Remembering Bo

When I first saw Bo in his cage in the Humane Society kennel on Howell Mill Rd., he was the only dog not to caper and call to me for attention. He lay at the back of his cage, his front paws elegantly crossed.  He looked up as I passed, inquisitively knitting his brows.  When I doubled back to see the calm dog, he didn't move, but thumped his tail.  When I knelt, he came forward to lick my hand, and I'd made my choice.

Back then he was called BJ, and the card said he was "hyper but lovable."  Within minutes of adopting him, I was sure that I'd made a mistake.  He tugged on his leash, ignored my calls and reassuring pats.  In the back of my car, he paced and fretted the whole way from Atlanta to Kennesaw.  Then when I let him out of the car, he unloaded his bowels on the garage floor.  Suddenly I knew what he'd been fretting about during that hour, and I was grateful to him then, and ever after.

As the young dog, he submitted to queenly Cleo [reclining in the lower right hand corner of the photo collage].  She and I were both in mourning for my first lab, Churchill, and we had both just moved to Atlanta.   She had grown suddenly old; but Bo made her young again.  He was playful, and maybe too playful.  At first, I was alarmed at his tearing around the back yard and his determined lunging at me for the stick or tennis ball that I held. 

When Cleo died, I adopted our neighbor dog Luis, who had sometimes cavorted with Bo in my backyard.  My neighbor had tied Luis to a stake for more than two years, pegging him to the carport in all weather, hot, cold or stormy.  Bo solemnly assumed the role of Alpha, biting Luis to keep him out of our bed, putting the younger dog in his place.  Bo maintained his status with long-suffering dignity.

Dignity may be a word hard to associate with a dog who, just last week, thrust his snout up and out from behind the thighs of a woman visiting my home.  He licked the bowl of cashews at last week's choir party.  Whichever side of the road I walked, he always wanted to tug to the opposite side. 

Yet he had a sense of dignity.  In these last months, he looked at me with helpless dismay when his legs gave out midway across the road, or when he woke to discover that he had fouled his bed, or when he needed my help to stand and greet me when I came home.  Deaf and perhaps forgetful, he wandered around the house looking for me. 

He still could get a kick from a walk or a snack, but his enjoyment was declining fast.  I'd promised myself years ago not to let him lose that enjoyment.  So the time had come.

On Maundy Thursday, he had his last supper.  For the first time in weeks, I let him sleep in the bed with me (incontinence notwithstanding).  On the morning of Good Friday, I took him out for a walk with me in our battlefield park.  We used to walk four or five miles, but he was tripping after only a hundred yards.  Still, we made it one last time to the clearing where he stood, chest out, nose raised and quivering at the spring breeze, looking at the sun's rising under a carpet of grey clouds. 

My friend Suzanne sent me the photos of him from these past few months, along with these words from a hymn that we sang on Maundy Thursday:

God is love, and where true love is, God Himself is there.

I've been blessed by Bo, and he by me.  Thanks be to God, and to friends who helped me to care for him.

[I wrote about Bo and Luis in two other reflections:  "Dogs are Poetry"  and "Dog in Winter"]

"How Did you Get to be Here?": Merrily We Roll Along



Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park cast of MERRILY / photo Sandy Underwood

Never having heard any of Stephen Sondheim's score for MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, and knowing little about the story, my friend Suzanne confirmed my judgement that this production, directed by John Doyle, hits home.  Suzanne grew tearful talking about the experience this morning.  The lyrics accurately spoke what she has thought as she has rolled along her own way in life, also wondering, "How did I get to be here?" 

She went on to cite "Not a Day Goes By," and how it turns from a rapturous song of youthful love and hope, to a statement of bitter regret; yet very little changes in the song itself.  It's an image of the way relationships really do alter over time without losing their original shape.

Both of us were strongly affected by a simple gesture in the final anthem "Our Time," when central character Franklin Shepherd laid his hands on the shoulders of the young man billed in the program as "Franklin Jr."   This college-age man, in a Juilliard tee shirt, started the show poring over a score from the archives of sheet music that comprise the set (reams of manuscript paper the backdrop; boxes and stacks of manuscript paper the furniture).   From the first chords that the middle-aged Franklin Shepherd plays at the piano, he seems to direct the entire show at the younger man -- trying to justify himself to the younger man.  Other members of the cast, seeing the young man, ask him "How did you get to be here?"  Suzanne was confused, but I was no more certain of who exactly "Franklin Jr." was:  Franklin at a younger age?   Franklin's son?  At times, he was clearly portraying the son at age 3 or 6 or 10.  He could be Franklin's grown and estranged son trying to understand his father.  

Suzanne and I decided that a definitive answer isn't necessary.   What matters is that gesture, hands on the shoulders, a sign of investiture and benediction.  By that time, the middle-aged Franklin has worked backwards through some bitter memories to memories of youthful struggles and hopes with friends Mary and Charley.  This "Franklin Jr." has been witness, often anguished and accusing.  At the end of the show, the "beginning" of its characters' friendship on a rooftop in 1957, he also seems to have come out onto the roof to see Sputnik -- not the Russians' triumph alone, but for all of us, they say -- and Franklin Sr. lays those hands on him.

In John Doyle's production, there's no doubt.  We're to leave the theatre energized to go forward ready to get started:  "There's so much stuff to sing."

Poet Todd Boss's Pitch: Family's Value

(Reflections on PITCH by Todd Boss, Norton Co., 2012.)

A piano pitches out of the bed of the family truck when the father misjudges a turn on an icy road.  For poet Todd Boss, the anecdote crystallizes some truths about his own parents, beginning with "the broken cords, the empty bed".   He examines its facets in four poems under the cute title "Overture on an Overturned Piano," and he plays musical puns throughout.  These glints of wordplay are incidental pleasures in Boss's work, burnishing his reflections on family in poems about his father, his own children, and even beloved dogs.

For one poem in the suite, "Fine," (another musical pun), Boss begins, "I wonder what it was like to have to call his dad on the phone the morning after and answer the question: So, piano make it home all right?"  The humiliation of his father is a trope throughout the collection.  Behind many of Boss's poems is the story of a family moved to a farm that fails.  "Your Dad Never Did, in the End," is one such poem.  "The God of our Farm Had Blades," describes the rust-encrusted windmill overlooking the fields.  Another poem, "Broke," accumulates dozens of connotations of that word, a crushing summation of the family's experience.  

Yet, in "Apple Slices," the poem that introduced Todd Boss to public radio listeners world wide when he read it to the gourmet host of The Splendid Table, he tells us that he has "never labored harder, nor eaten better" than a time when he and his dad took a break from farm work.  "And Then One Day in a Department Store" seems, even from its title, to be an afterthought about the father in a later section of the book, a bit of Muzak recalling the classical piano pieces "your father used to fumble over all those years before," and "you'll feel what he felt -- or feel again that familiar longing to learn...." 

There's an undercurrent of self-dissatisfaction, mirroring the father's.   Boss's persona is a mere "paper-pusher," and "a pitch-man for the rich man."  Boss writes about a family reunion of three generations in a ghost town of "Luckenbach," (pun on "lookin' back"?), admitting 

Only recently have I begun

to let my small-town

farm roots show.

                             I've been a fool.

In a pair of poems "Amidwives," Boss finds sardonic fun in the fraught relationship among mother, wife, and the man they have in common.

But it's mostly delight that shows in Boss's work.   In a favorite poem of mine, "This Morning in a Morning Voice," which I called a "secular psalm" in a comment on its appearance in Poetry years ago, Boss lies in bed marveling while his son sings a kindergarten ditty on his way to the bathroom.   Other poems are playfully erotic ("Feast," "My Love for You Is So Embarrasingly"), and many are those "secular psalms" I described that pay such close attention to the wonders of creation that they come close to expressing gratitude to a creator.  He comes close to saying just that in "The World Is in Pencil," speculating that sketching the world "had to be a labor of love." 

A couple of poems stand out for what they say about specific occasions.  One tells of sitting through "A Stock Homily" for Aunt Emily, which, in its "anonymity" feels "like sin / to those / whose pages / her life was / written in."  Been there; felt that.     Another poem "My Dog Has No Nose" finds rueful fun in an incident when a dog offers up an unwelcome gift.

I've blogged about Todd Boss's first collection Yellowrocket.  Before that, he showed up in two articles that I wrote about "secular psalms."  Here are the links:

http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2009/06/poet-todd-boss-story-and-rhyme.html
http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2008/12/more-secular-psalms-in-poetry.html
http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2007/08/summer-poetry-time-to-catch-up-on.html

Church and Theatre: Laughing Matters?

When I mentioned to my 7th grade writing workshop that I've been at work on a comedy - murder - mystery - dinner - theatre piece for my home church, some were aghast.  A play, in a church?  About  murder?  And it's a comedy?

The Cast of DESPERATE CHURCH LADIES
rehearses the "interrogation scene."

I understand their reaction.  When I was an acting student who viewed the world through fundamentalist lenses, my conscience used to bother me, because plays seemed always to be about misbehavior and unhappiness.  Then I discovered Flannery O'Connor's observation that "Christian novels" about good people doing good things depict a world of false innocence.  "That strongly suggests its opposite," she drily added.  O'Connor and others asserted that any art that shows the world as it truly is will also show God.  

Years later, I heard confirmation of this view from an unlikely source.  I attended a dinner party where my mentor Frank Boggs interviewed an actor / director from London who runs an evangelical retreat for actors there.  This evangelical actor surprised his Christian audience by saying that his favorite play was WAITING FOR GODOT.  Yes, its creator Samuel Beckett was a confirmed atheist, but his humanity, humor, and despair take us to the heart of the world as we experience it, as do Ecclesiastes, Job, and Psalms.

Still, to make light of murder at a church for a fund-raiser also raises eyebrows and questions for people who don't know what acting entails. 

To them, I say two things.

First:  Not only is play-acting a legitimate activity for church members, it is essential activity for church members.  

In an article at Belief Net,  "Acting is a Form of Prayer,"  actor Liam Neeson explains how the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola prefigure by centuries Stanislavski's "method" that all trained actors know today.   Jesuits are enjoined to "study scripture by taking the part of a character in a Bible story, such as a shepherd in the stable and Bethlem, and employing all the senses to imaginatively enter into the scene."

To my own middle school drama students, I add that we actors practice radical empathy, working from externals (spoken words, actions, stances, costume) to comprehend the spirits of characters.    

So, when a group of novice (and nervous!) actors first met with me at the church to begin the process of creating our play, I began with Neeson's observations about acting. 

Creating characters led us to another theological lesson:  Artistic creation is a form of discovery.  Failing to appreciate this point, some believers scoff at the arts as mere entertainment or, worse, as inflated lies.   But the same point was made just yesterday by a physicist on Krista Tippett's radio program "On Being."  This scientist lives by Einstein's saying, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."  After years of puzzlement, the physicist realized that imagination is our route to new knowledge.

So our little group experienced creation in a way that non-artists don't "get":  The Creator may begin with a notion of an endpoint, but the characters and events can go off in unintended directions.   Nonetheless, when our creation hits a wall, we can redeem it. 

That happened at a meeting in my living room a few weeks ago when the actors and I got tangled in our own plotlines.   It began to look as if there was no "who" in our "whodunnit."  Then one of our actors, Laura, pointed out a simple connection that we'd all missed, and we had found the truth, built into our work as if it had been planned!

Now, to address that other issue, making light of murder, I cite C. S. Lewis's brief discussion of dirty jokes.  The fun in them isn't in the subject matter, but in the incongruous images they conjure for us.  Like a joke, the murder - mystery - dinner comedy is a form that generates delight from the ingenious and incongruous mixing and matching of familiar tropes -- jealousy, venality, cupidity, and fatality.  There's also the simple pleasure of seeing grown - ups behaving like cartoon versions of ourselves.

So, here's to DESPERATE CHURCH LADIES.  The script is in the hands of the director and the actors who created from scratch the characters that they will portray.   I'm eager to see this creation living and breathing, April 20 and 21.

Letter to Walker School's Cast of Xanadu

(response to a performance of the stage musical XANADU, a pastiche of songs recorded by ELO and Olivia-Newton John.  Book by Doulas Carter Beane, music and lyrics by Jeff Lynne and John Farrar, based on the Universal Pictures film.  Director and Choreographer Katie Arjona.)

Dear XANADU,

You made my face hurt from smiling so long!  I admit I came to the show a skeptic, remembering the blandness of those early 80s songs.   I feared that seeing the lights rise on that fabulous set might be a high point of the evening.

Then Justin's warmth and energy and strong voice generated good feeling right away; the Muses' unison jokes and choreography loosened me up;  Georgie's fresh voice and persona (somehow combining winking irony with naivety) won me over.

All of that happened before I laughed myself silly at Eleni and Olivia in "Evil Woman," only to be left breathless by the dance in "Whenever You're Away From Me," and touched by our musicians' big band sounds and McLain's suave crooning.  The melding of Andrews' Sisters – I saw them live, by the way – and the metal boys  was unexpected and a great musical / staging coup! 

Overall, I felt a spirit of teamwork and friendship from you all that washed over the audience, and I left refreshed.  Today I awoke singing "I'm Alive!"

I was a skeptic; now I'm a believer.  Thank you!

V is for Vengeance: The Musical?

Over thirty years ago, author Sue Grafton set some parameters for a series of mysteries.  Learning on the job, her variations within those parameters grow in complexity until her form seems about to break apart.  Each novel follows in an alphabetical pattern;  each features detective Kinsey Millhone, each moves forward just a few months past the one before, so that, thirty years later, we're still in the 1980s.   Now, with V is for Vengeance we have a master playing with her form, this time creating something close to musical comedy.

The "opening number" draws us into the story of a cocky college graduate desperate to climb out of his debt to a gangster by gambling.  The shocking end of that chapter is followed by a high-contrast piece set in a department store where Millhone alerts store personnel to a pair of high-volume shoplifters. 

Many chapters pass before we understand the connection of chapter one to chapter two, and the novel has nearly reached its conclusion before we understand the title.  Along the way, we have chapters that involve us in the lives of characters interesting in their own right -- a suburban housewife with a philandering husband, the gangster with the code of honor, and Kinsey herself investigating the apparent suicide of the shoplifter.  Add to the mix a small time crook, friend of Kinsey, named Pinky, and a corrupt cop named Len Priddy.

Grafton takes her time tying all of these together, choreographing some coincidences and connections in the manner of a farceur, slamming doors and all. 

All the characters join in the grand finale.

I have one beef with Grafton, and it's in the Millhone chapters.  Must we be told every detail about what she ate, when she washed, how she drove? 

Otherwise, I appreciate the craftsmanship and humane feelings behind the events and characters of the series.

Met Opera's Enchanted Island: Distance and Intimacy

(reflection on a live performance of THE ENCHANTED ISLAND, seen in HD broadcast two days ago. )

"Devised" by Jeremy Sams, THE ENCHANTED ISLAND is what Sams calls a "mash - up" of Shakespeare plays, Baroque composers' music, 18th century stage conventions and the latest stage gadgetry.   Every scene brought a smile of appreciation for the canny ways in which Sams and director Phelim McDermott mixed and matched their resources.   This was created frankly to be a vehicle for the Met's best Baroque talents.

So, being all about showcasing technique and technology, borrowing its characters from well-known sources, how could we be drawn in to the story?  Two of the characters are played by counter-tenors (David Daniels as "Prospero" and Anthony Roth Costanzo as "Ferdinand"), their every entrance a shock at the strong high voices emerging from these grown men.  How could it be real to us with so much blatant artifice?

Unlikely as it seems, the production arouses a great tide of affection.  The stars' voices astounded as great athletes' most amazing feats would do.   Danielle DeNiese's voice skipped skyward and laterally as her character "Ariel" would do, while she got laughs for adolescent petulance and energy.  Joyce DiDonato as the witch "Sycorax" swelled a single pitch from pianissimo to painfully loud on the word "Maybe" in one aria, and projected character as well as the notes -- especially in a scene where she laments "a mother's pain" at being unable to mitigate her son's agony at rejection.  With great dignity, bass Luca Pisaroni plays the son "Caliban" in white face makeup and a lugubrious body suit, part turtle, part gorilla.   The moment when a magic potion wears off and his only girl friend suddenly runs away from him is the only moment that resonates as real world emotion;  all the rest is cued by magic and music, and makes us smile.

The real love story here wasn't to be found in the plot, but in the love of the Baroque music evinced by all concerned.   Conductor William Christie is a Baroque specialist, an expert at revealing this music to audiences.  The music was certainly a revelation: the instrumental lines rose and fell in sympathy with the vocal lines, the orchestra rocked and keened, belying the notion that Baroque music is staid and polite.   The novel twisting of the familiar stories, the spectacle, and the clear English lyrics all served to close the distance between us and that music of a distant time. 

Father Roger and Water

The Baptism of Christ was the theme of yesterday's readings in the Episcopal church, and our new rector Father Roger D Allen meditated on "water."  From water that cleanses in John's Baptism to water that makes a new creation in the Holy Spirit, which parallels the water over which the Spirit of God moves in Genesis I, Father Roger led us to see church itself as a source of that kind of water.

"What are we doing here?" he asked a full house of parishioners.   He ticked off a list of things that church does not do, or does not do primarily:  produce anything that could be measured by people on the street, solve problems, connect people to a club of like-minded people, or administer aid the way Red Cross and United Way do. 

It reminded me of a core chapter in Ronald Rolheiser's book The Holy Longing, which parishioners of St. James' Marietta discussed in a book group some ten years ago.  Glancing again through notes I made in that book, I see some startling corollaries to Father Roger's list of what church is not. It's not a self-help center where individual spiritual growth is the aim, but a merging with God in community (Rolheiser 137).  Rolheiser relates the oil applied to the forehead in baptism to oil used in Hebrew burial rites and observes that "we go to church to help ready each other for death" (134).  Rolheiser takes literally the idea that the church is the body of Christ in the world, the Holy Spirit "with skin on."  He also observes, incidentally, that our desire to "distinguish ourselves" is a sign of immaturity, holding on to the early stage of "individuation" (136).  His emphasis throughout is on commitment, of which Paul is his prime example, when Paul stands up, goes forward, eyes open, seeing nothing (125).

Father Kirk and Father Roger went on to baptize an adult, whose children watched from the front row, and an infant who charmingly went to sleep between the dribbling of water and the consecration by oil.  Children of the congregation came up into the choir area to watch, so that all parishioners could watch the children watching the ceremony.  It was sweet, and, thanks to the preparation, it was an outward and visible sign of something we had been provoked to think about.

Silence

(a short homily for middle school assembly, responding to a reading from I Kings.)

I want you all to listen to something.   You probably haven't heard it in a long time.  Someone of your generation may never have heard it.  In fact, I'm afraid that it may make you feel uncomfortable.  It may strike you as awkward. . .

(silence)

Silence.   We don't like it.  I have music or news playing at my home from the moment I wake up until I'm asleep.  I turn on the radio in my car before I fasten my seat belt.  Thanks to my Android, I'm listening to news or music when I walk in the forest or ride my bike.  My students want to plug into their devices when we have silent writing time.

If you are like me, then we don't even have to care about what we're hearing, much.  Thinking about this message on the way to school this morning, I was half-listening to some guy who says he has "mo-oo-oo-ooves like Jagger."  How annoying is that?

So it's our own responsibility if we cram our own heads non-stop with messages from pop stars and politicians and comics and commercial announcers who are all trying to distract us from what we have to do, and what we want to do, and what we ought to do.

Why do we do this to ourselves?    Four centuries ago, a French mathematician named Pascal observed something new among the sophisticated city dwellers of his day:  they hated silence.  They needed other people to provide some kind of distraction at all times.  His theory  was that their belief in a God was just something they had because they were supposed to.  With no real belief in God, he says that a modern man feels alone.   Worse, the modern man alone, in silence, feels like nobody, with no real value or purpose, only to consume what others offer.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the prophet Elijah, on the run from the evil queen Jezebel, hides in a cave on Mt. Horeb.  He is drawn out of the cave by the promise that God will speak to him.  Suddenly, a great wind rips the mountain.  But Elijah doesn't hear God in the wind.  Then an earthquake shakes the mountain.  But Elijah doesn't hear God in the earthquake.  Then a fire sweeps across the face of the mountain.  But Elijah doesn't hear God in the roaring of the fire.  Then all becomes quiet, and that's when Elijah hears what he calls a "still, small voice" that tells him what to do next in his life.

It's an interesting scene repeated in all the major religions.  Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed all began their careers after long periods alone in silence, far away from the distractions of their hometowns.   

(silence)

When we find ourselves anxious to plug in, to seek out noise and distraction, let's consider the possibility that it might be better for us to listen to silence.

 

P. D. James Cracks Open Austen's World

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice owes at least a portion of its charm to its self-contained world.  P. D. James's homage to Austen, Death Comes to Pemberley, owes a great deal to our affection for Austen's world, and our pain at seeing its end.  

In Austen, we see soldiers, but no one mentions war; we hear of the Court, but not of government;  concern for steady income underlays the romance, but being forced to economize is not the abject poverty we know from cartoons by Austen's contemporary Hogarth.  Death comes no nearer than a bad cold.   Characters attend church and suffer the Reverend Collins, but God stands back in the manner of the servants, waiting on the other side of a closed door should He be called.  Reverend Collins is concerned only with cultivating plants and the prestige that comes from having tea with Lady Catherine.

Within that world, Austen focuses us on affairs of the heart.  Major events include a young man's smile, an invitation to dance, and all the things left unsaid during polite conversation.  One adolescent girl, having visited Lady Catherine's manor nine times for dinner and twice for tea, exclaims, "How much will I have to tell!" while Elizabeth thinks, "How much will I have to conceal!"

For a few dozen pages, P. D. James sustains us in that world.  But she throws down a gauntlet at the end of "Book One" (James 48-49).  Napoleonic wars threaten.  And as a frightful wind howls with "malevolent force" as if trying to find a way into the manor house, Elizabeth thinks...

Here we are at the beginning of a new century, citizens of the most civilized country in Europe, surrounded by the splendour of its craftsmanship... while outside there is another world which wealth and education and privilege can keep from us, a world in which men are as violent and destructive as is the animal world.  Perhaps even the most fortunate of us will not be able to ignore it and keep it at bay for ever.

That scene and the ones immediately following it are the most vivid and breathtaking in the novel.

A century later, around 1914, another generation would feel the same sense of a world's ending, barbarians at the gates ( a theme I've considered before on this blog).

P. D. James has done a wonderful job of imagining how Austen's crystalline world cracks when that "other world" intrudes, but I rather wish she hadn't.

[I wrote about the pleasures of Pride and Prejudice in one of my first blog posts.]

Conversations with the Dead

"Conversations with the dead are never satisfactory.  The dead are not very interested in what you tell them and usually don't have much to say."

When I first read that passage back around 1986, I was 27, and there were no dead in my life.  Shortly thereafter, leukemia took Chris, a fourteen-year-old student of mine; my Grandmother Thelma would soon begin to recede from us into a world of ghosts, reaching a day five years later when she didn't recognize me or my mother, but she spoke to my Dad by name about all the others present to her in the empty room -- her late mother, and some little girls..  Twenty years after that, one year after Dad's unexpected death, all the grownups of my childhood are gone except for Mom and her brother-in-law, my Uncle Jack.

Back then, I was reading Frederick Buechner's four novels collected as a tetralogy called THE BOOK OF BEBB  (Atheneum 1984). It nominally concerns a preacher named Leo Bebb, but really its concern is everything there is. I kid you not.  This morning, haunted by a dream of Dad, leafing through just four pages of the novel as I tried to locate this passage, my eyes ran across evocative references to Christmas Eve, aliens, adultery, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and the Wolfman, Native American mythology, cheap motels, Episcopal funeral rites ("Lord, [make it so] that the bones that you have broken may rejoice"), Noel Coward comedies,  blacks in the South, the coming of the Kingdom, King Lear, and opera.  Oh, yeah:  yoga, gin, and mistakes in child-rearing.

So now that I read Buechner with some experience, it's still true.  The passage continues,

Death is apparently as much of a rat race as life is, and they've got other things on their minds.  I don't picture them sitting around in chairs like the cemetery scene in Our Town or cooling their heels in God's outer office singing Bach.  As much as I can picture them at all, I picture them hurrying someplace like the White Rabbit in Alice.  They don't even stop when you speak to them, just look back at you over their shoulders maybe.  I could dimly picture [my sister] Miriam looking back at me as I spoke.  (p. 188)

So, in my dream, Dad takes a seat on a picnic table up the street from our old family house, and he's watching my mother working alone in our old front yard.  His eyes meet mine, he knows I can see him, and I know that she cannot.  He carries a box of Dunkin' Donuts, and he raises a half-eaten donut to acknowledge my presence, but that's all he does.   I tell him she needs him, and he just waves away the comment as superfluous and kind of annoying.  He doesn't move or draw her attention, and now I'm the one who's kind of annoyed.  I tell her he's there, and she calls out, and she approaches the picnic table, but she can't see him.  He doesn't move.  So I tell her, "He's always with you, on the inside."

The dream, as Buechner suggests, blurs the boundaries between this world and one that we don't normally perceive.  It's all part of continuum, death being only one landmark on the way.  Though we can support each other, we all travel alone. 

This brings to mind a spectacle in the same novel, one of several examples of what would be called a "set piece" in a play or movie -- kind of like the Cyd Charisse fantasy number that interrupts Singing in the Rain for ten minutes.  Here it's the story of what happens to a wizened old wealthy Indian named Herman Redpath when he wakes up from death to find himself young again, and vigorous, but also alone on the edge of a vast plain.  Naked, except for items thrown in his coffin at the funeral, Redpath must travel to the horizon.  We're told the story in a letter left by Lucille Bebb, who is relaying what her husband Leo told her (pp. 219-227).

No message, here, except that the Book of Bebb should be added on to the Bible after the Book of Revelation. (For my more extensive reflection on Buechner, go to "My Favorite Fiction: The Book of Bebb")

The Fundamentalist - Sports Complex

President Eisenhower warned the USA of a "military-industrial complex," Pentagon entangled with lawmakers and corporations that supplied the military its machines.  These parties reinforced each others' beliefs and policy decisions, supported each others' interests, and insulated each other from alternative views.

What I detect today is more widespread, less selfish, yet maybe more corrosive to our Republic. 

It starts with confusion between "faith" and "belief." Thomas Aquinas long ago described faith as a way of knowing the world; an instrument, together with sense and reason, for an open mind to interpret both Scripture and experience.

"Belief" is, normally, a tentative intellectual acceptance of a provisional statement.  For the fundamentalist, there is nothing tentative or provisional about it.  If eternal life depends on "belief" that Jesus was Son of God, then it had better be a "certainty."  To allow for some of Scripture to be folk wisdom or poetic imagery is to put the rest of Scripture in doubt.  That's how a spokesman for the Southern Baptist convention could insist on NPR recently that belief in historical Adam and Eve is "central" to Christianity: in his mind, it's the first link in a chain that leads to Jesus.  

When that outlook is applied to policy, we get "belief" in "conservatism."  That used to mean agreement on certain principles that could be applied variously to different policy choices, allowing for weighing pros and cons.  Thus, Ronald Reagan advocated "amnesty," his own word, for illegal immigrants, because they, in their hard work and selfless sacrifice for their families, exemplified conservative values.  But Newt Gingrich's standing among conservatives in South Carolina has fallen since an ad played a clip of Newt's echoing Reagan on immigration, advocating a way for all Americans to afford health care, and acknowledging that human activity has something to do with climate change.  That's three wrong answers, and Newt suddenly isn't conservative enough for respondents to polls in South Carolina.

But there's a third element, here, made especially visible by the ascent of Tim Tebow.  With "John 3:16" inscribed in his eye-shadow, he draws attention to the fundamentalist fan base for football.  Being "for" a team means buying branded merchandise and deploring opponents.  Because it's just sports, there's license for vicious expressions in the sports arena.

I sense a confusion among these three belief systems:   We're "for" Christianity, "for" conservative values, and "for" our favorite team.  "For" shouldn't mean the same thing in all three contexts, but that's what I hear in public discourse, along with a long list of all the things we're "against."  As in sports, it's zero-sum:  a point on one side must hurt the other side. 

So Reagan's era of conservative principles and principled compromise has degenerated to an era of fundamentalist politics where denying any kind of victory to the other side is more important than, say, extending jobless benefits that all sides agree should be extended, remunerating doctors who treat Medicare patients in a way that all sides admit to be fair, or finding a way to pay for our wars that may involve taxation.  

It's nothing new for American partisans to ridicule compromise as "flip-flopping."  Horace Greeley launched his abolitionist newspaper with the printed boast that he would not compromise.   He opposed Lincoln, who eloquently defended compromise on the grounds that rule by a minority is unacceptable, and chaos is not an option. For Lincoln, that leaves one just and fair way to go:  rule by a majority enjoined by limits to respect the rights of the minority -- i.e., by negotiation and compromise.

The difference that I observe between then and now is only in the superficiality in expressions of this hot "no compromise" feeling.   Think of the big applause we heard in a roomful of Republicans when Governor Perry was asked about his state's record number executions:  Conservatives are "for" capital punishment, so, some in the crowd cheered their side's racking up points -- by putting someone to death.

So-called "conservatives" who claim to be "for" the Constitution and "against" compromise with the other party don't know their Constitution.  Built into the Constitution on a number of levels is the idea that truth and justice are arrived at only in the give and take of debate and negotiation.  That's the essential principle of the Constitution, expressed in the balance of Representatives and Senators, Congress and President, Federal Government and States, and a federal judiciary.

Daily I hear news clips of politicians who won't allow for compromise on policy or respect for opponents in politics:  how scary is that?

Dog in Winter

l-r:  Luis, age 9, and Bo, age 14, following an hour's walk at Kennesaw Mountain's Battlefield Park today.

This may be Bo's last winter.  I've thought that before, but now he's deaf, unable to jump up into the back of the wagon, apt to backslide down the stairs, and painstakingly slow to lower his hindquarters when he wants to rest.  Sitting must be painful, because he simply dips his head when I command him to "sit" for his supper, though he still looks to me for the command before he digs in.   Besides, he has lumps growing and hardening on his shoulders and flank.  A surgeon removed one the size of a golf ball that turned out to be benign, but any one of these could turn out to be the One.

Yet after I lift him into my bed at night, he tosses my pillows with his head, tail wagging.  He luxuriates in his morning rub down as if he'd paid for the massage.  When I pull on my trousers, he jumps out of bed and wraps a trouser leg around his head, delighted to begin one more day, with all its favorite morning rituals:  stepping out front to nose around bushes, drinking water, and digging into his dish.  He also enjoys a game that he plays with his younger adopted brother Luis, in which each tries to sneak mouths full of the other's food.

So long as Bo wants things with such eagerness, I'd say there's still life in him... or, better, he's still "in" his life.

I reflect on what's left in my life that I want so acutely.   While Bo lopes from one anticipated pleasure to another, I feel like I just meet deadlines, and what I want mostly is to put the next thing behind me. 

There's a religious reflection in here, somewhere.  Ecclesiastes resonates.   A meditation in this season's Forward Day by Day suggests that Jesus identified with children because, like them, he was good at living in the moment, spontaneous in his pleasures, unburdened by his past, unworried about his future.  Sounds like Bo to me: an old dog, enjoying the start of his fifteenth year as completely as he has enjoyed every other moment of his life.

The American: Henry James Lite

A scene from Exxon Masterpiece Theatre production in 2000.

(reflection on THE AMERICAN by Henry James, re-read on a Kindle. Page references are meaningless.)

Thirty-two years ago, Henry James's novel THE AMERICAN was about 100 years old, and I devoured it as an appetizer. The main course was to be one of the fictions from Henry James's late period, because I'd been bowled over by the intensity, not to mention the density, of "The Beast in the Jungle" and the novel THE WINGS OF THE DOVE. But Professor Edwin Cady, who directed my independent study, drew up a list of some thirty books to read first. Re-reading early James, I find the same themes and situations that animate the later works, without the same richly layered texture. I have to admit that Henry James Lite has little more to recommend it than skim creme fraiche, or a zero-proof martini.

That's not entirely fair to James. The story is a sturdy one: self-confident and successful Christopher Newman comes to Europe to see the best of everything, women included. He wants a wife. Not two chapters later, he has found a woman not only attractive but worthy of worship, a young widow named Claire de Cintre, nee Bellegarde. The courtship unfolds as comedy of manners, as good-hearted American patiently negotiates European social customs to win her love. More difficult to attain is the approval of her family, the Bellegardes. With the friendship and guidance of Claire's younger brother Valentin, Newman comes close to succeeding. But always, from the very beginning, there are warnings to Newman that he should not trust to appearances.

James tells the story through the eyes of a friendly narrator who refers to Newman as "our hero" and "our friend," and who occasionally suggests that "our friend" has missed something. The dialogue is always amusing, as we perceive that Newman's interlocutors are usually holding back something. On the other hand, once we grasp that, the reiteration of such dialogue becomes tedious.

Not that the book needs more "action" : When the "action" really starts, involving gunfire, murder most foul, and blackmail, the fun stops. We learn of the Bellegarde's family secret in page after page of narration by Mrs. Bread, every bit as humble and bland as her name suggests. I almost put the book down then.

I'm glad I persevered. Though high comedy ended and melodrama took over, James's real interest lies in Newman's moral choice where all the "action" ends. Here, the resolutely secular James, son of a famous theologian and brother of the philosopher who wrote THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, presents his "Christ - New - Man" as a venerable moral hero. Newman's epiphany occurs in a vast cathedral where, in despair, he rests his arm and head on the back of a chair. (Personal aside: I've had the same experience, same setting!)

Re-reading my notes on a Kindle is an annoying thing, because it's such a pain in the neck to browse, it's impossible to cluster the notes, and it's hard to view the marked passages in larger context. But I did find a reminder that Newman's epiphany is a bookend: He tells early in the book of a sickness that overcame him when he was about to get revenge on a client who cheated him. It was that sickness about his business life that sent him to Europe, and a deeper version of that sends him back home.

Years later, James would write THE AMBASSADORS, which also concerns a self-confident and morally solid American man whose sojourn in Paris shakes his world. In THE AMERICAN, James sets scenes as if we were in a theatre, telling us of the pauses and gestures that accompany scintillating dialogues. In the later works, we perceive the scenes through one actor's uncertain perceptions, and physical objects often melt into metaphor as James's "central consciousness" finds inner significance in them. In those late works, it's almost a law that "always" will be followed lines later by "never," as James consistently undercuts certainty, creating a space in which to explore ambivalent feelings and ambiguous signs.   In the AMERICAN, this time, I noticed instances of both techniques. For example, early on, a gossipy American expat named Mrs. Tristram says, "Ugly, my dear sir? It is magnificent." The response? "That is the same thing."

Now, that's the James I love!

See the reflection I wrote after re-reading the Henry James's greatest hit, Portrait of a Lady.

Biblical Revenge Fantasies

Psalm 55. 12-13 It is not an enemy who taunts me – then I could bear it – but it is you…my familiar friend.

Remember that time when everyone stopped talking the moment they saw you? Then you passed them, and someone murmured behind your back, and everyone laughed?

That’s when you turned on them, stretched out your hands, and said, “Lord! Show them Your righteous power!” You laughed as invisible fingers choked them, and the one who cracked the joke swelled up like a balloon and floated away.

Maybe your inner adolescent’s fantasies are less Harry Potter and more Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, so you picture yourself saying righteous things that teach those hypocrites a lesson.

We all have felt betrayed by friends, and I imagine that I’m not the only one at St. James’ to have fantasies of revenge. In fact, the readings today are full of such fantasies. The psalmist calls for the ground to open up and swallow his enemy; Matthew tells how Jesus will get even with the bad ones. Revelation cheers first-century Christians with the vision of four horsemen who will torment their oppressors.

Indulging such self-righteous fantasies is always fun, for a little while, and always a mistake. They get my heart rate up and fill me with adrenaline, as much as a real confrontation would do. They increase the resentment and add to the loathing I feel. But Jesus commands us, “Love your enemies,” and he tells us that to hate is the same as to murder.

Let’s return to the scene imagined at the head of this meditation. When everyone’s laughing, the victim can do little to save face. But imagine if someone in the crowd steps forward, gently chides the others, and starts a friendly conversation with the hurt one.

I like to think that we at St. James' bring our own church’s wise, un-self-righteous, moderating spirit to situations like this. I like to think that we impress others by how we diffuse cliques and deflect gossip.

In this season of office parties and family gatherings, let us go in peace to love and serve the Lord!

Other readings assigned for the day:  Psalm 55. . .138,139.1-17(18-23). . .Zech. 8.9-17. . .Rev. 6.1-17. . .Matt. 25.31-46

Church was Made for Waiting

2 Peter 3.8 With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day

"You've been waiting a thousand years for the Messiah? Sorry, you just missed him. He was here last century." A groan went up in a waiting room crowded with Hebrew converts to the new faith. Peter's secretary hastened to add, "But he says he'll be back any day now." He forced a little smile. "Of course, for him, a day could be a thousand years, Ha ha. Just be patient.”

Patient? Me, a 21^st - century commuter? Sometimes, when it takes a thousand seconds to inch along Marietta's 120 Loop,I grow angry to feel the minutes of my afternoon slipping away. I search the radio for news updates, check the phone for messages, scribble notes on a pad, and try to salvage my wasted time.

Sitting on a rise above the sluggish stream of cars, St. James reminds me how our church's approach to time sets us blessedly apart from the American mainstream. Since Ben Franklin, we Americans have equated time with money; every second, like every penny,must be invested in something productive.

But our Episcopal church retains a pre-modern sensibility. Our time moves at the stately pace of seasons through a cycle of daily personal devotions and weekly gatherings. We repeat ancient stories, pray quietly, make music, and share meals. This is the routine developed by the early church to nourish the Body of Christ until the Messiah returned.

Waiting is what the Church was formed to do, not by killing time, but filling time with prayer, learning, service, and relationship.

Revelation: Best of Historical Crime Series

C. J. Sansom's series of detective novels set in Tudor England has reached a milestone:  Henry VIII's wife number six.  "Crookback" lawyer Matthew Shardlake is the detective again, this time in pursuit of a serial killer inspired by a passage in the Book of Revelation. 

Watching Sansom's development of his series, I note that he has improved the plotting of this novel, so that the climactic scene nearly coincides with the final pages.  In earlier novels, there were chapters full of tying up loose ends.

Now, he needs to work on character development.  In this novel, Shardlake cares for the widow of his best friend, and he nurses regret that he didn't express his love for her years before, when he had the chance to marry her.   Could her husband's gruesome death be an opportunity?   He battles his conscience over this question.  Also, Shardlake's intrepid assistant Barak's marriage to Tamasin seems to be on the rocks, as the husband broods in disappointment over a stillborn son.

Both of these are potential situations for developing character, but they feel more like padding, used to pace the story.   Each time one of the characters reflects on his feelings, they're the same feelings, and it's the same reflection.  Then, suddenly, near the end, someone says something, and -- voila! --the tension is resolved.

I hope to see more of Shardlake, with more improvement.  

The Dog Who Knew Too Much: Fun with Feeling

Three novels into a series, Spencer Quinn keeps playing within the limits of his form.   I'd say "formula," but that carries disdainful connotations, and I'd rather emphasize how fun the books are and how I admire his fresh story-telling within the framework.  Besides, he built the frame.

Image from the cover of THE DOG WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

The frame consists of detective Bernie Little accepting a job from a dubious client, learning quickly that there's more to the job than meets the private eye.  What makes the series remarkable -- and, did I mention, fun? -- is its narrator, Bernie's dog Chet.

I've written before how delightful it is to get the story through Chet's eyes, nose, ears, and highly distractable consciousness.   A prime example in this book is a moment of gun-slinging action when Chet is primarily interested in a scrap of bacon.

This particular story's core event involves an adolescent boy, and Quinn seems to have struck a rich vein of narrative here, for he seems to know adolescents as well as he knows dogs.   Pudgy twelve-year-old boy named Devin is missing from a camping expedition.   Maybe because I work with children in that age group every day, I was moved  by the scene where Bernie and Chet interview one of the boys who shared Devin's tent on the night of the disappearance.  Frightened at first, the boy gains confidence in an interview technique that might be described as "good cop, good dog."  Afraid of retribution, the boy gets up the courage to tell how he participated in bullying Devin.  The boy halts when he remembers suddenly seeing Devin's face in flashlight.  He is ashamed to have seen a boy crying "like that."  Later, Bernie takes care to ensure that Devin won't remember his ordeal solely in terms of helplessness and fear.

With the introduction of a puppy identical to Chet, conceived on the memorable last page of the series' first story, Quinn hints where this series may be headed some years down the road, when Chet -- I don't want to imagine it -- may be too old to continue.  A good series can travel with us through time the way a flesh-and-blood companion does. 

Like Haydn, who created the form of the modern symphony and then wrote over a hundred, may Quinn keep delighting us with his variations. 

Ah, Paris: The Greater Journey

Under construction in 1888, the Eiffel Tower was called "too large, too ugly," and too American (405)

(reflections on France generally, and David McCullough's book THE GREATER JOURNEY, published by Simon and Schuster, 2011).

With a national debt that's 120% of its gross domestic product, Greece resents the way other members of the Euro-zone look upon her as Northern Europe's freeloading cousin. "All they do is go on strikes and complain," said one European in a radio report yesterday.  This is funny, because Americans have long looked upon all of Europe the same way, making exceptions only for the hard-working and well-organized Germans. 

That's the attitude that Americans took with them to Paris in the years between roughly 1830 and 1900, chronicled by David McCullough in THE GREATER JOURNEY.   Some come to study art (Samuel Morse, John Singer Sargent), some to study medicine (Oliver Wendell Holmes, Elizabeth Blackwell, Charles Sumner) and some to relax (James Fennimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe).   They come with some anticipation that they'll see some interesting sights and learn some interesting things, but also with a sense that American vigor, American know-how, and American enterprise are the future -- and how right they were, for good and for ill, is also a part of this book.   They leave, if they leave at all, feeling that they have discovered a new world in the Old World.

It's the story encapsulated in an anecdote about influential editor and novelist William Dean Howells who interrupts a casual conversation with a younger American to grasp him by the shoulders and say,

Live all you can.  ...It doesn't matter what you do -- but live. This place makes it all come over me. I see it now.  I haven't done so -- and now I'm old.  It's too late.  It has gone past me -- I've lost it.  You have time.  You are young.  Live!  (428)

Novelist Henry James knew both men, and took this anecdote for the germ of his late masterpiece THE AMBASSADORS.  But James had already examined the same story from many different angles for many years.

McCullough tells this same story more than twenty times, and it's always interesting.  Morse puts all his skill and imagination into capturing on canvas his wonderment at the Louvre, fails to make a living as an artist, and heads home with a vague idea that he can improve upon a system of flags that the French used for telegraphing messages (99).   Sumner is astounded to see a Black student integrated with his medical class (131), and becomes the most prominent abolitionist in Congress.  Cecilia Beaux, whose lovely works on display at Atlanta's High Museum were a revelation to me a few years ago, remarked that "Paris itself" was the greatest value of study in Paris (411).  Historian Henry Adams attained an epiphany at Chartres that became focus of his vision that modern times are powered by the inhuman force of the dynamo rather than by humane faith in the Virgin Mary (448).

If my notes here seem weighted to the last portion of the book, it's not because I skipped the first part, where the stories are fascinating and amusing.   Having concentrated two years of college on Henry James -- whose WINGS OF THE DOVE and BEAST IN THE JUNGLE were, for me, a kind of Paris -- I consider his crowd to be mine, too.

My own France experience involved a plate of asparagus.   At age 24, chaperoning high school students in France, I was the typical American described  in 1830 by one of McCullough's subjects: "The French aim to gratify, we to appease appetite -- we demolish dinner, they eat it" (35).  But then, in my journal, I devoted a full page to a plate of asparagus in a lemony butter sauce.  Not hard to make, it struck me not just for its taste, but also for elegance, and also for the artistry of its presentation, set off from other courses, served on a single small plate. For this drama major, it was a revelation that dinner could be theatre.

I learned in France that "dinner" was something that started with drinks and bread at six and ended sometime after ten or eleven or midnight, with kisses all around.   At a village restaurant, an hour or two into a "dinner" of this sort, I took a hike through the village, where the entire population seemed to be in backyards, neighbors sharing tables, drinking and eating and playing around with their children. 

In a flash I understood what my roommate in college had tried to make me understand.  Andreas Pozzi, transplanted to Philly from Italy, had told me that Americans had it all wrong.  "You guys live to work," he said, "but Italians work only to live."  For him, real life was that time with family, after work is done.   I was too full of my Puritan work ethic and Rust Belt background to appreciate a world view formed in a sunny, Catholic country.

Dining was only one art in a spectrum.  McCullough's Americans are startled to see that all classes of French people dined at the cafes, attended the concerts, and crowded the galleries. "[T]he conviction of the French that the arts were indispensable to the enjoyment and meaning of life affected the Americans more than anything else about Paris," McCullough tells us (47). 

That's something that my students and my fellow countrymen still don't get.   Ulysses S. Grant was bewildered by France, commenting after days in Paris that "there's nothing to do" (356).

My Dad was a lot like Grant, who once called himself "not a noun, but an active verb," and Dad derided the French as "Frogs."  But, through the agency of his business partner Alfredo Berato, he, too came to appreciate something of this other kind of life represented by the table, the glass, the bottle, the sunset, the time spent with friends.

Seeing that this kind of Mediterranean attitude leads to financial ruin in this world of ours makes me, with Henry Adams and his compatriots, "shudder" for this world of ours.

Sovereign: Roi Noir

(reflection on SOVEREIGN, third in C. J. Sansom's series of detective stories featuring Matthew Shardlake.)

In Raymond Chandler's noir novels, Marlowe narrates his pursuit of leads across LA, into clubs and bungalows and hotels, where he often meets with violence.  He thinks of himself as tough and cynical, but he's never cynical enough to mistrust the right person.  By the time I reach the end of a Chandler novel, I've long forgotten what Marlowe was looking for in chapter one, and I don't care:  Marlowe's toughness, integrity, and naivety make him a great companion for the journey into darkness. (Read my in-depth study of Chandler http://smootpage.com/books/Chandler.htm)

England in the time of Henry VIII's brief marriage to Catherine Howard provides C. J. Sansom with a background every bit as dark and labyrinthine as 1940s LA, dominated by duplicitous and brutally violent men in authority, with cruel Henry VIII setting the tone and the agenda.   Most of the action takes place in York, decorated for the King's entourage during his royal "progress" and seething with resentments and conspiracies. 

So Sansom has half of the noir formula right, and I intend to read the rest of the series.  Still, on the off-chance that Mr. Sansom might be Google surfing, I'll offer a couple of suggestions.    While Shardlake, the "crookback" lawyer, certainly gets into physical scrapes and scary situations, he is a narrator jealous of his own authority, wrapped up in his own back-story -- pun accidental -- and cerebral.  Compare him to Marlowe, who never tells us of his past and who never thinks ahead more than one step at a time. Shardlake is a Sherlock Holmes / Marlowe hybrid, and it might be better to see the next story narrated instead by Shardlake's Watson, named Barak.  Sansom, through Shardlake, is a bit fussy about details of plot in this third book as in the first one.  While I enjoyed the book, I often felt that we were going back over the same territory.   A model better than Holmes's Watson might be Nero Wolfe's Archie Goodwin.  Rex Stout was able to have his noir and intellectual games, too, having an active, impulsive, hot-tempered agent to mediate a sedentary detective's ratiocinations.