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a cup + a sword + a tree + a green hill + a blog about good stories + here there be spoilers
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Think of this post as the
Wood Between the Worlds. As it says in
The Magician's Nephew, "
it was the quietest wood you could possibly imagine....not the sort of place where things happen.........." That is how it will be here for most of 2009, I think, though I hope things will happen here again before Christmas. I love the topics in his blog and hate to set it aside temporarily, but I have some pressing business to take care of in several different worlds. You can visit these worlds by diving into the various link-pools below:
Through the pool next door to that one: I hop still further back in time, to the
7th Century, as I consult with my editor about my Saint Cuthbert picture book,
The Ravens of Farne.
And next to both of these....A
new pool to the world called
HALIWERFOLC, which will only open magically to
I hope you'll come explore these worlds with me while Storyspell sits here quietly for a little while.
This poster visualizes the spread of anonymous gossip as the production of destructive monsters. Designed by Alex Godfrey for Ownwhatyouthink.com. Download Poster PDF. The latest fads in our society almost never produce refreshing news. On the other hand, sometimes, like in the post from
before Christmas about the guy who overcame disability to build a useable
Viking Ship from popsicle sticks , you'll get somebody that says
"You can't take me down!" to evil, tragedy, pain or disaster. Or to a current fad.
Remember the Magician's book in
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader?(Sure you do, without it I wouldn't have the premise for this very blog! :-)It exists. Or at least, one of the spells from its pages does. That's the spell that Lucy tried out to see what her friends really thought of her. Lewis-as-narrator of Voyage of the Dawn Treader remarks of the words of this spell "nothing will induce me to tell you what they were."
But people today can find it --on the internet, of course. I guess we should have expected that, eh?
Blogs, e-mail lists, social networks, forums.....all of these have potential for damage. Writers may be indiscreet or even malicious as they slip into careless remarks about friends, or in a passive-aggressive way announce on their Facebook update or Twitter "Marjorie Preston (the girl who gossiped about Lucy) was getting pretty tired of some people by the end of last term."
But there is a site even more egregious than these, that exists for the very purpose of saying all sorts of things, without any social constraints at all. I'm not linking to it. It's called
Juicy Campus, and it's a
gossip cesspool like we've never seen before, where college students come to write the kind of stuff that used to only appear on washroom walls. Classmates may find themselves hounded, outed, harassed,
labeled and slandered--
and unlike Lucy's friends in the Magician's book, the perpetrators get to remain anonymous.
But it's all in good fun. Well, fun like running with scissors, that is, until somebody gets an eye poked out.....
But hang on. This evil website has a noble twin.
Started by students at Princeton,
Own What You Think.com "
seeks to unite people and bring personal accountability back into the ways in which we communicate and interact with each other. It is about encouraging individuals to voice their opinions respectfully and constructively while refusing to participate in anonymous and malicious character assassination. It is also about taking a personal stand for something and encouraging others to do the same. "Among the initiatives of their campaign for civil discourse, these students have created a "love wall" in which they write positive things about others; T-shirts that declare "anonymity=cowardice" and a petition/pledge that begins:
We, the undersigned, commit ourselves to taking a stand against anonymous character assassination, a culture of gossip, and all other acts of ethical and intellectual cowardice.
Bravo, Princeton and other colleges that have joined the campaign. Call it prissy and Pollyannaish if you like...when you see the stuff they are taking a stand against, ownwhatyouthink.com is what I call good magic.
...and how spiritually refreshing is that?
A Viking ship made totally from ice cream and lolly sticks!
The ship called Thor was built by a man who was injured badly as a child but would not listen to the naysayers and was determined to do remarkable things with his life.
Now the ship is sailing up the Thames to deliver Christmas toys to sick kids. Saint Nicholas, the patron who gives gifts to children in need as well as the patron of sailors, must be thrilled-- a ship named for a pagan Scandinavian god coming to England to deliver gifts, not to loot them, as the Scandinavian invaders did once upon a time!
Links to more Christmas material below, in previous post.
It is that time of year.....and rather than create yet another Christmas post at the moment, I'm going to ask you to consider giving the gift of Story this Christmas. If you're reading this blog, of course, you probably already have books on your gift list for your nearest and dearest.
But I'd like you to also consider giving a book for older kids or teenagers to your local Christmas bureau. These older kids in need are often forgotten at this time of year. Chances are, these kids are not from bookish homes, so the challenge is to present something that will grab them.
Obviously, The Chronicles of Narnia are one of my own favorite suggestions. Packaged to tie in with the films, they are appealing to a whole new generation of kids. And of course the Harry Potter phenomenon has made reading a bit cooler than it was before-- film tie-ins are good here too.
CDs and films that tell or tie in with good stories are also good bets for this purpose. A recent underappreciated film that I hope to blog on at some point is Penelope. This one is wonderful for girls.
Please do chime in and offer your own suggestions, particularly of stuff that's currently widely available.
Meanwhile, if you came here looking for a seasonal read, click on one of these:
"Cold Hands, Warm Heart"-- what could make Jack Frost decide to rebel against the Winterfolk and join the side of Summer? Short fiction from my archive of previously-published stories.
My husband said it was like a Hollywood fairy tale ending.
For several years now our church, the
Orthodox Church in America, has been agonizing over a financial scandal of vast proportions. We have been leaderless, our membership wounded and divided as we approached our most recent
“All-American” Council in Pittsburgh. This gathering of clergy and laity from all over North America had as its most important goal the choosing of a new Metropolitan.
Many people have been praying for many months or longer, both individually and corporately, for God’s mercy and guidance. True, a great deal of progress had already been made before the council in removing problem people from office, sorting out as much of the financial mess as possible, and setting up new Best Practices procedures to prevent such things in future. But the wounds were still raw, and the way ahead unclear. Many approached the council gathering with trepidation, the light of hope burning only dimly.
Tuesday night we began to see prayers answered. The newly-consecrated auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of the South,
Bishop Jonah, spoke to the delegates in response to many of the pained and difficult questions about the scandal, and something happened. The next day, the majority of the delegates gave him their votes. The
Holy Synod of Bishops then stepped out in humility and confirmed the people’s choice of this most junior bishop, consecrated to his office only 11 days earlier. It brought to mind St. Paul’s exhortation to the young bishop Timothy, “let no-one despise your youth, but be an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.”
Our membership could not see or agree upon a clear way out of our morass of denial and recriminations, but the Holy Spirit working in synergy with God’s people has now provided one. “It was like
Pentecost” one of my husband’s priestly friends said.
Whistle-blowers and gadflies have risked, and some have suffered, great things to inform and motivate the people of God to seek an answer to our troubles. And the people rose to this challenge, both in prayer and in action. Now we have a completed investigation, a new Metropolitan with a new emphasis on genuine conciliarity, and public thanks and vindication given to many of those who dared to speak out.
This is a fairy-tale ending-- the happy turn at the end of a tale, which
J.R.R. Tolkien calls a "eucatastrophe". But in God’s Kingdom, such an ending is only a
beginning. Only in the next world is there a true and final happy-ever-after. Having begun the race, we must not look back, but press on to the prize. Our bishops have truly said that trust cannot be re-established—they must earn it. There are wounded little ones who still need healing.
But perhaps most encouraging of all is the way some
of the strongest critics of the previous administration are speaking positively of this AAC and our new metropolitan. We have a new Metropolitan Council, and there is no reason to think they will not be vigilant and wise as the wheels of the OCA begin to move. They are beginning to move, and now that they are moving, it will be possible to steer.
Some remain a little skeptical. That is all right, and to be expected after our experience of the last few years. There is however a difference between skepticism and cynicism. The skeptic asks sincere questions and says ‘show me.’ The cynic however says ‘I don’t believe, no matter what you are showing me.’ Only the individuals can know in their hearts (if God grants them true self-knowledge) whether they are skeptics or cynics.
The rest of us can do little for the cynics but pray. They are the dwarfs in C.S. Lewis’s concluding volume of the Narnia books,
The Last Battle. Narnia is liberated, and here is what happens:
Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs’ knees...They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn’t taste it properly…One said he was trying to eat hay and another said he had got a bit of an old turnip…they raised golden goblets of rich red wine to their lips and said “Ugh! Fancy drinking dirty water out of a trough that a donkey’s been at!......”…they all said: “Well, at any rate there’s no Humbug here. We haven’t let anyone take us in..”
“You see,” said Aslan. “…Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”
We need to heal. Our hierarchs need to earn our trust again. But we are
not called to be dwarfs in a dark prison; we are called to be free men and women in the light of the Gospel. Let us continue to pray fervently for our new Metropolitan, our diocesan hierarchs and all our other church leaders, clergy and lay. We have seen God work a miracle in answer to our recent prayers. Now let us continue to ask Him for more such good gifts in the opening of missions, the healing of hearts, the ministry to the needy yet to come. For the best thanks we can give God for answered prayer is to ask Him for more, for He is a good Father who delights to give such good things to His children.
This post is in honour of Take Back Your Time Day Oct. 24, 2008
still from video posted on the Washington Post's website
It won’t be often that you see an article about a social/psychological experiment turning up as the main subject of a post on this blog. So please take it seriously when I give you the URL to a
Washington Post article from 2007 at the bottom of this post. The article is called
‘Pearls before Breakfast’.
It is a long article, but believe me it is worth reading every single word. In fact the length of the article is bound up with what I at least see as the main point: that our rat race world is doing something terrible to us. It is causing us grownups to miss the beauty that children are instinctively drawn towards.
A world-class musician plays a sublime selection of music on a
Stradivarius during the morning commute at a subway station. What reaction should we have expected, and what actually happened? The reporters involved could have simplistically disdained the barbarians who failed to appreciate the quality of the free concert, but there is more to it. This wasn’t just about people not recognizing a famous musician because they didn’t expect to see him there, or not caring about the quality of the music. The individual stories of the commuters of all walks of life are fascinating. And yes, it was the children who without exception were attracted to the music, heads turning as they tugged against their parents’ headlong progress to wherever they were going that seemed so important at the time. (you can listen to the full performance
here)
I don’t listen to a lot of music, for what might seem like an odd reason to some. I am deeply affected by a lot of music. If I listened to more, one of two things would happen: either I would get inured to it, or I would end up a basket case. It isn’t uncommon for music to provoke me to tears. It’s less common for an article –about- music (or anything else for that matter) to have that effect on me.
Why am I classing this article as a story of
Spiritual Refreshment? Partly it’s the humility of the musician,
Joshua Bell, which reminds me of that same
‘getting out of the way’ I wrote about in
Benjamin Bagby. Partly it’s the wonder of beauty and art that can touch something in us humans and make us aware of transcendence. And partly it’s the always-wonderful spectacle of little children showing a wisdom that the big people have forgotten.
still from the movie posted at :
http://www.theonering.net/scrapbook/source/Imladris.net
"IF MORE OF US VALUED FOOD AND CHEER AND SONG ABOVE HOARDED GOLD, IT WOULD BE A MERRIER WORLD. "
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit or There and Back Again
As we contemplate the celebration of Bilbo's (and Frodo's) birthday on Sept 22nd, corresponding with the first day of fall this year, you could hardly improve upon this quote from The Hobbit for spiritual refreshment.
The ancient practice of hospitality and gift-giving runs like a bright thread through the history of a dark world. To provide for the stranger was a sacred duty in the ancient world. And I don’t think there has ever been a culture in which food and music and giving things away were not near the center of the celebration of birthdays and other special occasions. From Anglo-saxon ring-giving to native North American potlatch, human hosts have forged bonds with their guests by serving them food and drink, then strengthend the bonds by sending them home with gifts.
One thing I especially love about hobbit birthdays is the ‘mathom’ tradition. Like many of our world’s cultures, hobbits in the Shire do not receive gifts on their birthdays, they give them away. This is a particular contrast with the solitary figure of poor Smeagol/Gollum. He speaks of the One Ring as his birthday present when he is in the cave with Bilbo; only later, in The Lord of the Rings, do we learn that this ‘present’ is not something he was given, but a precious thing he looked upon covetously and then took for himself with murderous hands.
A mathom is something handed down, passed around and given away. It is an appealing idea in our materialistically cluttered world, where we give lip service to Re-use as one of our modern three R’s. Bilbo was a wealthy hobbit and so could afford to give away the custom-made imported toys of “real dwarf make” (and you can be very sure they were ‘fair trade’. ;-) Bilbo also made sure to see that practical gifts, like tools and sacks of potatoes, were given to the poorer families in the neighborhood. But the more usual custom, in the comfortably middle-class Shire, was to recycle those unused odd whatsits and stray thingamabobs as presents, making sure that no guest went home from a party without something.
And then, when you had collected far too many of these knick-knacks, your own birthday would come around and you could de-clutter your hobbit hole by inviting a large number of guests. Don’t forget to fetch the Old Winyards out from the deepest cellar…and if perchance you have some unexpected guests, and the cakes run out, do remember your painful duty as hobbit host to go without!
I discovered Great Big Sea late. I don’t listen to much music—I am easily distractable, and highly susceptible to earworm songs. I have a lasting love of The Chieftains, though, and some other Celtic groups. Great Big Sea is a Newfoundland group that is part of this tradition, fusing the Irish-descended Newfoundland style with rock and pop and probably lots more I know nothing about. I just know it’s good stuff, with moving tunes and lyrics that are thoughtful and relevant to contemporary life.
I can’t classify all of GBS’s work as Spiritually Refreshing. Group leader Alan Doyle, a religious studies grad, throws a lot of criticism, cynicism and borderline blasphemy our way at times; and yet many songs, like "Walk on the Moon" and "Ordinary Day" use positive religious imagery and are definitely classed as inspirational.
GBS’s latest album, Fortune’s Favour, showcases a literary theme that is dear to my heart in the number “Company of Fools”. “The Fool” is an archetype with many variants and incarnations, such as the court jester, the Joker in the card deck (and most recently in Batman: The Dark Knight); the trickster character like Brer Rabbit and other rabbit heroes like Watership Down’s El-Ahrairah; and the Holy Fool or Fool for Christ. The Fool is important because, strange and laughable as he is, he can get away with Telling the Truth.
Perhaps one of the most famous stories about the Fool is Hans Christian Andersen’s "The Emperor’s New Clothes". You know it, I’m sure—two tailors dupe a vain emperor by pretending only really clever people can see the invisible cloth they use to make his new clothes. But of course they have only been sewing air, and when the Emperor parades himself in the streets wearing these imaginary garments, it is a small boy (whom critics identify with Andersen himself) who laughs and points, crying “The Emperor has no clothes!” The boy plays the part of a jester, but the Emperor turns out to be the really foolish one...
This is what Great Big Sea is celebrating in this collaboration between Alan Doyle and Russell Crowe (yes, THAT Russell Crowe…):
Many a truest word
has been spoken by the Jester
Standing against the tide
Is the noblest of gestures
It’s the little pearls of wisdom
That tumble from the light
That makes us laugh until we cry
Because we know that they are right
Within the strangest people
Truth can find the strangest home
So meet me in the village
where all we idiots go.....
Truth. Sometimes it's dark and nasty, and sometimes the Fool puts it crudely for the shock value-- to shock the audience awake. But without Truth, there is no spiritual refreshment.
That's why -I- would 'rather spend a lifetime in the Company of Fools."
Don’t forget—HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!
It’s not so much that Commander Sam Vimes has had greatness thrust upon him; it’s more like greatness has grabbed hold of his ankle to drag him along, kicking and screaming, to save the world.
…..oh, all right, I’m just trying to write like Terry Pratchett, and failing miserably. I’m sure better writers than I have tried and failed…if they were foolish enough to try in the first place.
The inimitable and brilliant
Terry Pratchett, O.B.E., who has “occasionally been accused of committing Literature”, is the creator of the fantasy universe of the
Discworld. Having your world’s very foundations comprise a gigantic turtle swimming through space, surmounted by a quartet of elephants bearing the spinning turntable of the world on their backs, strikes the western mythological sensibilities as rather amusing; and the denizens of this fictional universe are constructed with a similar offbeatness. Yet Pratchett’s stories, for all the comedy that sparkles across their pages, have a consistent weave of dark and grim themes.
THUD! Is a murder mystery featuring the redoubtable Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch. Except the mystery turns out to be more than mere murder….
While no-one knows more about the strange and unsavory streets of Ankh-Morpork than Sam Vimes, the commander is at heart a suburbanite and solid family man. Thereby hangs a frantic and hilarious chase scene—possibly the best ever written for a pre-motorized setting—as Vimes’s men help clear the way for his commute home, lest he be late to his daily appointment with his infant firstborn, Young Sam. The appointment is for the bedtime reading of
WHERE’S MY COW?
The heart of every parent in the world cries out in sympathy for Sam as he reads for the hundredth time the plot-challenged picture book with the senseless conclusion. When he dares to make his own editorial adjustments, we know that disaster will ensue….and it does, in the form of Young Sam repeating some rude language in the ears of his mother. Chastened, the elder Sam returns to the word-for-word authorized version of
WHERE’S MY COW? for the remainder of the novel….even when, at the climax of
THUD!, he finds himself fighting an epic underground battle.
You see, trolls and war and supernatural catastrophe and the like notwithstanding, the appointed hour for
WHERE’s MY COW? arrives, and Hell Hath No Fury like Sam prevented from reading to his boy.
WHERE’s MY COW?, shouted by memory as the commander hacks his way through an underground battle with the trolls, becomes an integral and mystical element in literally saving the Discworld from catastrophe.
It’s silly, of course. But “
God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise”, and there is a profundity to the silliness, because of Sam Vimes’s simple human fatherly devotion.
Vis a vis the importance of foolish things, it is quite interesting to see Pratchett, who
guesses he is an atheist arrive, via
THUD! and
WHERE’S MY COW? , if not at the same place as C.S. Lewis, at least in a nearby neighborhood.
I think of Puddleglum in
The Silver Chair, defying the witch’s taunts that his and the children’s talk of
Narnia is all a pretty fairy tale made up by babies. Pratchett’s outlook on the universe is indeed akin to Puddleglum’s in that in the Discworld pretty much anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Pratchett reinforces this view with the anthropomorphic language I tried to reproduce at the start of this post. And yet his characters like Vimes do not scruple to set store by such foolish things as a children’s story, and by such seemingly small commitments as reading to one’s children every day.
Kiddie Lit saves the World!
P.S. I am not one of those Christian readers who is more interested in what a given writer believes about God than anything else. I find the most interesting thing about Pratchett’s
recent experience of what he seems willing to believe may be supernatural is not the mere fact that he had such an experience, but his willingness to discuss it publicly. He seems not to care what other people, atheist, Christian, or other, may think of him as a result of this quite personal disclosure. That bespeaks a certain honesty and humility, reflected in his very amusing stories which in my opinion are indeed Literature of the best, spiritually refreshing sort.
This article, sans hypertext, first appeared in an issue of Christian Vision in the early 1990s. It was one of a series I did for that publication, a Christian writers’ newsletter from Skysong Press, who still publish the Christian fiction zine Dreams and Visions.
The storyteller mounts the platform and takes up his six-stringed lyre, and with his bold shout the audience falls silent, not daring to move a muscle.
"Hwaet!" he cries, "
We Gar-dena in geardagum theodcyninga thrym gefrunon...."
The year is 1991, the site of performance Vancouver, British Columbia. But almost from the first words, the audience is no longer there.
Benjamin Bagby has magic, and he uses it to open the door into the misty world of sixth century Denmark. For the next hour and a quarter his listeners join the Scyldings and Geats in the famous mead-hall, Heorot, while the hero Beowulf makes good his vow to destroy Grendel, the monstrous descendent of Cain whose jealousy of human happiness has goaded him to a bloodthirsty spree.
I was there. Yes, the entire performance was in Old English; the audience was given a translation of the poem, and in the brief lulls during which the storyteller re-tuned his lyre, you could hear the turning of pages. But even this did not break the spell.
No costumes, no special effects. Just a man with a voice and an instrument. Yes, he had to re-invent storytelling techniques that no longer exist-- techniques that must date back at least to the time when David soothed the demonized King Saul with his harp.
But techniques--the gentle strumming of the lyre to evoke the ocean voyage, or the heightened speech that paints for us Beowulf's heroic character-- these are only the magic runes that unlock the door to the story. Bagby's Beowulf transcends mere performance, for having unlocked the door, he does not stand on the threshold, blocking our view, but strides in confidently, drawing his listeners irresistibly after him.
I am not a performing artist, and don't know exactly how Bagby did this-- how he got himself so much out of the way that we all knew we had come there not to see Benjamin Bagby perform, but to experience Beowulf. I suspect we see few performing artists who are so successful at what they do, because most of them do not want to be actors or singers, they only want to be stars. In short, to enter the magic door needs humility.
The same applies to literary and visual artists. And here I do know a little about how to do it, or at least how not to do it. Don't let a bad sentence stand, for instance, or you'll be blocking the doorway into your story with your own laziness. Don't waste time showing off your flowing prose, if what the story requires is action; then it will be your ego that bars the entry.
It amounts to loving the story you are trying to tell, more than you love being a writer. Like Saint Francis, the artist must want only to be a channel. By all means, develop your technique; no less a genius than Hans Christian Andersen had to return to grammar school at the age of seventeen, to get the basic education without which he would never have had the tools to write the tales that are now more widely translated than any other book in the world except the Bible itself.
But having learned the runes that will unlock the magic door-- having learned how to write description, how to reveal character, how to keep the narrative moving-- don't stand in the doorway admiring your accomplishments. Get out of the way, and let your readers come in.
EDIT addendum, 2008: I've watched the DVD, including the extras, and it's worth every
sceatta.
Patrick O’Brian’s nautical Aubrey-Maturin books are not so much a series of novels as they are one long serial novel. In the world of these books the reader experiences a
deep immersion in 19th C shipboard life and feels the strength of camaraderie and unity of purpose that marks life aboard the
Surprise, Captain Jack Aubrey’s favorite ship.
Surprise is a ‘happy ship’ (though some other vessels in the books are not), led by a captain who is firm, fair, highly competent and dedicated. Aubrey and his close friend, ship’s doctor Stephen Maturin, complement each other in their strengths and weaknesses.
Every buddy movie ever made is built on the principle that two diverse characters are better off working together than going their separate ways. The initial encounter of a buddy duo often makes for a humorous scene, as one or both of the pair is surprised and discomfited. In the case of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, the catalyst that brings them together is music, which both of them adore…but their behaviour at the concert where they meet is quite different. As the musicians at the Governor’s House play their
final crescendo“… on the little gilt chairs at least some of the audience were following the rise with an equal intensity: …two in the third row…happened to be sitting next to one another…The listener farther to the left was a man …whose big form overflowed his seat, leaving only a streak of gilt wood to be seen here and there. He was wearing his best uniform…the deep white cuff of his gold-buttoned sleeve beat the time….The high note came, the pause, the resolution; and with the resolution the sailor’s fist swept firmly down upon his knee. He leant back in his chair, extinguishing it entirely, sighed happily, and turned towards his neighbour with a smile. The words ‘Very finely played, sir, I believe’ were formed in his gullet if not quite in his mouth when he caught the cold and indeed inimical look and heard the whisper, “If you really must beat the measure, sir, let me entreat you to do so in time, and not half a beat ahead.”
But the inauspicious beginning is soon put behind them, for Jack is convivial by nature and Stephen too honest with himself not to admit the music was so fine that Jack’s rather unrefined enthusiasm was in fact justified.
The excellent film adaptation
Master and Commander (drawing on events from several books in the series and not just the initial volume of the same title) captures, in particular by means of music, the essence of the multi-volume progress of the friendship between the open, bluff English ship’s captain and the intense, secretive, philosophical physician. The books of course show us in much more detail how at times their national outlooks—Stephen is Irish—and their personal agendas clash. We see them through thick and thin, battling the elements and the enemy; Stephen unable quite ever to get his sea legs, Jack at a loss on land. We see them each at their fallible worst—Stephen succumbing to
laudanum addiction, Jack to marital infidelity.
But through it all, the evenings spent playing
string duets and sharing meals reaffirm the surprising harmony between a pair who are very unlike. Friends and shipmates become much more than the sum of their parts, and their story is a joy to read.
As we are less than a fortnight away from the
movie premiere of Prince Caspian, I’ve decided to set aside part two of
Ships and Shipmates till next month and talk about the
second book in the
Chronicles of Narnia instead.
Who is so heartless as not to be won over by the most valiant character in children’s literature, perhaps in all literature?
I hope the film of
Prince Caspian will do him justice, for Reepicheep the Mouse, knight of Narnia, has a thing or two to teach us all.
I’ve written about
murine heroes in this blog before. They are certainly a popular staple of kidlit—besides Graham Oakley’s
Church Mice, there’s E. B. White’s
Stuart Little and numerous mice in the stories of
Beatrix Potter, to name only a few. Perhaps writers figure children should be able to identify with small and powerless creatures.
Lewis, however, does the rest one better. His Reepicheep is not there simply for his child readers to identify with as a little character threatened by all the larger characters around him, who can be escaped thanks to the very smallness of a mouse. Reepicheep, on the contrary, is fearless, feisty and above all truly valiant. He is a role model not only for children but for the adults those children become, and for the adults who read the Chronicles of Narnia over their children’s shoulders.
Today perhaps more than ever before, Reepicheep speaks to those who love Refreshment of Spirit, and indeed to the world. When
Prince Caspian was first published, the reaction other characters (and doubtless readers too) would have toward a swashbuckling mouse was predictable:
isn’t he cute?, or some variation thereof. But Reepicheep quickly proves that he is not playing at being a hero; he is a hero, first in his own heart, second in his actions, and third in the undying loyalty of his followers.
These days, Reepicheep is not just a figure of amusement to our jaded society because he appears to be a small creature trying to act big, but also because the very heroic code he lives by seems amusing to those who don’t know their own deep need for Refreshment of Spirit.
Perhaps this cynicism isn’t so new, however. Let’s remember that Queen Susan went home from the adventure of Prince Caspian to a life of bedazzlement with vanity and shallow social butterflying, and so ceased to be a Friend of Narnia. Somehow she lost touch with the depth of devotion shown by Reepicheep’s mouse troops, who promptly prepared to cut off their own tails rather than let him endure the humiliation of that maiming alone. That is the
loyalty that comes to the Truly Valiant.
...very briefly to note that I now have a Facebook group dedicated to the themes of this blog. So if you are on Facebook, come check it out. I hope the URL above will work if you are already a member there; if not, you can sign up and just search for A Spell for Refreshment of the Spirit on the "Groups" page.
Meanwhile, it's Holy Week and we are preparing to celebrate Pascha, the greatest feast of the Orthodox Church. I'll be back here in a week or two with the second part of Ships and Shipmates.
Seagoing stories are among my favorites. Perhaps the Royal Navy ship HMS
Surprise, with her strict wartime discipline and rigid chain of command, is a little more like a monastic community than your average parish. Still, it is not for nothing that the architectural term for the main space in a church, where the congregation gathers, is nave, from the Latin term for 'ship'. In an
essay on church architecture,
Aidan Hart writes
".....the basilica was the only building of the pagan Roman empire which was suitable for large Christian assemblies, since the interiors of pagan temples were designed only for the priests and the sacrifices, not for the worshipping public. Another early symbolic reading of the basilica relates it to a ship. According to the “Apostolic Constitutions” (c. 400 A.D.) “the house of the believers is long in shape like a ship [hence nave from the Latin navis] and directed towards the east.” Here the emphasis is on the transitory nature of our present life, of our movement towards the heavenly city to come. The basilica is primarily, therefore, a church plan which emphasises action, motion."
What other image but that of a ship could convey so vividly that we are all in this together, a company of shipmates on a journey, huddled together against the hostile elements in the great wild world around us?
Yet those who go down to the sea in ships (Ps. 107:23) are by no means cowards and isolationists. On the contrary, they are adventurers, like
Saint Brendan the Navigator-- or, to mention a fictional example, Caspian the Tenth of Narnia, who leads the
Dawn Treader expedition in search of his father's lost friends. With him sails
Reepicheep, the valiant talking mouse who seeks nothing less than Aslan's own country.
Mirror Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold
Passage by Connie Willis
Spiritual refreshment isn’t always found in the sunnier pastures of literature. Sometimes the most revivifying draughts well up from stories about the dark night of soul.
We interrupt this post for a public service announcement: If you didn’t pay attention to the masthead of this blog, now’s the time to remind you:
Here There Be Spoilers. If you haven’t yet read
Mirror Dance by
Lois McMaster Bujold or
Passage by
Connie Willis, you may perhaps want to hie thee off to some other blog for the nonce.
I love speculative fiction—sf, fantasy, horror, supernatural, any of those literary categories that hint that Things Are Not As They Seem. Where but in SF or fantasy could the author kill off the main character halfway through the story, and then go on writing about him or her—without resorting to flashbacks?
In the midst of life we are in death, reads one of the prayers in the Anglican funeral office. Willis and Bujold in these two books have each tackled the subject of death in the midst of life—the life of the story, that is. These are two very different writers, and you can catch how very different these two particular stories are just by looking at the style of the cover art. And yes, as I hinted up top—in each of these books, the main viewpoint character dies partway through the book.
Passage, the story of near-death researcher Joanna Lander, who gets a lot nearer the big D than she planned, has a lot of the screwball comedy in it, like most Connie Willis stories—even her rather grim novels
Doomsday Book and
Lincoln’s Dreams. There is a lot of chasing around after an elusive MacGuffin or three, a lot of interweaving of stories and themes that don’t at first appear to be related.
Mirror Dance is a volume in Bujold’s continuing space opera saga of the Vorkosigan family, focusing mostly on the character of Miles Naismith Vorkosigan, Imperial undercover agent, hyperactive mercenary fleet admiral and self-appointed knight errant. The main wonder is that in this line of work, Miles never managed to get himself killed any sooner in the multi-volume series…
As I said, these are two very different writers. Willis writes what I call “Science Fiction for people who hate Science Fiction,” where the technical details are mostly kept to a minimum. Bujold writes traditional space opera adventures of a very high calibre, strongly founded on characters facing acute moral conflict. But both of these literary cooks season their dishes with faith, hope and love—even, or perhaps especially, when their subject is Death.
UPDATE WARNING: I didn't mean to confuse anybody-- I just found out that
Lois McMaster Bujold's newest volume in her
Sharing Knife series is also, coincidentally, entitled
Passage. Don't go confusing it with
Connie Willis's Passage. Whatever-- most anything by either of these authors will be a good read!
Edit March 26/08: This book has just been nominated for the Hugo Award!
In her study of the Inklings, The Company they Keep, Diana Pavlac Glyer cites J.R.R. Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" and discusses how he "conceives of all stories everywhere existing as parts of a tapestry or web, an image that implies the work of many hands, many colors, many times, all contributing to one enormous, seamless, single work."
There are loads of wonderful things about Lewis, Tolkien and the other Inklings in this book. Reading about the heady creative sessions in Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College or over pints at the Eagle and Child, I find myself wishing my own writing crit partners lived nearer so we could enjoy similar occasions, rather than just swapping electronic copies of works in progress by e-mail. But the essential element of reading and commenting on each other's work is nevertheless part of our creative process.
Equally essential is our collaboration with "the immortal words of our dead literary ancestors", as Cory Doctorow puts it in his acceptance speech for the Sunburst Award, quoted by Glyer in her book. Some of the best advice I have ever had about writing-- and I can't remember from whom!-- was to read widely, and read deeply. I'm reading deeply about Saint Cuthbert and Northumbria in the seventh to 10th centuries right now; but reading beyond the specialized field of one or two projects keeps me weaving in threads of new colours. Hard to say, even, just what will turn up in the finished story....and that's all part of the fun.
The Web of Story has many weavers. It's a privilege to be one of them, drawing on threads from the depth of warp and the breadth of weft to weave in my own small but unique threads to the Great Tapestry.
Usually the stories I write about here are fiction...but this one is for real, a
bit of history from the First World War.
Weintraub's book does an admirable job of telling the story of the Christmas Truce, using letters and newspaper reports of the time, with plates featuring cartoons and photographs of the phenomenon.
When it comes to the complex causes of WWI aka The Great War, I'm about as clueless as
Baldrick ("No, there was definitely something about an ostrich..."). Well, probably a lot of the chaps in the trenches were no more informed of the big picture themselves. It seems to have been the front-line Germans and their Christmas trees who initiated the truce. Here is an excerpt from a
Great War website:
""It is thought possible that the enemy may be contemplating an attack during Xmas or New Year. Special vigilance will be maintained during these periods." --From General Headquarters at St. Omer - to all units24th December, 1914.
This message came from the Headquarters of Sir John French and was sent to all British Units in France and Flanders on Christmas Eve, 1914. It may be that Sir John ought to be taken at his word, and that there really was a considered possibility of some kind of German attack coming over the Christmas period. But there may have been a hidden message - that Sir John had considered the possibility of some show of friendliness at Christmas and had taken steps to give advance notice of HQ's disapproval of any such thing.
Far from wishing to attack, some Germans seemed inclined to make Christmas a quiet period, in which they could enjoy memories of home. The Germans had originated the tradition of bringing Christmas trees into their houses and decorating them, a practice which was introduced into England by Queen Victoria's Consort, Prince Albert. In 1914 the practice was still not as widespread in the UK as it was in Germany. The Germans had brought Christmas trees into their trenches and dugouts in various places, and had decorated some parts of their parapet. Leutnant Johannes Niemann, 133rd Royal Saxon Regiment refers to having a Christmas tree in his dugout, and mentions also that the soldiers had hung little Christmas trees above their trenches, complete with candles. The Scottish troops opposite him, seeing the lights and being mindful of the general order issued the day before, suspected an imminent attack and began firing. No attack came, of course, and things settled down soon afterwards." __________________________________________________
Next thing you knew, in many locations along the trenches that stretched from the North Sea to the Swiss border, soldiers were singing carols, calling greetings across No-Man's Land, even stepping out to shake hands and exchange small gifts like food and tobacco.
A major concern of both sides was the burial of the dead who lay in the No-Man's Land between the lines. But perhaps the most charming
of the complex of stories about the truce is that of the Christmas Day football game, told in the picture book
War Game by Michael Foreman (who also illustrated a fine edition of
Dickens' A Christmas Carol) 
From war to play, even just for a single day.....the surprising power of Christmas.
A hundred and nine today.....notice Father Christmas in this photo with the young author-to-be of the Chronicles of Narnia. I thought you all might enjoy Lewis's advice to a young writer:
The Kilns
Headington Quarry, Oxford
14 Dec. 1959
Dear Thomasine, It is very hard to give any general advice about writing. Here’s my attempt. (1) Turn off the Radio. (2) Read all the good books you can, and avoid nearly all magazines. (3) Always write (and read) with the ear, not the eye. You shd. hear every sentence you write as if it was being read aloud or spoken. If it does not sound nice, try again. (4) Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about . . .) (5) Take great pains to be clear. Remember that though you start by knowing what you mean, the reader doesn't, and a single ill-chosen word may lead him to a total misunderstanding. In a story it is terribly easy just to forget that you have not told the reader something that he wants to know - the whole picture is so clear in your mind that you forget that it isn't the same in his. (6) When you give up a bit of work don't (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier. (7) Don't use a typewriter. The noise will destroy your sense of rhythm, which still needs years of training. (8) Be sure you know the meaning (or meanings) of every word you use.
C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters volume 3
And here are a few Lewis links you may also appreciate:
Into the Wardrobe lively Lewis-focused community
NarniaWeb for news of the Narnia movies
Trailer for the docudrama C.S. Lewis: Beyond Narnia
I never get tired of mentioning that my daughter had a bit part in that last one.....;-)
And here are my own photos of our visit to the Kilns, Lewis's home in Oxford.
If it weren't for Lewis, I don't suppose I ever would have created this blog, as the title Refreshment of Spirit is straight from his work.
In The Lord of the Rings, the small hero, Frodo the hobbit, screws up his courage to undertake the terrible task of destroying the deadly One Ring:
"I will take the Ring," he said,"though I do not know the way."
Elrond raised his eyes and looked at him........."This is the hour of the Shire-folk, when they arise from their quiet fields, to shake the towers and counsels of the Great.Who of all the Wise could have foreseen it?"
Small heroes are classic....and that is one of the things that is so appealing about Graham Oakley's marvellous
Church Mice series.
Recently in an idle moment when I could and should have been doing any number of other things, I Googled the books, wondering if our collection was complete. To my astonishment, it turns out the whole series is out of print, and the volumes we are missing ourselves go for the kind of price that would make you want to put the book in a glass case and never touch it!
I'm not interested in collectibles as such, I'm afraid. My 1980s
X-Men comic books are in a disgraceful condition from re-reading and more re-reading. So the
Church Mice Take a Break and
Humphrey will have to wait until the publisher sees sense and brings the series back into print...or at least until I can get the library to order them.
These cleverly illustrated tales of the diminutive murine (yes I had to look it up) heroes ooze charm but never quite topple over into excessive sentimentality, thanks to the author-illustrator's brilliant poking-fun at the foibles of the mice and other inhabitants of Wortlethorpe, quintessential sleepy English village.
It's the tolerance of foibles, without allowing the tyranny of foibles, that makes the community of church mice so appealing. And the way these small, small heroes-- with a little help from Sampson the Church Cat-- overcome the villains of their various adventures. If they can do it, why not us?
try them out, if you can get hold of them.....the Christmas book is one of my favorites.
I like studying fairy tales almost as much as I like reading fairy tales (and
writing fairy tales. )
If
The Lord of the Rings was the novel that made me say "where has this book been all my life?", Ronald Murphy's
The Owl, the Raven and the Dove: the Religious Meaning of the Grimms' Magic Fairy Tales is the
non-fiction book that also made me say "where has the book been all my life?"
The birds of the title refer to three story traditions-- the classical myths, Germanic folk tale and legend, and the Christian sacred story. Fr. Murphy broke new ground with this study, investigating first hand Wilhelm Grimm's personal copy of the Greek New Testament.
The idea that the Grimm brothers merely collected traditional tales and published them has long ago been debunked. Fr. Murphy demonstrates just what sort of spin they put on them...braiding together three different strands to create something new, creating magical stories with a religious underpinning similar to the works of C.S. Lewis and George MacDonaold. Fr. Murphy's book pays particular attention to some of the best-known of the tales such as Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White.
I sent Fr. Murphy a copy of my poetry chapbook, which contains this poem about Snow White. He was kind enough to write back to me and remark "I was so happy to see from your poem that I was not the only one who caught the nature of the Prince."
be sure to read the actual Grimm's version of the tale, not some bowdlerized version. One important detail appears when the dwarfs have placed Snow White in her glass casket on the mountaintop:
"And birds came too, and wept for Snow-white; first an owl, then a raven, and last a dove."
Fr. Murphy writes:
"As Snow White opens her eyes, lifts the lid of the casket and sits upright, she says, "Oh God, where am I?" The answer which Wilhelm worot is Christ's, the answer hoped for for millennia, "the king's son says, 'You are with me,'" and he tells her that he loves her more than anything in the world and immediately invites her to follow him into the eternal world of the Father . "Come with me to my father's castle, you will be my wife." The story comes to a mystical Trinitarian ending as the good soul, led by the Spirit in the owl, the raven and the dove, is brought to a meeting with the Son, who conducts the person in love beyond death to his Father's house."
If you follow the TV show
LOST, you’ve glimpsed this book in the hands of the con artist Sawyer, who scavenged it from the wreckage. What a great book to have on a desert island—not because it is escapist fantasy, but because it speaks in a spiritually refreshing way about the topic that will become the number one concern of the castaways in
LOST—community.
Theological ethicist
Stanley Hauerwas has it right when he speaks of the rabbit heroes of Richard Adams’ novel
Watership Down as “a story-formed community.” Stories of the rabbit hero El-ahrairah are embedded in the main narrative, each one recounted at a time when the rabbits need to be buoyed up by the particular lesson of a particular story. These tales are by turns inspiring, thrilling, humorous, or frightening; and they model such virtues as cleverness, courage, and teamwork. (There is more about Watership Down and heroism in
this post.)
In contrast to the love of Story shown by the band of rabbits led by Hazel, another group of rabbits in the story have forgotten, downplayed and despised the traditional stories, instead steeping themselves in depressing modernist poetry. This rabbit warren, know as Cowslip’s warren, is living in self-deceit. They train themselves to accept death—because death is the price they pay for comfort. Their warren is surrounded by snares set by the farmer who feeds them and keeps off the foxes. Whenever one of their number goes missing, they pretend to forget that rabbit’s existence.
It is a chilling portrait. But the rabbits of Hazel’s group are by contrast the kind of characters the reader finds himself wanting to emulate. Inspired by the daring and cunning of El-ahrairah and his faithful helper Rabscuttle, Hazel’s rabbits dare to make a journey to find a new home. They learn new skills, make friends of other rabbits and even non-rabbits, and hold together against the attack of the martial warren of Efrafa. When the story of
Watership Down is over and the warren at peace, Hazel and his friends have become part of the story tradition that is being learned by new generations of rabbits. What a thing to aspire to—to be part of the great Story of life in such a way that we, even we ourselves, can become the heroes of our children and grandchildren!
Edit p.s. Dec 2007: My essay "Parables for Mission Planters: Principles of Leadership and Community Drawn from Richard Adams' Watership Down, is available as a free PDF download in the
Canadian Journal of Orthodox Christianity.
Some books are refreshing just because they are funny. Only certain kinds and degrees of funny, though. Satire is a useful tool in the public arena, and it can be refreshing if only it is done with a light touch. One of my favorites is
Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes". And of course, for brilliant satire these days you need look no farther than the
Harry Potter books. viz. this quote from
an interview with "
Hogwarts Professor" John Granger: "If Lewis and Tolkien are modernists writing in reaction to the same questions and issues that provoked all writers of the modern era, albeit as moderns in opposition to the unexamined convictions of modern people, I think the same might be said about Rowling as a post-modern writer. She is exploring the same problems as her contemporaries and she has the same seeming superficiality and lightness that makes her satire comic and winsome."
Satire can be tricky, though, as it can easily cross the line from fair if clever criticism to the savagely unbalanced. A favorite writer of mine who has no trouble with that line is
Connie Willis.
I like to call Ms. Willis's work "Science Fiction for People who hate Science Fiction". I like to recommend
Bellwether to start, as it is short and very lighthearted-- a screwball comedy that nevertheless ponders big questions about causality in the universe. A plot summary won't do it-- but if you have daughters you will SCREAM with laughter at the "Barbie birthday party" and the discussion of child-raising fads....plus, workplace morale-building fads, restaurant fads, fashion colour fads ("pomo pink", anybody?) and more. The amazing thing is that all these ingredients are not just thrown into a kind of a stew-- Willis weaves them into a narrative web that will catch you fast. But you'll like it. Really.
Full disclosure, the author is a friend. And I have just finished doing a review of the book for the "Books to Treasure" column of
The Handmaiden. That will be out in mid-August, and will have much more detail than I have posted here.
But apart from that.... if you want something "like" Narnia, but "different" from Narnia, this is the book you're looking for.
This book has a sense of the transcendent, like Narnia. Unlike Narnia, it is not an allegory.
It is however a tale of a magical unseen world, and a battle between good and evil. Young Jonah Comfait journeys to Mysterion, where he faces the Cyclops, the Reef of Fire and the Bay of Storms to rescue his father from the Djinn, who hold him captive in the Nightmare Tree, feasting on his terrible dreams.
Unlike most of the stories I write about in this blog, this one is just newly published, so I don't want to give any spoilers here. It's probably for a slightly older audience than Narnia-- pre-teens up to adult. It has a fresh setting,
the Seychelles, yet it uses the classic hero journey archetypes-- mentor, helper, crossing the threshold, enemies/shadows/shapechangers etc.; and it draws on classic legendary motifs like the Djinn, the Cyclops, pirates, mermaids and more.
What is "refreshing" about this book? It is a book of hope. "There's always hope of freedom in Mysterion," says one character.
You can order the book online now from
amazon.ca, but it will also soon be available on amazon.com
I’ve been thinking about this, thanks to a recent conjunction of story experiences.
1. Spider-Man 2—while channel flipping, I came upon one of my favorite scenes in the world, the one where Spidey stops a runaway commuter train with such effort that he collapses and is pulled into the train by the grateful rescued people who pass him overhead and lay him gently on the floor, mask missing.
- 300—finally got out to see this big screen movie of Frank Miller’s graphic novel interpretation of the battle of Thermopylae, in which a few Spartans, insanely outnumbered, save Western civilization as we know it by holding off the Persian hordes.
3. Watership Down—dipped into this old favorite while revising an essay I’ve been working on. A rabbit named Hazel leads his little band to a new home and concocts a plan to get some doe rabbits so the community won’t die out.
In every one of these cases, one or a few make a sacrifice of themselves on behalf of the many, a sacrifice that brings them to the very jaws of death. As Christopher Vogler notes in The Writer’s Journey:Mythic Structure for Storytellers & Screenwriters, a Hero is “someone who is willing to sacrifice his own needs on behalf of others, like a shepherd who will sacrifice to protect and serve his flock.” Vogler doesn’t spell it out, but of course this remark is an allusion to John 10:10-11...describing, in my mind, the Source of all genuine heroism.
“One who sacrifices himself for others” is a fairly broad and simple description, and the stories to be told are near-infinite. “Hero” is one of what Jung calls “Archetypes” in his theory of the collective unconscious; those ideas are further developed by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Christopher Vogler in turn has applied these ideas to modern storytelling.
Interestingly, if you look at the three examples above, you’ll notice that the heroes are each quite different. They are marked as heroes by their actions, but they are all of different character types. Spider-Man is what is sometimes called an anti-hero—indeed he was one of the first in modern comics—a neurotic loner, an outsider, a wimpy teenager suddenly given amazing powers. King Leonidas and his 300, on the other hand were born and bred to be heroes; the weak and deformed of Sparta have been weeded out by ruthless infanticide, and these 300 are the pick of the surviving crop, trained harshly from childhood.
Hazel is perhaps the least likely hero of all—he lacks any very distinguishing characteristics, and it is other rabbits in his band who supply size and strength, supernatural knowledge, and outstanding cleverness. But Hazel is the one who holds them together with farsightedness, good sense, and above all with his courage in going ahead of them to run their risks for them “like El-ahrairah”, the rabbit folk hero whose stories they admire.
There are so many heroes in the stories of the world—because we all need heroes, and really, American Idol and Superbowl winners just don’t cut it. And there are also many kinds of heroes....because, likely or not, we all need to know that we can be heroes too.
....to announce that Vi Nesdoly has honoured the Spell for Refreshment with the Thinking Blogger Award! Thank you Vi!
It's now my turn to pass on the award to five more bloggers. Here they are:
Peter Chattaway's Film Chat (since, to my surprise, I don't see the award anywhere on his blog yet! If it's there and I've missed it, what the heck, go visit anyway for great film news, reviews, ponderings.... )
Ed Willett's Hassenpfeffer already has the award, but-- his interesting posts, mostly about science news, do make me think!
Bev. M. Cooke's Bevnal Abbey Scriptorium thoughts about this and that-- societal trends, current events.
Graham Yates' Thoughts from the Vineyard quirky stuff well written
Thomas Wildeman's Kick Against the Goads (don't let his current Canuck fever fool you, there are plenty of thinkingblogposts there!)
From the original Thinking Blogger Award site
The participation rules are simple:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn't fit your blog).
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yikes! such madness. on the other hand, it's refreshing to see that there still are people out there with some heart and common sense who see practical and wonderful ways to counteract this kind of nastiness.
This is late in coming, but thank you for stopping by and the really enjoyable read.