Lenten disciplines

It's Good Friday, which means it's the best day for the exercise of my favorite Lenten habit: reading TS Eliot's Four Quartets. Eliot wrote these four five-movement poems late in life, arguably adapting sonata form to written language, and I esteem them as some of the best poems ever. (Maybe one day I'll post a fives list of poems.)

Two of the quartets, "Burnt Norton" (Quartet No. 1, if you will, as Eliot placed it first in the collection) and "Little Gidding" (No. 4), are highly anthologized, but my favorite is "East Coker" (No. 2), not least because it ends with the line "In my end is my beginning," which one day maybe Micah will let me have as a tattoo.

But we're getting off the subject. Every year during Lent, I read the quartets because they explore the humility of this age and the glory of the renewed age to come. And every year, I find that I love the poems even more than the year before, especially my favorite section, that which celebrates Good Friday ("East Coker," fourth movement):

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

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

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

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

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

In these metered feet and careful rhymes, we see the beauty of the Messiah: he is the wounded surgeon, the bloody-handed healer, the ultimate keeper of the hospital which that ruined millionaire endowed with sin and death, our only food and drink. He makes us whole on this ironic Friday, such a day of death and terror, a remembrance of the most awful bad. Let the dying nurse tell us the story again so that we might again call it good.

Things my grandmother gave me

Every time I go to my grandmother's house, she says she wants to give me something, and sometimes she actually does. Today, it was a hodgepodge as she puttered around her house finding things she had set aside just for me:

1. Half a pan of yellow cake with crushed pineapple on top. She wanted me to take more, but I told her we would struggle to eat what I was taking before it went bad. She thought I was lying, but Micah has confirmed that he probably won't eat any, as it's "just yellow cake with pineapple on top." To take the cake home, Grandma provided a plate, three toothpicks, and some aluminum foil; the toothpicks are ostensibly to keep the foil from sticking to the cake top, but, of course, they poke through the foil immediately, no matter how careful you are. Micah thinks this is a hazard. She really wanted me to use another pull of foil to go crosswise and also wanted to provide a plastic bag and twist-tie to further secure the package, but I refused those.
2. $5.50 cash. The $5 was an honorarium for taxiing her to the accountant's office this afternoon as she delivered her "tickets" (read: "receipts") and other tax-worthy documents so that he can prepare her W-2. (The papers were sealed with an entire roll of tape in the envelope her CPA sent last year's taxes to her in.) The 50 cents was repayment to Micah for scanning and printing two copies of an old family photo; she has asked multiple times "how much do I owe Mike for that work, now?" and we've told her the photos were only 20 cents each, so she doesn't need to repay us. She doesn't take anything for free, though, so she finally got out her coin purse and even gave him a 10-cent tip.
3. A pile of scrap paper. Every time I have talked to her over the past month or so, her answer to the question "What are you doing?" has been "First one thing and another, cutting up these papers." She has a small table-top shredder that she feeds the mailing labels on everything she receives, along with bank statements and the like, but the shredder is so small that she can't just shove in a full sheet of paper. Well, she could on the trifold, but that's too simple. And she could just tear them into shredder-size bits, but that's not sufficiently neurotic. So she cuts them with old-school scissors: metal and pointed, with a pinky rest. It's a wonder she hasn't punctured herself with them. And she apparently maintains piles of "to-be shredded" documents somewhere in her house so that she can tackle them all at once rather than bit-by-bit. Ergo, the project requires a good month of paced work. She never throws her mailing address in the trash can (you know, the one that she puts directly in front of her house, a stone's skip from the mailbox) and she gets scrap paper out of the deal. What's more, she can share the scraps: all the size of 1/3 a full 8.5" x 11" sheet, these apparently indicate that the month-long project has come to a close.
4. A spot of tea. In a common marketing endeavor, Tetley sent a sample of their round tea bags to postal customers and Grandma thought I might like to have them since she doesn't plan to brew tea with them. The envelope proclaims these are "FREE" and "Introducing" Tetley Round tea bags. And it seems that Tetley introduced those round bags in 1989. . . .
5. A bag of baby spoons with one surprise fork. Each utensil is still in its original cellophane package, and they are bound together with a twist-tie. That package was then dropped into a cellophane bag that has some gold stripes on it, and that bag is closed with a gold twist-tie. Grandma thought we might like to have these for "Dola." When I told her that another silver spoon originally in the gold bag wasn't a baby spoon but one designed for some kind of serving, like the spoon we always use for cranberries, she took that one out and only let me leave with the baby ones. She said, "I found these before your shower and held them, case nobody gave you spoons, but if you don't want them, I can keep them, but if you only have one, you could have another, case Doel knocks one on the floor you can just get another one, don't have to clean it. But Jenny, you don't have to take these, now, if you don't think you'll use them, but I'd like Doel to have them. You know Avon gave me those, worked for them long time and they always gave us things like that, a spoon in every big order, and I worked hard."

All this came after several stories about snakes, a lecture about how to feed Noel in such a way as to obviate all crying, and an offer of a boiled-ham sandwich ("Don't tell me you're not hungry. Oh, Jenny, I know. I know you're hungry." At 3:30 pm? Some of us lunch on more than a handful of potato chips, which is what she said she had today). It was an ironic afternoon.

198 words: quick, now

Earlier, I announced my knowledge of a certain CS Lewis conference. This evening, while watching the Gators trounce the Bruins (as predicted in my bracket and the warm cockles of my little heart), I emailed a paper proposal for that conference. Hopefully, they accept.

It was harder than I expected to do this. Lots of reasons why, but they're mostly compositional. That is, I have never composed an actual title for something unwritten, and I have certainly never composed a confident thesis before actually writing the body of its essay. But the CFP required both, so I struggled for them and have relative peace with what emerged. Here they are: first the proposed title, then a 198-word abstract for an unwritten but proposed paper. All comments welcome.

Will the Green Lady Become a Self? The Dangers of Self-Consciousness in CS Lewis' Perelandra

In the book of Genesis, no one asks "Who am I?" before the Fall, but all sons and daughters after ask this because the initial temptation struck directly at the question of identity: will humans define themselves as creatures in relationship with their Creator or as autonomous beings? In CS Lewis' Perelandra, the Un-man tempts the Green Lady with Eden's rhetoric, arguing that she can and should take upon herself the independent risk of disobedience: he tells stories about great women and teaches her about beauty, and then he makes those arguments practical by showing the Green Lady her other self in a mirror. As she begins to believe that experience trumps all theory, her interceder, Ransom, fears he may have finally lost her. After all, Ransom knows that this rhetorical triptych—the high call to maternal martyrdom, the definition of beauty as costume, and the assertion of an autonomous self—could steal the Green Lady's affections from Maleldil and the king to herself. Though many have argued that self-awareness distinguishes humans from all other creatures, the Perelandrian temptation demonstrates its dangers: such consciousness leads to independence, which leads to ego-centrism, which destroys relationships and compromises real beauty.

Birds and other books

Even if you don't like birds or books (oh, heavens, don't not like books!) please read Cindy Crosby's "Chuckleheads and Timberdoodles?" in the most recent Books and Culture. This review of The Birdwatcher's Companion to North American Birdlife is a treat, and most reviews aren't treats. So brew a cup of tea, grab your binoculars, and learn a few new vocabulary words from Crosby's lovely paragraphs.

This is for Malcolm

Just to confirm that I do take an interest in my husband's extracurricular activities, I would like to post these highlights from a very recent Books and Culture interview with William Langewiesche:

Q: Are you a pilot who writes or a writer who flies?

A: I'm a writer. Even when I was a pilot I was a writer.

and

Q: Should we honestly believe that if we're in a plane going down that our seat cushions can be used as flotation devices?

A: There are plenty of cases of airplanes going into the water and people surviving. What to do in that case is not difficult to remember. Get the hell of out the plane and don't wear your high heels down the inflatable exit ramp.

All righty, then.

This reminds me of that night outside Portland, Oregon, when we accidentally passed the Spruce Goose. We had been to a wedding in Medford, though we had stayed in Ashland at the beautiful Ashland Springs Hotel. We spent the post-wedding afternoon in the redwood forest ogling gigantic trees and then took a leisurely drive up the Oregon coast the next day because we were flying back home from Portland the day after that.

So we stopped at various points to watch creatures and eat local desserts and such, but as darkness achieved its westward creep from the east, we set our faces toward Portland. Until we saw this:


Imagine that the sky is a beautiful black and you haven't passed anything worth discussing in a while. Imagine that you're just driving down the highway and happen to glance left as you're approaching a huge hangar full of a huge airplane some ways off the road. Imagine that you say to your pilot husband, "Look, look" and the car drifts in the direction you are gesturing almost instinctually.

We can hardly close our jaws as we turn off the road and drive toward it, for the plane keeps getting bigger and bigger. I scramble for some kind of guide book that might tell us what we see, but signage finally makes it clear: that's the Spruce Goose.

Of course, the museum is closed because it's past dinnertime, but we park and walk around the hangar. The all-glass front wall lets you see the thing fairly well; what you can't see in the photo above is that other small planes (like the ones Micah flies on a regular basis) are lined up for display under the Spruce Goose's wings. The photo below might help you get a sense of scale: note the helicopter flying above the plane.


Now, the history of the Spruce Goose is a fascinating one, and so is the biography of the one who envisioned and built it. But the awe I felt driving toward it and standing next to it (albeit outside its hangar, which seemed all the more awful) was oddly not like the fear I feel for big things (like gigantic artifacts displayed at museums, like whales and all other massive creatures that abide in the ocean, and like the ocean itself) but more like a great intrigue for a meal I have never before eaten but suddenly find before me.

That is, it was deeply satisfying to see such a huge, crafted thing, such a bold creativity put so carefully together. And it was delicious to stand and reverence the thing, because that seemed the only right thing to do. Just like a primo bowl of macaroni and cheese at the Steakhouse. . . .