What an Authors Note Taught Me

I started a new book the other day.

I was reading it for a class assignment, so I already knew a bit about the author and story.

I cozied up on my bed and took as much joy as I could out of eventually getting a good grade.

I see the Authors note: why read it? Well, it's only two pages... so why not.

"This is a work of fiction."

No kidding.

"Its principal characters are pure inventions with no relations on this earth, as far as I know."

A bit funny.

"But the Congo in which I placed them is genuine. The historical figures and events described here are as real as I could render them with the help of recorded history, in all its fascinating variations."

Ok. Cool, I guess.

"I thank Virginia and Wendell Kingsolver...and Steven Hopp, Emma Hardest, Frances Goldin, Terry Karten, Sydelle Kramer, and Lillian Lent."

Alright but I don't know these people so I have a hard time caring.

"I spent nearly thirty years waiting for the wisdom and maturity to write this book. That I've now written it is proof of neither of those things, but of the endless encouragement, unconditional faith, insomnolent conversation, and piles of arcane reference books delivered always just in the nick of time by my extraordinary husband."

Modesty. I like it. And confirmation that this book may hold more substance than most New York Times Bestsellers. Don't think the reference to an extraordinary husband slipped my notice either.

"Thanks, Steven, for teaching me it's no use waiting for things that only appear at a distance, and for believing a spirit of adventure will usually suffice."

Ah, here is a gem.

Tears smarted in my eyes, my breath caught, and my mind found rest in the delightful experience of a truth recognized, and a truth shared.

That's what I lack as a writer. Wisdom and maturity. And a few other things. These things can be developed. Through purposeful study, research, and thought a person can obtain a depth of knowledge on a specific topic, which allows them to accurately see and analyze something for what it is. But, more often I've realized a person can narrow in and research a topic to death, and still lack maturity and wisdom. It seems we come across those two things in ways we would've never realized, or in ways that are indirectly related, and at first don't seem related at all.

In order to have real things to write about, you need to have contact with the world. You need to engage in it -- associate with minds, authors, and topics that may have nothing to do with what you want to write about. I did not understand a few years ago, how everything is connected -- that wisdom comes not in narrowing in, but in branching out. It doesn't matter how deep you can dig -- how much depth you seem to have in a particular topic -- depth means nothing if there is no context to put the knowledge in. This is why we often associate ancients with wisdom. The more years a person sees, the more likely they are to obtain this universality of knowledge that can be applied to specific issues.

Maturity comes through distasteful circumstances. These often come simply as we live life, even if we don't want them to. The harsh judgments we cast on others tend to fade as we experience a similar circumstance. The hope is that as we sense the world around us, the keener our minds become, and more understanding. Because we've been in it, or we've seen what it looks like when someone has been in it, there are fewer surface-level conceptions -- an ability to see when someone has missed the whole point.

As our author says, these things appear only at a distance. Then, when we feel like we've done what we can to develop the wisdom and maturity, we believe a spirit of adventure will usually suffice.

How grateful I am that when all is said and done, enthusiasm can trump accuracy!

Twisted Good

Monotony is one eternal round.

Frustration’s supply fills my oil lamp.

I put my light of anger on a hill

And know that it is a twisted good.

I meet with friends and family, and am

Filled with warmth from their light and love.

But righteousness becomes a destructive fire

And their beauty turns into betraying faults.

The light is divided from the dark,

Yet there is good in the horrible night.

The stars promise blessings upon blessings,

But destruction is the only counselor.

Twisted disfiguration cripples me.

The light bends, reflects, and blares in my eyes.

It turns people away, banishing them.

I am a martyr, and the fire burns.

There is nothing worthy of sacrifice,

Everything is offered, and it’s evil.

The twisted good is all that I have

Until little moments offer an alternative.

Glimmers of dew drops begin to brighten.

Magnificent mountains bring good tidings.

Sunsets and sunrises, moments sublime,

These are real inklings of the eternal.

Alas, I cannot always understand,

The glory and beauty in the natural.

But the light of the sun will fill my lamp,

And the peaceful mountains will be my hill.

Art is Only Beautiful when it Mirrors Reality

        The sun is rising. The mountains are a black silhouette as the sun peaks out from above their peaks. Clouds dust and sprinkle the sky. The world is slowly illuminated as the sun gets brighter and brighter, and becomes so glorious that you cannot look at it anymore. Suddenly, you can see everything. The dewy grass glistens, and the vines create shimmering shadows.
Is this beautiful? Is this art? In early Renaissance, not quite. However as the 16C progressed, the idea that nature was beautiful in and of itself took a greater hold. Nature when imitated by art maintains beauty. This is because art is only beautiful when it mirrors reality.
Classical art was never meant to look natural (as Vasari insisted.) The Renaissance treatises declare an opposite intention – that the artists duty is to imitate nature. This new style is sometimes described as “realistic.” Yet it begs the difficult question (as Barzun points out in his From Dawn to Decadence) – what is reality? This is a tricky inquiry because the answer varies from person to person. Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Logico Tractatus Philosophicus argues that reality includes the world – everything that is the case, and all possible worlds – everything that will be the case in the future. In short: reality is all that is, and all that will be. Life is the discovery of what is real. This is not an easy task. We may never know for sure if someone has hit upon this reality. Though there may be different perspectives and experiences concerning what is the case and what will be the case, it does not change the facts. Barzun asserts that “all styles of art are realistic.” This may be true, but not all art mirrors reality. Classical art calls to Platonic forms, a form in a possible world – something that will be in the future. “Realistic” art imitates what is. Both can mirror reality. An artist is like a translator. For the artist, the original author is God, and the original text is nature, or reality. The translator mirrors the original author and the original text and must choose between a multiplicity of possible solutions for each sentence. When each word is translated as directly as possible, translators lose sight of the whole. In the same way, the artist may imitate something in a realistic way, but it does not mirror the whole of reality.
        Beauty encompasses all of reality, or experience. It is impossible to have beauty without depth. A hollow understanding or character is not a beautiful one. Something is beautiful when it takes the ugliness and brutality of humanity and adds meaning to the suffering. Beauty is the flowers that grow from the mud and manure, and art is the display of both the manure and the flowers. The England based street artist Banksy wrote: “art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” True beauty is a type of reality that is not invasive, but employs only gratitude and appreciation, wonder and awe. Truth and goodness are deeply related to beauty, because beauty is an ultimate value. It calls to something within us in which we are free to reject or accept. Roger Scruton in his Beauty: A Very Short Introduction wrote:
Beauty is an ultimate value—something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.
         God knows what is, and what will be. He knows all of reality, so He is the great determiner of beauty. Yet, artists do not have to be morally sound to mirror reality in their art (though it will likely help.) Barzun writes: “All styles of art… point to varied aspects and conceivings of experience, all of which possess reality, or they would not command the artists interest in the first place and would not spark any response in the beholder.” In The Book Thief, a WWII novel written by Markus Zusak, death is personified, and narrates the story of a simple girl named Liesel that teaches a Jew hiding in her basement how to read. At one point, death says: “Yes, I have seen a great many things in this world. I attend the greatest disasters and work for the greatest villains. But then, there are other moments.” Death, employed by villains, was able to recognize the simple beauty in Liesel’s story. Anyone has access to these moments.
         Life is often ugly, impossible, and trite. Even a sunrise reveals the unkempt garden, the homeless bum on the street, or signifies the start of a tedious day. That is reality. But so is the gleam of the grass, the wonder of science, the shimmering of vines, and the glory provided by the sun. This glory adds meaning to the ugly and impossible. This is beauty. When art mirrors this vast expanse of human experience and emotion – when it calls to the immaculate forms of what will and can be – this is when art becomes beautiful. And, as Dostoyevsky wrote: “Beauty will save the world.”

The Faded Struggle of Restraint -- Two Poems

 The Faded Struggle of Restraint

She slogs through the forgotten days

Of practice, pleasure, and deep malaise.

They have meaning, I’m sure

They have meaning, I know.

And yet deepest desires

And ultimate focus go

To fictional days of excitement, color, and life

To wonderful times when husband calls me wife.

Vivid pigments fade when reality

Comes to the unwilling soul who must see

The danger in love, the confusion

In it’s deeply powerful illusion

Of security, meaning, and worth.

It cannot be true, I’m sure.

It cannot be true, I know?

So she slogs through the forgotten days

In the faded struggle of restraint.

The Faded Struggle of Restraint

Life is bright and full of beauty.

The world is colors, vivid and moody

Moments strike, and the world doesn’t change.

Yet mountains of suffering dim the range

Of colors faded, colors mute.

The world is still there!

The picture is the same!

Full life is through the door

That is closed to you now.

There is no opening it, for you don’t know how.

And even if you did

There would be no guarantee

That life would be even close

To the beauty you thought it would be.

But Then There are Other Moments

Occasionally I will be doing something totally random, or witnessing something simple and kind. Usually, I am engaged in learning and reading, or witnessing a small kindness like a door being opened for someone, or a bed made.

In these moments, my eyes well up with excitement or tenderness, I cannot keep the smile from my face, and this transcendent feeling is emanating off of me that I cannot contain, nor would I want to.

It reminds me of death's quote in the Book Thief.

"Yes, I have seen a great many things in this world. I attend the greatest disasters and work for the greatest villains.

But then there are other moments."

Make sure to have these moments. You can't actually manufacture them, or train yourself with a certain regiment to manipulate yourself into having them. They are actually constantly going on around us, no need to manufacture or manipulate. You simply have to tap into their beauty. You have to see reality differently -- like death began to. This is something you cannot do on your own, though it does require effort. In fact, these moments would occur more often for us if we forgot our own efforts and recognized the awesome wonder of the great world, the variety of individuals, and the greatness of God.

See the world differently, only you know how. I only wish I was as good as death is in sharing my moments with others.

How Would I Define Conservatism?

     In 1848, a man by the name of James Marshall was living a completely normal day, overseeing work on the construction of a sawmill. Unexpectedly, he saw something shiny within the river. He said: “It made my heart thump, for I was certain it was gold.” It was, in fact, gold!

    This idea of finding something magnificent within the dirt is what conservatism is all about. When Marshall’s discovery led to over 300,000 people flocking to California, they each took to panning the river. To pan, you put some river mud in a pan (preferably with holes in it), add some water, and sift through all the muck to hopefully discover gold.

    In America, conservatives are not against change. Though conservatism is about conserving, it is not about keeping what is worthless. For hundreds and thousands of years, different types of government have been tried, ancient philosophers have theorized, and God has spoken. There is nothing new going on today, human nature is prone to trying the same things over and over in hopes that someday they will work. As a conservative, one would look at the complicated and murky history of ideas, and pan for gold. Conservatism takes the morals that God has given, the types of government that have actually worked, the idea of natural law, the fact that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights -- and considers these things to be pure gold. These ideas matter not because they are old or Western or “white,” they matter because they produce the best results. Conservative ideas have value as they have proven to be true over and over again. These ideas are not just true because someone says they are -- they are part of the way the world works, they’re built into the foundation of life. Conservatism is preserving what is true, valuable, and realistic -- it is sifting through the repetitive postmodern mud and finding that glimmer of something, something that shows there is a way to live a wonderful life in a fallen world.

An Ode to Covid-19

                                    A Spring or two ago the virus spread

To which the nations all roared havoc

The time has passed begotten of our dread

Until the people all remembered luck

 

In the beginning the shelves were barren

All of the stores closed early to restock

A quarantine domineered over men

Weeks and years ticked by on a broken clock

 

A divide arose amidst the chaos

Those in luck, and those in fear fought to win

That though this sickness has divided us

The hardest battle always was with sin

 

Our time is meaningless when life is gone

But time is precious for those who’ve moved on