Prayer Requests

Readers are always welcome to ask for prayers from me and from other readers of the blog, whenever they so wish. Mail me your intentions and I will blog them, keeping them anonymous if you'd prefer.

I'm very grateful for all the times readers have answered my prayer requests. It shouldn't be a one-way street!

Amber

I've never really been much of a novel reader, but one novel which greatly appealed to me in my teens was Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny. It's a fantasy novel, and the Amber of the title is a city which is the only "true" place in existence. Every other world, including out own, is a reflection of some aspect of Amber.

The central character, Corwin, wakes up in a hospital on present-day Earth with no memory of who he is. He leaves the hospital and pieces together his own story through various clues. He slowly realizes he is a member of the royal family of Amber, and he resolves to depose his elder brother from its throne. (There are a whole series of books about Amber, and later on I read them all, but I only really liked the first.)

The idea of Amber was wildly exciting to me. For one thing, I absolutely love the word "Amber". When I had a secret society with my brother and cousins, (we existed for the purpose of being a secret society), my code-name was Amber. It's one of my favourite names, and one of my favourite words.

But the idea of Zelazny's Amber thrills me, too, and this is what this blog post is about.

All my life I've been beguiled by the idea of a world, or a state of being, where life is elevated. I don't know what better word to use than "elevated", because this yearning is very specific and not be confused with other yearnings.

It's not a yearning for a utopia, because it doesn't seek to escape from evil and struggle.

If I use words like "humdrum" and "quotidian", that also gives the wrong impression, because this yearning is not a yearning to escape from the ordinary. In fact, I've always loved the ordinary with all my heart.

Banal is a better word than 'ordinary' here. The ordinary can contain the sublime, but the banal never does.

Perhaps Nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence is the best way to approach it. Nietzsche said the ultimate affirmation of life would be to yearn for our lives to be repeated eternally. As a Christian, I obviously don't subscribe to that, but I do (involuntarily) apply the criterion of "eternal recurrence" to each moment.

I think; could this moment be frozen timelessly in a picture, or a poem? Is there something eternal within it? Now, obviously that can be a moment that is very ordinary, or one that is very special. It can be a kiss or standing at a bus stop on a cold day.

I've mentioned my fascination with photographs, especially enigmatic photographs...I constantly imagine I'm in a photograph when I am out and about. A photograph that is several decades old.

There are moments, however, that seem altogether devoid of this potential to be eternal. Bitching about one acquaintance to another, for instance. Small talk. Sarcasm. Channel-hopping. Lingering in a museum gift shop. Reading trashy magazines. That sort of thing.

Nietzsche expressed this very well, in a chapter of Thus Spake Zarathustra entitled "The Rabble". (In my early twenties, I read Thus Spake Zarathustra over and over):

Life is a well of delight; but where the rabble also drink, there all fountains are poisoned.

To everything cleanly am I well disposed; but I hate to see the grinning mouths and the thirst of the unclean.

They cast their eye down into the fountain: and now glanceth up to me their odious smile out of the fountain.

And it is not the mouthful which hath most choked me, to know that life itself requireth enmity and death and torture-crosses:—

But I asked once, and suffocated almost with my question: What? Is the rabble also necessary for life?

Are poisoned fountains necessary, and stinking fires, and filthy dreams, and maggots in the bread of life?

Of course, Nietzsche expressed this concept in typically aristocratic terms, and in my anti-populist youth I would have agreed with him enthusiastically. But even now, I sympathize with these words, although with the understanding that "the rabble" is me....the rabble is all of us, all too often.

Whenever we cheapen or banalize or coarsen life, we are the rabble.

But back to Amber. The thing I liked most about Amber was that Corwin only remembers it gradually. When someone first mentions the name to him (it's his sister, who doesn't realize he has lost his memory), it fills his soul with an unspeakable yearning and he doesn't know why. Slowly, he begins to remember it as the story goes on.

This is similar to my own yearnings for an "elevated" world. There's something inescapably indirect about such yearning.

When I look at my reflection in a Christmas bauble, and see myself and the room around me transfigured into something else, I seem to see Amber.

When I see out a back window through a front window, I seem to see Amber.

When I look at the frozen figures in a snow globe, I seem to see Amber.

I've often quoted a line I love from the poem "The Burning of the Leaves" by Laurence Binyon-- "The fingers of fire are making corruption clean". This yearning is a yearning for such a refining fire, in oneself and the world around.

I want to make clear that this isn't really a matter of morality. I'm not talking about the fires of Purgatory, and Amber is not Heaven. I'm talking about an attitude to this world.

Translated into social and cultural terms, this is a yearning for tradition, ceremony, ritual, solemnity, and splendour. For monarchy, cultural nationalism, hierarchy, chivalry, festival, national and regional identity, venerable institutions, public monuments, the preservation of rural life, and so forth.

It's what makes me wince when I see tacky advertising, or casinos, or trendy overpriced restaurants, or zany humour.

I yearn for Amber in cultural terms, too. As I've mentioned, I've been reading The Idylls of the King recently-- reading it, and reading about it. Whenever I read poetry, I feel a contempt for prose and for the primacy of prose. I get to thinking that we should read all prose as bashfully and apologetically as we read murder mystery novels. I feel ashamed of myself for reading so much prose.

I suppose my yearning for Amber is a yearning for a life that is poetry rather than prose-- and not just any poetry, but heroic verse like Idylls of the King.

Of course, we can never live in Amber. But we can try to get closer to it, to breathe its air.

Apologies to Marc Leslie Kagan

Marc, I only saw your comments on some earlier blog posts this morning. Thanks for those, and for your kind words.

I can't believe the Googie post got so many comments...it might be the most commented-upon post on this blog!

I really do appreciate people taking the time to comment and, if I ever fail to respond, it's only ever an oversight.

I also found this charming comment on my "What I Believe" post:

You say, "I believe in Jesus Christ, the Alpha and Omega, the same yesterday, today and forever."

NO you don't. That's the biblical Christ. YOU, sir, believe in "another jesus and another gospel" per 2 Cor 11:4, because the REAL Christ is not anymore in your piece of wafer thin bread as there is a man in the moon.

I challenge you to a debate on this very website on that very topic. But is it not true that you are a coward and will refuse the offer, coming up with some reason like, "I don't like your attitude?".

Either PUT UP your evidence for Transubstantiation, or kindly SHUT UP.

I can't help feeling a certain fondness towards people who write this kind of thing!

Idylls of the King (I)

On the bus into work on Friday, I was suddenly seized with a powerful desire to read some long poetry. I get these sudden whims. I can't help them. They come out of nowhere and are almost impossible to resist. Then they very often disappear, in favour of the next thing.

All the same, I've loved poetry since my early teens, and I've been in love with the magic of words for as long as I can remember. However, it was short lyric poetry which I loved, and which I've loved ever since, and which I'm sure I'll love till the day I day.

Poetry, it seemed to me, should be as intense and concentrated as a flame, and it simply couldn't be sustained for any longer than a few pages at most.

Poetry especially shouldn't tell a story, unless it was a very simple story, because a story requires lulls and pauses, and accounts of people going hither and thither. Plot mechanics are far too vulgar for poetry.

I did make efforts to read longer poems, but they never appealed to me very much. All the same, I couldn't help feeling a certain unease about this-- after all, most of the great poets did not regard their lyrics as their masterpieces, but their long poems. Was seventy or eighty per cent of a poet's Collected Poems to be regarded as so much ephemera?

Of course, I have read some long poems, including narrative poems. I read Paradise Lost in my twenties, and enjoyed it well enough-- although, as Samuel Johnson, no reader ever wished it longer than it was. (I'd known some excerpts of the poem since my teens, and indeed I had some of Satan's speeches off by heart. I always a bit of a rebel, so I identified with Milton's Satan-- although certainly not in any kind of Satanist spirit. I was an agnostic at this time.)

(Incidentally, it's funny how propitious name associations can be-- when I first encountered the name Milton, I associated it with Milton's Fluid. Milton's Fluid is a liquid used to sterilized baby bottles and the like. I didn't realize this; I think I thought it was some kind of medicine or tonic, such as gripe water. In any case, I associated the name "Milton" with something medicinal or astringent, and that association turned out to be entirely appropriate! Milton's poetry can certainly give pleasure, but it is a cerebral and even austere pleasure.)

Aside from Paradise Lost, I can't really think of any other long poem I enjoyed-- with the single exception of Night Thoughts by Dr. Edward Young, a series of extended blank verse meditations on death and the afterlife, written from a Christian perspective. I liked this because, like Paradise Lost, it's extremely philosophical and meditative.

I read George Chapman's blank verse translation of the Odyssey, Dorothy L. Sayers's translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, The Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton, The Wanderings of Oisin by W.B. Yeats, Autumn Sequel by Louis Macneice, the Canterbury Tales, and many others...I didn't really enjoy any of them as poetry, although I certainly appreciated passages from many of them.

In spite of all that, I decided, aged forty, that I was going to give long poetry another try. Not only reading it, but reading criticism about it.

I decided I would start with a long poem I had failed to conquer before-- that is, Idylls of the King by Lord Alfred Tennyson.

I've often written about Tennyson on this blog. "Ulysses" and "Locksley Hall" are amongst my absolute favourite poems of all time. I also like "Chorus of the Lotos Eaters", although it's a poem I very much associate with early puberty, when I remember being exhausted all the time. And there are even shorter pieces, such as "The Eagle" a six-line jewel of poetry.

Idylls of the King is the poem Tennyson regarded as his own masterpiece, and he wrote it over a period of decades. It's a set of linked blank verse narratives, set against the main narrative of King Arthur's Camelot, and its decline. The final "idyll", "The Passing of Arthur" is the most famous, and it's one that I've loved for many years. I've often quoted it on this blog. It includes these famous lines, which will speak to all conservatives:

"Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?
Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led
The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.
But now the whole Round Table is dissolved
Which was an image of the mighty world,
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds."

And slowly answered Arthur from the barge:
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

So I've always wanted to tackle the entire thing. I've made one major effort before, and I gave up. But given this new gusto for long poetry, I thought Idylls of the King was a natural starting point.

Tennyson is an "eminent victorian" if ever there was one; in fact, one biography of him has the title The Pre-Eminent Victorian. He was bearded, patriarchal, serious-minded, liberal (in the old-fashioned sense), idealistic, and so on. When the Victorians became an object of scorn, Tennyson fell out of favour with them. As Samuel Butler famously wrote: "Talking it over, we agreed that Blake was no good because he learnt Italian at sixty in order to study Dante, and we knew Dante was no good because he was so fond of Virgil, and Virgil was no good because Tennyson ran him, and as for Tennyson—well, Tennyson goes without saying." Tennyson has been rehabilitated since then, but more in spite of his Victorianism than for it, or even regardless of it. I love him for many reasons, and his Victorianism is one of them.

Another reason I love him is for the sheer polish of his verse. There is never anything jarring in them, whether in terms of scansion, tone or language. Take this, for instance:

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;

Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font. 

The firefly wakens; waken thou with me.

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

 

Verse this smooth is, in my view, unique to the Victorian and Edwardian eras. It's hard to describe exactly what makes it so "smooth"; it's not only the lack of discordance, but the ambitiousness of the scansion and sentence structure, almost so that it could be read as either poetry or prose, and needs no allowances made for it.

Well, I've spent so long writing this blog post, over the last two days, that I'm going to publish it as it is, and return to the subject another time.

Happy Guy Fawkes Day!

Every year, I'm saddened that Guy Fawkes Day (or Guy Fawkes Night, or Bonfire Night) has become so invisible. Regular readers of this blog will know my feelings about tradition. Short version: I'm keen on it.

Guy Fawkes Day commemorates the Gundpowder Plot of fifth November, a plot by Guy Fawkes and other English Catholic to blow up Parliament and thus assassinate King James I, and install a Catholic monarch instead. But the plot was detected, the plotters were executed, and Guy Fawkes Night became a celebration of the Protestant supremacy and foiling of Popish plots. So, it had an anti-Catholic element. Big deal.

I remember, when I was a kid, the British comics (which were the comics I got, since there weren't any Irish comics) used to print "Guy Fawkes masks" over centrefold pages, at this time of year-- the idea being that you would cut them out and put them on a cardboard base.

Today, there seems to be no mention of Guy Fawkes Day-- neither on the mainstream media, nor on social media. I find it very sad.

The jingle by which Guy Fawkes Day was immortalized was:

Remember, remember, the Fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I know not the reason why the gundpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

Why should any traditions be forgot? It makes you sad. Anyway, happy Guy Fawkes Day!

The Ongoing History of the Purple Notebook

OK, here's another very personal one...

Regular readers will recall my little purple notebook. Perhaps they are tired of hearing about it. Or perhaps not.... I recently had a very deep and emotional discussion with a good friend, one which, along with other things, inspired him with the idea of writing a short book on the meaning of life. As we spoke about this over the phone, I quickly realized that the heart of the book would consist of moments such as those chronicled in my purple notebook-- or (to put it another way), experiences of "joy" as described by C.S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy, or "spots of time" as described by Wordsworth in The Prelude. In fact, my friend was delighted that I'd heard about Wordsworth's "spots of time". So perhaps such experiences are not so unusual, and perhaps this subject is of some interest to my readers after all.

I am putting together a new "edition" of my purple notebook. My purple notebook was originally a computer file which I wrote up when I was sixteen or seventeen. I called it the Ancaneron (a name I'll explain in a moment). In my college years, I transferred it to a hard-covered notebook with a marble effect cover, and wrote it out in differently coloured inks. (I don't recall exactly what was in this original purple notebook, but I'd guess only a few entries have survived to the latest "editions").

As chronicled on this blog, the modern incarnations of this document have been a little purple notebook, then a blue notebook, then a golden notebook....the latest notebook is shiny red.

I have decided that there is no definitive version of my purple notebook. When I put together a new version, I add some new entries and drop some old entries-- sometimes I revive old entries that had been dropped. My current version is the one I find most inspiring at this stage of my life.

So back to the name 'Ancaneron'. This name came from a fantasy saga I was planning, all the way back in my teens, about an order of bards who would be rather like the bards of ancient Ireland-- not merely wandering minstrels, but living repositories of ancient lore. In my proposed story, the Ancaneron was the name of an epic poem, one which the bards had memorized and which gave them supernatural powers. Like the Bible, the Ancaneron would be a "living word", an animate thing in itself. (I was also rather influenced in this by the Matrix of Leadership in the Transformers stories. The Matrix of Leadership was a kind of power source which was handed from Autobot leader to Autobot leader, and which contained the spirit of previous owners. And of course The Force of the Jedi is in there somewhere, too.)

Well, I did eventually write a novel about an order of 'Bards'-- The Bard's Apprentice, which I serialized on this blog, and which accumulated a modest readership at the time. It's the most (artistically) successful of the novels I've written-- the closest thing to a real novel! However, I didn't use the idea of the Ancaneron.

The name itself was conjured out of thin air, intended to sound similar to the Decameron of Boccaccio (which I haven't read), the Mabinogion of Welsh mythology, or the Necronomicon of H.P. Lovecraft (another fictional text). It was supposed to suggest "ancient incantation".

I've always been excited by the idea of texts such as the Decameron, the Arabian Nights, the Mahabarata, the Canterbury Tales, and (of course) the Bible. (The Canterbury Tales is the only one of those, apart from the Bible, that I've actually read.)

But let me return to the Ancaneron-- not the fictional Ancaneron, but the real one, the progenitor of the purple notebook. Even when I was a teenager, I very consciously thought of the Ancaneron as a "body of folklore" similar to the works of Homer, or the Arthurian legends, or the Mabinogion, or the Kalevala, or indeed the Bible. Like Billy Fisher in Billy Liar, I had my own country, except the country was me. My life was its history, and the Ancaneron was its national epic, or Scripture, or folklore, or some hodge-podge of all these things.

And this analogy still makes sense to me. Writing out my new edition of the purple notebook, I found myself once again musing on canon formation, a life-long fascination. I tried to express it in this blog post, one of the posts that mean the most to me.

Canon formation fascinates me in all its forms. Whether it is the canon formation of Scripture itself, or the evolution of an epic cycle or a folk tale or an urban legend, or the process whereby a poem or a song or a movie comes to be considered a "classic", there is something mysterious about it. At the most exalted heights, this is the mystery of the Holy Spirit forming the canon of Scripture from the choices of the ancient Hebrews and the early Christians. But, even when we descend from those heights, a certain mysteriousness remains. Who decided Casablanca was a classic movie? When did The Lord of the Rings pass from being a fad to an institution? You can't watch this happening; nobody can control it; it would be impossible even to reconstruct retrospectively. It just happens, on the dark side of the moon. It delights my Counter-Enlightenment heart.

Well, my purple notebook has the same mysteriousness, on a micro level. The "spots of time" it chronicles just happened-- whether they are experiences or ideas. At a certain point, I realized that some memory or idea inspired me in a way that was especially potent. It kept coming back, just as "classic" songs or poems or films keep coming back (or classic plays "command the stage"). And, as I'm writing a new edition, I realize that some entries have ceased to "glow" while others have not.

For instance, a memory of attending a Marc Chagall exhibition in Geneva, with Michelle, has continued to "glow", while the memory of reading the Foundation series of science-fiction novels by Isaac Asimov, in my teens, no longer "glows". (But perhaps it will glow again.) The dedication of a book of humorous essays, "For anyone, anywhere, with whom I have ever shared a laugh", continues to glow, while the memory of reading The Iliad when I was seventeen has ceased to glow-- for the moment.

Does anyone find such matters interesting, other than me? Now that I have written so much, I find myself lacking a conclusion. Well, to anyone who cares, the purple notebook lives on!

Thank You Thank You Thank You!

Look what I got in the mail today from a very generous reader! My favourite thing in the world....a snow globe! And a birthday card, and more!

I was both delighted and taken aback at this very generous gift. Thank you!

As I'd admitted, I was a little bit melancholy about my approaching fortieth birthday, for various reasons. But a lot of kind gestures from various people made it a nice experience, overall.

My reader sent me a very sweet letter in which he said: "It's fair to contribute something". It's very kind, but there's no need! A few readers have sent me gifts over the years...The kindness is most appreciated, but I enjoy writing this blog as much as anyone enjoys reading it. Just having readers is ample reward-- and prayers, when I've asked for them. I pray for you, too.

So thank you, friend, and thanks everybody for reading, and praying for me.