to the woman who somehow thought she could make a U-turn from the center lane

It is a rare and precious moment, when such things happen, and we are for a moment face to face, staring at each other through our windows, seeing a person instead of a driver. And what strikes me most is how perfectly your expression mirrored mine: not guilt for you and outrage for me, but both of us stricken, shocked, and frightened, because something happened that we did not expect. There are people who will react in such a moment with outrage, because they have decided already that the other person is always to blame; but that is not you, and that is not me. Only afterwards did we understand what had happened, and I began to feel angry, and you perhaps to feel ashamed. In the moment, all we could realize was that something had gone wrong, and in that shock we were, for that glance, sisters.

two high compliments for SUFJAN, a musician of unusual quality, in more senses than one

I don't know that you'd like Sufjan Stevens; and it wouldn't help if you told me what kind of music you like. I'm not familiar enough with the off-off-Broadway of the music world to know how to describe him to those who are, and to the rest of you, he will be as inexplicable and description-defying as he is to me.

At the very least, though, I recommend checking out his CD next time you're in the record store. Not buying it; just reading the back. Seven Swans won't get you anywhere, but if you can find a copy of Illinois or Michigan, just read the song titles. That should give you a clue for whether you should even begin to think about buying one of the CDs. Also, they're really fun and they make me grin.

But I have these two things to say about Sufjan, inexplicable though he may be: First, when I put a CD of his into my car player, I don't usually take it out again for about a week. Second, he has written a song which I hate to listen to, but which I can't turn off if it begins to play.

And that's what I have to say about that.

Black and white: more newfound loves

It's taken me exactly this long to be able to declare confidently that Ben Folds is my favorite currently-recording musician. Back in school, when one's musical loves were the essence of self-definition, I was troubled by my inability to find an artist that adequately captured the voice of my inmost self. It sounds silly, writing that now, but that's the kind of project we embarked upon in school, and I can't say we're fully over it now. We evolve from "what's your favorite color?" to "who's your favorite musician?" but the object is still the same: tell me who you are, by reference to some commonly-known entity. I haven't decided yet whether "what do you do?" is the same question in the adult world, or whether most adults have just given up the need for self-definition. And if they have, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. But that's not the blog I wanted to write today anyway.

Ben Folds. Ben Folds was a troubling artist to love because he does not often write introspectively. And how can you say "this person's songs express who I am" when this person's songs don't even express who he is? Not directly anyway; not like Adam Duritz's, for example. Ben Folds writes stories and scenes and characters. Even when he's singing in the first person, it's clear that some of the time, at least, it's an adopted voice, and not a statement about himself. In that respect, he's much more like a novelist: his writing doesn't let you see inside his head, it lets you see outside, through his eyes.

Well, it should have been obvious to me, but as I said, it's taken me this long to realize that it's that very thing that makes him my perfect "favorite musician." I know the dangers of overindulging in introspective expression. First of all, it's something of a contradiction in terms, and impossible to do with complete honesty: second, you will, if you go on too long, inevitably become boring. We who are chronically self-conscious need to develop the ability of talking more about what we see than what we feel... and Ben Folds seems to have done this.

But we all know that that's just an excuse. A very necessary one, but an excuse nonetheless. You have to have reasons for liking your favorite musician, or there's nowhere for the conversation to go. But we all know the real reason I love Ben Folds: the piano.

Why I have to be in love with such an inconvenient instrument as the piano is beyond me. Most of the time I'm piano-less, and there's not much I can do about it, and I don't really play that well anyway. But you can sit at that bench and start rocking those keys and I don't care what you're singing about: you've just won my heart. When I started learning to play, I thought it was a very generic, unromantic instrument. Then I began to love it, but I thought it was only because it was the instrument I knew how to play. Now I know that it's more than that.

And this is one of those inarticulate things that I fear my powers will be insufficient to capture. I love the piano's versatility, and its self-sufficiency. I know of no other instrument that so easily converses with itself in melody, harmony, and rhythm. It can convey nearly any mood that other instruments can... though I have never heard a piano sound despairing. But it can laugh better than any of them. I love the spread of fingers playing it, and the way the tendons in the hand move running up and down the keys (they almost mirror the hammers inside.) But these are only reasons, and the truth of my love runs much deeper than that.

At any rate, I love the piano; and Ben Folds loves the piano; and I love Ben Folds. And when the three of us get together, via my CD player, there is joy.

My other new love is the game Go. It's frequently described as the Eastern equivalent of chess: a complex strategic game with an ancient heritage and analogies to warfare. It involves the placement of black and white stones on a board, in such a way as to establish territory and surround and capture your opponent. I could explain the rules to you in five minutes... but it's taken me several weeks to grasp the strategy enough to play a game with some understanding of my own moves.

It's an elegant game, extreme simplicity yielding vast complexity. I like that about it, and I like that it involves playing with patterns and shapes. I watched a game between two players today, and most of the time I could only vaguely read the meanings behind each move, but I could begin to see how the board might look to me after I've been playing for a while, with patterns and possibilities readable at a glance.

It seems strange and presumptuous of me to attempt a comparison between go and chess, since I have such a limited understanding of both games... but what are private blogs for but to wax eloquent on subjects we're underqualified in? It seems to me, then, that they're on a roughly equal plane of complexity, but it comes from very different sources. Chess requires more raw analytical power: processing moves and their consequences far in advance. Go uses this as well, but it's less critical to good play. There are so many different styles and strategies that can be used toward victory, that it requires more of creativity and flexibility than chess does; at least, that's how it appears to my novice eyes.

In chess the pieces are distinct from each other, and combine into fairly rigid power structures; in go every piece is identical, and the meaning and role of each piece depends on the shape of the stones around it. This means that a given stone or group of stones may play several different roles in the course of a game, and you have to keep alert to the fluidity of possibilities.

Yeah... so I'm hooked.

On sequels

I love the new Dr. Who.

I know I'm a little behind the times, the Brits are winding up their second season, but the first was only just released on DVD and I only just borrowed the set from my rabid-fanatic sister.

Sometimes I forget that my rabid-fanatic sister and I come from the same gene pool. Then something like this comes along, and I remember.

No, but really. I love the new Dr. Who. I didn't dare hope it would be as good as it is.

And this is the really great thing: not only does it not disappoint-- and there was a lot of room for disappointment-- not only does it stay true to the old show and carry on faithfully where the old one left off... but it's good. Really good. You just want to keep watching it. At least if you're me. It's not just the old show revisited; it's alive, it's rooted and growing, it's a real show in its own right. It's terribly exciting.

And that's what a good sequel needs to be. I used to be much more conservative about sequels. I wanted them to stay tied to the original, without going much beyond the bounds of what the original established. But that's no way to write a story. For a sequel to be great, it needs to make the characters and history from the original story grow beyond what they were. It needs to be organic, it needs to be true to what was established, but then it needs to go further.

Here's another great sequel: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. And it's great for the same reason. It's not afraid to plow new ground. All three of its main characters (as well as two secondary characters) develop new qualities and new struggles... but the seeds of each quality and struggle were there in the first movie.

In a bad sequel, the characters face new problems, but they handle them in the exact same way. In a very bad sequel, characters go completely off the wall and do things utterly discordant with their earlier selves. But in a great sequel, characters face problems and situations that they can't handle in the old way, and the ways they find to handle them reveal new things about them-- to themselves and to us.

What Elizabeth does at the end of Pirates II ranks as one of my favorite character moments of all time. It's completely unexpected and shocking, and yet completely true to what she's been before. And it opens up vast new prospects on who she is and what she's capable of. I'm very excited to see what happens with her in the next movie... it's got so much potential, and I'm reasonably confident in Ted and Terry to write it out.

So yay for good sequels. And yay for the seven remaining Dr. Who episodes I have waiting for me at home.

a quartet of book reviews: II

The second book I read was The Wizard Test, by Hilari Bell. I read it all the way through, and was moderately entertained as I did so. Bell has some strengths; the world she wrote in was neatly drawn, though not remarkable, and she created a couple of pretty good characters. The secondary character, in particular, was very engaging. But still I didn't find the book worthy of the hearty endorsement Uncle Orson gave it. It seemed altogether too lightweight: not in themes or content, but in execution. It was a book I could have written, without giving it too much sweat. In fact I would guess Hilari Bell is at about the same level I am as a writer. Difference is I mean to get a lot better before trying to have anything published.

There's a lot of inventiveness in the book, and good details holding images together. There's a nicely constructed social system, with soldiers, who are held in high honor, and wizards, who are considered unreliable and looked on with scorn. The main character is an aspiring soldier who's found, to his dismay, to have aptitude for magic. He's an interesting enough character, with strong desires. It's not his fault he's named Dayven, which sounds far too much like an uber-trendy baby name of the present day (though I admit my perspective was already turned that way, having read that the main character of another of her books is named Makenna.) And the writer creates both some good, tight situations and some interesting moments.

The problem? I was not remotely moved or captivated by anything in the book. I was, as Dave Lister would say, completely ungripped. I read it, and was entertained enough to keep reading, but if every copy of the book in the world, including mine, had spontaneously combusted while I was in the middle of it, it wouldn't have disturbed me for a minute.

Actually, that's a great test to put a book to: the spontaneous combustion test. If every copy spontaneously combusted while someone was in the middle of reading it, thereby preventing them from ever finishing, how upset would they be? My mind scans over a list of old favorites: Emma-- greatly upset. Crime and Punishment-- greatly upset (except when I was writing my paper on it. Then I would have been ecstatic-- but by then I had finished it anyway, so never mind.) Lord of the Rings-- greatly upset. Ender's Game-- just about frantic.

Anyway, for all its mild virtues, The Wizard Test utterly fails the spontaneous combustion test. Not only did it not hold me in any kind of suspense, it failed to move me in any way. I can only think of one moment in the book that aroused any kind of emotion in me. And it's not the fault of the plot: there's lots of great issues, like loyalty and friendship, an interesting moral dilemma, war and peace and destruction of the land.

I've read books that had this problem before. Some of them came from one of my favorite authors, Lloyd Alexander. Many of his later books just seem lackluster, like he's skimming the surface of a good story, but never quite diving down into it (and thus not allowing the reader to dive into it either.) I don't know what this comes from, but I suspect it is laziness: a writer knows how to string together a good plot, and does it smoothly, almost mechanically. A story doesn't come alive, though, by a smooth mechanical process. It takes wrestling, wrestling with characters and details, and it takes flexibility, a willingness to let go of your first ideas so that they can bloom into new shapes. That's what I think, anyway.

For someone like Alexander, he can get away with writing a lightweight book because he's already such a big name in the genre that they'll publish anything he writes. Now I'm interested to read Bell's other books, to see if they all suffer from the same problem or if she wrote The Wizard Test coasting on an earlier, much more difficult book.

Lessons learned:
1) Don't be lazy. Work harder to know your characters, to make them come to life. Think more freely and loosely about your plot; when something's not working, be truly creative with your new ideas. Don't be afraid to go into difficult places. If it doesn't hurt a little, it's not great writing.

a quartet of book reviews: I

One of the coolest things about my job (my aspiring-novelist job, that is, not any of the others that I occasionally hold) is that part of the job is keeping up on the most recent books in my field. The upshot of that is that I get to consider it a duty to read lots of JFIC and YA fantasy novels... which is pretty much my favorite thing to do anyway.

Conveniently, Uncle Orson is a big fan of this genre as well, and has reviewed quite a few books recently. I picked up Megan Whalen Turner's Eugenides books not long ago on his recommendation, and enjoyed them so much I went combing through his past reviews for other recommendations. I picked out four, all from different authors, put them on hold at my library, and have diligently been plowing through them over the last week.

It's a mixed bag. He's an interesting reviewer, is Uncle Orson... I tend to agree with him in principle on what makes a great story, but I've found I often disagree with him when it comes to how well a particular book or movie does in fulfilling the principles. All four of the books I got received high praise, but I found one of them unpalatable, one weak, and one good but not nearly as momentous as he made it out to be. I've learned a good bit already about my craft, though, from reading them.

The unpalatable one was Mira, Mirror, by Mette Ivie Harrison. I was very excited about this one: it's a spinoff of Snow White, telling the story of a girl who was betrayed and trapped in a magic mirror. What a cool concept! To my disappointment, though, the Snow White story was barely touched on, and finished off, as far as I can tell, in the first chapter. The rest of the story seems to be entirely unrelated to the fairy tale, and instead tells the story of the mirror-girl's own redemption. I say "seems" because I only got a few chapters in. The promise of seeing a new and intriguing twist on the familiar story held my interest during the prologue, but once it became apparent that we weren't going to deal with Snow White, I found little reason to keep reading.

Two factors combined for this book's downfall. First, it's unpleasant. Magical power, in this story, comes from absorbing the life-force of another, usually by being present as he, she, or it dies. Apparently the more painful the death, the more power it gives. This doesn't make for a world I'm anxious to spend a lot of time in.

Unpleasantness alone, though, isn't enough to make a book off-putting. A book in an unpleasant world, or dealing with unpleasant things, can be very compelling. But it has to be compelling. This book, as far as I read it, simply... isn't. In fact, on the whole, I found it pretty dull. The world seems to be generic fairy-tale land, a woodsy medieval society without any distinguishing features other than the death=magic idea. And the main character is even duller. She starts out weak and innocent, and becomes weak and guilty. After being trapped in a mirror for a hundred-odd years, she has few scruples about doing what it takes to get herself out, from killing a huntsman to deceiving a lost peasant girl.

It is hard to be sympathetic to a character who behaves cruelly. It is even harder to be sympathetic to a character who behaves cruelly out of weakness. She does the things she does because she is desperate, but there's no power even in her desperation. There's no strength anywhere in her to make her interesting, no potent conflict. She doesn't agonize over the huntsman she kills to keep herself alive; she just feels vaguely sorry but tells herself she had no choice, and lets it go.

This illustrates for me something writing teachers have always said: characters need to be strong. They can be nice or they can be mean, they can be powerful or powerless, but there needs to be strength. Passion. Conflict. Something. If she's going to rationalize her behavior, let her rationalize passionately. Whatever she's doing, let her struggle. If this character had been sweet and pleasant and kind, I might have kept reading, but I would still have been bored. But an unpleasant and dull character gives me no reason at all to keep going.

The peasant girl who the mirror-girl seizes on as her ticket to freedom is, as far as I can tell, a sweet and pleasant and dull character. From the shape of the first few chapters, I could tell you how the story will proceed: the nasty and dull mirror-girl will continue trying to take advantage of the sweet and dull peasant girl, until the peasant girl's sweetness begins to penetrate and the mirror-girl has a change of heart. Maybe at some point some intensity will gather somewhere, and the book will become interesting. I don't really care to find out.

Lessons learned:
1) A fascinating biography, remarkable predicament, or link to an interesting subject are not enough to make a character interesting. If there is no spark or strength or struggle, the character is going to be boring, and that is that.

2) If you're going to make your story or your setting unpleasant, you've got to work extra hard to make it worth reading.

3) No one owes you a reading. You have to earn the readers' interest, and you have to earn it from the beginning, or they will get bored and quit. It doesn't matter how powerful and fascinating your ending is, if you lose half your readers at the beginning.

a poem by someone else, for today

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only cure is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam's, curse
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood--
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

-T. S. Eliot

a parable

There was a great temple court, with many people walking around in it. And as I looked, I saw that each person, in their hands, held one or more stones. Some of them held common pebbles; some held lovely-colored rocks; some held pearls, sapphires, and rubies. And every now and again someone would approach the altar, kneel in prayer, and, sometimes with merely a sigh, sometimes with tears of anguish, would drop whatever stone he or she held. That person would kneel empty-handed for a moment-- though sometimes, watching them, it felt much longer-- and then a wonderful thing happened. A new stone appeared in the person's open hands, and the new stone was always of greater value than the one the person had released.

Now as I watched, two men caught my attention. The first was tall, neatly dressed, with an air of wisdom about him. And the stone in his hand was very lovely indeed-- I believe it was an emerald. And as he walked about the temple court, many people approached him, asking for his insight or assistance, and he always gave it gladly, and his words were always wise. I watched this man for a long time-- it seemed sometimes many years-- and in time something struck me. In all his walkings about the court, he never went near the altar. And it seemed to me, though I may have been imagining it, that he even avoided looking at it, except out of the corner of his eye.

As I saw and puzzled over this, a second man approached near where I stood. He looked very poor indeed, dirty and tired. I looked to his hands, and saw that they held only dripping mud. It dripped everywhere he went, and its stains were covering his clothes. He came to the altar very slowly, on halting feet, and knelt as an old man kneels. Then he stayed motionless, mud still dripping, even staining the ground near the altar. At last he cried out in a loud voice, "Father, I cannot drop it! But take it from me if you will."

I left the temple soon after that, and have never returned. But I think sometimes of those two men, and wonder which of the two stands nearer to God's heart? And if I returned, which one would I now see more richly blessed?

On Lazarus

Jesus wept at the tomb of his friend.

Of all the mysteries of God and love, this is one of the strangest to me. Jesus already knew he was going to raise Lazarus: he'd said to his disciples, "Our friend Lazarus sleeps; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep." He already knew-- he was there to heal-- but he wept.

Why? I've never quite understood it... but I think it's related to something in my earlier post. Death is a product of evil, a destruction of what is precious to the heart of God, and he grieves over it...

...even while he prepares to restore it.

a poem by someone else

O yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;
That not one moth with vain desire
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.

Behold, we know not anything;
I can but trust that good shall fall
At last--far off--at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I?
An infant crying in the night:
An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

-Tennyson

***

And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.

These truths are not written for the times when they are easy to believe.

O death

Recently I was listening to a song-- a hymn I think-- talking about how Christ's sacrifice has conquered death. And for a moment it was hard for me to relate to. I am not accustomed to thinking of death as a bad thing. Death, for us, is a release, it's going home. "To die is gain." I understood, of course, that it would not be that way unless Jesus had died and come to life again... that death is, inherently, an abomination. But the sting of death being removed, I found it hard for a moment to receive as a present comfort the reminder that Christ has conquered death.

Then I thought some more, as is my wont. And this hit me: death-- literal, physical death-- is only the culmination of the lifelong process of dying which we all undergo. We are dying every day, you and I. It was the truth, when God said to Adam, "On the day you eat that fruit you will surely die." They died that day, and every day afterward, for hundreds of years, until the final death came upon them.

It was death to feel shame in their nakedness. It was death, a terrible death, to hear the footsteps of their Lord and maker and be afraid. It was death to be driven from the garden. All these deaths they died then and there... and then went out into the world outside the garden, where death was ever-present.

It was death to me to leave my beloved friends in Atlanta. It was death, when I was five years old, when I left a beloved stuffed raccoon at a park and never found it again (I still remember the grief, and my mother's inability to comfort me.) Everywhere around us, beloved, beautiful things are being lost or destroyed. Loss, great and small, is so common that we even forget that it was never meant to be. We say "that's the way life is." But it's not. That's the way death is, and we live in a world which is ruled by death.

But Christ has conquered death. Not only the last death, but all the smaller deaths that we die before it. Even the ones that we force ourselves to accept because they're "the right thing." They're not the right thing... the best of all possible evils is still an evil. They may be absolutely necessary... they may be the best thing to do... but they're still deaths.

I've just finished listening through the Chronicles of Narnia. In Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Reepicheep goes off at the very end to seek the utter East. And it's a good thing-- it's his dream and his destiny, and he rejoices to do it. But it means leaving his friends and traveling companions. And we miss him! It's the right thing to happen, but it's sad. Literature is full of this sort of thing. Every good story (give me a counterexample if you can) features at least one death, in this sense. Often it's a "good death." It's the right thing to happen in the story... but it's still a death.

C. S. Lewis takes us a little further than most literature, though. He takes us beyond death. In The Last Battle, our friends Peter and Edmund and Lucy (who were previously told they could never go back to Narnia... another death) and the other friends of Narnia are walking through Aslan's country. And who walks out of the gate to meet them... Reepicheep! And all the other heroes of Narnia who died, of old age or in battle. Death is undone, even the so-called "good deaths." All is made right, right in a way our death-accustomed minds can barely imagine. Blessing is poured on blessing. There are no mixed joys, no bittersweet victories.

"And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away." Then He who sat on the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new."

On hope, part two

I don't like hope very much. Maybe it's because my mind dwells near-exclusively in the future, and my heart is much more responsive to what might be than to what is. Whatever the reason, I don't like hope very much.

When I looked up, in an online concordance, occurances of the word 'hope' in the Bible, the first one was from Ruth. The second was from Ezra. The next fifteen were from Job.

That's right, folks, barely a mention in the first third of the Bible, and then it's all over Job. The pattern continues, too. The word is scattered all through the psalms and the prophets-- then it all but disappears in the Gospels. Barely a mention of hope when Jesus is present. There wouldn't be, of course... he is the fulfillment. What need for hope when the bridegroom is present? Hope returns, though, starting in Acts and all through the letters.

This should tell you something about hope. Hope comes with pain, with loss, with incompleteness. It has to. There's no need for it otherwise. Is it any wonder I'm not a big fan?

Hope deferred makes the heart sick.

Those of us who like to avoid pain would do well to shun hope. As I experienced in the football game, the higher the hope, the more bitter the letdown. Sure, it pays off beautifully if the hope is fulfilled-- in fact nothing, no experience, is more beautiful to me than seeing an agonized, uncertain hope fulfilled. But it's a gamble, and I am no gambler.

My heart has been sickened too many times by the deferral of hope. It's too much. Far, far easier to make my expectations subside. There's a little game I learned to play with myself, when I found out I was hoping too much for something that was too uncertain. I would quickly come up with a list of all the good things that could not happen if the hope was fulfilled, and set myself to hoping for them too. That way, I had hedged my bets. Either outcome was okay now. There was no bad result, no disappointment to be had. I was safe. And I like safe.

To allow hope is to admit that I live in Job and not in John. It's to admit the existence of pain, loss, and incompleteness. You might say, "Well of course there's pain, of course there's incompleteness... what difference does it make whether or not you admit it?" But that would be vastly underestimating the power of the mental gymnastics I am capable of. I can command contentment in nearly any situation. Just stick me in a prison cell and watch what I do with it. Give me a couple of hours to think over the situation, and you'll find me quite at home. Just don't make me hope for release. That would be agony.

And now, Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in You.

It's a lie, of course. And I don't like lies. Also it allows me to fall into a deceptively gentle complacency. I could live my entire life this way, calming my expectations, denying pain where there is pain, insisting so loud and so long on my utter satisfaction with the situation that I begin to believe it. I could do it. I am quite capable of that much stubbornness.

But it's a lie. And more, it's crippling. For I find, when I refuse to hope for anything on earth, I rob myself of the ability to hope for anything in heaven either. I'm okay with hoping for heaven: that is a certain hope. It's the one thing I allow myself to depend on. But that hope becomes pale, shadowy, hollow and distant, when I am deadening all earthly hopes in my heart. So, too, does any expectation I have from God in the here and now. I cannot abide in Him... cannot receive any comfort or joy or strength from Him... when I am refusing to hope. Why this is I'm not entirely sure, but it seems that, for my spiritual health, I must submit to the ebb and flow, the throbbing of hope and disappointment and, sometimes, fulfillment.

I have set the Lord always before me: because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoices: my flesh also shall rest in hope.

This is not easy. It requires constant dependence on the God from whom all blessings flow. (Dependence, by the way, is another thing I'm not too keen on.) More than that, it requires the continual surrender of the protective complacency that I know is there for me, ready to be called up at a moment's notice. It's stepping into the fire, again and again.

"The Lord is my portion," says my soul, "therefore will I hope in Him."

The good news is this: there is ultimate fulfillment. In the end, it will not be disappointment for me, not looking back over dashed and futile hopes. In the end, it will be victory, it will be joy, it will be that elation that only comes after a night of sorrow. In the meantime? The Lord is my portion. I may, and shall (for I am commanded) hope for many earthly things, but at the beginning of the day and at its end, I know where my good lies. When blessings fall, I shall receive them with praise. When they are taken away, I shall weep before the Lord. And my eyes shall behold him. The Lord is my portion.

"Safe? Of course he's not safe...

...but he's good."

On hope, part one

We came into the game with restrained expectations. They were one of the best teams in the league, and we had just barely squeaked into the playoffs. My family of devoted Redskins fans was just happy we'd gotten so far-- mostly. There was, of course, a slender and not impossible hope that we might win this game, and having won it, the football experts in the family (i.e. Dad and the brothers) didn't see why we shouldn't go all the way.

It was a beautiful game. We scored first. It took us most of the first quarter to do it, but we got our three points on the board. Everybody was playing tightly. Our guys were on today (as they most definitely weren't in the first half of last week's game). Our hopes began to rise. Coming into a game, statistics and records seem very important, but after the first ten minutes, all history melts away. Never mind what they've done other weeks, other seasons. Which team is better now, here, today? And in this game, it quickly became clear that both teams were very, very good.

We remained suspended, on edge, hoping, for the next hour. The Seahawks overtook us, and the initial surge of hope fell down. But all was not lost. We hung on-- no one lost patience, no one lost focus, no one threw in the towel. Coming into the fourth quarter, it didn't look good for us, but it was a game that we could win if we did just a little better and they did just a little worse. I said as much to my dad. And then, not two minutes after I said it, we had a gorgeous scoring drive, putting us only a touchdown behind. Hope rose higher. We might pull this one out. With the momentum on our side, we might manage a tremendous upset. It was within our grasp.

It had been decided that I would make hit and harden sauce for dessert, but I refused to begin until I knew whether it was celebratory sauce or consolatory sauce. I had figured that I'd be able to get up and make the sauce about halfway through the fourth quarter. Usually you know by then. You can relax in victory or relax in defeat. You can begin to detach emotionally from the game, start to care about other stuff again.

Not so with this game. We were behind, and soon behind by two scores, but not until the last minute could I get up and make my consolatory hit and harden sauce. I was proud of our guys-- they made the Seahawks fight until the bitter end for their victory.

This is both my favorite and my least favorite kind of game. It's clearly the best kind... where's the fun if it's plain, early on, who will win? But it is also by far the most brutal. Oh, the long extension of hope-- the rise and fall, the endless calculations to see if some, some certainty can be reached about the outcome. It can't, of course. The game must be played, moment by moment, each new play bringing, perhaps, a new turn of fortunes. And the higher and longer our hopes are raised, the more painful we know it will be if, at the end, there is no victory.

And if you think it's bad when the Redskins play, you should see me at my brother's basketball games.

something fun

I have a couple of deep and profound posts I'll put up eventually... but not today. Today, I have for all my loyal fans, a quiz! Specifically, a movie/TV quotes quiz. Behold, sixteen quotes from movies and shows that I like, yours for the identifying! Some are very familiar, some are rather obscure... but I've tried to take familiar quotes from obscure movies and obscure quotes from familiar movies. Go ahead and comment on the ones you think you know... we'll see who gets the most (just don't read anybody else's comments before making your guess. Not that you'd do such a thing.)

Let the games begin.

1: Everybody's dead, Dave.

2: If you value your lives, be somewhere else.

3: I will call you if anyone anywhere gets drunk.

4: The deepest circle of hell is reserved for betrayers and mutineers.

5: Forgive me for not leaping for joy, bad back you know.

6: Some things in here don't react well to bullets.

7: These days you have to think like a hero merely to behave like a decent human being.

8: I hope your mango's ripe.

9: Was you ever bit by a dead bee?

10: I'll go put these in some rubbing alcohol.

11: Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is... maybe he didn't.

12: If you come back on Easter, you can burn down my apartment.

13: Somebody help me, I'm being spontaneous!

14: I gave her my heart, she gave me a pen.

15: If you are a Scottish lord, then I am Mickey Mouse!

16: Can you form some sort of rudimentary lathe?

On myth

This is not at all the post I thought I was going to write next. I thought I was going to write a triple movie review, covering the first and only three movies I'll see in theaters this winter. But I wasn't really motivated to do that, and a comment I posted on a friend's blog inspired me to write up some thoughts I had a long time ago, and never got the opportunity to explore.

To begin, a question for those who have read or seen The Lord of the Rings: Who is the Christ figure in the story? (I have here a tangential disclaimer for anyone who would point out that Tolkien hated allegory and didn't write deliberate symbolism into his books. But said disclaimer spills over into a whole rant of its own, and I'd rather stick to the subject, so I'll only pull it out if it's needed.)

Now that my parenthetical has given you some space to think, you should have your answer in mind. And I'd love it if you'd comment and say who you thought of, because I'm very interested to know. Apparently most people would say Gandalf. So I'm told, anyway. And the connection is obvious: the character who died and came to life again... also the leader and most powerful, the one who guides the others.

The funny thing is, it never occurred to me to see Gandalf as a Christ figure. When a friend of mine asked (obviously having his own answer in mind, and expecting mine to be different from his), I said immediately, "Frodo." Frodo, the one who must bear an unbearable burden for the salvation of the world. From the time I first read the book, Frodo was the one I associated with Jesus. Of course, the comparison breaks down (but they all do, unless deliberately crafted as Christ figures). Frodo is mortal, and fallible, and he does fail at the point of it. But what is that last trek through Mordor but one long Gethsemane?

My friend, who asked the question, had yet a third character in mind, one I'd never thought of either: Aragorn. His take on it was Christ as the Second Adam, as outlined in Romans. Where Isildur fell, to the great suffering of the world, Aragorn succeeded, to its salvation. He then went on to reign in glory. A nice little parallel, I was impressed by it.

The point of all this: we all see our Lord in different ways; different parts of his role and his character speak most strongly to each of us. My friend's father, who said Gandalf, saw the Son of God, glorious, powerful, conquering death; my friend who said Aragorn saw the Son of Man, the crown of mankind, the only unfallen son of Adam; I saw the sufferer, the burden-bearer, the one who willingly submitted to carry a curse he did not earn.

And the wonder of it is that all these pictures are true. And there are more besides; the healer and humanitarian, the wounded lover, the accused innocent... and the list could go on. This, our true myth, has more depth and resonance than any of the mirror-myths. They each reflect a small fragment of the truth we have only begun to know.

As a writer and lover of stories, I am thrilled to the core at being swept up in this, the wellspring of all stories. As a person, I am awed almost to disbelief that the author and hero of the story would speak to me...

On flying

I'm so glad I was born in a century of airplanes. I love to fly: I love airports, with their marvellous array of people; I love boarding a plane and getting all cozy with my few essential items (book, writing implements, bear) and the knowledge that I have nothing to do but sit and watch and read and write for the next hour or more; I love lifting off, getting faster and faster and then suddenly realizing that you're actually being supported by nothing more than air and physics. And I love how different the earth becomes when you're separated from it.

Something that struck me, as I was in the air today, is how much less interesting everything on the ground becomes. A rock quarry, which is a stunning sight from the ground, becomes just a grey hole in the ground when you're in an airplane. The effect varies, depending on what you're looking at-- trees are still pretty great, especially when they're turning colors (though I like them best when they're bare and they look like soft brushes from the sky). And rivers are awesome. But as cool as it is to see a forest from miles above, looking like it's part of a model train set, it's about a million times cooler to see it from a few inches away.

This is something that's been dawning on me recently, as I spend lots of time with small children. I'd forgotten how important and fascinating nature is when you're a child: not Nature in any big metaphysical sense, but just common everyday nature like blades of grass and bits of bark. I used to know all the different kinds of grasses and wildflowers that grew in my yard-- sometimes their names, but always their colors, and where they grew, and what they looked like when you took them apart. My friend and I would collect berries and leaves and acorns, and set up a market with them... we'd grind things into paste, we'd build tiny forts out of sticks. That was nature.

So yesterday, I was outside with the kids and looking at a tree whose peachy-yellow leaves have almost all fallen. And I noticed it had buds, and little fresh brown twigs growing out of its branches. And I was fascinated by them: there are so many shapes and smells and textures in the world that we forget about as adults.

But I was talking about flying. I find the landscapes, as seen from the air, interesting for a few minutes, especially when we're lifting off or landing and the perspective is continually changing. But what I really love, what I look forward to every trip and what makes me thank God that I was born in an age of airplanes, are the skyscapes. Just think: five hundred years ago, no one except a few mountain-dwellers knew what clouds look like from above. And what they missed! what plains of snowy whiteness, what cities and mountains piled high, struck gold and blue by the sun! There is nothing, my friends, no sight on the planet, that I love as much as I love the sight of clouds spread out below me, with all their textures and shadows and impossibly inviting depths.

I must say I've never entirely gotten the "every cloud has a silver lining" thing. I'm sure, like most old sayings, it began with a real-life, observable phenomenon. But I've never seen anything on a cloud which I'd call a silver lining. No, my friends, I don't draw a lot of comfort from the silver linings that folk wisdom tells me are there. What every cloud has is an upper side: and it is shining and glorious in the light of the sun. I may not see even a glimpse of it, but on an overcast day I know it is there, and that one of these days I'll be up there again, on the right side of the clouds, where all is light.

after much pestering, she consents, in part...

It's your lucky day. In keeping with my aim of loosening the iron fist of pride that clutches all my writing endeavors, I am going to make my NaNo work available to read. Sort of. Parts of it. To some people.

The way it works is this: I'll be posting excerpts, from scenes I enjoy and consider to not have more than three or four embarrassingly weak moments, on my other blog. Yes, I have another blog. It's here, but as of last spring it's friends-only, which means in order to read it you must either a) have a livejournal account and be listed as one of my friends, or b) have the username and password to the super-spiffy friends account I set up just so people like you could read my livejournal.

If you think I've been keeping riches of deep and life-altering thought away from you by not mentioning this journal sooner, set your mind at ease. The chief purpose of it is to keep out-of-state friends posted on my life and happenings... and to say the occasional silly things that pop into my head that I wish to share, but not to have tainting my public image (because, um, I have a public image and all, what with this highly-trafficked blog... ah, never mind.) This here is supposed to be my quality journal... which explains why I post so infrequently.

ANYway... so if you want to have access to the story excerpts I shall put up, email me, or comment here, and I'll send you the info to log in. Only if I know you, though. If you're a random stranger who likes my blog (I'm sure there are hundreds of you), well I'm sure you're a very nice person, but you'll have to content yourself with the wit and wisdom to be found right here.

some words of a great man

G. K. Chesterton was a lousy novelist.

This statement may come as a surprise to those who know me and know my love for Chesterton. But rest assured that I have not suddenly reversed my position. I still love Chesterton; as much as I have a soulmate, he is it. And I love his fiction works no less than his nonfiction... but in all honesty I must acknowledge that he was a lousy novelist.

His characters have no distinct voices, and hardly any distinct personalities. They do not come to life as people at all. There are essentially two character voices he uses: the wise and the unwise. The wise voice speaks in Chesterton's own, and delivers insight, usually in the form of paradox. The unwise voice exists to give the wise voice something to respond to. Chestertonian dialogue is more like Socratic dialogue than proper fictional dialogue. And, over the whole body of his fiction, it is possible to identify about seven distinct types into which nearly all of his characters fall. But that's all right, because the true characters of Chesterton's stories aren't the people at all.

The true characters in a Chesterton story are ideas; often an idea is personified by one of the people in the story, or spread over several, or several condensed into one person. But, by combining people and events, he puts ideas into play with one another. A Chesterton story is really just a Chesterton essay dramatized. And once you come to look at it in this way, a Chesterton story is every bit as delightful as a Chesterton essay.

He rejoices in wordplay, in pun and paradox. Better than any other writer I know, he links the whimsical and the profound. He is fond of turning things on their head, a master at creating a sudden shift of perspective which yields new understanding. He is a jolly philosopher, with optimism that comes not from blindness, but from an unshakable faith that the good, true, and beautiful is stronger than the evil.

There's a great website, providing most of his writings for free and public consumption, here. If you want to read his fiction, I suggest starting with the Father Brown stories. If you want to read nonfiction, you can't go wrong with any of the essays. Some of my favorites are "The Case for the Ephemeral," "A Defence of Rash Vows," and "Cheese." And if you want to read the most marvellous love-letter ever penned, the one that would have irrevocably captured my heart had it been written to me instead of to Miss Frances Blogg (later Frances Chesterton), it is found in the essay section under the title "To Frances."

In case you're the kind of person who tells yourself you'll check out the link later and never will, here's a sampler of quotes.

"I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid."

"It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, “Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe,” or “Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet.” They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complex picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority."

"What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon."

"One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is this, that white is a color. It is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a color. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colors; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white."

"Passing from the last miracle of practical foresight, we come to a box of matches. Every now and then I strike one of these, because fire is beautiful and burns your fingers. Some people think this a waste of matches: the same people who object to the building of Cathedrals."

On impossible endeavors, and what to expect 20 days from now

November is such an exciting month.

It wasn't always this way. Back in 2001, and all years previous, November was a low point in the year, second only to February in dullness, greyness, and general interminability (it's a word now folks.) Then in 2002, a friend with a penchant for discovering interesting and curious things online emailed me this link: www.nanowrimo.org. That one email changed my Novembers forever. ("Forever", in this case, is defined to mean the span of time between 2002 and 2005, and possibly longer.) Now they are thrilling, agonizing, infuriating, triumphant, despondent, panicked, giddy-- almost anything except dull.

In case you haven't compulsively checked the link already, I'll explain that November is the month when a handful of lunatic writers decide every year to attempt writing an entire 50,000-word novel in thirty days. The "handful" is getting quite large, with tens of thousands of people signing on from all around the world. There's a large forum where we all come to share our lunacy and procrastinate. It's great fun. There's no prize for those who make it-- except that you get a bright purple 'winner' banner in the NaNo forums.

The purpose of this exercise is to get people who have always talked about wanting to be writers to sit down and actually write. If you're trying to produce 50,000 words in thirty days, it's fairly certain they're not going to be terribly good words. It's a madcap dash, where you must throw all considerations of form and aesthetics aside and make a break for it. It requires laying aside perfectionism, self-criticism, and attention to detail, and just slopping words onto the page as fast as they'll come. In my three years of participating, I've never even made it to the halfway point.

My problem is, as most of my problems in life are, three parts pride and two parts laziness. Laying aside perfectionism and self-criticism: not so easy. Damn near impossible sometimes. There are many, many areas of life where I'm willing to do a merely decent job-- content as long as I don't utterly disgrace myself. Writing is not one of these areas. It's a toss-up whether my perfectionism is more suffocating when it comes to writing or when it comes to relationships. God may know which one I have a harder time with; I certainly don't. For whatever reason, writing is the act that lies nearest to my soul, and it wounds me to even think of doing it less than magnificently.

I am fortunate in that my two worst qualities, the aforementioned pride and laziness, tend to take the edge off one another. Pride motivates me to work harder at most things than my laziness would otherwise allow; laziness encourages me to let go of things that my pride would otherwise keep an iron grip on. In writing, though, the two simply tag-team to sabotage me. When I am wearied of perfectionism, I slump into a refusal to do any work at all. When I build up my motivation again, pride leaps in to freeze my words before they ever reach the page.

This is why I have "failed" NaNo three years in a row. This is also why I continue to attempt it, even when the outlook for finishing isn't good (this November's agenda includes editing nearly a whole book of my father's, writing a newsletter, and a trip out of town, as well as possibly being responsible for my family's Thanksgiving dinner). It's important that I give myself this month every year-- not so that I can let all my writerly inhibitions go and work with both abandon and diligence, but so that I can practice doing so. I'm still not very good at it. I think my record is around 20,000. But I'm getting better. And one of these years I will develop the courage and dedication to achieve the purple banner. And that will mean that I'm just a little bit closer to being able to live and love effectively, and to make a little more successful my raids on the inarticulate.

On triumph

It is an exhilarating thing to stand on the front lines of the battle between good and evil. Many people, in their day-to-day lives, work in the camps of this battle, often without realizing it, and their contributions are not to be underrated. But I am talking about standing directly in the line of fire—placing all your strength and all your devotion in a desperate stand against the destruction of something precious. The scale does not matter, nor the field: it can be physical, emotional, intellectual, or moral. Those who have stood here know what I mean.

My battle was small, intimate, and nearly overwhelming. It was a fight for the sanity of one person. The battle was not mine to win—victory, in such cases, comes only from the soul of the person and the Holy Spirit, in a private mystery of healing. But it was mine to fight. For over a year, every resource I had and many I didn't were called into the service of this battle. And we won. The sun broke through, the lie was defeated, and life began to grow again in the soil of truth.

That kind of triumph doesn't allow for conceit. I know that in my own power any resistance I could make would have been feeble. I know that in my own power, my faults of selfishness and arrogance would have overwhelmed any good I was able to do. It was grace which provided the continued strength, grace which provided the checks to my own unholy impulses. Most of all, it was grace that provided the ability to act out of character when it was needed—to push farther than I had ever done, to supply resources I did not yet possess. The grace of God upholds his warriors, and it is his gift to us that he allows us to be his arms in the fight.

That kind of triumph doesn't come without cost. I have never been able to tell fully what it was to stand in that place. The anguish, the helplessness, the desolation I walked through is private and unique, as every sufferer's suffering is private and unique—known only to the heart of God, who holds all our tears in a bottle. Then, too, there was the external cost: missed opportunities, undeveloped relationships, because my life for that year was wrapped around the all-consuming battle.

That kind of triumph doesn't leave you. For ever and always, I will have the knowledge of this victory. And in a world where evil is overwhelming, this is no mean possession. Once at least to me, suffering, struggle, and sacrifice were not in vain. Once at least, I have stood in rank against the dragon, and it was the dragon that fell.

Hard as that place was to walk in—and it was the hardest thing I have ever done—I have felt, since then, a desire to go back. Not to the same situation, not even to the same kind of situation, but to a place where the battle is clear and the stakes are high, a place that demands everything you're capable of and then some, a place where all your faith and all your love are called into single-minded service. A place where, though you do not know how to fight or even how to survive the next day, you know that you are fighting for the good. I found that I loved this place.

This is why I write fantasy, and why over and over again I return to read it. Particularly children's fantasy, because it is in these books that the battle between good and evil is played out most clearly and unapologetically. It is fought in ways and on grounds that you and I will never encounter, but it is fought against strong forces, at great cost, and to great reward. During my own battle, the story that most resonated with me was The Lord of the Rings. The movie version of Return of the King came out in the middle of that time, and I wept and wept to see Frodo and Sam making their way through Mordor. That was my fight: to walk with my friend through hell, until the deadly burden could be released and destroyed. That story was more real for me at that time than any tale about college friends going through hard times. This is why I write fantasy.

And this is why I will seek out another battleground. In this perpetual (but not eternal) war, we all have our part. Many spend their lives on the home front, working steadily to build the resources of the good, and the value of this work is immeasurable. But for myself—I think I was made to be a soldier. I don't know what fields I will be called to fight on, or for how long, or how soon. And until the time comes, I will work in the places given me. But I will be looking, and waiting, for a time when I am once again called to active duty.