never fails to sober me

Spring and Fall: To a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

[Gerard Manley Hopkins]

confession

I think I need to break my ee cummings habit.

Mary Oliver is much, much safer. She anthems her heart out to an egalitarian classless world, surpassing the provincialism of cummings' seductive old-fashioned thous. Reading Oliver, I participate indiscriminately in loving Earth: owls, lilies, trees. This love is safe because it is not too deeply personal. I don't say this to belittle my enthusiasm for the "orange sticks of the sun," the "heaped ashes of the night," and the "dark hug of time," subjects so deftly illuminated when Oliver strikes her worded matches over them! But that enthusiasm is untainted by the longing that ee cummings stirs deep in my stomach with his language-powered emotional blender--longing for more than the fellowship of "the hummingbird in the summer rain shaking the water-sparks from its wings." Longing to possess the "fragile lips" that "usher the sweet small clumsy feet of April" into the "ragged meadows" of someone's soul. Longing for wooing and kisses and above all never to be a "deadfromtheneckup graduate" or a "Cambridge lady who lives in a furnished soul."

Both poets inspire me, but in different directions. I read Oliver and am inflamed with a zest to live a high life of wonder and witness. I read cummings and suddenly remember the becalmed seas of emotion residing within me, and this awareness alarms me into believing that a life bereft of a human love story cannot be complete.

To Oliver belongs the chanting of high priestesses, chaste and precious. To cummings, all the greed and ardor of an addict, grasping for experiences of deeper intensity.

Perhaps one day cummings will be safe for me. But for now, I think I'd best break the habit.

In Defense of Babel

Our situation is becoming dire. The Deconstructionists have pulled the rug from beneath the canon, and our tower is wrenching its underdeveloped torso toward heaven even as it fragments beneath the roar of a dreadful clamor. We hoped to make a name for ourselves by building this tower. We hoped to reach to heaven. We hoped that these turrets would at long last arrive at TRUTH, and our identities would be secured on the face of the earth.

Instead, we have reaped chaos and estrangement. But can we be blamed? We used the latest technology available, far superior to the ambiguous drawings sketched on ancient caves! Is it our fault that the words that we stacked upon each other were inadequate, despite our careful craftsmanship? We did what we could with what we had. It was a glorious effort.

Of course we know that words are mere symbols, pointing to their subjects in the tradition of cave drawings, incapable of conveying the essence of things, prey to the associations and perspectives of their handlers. One needs only consider the act of storytelling to prove this. Ask five eyewitnesses to describe one event, and see what a variety of soups emerge as the storytellers season the water of the event with their own contextual piquancy. Yet--what a feat!--out of these nuanced, imprecise stories we fashioned the stories of our tower. What else could we use? What other medium could bridge that terrible void?

No wonder our quest for heaven and a name is foundering. Bereft of a cornerstone, fashioned in ignorance and out of a desperate bravado, it was only a matter of time before this tower began to falter. I suppose we've felt premonitions of our demise for centuries. But isn't it marvelous, how far we got? This vast, aspiring, flawed monolith: what a tribute to the human spirit!

(We won't voice our terror. We won't express our suspicion that heaven and a name is more than a handful of atmospheric layers beyond our grasp. Too late now, as the tower crumbles, to wonder if some other way exists to bridge the terrible gap between earth and heaven, chaos and order, the name of a thing and its essence. We have come so far: we won't desert.)

"The person who would do great things well must practice daily on little ones; and she who would have the assistance of the Almighty in important acts, must be daily and hourly accustomed to consult His will in the minor affairs of life." -Emily Judson

I am wasting my life waiting in idleness for some great, important task. How encouraging to remember that the business of living well is reserved for all followers of Christ, and is significant and useful in its own right, even as it prepares me for the "greater" moments that may eventually confront me.

Obedience to the will of God brings satisfaction always, to all of my desires, be they deep or shallow, noble or mean. And a life of obedience is never insignificant.