Autobiographical Ruminations

More from Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker:

“But the writing of autobiography is a dangerous business; it is a mark either of great insensitiveness to danger or of an almost supernatural courage.  Nobody but a god can pass unscathed through the searching ordeal of incarnation.”

[Background:  Sayers is using that observation as the conclusion of a chapter discussing of the writing of autobiography, a particular form of art which has obvious relevance to a rather noteworthy Creative Act of God.  What follows is not directly related to what Sayers is arguing, so I suppose this isn’t really background after all.  Relabel it as: Pointless Digression.]

After reading Sayers’ chapter on autobiography, I got to ruminating about my own life (shocking) and once again faced the realization that a biography of my life would be pretty dull stuff.  When I have said this to people in the past, there is almost always an immediate objection.  It seems that saying one’s life would make a dull biography is taken as a strong version of self-deprecation.  There is apparently rampant confusion of the two sentences: 1) “My biography would be dull” and 2) “My life is worthless.”  But, those two sentences are not even remotely the same.  My life is not worthless, yet I have a hard time imagining anyone wanting to read a book-length treatment of it.  I was born, grew up, went to school, got married, got a job, had kids.  Nothing exciting there.  So, I cannot even imagine writing an autobiography, which made me wonder about whether Sayers’ remarks quoted above were accurate or not.  How would I know?

Then it hit me.  I’ve been writing this here blog for a few years now.  This blog has no real content other than a Faithful Record of My Thoughts over Time.  Which strangely sounds a lot like autobiography.  Have I been writing an autobiography for the last few years without even knowing it?  The mind reels.

If so, which is it:  do I have an insensitivity (Sayers’ “insensitiveness” is a rather ugly word, no?) to danger or a supernatural courage?  Clearly the former—despite all evidence to the contrary, I still write up these ruminations with pretense that nobody is actually reading this blog.  Then again, there really isn’t much of a danger here—after all, I am a tenured professor.  (Janet is constantly worried that my blog will somehow lead to some dire result, but when pressed, she can never actually figure out what could actually happen to me if someone (who?) took offense.  Janet has neither an insensitivity to danger nor supernatural courage—and perhaps not coincidentally, she doesn’t write autobiography.  More from Janet anon.)

Pursuing the Blog as Autobiography line a bit further:  is this blog an honest autobiography?  As Sayers notes, no autobiography can be the whole of the author, it is inherently a partial revelation due to the limitation of the form.  Obviously I am more than my blog (and as Hannah constantly reminds me, I am certainly more than the title of my blog).  But, if we imagine handing the last few years of blog entries to a person who knew nothing about me, would the impression formed from nothing other than what was written in this place bear any resemblance to Reality?  What strange creature would be conjured up by the contents herein?  That is one of those questions which would generate an answer which it is probably better not to know.  Yet , it is also one of those questions that once asked, makes one wonder.

And then:  if this blog is a form of autobiography, then perhaps my autobiography isn’t as dull as I would have thought.  (Please, Dear Reader, bear with the line of reasoning a bit and avoid the Obvious Retort.)  While my conventional biography would be quite dull, I have read some Great Books and had some Great Conversations over the years, and a record of those books and conversations is potentially not Without Interest.  (Again, Dear Reader, imagine a Competent Scribe and you can at least imagine the possibility.)  And suddenly I realized that the most famous biography of all time details a life in which absolutely nothing happens—one reads Boswell to see Johnson’s wit, not his activities.

At this stage in my ruminations, I broached the subject at the dinner table last night.  Lo and behold, Janet was channeling Samuel Johnson.  She quickly concluded that blogs were akin to autobiography.  However she added that blogs were much worse than autobiography.  Traditional autobiography required that the contents pass muster with an editor before they were broadcast to the world.  Blogs have no such editor.  These days, anybody can feel free to broadcast his life and thoughts to the world, whether such writing is worthy of attention or not (and for some reason, Janet looked at Your Humble Narrator with a knowing glance when mentioning the latter option).  Insensitive to the danger (see above), I then asked why people would feel the need to write an autobiography.  “Narcissism.”  Janet didn’t miss a beat in giving that answer.  Blogging is the ultimate form of narcissism, concluded Janet.  One assumes that  one’s every thought is worthy of attention and so one blogs.  Moreover, my Long-Suffering Wife added, to write with a complete lack of concern for the Reader, to write simply for one’s own amusement and yet post such writings in a public forum, is the Supreme Form of Narcissism. 

Apparently my wife thinks I am a Narcissist.

Creators

In My Life as a Reader, I have stumbled onto books, both good and ill, in a multitude of ways (indeed, a history of how I came to read all the books I have ever read could potentially be an interesting thing to read (well, interesting to me...perhaps…though the longer I toy with this idea, the more I think it might be a rather dull catalogue in the end)), but I cannot recall an example as circuitous as the Story of How I came to Read the Book at Hand.

Last year, I was the outside reader on a thesis in Studio Art.  (For those unacquainted with the details of Mount Holyoke College Faculty Legislation: 1) Why have you not yet read this fine publication? (you can read it here), and, more to the point, 2) part of the senior thesis process at Mount Holyoke is a thesis defense which requires at least one of the examiners to be from outside the department in which the thesis is being done.)  (And, by the way, the thesis, which is not the subject of this here rumination, was good—some rather interesting Art (with a capital A).)  I was talking with the student doing the thesis (Ashley), and she mentioned that she was extraordinarily interested in the idea of the Trinity; that paradox was much like the way she thought about her Art; in fact she was puzzling out how to express the Trinity in art.  (And lest the Reader get the wrong idea, for Ashley, not exactly a devout Christian, this was a matter of art, not religious devotion.)  Her remarks immediately triggered in the recesses of my mind a hazy memory:  Augustine, in one of his myriad works had some sort of thing where he compared the Trinity to the process of making art, or something like that, but it the whole memory was pretty fuzzy since I never actually read this bit in Augustine, I just remember reading about how he wrote about it, but I couldn’t remember where I read that fact, so rather than send Ashley off to the library with that sort of vague mandate to find a work I could only vaguely remember, I promised to look it up for her.  After she left, I started pulling my volumes of Augustine off the shelf looking for the passage about which I had that dim memory of having once seen mentioned.  It wasn’t in The Trinity, nor in any other book of his I had.   So, I puzzled.  Then it hit me—it wasn’t Augustine, it was Dorothy Sayers.  The Mind of the Maker.  Augustine: Sayers…memory is a fickle beast.  (Augustine had something to say about that, but I digress.)

I subsequently recommended Sayers’ book to Ashley.  She came in a few days later telling me how amazing the book was.  I was, to be honest, a bit surprised.  I’d never read the book (obviously) because the idea of explaining the Trinity by talking about artists struck me as an intellectual dead end, the sort of thing someone grasping at straws would throw together in an off-hand way in the vain hope that maybe it just might work.  Yet here was this thoroughly secular student telling me how amazing this work of Christian theology was.  Obviously, I needed to read the book.

I did.  It is amazing.  It can be read as an attempt to explain the Trinity, I suppose, but it is much better read as an attempt to explain the artist.  As Sayers argues:  God created us in His image and thus God is a creator, so if we are created in His image, then that means, in part, that we are created as creators.  An utterly absorbing idea, that.  Our urge to create is the very spark of divinity.

To be a good creator is thus to have all three of the aspects of the Godhead.  We need the controlling idea, the means to cause the idea to become incarnate and the power to enable the creation to work in the world.  Artists fail when they are either too driven by one part of that trinity or when one of the parts atrophies.  Indeed, Sayers notes the distinction between the Father Driven artists, possessed of an intellectual idea with no means of expressing it; the Son Driven  artists with the tools to express, but nothing to be expressed; and the Spirit driven artists who imagine they can work their Power on the world with neither Idea not a means to express an idea.  (Undergraduate artists are almost always that last group—nothing to say, and no skill at saying it, yet they spew their emotions onto the page.)  (And just for the record, Ashley was not Spirit driven; if I had to say, I think she is Father Driven in Sayers’ framework.  Interesting art.  You just might hear about her someday.)

The summary does not even begin to capture the feel of the book, however.   Writing this review feels like trying to express an Idea with shabby equipment, rapidly decaying.  So, I’ll change the question:  for what audience is this book intended?  Before reading it, I assumed it was a work of Christian apologetics, belonging, as I noted above, in the (rather large) set of futile attempts to explain the Trinity to Human minds. Said attempts are an exemplar of an impossible task.  But, Sayers’ book isn’t in that set at all.  To be sure, one learns a great deal about the Trinity from reading this book, but it doesn’t attempt to explain the Trinity.  Indeed, I’m not convinced that the Trinity is really what this book is best at explaining.  I think it is much better seen as an exploration of the human artist.  At that task, it is an utterly brilliant book.  And, I suspect a terribly neglected book by the very people who would most profit from reading it.  The neglect comes from the general aversion to all things religious.  Imagine a book explaining artists which takes as a given that we can gain a better understanding of the artistic mind by thinking about the mind of the Maker of the maker.  Now imagine the hurdle which will have to be overcome to convince an artist who denies the existence of the Prime Maker to read a book showing how the mind of that maker explains the artist’s mind. 

It’s too bad.  Many a secular artists would enjoy this book a great deal.  Many a Christian would also enjoy this book, but will be put off by the realization that it is about artists.  Christian Artists?  Well,  sadly, there are far too few of them (well, there are too few of them with enough talent to merit the title of Artist, as opposed to ones who fancy themselves artists) to know what they would make of this book.     

Leaving Kilroy

Last night I returned from Halifax (Nova Scotia (Canada (Earth—well, I guess I am still on Earth (come to think of it, why do we say we are on Earth, but in Canada; after all, my physical relationship to Canada is (or more properly, was) the same as my physical relationship to Earth)))).   I was at a conference there—mirabile dictu, a good conference. 

At the hotel bar one evening, one of the participants noted that the first incarnation of this particular conference in 2004 was the first time he had been the senior member at a conference.  I knew exactly what he meant.  Somewhere along the line, I moved from being one of the young folk to being one of the old folk at a few conferences.  (Now since I am just 45, this surely says something about the kind of conferences to which I get invited, but I am not sure what.)  I’ve noticed this at the last few conferences—while sitting around talking about the academy (an occupational hazard for professors), I’m the one giving advice to assistant professors.  I don’t know when this transition happened.

Which is exactly the theme of the second volume of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.  In volume 2, A Buyer’s Market, our narrator notes:

Certain stages of experience might be compared with the game of Russian billiards, played (as I used to play with Jean, when the time came) on those small green tables, within the secret recesses of which, at the termination of a given passage of time—a quarter of an hour, I think—the hidden gate goes down; after the descent of which, the coloured balls return no longer to the slot to be replayed; and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.

This volume certainly has a different tone than the first—for one thing it is a much more compressed period than the leisurely descriptions of school in volume 1.  The Buyer’s Market in the title is, I assume, the marriage market—but this is never made really clear.  Our narrator grows up in this novel; one senses that while the first novel is the story of a kid, future novels will be about an adult.  Cleverly, the novel doesn’t really have a striking break point—it isn’t really clear when the change even happens here.  We can see it most clearly in the narrator’s relationship with women—at the beginning we still have the crushes of a kid; by the end, we have someone sliding into a meaningless tryst with a loose woman to whom he feels no genuine attachment.

So, if I think about my own life, when did I grow up?  I used to think this song was musical brilliance.  Now?  Well…it’s still not bad playing in the background, but, I suspect, only because it reminds me of my youth.  When did any of us grow up? 

(The Wee Reader may translate this thought experiment to some future time, project backwards and imagine a time when the current manifestation of the Wee Reader is now a Past and manifestly Younger version of the Aged Reader and thus the change under discussion will have Come True.  In said thought Experiment, no fair crafting a Future Defining Event to mark the Change.) 

A Neverending Line of Toads

I don’t often read books which make me feel full of youthful optimism.  Obviously, I have a sardonic and mordant streak (Ok, “streak” may be a bit understated), but I am generally quite upbeat and think the future isn’t all that bad.  Sure the world is decaying and getting worse all the time, but in the juvenescence of the year came Christ the tiger and all that.  (Yes, he devours us, but even still…)  I can’t remember the last time I felt that bubbly, optimistic, really the world isn’t all that bad, attitude.  After all, the world really is that bad, but we might as well smile as the ship is sinking.  Yet, here I am reading a book, thinking the whole time:  “Oh, please Philip, it isn’t that bad.  Seriously, now.  Must you be so bleak and glum and dismal?”

That’s what Philip Larkin does to me...which makes me wonder how in the world he is such a popular poet.  In a world in which I generally have less optimism than most that things are getting better, how can there be a popular poet who shows nary a sign of optimism?  The general spirit of the age is that if things go just right, if the right people are elected or the forces of evil can be stopped, then we can remake the world in out own image and everything will be all warm and cuddly and cheerful—so how can those same people like Larkin so much?  Maybe I spend too much time with Americans.  Maybe the British are really all dour and sad—come to think of it, maybe they have every reason to be glum—the weather’s bad and all they have to look forward to is King Charles.

After reading a New Criterion review of Larkin, I bought a copy of Collected Poems.  Well, one of the volumes entitled Collected Poems.  The same editor, Anthony Thwaite, has put together two different collections of Larkin and cleverly gave them both the same title.  So, this is the one that has Larkin’s original books republished instead of putting all the poems in chronological order.  (Can I just say that Thwaite belongs in the Hall of Shame for this—how could he not notice that the two collections had the same title?  Was he trying to confuse?  Where were the editors in all this?)

I’ve recently read The North Ship, The Less Deceived, and The Whitsun Weddings.  (He has one other book, High Windows, but I am ready to move on from Larkin—one can only take so much dark sky before wanting a little sun in one’s poetry reading.) 

The North Ship really isn’t worth reading.  If he hadn’t published anything after that, we wouldn’t be talking about Larkin today.

The other two were good, quite good.  But, bleak—did I mention that already?

Consider the poem “Next, Please.”  I like this poem a lot, so it makes a useful means of seeing how Larkin works.  I’d reproduce it here but, I am still not sure whether reproducing a poem in an online blog critically discussing the poem falls under the Fair Use doctrine of Copyright Law or not.  So, you can read the poem here (is that an infringement of copyright?  If it is wrong to put a poem on the web, is it doubly wrong to link to the poem or is that simply a repetition of the first wrong?  Copyright law is annoying. (Don’t tell Mark Helprin I said that.)), or listen to it being read here, and pretend I didn’t link to it  if you are worried about the legality of my actions.

[For those who didn't bother to click on the link, the poem is about how we stand on a bluff waiting for a ship to drop off the good things in life, but

We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break

(Linking to a portion of a poem in a critical analysis is within the terms of Fair Use doctrine, by the way.)]

And after reading that, my first reaction is, Oh Please, Philip.  It isn’t that  bad.  Surely every now and then a ship drops off at least a small bit of cargo to brighten our days.  Surely we get a trinket every now and then, don’t we?  And, therein lies the brilliance of Larkin and the tedium of Larkin.  Poem after poem wit the same tone and the same message.  All is pointless and lost.  You are a toad, merely going to your dull job and learning to enjoy your dull, pathetic life (“Toads” and “Toads Revisited”).  Your memories of good times are just that, memories—there is nothing to them and everything you remember as making you happy is gone, long gone ("I Remember, I Remember”).  Seeing a dead body loaded into an ambulance is really just a picture of the emptiness of our lives (“Ambulances”).

And so, what do we make of Larkin?  Technically, he is very good.  He has a consistent message and relates it well.  But, it clearly takes a different temperament than I have in order to deeply enjoy reading him.  Once can admire his work, one can even enjoy it.  But only in small doses.

The Avengers

Finally saw The Avengers last night.  It will come as a shock to nobody who has read this blog for even a limited amount of time that I am overly fond of superhero movies.  Such fondness stems from being overly fond of comic books.  The movie was, in a word, amazing.  Best superhero movie ever.  The Dark Knight Returns used to have that crown.  The comparison is instructive.  Partly, the comparison is personal preference—The Avengers is always the comic book I wanted to like the most.  In its run, there have been good and bad years—which is hard to avoid when the composition of the team changes constantly.  But, I always loved the superhero team-ups.  (Though, oddly, Spider-Man, the ultimate non-joiner, is my favorite superhero.)  I also always liked the Marvel Universe better than the DC universe.  But, the real reason The Avengers trumps Dark Knight is that it is truer to the spirit of what makes superhero comic books fun.  Dark Knight captures the post 1980s, Miller/Moore dark world of comics perfectly.  It is brilliantly done.  But, The Avengers has the fun along with the drama. 

At their best, superhero books are more than just brooding depressing tales.  They are fun exaltation of the human spirit—showing us the greatness of superheroes gives us something to which to aspire.  The genius of Stan Lee’s Marvel era was that the superheroes become human; they are flawed people with personalities.  Sometimes they don’t get along.  They have different motives.  And yet, in the face of great peril, they rise above themselves to do great deeds.  This movie captures that part of superhero comic books perfectly.  It’s movie that reminds us all that while we may not have superpowers, heroism and greatness requires an Aspiration to be heroic and great.  We need superheroes to remind us of what we can become.  But we need superheroes which take on mortal form so that they too can sympathize with our plight.  We need to see Tony Stark become an alcoholic and Peter Parker get bullied in school and the Avengers to be persecuted by the government and Steve Rogers to watch Bucky die and Bruce Banner to become an outcast.  When these gods walk among us suffering from mortal temptations and real pain, it draws our thoughts upward. 

The book Marvels by Busier (drawn by Ross) thus provides an interesting example of the Death of Faith in the modern age.  The book looks at the early years of Marvel through the eyes of a mortal.  It’s clever in a way.  All the events from the early years—in particular the first few years after Lee and Ditko arrived at Marvel—are here.  The book asks us to imagine living in a world where Galactus arrives to destroy the earth and we sit helplessly hoping that someone can save us.  We imagine what it would be like to hear the announcement that Reed Richards and Sue Storm are getting married or read that the Avengers have been declared a public menace and then vindicated followed by the celebration of Avengers Day.  But in the end, fear of mutants reigns and the X-Men are outcast; people show insufficient gratitude for being saved time and again.  The protagonist of the book watches Gwen Stacey die and realizes that faith in superheroes is misplaced.  There are no heroes.  Gwen dies because Spider-Man tries to save her.  And so, the book closes with a celebration of normalcy.  No need to aspire higher, no need to become better than we are.  Look down, young man, ignore that spectacle in the sky.

Or take Moore’s Top Ten, which I also finished recently.  I reviewed part one some time ago, noting it was just Hill Street Blues with superheroes.  The whole series had that feel.  (Well, expect the utterly pointless, let’s cash in on a preexisting title, The Forty-Niners—it’s a prequel to Top Ten.  And it realizes none of the potential a prequel could have had.  Other than the coloring—the book has the look of an old movie reel—the book doesn’t do much interesting.)  What about the original series is interesting?  There are some clever superheroes here; it’s an ensemble cast, so it has the potential to be like The Avengers.  But, in the end, it too shows the same lack of faith in heroes as we saw in Marvels.  The central bad guys are stopped, but of course the chief villain is the Commissioner.  The only being who ends up celebrated at the end is the robot, who, of course was the object of speciesism and discrimination until he proves that he is as good as anyone.  It’s a nice tale, well told—this is Alan Moore after all—but uplifting?  Hardly.

The same is true of another comic book I recently reread: Loeb, Lee and Williams, Batman: Hush.  This is one of the best modern Batman comic books.  I can’t figure out if they really thought the identity of Hush was going to be a surprise—if you haven’t figured out who Hush is very early on in the story, you just aren’t paying attention.  This is a beautiful book, and Batman gets to battle a host of villains.  And yet, after battling that host, Batman is still a lonely man, fighting his own demons.  That is the Batman’s story, of course, so in this case the lack of an uplift is suitable—the Batman as happy-go-lucky hero books are always a bit jarring.  This is why, I suspect, that the Nolan/Bale Batman movies get such critical acclaim.  Batman is the superhero of the modern age—as Batman says at the end of Batman Begins, he will be exactly what the people need.  Right now, people want their superheroes dark, brooding, and dangerous.  (Lovely: dark and deep—not a bad description of Batman (the colon is meant to clear up the nagging question of whether there is a second comma).)

So, consider this the summer when the soul of a nation is put to the test.  We have the final movie in the Batman trilogy and the first Avengers movie being released.  Which movie’s spirit is a better description of the modern world?  That’s will be easy to answer.  Which movie’s spirit captures better the world in which you would want to live?  That is your test question.