Kinds of Poetry - Tolkien vs. Jackson

Jackson apparently thinks the characters Tolkien gives us are too simply good to be fully believable to modern audiences, and so he feels obligated to "complicate" them, to give them internal conflicts other than the ones they actually have, in the hopes that we will better be able to relate to them.

I'm quoting from this article in the Nov/Dec 2013 Touchstone Magazine, in which Donald T. Williams explains how literature, while delighting us with its art, is more powerful than history or philosophy to nurture our moral vision, or to corrupt us with false images.

With the help of quotes from Sir Philip Sidney, who wrote Apology for Poetry in the sixteenth century, he shows how "Tolkien was very consciously and deliberately following the literary tradition that flows down to us from Sidney through Dr. Johnson and C. S. Lewis."

Peter Jackson the filmmaker seems to be flowing in a different stream. But he is an artist, and of course will impart his own soul to his work. I wouldn't expect him to give us The Rings, because that has already been done, and he is not J.R.R. Tolkien. But it is unfortunate that he has changed things to the degree and in the directions he has. Williams points out specific ways in which the characters who inspired us in the books disappoint us in the movies, and makes these general remarks:

By this process of negative moral transformation, in other words, we reach the place where beloved characters are unrecognizable to Tolkien's fans, and those fans feel betrayed. And they are right to feel so, though mostly they do not understand why. It is because the difference between the books and the movies is not just one of necessary adaptation to a different medium. It is that the author consciously followed the Sidneyan tradition while the adaptor is either ignorant of it or doesn't understand it or has rejected it.

Read the whole article here.

Philosophy of Pie and Picnics

Vegan Coconut Pie

Between tonight and tomorrow this subject must become theoretical, as Monday my church begins fasting in preparation for the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. Though I admit to making vegan desserts, like this coconut pie for Father L.'s birthday, usually I'd rather just wait until a fast-free day to enjoy the butter and cream. Hey, by then I'm happy to pour cream in my coffee and call it dessert.

But that's not festive enough for a picnic, or for a tea party. I think both of those events demand some cake, if they are going to be traditional (in addition to the scones, if you want those). Sadly, our family is generally lacking in cakes, with the major exception of Pearl, who learned on her own and makes lovely ones. I don't think her household lacks cake; I don't know anything about their picnics.

The rest of us, going back a couple of generations and on both sides of the family, eat pie. One of us even declared, "Cakes are for looking at."

I can't grant that much myself, because my very few attempts at cake decorating beyond the sprinkling of some coarse sugar did not draw any comments about prettiness. My favorite topping for children's birthday cakes of long ago was an array of gumdrops -- but with that we start slipping into the candy category.

It may have been Big Sister Pearl who baked this birthday cake for Soldier, using plenty of that ingredient that is so important. I can see something in his expression that hints at what he would do 20 years down the road: leave cake out of his wedding altogether, in preference for pie.

I blame bloggers for giving me the feeling that something is missing. Have you noticed how many blog posts have been written about this or that recipe for cake, which comes out of the oven in the late morning or afternoon just in time to have a slice with some tea, at the kitchen table with the children just home from school, or just taking a break from homeschool?

Proof that I baked a cake

It's not clear how I would work that tradition into my lifestyle at this point. My husband would be alarmed and reluctant, to put a good spin on it, and might not eat any cake. I'm considering reviving my Girlfriends Tea Parties just so I can make a cake or two. When I did this before it was a great way to try out a few of the hundreds of dessert recipes I have in my collection. After we sampled them together, all the ladies took home most of the leftovers to share with their sweeter-toothed husbands.

One huge advantage to packing the cake into a basket instead, to be eaten on a blanket spread under a tree, is that I wouldn't have to clean the house beforehand. But the Old English style of picnicking has also not caught on in the Glad Tribe. Our group has favored throwing handfuls of trail mix into their mouths so that they can get to the mountain peak and back before dark. None of this leisurely sitting around eating and fattening up.

But I have a new desire to broaden our style in that regard, too, probably from reading too many blog posts about Wind in the Willows and grown-up girls taking their Toad and Mole dolls on outings with yummy noshables.

It's good that I will have a few weeks to think about these important questions -- or rather, not to think about them. And by then I'll be too busy getting ready for a new grandchild, and getting ready for a trip...Then there will be another fast, and then another new grandchild. All these ideas for events that require a Lot of Planning really don't fit in this summer.
 
But it won't take long to throw together a pie to set before my dear husband, a blackberry or cherry would suit just fine, and leftovers won't be a problem.

Elder Zosima and his brother

In my reading of The Brothers Karamazov, I came this morning, Monday of Holy Week, to the part "From the Life of the Elder Zosima." The elder first relates about his older brother, who only at the age of seventeen and sick unto death, turned from anger and scoffing toward a path that might lead to repentance, and seemingly only to please his mother. But that is not an entirely bad reason.

...on Tuesday morning my brother started keeping the fast and going to church. "I'm doing it only for your sake, mother, to give you joy and peace," he said to her....But he did not go to church for long, he took to his bed, so that he had to confess and receive communion at home. The days grew bright, clear, fragrant -- Easter was late that year. All night, I remember, he used to cough, slept badly, but in the morning he would always get dressed and try to sit in an armchair. So I remember him: he sits, quiet and meek, he smiles, he is sick but his countenance is glad, joyful. He was utterly changed in spirit -- such a wondrous change had suddenly begun in him!

The young man asked forgiveness of everyone and talked about his great sin, but at the same time was so happy and full of thankfulness and exhortations, that people thought he was going mad.

Thus he awoke every day with more and more tenderness, rejoicing and all atremble with love. The doctor would come -- the old German Eisenschmidt used to come to us: "Well, what do you think, doctor, shall I live one more day in the world?" he would joke with him. "Not just one day, you will live many days," the doctor would answer, "you will live months and years, too." "But what are years, what are months!" he would exclaim. "Why count the days, when even one day is enough for a man to know all happiness. My dears, why do we quarrel, boast before each other, remember each other's offenses? Let us go into the garden, let us walk and play and love and praise and kiss each other, and bless our life."

This older brother died a few weeks after Easter, when the teller of the story, the elder Zosima, was only eight years old. He talks, now near death himself, more about his childhood, and how it was also during Holy Week that he began to see more when he went to church.

But I remember how, even before I learned to read, a certain spiritual perception visited me for the first time, when I was just eight years old. Mother took me to church by myself (I do not remember where my brother was then), during Holy Week, to the Monday liturgy. It was a clear day, and, remembering it now, I seem to see again the incense rising from the censer and quietly ascending upwards, and from above, through a narrow window in the cupola, God's rays pouring down upon us in the church, and the incense rising up to them in waves, as if dissolving into them. I looked with deep tenderness, and for the first time in my life I consciously received the first seed of the word of God in my soul. A young man walked out into the middle of the church with a big book, so big that it seemed to me he even had difficulty in carrying it, and he placed it on the analogion [lectern], opened it, and began to read, and suddenly, then, for the first time I understood something, for the first time in my life I understood what was read in God's church.

The reading was from the book of Job. And tonight I myself plan to attend this liturgy, and though I haven't seen the program for the service, I now have confidence that I will hear this same reading. How many times have I also watched the beams of light shining down when I stood in church, and even felt their heat on my face, like the warmth of God's Holy Spirit?

The Elder Zosima is a fictional character, but he is believed to be based on a real-life monk in old Russia. In the novel, where I am reading, Zosima goes on in his very moving fashion to tell his life's story: "-- and over all is God's truth, moving, reconciling, all-forgiving!"

Isn't it sweet that God should arrange for me to read this passage this morning, to help me in an unusual way to become even more receptive to His being with us tonight by means of hymns such as, "Let my prayer arise in Thy sight as incense....," and the Psalms of Ascent -- and the Holy Mysteries!

Last week our bishop was present with us, and he gave us a good word about the last days of Lent -- well, technically Lent has come to an end, but we are still in the anticipation and preparation that is Holy Week. He said that Lent is not about finding every bit of dirt in our souls, but about the bridal chamber, about discovering the great love that our Lord Jesus has for us.

Perhaps Zosima's brother went to a Bridegroom Matins service on Tuesday; we have three of them this week, and tomorrow I hope to attend at 6:30 in the morning. The Lord Himself has been filling my lamp with the oil of His Holy Spirit!

Snowmen and Jello - Christmas

Two Glad Grandboys

While we are waiting for Christmas and preparing our gifts, and thinking about what Santa and our parents are preparing for us, children are lucky if we have some snow around with which to build a snowman or snowlady.

My own grandchildren sometimes have that. But when I was a child, I only had the beloved "Frosty the Snowman" 45 to play on my little record player.

It's the only record I remember from my youth until I bought such ones as "Like a Rolling Stone," and I listened to the Frosty tale over and over so that I can still hear the voice -- maybe it was Red Foley -- in my head. On the other side he sang "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." The image below is not quite like what I owned, but it evokes the memory well enough.
 

I remain snowless, and don't mind a bit. Besides, I can watch "The Snowman" on video. Those who lack the technology for watching movies (and I know there must be some of those people still, though they are probably not the ones reading this) could read the wordless book The Snowman.

But the video is so enchanting, with its haunting tune. The first time I borrowed the movie from the library, it was a version with the song, but since then I have only found it with a purely instrumental score. We are all fortunate now, and I am more than pleased, because I can share with you what I found on YouTube, a clip that includes sung lyrics of "Walking in the Air."



















When I turned fifty a friend took me browsing in a quilt shop to pick out a few pieces of fabric as a birthday present from her. Several prints called to mind images from the adventures of the snowman and his little boy, and I took rectangles of them home with a theme brewing.

I sewed by hand several potholders that I call my Snowman Potholders. Of course, they have nothing to do with Christmas, except for their frequent role in pulling pies out of the oven for Christmas dinner.

Waiting....We Orthodox are still waiting until December 25 (or January 7) for the feast and waiting to feast, because we are preparing our hearts, which are tightly bound to our bodies. But participation in the Advent fast needn't mean that children of any age must forgo all goodies. I made this festive rainbow jello for one Christmas Day, but while we are still fasting it seems to me it could easily be made with some soy or coconut milk replacing the small dairy part of the recipe.

RAINBOW RIBBON DESSERT

1 (3 oz.) package (each flavor) raspberry, lime, orange, lemon, and strawberry Jell-O
6-1/4 cups water
1-1/4 cups evaporated milk

Dissolve raspberry Jell-O in 1 cup boiling water. Remove 1/2 of Jell-O to a bowl and add 1/4 cup cold water. Place into a 9-inch square pan. Place in refrigerator until slightly firm. To the remaining half of Jell-O, add 1/4 cup evaporated milk. Cool and place over slightly firm layer in pan. Continue procedure with remaining flavors of Jell-O in this order: lime, orange, lemon, and strawberry. Cool each mixture before layering. Chill completely. Cut into squares to serve. Yield: serves 8 to 12. 

Now I'm trying to figure out how to tweak this colorful recipe into a frozen dessert. It already has the brightness of Tolkien's wintery image, and I think I might attract my snowmen friends to my holiday table if I just advertise that for dessert we are serving a treat called "Northern Lights."


(This is the third in my contributions to Pom Pom's Childlike Christmas Party.)

George Eliot and The Paralytic

This Lord's Day we were remembering the paralytic, who sat by the pool waiting for a chance to get into the water at those times when an angel stirred it, so that he might be healed. After 38 years, Jesus came by and healed him.

Father John in his homily highlighted one aspect of the Gospel story: how we are like that man in our seeming paralysis when it comes to overcoming our sins. Priests often hear in confession the lament of the Christian who continues to battle the same weaknesses and failings year after year, feeling that he makes little progress.

I think a lot about the truism that habits are like a second nature to us. As we read in Jeremiah 13:23: "Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard its spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil."

It sounds very little like one chipper exhortation you might have read: "It's never too late to be what you might have been." Well, yes, why not just start today? When I read that on Tuesday, I remembered the paralytic, and I thought on my own unchanged bad habits. After his 38 years, wasn't it in fact too late for many things? (The assumption is that one might have been greater; the reverse is probably more true, that it's never too late to start a downward spiral.)

For myself, let's see...how many years have I been cultivating certain of my bad habits? More than that, I'm afraid. But it's a simple thing: "The only thing that stands between me and greatness is me." (Woody Allen)

George Eliot

George Eliot is credited with having made that bold assertion, "It's never to late to be what you might have been." She was the subject of a New Yorker article from February of this year, "Middlemarch and Me," by Rebecca Mead, who questions the validity of the quote and whether it even reflects the true outlook of the author Mary Ann Evans.

Mead has been a lifelong lover of Eliot's books, Middlemarch in particular, and she points out some hints that the author leaves in her novels, as well as forthright confessions from her journals, to show that her general attitude was wiser and more modest.

In Middlemarch, we read of the main character,  "Dorothea herself had no dreams of being praised above other women, feeling that there was always something better which she might have done, if she had only been better and known better."

Mead writes: "Middlemarch is not about blooming late, or unexpectedly coming into one's own after the unproductive flush of youth. Middlemarch suggests that it is always too late to be what you might have been -- but it also shows that, virtually without exception, the unrealized life is worth living. The book that Virginia Woolf characterized as 'one of the few English novels written for grown-up people' is also a book about how to be a grownup person -- about how to bear one's share of sorrow, failure, and loss, as well as to enjoy moments of hard-won happiness."

Let's look back at the Paralytic by the Sheep's Gate Pool. He must have had some way to propel himself, perhaps one limb that was functional, so that he could sit there for much of his life hoping to get down to the water first. He certainly had patience -- and perseverance, to keep trying.

Father John said that even if we feel we have nothing more than a big toe's worth of strength against our sins, we must keep struggling. Because we never know when Jesus will come to us. When he came to the cripple by the pool, He Himself was the source of the healing, and the man was delivered from his afflictions and was able to walk and carry his bed. For most of us, we will not receive the equivalent healing until we are resurrected in the coming Kingdom.

In the meantime, we will have failures. Maybe we will even think we are failures. It is very discouraging when one realizes what Samuel Johnson found: "The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken." On another aspect of this human experience, Dorothea said in Middlemarch about her husband's intellectual labors: "Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure."

The most helpful sort of activity to persevere in, if one wants to be on the path to God, is prayer. "A long perseverance" of this sort would never be disappointing. The very moments of prayer have the potential to be Heaven itself, in the presence of the God Who is Love.

"In patience you possess your souls," we read in Luke 21, and Mark Twain elaborates: "Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time."

Whether we are being too easy on ourselves is the question. If we are being lazy, of course, that is one of the sins we are trying to overcome. And pride in thinking we are equal to any task, we can be anything we put our minds to -- that also must be set aside.

Mary Ann Evans put it this way in her journal: "The difficulty is, to decide how far resolution should set in the direction of activity rather than in the acceptance of a more negative state."

But I like best the way St. Seraphim of Sarov speaks about this, and will close with his gentle words: One should be lenient towards the weaknesses and imperfections of one's own soul and endure one's own shortcomings as we tolerate the shortcomings of our neighbours, and at the same time not become lazy but impel oneself to work on one's improvement incessantly.

The Hungry Soul - Struggle to Stand

Other posts on this book: The Hungry Soul -- Intro (Why I love this book) and The Hungry Soul -- How Science Disappoints

The charming children we get to know in the recent documentary "Babies" are, at the end of the film, struggling to become toddlers, persons enjoying the upright posture that is a mark of homo erectus. They don't even think about it, because it seems to be a given that children want very much to stand up and walk. 

That is, unless you are Lazy Tommy Pumpkinhead, who lives in an electric house that does everything for him; Tommy can't bring himself to get out of bed or even stand up without assistance. But his story is meant to teach any self-respecting child to be self-respecting, to be human, and not lazy. He is the hero of a children's book I liked to read to our children.

In the chapter on "The Human Form," in his book The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of our Nature, Leon Kass examines how the erect and forward-facing posture that distinguishes us from most of the animal world contributes to our outlook and coordinates with our calling to be lords of creation, as it were. He takes many of his foundational ideas on this subject from the neurologist-psychologist Erwin Straus, and from his essay titled "The Upright Posture."

In my reviews I'm skipping around in the book, but I should explain that the first chapters make a case for the primacy of form. That is, all living beings are more than a collection of the same kinds of particles. Even though absolutely all our material is replaced during our lifetime, we retain the same recognizable form. And as this is a book about the human soul, the subject is next narrowed to the human form. From there the author goes on to discuss what humans do with these bodies.

The uprightness of our form is what I am trying to stick to in this post. I think of this a lot now, when I wake up in the mornings and am lying in bed for at least a few seconds. Rarely do I have to get up with an alarm clock, for which I am grateful. But at this time of my life no baby is demanding that I get up to feed her and no child will be late for school if I linger a bit. This morning when I woke I realized that God had answered my prayer to be wakened in time to go to Bridegroom Matins, so I hopped out of bed.

But it isn't always so easy. Wouldn't it be lovely if we could keep that verve that children have, that makes them get up, or cry to be let out of their cribs, as soon as they wake up? It seems that God gives us a special grace, when we are new to the world, to work hard at standing before we know what work is.

Though upright posture characterizes the human species, each of us must struggle to attain it. Our birthright includes standing, but we cannot stand at birth. Feral children who have survived in the wild were not found upright but were able to become so. As with other distinctively human traits (speech, for example), human beings must work to make themselves do or become what nature prepares them to be or do. Upright posture is a human, and humanizing, accomplishment.

Kass quotes Straus:

Before reflection or self-reflection start, but as if they were a prelude to it, work makes its appearance within the realm of the elemental biological functions of man. In getting up, in reaching the upright posture, man must oppose the forces of gravity. It seems to be his nature to oppose nature in its impersonal, fundamental aspects with natural means. However, gravity is never fully overcome; upright posture always maintains its character of counteraction.

And Kass elaborates:

Effort does not cease with rising up; it is required to maintain our uprightness. Automatic regulation does not suffice; staying up takes continuous attention and activity, as well it should, inasmuch as our very existence is at stake. Awakeness is necessary for uprightness; uprightness is necessary for survival. Yet our standing in the world is always precarious; we are always in danger of falling. Our natural stance is, therefore, one of 'resistance,' of "withstanding,' of becoming constant, stable.

It doesn't get any easier, does it? As we get older and weaker, the temptation is to sit down more often. I notice that tendency in church, where in my tradition we stand during the services, which means for one or two hours at a time we stand. What better attitude could we take toward The Holy Con-substantial Life-Creating Trinity?

Yes, we can prostrate ourselves, and I know people who do that when their ailing backs prevent their standing in prayer. But I notice in the Bible that after people fall on their faces before messengers of God, they are told to stand up. The Psalms speak of standing in His presence, and in the New Testament we are told, "...having done all, to stand."

Stand firm, stand in the gap, stand still and see the salvation of the Lord...The posture is both a metaphor for and a support to our efforts, the whole Christian life being a struggle against laziness, even to the point of, "Let us labor therefore to enter into that rest." (Hebrews 4) Perhaps if I stand a little longer than is comfortable in church, or work a few more minutes at my household chores before sitting down, it will make me call out to God and ask for help to be the kind of person He wants.

And if I doubt my ability, let me remind myself, "You've been doing this your whole life, resisting gravity, walking this precarious walk against natural forces that want to pull you down. You can keep doing it, you can!" I will call to mind the words of T.S. Eliot: "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." And not forgetting the difference between the metaphor and the reality, I'm only too aware that some people who are no longer able to stand with their bodies are standing in the gap for me.

As to lying in bed, for most of us it is a near necessity, though the saints' lives testify that some of them avoided it like the plague. One wants to avoid the condition described in Proverbs 26, "As a door turns on its hinges, so a sluggard turns on his bed." I haven't yet figured out how exactly it fits in without spoiling my thesis, but I have to mention my dear G.K. Chesterton's delightful essay, "On Lying in Bed," in which he cautions tongue-in-cheek against legalism and hypocrisy, mostly about how early one rises:

A man can get used to getting up at five o'clock in the morning. A man cannot very well get used to being burnt for his opinions; the first experiment is commonly fatal. Let us pay a little more attention to these possibilities of the heroic and the unexpected. I dare say that when I get out of this bed I shall do some deed of an almost terrible virtue.

This drawing of Lazy Tommy illustrates what happens after he is all dressed and fed, and the long afternoon stretches ahead of him with nothing to do but propel himself up the stairs -- not walking, but crawling, it should be noted -- but his bed is the attraction that gives him that much energy.

I like this picture, only because it shows that even Tommy is capable of struggling. Maybe we could think of him as a late bloomer, crawling when he should have learned to walk -- but at least he is showing some spunk. At the end of the book he experiences enough discomfort resulting from an electrical outage and the failure of technology that he resolves to "turn over a new leaf."

As I finish this post we are in Holy Week. All through Lent I wanted to write something about the wonderful midweek services that we have (and at which I hope to worship tonight), but it seemed to be beyond my ability to capture even a bit of the sweetness in words. One thing I love about them is that all the Psalms that are called Songs of Ascent are read at each service. And the last of those, Psalm 134, provides a fitting picture of our souls' posture before our God.

Behold, bless ye the LORD, 

all ye servants of the LORD, 

which by night stand 

in the house of the LORD. 

Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, 

and bless the LORD. 

The LORD that made heaven and earth 

bless thee out of Zion.

Further posts on this book: The Hungry Soul - How Science Disappoints

Four Storybook Friends

Who are my "fictional best friends"? This meme was going around some time back, and got me thinking about "The Top Ten Characters I'd Like to Be Friends With." I don't aspire to be Best Friends -- that's too big an idea -- but to be A Friend is something I would consider. You see, not being a People Person, I don't really feel like taking on ten more friends with problems, which book characters always must have, preferably a few of them in order for it to be a good book.

But these characters came to mind:

1. Harold of the Harold and the Purple Crayon because he is so creative and resourceful in his solutions for all the predicaments he gets into, and I'd like to go with him on his adventures. I would never tire of watching him draw whatever he wants, so quickly and easily. When he goes to bed he even draws the moon out the window so I know we think alike.

2. Natty Bumpo of the Leatherstocking Tales. He is a real gentleman, but not a fussy one. He would have wonderful tales to tell and philosophizing to do as we took long walks in the woods, and I'd be perfectly safe with him, as he is pretty much king of the forest and could protect me from any Indians or wild animals, and trap or hunt for all the meat we could want.

3. Kristin of Kristin Lavransdatter only because she seems to badly need a good woman friend. Besides her mother, who isn't even nearby to have a chat with, I can't see that she has one female friend in the whole three novels about her life. I wonder, if I were her friend, if I could make any positive difference in the drama? I know it would be a lot of work, but in her world I think I could do it. Back then I wouldn't have all the stresses pulling me away from home so I would have more emotional resources to give to Kristin.

4. Winnie-the-Pooh would be a good friend to have for the times when you just wanted to throw sticks over the bridge or sit around eating condensed milk and thinking deeply about thoughts that other people don't even bother having. He and I would understand each other.

I haven't given a lot of thought to this, maybe because I have so many real friends whom I'm already neglecting enough that I somewhat begrudge the time looking for imaginary others. And when I do bring to mind the sort of characters I have met in books, for the most part I'm quite content to let them live their lives without me, as I have more enjoyable ones right here.