This is my anthem

Passing years and fallen leaves

The Shepherd leadeth

(WRITTEN AUGUST 19TH) Here I am again, friends. What a thing life is, eh? I'm currently riding the waves (though last week I felt like I was just being drowned by them) of a tumultuous set of circumstances; I am reconsidering my commitment to go to China for 2 years with CRM, my parents have put our house up for sale, and though I can't really afford it yet I am looking for a place to move to myself. I've also got a slew of good friends who are moving homes right now and one in particular who I don't want to move so far away.

As I reassess my sense of calling for this current season of life, I wonder how much I can trust my heart to help me decide which path to tread. Years of compounded training at home and at church, plus a good, solid classical education, have lodged in my head that the mind must be master over the appetite and affections. Yet, as I was reminded the other day by Shakespeare's witty and profound comedy, "As You Like It," there is a time and place for the heart to... take center stage. Though love is a folly, it is a natural and necessary one. It happens in the forest, where people are removed from the atmosphere of the Court and the City and can allow wild and silly and wonderful things to happen...  

He leadeth me, O blessed thought!
O words with heav’nly comfort fraught!
Whate’er I do, where’er I be
Still ’tis God’s hand that leadeth me.

Refrain:
He leadeth me, He leadeth me,
By His own hand He leadeth me;
His faithful foll’wer I would be,
For by His hand He leadeth me.

Sometimes ’mid scenes of deepest gloom,
Sometimes where Eden’s bowers bloom,
By waters still, o’er troubled sea,
Still ’tis His hand that leadeth me.

Lord, I would place my hand in Thine,
Nor ever murmur nor repine;
Content, whatever lot I see,
Since ’tis my God that leadeth me.

And when my task on earth is done,
When by Thy grace the vict’ry’s won,
E’en death’s cold wave I will not flee,
Since God through Jordan leadeth me.

Trimmings and Truth

As an addendum to the previous post, I've also been thinking about the trimmings and trappings of a story. I've read so many of the 'greatest short stories' lately, not to mention other popular or well-loved works of fiction and nonfiction, that I've...and I never thought I'd say this in a million years...almost reached my limit (for now) on beautiful, flowery, descriptive prose. Yes, I realize that I write flowery, descriptive prose, but I think that's a part of why I'm losing a little bit of patience with it.

George MacDonald wrote a small essay about Fantasy stories and what they are to him. In this wonderful little essay filled with good thoughts, he says that fantasy stories are "beauty clothed in truth" or maybe "wrapped in truth," but you get the picture. This phrase, that beautiful word picture of the harmony and symbiotic relationship required to make a truly great story, instantly became a part of my mental framework.

There's a great deal that goes into a story that we don't usually think about (which is perhaps why I haven't really tried to write one in several years), but at its barest parts, perhaps we can divide it simply into beauty and truth; a great story is beautifully expressed and contains real substance; instances of goodness and/or wickedness portrayed as such (truth) but told through images conjured up in the imagination (beauty). An eloguently expressed story full of fanciful creatures and breathtaking scenery can only go so far unless undergirded with elements of truth and goodness. A true concept can have so much more lasting affect on the heart and soul if expressed creatively and aesthetically.

To think about it in Biblical terms, "the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us." He did not merely tell us how to live but embodied those ideas for us in a powerful and beautiful living testimony.  The gospels tell Jesus' narrative, and meanwhile Jesus himself is a living story; a living incarnation of Truth! Hallelluiah!

The truth/beauty distinction is not so cut and dried as I'm making it sound, of course. Truth is itself beautiful and always will be to the one seeking it, as belgian detective Hercule Poirot points out in one of the novels I'm currently reading. I will say also that there is some truth value inherent in beauty in any form. But that is another topic for another day!

I read a story the other night which was fun, interesting, and beautifully expressed- just exquisite prose in places. It was called "The Mummy's Foot" and written by a fellow with an outrageously French name: Theophile Gautier. Impressive, no? But I digress. While charming and fanciful, the story did not fully transport me as I had expected it to from its promising beginning. Upon reflecting back on it, I realized this was because it lacked...meaning. The beauty was there, but very little truth; the trimmings were quite trim and attractive, but there was so little behind them that they simply fluttered in the breeze. Naturally, I don't expect every short story to be full of profound insights, but I came away from that story rather disappointed. It had the makings to be so much more than it was, and it settled for eliciting a smile and a brief chuckle. That's not such a bad thing, and perhaps that's all Mr. Gautier set out to do, but for me...for me, I felt that his florid prose deserved to grace better subject matter. 

In summation, the best stories are valuable treasures wrapped in elegant, shining paper; a harmony between substance and appearance, as it were. With such high expectations for stories, however, I find myself stifled from writing at the risk of producing something utterly meaningless. I'd rather not write at all than add to the world one more pointless, vapid, tarnished plot.

Hm. What pride and stubbornness that shows in me. Unwilling to put pen to paper unless what I write is sure to amaze and inspire. Evidently the perfectionist within is alive and kicking. Well, I will fight her and try to put into practice what a friend told me this week about any art form that takes practice: "We've all got 1,000 bad ones in us (whether paintings, sculptures, stories...), so our job is to get them out all as quickly as we can [so we can get to the good stuff sooner]." Excellent advice, that. A clever variation on the assertion that "practice makes perfect," or at least that practice brings great improvement. 

So to all those aspiring artists of any kind out there, whether painter, photographer, writer or something else, I encourage you to do what I, too will strive to do: Keep at it--keep creating--and do not give up! Together, we can make the world a more beautifully true and truly beautiful place.

Great storytelling

I find myself in the awkard position of being absolutely wide awake at a very late hour, thanks to a bit of homemade chai (made by my father and I, I'd like to add) just recently consumed while visiting a friend this evening. I knew what I was doing, though I hoped I might be able to overpower the caffeine with a bit of self-delusion, or some accumulated exhaustion, but alas! No dice. Still, I'm inclined to make use of this opportunity - seize the moment!- and get out a few thoughts that were whipping through my head in quick succession during the drive home.

Practically all I can think about these days is writing. Ok, so that’s not entirely true, but let’s just say it’s a theme being interwoven into just about everything I do or think about these days. You, astute reader that you are, may have noticed this in my recent posts. There's just something about writing that fulfills an important creative corner of my soul, and which has been demanding more and more of my attention, like a bratty little child tugging Mom’s sleeve with quick, impatient jerks of his little arm.

Anyway, writing… Have you read C.S. Lewis’ book called The Abolition of Man? If you haven’t, perhaps you should, though it’s not one of those books I’d recommend to everybody. I read it in school a couple years ago, and of all the books I read in the Torrey Honors program, it left the deepest mark on my philosophy of education and my thoughts about reading and writing fiction.

Lewis uses a then-contemporary children’s textbook as a negative example illustrating the difference between indoctrination and education. Indoctrination masquerades as education, but in reality is so focused on teaching children what to think about things that it fails miserably to teach them how to think about things. Education, in contrast, teaches a child how to think, and, just as importantly- and this is the part I love best but can’t articulate as well- trains a child to recognize and appreciate beauty and goodness; it slips in beyond the mind and forms the very heart and soul- the chest, as Lewis calls it- to respond rightly to things- loving what is good, hating what is evil, etc. He uses the example of the “chest,” if I recall it correctly, to distinguish between it and the stomach, or appetite, and the head, or mind. The chest is that part of us which indoctrination not only ignores but stifles, and which once eliminated leaves us less than human, just automatons or even ghosts of what we were meant to be.

What I love about this is that FICTION- STORY- LITERATURE is what Lewis prescribes to help teach the “chest!” Perhaps music, too, and other forms of art. but I don’t remember that part as well. Can you believe it? I don’t remember if that surprised me when I read it the first time, but I know it is only too true. Wonderfully, magically true! Think about it: A story like Sleeping Beauty, for instance…we encounter characters like the dark and brooding faerie Mellificent, the three good fairies, the beautiful Princess Aurora, the King and Queen, and the handsome Prince. Our encounters with these characters, our experience of their existence in our imagination, brings us through a gamut of emotions from joy to mourning to outrage to rejoicing. To even say that we “learn” things about “the character of goodness and wickedness” is to bring it from the realm of the chest to the head. We approach closer to the truth if we simply say that as we respond to the mellificent faerie in one way and to dear Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather in another way, there is something going on within us that is actually helping shape us to be better people.

And there, just there, you have the crux of my need to learn to write fiction- I deeply, earnestly and even desperately desire to teach/inform, but really to form that part of us that is so neglected by some of today’s educative methods, through this almost mystical exchange of a reader with the characters in a great story; to point people to Goodness through the art of writing (and other forms of art besides). 

I’ve given this much thought lately, largely thanks to that amazing “Plot and Structure” book I raved about before (by James Scott Bell). At the end of each chapter are a few suggested exercises to help you understand what sort of writer you are, to get the creative juices flowing, and to give you a little practice applying the principles just learned. These exercises, even if you didn’t have the chapters preceding them, would be worth buying the book. They’re that good. Anyway, one of them gives this question to which it suggests you write a free form response: “When readers read my novels I want them to feel __________________ at the end. That’s because to me, novels are __________________." Brilliant, isn’t it? “Write quickly, from the gut,” he says. I somewhat shyly proffer to you my own quickly-scrawled answer (having come off of reading Secret Life of Bees the same day):

“I want to tell stories the way Sue Monk Kidd tells stories. Lyrically, poetically, achingly but with an overall atmosphere filled with hope and growth and wonder. I want people to come away from my stories with a greater sense of the preciousness of life, the beauty in the ordinary, the spark of divinity within every human soul; to feel hopeful, inspired, stirred, wiser, and challenged. I want them to get the feeling that I know just how they feel. To feel accepted, even. I want to slip in bits of truth, observations that are almost more powerful than the story (like George MacDonald). To make them feel that they are better for having read it. To restore and change people.”

That’s because, “To me a novel is a journey alongside a great (believable, preferably endearing) character. It’s an experience of a different world, a way to expand your mind and awareness of the world. It’s a study in human psychology, what makes us tick, what makes us think, what it means to love. It’s a study of human interactions. It’s ‘truth wrapped in beauty,’ a way to shape our ‘chests,’ our very souls, not just give us head knowledge. A novel is a magic portal and a powerful learning experience. A good novel makes us think, draws us in and makes us better for reading it.”

Noticing more themes? Me too. I don’t know when I started having this insatiable desire for growth and knowledge and self-improvement. The latter probably dates from when I became a Christian and became aware of the impoverishment of my soul up to that point, plus the exposure to the Bible’s many passages about being conformed to Christ’s likeness, becoming more like God, growing in holiness and starting to produce the fruits of the Spirit. Christians are all about personal growth to the glory of God. J Anyway, I’m starting to wander.

The fascinating thing about all this talk of writing things to inspire and restore, is that I have been immersing myself of late in short stories of a decidedly different flavor. These have been tales full of malice, terror, shock, and horror- and inducing much of the same. It’s funny how much I’ve been enjoying these, especially when you think that most of my life I’ve been  protecting myself from these very emotions (mostly subconciously). For better or for worse, I’ve shied away from the powerful emotions induced by horror films, unhappy endings and disturbing stories. I’ve preferred to focus on the bright side of life; the silver lining; the cup half full; the blessing amidst the trial, etc. In short, I’ve been the optimist all my life and kind of nicely, smilingly, primly and properly avoided the darker shades of reality- all except for sadness, of which I have at times drunk deeply. But this year, cautiously and with an attempt at wisdom and moderation, I’ve dipped a straw in and taken sips here and there of some of those less pleasant emotions I previously thought to be without value. And I’m learning that there is some merit to allowing oneself to experience a more complete gamut of emotions, particularly if done through the vehicle of STORY rather than personal experience. Besides, those types of tales are often redolent with supernatural, spiritual themes just begging to be considered and discussed with others. J

Story has been my portal lately into a world of “October people” laced throughout with sin, fears, apathy, petty complaints and furtive thoughts. And a world of recognizing and being OK with the imperfect, the broken, the less-than-ideal. One more small step for me in my journey of recovery from the plague of perfectionism. Somehow, and I can’t say just how, these creepy, shocking, unsettling stories bring me further into a place of peace with my own life and ‘the state of things.’ I can see with more open eyes the things I like and dislike, the things that excite and disappoint, and I can take the good along with the bad. My literary window into a messy pseudo-reality in turn has an affect on me in that realm beyond words. And, believe it or not, this extends to the very real act of letting go of some things I wish were different, and finding joy in patience and acceptance.  

I’d also like to point out that it’s amazing how many different sorts of instruments God has in His marvelous and mysterious teaching toolbox. The echoes of His voice, as pointed in my direction of late, have been blessedly strong and clear, at least on these repeating themes I’ve just shared. I come across them in the movies, books, and conversations that make up my experiences of the past several months, and I am eager for more. He is the Great Story-teller. His story molds me-body, mind and soul- and shapes me toward His great design. Speak on, Lord. Your servant is listening, and grateful.