David Hare

One of my sisters acted in an end-of-year directing showcase put on by her college's theatre department. The directing students chose to work with various scenes from the plays of David Hare.

These two plays are worth watching/reading; the mother-daughter dynamics are especially well done.

Amy's View (wiki; also some pages here) - My sister played Esme. (Well, played her for one scene. We cycled through several Esmes over the course of the evening).

The Secret Rapture (wiki)

A Song For Lya

I believe I first read A Song for Lya about a year ago.

Subjectively speaking, it is the best short story (novella?) I've read in ages. I'm not even going to put the qualifier "science fiction" in there.

Objectively speaking, it may not deserve quite that much praise. But it deserves a heck of a lot. My aesthetic sensibilities may have some weaknesses -- including a inexplicable taste for science fiction, and a particular fondness for Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach -- but they aren't completely whacked. The story is excellently crafted, and it is powerful, and it is good. It also managed to win a Hugo award, and almost nabbed a Nebula, so I don't think I'm completely off my rocker here.

Quite honestly, every time I look at it, I think "there's no way this should have worked." It tackles way too many big themes in way too strange a setting. And yet it does work, and beautifully.

((Obligatory caveats: sf genre; some sexual content (that is darn well needed); quite long.))

Science and Poetry

"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars--mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere.' I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. [...] What is the pattern, or the meaning, or why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

~Richard Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, p. 59

This is why I have seldom cared for nature-contemplation poetry. Not that I know terribly much of anything about science -- but what I do know is still more than most poems bother to acknowledge, even those that should know better.

It's also why Annie Dillard floored me, when my sister handed me the book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (also here) last summer.

"A rosy, complex light fills my kitchen at the end of these lengthening June days. From an explosion on a nearby star eight minutes ago, the light zips through space, particle-wave, strikes the planet, angles on the continent, and filters through a mesh of land dust: clay bits, sod bits, tiny windborne insects, bacteria, shred of wing and leg, gravel dust, grits of carbon, and dried cells of grass, bark, and leaves. [...] The light crosses the valley, threads through the screen on my open kitchen window, and gilds the painted wall. A plank of brightness bends from the wall and extends over the goldfish bowl on the table where I sit. The goldfish's side catches the light and bats it my way; I've an eyeful of fish scale and star." (124-125)

"A whirling air in his swim bladder balances the goldfish's weight in the water; his scales overlap, his feathery gills pump and filter; his eyes work, his heart beats, his liver absorbs, his muscles contract in a wave of extending ripples. The daphnieas he eats have eyes and jointed legs. The algae the daphnieas eat have green cells stacked like checkers or winding in narrow ribbons like spiral staircases up long columns of emptiness. And so on diminishingly down. We have not yet found the dot so small it is uncreated, as it were, like a metal blank, or merely roughed in--and we never shall. We go down landscape after mobile, sculpture after collage, down to molecular structures like a mob dance in Bureghel, down to atoms airy and balanced as a canvas by Klee, down to atomic particles, the heart of the matter, as spirited and wild as any El Greco saints. And it all works." (128)

~Annie Dillard - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Chapter 8

(The next chapter is all about death, for the record. Her smashing of any rose-colored glasses is another reason I liked the book).

And I think if anyone is going to write poetry about nature, or Emersonian musings about nature today -- this is probably how they need to write. If nature-based poetry is actually going to wake people up, and grab their attention, this is what it will have to look like. We know -- or at least I know -- too much to be content with dancing golden daffodils and red red roses and purple sunsets. To do less than that, to repeat surface banalities, to pretend we don't know what we now know...it feels false and forced, playing pretend and walking with our ears muffled, in a creation that is far stranger and far grander.

Drefful Mistakes Somewhere

"All systems that deal with the infinite are, besides, exposed to danger from small, unsuspected admixtures of human error, which become deadly when carried to such vast results. The smallest speck of earth's dust, in the focus of an infinite lens, appears magnified among the heavenly orbs as a frightful monster."
~Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Minister's Wooing, Chapter 23

"Honey, darlin', ye a'n't right, -- dar's a drefful mistake somewhar," she said. "Why, de Lord a'n't like what ye tink."
~Ibid.

"If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him."
~John 14:7

People who've talked to me over the past three years or so have probably heard me mention The Minister's Wooing. If only because I quote parts of it, like the above, on my Facebook profile from time to time.

I've said repeatedly that I'm going to write about it. But I never do. As a first post after two years of being gone, however, it seems a good place to start. I won't manage to say everything I want to about the book in this post, but I'll say some.

I first saw the book mentioned here. That post introduces the book and the author better than I can, and frames the historical context better than I can, and introduces some of the essential passages better than I can. So I'll just point there and say "read it now." Also, I think walking the same steps I did in becoming acquainted with the book is helpful in explaining this. And because a lot of what it did for this individual, it also did for me.

The book is a local color novel set in 18th century New England, in which Stowe wrestles with both the northern response to slavery and the Calvinist theology in which she was raised. In particular, she explores the ways in which different personality types and temperaments respond to Calvinist theology, especially the doctrine of predestination.

It's also the most bluntly clear-sighted and sympathetic critique of Calvinism I think I've ever read. (Anyone who calls it a "satire of Calvinism" understands nothing of either Calvinism or Stowe).

Now, I know I'm going to make certain people **facepalm** by bringing this book up in any serious way. In fact, shall I list your objections for you?

"Novels on serious subjects are the curse of serious thought. The difficulty of serious reflection upon any subject, and especially on theological subjects, is incalculably increased by those who overlay the essential parts of the question with a mass of perfectly irrelevant matter, which can have no other effect than to prejudice the feeling in one direction or another.

"The only question about [divine matters] which can interest any rational creature is, whether they are true or false. [...] Now, every one admits that the average tone and temper of every-day existence is not our ultimate rule -- that if theology is worth anything at all, it must form the rule and guide of our daily lives, instead of being guided by them ; and, therefore, a novel which (as all novels must) takes daily life as its standing ground, and shows how it is related to theology, has no tendency whatever to show the truth or falsehood of the theological doctrines which it describes.

"It is impossible not to feel a very strong sense of indignation against those who nibble at such questions, gossip about them, and, as far as their influence extends, try to substitute for the adamantine foundations on which any genuine faith must rest the mere shifting sand and mud of personal sentiment and inclination."

To which I can only say, "you're missing the whole darn point." If I'm feeling argumentative later, maybe I'll expound upon that in detail sometime. (One thing Stowe is arguing, for instance, is precisely that very issue -- that exploring the practical "working out" of a theological system is NOT tangential or irrelevant).

But for now, I will simply say this. Stowe doesn't propose some "hazy emotional personal sentimentality." At all. She reaches her arguments in a roundabout way, but she makes arguments just the same, and makes them quite powerfully. And they include such things as this:

a) Humans are fallible and limited, and our systems of theology and pictures of God are never completely perfect.

b) Jesus is the fullest revelation of God we have been given.

c) In light of (b), passages such as John 14 are probably a bit more central to any understanding of God than Romans 9. And any theological systematizing or pastoral care needs to take this into account.

Is it laid out in precisely those terms? No. But it's there for the taking, amongst chapters 6-8, 18, 23-24. And it's the beginning of a theology that focuses upon Christ as the adamantine foundation of Christianity, Christ as the lens through which the Bible is to be interpreted, and Christ only the true solution to the problem of evil and suffering.

One could do far worse than that.