Stonework Issue 2

2007-12-31T12:59:00.000-08:00

Stonework

Poetry

Thom Satterlee (with Appreciation)
Jeanne Murray Walker
Samiel Mitra
Alin Creangă
Camilia Luncan
Andreea Luncan
Jean Janzen
James Zoller
David Wright

Fiction

Alison Gresik (with Interview)

Essays

Charles E. Bressler & Benjamin Walker
Benjamin Walker
James Wardwell
Lionel Basney

Art

Gary Baxter

Contributors

Suite for a Blue Afternoon

2006-07-03T12:14:00.000-07:00

David Wright

I (Theme)

We went to the park and became shadows.

It was a blue afternoon.

We went to the park and became long, spindly shadows.

It was a long, blue afternoon.

II (Landing Pattern)

A road runs beside the playground’s edge.

Above the swing sets, jets angle and whine against the sky’s grain.

On the swing sets, along yellow lined asphalt,

our daughter and her friends swing hard,

swing high, their legs uneven and ragged

in triplets against the improvised air.

III (March Tempo)

Pines filter and fine tune the wind.

Black oaks line up in pairs: shadow and tree, shadow and tree.

A cardinal-red kite tail traps itself in cross winds,

in branches, and flips against the too blue sky,

snaps like a finger and thumb, a finger and thumb,

snaps like a banner that might never come down.

IV (Lying/Laying Down)

I lie down in my tracks

in the unmuted sun.

You lay down too.

The grass still feels damp.

Light on a fence turns the chain

link diamonds blue.

Arranged on the ground like this,

like shadow and tree,

I want to ask you:

Wouldn’t a babysitter be nice?

Baby, wouldn’t we like to stay

right like this?

But my, oh my, we lie and listen

to the children swing,

the kite snap,

those high planes sing,

and the cars slow down

on this sweet, long, blue-spring afternoon.

A Kind of Extravegance - a Kind of Love: The Art of Gary Baxter

2006-05-24T12:42:00.000-07:00

By Kelsey Harro

Gary Baxter, Houghton College professor of art, talks about his first college ceramics class as though it was the beginning of an affair. “It was one of those love stories where I fell in love with everything about the material and the process. It moved me,” he recalls. At the time he was in his third year studying architectural drawing but after finishing his degree, he switched fields and went on to get a master in fine arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “I think part of it was the whole functional thing: you spend the day making things and you end up with this pile of pieces in front of you—it’s very satisfying.”

To him, the sheer abundance of wheel-thrown pots is part of the fascination. “There are millions and millions of them in the world, and that’s the point.” he explains. “It’s like nature, it seems wasteful to have so many varieties and colors of birds and trees. They do meet certain utilitarian needs but mostly we don’t need them anymore. Making pots is a kind of extravagance, which translates into a kind of love.”

In an intensely process-based medium like ceramics, the concepts of nature and the environment which intrigue him can be entwined into every aspect of Baxter’s work. The development of throwing the form, for instance, echoes the idea of growth Baxter begins with a very thick walled piece which is stretched and altered as it dries “like a melon growing in the garden” that gradually expands. These alterations deliberately resemble the bulges of fruits and vegetables and “the kind of things you see when you’re snorkeling over corral reefs.” He describes the shape of the vessels as “very domestic, very spherical, like a well-fed human.” The swollen forms are intended as a reference to God as the “ultimate provider and nourisher, both physically and spiritually” leading to “a sense of growth from the inside emanating out.” For Baxter, machine-like consistency is not the goal. Instead, he alters his
vessels in order to attain a different kind of perfection. “It depends on how you define perfect,” he explains.

The idea of returning to the most basic possible materials of earth, water, wood and fire, is also metaphorically significant in his environmental awareness. He compares the use of water to move clay to the natural process of erosion, and the firings to the igneous solidification of earth into granite. For his firings, Baxter uses scrap wood from local Amish sawmills that would otherwise go to waste. His choice of traditional ash glazes and wood firing techniques increases the unpredictability inherent in a system that depends on extremes of temperature and balance. “Wood is definitely the wildest form of firing,” he says. “I like the risk, the natural references.”

Baxter compares the concepts of risk and intensity in the way that “ceramicists restore order and give shape to decomposed particles” to the Joman potters in Japan and the Korayo in Korea whose ceremonial vessels were used both to celebrate nature and appease the gods. In this sense, both the process and the product can be seen as a kind of allegory of redemption. “The hand is capable of taking ideas and transforming materials into tangible objects that are a record of our thought processes, what was important to us, a record of our faith.”

Works in order of appearence:
Orange Jar # 4
Covered Jar # 2
Sand Spiral
Spanish River
Rabbit Jar
Covered Jar # 9
Ridged Covered Jar
Jar # 12

Restoring the Broken Themes of Praise: Geoffrey Hill’s Ectocentric Christianity

2006-05-17T12:12:00.000-07:00

James Wardwell

In his little 1978 poem “’Christmas Trees,’” English poet Geoffrey Hill salutes the example of German theologian and churchman Deitrich Bonhoeffer, who stood against the blitz of Hitler’s ethnic cleansing and died in prison, as a “sacrifice” that “restores the broken themes of praise” to an incredulous world.

Typically, Hill celebrates quiet martyrs. Of the “great soul” Charles Pequy, an “eccentric” socialist who died in his forties a “self-excommunicate but adoring” neo-Catholic on the first day of the first Battle of Marne in 1914, Hill writes The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Pequy as “homage to the triumph of his ‘defeat.’” The dedication of “Funeral Music” to the beheadings and suspect faith of three obscure fifteenth-century English nobles--one of whom requested that he be decapitated in three stroke “in honour of the Trinity,” (as Hill notes) an odd “compounding of orthodox humility and unorthodox arrogance”-- further illustrates Hill’s preference for the extraordinary anonymity of Christian heroism. These are they who call no attention to themselves. Especially not in relationship to Christ. But somehow their fallibility and the faith which possessed them authenticates the continuity of Jesus himself in human history. It is his ability to see himself and the world as a poet, and not as a “Christian poet,” to be ectocentric, not seeing through a dogmatic filter but dimly, that distinguishes Hill as an exciting new voice of devotion.

In “Lachrimae Amantis” (tears of love), Hill whispers the anguish of the agnostic. Too often agnosticism has received bad press as an arrogance that claims there is no God, which is technically atheism. Agnosticism can be an arrogance that knows that we can’t know whether there is a God or not, although I suspect there is a humility implicit in accepting such irony. Conversely, Hill’s is a tortured voice who wants to know God but doubts that He can be known by mortal minds. As such, Hill portraits a corrective respect to Divinity inherent in lowly agnosticism. If God is truly God, there is nothing in us that allows for our knowing Him.

But because God is God, he pursues us lovingly. In sonnet fashion, Hill’s poem questions the identity of one who “sue[s] so fiercely for” the heart. Although left a “stranger to my door / through the long night,” only “icy dew” foreshadows an awakening in the heart inaccessible, “that keeps itself religiously secure.” Nevertheless, there is a panting desperation in the questioning, and to close the first eight lines, the compassion of the pursuer stimulates a reciprocity in the pursued. In his “dark solstice,” the doubter recognizes that the unnamed Christ’s “passion’s ancient wounds must bleed anew.”

In response, the concluding lines “dream” of communion with the pursuer. The persona hears the “urgent comfort” of an angelic voice. “’[Y]our lord is coming, he is close.’” It is a dream, but the words echo in that delicious state of consciousness where the flap of an unseen curtain at the bedroom window articulates angel’s wings. “[D]rowsed half faithful for a time” in “pure tones of promise and remorse” the voice of the poem speaks inwardly, committing to a “welcome,” even if future, dialogue.

Of course, there have always been strong, immediately recognizable indications of Hill’s faith in his poems. The first poem in his first published volume of poetry, For the Unfallen (1959), “Genesis” starts him off “crying the miracles of God.” Many of his early titles—“God’s Little Mountain,” “Holy Thursday,” “Picture of a Nativity,” and “Canticle for Good Friday”—set up natural trajectories into his devotional writing. In 1996, having moved to America, remarried (this time to an Anglican priest), and having for the first time made significant strides against what he has called an “undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder,” Hill produced Canaan as a watershed crossing into promised land.

Still, in Hill’s most recent volume of poems Without Title (2006), familiar rhythms of ectocentric slogging through his own density echo. In punning, the title reflects his poised humility. In spite of generally being hail as one of, if not the greatest living English poet—Harold Bloom, A. N. Wilson, Christopher Ricks, and John Hollander being some of his most vociferous admirers—Hill remains remarkably unsung in his native land; not receiving the title “Sir” some of his younger contemporaries have. (In a year in which English playwright Harold Pinter accepted the Nobel Prize without the title of his fellows and friends Sir Tom Stoppard and Sir David Hare, the slighting of Hill seems an inverse literary compliment.) More significantly, perhaps, the title reflects something of that “side-glimpse / of feared eternity” (“In the Valley of the Arrow,” 4) still traceable in his poems. He is not entitled to an audience with God, nor does he claim such for himself, his poems or the reader. In three poems of this new volume, he is literally ectocentric, left outside the church, “In Ipsley Church Lane.” He writes not as a privileged insider, but still as one graciously hovering about with the many outside.

In “Epiphany at Saint Mary and All Saints,” Hill returns to a familiar intersection of his secular society and Christian aspiration. In this poem, it is Christmas or more specifically the twelfth day of Christmas, Epiphany, where reader and author collide. Almost everyone in the West celebrates Christmas which is not to say they necessarily celebrate the birth of Jesus. They get at least one of the twelve days off. The Jesus event has had some meaning and impact on our lives. Christmas is a door the ectocentric Christian can at least pace in front of if not enter. Recognizing this, Hill sets a scene of decorating with “ageing plaster” wise men. As the magi themselves become the “borne” gifts, Hill attempts to “set down” among us the “familial strangeness” of incarnation. Whether or not a positive one, Christmas is a powerful appeal to primal venerations. For some, the family of God metaphor is an unspecific catalyst to faith. These are “mystery’s toys.

The middle stanza of the poem further develops the intersection of worlds with the use of religiously suggestive language to present mundane images. Here Hill presents a church that has a river flowing out of it. He scatters “salt” on the “service” road. Again, like with the reader’s own “familial” connectivity above, “thin rain doubling as snow” seems to have nothing to do with the historic Christmas story. I doubt very much it snowed in Bethlehem at Jesus’s birth. But for natives of the northern hemisphere the coming of snow at Christmas may hold positive romantic lure that enhances the event’s appeal to us nevertheless.

The preparation of the first two stanzas comes to fruition in the third and final stanza, in one of Hill’s most radical interventions of the divine into human history:

Showings are not unknown: a six-winged seraph

somewhere impends—it is the geste of invention,

not the creative but the creator spirit.

“Showings,” in a word medieval, mystic Julian of Norwich used to describe her visions, her primary experience of interaction with God, happen. With the tentative spirit of one ‘without title,” Hill couches the declaration in double negation. But in Isaiah 6 the prophet “saw the Lord” as a “six-winged seraph.” “Somewhere” amidst plaster wise men, rivers flowing out of churches, and snow, epiphany—another word that bridges Hill’s secular/sacred divide—“impends.” The “Epiphany at Saint Mary and All Saints” is not a tale of Hill’s invention but of the Creator himself bursting into the poem.

This epiphany harkens back to poems in Hill’s first volume, “Picture of a Nativity” and “Canticle for Good Friday.” That the “Picture” is of “a” nativity and not the nativity again reflects Hill’s unpresuming nature, as if an outsider, but also emphasizes the foreignness of incarnation. The indefinite article, however, more immediately indicates that the poem is a word picture of a painting. The initial nautical images of the first stanza, “heaped with sea-spoils,” starts Hill in the language of the sea he so frequently employs in his poems. Perhaps this is natural for poets born on an island, but here, by featuring the infant “[d]ischarged on the world’s outer shores,” Hill bridges the gulf between his (and his reader’s) existence in flotsam and divine presence.

The poem continues as a “gathering” of similar contrasts. The “child-king” sleeps in innocence and strength, “undisturbed” even while being surrounded by “slack serpents” and “flesh-buttered” beasts. The contrasts, like incarnation itself, allow us “to recognize / Familiar tokens.” Divine image is recreated in human flesh, and vica versa. “Artistic men appear to worship.” Appearance and reality converge and they “believe their own eyes.”

The “picture” ends “[r]ecalling the dead.” Immediately, this last line refers to the “rigid,” lifeless quality of angels traced into the upper regions of the canvas. Perhaps, it also suggests something of the futility of even the artist’s ability to portray the mystical. After all, the human conundrum is to be able to perceive the sublime but never quite fully; capturing it in any art is most elusive. Still, the end of the poem may also be alluding to the connectivity of the savior’s birth to his death in painting and theology. But in the Collected Poems (1985), the nativity poem is matched on the next page with “Canticle for Good Friday,” which also recalls the dead.

Although the first sentence, “The cross staggered him,” would lead the reader to believe the sole focus of the “canticle” will be Jesus, in typically ectocentric fashion, Hill writes about Thomas. “The cross staggered him.” He is called “doubting” because of what he believed. He believed that Jesus was dead. He had seen him die, taken from the cross and lain in a tomb. He stood beneath the cross and saw blood “[s]pat on the stones” beside him. He “[s]melt vinegar and blood.”

Who remembers Thomas at the crucifixion? He’s a post-resurrection hero, right? But Geoffrey Hill, the doubter, the Christian who sees God from outside the inner sanctum, places him beneath the Good Friday cross. “[N]ot transfigured,” Thomas serves as an emblem of the natural man. Another quiet martyr.

Unable to suffer the “near distance” of crucifixion, Thomas “moved away.” What he wanted was a “miracle,” the breaking of natural patterns by the supernatural. Thomas was enthralled by the “claw-roots of sense,” which would eventually resurrect his faith. But not on “Good Friday.” The miracle of the poem is the proximity to which the divine approaches us. Hill couches the salvific necessity of Christ’s death in cryptic terms of the eucharist. The blood dropt earlier in the poem congeals. The “strange flesh” will be reconstituted “carrion-sustenance / Of staunchest love.” His is our and Thomas’ “choicest defiance;” our redemption demands the death of God and all our “attachments” to him. We choose with Thomas to believe in his death.

“God / Is distant, difficult.” So Hill writes in “Ovid in the Third Reich.” “Things happen.” As a boy, Hill had personally witnessed the leveling of Coventry and its medieval cathedral during World War II. “Too near the ancient troughs of blood / Innocence is no earthly weapon.” Earlier Hill had written “Two Formal Elegies,” “For the Jews in Europe,” sympathetically documenting “the dead, and how some are disposed.” In the holocaust, “This world went spinning from Jehovah’s hand.” Yet, later in “Ovid in the Third Reich,” Hill has learned not to raise himself over “the damned,” as they too are somehow essential to the divine comedy. This strange harmony with divine love suggests that to be forgiven, we must forgive. So the poet concludes, “I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.”

As a devotional poet, Geoffrey Hill uniquely fosters intimacy with God by recognizing his own distance from Him. By referring to Hill as ectocentric—I may have created the term—I have tried to emphasize his humility, identifying with and speaking to those outside the traditional frame of Christianity. As such, although clearly Christian himself, he is not a dedicated devotional poet. Much like Christina Rosetti, devotion is only one of his fields of exploration. Politics, history, love and human relationships are all profitably considered in his work. From the lovely descriptive characterization “In Memory of Jane Fraser” to the playful, “patterned randomness” of “Ars,” all of Hill’s poetry provides rich soil for tillers and toilers. Somehow it all, including the more explicitly devotional pieces, “restores the broken themes of praise.”

~~~~~~

The references to Geoffrey Hill’s poems in this essay were taken from Geoffrey Hill: Collected Poems, London: Penguin Books, 1985 and Without Title, London: Penguin Books, 2006.

A Wealth of Example: Reflections on Oxbridge 2005

2006-05-17T12:10:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Walker

On the train from London traveling to the C. S. Lewis Institute’s Oxbridge 2005 Conference on “The Good, the True and the Beautiful in the 21st Century,” I had been looking at the tourist maps of Cambridge that the Oxbridge people had sent me a month before. I had the idea I would make me look smart if I knew in which room each event was being held and how many meters it was from one location to another when I arrived. After picking up my registration packet, however, the first thing I did was get lost in Cambridge. Not intentionally. I got lost with Carina, another Houghton student. We were going to be presenting papers at the conference, she on the depiction of women in The Chronicles of Narnia, I a paper I had written with Dr. Charles Bressler on The Lord of the Rings.

We managed to get lost by missing a footpath on the right side of the road that would have led us directly from Robinson College to the Clare College dormitories. This caused us to make a large circuit around a block of cricket fields and private houses, walk into downtown Cambridge, and finally locating the main college buildings, walk ten minutes back the way we had come to discover the dorms. We received generous assistance from a retiree from Kentucky who was no use in giving us directions, but gallantly shouldered Carina’s (unwheeled) suitcase for a while. We finally made it to the dorms with only twenty minutes to spare until the first event, the 1:30 bus trip to the cathedral in “Cromwell’s Ely,” but I was glad to have just gotten there.

That was Sunday, July 31st. Monday afternoon was the paper presentation. The paper in question had been the result of collaborative research between Dr. Charles Bressler and myself during the spring semester, in an independent study of Tolkien’s work, the goal of which was to bring to life two papers based on abstracts he had developed. Bringing them to life meant reading through The Lord of the Rings once for each paper, hundreds of note cards, and lots of discussion with Dr. Bressler. The paper we were presenting, “J. R. R. Tolkien’s Love of Words: The Revelatory Nature of Tolkien’s Aphorisms in The Lord of the Rings,” discussed the little phrases and constructions, scattered throughout the book, which seemed to fit the definition of an aphorism, a “short, pithy statement of an evident truth concerned with life or nature”, as we defined it.

These sayings ranged from the mundane— the Hobbit-saying “all’s well as ends better”— to the profound—Gandalf’s comforting words “I will not say do not weep; for not all tears are evil” and seemed to us to express the deep underlying truths of Tolkien’s elaborately realized universe, truths which we saw as connected to, even inseparable from Tolkien’s own sacramental Christian worldview. I was very glad the presentation was scheduled for Monday: that would mean getting it out of the way, so that for better or worse, I would not have to worry about it more than one day. There was also another comforting fact: Dr. Bressler and I would be co-presenting the paper. He would be introducing it and introducing me, as well as, I hoped, fielding most of the questions that would occur afterwards.

I can’t say I slept very well Sunday night, despite my tiredness, what with the jet lag and the nervousness and the unfamiliarity of sleeping in a new bed. Also, I had so much to think about. The evening program for Sunday had included “A Visit with Rick Warren,” the author of The Purpose-Driven Life. To see him and hear what he had to say had been a very interesting experience. Not knowing much about either Warren or his book except the fact of their success, I didn’t know what to expect. Stepping onstage in a red and green palm-treed Hawaiian shirt and moccasins, he explained that he had been traveling for a couple of weeks and those were his only remaining clean clothes. There was something delightfully American and laid back about that. As a student, I was overwhelmed by the stature of the conference and the prestige and age of the venue. Warren’s little bit of informality relieved me. As he talked about his current projects, I was surprised to hear him say that he had been become actively interested in problems like AIDS and poverty in the developing world. That seemed to me an excellent message to set the tone for the week. It helped me to see the conference’s goals of redeeming culture in proper focus: we were redeeming things like the arts and literature, as part of God’s larger purposes for every aspect of human society.

Especially for a neophyte like me, this was a useful reminder, because the conference was, on a variety of levels, so impressive. Clare College, where I was saying, had been founded in the year 1326. The speakers, all respected Christian thinkers and writers came from all over the cultural spectrum, from Sir John Polkinghorne, the physicist and theologian, to Dana Gioia, poet and current chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Richard J. Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline. The speakers, the venue, the crowded schedule, the academic paper sessions, the fact that dinner “in college” as the schedule phrased it, was served in courses, as you sat and conversed with other conferees at wooden tables that ran almost the length of the room, as the room’s oil portraits and stained glass windows looked on: all of these things amazed me It gave me a glow of pleasure to clip on to my shirt the laminated index card that read Clare College: Conference Delegate, because it allowed me past the gatekeepers whose main duty was, it seemed, to politely steer wandering tourists away from college grounds.

Sometime around lunchtime Monday, Dr. Bressler and I met for a read-through of the paper together. We agreed that he would give the introduction and read the first part of the paper. Then we would alternate sections with me reading the conclusion. We sat on a park bench outside the venue, the Faculty School of Music, Robinson College, in which all of the plenary lectures had occurred and where the paper sessions were to be held. By this point I had become nervous; I would actually have to do this thing, upon which all of the college’s generosity in letting me be in Cambridge, England right now, instead of Selkirk, New York, was predicated.
At two thirty, I arrived at the room in which the paper was to be read. In it sat a scattering of people, probably about a dozen. The conference facilitator and the other presenter, a professor from Georgia, were sitting near the front. We didn’t have long to wait before the facilitator got up and introduced Dr. Bressler and the topic of our paper.

It was started.

I got up, tried to smile and look normal as Dr. Bressler introduced me and explained the background of our topic, trying to summarize our research and our main conclusions in a few sentences before plunging into the reading of the paper. He read his section, stopping at points to expand or explain, or make a small joke. When he reached the paragraph where I was to begin reading, he stepped aside from the podium and sat down. I stood up from my front row seat and assumed his place, flinging one nervous smile in the general direction of the audience before starting the reading where he had left off. It actually wasn’t too difficult, just draining. My main concerns were to pronounce all of the words right and to keep my legs or hands from visibly shaking. Dr. Bressler and I transitioned fairly smoothly from section to section. I even managed to put some feeling into the dialogue from Sam Gamgee at the conclusion of the paper. During the time for questions, one middle-aged American lady directed one specifically at me, clarifying that I was, indeed, an undergraduate. She marveled that I had gotten to come all the way over to this conference and present this paper, and all as an undergrad. She seemed pretty impressed. “That’s great!” she said. I couldn’t agree more: I felt like I should expound on what a completely unexpected privilege it was, or thank Dr. Bressler in some way, or at least say something intelligent-sounding and gracious, but I ended up sort of smiling fixedly and nodding at her, saying something clever like “Yeah, it really is,” especially now that it was over and I could breathe, though I didn’t say that last part.

So that was the paper presentation. As for the rest of the conference, for getting a larger view of the life of the Christian mind today, few events could have been more challenging to me. The conference. was ecumenical: the keynote speaker was a Catholic, one of the morning worship sessions was led by an Orthodox bishop. The presenters and conferees represented the full range of the American and British denominational spectrums. It was also multidisciplinary: the speakers there had experience in all areas of public life from fashion advertising (business consultant Gordon Pennington) to high energy physics (Sir John Polkinghorne) to running government agencies (poet Dana Gioia,). They all brought forth their own ideas and visions of the transformation that Christians could effect in today’s culture by reclaiming and resurrecting the ideals of goodness, beauty and truth in the secular world. My favorite speaker had to be Malcolm Guite, who is both an ordained clergyman and a Fellow of Girton College in Cambridge, where he currently teaches courses in both Literature and Pastoral Theology. He had striking blue eyes behind a bushy beard flowing to grey at the sides. In his afternoon workshop discussion of C.S. Lewis’s literary criticism (which I made sure to attend, despite the fact that it was quite crowded) he quoted, apparently from memory, everything from 14th century folk verse to lines from Philip Larkin. As I watched and listened to Guite, he seemed to me in many ways an heir to Lewis—both a respected part of the secular academy, clearly comfortable and even thriving in it, but also deeply and unapologetically Christian, allowing his intellectual and spiritual pursuits to meld, enriching, enlivening and informing each other.

It is memories of people that I take away from the conference. When I look over my pages of notes, I can find plenty of fresh, inspiring and challenging ideas and tantalizingly suggestive phrases littered throughout all of the addresses and lectures and talks I heard. But what staye with me, and comes back to me most distinctly, are the images of the many people there, people like Guite, or like Kathleen Norris, or many of my fellow conferees who I met at the breakfast or dinner table, who themselves were expressions of ways in which Christians and Christian belief could come into culture and create things that were true and beautiful, and inspire the love of those things in others. Maybe more than anything else about my time in Cambridge, that wealth of example which I saw around me gave me the first inkling that, the conference’s lofty and admirable goals might actually be applied to the world, not through programs and papers, but on a human-to-human level, through the efforts of individuals it could be achieved. And who knows? Maybe I could even be one of those working to achieve them.

Contributors

2006-05-08T14:06:00.000-07:00

Lionel Basney was Professor of English at Calvin College until his accidental death by drowning. His poems and essays were widely published in academic and popular journals. He twice won the best essay of the year award from The American Scholar. Christianity and Literature published his book length poem The Snow Plough Man. In 1995 he published An Earth Careful Way of Life.

Gary Baxter is Professor of Art at Houghton College, where he teaches ceramics, 3D design, and sculpture. He received his Bachelor’s Degree from SUNY College at Geneseo, and his Master’s in Fine Arts from Rochester Institute of Technology. He has exhibited his work at Concordia University, Huntington College and Corning Community College.

Charles Bressler is a Professor of English at Houghton College. He is collaborating with Daniel Strait on Of Welcome and Wonder: G. K. Chesterton's and George MacDonald's s Spiritual and Literary Influences on the Lives and Writings of Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, Williams and Sayers for the University of Notre Dame Press. The fourth edition of his text, Literary Theory: an Introduction, has just been completed.

Alison Gresik is a fiction writer residing in Ottawa, Ontario. She has a B.A. in English and Chemistry from Redeemer University, and has published short stories in Descant (Nov 2001), Grain (May 2003), and the anthology The Company We Keep (Jun 2004). Her book Brick and Mortar, a series of connected short stories, was published in 2000. She has fiction forthcoming in Image.

Lori Huth is Assistant Professor of Writing at Houghton College. She is completing her MFA in fiction writing at Goddard College.

Jean Janzen has published six books of poetry, including Piano in the Vineyard, Words for the Silence, The Upside-down Tree, and Snake in the Parsonage. She taught at Fresno Pacific University and at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia until her recent retirement. She will be a participant in the Spring Writing Festival at Houghton in 2007.

David Perkins is Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Houghton College. He holds an MS in mathematics from South Dakota State University, and his PhD in mathematics from the University of Montana. He is a recipient of a Millay Fellowship for fiction writing.

Thom Satterlee is a 1989 graduate of Houghton College where he majored in philosophy. He holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas and currently teaches creative writing at Taylor University. His translations of Henrik Norbrandt’s work have appeared in journals such as Seneca Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Literary Review. They were collected in The Hangman’s Lament (Green Integer, 2003). His first collection of his own poems, Burning Wycliff, received the Walt MacDonald First-Book Award from Texas Tech University Press. The poems featured in this issue of Stonework are from that collection.

Benjamin Walker is junior English major at Houghton College

Jeanne Murray Walker is currently a Professor of Poetry and Script Writing at the University of Delaware. She has published her poetry in many prominent periodicals, as well as having published six books of poetry, the latest being A Deed To the Light (University of Illinois Press, 2004). Walker has written many essays, as well as scripts, which include Inventing Montana, Tales From The Daily Tabloid, Rowing Into Light on Lake Adley, and The Queen’s 2 Bodies: The Double Life of Elizabeth I.

James Wardwell teaches in the Honors Program at Houghton College. He holds an MDiv from Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary and a Ph.D from the University of Rhode Island.

David Wright is a member of the faculty at Wheaton College where he teaches writing and literature. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in many magazines. He has written two collections of poetry: Lines from the Provinces(2000), and more recently, A Liturgy for Stones(2003). He is also the recipient of the Illinois Arts Council Artist’s Fellowship for Poetry.

James Zoller is Professor of Writing and Literature at Houghton College where he holds the Van Gordon Chair in Communications and Writing which has allowed him to the time to complete Living on the Floodplain, a collection of poems to be published in 2007 by WordFram.

Why We Rehearse

2006-05-08T13:29:00.000-07:00

James Zoller
(for KB on her wedding day)

Once
you imagined this day
though a cousin was bridegroom enough
and another cousin stood in.

Your gowns trailed badly,
train and hem, dragging fore and aft,
tripping your small feet, slid
to the toes of grandmother’s castaway heels

–the unfilled, elevated heels
clack-clacking like tack hammers
against the hard tiles
of her broad front hall.

Such a grand procession, gown
slid down your thin shoulders,
the thin bop of pomp and circumstance
from your own too red lips.

Once
you imagined another part
as it should be, who
stands where, with whom,

what to say, even how
it should be said –
step and turn and speak,
a little louder, but somehow defer . . .

until your cousin
who wasn’t, yet,
groom enough himself
lost interest anyway.

We have taken pictures
to hold against this day.
It is a picture I describe.
Once when we imagined

we failed to imagine
beyond that day.
But we prayed.
And when we prayed with

clacking heels and too red lips
coming again and again to mind . . .
when we prayed
we prayed toward this moment,

not for shoes that fit
or makeup properly managed
but for your own deep happiness
and for a man who would be groom enough.

The Natural Order of Things

2006-05-08T13:28:00.001-07:00

James Zoller
(for KB, six months)

daughter, my world
revolves around yours:
the earth

circles the moon
you are not impressed
with the natural order of things

it is 6 a.m. it has
become familiar for me to work
with you on my lap
in these hours when the only sound is of rain
hitting the roof or pipes popping with heat

now
your slender panting
the slurp of your thumb

(to think I once found
my own pulse distracting)

as I work around
you, daughter, and your brother
who sleeps

the world is still
it is the sun that creeps

~~~~~

Next: Why We Rehearse

New Snow

2006-05-08T13:28:00.000-07:00

James Zoller

It has begun to snow again
Dime-sized white flakes filling the air
as if they were swirling in the dense water
of a snow globe

The plow scrapes past with its circling amber light
and its blade that curls the snow back on itself
like revolving seasons

I sit at my table by the window
at the threshold of a new century
at the doorsill of a new millennium

expecting to write about myself and my times
expecting somehow a rush of ideas and voices

Finally, we take our lives and lay them out before us
taking whatever tools we have – paints, gestures, words
table knife or
scalpel – we begin to cut

Now the snow has tapered off,
the temperature drops. No one is on the street,
no sounds sift through the air.

This might be at the end of time,
the end of the world

But something tells me – reason, habit, memory
faith – that life must continue, that I
have a tool somewhere to stanch the bleeding

~~~~~

Next: The Natural Order of Things

The Life of the River

2006-05-08T13:27:00.000-07:00

James Zoller

One might begin at the headwaters –
at a lake, say, because lakes are primal.

One would not begin with glaciers.
Begin with moving water,
at lake-fed streams and springs.

At headwaters, then – this gathering place
for snowmelt or ground water
finding its way through rock and sand.

The lake, we say, is springfed or snowfed,
emits a stream at its lower end –
and this, too, this stream knows gravity.

This is what we say: We say this river
has life; we say this river is life; or
we say this river is like life – it is more
than itself. When life ends, the river goes on.
Just as a mother has life, brings life, is more
than woman. Just as God is more than life.

So, the headwaters, a beginning,
cold,
a present holding past and future.

.
And it means – for us – every-
thing.
In spring:
snow melts,
dry hills run,
dry stream beds fill,
rush madly as rapids,
leap from any high stone in its eagerness

to become river, to bring life,

to carry earth on its back.

~~~~~

Next: New Snow

Words for His Widow

2006-05-08T13:26:00.000-07:00

James Zoller

Now the house
is empty –
friends gone back
to other places;
family, children,
resuming their lives.

Quiet settles
like dust.

Today
the house
must be cleaned
– a tidy gesture
after the chaos
of condolences.

And tomorrow?

Tomorrow, perhaps,
pausing as you
climb the stairs,
touching
my picture
as you go,

you will sense
how long
I have been away
– how young
I am becoming – how we
were happy.

Take that happiness
with you
as you finish
climbing,

feeling too small

to fill
this house,
every sound
your own sound.

Would you have lived
differently
had you known?
Would I?
Would it have
made this moment
easier?

On the landing
you open
the window
to unsettle the quiet.

The wild voices of water
rush in.

It is spring.
Last night’s untimely snow
is melting,
running from the roof
running from the roofs
of all the houses
along the street.
Laughing, singing
it runs down
hill – water,
water everywhere
running
for the sea.
The river has blundered
over its banks,

churning, shouting!
you know the sound –

the furious
insensible
loud river of grief.

~~~~~

Next: The Life of the River

Bottle

2006-05-08T13:25:00.001-07:00

James Zoller

[The first brilliant rays of morning sun
catch a newly emptied wine bottle
splashing its colors on the walls.]

I have begun
the sober period
of my life.

One might think it
a kind of emptiness
a loss of particular joy.

Or, one might notice
how light catches skin
how light shatters

on the old air within
how it throws itself
across the wall.

For a moment
my long elegance
is shadowed within

the dancing light.
For a moment
I am free

of shape
I am free
of weight

I am free
of bottleness, of glass,
for a moment

the shadows
hold no memor

of hands.

~~~~~

Next: Words for his Widow

Untitled

2006-05-08T13:25:00.000-07:00

James Zoller

For a moment the straight western sun, burning
in the treetops, strikes west-facing slopes opposite

setting reds aflame, burnishing gold
until it nearly blinds, warming orange and brown,

this whole world filled, unspeakably, with fire.
And I, unsentimental man that I am,

I, who have been looking for a way, I
who have wanted words for love, for you,

who have felt, now, my heart opened
and opening, who would bring you here with me,

I, who would say this is what love
must mean, who would say foolish things, I

find myself doubly at a loss,
having seen heaven, alone.

~~~~~

Next: Bottle

This Most Obvious of Things

2006-05-08T13:24:00.000-07:00

James Zoller

I am looking, as I leave, for a way
to say I love you, this most obvious of things.

It is mid-October, and I drive through valleys,
alone, beneath blue sky both bright and unbroken,

driving distractedly, despite my intentions,
slowed every mile by hillside after hillside

of brilliant red leaves, of vivid orange,
leaves of shimmering gold against evergreen

as if the unpatterned pattern lay like sky
unbroken, the impression of seamless difference

tugging the eyes like water eddying over stones
tugs the ear, thrilling the heart

until breathing is labored and hours
have passed without notice, slipping, gone.

Soon it will be dusk, then dark,
the texture of hillsides gone in darkness,

the fabric, the folds of color gone black
as my destination draws nearer.

For a moment the straight western sun, burning
in the treetops, strikes west-facing slopes opposite

setting reds aflame, burnishing gold
until it nearly blinds, warming orange and brown,

this whole world filled, unspeakably, with fire.
And I, unsentimental man that I am,

I, who have been looking for a way, I
who have wanted words for love, for you,

who have felt, now, my heart opened
and opening, who would bring you here with me,

I, who would say this is what love
must mean, who would say foolish things, I

find myself doubly at a loss,
having seen heaven, alone.

~~~~~

Next: Bottle

Romance of Air and Bones

2006-05-08T13:23:00.001-07:00

James Zoller

Along the dead-end street
you and I walk hand in hand,

listening to the soft snow
drifting through this gray afternoon,

watching flakes light upon
our dark winter clothes.

When you speak, dark-
limbed trees lean in,

the sky brightens.
When you speak, your day

appears in the cold air,
lands upon my ears and lashes,

white grows transparent
– your day my day float,

dance in air weightless as snow,
lightened by love and talk

– those ephemeral white crystals,
commonplace of true companions.

~~~~~

Next: This Most Obvious of Things

The Interval

2006-05-08T13:23:00.000-07:00

James Zoller

when snow is gone
from the street
and from ground beyond

– the snowbank
reveals its gritty self
grows black and hard
with sand and silt

these seasons of life
we pass through
time and again

the interval between snow
and excess of daffodils
is the interval
we crave
and dread

the ugliness of life
hidden in winter
overwhelmed
by spring
follows us

waiting
just here, just now
to remind us
just who
we are

~~~~~

Next: Romance of Air and Bones

Breaking the Ice

2006-05-08T13:22:00.000-07:00

James Zoller

Gathering strength
in its downward rush
the stream flexes beneath ice
that has held since December

breaks it free of its anchors
lifts and slides the huge plates
out of its path

pushes before it
the walls of its winter prison

as mad, brown water
surges over and around its banks
looking for a shorter path
through fields through quiet
streets clamoring
to rejoin the rampage

falling into cellars
shouting as it runs

Once in that bedlam
at the point I could no longer
hear myself think
– as if it were called
by the voice of God –

I heard my name

~~~~~

Next: The Interval

Purvey Translates: In ipso enim vivimus et

2006-05-06T09:11:00.000-07:00

Thom Satterlee

Sometimes the words I translated
translated me, as when
I wrote, “In Him we live
and move and are.” For days
I dwelled in that mystery
where all air seemed holy
and fearful. I believed
I was a rip running
through God’s body, a tear
that only stopped
when I sat still. Then
at my desk, half in daydream
I felt myself placed
as a word on the page,
and suddenly I saw
the whole of who we are
and how we’re bound together—
each one of us a word
in the Word of God,
and our life’s goal as simple
as remembering the lines
He first drew us with,
that sound and sense
we made in that language
before languages.

~~~~~

From Burning Wycliff, copyright 2006 Thom Satterlee: reprinted with permission from Texas Tech University Press.

~~~~~

Next: On Inspiration

Border Crossings

2006-05-05T08:36:00.000-07:00

Jeanne Murray Walker

The sun glinted off the guard’s dark glasses and in my mind’s eye, I could see him demanding that we open our overstuffed suitcases scattered on the ground around the car Ten pair of jeans spring out. “MI AZ?" he bellows. We stare at him in a stupor, not having a clue. Then, suspicions aroused, he forces us to unpack everything. Ripping the suitcase apart, he discovers the two hundred syringes we have hidden in the linings.

Approaching the border between Austria and Hungary, the road in front of us divided into five or six lanes surrounded by low, squat booths and attended by uniformed border guards with holsters and guns. We pulled out of the piercing late May sunshine into what we hoped was the correct lane for the guard to check our passports and interrogate us about our purpose for crossing into Hungary. As they bent into the trunk of the Toyota in front of us, we tried to read the posted signs. Hungarian is not a Romance language. Hungarian bears little resemblance to any language I know. The posted instructions were intended to make the process efficient, but we could not understand them. The bold consonants and diacritical markings seemed to shout threats. I felt as if I had been launched into a free fall. It crossed my mind that this must be what it feels like to be an immigrant in the US who can’t read English. I am an immigrant. I am about to be searched by men who speak a language I don’t know, governed by laws I don’t know, a language and laws that rule here. It’s after 9/11, and border crossings all over have been tightened. I can only guess what the grilling will be like.

This, I thought, is what happens to anyone foolish enough to agree to give a poetry reading in Romania. In the fall of 2004, a Romanian poet named Ionatan Pirosca invited me to read my poetry and talk to a group of poets there about the discipline of writing.

I had never traveled to Eastern Europe. I didn’t know any Romanian. I had only the vaguest notion of what Romanians ate or how they were educated or what their houses looked like. No airport services regular flights in Cluj, where the Conference was being held. I didn’t know what the roads were like, or the currency, or how difficult it would be to rent a car. I heard that Romanian hospitals are dreadful and that I could expect rampant crime in the cities. (This, by the way, turned out to be an exaggeration.) I knew the clichés about Romanian orphans and the cruelty of Nicolae Ceausescu and the poverty of daily life there. But for the life of me, I couldn’t conjure up any images of the place that felt substantial and trustworthy, and I didn’t have time to learn, either, since the dates of the “Cuvinte la Schimb’s Conference fell immediately after six months of reading tours for my new book, just as my teaching schedule at my own University was ending.

Another horror occurred to me. Suppose a Romanian Conference is so different from American conferences that the whole thing falls apart. What are their expectations? How can I know, for sure? Americans are clear, often brutally direct. One university in Illinois sent me a ten page, single spaced contract laying out my obligations for a poetry reading that, when I got there, lasted a little over an hour. In Eastern Europe, though, as in much of the rest of the world, tact reigns. Plans are rarely clarified. Then when expectations aren't met, everyone is disappointed. I know that translation from one culture to another is a sticky proposition, and poetry is virtually impossible to translate at all; indeed some poets and critics believe it can’t be translated. True enough, Ionatan had written, “We invite you with all our love.” And we had something in common; we were Christians. But that could also conceal a more deadly divide between us Were they the kind of poets, maybe, who construct poems like sermons?

I began to dream about crossing borders. Jolts of terror struck my heart at unpredictable times. I laughed about it, yes. But it felt like I was stepping into a black zero, stripped of language, with no ability to predict what might happen. Crossing a border. Crossing over Jordan. The river is chilly and cold. Chill the body but not the soul. I imagined swimming the terrible River of Death in Pilgrim’s Progress, a river that changes identies for each pilgrim—deep, shallow, murky, clear, rushing current or slowly meandering. How could you know? And no one had returned from the other side to tell what it was like.

I phoned my sensible, lively friend, Luci Shaw, who lives across this continent from me, and asked her to come along. After several months of thought, she agreed. We began making plans. Among other things, because disposable syringes are hard to find and jeans are both desired and expensive in Romania, we planned to carry over 200 syringes and as many jeans as we could cram into our suitcases. We collected dozens of books for the poets. We wanted to bring them whatever they needed, if they could explain what that was.

Luci and I left Philadelphia, where it was 65 with slight rain, and flew to sun-filled, 95-degree heat in Vienna. After two days there with Sharon Mumper from The Magazine Training Institute, who deluged us with practical tips about how to work with our translators and essays about Romanian history, culture, and literature, we packed into a small car with Lori Compton, Sharon’s assistant, and drove to the border. When it was our turn at the booth, a guard collected our passports, disappeared, emerged and handed them to us, stamped. Whooping with relief, we changed money, and stopped at a gas station to celebrate by eating delicate pastries and drinking rich, dark coffee. Sitting at a round, glass table, chatting, it suddenly dawned on us that we were the only women in the station. Were we invading turf that was off-limits? Or was the lack of women a coincidence? We never found out. After driving 8 hours across Hungary, we crossed the border once again, with its heart-stopping suspense, into Romania.

Once the Conference started, the process of translation-- inevitably rough-hewn, slap-dash, catch-as-catch-can, hair-raising--was a kind of border crossing, every day. Frankly, as I have said, I have doubts about whether poetry can be translated. But all of our intense debate at the Conference had to occur in translation, because, to put it charitably, Luci and I are beginners in Romanian. Andreea Luncan, our brilliant, patient young translator, made Romanian versions of our poems and our talks and distributed them before we arrived. While the Romanian poets bantered and quipped and hassled over the texts, she and our other translator, Corneliu Szekely-Hategan listened and translated into English simultaneously. This kind of simultaneous translation is so arduous that people who do it professionally at the UN rotate several times an hour. Andreea and Corneliu worked for twelve to fourteen hours a day, through the sessions, thorough lunch, through dinner. The conversation overflowed with puns and other language jokes, which our gallant translators wracked their brains to explicate. I became acutely attuned to the process of translation and came to feel deep affection for our translators, our other halves, without whom we might as well have been deaf.

This other kind of border crossing—translating poetry—is frightening, too, and constantly threatens to break down. Poetry aspires to the condition of music, which cannot be translated. In fact, the unsayable lurks even in takeout orders at MacDonald’s and weather forecasts. What is untranslatable from one language to another we have no language for. Where does that meaning go? . It’s like the proverbial sock that finds a life somewhere away from its mate after it gets lost in the wash. It’s liminal, like midnight, the moment between the old and the new day. Or maybe more accurately, its like negative space in a painting. It defines, but silently. What’s missing hovers out there somewhere like a lonely ghost. We would need a third language to say it.

The Conference was not like any academic conference I have attended here or in Western Europe. Besides arguing over poetry, we ate an exotic kind of pizza outside under trees, sampled Romanian restaurant fare, wandered around Cluj arm-in-arm, listened to Catalin Lata sing folk songs, and lingered for an afternoon in the sculpture studio of Liviu Mocan, who designed the memorial to the martyrs of the 1989 Revolution. We took a lot of pictures and the last day in a ceremony under the trees, Ionatan presented each of us with a scroll and a gift. Then—when our Romanian colleagues told us they would have normally held a bonfire—we blew bubbles. Standing around in the dappled light, dipping and blowing, each of us became connected to the others by hundreds and hundreds of fragile, shimmering, rainbow-colored bubbles. I will not soon forget it.

I do not feel a stranger to Romania any more. I have Romanian friends in this country. I have discovered the great Romanian poets and the remarkable composer, Porumbescu. We are still in touch with the Romanian poets we met last May. They are serious and hugely gifted, though they do not write as much as they would like because they are struggling in a precarious economy just to feed their families. What follows are some of their poems. I am not convinced that the English versions of these poems say what the Romanian versions say. The two versions live in different countries with different habits. But I believe the English versions are fine poems, living just across an impassible border from their Romanian brothers.

~~~~~

Romanian Poets:
Samiel Mitra
Alin Creangă
Camilia Luncan
Andrea Luncan

Eclipse

2006-05-05T08:35:00.000-07:00

Samiel Mitra

In heaven it can be dark too.
On the other side of the house,
on the flip side of the coin,
beyond the blind mirror in front of you.
Even in heaven you may feel a heavy night.
It is enough to make me turn my face from you,
to tremble at my own shadow
for all the stars of your love
fade away as a passing impression
melted in the bitter cup
already drunk by Jesus the Lord.

Almost nothing (Aproape nimic)

2006-05-05T08:34:00.000-07:00

Alin Creangă

I am that
Fragile and useless nerve
Within the little finger
Of the universe

His presence means nothing
His absence
A permanent frustration

May (Mai)

2006-05-05T08:33:00.000-07:00

Camilia Luncan

May that be more than a shadow
Less than a thorn twisted
in thought.

May that be less than a stone
And more than a silent
toll.

May that be more than I am...
Less than tomorrow...

In May
I long to breathe
profoundly.

On Inspiration

2006-05-05T08:32:00.000-07:00

Thom Satterlee

Like some grand migration
of birds, the words came
and settled on my page.

Then, when I looked up,
a dove perched on my windowsill.
I nodded to it awkwardly

and watched it fly away.
All day I felt
too afraid to read

what I had written.
When the ink dried
I hid the page

beneath other pages, believing
that if I were right
pride would make it

impossible to write again,
and if I were wrongshame would do the same.

~~~~~

From Burning Wycliff, copyright 2006 Thom Satterlee: reprinted with permission from Texas Tech University Press.

~~~~~

Next: Wycliff Becomes an Instrument of the Spirit

Thom Satterlee: an Appreciation

2006-05-05T08:31:00.002-07:00

David Perkins

I first met Thom in college when his parted hair swept even more poetically across his brow. Twenty years later, Thom has won an award for best first book by a poet, which gratifies me very much because he is my favorite poet, so naturally I think he is the best.

I am a math teacher and read more fiction than poetry, but I believe I can recognize a poetic imagination when I see it. A hundred years ago, the German mathematician David Hilbert learned that one of his students had stopped attending his lectures and had gone off to be a poet. Hilbert shrugged and remarked, “I never thought he had the imagination to be a mathematician.” I think Hilbert would have been pleased to make this remark no matter what field the student had wandered off to study, but I suspect he was especially pleased that the student went to poetry. A poet needs a fertile imagination, which gives Hilbert’s comment its punch.

I think Thom approaches poetry not from the crazy side of imagination but from the quieter side. Some people come to a party and start out trying to be the party’s life, and eventually simmer down to a tolerable level. Others stay calm and only speak when they have something worth saying, and afterwards people recall, “That person was witty, wasn’t he?” I’m usually the first kind of person, and Thom is the second. His poetry has the same characteristic: it’s not until his poems are over that their creativity washes over you, and you look back through the poem to find the lines that struck you as honest or clever without you knowing it at the time.
Here is my favorite poem by Thom. I first read it at a friend’s house; this poem was framed and hung on the wall of the entryway.

HOW THE DEAD ARE RAISED

Why a trumpet? Why not a mole
whispering in their ears, or the sound
of footsteps on the earth
above their faces? I could imagine a rock
that shifts underground and knocks
on each coffin: “Come out! Come
out!” For the man who loved bees,
a swarm of them to serenade him
back to the living, their stingers
gone, fallen into a lake and turned
into minnows. For the woman
who complained, her pastor
never visited her, the crunching of gravel
as his car stops outside her door.
Still others will want a certain voice,
maybe your own, to bring them back, saying,
“You always hoped, now you can believe.”

I like how there are impossible events in the poem that, in the context of the rapture, don’t seem so crazy. I am perfectly willing to grant that a mole can whisper, that a bee’s stinger can transform into a minnow, and that a rock can knock on a coffin like a little fist, because after all, the dead are being raised, so nature is of course going to be tipped on its head. And in contrast to the blaring visions of robes and trumpets that we are accustomed to, Thom’s waking of the dead is quiet and motivated by love.

These observations did not come to me as I read the poem the first time; instead, I simply imagined the mole, the rock, the dirt they were moving through, the darkness surrounding each coffin, and then the trip up into the brightness of day, the bees, the lake filled with minnows, the sound of gravel. I felt uplifted as I finished the poem, but I didn’t detect (until later) how Thom had led me from underground up into the light and the sounds of voices I know. That’s the sort of subtlety that pervades Thom’s poems, which is why I like them so much.

For some reason, Thom is very funny in person but not so much in his poems. I don’t know why this is. To illustrate his wit, I need only tell a single story. Thom, his wife Kathy, and my own parents were visiting an intentional community together, and the people living in the community were generally serious, and at times even dour. Certainly they were intensely committed both to the Gospels and to the life they believed the Gospel asks of us. Thom was helping out in the candle-making shop one morning and the other three had lost track of him. After searching the community’s common areas, they found Thom making candles, working side by side with a few young community men with their long beards and hair tied back. When they said, “At last, we found you!” Thom replied (as I imagine things, holding a small bucket of wax and a partially completed candle), “Didn’t you know I’d be about my Father’s business?”

Then, as I imagine things, the other young men managed to achieve even deeper levels of dour. Fortunately for me, Thom and I still hold frequent conversations, and I can ask him why his poems are as sensitive as he is, but not as funny. For now, I can content myself with reading the poems chosen for this issue of Stonework, as can you.

Loving

2006-05-05T08:31:00.001-07:00

Andreea Luncan

They're weaving themselves into my being
like ropes of soft and vibrant gold
tying me to the earth.
So tightly the weaving at times
it's hard to tell where they end and I begin
So kind of You to remind me
about my tender margins of dawn
even if to do it
You let the gold ropes turn
into snakes of fire
and my heart shrinks to a knot
with no place to tumble
but your arms.

Wyclif Becomes an Instrument of the Spirit

2006-05-05T08:31:00.000-07:00

Thom Satterlee

The humble and obedient man becomes…an instrument of the Spirit.
SAINT JOHN OF DAMASCUS, from the Preface to The Frost of Knowledge

He often prayed for help with what he wrote.
Once, eyes closed,
he held the pen against the page
and waited for the Spirit’s voice
to tell him what to say. Minutes passed.
He heard nothing. When he opened his eyes
ink pooled under his empty pen.
What could Wyclif do but wait
until , humble and obedient, broken
from writing words he hated to see,
he set down his instrument
in order to become one. Then the Spirit
took him up, as if he were a reed-pen,
functional and willing to be used.

~~~~~

From Burning Wycliff, copyright 2006 Thom Satterlee: reprinted with permission from Texas Tech University Press.

~~~~~

Next: Last Rites

Last Rites

2006-05-05T08:30:00.000-07:00

Thom Satterlee

A door opens. Wyclif climbs the stairs
and stands at the bedside
of the dying. He says a prayer,

places the host on a tongue,
and makes the sign of the cross
before leaving. He does the same

at another house on the same street,
then later at a house one street over.
At night when he walks homes

he carries the sour smell of their sickness.
No matter where he hangs his cloak,
the last breaths of the dying come off of it

and enter his dreams, turning everything
to rot. When he wakes
he can only remembers a force

that made him hold
a piece of straw in one hand
and bless it with the other.

~~~~~

From Burning Wycliff, copyright 2006 Thom Satterlee: reprinted with permission from Texas Tech University Press.

~~~~~

Next: Habitus

Sacred Prayer

2006-05-05T08:28:00.000-07:00

Andreea Luncan

Some mornings simply thrust themselves into my face
and I have no defenses against them,
nothing but the soft barrier of my bedcover
--my shell home.

A small and scared prayer
is snailing its way towards Him:
what if instead of solid barriers
He'll give me tender wings
again?

Habitus

2006-05-05T08:26:00.000-07:00

Thom Satterlee

Language, he asserted, was a habitus…What precisely he meant by habitus is not explained but the context in which the word is applied to language would suggest sense of “clothing.”
Anne Hudson, “Wyclif and the English Language”

All morning he read from a thick volume
propped on a stand. He read and he read,
and when he closed his eyes
he continued to read
until the words took off their clothes
and laid them down on a hillside
that vanished whenever a cloud
passed between it and the sun.

All his life Wyclif had wanted this:
the words undressed and he going to them,
a child to a fair, burning to see
if Faith wore her hair in a braid,
whether Why held out its hands, palms up,
and where Simony put his coins
when he stood naked in the light.

But no: Wyclif had got it all wrong.
He was not going to see the words.
They were coming to him
With their arms loaded with robes
stacked so high he couldn’t see their faces,
and before he knew it, invisible hands
began measuring him with ropes
stretched between his wrist and his chest,
from his hip down to the ground,
around his waist and around his neck.

The fitting took all day. He tried on
Son and Friend, Scholar, Reformer,
Heretic, he slipped into Priest,
wore also Doctor Evangelicus
and Morning Star. Some robes
hung too loosely; others pinched his neck.

In the end, he had to wear them all
and learn the sadness of being a word—
only one surface to show the world
while he lived underneath the layers
and listened for the barely audible
sound of his own heart beating.

~~~~~

From Burning Wycliff, copyright 2006 Thom Satterlee: reprinted with permission from Texas Tech University Press.

Liminal

2006-05-05T08:21:00.000-07:00

Jean Janzen

"To see nothing cross the threshhold,
but to see the threshhold."
~Frederick Buechner

Sometimes it is the scent
of peach, smooth and sweet
as a newborn, or the newborn

breathing in soft flutter.
Or the river, relentless
and disappearing.

Nothing firm, like granite,
which bars the entrance, yet
having been born in fire

could become fire again.
Then is the doorway everywhere--
grass, bread, your hand gesturing?

Or language, your voice saying
"here it is," a place
we can almost glimpse.

~~~~~

Next: Literature

The Family of Time

2006-05-05T08:16:00.000-07:00

Lionel Basney

When I was a boy, most of the people I knew called me "Joe." I'm not sure what prompted the name, except that it had begun with my parents and was therefore official. I had no other nickname; I was too young for a locker-room label, and the neighborhood used Joe. So intime did everyone else - town, cousins, mere acquaintances, even (though they lived a long waysaway) my grandparents.

I suspect most of us have nicknames, and perhaps many like this, the parents' name, the family's name. When we pass 18 or so, the rites of passage require that we give our nicknames up. My students will admit having had them but will not tell what they were. This is plain enough: 18-year-olds don't want childhood, recent, urgent, calling to them in the college halls. But they give themselves away. Even as the refuse, their faces color with a look of longing. The names they cannot say are still calling to them in their hearts.

When my sister was old enough to go to school, my parents pronounced a fiat in favor of my legal name and began to reel in the network of Joes. The name disappeared in the family overnight, and cleared up more slowly on the block. In time the uncles and cousins lost it, though I think they still have not become accustomed to "Lionel" and say it (as many people do) with a slight hesitation.

Finally only one person stuck with Joe and has stuck with it to the present day. She was the nurse and office manager of the local doctor, witness to the midnight flus and eruptions of allergy, to which I was particularly susceptible. She was always gossipy, gruff, and careful. She had grown up in a small north Pennsylvania town, gone to college, and settled in the little college town, as it turned out, for life.

The doctor she worked for was gray and quiet, with the learned calm of the professional man of crisis. She was brisk and loud. She was the kind to take the town over, to criticize all its doings and conduit all its news. She worked with a kind of belligerent casualness: her desk always a reef for paper, she always standing behind it in her uniform, talking loud, apparently never consulting the records, stuffing folders into the filing cabinet apparently without checking where they went. No matter how tense the moment, she was talking; no matter how raucous her laughter, her eyes mourned. These were advantages: the wretched child, abandoned in the green walled, odd-smelling consulting room, with the blank dampness of the middle of the night around him, was quieted if not solaced by her sad glance and the rasp of her laughter. Anyhow she struck with the nickname, or it stuck with her, for decades after its official revocation. She shocked my fiancee with it - "Joe? What's a Joe?" - and I imagine puzzled everyone else, because by the time I was a man, all my siblings and playmates, everyone who would remember, had moved away. It was still in my mind, of course - the anchor caught in the dark harbor of the past, the line tugging back - and still in hers, though what it meant to her, if it meant anything but habit, I don't know. Was it loyalty? Were "Lionel" and all the pretensions to adulthood that went with it just aberrations to be corrected by that sharp north-country tongue?

Did she see in my lank face the round grave face of the child ill with poison sumac? My medical record must have said "Lionel." So much for the record.

I go back to that town, not often but regularly, and on my last visit I heard that she was ill. One afternoon as we sat and talked in my parents' living room there was a slight sound outside, a footfall. My father was first to the door. It was Barbara, halfway back to her car. She turned as he came out, irresolute, at bay; we followed in a flood. She had been driving by, she said, had seen the Michigan plate, and figured it was Joe. She just wanted to say hi. We said hi all around, awkwardly, estranged by the feeling that there was nothing more to say. Later we talked it over. "You know Barbara," my mother said. "All these years she's been so hard. Now that she's sick, she wants everyone to know she really cared about them."

But we had known that; we had always seen it. This is a small place we shared for 30 years, the prototypical small town where everything is known and individuals come to play supporting roles to their entire acquaintance - community handyman or shower-giver, community provider of comfort or amusement. Barbara had been everyone's older sister resourceful, scornful, as dependable as illness itself and therefore a source of comfort. She had taken our measure as often as our temperature.

This devotion to a limited, repetitive mob in a narrow place - keeping records, laying out the charts and bandages, calling the ambulance, turning up at two in the morning in her small sports car, shadows around her eyes darker than every, ushering the hysterical children, chatting with the frantic parents, keeping the endless lines of gossip clear through the waiting-room window, the hair graying, the walk thickening, keeping the children straight with the parents and grandparents, keeping the town straight - what else could this have been but love? No one needed to have it said.

Or not at the time. Now, of course, things were different: when ordinary routine life breaks down, as it must, words are instantly necessary. We need them, urgently, at the moment when their inadequacy is clearest.

Afraid of the moment, embarrassed, we prepare things to say, litanies, the jargon of ministers and counselors, thank-you luncheons and service pins. All of this is beside the point. The experience has been spontaneous, unanticipated, the language is preformulated, stiff, and general. Life comes downstream to us in a jumble - people places, obligations, trouble, disaster, communities assembled piecemeal like the contents of our memories and the names we know each other by. Better, perhaps, to speak of it that way - casually, using the ordinary words the nicknames; saying what comes to mind.

The Spirit will tell you, in that hour what you must say - partly because it is the hour that makes the words. When Barbara said, "I just wanted to say hi to Joe," she was speaking poetry, certainly to me and I suspect (without knowing) to herself. For me it was one more twitch on the long line into the past of my self, that secret land no one else will ever enter and I will never leave; one more half-recovery of the time when I ran my chipped metal cars around in the dirt under the tall, sharp-skinned firs, themselves now only a memory. For her it was. . . but I have no right to say. She was making contact again; she was reassembling the town, clearing one of the lines of succession, announcing to us and to herself that she was part of the family. She is, of course; only the family, as we all saw for a moment, is larger than the town, or my parents, wife, and children. It is the family of time.

P.S. I wrote the first draft of this essay about a year ago, all in a sitting. A week or two later, with many misgivings but counting on the advice of people I trust, I sent Barbara a copy. It was partly an act of writers' conscience. I thought she has a right to see what had been written about her. I didn't expect to hear from her directly, and I didn't. I heard, indirectly, that she had been touched by the piece, and had given it to friends to read.

It would be easy to make too much of this. She had better things to do in those days of her illness than read my prose. My largest hope was that the essay would fit in with those other matters; that it would help her to think well of her life, or at least of God's difficulty intentions and how they had in fact worked out. I hoped it would help her to see her life in order; to know that she had not lived unnoticed.

I saw her, briefly, for a last time, a few weeks ago. In her terrible descent into illness, she had become all but unrecognizable. My mother bent over the bed: "Here's Joe come to see you."
"Give me a hug, Joe."

She came in and out of the morphine, groping and paddling with her hands in the air, murmuring. My wife and I linked hands and sang across the foot of the bed: "Beautiful Savior, Lord of the nations. . . . " I don't think she understood. She was already beyond us.

She has since died, after great pain long-continued. The thing about her passing which gives me most comfort is the patient willingness of members of that small town to stay with her, hour after hour, as she went. It is particularly good to record that even people who for one reason or another have lived on the margins of the community - the tiny minority of Roman Catholics, for instance, in that overwhelmingly Protestant and evangelical place - came one by one to take their places in the vigil. Many others might have come: people from small towns all around that part of the county, hill people from the welfare farms. Barbara made them all family.

My attendance at that bedside was brief and easy. It was full of the suspended emotion you register when you are afraid pain or embarrassment is coming. But I was obliged to it – I had earned the right to it - simply by having grow up in that place, as I was, as I was called.

Now the place and the time are a step further off.

Now this essay is orphaned. Its first use was to help in someone's last summing up, her last effort at reconciliation. I don't know whether it served or not; I am humbled by the fact that I will never know, for certain, what its effect was. It alters one's notion of writing, in a healthy way, to see it not as gift or craft or cultural mandate but as response to mortal need.

I believe that crafts like writing are ordained for us to practice. I also believe that little of our work, even when we do it carefully, has its proper motive or place in other lives; most of it, therefore, will have to be repented of.

The image of this repentance, for a writer, is Job repenting of his words about God. He has not sinned, but he has been inadequate; he has spoken of what he did not know. I feel like that: I said something, as I felt compelled to do; but I have my hand across my mouth. Seeing my writing in the light of Barbara's need, I saw some of its pretentiousness and irresponsibility and tried to remove them. But the artist's repentance is deeper than that, and less easily performed. It has to do with the status of the art itself, its place in people's lives. It is less important than we sometimes think, and claim. Its best economy is simply to be one of the expedients by which people endure their coming hither and their going hence.

There are better expedients, known and practiced by people who do not care about writing. What writing knows of wisdom depends on its willingness to settle down among other things - those day and night hours of simply waiting by the bed, keeping company with fear and pain, those acts of a harder, purer charity. There, if anywhere, this odd business of words must find its place.

Literature

2006-05-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

Jean Janzen

after the painting by Chagall

In a blue room
the poet's pen
rides the air,
his hand poised
to mark the scroll
unrolled before him
like a desert.
He is bent and listening.

Just outside
is a cow on a hill
who sings, muzzle
raised, Hebrew words
rising: "God roars!"
The room is water,
the hill is earth,
the scribe and cow
are pale as air,
for the poem
has only begun,
caught in the ages
and silence of waiting.

A small inkwell,
one alphabet,
and a pause
before the next
translation,
wet and newly-born,
a cry becoming word.

J. R. R. Tolkien’s Love of Words: The Revelatory Nature of Tolkien’s Aphorisms in The Lord of the Rings

2006-05-05T07:49:00.000-07:00

Charles E. Bressler, Ph. D, Professor of English
Benjamin Walker, Undergraduate English Major

Fact: Without question, J. R. R. Tolkien is one of Oxford University’s most famous philologists, his Lord of the Rings being voted “the book of the century” by a 1996 Waterstone bookstore poll of 26,000 readers.

Fact: As a philologist, Tolkien loved words in all their various combinations: in isolation and those found in phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs.

Fact: As a master of many languages, including several created by himself, Tolkien knew the etymology of countless words, phrases, maxims, adages, and aphorisms. Included in his vast word storehouse are not only the roots and meanings of these words and expressions but also their cultural milieu.

Fact: Tolkien uses well over one hundred aphorisms in The Lord of the Rings. For the most part, scholars have neglected studying these aphorisms, with only a few Tolkienites such as Tom Shippey even mentioning such constructions in their writings.

Our essay centers on Tolkien’s creation and use of aphorisms in The Lord of the Rings. It is our contention that Tolkien uses this type of construction to reveal the deep truths of his cosmogony and mythology. Being ever the watchful philologist, Tolkien knew the original purpose and cultural milieu of an aphorism. Because of such knowledge, Tolkien has many of his characters speak in aphoristic statements in order to bring healing to the creatures of Middle-earth and to provide them with encouragement, chastisement, and understanding not only of themselves but also of other created species of the world they inhabit. An overall analysis of Tolkien’s aphorisms will help us, we believe, to clarify the underlying truths upon which Tolkien bases his mythology.

About 138 aphorisms weave their way through the text of The Lord of the Rings, ranging from the rather simple aphorisms of the Gaffer—“And all’s well as ends better,” and “Whenever you open your big mouth you put your foot in it”—to the more sophisticated of Aragorn—“The wolf that one hears is worse than the orc that one fears, ” and “One who cannot cast away a treasure at need is in fetters”—to those mouthed by Gandalf, the White wizard: “I will not say do not weep; for not all tears are evil,” and “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” Discerning each individual aphorism in The Lord of the Rings is in itself not a simple task. Is an aphorism one statement? One clause? A series of clauses? Or could an aphorism be considered a group of sentences. For example, in Book Three, Aragorn and company meet up for the first time with Eomer and his outlawed followers.

During their conversation, Eomer says: ‘It is hard to be sure of anything among so many marvels. The world is all grown strange. Elf and Dwarf in company walk in our daily fields; and folk speak with the Lady of the Wood and yet live; and the Sword comes back to war that was broken in the long ages ere the fathers of our fathers rode into the Mark! How shall a man judge what to do in such times?’

‘As he ever has judged,’ said Aragorn. ‘Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.’ (427-28)

Should any of these words or sentences be considered an aphorism, or is there such a construction as a “near aphorism”? Or can an entire paragraph(s) be considered an aphoristic passage? Our first task, then, is to define and thereby limit the scope of the term aphorism itself.

A survey of over 30 dictionaries of various kinds reveals that an aphorism is a short, pithy statement of an evident truth concerned with life or nature. For the sake of our discussion, it will be helpful to distinguish an aphorism from its synonyms: axiom, proverb, maxim, and adage. An aphorism differs from an axiom in that its expressed truth is not capable of scientific demonstration as is the axiom’s. And it differs from a proverb in that it is more philosophical and less homely. Like the proverb, both the adage and maxim are familiar statements expressing an observation or principle generally accepted as wise or true. The maxim is a saying that is widely accepted on its own merits. Often times it is obvious, but not always meaningful, and may actually contradict other maxims. Like the proverb and maxim, the adage is a condensed but memorable saying embodying some important fact of experience that is taken as true by many people. Although the definitions of all these terms are somewhat similar, the aphorism stands out in that its content has not necessarily gained esteem through long use, but is distinguished by its particular philosophical depth. Based on such distinctions of terms, we can define an aphorism as a tersely expressed principle or truth articulated in a short and pithy sentence in such a way that when heard is unlikely to pass from memory, although its content has not necessarily gained credibility through long use.

Tolkien himself would have known this definition of an aphorism along with its multiple synonyms. But he would also have known the original meaning and cultural milieu of this term. Coming into English through Late Latin and Middle French, the English word aphorism originated in Greek (aphorismos ‘definition’) and was first used by Hippocrates in his text entitled Aphorisms, referring specially to briefly stated medical principles. Hippocrates’ now famous opening line commences the use of aphorisms in Western literature: “Life is short, art is long, opportunity fleeting, experimenting dangerous, reasoning difficult.” Throughout his work, Hippocrates lists his medical principles or what he called aphorisms. A few examples follow: “Patients cured of chronic hemorrhoids which had been bleeding much are in danger of dropsy or consumption unless one pile tumor is left to continue bleeding,” and “In prolonged diarrohea involuntary vomiting may be curative.” Tolkien would have known that the primary purpose of Hippocrates’ original aphorisms was to instruct and help physicians in the art of healing. Similarly, many of Tolkien’s aphorisms in The Lord of the Rings help to muster courage, to provide encouragement, and to bring a type of psychological, spiritual, and even physical healing both to their speakers and the listeners. As noted earlier, aphorisms are usually original with their speakers, for the statements themselves have not yet gained credibility through long usage. Like maxims or adages, they can be rather simple (“People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones) or sophisticated (“To make a decision is to invite change”).

For Tolkien, the social and spiritual sophistication of the speaker of an aphorism and the depth of the aphorism’s philosophical content are directly related to Tolkien’s cosmogony and mythology.

Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is philosophical grounded in his created mythology that appears ever so slightly in the work itself. His mythology—his overall story that “makes concrete and particular a special perception of human beings or a cosmic view” (Harmon, A Handbook) is contained in his lifelong work The Silmarillion, published posthumously by his son, Christopher. In this text, Tolkien makes clear his cosmogony, or his account of creation, the origin of all spiritual beings in his created universe, and the created order of his mythic world. Without question, Tolkien’s story of creation and of its creator reveals an established hierarchy involving not only the creator and all created spiritual beings but all created beings, with each species or group possessing different physical and intellectual traits and responsibilities.

At the apex of Tolkien’s hierarchy is Illuvatar, the All-Father, the creator of all things who dwells in the Timeless Halls. Shaping all events to fulfill his stated purposes, Illuvatar rarely intervenes directly in his creation, but chooses to work through fifteen created spiritual beings called Valar. Created with the Flame Imperishable, these Valar are responsible for carrying out the will of Illuvatar in his created universe. As with all created beings in Tolkien’s mythic universe, the Valar are hierarchical, with Manwe, the Good and Pure, being the highest and noblest, and thus named the Lord of the Valar. His spouse, Varda, called by various names such as Elbereth and Gilthoniel, made the stars and established the courses of the sun and moon. Next in line comes Melkor or “He who arises in Might,” the Valar to whom Illuvatar gave the greatest power and knowledge. To each of the fifteen Valar, Illuvatar gave special gifts and responsibilities.

The helpers of the Valar are the Maiar. Some Maiar, like Gandalf the White, have chosen to take on bodily form, to encourage and aid the created peoples of Middle-earth, while others like Sauron (“abominable”) chose to become a follower of Melkor or Morgoth. Like the Valar, however, these created beings have freedom of the will. And like Melkor who rejected Illuvatar’s will and wished to take his place, some Maiar, namely the Balrogs (“power terrors”) chose to rebel with Melkor and have since become Melkor’s horrific servants.

Next in line are men and the Elves—each with their own subdivisions--followed by the dwarves, ents, the animal world, the botanical world, and lastly the inorganic or mineral world, each with its own subordinate divisions. Like the “good” peoples of Middle-earth, the “bad” side (Tolkien’s own words) are also arranged hierarchically, with Sauron being their leader, followed by a host of various “bound” creatures like the orcs who also have various ranks or classes within their kind. And scattered throughout Tolkien’s universe are other beings like Tom Bombadil and Treebeard who somewhat escape classification.

Within this created world, Tolkien’s characters live, move, and speak. Their language, however, is not merely coincidental. Carefully constructing each people’s and character’s spoken words, Tolkien reveals through language the hierarchical nature of his mythology and cosmogony. Characters’ words reflect their social class, their education or learning, their moral development, their ethics, and their overall relationship--either consciously or unconsciously--to Illuvatar. Giving only ever-so-slight hints of his detailed mythology in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien similarly structures his characters’ utterance of aphorisms to reflect his hierarchical mythology and cosmogony. A starting point for such an observation resides in the number of aphorisms spoken by the various kinds of created beings. For example, the character who speaks the most aphorisms, 30 in all, is Gandalf, a Maiar. The next is Aragorn, both a Numenorean and, by the text’s end, Gondor’s newly-crowned king, with 13. Théoden, king of Rohan, utters 8. Faramir, the younger son of the Steward of Gondor, speaks 5, and so forth, with a many other characters, such as Maggot, Haldir, Hama, and a few orcs uttering one each. On the surface, it would appear that the higher the social status of each character within each species and in relationship to the created order of that character in the hierarchical structure of creation, the more aphorisms that character will utter, revealing that the higher ordered characters, like Gandalf, are the wiser, with the lower ordered characters speaking forth lesser wisdom, like the Gaffer. Such data would allow us to argue that the aphorisms in The Lord of the Rings appear to be on a continuum, from the lesser aphorisms (or maxims) of the lower class characters such as the Gaffer (“It’s an ill wind as blows nobody no good”) to those uttered by the wisest character of all, Gandalf (“The guest who has escaped from the roof will think twice before he comes back in by the door”).

Pushing this analysis further, we note that those aphorisms uttered by the Gaffer and other characters of similar social status are shorter, less original, and of lower diction than those uttered by the wiser characters. For example, an orc driver says to Sam and Frodo, “Where there’s a whip, there’s a will, my slugs” (910) and the Gaffer notes, “All’s well that ends well.” Such mundane utterances can be juxtaposed to Legolas’s response to both Aragorn and Gimli shortly before they meet the riders of the Mark: “But rest, if you must. Yet do not cast all hope away. Tomorrow is unknown. Rede oft is found at the rising of the Sun” (419). The Gaffer’s aphorism (or maxim as it may be argued) is anything but original, and its level of diction, like the orc driver’s, is low. Often Tolkien notes the “borrowed” and overused content of the more simplistic and generalized aphorisms by italicizing them, as he does with most of the Gaffer’s sayings. In addition, such aphorisms, more frequently than not, come earlier in The Lord of the Rings (Books I, II, and III), with only a few exceptions. When compared to such simple and oft-repeated sayings, Legolas’s aphorism is a bit lengthier, possesses a much higher level of diction, and is original, both in content and word choice. Note, for example, Legolas’s use of the now archaic word rede, meaning to give advice or counsel, originating from Middle English reden, ‘to guide and direct,’ and from Old English raedan. Neither the Gaffer nor the orc driver nor any other lesser creature utilizes such a high level of diction as does Legolas the Elf or Aragorn the Numenorean and King of Gondor or the White Wizard, Gandalf.

That Tolkien’s wise characters—those in the upper portion of his “Great Chain of Being” cosmogony—utter the more profound and philosophically deft aphorisms is not surprising. What is fascinating, however, is the connection Tolkien makes between a character’s choices and each character’s spoken words. For Tolkien, a character can become wise by continually choosing the good, no matter what the character’s social class. As Legolas, Aragorn, and even Gandalf, for example, strive to do the will of Illuvatar, the will of the good that never changes (as we have already noted in Aragorn’s statement to Eomer), each becomes “more wise,” finally becoming a theotokos for those they serve and have come to love. And it is through their spoken aphorisms that Tolkien reveals such astounding growth of character, each becoming agents of grace and healing in the lives of their listeners. For example, in Book II when Legolas and company are leaving Lorien, Gimli weeps openly because of his sadness for his having to leave Galadriel, he asks Legolas, “Why did I come on this Quest? Torment in the dark was the danger that I feared, and it did not hold me back. But I would not have come, had I known the danger of light and joy.”

Legolas answers, “Alas for us all! And for all that walk the world in these after-days. For such is the way of it: to find and lose, as it seems to those whose boat is on the running stream” (369). But after surviving many adventures and perils and constantly choosing to follow the good, we note Legolas’s response (and personal growth) to Gimli once again as they prepare to face the Dark Lord before his very gates: “Up with your beard, Durin’s son. Oft hope is born, when all is forlorn” (859). “Follow what may, greet deeds are not lessened in worth” (859). Through these words, an experienced-changed Legolas now breathes hope, courage, and honor in Gimli.
Similarly, in Book I Aragorn speaks a bit arrogantly when he says to Pippin concerning shortcuts through forests, “My cuts, short or long, don’t go wrong” (177). But when talking to the fellowship shortly after Gandalf’s supposed defeat by the Balrog, a more life-changed Aragorn says, “The counsel of Gandalf was not founded on the foreknowledge of safety, for himself or others. There are some things that it is better to begin then to refuse, even though the end be dark” (430). Through these words, Aragorn once again affirms the existence of absolutes, ennobling the fellowship to carry on in their tasks.

Even Gandalf’s aphorisms show his growth as a character. When speaking to Aragorn concerning Théoden, for example, Gandalf says, “A king will have his way in his own hall, be it folly or wisdom” (499). Such a statement is indeed true. But note Gandalf’s last aphorism appearing on the penultimate page of the work: “Well, here at last dear friends, on the shores of the sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-earth. Go in peace! I will not say do not weep; for not all tears are evil” (1007). Here indeed are words not only of wisdom but also of grace and understanding and healing.

But through their choices two characters and their words outshine all others: Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins. By choosing to do good—to follow the will of Illuvatar—both Sam and Frodo become agents of grace in the lives of many characters. For example, early on in the text, Frodo notes that “Short cuts make delays, but inns take longer ones” (86). What a change, however, takes places in Frodo’s aphorisms after bearing the Ring to the Cracks of Doom and experiencing its full power. This life-changed hobbit says about the pathetic Saruman who becomes the ruler of the Shire, “It is useless to meet revenge with revenge: it will heal nothing” (995). And to Sam, Frodo says some of his last recorded words: “I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them” (1006)—once again, words of grace, words of healing, and words of comfort.

Likewise, Sam Gamgee, another Ringbearer, is changed by life’s experiences and personal choices into a theotokos. Often speaking in Gafferisms—“Handsome is as handsome does,” “It’s the job never started as takes longest to finish,” and “Live and learn”--Sam, by being faithful to his commitment to Frodo, to the quest, and to truth and good, becomes the most completely developed of all Tolkien’s characters, despite his use of rather simplistic aphorisms. For when he sees the fallen Frodo unable to climb the final steps to Mount Doom, Sam says, “Come, Mr. Frodo. I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you.” This low-class hobbit, by following the path of honor and truth and the good, has learned the value of self sacrifice in the service of others and the joy in doing so.

Tolkien’s aphorisms do indeed reflect both the speaker’s social status and place in Tolkien’s hierarchical mythology and cosmogony. But as in all good literature, tension and ambiguity abound. By constantly seeking the good, characters like Frodo and Sam can become a theotokos despite social rank, education, or class.

Broken Water

2006-05-05T07:46:00.000-07:00

Alison Gresik

When I came home from swimming lessons my mother was in labour. I found her in the basement, pacing, beads of sweat like blisters on her upper lip. She wore her lightest dress, a layered yellow cotton that gaped under the arms, and you could see through the thin cotton, especially where it billowed over her belly, showing the dark spot of her navel standing out like the swollen valve of an inner tube.

My mother paced and blew and wiped sweaty hair off her forehead. The temperature was very high that day even for August. We stayed in the basement. I still had on my bathing suit, under my shorts and t-shirt—between my legs it pinched and my bottom was damp and prickly. I don’t change after swimming lessons, not since I was eleven. I don’t like the floor of the change room, wet and slimy.

I shouldn’t have gone to swimming lessons. My mother’s water broke just when I was diving into the deep end of the pool. No one was home to help her.

I timed her contractions with my watch. After swimming lessons my little brother biked away with his friends, toward the school yard. He didn’t want to be around in case my mother made strange noises or lost her head. My father was at work, we didn’t call him home. Hours could pass yet before she went to the hospital.

But she needed to be watched, like an animal in heat. I felt she ought to be watched. And timed. From the beginning of a contraction to the end. And the time in between. As she panted, red-faced, catching her breath. I wished I had a stopwatch—our swimming instructor had one to time our rescues.

I learn first aid at swimming lessons, but not about women in labour, just how to treat shock and bleeding wounds and blocked airways.

In the laundry room I found a stack of fresh towels on the dryer. I held a washcloth under the tap and wrung it out. My mother hardly noticed when I patted her forehead, mottled with heat. She kneeled in front of the couch, head resting on the cushions. I didn’t like her face being hidden. The bottoms of her feet were blotched and red, the blood not circulating.

An important part of lifesaving is talking to the victim. Not conversation, but to keep them awake. When I’m rescuing I yell, Are you okay? What’s your name? Who are you here with? Do you know how to swim? How many brothers and sisters do you have? You’re going to be okay, alright? The answers to these questions come back garbled, through water-filled mouths. Between gasps for breath. Then I explain, I’m going to throw this flutterboard to you. Can you catch it? Good. Hold on tight and I’m going to pull you in. Just keep your head above the water.

I found the puddle of my mother’s broken water, on the kitchen floor. She had been clearing the dishes. I soaked up the thick pool with old towels from the rag bag, and went over the floor with a mop and some vinegar.

Later that day we would go next door to the neighbours, my brother and I. After the baby was born, Mrs. Lewis would drive us to the hospital to see my mother, to see that everything was alright, and to see the baby. I had my camera ready, loaded with film and new batteries in the flash.

There’s a trick with your wrist when you’re throwing a flutterboard. You hold the corner, with your forefinger extended up the edge for balance. Then you flick your wrist and send the board spinning, not flat like a dinner plate but edge up, until it lands with a smack on the water.

My aim isn’t very good. The water around my victim is littered with flutterboards that missed the target. Sometimes they drift within reach of someone else’s victim and save them by accident.

I thought of the baby, floating, breathing water, and then pulled into the air, resuscitated.

When you get the victim to the side of the pool, getting them out isn’t easy. I’m too small to do lifts, mostly my victims just climb out the ladder themselves. But I get lifted all the time, heaved out of the water, someone’s arms locked under my armpits. My breasts are crushed and the skin of my back scraped against the concrete edge of the pool.

I pushed my mother’s wheelchair from her room to the car, the day she came home from the hospital. My father carried the baby. Neither of them moved much—the baby waved its fist and my mother tipped her head back to lay against the headrest. She wouldn’t let my father turn on the air conditioning. She hugged her sweater and shivered. I would have taken the baby’s blanket and given it to my mother.

I keep talking while I treat the victims for shock, laying them on the concrete, elevating their feet. I cover them with their towel if I can find it—not mine, I wouldn’t want it to get wet. At our outdoor pool, the mornings are cold during lessons and the victims shiver for real. Don’t worry, the ambulance is on its way. Is there someone we can call to come get you?

We put them both to bed when we got home. My mother was changed into a cotton night-gown, and I put a new diaper on the baby. The blackened end of the umbilical cord stuck out of its navel. The skin around the baby’s nose looked hot and red, and the white pores stood out like needle pricks.

My mother slept until noon, sleeping while the baby was awake in the morning. At first I put the baby in the bassinet in my mother’s room while I went to swimming lessons, I thought she would hear if it cried, but I wasn’t sure. So I wrapped the baby up and brought it to the pool in the stroller. The lifeguards who weren’t teaching and the mothers who had brought their children to lessons leaned over the stroller and watched the baby most of the time while I was swimming. Before and after my lesson I had to tell them over and over again the baby’s name and when it was born and how much it weighed. They all wanted to know. If the baby cried one of them would pick it up.

In a few days a nurse came by to check on the baby and my mother. She showed me how to clean the baby’s cord with a cotton-tipped swab and some alcohol while we bathed it in a plastic tub on the change table. My mother was too tired to get up. The nurse made sure she was breast-feeding properly and checked her pulse and blood pressure. I asked the nurse how much longer my mother would stay in bed, and she said maybe a few more days. Giving birth takes a lot out of you, she said. I wanted to ask her also why my mother didn’t want to eat or talk to me, but she was a nurse. She wouldn’t know the answer to questions like that. She was more concerned with making sure the baby wasn’t jaundiced.

Only once we practised mouth-to-mouth using the baby as our casualty. Artificial respiration is different with infants, you must cover the entire nose and mouth when breathing in. And blow gently with frequent breaths to avoid damaging the lungs. We put the baby on a picnic table in the recovery position and took turns checking the breathing, taking a pulse on the inner arm and opening the airway. Baby! Baby! Can you hear me? we shouted. When my turn came, I opened my mouth wide and pressed it wet against the baby’s face. This was nothing like a kiss. I could have been blowing up an inner tube.

Every day that goes by my mother sinks further into her bed. Her eyes are closed most of the time, even when she’s awake. Tears leak out from behind her eyelids, I see the damp patches on the pillow. Her lips are pale, the same colour as her skin. I try to keep them moist with Vaseline. Her stomach has collapsed.

At swimming lessons I learned first to swim. To save myself. But that wasn’t enough. I had to learn how to rescue, how to resuscitate. I had to keep other people from drowning. And once I learned to rescue, I had a responsibility. I couldn’t walk past a drowning person without trying to help, because I knew how.

The baby squalls, waking up hungry. My mother is huddled in the sheets and she doesn’t move when I pull the curtains open. I want to shake her. I want to ask her questions. What’s your name? How did you get here? What did that baby pull out of you when it came, and how can I put it back? The ambulance is on its way, and what should I tell them is wrong with you?

Interconnected Rooms: A Conversation with Alison Gresik

2006-05-02T10:21:00.000-07:00

Lori Huth
Edited by Reba Larson

Huth: Alison, I’d like to start with a few questions about your book Brick and Mortar. Brick and Mortar is a collection of connected short stories, a form we’ve been talking about throughout the Writing Festival. Can you describe the process of writing short stories that are discrete units but still connected in ways that unite the whole work?

Gresik: Yes. I was interested in finding a structure that would allow a number of different voices from a community to come together. I wanted to make the setting a church, because the only thing bringing these particular people together is their desire to worship. I wanted to see what sort of new entity would arise from their interactions. I chose to use the short story format so that I would have room for those voices. Even though I originally thought that I would go from beginning to end, and write and finish one story before moving on to the next one, it didn’t work out that way at all. I wrote first drafts of all the stories, and then found that something which happened in a later story affected and had implications for some of the other stories. I ended up working on the whole book at the same time, which I hadn’t expected to do.
One of the things that my thesis advisor worked with me on was having a similar narrative voice for each of the individual stories, so not only were they connected by the fact that all of the characters know each other and they are worshipping in the same church, but the tone and the narrator’s voice in telling the stories is similar, so that the reader will feel like it is a unified experience. I hope that the reader will be able to get into each character’s mind, and see what they are thinking and how they are reacting to things, but in one of the other stories, the reader will be able to see a different perspective and see another view on that particular character. I think this gives the book a kind of layering feeling.

Huth: Did making those connections feel restrictive at all, or did it feel freeing? Did connections naturally emerge from the writing?

Gresik: Actually, it was like a process of discovery. I was talking last night about how I had an idea about a girl shaving her head, and then I had this other idea of a man baking bread. Later, I realized that the characters are related, that they’re father and daughter. There was another situation like that where I had an idea about a woman helping out a single mother and giving her support, and I later realized that she is the mother of the girl who shaved her head. It was almost like the connections were already there, and I just had to find them. . I would have discoveries about the way that things are related, and it just made the book fit closer together.

Huth: You mentioned the church being largely united by this group of characters. I’m curious about how you saw the role of the church and its function in the narrative. Was the church a character itself? Did it help to influence the action? Or was the church only a setting?

Gresik: One of the underlying ideas I had was that the church was telling its story through the stories of the individual parishioners. The church has a life of its own, and it is expressed through the stories of these people. I grew up in a church, and it was a defining experience in young life, as well as in my ongoing life. I was interested in the need to find a community of faith where you could relate to others who were trying to live the same way and follow Christ, and the way that there are sometimes complementary relationships and there are sometimes conflicts.
Some people are not in the same place in their lives, and many of them struggle with different things. For example, one of the characters, an older man who has been a caretaker in the church and the janitor for many years, realizes that it’s time for him to move on from this particular church. He wants to be closer to his family, and it is just time for him to move on. The final story is about a new minister who is coming to the church, and her anxiety about how she will fit into this new community and the way that she is welcomed in, so the church is always shifting. It is a place that is defined by the people who make it their home at any particular time.

Huth: You mentioned earlier this week that you see a kernel of yourself in each of your characters and their stories. Is this true of each of the stories in this book? Would you be able to say that each story reflects you and your own personality?

Gresik: There is probably more of me in some characters and less in others. I often go first to my own experiences and feelings, and try to find what there is about a character that I can identify with. I need to be able to see through their eyes and understand the world in the way that they would. In some cases, the actual things that happened are things that I’ve been through. For example, I used to go with my dad to his office and work with him. This is something that I had in common with the character Molly who goes and bakes with her dad, but there are other parts of her experience that are less like what I have been through.
Also, the first story is about an older woman who has been in the church for years, and she has actually helped establish it. She has a really alienating experience one Sunday where she comes to church late, and she doesn’t get a bulletin, so she doesn’t know what the hymns are and she can’t follow along with the readings. Even though she has been in this church forever, she feels really isolated and separated from it. I had an experience like that one Sunday where I didn’t get a bulletin, and I was amazed at what a difference it made for me as to how much I felt a part of what was going on during the service. So even though this particular character is very old and there are a lot of differences between us, I felt like I could identify with this feeling of not belonging in a place where you are used to belonging.

Huth: Can you think of a character that you’ve written about who was very unlike you? How did you manage to really get into this character’s head and write a believable narrative about him or her?

Gresik: The one that comes to mind is the caretaker character, Knox. He’s a widower, and a gruff, no-nonsense type of person. He is a bit oblivious to what is going on around him. He just does his thing, and is not always connected to the things that are going on around him. He has also become estranged from his adopted daughter, and I think that was probably the story that I had to most imagine what he would be going through, because I couldn’t really draw much on my own experiences.

Huth: I’m going to shift directions a little. We can still bring up the book if it is relevant, but I’d like to know a little more about you as a person, as an author, and as a woman. It seems that you balance your life really well. You are a married woman with a career, and you’ve talked about having children. How will this affect your professional life? By the same token, how will your professional life affect your family life? Have you thought of ways to combine and balance these things?

Gresik: I feel like this is probably going to be a life long challenge. Since university, I have made some deliberate choices about wanting to make sure I have room in my life for a vocation. When Shawn and I finished our undergraduate programs, I went to graduate school first before I did anything else, because I wanted to make sure that I did that. It was a way to honor my interests, and make sure I got the work done that I needed to do.

Huth: Was that particularly related to you being the woman, or was it more since your vocation is writing? What factor suggested that you should go first?

Gresik: At the time, I wanted to make sure that I finished school so that it didn’t get put off indefinitely if we were to have a family. Finding time for my own writing can be a real challenge. Several years ago, I wasn’t being very careful about having the physical time and mental space to shut out other things and focus on my own expression and my own stories. This built up over a number of months, and my family was also going through a couple of crises. I got very caught up in that, and I realized one day that I was experiencing clinical depression. There is a history of that in my family, so I knew what the signs were, and I had had some episodes of it before, but it still had a big impact on my life for the next several years. I got on some medication to try to pull myself out of the deep valley that depression is, and I also made some changes in my life so that I could have a healthier way of living and a healthier balance in general. Part of that involved getting into therapy, and figuring out what the circumstances were that led to this breakdown.
What was missing in the way that I was thinking, and spending my time, and relating to other people in my life? What was missing that had led to that sort of loss of meaning and pleasure in life? For the next year, I just really focused on taking care of myself. Extravagant care, I called it. I made sure that I had time to rest, and that I was not putting up with so many expectations about meeting the needs of others and looking after everyone else before myself. I was very gentle with myself, and learned what I needed to be healthy. Part of that was realizing if I wasn’t writing, everyone else was out of whack. I really believe that writing is one of my core purposes for being on this earth. I had to learn to say no to others so that I could spend the time that I needed to writing. I’m still learning that balance. I still get into trouble sometimes by over committing myself, so it’s always a struggle to find that balance. And in the middle of all this, Shawn and I were having a discussion about having children and how they would fit into our lives. One of my biggest fears was that I wouldn’t be able to meet the demands of raising children with my writing and my depression. I knew that I might be able to say no to my pastor if he asked me to do some extra work at church, but I wasn’t sure how I would be able to say no to my kids if I needed to shut the door and work.
I’m thankful that Shawn had the patience to give me time to work through some of these questions, and I asked a lot of other women how they were working through these same questions. Last year, Shawn and I decided that we were going to go ahead, and we’ve chosen adoption as the means of expanding our family. We are going to be bringing home a little girl from China sometime next year. It has been really important for me to not just assume that I would automatically have children since I was married. We have really had to do what is best for each other in light of what God wants for us and the other work that He has for us to do through our lives. This year, I’ve made writing my top priority because it’s been a few years since Brick and Mortar came out, and I feel that I need to hit another milestone in my writing work before I turn my attention towards raising children.

Huth: I’m curious, partly because it’s Women’s History Month, and partly because we have a lot of women students at Houghton, and I imagine that they may be wondering this, too. To what degree do you think the struggles you’ve been talking about have to do with gender? Do you think it is just incidental that you are experiencing these problems, such as depression, as a woman?

Gresik: I do think that there is a correlation. There are certain things about my personality that factor in. One of the ways that I can feel good about myself or feel that I am accepted and loved is if I am making other people happy, and I do think that this is a pretty common experience for women. There’s more of an impact in women’s lives because they deal with childbearing and being primary caregivers. I think that some women feel that in order to be a good woman or a good wife, they must do certain things because they are expected of them. I’m not as quick to question whether or not my husband wants to be the primary caregiver, or that maybe there is another way to bring children into our lives that doesn’t place such a burden on me, or maybe there are creative ways that we want to share the family responsibilities.
I think you can certainly tell from some of the books that are coming out lately that women are putting off childbearing until they are in their thirties because they want to establish themselves in a career. Sometimes this brings infertility problems, but there just isn’t enough societal support with child care, insurance, and job flexibility to balance out these things. Every woman is going to be different in the way that she resolves these questions. We should be cutting each other some slack and not making judgments about the ways others choose to do things. It helps to look at different ways that people resolve these questions for themselves, and then you can see where God is leading you.

Huth: I’d also like to ask whether or not you have had role models in your life as a woman and a writer? If so, how have you found these people, and what kind of relationships do you have with them?

Gresik: Probably one of my first role models was my thesis advisor at the University of Calgary. Her name is Aritha Van Herk. She is a professor, as well as a writer, and she doesn’t have any children. She is very passionate about her work, especially her students. She was very generous in the time and attention that she gave to my work, and I’m so glad that I had the opportunity to work with her. Also, when I moved to Ottawa, I needed to establish myself in a new writing community because I’d left all my old writing friends behind in Calgary. I did a writing workshop and met lots of other women poets and fiction writers. We started to get together once a month to share our work and critique each other’s writing. We talked about our frustrations and the challenges of writing. That was a great support for me. I also look to other women writers that I don’t necessarily know personally, but that I admire. Some examples are Ann Patchett, Jane Smiley, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Huth: Do you find much time to read? And if you do, to what extent does your reading influence your own writing? Are there ways that you integrate what you learn from other writers into your writing? Also, is it possible for you to just enjoy reading without worrying about these things?

Gresik: I find that my reading goes in phases. For a while, I might be reading a lot of fiction because it is my favorite thing to read, but other times, I’m just not really attracted to any particular books that are coming my way, or sometimes I’m just finding other things that I need to work on, so I will consciously try to read less.

Huth: Why is that?

Gresik: Well, there can be some pitfalls in terms of comparing or thinking that you should do something a certain way based on another novel when this particular novel that you are working on needs to come to fruition. I need to stop listening to everything else going on and try to just listen to my own subject and the way it needs to come out. Reading does help me, but if I’m reading other books while I’m working on something, it doesn’t always help. I do read a lot of books about writing or the challenges of writing. The War of Art is one book that I’ve found recently that has really helped me a lot in terms of understanding my processes. The novel that I am working on now has some subject matter dealing with bullying and the way that children interact at a certain age, and so I’m doing research for that and reading some books about the social lives of children and how they relate to that sort of thing.

Huth: One reason writing fiction is fun is that you get to research things you’re interested in. Now, you are a Christian, but you aren’t writing explicitly Christian literature. The church is a setting in your first book, but the book is relevant and interesting to a broader audience, not only Christians. Is that what you have in mind? How does your Christian faith affect your writing life and the things you write about?

Gresik: I’ve always known that because my faith is such an integral part of who I am that it is automatically going to affect the kinds of stories that I want to tell. In Brick and Mortar, it did explicitly come out in the form of a church, but I knew that I didn’t just want it to appeal to a Christian audience. I think that the experiences the characters have are pretty universal, and a lot of people could relate to them. I found that when I tried to write stories explicitly about the church or about faith, it often did not work. It sounded preachy or boring, so I found myself working more with some of the rituals and symbols around the Christian faith that were elements of worship, but that also had other connotations. I found that tactile, sensory things were more communicative about faith and community.

Huth: You do include many familiar Christian rituals, like the character of Molly going to the teen Christian retreat, and the story with a foot washing ceremony.

Gresik: Yes, and then I intentionally went to a non-religious press to try to get the book published because I wanted it to reach a wider audience. I don’t read exclusively religious or non-religious writers. If it is an interesting story and has something to say to me, I don’t want to restrict myself. For the novel I am working on now, there’s already enough going on with the main character and the story that I’m worried if I were to force this family to be Christian, it might be too distracting or too much for the reader to be able to absorb. I think that the underlying theme, however, will certainly reflect my world view and my belief in trying to understand each other and care for one another. I think that my faith will still be there, even if it isn’t explicit in the subject matter.

Huth: I have one last question. You are in the early stages of your process as a writer, which is exciting, and I’m wondering if you have an ideal vision of what things will be like in fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years. Would you still be working at Adobe? Would you be doing something different there or completely leaving it behind? Do you have a dream of what your future might be like?

Gresik: I would love to be able to just write full time at some point. I would love to be able to make some kind of living writing and publishing. I would love to work as a writer-in-residence or something like that. I tend not to look too far forward into the future, though. Sometimes it can be discouraging. I just work on trying to appreciate where I am right now and just focusing on doing one more book, and then maybe one more after that. I mean, I would love to be able to look back on a shelf full of things that I wrote at the end of my life, to reach my readers, and to know that I did the work that God wanted me to do.