Angels abound...

Startzman · October 7, 2011

#138

Angelic Breath

An Angel plays the wind chimes,

Breathing in and out,

Softer than a whisper,

More compelling than a shout.

Sign on a T-shirt: Dachshund: German for "Little Pain in the Ass"

Startzman · September 22, 2011

#137

Bark Bark

Simon, known as "Little Pain,"

Barks up our trees, not all in vain;

His bark is like a double tap,

Two 38s: snap-snap, snap-snap,

In one ear, then in the other,

Disturbing as a little brother,

Till the squirrel falls to the ground,

Knocked down dead by the Dachshund sound.

The retired teacher's lament...

Startzman · September 12, 2011

#136

Missing Parts

John Milton wrote an epic poem,

An epic poem wrote he.

No one reads it now, of course,

Except my class and me;

Except my class and me.

Now I've retired no one's been hired

To teach majestic Milton;

Thus Beelzebub and his demon club

Celebrate at the local pub

With a keg of stout and stilton;

With a keg of stout and stilton.

[Pandemonium, alas, or a work in progress.]

The towers rose, the towers fell,

Wrought by agents straight from Hell

And straight to Hell returning,

Where now, unlike John Milton,

They find themselves still burning,

While Beelzebub and his loathsome crew

Consume their stout and stilton too,

Gloating that their demon lies

Always end in anguished cries

And no one reads John Milton;

And no one reads John Milton.

Thoughts on literature or Timeout...

Startzman · September 3, 2011

Paragraph #1

I love literature, primarily because I love stories, adventures; and at the heart of all great literature is an exciting, compelling story—an adventure. Dante, the character in The Divine Comedy, for example, must journey through Hell, see it (really see it, both within and without) and put it beneath him or behind him (that is, reject it absolutely), if he would be saved from it. He must then climb the incredibly steep Mt. Purgatory and ascend through the circles of Heaven if he would see and know what the romantic love of his life (the Florentine young lady, Beatrice) truly means. His adventure, like many quest adventures, begins in a Dark Wood, which leads immediately to Hell, a hideous, horrible and terrifyingly dangerous place; Purgatory begins with one of the most beautiful images in literature, the Ship of Souls ferrying the redeemed to the shores of the mountain; Purgatory itself is an arduous climb and a mixture of extremely terrifying images and extremely beautiful images in that each circle of Purgatory is governed by an angelic splendor, an Angel embodying the virtue of the circle. Dante’s angels are beings to be taken seriously, aesthetically and intellectually. In Heaven Dante’s ascent to God is now easy physically (he and Beatrice rise like helium-filled balloons); but Heaven is intellectually and theologically rigorous (there is even a test); Purgatory created in Dante a mind fully awake; Heaven is what the fully awakened mind truly understands about the universe of which it is a part; Heaven is also a study in the image of light and its increasing splendors.

Update on 2011-09-05 18:35 by Startzman

Paragraph #2

The governing substance of the entire Divine Comedy has to do with a fundamental human reality: desire for fulfillment, wholly and completely; desire for a truly, wholly fulfilling love. The best and most meaningful image we have for that reality is Romantic love (eros): and the lovers lived happily ever after. Dante is literally moved by this Romantic love, his very human love for the Florentine woman Beatrice (the quest is for her; see Hell, Canto 2); however, the first real image of the damned in Hell that Dante faces is also an image of that same Romantic love—the lovers Paolo and Francesca who tell their story are forever blown around the second circle by an uncontrollable black wind. Romantic love can lead to Hell; Dante must see that; he does; it overwhelms him and he faints. If the best we have that promises so much is not humanly fulfilling (think of Romeo and Juliet), what is? The entire poem is the answer to that. If I may be so bold—for a moment in human history, all aspects of human life came together to produce in this author’s imagination and work, a story of the human soul’s journey to its absolute fulfillment in the Triune God of orthodox Christianity. The principle that governs Dante’s ascent through Heaven is fundamental to the poem: desire for Divine love enables the soul to understand Divine love. Greater understanding of Divine love leads to a greater capacity to give and receive that love. In other words mind and heart work together in the journey to fulfillment, unity, and Divine peace and love. Dante’s Love and Understanding grow to the point where unity with God (Three in One) is the inevitable end. The Divine Comedy is an astonishing work of literature.

Update on 2011-09-08 21:58 by Startzman

Paragraph #3

The reason for describing the Divine Comedy in brief here is that, besides adventure, the poem embodies the three principles that I see at the heart of all great literature: Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. In High School, I memorized Shakespeare because, ignorant and foolish as I was, I at least had the sense to recognize that there was language in the poems and plays of exquisite beauty and elegance. I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the ninth grade and even took the part of Nick Bottom the weaver; however, I also memorized Oberon’s I know a place where the wild thyme blows and Theseus’s The lunatic, the lover, and the poet speeches. In my senior year I discovered The Tempest. It was fantasy literature, my favorite kind: there was Prospero, a Wizard (I still love wizards: Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden, for example; Tolkien’s Gandalf the White); there was Ariel, an elemental spirit of Air; there were two perfect (archetypal) romantic lovers, Ferdinand and Miranda; and a hybrid, subhuman creature, Caliban (somewhat like Gollum?)—here I underwent a conversion of the first order; I would never be the same because I had discovered in this literary work that Beauty was not some subjective phenomenon, determined by my own emotions, but was a reality embodied in this work and others like it. I could not have explained that at the time, but that was what I experienced. Shakespeare’s language was frequently exquisitely beautiful; The Tempest was the embodiment of Beauty from beginning to end. I was hooked.

Update on 2011-09-12 22:23 by Startzman

Paragraph #4

The second principle in Dante is Truth. Having read and taught Dante’s Hell, I understand that the spiritual state defined in the work is a real human spiritual state. Add Purgatory and Heaven and you have an Idea of the complete human self with its loves fully and completely ordered. You can experience in reading the poem the artist’s insight into the meaning and mystery of the human self.

The Truth we experience best in literature, I think, is intuitive truth (intellectus), insight, not moral truth; we may indeed discover moral truths in literature, but I do not believe that is literature’s real purpose. We come to literature knowing, for the most part, moral truths, but if literature is only about telling stories that have morals, there is no point to reading great literature. We can get morals anywhere, mostly, even from the Internet, or from that old sinner Ben Franklin, if you wish. We know, for the most part, what we ought to do and ought not to do; we do not, however, know how to see into the human self unless the artist or poet really shows us, because he or she discovered it or saw it in the course of writing the work. Real Art then gives us something we can get nowhere else—an intuitive grasp of truth about the human condition, the human self. To put it another way, real Art lets us experience the mystery of our humanity whether we realize it or not.

Need an example? Read Henry James’ The Real Thing. The title of the short story is true in a number of ways, but it is especially true in pointing to what the story is really accomplishing. While I’m at it, the work of art that best embodies the Idea of Art that I will always have foremost in mind is Henry James’ The Figure in the Carpet. Perhaps more about both of these works later.

Update on 2011-10-13 22:27 by Startzman

Paragraph #5

I seem to have written myself into a box: truth, beauty, and goodness, I said about literature, because they make an excellent trio of companions, and because that is what Art is about, I thought. But goodness, what does goodness have to do with the work of art? What I had in mind was the analogy: God speaks the creation into being in Genesis; He proclaims that creation good. The artist “speaks” his or her creation into being, and it should be good, but it may or may not be good depending on the abilities of the author. Saying “goodness” felt right when I wrote it, but to understand it, I think I need to find it in an actual work of literature, say a Flannery O’Connor short story, one that is particularly concerned with being and that involves an artist as well: like Parker’s Back. Hmmm. First, I need the text before me.

The ISS again...

Startzman · September 3, 2011

Last night the space station sailed overhead at 8:59p.m., right on time, for the full 3 minutes. The delightful aspect was that it seemed to split the sky in half, coming primarily from the north, then moving toward us directly overhead until it disappeared in the south behind us. Watching it never gets old.

Tonight the ISS is low in the west, but Sunday there is the promise of 3 minutes again.

Space station observation...

Startzman · August 17, 2011

#135

Chariots of Light

Silently across our sky

Our chariot swiftly glides;

Human life works in the light

Though from the Earth it hides,

As Soul in earth abides.

Hmmm. Rough draft? The problem is that on the way here I saw a reference to the Big Lebowski, which sets up an allusion I would rather not have, I think.

I love watching the Space Station sail overhead. Last night (the 16th) we had a long three minutes; two nights before (the 14th), we were treated to six minutes viewing in a somewhat cloudy sky.

Those bugs...

Startzman · August 4, 2011

#134

Gnat Here

A bug just walked across my screen;

Audacious bug, it paused to preen.

I think it was a stellar gnat

Come down to show me this and that.

The gnat, alas, would not compute;

So off I sent it to reboot.

Bug Business: Shock, the Follow-up

Startzman · August 2, 2011

#133

Fate's Invisible Web

I look away,

Then quickly back,

Assuming a bug's eye view:

There's nothing there

But empty space

Waiting for me to fly through.

Bug Business: Shock and Awe

Startzman · August 2, 2011

#132

Awe

The sliver of light

Runs down and up

The spider's invisible strand,

As I sit with Awe

In our dining room

At this thin iridescent band.

Emily D and the bee...

Startzman · August 1, 2011

Emily wrote that

"Fame is a bee.

It has a song--

It has a sting--

Ah, too, it has

a wing."

Delightful, poignant. It occurred to me that fame might be defined using another entomological image, one that may be somewhat delightful, but probably not poignant:

Fame is a flea.

It has a poem--

It has a bite--

Ah, but, it has

no flight.

Co-inherence

Startzman · July 18, 2011

This entry goes with earlier thoughts on beauty and art, goodness and truth. In Magnificat's Roman Missal Companion, I came across a brief Editorial by Father Peter John Cameron, O.P., the editor-in-chief of Magnificat, concerning the new translation of the Roman Missal, Third Edition. Father Cameron packs a great deal of wisdom into 3 pages: "The way we say things matters. It changes how we think and how we feel. In a world of myriad synonyms, finding 'the right word' remains a considerably more intricate and involved process than one may imagine. It entails hitting upon a certain rhythm and sound that renders a certain special sense. We know it when we hear it."

His concern in the editorial is primarily about the meaning and substance of the new translation, in essence its purpose or final cause. He writes that first "The Church has made a new translation of the Mass in order to give us a more sublime sense of the liturgy"; he uses a passage from philosopher Paul Ricoeur to develop his idea: "'To understand a text is to follow its movement from sense to reference, from what it says to what it talks about.' In other words, good communication happens when the sense--the concrete and intentional phrasing of a text--leads us to something beyond the words: to the reality the words are talking about." Talking like that always gets my attention, especially when his concern is with Mystery.

In the next section he defines a second reason for the new translation: "The Church wants to restore to her worship a heightened sense of the sacred." Here he quotes Wolfhart Pannenberg's article "How to Think about Secularism" (1996). "'The absolutely worst way to respond to the challenge of secularism is to adapt to secular standards in language, thought, and way of life.'" Amen. "'Religion that is "more of the same" is not likely to be very interesting.'" Indeed.

The idea that most delighted me in the editorial occurs after the lengthy quote in a section entitled "Souls Communicating." And here we go: "The Church's response to such secularist trends is to present a new translation of the Mass that is aesthetically rich. For nothing transforms us like beauty. The philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote that 'the moment one touches a transcendental [like the beautiful], one touches being itself, a likeness of God,...that which ennobles and delights our life...Only in this way do [people] escape from the individuality in which matter encloses them...They observe each other without seeing each other, each one of them infinitely alone...But let one touch the good and love the true...the beautiful..., then contact is made, souls communicate."

Father Cameron ends the editorial with a quote from the "Blessed John Paul II": "'Ultimately, the mystery of language brings us back to the inscrutable mystery of God himself."

The Drought

Startzman · July 18, 2011

It's good to have written something, especially since verse #131 is about my favorite character, Simon, who always sleeps under something soft if he possibly can. I tried to grab him on my way to bed two nights ago, but he evaded my awkward lunge and made it into the back TV room and on to the sofa there. He was scuffing up the sofa cover when I went in after him, so I unfolded the blanket from the top of the sofa and put it on him, gave him a quick belly rub, then went to bed in our bedroom. I looked over my shoulder to see if he would follow, but no luck. Stubborn as starlight. His nose was sticking out from under the blanket. Cute as a Christmas elf.

Then last night Mary called my attention to Simon's attack on a front room sofa pillow Simon had earlier knocked to the floor. (I had my gaze fixed on the TV, of course.) He had the designer pillow by one corner and was shaking the dickens out of it. Really cute. "But that's a good pillow," she said. I rescued the pillow. Later, I was sitting next to him on the sofa, thinking about the latest Simon incidents, and here we are.

This verse isn't an end to the drought (I would have said "creative drought," though I thought that might be a tad presumptuous), but the verse works for me. Simon, I hear him moving on the sofa, rattling his tags. Perhaps he was dreaming of squirrels. Time to tell him good night.