Tolkien is Now a Doctor of the Church!

Well, not quite, but it's quite remarkable that Pope Leo has quoted Gandalf in his first encyclical, which is about artificial intelligence.

I haven't read the encyclical yet, though I've read a few analyses of it. But here's the quotation:

The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, described our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” Tolkien's mother would be very proud!

Having It Both Ways

I came across this book cover today. Doesn't it illustrate the contradiction of identity politics, and of the politicization of the arts and humanities?

Dull People Hype Silence Because They Have Nothing to Say

I don't actually believe this. Well, not entirely.

But it's an expression of my irritation at the whole cult of silence. To love silence makes you deep; to love discussion, animation, and activity makes you shallow. Supposedly.

Apparently (at least people always say this), silence is undervalued in the modern world, despite all the bookshop shelves groaning under the weight of books on mindfulness, contemplative prayer, and introvert pride. (I'm an introvert. I'm not in the slightest bit proud of it.)

Celebrated arty films such as Solaris (the 2002 remake) or the aptly-named Into Great Silence (a bunch of Carthusians monks going about their day) are full of long moody shots and minutes on end without any dialogue. Trippy! Profound! Uncompromising!

When I get especially irritated at the cult of silence, I think of pointing out one place that is very silent indeed. Well, you've probably guessed it. The graveyard.

Of course, all this won't do. The Bible (and doubtless all wisdom literature) is full of injunctions to silence. So I should probably just shut up myself.

Should Tradition be Causative?

As regular readers will know, I'm very interested in tradition. OK, I'm obsessed by tradition.

Today I found myself mulling over the phrase "in the tradition of...". What does it mean, exactly?

For instance, there's often talk about Kingston-upon-Hull's tradition of poetry. Philip Larkin is the big name, along with Andrew Marvell. There's also Stevie Smith and a good few others. Anyway, a surprising number of celebrated poets are associated with Hull.

But is this really a tradition? Or is it just a coincidence? Or can a coincidence be a tradition?

Conversely, I remember someone pointing out how the Harry Potter books (and films) are very much in the tradition of Enid Blyton. But this does seem to be a tradition in a more causative sense. Rowling was a huge fan of Enid Blyton in her girlhood.

More importantly, perhaps, is anybody exercised by such questions other than me?

More on Distraction

In a previous post, I wrote this:

T.S. Eliot famously wrote that modern man is "distracted by distraction from distraction". It's a valid point, but...surely people need some kind of distraction, or at least some kind of occupation. What is it we're supposedly being distracted from, anyway?

The Christian might say "worship". The socialist might say politics, or the improvement of the human species. The hippie (I think that we still have hippies even if they aren't classic hippies) might say "love" or "human connection" or some such thing. Or perhaps we come down to the ideal of pure being-- whatever that is. Whatever anyone might say, people who complain about modern distractions must believe we're being distracted from something.

I'm very sympathetic to the argument made by Wally in the wonderful movie My Dinner with André, when he reacts against his rather hippie-ish friend, who is talking about various workshops he's led and which seem similiar to Sixties "happenings" or modern mindfulness exercises.

Wally says: "The whole point, really, I think, was to enable the people in the workshops, including yourself, to somehow sort of strip away every scrap of purposefulness from certain selected moments. And the point of it was so that you would then all be able to experience, somehow, just pure being. In other words, you were trying to discover what it would be like to live for certain moments without having any particular thing that you were supposed to be doing.

"And I think I just simply object to that. I mean, I just don’t think I accept the idea that there should be moments in which you’re not trying to do anything. I think, uh, it’s our nature, uh, to do things, I think we should do things, I think that, uh, purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic human structure, and…and to say that we ought to be able to live without it is like saying that, uh, a tree ought to be able to live without branches or roots, but…but actually, without branches or roots, it wouldn’t be a tree, I mean, it would just be a log. Do you see what I’m saying?"

I agree with Wally, but at the same time, I also find myself-- at other times, in other moods-- sharing in this disapproval of "distraction". "Distraction" seems to be the only word.

The idea of distraction seems to be clearly present in the New Testament, principally in the parable of the sower: "He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful."

Then there's that wonderful passage from the first letter of James: "For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass. For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was."

I'm also reminded of this wonderful passage from Miracles by C.S. Lewis, a book which went a huge way towards getting me to accept a supernatural worldview. I quote the entire passage, first because it's relevant, but also for its own sake: "And yet . . . and yet . . . It is that which I fear more than any positive argument against miracles: that soft, tidal return of your habitual outlook as you close the book and the familiar four walls about you and the familiar noises from the street reassert themselves. Perhaps (if I dare suppose so much) you have been led on at times while you were reading, have felt ancient hopes and fears astir in your heart, have perhaps come almost to the threshold of belief—but now? No. It just won’t do. Here is the ordinary, here is the “real” world, round you again. The dream is ending; as all other similar dreams have always ended. For of course this is not the first time such a thing has happened. More than once in your life before this you have heard a strange story, read some odd book, seen something queer or imagined you have seen it, entertained some wild hope or terror: but always it ended in the same way. And always you wondered how you could, even for a moment, have expected it not to. For that “real world” when you came back to it is so unanswerable. Of course the strange story was false, of course the voice was really subjective, of course the apparent portent was a coincidence. You are ashamed of yourself for having ever thought otherwise: ashamed, relieved, amused, disappointed, and angry all at once. You ought to have known that, as Arnold says, “Miracles don’t happen.” "

So, while I'm very sympathetic to Wally's critique of the notion of "distraction", I think it only really applies to a distraction from this weird idea of "pure being" or "the moment". I'm much more sympathetic to the critique of distraction when it applies to an ideal, or a view of ultimate reality-- and Christianity fits both of these definitions.

I could also apply it to the ideals of the Gaelic Revival which ebbed away in the middle of the twentieth century. It's hard to believe that television, consumerism, and pop culture had nothing to do with this. The Irish people weren't won away from the ideals of the Irish Revolution by all this trash culture. They were distracted from them-- several generations holding onto those ideals in an increasingly nominal way, until finally they were peeled off like a scab.

When I think of my own attempts to live up to my ideal of "priggishness", the foe of this seems to be a sort of distraction. The lower is the enemy of the higher. It's always easier to gorge on light entertainment than to read poetry. It's always easier to be facetious than to try to sustain a mood of solemnity. Contemplation is often held to be the highest human activity, but it's also boring, or tends to be.

In this regard (and I will close on this quotation) I find John Ruskin's defence of monotony in the arts to be interesting: 

"From these facts we may gather generally that monotony is, and ought to be, in itself painful to us, just as darkness is; that an architecture which is altogether monotonous is a dark or dead architecture; and of those who love it, it may be truly said, "they love darkness rather than light." But monotony in certain measure, used in order to give value to change, and above all, that transparent monotony, which, like the shadows of a great painter, suffers all manner of dimly suggested form to be seen through the body of it, is an essential in architectural as in all other composition; and the endurance of monotony has about the same place in a healthy mind that the endurance of darkness has: that is to say, as a strong intellect will have pleasure in the solemnities of storm and twilight, and in the broken and mysterious lights that gleam among them, rather than in mere brilliancy and glare, while a frivolous mind will dread the shadow and the storm; and as a great man will be ready to endure much darkness of fortune in order to reach greater eminence of power or felicity, while an inferior man will not pay the price; exactly in like manner a great mind will accept, or even delight in, monotony which would be wearisome to an inferior intellect, because it has more patience and power of expectation, and is ready to pay the full price for the great future pleasure of change. But in all cases it is not that the noble nature loves monotony, anymore than it loves darkness or pain. But it can bear with it, and receives a high pleasure in the endurance or patience, a pleasure necessary to the well-being of this world; while those who will not submit to the temporary sameness, but rush from one change to another, gradually dull the edge of change itself, and bring a shadow and weariness over the whole world from which there is no more escape."

Favourite Poems: Ozymandias

I realize that, in my "favourite poems" series, I've concentrated on poems which aren't particularly well-known. For the obvious reason: because I feel they haven't got the attention they deserve.

But that's not to say I don't love the more famous anthology pieces. I do, in most cases. I fully agree with Arthur Quiller-Coach, the editor of the first Oxford Book of English Verse: "Having set my heart on choosing the best, I resolved not to be dissuaded by common objections against anthologies—that they repeat one another until the proverb "good things are worth repeating" loses all application—or perturbed if my judgement should often agree with that of good critics. The best is the best, though a hundred judges have declared it so; nor had it been any feat to search out and insert the second-rate merely because it happened to be recondite."

"Ozymandias" by Shelley is a poem that is deservedly famous. Probably you all know and love it already, so I won't presume to "Ozymandias-splain" it to you. I just wanted to comment, not on the main virtues of the poem, but some incidental points that occur to me:

1) I absolutely love the first line. It's one of my favourite opening lines in poetry. I like the indirectness of it. In a fourteen-line poem, Shelley don't "cut to the chase": he uses a simple "frame narrative" (and I love frame narratives). The glory of Ozymandias is given to us at two removes: there is the remove of time, but also the remove of a second-hand account. This adds, I think, to the delicious sense of dimness and remoteness.

2) Again on the first line, I really love the fact that Shelley doesn't name Egypt, He simply call it "an antique land". I personally believe vagueness is often very effective in creating poetic effects.

3) The anti-climax of the last line is magnificent. Most poems build to a climax, and (in my view) most poems always should. But occasionally, a poem does quite the opposite, and very effectively-- as in this case.

Shelley seems to have been a pretty awful human being, both ideologically and (more importantly) personally. He treated his first wife so cruelly, it does diminish my pleasure in his poetry. But his genius can't be doubted.

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

My Favourite Stanza of Poetry

I've long considered this my favourite stanza in all of poetry:

Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor Iron bars a Cage;

Minds innocent and quiet take

That for an Hermitage.

If I have freedom in my love,

And in my soul am free,

Angels alone, that soar above,

Enjoy such liberty.

It comes, of course, from To Althea, from Prison by Richard Lovelace. The whole poem is excellent but the last verse (which this is) raises it to a much higher level.

I even like the scansion of "an hermitage", which in my mind I always pronounce just as it's pronounced today. Whether it was pronounced differently in Lovelace's day, whether the last syllable was stressed, I don't know.

I think the beauty of the verse is beyond analysis. The parallelism of the first two lines, the timelessness of the imagery, the distinctly masculine gentleness of the whole thing...that's all a part of it. "Angel" is one of my very words in the language, and it's the focal point of the whole stanza, and thus the whole poem. I think the last line of a poem should "soar", should raise our thoughts and spirits to the heights, and it quite literally soars in this case.

The whole stanza is so beautifully crafted that there's no suggestion of artifice or of effort, it seems like an organic whole. Every word seems to follow every word with something close to inevitability.

And yet...even after such analysis, the brilliance of the stanza remains undiminished and unexplained. You could say all these things of many other stanzas of poetry, and yet this one seems to have something that surpasses any other-- for me, anyway.

By the way, I lied a little at the start of this poem. I haven't quite considered this my definitive favourite stanza of all time. For years, I've said it's a toss-up between this one and the following stanza from "The Walrus and the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll. There was always an element of striving after comic effect in this, though, with the contrast between the two. (Not that anybody "in real life" shows any interest in anything I have to say about poetry, anyway. I needn't have bothered.) But today I've decided that Lovelace trumps Carroll, though I still love the Carroll stanza:

The time has come,' the Walrus said,

      To talk of many things:

Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —

      Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

      And whether pigs have wings.'

(Incidentally, I think the line "why the sea is boiling hot" is a brilliant prophetic satire of most social and political discourse today, especially in the mainstream media-- long earnest discussions that take as their assumption something that isn't true, that is observably untrue, that is ludicrously and patently untrue.)