Year: 2013

Stumbling upon a nearly forgotten anthology of fiction by and about women, Bitches and Sad Ladies, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan found herself transfixed by the late poet Anne Sexton’s tale, “The Letting Down of The Hair,” the story of “a modern Rapunzel who has locked herself in a stone room”:

Her hair receives fan letters, pilgrims, and gawkers. The hair is filmed for television. Although the setting is modern, Sexton plays with fairy tale logic. Honey is preferred to shampoo. A woman is only a vessel for her hair. A wish causes a death.

Sexton has the poet’s skill of condensing meaning. The speaker informs us: “I’d had a normal life, men and lipstick, daiquiris and sunburns.” And we immediately know the sort of woman she has been—without names of men, without dates, or history—we know. Ruth, the speaker’s shorthaired confidant, becomes emotionally vivid in two lines: “After years of therapy, [Ruth] gave it all up for Zen. She watched her mind as a cat watches over a fish tank.” The sentences stay thrumming in the reader’s mind.

The prose is as wild and strange as the woman it describes: “I have never cut my hair. That’s something you ought to know right off. It fills the room the way ten giraffes would, twisting and twisting, their long and innocent necks.” Before Ruth dies, she writes to the speaker telling her that Christ has revealed the hair is a parable for the life of the poet. The speaker doesn’t know what to do about this, doesn’t even fully understand it. And after Ruth dies, she has no one to ask.

Reviewing The Classical Tradition, a massive compendium of essays on ancient Greece and Rome, Stephen Greenblatt and Joseph Leo Koerner note that the volume’s contributors had to “scramble to fill in what they know will be for many people a succession of blanks.” The reason why? Our relatively recent refusal to learn their language:

The Latin-centered educational system remained largely intact well into the twentieth century. Its downfall in the United States may be symbolically dated to 1931, when Yale University—quickly followed by other institutions—decided to abolish the Latin requirement for all secondary school applicants. With it vanished a shared linguistic possession that had been handed down, at least among the entire educated elite, since ancient times.

The vanishing is not a matter of language alone: Latin was traditionally taught by means of ancient literary texts. This means that virtually all educated men (and women, as soon as they could gain access to what had been a male privilege) were steeped in the same books. When Shakespeare went to the King’s Grammar School in Stratford in the 1570s, he read Plautus and Terence, Virgil and Ovid, and this core curriculum remained more or less the same for centuries, through Isaac Newton and John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson. In the latter half of the twentieth century this whole structure collapsed. As anyone who has recently set foot in a college or university knows, few students arrive with even a fragmentary knowledge of ancient literature and culture, and, what is more, only a small number of these same students graduate with any more knowledge of the classics than they brought with them.

Peter Popham argues that Geoffrey Hill is perhaps the great living British poet but also one of the most under-read. Why? Hill’s dense, difficult style, and the lingering “stigma of elitism”:

Why should we expect to understand poems at a single sitting, as if poetry were under the jurisdiction of the Plain English Campaign? We think nothing of exerting ourselves to learn a language or master a new software program – why should it be regarded as anachronistic to demand a fraction of such effort to understand a poem? If a poet has something to teach, poetry lovers should be prepared to make the effort to learn.

Hill has never worn his politics on his sleeve but he is clear about the dangers of deliberate simplification, quoting the dictum that “tyrants always want a language and a literature that is easily understood”. “Tyranny requires simplification,” he maintains. “Genuinely difficult art is truly democratic.”

Mark Rowland meditates on the well-lived life, arguing that it “is play, and not work, that gives value to our lives”:

It might be that most of the things we do in life we do for the sake of something else. But there are still some things we do just to do them — for their own sake and not for the sake of anything else. If the former category is work, then the latter category is play. Work is activity directed at an external goal. Play is activity whose goal is internal or intrinsic to it. In its pure form, play has no external purpose or reward. We play just to play. When my sons’ volleys have been sufficiently consistent and accurate, their tennis coach will instigate a game. He yells, ‘Fruit basket!’ and lobs several balls into the air in quick succession. They have to drop their rackets, run and catch the balls before they stop bouncing. This is done amid much cackling and squeals of delight on their part — almost as if the rest of their lesson was work aimed at unleashing this bout of play. I love watching this, because I cannot imagine a purer form of play. There is no external goal or purpose. My sons do it simply because at that precise moment in time — and the squeals of delight are testament to this — there is nothing in the world they would rather be doing.

After reading Zadie Smith’s essay on joy, Brett McCracken contemplates that emotion’s place in his own life:

When I consider instances of joy in my life thus far, most of what I would list probably felt more like pleasure at the time. I think of the summer night in Cambridge when I snuck onto the roof of Clare College with friends, looking out over the moonlit gardens, punting down the Cam river well after midnight, with champagne and laughter in ample supply. I think of the long, late-night undergrad conversations at Wheaton with my roommates: about God, movies, theology, relationships and the like. Or the childhood trips with my family to the Tulsa State Fair, an autumnal tradition rife with the screams and whirring of carnival rides and the smells of all things barbecue and fried. Pleasures all.

The memories of all that, the longing for those happy experiences and the intense recognition that they will never be replicated in just the same way… that’s what stirs up joy. Sehnsucht. And it’s not just nostalgia for the past. It’s nostalgia for a future that a lifetime full of accumulated pangs and pleasures leads us to believe exists. Somewhere. Joy is the ineffable, the transcendent, the sublime stasis which a million little experiences grasp at but can never fully capture. An ultimate settledness for which our hearts now restlessly pine.

In a follow-up to his essay on his idiosyncratic Christian faith, Justin E. H. Smith finds Ralph Waldo Emerson better able “to express what I myself would like to say”. Here’s Emerson:

Every man’s words, who speaks from that life, must sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not carry its august sense; they fall short and cold. Only itself can inspire whom it will, and behold! their speech shall be lyrical, and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indicate the heaven of this deity, and to report what hints I have collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the Highest Law.

Smith concludes:

Emerson knows that he cannot argue, but can only profess. He knows that his words will fail, even as he knows he cannot suppress the desire to use words, to try to describe the character and feeling of his faith. He knows that this is just a wind blowing through him, that he cannot blow it into another who happens for now to be standing in a quiet spot; but he also knows that wind blows everywhere the same, and that it is miraculous.

(Photo by DeuxXFlorida)

In an interview, Will Willimon, a former bishop in the Methodist Church and author of the recent novel Incorporation, explains why he turned to fiction:

I think you can be more truthful. And the truth rendered by fiction is usually a much more textured, rounder truth than the truth available in straight discourse and analytical, philosophical writing. We are, as Luther said, simul justus et peccator. In the church, we believe we are being redeemed. We have been — we are being — redeemed, but not yet. We are not there yet. And in fiction, you can capture that same quality.

It’s no surprise that some of our greatest novelists — Flannery O’Connor, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene — were Catholics. There is a sacramental quality of fiction, an incarnational quality of fiction, whereby the earthy people, utterly human people, have been in some mysterious way embraced by the divine and become themselves sort of sacramental. We see God through the most mundane and quotidian of devices.