October 2007 Archives
This is a sestina. Six words repeated throughout six stanzas, capped by an envoi of three lines that uses all six words. The order of the words changes according to a set pattern throughout the stanzas. It's by far the most difficult form of poetry I've had to write this semester. This is rough and repetitious. Which is why I'm not a poet.
At an age when they’re just eyes,
Sucking up the world; at once following
The dog through the house and crashing
Into a pile of left-out toys. They keep
Your attention from wandering, the better
To appreciate them in that vaporous moment.
I can’t say I’ve ever overlooked those moments.
The glow in their eyes when they sit,
Head resting on my chest, wanting better
Expressions while reading a book; following
The words with my finger; keeping time
With the rhyme when the dodgeits crash.
The on/off switch is broken. They crash
Into sleep the moment they lie (or are laid)
Down. But they keep playing in dreams.
Excitement in sleep flutters their eyelids.
Mom follows the trail of dolls and clothes
Through the house. What could be better?
Some say it’s better to pretend they don’t exist.
That the stock market could crash and
Put us out of work. We could follow our dreams
And at the moment we reach them, fail.
The eyelids still flutter and the child
Keeps dreaming and so do we.
To have and to hold. To keep and to cherish.
We once said no better words to each other.
Eyes locked together as we ourselves would be.
The stock market did crash and our stomachs
Stayed empty. At the moment we reached for
Our dreams to follow them, they were ghosts.
To follow our dreams so our children can dream
Unfettered and in safety. To keep and to cherish
Until that moment when we realize that it’s
Not a better place for us that we make,
But for them. The crashing and noise,
The eyes closed in sleep. The dreams, ghosts.
My eyes follow the child through the room.
She crashes over toys. Again. I keep picking
Them up. A better moment, though ghostly, doesn’t exist.
I feel like I've been writing fiction for a long time. Not counting that time when I went to the lake with my grandparents and started working on a mystery novel when I was all of nine or ten, I've been concentrating on writing fiction for the last six or eight years. I would take my Underwood portable typewriter with me when I worked at the factory. Got some strange looks from folks, as I'm sure you can imagine. The life of a writer is a perfect fit for my personality and who I feel like I am.
But sometimes stories come out of me that I don't know what to do with.
The story that won me Editor's Choice at Relief Journal is still a mystery to me. I don't know where that story came from. I read it again when I got that issue in the mail and although I recognized the words I had written, in some ways it didn't feel like it was mine. At that point, it really wasn't. It had grown up and gone out into the big, bad world on its own. It had become its own "thing," wholly separate from its creator.
I wrote a story the other day and had planned to submit it to a contest. I let a few trusted readers look at it, though, and they confirmed my own suspicions: it's not really a literary story. It's pretty conventional—conventional narration, conventional dialogue, conventional emotional arc… More of a mass-market piece than a "literary" work. I know, labels shouldn't really matter. "Literary" is just an arbitrary adjective to describe work that tries (whether it succeeds or not isn't so much the issue) to go beyond the conventional and explore areas of human experience in new (and sometimes fresh) ways. This story doesn't really do that. It's just a plain-ol' short story.
I wrestle violently with the ogre of wanting to be A Writer That Matters. I set for myself a lifetime goal: to have something I've written be anthologized in a college textbook. It's an ambitious goal; I look through the authors that have stories in the various literary anthologies I have collected over the past several years and I doubt whether I have what it takes to play in that league.
But maybe that's short-sighted. I really would like to make a full-time living as a fiction writer so I can get out of web development entirely. Most of the writers in those anthologies, while respected for their craft, are not John Grishams. They probably have no desire to be. I think there's a lot to be said for focussing on the purity of your art at the expense of commercial viability. But somewhere, there's a tight-rope to walk. Somewhere, there's a line you spend time jumping back and forth across so you can be respected for your art while allowing yourself to be commercially viable so you can continue to do your art.
One of the things I've considered doing, in addition to writing short stories and novels, is to get into writing screenplays. A couple screenplays could give me the income I need to keep writing the more "artistic" works. I've been toying with the idea of writing a screenplay for quite a long time. I think it fits my personality very well because screenplays are a shorter, more concentrated form of story-telling. My writing also tends to be very visual. I doubt I would have a lot trouble transitioning the same skills I've learned writing fiction to the more visual medium of film-making. It's also a market that doesn't have as bleak an outlook as that of fiction in print.
At any rate, I'm not giving up on this latest short story. I'm a little disappointed in myself that it's not more "literary" than it is, but I feel like it's a story that has some mass-market potential because it's much more accessible than a lot of stuff I've written lately.
If nothing else, I'll just have to say to myself: "you did the best you could, so be happy with that."
Unfortunately, I rarely am.
I may have broken the months-long logjam this weekend. I'd hate to jinx it by talking about it, but I was finally able to get in three or four hours of uninterrupted writing on Saturday. There was a lot going on in the house, so I don't know how it happened (I usually get frustrated with the constant interruption and just give up). But there was three or four hours of pecking away on the late '40s Underwood typewriter on a short story for a competition.
If I can get this finished and submitted in the next several days, I might have gotten enough momentum built up to get back to the novel in earnest.
I know they say that you have to write whether you feel like it or not if you expect to accomplish anything as a writer. That may, in fact, be true. But it does feel good to just flat-out write. It feels wonderful to find out you're at the end of the page and pop another sheet into the typewriter and after several hours, it feels even better to start typing page numbers with more than one digit!
Wish me luck…
As a member of our pulpit committee at church, it's our job to fill in the pulpit until we can find a new pastor (our last pastor retired). It was my turn this Sunday.
The scripture referenced is the Book of Jude.
The book of Jude has always interested me. It's short—only twenty-five verses. That fits well with my short attention span. It's mysterious, too: just who are these "angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their own home," and what about the oft-mentioned reference to the apocryphal Book of Enoch in verse fourteen?
It's a dramatic book, no longer than it is: in verse seven, Jude reminds us of the fire from heaven at Sodom and Gomorrah; and verse eleven, the Israelite fricassee of Korah's rebellion.
Its metaphors are beautiful and frightening: (verse 12) "These men are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm—shepherds who feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted—twice dead." It's a work of literary brilliance in its own right.
These are some of the reasons I personally am interested in the book of Jude. But if there's one thing I've learned about myself as I've matured, it's that what interests me is, quite often, of little to no interest to everyone else. As much as I'd like to, we won't talk about the Nephilim of Genesis six. Or the Book of Enoch. Or the poetic metaphors. I think the book of Jude has several important themes that are as relevant today as they were two millennia ago. Be on your guard—and pray. Be merciful, but be careful. Be proactive. Contend for the faith—and do it with confidence.
William Jennings Bryan wrote an eloquent closing remarks speech for the Scopes trial. Though he sometimes makes logical assumptions (which he shared with most people then) to support his argument, he makes some good points. This is one.
The evolutionist does not undertake to tell us how protozoa, moved by interior and resident forces, sent life up through all the various species, and cannot prove that there was actually any such compelling power at all. And yet, the school children are asked to accept their guesses and build a philosophy of life upon them. If it were not so serious a matter, one might be tempted to speculate upon the various degrees of relationship that, according to evolutionists, exist between man and other forms of life. It might require some very nice calculation to determine at what degree of relationship the killing of a relative ceases to be murder and the eating of one's kin ceases to be cannibalism.
— William Jennings Bryan
An exchange between William Jennings Bryan (currently on the stand) and Clarence Darrow…
Think I'm talking about O.J.? Hardly. It was the first court case to be broadcast on the radio. It happened in a small town in Tennessee. Both prosecution and defense sported lawyers famous in their own circles and infamous in the other's.
It was a showdown between competing worldviews.
Before a double homicide, a dubious innocent verdict, and a grandiose display of the logical conclusion of attempting to exact temporal justice in that civil trial, there was a trial that held actual importance. Theology, science, and religion would all be irreperably harmed by ripples that were sent out when the ACLU's agnostic bulldog Clarence Darrow convinced his bosses to let him face down the evangelical heavyweight William Jennings Bryan.
It was called the Scopes Monkey Trial. Excerpts of the transcript can be read on the UMKC page about the Scopes trial. I've also purchased an eBook that contains the full transcript of the trial.
One of the things that strikes me is the relative ignorance of Clarence Darrow about what the Bible does or does not say about science. When the court characterizes him as an "agnostic," Darrow responds that he is pleased to be known as such. Agnostics don't make good Bible students. His questioning of Bryan about the stopping of the sun in Joshua, Jonah and the Whale, and his continued assertion that Genesis calls the earth flat (the Bible claims the earth is round: Psalm 102:12 [NIV] "as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us"—if it wasn't known that the earth was round, this would have made no sense whatsoever…"north from the south" would have been as good as "east from the west") proves that any tenuous grasp on understanding the Bible he has is superficial at best. At one point, he calls Bryan's Christianity a "foolish religion." Maybe he let that slip. Freudian thing.
The trial transcript is sometimes tedious (I skipped over picking the jury.) But as a document of one moment in history in which the entire nation was held captive by the media, it's interesting to go back to the source of all that and find out what was actually said. It's chock full of great period details, too.
H.L Mencken's coverage of the trial —vociferously arrogant, one-sided, and scathingly anti-Christian—is enlightening because it shows what a city boy from Baltimore who considers himself an in-tee-lekt-shool thinks about us poor, backward, ignorant hillbillies. If you think the mainstream media is surreptitiously anti-Christian and xenophobic about rural America now, you should read the blatant lambasting that Mencken laid down about the Scopes trial and the town of Dayton, Tennessee.
As I digest some of this material, I'll post quotes and general observations about this fascinating moment in 1925 when two universes collided. The resulting supernova is still being observed today.
