Sunday, May 27, 2007
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Annie Dillard, "Notes For Young Writers"
After I left Chapel Hill, I thought of many things I wish I'd said to you. Here are some of them.
Dedicate (donate, give all) your life to something larger than yourself and pleasure to the largest thing you can: to God, to relieving suffering, to contributing to knowledge, to adding to literature, or something else. Happiness lies this way, and it beats pleasure hollow.
A great physicist taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He published many important books and papers. Often he had an idea in the middle of the night. He rose from his bed, took a shower, washed his hair, and shaved. He dressed completely, in a clean shirt, in polished shoes, a jacket and tie. Then he sat at his desk and wrote down his idea. A friend of mine asked him why he put himself through all that rigamarole. "Why," he said, surprised at the question, "in honor of physics!"
(Incidentally, he had been an illiterate little Arab boy without any schooling whatever, who had hitchhiked somewhere once when he was thirteen or fourteen. The driver who picked him up chatted with him for five hours, and recognized that the boy had a genius for mathematical thinking. Consequently the driver educated the boy, through his doctorate abroad, at his own expense. This sort of thing happens in Arabic countries, where the people actually practice their religion.)
If you have a choice, live at least a year in very different parts of the country.
Never, ever, get yourself into a situation where you have nothing to do but write and read. You'll go into a depression. You have to be doing something good for the world, something undeniably useful; you need exercise, too, and people.
Read for pleasure. If you like Tolstoy, read Tolstoy; if you like Dostoevsky, read Dostoevsky. Push it a little, but don't read something totally alien to your nature and then say, "I'll never be able to write like that." Of course you won't. Read books you'd like to write. If you want to write literature, read literature. Write books you'd like to read. Follow your own weirdness.
You'll have time to read after college.
Don't worry about what you do the first year after college. It's not what you'll be doing for the rest of your life.
People in the arts, I read once, take about eight years just to figure out which art they're in! Notify your parents.
MFA and MA writing programs are great fun, and many are cheap or free.
Learn grammar. Get a grammar book and read it two or three times a year (Strunk and White is a classic.)
Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools you have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go. (If you get it wrong, any least thing, the editor will throw your manuscript out.) Punctuation is not like musical notation; it doesn't indicate the length of pauses, but instead signifies logical relations. There are all sorts of people out there who know these things very well. You have to be among them even to begin.
Check the spelling; proofread. Get someone else to proofread, too.
Don't use passive verb constructions. You can rewrite any sentence.
Don't misspell dialect. Let the syntax and words suggest the pronunciation.
Don't use any word for "walk" or "say" except "walk" or "say." I know your sixth grade teacher told you otherwise. She told me otherwise, too, and is still telling her sixth graders otherwise.
Always locate the reader in time and space again and again. Beginning writers rush in to feelings, to interior lives. Instead, stick to surface appearances; hit the five senses; give the history of the person and the place, and the look of the person and the place. Use first and last names. As you write, stick everything in a place and a time.
Don't describe feelings.
The way to a reader's emotions is, oddly enough, through the senses.
If something in your narrative or poem is important, give it proportional space. I mean, actual inches. The reader has to spend time with a subject to care about it. Don't shy away from your big scenes; stretch them out.
Writing in scenes doesn't mean in television scenes. No dull dialogue: "Honey, I'm home! Where's the beer?" "In the refrigerator!" (I think most fiction contains far too much dialogue.)
Capturing the typical isn't a virtue. Only making something new and interesting is. If you find life dull and people hateful, keep thinking until you can see it another way. Why would any reader pick up a book to read a detailed description of all that is most annoying in his daily life?
Don't use any extra words. A sentence is a machine; it has a job to do. An extra word in a sentence is like a sock in a machine.
Buy hardback fiction and poetry. Request hardback fiction and poetry as gifts from everyone you know. Give hardback fiction and poetry as gifts to everyone. No shirt or sweater ever changed a life. Never complain about publishing if you don't buy hardcover fiction and poetry regularly.
Buy books from independent booksellers, not chain stores. For complicated reasons, chain stores are helping stamp out literary publishing.
(Similarly, register and vote. If you don't vote, don't complain.)
Write for readers. Ask yourself how every sentence and every line will strike the reader. That way you can see if you're misleading, or boring, the reader. Of course it's hard to read your work when you've just written it; it all seems clear and powerful. Put it away and rewrite it later. Don't keep reading it over, or you'll have to wait longer to see it afresh.
Don't write about yourself. Think of books you like. Isn't it their subjects you like best? Boring people talk about themselves.
The work's unity is more important than anything else about it. Those digressions that were so much fun to write must go.
Usually you will have to rewrite the beginning the first quarter or third of whatever it is. Don't waste much time polishing this; you'll just have to take a deep breath and throw it away anyway, once you finish the work and have a clearer sense of what it is about. Tear up the runway; it helped you take off, and you don't need it now. This is why some writers say it takes "courage" to write. It does. Over and over you must choose the book over your own wishes and feelings.
Ignore your feelings about your work. These are an occupational hazard. If you are writing a book, keep working at it, deeper and deeper, when you feel it is awful; keep revising and improving it when you feel it is wonderful. When you are young and starting out, often it is better, however, to write something else than to labor over something that was a bad idea in the first place. Write something else; then write something else; then write something else. No matter how experienced you are, there is no correlation, either direct or inverse, between your immediate feelings about your work's quality and its actual quality. All you can do is ignore your feelings altogether. It's hard to do, but you can learn to do it.
When you are writing full time (three to four hours a day), go in the room with the book every day, regardless of your feelings. If you skip a day it will take three painful days to get to believing in the work again. Have a place where you can leave the work out and open, so you don't have to get it all out and spread before you can start again.
The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write. You have many years. You can develop a taste for good literature gradually. Keep a list of books you want to read. You soon learn that "classics" are books that are endlessly interesting almost all of them. You can keep rereading them all your life about every ten years and various ones light up for you at different stages of your life.
Don't find an interesting true story a life, say, or a historical incident, and decide to turn it into a novel instead of a biograpy or a historical account. The novel based on fact is a muddy hybrid; readers can't tell what's true. Publishers won't touch these. Write it as nonfiction if you want to write it.
If you want to write novels (and if you buy hardcover novels regularly), go ahead and write novels. Publishing has changed, however, and novels are very difficult to publish. If you want to improve the odds that people will read what you write, write nonfiction narrative.
For fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, the more research you do, the more materials you will have to play with. You are writing for readers a very educated bunch in this country. It's hard and interesting to tell them something they don't know. The more you read, the better you will know what they know.
No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you see the work's possibilities. In every work, there's an inherent impossibility which you discover sooner or later some intrinsic reason why this will never be able to proceed. You can figure out ways around it. Often the way around it is to throw out, painfully, the one idea you started with.
Publication is not a gauge of excellence. This is harder to learn than anything about publishing, and very important. Formerly, if a manuscript was "good," it "merited" publication. This has not been true for at least twenty years, but the news hasn't filtered out to change the belief. People say, "Why, Faulkner couldn't get published today!" as if exaggerating. In fact, Faulkner certainly couldn't, and publishers don't deny it. The market for hardback fiction is rich married or widowed women over fifty (until you all start buying hardback books). The junior editors who choose new work are New York women in their twenties, who are interested in what is chic in New York that week, and who have become experts in what the older women will buy in hardcover. Eight books of nonfiction appear for every book of fiction. The chance of any manuscript coming into a publishing house and getting published is 1 in 3,000. (Agents send in most of these manuscripts. Most agents won't touch fiction.)
When a magazine rejects your story or poem, it doesn't mean it wasn't "good" enough. It means that magazine thought its particular readers didn't need that exact story or poem. Editors think of readers: what's in it for the reader? There is a cult of celebrity, too, in this country, and many magazines publish only famous people, and reject better work by unknown people.
You need to know these things somewhere in the back of your mind, and you need to forget them and write whatever you're going to write.
from IMAGE: A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS & RELIGION, #16, Summer 1997
Dedicate (donate, give all) your life to something larger than yourself and pleasure to the largest thing you can: to God, to relieving suffering, to contributing to knowledge, to adding to literature, or something else. Happiness lies this way, and it beats pleasure hollow.
A great physicist taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He published many important books and papers. Often he had an idea in the middle of the night. He rose from his bed, took a shower, washed his hair, and shaved. He dressed completely, in a clean shirt, in polished shoes, a jacket and tie. Then he sat at his desk and wrote down his idea. A friend of mine asked him why he put himself through all that rigamarole. "Why," he said, surprised at the question, "in honor of physics!"
(Incidentally, he had been an illiterate little Arab boy without any schooling whatever, who had hitchhiked somewhere once when he was thirteen or fourteen. The driver who picked him up chatted with him for five hours, and recognized that the boy had a genius for mathematical thinking. Consequently the driver educated the boy, through his doctorate abroad, at his own expense. This sort of thing happens in Arabic countries, where the people actually practice their religion.)
*
If you have a choice, live at least a year in very different parts of the country.
Never, ever, get yourself into a situation where you have nothing to do but write and read. You'll go into a depression. You have to be doing something good for the world, something undeniably useful; you need exercise, too, and people.
Read for pleasure. If you like Tolstoy, read Tolstoy; if you like Dostoevsky, read Dostoevsky. Push it a little, but don't read something totally alien to your nature and then say, "I'll never be able to write like that." Of course you won't. Read books you'd like to write. If you want to write literature, read literature. Write books you'd like to read. Follow your own weirdness.
You'll have time to read after college.
Don't worry about what you do the first year after college. It's not what you'll be doing for the rest of your life.
People in the arts, I read once, take about eight years just to figure out which art they're in! Notify your parents.
MFA and MA writing programs are great fun, and many are cheap or free.
Learn grammar. Get a grammar book and read it two or three times a year (Strunk and White is a classic.)
Learn punctuation; it is your little drum set, one of the few tools you have to signal the reader where the beats and emphases go. (If you get it wrong, any least thing, the editor will throw your manuscript out.) Punctuation is not like musical notation; it doesn't indicate the length of pauses, but instead signifies logical relations. There are all sorts of people out there who know these things very well. You have to be among them even to begin.
Check the spelling; proofread. Get someone else to proofread, too.
Don't use passive verb constructions. You can rewrite any sentence.
Don't misspell dialect. Let the syntax and words suggest the pronunciation.
Don't use any word for "walk" or "say" except "walk" or "say." I know your sixth grade teacher told you otherwise. She told me otherwise, too, and is still telling her sixth graders otherwise.
Always locate the reader in time and space again and again. Beginning writers rush in to feelings, to interior lives. Instead, stick to surface appearances; hit the five senses; give the history of the person and the place, and the look of the person and the place. Use first and last names. As you write, stick everything in a place and a time.
Don't describe feelings.
The way to a reader's emotions is, oddly enough, through the senses.
If something in your narrative or poem is important, give it proportional space. I mean, actual inches. The reader has to spend time with a subject to care about it. Don't shy away from your big scenes; stretch them out.
Writing in scenes doesn't mean in television scenes. No dull dialogue: "Honey, I'm home! Where's the beer?" "In the refrigerator!" (I think most fiction contains far too much dialogue.)
Capturing the typical isn't a virtue. Only making something new and interesting is. If you find life dull and people hateful, keep thinking until you can see it another way. Why would any reader pick up a book to read a detailed description of all that is most annoying in his daily life?
Don't use any extra words. A sentence is a machine; it has a job to do. An extra word in a sentence is like a sock in a machine.
Buy hardback fiction and poetry. Request hardback fiction and poetry as gifts from everyone you know. Give hardback fiction and poetry as gifts to everyone. No shirt or sweater ever changed a life. Never complain about publishing if you don't buy hardcover fiction and poetry regularly.
Buy books from independent booksellers, not chain stores. For complicated reasons, chain stores are helping stamp out literary publishing.
(Similarly, register and vote. If you don't vote, don't complain.)
Write for readers. Ask yourself how every sentence and every line will strike the reader. That way you can see if you're misleading, or boring, the reader. Of course it's hard to read your work when you've just written it; it all seems clear and powerful. Put it away and rewrite it later. Don't keep reading it over, or you'll have to wait longer to see it afresh.
Don't write about yourself. Think of books you like. Isn't it their subjects you like best? Boring people talk about themselves.
The work's unity is more important than anything else about it. Those digressions that were so much fun to write must go.
Usually you will have to rewrite the beginning the first quarter or third of whatever it is. Don't waste much time polishing this; you'll just have to take a deep breath and throw it away anyway, once you finish the work and have a clearer sense of what it is about. Tear up the runway; it helped you take off, and you don't need it now. This is why some writers say it takes "courage" to write. It does. Over and over you must choose the book over your own wishes and feelings.
Ignore your feelings about your work. These are an occupational hazard. If you are writing a book, keep working at it, deeper and deeper, when you feel it is awful; keep revising and improving it when you feel it is wonderful. When you are young and starting out, often it is better, however, to write something else than to labor over something that was a bad idea in the first place. Write something else; then write something else; then write something else. No matter how experienced you are, there is no correlation, either direct or inverse, between your immediate feelings about your work's quality and its actual quality. All you can do is ignore your feelings altogether. It's hard to do, but you can learn to do it.
When you are writing full time (three to four hours a day), go in the room with the book every day, regardless of your feelings. If you skip a day it will take three painful days to get to believing in the work again. Have a place where you can leave the work out and open, so you don't have to get it all out and spread before you can start again.
The more you read, the more you will write. The better the stuff you read, the better the stuff you will write. You have many years. You can develop a taste for good literature gradually. Keep a list of books you want to read. You soon learn that "classics" are books that are endlessly interesting almost all of them. You can keep rereading them all your life about every ten years and various ones light up for you at different stages of your life.
Don't find an interesting true story a life, say, or a historical incident, and decide to turn it into a novel instead of a biograpy or a historical account. The novel based on fact is a muddy hybrid; readers can't tell what's true. Publishers won't touch these. Write it as nonfiction if you want to write it.
If you want to write novels (and if you buy hardcover novels regularly), go ahead and write novels. Publishing has changed, however, and novels are very difficult to publish. If you want to improve the odds that people will read what you write, write nonfiction narrative.
For fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, the more research you do, the more materials you will have to play with. You are writing for readers a very educated bunch in this country. It's hard and interesting to tell them something they don't know. The more you read, the better you will know what they know.
No one can help you if you're stuck in a work. Only you can figure a way out, because only you see the work's possibilities. In every work, there's an inherent impossibility which you discover sooner or later some intrinsic reason why this will never be able to proceed. You can figure out ways around it. Often the way around it is to throw out, painfully, the one idea you started with.
Publication is not a gauge of excellence. This is harder to learn than anything about publishing, and very important. Formerly, if a manuscript was "good," it "merited" publication. This has not been true for at least twenty years, but the news hasn't filtered out to change the belief. People say, "Why, Faulkner couldn't get published today!" as if exaggerating. In fact, Faulkner certainly couldn't, and publishers don't deny it. The market for hardback fiction is rich married or widowed women over fifty (until you all start buying hardback books). The junior editors who choose new work are New York women in their twenties, who are interested in what is chic in New York that week, and who have become experts in what the older women will buy in hardcover. Eight books of nonfiction appear for every book of fiction. The chance of any manuscript coming into a publishing house and getting published is 1 in 3,000. (Agents send in most of these manuscripts. Most agents won't touch fiction.)
When a magazine rejects your story or poem, it doesn't mean it wasn't "good" enough. It means that magazine thought its particular readers didn't need that exact story or poem. Editors think of readers: what's in it for the reader? There is a cult of celebrity, too, in this country, and many magazines publish only famous people, and reject better work by unknown people.
You need to know these things somewhere in the back of your mind, and you need to forget them and write whatever you're going to write.
from IMAGE: A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS & RELIGION, #16, Summer 1997
Monday, May 14, 2007
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Billy Collins, "The Movies"
I would like to watch a movie tonight
in which a stranger rides into town
or where someone embarks on a long journey,
a movie with the promise of danger,
danger visited upon the citizens of the town
by the stranger who rides in,
or the danger that will befall the person
on his or her long hazardous journey—
it hardly matters to me
so long as I am not in danger,
and not much danger lies in watching
a movie, you might as well agree.
I would prefer to watch this movie at home
than walk out in the cold to a theater
and stand on line for a ticket.
I want to watch it lying down
with the bed hitched up to the television
the way they'd hitch up a stagecoach
to a team of horses
so the movie could pull me along
the crooked, dusty road of its adventures.
I would stay out of harm's way
by identifying with the characters
like the bartender in the movie about the stranger
who rides into town,
the fellow who knows enough to duck
when a chair shatters the mirror over the bar.
Or the stationmaster
in the movie about the perilous journey,
the fellow who fishes a gold watch from his pocket,
helps a lady onto the train,
and hands up a heavy satchel
to the man with the mustache
and the dangerous eyes,
waving the all-clear to the engineer.
Then the train would pull out of the station
and the movie would continue without me.
And at the end of the day
I would hang up my oval hat on a hook
and take the shortcut home to my two dogs,
my faithful, amorous wife, and my children—
Molly, Lucinda, and Harold, Jr.
from "Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems" by Billy Collins
Garrison Keillor reads this - wonderfully - at The Writers Almanac for Thursday, April 12, where there's also a link to buy the Collins book. You can subscribe to Garry The K's podcast through iTunes. Thanks, Spencer, for the tip.
More about the movies at Soul Food Movies
in which a stranger rides into town
or where someone embarks on a long journey,
a movie with the promise of danger,
danger visited upon the citizens of the town
by the stranger who rides in,
or the danger that will befall the person
on his or her long hazardous journey—
it hardly matters to me
so long as I am not in danger,
and not much danger lies in watching
a movie, you might as well agree.
I would prefer to watch this movie at home
than walk out in the cold to a theater
and stand on line for a ticket.
I want to watch it lying down
with the bed hitched up to the television
the way they'd hitch up a stagecoach
to a team of horses
so the movie could pull me along
the crooked, dusty road of its adventures.
I would stay out of harm's way
by identifying with the characters
like the bartender in the movie about the stranger
who rides into town,
the fellow who knows enough to duck
when a chair shatters the mirror over the bar.
Or the stationmaster
in the movie about the perilous journey,
the fellow who fishes a gold watch from his pocket,
helps a lady onto the train,
and hands up a heavy satchel
to the man with the mustache
and the dangerous eyes,
waving the all-clear to the engineer.
Then the train would pull out of the station
and the movie would continue without me.
And at the end of the day
I would hang up my oval hat on a hook
and take the shortcut home to my two dogs,
my faithful, amorous wife, and my children—
Molly, Lucinda, and Harold, Jr.
from "Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems" by Billy Collins
Garrison Keillor reads this - wonderfully - at The Writers Almanac for Thursday, April 12, where there's also a link to buy the Collins book. You can subscribe to Garry The K's podcast through iTunes. Thanks, Spencer, for the tip.
More about the movies at Soul Food Movies
Friday, March 30, 2007
J.R.R. Tolkien, "Tales That Really Matter"
"I don't like anything here at all," said Frodo, "step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid."
"Yes, that's so," said Sam. "And we shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually - their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on - and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same - like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?"
"I wonder," said Frodo. "But I don't know. And that's the way of a real tale. Take any one that you're fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don't know. And you don't want them to."
"No sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that's a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it - and the Silmaril went on and came to Earendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We've got - you've got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales ever end?"
"No, they never end as tales," said Frodo. "But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later - or sooner."
from The Lord Of The Rings, Book IV, Chapter 8, "The Stairs of Cirith Ungol", by J.R.R. Tolkien
"Yes, that's so," said Sam. "And we shouldn't be here at all, if we'd known more about it before we started. But I suppose it's often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that's not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually - their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn't. And if they had, we shouldn't know, because they'd have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on - and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same - like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren't always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we've fallen into?"
"I wonder," said Frodo. "But I don't know. And that's the way of a real tale. Take any one that you're fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don't know. And you don't want them to."
"No sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that's a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it - and the Silmaril went on and came to Earendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We've got - you've got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales ever end?"
"No, they never end as tales," said Frodo. "But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later - or sooner."
from The Lord Of The Rings, Book IV, Chapter 8, "The Stairs of Cirith Ungol", by J.R.R. Tolkien
Wendell Berry, "The Story In Which We Are Taking Part"
The significance - and ultimately the quality - of the work we do is determined by our understanding of the story in which we are taking part. If we think of ourselves as merely biological creatures, whose story is determined by genetics or environment or history or economics or technology, then, however pleasant or painful the part we play, it cannot matter much. Its significance is that of mere self-concern. "It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing," as Macbeth says when he has "supp'd full with horrors" and is "aweary of the sun."
If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of mortal human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures - then all our acts have a supreme significance.
from "Christianity And The Survival Of Creation" by Wendell Berry
If, on the other hand, we believe that we are living souls, God's dust and God's breath, acting our parts among other creatures all made of the same dust and breath as ourselves; and if we understand that we are free, within the obvious limits of mortal human life, to do evil or good to ourselves and to the other creatures - then all our acts have a supreme significance.
from "Christianity And The Survival Of Creation" by Wendell Berry
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Ron Reed, "Redeeming The Time: Live Theatre"
Is the theatre really dead? Everyone asked that question in the early Fifties, and it probably wasn't new even then. Simon and Garfunkel reiterated it in 1966 and now, a few years into this media-saturated new millennium, it's as timely and embarrassing a question as ever.
We were a dominant cultural force a mere hundred years ago, the place to go for communal stories, public dreams. Until our flashy celluloid kid sister showed up to hog the spotlight, joined onstage by her even brasher little broadcast brother. Their economies of scale and marketing muscle mean live theatre now occupies a dimly lit corner of the public stage, shabbily costumed and almost unnoticed, somewhere near the stage-left exit.
Post-modern culture is notoriously – and increasingly – word-resistant and image-oriented, not to mention fractured, hurried and advertised-to. Fast, cheap and out of control. (Maybe it's not theatre that's dying, maybe it's our culture that's killing itself). Consumers – which is what we're being reduced to – aren't likely even to hear about what's going on at the local skit factory: we can't afford the billboards, and electronic media looks after its own. Even when word does leak out, this language-rooted art form lacks the jump cuts, digital effects and – let's face it – graphic violence and sex that sells its flashier sibs.
So. Is the theatre really dead? If by dead you mean we're not the most visible cultural juggernaut in the neighbourhood then, yes, we're as near-dead now as thirty-five or fifty years ago – not completely, but pretty much. Us and the poets, the string quartets and the speakers of Esperanto. But if you mean dead as in dead - not breathing, no pulse, stage lights off, nobody home – I must report that the rumours are, as always, greatly exaggerated. Theatre is live. Very much so.
And that's the point, really. Liveness. Because people still, and always will, need that one essential, irreducible distinctive of our miraculous, marginal, indispensable art form. Maybe now more than ever.
A lot of us are getting more than a little sick of the whole franchised, hyped, impersonal show. Forget Reality TV, we want Real. It became obvious in the Eighties that TV church wasn't church at all – however postmodern we might get, we'll always be human, we'll always need human contact, flesh and blood and bread and wine. And what's true of church is true of theatre – screens won't do. It's not just our sermons and small groups that need to live and breathe, it's our stories. We crave this – to breathe common air, feel the actor's closeness, smell the grease paint, roar with the crowd. We're wary and weary of words, but what if those words take flesh and live among us?
Stuart Scadron-Wattles rightly observes that the best, truest and most vital theatre – Necessary, not Obligatory, Theatre – does powerfully what we've always needed story to do. Without preaching message, it nonetheless proposes an order to the chaos of fragmented lives – and God knows they're as chaotic and fragmented as ever, just now. It engages audience and artist in a tangible kind of community, as co-creators held together by the distinctly participative and permissive imagination that can make theatre an experience of transcendence. Far from being culturally peripheral or irrelevant, Necessary Theatre is essential to its community, and to the lives of its audience: "it reports from the front of cultural change," and because it is produced locally (rather than shipped in bulk from massive narrative warehouses thousands of miles away), it speaks distinctively and potently to the specific concerns of its community.
Theatre & Company, which Stuart founded, is as committed to serving its region (Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario) as it is to a particular spiritual or artistic mandate. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the company's spiritual/artistic mandate is worked out within the particularities of a specific geographical calling. This dynamic distinguishes all the professional theatres expressing a Judeo-Christian mandate, from Lamb's Players in San Diego and Seattle's Taproot Theatre, for example, to the remarkable proliferation of such companies north of the border – Toronto's Brookstone Theatre, Rosebud Theatre in Alberta, Pacific Theatre and the Chemainus Theatre Festival on the west coast. Live theatre may not be as visible in the trans-continental mass market as film, television or published media, but it survives by tuning its ear to its proximate community, telling the specific stories those particular people are hungry to hear. What guarantees that this home-grown, humble art form remains Necessary and essential is its very smallness, its intimacy, its specificity. Generality, as Stanislavsky said, is the enemy of art.
It is fascinating to me that, by and large, these companies were founded by evangelical Christians, even though – and this must be stressed – their mandates were and are not evangelistic. (It may also be significant that many of these people would now be wary about labeling themselves "evangelical," though all are still Christians). There have always been Christians involved in the theatre, though thirty years ago they mostly operated undercover, and I'm going to guess they were mostly Lutherans and Catholics and Anglicans who lacked their evangelical cousins' guardedness toward the arts. But I find it remarkable that so much vital, culturally-engaged work that Christians are now doing springs from soil that until so recently grew mostly gospel singers and evangelists.
Forty years ago, the prevailing Evangelical stance toward theatre was the same as its stance toward culture in general – guarded skepticism, even outright antagonism. But Baptists made the mistake of buying TVs, to watch Billy Graham and Monday night football. Once those square-eyed Trojan horses infiltrated evangelical living rooms, the mighty fortress of cultural separationism was breached and it was only a matter of time until the kids were going to movies and trying out for the school play. When they left home for theatre school twenty-five years ago, they were hard-pressed to find believing peers, let alone role models or mentors, but their children are now signing up for actor training and playwriting workshops with no clue that their grandparents didn't even go to the movies. Indeed, the theatre program they attend may be at the very college where Grandpa learned his anti-culture theology. I don't know if Wheaton students were allowed to go to plays thirty years ago: now they're making them.
Other signs of life. After a decade or more when no new religious-mandate professional companies were birthed, recent years have seen new initiatives in New York City (the Salvation Army's Theatre 315), Orlando (The Vine Theatre) and Atlanta (Art Within), with a some Baylor theatre grads about to raise the curtain on a new venture in Dallas. Even the theologians are catching on: Jeremy Begbie, whose notion of "doing theology through the arts" is all the rage in certain circles, and Hans Urs von Balthazar, the It Boy of Catholic theology, share an appreciation for theatre their pastor-shaping predecessors lacked.
Good thing. Increasingly, the churches those seminarians end up pastoring have ministers of drama, acting workshops and even well-equipped theatres. Congregations are mounting full-scale productions of real plays, embracing the power of theatre-making to forge community and appeal to a generation of non-church-goers who don't want to be preached at, but are hungry for both story and authentic human contact.
The church is catching on to theatre just as theatre is catching on to church – or if not church, at least what churches have been reaching for all these years. I don't know if it's because everybody got all superstitious as the millennium approached, or if the collapse of the World Trade Towers put not only fear but the fear of God into people. Or maybe it's just because Christians have been emerging from their hidey-holes and getting involved in the culture, until we've reached the point where enough of them know enough of us that we all realize there's not really an Us and a Them anymore.
Whatever it is, there's no denying that the arts community's suspicious antipathy toward Christians and Christianity is being replaced by – dare I imagine it? – an almost respectful interest in what we've been on about all along.
Live theatre is an up-close and local thing, which makes it harder to generalize about Theatre In North America than about, say, film or fiction, which have a geographically dispersed audience and impact. So let me reflect on what I've seen over the past twenty years here in Vancouver, on the Emersonian principle that what's true of me is true of the universe.
When Pacific Theatre was founded in 1984, the Christians portrayed on stage – or screen, for that matter – were hypocrites, manipulators and sex abusers. Most new plays didn't deal with spiritual things, except in the vaguest and flakiest terms. Now I see spiritual enquiry in every second play I attend, and as often as not Christian characters are portrayed with the same humanity as anybody else – neither more nor less fallen, neither more nor less holy.
For the first decade of our history, Pacific Theatre was excluded from pretty much every aspect of the cultural mainstream: no government arts funding, no reviews, no admission to the Theatre Alliance. But the second ten years of our story has seen a dramatic reversal. Critics cover all our shows and even applaud the company's religious mandate, government agencies fund and encourage our work, and the professional theatre community welcomes us at the table, gives us our fair share of award nominations and committee assignments, comes to see our work.
Have we "won the right to be heard"? I suppose, partly. Sheer survival counts for something, and eventually people had to realize we weren't the proselytizing monsters they feared we were. But more, I believe, something has shifted in the zeitgeist. People are not only willing to tolerate us, they want to hear what we have to say, find out our spiritual survival strategies. Modernism, and its mystery-denying faith in science and pure rationality, has all but expired. Post-modernism's scorn for narrative and meaning don't wash any more. People – some people, anyway – want Mystery and humanity.
It astounds me that the Pacific Theatre plays which end up being produced at companies with no religious mandate are our most religious ones. Who would ever have believed that Tent Meeting, a play about gospel quartets and revival meetings and climaxing with an altar call, and Espresso, where the pursuing lover is Christ himself, would be performed at regional theatres across Canada?
Twenty years ago, non-propagandist scripts exploring spiritual experience with any sort of Christian resonance just weren't out there – we had to write our own. Which was fine: it made us nurture playwrights who create highly specific works for our context which – Emerson, again – end up having far wider impact than anything confined to our stage. But that's no longer our only recourse: my next season includes two new works from Canadian theatres with no faith mandate; Halo, in which the face of Christ appears on the wall of a Cape Breton donut shop, and The Domino Heart, about the spiritual consequences of an organ transplant. We're no longer the only game in town. Thank God.
Still, as spiritually open as theatre may now be, our days as Belle of the cultural Ball are long since passed. But they can't stop us from dancing. There will always be people born with story in their bones, and a compulsion to incarnate them in front of other people. Because the movies only need a handful of us – a flick with maybe fifty speaking parts will be seen by how many million people? – we find other ways to live out our calling. That's what the stage is for.
Something is stirring in live theatre on our continent. It may be that ours is the most peripheral of the narrative arts, with the least visibility and the lowest attendance. But if the invisible God is indeed moving in the arts, it wouldn't surprise me to find him in the midst of the least and the lowest.
Originally appeared in IMAGE Journal #42, Spring 2004, as part of their 15th anniversary symposium on the future of the arts, "Redeeming The Time."
We were a dominant cultural force a mere hundred years ago, the place to go for communal stories, public dreams. Until our flashy celluloid kid sister showed up to hog the spotlight, joined onstage by her even brasher little broadcast brother. Their economies of scale and marketing muscle mean live theatre now occupies a dimly lit corner of the public stage, shabbily costumed and almost unnoticed, somewhere near the stage-left exit.
Post-modern culture is notoriously – and increasingly – word-resistant and image-oriented, not to mention fractured, hurried and advertised-to. Fast, cheap and out of control. (Maybe it's not theatre that's dying, maybe it's our culture that's killing itself). Consumers – which is what we're being reduced to – aren't likely even to hear about what's going on at the local skit factory: we can't afford the billboards, and electronic media looks after its own. Even when word does leak out, this language-rooted art form lacks the jump cuts, digital effects and – let's face it – graphic violence and sex that sells its flashier sibs.
So. Is the theatre really dead? If by dead you mean we're not the most visible cultural juggernaut in the neighbourhood then, yes, we're as near-dead now as thirty-five or fifty years ago – not completely, but pretty much. Us and the poets, the string quartets and the speakers of Esperanto. But if you mean dead as in dead - not breathing, no pulse, stage lights off, nobody home – I must report that the rumours are, as always, greatly exaggerated. Theatre is live. Very much so.
And that's the point, really. Liveness. Because people still, and always will, need that one essential, irreducible distinctive of our miraculous, marginal, indispensable art form. Maybe now more than ever.
A lot of us are getting more than a little sick of the whole franchised, hyped, impersonal show. Forget Reality TV, we want Real. It became obvious in the Eighties that TV church wasn't church at all – however postmodern we might get, we'll always be human, we'll always need human contact, flesh and blood and bread and wine. And what's true of church is true of theatre – screens won't do. It's not just our sermons and small groups that need to live and breathe, it's our stories. We crave this – to breathe common air, feel the actor's closeness, smell the grease paint, roar with the crowd. We're wary and weary of words, but what if those words take flesh and live among us?
Stuart Scadron-Wattles rightly observes that the best, truest and most vital theatre – Necessary, not Obligatory, Theatre – does powerfully what we've always needed story to do. Without preaching message, it nonetheless proposes an order to the chaos of fragmented lives – and God knows they're as chaotic and fragmented as ever, just now. It engages audience and artist in a tangible kind of community, as co-creators held together by the distinctly participative and permissive imagination that can make theatre an experience of transcendence. Far from being culturally peripheral or irrelevant, Necessary Theatre is essential to its community, and to the lives of its audience: "it reports from the front of cultural change," and because it is produced locally (rather than shipped in bulk from massive narrative warehouses thousands of miles away), it speaks distinctively and potently to the specific concerns of its community.
Theatre & Company, which Stuart founded, is as committed to serving its region (Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario) as it is to a particular spiritual or artistic mandate. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the company's spiritual/artistic mandate is worked out within the particularities of a specific geographical calling. This dynamic distinguishes all the professional theatres expressing a Judeo-Christian mandate, from Lamb's Players in San Diego and Seattle's Taproot Theatre, for example, to the remarkable proliferation of such companies north of the border – Toronto's Brookstone Theatre, Rosebud Theatre in Alberta, Pacific Theatre and the Chemainus Theatre Festival on the west coast. Live theatre may not be as visible in the trans-continental mass market as film, television or published media, but it survives by tuning its ear to its proximate community, telling the specific stories those particular people are hungry to hear. What guarantees that this home-grown, humble art form remains Necessary and essential is its very smallness, its intimacy, its specificity. Generality, as Stanislavsky said, is the enemy of art.
It is fascinating to me that, by and large, these companies were founded by evangelical Christians, even though – and this must be stressed – their mandates were and are not evangelistic. (It may also be significant that many of these people would now be wary about labeling themselves "evangelical," though all are still Christians). There have always been Christians involved in the theatre, though thirty years ago they mostly operated undercover, and I'm going to guess they were mostly Lutherans and Catholics and Anglicans who lacked their evangelical cousins' guardedness toward the arts. But I find it remarkable that so much vital, culturally-engaged work that Christians are now doing springs from soil that until so recently grew mostly gospel singers and evangelists.
Forty years ago, the prevailing Evangelical stance toward theatre was the same as its stance toward culture in general – guarded skepticism, even outright antagonism. But Baptists made the mistake of buying TVs, to watch Billy Graham and Monday night football. Once those square-eyed Trojan horses infiltrated evangelical living rooms, the mighty fortress of cultural separationism was breached and it was only a matter of time until the kids were going to movies and trying out for the school play. When they left home for theatre school twenty-five years ago, they were hard-pressed to find believing peers, let alone role models or mentors, but their children are now signing up for actor training and playwriting workshops with no clue that their grandparents didn't even go to the movies. Indeed, the theatre program they attend may be at the very college where Grandpa learned his anti-culture theology. I don't know if Wheaton students were allowed to go to plays thirty years ago: now they're making them.
Other signs of life. After a decade or more when no new religious-mandate professional companies were birthed, recent years have seen new initiatives in New York City (the Salvation Army's Theatre 315), Orlando (The Vine Theatre) and Atlanta (Art Within), with a some Baylor theatre grads about to raise the curtain on a new venture in Dallas. Even the theologians are catching on: Jeremy Begbie, whose notion of "doing theology through the arts" is all the rage in certain circles, and Hans Urs von Balthazar, the It Boy of Catholic theology, share an appreciation for theatre their pastor-shaping predecessors lacked.
Good thing. Increasingly, the churches those seminarians end up pastoring have ministers of drama, acting workshops and even well-equipped theatres. Congregations are mounting full-scale productions of real plays, embracing the power of theatre-making to forge community and appeal to a generation of non-church-goers who don't want to be preached at, but are hungry for both story and authentic human contact.
The church is catching on to theatre just as theatre is catching on to church – or if not church, at least what churches have been reaching for all these years. I don't know if it's because everybody got all superstitious as the millennium approached, or if the collapse of the World Trade Towers put not only fear but the fear of God into people. Or maybe it's just because Christians have been emerging from their hidey-holes and getting involved in the culture, until we've reached the point where enough of them know enough of us that we all realize there's not really an Us and a Them anymore.
Whatever it is, there's no denying that the arts community's suspicious antipathy toward Christians and Christianity is being replaced by – dare I imagine it? – an almost respectful interest in what we've been on about all along.
Live theatre is an up-close and local thing, which makes it harder to generalize about Theatre In North America than about, say, film or fiction, which have a geographically dispersed audience and impact. So let me reflect on what I've seen over the past twenty years here in Vancouver, on the Emersonian principle that what's true of me is true of the universe.
When Pacific Theatre was founded in 1984, the Christians portrayed on stage – or screen, for that matter – were hypocrites, manipulators and sex abusers. Most new plays didn't deal with spiritual things, except in the vaguest and flakiest terms. Now I see spiritual enquiry in every second play I attend, and as often as not Christian characters are portrayed with the same humanity as anybody else – neither more nor less fallen, neither more nor less holy.
For the first decade of our history, Pacific Theatre was excluded from pretty much every aspect of the cultural mainstream: no government arts funding, no reviews, no admission to the Theatre Alliance. But the second ten years of our story has seen a dramatic reversal. Critics cover all our shows and even applaud the company's religious mandate, government agencies fund and encourage our work, and the professional theatre community welcomes us at the table, gives us our fair share of award nominations and committee assignments, comes to see our work.
Have we "won the right to be heard"? I suppose, partly. Sheer survival counts for something, and eventually people had to realize we weren't the proselytizing monsters they feared we were. But more, I believe, something has shifted in the zeitgeist. People are not only willing to tolerate us, they want to hear what we have to say, find out our spiritual survival strategies. Modernism, and its mystery-denying faith in science and pure rationality, has all but expired. Post-modernism's scorn for narrative and meaning don't wash any more. People – some people, anyway – want Mystery and humanity.
It astounds me that the Pacific Theatre plays which end up being produced at companies with no religious mandate are our most religious ones. Who would ever have believed that Tent Meeting, a play about gospel quartets and revival meetings and climaxing with an altar call, and Espresso, where the pursuing lover is Christ himself, would be performed at regional theatres across Canada?
Twenty years ago, non-propagandist scripts exploring spiritual experience with any sort of Christian resonance just weren't out there – we had to write our own. Which was fine: it made us nurture playwrights who create highly specific works for our context which – Emerson, again – end up having far wider impact than anything confined to our stage. But that's no longer our only recourse: my next season includes two new works from Canadian theatres with no faith mandate; Halo, in which the face of Christ appears on the wall of a Cape Breton donut shop, and The Domino Heart, about the spiritual consequences of an organ transplant. We're no longer the only game in town. Thank God.
Still, as spiritually open as theatre may now be, our days as Belle of the cultural Ball are long since passed. But they can't stop us from dancing. There will always be people born with story in their bones, and a compulsion to incarnate them in front of other people. Because the movies only need a handful of us – a flick with maybe fifty speaking parts will be seen by how many million people? – we find other ways to live out our calling. That's what the stage is for.
Something is stirring in live theatre on our continent. It may be that ours is the most peripheral of the narrative arts, with the least visibility and the lowest attendance. But if the invisible God is indeed moving in the arts, it wouldn't surprise me to find him in the midst of the least and the lowest.
Originally appeared in IMAGE Journal #42, Spring 2004, as part of their 15th anniversary symposium on the future of the arts, "Redeeming The Time."
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Steven Soderbergh's Oscar Acceptance Speech
I want to thank anyone who spends part of their day creating. I don’t care if it’s a book, a film, a painting, a dance, a piece of theater, a piece of music. Anybody who spends part of their day sharing their experience with us. I think the world would be unlivable without art.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
For Lent, I'm giving up...
It's not
What you thought
When you first began it
You got
What you want
Now you can hardly stand it though,
By now you know
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
'Til you wise up
Prepare a list of what you need
Before you sign away the deed
'Cause it's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
'Til you wise up
No, it's not going to stop
'Til you wise up
No, it's not going to stop
So just...
Give up
Aimee Mann, "Wise Up"
What you thought
When you first began it
You got
What you want
Now you can hardly stand it though,
By now you know
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
'Til you wise up
Prepare a list of what you need
Before you sign away the deed
'Cause it's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
'Til you wise up
No, it's not going to stop
'Til you wise up
No, it's not going to stop
So just...
Give up
Aimee Mann, "Wise Up"
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
E15, "The Actor's Calling"
To grasp the full significance of life is the actor’s duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.
James Dean
Acting is about giving something away, handing yourself over to whatever role you are asked to play…
Alan Rickman
Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
Cecil Beaton
Regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
Thornton Wilder
The language of the body is the key that can unlock the soul.
Konstantin Stanislavsky
The camera doesn’t remind me of a gun, but it does remind me of a weapon. I believe the revolution will be fought with a camera, with films, and at a certain point guns will be unfeasible. Minds will be won in the theatre instead of on the battlefield.
Dennis Hopper
An actor, like every human being, has a very thin part of him which he uses all the time and which he considers to be himself. There is a vast area which is himself that he doesn’t know. By experimenting and taking risks a new process starts – what one actor once called a ‘number of drawers’ in himself that he has never opened.
Peter Brook
We don’t want bores in the theatre. Give us something that is different.
Dame Sybil Thorndike
If you want a bourgeois existence, you shouldn’t be an actor. You’re in the wrong profession.
Uta Hagen
Every now and then, when you’re on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It’s a sound you can’t get in movies or television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you’ve it them where they live.
Shelley Winters
He who is incapable of feeling strong passions, of being shaken by anger, of living in every sense of the word, will never be a good actor.
Sarah Bernhardt
Quotes from the prospectus of the East 15 Acting School, Essex, England
James Dean
Acting is about giving something away, handing yourself over to whatever role you are asked to play…
Alan Rickman
Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
Cecil Beaton
Regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
Thornton Wilder
The language of the body is the key that can unlock the soul.
Konstantin Stanislavsky
The camera doesn’t remind me of a gun, but it does remind me of a weapon. I believe the revolution will be fought with a camera, with films, and at a certain point guns will be unfeasible. Minds will be won in the theatre instead of on the battlefield.
Dennis Hopper
An actor, like every human being, has a very thin part of him which he uses all the time and which he considers to be himself. There is a vast area which is himself that he doesn’t know. By experimenting and taking risks a new process starts – what one actor once called a ‘number of drawers’ in himself that he has never opened.
Peter Brook
We don’t want bores in the theatre. Give us something that is different.
Dame Sybil Thorndike
If you want a bourgeois existence, you shouldn’t be an actor. You’re in the wrong profession.
Uta Hagen
Every now and then, when you’re on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It’s a sound you can’t get in movies or television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you’ve it them where they live.
Shelley Winters
He who is incapable of feeling strong passions, of being shaken by anger, of living in every sense of the word, will never be a good actor.
Sarah Bernhardt
Quotes from the prospectus of the East 15 Acting School, Essex, England
Friday, February 16, 2007
Aaron Zeitlin poem
Praise me, says God, and I will know that you love me.
Curse me, says God, and I will know that you love me.
Praise me or curse me
And I will know that you love me.
Sing out my graces, says God,
Raise your fist against me and revile, says God.
Sing out graces or revile,
Reviling is also a kind of praise,
says God.
But if you sit fenced off in your apathy,
says God,
If you sit entrenched in: "I don't give a hang," says God,
If you look at the stars and yawn,
If you see suffering and don't cry out,
If you don't praise and you don't revile,
Then I created you in vain, says God.
Aaron Zeitlin
Curse me, says God, and I will know that you love me.
Praise me or curse me
And I will know that you love me.
Sing out my graces, says God,
Raise your fist against me and revile, says God.
Sing out graces or revile,
Reviling is also a kind of praise,
says God.
But if you sit fenced off in your apathy,
says God,
If you sit entrenched in: "I don't give a hang," says God,
If you look at the stars and yawn,
If you see suffering and don't cry out,
If you don't praise and you don't revile,
Then I created you in vain, says God.
Aaron Zeitlin
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Eighteenth-Century Playbill
An 18th-Century Playbill
This evening, and during the summer season, will be performed several new exercises of
Rope Dancing, Tumbling, Vaulting, Equilibrium, Ladder Dancing and Balancing,
by Madame Kerman,
Sampson Rogetzi,
Monsieur German
and Mesieur Dominique,
With a new Grand Dance, called Apollo and Daphne,
by Mr. Phillips,
Mrs. Lebrune,
and others.
Singing by Mrs Phillips and Mrs Jackson.
Likewise the Extraordinary Performance of Herr von Eckenberg,
who imitates the lark, thrush, blackbird, goldfish,
canary-bird, flageolet and German flute.
A Sailor’s Dance by Mr Phillips.
And Mesieur Dominique flies through a Hogshead and Forces Both Ends Out.
To which will be added The Harlot’s Progress:
Harlequin by Mr. Phillips,
Miss Kitty by Mrs Phillips.
Also an Exact Representation of the late Glorious Victory
gained over the French at the Battle of Dettingen,
with the taking of the White Household Standard by the Scots Greys,
Blowing Up the bridge, and Destroying and Drowning most part of the French Army.
Every evening
at five o’clock.
This evening, and during the summer season, will be performed several new exercises of
Rope Dancing, Tumbling, Vaulting, Equilibrium, Ladder Dancing and Balancing,
by Madame Kerman,
Sampson Rogetzi,
Monsieur German
and Mesieur Dominique,
With a new Grand Dance, called Apollo and Daphne,
by Mr. Phillips,
Mrs. Lebrune,
and others.
Singing by Mrs Phillips and Mrs Jackson.
Likewise the Extraordinary Performance of Herr von Eckenberg,
who imitates the lark, thrush, blackbird, goldfish,
canary-bird, flageolet and German flute.
A Sailor’s Dance by Mr Phillips.
And Mesieur Dominique flies through a Hogshead and Forces Both Ends Out.
To which will be added The Harlot’s Progress:
Harlequin by Mr. Phillips,
Miss Kitty by Mrs Phillips.
Also an Exact Representation of the late Glorious Victory
gained over the French at the Battle of Dettingen,
with the taking of the White Household Standard by the Scots Greys,
Blowing Up the bridge, and Destroying and Drowning most part of the French Army.
Every evening
at five o’clock.
Welles, Guthrie, Mamet - On Theatre
I believe the Theatre, like Ballet and Grand Opera, is already an anachronism. The Theatre, as we know it, is now in its last stages; the end cannot be far off.
Orson Welles
I think the Theatre will survive. It is bound to, as long as mankind demands to be amused, terrified, interested, shocked, corrupted and delighted.
Tyrone Guthrie
We are elected to supply the dreams of the body politic – we are the dream makers of the society. What we act out, design, write, springs not from meaningless individual fancy, but from the soul of the times.
David Mamet
Orson Welles
I think the Theatre will survive. It is bound to, as long as mankind demands to be amused, terrified, interested, shocked, corrupted and delighted.
Tyrone Guthrie
We are elected to supply the dreams of the body politic – we are the dream makers of the society. What we act out, design, write, springs not from meaningless individual fancy, but from the soul of the times.
David Mamet
David Mamet, "Theater & Dreams"
The theater is an expression of our dream life, our unconscious aspirations – a response to that which is best, most troubled, most visionary in our society.
In dreams we do not seek answers which our conscious rational mind is capable of supplying, we seek answers to those questions which the conscious mind is incompetent to deal with. So with the drama, if the question posed is one which can be answered rationally – e.g. how does one fix a car, should white people be nice to black people, are the physically handicapped entitled to our respect – our enjoyment of the drama is incomplete. We feel diverted but not fulfilled. Only if the question posed is one whose complexity and depth renders it unsusceptible to rational examination does the dramatic treatment seem to us appropriate, and the dramatic solution become enlightening.
Ecclesiastes 9:12. "For man also know it's not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil man, and as the birds that are caught in a snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time when it follows a suddenly upon them."
The solution is the dream.
The theatrical artist serves the same function in society that dreams do in our subconscious life-the subconscious life of the individual. We are elected to supply the dreams of the body politic-we are the dream makers of the society. What we act out, design, write, springs not from meaningless individual fancy, but from the soul of the times – that soul both observed by and expressed in the artist.
We all dream each night, but sometimes we are reluctant to remember a dream; just so we, as a collective artistic unity, create poetic theatrical dreams, but it sometimes we are reluctant to remember (stage, acccept, support) them.
The mass media pander to the low and the lowest of the low in the human experience. They, finally, debase us through the sheer weight of their mindlessness. Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams – like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams.
Who is going to speak up? Who's going to speak for the human spirit? The artist. The actor. Dedicated to the idea that the theater is the place we go to hear the truth.
Theatre – true theatre – is an art whose benefits will cheer us, and will warm us, it will care for us, and to elevate our soul out of the story times. The place we can go to hear the truth.
From three essays in "Writing In Restaurants" by David Mamet;
"A National Dream-Life"
"A Tradition of the Theater as Art"
"Decay: Some Thoughts For Actors"
In dreams we do not seek answers which our conscious rational mind is capable of supplying, we seek answers to those questions which the conscious mind is incompetent to deal with. So with the drama, if the question posed is one which can be answered rationally – e.g. how does one fix a car, should white people be nice to black people, are the physically handicapped entitled to our respect – our enjoyment of the drama is incomplete. We feel diverted but not fulfilled. Only if the question posed is one whose complexity and depth renders it unsusceptible to rational examination does the dramatic treatment seem to us appropriate, and the dramatic solution become enlightening.
Ecclesiastes 9:12. "For man also know it's not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil man, and as the birds that are caught in a snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time when it follows a suddenly upon them."
The solution is the dream.
The theatrical artist serves the same function in society that dreams do in our subconscious life-the subconscious life of the individual. We are elected to supply the dreams of the body politic-we are the dream makers of the society. What we act out, design, write, springs not from meaningless individual fancy, but from the soul of the times – that soul both observed by and expressed in the artist.
We all dream each night, but sometimes we are reluctant to remember a dream; just so we, as a collective artistic unity, create poetic theatrical dreams, but it sometimes we are reluctant to remember (stage, acccept, support) them.
The mass media pander to the low and the lowest of the low in the human experience. They, finally, debase us through the sheer weight of their mindlessness. Every reiteration of the idea that nothing matters debases the human spirit. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams – like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams.
Who is going to speak up? Who's going to speak for the human spirit? The artist. The actor. Dedicated to the idea that the theater is the place we go to hear the truth.
Theatre – true theatre – is an art whose benefits will cheer us, and will warm us, it will care for us, and to elevate our soul out of the story times. The place we can go to hear the truth.
From three essays in "Writing In Restaurants" by David Mamet;
"A National Dream-Life"
"A Tradition of the Theater as Art"
"Decay: Some Thoughts For Actors"
Ron Reed, scenes from "A Bright Particular Star"
Henry Irving & His Wife
It was at the opening of “The Bells,” you will remember that, Henry Irving's first great triumph. Some three or four years after had married and retired from the stage. Mr. Irving arranged for his wife, Florence, to sit in a box with their friends, the Hain-Friswells I believe it must have been. After the ovation – there were several curtain calls, absolutely everyone knew it to be a smashing success, and Mr. Irving in particular – his wife waited outside in a carriage as he made his way back to her through a thicket of well-wishers. As they drove home, Irving was ecstatic – he was the toast of the London theater. “Florence, we shall soon have our own coach and a pair!” To which his wife replied, "are you going on making a fool of yourself like this all your life?" He did not reply, except to order the driver to stop as they passed Hyde Park corner. Mr. Irving got out of the carriage and walked away, never to return home or speak to his wife again.
It was at the opening of “The Bells,” you will remember that, Henry Irving's first great triumph. Some three or four years after had married and retired from the stage. Mr. Irving arranged for his wife, Florence, to sit in a box with their friends, the Hain-Friswells I believe it must have been. After the ovation – there were several curtain calls, absolutely everyone knew it to be a smashing success, and Mr. Irving in particular – his wife waited outside in a carriage as he made his way back to her through a thicket of well-wishers. As they drove home, Irving was ecstatic – he was the toast of the London theater. “Florence, we shall soon have our own coach and a pair!” To which his wife replied, "are you going on making a fool of yourself like this all your life?" He did not reply, except to order the driver to stop as they passed Hyde Park corner. Mr. Irving got out of the carriage and walked away, never to return home or speak to his wife again.
*
Mark Twain on Junius Brutus Booth
(deleted scene)
Junius Brutus Booth. They say he left a tremendous theatrical legacy in this country prior to his triumphant return to the American stage. Fact is he fled to the States, at least that's how the story plays on my side of the pond. Traded his wife for Covent Garden flower girl, booked a pair of schooner tickets home to the United States of, and never looked back. Junius Brutus Booth and his offspring, the Booth boys, Edwin and John Wilkes, true blue native sons; braggarts, madmen, drunkards, and assassins – drunkards most of all. They do our nation proud.
Before his hasty departure from these sceptred shores, Junius toured England playing any theater that would have him, provided there was a pub within staggering distance of the stage door. Mr. Booth believed in the balanced life – excess in all things, including vanity and contempt for his audience. If he must interrupt his drinking to suffer the twin indignities of donning tights and a British accent, they were damn well going to listen, and he took it upon himself to do what ever he deemed necessary to encourage their rapt attention.
Do you know Manchester? Nothing but factories and, what was worse, factory workers – at least, that is how Booth saw it. Button factories. Booth was engaged to play the role of Hamlet as a visiting guest star for a Manchester company. At one particular performance it seems that Junius found the attentions of his working-class audience insufficient, to the point where, come the dueling scene, Mr. Booth saw fit to enliven the festivities for the enjoyment of his buccaneering spectators. He undertook to beat poor Laertes to a bloody pulp with his bare fists. The stunned audience fell silent. When at last the local actor laid bleeding and unconscious at his feet, Junius Brutus Booth turned to the crowd and said, "So what do you think of that, you bunch of damn button makers?" Oh, the life of the theater.
Do you ever have occasion to improvise in such a manner, Miss Ward?
*
Lilia Dreams
Charlie. I am in awe of the work you are doing amongst the poor.
Lilia. I’m no Octavia Hill! I visit with people who look like they want to talk, that's all. Most often I have to be at home. It's no hardship to sing a song or recite a poem.
Charlie. Not for you!
Lilia. No. That's just how I’m made.
Charlie. I like how you’re made.
(Silence)
Lilia. But this isn’t all, you know, all I'm meant to do. I feel it when I play in Shakespeare. I feel it when I can do something for one of the tenants, something that actually makes a difference. I have work to do, work the world has need of. Only – I am not doing it!
Charlie. Perhaps you are.
Lilia. I'm not! Otherwise, why this yearning? I'm made for something bigger, Charlie, something... Something I don't know.
Charlie. You need a larger stage, that's all.
Lilia. When my father speaks, people are enthralled. They say it is like listening to Jesus.
Charlie. You can sense it in his books.
Lilia. In Philadelphia, 3000 people crammed into a 2800 seat theater to hear him speak, about "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" if you can believe it. And they said it was better than any sermon they had ever heard! That God spoke through him.
Charlie. I believe that.
Lilia. What if I have that in me? And I do nothing but babysit my brothers and read poems to the poor people.
Charlie. Those sacrifices may be of more account than you know.
Lilia. And they may be of less! I think it lives in me, just as it does in my father. Sometimes it presses so hard inside me, I fear it will seep out through my skin if I don't find a way to let it out! That I will bleed from the eyes! (Beat) I'm sorry.
Charlie. No!
Lilia. I've never spoken of these things.
Charlie. No.
Lilia. Something takes hold when I'm on a stage, inside a character. And it could transform people, somehow. Why am I telling you all this? I don't even know you, and I pour my silly ideas in your ear! I feel embarrassed.
(Charlie looks in her eyes, then leans over and kisses her tentatively on the cheek.)
Lilia. Oh my. Charlie. Now I feel embarrassed.
*
George MacDonald on Theatre
(from an actual letter)
Mark Twain on Junius Brutus Booth
(deleted scene)
Junius Brutus Booth. They say he left a tremendous theatrical legacy in this country prior to his triumphant return to the American stage. Fact is he fled to the States, at least that's how the story plays on my side of the pond. Traded his wife for Covent Garden flower girl, booked a pair of schooner tickets home to the United States of, and never looked back. Junius Brutus Booth and his offspring, the Booth boys, Edwin and John Wilkes, true blue native sons; braggarts, madmen, drunkards, and assassins – drunkards most of all. They do our nation proud.
Before his hasty departure from these sceptred shores, Junius toured England playing any theater that would have him, provided there was a pub within staggering distance of the stage door. Mr. Booth believed in the balanced life – excess in all things, including vanity and contempt for his audience. If he must interrupt his drinking to suffer the twin indignities of donning tights and a British accent, they were damn well going to listen, and he took it upon himself to do what ever he deemed necessary to encourage their rapt attention.
Do you know Manchester? Nothing but factories and, what was worse, factory workers – at least, that is how Booth saw it. Button factories. Booth was engaged to play the role of Hamlet as a visiting guest star for a Manchester company. At one particular performance it seems that Junius found the attentions of his working-class audience insufficient, to the point where, come the dueling scene, Mr. Booth saw fit to enliven the festivities for the enjoyment of his buccaneering spectators. He undertook to beat poor Laertes to a bloody pulp with his bare fists. The stunned audience fell silent. When at last the local actor laid bleeding and unconscious at his feet, Junius Brutus Booth turned to the crowd and said, "So what do you think of that, you bunch of damn button makers?" Oh, the life of the theater.
Do you ever have occasion to improvise in such a manner, Miss Ward?
*
Lilia Dreams
Charlie. I am in awe of the work you are doing amongst the poor.
Lilia. I’m no Octavia Hill! I visit with people who look like they want to talk, that's all. Most often I have to be at home. It's no hardship to sing a song or recite a poem.
Charlie. Not for you!
Lilia. No. That's just how I’m made.
Charlie. I like how you’re made.
(Silence)
Lilia. But this isn’t all, you know, all I'm meant to do. I feel it when I play in Shakespeare. I feel it when I can do something for one of the tenants, something that actually makes a difference. I have work to do, work the world has need of. Only – I am not doing it!
Charlie. Perhaps you are.
Lilia. I'm not! Otherwise, why this yearning? I'm made for something bigger, Charlie, something... Something I don't know.
Charlie. You need a larger stage, that's all.
Lilia. When my father speaks, people are enthralled. They say it is like listening to Jesus.
Charlie. You can sense it in his books.
Lilia. In Philadelphia, 3000 people crammed into a 2800 seat theater to hear him speak, about "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" if you can believe it. And they said it was better than any sermon they had ever heard! That God spoke through him.
Charlie. I believe that.
Lilia. What if I have that in me? And I do nothing but babysit my brothers and read poems to the poor people.
Charlie. Those sacrifices may be of more account than you know.
Lilia. And they may be of less! I think it lives in me, just as it does in my father. Sometimes it presses so hard inside me, I fear it will seep out through my skin if I don't find a way to let it out! That I will bleed from the eyes! (Beat) I'm sorry.
Charlie. No!
Lilia. I've never spoken of these things.
Charlie. No.
Lilia. Something takes hold when I'm on a stage, inside a character. And it could transform people, somehow. Why am I telling you all this? I don't even know you, and I pour my silly ideas in your ear! I feel embarrassed.
(Charlie looks in her eyes, then leans over and kisses her tentatively on the cheek.)
Lilia. Oh my. Charlie. Now I feel embarrassed.
*
George MacDonald on Theatre
(from an actual letter)
It has come to my recent attention that a number of your circle have expressed disapproval of the theatrical work carried out by my family. Let me say this. What society so called may say or do, I simply will not heed one straw! We are only taking up an art that has been unjustly undervalued and left too much to unfit representation, and I shall not hesitate to take my share with my children. The time is short, and there is none for humbug, whether social or ecclesiastical. There is time only for truth and justice and graciousness and lovingkindness, and we hope to learn and teach some of all these things. What God has put in us, we will let come out, and not be ashamed!
Yours, Dr. George MacDonald
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Christopher Durang, "Peter Pan"
When I was eight years old, someone brought me to this... theatre. Full of lots of other children. We were supposed to be watching a production of Peter Pan. And I remember that something seemed terribly wrong with the whole production. Odd things kept happening.
For instance, when the children would fly, the ropes they were on would just keep breaking ... and the actors would come thumping to the ground and they had to be carried off by stagehands. And there seemed to be an unlimited supply of understudies, to take their places, and then they'd just fall to the ground. And then the crocodile that chases Captain Hook, seemed to be a real crocodile, it wasn't an actor. And at one point it fell off the stage and crushed a couple of kids in the front row. And then some of the understudies came and took their places in the audience. And from scene to scene, Wendy just seemed to get fatter and fatter until finally by the end of act one she was completely immobile and they had to move her off stage with a cart.
You remember how in the second act Tinkerbell drinks some poison that Peter is about to drink in order to save him? And then Peter turns to the audience and he says, "Tinkerbell is going to die because not enough people believe in fairies. But if all of you clap your hands real hard to show that you do believe in fairies, maybe she won't die."
So, we all started to clap. I clapped so long and so hard that my palms hurt and they even started to bleed I clapped so hard. Then suddenly the actress playing Peter Pan turned to the audience and she said, "That wasn't enough. You did not clap hard enough. Tinkerbell is dead." And then we all started to cry. The actress stomped off stage and refused to continue with the production. They finally had to lower the curtain. The ushers had to come help us out of the aisles and into the street.
I don't think that any of us were ever the same after that experience. It certainly turned me against theatre. And even more damagingly, I think it's warped my total sense of life. I mean nothing seems worth trying if Tinkerbell is just going to die.
from 'Denity Crisis
by Christopher Durang
For instance, when the children would fly, the ropes they were on would just keep breaking ... and the actors would come thumping to the ground and they had to be carried off by stagehands. And there seemed to be an unlimited supply of understudies, to take their places, and then they'd just fall to the ground. And then the crocodile that chases Captain Hook, seemed to be a real crocodile, it wasn't an actor. And at one point it fell off the stage and crushed a couple of kids in the front row. And then some of the understudies came and took their places in the audience. And from scene to scene, Wendy just seemed to get fatter and fatter until finally by the end of act one she was completely immobile and they had to move her off stage with a cart.
You remember how in the second act Tinkerbell drinks some poison that Peter is about to drink in order to save him? And then Peter turns to the audience and he says, "Tinkerbell is going to die because not enough people believe in fairies. But if all of you clap your hands real hard to show that you do believe in fairies, maybe she won't die."
So, we all started to clap. I clapped so long and so hard that my palms hurt and they even started to bleed I clapped so hard. Then suddenly the actress playing Peter Pan turned to the audience and she said, "That wasn't enough. You did not clap hard enough. Tinkerbell is dead." And then we all started to cry. The actress stomped off stage and refused to continue with the production. They finally had to lower the curtain. The ushers had to come help us out of the aisles and into the street.
I don't think that any of us were ever the same after that experience. It certainly turned me against theatre. And even more damagingly, I think it's warped my total sense of life. I mean nothing seems worth trying if Tinkerbell is just going to die.
from 'Denity Crisis
by Christopher Durang
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Ron Reed, Review of Annie Dillard's "For The Time Being"
Annie Dillard's "For The Time Being" is astonishing, a many-voiced fugue whose intricate, sometimes stark counterpoint ranges wide in search of God and his Mercy in this vast, bent creation. A nurse washes newborns in an American hospital; a French paleontologist and mystic wanders deserts in search of early man; Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn search the Connecticut woods for a lost schoolgirl; Chinese peasants work the soil that covers statues of thousands upon thousands of warriors, buried since the time of Emperor Quin. Annie Dillard shares a cigarette with a Palestinian tour driver.
Dillard ranges across millenia, right round the globe and down to the earth's core, in search of mysteries. The mysteries of God, and of His Creation, and of how He is revealed in what He has created. The mysteries of human evil and human good, of God's grace and complicity.
It's not an easy journey. Dillard warns us right up front, barring the entrance of any unwary reader with a stern Author's Note: "Its form is unusual, its scenes are remote, its focus wide, and its tone austere." Sort of a "come along if you want to, but don't expect me to look after you" warning before we set out on a demanding journey. "Its pleasures are almost purely mental," she warns us.
But pleasures there are. Most immediately accessible are her constant humour and wit: the text is dotted with smart, discordant, bracingly honest comments, impertinent questions and laugh-out-loud quips that are pure Annie. Reading Dillard, one always has the sense that she must be great fun to be with, a wildly creative, winsome human being intrigued by everything and everyone she meets. So much of the fully-alive girl we met in the autobiographical "An American Childhood" (her most accessible work) is very much intact in the widely-experienced woman whose voice is so identifiable in "For The Time Being." Dillard has the same enthusiasm, attention to detail, fascination and joy in life that I see in my wide©awake daughter: delightful in a ten-year-old, miraculous in a forty-something-year-old. And both of them, in their childlike faith and guileless honest willingness to question, lead me very much closer to Christ. "Except ye become as little children..."
Nonetheless, a very sophisticated child of God is Annie Dillard. Another of the great pleasures here is the impeccable artistry of her writing: the well-turned elegance of every phrase, the careful balance evident in the shaping of each sentence. As in all her other works (her first prose work, "Pilgrim At Tinder Creek," was awarded the Pulitzer Prize – no mean accomplishment), Dillard brings the scrutiny and artfulness of the poet to every word of her exquisite prose.
Too, there is the simple pleasure of curiosity indulged. Reading this book is like spending an afternoon at a great and vast library, following wherever one's curiosity might lead, jotting down interesting tidbits. In "An American Childhood," Dillard writes of her discovery of libraries as a young girl, her voracious reading on the most commonplace or obscure subjects, a spelunker exploring the caves of learning and language and literature, in search of rare and precious things. Her most recent book prior to "For The Time Being" was "Mornings Like This," a collection of pieces created by editing "found" bits of writing into beautiful, quirky, evocative poems. There's something of that collector's mentality in the present volume, with snippets of C.S. Lewis and quotes from famine relief workers and desert fathers and seven-year-old daughters and sixteenth-century rabbis dropped in here and there, apparently at random. Apparently.
Notwithstanding all these other pleasures, the author is right: the greatest delights here are mental, rigoroudly so. They derive from the work's idiosyncratic structure, which ultimately discloses its subtle and complex meaning. Austere pleasures of the mind culminate in rich food for the spirit.
Dillard introduces each of the many distinct themes of her fugue clearly and separately, without reference to any of the others. A character is introduced, a question raised, an observation made, a theme simply stated then set aside for a time. As we return to each of these melodic bits a second, a third, a fourth time, our curiosity about each grows until we are utterly gripped by the story of a Brooklyn schoolgirl lost in the woods, the life and thought of Tielhard de Chardin, the natural history of sand or clouds or waves, the significance of a cigarette lighter in the desert.
Our fascination with each of these elements begins to compound as we begin to recognize in glimpses their inter-relatedness. Suddenly for a moment we notice that two melodies have crossed, or locked in a brief harmony – what do you know, the pathology of birth defects in our century and the centuries-old musings of an Hasidic rabbi on prayer DO have something in common! – and we experience the pure pleasure of connectedness and inter-relation that comes to us when we drink in a Bach fugue or saturate ourselves with the study of Scripture.
Dillard's treatment of this thematic interplay is deft and understated, her touch light: for the most part, it is left to the reader to make the connections between Dillard's various subjects as our curiosity and involvement continue to grow.
Ultimately, Dillard's book "gathers to a greatness" far beyond what one might expect in 200 small pages. Like the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, this writing rewards close attention and heartful reading, finally "exploding with meaning" in a way that enriches mind, heart and spirit.
Best of all, there are a handful of moments when Dillard gathers all her threads into a brightly coloured bundle and lets us see the interplay of all their colours, to feel by their texture how each is somehow part of a great weaving yet to be revealed. Perhaps three or four times in this work, it all comes together, and these moments become extraordinary epiphanies. But quickly she moves on, never dwelling too long in these dense places, never over-indulging in the pleasures of making connections. That delight she leaves mostly to the reader.
Structurally, "For The Time Being" is akin to her astonishing piece from "Teaching A Stone To Talk," a 1982 essay entitled "An Expedition To The Pole" – to my mind, perhaps the finest thing she has written. In that work she alternates meditations on an inept singing group who visits a Sunday morning church service ("Who gave these nice Catholics guitars?") with quirky bits of historical information about various expeditions to the south and north poles. Increasingly the two disparate subjects come together until the astonishing climax, a surreal vision of priests and penguins and Dillard herself on an ice floe, drifting toward The Pole Of Relative Inaccessibility. A vision which makes some sort of sense of it all, and lifts the heart and spirit toward God.
I cannot help being reminded, in both these works, of the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, another Divinely gifted artist, another skilled crafts©person, another believer and soul©exalting visionary. There is the story of Bach's visit to the German court where the composer was asked to improvise (!) a multi-voice fugue based on a pedestrian theme invented by the king. Bach did so, whereupon the king asked him to improvise a six-voice fugue on the same theme. The mind recoils! Most of us can't even hear six voices in counterpoint, let alone play or compose or – inconceivable! – improvise such a thing! Bach deferred, wishing to "do the King justice" by taking the time to compose a proper invention on the royal theme. He did so, and produced from the ruler's clay melody one of the great works ever composed for the piano: some consider it his greatest composition.
In "For The Time Being," Annie Dillard takes the common clay of her day to day experience, her reading of arcane philosophy and books of statistics and the daily newspaper (she hasn't changed since she was a bookish, curious little girl raiding the Pittsburgh library), and builds from these unlikely scraps a monumental work of art. An art which, like that of Bach, is dedicated to the sole glory of God.
At one point, writing about the mysteries of prayer, Annie Dillard says "I don't know beans about God." Well, perhaps not. But her book certainly brings Him close.
I'm not a person who is willing to give away endings, or spoil movies by revealing key plot developments. So I'm not goint to tell you what this book, ultimately, is about: getting there is all the fun! That is the great delight of the work, and the author's great accomplishment: she engages the reader in her archaeological dig into the human condition, uncertain what may be buried there, and in the end the act of discovery is perhaps as important as what is discovered.
Suffice it to say, I finished Dillard's book with tears in my eyes, and have passed my subsequent days quickened, curious, and glorifying my God. And desperately eager to go back to this slender volume, to explore again its profound intricacies.
It's that kind of book.
Ron Reed
first published in Christian Info, 1991
Dillard ranges across millenia, right round the globe and down to the earth's core, in search of mysteries. The mysteries of God, and of His Creation, and of how He is revealed in what He has created. The mysteries of human evil and human good, of God's grace and complicity.
It's not an easy journey. Dillard warns us right up front, barring the entrance of any unwary reader with a stern Author's Note: "Its form is unusual, its scenes are remote, its focus wide, and its tone austere." Sort of a "come along if you want to, but don't expect me to look after you" warning before we set out on a demanding journey. "Its pleasures are almost purely mental," she warns us.
But pleasures there are. Most immediately accessible are her constant humour and wit: the text is dotted with smart, discordant, bracingly honest comments, impertinent questions and laugh-out-loud quips that are pure Annie. Reading Dillard, one always has the sense that she must be great fun to be with, a wildly creative, winsome human being intrigued by everything and everyone she meets. So much of the fully-alive girl we met in the autobiographical "An American Childhood" (her most accessible work) is very much intact in the widely-experienced woman whose voice is so identifiable in "For The Time Being." Dillard has the same enthusiasm, attention to detail, fascination and joy in life that I see in my wide©awake daughter: delightful in a ten-year-old, miraculous in a forty-something-year-old. And both of them, in their childlike faith and guileless honest willingness to question, lead me very much closer to Christ. "Except ye become as little children..."
Nonetheless, a very sophisticated child of God is Annie Dillard. Another of the great pleasures here is the impeccable artistry of her writing: the well-turned elegance of every phrase, the careful balance evident in the shaping of each sentence. As in all her other works (her first prose work, "Pilgrim At Tinder Creek," was awarded the Pulitzer Prize – no mean accomplishment), Dillard brings the scrutiny and artfulness of the poet to every word of her exquisite prose.
Too, there is the simple pleasure of curiosity indulged. Reading this book is like spending an afternoon at a great and vast library, following wherever one's curiosity might lead, jotting down interesting tidbits. In "An American Childhood," Dillard writes of her discovery of libraries as a young girl, her voracious reading on the most commonplace or obscure subjects, a spelunker exploring the caves of learning and language and literature, in search of rare and precious things. Her most recent book prior to "For The Time Being" was "Mornings Like This," a collection of pieces created by editing "found" bits of writing into beautiful, quirky, evocative poems. There's something of that collector's mentality in the present volume, with snippets of C.S. Lewis and quotes from famine relief workers and desert fathers and seven-year-old daughters and sixteenth-century rabbis dropped in here and there, apparently at random. Apparently.
Notwithstanding all these other pleasures, the author is right: the greatest delights here are mental, rigoroudly so. They derive from the work's idiosyncratic structure, which ultimately discloses its subtle and complex meaning. Austere pleasures of the mind culminate in rich food for the spirit.
Dillard introduces each of the many distinct themes of her fugue clearly and separately, without reference to any of the others. A character is introduced, a question raised, an observation made, a theme simply stated then set aside for a time. As we return to each of these melodic bits a second, a third, a fourth time, our curiosity about each grows until we are utterly gripped by the story of a Brooklyn schoolgirl lost in the woods, the life and thought of Tielhard de Chardin, the natural history of sand or clouds or waves, the significance of a cigarette lighter in the desert.
Our fascination with each of these elements begins to compound as we begin to recognize in glimpses their inter-relatedness. Suddenly for a moment we notice that two melodies have crossed, or locked in a brief harmony – what do you know, the pathology of birth defects in our century and the centuries-old musings of an Hasidic rabbi on prayer DO have something in common! – and we experience the pure pleasure of connectedness and inter-relation that comes to us when we drink in a Bach fugue or saturate ourselves with the study of Scripture.
Dillard's treatment of this thematic interplay is deft and understated, her touch light: for the most part, it is left to the reader to make the connections between Dillard's various subjects as our curiosity and involvement continue to grow.
Ultimately, Dillard's book "gathers to a greatness" far beyond what one might expect in 200 small pages. Like the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, this writing rewards close attention and heartful reading, finally "exploding with meaning" in a way that enriches mind, heart and spirit.
Best of all, there are a handful of moments when Dillard gathers all her threads into a brightly coloured bundle and lets us see the interplay of all their colours, to feel by their texture how each is somehow part of a great weaving yet to be revealed. Perhaps three or four times in this work, it all comes together, and these moments become extraordinary epiphanies. But quickly she moves on, never dwelling too long in these dense places, never over-indulging in the pleasures of making connections. That delight she leaves mostly to the reader.
Structurally, "For The Time Being" is akin to her astonishing piece from "Teaching A Stone To Talk," a 1982 essay entitled "An Expedition To The Pole" – to my mind, perhaps the finest thing she has written. In that work she alternates meditations on an inept singing group who visits a Sunday morning church service ("Who gave these nice Catholics guitars?") with quirky bits of historical information about various expeditions to the south and north poles. Increasingly the two disparate subjects come together until the astonishing climax, a surreal vision of priests and penguins and Dillard herself on an ice floe, drifting toward The Pole Of Relative Inaccessibility. A vision which makes some sort of sense of it all, and lifts the heart and spirit toward God.
I cannot help being reminded, in both these works, of the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, another Divinely gifted artist, another skilled crafts©person, another believer and soul©exalting visionary. There is the story of Bach's visit to the German court where the composer was asked to improvise (!) a multi-voice fugue based on a pedestrian theme invented by the king. Bach did so, whereupon the king asked him to improvise a six-voice fugue on the same theme. The mind recoils! Most of us can't even hear six voices in counterpoint, let alone play or compose or – inconceivable! – improvise such a thing! Bach deferred, wishing to "do the King justice" by taking the time to compose a proper invention on the royal theme. He did so, and produced from the ruler's clay melody one of the great works ever composed for the piano: some consider it his greatest composition.
In "For The Time Being," Annie Dillard takes the common clay of her day to day experience, her reading of arcane philosophy and books of statistics and the daily newspaper (she hasn't changed since she was a bookish, curious little girl raiding the Pittsburgh library), and builds from these unlikely scraps a monumental work of art. An art which, like that of Bach, is dedicated to the sole glory of God.
At one point, writing about the mysteries of prayer, Annie Dillard says "I don't know beans about God." Well, perhaps not. But her book certainly brings Him close.
I'm not a person who is willing to give away endings, or spoil movies by revealing key plot developments. So I'm not goint to tell you what this book, ultimately, is about: getting there is all the fun! That is the great delight of the work, and the author's great accomplishment: she engages the reader in her archaeological dig into the human condition, uncertain what may be buried there, and in the end the act of discovery is perhaps as important as what is discovered.
Suffice it to say, I finished Dillard's book with tears in my eyes, and have passed my subsequent days quickened, curious, and glorifying my God. And desperately eager to go back to this slender volume, to explore again its profound intricacies.
It's that kind of book.
Ron Reed
first published in Christian Info, 1991
Monday, January 01, 2007
Bob Dylan, "The most supreme craft of all craft"
I always liked the stage and even more so, the theater. It seemed like the most supreme craft of all craft. Whatever the environment, a ballroom or a sidewalk, the dirt of a country road, the action always took place in the eternal "now."
My first appearance in a public spectacle had been on my hometown school auditorium stage, no small music box theatre but a professional concert hall like Carnegie Hall built with East Coast mining money, with curtains and props, trapdoors and orchestra pit. My first performances were seen in the Black Hills Passion Play of South Dakota, a religious drama depicting the last days of Christ. This play always came to town during the Christmas season with professional actors in the leading roles, cages of pigeons, a donkey, a camel and a truck full of props. There were always parts that called for extras. One year I played a Roman soldier with a spear and helmet - breastplate, the works - a nonspeaking role, but it didn't matter. I felt like a star. I liked the costume. It felt like a nerve tonic . . . as a Roman soldier I felt like a part of everything, in the center of the planet, invincible.
from Chronicles, Volume One, p 124/125
My first appearance in a public spectacle had been on my hometown school auditorium stage, no small music box theatre but a professional concert hall like Carnegie Hall built with East Coast mining money, with curtains and props, trapdoors and orchestra pit. My first performances were seen in the Black Hills Passion Play of South Dakota, a religious drama depicting the last days of Christ. This play always came to town during the Christmas season with professional actors in the leading roles, cages of pigeons, a donkey, a camel and a truck full of props. There were always parts that called for extras. One year I played a Roman soldier with a spear and helmet - breastplate, the works - a nonspeaking role, but it didn't matter. I felt like a star. I liked the costume. It felt like a nerve tonic . . . as a Roman soldier I felt like a part of everything, in the center of the planet, invincible.
from Chronicles, Volume One, p 124/125
Sunday, December 17, 2006
jellema / petersen / rilke / l'engle / Klug | joseph & mary
MARY:
He could squint along forty foot beams
And catch the gentlest wayward drift toward a curve
That no one else saw. His calloused, pitch stained hands
Would tenderly stroke the flush seams of a perfect joint.
We used to see him astride his unwavering rafters,
Tall as the echoing blows of his worshipping arms,
Looking with pride on the loving work of his mitred,
Four square world. He always looked sharply to see
If some sinning board in somebody's house were off square,
And longed to redeem it with the righteous tongue of his plane.
JOSEPH:
She looks at me, pale and ghostly, even
though she stands full in the evening light
outside my shop door. The hammer
in my hand drops to the ground,
she fills me with such terror:
the innocent delight of her eyes gone out,
those gentle hands which she could hold
the world in wring and twist
over her stomach in the folds of her dress,
and the delicately proud line of her body—
where has it gone, stooped as if spent
from a sickness?
ANGEL:
Her eyes drift to the ground
where earth-shaking news takes shape
in the carpet of splintered wood and nails.
JOSEPH: Mary?
MARY: Please listen and hear me out,
JOSEPH: her voice
that has so many times quickened my heart
with the lightness of a star, so heavy now.
Mary, what—
She takes my hand, draws me closer
and places my callused palm
over a bulge in her stomach.
Is it—
MARY: You must believe—
JOSEPH: How did this—
MARY:
--what I need to say…
then do what you will.
JOSEPH:
My face flushes to feel this growing
in her. I try to sit, and stumble
against a pile of boards that fall
in a clattering heap,
repeating the shattering announcement
down the streets, through the open windows
and doors of the torpid town; women and
children passing by glance in bewilderment,
Reuben the blacksmith stops his clanging
three doors down.
I beg her to come inside,
my throat tight, so dry I cannot speak.
I try to think, to bring substance
to the dizzying rush
of incomprehension in my skull.
Your trip south, was it then? I ask,
That you met… that it happened?
MARY: I haven’t slept with anyone.
JOSEPH: Just tell me who.
MARY:
It wasn’t that way.
An angel came to me—
JOSEPH: An angel came to you!
MARY: Joseph…
JOSEPH: Go! Get out!
That night in bed I stare into the dark,
do not sleep, her voice that was not her own,
her words haunting me, my Mary,
visions of her betrayal mocking me:
strange hands in her dark, velvet hair,
her skin so tender against his,
her warm breath
on his face, lips, limbs merging—
Was it awkward, timid?
or yearning and confident?
I try to cry but cannot,
the wound too deep, and burning,
twisting, knotting.
SONG: You've Got To Hide Your Love Away
ANGEL. And the angel, taking due pains, told
the man who clenched his fists:
But can't you see in her robe's every fold
that she is cool as the Lord's morning mists?
But the other, gazing gloomily, just murmured:
JOSEPH. What is it has wrought this change in her?
ANGEL. Then cried the angel to him:
Carpenter, can't you see that God is acting here?
Because you plane the planks, in your pride would
you really make the Lord God answerable
who unpretentiously from the same wood
makes the leaves burst forth, the young buds swell?
JOSEPH. He understood that.
ANGEL. And now as he raised
his frightened glance toward the angel who
was gone already...
GUITAR INSTRUMENTAL: What Child Is This?
MARY:
It was from Joseph first I learned
Of love. Like me he was dismayed.
How easily he could have turned
Me from his house; but, unafraid,
He put me not away from him
(O God sent angel, pray for him).
Thus through his love was Love obeyed.
The Child's first cry came like a bell:
God's Word aloud, God's Word in deed.
The angel spoke: so it befell,
And Joseph with me in my need.
O Child whose father came from heaven,
To you another gift was given,
Your earthly father chosen well.
With Joseph I was always warmed
And cherished. Even in the stable
I knew that I would not be harmed.
And, though above the angels swarmed,
Man's love it was that made me able
To bear God's Love, wild, formidable,
To bear God's Will, through me performed.
JOSEPH:
Sleep now, little one.
I will watch while you and your mother sleep.
I wish I could do more.
This straw is not good enough for you.
Back in Nazareth I'll make a proper bed for you
of seasoned wood, smooth, strong, well‑pegged.
A bed fit for a carpenter's son.
Just wait till we get back to Nazareth.
I'll teach you everything I know.
You'll learn to choose the cedarwood, eucalyptus, and fir.
You'll learn to use the drawshave, ax, and saw.
Your arms will grow strong, your hands rough ‑‑ like these.
You will bear the pungent smell of new wood
and wear shavings and sawdust in your hair.
You'll be a man whose life centers
on hammer and nails and wood.
But for now,
sleep, little Jesus, sleep.
SONG: Golden Slumbers
assembled from excerpts from the following (in order of appearance);
Four-Square, by Roderick Jellema
Joseph's Night Watch, by Karl Petersen
Joseph's Suspicion, by Rainer Maria Rilke
O Sapientia, by Madeleine L'Engle
Joseph's Lullaby, by Ron Klug
He could squint along forty foot beams
And catch the gentlest wayward drift toward a curve
That no one else saw. His calloused, pitch stained hands
Would tenderly stroke the flush seams of a perfect joint.
We used to see him astride his unwavering rafters,
Tall as the echoing blows of his worshipping arms,
Looking with pride on the loving work of his mitred,
Four square world. He always looked sharply to see
If some sinning board in somebody's house were off square,
And longed to redeem it with the righteous tongue of his plane.
JOSEPH:
She looks at me, pale and ghostly, even
though she stands full in the evening light
outside my shop door. The hammer
in my hand drops to the ground,
she fills me with such terror:
the innocent delight of her eyes gone out,
those gentle hands which she could hold
the world in wring and twist
over her stomach in the folds of her dress,
and the delicately proud line of her body—
where has it gone, stooped as if spent
from a sickness?
ANGEL:
Her eyes drift to the ground
where earth-shaking news takes shape
in the carpet of splintered wood and nails.
JOSEPH: Mary?
MARY: Please listen and hear me out,
JOSEPH: her voice
that has so many times quickened my heart
with the lightness of a star, so heavy now.
Mary, what—
She takes my hand, draws me closer
and places my callused palm
over a bulge in her stomach.
Is it—
MARY: You must believe—
JOSEPH: How did this—
MARY:
--what I need to say…
then do what you will.
JOSEPH:
My face flushes to feel this growing
in her. I try to sit, and stumble
against a pile of boards that fall
in a clattering heap,
repeating the shattering announcement
down the streets, through the open windows
and doors of the torpid town; women and
children passing by glance in bewilderment,
Reuben the blacksmith stops his clanging
three doors down.
I beg her to come inside,
my throat tight, so dry I cannot speak.
I try to think, to bring substance
to the dizzying rush
of incomprehension in my skull.
Your trip south, was it then? I ask,
That you met… that it happened?
MARY: I haven’t slept with anyone.
JOSEPH: Just tell me who.
MARY:
It wasn’t that way.
An angel came to me—
JOSEPH: An angel came to you!
MARY: Joseph…
JOSEPH: Go! Get out!
That night in bed I stare into the dark,
do not sleep, her voice that was not her own,
her words haunting me, my Mary,
visions of her betrayal mocking me:
strange hands in her dark, velvet hair,
her skin so tender against his,
her warm breath
on his face, lips, limbs merging—
Was it awkward, timid?
or yearning and confident?
I try to cry but cannot,
the wound too deep, and burning,
twisting, knotting.
SONG: You've Got To Hide Your Love Away
ANGEL. And the angel, taking due pains, told
the man who clenched his fists:
But can't you see in her robe's every fold
that she is cool as the Lord's morning mists?
But the other, gazing gloomily, just murmured:
JOSEPH. What is it has wrought this change in her?
ANGEL. Then cried the angel to him:
Carpenter, can't you see that God is acting here?
Because you plane the planks, in your pride would
you really make the Lord God answerable
who unpretentiously from the same wood
makes the leaves burst forth, the young buds swell?
JOSEPH. He understood that.
ANGEL. And now as he raised
his frightened glance toward the angel who
was gone already...
GUITAR INSTRUMENTAL: What Child Is This?
MARY:
It was from Joseph first I learned
Of love. Like me he was dismayed.
How easily he could have turned
Me from his house; but, unafraid,
He put me not away from him
(O God sent angel, pray for him).
Thus through his love was Love obeyed.
The Child's first cry came like a bell:
God's Word aloud, God's Word in deed.
The angel spoke: so it befell,
And Joseph with me in my need.
O Child whose father came from heaven,
To you another gift was given,
Your earthly father chosen well.
With Joseph I was always warmed
And cherished. Even in the stable
I knew that I would not be harmed.
And, though above the angels swarmed,
Man's love it was that made me able
To bear God's Love, wild, formidable,
To bear God's Will, through me performed.
Sleep now, little one.
I will watch while you and your mother sleep.
I wish I could do more.
This straw is not good enough for you.
Back in Nazareth I'll make a proper bed for you
of seasoned wood, smooth, strong, well‑pegged.
A bed fit for a carpenter's son.
Just wait till we get back to Nazareth.
I'll teach you everything I know.
You'll learn to choose the cedarwood, eucalyptus, and fir.
You'll learn to use the drawshave, ax, and saw.
Your arms will grow strong, your hands rough ‑‑ like these.
You will bear the pungent smell of new wood
and wear shavings and sawdust in your hair.
You'll be a man whose life centers
on hammer and nails and wood.
But for now,
sleep, little Jesus, sleep.
SONG: Golden Slumbers
assembled from excerpts from the following (in order of appearance);
Four-Square, by Roderick Jellema
Joseph's Night Watch, by Karl Petersen
Joseph's Suspicion, by Rainer Maria Rilke
O Sapientia, by Madeleine L'Engle
Joseph's Lullaby, by Ron Klug
Thursday, December 14, 2006
David Kossoff, "Seth"
My father and my grandfather were shepherds. It is a thing that runs in families. My sons own their own farms and their own sheep, but that is progress. I always looked after other people's sheep. That was not unusual when I was younger. We were looked down on, I suppose, for often we had to work every day, ignoring the sabbath, and with so many priests among the people, we were often told we were breaking the law. Though where the priests would have got their perfect lambs for sacrifice without us I don't know. They could be very rude the priests especially the young silly ones. It's the same today, and not just with priests: people speak before they think. That's one good thing about looking after sheep: you get into the habit of keeping quiet. If you have to use words, you take your time to get them right. Words are important.
People often tell me that mine was a dull life. Well, maybe. I like to watch the night sky, the moon and the stars. Once I saw, at night, a sight that very few have seen. Just once, but once was enough for any man. If a priest is rude to me, I always say to myself, It doesn't matter. I had that night, and you didn't.
I was about nineteen at the time, and although it's now about fifty years ago, I remember it like yesterday. On this night I'm talking about, we'd met up where we usually did, on the side of quite a big hill. We'd had a bite to eat and drink and were sitting talking. Around us our hundreds of sheep. All normal and usual and quiet. Very restful and quiet, those talks at night. It was a dark night.
Then there was a sort of stillness and a feeling of change, of difference. We all felt it. I had a friend called Simon, and he first noticed what the change was. It was the light. There was a sort of paleness. It was a dark night, but suddenly it wasn't so dark. We began to see each others faces very clearly in a sort of silvery, shimmering light. We seemed surrounded and enclosed in a great glow. It was the purest light I ever saw. The sheep were white as snow. Then as our eyes began to ache with it, just farther up the hill from us the glow seemed to intensify and take shape, and we saw a man. Like us but not like us. Taller, stiller. Though we were still enough, God knows.
He looked at us and we looked at him. We waited for him to speak. It didn't seem right we all felt it for any of us to speak first. He took his time as though to find the right words and then he began to tell us what he called good news of great joy. Of a new born baby, born in David's town. A baby sent by God to save the world, to change things, to make things better. He told us where to go and find the baby and how to recognise him. And to tell other people the good news. His own pleasure in telling us filled us with joy: we shared his pleasure, if you follow me. Then he stopped speaking and became two. Then four, then eight, and in a second there seemed to be a million like him. Right up the hill and on up into the sky. A million. And they sang to us. Glory to God, they sang, And on earth peace to all men. It was wonderful. It came to an end and then they were gone. EVery single one, and we felt lonely and lost.
Then Samuel, who was the eldest of us, said "Come, let us go and find the baby. David's town, the angel said: Bethlehem. In a manger. In swaddling clothes. And off we went. We ran, we sang, we shouted, we were important, we'd been chosen. We were special. We were on a search. We had to find a baby.
And we did find him. We were led there. There was no searching, we were led, and we saw for ourselves. Not much to see, perhaps. A young mother and her husband and a newly born baby. Born in a stable because all the inns were full. Poor people they were. The man was a carpenter.
Well, we did as we'd been told. We spread the word, and people did get excited. But not for long. Nothing lasts. We shepherds were heroes for a while, but then everyone knew the story. It was old news. Soon we were just shepherds again, doing a dull job. But we were different from all the rest: we'd had that night. I don't talk about it much any more, but it keeps me warm. I was there.
by David Kossoff,
from The Book Of Witnesses
People often tell me that mine was a dull life. Well, maybe. I like to watch the night sky, the moon and the stars. Once I saw, at night, a sight that very few have seen. Just once, but once was enough for any man. If a priest is rude to me, I always say to myself, It doesn't matter. I had that night, and you didn't.
I was about nineteen at the time, and although it's now about fifty years ago, I remember it like yesterday. On this night I'm talking about, we'd met up where we usually did, on the side of quite a big hill. We'd had a bite to eat and drink and were sitting talking. Around us our hundreds of sheep. All normal and usual and quiet. Very restful and quiet, those talks at night. It was a dark night.
Then there was a sort of stillness and a feeling of change, of difference. We all felt it. I had a friend called Simon, and he first noticed what the change was. It was the light. There was a sort of paleness. It was a dark night, but suddenly it wasn't so dark. We began to see each others faces very clearly in a sort of silvery, shimmering light. We seemed surrounded and enclosed in a great glow. It was the purest light I ever saw. The sheep were white as snow. Then as our eyes began to ache with it, just farther up the hill from us the glow seemed to intensify and take shape, and we saw a man. Like us but not like us. Taller, stiller. Though we were still enough, God knows.
He looked at us and we looked at him. We waited for him to speak. It didn't seem right we all felt it for any of us to speak first. He took his time as though to find the right words and then he began to tell us what he called good news of great joy. Of a new born baby, born in David's town. A baby sent by God to save the world, to change things, to make things better. He told us where to go and find the baby and how to recognise him. And to tell other people the good news. His own pleasure in telling us filled us with joy: we shared his pleasure, if you follow me. Then he stopped speaking and became two. Then four, then eight, and in a second there seemed to be a million like him. Right up the hill and on up into the sky. A million. And they sang to us. Glory to God, they sang, And on earth peace to all men. It was wonderful. It came to an end and then they were gone. EVery single one, and we felt lonely and lost.
Then Samuel, who was the eldest of us, said "Come, let us go and find the baby. David's town, the angel said: Bethlehem. In a manger. In swaddling clothes. And off we went. We ran, we sang, we shouted, we were important, we'd been chosen. We were special. We were on a search. We had to find a baby.
And we did find him. We were led there. There was no searching, we were led, and we saw for ourselves. Not much to see, perhaps. A young mother and her husband and a newly born baby. Born in a stable because all the inns were full. Poor people they were. The man was a carpenter.
Well, we did as we'd been told. We spread the word, and people did get excited. But not for long. Nothing lasts. We shepherds were heroes for a while, but then everyone knew the story. It was old news. Soon we were just shepherds again, doing a dull job. But we were different from all the rest: we'd had that night. I don't talk about it much any more, but it keeps me warm. I was there.
by David Kossoff,
from The Book Of Witnesses
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Frederick Buechner, "Gabriel"
She struck the angel Gabriel as hardly old enough to have a child at all, let alone this child, but he'd been entrusted with a message to give her, and he gave it. He told her what the child was to be named, and who he was to be, and something about the mystery that was to come upon her. "You mustn't be afraid, Mary," he said.
As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn't notice that beneath the great, golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl.
As he said it, he only hoped she wouldn't notice that beneath the great, golden wings he himself was trembling with fear to think that the whole future of creation hung now on the answer of a girl.
Frederick Buechner, "Emmanuel"
Christmas is not just Mr. Pickwick dancing a reel with the old lady at Dingley Dell or Scrooge waking up the next morning a changed man. It is not just the spirit of giving abroad in the land with a white beard and reindeer. It is not just the most famous birthday of them all and not just the annual reaffirmation of Peace on Earth that it is often reduced to so that people of many faiths or no faith can exchange Christmas cards without a qualm.
On the contrary, if you do not hear in the message of Christmas something that must strike some as blasphemy and others as sheer fantasy, the chances are you have not heard the message for what it is. Emmanuel is the message in a nutshell. Emmanuel, which is Hebrew for "God with us." That's where the problem lies.
The claim that Christianity makes for Christmas is that at a particular time and place "the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity" came to be with us himself. When Quirinius was governor of Syria, in a town called Bethlehem, a child was born who, beyond the power of anyone to account for, was the high and lofty One made low and helpless. The One whom none can look upon and live is delivered in a stable under the soft, indifferent gaze of cattle. The Father of all mercies puts himself at our mercy. Year after year the ancient tale of what happened is told raw, preposterous, holy and year after year the world in some measure stops to listen.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. A dream as old as time. If it is true, it is the chief of all truths. If it is not true, it is of all truths the one that people would most have be true if they could make it so.
Maybe it is that longing to have it be true that is at the bottom even of the whole vast Christmas industry the tons of cards and presents and fancy food, the plastic figures kneeling on the floodlit lawns of poorly attended churches. The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is a worldly language.
Emmanuel. We all must decide for ourselves whether it is true. Certainly the grounds on which to dismiss it are not hard to find. Christmas is commercialism. It is a pain in the neck. It is sentimentality.
It is wishful thinking. The shepherds. The star. The three wise men. Make believe.
Yet it is never as easy to get rid of as all this makes it sound. To dismiss Christmas is for most of us to dismiss part of ourselves. It is to dismiss one of the most fragile yet enduring visions of our own childhood and of the child that continues to exist in all of us. The sense of mystery and wonderment. The sense that on this one day each year two plus two adds up not to four but to a million.
What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us.
Emmanuel. Emmanuel.
On the contrary, if you do not hear in the message of Christmas something that must strike some as blasphemy and others as sheer fantasy, the chances are you have not heard the message for what it is. Emmanuel is the message in a nutshell. Emmanuel, which is Hebrew for "God with us." That's where the problem lies.
The claim that Christianity makes for Christmas is that at a particular time and place "the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity" came to be with us himself. When Quirinius was governor of Syria, in a town called Bethlehem, a child was born who, beyond the power of anyone to account for, was the high and lofty One made low and helpless. The One whom none can look upon and live is delivered in a stable under the soft, indifferent gaze of cattle. The Father of all mercies puts himself at our mercy. Year after year the ancient tale of what happened is told raw, preposterous, holy and year after year the world in some measure stops to listen.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. A dream as old as time. If it is true, it is the chief of all truths. If it is not true, it is of all truths the one that people would most have be true if they could make it so.
Maybe it is that longing to have it be true that is at the bottom even of the whole vast Christmas industry the tons of cards and presents and fancy food, the plastic figures kneeling on the floodlit lawns of poorly attended churches. The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is a worldly language.
Emmanuel. We all must decide for ourselves whether it is true. Certainly the grounds on which to dismiss it are not hard to find. Christmas is commercialism. It is a pain in the neck. It is sentimentality.
It is wishful thinking. The shepherds. The star. The three wise men. Make believe.
Yet it is never as easy to get rid of as all this makes it sound. To dismiss Christmas is for most of us to dismiss part of ourselves. It is to dismiss one of the most fragile yet enduring visions of our own childhood and of the child that continues to exist in all of us. The sense of mystery and wonderment. The sense that on this one day each year two plus two adds up not to four but to a million.
What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us.
Emmanuel. Emmanuel.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
David Kossoff, "Shem"
I'm not a religious man, you understand, and I didn't have much in the way of an education, but I'm not young and I've travelled a lot and listened a lot and you learn, you know, you learn. I was born in Samaria in the same year that Herod became King. Herod the Great he was called. Well, maybe he was great. He didn't do much for us in Samaria. All right, we are a mixed lot but we are not lepers. Our law is based on the same rules as the rest of Israel. The Law of Moses. One of those Laws is that the children shouldn't suffer for the sins of the fathers. That's a joke. All my life I've suffered for some nonsense generations ago about my people wanting to help in the rebuilding of the Great Temple and being refused because our religion wasn't holy enough. You'd have thought a few extra gods and idols would have made it more religious. And Samaritans are good builders. My family have been joiners and carpenters for a long time. I think that's what first drew me to Joseph.
I'm a journeyman; I work anywhere. My tools are my luggage. When I first met Joseph and his little family in Bethlehem it was the first time I'd ever been there and I've worked all over; Phoenicia, Syria, Parthia, Egypt. Not a big place, Bethlehem. One big inn, a decent synagogue, a meeting hall. Anyway, this inn had been damaged by some sort of religious demonstration. There'd been crowds of people who'd broken things off for souvenirs. A lot of the timber in the stables needed replacing. I heard about it and was taken on. I found a room on the edge of the town. And met Joseph, who lived next door. When he told me he was also a joiner, I told him about the inn and he smiled and said he'd like to help with the repairs. So I put in a word for him and we worked together.
Very quiet man he was. His wife was younger. Her name was Mary. They had a baby boy. Joseph and I worked together for some weeks before I told him I was a Samaritan.
"Oh," he said. "I've never been in Samaria. Will you eat with us this evening?"
One night I got in very late. It was pay night and I like a drink. The street was quiet and dark. As I got ready for bed, Joseph knocked on my door.
"Can you help us?" he said. "We have to leave right away."
We went next door. Mary was packing and the baby was fast asleep in his crib.
"We have been told by God to go down to Egypt. Right away. Tonight. We know nothing of long journeys. Please help us."
I went next door and packed my tools. We were out of the place in an hour. We joined a trade caravan of merchants and we kept to ourselves. If people got too inquisitive I used rough talk and said loudly I was a Samaritan. That got rid of them. Sins of the fathers can be very useful sometimes.
Now you might ask why did I go with them. Well, there was nothing heroic in it. I've moved around working in different places all my life. And Joseph had hardly been out of his town. Also we were both joiners, and carpenters can pick up work anywhere if you know the way. Another thing, as I told you, I'm a Samaritan, which at that time, thirty five years ago, just before Great Herod died, was the same as being a leper nearly. No one had a good word for you. You walked by yourself. Well, Joseph was an orthodox Jew and he accepted me like a brother and so did Mary. Even the baby liked me. I was one of the family. Of course I went with them. I looked after them.
We stayed with no one long, for Joseph and Mary were afraid. My gentle friend, who never raised his voice, was a wanted man. Mad King herod himself was after him. Well, not him so much as the baby. I don't know all the ins and outs of it even now, but somehow or other Joseph and Mary had got an early warning that Herod was going to kill all the baby boys under two in Bethlehem. They were not hysterical people, and when they went I went with with them, but I didn't really believe such a thing would happen. But it did. We heard about it. Mary wept for days, and Joseph was quieter even than usual.
We didn't go deep into Egypt. We stayed this side of the great delta of the Nile and found a little house in a village. There was enough work round about and the village people were used to travellers. Joseph never spoke much. Once, when I said I'd no idea how he knew about the order to kill the babies, he said, "I didn't know. I was told in a dream by an angel of God to leave immediately. My little son was given to Mary by God. I did as I was told." He was quite serious. I made a sort of joke, I remember. I said, "Well, when the angel tells us to go back home, let me know I'm not too fond of Egypt." Joseph laughed.
I forget now exactly how long we lived in the village but one morning I came down and Joseph had the little boy on his knee. Mary was my the stove, Joseph smiled.
"Good morning," he said. "We can go home."
"Another angel?" I said.
"Same one.' said Joseph. "Herod is dead. It is safe now."
Well, it wasn't so safe really. There'd been riots and disturbances and mass executions, so he would not go back to Bethlehem, but farther north to Galilee, where it was more peaceful. He knew Galilee, he came from Nazareth, and that is where we finished up.
I went with them and helped them find a place and get it fixed up, but then I moved on. Nazareth was a very religious, very orthodox place. Joseph fitted in well, me not at all. I was sorry to go. I saw them from time to time. Then I worked in Syria and Cyprus for a long time and lost touch. But I think of that time often.
by David Kossoff
from The Book Of Witnesses
I'm a journeyman; I work anywhere. My tools are my luggage. When I first met Joseph and his little family in Bethlehem it was the first time I'd ever been there and I've worked all over; Phoenicia, Syria, Parthia, Egypt. Not a big place, Bethlehem. One big inn, a decent synagogue, a meeting hall. Anyway, this inn had been damaged by some sort of religious demonstration. There'd been crowds of people who'd broken things off for souvenirs. A lot of the timber in the stables needed replacing. I heard about it and was taken on. I found a room on the edge of the town. And met Joseph, who lived next door. When he told me he was also a joiner, I told him about the inn and he smiled and said he'd like to help with the repairs. So I put in a word for him and we worked together.
Very quiet man he was. His wife was younger. Her name was Mary. They had a baby boy. Joseph and I worked together for some weeks before I told him I was a Samaritan.
"Oh," he said. "I've never been in Samaria. Will you eat with us this evening?"
One night I got in very late. It was pay night and I like a drink. The street was quiet and dark. As I got ready for bed, Joseph knocked on my door.
"Can you help us?" he said. "We have to leave right away."
We went next door. Mary was packing and the baby was fast asleep in his crib.
"We have been told by God to go down to Egypt. Right away. Tonight. We know nothing of long journeys. Please help us."
I went next door and packed my tools. We were out of the place in an hour. We joined a trade caravan of merchants and we kept to ourselves. If people got too inquisitive I used rough talk and said loudly I was a Samaritan. That got rid of them. Sins of the fathers can be very useful sometimes.
Now you might ask why did I go with them. Well, there was nothing heroic in it. I've moved around working in different places all my life. And Joseph had hardly been out of his town. Also we were both joiners, and carpenters can pick up work anywhere if you know the way. Another thing, as I told you, I'm a Samaritan, which at that time, thirty five years ago, just before Great Herod died, was the same as being a leper nearly. No one had a good word for you. You walked by yourself. Well, Joseph was an orthodox Jew and he accepted me like a brother and so did Mary. Even the baby liked me. I was one of the family. Of course I went with them. I looked after them.
We stayed with no one long, for Joseph and Mary were afraid. My gentle friend, who never raised his voice, was a wanted man. Mad King herod himself was after him. Well, not him so much as the baby. I don't know all the ins and outs of it even now, but somehow or other Joseph and Mary had got an early warning that Herod was going to kill all the baby boys under two in Bethlehem. They were not hysterical people, and when they went I went with with them, but I didn't really believe such a thing would happen. But it did. We heard about it. Mary wept for days, and Joseph was quieter even than usual.
We didn't go deep into Egypt. We stayed this side of the great delta of the Nile and found a little house in a village. There was enough work round about and the village people were used to travellers. Joseph never spoke much. Once, when I said I'd no idea how he knew about the order to kill the babies, he said, "I didn't know. I was told in a dream by an angel of God to leave immediately. My little son was given to Mary by God. I did as I was told." He was quite serious. I made a sort of joke, I remember. I said, "Well, when the angel tells us to go back home, let me know I'm not too fond of Egypt." Joseph laughed.
I forget now exactly how long we lived in the village but one morning I came down and Joseph had the little boy on his knee. Mary was my the stove, Joseph smiled.
"Good morning," he said. "We can go home."
"Another angel?" I said.
"Same one.' said Joseph. "Herod is dead. It is safe now."
Well, it wasn't so safe really. There'd been riots and disturbances and mass executions, so he would not go back to Bethlehem, but farther north to Galilee, where it was more peaceful. He knew Galilee, he came from Nazareth, and that is where we finished up.
I went with them and helped them find a place and get it fixed up, but then I moved on. Nazareth was a very religious, very orthodox place. Joseph fitted in well, me not at all. I was sorry to go. I saw them from time to time. Then I worked in Syria and Cyprus for a long time and lost touch. But I think of that time often.
by David Kossoff
from The Book Of Witnesses
Rudi Krause, "unforeseen"
angels incognito
step from the airplane
unnoticed they ride taxis
into town
they have come
to take over
our daily paper
and we think
they reside
innoculously
in our attics
rudi krause
step from the airplane
unnoticed they ride taxis
into town
they have come
to take over
our daily paper
and we think
they reside
innoculously
in our attics
rudi krause
Rudi Krause, "one way"
minutes before the Son
caught the outgoing
one-way transport to Bethlehem
one of the angels slipped
a receiver into his inner ear
after the shepherds had stumbled
back out into the night
Jesus heard the whispered query:
whatever made you choose
a place like that?
heard, but didn’t hear
he had already forgotten
the language of the angels
rudi krause
caught the outgoing
one-way transport to Bethlehem
one of the angels slipped
a receiver into his inner ear
after the shepherds had stumbled
back out into the night
Jesus heard the whispered query:
whatever made you choose
a place like that?
heard, but didn’t hear
he had already forgotten
the language of the angels
rudi krause
Robert Farrar Capon, "Advent"
Advent is the church's annual celebration of the silliness (from selig, which is German for "blessed") of salvation. The whole thing really is a divine lark. God has fudged everything in our favour: without shame or fear we rejoice to behold his appearing. Yes, there is dirt under the divine Deliverer's fingernails. But no, it isn't any different from all the other dirt of history. The main thing is, he's got the package and we've got the trust: Lo, he comes with clouds descending. Alleluia, and three cheers.
What we are watching for is a party. And that party is not just down the street making up its mind when to come to us. It is already hiding in our basement, banging on our steam pipes, and laughing its way up our cellar stairs. The unknown day and hour of its finally bursting into the kitchen and roistering its way through the whole house is not dreadful; it is all part of the divine lark of grace. God is not our mother-in-law, coming to see whether her wedding-present china has been chipped. He is funny Old Uncle with a salami under one arm and a bottle of wine under the other. We do indeed need to watch for him; but only because it would be such a pity to miss all the fun.
by Robert Farrar Capon,
from The Parables of Judgment, Chapter 12
What we are watching for is a party. And that party is not just down the street making up its mind when to come to us. It is already hiding in our basement, banging on our steam pipes, and laughing its way up our cellar stairs. The unknown day and hour of its finally bursting into the kitchen and roistering its way through the whole house is not dreadful; it is all part of the divine lark of grace. God is not our mother-in-law, coming to see whether her wedding-present china has been chipped. He is funny Old Uncle with a salami under one arm and a bottle of wine under the other. We do indeed need to watch for him; but only because it would be such a pity to miss all the fun.
by Robert Farrar Capon,
from The Parables of Judgment, Chapter 12
Monday, December 11, 2006
Richard Osler, Advent poems (2006)
She Was Asked
(After Wilde )
In other stories the god comes
himself. Disguised as a shower
of gold, a swan. He takes
without asking. Then
he is gone. Mary was asked.
By an angel. With flowers.
Lilies. Bold, wide open.
Wouldn't anyone be flabbergasted
by such as he was. Preposterous.
Pregnant without intercourse, a son -
of God. Human and eternal. Three
in one. She was the one who
had to choose, blind to the final
outcome. We have always
Known her answer. She did not.
Richard Osler, Advent I, December 3rd 2006
*
Come O Come Emmanuel
Carrying God was she
Overshadowed with joy or dread? Or
Maybe she thought it just a dream.
Even so, she might still have wondered
Or, at least
Calculated the days until
Overcome with obvious signs
Mary remembered everything;
Even her acceptance of impossibility:
Eternal
Mystery living in her.
Mary, mother-child
Aware
Now of what she chose
Under her heart –
Emmanuel – God With Us,
Love, living in darkness.
Richard Osler, Advent II, December 10th 2006
*
Troubled – Luke 1, Verse 29
You hear a voice telling you to risk everything,
even you’re your one carefully constructed life.
Sometimes it is like Mary carrying a promise
someone else has made and it lives inside you
as if it were yours but first you must claim it.
Will you welcome this angel whatever it is
that comes in the dark and talks against
all your thoughtful plans? Will you say ”yes?”
If you do there will be a journey, a difficult one,
a birth surrounded by strangers, and signs.
A baby to be honoured by kings. Such hope
wrapped up in something just that small.
Richard Osler, Advent III, December 17 2006
*
Puer Natus Est
(After Raine)
Power that comes
Undone on
Earth
Revolving round its star.
Newborn
At his mother’s breast
Tugging against eternity
Utterly
Satisfied
Even now, as
Star-maker, star-made within
Time.
Richard Osler, Advent IV, December 24th 2006
(After Wilde )
In other stories the god comes
himself. Disguised as a shower
of gold, a swan. He takes
without asking. Then
he is gone. Mary was asked.
By an angel. With flowers.
Lilies. Bold, wide open.
Wouldn't anyone be flabbergasted
by such as he was. Preposterous.
Pregnant without intercourse, a son -
of God. Human and eternal. Three
in one. She was the one who
had to choose, blind to the final
outcome. We have always
Known her answer. She did not.
Richard Osler, Advent I, December 3rd 2006
*
Come O Come Emmanuel
Carrying God was she
Overshadowed with joy or dread? Or
Maybe she thought it just a dream.
Even so, she might still have wondered
Or, at least
Calculated the days until
Overcome with obvious signs
Mary remembered everything;
Even her acceptance of impossibility:
Eternal
Mystery living in her.
Mary, mother-child
Aware
Now of what she chose
Under her heart –
Emmanuel – God With Us,
Love, living in darkness.
Richard Osler, Advent II, December 10th 2006
*
Troubled – Luke 1, Verse 29
You hear a voice telling you to risk everything,
even you’re your one carefully constructed life.
Sometimes it is like Mary carrying a promise
someone else has made and it lives inside you
as if it were yours but first you must claim it.
Will you welcome this angel whatever it is
that comes in the dark and talks against
all your thoughtful plans? Will you say ”yes?”
If you do there will be a journey, a difficult one,
a birth surrounded by strangers, and signs.
A baby to be honoured by kings. Such hope
wrapped up in something just that small.
Richard Osler, Advent III, December 17 2006
*
Puer Natus Est
(After Raine)
Power that comes
Undone on
Earth
Revolving round its star.
Newborn
At his mother’s breast
Tugging against eternity
Utterly
Satisfied
Even now, as
Star-maker, star-made within
Time.
Richard Osler, Advent IV, December 24th 2006
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