Record

To keep track of useful things I've read

[sethwieck]

New Story Published

Fathom Magazine awarded first place and published one of my stories ––Once in This Bread–– this morning. Below is an excerpt (and link):

On the college library steps, she finds Adam reclined, waiting on her. He eats a sandwich from a paper bag while the vestige of summer heat slides out of October. “This might be the last beautiful day of the year,” he tells her.

[neovictorian]

My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.

G K Chesterton (via revenantwaltz)

[sethwieck]

Reading Dr. King: Part 1

In signing [the Voting Rights Bill of 1965], the President announced that “Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that’s ever been won on any battlefield... today we strike away the last major shackle of...fierce and ancient bonds.”

One year later, some of the people who had been brutalized in Selma and who were present at the Capitol ceremonies were leading marchers in the suburbs of Chicago amid a rain of rocks and bottles, among burning automobiles, to the thunder of jeering thousands, many of them waving Nazi flags.

A year later, some of the Negro leaders who had been present in Selma and at the Capitol ceremonies no longer held office in their organizations. They ha been discarded to symbolize a radical change of tactics.

A year later, the white backlash  had become an emotional electoral issue in California, Maryland and elsewhere. In several Southern states men long regarded as political clowns had become governors or only narrowly missed election, their magic achieved with a “witches’” brew of bigotry, prejudice, half-truths and whole lies.

- Dr. Martin Luther King. Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community. “Where Do We Go From Here?” Pg. 2. Emphasis mine.

//One brief thought: This was published in 1967. We won’t progress out of racism. The subtitle of Dr. King’s book is “Chaos or Community.” Those are always the options.

[sethwieck]

The questions of language and war are often intertwined: a language is just a dialect with an army, as the saying goes

William T. Cavanaugh. “Killing for the Telephone Company.” Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church. (34). Eerdman’s.

[settledthingsstrange]

And I realized then that the answer to “why write? Why talk? Why read? Why publish?” is that we are not primarily writing and reading and publishing to “fix” the City of Man. I mean, maybe things will in the future “swing our way,” and maybe our words will have had something to do with the restoration of social conservatism in America. But maybe not. But the thing is, that was never—it never should have been—our major vision for writing anyway.  Why write, in the first place? The answer is the same answer you’ve got to give to “Why garden?” “Why have babies?” “Why build a house?” The answer is, because we are called to, we are called to be makers, because we are made in the image of a creator, and this is part of what it means to be fruitful, to have dominion, to be humanity, restored in Christ, as God intended us to be. It is by being the best humans we can be, the best makers we can be, that we will do the best for the culture at large. If we’re writers, then we write because it’s our part of the human task to do this, to write essays and publish them, the way we might bottle peaches, or crochet granny squares, or install insulation. When we are in Christ, and being in Him, offer him our work, it lasts into eternity; I think it ends up as part of what we’ll be able to get from the libraries and bookshops in the New Jerusalem. It’s not about “turning America around;” it’s about living in the Kingdom now, being ambassadors from another city, being a light in a dark world. Living the cultural life of eternity, starting now.

the always wonderful Susannah Black, “On Writing in Dark Times” (via settledthingsstrange)

[sethwieck]

[View the story "I Will Sing of Steadfast Love & Justice" on Storify]

[ayjay-deactivated20161206]

In some quarters of American life, evangelical Christians are viewed as fearful and xenophobic—afraid of “the other.” Perhaps in a few cases, which happen to make the news. But in fact, US evangelical churches are refugees’ best friend. If anyone looks fearful and xenophobic, it is the federal government and its broken immigration policies.    This is not to deny the real political, social, and economic challenges of welcoming more sojourners. This is not to suggest that we open our borders without any security checks. It is to refuse to let the gods of fear and security dictate how we respond.   Nor do we mean to suggest our churches are doing all they can for the sojourner. Our resettlement agencies, here and abroad, need more money, more volunteers—more sponsorship from local churches—to face the burgeoning refugee crisis.   This is an unparalleled opportunity to love neighbors here and abroad, and to showcase the beauty of the gospel that proclaims good news to the poor, liberty for those stuck in refugee camps, and a new life for those fleeing from oppression, so that those “yearning to breathe free” can breathe easily.

A Church Welcome for the Tired, the Poor | Christianity Today (via ayjay)

[sethwieck]

Pen and ink studies of a dove found dead after a storm.

[sethwieck]

“This ease of access is in itself a blessing, but its misuse can make it a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more poetry and fiction, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly respond to properly, and the consequence of such over-indulgence is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to, is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces than yesterday’s newspaper.”

Auden, W.H. “Culture and Leisure.” Lecture delivered in 1966!

This comes from a review of the recently completed collection of Auden’s prose: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-complete-works-of-auden-showcases-writings-beyond-the-poetry/2015/09/09/596e1362-5626-11e5-abe9-27d53f250b11_story.html?mc_cid=9d43685789&mc_eid=968c129113 

[sethwieck]

Once aroused, the urge to violence triggers certain physical changes that prepare men’s bodies for battle. This set toward violence lingers on; it should not be regarded as a simple reflex that ceases with the removal of the initial stimulus… it is more difficult to quell an impulse toward violence than to rouse it, especially within the normal framework of social behavior. Violence is frequently called irrational. It has its reasons, however, and can marshal some rather convincing ones when the need arises. Yet these reasons cannot be taken seriously, no matter how valid they may appear. Violence itself will discard them if the initial object remains persistently out of reach and continues to provoke hostility. When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand.

Girard, Rene. Violence and the Sacred. Johns Hopkins University Press. p.2.

Commentary that has become very practical in our country regarding race.

http://theird.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/rene_girard_photo_002.jpg

[sethwieck]

I drew a picture of a man with a hat.

[sethwieck]

Virgil Has Departed, Do Not Weep Yet

(I put together a little academic-ish essay in order to be systematic with my McCarthy habit. I tried to keep it under 2000 words, which means it’s not as thorough as it could be, but it should hold water.)

An Analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree As It Regards Dante’s Use of Allegory

by Seth Wieck

“I will sing of warfare and a man of war. I tuned my verse to praise Anchises’ righteous son” (Virgil, emphasis mine). 

Please forgive Virgil’s tense change -- from simple future to simple past -- in the opening lines. The line break denotes 1300 years passing between two of the Mantuan’s songs of Aeneas. Of course, the first line was sung by the historical Virgil in The Aeneid, while Dante voiced the second through his allegorical Virgil. I won’t spend much space explaining that medieval method of exegesis; however, I’ll allow translator Dorothy Sayers to paint some background strokes to my main point: for Dante, “in the allegory, Virgil is the image of Human Wisdom — the best that man can become in his own strength without the especial grace of God…as the image of these things, [he] cannot himself enter Heaven or bring anyone else there” (Introduction. Divine Comedy 67). Bear in mind this lineage of Virgils as we turn our attention to Suttree. I’ll demonstrate, through character and setting, that Cormac McCarthy intentionally places his protagonist Cornelius Suttree in that lineage as a third Virgil, builds an elaborate allegory akin to Dante’s project, and finally McCarthy demolishes the notion of allegory as a legitimate mode of knowledge.

Geography is important for both Dante and McCarthy. For Dante, his geography of Hell is an intricate girder-work to abstract ideas like theology, mythology, and the known cosmos of his time — the nuances of which I’ll leave to the commentaries — but I’ll emphasize: his Hell is effective because the characters of his imagination suffer in real swamps, whirlwinds, winter wastes, and rivers. McCarthy, likewise, takes the topography of a real city, Knoxville, and lays an allegorical map over its contours.

Briefly, I’ll denote the importance of the literal Tennessee River to Suttree, and then explain an allegorical significance it bears to The Inferno’s Virgil. Knoxville is geographically the mouth of the Tennessee River before it cuts across the state and joins the Ohio River, and finally “flows in a sluggard ooze toward southern seas” (McCarthy 4). The character Suttree makes his sometime living as a fisherman on the Tennessee River. The novel opens with Suttree checking his fishing lines. Secondly, Suttree actually resides on the banks of the river in a houseboat, a residence that neither functions fully as a house nor a boat. Similarly in The Inferno, Virgil, Dante’s guide, resides in Limbo, neither fully Hell nor Heaven, on the banks of the River Acheron, the headwaters of all the rivers in Hell. He’s able to cross the river with impunity, fishing out anything he finds living there, in this case Dante himself. And finally, in a pun that reveals McCarthy’s wry sense of humor, we discover that Virgil hangs out with Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan: poets. And what would poets do for all eternity but “check their lines?”

Admittedly, The Divine Comedy has a broad sweep, so the analogy between rivers may seem tenuous at first; however, McCarthy makes further effort to draw the comparison. In one scene, Suttree rises during a foggy dawn. Suddenly another figure in a boat appears out of the gloom, “…already on the river when [Suttree] set forth, standing like some latterday Charon skulling through the fog. With a long pole he hooked condoms aboard and into a pail of soapy water” (107). In Dante, of course, Charon ferries the souls of the damned across the River Acheron into Limbo, crying out, “never you hope to look on Heaven” (Inferno, 3, 85). But even the structure of the description sets the two characters at odds, just as we find Virgil arguing with Charon for the living soul of Dante in Canto 3, so we find these two modern fishermen in competition for the contents of the river: Suttree, who “might even have been a fisher of men in another time” (McCarthy 14) retrieving live things from the detritus, and this “Charon” fishing condoms, a man’s abandonment of hope for future life.

I've briefly demonstrated the allegory that McCarthy has constructed between Knoxville and Hell, and between Suttree and Virgil, and this understanding is a valuable hermeneutic for the rest of the book. But to what ends is McCarthy employing the mode of allegory? As Sayers instructs, these allegories are made of “a thing really existing which, by its very nature, stands for and images forth a greater reality” (13). After McCarthy has gone to such lengths to construct an elaborate allegory, similar in scope to Dante, upon a city “really existing,” then it follows that his project is attempting the aim of allegory: to image forth a greater reality. However, McCarthy seems to have realized a modern agnosticism toward anything metaphysical. At one point, Suttree sits outside of a church, listening to the congregation, and “He was stayed in a peace that drained his mind, for even a false adumbration of the world of the spirit is better than none at all” (21). If a greater reality is only a false adumbration, then the aim of allegory falls flaccid. So, again, why does McCarthy employ the allegorical mode?

Early in the novel, Suttree meditates on his own still-born twin brother who is consigned to exist in the “limbo of the Christless righteous” (14). The image of this twin, now a neighbor to Dante’s allegorical Virgil, haunts Suttree throughout the novel, variously arriving as a reflection in a glass door, “His fetch come up from life’s other side… Suttree and Antisuttree, hand reaching to the hand” (28); a dream, “obsession with uniqueness troubled all his dreams. He saw his brother in swaddling, hands outheld, a scent of myrrh and lilies” (113); and in paranoia as Suttree wanders into the woods like a mid-life Dante, “Some doublegoer, some othersuttree eluded him in these woods and he feared that…were he to come to himself in this obscure wood he’d be neither mended nor made whole but rather set mindless to dodder drooling with his ghosty clone” (287). Suttree is haunted by an allegory of himself who might image a greater reality, just as Dante imagined an allegory of the historical Virgil. However, after Suttree nearly dies from typhoid fever, he awakens from a vision of an afterlife and tells a priest, “I learned that there is one Suttree and one Suttree only” (461). The allegorical Suttree has died.

Finally, the novel closes as Knoxville with which we've become familiar, and which Suttree used to provide existential meaning, is bulldozed for a modern expressway. "Gnostic workmen" demolish old buildings, leaving "a freestanding stairwell to nowhere" (464); the "concrete of the expressway gleamed...where the ramp curved out into empty air and hung truncate...among the vectors of nowhere" (471). All of these manmade constructions made of literal concrete ultimately point nowhere, and McCarthy, having constructed an elaborate allegory, then demolishes the notion of allegory as a legitimate mode of knowledge, as in: there may be worlds beyond our reckoning, but we can never know.

This agnostic allegory pointing nowhere is actually well represented in Virgil, Dante's allegory for Human Wisdom, who, as Sayers informed us, could only guide to the border of Purgatory. When Virgil leaves Dante in Canto 30 of The Purgatory, Beatrice must comfort him, saying "Virgil has departed, do not weep yet." This grief Dante feels for his "sweetest of fathers,” is the same sadness McCarthy's modern readers experience as we're left with a secular end-of-things. McCarthy's project is effective because he leaves us on the shore of Purgatory, gazing across in the mist of unknowing. While Dante constructed an allegorical Virgil, McCarthy’s modern Virgil-in-Suttree stops, turns and "holds his lamp behind him, shedding light not for himself but to make others wise" (Purgatory, 22, 68-69).

*Here’s a proper citation of this essay:

Wieck, Seth. "Virgil Has Departed, Do Not Weep Yet." Virgil Has Departed, Do Not Weep Yet. 27 Aug. 2015. Web. 27 Aug. 2015. <http://sethwieck.tumblr.com/post/127706531198/virgil-has-departed-do-not-weep-yet>.

Works Cited

McCarthy, Cormac. Suttree. New York: Vintage International, Vintage, 1992. Print.

Sayers, Dorothy L. Introduction. Translation. Divine Comedy. By Dante Alighieri. London: Penguin, 2002. 67, 101, 120. Print.

[sethwieck]

A poem I wrote wound up in the liner of an album.

[sethwieck]

The Holiness of Hobbitry

Bernthal’s monograph demonstrates that the growing attention to religion in Tolkien studies has not only rectified misreadings of his work but also promoted deeper understanding of it. Discerning the holiness of hobbitry discloses that Tolkien’s Catholic sacramentalism shaped fundamental convictions about language, society, and human responsibilities toward one another and their fellow creatures. Belief that the world is charged with the grandeur of God gave Tolkien a heartfelt concern for authentic, truth-telling communication, the natural environment and the commonweal, and man’s duty to be a self-sacrificial steward of them. For him, such integrated relationships were a profound pathway for subcreators to learn and imitate the mind and heart of the Creator, making his vision akin to Dostoevsky’s: “Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things.… And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.” - Adam Schwartz reviews "Tolkien's Sacramental Vision". http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/bookman/article/the-holiness-of-hobbitry/

[sethwieck]

I wait, with all the patience I can muster, for another Jane Austen.

[sethwieck]

If art, even popular art—especially popular art—were simply a repository of an era’s wishes, to be matched beat for beat with its time’s psyche, it would not be art. It would be, well, a Comment, or an op-ed piece, with all the necessary fatuities of its kind.

Adam Gopnik http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/four-kinds-of-opinion-pieces-i-will-not-read?mbid=social_twitter

[wesleyhill]

Robert Crawford, “Thread”

My faith Hangs by a thread. It always has. No point Spending long Going over it Worrying, Will it snap? Will it go? Is it the wrong Kind of faith? Better just to take it And sew.