the Last Days.” He’s riding along with me as part of a story assignment. Provided he’s not preempted by the Rapture, Vance sees a cover feature in his near future. I was worried for a while about how I’d come off in the story, but not anymore. At a rest stop a few days ago, my curiosity got the best of me, and I thumbed through Vance’s notebook while he was powdering his nose. My name isn’t mentioned once. Not a jot nor a tittle.
“Land of Larry Bird,” I say, thinking I’m talking to myself. To this point in the tour, Vance hasn’t struck me as much of a sports fan, talking over the baseball scores on the radio the way he does.
“Right, Bird went to college in Terre Haute,” Vance says without looking up, “but he hails originally from a town south of here. French Lick.”
“That’s borderline disgusting,” I say.
Vance nods as he closes his notebook, pockets his pen. “Downright lascivious.”
~
I’m not entirely convinced this job’s for me, yet here I am doing it. I had an inkling of this doubt from the start, but it didn’t stop me six weeks ago from answering Pastor Jeffers’s altar call. That Misty was sitting next to me in the pew praying I’d open my heart to the challenge was no doubt a factor—she’d whispered her petition aloud—but it wasn’t only about pleasing Misty. I’d been going stir crazy in Montgomery since my layoff—I’d reacquainted myself with some old companions and habits I’d been better off without—and I thought maybe this job, minimum wage and all, was something that could help me. Keep me on the straight and narrow.
There’s not to be any peeking during altar calls, but in reality, there’s all sorts of peeking—I’m a peeker myself—so when I rose from the pew to make my way to Reverend Jeffers, there were a lot of amens. Seems a large portion of the congregation had been praying along with Misty, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how cared for this made me feel. I relish being on the minds of others, and I enjoy pleasing people, especially women and the elderly.
Later in his office, Pastor Jeffers mopped the back of his neck with his handkerchief and motioned for me to sit across the desk from him. The last time I’d been in Pastor Jeffers’ office was three years before when Misty and I had gone through his pre-marital counseling program, a requirement if you want him to preside over your union. I don’t remember much of what was said in those sessions, but I do recall that his eyes were on Misty most of the time, and I couldn’t help but feel he was worried for her right up through D-Day.
On this afternoon, though, when it was just the two of us, Pastor Jeffers was all smiles. “It’s a wonderful blessing to receive God’s calling, Dusty,” he said. “Lord doesn’t make mistakes. He’s prepared you for this.”
“I’ve some time on my hands,” I said.
“The driver we’d originally lined up is full of gall stones. Just got word yesterday. This has put us in a bind as the tour’s slated to kick off tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” I said as Pastor Jeffers opened a drawer and took out a box of cinnamon Tic-Tacs. He shook a bunch into his mouth and commenced chewing like they were peanuts. “Did you mention that from the pulpit?” I said. “I haven’t yet sat down with my wife about this. I have a doctor’s appointment coming up. Misty’s car is past due for an oil change. Any chance I might get a week or two to tie up loose ends?”
Pastor Jeffers’ forehead wrinkled as I spoke. When I finished he tilted his head back and poured a second mouthful of Tic-Tacs. He studied me as he chewed, filling the gap in conversation by shaking the now half-empty box like a baby rattle. Finally, suddenly, he poked the air with his finger as if to make room for his words. “A man asked Jesus if, before following Him, he might return home once more to say goodbye to his family. You know what Jesus said, Dusty? ‘No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.’”
“That’s rough,” I said. “If it weren’t Christ, I’d consider it borderline unreasonable.”
“You’re better off than that guy, though, Dusty,” Pastor Jeffers said. “The Lord doesn’t need you until 5:30 tomorrow morning.”
“I’ve always been lucky just like that,” I said.
Pastor Jeffers shook his head. “No room for luck, Dusty. You’re a key component in God’s plan for national revival. Golden calves are being worshipped all over this country, and someone’s got to lay down the good and perfect law. You’re Moses with a flatbed, delivering to America the one true God’s instructions and expectations. I’m half glad the dark powers ordered the monument removed. Why? Publicity. Airtime. God uses even the wicked to further his purposes. Poor saps don’t even realize.” Pastor Jeffers dropped the box of Tic-Tacs in his shirt pocket and leaned forward, rested his elbows on the desk. “On a more personal note, Dusty, I’m glad for your sake. Glad my prayers for you have been answered. There are stragglers in every flock, but no not one that the Lord can’t reach, no not one that He can’t bring back to His fold.”
Pastor Jeffers opened his hand then as if he were the Lord reaching for me, and he kept it open, like he was waiting for a response. I thought about shaking it, but it wasn’t extended out to me sideways; rather, it was straight up and down, hovering over the desk, like the man wanted me to play Mercy, that game where you and your opponent bend each other’s fingers until one of you surrenders. I couldn’t imagine this was what he intended, though, and a high-five seemed just as inappropriate, so I went with instinct and mirrored him, raised my flat hand over my shoulder as if my blinker were out and my intention was a right turn.
Pastor Jeffers looked confused before dropping his hand to scratch his eyebrow. My guess is it didn’t even itch. “By the way, Dusty, your license is up to date, right?”
“Had it renewed just before my layoff,” I said.
Pastor Jeffers smiled and raised both fists to his ears as if he’d just beaten somebody at something. “All things work together for good,” he said. “Ain’t no denying.”
~
The venue in Terre Haute is a picnic shelter in the city’s riverfront park. The Commandments are a dual attraction this weekend along with the 9th Annual World Hovercraft Racing Championships. Vance and I saw a billboard for the event just off the exit. Neither of us knows exactly what a hovercraft is, but I like gasoline engines as much as the next guy and am hoping to catch a race or two.
As we turn into the park, we see a few of the machines on trailers. They have giant fans on the back like those alligator hunting boats in the Everglades, but they’re sleek and shiny, and the driver’s seat is sunk into the body like an Indy car or an Olympic bobsled. All the guys scrambling around the machines look like their business is serious. Most are wearing coveralls, wrap-around sunglasses, and baseball caps. As Vance, the Commandments and I rumble past, not one of them looks up.
At Picnic Shelter #11, there’s nothing but a posterboard and magic marker sign that reads “Ten Commandments.” Some towns have crews meet us to unload the monument onto a platform or stage, but in towns like Terre Haute, crews weren’t assembled for whatever reason, so the monument stays on the truck. I prefer these venues because there’s less work. Besides setting up the merchandise table—I can do this in under fifteen minutes—all I have to do is take the tarp off the monument and lower the ramp so people can climb up to get their close looks. I can easily do all this in the morning just prior to show time, so Vance and I have the rest of this afternoon and tonight for ourselves.
The two of us are circling each other in the grass, stretching our legs and discussing whether to drive or hoof it back toward the restaurants and motels when a hovercraft comes into view, skimming along the middle of the Wabash River like a big dragonfly. I take my eyes off it for a second to gauge Vance’s response, and in the very same moment I look back at the water, the machine flips onto its side and spins to a stop. We can’t see the driver’s seat from where we stand, so we’re worried and start toward the bank. We’re only about halfway there, though, when we spot him coming around the side of the wreck, dog-paddling crosswise against the current. When he’s close enough to shore that he can walk, he uses his hands to wrestle off his helmet and flings it wildly toward shore, but it falls well short and sinks slowly in the muddy water.
A couple other men coming from downriver reach the bank ahead of Vance and me. One’s in mechanic’s duds, and the other’s in an Oxford and khakis, like a bank teller. When the driver gets close enough to shore, the mechanic extends a hand. The bank teller, though, picks up a big stick and takes an uppercut swing at the driver’s head. The blow doesn’t land, but the driver’s mad just the same, and as soon as his feet are on dry land, he picks up a rock. The two are squared off now, stick against rock, telling each other their intentions, but I can tell by their gabbing that neither of them is going to go through with anything, so it’s not difficult for the mechanic, along with Vance and me when we arrive, to break it up. The mechanic grabs the bank teller by the shoulders, steering him away from the river and toward the parking area, so the soggy driver is left to Vance and me. He smells like rot, and his face is as red as a cinnamon Tic-Tac. He’s blinking fast as if to keep tears from coming, and my guess is that the purpose of the grunting noise he’s making on the exhale is to keep a sadder, more painful noise from rising.
“Hit me with a stick?” he says. “Don’t think so.”
“People lose their tempers, right?” Vance says. He has a handful of the guy’s driving suit in one hand, and with the other he’s clapping the guy on the back like they’re chums. “Your friend’s probably already feeling bad.”
“If that guy’s your friend, pickings must be slim where you’re from,” I say.
Vance gives me a look that makes me want to hit him with a stick, and the driver turns to face me. “You from a place where friends don’t quarrel?” he says.
“We’re all too busy dating each other’s wives and beating each other’s kids,” I say. I’ve spent some time on both sides of the bar, have seen my share of brawls. The best way to cool a hot head is jokes. Humor reminds people that the world goes on.
When what I said sinks in, the guy smirks, and his body loosens. He looks at his muddy hands and stoops to wipe them on the grass. “Skinner’s got every right to be mad,” the driver says. “I’m not happy, either. What I take offense at is the stick.”
“What happened?” I say, nodding to the river and his stranded machine.
“Tree limb,” he says. “It’s a mess out there. Absolutely unacceptable. The site’s supposed to be clear. Imagine a NASCAR driver hitting a pothole on a practice lap. Heads would roll.”
“Why’d your friend take it so hard?” Vance says.
“Craft’s his,” the driver says. “Owner and sponsor.” He looks once more at the hovercraft and then turns his back to the river. “This is the third mishap this season. Not one of them my fault, though. Not all my fault. Run of bad luck.”
“He’ll cool down, and the two of you will talk it out,” Vance says.
“In the meantime, have lunch with us,” I say. “Even the unlucky have to eat.”
The driver shrugs. “Might as well. Besides, if I’m not fired, I quit.”
~
My last night in Montgomery with Misty was unforgettable. God and I had joined forces to answer her prayer, and she was appreciative and satisfied. ’Tis better to give than to receive. That one didn’t make the Top Ten, but it should’ve.
What was between Misty and me that night makes what’s been going on since I left all the more puzzling. It’s to the point now where she’s got Caller ID, and if it’s long distance, she doesn’t pick up. I can’t even leave a message as she’s disconnected our answering machine. I learned all this from Pastor Jeffers, who I contacted, thinking he owed me in a way. When I asked him to talk to Misty for me, though, he turned it around and started counseling me, saying I needed to give Misty time and space. He said she’d been going through a time of transition since I left, discovering and exploring aspects of herself she’d never known. He told me that he was helping her work through it, that I needed to be patient in allowing them to discern God’s perfect plan for her.
“I hope God didn’t get me out of town so that He could get between my wife and me.” The moment I said this was the same moment that the suspicion first occurred to me, so I was surprised by my own words.
“You’re not thinking about this rightmindedly, Dusty,” Pastor Jeffers said. “You’re holding your own desires most dear.”
“I’m human,” I said. “You cut me, I bleed.”
I tell this tale at lunch to Vance and Raymond, the hovercraft driver. From the river we’d taken a cab to an Irish bar that the driver recommended. The three of us ordered Reubens, and Raymond and I are drinking beer. They have a local brew on tap called Champagne Velvet, and its name alone makes Raymond and me want to keep toasting each other. I can tell that Vance is surprised by the beer—I’ve stuck to Diet Coke and iced tea to this point in the tour—and I sense he’s taken aback, maybe even hurt, that now, in the presence of a stranger, is the first he’s hearing of my troubles with Misty.
“We all bleed,” Raymond says, nodding. “If Skinner would’ve landed that stick, I would’ve bled like a stuck pig.”
Vance is done eating, sitting back in his seat, wringing a napkin. Raymond and I are only about half done with our sandwiches because we’ve been talking and working our way through a couple three pitchers. I can tell the two of us see the world similarly, and we’re mutually glad to have stumbled onto each other. If Vance is feeling like a third wheel, maybe he should write about that in his precious notebook.
“What you fellows told me in the cab about the Ten Commandments? How that judge wasn’t allowed to have them in his courthouse? That’s not right,” Raymond says. “Doesn’t strike me as fair and balanced. It goes against the Declaration of Independence, the part about the government minding its own business.”
“I suppose the Supreme Court thought the courthouse was their business,” I say.
“Well, that’s true. That complicates the situation, them thinking it was their business. If they could make the case that they were in fact minding their own business, things could swing in their favor,” Raymond says. When he drinks his beer, he curls his hand to hold the glass from behind, like a sneaky hug.
Vance squeezes his napkin into a ball and drops it on the table. “They minded their own business, but they did so unjustly. They minded their own business in such a way as to infringe upon the freedoms of speech and religion. Yours and mine.”
“Of course, their argument is they’re protecting those freedoms,” I say, falling into rhythm. “Not everyone who walks into that courthouse is Christian or Jew.”
“Let’s not bring race into this now,” Raymond says in a whisper that’s somehow louder than his normal voice. He jerks his head to the left so we’ll take note of the Asian customer at the bar. The guy’s in a suit, eating a Cobb salad, talking English on his cell.
“It comes down to this,” Vance says. “You can’t serve both God and mammon.”
“Mammons have hair and suckle their babies,” Raymond says. “Except for the platypus, who lays eggs and has a beak.”
“To platypussies,” I say, raising my glass.
“It’s platypuses,” Vance says. “Or maybe platypi.”
“To every single one of the freaky-looking suckers,” Raymond says. Our glasses clink.
“I guess it’s about that time,” Vance says as he stands. “I’m going back to the truck to get my bag before checking into a motel. I think you should come with me, Dusty.” He looks from me to the pitcher of beer and then back at me, slowly, dramatically, like we’re in a movie, like this is some staged moment of truth.
“You go,” I say. “I’m visiting with my new friend.”
“Do not be given over to strong drink,” Vance says. He says it like I made him say it.
“Take a little for your stomach,” I say, paraphrasing the verse my father used to quote to my mother. “If it still hurts, take a little more.”
“Ouch,” Raymond says as he reaches for the pitcher. He laughs as he pours but doesn’t spill a drop.
Vance opens his wallet, drops too much money on the table and walks out.
“My world just brightened,” Raymond says. “Brother was bringing me down.”
“I’m disappointing to him,” I say to Raymond.
“Everybody’s disappointing to somebody,” Raymond says. “And some are disappointing to everybody.”
~
Raymond and I spend the rest of the afternoon at the bar. When the after-work crowd starts drifting in, things get friendly, and by the end of happy hour, I’m fielding questions about the Commandments, and Raymond’s holding forth on the ins and outs of hovercraft racing.
“They’re not the original Commandments, are they?” The woman’s dressed in her Sunday-best, heavily perfumed, wearing a corsage. She could be AWOL from a wedding.
“They’re not Moses’ stone tablets, but the words are the same,” I say. “If not the actual words, the ideas, anyway. Summarized, for sure. In English, of course.”
My answer seems to disappoint her, and she turns to Raymond. “Why not race cars?” she asks, poking him in the chest. “Why not boats?”
“Why not magic carpets?” I say to her loudly, but I’m not quite sure what I’m getting at.
“The firmament,” says a pink-headed man in a corduroy sport coat. “That’s where truth resides. That hazy border between heaven and earth. You race in the firmament.”
“Professor at the university,” the fancy woman says to Raymond. “Mr. Philosophical Poet after a few. Mr. Quirky Genius.”
“I like it,” Raymond says. “Me on my cushion of air, racing for truth in the affirmative.”
“Firmament,” the professor says.
Raymond turns to me. “Not just me, Dusty. You and Misty are in the affirmative, too. Not quite together, not quite apart. You’re in between, looking for the truth about your love.”
Hearing this, I’m filled simultaneously with fear and hope, and I begin to weep for the first time as a full-grown man. I see now that Misty and I are on the verge of catching a submerged tree limb and crashing, so to speak, but maybe with some in-the-nick-of-time help, we could still find a way to rise above it, so to speak, and continue gently, merrily down the stream of our love, so to speak.
“There there,” the fancy woman says. She’s looking at me but squeezing Raymond’s arm, like he’s the one in need of comfort. “The heart wants what it wants.”
“You’ll get through to her, Dusty,” Raymond says. “You’ll find a way.”
And then it hits me. It doesn’t come from within like a memory or an idea, but from without, like I imagine revelation must. I force the words through my tears. “Misty has e-mail at work.”
“You can get on-line at the university library,” the professor says. “Control-Alt-Delete will bring up the start screen, then you log in as ‘guest.’”
“Say what?” I say.
“Whoever’s behind the counter can assist you,” the professor says. “Despite their pained expressions, that’s what they’re there for.”
“When it comes to computers, I tend toward distrust and suspicion, but these are drastic times,” I say to Raymond.
“Do you have an account?” he asks.
“Not that I’m aware of,” I say.
“You’ll use my Hotmail,” he says. “Do you know her address?”
“Haven’t the foggiest,” I say. “My own wife.”
“There are ways,” Raymond says, pushing himself back from the table. “Let’s go. First things first, though. If we’re going to a college, we need gum or mints. We’re going to be around impressionable young Americans.”
“Got you covered,” the fancy woman says to Raymond. She digs through her purse, comes up with an unopened pack of Wint-O-Green Lifesavers, and then holds them beside her mouth as she talks, like a commercial. “If you let me know where you’re staying, I could swing by later tonight to pick up what you don’t eat,” she says.
“She’s a saint who provides for strangers in need,” Raymond says as he accepts with both hands the LifeSavers and pen the woman gives him.
“Write on this,” the woman says, sliding a napkin toward him over the table. “Write neatly.”
~
Raymond and I get directions from the professor and step into the evening’s soft sunshine. After a block or two we’re talking at normal volume again, and the sweat we’re working up is leveling us off. Raymond’s letting me bounce ideas off him of what I might write to Misty, and so far he likes them all.
“I’ve seen things on this tour that I could share with her,” I tell him. “A vanful of cripples traveled all the way from North Carolina to see the monument when we were in Georgia. They lined up their wheelchairs in single-file to touch it one at a time. The last of them, an old woman wearing cataract sunglasses, told me a canker sore on her bottom gum went numb the moment her fingers touched the Commandments, and she thanked me as if I’d had something to do with it. In Tennessee a rabbi blessed me when I wasn’t looking and then told me about King David’s bodyguard, a Gentile who hosted the Ark of the Covenant for a few weeks and then enjoyed blessings the rest of his life. ‘Yahweh’s a good tipper,’ the rabbi said. A week later at a county fair in Kentucky, a local youth pastor equipped with guitar set up in front of the monument and performed a song he’d written putting the Commandments to music. The chorus was catchy. ‘Living as a straightened arrow on the straight and narrow.’ The applause was thunderous. Afterwards, the rumor around the fairgrounds was that a talent scout from Nashville tracked the boy down at the 4-H livestock pens and signed him then and there.”
“Tell her everything,” Raymond says. “Bring out all the tricks.”
“Whatever her doubts and concerns may be, they are about the Dusty who left, not the Dusty who longs to return,” I say. “I’m just now realizing this very thing.”
“She’ll eat it up,” Raymond says.
“I don’t type,” I say. “I hunt and peck.”
“I’m lightning on a keyboard,” Raymond says. “My fingers are your fingers.”
When we hit 7th Street where we’re to take a right, we have to stop to wait for the light to change, and I notice an historical marker just a few feet from where we’re standing. Turns out the intersection was at one time considered the Crossroads of America. Routes 40 and 63 were big in their day. Sea to shining sea, the Great Lakes to Mexico, and for the second time in an hour, I’m on the verge of tears. It hits me suddenly how big America is, how long and lonely its stretches of blacktop are, and I think of my life on the road, all the years I’ve spent driving rig, all the people I’ve passed and all who’ve passed me, and my chest feels full like it did back at the bar, and I have to bring my fist to my mouth and cough into it to keep myself together.
“We’re on our way to making things better,” Raymond says in my ear. He puts his arm around my shoulder and squeezes.
The Lifesavers have worked. His breath is pleasant and fresh, and I can only assume mine smells similarly. This instills some hope in me, and when the light changes, we cross.
~
Once inside the library, Raymond takes control. In no time he has us up and running on a computer, he’s found Misty’s address, and his hands are poised over the keyboard, waiting for me to begin. Things are moving fast, and I feel pressure. “I know approximately what needs to be said, but I don’t what words to use,” I say. “I wonder if sending the wrong message might be worse than sending no message at all.”
The section of the library we’re in is wall-to-wall computers, but as for people, the room’s nearly empty. Besides Raymond and me, there’s only the guy behind the main desk. He doesn’t look like a librarian, not what I imagine a librarian to look like. He’s spent some time in the weight room—he’s wearing a tight black t-shirt—his head’s shaved, and he’s got a hoop earring in each ear. Mr. Clean is who I’m thinking.
I’m still tongue-tied when a girl walks in the room and sits at a computer down the row from Raymond and me. Upon seeing her, Mr. Clean springs into action. He’s on her before her fingers hit the keyboard.
“No beverages at the computers,” he says.
“Has a top on it,” the girl says, holding up the cup. She’s wearing a handkerchief on her head, the kind stagecoach robbers hide behind, and dangly bracelets that jingle when she moves her hands.
“Rules are rules are rules,” Mr. Clean says.
The girl gets up, marches over to a wastebasket and drops in her full cup. “Happy?” she asks.
“Not especially, no,” Mr. Clean says on the way back to his desk.
When the girl sits down again, she sees Raymond and me looking at her. “Whose side are you on?” she says. “As impartial observers, tell me who’s in the right.”
Raymond turns in his seat, clears his throat. “Tough call,” he says. “Brother’s just doing his job. You’re just thirsty.”
“Maybe you’re both wrong,” I say. “Maybe you shouldn’t be so quick to think rules don’t apply to you. Maybe he needs to learn not to sweat the small stuff.”
“Do you guys go to school here? Are you like nontraditional students?” The girl’s moved a few chairs closer now, and I can see she has a small jewel in her left nostril. It’s hard not to stare at it.
“We’re just passing through,” Raymond says. “Strangers on a mission.”
“What’s your mission?” the girl says.
“Actually,” Raymond says, and then pauses to look at me. I shrug. “It might be something you could help us with,” he says.
“You being a woman,” I say. “Same as my wife.”
“This is Dusty,” Raymond says. “He and his better half have come to a crisis point. Long story short, here we sit in front of a blank screen, looking to compose a few lines that might help initiate the healing process.”
The girl gets out of her chair to stand behind Dusty and me. She leans forward as she eyes the screen, one hand on the back of Dusty’s chair, one hand on the back of mine. “Don’t start with ‘Dear,’” she says. “Everyone starts with ‘Dear.’”
When she was sitting farther away, I could’ve sworn the stud in her nose was red, but now, from close range, I see it’s more of a purple.
“If not ‘Dear,’ then what?” I say.
“Dearest?” Raymond says.
“Skip the formality of the greeting altogether,” the girl says. “This is your wife, right? Cut through the bull. Up front and honest. Launch into it. Project urgency. Something like, ‘Here’s what I need to tell you,’ or ‘Listen up. We need to work this out.’”
“What’s your major?” Raymond says.
“Undeclared,” the girl says. “It’s hard for me to choose because I’m good at everything. That’s not me being cocky. It’s just how it is.”
“You’ve been a big help,” I say, “and I like the earring in your nose.”
The girl smiles bashfully as she runs her finger over her nostril. “My birthstone,” she says. “February’s amethyst.”
“No kidding,” I say. “My wife, too. She’s the 29th. Leap year baby.”
The girl’s still looking at me as she sticks one finger up her nose and lifts the amethyst off her nostril with her other hand. She puts the back on the stud and holds it out to me. “New plan,” the girl says. “Type this sentence: ‘I have something I can’t wait to give you.’ Then sign and send.”
“Doesn’t that sound vaguely threatening?” Raymond says.
“Does she have any reason to fear you?” the girl asks me. The hole in her nose looks like a caved-in freckle.
“Not even one,” I say.
“Trust me on this,” she says as she takes my hand, opens my palm, and presses the amethyst into it. “Have faith.”
“I know I need that,” I say.
“I feel really good,” the girl says. “Like I know why I got out of bed today.”
When Raymond’s finished typing, he tells me to click the mouse on the Send button. When I do, the girl claps, and Raymond lets out a little whoop. This makes Mr. Clean clear his throat like he wants our attention, but when we look over, all we see is the back of his narrow, waxy head. It’s unnaturally smooth and still, like a mannequin’s.
~
On my walk back to the truck to grab my duffel, I’m alone for the first time all day. Raymond called a cab from the library to get him back to his motel room. He figured Skinner would be waiting for him to talk things over, and he knew he’d have to face that music eventually, so he figured he’d get it over with tonight so he could hit tomorrow unburdened. He invited me along, but it was a situation in which I didn’t see a useful role for myself, and I felt like walking rather than riding, so we said we’d see each other tomorrow at the river. We covered all this in the library lobby where the girl had told us there was a courtesy phone. Afterwards, when we returned to the computers to say our goodbyes and thank-yous, the girl was gone. I made Mr. Clean shake his head by asking if he’d seen which way she went.
I step down off one curb, up onto another, and run my thumb over the amethyst in my shirt pocket. I feel a little guilty. I have no idea how much the thing’s worth and probably shouldn’t have accepted it. I wonder if this is why the girl gave Raymond and me the slip; maybe she thought I’d try to give it back to her, and it was something she didn’t want to have to take back. Who knows how she’d come by it, who’d given it to her? It’s possible I did her a favor by taking it off her hands, maybe even a bigger favor than the one she did me.
At the long red light at Wabash Street and Route 41, there’s nothing to do but stand still and watch cars go by—it’s about fifty-fifty how many have their headlights on, how many don’t—and I wonder about the now-empty hole in the girl’s nose, how long it would take to close up if left empty, if it would ever close up the whole way.
By the time I reach the river, I have a stitch in my side. When you spend most days sitting behind the wheel, your body gets used to being moved rather than moving itself. The pain’s right above my belt. What’s there? What part of my guts? Maybe it’s not a walking stitch at all but gall stones, like that guy who originally was supposed to drive the Commandments. Stones passed from him to me, like a plague. I wonder how he and Vance would’ve gotten along. I take out of my pocket the key that would’ve been his key, unlock and open the door that would’ve been his door, and pull myself up into the seat that would’ve been his seat.
I let my head fall back and close my eyes for a few minutes. I’m not sleepy, but it feels good to see nothing for a while. I fold my hands over my stomach and try to relax my muscles one at a time. Misty does this at night. She used to have to take sleeping pills, but she’s gotten so good at relaxing that she doesn’t need them anymore. She starts at the tips of her toes and moves all the way up to her scalp. Sometimes I watch her, try to guess which part of her body’s she’s on. I never fall asleep first.
When I re-open my eyes, it’s almost the whole way dark outside, but if I concentrate I can still see the river, like a silhouette, beyond the picnic shelter, and I wonder if Raymond’s hovercraft is still out there.
It’s then I notice Vance’s note. A page ripped from his notebook, folded long ways like a tent, and half-hidden between the passenger seat and the console. Beside it on the seat is the key I’d given him at the start of the tour. I switch on the overhead light and read.
Vance’s message to me is that he’s decided to rent a car, drive back home to Grand Rapids. He thinks he has the material he needs to write his story. He thanks me for letting him tag along and promises to get me a copy of the article when it comes out. He apologizes twice, once in case he overstayed his welcome, and again if his leaving seems sudden. He closes by saying he’s glad I’m his friend, that he’s praying for me. Under his signature, there’s a verse reference. First John 5:3.
I reach behind my seat, grab my duffel and dig around to find the pocket New Testament Pastor Jeffers gave me back when Misty and I first started going to him for pre-marital counseling. I told him I was quite satisfied using the pew Bible on Sundays, but he insisted, saying, “This one’s for Monday through Saturday, then.” As he handed it to me, I remember now, he winked at Misty, like she was the one he was doing the favor for.
At first I mess up by turning to the Gospel of John 5:3 rather than First John 5:3, and I can’t figure out for the life of me what Vance is getting at. “In these lay a great multitude of sick people, blind, lame, paralyzed, waiting for the moving of the water.” Who’s sick? I’m sick? Raymond’s sick? People coming to the river tomorrow to see the hovercraft races and Commandments are sick? When I catch my mistake and read the verse Vance intended for me to read, though, things come clearer. “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome.”
It’s not that I think that God, through this verse, is talking directly to me, instructing me to do or not do anything specific. Rather it’s that I feel freed somehow, like I’ve been given permission to do whatever it is I think I need to do. “His commandments aren’t burdensome.” Some lessons feel new, but most feel like reminders, like life is spent learning the same things over and over.
I reach the flashlight under the dash, swing my legs out of the truck, head back to the trailer, and climb up with the Commandments. I loosen the straps on the monument, hop back down and pull off the tarp.
I spotlight them one at a time. They’re hard to argue with, the shalt nots and shalts alike. On the one hand, don’t swear, kill, cheat, steal, lie, or get jealous; on the other hand, do respect God and your folks. They’re no-brainers, really. Obvious. They almost go without saying.
The only one I’m having trouble with, the one my flashlight keeps returning to, is the second. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” It strikes me that reading this rule inscribed on a touring marble monument is akin to reading the bumper sticker Vance and I saw in line at a toll booth a few weeks back: “Bumper stickers suck.” Akin to people who call themselves pro-life blowing up doctors’ offices. Akin to tobacco companies beseeching people not to smoke.
As I climb back into the cab, Pastor Jeffers’ song and dance about me being chosen echoes in my head. I don’t know if I believed at the time what he was saying—I don’t know if he believed it himself—but it turns out he was right. I turn the key to let the engine warm up. I see fuel’s getting low, but I’m not going far.
I put the rig in gear and steer it slowly around the circumference of the park, ending up at the entrance where Vance and I first came in. Seems like a lifetime ago, and I guess, in a way, it was.
I brake at the top of the straightaway that leads to the boat launch, and my headlights fall on the short boardwalks on either side of the slip. I can use them as guides to aim down the middle, a straightened arrow on the straight and narrow, and I feel like I now know why I got out of bed today. I rev the engine in neutral until it whines, and then I roll down my window and throw my duffel, wallet, belt and shoes onto the grass.
I pick up good speed down the hill, more than I thought I would. When the truck hits the water, I’m thrown forward so the side of my head caroms off the steering wheel, and I’m bleeding and fuzzy-headed as I squeeze out the window into the pitch black river. The water’s surprisingly cold—my heart and brain are drumming hard enough that I can feel my eyeballs pulse—but it’s only a short wade back to the dock, so I’m not in the river for long.
Once out of the water, I try to take care of my head wound. At first I keep pressure on the gash with my bare hand, but the blood’s trickling through my fingers and seeping into my eye, so I take off my shirt, roll it up, pull the sleeves tightly around my head and knot them in the back, like I’m Rambo or a Samurai, and then I just sit still on the dock for a while to get my bearings. To try to stop the world from spinning, I focus on the headlights of the truck, glowing under the water and rippling in the current like they’re reflections of headlights, like the actual truck with its actual headlights is hovering over the water, burning diesel in the dark, idling in the firmament.
It’s a good while before the lights go out, and although my head’s not feeling much better when they do, I’m satisfied as I pull myself up and turn away from the river. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but the job got done. The trailer didn’t get as deep as I would’ve liked, but it looks like it tipped onto its side, so the monument’s completely submerged. I imagine it probably snapped the straps and slid off into the muck.
I’m not the first caretaker of the tablets to decide enough’s enough. It was Moses himself who ruined the originals. He was so frustrated by the sins of his people that he snapped, dashed the Commandments to smithereens on the rocks of Sinai. He had to hike all the way back up the mountain to God, confess what happened, ask sheepishly if the Almighty had an extra copy. I imagine it was a long hike, maybe the longest ever hiked, and I imagine as he made the climb, Moses’s empty hands felt heavier to him than the slabs of rock he’d hauled on the way down.
I have ahead of me a long walk, too, and I’m still dizzy as I start back up the road, and I can’t tell if my head’s slowly clearing or getting cloudier, but my empty hands feel light. After locating my duffel, shoes, belt and wallet, I’m enough on the ball to duck behind a tree and get myself into dry clothes. When I untie the shirt from my head, I realize that I’m still bleeding pretty good, so I make another bandage by ripping a pair of sweat pants in half.
Patched up and dry, I sling the duffel over my shoulder and am about to leave the wet, bloody shirt in the grass when I remember the amethyst. I reach my hand into the empty pocket and then halfheartedly feel around in the grass, but I know what’s true, and on the hike back to Route 41, it’s hard not to mourn even though I know now’s not the time to dwell on what’s been lost. Keys included. I should’ve thought to yank them out of the ignition before abandoning the truck. At any rate, going back isn’t an option at this point. At what point is it ever an option? Vance will have to face this truth when he realizes that he left before having the ending for his story. No one’s fault but his own. Even if it was the Holy Spirit bidding him go, his journalistic instincts should’ve told him to stay. When he catches wind of the monument’s relocation, I wonder how he’ll spin it, if I’ll end up making it into his article after all.
As I cross a set of railroad tracks, I’m surprised and proud to find myself saying a sudden, quick prayer for Vance, that he’ll seek the guidance he needs in writing the story. When I’m at it, I offer one up for Raymond, too. I first express my thanks for him, and then ask that no matter how things end up with his career, he might find peace and happiness. If the fancy woman from the bar shows up at his door tonight, my desire for the both of them is that they’ll be able to find comfort and hope in one another, even if only of the non-eternal variety.
Less than a block away from Route 41, I stop to re-adjust my head-dressing. I feel a bit better when I loosen it, but after a few more steps I have blood running into my eye again, so I have to stop once more to re-tighten it. It’s a hindrance but nothing I can’t fight through. All I’m asking of myself is to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
The rental car places are closed until morning, of course. Besides, I’m in no shape to face someone behind a counter, in no shape to drive, and it’s probably necessary I travel anonymously for a while, keep my ID in my wallet and get out of Dodge while it’s still dark. When I hit the main road, I’ll face the southbound traffic, show them my thumb. I’m a bit worse for wear, but if I avoid trouble, if the right drivers are sent my way, those willing and able to look beyond appearances, I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to fully recuperate and reach Montgomery before Misty heads to work in the morning. Without my key, the front door’s not an option, but the locks are busted on two of our four living room windows, so my entrance won’t be a problem. If it’s one of Misty’s off Saturdays, a sleeping-in morning, I might even be there bedside to say good morning when she wakes up. At any rate, our reunion’s a matter of when, not if.
I know it’s not something the two of us should get into right away, but eventually I’m going to have to find an agreeable way to suggest that we take a break from church. If she balks—she might see it that she and I need church more than we ever have before, or she might tell me that I can attend Bedside Baptist if I want, but she’s going to stay faithful—I’ll remind her that God said where two or three are gathered in His name, there He is also. She and I make two. We’re enough. Says Him. This is me thinking positively. I shalt, I shalt, I shalt.

Brown Trout

2006-11-15T13:01:00.000-08:00

~Karen Knight

You were more beautiful
breathing in a chalk stream
of sunlight than this damaged
rainbow, smoked in native timber
shavings, garnished with pepper
berries, bush tucker spice.
It's impossible to set my knife
and fork onto your skin
of spotted halos.

Did the angler see the clean blade
of your belly when you leapt
at his lure of mayfly nymph?

You are nature's only creation
when rubbed by chefs with Lark's
Distillery Apple Schnappes.

Worthy of a wooden plaque
in the Anglers Hall of Fame
you are the essence of Tasmania
the purest strain of sea-run trout
sharing a wall with your ancestors
who as eggs, were carried in a billy can
on horseback, to be laid in a gentle
lowland stream to hatch.

With the blood of an orange
I squeeze forgiveness
over the history of patterns
on your back;

for the baritone slurp
of your dying as you mouth
our thick, human air.

~~~~~

Next: Winter Solstice

In the Valley of Salt

2006-11-15T12:58:00.001-08:00

~Laurie Klein

I
Before the Wind

High on mulled air, the bos’n stood lookout,
alive to salt, alert to wing and wind, the tang of land,
when starboard a tempest arose,
driving a city of waves—
Avast! he cried.
Stern to hull,
timbers groaned. Jettisoned cargo sundered the whitecaps,
sailors prayed, and the pacing captain bellowed for Jonah,
hammocked below,
lost in nightmare:
a gaping lip
like a swamped skiff, a peninsular shore,
fringed with kelp. With an almighty heave
she breached, and that sighted coal in its socket,
that eye like an oven burned, turned on the dreamer with
lasic force.
And Jonah quailed at the captain’s shout,
shaken
awake. The gale howled; lots were cast. Leviathan rumbled,
keening below. Now God’s fugitive kneels at the rail and
cradles his head;
skull bones chime.
"Out!” he cries.
“Gristle, fin and marrowbone, I have been chosen.
T’is my wedding night, mates.”

II
Jonah's Wale Addresses the Almighty

Ruler of oceans, who can fathom
your summons? Pity this small throat
aching for everyday air. Doubts
are lice, eating into this brain and heart.
With a word, I’m consigned
to an unknown shore. Oh,
maker of magnificent tails, reconsider
stranding this body
far from the circle of my kind,
errand girl for your dirty work: I, your unholy
bride, your eager breakers my jealous
attendants—they batter my flesh. Yes, they will
flense my flesh.
Never mind. Let the dripping thing
live. Whatever end you design
in kindness will close its mouth
over me. Not to leap, not to swim,
but once more let me sink
into you, before beaching.

III
Jonah, Within

Rib to rib I’m flung, my robe
rotting off bone. Am I krill to be sieved,
then excreted, a gruel of cells
tainting your sea? Let me die,
curled in this pulsing sac, your words
rising like bile, singeing tonsils
and tongue, your briny God-talk
likely to split a lip, score
the roof of a mouth. Ancient of Days,
no one will heed such a walking
blight, or welcome a warning
planted like tares in my breastbone—
eyeless roots,
nosing down windpipe, tentacles
trussing each lung as I choke out
a vow, a squall of diphthongs.

V
Stranding

Into the wind’s eye
leviathan slews, gulping
flesh—her pleated throat
swells. Surf churns and,
ignoring soundings,
she runs aground—dorsal fin
listing hard, her underside
a rounded keel, half-
embedded. How those eyes
smolder, embers in an iron
helmet, drenched in spume.
Backwash roils, a stun of water
everywhere. Aye, the wake
unravels for leagues.
Constellations of shadow
swarm skull and spine,
the nave of ribs. Networked with oils
and braids of kelp the whale
lies, self-moored,
veiled with steam,
flippers like wings, sculling air.
From the great eyelids and over
the monstrous jaws,
glutinous strings
loop like hawsers, festooning
a face: Jehovah’s
tears, shawling her body.

VI
Threshold

From lifted flukes to jaw,
the marbled halls of muscle
convulse. Each wave is a gable,
an eave that shudders loose
from a sacred pavilion. Debris
litters sand. Like a shed, fallen-in,
stirred by wind, her voice
sounds like ten-penny nails,
wrested from oak beams.
Through aqueous light,
guttering now, she sees him stumble
clear of the ambergris before
it hardens. Groaning,
she angles her corridor of neck
nearer to water. For hours,
all her doors will lie open.
Jonah will kneel to stroke her hide,
cupping brine in withered palms,
pouring his thanks, over and over.

Winter Solstice

2006-11-15T12:58:00.000-08:00

~Karen Knight

The annual Antarctic depression
wrapped in a thick gauze of cloud
rides pillion with the Bridgewater Jerry
across the Derwent River
over the tops of hills
round as a nudist colony
like a cold blooded fog snake
it sheds its skin
trails a giant smudge through the city
The homeless stand between
freeze and thaw.
They are frost shadows
holding the ice
long after their sorrows
have melted around them.

* The Bridgewater Jerry is an infamous fog in the winter months of Tasmania which travels down the length of the Derwent River and engulfs surrounding suburbs of Hobart.

~~~~~

Next: All Over America

All Over America

2006-11-15T12:56:00.001-08:00

(for Walt Whitman)

~Karen Knight

People steal collections of his poetry every day.
They're taken from shelves in rare bookshops
where they sweat for hours in big overcoat pockets.
They take them from the bedside tables
of luxurious hotel rooms
wrapped in monogrammed towels.
In libraries they're often reprimanded on the stairs.
In prisons they're confiscated
and locked up with the Hershey bars.
In the rush hour
people take his poems home through the subways.
The poems usually have to stand.
They're taken into restaurants
where they listen to one-sided conversations
on mobile phones.
But when his poems are taken into hospitals
they ease themselves through the sliding doors
dressed in immaculate white shirts
open at the neck
and soft grey felt sombreros
that tilt, all the way back.

Can You Imagine

2006-11-15T12:56:00.000-08:00

~Sandra Duguid

Can you imagine
what good fortune
has brought you here
to this bright deli
with its Southwest décor
in Livingston, New Jersey?
Eggs blossom on your oval plate
by browned potatoes;
you are eating a bagel—You.
And there’s no reason
this isn’t
a breakfast room in Paris,
and you, Pierre Bonnard,
the painter many disdain
for his failure to include
in his glorious morning interiors
more of the sinister.
And there’s no reason
this isn’t Bailey’s Mills, New York,
and you, your grandmother,
jealous, early on, of your mother
for having more children
than she ever even knew
while she had only
one boy—your father.
Even so, you’d like to think
in some way,
when the sky hung down like a long skirt
she could still pick up and move,
she was thinking of you
with kindness
when she sent him across the snowy fields
and roads to the one-room school
with his sandwich,
and then labored to paint
morning glories up either side
of the runner on the stairs
of the big house
that’s no longer there
where trains picked up
and left off their passengers
over by The Junction.

~~~~~~

Next: Property

Nights

2006-11-15T12:55:00.000-08:00

~Kevin Hart

At times my name gets tired of me
And wanders off into the dark:
Some times it claws me with a bark
Some times it leaves me almost free

And then I cannot see a thing
And flesh is barely tied to soul:
Those nights the density of coal
Those nights when I am not a king

Then hours bunch up to watch me fall
And I am turned into a prayer:
Some nights I circle God’s dark lair
Some nights an endless night is all

Property

2006-11-15T12:53:00.000-08:00

~Sandra Duguid

Our back porch, I discover from the yard,
is caving in;
eaves troughs rust in the grass.
What defines the limits of this house?
Spirea takes over the living room;
rain attacking the neighbor’s tin roof
advances this way.
I stand on the back steps,
smell the rain, and through her screen,
the match Mother lights
to cook supper.
She comes to the door
and we talk about
Bradley’s acres of dark winter wheat, growing
farther from us
across the newly widened road.
We used to own the place next door—
my father’s, his father’s grocery,
my sister’s and brother’s early apartments;
I’ve never given it up.
An old Pepsi Cola sign
shines from the upstairs window in the barn.
We claim the heavy
peonies nodding across the line,
elegant iris we planted
rise in their yard.

~~~~~

Next: Be

Be

2006-11-15T12:52:00.000-08:00

~Sandra Duguid

a body in space, dimensional
like the flowering
pear that sets to right
suburbs in spring
Trunks focus, sun
spills; be
light in wide diffusion
against those slats of cloud
What shapes nothing
takes
among the white
blossoms! Breathe, recede—see now
what wind begins to blow

~~~~~

Next: Reading a Student's Paper

The World Needs Tuning: A Faith Journey

2006-11-15T12:50:00.001-08:00

William T. Allen

William Timberlake Allen was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota in 1926 and grew up there. After serving with the U.S. Army in World War II, he attended Northern State College from 1946-1948. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Music Composition from Northwestern University in 1950, and his Master’s degree from the same institution in 1951. In 1954 he received his Ph.D. in Music Composition from the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester. He was a member of the music faculty of Houghton College from 1953-1991, and was “Composer in Residence” for many of those years. He has composed works for organ, piano, and choir, including the opera “Young John Wesley,” written in 1983 for Houghton College’s centennial celebration. Dr. Allen is also an amateur poet, and the author of several plays and musicals performed at Houghton College. The following essay was edited by Benjamin Walker from a talk delivered during a faith-journey chapel at Houghton College in the spring of 2004.

I come to you out of the past, from a country called Yesterday. My four grandparents were all born before the start of the Civil War. My father arrived in 1879—three years after Custer made his Last Stand. Dad, as a boy raised on the plains, was once allowed to ride his Indian pony 20 miles across prairie to visit his brother in town. Evening came, and street lamps made circle reflections of light on the main street. The pony had never seen such a thing, and—I want you to think of this charming picture—he hopped over each circle of light.

Civilization, however, was advancing: by the 1920s, many people had radios! Just to think of it! I remember sitting as a young fellow in front of a large, fancy console in 1932 hearing the presidential election news: Franklin Roosevelt was trouncing Herbert Hoover. It was a time of depression and dust storms and tumbleweeds piled high.

My home, though dust did seep in, seemed a secure place. We had a piano in our Music Room, and I took to it gleefully, realizing early on that I wanted to be a musician—a composer and piano player. While I was visiting school friends who were sons of the local Wesleyan pastor, I tried out their piano. It made their mother quite nervous, as my tunes were deemed by her inappropriate. Years later, one of those Wesleyan lads, hearing I had arrived at Houghton College where my piano playing sometimes got the same response, inquired, “Is he really saved?” My confident answer: “O blessed assurance—yes I am!”

My hometown church was what you could call “1930’s liberal.” I’ll explain it this way: our Sunday School paper featured a serial about a boy who was trying to break into radio announcing—radio, remember, was big in those days. Its nifty title was “Take It Away, Sam.” Week after week though, there didn’t seem to be any spiritual point. However, not to worry: missionaries had arrived! A Miss Beatrice Hollenbeck, a serious Christian (blessed be her memory)—along with her sister and another helper, took over our Sunday school program and urged gospel truth upon our hearts. The good old flannel graph was put to work. We saw a beautiful figure—a yellow angel—representing Satan in disguise. That cruel deceiver had fooled many, and he was ready to fool more she explained, sowing biblical truth in the soil of tender young minds. Goodly sprouts did appear, but still many a noxious worldly weed was ever ready to undo the harvest. False worldly glory, for example, tempted when, in a high school band uniform, I strode to the center of a basketball court at halftime, sat down at a piano, and offered a big-time blast of boogie-woogie. The applause of the cheering crowd was positively intoxicating.

A few years later, during World War II, the U.S. Army sent me a letter. They were taking piano players. They were taking practically everybody. I was there when Bob Hope entertained us soldiers on the island of Saipan. A young lady with his troupe played part of the Grieg Piano Concerto. I envied her, and sought keyboards wherever I went. In Tokyo, after the war, I came across a huge organ in the Mitsubishi Department Store—an instrument similar to the one in Wanamakers in Philadelphia. Somehow I was allowed to play it. I was perched at the top of a long staircase, and as I made a stab at the Hallelujah Chorus, I glanced down to see those stairs lined on both sides with curious citizens of Tokyo, dressed in both Western and traditional Japanese garb. Never mind that I wasn’t a legitimate organist. Ah, how cheap fame doth heighten the wretched ego.

After finishing up with the army, it was time, I deemed, for college and music study. In due time, I was invited to teach music at Houghton College. “If you love the Lord,” was part of the invitation. I wrote the Dean of the College that I had been brought up to believe in the Bible. A true, but rather inadequate testimony. Looking back, I am amazed at how little I truly knew of such things. A friend in retrospect pointed out to me: “You saw yourself as a Christian.” But he was too polite, or too wise to add, “An ignorant Christian, of course.” Well meaning and eager to please. I was unschooled in how to declare my faith, but they had hopes for me. I was signed on, and I’m forever grateful for the many prayers that were offered in my behalf.

What a new experience this community was.

Inch by inch, struggle, by struggle, Houghton began to change my life. The Lord, as told in Psalm 139, knew my frame before it was made, knew I would be drawn to Him, knew my life should change, and knew that someday I should stand here to declare His mercy and His glory. What a privilege it was for me to discover at this place faculty, staff, townspeople, and students who were not game-players but sincere believers! One of the greatest characteristics of the “old” faculty was the strong sense that, however academically gifted they might have been, they were first of all genuine and committed Christians who cared deeply about the spiritual life of others. Dr. Stephen Paine, President of the College, spoke in no platitudinous language as he said, with that familiar right arm gesture, and in vigorous words right out of Middle English: “Students, get glory for God!” His voice still rings in my soul. Dr. Charles Finney, Music Department head at the time, supported me in my Houghton pilgrimage. Indeed, I became a kind of Poster Boy that he used to ease administrative doubts about newly hired music faculty.

In the 1950s, dramatic attempts were confined pretty much to readings and short skits. Interested in producing something of more length, I joined with English professor Charles Davis in putting together a small musical called “Ardelia,”—a kind of quaint period piece. It didn’t hurt the show’s official acceptability that the Dean of Women and the Chairman of the Music Department were in the cast. The whole presentation took place in the old chapel on the top floor of Fancher Hall, with piano instead of organ accompaniment.

Our musical “Ardelia” broadened much later into a full production, but efforts reflecting the local scene were what was really desired at the time. What local scene, you may ask? Well, there was a campus snack shop, called at one time “The Bent Cent” and at other times “John and Charles Wesley Snack Shop.” And downtown, the “Twin Spruce Inn”offered meals and a juke box. After the twin spruces were cut down, it was renamed the “Twin Stump Inn.” Adventurous souls drove all the way to “Bob and Aggie’s Diner” in Caneadea to eat chili and watch the tube glowing at the end of the counter. For those without wheels, a coffee machine in the basement of Luckey Memorial became a social gathering place, and not surprisingly there subsequently appeared such dramatic turnouts as “The Coffee Machine” and “Coffee Machine Revisited.” These short musicals were entertainments, written for a society that in those early days was thirsting for any allowable action on stage. There were many others: “Everane” was a comment on Houghton weather, while “Selectra” was a zany spoof with classical overtones, starring hero “Jukus Bacchus.”

“Coffee Machine Revisited” enjoyed a unique ending. All through the play we expected the return to Houghton of Bobby Blackjack, rambunctious young rebel, notorious dissident, and twisted purveyor of relativism learned at the University of Chicago. Finally, the great moment! Slowly drawing aside a curtain, stepping forward with a surly demeanor, and dressed sort of like early Marlon Brando (very early Marlon Brando) was none other than Houghton College President Stephen Paine!

But enough of these mere entertainments! Enter a serious production: Houghton’s Christmas Concert of 1961! The Houghton College Oratorio Society performed composer Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms—certainly not too far out for contemporary ears, but a bit of a shocker to listeners back then, accustomed to hearing Handel at Christmas. Conductor Charles Finney wanted us to reach out, “stretch our ears,” as he liked to say. After all, Stravinsky’s composition was over thirty years old. It was ever Dr. Finney’s goal to sing to the Lord a new song. Soon after the concert, however, the Music Faculty met with the Powers that Were, who encouraged us to perform something a little less new the next year. We followed the suggestion. But Symphony of Psalms is now seventy-four years old. Perhaps the Greatbatch School of Music is ready for a repeat performance— though maybe not at Christmas.

Meanwhile, in all of this time, how was my Christian journey? I was learning some extremely valuable lessons. The Lord takes you as you are. It’s all right if other persons are wiser, better informed, better trained, better teachers, better speakers, better theologians, better piano players, better everything than you. There’s still room for you in heaven. There was a point when I prayed to the Lord, “If I’m not saved, save me now,” though the journey is life-long, of course. Indeed, any past look at my life reveals, with increasing clarity, how God steered me away from potential disasters, and so, I praise the name of Jesus. I give thanks to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—quite often in the middle of the night. I know eternal life is mine, and that another Person paid the price for it. This is too wonderful to comprehend!

Finally, “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and anything worthy of praise, let your mind dwell on these things.” Words of St. Paul to the Philippians: words for us. We are to dwell on good things, not only yesterday, but today! And not just today—always!

Exalt the LORD with the blessed jangle of heavenly praise!

Miriam of ancient days, take up your timbrel!

Trees, clap your hands exultantly!

Prophets, whirl ecstatically! Trumpeteers, blow up the trumpet in the new moon!

Worthy art Thou, O LORD, forever!

But also—we know it full well—there lives that blessed non-jangle of our lives, the non-jangle of calm faith, of quiet moments alone, of serene contemplation, of fervent, silent prayer, of the Spirit’s intercession— groanings too deep for words!

Non-jangle soothes our ears, and we are refreshed. It creates a space in which our minds can dwell on good things. My “serious” compositions, such as my piece Andante Cantabile, are meant as pleas for sensitivity and quietude in an inquiet world. It is music of meditation, of non-jangle, composed long ago by a 21-year-old dreamer, who is grown old, but is still dreaming dreams of that great and awesome day of the Lord’s coming, when, Prophet Joel tells us, those who call on the name of the Lord will be saved. Of course, we must always have Art. It is part of all of us, and we couldn’t be very happy without it. But Art cannot save. This world needs tuning, but Art will not get us all in tune. I firmly believe that only the power of Christ can do that.

An Anthology of Christian Australian Poets

2006-11-15T12:50:00.000-08:00

~Peter Stiles (Dr.)

Poetry composed by Christians in Australia is suffused with the many of the same shades, stances and savours that inevitably inhabit any verse written in this vast, enticing, yet often inhospitable continent. From the earliest days of European settlement (the First Fleet arrived in 1788) there has been a constant struggle to adapt to an environment where drought, bushfires, a lack of reliable fresh water and relentless sunlight have made any attempt to recreate the verdant fields of England difficult, if not impossible.

An understandable response to this problem has been to stay on the fertile coastal plains and nearby mountain ranges (on both the East and West coasts) and it is here that the big cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth have developed. The silent, formidable interior of Australia (which is largely desert) has turned human attention towards the more welcoming coastal areas, where there is a greater sense of moderation, ease of activity and recreational pursuits to be had. Australians have largely turned their backs on the brooding interior of this Great South Land.

Australians love to frequent the liminal world between land and sea, and with good reason. It is a country that is blessed with arguably the most beautiful beaches in the world. They stretch for hundreds and hundreds of miles, with endless reaches of fine, golden sand. Thus, a striking feature of poetry written in Australia is a preoccupation with coastal landscapes. It is evident in some of the poems included in this issue of ‘Stonework’. Most Australians are Pacific rim dwellers who look outward, rather than inward.

The harshness of the environment has also bred a strong individualism and self-dependence in the Australian psyche. This has developed over centuries and is reflected in the Australian attitude to religion. Religious conviction has always been a personal matter, and a cheerful agnosticism is common. Unlike the United States, which has been blessed with a strong Christian heritage and many excellent Christian colleges (Houghton College included), Australian education has been largely secular at a tertiary level. Only recently has the evangelical Christian constituency seen the value of the Christian tertiary college.

So, while Australia has produced many great novelists, playwrights and poets, it has not been de rigueur to be explicitly Christian in the way that so much American writing unashamedly is. Australia did not have the Pilgrim Fathers. It began, rather, as a penal settlement for English and Irish miscreants. Some of that acerbic distaste for the Christian faith of the establishment still persists in Australian cultural expression today. But, to use an aquatic analogy, the tide is turning. Some of the finest poets writing in English are Australian, and some are now unashamed about engaging with spiritual themes and issues. Les A. Murray and Kevin Hart come to mind in this regard.

The sheer size and isolation of the Australian continent, the distances between major cities and the relatively small number of Christians involved in serious writing, have meant that for the most part their craft is a fairly solitary exercise. It is not unlike the predicament faced by the majority of creative people in Australia (visual artists and musicians included). To find encouragement, affirmation and a sense of community they often have to travel overseas. Many of the great works about Australia (for example, the novel ‘Cloudstreet’, by Tim Winton) were written outside Australia. Many writers go overseas and never return.

But Australia is a uniquely beautiful and diverse country, with flora, fauna, and a special freshness and appeal that are impossible to find anywhere else in the world. Like all creative people, Christian poets writing today owe so much to the sense of peace, security and stillness that the Australian environment provides. If God is to be found in the silence of a dark forest, under a clear desert sky at night, by walking barefoot on an isolated beach in the salty air, or sitting by a cool rainforest waterfall, then He is to be encountered in Australia. It is a country that is replete in natural beauty.

The poets represented in this issue of ‘Stonework’ are just that, representational. There are many others who could have been included. But I am confident that readers at Houghton College and elsewhere will derive much satisfaction from this selection. Kevin Hart, James Harrison, Ivan Head, Karen Knight, Andrew Lansdown and Peter Stiles provide a good sample of what it means to be a Christian poet in Australia.

~~~~~

Biographical Notes:
Kevin Hart is considered by many as one of the major living poets writing in English. He has published several significant volumes of poetry, criticism and philosophy. At present he is Notre Dame Professor of Philosophy and Literature at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.
Karen Knight has been widely published both overseas and within Australia. She has been the recipient of several awards and three writer’s grants from Arts Tasmania, where she lives.
James Harrison is Head of Theology at the Wesley Institute in Sydney. His book, ‘Paul’s Language of Grace in the Graeco-Roman World’ ( 2003 ) won a major international award.
Ivan Head is an Anglican Priest and Warden of St. Paul’s College at the University of Sydney. His poetry collection, ‘The Projectionist’, was published in 2004.
Andrew Lansdown has published several books of verse, plus short stories and fantasy novels. He is currently a Baptist Pastor in Western Australia.
Peter Stiles has published poetry, articles and reviews within Australia and the United States. He is the Australian representative for the Conference on Christianity and Literature.

Reading a Student's Paper

2006-11-15T12:43:00.000-08:00

~Sandra Duguid

Marion, on her ladder,
pasting flowers—
I’m trying to read just
that carefully,
my scribble on the page
accurate, suggestions—
to improve a house, its walls—
the paper, tight against
the ceiling, a brush over
the vines, the matching,
catching
a curve off the line
of thought, plurals,
possessives, whose
entitlement is this?
All of us
glad, especially Mother,
a job done,
walls tended—a new place to be,
to walk through—to
the columns supporting
the front porch—Marion later
spread the story, how she knew—
from down the road—
sparrows singing extra clearly
and loudly in our bushes
the morning
my brother
was born.

It Makes One Think

2006-11-14T18:15:00.000-08:00

~Robert Siegel

He had a fit—tore the lion limb from limb
and killed thirty Philistines over a party joke.
When a girl he hated was taken from him,
he burnt their crops up: a sour, ill-tempered bloke.
When they came after him, he smote them hip and thigh;
when captured, escaped, grabbing the jaw of an ass,
and killed thousands more. But soon he cast an eye
again on a Philistine woman, who brought him to this pass:
Delilah (clever, and needing to play both sides
to save her skin, no doubt), agreed to trick him
into revealing the secret of his strength: unwise,
though suspicious at first, he proved an easy victim
(not the last) of feminine wiles. Whatever we think of these,
weak and blind he pulled the house down on Israel’s enemies.

~~~~~

Next: Sheba

Sheba

2006-11-14T18:14:00.000-08:00

~Robert Siegel

Bringing gold from Ophir and silk from Samarcand,
I came, your reputation having excelled
anyone's of whom I'd heard in any land,
and sharply questioned you till I was told
what man had never answered man or woman.
Until it seemed the hundred talents of gold
I'd brought with spices, apes and peacocks
were so much straw that, embarrassed, I took home.
Your wisdom turned the wavering sands to gold,
the face of heaven shone from each rock,
till I renounced my ivory throne, let go
the world that melts like sherbet in summer air
for a cave high in the mountains. Here, alone,
I pray for you crushed by your greatness there.

~~~~~

Next: Solomon's Last Words

Solomon's Last Words

2006-11-14T18:13:00.000-08:00

~Robert Siegel

I had it all: that's certainly the case.
And all was vanity--yet it was not enough:
gardens, palaces, slaves, the taste
of every exotic fruit and arcane love.
Growing old as well as wise in years I made
account of what it all amounted to,
including my own folly when I strayed
after strange gods my strange wives led me to,
before at last repenting. My advice is,
fear God and keep His laws. Meanwhile enjoy
your work and what you eat and drink: the rest
is fluff. As for writing a book? You might employ
your time better--of making many books there is no end.
(I'm writing this one for just a few well-chosen friends.)

~~~~~

Next: Adam's Dream

Adam's Dream

2006-11-14T18:12:00.000-08:00

The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream:
he awoke and found it truth. --Keats

~Robert Siegel

He saw the garden spreading past the trees
he'd been warned to avoid (yet keep a special eye on).
He'd learned by scents, transported by the breeze,
myriads of roses and how, by hand, the scion
of one to graft on another--and what was edible:
whole families of legumes, grasses, roots,
melons, peaches, apples, pears. Incredible,
the variety of tastes just from the fruits!
But it wasn't enough. Even the breathing animals
with friendly grunt or sigh, silken warm side,
and large affectionate eye were not able
to speak. When he named them, none replied:
His words fell dead on the air--though he said
them everywhere, walking or running to each place:
to the mountain, which echoed back the sounds he made,
or the still pool, returning his own gaze.
But no one answered him until one night in a dream
he woke and heard a soft voice speak his name.

Restoration

2006-11-14T18:06:00.000-08:00

~Laurie Dashnau

I will restore unto you the years the locusts have eaten... Joel 2:25

The wind howled as the snow fell briskly, fog forming on the hospital room window. My eyes were drawn to the porch of the house across the street, particularly to the bright red, handmade wreath of hearts that adorned the house’s front door. Two toddlers, a boy and a girl, soon came bounding up the porch’s stairs. Despite nature's fury, the children reached out to run their index fingers along the exposed top step and then tousle the hair of a man whom I presumed to be their father. No sooner had they done that than their father scooped them up, one in each arm, and proceeded through the doorway. While the snow and the fog prevented me from seeing the expressions on the faces of these three strangers, I interpreted their frolic as an act of endearment, an intimate family moment I was sharing in by happenstance.
Shivering, I turned from the window and made eye contact with my brother, Jim. Silent sentinels, we must have stood there ten minutes or more before the tears streamed down our faces in tandem. When the heart monitor skipped a beat, we made our way over to my father's bedside. A week earlier, after pneumonia had taken its toll on him even though he was only sixty-one years old and in relatively good health, he had stopped breathing. Since then, the doctors had pumped up his body with so many steroids that he was barely recognizable. Now, fragile shell of a man that he was, I longed to reach out to him, to connect with him, to tell him that I loved him and that everything would be okay. If that actually were possible, it would have been the first February 14 in twenty-five years that I had given him more than an obligatory Valentine’s Day card.

***

Twenty-five years ago, I mused, Jim and I were just like those children. Suddenly, I was transported back in time. There I was, sitting on our family's living room sofa, smiling broadly as I asked for a nickel in exchange for my father's imaginary haircut, complete with an imaginary Barbisol shave and a stick of Wrigley's spearmint gum for my father's good behavior. Though I was lucky to end up with two pennies for the services rendered, I was a happy five-year-old. My father was thrifty, and more delightful than the money was the pleasure of running my fingers through his thick, wavy brown hair. As an added bonus, my father would sometimes offer to give me a piggy-back ride on his sturdy back afterwards, but only if I did a first-rate job. Consequently, these grooming sessions often turned into half-hour-long events during which I first sat on his lap, then skipped over to the makeshift barber's tray (most often a first aid kit) for yet another Barbie doll comb, and finally returned to stand behind him on the couch cushions, always commenting about his make-believe growing bald spot. He, willing playmate, would inevitably gasp as if horrified by the revelation.
There had been all too many gasps since those days, several ending with me looking out the window as paramedics placed my father on a stretcher and shut the ambulance doors, red lights whirling but no sirens blaring. When I was six my father was first diagnosed as being mentally ill, a diagnosis not met by his or others’ gasps, but instead shrouded in silence. Over the years the specific category changed, from schizophrenic to manic depressive--and the treatments changed dozens of times, from electroconvulsive shock therapy to Zoloft and lithium and all of their pharmaceutical cousins--but my father's gasps remained the same. He gasped after he had thrown dishes across the kitchen, blaming my mother for not understanding the pressures he faced stocking groceries at a store that set quotas for eighteen-year-old, muscular boys rather than skinny, thirty-five-year-old men. He gasped before he struck me when I yelled back at him during one of his fits of rage. He gasped while he went through one of his high periods and struck up conversations with neighbors he had never met before, telling them inappropriate "jokes" that prompted my brother and me to scurry inside, embarrassed. And almost inevitably, his gasping was coupled by finger pointing, pointing that underscored his "you-better-watch-out" glare, or, in his manic moments, his "now-listen-to-this" bravado. That finger pointing had so seared its mark on me that well into my adult years, when I saw someone else make the same gesture (regardless of what it was intended to convey), my heart raced and my eyes fell downcast.

***

Here in this hospital room, I thought, I'd give anything to see my father point his finger. Two or three times visitors had reported feeling him lightly squeeze their hands when asked to do so, but the doctors were not even cautiously optimistic. In the room next door, another man about my father's age, and with my father's same form of pneumonia, was left to die after his family made the decision to remove life support. It was only a matter of hours before a sheet was placed over him and his body was rolled away to the basement morgue. A few hours later another pneumonia-stricken man was wheeled into the same corner of the I.C.U. One of the nurses, excusing her inattentiveness to the patients as she phoned her friends one after another, remarked that little mattered in a place where everyone was almost certain to die sooner or later. For the first time in my life, I myself had been tempted to finger point. Appalled, I left the room and waited down the hall until the next nurse came on duty.
Another week and countless nurses’ shifts later, my brother and I again stood at my father's bedside as my father defied the odds and regained consciousness. Half opening his eyes and then closing them again, blinking them randomly and then focusing on individual objects like infants do when their vision is developing, he wore on his face a mixed expression of awe and frustration. We had been told that he might have amnesia when he awoke, but he quickly alleviated our fears by titling his head toward each one of us when asked to show that he recognized our names.
After his repeated attempts to talk failed because of his respirator and feeding tube, my father lifted his arms just enough, pointing unsteadily towards a desk, for us to surmise that he wanted to write down something. His letters were chicken scratch, indecipherable dots, and crossed lines. The anger rising in him when we, like game show hosts, posed twenty questions to him--questions including "Do you want to know today's date?," "Are you trying to tell us you're in pain?," and "Is it too hot or cold in here for you?"--was exceeded only by his anger when we took away his pencil and paper and commanded him to rest. Four tries and a full hour later, we were able to recognize three letters: "I," "N," and "S."
"Insides...do your insides hurt?" we queried.
He shook his head no.
"Insulted?" we offered, realizing that anyone in a paper-thin hospital gown might well feel that way.
Another negative head shake.
Suddenly, in a soft, tentative voice, my mother ventured, "Insurance?"
Bingo--a nod.
"It's all covered," she reassured him, in response to which he sighed heavily, his body going limp as he rested his head on the pillow.
I looked at my mother, my mother looked at my brother, and then all three of us, the solemnity of the occasion notwithstanding, laughed with abandon. It was a good
sign, a turning point in my father's several-month-long recovery.

***

One week later my father was moved out of the I.C.U. and into a regular room, and a week after that he was released. Only then did my mother choose to tell him of his
brush with death. Only then did my father begin to comprehend what a month's worth of lost time meant in the larger scheme of things. My mother phoned me and said that my father had bawled when she told him about the countless prayers that God's will be done, no longer accusing others of not caring as he so often had done during his previous hospitalizations for his mental illness, but instead realizing and being overwhelmed by their genuine concern. My mother also said that my father wanted to speak with my brother and me. Though I never had known my mother to lie, I was skeptical. I had long avoided conversations of any sort with my father and didn't even know how to go about one. If I said nothing, would he break the silence by saying something off-color, as he so often had done in the past, making me not only uncomfortable but also mad, feeling violated as a woman and as his daughter? And if I extended a small gesture of kindness, perhaps telling him that I was glad to see him doing so much better, would he, as he also had often done in the past, blame me for not really understanding how hard things were for him, distancing himself once again addressing me as “You People”?

***

“You People!” he had shouted dozens of times through my years in elementary and high school after coming home from work and being put on suspension or fired from work once again after talking back to his manager, glaring at my mom, brother, and me from the kitchen table, where he often sat for hours at a time. “You People just don’t understand me! In fact, You People--You People are the ones who have made me this way!”
“No, we have not!” my brother and I, I especially, would sometimes be feisty or foolish enough to retort. “You are responsible for your own actions.”
“You People!” he would repeat. “You People!” And with that came what in the best of terms would be called a meltdown and would be followed by a flurry of phone calls by my mother to see if we could stay with my grandmother for a few hours or the night or if my father’s psychiatrist would recommend and authorize yet another hospitalization.

***

So there I sat on the family sofa, a week or two after my father had come home, my eyes glued to the carpet, feet tapping, stomach queasy. What was it that my father wanted to say now? I wondered, equally if not more worried about how I would respond, or, perhaps even more accurately, fail to respond.
Dim light shone through the window, the March afternoon sun fading. Overwhelmed by the tension of the moment, I was reminded of the words attributed to C. S. Lewis in William Nicholson's play Shadowlands. Knowing that his wife, Joy Davidman Gresham, had cancer, but not knowing how long her remission would last, Lewis half-prayed, half-pleaded with God, "Give me blizzards and frozen pipes, but not this waiting room of the world." That's exactly how I felt. True, my father was out of the hospital, and I was literally out of the waiting room. Yet ironically, I almost wanted my relationship with my father to go back to what it had been like before he almost died. I was so afraid of the unknown that I almost longed for the all too painfully familiar.
But then there came another turning point. Tears streaming down his face, my father choked out, "I…love you."
I wish the words had come more easily to me, but I faltered as I reciprocated, "I...love you, too." I swallowed hard. It was the first time in the decades after those hair-grooming days that I remember such a fond, albeit strained, exchange taking place.

***

Since that day when I discovered that I could say those three words and truly mean it, I still have found it difficult to really talk with my father. But my life will never be the same. One time recently, when I visited my parents and my father asked me how I was and made a comment about me needing to be careful not to become obsessed with work and, as he put it, “end up like [him],” I began to panic.
“Knock, knock,” he said.
I could feel my face going pale even as I started perspiring, fearing a crude joke would soon follow regardless of whether or not I responded with “Who’s there?” Nevertheless, I remained silent even while planning to excuse myself.
“Knock, knock,” he repeated.
“Who’s there?” I conceded.
“Orange.”

“Orange who?”
“Orange you glad I’m going to drop that subject and that I won’t be telling any more knock-knock jokes?”
Both he and I laughed. In that moment, I somehow knew he realized a lot more than words could ever express. In that moment, I sensed that, in the future, I possibly even might be able to let down my guard a little when talking with him. And finally, in that moment, I began to realize anew that a part of my childhood of which I had been robbed by spending most winters after school visiting my father in the hospital's psychiatric ward--and when I was at home, cowering in fear--had been restored.

A World of Music in Space and Time

2006-11-14T17:51:00.000-08:00

Mark Hijleh

(NB: I am especially indebted to Dr. Jeremy Begbie for some of the concepts in this essay, which are explicated in much detail in his Music, Theology and Time (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

I often hear it suggested that music is one of the most ‘spiritual’ of the arts, by which the commenter usually means that music somehow transcends our mundane bodily existence. While the basic intent of such sentiments is probably laudable, they seem all too often to lead to a regrettable misunderstanding of the fundamental nature of music and music-making. A sort of ‘musical Gnosticism’ is usually the unintended result, a failure to understand that music is at its core an embodied experience rather than an ephemeral one. To exist at all, music must consist of bodies in motion through time at various levels. At the same time, effective music does indeed point to something beyond itself – something that transcends the merely natural, I would argue. In a word, then, music at its best is fundamentally incarnational; it is a synergistic integration of the temporal and the eternal. As such, it can offer us glimpses into the ultimate Incarnation of Jesus Christ.

The ways in which music is ‘embodied’ prove endlessly fascinating. For there to be music, there must be sound, and for sound to be created some sort of body must vibrate – a stretched violin or guitar string, a taut drum head, tiny folds of flesh deep in a singer’s throat. But the embodied motion does not stop there, for music also requires intelligent action in the planning and execution of its vibrations: there must be a musician who produces the notes we hear. Proto-music may exist in the mind of the composer, but true music seems to come into being only when it is heard by others. Such production requires great amounts of disciplined physical activity. Not until our eardrums vibrate in sympathy with these intentional sound waves do we apprehend any music. At yet another level, it is surely the principle of vibrating bodies in motion that explains why dancing to music is to be found wherever there are human beings. For those cultures in which such bodily movement is taboo, singing provides a somewhat less vigorous but no less directly physical connection to sound – and singing is as universal among human beings as speech.

Music also must flow through time to have any meaning; in this sense it is the antithesis of ‘timelessness’. Imagine hearing all the notes of a piece of music simultaneously – such an experience would be utterly incomprehensible. The musical time must also be manifest somehow in our time (and place), regardless of its original time (and place). Music is always about ‘the now’. When we for whatever reason attempt to make it otherwise, we become hopelessly disconnected.

A part of the necessary connectedness in music is the sense of its location. This is true even though musical ‘aural space’ actually has no physical locality – the sound may come from an instrument or loudspeaker or voice located across the room, but the music exists in an intimate but nevertheless physically unbounded ‘aural space’ connected somehow with each person who hears it. Perhaps this is why music is thought of as ‘spiritual’. Be that as it may, every musical event has a contextual location in both time and space, and we are not aware of this local connectedness, we will likely not be able to participate in the experience at the most meaningful level. Houghton music Professor Emeritus and composer Bill Allen testifies to this as he speaks of his work over many decades in the Houghton community, sharing the community connectedness of each major event as if the music could not exist apart from its context – and indeed, he is right.

This further suggests, then, that the temporal embodiment of music neither begins nor ends with individual performers or listeners, for music is ultimately a contextual, communitarian phenomenon. In short, musics arise from historically situated cultures, and carry with them the marks of the peoples from whence they come – musics are, in fact Incarnated from and by peoples. In this sense, to paraphrase a famous political maxim, ‘all music is local’. However, it is at the same time, and especially in our time, global as well.

It is from this last level of embodiment that we might in our particular era learn (or remember) something fresh about Jesus Christ. For He is the Incarnate Lord of a people “…from every nation, tribe, people and language…(Rev. 7:9, NIV). And we are currently witnesses to an unprecedented explosion of Christianity across the globe, a manifestation of His Body (in motion) in a multitude of cultural contexts. A seemingly endless variety of possible musical sounds and expressions pour from these emerging Christian cultures, musics offered in praise, thanksgiving, lamentation, confession, repentance and exultation to God. “O, for a thousand tongues to sing my great Redeemer’s praise”, wrote Charles Wesley – how about a thousand (or ten thousand) musical styles? We may understand and embrace such an opportunity only to the extent that we understand music as Incarnation at this yet higher level of order. Jesus is Lord of us, yes – but Jesus is Lord of all. We human beings, whose shockingly powerful musical preferences are often defended at great loss, have much to learn from one another’s music, just as we have much to learn about how Christ may be authentically Incarnate in human cultures in ways we sometimes cannot even imagine.

How might we then rise to this challenge of musical Incarnation? Eternal and yet temporal, local and yet global, flowing through times and spaces and yet always signifying something beyond itself – music, when it is as it was meant by the Great Composer to be, is all that. We can be open to the disturbingly paradoxical nature of music, rather than seeking to limit ourselves to the comfortable. We can be ever listening for and expecting more. Elsewhere, I have said that ‘real’ music is best thought of as ‘The Music of Jesus’. When He is in the middle of our music, and we in the middle of His – that is, when they are Incarnate together – the sound is sweet indeed.

Notes for This High Calling

2006-11-14T17:50:00.000-08:00

A Tribute to William T. Allen at Fourscore
Matthew 5:14-16

~James Zoller

Let us say:
Blessed are the common places,
for they shall sustain us.
Blessed are the humble,
for they shall guide our steps.
Blessed are the reticent, Blessed the quiet,
for they shall point us to God,
they shall open our ears.
On a curb at a village cross-
roads late at night, passing
among shadows, a trash bin
Painted after Van Gogh, redeemed
by a copier, nameless artist,
who turns our thoughts upward
in great darkness to starry songs of light,
Called to bear witness in this troubled world.
We travel homeward through night -
our journeys, somehow, enlightened.
Let us say:
Blessed are the un-likely,
for they shall be called by name.
Blessed are the deep coals,
for they shall be fanned to flame.
Blessed are the willing, Blessed the servant hearts,
for their hands shall be calloused,
they shall be given, abundantly.
Joy of spring dawning
sun dazzling, bush burning,
forsythia in bloom!
Joyously red at its heart
all but hidden in aureolin,
a cardinal declaims
his song, pulsing, a many noted aria.
Called to witness, unwitting wonderers,
we stand, arrested, air vibrant -
our very souls aflame.
Let us say:
Blessed are the uncommon places,
for they shall breathe life.
Blessed are the restless minds,
for they are heir to the God of Creation.
Blessed is the deep welling, Blessed the music maker,
who has brought us nearer to God
and bids us listen. Children, listen.

The Discerning Eye of Aileen Ortlip Shea

2006-11-14T17:32:00.000-08:00

~Ted Murphy

“A portrait,” said Sargeant, “is a face where the mouth is never quite right." The ability to render on a two-dimensional surface a convincing replica of a face, such that others could recognize them, is a rare and underappreciated artistic gift in our culture. Portraits are paintings that must please the person of whom or for whom the painting is being done and also function as a work of art. Portrait painting remains today one of the few art forms still supported by the patron system. Typically a good portrait will over time transcend the subject matter of a specific person and become more timeless as it addresses aspects of the “ human condition”. Portraits move from being “someone” to meditation on human character, on mortality, on the fragile nature of what a life means.

When we look at Raphael’s portrait of "Baldassare Castiglione" we see it not only in terms of Raphael’s painting but also in terms of Castiglione’s writings. His gracious words on humanist conduct are left to us in the Book of the Courtier. Those large eyes seem wise, those hands gentle. What we know informs how we see. In the same manner, no one can look at Velázquez’s portrait of "Pope Innocent X" and not contemplate the energy and force of this man recorded in history. Most of the great portraits are of known people, yet even if we do not know the subject, a great portrait holds our attention by the manner in which a person looks out toward us. Great portraits point toward the mystery of the personality, the unknowable-ness of another. Consider the celebrated Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer. No one knows who she is, yet somehow we all feel we know her intimately. She seems so real, almost a presence to our memory. Vermeer captures that moment of seeing, that poetic point where the details serve some more enigmatic purpose. This is the thing we can never name; yet we all know what it is when we refer to it.

Portraits are also like biographies in literature. Portraits use a moment in time to speak to an implied history. The lines on a face become what Borges refers to as a map. A map which takes you to other places, times, persons and experiences. Who can say what stress is manifest upon the edge of a mouth except the bearer? Was it the work they were required to do or the relationships they felt they alone could manage? Our choices in life have some impact upon our features, and by a certain age we begin to have the faces we deserve. Married couples grow similar in appearance because of the practices of empathy. Everyday, over and over you make the face of your spouse as they relate their feelings and experiences. In time their pain becomes your pain, and their joy, your joy.

Portrait artists need a discerning eye. They learn to read the face and the posture for its telling quality. They learn how to make some small gesture become a sign for a greater purpose. The difference between a photograph portrait and a painted or sculpted portrait is one of method more than media. Most great photo portraits are one among many, sometimes thousands of similar but failed pictures. Take McCurdy’s famous Portrait of the Afghani refugee. Look at all those other photos, there are dozens, but only one has that “telling effect”. That effect has become an iconic image for the final quarter of the last century.

The painted portrait has nearly as many examples, yet they remain buried under layers of subtle adjustment and restarting. We have many curious accounts of Sergeant, Gainsborough, and Reynolds to compare on this process; how they seldom were the same from each artist. Great painters seldom make their pictures the same way, there are always last minute changes and adjustments. Sargeant required from his sitter a minimum of 150 hours for a portrait, which is essentially a month. Not many people have the resources to take a month of their life to sit for a portrait so it is little wonder that his paintings are of only the rich. He painted people who seem like they are from Henry James’ novels. Indeed, Sargent made several paintings and drawings of Henry James. The world in Sargent’s portraits has the feeling of a perfect summer day with no end. There is a suspension not only of time but also of obligation and concern. Sargent worked very hard to achieve this tone in his paintings.

By its very nature portrait painting is a conservative art form. Individuals who wish to leave a record of themselves among the things that define them largely fund the art of portrait painting. Look closely at their clothes, their posture, and their jewels. Consider the environment they inhabit. This is a material world of purpose. They are the ones the doors are opened for, the schools are named after, and the lifeboats are waiting for. Anyone who makes a living in the profession of portrait painting must learn how to work with the emotions and attitudes of these people. Some artists, such as Goya and Van Dyke, could occasionally reveal the rotten core beneath the pristine surface. It is difficult to know for sure whether this quality was entirely intentional in these paintings or whether it is just our knowledge of the fate of the subjects that invites us to speculate on the more social comment these pictures suggest.

The great portraits remain among history's most celebrated objects. These works transcend the subject and become signs or symbols of our deeper poetic ideals. Whether this be the iconic “Mona Lisa”, the enigmatic “ Girl with the Pearl Earring” or the emotionally charged “Laughing Cavalier”, these works stand for a world of feeling and knowing. They hold a moment in time by their very unchanging perfection and persuade us to return and contemplate them. Portrait painting becomes a form of art, not merely a subject.

It is into this tradition that Aileen Shea was born and nurtured as a painter. Both her parents were painters. They met at the academy of fine arts in Pennsylvania. Willard Ortlip studied with William Merrit Chase, Child Hanson and Thomas Eakins. Willard Ortlips established a powerful line of American paintings into Houghton’s artistic tradition. Willard and Aimee maintained a studio household. During financially challenging times they successfully painted portraits and landscapes, still life and subject illustrations. At one point they rented a house among the Palisades on the Hudson. This house was called “The Castle”. It was an old stone mansion with an open veranda once used as the meeting place for New York elite, many among the entertainment world. The veranda functioned as a dance floor. It is a curious thing to speculate on the link of Houghton to Charlie Chaplin. Imagine the Ortlips renting a house in which Keaton, Chaplin and Pickford danced the night into morning.

Aileen was reared in a world of picture making. The smell of oil paint was a familiar smell. Aileen was the first of the Ortlips children to find her way into the art academy. She quickly established herself as a gifted portrait and figure painter. She was awarded a student Pulitzer prize (yes, at that time the prize also went to artists) this prize enabled her to study in France and Spain.

Aileen followed her parent’s trajectory of portrait painting. Her lively brushwork combines the escaping edge of form. If you look closely at great portraits you seldom see a hard or precise edge. Even among Inges best-known works there is a fascicle modeling of edge so that the intermediate values and tone move as light across an arching surface. Without these tone changes a form looks flat and geometric. The human face really has no edge in this sense. Aileen uses cool middle values to achieve this effect, and is a master of reflected color. Look at the color of the eye wall in her portraits, the region between the eye and the down plane of the glabella, how it becomes for Aileen an occasion to sneak in a pale blue, violet or perhaps a green- green like the foam of the sea.

Experienced portrait artists know we impose upon the subject qualities that exploit what is hardly there to the untrained eye. Aileen refers to the catch light of the eye as a kind of painter’s desert. She patiently waits for the opportunity to add these life-giving strokes for the illumination of the painting. For her it can be a satisfying moment when the eye takes on a reflected light both in the hot catch point and the subtler half moon reflected light that curls under the pupil directly opposite the catch light.

She follows this through in all the features, the fugitive color of the lip, and the temperature change of flesh from cheek to chin. Aileen loves color and celebrates its vibrancy throughout the flesh. She has equal joy in her treatment of hair. For Aileen hair becomes a field of slow, low light reflection. Few people seem so aware of the green necessary to make red hair come alive. Like Degas, she knows shadows are colors and never negative holes in the form. Whether she is painting a wealthy donor or a peasant girl from the mountains of Spain or the shores of Liberia, Aileen is capable of an informed, telling mark.

Now in her mid-nineties, Aileen holds her brush in a manner reminiscent of the late works of Renoir. Legend has it that servants delicately strapped Renior’s brushes to his hand, (too old and afflicted with arthritis to be capable of holding his brush) he would then swipe at his last paintings using what strength he possessed in his hand and wrist to reveal his final marks. For this reason Aileen some times prefers pastels to paint. The color is immediately in her reach. Her pastels are often no more than blunt chunks of the sticks they once were. She keeps them in piles in her pastel box, sorting through them like a button collection looking for just the right lavender or warm red ochre. I marvel that she is still producing works of beauty and riches. No painter turns out a success at every venture. Aileen struggles like all artists to work beyond the likeness toward a work of dignity and distinction as well as mystery.

The skin of Aileen's hands seems almost transparent now, yet her eyes are remarkably young. She is still a dignified, beautiful woman. The years have only magnified these qualities in her. It is an injustice that we require artists to be famous before we acknowledge their significance. Such an expectation is driven by money, not quality. Everyone who owns a work by Aileen Ortlip Shea cherishes that work. I can think of few honors more meaningful to an artist then to have works valued by posterity. All of us who are painters understand that it is this grand tradition that we are so fortunate to participate in. The magisterial grace of Aileen Ortlip Shea deepens this tradition and inspires generations in her wake.

Making Meaning: Telling Truth - an Interview with Julia Kasdorf

2006-11-14T17:31:00.000-08:00

~Kelsey Harro, Allison Brown

Interviewer: In your essay, “Preacher’s Striptease,” you wrote, “Ironically the second book has been seen as less daring. A New York University creative writing teacher told me in the late 1980’s, ‘Anyone can write about sex, but who wants to write about religion, that is the real taboo.’ In our community it seems to be the other way around. Talking about religion is the norm and discussing issues about sexuality is the taboo. Could you talk about what makes the secular writing world so suspicious of your writing?

Kasdorf: The teacher who said that was Sharon Olds, who was my thesis advisor in the creative writing program at New York University. She said that around 1989, and since then the whole landscape has changed, the taboos do seem to have switched. Right now, I don’t think they can publish enough books dealing with religion. Whether they’re memoirs, contemporary poetry or books on spirituality, it’s no longer taboo. I think many people now have a better understanding of the connection between Eros and spirituality.

Interviewer: Can you talk more about that connection between Eros and spirituality?

Kasdorf: I think they both have to do with transcendence, transcending the definitions of the body, transcending the definitions of the mind. Every religious tradition has a mystical vein; in Christianity the writings of St. Theresa of Avila or St. John of the Cross show how the metaphors and tropes for religious ecstasy intersect with those of erotic ecstasy.

Interviewer: Yesterday you mentioned moving into the Episcopalian denomination; can you talk more about that and the transition’s effect on your ideas about sacrament and incarnation?

Kasdorf: Converting to the Episcopal church was not a conscious move for me. I grew up in a progressive, intellectual Mennonite congregation. My home church as a child was across the street from the denominational publishing house and so there were lots of editors in the congregation. It wasn’t at all what you might think of as a typical Mennonite church out in the country. I identified myself as a Mennonite both ethnically and religiously; I went to a Mennonite college for a couple years and lived in a Mennonite group house while attending New York University. I identified myself with the Mennonite fellowship in Manhattan, which met on Sunday night. This allowed me on Sunday morning to sneak off to the Episcopal church, which I continued to do for years, still thinking of myself as a Mennonite because it fit my ethnic identity.

I started going to the Episcopal church because I loved the Eucharist; it is so different from what communion is in the Mennonite church. In that church, communion happened twice a year and was an extremely solemn affair; it meant examining yourself and your relationship with God as well as your relationship with the community. And when I was growing up, that Saturday night before Communion Sunday there were a lot of phone calls. If somebody had hard feelings against another person in the church you had to make amends before you took communion. There was also a lot of emphasis on suffering and binding yourself to suffering. The image of the grapes being smashed and the image of the kernels of wheat being ground were metaphors for individual bodies becoming one body, through breaking.

But in the Episcopalian church, communion is about thanksgiving, and is open to anyone who has been baptized. It was a completely different spirit and it had a completely different meaning, which also encompassed the idea of sacrament. But I didn’t understand sacrament because I was so rooted in the Radical Reformation understanding that the elements are just symbols. Real absence in every sense of the word.

So after 10 or 12 years of working through this, looking back on it I would say that the sacrament worked on me in some way that was unconscious and invisible and full of grace. I became a sacramental Christian in a way that bypassed my intellect. But I didn’t have to act on this change until I moved to Pennsylvania where there were Mennonite churches. Then I no longer had the excuse of not being able to find a Mennonite church. I attended a Mennonite church one Palm Sunday and it convinced me that this was not the home for my soul; this was the home for my body. These people are my people, this is my ethnicity, but I can’t worship here.

Then when I had a child, I had to make a decision whether or not that kid would be baptized. It was a big decision because essentially this is where the rubber hits the road for Anabaptists. We’ve all grown up hearing stories of people who were killed in gruesome ways for baptizing one another. So if I were to have that kid baptized, to them it would be like having the blood of all those martyrs on my hands. But I didn’t want her to be excluded from the Eucharist, and so I made a decision to have her baptized and at that time I was also confirmed, about four years ago. Another big piece of that decision is that I’ve just lost patience with the denomination’s dialog on what to do about homosexuality. The way it’s been handled in the Mennonite church is that entire congregations are getting kicked out of the denomination when churches refuse to expel members who are openly gay, and so the entire church gets expelled; that breaks my heart in a lot of ways.

To me it is an uncanny irony because the Mennonite denomination has such a strong history of human rights, and yet here on this one issue, which I regard as a human rights issue, the denomination couldn’t find a way to keep everyone together. And I think in our community it’s especially wrenching because for Mennonites who are born into the tradition, family and faith are so entangled. If you get kicked out of the denomination it’s like being disowned by your family, it’s heartbreaking for everybody, and painful on both sides of the controversy.

Interviewer: I have a question about the connection of family and faith that you just mentioned. You were saying that a part of the appeal becoming an Episcopalian is that it’s open to everyone. Do you have a sense in which an inherent part your faith is rooted in connecting with other people?

Kasdorf: Well, at some level life is fundamentally painful and it ends badly, so why are we here except to bind the wounds? Menno Simons, one of the founders of the Mennonite church, wrote in the 1500’s, “True evangelical faith cannot lie dormant, it feeds the hungry, it clothes the naked.”

Interviewer: You said something yesterday about the advantage of being able to be in both the Christian community and the writing community. What kind of insights does that provide?

Kasdorf: I don’t like to think of a dichotomy between the faith community and the writing community. It’s more that we travel through the world and we have relationships with many people, if life is rich. I’m fortunate to have a place in multiple communities because every community has its own way of thinking and talking, and its own values and loves. If you’re lucky enough to be able to relate to these different groups it means only that you can learn to love more things, or you can learn more stories, or more ways of being. Of course, I know that the values of different communities are often not compatible and you can feel like you’re being torn apart. But as a writer you have to be large and embrace many things.

Interviewer: We’d like to go back to another quote, “She sees both from within herself and slightly outside herself, constantly watching to determine whether she meets the expectation of masculine desire, having internalized his ideal image of beauty and femininity.” Could you talk more about the idea of having a divided consciousness, and your doubly marginalized role as female and ethnically Mennonite?

Kasdorf: Well, that quote is from “Preacher’s Striptease,” which is a very troubled essay about anxiety, and also about gender. The idea I was expressing is actually a major theme in film and visual theory, the theme of the male gaze which becomes internalized within the female. It’s also a prevalent idea in feminist theory that there is some ideal of beauty or desirability that women internalize within themselves and then constantly scrutinize themselves to see if they are meeting. It becomes active self-surveillance, and one is constantly aware of how one is being perceived by others. The idea that I was exploring was, in writing poetry, how do you live with this consciousness of how you’re being perceived?

One way this played out was when the first book came out and I was interviewed on National Public Radio. It was a strange experience because it was really clear to me that the interviewer had a very clear idea of what the story was going to be. She perceived it as, “Well, here’s this ethnic, country-girl who writes poems about this quaint place, and then she moved to New York City.” To her it was something sweet about the American story of immigration, but instead of coming from a distant place, the immigrant is coming from a rural community. There was no way that any amount of talking I could do in that interview could complicate her version of the story, and in fact I found myself cooperating with it, because I know that’s the story they want to hear. I felt ashamed, but also completely helpless. Another example might be the image of the female author. Say that this woman decides to be a writer, what’s the story about what that writer can say, how angry can she be, how explicit can she be? How can you tell your truth so that people can hear it? How do you negotiate between what you know of yourself and what people believe when they see you? How can you know yourself at all, with all this information being projected upon you?

Interviewer: You said something about people reading your books with the assumption that they are autobiographical. Do you find that to be true in your writing, or is there a distancing that happens as you move along in a poem?

Kasdorf: First of all, I’ll put the cards on the table and say that I do use an autobiographical “I”. But I would also say that it isn’t all of me all the time, it’s me in the moment that I was making that poem. So in that sense it’s a lie, it’s not an artifact of life, but rather a creation. Right now, there’s a lot of talk about the death of the author and the rise of the reader, and a dismissal of the sense of authenticity of the individual voice. But you have to keep in mind that those things are not necessarily true of people who are writing out of communities that haven’t had a voice in literature. How can you talk about the death of the author when there weren’t any authors to begin with? I don’t think you can read literature that comes out of ethnic communities and even literature that comes out of women’s experience through those same lenses.

Interviewer: Can you talk more about what the difference would be when looking through a woman’s lens?

Kasdorf: The difference is that women don’t have enough stories yet to dismiss narrative or to talk about the notion of the first person as being faux authentic. There aren’t enough stories yet written in the first person that explore certain types of experience to start doing this high theory on it. People are questioning reading fiction and poetry as representative of groups but there’s also a move to write that all off as identity politics, and as simplistic, but I think that all those dismissals are easy ways to not pay attention to these minority voices that are still surfacing. We don’t have enough stories coming from minority groups to apply what is essentially a theory of white, European and North American patriarchal high-culture.
Interviewer: We noticed that Sleeping Preacher seems to have a clear, connecting theme concentrated on oral tradition and the community, but that Eve’s Striptease is more of a collage, putting many different experiences and points of view together. Was the way you put each book together different?

Kasdorf: As is, I think, the case with many people’s first book, Sleeping Preacher was written over 10 years, during which time I was writing one poem after the other. The themes of that book of family and history were important then because they were coming out of this sense of growing mindfulness of what home was, as many people experience when they move away and find they have the distance and maybe even the language to recognize the particularities of where they came from. When you’re growing up there it’s just the world, but when you get away from it, you realize “Oh, not every family is like my family, not every church is like my church.” So Sleeping Preacher is essentially an exploration of ethnic identity and religious identity, a story about leaving home and going to a big, multicultural city.

So after the experience of publishing your first book, you lose your innocence about your readership and also about your own intentionality. As I was writing Eve’s Striptease, I believed the book would be a kind of investigation into how we know what we know about gender and marriage and sexuality. Both of the books are about identity. I think they’re very much located in place and time, and self-obsessed in certain ways.

Interviewer: How does your next book fit in?

Kasdorf: I’m seeing the next book as a kind of exploration of both public and private subjects. It is inspired partially by experiences of being a mother during wartime, since I was pregnant during 9/11 and have seen how the country has changed since then. I definitely felt conflicting pulls, both to be interested in the world and to just protect this little life. I think also that when people have children they have to start thinking in terms of generations, not just the self. All of this has made me feel more connected to the basic questions about life in the world. I’m also working on trying to depart from my usual tone in these pieces, to be a little lighter even though it’s about war and raising a child. The book also has a lot to do with language and the place of literature in all of this.

Interviewer: What do you think the place of literature is?

Kasdorf: Well, language is what we have in common, and I think literature can help us defend a language from its misuses. And by its misuses I mean certain kinds of media, certain kinds of lying that are used to justify self-interested behaviors and violence. I see literature and the work of writing as the work of trying to keep language useful as a tool for making meaning and telling truths in a world of big lies.