Wednesday, June 29, 2005

The Greatest Sin

Perhaps shame is the greatest sin, worse than any other.
--Gwynneve, Confessions of a Pagan Nun

On many levels I agree with the above statement; however, I think I'd alter it to read, "Perhaps to inflict shame is the greatest sin." This morning I finished Kate Horsley's, Confessions of a Pagan Nun. It's one of the best books I've read all year. The story affected me the way great poetry or music affects me: I feel both diminished and enlarged; I have both nothing to say in response and much too much to say. I suppose you could argue that the main theme of the novel is the paradox of saying but not saying--the elusive yet reconciliatory embrace of mystery.

Confessions is about Gwynneve, a medeival Irish nun who was raised by pagans. Though she loves Christ, she is also--much to St. John's and her contemporaries' consternation--a lover of "the world and the things in the world" (see I John 2:15). She's somehow able to harmonize the many dualities she encounters during this transitional period of history by means of two things: imagination and words. Both are incredibly powerful--able to instigate bloodshed and able to course like familiar blood in veins. It's in both that she puts her faith.

Ultimately, Gwynneve muses, "The truth may be too brilliant a light, too vast for words or other mental geometries." To revere the light while refusing to be ashamed or afraid of what lurks in the dark is, according to the novel, to be free. "I am dangerous," writes Gwynneve, "only when I am urged to be what I am not."

I have much more to say (about the love story between Gwynneve and the druid Giannon, her "soul's twin," about her vibrant, earthy mother, Murrynn, and about the lyricism of Horsley's writing), but at the same time, I'm rendered mute (!). I'll let the book speak (or not speak?) for itself. By all means, read it. Receive its shadows and secrets, its emerald-and-moss-covered luminosity. As John Lennon said, "It's all about God anyway."

Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Shards from Louise Gluck's Vita Nova

From "Lute Song:"

I made a harp of disaster
to perpetuate the beauty of my last love.
Yet my anguish, such as it is,
remains the struggle for form

and my dreams, if I speak openly,
less the wish to be remembered
than the wish to survive...

From "Lament:"

A terrible thing is happening--my love
is dying again, my love who has died already:
died and been mourned. And music continues,
music of separation: the trees
become instruments.

How cruel the earth...

...He is dying again,
and the world also. Dying the rest of my life...

From "Relic:"

I think sometimes
our consolations are the costliest thing.

From "Orfeo:"

...there is no music like this
without real grief.

Louise Gluck, Vita Nova, 1999. From SF

Thursday, June 23, 2005

June 23rd

Erotism is assenting to life even in death.
--Georges Bataille

Currently reading:
Confessions of a Pagan Nun by Kate Horsley
Erotism: Death and Sensuality by Bataille
Poems of Yeats
Soul Mates by Thomas Moore

Currently feeling:
Sad. Full of grief. Always the vague, lingering grief. The stone in the throat.

Currently writing:
I'm off tomorrow, so I'm going to set up my new laptop, load my new writing software (Storyweaver) and work on my novel. I'm thinking about changing the working title from Full Immersion Water Baptism to The Patience of Beauty. I also plan on reading a picture book on dragonflies--for research. Will probably listen to Bach while writing. He touches me.

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

The Collector

I am so angry. (I’m actually writing this a day after my first entry—but I did something wrong yesterday and it didn’t publish correctly.) I’m angry because of a novel I just finished, John Fowles’ The Collector. He paints his two characters so well that I found myself loving one and loathing—having murderous feelings toward—the other. Without giving too much away...The Collector is the story of a Londoner named Frederick who has no interiority. He’s hollow and artless and narcissistic. (Even Bartleby had more substance.) His only interest is butterfly collecting. He’s just going about his mundane life as a clerk (an unmarried, asexual, still-living-at-home-with-his-aunt clerk, to be exact) when he notices a beautiful young coed named Miranda who lives near his office. He begins to stalk her. Then he comes into some money after winning the lottery, and this emboldens him. He decides he wants to “take” Miranda for himself, so he kidnaps her and keeps her locked in a room in his cellar. (His aunt’s on holiday in Australia, so he’s living alone by this time.) For the first half of the book, we see events through Frederick’s eyes. While I did sympathize a bit with his dreary existence, I mostly despised him for being weak and spiritually vacant. “I could *so* kick his ass,” I thought to myself. His indifference and ineffectuality and utter selfishness are more despicable to me than stupidity or ignorance or hostility. At least there is a spark of something in the misguided and bitter. Frederick, on the other hand, is nothing but ash.

Then there’s Miranda, whom we hear from in the second half of the book. She’s keeping a diary. She’s everything that Frederick is not. She’s smart and perceptive, with a voracious appetite for life. An art student, she appreciates all forms of creativity and says she most hates “those who don’t make anything.” She also figures Frederick out very quickly; she knows she’s nothing more to him than a butterfly in a killing glass. She calls the other specimens in his collection her “fellow abductees.” Frederick can’t love anyone or anything, so he imprisons Miranda in order to indulge his admiration for her outer beauty. He knows nothing about her person. Fortunately, Fowles does allow the reader that pleasure. I fell in love with Miranda. I wish she were a real person. She’d be a close friend—or a sister. Here are my favorite lines from their conversations and her diary:

· “Ugly ornaments don’t deserve to exist…He is ugliness. But you can’t smash human ugliness.”
· “I’m thinking of all the butterflies that would have come from these if you’d let them live. I’m thinking of all the living beauty you’ve ended…You’re like a miser, you hoard up all the beauty in these drawers.”
· “Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?…Why do you take all the life out of life? Why do you kill all the beauty?”
· “The essences. Not the things themselves.”
· “Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.”
· “It’s feeling that matters. Can’t you see?”
· [Thinking about a man named George, whom she loves...] “The two of us in that room. No past, no future. All intense deep that-time-only. A feeling that everything must end, the music, ourselves, the moon, everything. That if you get to the heart of things you find sadness for ever and ever, everywhere; but a beautiful silver sadness, like a Christ face.”
· “Uncreative men plus opportunity-to-create equals evil men.”

What makes me so angry is the way Frederick—and people like him—snuff out life by trying to “capture” it. You can’t possess another living thing. Not its essence, anyway. Why do we have to get our hands on life? Grab, grab, grab. Greed, greed, greed. Like the Japanese tourists you see at the Grand Canyon who never really look at the landscape; they’re too busy capturing a still shot for their scrap book. I wrote author Thomas Moore a few weeks ago. I titled the subject of my email, “Eros and other difficulties.” (I was struggling with some of my own "longing" issues.) When he wrote back he’d changed the title to “Winged desire.” I like that. To look at a thing—even desire itself—without touching it. “To have,” writes poet Louise Gluck, “honored hunger.” Is there a way to honor hunger while neither feeding nor supressing it?

In the Beginning...Beauty

I only have a minute. I'm at work and am heading out the door. First, though, I want to jot down some thoughts in honor of beginnings...and beauty. I've been thinking a lot about the latter concept and am beginning to imagine that it is vital to my search for understanding. I have so much to learn, but what I do know now--today, this very minute--is that beauty is not the same as attractiveness or loveliness. Rather, it's the fragile splendor of the breakdown (Frou Frou), the residue of immense patience (Witter Byner), the beginning of terror (Rainer Maria Rilke), the blood-indigo hue of pain (Trent Reznor), and the "Other" that Plato, Jung, Woolf, Faulkner, Tillich, Gluck and other seekers said is the sole object of soulful desire. More so even than truth, which Keats insisted is synonymous with beauty. I also like what Robinson Jeffers called it: "the sole business of poetry." Everything else, he said, is a reason but not the reason. I want to catch a holy glimpse before I die of this paradoxical ideal the Greeks referred to as kallos--from which we get the English calli. Calli + graphy = beauty-filled writing. Since beauty encompasses much more than what is aesthetically appealing, however, I think it's only fitting to name my web log Calli + graffito (Italian for colloquial, often vulgar and defacing, inscriptions). So welcome to my quest for beauty. Welcome to Calligraffiti.