Stonework Issue 4

Gallery of Rhett Landscapes

2007-05-24T12:43:00.001-07:00

The Summer of My 10th Birthday

2007-05-24T12:27:00.000-07:00

Stacy Barton

It was the summer of my tenth birthday that I came to believe in God. It was also the summer that Sister Ignatius caught me pretending to have a twin. When she took me to Father Francis, she told him it was wrong for me to tell stories, but stories were the only thing I had. For my punishment, I was to copy letters out of the Twenty-third Psalm. Twenty-three times.

Sister Ignatius thought it was going to be a harsh punishment, but it turned out to be the most wonderful summer of my life. For two hours each day I copied beautiful words in the sweet-smelling room above the chapel. It was an oasis.

Afterwards I had to walk home, nearly wilting in the heat before I arrived at the little house I shared with my aunt on the edge of town. Aunt Tilley wasn’t so bad; she had loved my mother—who was her younger sister—but hated my father for taking her away. My father was a writer and poor and bound for the big city. Aunt Tilley took me in after Mother died. She never said what happened to Father. I don’t remember either of them very well. Mostly, I recall Father reading us his stories. It was Aunt Tilley who insisted that I go to school with the sisters at St. Mary’s in town. She thought it would cure me of my genetic tendency to exaggerate. She would have been mortified to know that it was on her account that I became a religious fanatic at the age of ten.

I loved the cool dampness of the cathedral. The winding stone stairs that took me to my room above the chapel were enchanted. I used to pretend that I was a princess from Italy or Paraguay and that, if anyone knew my true identity, they would mourn over not having given me more important rooms.

But truthfully, I loved Father Francis’s reading room more than anyplace I had ever been in my whole life. The walls were lined with ancient books that had wooden bindings, gilded pages, and romantic titles like The Love Poetry of Solomon and Laments from the Catacombs. Of course, I had no idea what any of them were talking about, but I knew they were about things that could be felt and not always seen. I felt sure they were stories along the lines of those that sent me to my new paradise. Stories that somehow made sense of all the ugliness and pain I had already experienced in my short life.

I loved just being near all those beautiful holy words. I relished my new job of copying out the Twenty-third Psalm. I was careful to keep several copies done with a no. 2 pencil on school-gray paper for showing Sister Ignatius, but I spent most of my hours copying golden curlicues and elaborate script like the old books I had found. Somehow I knew instinctively that Sister Ignatius would not particularly approve of curlicues.

Father Francis turned out to be quite different. He surprised me one afternoon in July when I was so intent on my work that I didn’t hear him come in. I was bent over a particularly difficult rendition of “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Thou art with me,” when he gently placed his hand on my shoulder. I nearly shrieked. Then I sat frozen in my chair, certain he was going to reprimand me for overindulgence. Instead, he smiled at me with a twinkle and nodded his approval.

After that, Father Francis and I were friends. By August he was reading me testament stories out of one of his golden holy books, and, before school began again, I had found my shepherd. I, a tenyear-old no one wanted, had found the Christ. By the time school started, I no longer needed to pretend I had a twin. I had Jesus and told everyone so. I heard that Sister Ignatius complained to Father Francis about my odd devotion to the Good Shepherd, but rumor had it that Father Francis told her to mind her own business
and let me be.

The year Father Francis died, I was away at college studying to be a writer. I had nearly forgotten those early years in the cathedral tower and my burgeoning faith in God, when a package was delivered to my garage apartment. Inside, wrapped in a brown paper bag, was Father Francis’s prayer book. A simple card read, “Father Francis wanted you to have this.” I held the precious book to my face and smelled. The holy air of Father Francis’s reading room still clung to the pages of his ancient book. I ran my fingers across the gold letters on the cover and looked inside. Several brittle pages full of childish curlicues slipped out onto my lap, and I began to weep as I read aloud the poetry of the Twenty-third Psalm written in my own ten-year-old hand.

~~~~~

Reprinted with permission from Surviving Nashville (WordFarm, 2007) copyright by stacy Barton 2007.

Hail Mary

2007-05-24T12:20:00.000-07:00

~Stacy Barton

My very best friend in all the world was Mary Katherine. She was Catholic. There were seven children in her family, and every single one of them had red hair. There were so many kids in that house that her mamma didn’t even bother with bed sheets; they
just slept three or four to a bed right across the top of the mattress. Mamma said that wasn’t Christian, but Mary Katherine didn’t seem to mind.

We were Nazarene. There were only a very few of us in St. Margaret Parish, Louisiana. We didn’t drink, and we didn’t smoke, and we put out clean linens every week. We never swore, and we never worked on Sundays. There was only me and Mamma, and we ate meat every Friday. At Mary Katherine’s there was never enough food, too many kids, and Mary Katherine’s daddy drank whiskey. Mamma said they’d go to hell for drinking and for praying to the Virgin Mary, but I thought it was nice at Mary Katherine’s house. There was a lot of laughing there.

Mary Katherine and her mamma helped me sneak into the movies sometimes. In general my mamma believed movies were the handiwork of the devil. Last summer we saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. My mamma would never have approved of that one on account of its having dancing. Mamma definitely didn’t believe in dancing. I thought it was beautiful and couldn’t imagine what could be wrong with twirling around to gorgeous music. I couldn’t imagine God would hate me for it, but I said a quick prayer at the shrine for the Mother Mary in the rosebushes at Mary Katherine’s—just in case.

It was a beautiful place, that shrine. I could just feel heaven when I was there. Hail, Mary, full of grace. Our Lord is with thee. She had the sweetest expression on her face, and her hands were stretched out among God’s roses. I imagined that if she weren’t made of stone she would just break out dancing. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Mary Katherine wasn’t so sure that the Mother Mary danced, but she said I should imagine so if it helped me with all the guilt I felt for disobeying my mamma’s church. If I wanted to get near to God, I suppose I would just go out under the stars and be quiet and wait to see what God actually had to say. But I’d never heard of anything like that, so I just sat through the services with Mamma and heard how we were all going to burn in hell if we weren’t extra careful. I spent most of my time tracing the pew in front of me with my eyes.

Saturday was to be a very special day. We were going to see Gone with the Wind. Mary Katherine and I had been waiting for weeks. We had every last detail planned out. We told my mamma that there was an additional Girl Scout meeting over at Laura Lane’s
house to discuss the upcoming cookie sale. I planned to wear my very ugly Girl Scout uniform because Mamma couldn’t possibly imagine that I could do anything terribly evil in a Girl Scout uniform. Of course, I would have on an extra shirt underneath, but I simply must bear the disgrace of going to the movies in my Girl Scout skirt. It couldn’t be helped. But I didn’t care so very much because I was going to see Vivien Leigh!

By Friday night I was so nervous I couldn’t eat my okra, and Mamma started to worry I was taking sick. So I stuffed my mouth full of the little slimy things, and when Mamma wasn’t looking I spit them into my napkin. I hoped God wouldn’t get angry at me for wasting, and I said a special blessing on the poor heathens in Africa.

I could hardly sleep all night. In the morning Mamma asked why my color was so bright, and I said because I was especially excited about winning the badge for the top Girl Scout cookie sales. Mamma didn’t look exactly convinced, but before she could think of anything else to say, I kissed her goodbye and ran out the door. I would have to say another prayer to the Holy Mother for lying on the way to the movies, but I didn’t even care.

There was a decided thrill in going to the Ascension Palace Theater downtown. Even though we were seeing a matinee, they had the popcorn machine running and all the lights on just as if we were going to a nighttime feature.

Mary Katherine and I showed up red-faced and breathless; we had run all the way from the corner where her mamma dropped us off to escape being seen by anyone who might tell my mamma where I was. We slipped into the ladies’ room to cool our faces with a little water and remarked about how we just might faint from the excitement of it all. Mary Katherine had snuck a tube of her mamma’s lipstick, and we giggled as we painted our lips movie-star red. We bought our tickets and mooned over a large Gone with the Wind poster as we counted out our change for hot buttered popcorn. I squeezed Mary Katherine’s arm, and we walked down the aisle of the theater like brides.

I liked to sit close to the front and clear in the middle so I could feel like I was actually inside the moving picture with all those beautiful people. The Ascension Palace was the one place in the whole parish where I could believe.

The lights went dim, and the red velvet curtain parted, and Mary Katherine took my hand. We were beholding the very opening of Gone with the Wind itself. We hardly breathed, it was so beautiful, and we held each other all the way through. We were weeping by the final scene and positively hugging, and I couldn’t quite help myself—I kissed Mary Katherine on the lips. She was warm and salty and surprised, but she kissed me back, and for a moment we were Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, and St. Margaret Parish fell away, and God loved the Nazarenes.

Then it was over. We giggled, wiped off our lipstick, gathered up our popcorn bags and little change purses, and headed for the door. Suddenly, I was stone. There was my mamma in the doorway to the theater looking as though she hated me more than life itself, and all the beauty just slipped right out of me.

Mamma sent Mary Katherine directly home and didn’t speak to me in the car—except to tell me she was ashamed that I was her daughter and that to save my soul from burning in hell for eternity I was never to see Mary Katherine again. I didn’t even cry.

Later in my room, I traced my lip with my finger and remembered my best friend in all the world and wished I had been born a redheaded Catholic to a family that was going to hell for whiskey and prayers. I remembered Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, and Mary Katherine’s movie-star lipstick and all those glorious sleepovers without sheets. I considered asking the Holy Mary, Mother of God, to pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. But I was a child of a devout Nazarene, so I laid on top of the hot summer covers and closed my heart to God.

~~~~~

Reprinted with permission from Surviving Nashville (WordFarm, 2007) copyright by stacy Barton 2007.

~~~~~

Herrick

2007-05-07T12:31:00.000-07:00

~David Landrum

The church where Robert Herrick served as vicar

blackens in the rain, cold as its own stone,

empty as the silences of hope or doubt.

All flesh is sodden wood, not grass:

musty, encumbering even when it goes

to gather rosebuds or to bring in May.

Under streaking clouds,

dark sanctuary, blank graves,

oak door grit-stained from pilgrim touches

stand like stones washed in a stream.

Herrick once threw his sermon in a fit of rage

at his snoring, farting, whispering congregation.

Down the road, sawyers cover new-cut wood

with blue tarpaulins to seal it from the damp.

Somewhere in the church graveyard he is dead,

the place of his plot lost amid

epitaphs erased by wind and rain

where he himself was minister long years.

No surprise in this, since he said he could

utterly forgotten lye

and poetry would be his pillar, his monument

that never would

decline or waste at all

But stand for ever by his own

Firme and well fixt foundation.

In those pig-lands, the mucky soil shit-slurried,

clouds tossed over the endless tracts of field,

he wrote, as if poetry could be salvation,

could come like Christ leading the hosts of heaven

and bring him from the meadows and ditches of

loathéd Devonshire. That place

wore long and hard on him,

as he remembered the alehouses of London,

where he drank with Ben Jonson at the Sun

The Dog, the triple Tunne.

Yet Jonson does not mention him in letters or memoirs.

And none of his circle wrote Herrick's name. His absence

yawns like the empty fields around his place.

Wit could not free him, though he said,

God I love wit. His poems came at the wrong time,

as fratricide plowed every English shire.

No one noticed his book piled in the stalls.

The din of tracts and pamphlets silenced him.

A Puritan supplanted him, took his pulpit and his church.

He fled to London (not unhappily), a true-borne Roman,

to a ten-year exile but no reward for it. He found

his way back to Dean-Bourne, rocky creek,

unstable waters, to live obscurity.

He lived to eighty-three. Twenty-six years of his life

his poetry gathered dust in London's stalls.

The seasons rolled again, the liturgy, the holidays,

the land settled to peace, new fads and crazes came,

and Herrick preached and wrote and read and died

until men with powered wigs years afterward

picked up and read his curiosity, turning the obscure pages,

seeing his lines, Gather ye rosebuds while ye may

Old time is still a-flying and wondering, those antiquarians

who made their inquiries about this poet.

Under the soil time flies: the roots that leached his ribs,

took out his flesh, carried his body back to loam. He once said,

Putrefaction is the end

of all that nature doth intend.

The slow roll of seasons confirmed as much to him.

In his decline he only saw (dim-sighted)

sights dull anyway—not knowing

his pillar of fame would rise.

It lay, like him, bound up in undug rock.

How Memory Works

2007-05-01T07:27:00.001-07:00

~Matthew Roth

One giant slab of morning light
crashes down the narrow street
like a whale struck in a shipping lane.

The scientists come wearing rubber gloves
and hip waders. They heave it onto the sidewalk
and have at it with their dull gray instruments.

Soon, its organs are spilled across the ground
like Gettysburg's dead. They slice open
the stomach and find everything

the light consumed: the white tablecloth
bruised with wine, the two a.m. feeding,
the knife and the gun, brown nut of sleep

cracked open, bowed heads of flowers,
still fragrant, asleep in their beds.
By the time I arrive almost nothing is left.

Every article of interest has been carted away
to far-off labs for further study. So I go, without
thinking even to touch its dim remainders,

lying there on the concrete like twilight—
not thinking until now, two weeks hence,
standing here in the pre-dawn rain,

I look down and spy something
glinting off my black boots
like a tiny flower of daylight,

which it is.

~~~~~

Next

Kansas

2007-05-01T07:26:00.001-07:00

~Matthew Roth

So we drove all the way across Kansas
in the rearview mirror of a storm.
The radio towers hummed above us

no particular tune for a villainess
or a man without backbone or charm.
But we drove all the way across Kansas

for something—perhaps it was for this:
to prove we could only do so much harm.
Like the radio towers looming above us,

we flashed a bright warning, red and careless,
then stoic, inscrutable as the term
that we drove all the way across Kansas

to find, whether it be love or weakness.
We just wanted something obvious and firm
as the radio towers that rose above us.

But country radio is all about loss.
Kansas is about the death of the farm.
So we drove all that way, across Kansas

and back, through the heat and wind and dust,
to discover nothing left to learn.
Nothing in all that way across Kansas,
or in the radio towers above us.

~~~~~

Next

Calling

2007-05-01T07:23:00.000-07:00

~Matthew Roth

Who are you? Me too.
Who are you? Me too.

In the winter half light, each breath
silvers, falls, as our feet fall—
we’re barely married half a year—
across the bone-hard drifts
of our back acre. We’re moving
toward the dark the border woods reserve
against the twin-bright pall
of snow and moon.
At the edge, just where the ragged
underbrush creeps out to claim
another crust of clearing, we stop.
I call. Everything listens.

Through the tangle of shadows,
a little east and far off, an echo,
then another, nearer still.
We dare not move, though I feel
your hand in the crook of my arm
squeeze a little tighter,
and I recall our first time
owling, how you joked
that I was “wooing” you,
and later, when the wood I’d stood up
wouldn’t burn, you smiled and warmed
your hands above it anyway.

The shadows shiver a little, deep,
and then the louder, clearer song again,
strangely human, as if the owl sympathized
with our rough, inadequate transcription,
our trick against forgetting.

Who are you?

I feel your hand, strangely warm,
on my arm. I open my eyes.
You are there, half-asleep beside me
in the bed where we have slept
together almost ten full years.
The red line on the monitor leaps.

Me too.

It’s Silas, not yet two, calling out
from his crib the words he’s learned
from Birding by Ear. This is his favorite,
the Great Horned Owl, a kind of solo
call and response. Hearing this way,
in the blue-black fog of six o’clock,
awakened from my careless dream,
I’m almost overcome by fear
and love. In his tiny, sing-song liturgy,
I hear his certain loneliness, his waking
to a future full of empty, dimlit rooms.
But also this: his perfect faith
that somebody at last will come
and lift him into morning.

I rise before he calls again,
and when he sees my shadow fall
across the crack beneath his door
he chirps, in his new voice, my name,
the name my place in life has earned,
and I, like some great bird a-wing,
swoop down on him, whispering
his own name in return.

~~~~~

Next

Essay

2007-05-01T07:13:00.000-07:00

~Matthew Roth

In “The Boy of Winander” Wordsworth paints
the youth lakeside. He’s calling out to owls
at dusk, his small hands cupped around his mouth,
and when at last they don’t call back, the void
they leave resides not in the air that fails
to tremble with their song but in his own
deep double self, whose heart receives instead,
though he himself is unaware, “the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene . . .
With all its solemn imagery.” All these
he carries “far into his heart,” as if
the distance there conceived is not
outward at all, instead begins at the ear
or eye, the tongue or skin, whichever sense,
absent mind, gathers the impression in.

Does it matter that, in an early draft,
at the moment the owl fails to call,
Wordsworth becomes himself the boy: “my call,”
“my skill,” “I hung,” he says, “[l]istening” for
what never came. Or that, in later drafts,
when Wordsworth slays the boy—“was taken
from his Mates”—the third person is retained
throughout? Or how, in its final version—
a poor sequel he should have left undone—
Wordsworth returns again, as from the dead,
and stews upon the grave, which “hangs” halfway
between the valley and that uncertain sky
the boy once took into his heart, as if
he were himself the steady, mirror lake?

It’s but one more migration, self to other
self, “other I” our lyric turn requires.
What was it, after all, the boy desired?
Just this: to hear his coarse cry echo back
in a voice more alien and more true. It’s all
that any poet wants, our ageless task
and one more proof that Wordsworth was the boy
he killed, his death a mirror death of form
without matter, hard stars in the black of the lake.

~~~~~

Contributors

2007-04-29T22:22:00.001-07:00

Jon Arensen is a professor of Intercultural Studies at Houghton College. In the spring he resides in Tanzania, Africa where he directs the institution’s off-campus program for the semester.

Stacy Barton is a children’s author and scriptwriter for Walt Disney Entertainment. Her current project, Surviving Nashville, is a collection of short stories (Wordfarm 2007).

Diane Glancy is a Christian writer of German and Native American extraction. Her numerous prizes include an American Book Award, an Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, a native American Prose Award, and a Sundance Screenwriting Fellowship. Her books include Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea (Overlook Press, 2003), Designs of the Night Sky (U of Nebraska Press, 2002) and the Mask Maker: A Novel (U of Oklahoma Press, 2002).

Marcus Goodyear is the content and research editor of two websites: www.TheHighCalling.org and www.FaithInTheWorkplace.com.

William Griffin is the author of Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life, the mind behind the collaborative mystery Carnage at Christhaven, and an acclaimed translator of Thomas A'kempis.

Marci Rae Johnson holds a MFA in Poetry Writing from Spalding University, and a MA in Theological Studies from Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL). She is Founder and Director of the Poetry Factory reading and workshop series at the Box Factory for the Arts in St. Joseph Michigan, and serves as Poetry Editor for WordFarm, a small Midwestern publisher. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Minnetonka Review, Christianity and Literature, the anthology Becoming Fire: Spiritual Writing from Rising Generations, Garbanzo, Strange Horizons and 32 Poems, among others.

David Landrum is a member of the faculty of Cornerstone University.

John Rhett is a member of the Art faculty at Houghton College. He lives with his family in Houghton, teaching painting and digital imaging.

Matthew Roth, a Houghton alumnus, is currently a member of the English department at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania where he is a professor of poetry and creative writing. His poems have appeared in Fence, Columbia Poetry Review, Verse, Antioch Review, and the American Literary Review.

John Tatter is professor of English at Birmingham-Southern College. He maintains an innovative website, Stowe Landscape Gardens.

James Wardwell is a professor of English at Houghton College. He attended Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary for a Master of Divinity and received a Ph. D from the University of Rhode Island. His essays on devotional poets are a regular feature in Stonework.

Stephen Woolsey is a valued Professor of English at Houghton College where he teaches poetry and literature.

One of Us

2007-04-29T20:42:00.000-07:00

by Diane Glancy

It was in the news. A man had been arrested. He was responsible for ten murders. He had terrorized Wichita, Kansas, for nearly thirty years.

I was in Richmond, Kentucky, the weekend of February 25, 2005, when CNN announced the arrest of the man who called himself, BTK: Bind, Torture, Kill. I had wanted to write about a minister, and when I saw Reverend Michael Clark, the pastor of Christ Lutheran Church in Wichita, standing before news reporters, stunned that BTK was a member of his congregation, the question for the novel appeared— How does a minister recognize evil and deal with it in his own congregation? What is the nature of evil? What is our resilience to it?

This book is a work of fiction, though based on fact. I have written this as an outsider to the event. It is a work of imagination for the purpose of exploring issues. What is the definition of a Christian? How far can a Christian go and still be a Christian?

I used the arrest of BTK as the triggering event. The method of arrest, a disk from the church computer, and the murder of ten people, are the same, but the novel soon departs into a story of its own. The circumstances of Reverend Michael Clark and his wife, Jan, of Christ Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas, are very different from those of Reverend Mark Cabot and his wife, Grace, of Christ Church in Buckholt, Kansas.

It is a story I wanted to catch in a net between the first-person narration of Mark Cabot and the third-person narratives of Grace Cabot and Ralph Gheary, the assistant minister.

ONE OF US

Faustus
I think hell’s a fable.

Mephostophilis
Ay, think so still, till experience change your mind.

Dr. Faustus, Christopher Marlowe

Prologue: Mark Cabot, Senior Pastor, Christ Church

This was the question. Can a murderer enter heaven?
The answer is no. No murderer has eternal life— I John 3:15.
Yet Moses murdered— Exodus 2:12. He was in heaven. Surely he came with Elijah and was seen on the mount of transfiguration by Jesus and his disciples, Peter, James and John— Matthew 17:3
David murdered. Not directly, but he ordered Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba, on the front line of battle so he would be killed— II Samuel 11:15. Yet Jesus is the root and offspring of David— Revelation 22:16.
These are these contradictions I face.
These are the difficulties of scripture.

Chapter One: What Day Is This?

I sat at my desk with sermon notes when authorities came into the office with a disc from a computer they thought belonged to the church.
“Why?” I asked.
“We recovered a list of church duties.”
“It looks like one of our discs, but they’re standard— ”
The men confiscated the machine.
I saw there was a van in the church drive as well as the sheriff’s car.
“Who used the machine for this list?”
I gave them his name.
There was something ominous in their presence.
When they left, I called Grace, my wife, and told her something was up, but I didn’t know what. The men had asked that I not say anything.
The authorities returned. I saw they were from federal as well as state agencies. How well did I know Thomas Faust?
“Nearly thirty years.”
“Did he have access to the church computer?”
“Yes.”
They said they were certain that Thomas Faust had murdered ten people over a period of twenty years.
My secretary wept in a way I had not seen her weep in all the years I had known her, not even at the death of her parents.
I called the Bishop when the authorities left.
I called my wife on her cell phone. I told her not to answer questions— Not to let anyone in the house. Not to say anything on the phone. She wasn’t home anyway, she said.
I asked about our daughter.
“Clare’s at school, of course, then she’s going to a friend’s house.”
I drove to the Faust’s. The street was blocked. I’d never seen more state and city vehicles. Reporters and camera vans continued to arrive. People gathered outside the tape that blocked off the street. I could show them I was a pastor. The Faust’s pastor. I could get through. But I backed away.
I returned to the church and closed the door of my office to pray, but was interrupted with calls. One of them was my friend and member of my congregation, Roy Saith. I asked him to stay with Grace and Clare until I came home. Already there were calls from church members. Was it true? Yes. How could it be true? I didn’t know. I told my secretary to leave a message on the answering machine that I would meet with reporters after the authorities made their official announcement. I told her to call Ralph Gheary, the youth minister who also served as my assistant. He was in Elwood at the funeral of his wife’s grandmother. Then I told my secretary to go home.

The announcement was televised the next day. Families of the victims sat in the room hearing at last the murderer of their relatives had been caught. The police and agents were sure. They had felt sure the last time they arrested someone. But now they were sure again. This time they had DNA evidence.

The Bishop arrived that evening. We would meet the reporters at the church tomorrow afternoon.
Grace seemed to be holding up.
I called Ruth Faust all evening until I got through. A man answered, a relative I didn’t know. The family was gathering. A brother had been called from Iraq. Would they like for me to come to the house? No, Ruth was resting in her room. A doctor had come to the house because of the emergency.

We met at the church the next day— the bishop, the men’s prayer group, my wife, other members who wanted to pray with us.
The waters go up by the mountains; they go down by the valleys to the place that you formed for them. You set a bound that they may not pass over; that they turn not again to cover the earth. I held those words. The waters had come up to my mouth, but they would not cover me. I reminded them of their bounds. The waters could not cover us. In the name of Jesus. We stood from our prayer. I went to the door of the church and pushed it open. I looked at the news reporters— at the people that had gathered.
I saw the cameras— The microphones in my face. I heard the questions. Thomas Faust was a member of my church? The man arrested for murder? Yes. Yes. He had been president of the congregation. Did I know it was the church that led authorities to Thomas Faust? No, not at first. Faust had used the church computer to send a note to the newspaper. Yes, I knew it now. The investigators had traced it to the church. Faust had erased a list of what he had to do at church. The investigators retrieved the erased words on the disk. They found the church. I, the pastor, had identified the man whose list it was.
Had I seen him yet? The reporters asked. No, I hadn’t seen him yet, but I was going to meet with him soon. He had asked to see his pastor. Had I seen his family? Yes. I talked with them on the phone. Had his wife known? No. She was distraught.
I stood on scripture. It was what held me up that day. I kept hearing my own questions. Had the church brought him down? Had the power of the Lord expelled him from the church— had caught him— had said, this is the man who must pay for his crimes?
I had stood before the reporters. Yes, Thomas Faust was a member of my church. Not someone I saw once a year, but someone who was a part of my congregation. He was a leader of the congregation. He walked into church whenever he wanted. He had access to the office. To the computer. How could a man have been both murderer and member of my congregation? How could he have been an ordinance officer in Buckholt, Kansas, yet broken the law himself?
The reporters and more reporters came like water. We continued to pray in my office for strength. We went out to meet them again. The Bishop stood with me. I was caught with a murderer in my pocket. A wolf in my flock of sheep. Why had Faust not risen up on a Sunday morning and taken our lives? What moved in Faust’s mind as he sang hymns? As he listened to my sermons? My sermons? How freakish. He heard a sermon and went out and murdered. How could I live that down? Why was I thinking about myself? My secretary had been alone with him in the church. She had been at risk and had not known it. She had been endangered.
There was relief that the murderer was caught. He would not kill again. The mystery of what had happened to the man who had killed so many people was solved. But the relief was tempered with horror.
Thomas Faust had brought us to the knowledge of what we didn’t want. He was not separate from us. He was one of us.

Ruth Faust was on my mind again. What was she going through? I thought about her as I watched the repetition of news on television. She was with her family— they had moved her somewhere— even I didn’t know where— so I wouldn’t have to lie to the press, Grace said. Ruth had slept beside him all the years of their marriage. My thoughts jumped again to the children in boy scouts with him. Had my own wife and daughter been in the church alone with Faust? Had they come to get an early start on a church supper? What about the times I was at meetings while Grace and Clare were at home by themselves? No, Faust was at most of the church meetings with me. Was my congregation thinking the same thing? Did they go back and shake with fear he could have come into their houses? Into their bedrooms? Had he paused outside their houses thinking of murdering them? How had they survived?
How had we survived?— Mark Cabot, myself. Grace Cabot, my wife. Clare Cabot, our daughter.

Chapter Two: The Day We Sat Stunned

I went to the jail and met with Thomas Faust, the member of my congregation. He was in trouble. He wanted prayer. He wanted consideration. He had met with investigators. He had felt camaraderie. They all were corrections officers— he and they. He had confessed. Then the investigators were gone and he was alone. He was devastated. They had had an understanding. Then they abandoned him. Now he was an inmate. Now he was alone. He had asked if erased files on a computer disc could be resurrected. That wasn’t the word he used— retrieved, I suppose. They said, no. He sent the disc with more information about his murders. They found the erased files of his church duties. Thomas must have known. He wanted to be caught. Not convicted of his crimes and left alone. But he wanted attention.
He was behind a desk in an orange inmate suit when I walked in the room. I was awkward. I bumped my leg on the edge of the table as I sat down across from him. We looked at one another. Was it fear I felt? Who would speak first? We were waiting for the current to break— we were snagged. What was I trying to do? I asked myself. Why hadn’t I prepared myself. But how?
“Tom— we’re stunned.” I said. “We couldn’t believe it was you. We’re trying to understand. What did—” I stopped, not knowing where or how to go. “Did you?— ” I continued.
We were not strangers, but the meeting was the stranger between us. The room in which we sat could have been on another planet.
He had been caught. I was caught with him.
I did not want to be here. He did not want to be here either, now, anyway, now that the officers were gone and he was no longer the center of their attention. Now that he could not leave the building, let alone the room.
I didn’t want to be here, but as I looked at him, I wasn’t sure he didn’t, if he could be here on his own terms. It almost seemed that he had the authority and I was the recipient of his visit. He was the pastor in a perverse way. I had come for instruction for my ignorance. How could I meet this situation in which I was a stranger? I remembered people who had come to the church for help— Who had sat in my office overwhelmed.
“Should we pray?” I asked, then without waiting for his answer, because I realized it was my place, as the pastor, to decide, I bowed my head and began. “Lord, be with us. We come to you for guidance.” I’m not sure what else I said.
I knew Old Testament history. David certainly murdered, not directly, but he ordered Uriah on the front line so he would be killed because Bathsheba, his wife, was pregnant with David’s child. God was a murderer— of animals, certainly— for skins to clothe Adam and Eve. How many times did he call down fire on his rebellious people. Moses pleaded with him more than once for leniency. God killed his own son on the cross— it was necessary for the salvation of man— in the Christian’s opinion, anyway. God had to judge sin. Jesus became sin on the cross. He was judged and suffered death. Jesus rose again. God’s judgment on sin was satisfied. That was the crux of the Christian religion— for most Christians anyway. I was aware of unbelief. I was aware of the many who thought the Bible was irrelevant— Or tried to warp it to say something that almost looked like the message of the Bible— Or made a spirituality of their own construction. I was aware of the theories that try to discredit— to undermine— what for me was fact. If we believed Christ died on the cross and was raised, we were raised with him, our sins forgiven. What was so hard about that?
I was aware how tightly I held my shoulders as I talked— As I listened— As I thought— As I tried to reconcile— To resolve.
Thomas Faust felt betrayed. He felt hurt. He saw the murders as accomplishments. He thought the investigators wanted to talk to him, be involved with him as he led them on an adventure. They would be impressed with his skill. He thought they would remain in contact with him, not leave alone him in his cell. I was stunned. I tried not to show it. I had never seen him think this way.
I gave Faust what I could. I had to be honest.
There were awkward moments of silence. Did he see my nervousness? There were awkward moments of us speaking over one another, of interrupting without meaning to. You first— No, you— Go ahead. We were fishing. We were casting reels. We were not standing in the same stream. Had I seen his wife? Had his children come to Buckholt? Where were his brothers— the rest of his family?
How could I resolve what could not be resolved? It had torn our community— it had cut me— I didn’t want to see Thomas Faust. I wanted to leap from my chair, from this room, from this place, and flee. I couldn’t get far enough away if I drove for the rest of my life. The land was tainted with his acts of murder. The place itself wanted to flee from him, from what he did. I felt sick to my stomach. I felt sick in my spirit. I felt touched with a filth I couldn’t wash off. What else could I say? There were cities of refuge in the Old Testament for murderers, but those were accidental murders. Not planned and executed with precision. You carried a kit with tape and rope—
I want forgiveness, Tom said.
That’s between you and God. I cannot say, your sins are forgiven. I cannot even begin to think what you have done. You have implicated the church also. God’s salvation is irrevocable. Christ may be your city of refuge. He may accept you in his mercy. I can say, God forgives you. But right now, I, myself, cannot.
My head hurt. My shoulders were stiff. I was shaking. Did he see my shudders? Did he see my weakness? I could hardly get up from my chair. I felt like I was a stone. A huge, numb, cold, angry piece of rock. He would have kept me longer. He would have kept me prisoner. But I had to leave the room. I had to get out before I fell there.

Chapter Three: We Arrived at Night

The sky above us was smeared with moonlight.
I carried our luggage into the cabin. My wife, Grace, would unpack it. Our daughter, Clare, already was drawn up under a blanket in front of the television—
I often came to Orbson Lake to work. Ralph Gheary, the youth pastor, was back from Elwood and would be at the church. It was not my cabin, but my friend, Roy Saith’s. I liked the feel of tenant. That’s what I was on the earth. I did not want to get comfortable, to sit back and feel I had accomplished what I needed to accomplish. To say, this is mine.
I had come to the cabin to think, to write a report, to write a sermon that would reach out to my stunned congregation. To say what I could. To answer. To get my footing. What could I say? A member of my congregation had murdered ten people. Thomas Faust had been a boy scout leader. I thought of the members of the congregation whose sons who had camped with him. I thought of the members of the church who served on committees with him. We were traumatized. Evil had been with us. We had sat next to it. We had not come away clean. Knowing who the murderer was, was more fearful than not knowing. Now we knew the murderer was one of us. He was from us. He was among us. Many were still in shock. There had been a traitor in the congregation. We could not separate from it. It was there. The truth. How many would not return to church?
We lived in Buckholt, Kansas, a small town. We knew one another. But in knowing, we had not known. The authorities had come to the church. There was an investigation. I couldn’t believe they were asking about Thomas Faust. A murderer in my congregation? One of my flock. Was not Judas chosen to betray? But what was the purpose of this?
Later that night, I could see the shapes of the furniture in the room in the cabin. The smear of dim light— It was a night light in the hall in the cabin that served the same purpose as the moon I could see through the window, still spread across thin clouds. It was a lake house, I decided, more than a cabin.
I felt my depression returning. Even as a boy, I had heavy moods that weighed me down. I had taken medication. I had stopped the medication. My moods would plummet then lift from time to time. I would handle them with my will. I felt the heaviness that pushed me into the bed. I thought of scriptures written by others who had known despair. Out of the depths have I cried to you, O Lord. I wait for you more than they that watch for morning.
That old asteroid, Satan, thrown from heaven, hit the earth with a thud. That old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, who deceived the whole world was cast out of heaven and fell to earth, and his angels were cast out with him. Satan’s purpose was to damage— to take what he could for his own. He seemed to have access to dreams. To the depths of sleep.
I pondered scriptures again until the last, dim light of conscious thought turned off and I swam in the underlife on the other side of waking.
A disc floated somewhere like the rings of Saturn. But the rings had moved to Pluto and they had squared. I saw the rings had atmosphere. There was a sky. The sky had wings in it. The wings had hooks. The hooks caught the clouds that floated past. Then I saw the rings were an open mouth. The mouth tried to tell me something, but I could not hear. The mouth enlarged. It formed the whole universe. Something terrible was there.
In the morning, I sat at the desk in the cabin and thought about my dream. Was Pluto still a planet? No, it had been removed from the list of planets. What was a planet when it was not a planet? A meteorite? No, a meteor flew through the sky. Pluto orbited with the planets. And wasn’t there the discovery of a new planet? Facts were always shifting, always changing, just as Clare got them memorized for school.
I sat with my head bowed. A disc was a circle in a square. My secretary had ordered some transparent discs. I had noticed the circle inside like the rings of a planet— Not the disenfranchised planet that might not be what it was thought to be. What could I say to the bishop in his report? Thomas Faust was a member of my congregation who was not a member? Not a genuine member— he only looked like one? Or was he a genuine member in whom something was terribly wrong? Was he a man like everyone else, but had found evil in himself, and encouraged it, acted on it, thrived on it? Was evil in everyone? Was it like having a cabin one could choose to go to? Or stay away from?
Did I want to fish? Grace, my wife, asked. Sometimes it helped me think—
No, I didn’t want to fish. I wanted to work on my letter, and a sermon— my war notes, my manual of war. How could I face the fact I had a murderer in my congregation? I felt an anvil on my chest. It was warfare. Spiritual warfare. No, I wanted to stay in the cabin. I wanted to hear Grace moving in the kitchen, talking to Clare. I wanted to hear them laughing. Didn’t they know their world anchored me?
I believed there was a force of evil in the world, and in the heart of man. The destroyer had arrived in my church. I was a minister— the minister of Christ Church— the shepherd of a small flock. Why hadn’t I picked up on Thomas Faust? How could I have had a murderer in my congregation all these years? How could no one have known? How could it have been hidden so long? How would we get through this as a church? How had Grace and I gotten through our years of poverty years? Our years of uncertainty. The loss of a child. The disappointment over an appointment at another church that didn’t come.
I would get through this as I had gotten through it all— By faith. That’s how I had managed. That’s how I would continue. I was never sure of income because it depended on tithing, the giving of the congregation. I was never sure who was in my congregation— maybe a murderer— maybe someone was thinking of a criminal act while listening to my sermon. I could never be sure again. I felt violated— The way people felt when their house was broken into. I’d been caught off guard. I had been a buffoon by not picking up clues. But what clues had there been? I was duped. I was angered. I wanted to abandon Thomas Faust. Deny he was a part of my congregation. He brought home the reminder of what we were capable of.
Lord, you know my downsitting and my uprising. You understand my thoughts. You compass my path. You are acquainted with my ways. Where could I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there. If I made my bed in hell, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand leads me. You possess my reins. My substance was not hid from you, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being imperfect. In your book all my days are written.
Even this.
I knew also that Thomas Faust was fearfully made— But what had happened with this fearfully made man who turned murderer?
Did God know the terrible acts we would commit, but still chose to let us operate on self-will? Yes— we were free to act on our desires. Yes— God had to know. The terrible and even more terrible acts that we have done on earth were before him. Our history was full of horrors. That’s why it took the death of Jesus Christ on the cross to atone for the sin within us.
Depression was a polder. I was below sea level. In my sleep at nights in the cabin— in my uncertainty of the way ahead— I felt broken. But hadn’t the way behind been an indication of the way ahead? Had I ever been abandoned by God? Yes, when Tessa, our daughter, died.
Why couldn’t I write my report? How much more my sermon. I woke in the morning a ghost of myself. My idea of what I could be was more than what I was. My wife, Grace, was grace to me— keeping the house— being my emissary— my ambassador. Our daughter, Clare, in 7th grade. Only one child to worry about, someone told me once. A daughter who had not caused us trouble as yet. Who would not. Who saw that the love of order opened up time for more important things. Who brought books and puzzles and video games to the cabin. Who could be by herself. Who was so quiet I sometimes wondered if she was there. How would this impact her? What would the children say to her at school? What could I say to ease her way through this? Could I even help myself?
What was this job I had?— Ministry— Was it because I couldn’t do anything else? Manual labor? Accountant? I had no father to go into business with like Roy Saith. I had resented Roy’s ease into his father’s construction company. It was already there for Roy, while I had to plow the road. To go where it wasn’t clear. To work with Biblical architecture that could not be seen. No, I had been chosen for the ministry, and in turn, I had chosen to do it. I was doing the Lord’s work. I was in want. I was in uncertainty. The rectory in need of repair. The old car. The used furniture. The insecurity when I thought of my bank account. Then the message— preach the gospel to every creature. Whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved; but they that do not believe shall be damned. God often left no hard evidence of himself. Preaching would seem futile. It would be heartbreaking. It would be grace. He was. He is. He will be. There were times I would have done it differently than God. The I Am That I Am.
How could I explain the gospel more clearly? How could I explain it at all? I walked blind on the road where God led me. I even had difficulty explaining it to myself.
I had wanted another ministry— almost had been chosen for it— a position in another church. But I had been chosen to be here— in the middle of this. I got up from my chair. I sat down. I got up again. I walked down to the dock. I went back to the room. I paced.
Thomas Faust was president of the congregation. He was a compliance officer in the community.
Yet he had murdered and kept Buckholt under the siege of fear.
I wanted to say, had been the president of the congregation— but he still was, even as he sat in jail. There would have to be another election— soon—
Faust had murdered for years. Then the murders stopped. Had the murderer disappeared? Maybe he had moved away. Maybe he had died. Then, after many years, he re-surfaced. When he was caught, I couldn’t believe it was him. None of us could.
The investigators had traced him to the church. It was the church through which they found him. Maybe he had given himself up. Maybe he knew what he had done in secret could not be hidden forever.
What was the nature of man? What was the nature of his evil? Did everyone have it? Yes— according to the Bible no one was righteous, no not one. Why did Thomas Faust not keep his unrighteousness in check?— but let it out to prowl the neighborhoods— Why did he nurture it, develop it? Was it possible to understand the mind of a killer?— The evil that was in all of us? It could not be denied. Faust was an ordinary man who went into the houses of others and killed them. He invaded their homes and took their lives. Why had evil gone so far in him? Did his wife not ask where he was when he came in late? Did she not smell death on him? How does murder smell? The intent to murder? The release when it was over? Did he come home, shower? Had his pupils stopped enlarging. Was his gland no longer swollen? Did Ruth Faust feel his heart still pounding next to her? Did he kill calmly. No, he had ejaculated. He had known arousal. Did he talk in his sleep? Did he toss? Was there knowledge of something she put away like a towel in a drawer? Did their dreams meet at night above them and kiss? His wife, with things in her house he had taken from his victims. She never found them? Or suspected? Had I? How could she not have known? How could I? Had Thomas thought of killing Ruth, his own wife? Did his children dream of it in their beds? Did the parents of any of the boys in scouts suspect? Did Faust do anything that raised a suspicion we ignored? Some of his co-workers said he was arrogant, controlling. But most thought he was an ordinary man. No, it could not be. An ordinary man did not murder on his lunch hour and return to work. And how did he stop the murders after going so far? Did he step into an airtight compartment in himself, shut off from the part of himself that murdered? Did he just decide he could not do that anymore? How hard had it been to stop?
I was suddenly aware that the cabin was quiet. Grace and Clare were not there. Had they gone for a walk? Was I talking to myself? Had they overheard and left? Had Grace picked up on my wanderings?
God had made his will known in the Bible. He didn’t impose himself on us. In fact, sometimes, it seemed that he didn’t care what we did. Yet he took notes. Our lives would be written before us when we stood at the judgment seat. The book would be opened. It was in words. Who was doing this writing? By writing we are known. We had been given freedom. Yet we were bound in a book— Our will, our action, our decisions. We had to account for our words. Even the idle ones. Would there be instant replay? Was there a leniency in this toughness? I didn’t find it.
Heaven or hell were the choices. That was what the Bible said. I did not make it up. I was a minister. This was my territory. But the Bible could be bypassed. It could be ignored. It could be decided against as a conscious choice. The Bible could be left unread. But if it was picked up— If it was read and considered, if it was decided on, there was a world that opened. How could anyone argue with the evidence on the page? It was written by the author. The Author.
But what was said? Sometimes my sermons were wings tied onto my arms. Sometimes they were wings that grew from myself of themselves. If I could quiet my thoughts that were running everywhere. If I would not be preoccupied. But that was what religion was for— to puzzle, to face the question of evil head on. It was what Christianity was for.
To pin on wings was to feel the suffering of others. To grow one’s own wings was to know suffering itself. I felt the first wing start to grow— not the tied-on kind.
I wanted to follow Christ into the mystery and horror of life that I was at a loss to explain. Christianity wasn’t an easy out. I didn’t want to be disturbed by peace. I wanted the turbulence of high flight. A fool. A dreamer. A hound. Hounded and hounding. How often did I pray and receive no answer? Yet there was no doubt. I believed that God was there. I believed God had his own way that I could only know was there, though I couldn’t know it.
Thomas Faust called again for me. The second or third time? The message was waiting when I returned from the cabin. I couldn’t keep time straight. I couldn’t keep events in order. They seemed to run into one another and repeat themselves in different combinations.
The church had been smeared with Thomas Faust.

Stonework, Issue 4

2007-04-28T11:48:00.000-07:00

Poetry:

William Griffin

My First and Indeed My Last

Marcus Goodyear

Marci Johnson

David Landrum

Matthew Roth

Fiction:

Stacy Barton

Hail Mary

In the Summer of My Tenth Birthday

Diane Glancy

One of Us

The Bottom of Our Lives: A Conversation with Diane Glancy

Essay:

John Tatter

Poet as Gardener, Gardener as Poet

Steven R. Woolsey

Naming Wholeness in a Sick Climate

Classical Devotional Poets: James Wardwell

Robert Herrick: A Tithe of Praise

Art:

John Rhett

A Gallery of Rhett Landscapes

The Landscapes of John Rhett

Merle Folk Tales

Jon Arensen - Nota Bene

Dog and Cow

Ostrich and Man

Jackal, Hyena, and Lion

A Life for a Life

Two Friends and a Buffalo

Hare Decieves Hyena

Hare Defeats the Elephant

Contributors

Hare Defeats the Elephant

2007-04-28T11:47:00.002-07:00

Once long ago a certain elephant went hunting in the forest. There in the forest her foot was pierced by a thorn. So she limped along until finally she arrived at the compound of the hare. When she arrived, she said to the hare, “Come help me, my child. Take out the thorn which prevents me from walking home.”
The hare replied, “Good. Wait while I get another thorn to take out the first one.”
She ran into the house and whispered to her children to put the cooking pot on the fire. Then she sharpened the knife and brought it out together with a fish spear. As she cut the meat from the foot of the elephant, she said to the children, “Take this and throw it away in the forest. It stinks very much.”
To the elephant she said, “Why did this thorn pierce you in such a bad way?”
The children ran with this meat and put it in the cooking pot and they kept on doing this until the pot was completely full of meat. Then the hare said to the elephant, “It is finished my sister. The thorn is out.”
The elephant limped on until she arrived at home. The whole leg was infected and swollen up. When the other elephants asked about it, she said it had been pierced by a thorn and the hare had only made it worse. After a while the elephant died.
After she died, the other elephants blamed the death of their woman on the hare. So they gathered together to go to avenge the elephant and kill the hare. While they were preparing, another person ran and came and told the hare, “You are still here? The elephants say you killed their woman. Now they are gathering to come to kill you.”
When the hare heard this, she went to the animals that were her friends and asked for their help, but they all refused completely. So the hare said, “Death is only once. Let them come.” Then she went out and brought back three gourds. In the first gourd she put tsetse flies. In the second she put bees, and in the last she put fleas.
In a little while she saw the elephants coming with many spears. She let them come and while they were still far away, she sent out the tsetse flies. The tsetse flies stung the elephants over and over, but were finally defeated. The hare let the elephants come until they were a little closer and then sent out the bees. The bees stung the elephants over and over, but eventually they stopped stinging and the elephants kept coming.
When the elephants were nearing the compound, the hare released the fleas. The fleas immediately attacked the elephants. The fleas entered the eyes and ears of the elephants. The elephants started crying and calling to each other. “Help me. Help me with the one in my trunk. Help me with the one in my anus.” The fleas kept on attacking them until finally the elephants ran away. The hare won the battle.
The Murle people say that is why elephants do not like fleas up until the present day.

~~~~~

Reprinted with permission of the translator, Jonathan E. Arensen from Mice Are Men (International Museum of Cultures, 1992) copyright by The summer Insstitute of Linguistics, Inc., 1992

Hare Deceives Hyena

2007-04-28T11:47:00.001-07:00

One time a hyena went on a visit to see a hare. When he arrived at the compound of the hare, the hare spoke to her heart to watch out. She knew that the hyena had not come to her home for nothing. He came because he wanted to steal her children.
As for this hyena, he had never before seen a hare with his own eyes. It was the first time he had ever seen one. He saw the long ears of the hare and thought that they were horns. Earlier the children of the hare had invited the hyena into the house and given him a skin to sit on. The hare came in, but before she greeted the hyena, she bragged saying, “I gored a rock and the water came out kilik, kilik, kilik,” [drip, drip, drip].
When the hyena heard the hare say this he was afraid, thinking that the hare would gore him with her sharp horns. He did not realize that they were just ears. Therefore, he quickly said to the hare, “I just came for nothing, Maanygoon” [honorific].
“Earlier I was not intending to come this way. However, when I was just passing on the path I lifted my eyes and saw the children playing here in the center of the compound. I said to myself, ‘Let me go and just greet them standing up and then proceed. It is not proper to see people and pass on without greeting them.’”
The hare asked, “Don’t you want any water to drink? You can’t go without drinking some water.”
The hyena said, “I need to hurry and get on my way. I will come to see you another day.”
The hare replied, “All right. We will meet again another day.”
The hyena left and proceeded on his way. He stayed away for awhile and then on another day he returned again. When he arrived at the compound of the hare, he found the children alone and their mother absent. He asked them where their mother was. The children replied, “Our mother went into the forest earlier. Now she is on her way home.”
The hyena said, “Awaŋ [exclamation]. How are you all?”
The children replied, “We are all fine.”
The hyena said, “I want to ask you a question. What does your mother use to sharpen her horns before she gores the rock to let out the water?”
The children replied, “Our mother has horns where? Perhaps you saw her long ears and thought they were horns.”
“No way. They were not ears. Why are you trying to deceive me, an old man like your father? When I saw your mother come here last time, I saw that she had horns.”
“No. We are not deceiving you. Later when she comes, you can see for yourself. Even now she is coming.”
The hare came and when she entered the house, she found the hyena inside. She sat down and immediately boasted saying, “I pierced the rock and the water came out kilik, kilik, kilik.”
When she said this, the hyena immediately jumped on her saying, “Here I am. Gore me.”
The hare escaped and fled and the hyena chased her into the forest until she disappeared. The hyena returned and collected the children and hit them on the head and ate them.

~~~~~

Reprinted with permission of the translator, Jonathan E. Arensen from Mice Are Men (International Museum of Cultures, 1992) copyright by The summer Insstitute of Linguistics, Inc., 1992

~~~~~

Two Friends and a Buffalo

2007-04-28T11:46:00.002-07:00

One day there were two youths that were friends who went hunting. They went to the forest and there they were attacked by a buffalo. One of them escaped up a tree. The buffalo knocked the other youth down and pummeled him on the ground. The friend who was in the tree did not come down to help. Instead, he was laughing. While the buffalo was pummeling his friend and knocking the wind out of him, he was sitting in the tree saying, “Struggle hard, Manaboŋ. Fight on young man. Struggle hard, Manaboŋ.”
He said this and laughed very hard until he forgot where he was. In a little while he missed a hold on a branch and fell out of the tree. The buffalo charged him at once and gored him before he hit the ground. It gored him until he was dead. As for the youth who had been laughed at as he was being pummeled by the buffalo, he escaped from beneath the buffalo unharmed.
These then are the words of the two youths who went hunting. It is finished.

~~~~~

Reprinted with permission of the translator, Jonathan E. Arensen from Mice Are Men (International Museum of Cultures, 1992) copyright by The summer Insstitute of Linguistics, Inc., 1992

~~~~~

A Life for a Life

2007-04-28T11:46:00.001-07:00

One day in the evening a man was playing with his children at the sitting place. He saw a dove being chased by a hawk which wanted to kill it. The dove came and fell on the man’s head trying to hide. When the children saw it, they wanted to kill the dove and roast it. But the father hid the dove under his arm and said to the children, “It flew away.” After the children left, he took out the dove and let it fly away.
Another day some enemy came to attack and raid the people of that homestead. While the enemy were on the way to attack, the same dove came to the sitting place and perched on the top of a tree. As for the man, he was together with his children in the sitting place. In a little while he heard something saying, “A life for a life. Leave. A life for a life. Leave. Tonight the enemy will attack in the early hours of morning.”
When the man lifted his head, he saw that he was hearing the dove on top of the tree. He got up and told his wives to pack their things. When he told the other people who lived with him, they laughed saying, “Where are the enemy?”
He took his family and herded his cattle onto the path and left. In the early morning truly the enemy came and killed the remaining people and took all the cattle.

~~~~~

Reprinted with permission of the translator, Jonathan E. Arensen from Mice Are Men (International Museum of Cultures, 1992) copyright by The summer Insstitute of Linguistics, Inc., 1992

~~~~~

Jackal, Hyena, and Lion

2007-04-28T11:45:00.001-07:00

Long ago the hyena and the lion had their cattle. Then the cow of the hyena was a female; as for the cow of the lion, it was an ox. The hyena and the lion took turns taking care of the two animals. One day the lion would herd them and the next day the hyena would herd them. Eventually the cow of the hyena became pregnant and one day gives birth on the day that the lion was herding the cattle. After the cow gave birth, the lion took the calf of the cow of the hyena and placed it with his ox. Then he caught a baby tiang (hartebeest) and came and put it with the cow of the hyena.
When the lion brought the cattle to the homestead, he came and told the hyena, “This one is the calf to which your cow gave birth. This other one is the one to which my ox gave birth.”
The hyena says to the lion, “No way. Since when do male cows give birth? This one is the calf of my cow.”
The hyena and the lion quarreled on and on until eventually they went and collected arbitrators. These arbitrators talked on and on, but there was no one who could make a judgment. Finally, the arbitrators said, “Let us send a message to Jackal to come and see about this matter.”
When Jackal received the message, he said, “Good. I will go.” Then Jackal dug many holes until when he neared the place of the court he came out and smeared his body with red gum so that he was completely red. When he suddenly appeared to the people of the court in the late afternoon, the lion says to him, “Jackal, what were you doing? Why have we been waiting for you for a long time?”
Jackal replies, “I came earlier, and on the path I found dry mud fighting. I have been separating them until this time. Look at the blood which they smeared on me until I became completely red.”
The lion says, “Since when have we found mud that fights?”
Jackal replies, “And you, since when have we found a male which gives birth?”
All the animals say to each other, “It is judged. It is judged. Jackal is right. The cow of the hyena wins the calf.”

~~~~~

Reprinted with permission of the translator, Jonathan E. Arensen from Mice Are Men (International Museum of Cultures, 1992) copyright by The summer Insstitute of Linguistics, Inc., 1992

~~~~~

Jackal, Hyena, and Lion

2007-04-28T11:45:00.000-07:00

Ostrich and Man

2007-04-28T11:44:00.002-07:00

They say that long ago man was swift like ostriches are today. One day an ostrich came to a human and said, “Maanygoon. I want to go on a long trip. Now I want you to help me. Give me your legs for the trip. I will return them to you day after tomorrow.”
The man agreed to this matter. He truly gave the ostrich his legs to be brought back the day after tomorrow as he had promised earlier.
At this point the ostrich disappeared. The man waited on and on for a long time. Finally, he gave up hope that they would ever be returned.
The Murle say this is why the ostrich is swift up until now.

~~~~~

Reprinted with permission of the translator, Jonathan E. Arensen from Mice Are Men (International Museum of Cultures, 1992) copyright by The summer Insstitute of Linguistics, Inc., 1992

~~~~~

Dog and Cow

2007-04-28T11:44:00.001-07:00

The cow and the dog were talking together saying, “Let us run to see which one of us is faster.”
The dog said to the cow, “Now if we race, I will defeat you.”
The cow said to the dog, “No. We are both equal.”
The dog replied to the cow, “Then let us run to the top of that hill.”
The cow agreed. “All right.”
So they ran, and they ran on and on until the cow tripped and fell to the ground. All of her front teeth were broken off completely.
When the cow fell to the ground, the dog laughed. He laughed and laughed, but the cow was silent. She was crying because she had broken her teeth.
The cow said to the dog, “Do not laugh like that. If you do, your mouth will tear completely open.”
The dog laughed anyway. He laughed a long time. He laughed until as a result truly his mouth tore apart completely.
When the dog tore his mouth, the cow was happy also. She said, “Your mouth tore because I told you earlier to not laugh at me.” The cow was very happy.
As for the dog, he was very angry. He said, “Why did you curse me until my moth tore?” The dog which had earlier laughed at the cow now had an ugly face. He had thought earlier that only the cow was ugly.
The result is that the dog has an ugly torn mouth and the mouth of the cow has no teeth.
This, then, is the word of the cow and the dog. It is finished.

~~~~~

Reprinted with permission of the translator, Jonathan E. Arensen from Mice Are Men (International Museum of Cultures, 1992) copyright by The summer Insstitute of Linguistics, Inc., 1992

~~~~~

Murle Folktales

2007-04-28T11:43:00.000-07:00

Dr. Jon Arensen, professor of anthropology at Houghton College, is director of the Houghton in Tanzania program. He has spent many years with the Murle people, translating their language for Wycliffe Bible Translators. The folktales included are reprinted from his book Mice Are Men.
The Murle people enjoy telling and listening to stories. Stories can be told at any time of the day and by anybody. However, storytelling usually takes place in the evening after the day’s work is done and the people are relaxing. It is in this setting that older men and women, renowned for their ability, regale their audience with tales of many different types. Many of them are tales about people, animals, and birds which live in an earlier fantastic world where they are not limited by the present restrictions of life. In a sense, these tales are metaphorical in nature in that there are often underlying meanings which can only be understood in the context of Murle society and by having a good knowledge of the language. These types of tales are not told to report historical facts but primarily for entertainment. The Murle use the verb kamici for the telling of a tale. In other contexts this verb can mean ‘play’, ‘converse’, ‘flirt’, and ‘sexual intercourse’. Even though tales are seen by the Murle people to be primarily for entertainment, they do give some insights about the world, both physical and social, in which they live.

The Bottom of Our Lives: A conversation with Diane Glancy

2007-04-25T11:57:00.000-07:00

Edited by Sally Amphor, Elizabeth Petrillo, and Amanda Sylor

Stonework: One of Us has its origin in the story of the BTK murders in Kansas, murders committed by a man who proved to be a church member and a respected member of his community. The first question that came to me as I read was: Could a man capable of such acts ever have truly been a Christian?

Glancy: My first answer is no. A Christian cannot sin in that way. But it may not be that simple.

I want to ask the question, What do you mean by Christian? To some (myself included) it is the born-again experience of accepting Christ as Savior— making the personal confession—“I am a sinner and I accept you Jesus as my personal savior.”

For other Christians I know, Christianity seems to be a movement for social justice. They spend time building houses for the poor, etc. The death of Christ on the cross does not seem as important to them as it is to me. Still others (I am thinking of a Catholic friend) believe you have to be a member of a certain church— that is their salvation. I am sure there are many more interpretations of Christianity.

I have not been in the Lutheran Church, so I don’t know its tenets, but I assume it is confession of faith in Jesus Christ. BTK was a member of the Lutheran Church for 30 years (is still a Lutheran as he sits in prison?) He was a major member, president of the congregation. How can this happen? That is the question of the book. The Christian is a new being in Christ. We have access to his nature. We have forgiveness over sin. We have power to side-step it through prayer and the washing of the water of the word. (I am just writing ideas, seeing where these thoughts go.) Yet I sin. I fall short all the time. Just let someone cut me off in traffic. Just give me a long day with my three young grandchildren. Just give me a little frustration and disappointment and I fail.

But this sin (BTK’s) is on another level. I asked Michael Clark (BTK’s minister) if he wanted to work on this book with me and he said he didn’t want to go through it again. I also had the feeling he thought it was beyond explanation. Maybe he didn’t want the Lutheran church involved with an examination of the problem. It gave me permission to go on my own, fictionalizing it somewhat, yet looking at the central problem. How could a Christian murder? Much less, how could a Christian murder 10 people, terrorizing them as he murdered, and sit in church year after year, singing hymns, listening to sermons, bringing covered dishes to church suppers? It is a worse “horror” than Conrad wrote about in Heart of Darkness. It is such a dark hole, such a huge splot. It is frightening.

Stonework: I find even thinking about mass murder appalling. What attracted you, a Christian woman, to such a violent story?

Glancy: Why would I want to write about it? Because it haunts me. I think it needs to be looked at. There’s a book by Stephen Single, Unholy Messenger, about BTK. I wanted to write from the minister’s point of view. Can a Christian murder? What if BTK was not really a Christian?

Yes, I like that thought. It’s easier. He was not a Christian, therefore he could murder. He had a sickness, a psychological sickness. He toyed with the thought and planning of the murders and carried them out. He was not truly a Christian and did not have the stop-gap available to him.
I would like for that to be the answer. But it seems that BTK did make a commitment to Christ. How could he be in these two places? Is it possible for a sickness of the mind and spirit to get a hold of a Christian? I want to run from that thought. I want to be safe in Christ.

I want to return to the first answer— BTK was not truly a Christian, only a counterfeit all those years of church attendance. He was like Judas who was in Christ’s company, yet was not truly one of the disciples. In the end, Judas let Satan enter his thoughts with the act of betrayal. I return again to the Christian community with the question of what went wrong? Is it possible for a Christian to sin? Yes, I think of the sexual scandals of ministers who are Christians. I think of a two ministers I have known in my long life who failed. I think of my own failures. And I want to say, yes, it is possible for a Christian to sin. But to sin to this extent? That is the problem. Why did God let that happen? Why the Holocaust? Why the death of a child from cancer? Why these questions for which there are no easy answers. Maybe not even difficult answers.

Stonework: This book seems to be a departure for you. I sense you putting yourself at risk in two ways. The first is personally—submitting to the horror to tell the story. The second is professional. People begin to expect certain things from writers, and I’d wager your readers are not anticipating the challenge you’re preparing for them. Would you talk about these risks? In regard to the first, do you pray a lot? In regard to the second, Is it necessary to make breaks with the past to stay alive as a creator?

Glancy: In THE DANCE PARTNER, I say at the end one of my stories, “Christ goes anywhere even to the bottom of our lives.” I wrote the piece after a visit to Pine Ridge. The harder issues always have interested me. Maybe it’s heritage or experience. But I think Christianity faces whatever problems we encounter, no matter how horrific. Christ suffered on the cross more than we can realize because he went to the bottom of sin and uprooted it.

Since Eden, Satan has worked to cast doubt and questioning. I consider BTK an act of Satan. Something like 911 was an act of Terrorism. What a terrible “hit” to the church. How much damage to those struggling for faith? I wanted to work toward some sort of conclusion, though only God knows if BTK is a Christian or not. BKT insists that he is, but it is hard to understand how he could be, unless it is possible for a Christian to give himself/herself over to a reprobate mind. Does he/she remain a Christian afterwards? I believe when we accept Christ our names are written in the book of life. I don’t think God erases names. The term I believe in is called “eternal security” (as it is not possible for a child to remove himself from his bloodline). I know at the end of Revelation it says, “if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life.” So I suppose God could erase the name of Dennis Rader (if indeed it was there). But I have trouble accepting erasure in this case. Maybe I will change my mind. Or maybe Mark Cabot and Ralph Gheary, the fictional senior and junior ministers at the church, will have opposing opinions at the end of the book. That would be an easy way around it. Then both yes and no could be present, and the reader can decide. These are the difficult questions that are there to be asked. I am very interested in the voice of faith, especially as it meets the hard places. I want to see how Christianity works in the zones of discomfort. How could we not think and write about this?

Yes, this work is a departure for me as well as a risk because I mostly have written about the Native American culture. I have sent a query letter to several Christian agents / publishers and they don’t seem interested because I have not published with a Christian house. Sometimes it’s just a rejection without a reason. I don’t know what will happen to the manuscript.

I don’t know if it is necessary to make a break with the past. I still write about Native American issues. I like to give voice to historical characters that did not have a chance to speak such as the Cherokee who walked the Trail of Tears, Sacajawea, and a book I just finished, Kateri Tekakwitha, a 17th Mohawk who was converted to Christianity.

My personal Christianity, which always has been there, has been pushing forward. I feel the desire to write in that direction. I’ve written a long time. Maybe I want to move on from what I’ve done. I also think moving to Kansas sharpened my interest in this. And yes, I pray a lot. I think it’s the most important thing I do.

Stonework: D. Bruce Lockerbie, one of the first evangelical writers to engage the most violent and sexually explicit works of contemporary literature, once said he believed he was called to bear the risk of such works on behalf of the community. We sense something of the same spirit in your answers; you’re going to the hard place, the place of no answers for us. How do you expect this book to be read?

Glancy: Last Sunday morning in church we sang Fanny Crosby’s 1875 hymn, To God Be the Glory. I wrote down a line to use in the novel, “the vilest offender who truly believes, that moment from Jesus a pardon receives.” It was an assurance. But then the question, what if the offender had already been pardoned when he offends again? Is it the 7 x 7 or 77 x 77? The moment assurance arrives, another question comes to blur the assurance: But what about this case (BTK)? If we believe we are pardoned, we are pardoned? No, I don’t think that is what is meant. The pardon comes from Jesus, not from our own absolving of ourselves (not self righteousness, but the righteousness of God is what counts). So, if BTK believes he is pardoned, he is pardoned? I doubt it. We don’t control pardon by believing we are pardoned. That is an act of God through the blood of Christ. I think the true belief Crosby meant is our fundamental faith in the atoning work of Christ. The individual pardons God gives us during our Christian walk are up to him. These fine lines have shown up over and over to trip and to confuse the issues. If BTK is a Christian, and asked God to pardon his individual sins, though they are sins of murder, is he forgiven by God?

I actually hope (expect) this book to build faith and confidence in God. I have felt a confidence as I wrote: God is in control no matter what happens. I did not linger at the murder scenes in my writing, or in the mind of BTK. My purpose is to look at the situation from a Christian perspective because Christianity has been implicated. My faith fights back.

Stonework: Evil is present in so much of popular culture as entertainment, as a cheap thrill. How does a writer take this into account? What can a writer do to direct a reader to a fruitful moral engagement with a topic such as this?

Glancy: Scripture helps. Whenever I am afraid while thinking about BTK and the conundrum of these issues— Whenever I am afraid while writing about this frightening situation, I say, “the Lord rebuke you, Satan.” It is what I found in scripture to do. I still feel fear, but it is a confident fear. A semi-confident fear. I realize there is a horror involved in this that is much bigger than I am, yet I feel protected from it.

In Zechariah 3:1-2, the priest Joshua stands before the angel of the Lord and Satan stands at his right hand to resist him. And the Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you, O Satan; even the Lord, who has chosen Jerusalem, rebuke you.” The verse is mentioned again in Jude 9. “Yet Michael, the archangel, when contending with the devil he disputed about the body of Moses, dared not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke you.” (I wish there was more about this incident in the Bible. Why was there dispute over the body of Moses? Was it because Moses murdered an Egyptian?)

Another thing that helps is that I also am working on other things, so I don’t stay with the book too long at one time. I remember early on, mentioning this book to John Wilson, and he said, don’t stay in it too long.

To get back to your question about what I expect from this book, it is confidence in the Christian faith. In my Bible study at church, we are in the book of Revelation. Even in the midst of the tribulation when everything is out of control on earth, there are parenthetical statements. In chapter 7, for instance, Jews and Gentiles are added to God’s kingdom. In Revelation 10, there is the wonderful angel with his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the earth.

I think evil is getting worse. When I go to the movies, some of the previews of movies I have no desire to see are revolting. I also have passed through television programs that should not be on television. When I open my e-mail, even with the filtering program of the college, disgusting messages creep in. In my reading, I see many attacks on Christianity. It is an out-moded religion, etc., etc. I think evil will keep intensifying. I think there is an acceleration, an inflation of evil. Faith will have to be augmented also. It is the moral engagement in which I want to be involved.

Last Sunday in my Sunday school class, there were those who ask, how can I believe in a God who sends people to hell? How can I believe in a God who sent Israel into Canaan to wipe out enemy tribes? This is an adult senior class. People have been going to church all their lives. Yet they are still asking basic questions. Christianity is not easy.

I feel drawn to these questions and to these things I don’t want to deal with, or even look at while they stare us in the face. I want to write about what we face as Christians in this dangerous, deceptive world that God has made bearable to us. Scripture is bigger, so much bigger than BTK.

Stonework: In closing, let us draw you out just a bit more on the paradox in what you’ve just said. You feel drawn to questions you don’t want to deal with. As writers, we understand that. We too feel drawn to the hard places. But as readers, we sometimes prefer pleasant evenings by the fire. What challenge would you issue to Christians who want to make their reading a formative part of their lives?

Glancy: When writing fiction, a question to ask is, what is the worst thing that can happen to my character? Then we watch the character proceed through the worst. We read literature to see how others face their problems, crises, etc. This story had a built-in worst thing. I wanted to see how the minister worked his way through his disaster. What wisdom did he gain? (I'm thinking of Job's amazing statement—I had heard of God with my ears, now I see him with my eyes.) Then maybe I can work my way through mine, though I may not face anything so critical. Nonetheless, we read to grow as human beings. We read to learn. To grow larger than we are on our own. This world has disasters such as this minister faced. I want to know how the problems can be handled.

I also like to write what I want to read. I want to be assured that in a battle with darkness, the seeds of light are always there. God’s light is a light that darkness cannot overcome.

My First and Indeed My Last -- A Poem in 12 Fits or Starts

2007-04-25T07:35:00.000-07:00

~William Griffin

FIT I.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, no,
a poem on water? if I may begin where I'll end. My mistake!

FIT II.
I'd complained in public,
I should've known better,
that never in my writing life did anyone ask
me to write a poem, or assign me the task.
And so the Poet, the Master Poet, the Poetaster,
the Sonneteer Siníster, slapped me in the face with one.
What's more, he laid down the rules.

FIT III.
Typically, one would have thought him Roman or Italic,
but no, typographically, he was Greek Orthodox,
Extra Bold Extended, Display Caps only.

FIT IV.
"Title?" I asked.
"‘A Poem on Water,'" he replied.
"With water music?" I asked. "I could Handel that."
"No music," he replied, unable to handle a note himself.
"First word?" I asked.
"Not," he replied.
"Not?" I asked.
"Naught but a not," he replied.
"Naughty but nice," mused I, notting along to be nice. "But
many are the nots, not spelled the same, not meant the same."
"It's nice to be naughty," he nodded,
his reasoning knotted. "End with a not or else pay the price!"

FIT V.
"Stanza?" I dared ask.
"Four Tercels, or three Quattros," he dared reply.
"That's more than I can afford," I humm-mm-mmed,
but to a dealership I hied where a parking lot of Stanzas I espied.
Who'd ‘ve thought a Stanza Civic to be so pricey,
but I did find a pre-owned one that was rather nicey.

FIT VI.
"Caesura?" I asked further.
"I come to bury Caesura, not to phrase him!" he replied further
with what I thought was a little too much bravura.
"End rhyme?" I had to know.
"No end rhyme!" he had to tell.
"No end rhyme? Did you hear that, ladies and gentlemen? He says No
end rhyme!"
"It's about time, don't you think?" he asked rhetorically.

FIT VII.
"But what about feet?" I countered sillily.
"Surely a poem has to have feet if it's to travel, not to creep."
"What think you of Mr. Iamb?" he asked icily.
"I'm nuts about Mr. Iamb," I replied heartily,
"and I'm crazy for his hat."
"Miss Anapest it is then," he said irenically.
"Not in your top knot!" I announced iratedly.
"Mr. Iamb it is then," he spouted apophatically,
"but you'll live to regret it!"

FIT VIII.
"I-amb Who-amb," Mr. Iamb once said to me
in a moment of private revelation;
"thou shalt not have false feet before thee!"
So iamb it is then, iamba cum viol de gamba!

FIT IX.
Those were the rules, that was the assignment,
flung like a pie right into my mush.
Cream, yes, but shaving, not whipped—
such was his menthol operandi that
I sent him tumbling onto his tush.

FIT X.
A Laureate without laurels he was;
a Poet on water himself,
in summer swanning in thick algae,
in winter coruscating on thin ice.
More Neptune than Naiad,
drowning end rhymes like kittens—
that was his devious intention...
but he was ill, the Poet;
something to do with water retention.

FIT XI.
His wooden frame topped by a facial fuzz,
in smart contact with smooth surface,
would leap to flame.
Alas, it was me he wanted to torch
with this "poem on water," and I
in my humility am all too incendiary.
To burn or to drown, those were his only concerns.

FIT XII.
I shall end where I began, with a naught,
not that there's anything wrong with a knot,
as long as it's a knot with a knoose,
not a burnoose, just a nuisance to be noosed.
To tie a knot, alas, I cannot, at least all by myself;
someone else must help.
But now, alone at last, all by myself,
more ebullient than a Booleant,
I can write a poem truly my own,
not having to begin with a not, or a knot, or a naught].
Not that there's anything naughty with a not....
But I won't!

Definitely Not Dedicated to Scott Cairns.

How to Listen

2007-04-25T07:21:00.000-07:00

~Marci Johnson

We make a vessel from a lump of clay;
It is the empty space within the vessel that makes it useful.
-from Lao Tzu¹s Tao Teh Ching

Put the sky in a frame
hang it on your wall
call it
art
a window
silence

a door

must stay open
to the wind
to footsteps,
a lover's
a child's
your own
a stranger bearing
an ancient bowl
filled with water
or not filled

a tomb, filled
or not filled

a house

light falling upward
from floor
to ceiling

a house
a church

filled with light
falling upward
a window
a door
the sky

Passion Play

2007-04-18T07:40:00.000-07:00

~Marcus Goodyear

From a step stool my girl drops tabs in 6 cups,
red, yellow, green, orange, blue, and pink.
She tells the Easter story while we wait
for shells to stain. "This is Jesus,"
C.J. begins. She's got a red M&M doll,
a McDonald's Happy Meal prize. "Here's the cross,"
she says and displays her Popsicle stick
creation from the Baptist egg hunt.
The M&M doll has a clip--so trendy kids
can hang him from their back pack zipper,
I guess. No marketing exec for junk or fast food
foresaw the candy man of sorrows crucified
on my kitchen table, cups of vinegar hissing
disdain around him. In her gospel
Big Bird stands in for both Marys and visits
the crook of my arm. “Here, Daddy, be the tomb.”
Elmo rises a creepy soft angel squeezed, tickled
and giggling against my white washed shoulder
"He is not here! He is risen!"
But our Jesus has not. The storyteller forgot
the hanging candy doll--or worse, I fear--
prefers to see him hang there
an acceptable suggestion of sacrifice
reminding us both to dip our hands
in the bunny bowl for Easter M&Ms,
lilies stamped where Ms should be.
Colored shells bleed on our palms,
and the candy Christ speaks,
“This is my body. Take and eat.”

~~~~~

Next

Outside Abilene

2007-04-18T07:38:00.000-07:00

~Marcus Goodyear

The land less flat than I
guessed, it’s still hairy gray
with curly pubic oak
at the 33 miles to go sign
where that church boy fell asleep
and killed a family of four
on their way camping.

Still alive, the land has its labors
pushing until the grain crowns
golden ripe for the combine,
elevated or spewed onto trains
running parallel to barbed wire
stretching between corrugated iron
posts that keep us company.

A sign in the dry lake:
Please Jesus send rain
But Jesus hitched a ride
in the back of our truck
where the wind blows his dark hair
so wild no one sees him smile
except the dry prickly pear.

Louisiana

2007-04-18T07:34:00.000-07:00

~Matthew Roth

--after Wilfred Owen

So Noah rose, with an axe went out, and felled
the forest all around, and planed the wood
and joined it also, according to the rude
assignment God had dreamed into his head.
And when that work was done, though he'd not seen
a cloud for weeks, and all was stars and sun,
he honored God, and laying a hand upon
her hull, christened the ark Evangeline.
Weeks passed. God's creatures all were gathered in,
and then, at last, the rain did fall, the tide
rose up, and when it reached them, Noah cried
for God to spare them from the flood's cruel end.
But God demurred, the ark was overcome,
and all the souls inside her, one by one.

Robert Herrick: A Tithe of Praise

2007-04-18T07:29:00.001-07:00

~James Wardwell

Robert Herrick seems an odd subject for a series of essays written to revitalize devotional poetry. Although a clergyman and writer of some conspicuously designated religious verse (“Noble Numbers”), Herrick is better known for his light, occasionally bawdy poems, which he suggests outnumber the former by at least three to one (“His Confession”) and the proportion maybe more like ten to one. Nevertheless, this decided contrast may be seen to oddly highlight an appreciable depth to Herrick’s consideration of spiritual matters.

As masterful craftsmanship, Herrick’s bouncing rhythm and rhyme echo a not-so-latent hedonism. “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” his best remembered piece, jams syllables into rapid torrents, “a-flying” toward a carpe diem enticement to “use your time” “while ye may.” Although there may be a legitimizing pun in the admonition to “go marry,” the song originally set by William Lawes remains standard pub fare.

A life long bachelor, in poems like “Upon Julia’s Clothes” and “Upon Julia’s Nipples,” Herrick titillates. He finds a “Delight in Disorder” of a woman imperfectly dressed in “neglectful” cuff and “tempestuous petticoat.” Something completely untoward pants in the dispatching of “cakes and creams,” “green gown[s] . . . given,” and “locks picked” in “Corinna’s Going A-Maying.” Parson Herrick naughtily twists in religious diction—sin, profanation, matins, hymns, devotion—to advocate ungodly abandon: “Wash, dress, be brief in praying: / Few beads are best, when once we go a-maying” (lines 27-28). There may be a self-critical tone intimated in the last stanza, but it hardly lessens the lawless thrust of its “liberty.”

Come, let us go, while we are in our prime,

And take the harmless folly of the time. (57-58)

Although minister to the humble churches of Dean Priory in Devonshire for nearly forty-five years (his forced removal to London during several years of the civil war and Commonwealth notwithstanding), Herrick may not have been vocationally fit. He writes:

More discontents I never had

Since I was born, than here;

Where I have been, and still am, sad,

In this dull Devonshire

(“Discontents in Devon,” 1-4).

It’s hard to tell whether separation from London—he does embrace many delights of rural existence in his poems—or unhappiness with his job dissatisfies him. However, around 1640, an internal investigation by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s office sought the AWOL Herrick in London and found him residing there in the home of Thomsin Parsons, twenty-seven years Herrick’s junior, who had “had a bastard lately.” Although his poem “The suspicion upon his over-much familiarity with a Gentlewoman” proclaims the innocence of a relationship that is open, consensual and loving, he tacitly acknowledges the fathering of a daughter in “Mr Herrick his daughter’s Dowry.”

In as much as we can take Herrick’s (or anyone’s) poems as autobiographical, his occasional turning to devotional poetry may by contrast reflect a depth rarely detected in most of his verse. When Herrick published his poems in Hesperides (1648), he set off a section under the heading “Noble Numbers.” The latter poems are devotional in subject and approach. In spite of their being so compartmentalized, in these poems the poet excels in three themes he also explores in the rest of his poems: penance, celebration, and death.

Given the generally heathenish tenor of his poetry (suggested above), that Herrick displays a forte in penitential poems seems somehow apt. The minister poet may need to repent of some of what he has written. He is apologetic throughout Hesperides, but more pronouncedly so in the “Noble Numbers.” He begins Hesperides with “The Argument of His Book,” which functions as a proud thematic table of contents for the “cleanly wantonness” of the work, and boldly concludes “I write of hell; I sing (and ever shall) / Of heaven, and hope to have it after all” (13-14). The anticlimactic inclusion of heaven in the poem and the pun on having it “after all” as the “Noble Numbers” constitute the last section of Hesperides justly reflect the lightness of Herrick’s compunction in most of his poems. “When He Would Have His Verses Read” is in “orgies” when “well drunk and fed,” not in “sober mornings.”

The contrast of these self justifications with his penance in “Noble Numbers” tolls deeply into his spirit.

Look how our foul days do exceed our fair;

And as our bad, more than our good works are,

E’en so those lines, pen’d by my wanton wit,

Treble the number of these good I’ve writ.

Things precious are least numerous: men are prone

To do ten bad for one good action.

(“His Confession”)

Like many of his penitential poems in “Noble Numbers,” “His Confession,” is short (six lines), perhaps reflecting the humility of the sinner’s prayer “Lord, I believe. Help Thou my unbelief.” Starting with a general observation that we all have good days and bad days, the persona moves on to assessing our works and then his own “lines.” He seems to confess to disproportion. Our “foul days” exceed “our fair”; our bad, our good “works,” culpably. So his “wanton” poems out mass “the number of these [the noble numbers] I’ve writ.” Suggesting that the proportion is three “wanton” to one “noble” poem seems generously self-protective. Judging from the entirety of Herrick’s poetic works, the proportion may more justly be intimated in the ten to one proportion between men’s bad and good “action[s]” of the last lines. The implication, in economic terms, is that by their scarcity the noble numbers are more to be valued; they are “precious” material. The practice of Herrick’s rural village was that the minister was due a tithe of the land’s increase paid in vegetables, eggs, and lambs, a tithe onto the Lord practically given to the parson twice a year. In “The Tithe. To the Bride” (not a noble number), Herrick cajoles,

If nine times you your Bridegroom kiss;

The tenth you know the Parsons is.

Pay then your tithe.

These funny lines reflect Herrick’s familiarity with the appropriating of a tenth proportion to the Lord via the parson and perhaps a willingness to apply the principle liberally. This proportioning may also formulate his design for his poetic offerings. Nine ignoble poems in Hesperides may balance his tithe of praise in the “Noble Numbers.”

“His Prayer for Absolution” seeks forgiveness for his “unbaptized Rhimes” written in his “wild unhallowed Times.” Nevertheless, Herrick does not throw out the earlier poems wholly. Rather he pleads God “blot” the unholy therein, those words, lines, sentences not “inlaid with Thee.” By doing so the resilient poet invites God and thereby the reader to read and examine all of his poems which are at least “inlaid,” that is, adorned with God. Having apprenticed six years to a goldsmith, Herrick no doubt would distinguish between those works “inlaid” with God and those bonded with Him. He is making a minimal claim of achievement. Although explicitly asking “Forgive me God” for some unworthy writing (if any exists), the “Prayer” concludes seeking approval of any “worthy” poem of his that God might find.

That One of all the rest, shall be

The Glory of my Work, and Me. (9-10)

What might be misconstrued as more nonchalance in Herrick’s attitude, actually reflects through ambiguity the depth of his struggle with vocation. He has been gifted as a poet and has achieved a high level of success in the craft. In that way his poems are done as onto the Lord. He is his “work.” Herrick is caught in a sanctification dialectic: knowing that his “unbaptized,” “unhallowed” writing will not make him “holy, acceptable unto God” but needing to “work out his own salvation.” His prayer is that God find one of his poems or works “Worthy thy Benediction,” meaning both one that God would praise and one that is praise to God.

In “His Ejaculation to God,” Herrick anguishes over his repulsiveness before the Lord.

My God! Look on me with thine eye

Of pity, not of scrutiny (1-2).

The persona extends the anthropomorphic glance of God to observe the “loathsome sores” and “irruptions” in his diseased skin. Again, to the goldsmith’s eye surface beauty is important and metaphorically he is “odious” in God’s sight. In such a state, the penitent one pleads that God “heal me with thy look, or touch,” anything, just “cure me quite.”

In keeping with his [dis]proportion of praise, when he writes “To His Conscience,” fourteen of the eighteen lines are questions. The questions all seek asylum for a cherished, hidden sin: “a short and sweet iniquity.” Perhaps not explicitly naming the sin apes the words, effectually cradling the “delicate transgression” in obfuscation. But “conscience” remains a “private protonotary,” that is the lead prosecutor in the Court of Common Pleas. The questions prompt a turning from “hugg’d impiety” and a “vow” in the end to “live free” from “aberrations.”

Even as Herrick celebrated an idyllic and Bacchanalian world in his non-religious poems like “The Wassail” and “Oberon’s Feast,” he festively explores the events of the Christian life in his “Noble Numbers.” Christmas seems a favorite topic of such poems, receiving numerous considerations in both sections of Hesperides. Herrick wrote the words to some Christmas carols which were set to music by Henry Lawes and presented at court in the presence of the King. Like Milton, he wrote an ode “of the birth of our saviour.” Herrick’s ode contrasts the lowly “out-stable” of the Christ child’s birth to the amplification of his contemporaries’ celebrating in “silks” and “jewels” as a just retrospective to the Lord’s life and work, “more for love than pity.”

In graphically incarnational language, “To His Saviour. The New Year’s Gift,” Herrick’s persona trades his “bleeding heart” for the “foreskin” God had sent him. In contrast to the “gem” God sent, his “small” and “faulty” gift is accepted only “because I send Thee all.” In celebration of the crucifixion, Herrick writes a poem that prints in the shape of a cross.

And O! dear Christ,

E’en as Thou di’st,

Look down, and see

Us weep for Thee.

“A Thanksgiving To God For His House” enumerates the simple pleasures of life from a leakless roof to a “little loaf” of daily bread to “the mess / Of watercress, / Which of thy kindness Thou hast sent” to hens laying and ewes lambing and “wassail bowls:” “That I should render for my part / A thankful heart.” “To Find God” seeks and celebrates the Creator who can weigh fire, measure the wind, distill fresh water from the sea, and “fetch” the rain drop back into the cloudy heavens. For surely that One can

Show me that world of stars, and whence

They noiseless spill their influence. (13-14)

“To Keep a True Lent” celebrates the spiritual discipline of fasting. At first the poem questions the purposefulness of the practice. Is it to keep the “larder lean, / And clean?” In the proverbial flesh or fish debate, Herrick questions the commitment that gives up meat but gorges itself on fish. The meaning of the fast is not in the participant’s “downcast look.” Surely, it is not to grow “ragg’d” or “sour” that we fast; even here the Lord loves a cheerful giver. “No,” the Lenten fast is to “dole” some “meat” “unto the hungry soul.” “To circumcise thy life” from “hate,” “debate,” and “strife.”

To show a heart grief-rent;

To starve thy sin,

Not bin.

And that’s to keep thy Lent. (21-24)

In as much as a carpe diem attitude can be summed up “eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die,” it is a response to our ultimate demise: death. In his “Noble Numbers” Herrick reconsiders this familiar theme with a very different attitude than that found in most of the rest of Hesperides. He attaches the date 1647 to “Noble Numbers.” Although he lived to the age of eighty-three, in 1647 he was already fifty-six and had outlasted most of his Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Carolingian contemporaries. His own sensibility and even his style of writing were out of fashion. So perhaps consequently he turns to the end in a profoundly personal way and often in his devotional poems.

“His Wish To God” is that he be afforded in “mine old age” a time to prepare for death. He envisions a period of mortification (the spiritual discipline of dying well, which was of tantamount importance to those susceptible to plague and is foolishly ignored by those of us so less familiar with widespread and instantaneous death) as a “living grave,” a “poor almshouse” from whence he might consider “Thy Cross” and read “Thy Bible.” Thus, the “necessity” of his “meaner sepulcher” of actual death might “excite” him to both “fore and after-grace;” that is, to live better in this life and the next. “[S]o end.”

In “To Death,” mortification demands some “tears / For faults of former years” and the repenting of present “crimes.” Either sacramentally or symbolically, the persona wishes to take communion. “To don my robes of love” and “gird my loins . . . with charity” will move him on “With feet of innocence.” “These done, I’ll only cry / God mercy, and so die” (15-16).

“His Meditation Upon Death” begins with a prayer for mortification.

Be those few hours, which I have yet to spend,

Blest with the meditation of my end.

What he has in mind that follows in the poem will help him to a blessed end. First, he considers that the quality not the quantity of years on this earth matters. “A multitude of days” “heaped on” only brings “confusion.” Herrick, who will live over a quarter of a century after publishing the poem, writes that if he could choose “long life should be withstood.” This persona urges on his own demise, supplicating that the next death knell be his own. So he imaginatively delights in his nightly being his eternal rest, that his blankets are “turfs” to cover him, his sheet, his “winding sheet.” If he doesn’t die in the night and wakes again to another day, “I’ll have in mind my resurrection,” imaging a correspondence in his earthly to his heavenly existence. He hopes in the “General Doom.” Thus, a second prayer: “Let me, though late, yet at the last, begin / To shun the least temptation to a sin” (29-30). Even if “late,” a sanctified life reassures “I am safe in death.”

Which is the height of comfort: when I fall,

I rise triumphant in my funeral.

“Naming Wholeness in a Sick Climate”: Landscape, Nature, and Grace in Jack Clemo’s Poetry

2007-04-18T07:29:00.000-07:00

~Stephen A. Woolsey

“Never did He make two things the same; never did he utter one word twice. […]
After a falling, not a recovery but a new creation.” C. S. Lewis, Perelandra

Many readers would be stymied if asked to identify even one modern Cornish writer, let alone two, but at least two twentieth-century authors—one well-known, the other much less so—deserve our attention for the very different ways in which they have captured the landscape and spirit of Cornwall. The first, Daphne du Maurier, was born in London in 1907 to a family of wealth and privilege, but lived much of her life in Cornwall and made her literary name by writing novels set on the Cornish coast and moors, which she infused with mystery and romance. The second, John Reginald (better known as Jack) Clemo was born in relative poverty in 1916 near Goonvean, Cornwall, son of a restless working-class father who died at sea when Clemo was less than a year old, and of a mother who, disappointed in her marriage to a man with whom she had little in common, did her best to raise young Jack on her own, surrounded by the scarred gray industrial landscape of pits and dumps created by the clay-mining industry near St. Austell, Cornwall.

In du Maurier’s work the Cornish coast and landscape are haunted, enchanting, and perfectly beautiful in their wild mystery. For Clemo too the land and water of Cornwall are haunted, but by a “twisted clay-spell” (“On the Prospect of Leaving My Birthplace” Murano 20) rather than by lovely enchantment. All around him the natural world has been corrupted and the earth torn open, its now-raw contours carelessly reshaped by human excavation, making it the very emblem of sin, both original and personal. Moreover, when Clemo was only five years old he experienced his first episode of the blindness—and a few years later of the profound deafness—that would plague him for the rest of his life. This onset of serious physical disability further influences his depiction of the Cornish landscape, since his double handicap seemed to end any possibility of full connection with the human and natural worlds around him. Thus for Clemo the clay landscape represents not only radical human isolation but also the “cradle” of his depravity, to be “outgrown” and left behind as he makes his pilgrim way to a beautiful new country of the heart, mind, spirit, and imagination. He does not forget that old clay country as he passes beyond its borders, however, instead carrying it with him in his “redemptive memory,” where the saving truth about his journey—where it began, where it will end, and all that must change in the process—continues to unfold (Murano 20).

For both du Maurier and Clemo the Cornish landscape and natural world define the vision and shape the consciousness of those who live on this “claw” of granite and clay which is always “probing the grey Atlantic” (du Maurier 9). The wild beauty of this place where land and sea meet dramatically at the base of rocky cliffs finds its echo in the human passions of “the Cornish character, smouldering beneath the surface, ever ready to ignite” (du Maurier 11). The fire buried in the hearts of the Cornish people helps to explain their traditional ways of making a living, either by illegal “wrecking”—salvaging goods from ships that run aground on the jagged coastal rocks—or by digging for various kinds of treasure buried deep in the earth. As du Maurier puts it, “They were, are, tinners, copper-seekers, quarriers, slate-breakers, clay-workers, farmers; an earthy people with an earthy knowledge” (14) of the ground beneath their feet, source of their living, but also realm of their dead. Evoking Cornwall’s ubiquitous standing stones, cairns, and tumuli, du Maurier declares that death haunts this place; every hike on almost any moor is a stroll past or over ancient tombs, for “scattered throughout the length and breadth of the peninsula are other stones and other chambers, barrows and trenches, mounds and circles, so that it might be said that death, like the sea, is ever present” (13).

Still, those who walk the Cornish earth must find a way to earn their livings, and for generations the soil itself has offered the best opportunities. Just when the Cornish tin mines had largely played out in the nineteenth century, according to du Maurier, a Plymouth Quaker named William Cookworthy established a thriving china-clay enterprise, employing many former tin-miners to dredge out the clay, “a species of moist granite” that has been “reduced by decomposition into a soft adhesive substance,” according to Mr. Cookworthy (qtd. du Maurier 150). A system of channeled water-streams, tanks, and kilns was used to sort and purify the dredged clay, which would then be shipped to factories in the English Midlands, where the “kaolin” would be transformed into fine porcelain products. Over the course of almost two centuries these clay-works gradually re-shaped the land’s contours, as clay waste piled up in vast heaps, creating a “lunar landscape” of pyramidal mountains, and sometimes whole ranges, with pools and even small lakes of turbid water at their bases (du Maurier 152, 153). Refusing to see desolation in this parched, largely-monochromatic landscape created by industry, however, du Maurier reminds her readers that natural forces and processes eventually bring even abandoned clay-works and their waste-mountains into living harmony with surrounding moors: “Wild flowers straggle across the waste, seeds flourish into nameless plants, wandering birds from the moorland skim the lakes or dabble at the water’s edge. Seagulls, flying inland, hover above the surface. There is nothing ugly here” (du Maurier 152).

In this Cornish clay country Jack Clemo was born and grew up, but his impressions of the landscape bear little resemblance to du Maurier’s, as we see in his wry description of the rough “four-roomed granite cottage” in which he was born: “It was a fitting birthplace for me, being dwarfed under Bloomdale clay-dump, solitary, grim-looking, with no drainage, no water or electricity supply, and no back door” (Rebel 15). Clemo does not suggest that all the land-forms created by the clay-works of his home country are ugly, but he does depict an alien and alienating sort of beauty at odds with the “sensitive mind.” He recalls “a hostile world of grey beauty, …a landscape of purgation in which the soil was thrown into tanks and kilns,” and he evokes a vision of houses, farmsteads, and fields gradually engulfed by smothering clay-waste, bringing “to the human spirit more poignantly than anything in the peaceful countryside the sense of insecurity, the sudden pounce of the destroyer” (Rebel 5, 6).

In this landscape of purgation the clay-works disrupted both human and natural cycles, Clemo declares, as “the carts rattling about under the puffing stacks were filled as often with coal and clay as with farm produce, manure or fodder,” adding that “there were no rhythms about it, no recurrences; only a pitiless finality in every change” (Rebel 5, 6). In the poem “Crab Country,” Clemo unexpectedly brings together images of land and sea to describe a profoundly-disturbed natural balance and order:

Pincer movement on the hills.

Salty clay-crabs advance, edging sideways

Or straight ahead over fields, lanes and thickets.

The whole scarp slowly fills

With vast crusted shells, gleaming like armour,

And the gravelly claws

Baulk the bus, stop the plough of the farmer. (SP 70)

The phrase “landscape of purgation” points to a complex, paradoxical, but crucial theme in Clemo’s work: the redeeming work of grace which begins in renunciation of a ruined world and ends in affirmation of a world transformed, made new—in C. S. Lewis’s words, “not a recovery but a new creation” (Perelandra 214). As the “dual stress of Nature and purgation” shaped his mother’s early years (Rebel 6), so it shaped Clemo’s spiritual, emotional, and artistic life. The clay-works which dotted the north-Cornish landscape during Clemo’s lifetime often disrupted or overwhelmed both human and natural rhythms and systems, but they provided many (including Clemo’s father) with a livelihood, and though the clay extraction process involved ripping the earth open, blighting the landscape with gaping wounds and piles of debris, it also brought out from deep in the earth itself the raw material which could be purified and then transformed by human craft and touch into useful objects of astonishing beauty and fragility.

Thus, in a way, a very earthy human sort of grace transmuted and even redeemed the
end of a process that seems inherently hostile to natural patterns and processes, hostile to beauty and even to life itself, and eventually, years later, a scraggly, vital layer of green covers the land’s scars, gouges, and heaps, giving the earth new, living contours. We can see an analogous pattern in the emotional, spiritual, and thematic arcs of Clemo’s poetry: from a bitter, apparently self-destructive pattern of renunciation and denial—of nature, of beauty, of love, of joy—through a process of purgation, to a landscape of heart, mind, and spirit made new in hope, made beautiful by love, both human and divine.

Over and over Clemo’s early poetry depicts the horrors inflicted on the land by the clay industry. He remembers his boyhood trudges in search of safe, clean water,

Holding my pitcher to the wheezing pump

Or the valley spring-pipe, forty years back.

All waters fouled by clay sores

Around my home, except what the pump lifted

And that clear spurt in the niche

Between bridge wall and thorn-clump,

Where the poisoned brook crawled under the road.

(“The Riven Niche” SP 68)

He recalls images of dirty water lapping at the base of sodden waste-heaps until “the whole clay-belly sags,” and darker images, half-memory and half-fantasy, of lives buried beneath waste-water and cast-off soil:

What scenes far

Beneath those waters: chimney pots

That used to smoke; brown rusty clots

Of wheels still oozing tar;

Lodge doors that rot ajar. (“The Flooded Clay-Pit” SP 19)

Perversely, human industry makes the living world of greening nature seem alien, out of place. Brambles grow on the ash-heap of “fires long dead” beside an abandoned engine-house, despite the filth and poison which linger in the soil:

All that’s left

Of purging and consuming fire now feeds

The rousing seeds;

And the world of refuse feels the alien sting

In the crumpled cleft,

In the warmth of Spring:

Sap forcing out through rubble, filming green

With soft coarse leaves the gritty silt

Which pit and engine-house have vainly spilt

To make the earth unclean. (“The Cinder-Heap” SP 20)

Clemo acknowledges in a poem entitled “Link at Oxford” that when he was a young man the industrial wasteland created by the clay-works found its echo in his heart, mind, and soul: “I saw tip-waggons bombard earth’s beauty / Till my faith caught their mood […]” (Murano 30). Embittered as his bouts of blindness and deafness lasted longer and grew worse, desperately lonely because his condition cut him off from social contact with peers, and chafed raw spiritually and emotionally by the comfortless rigors of Reformed theology, Clemo responded with poetry that seems almost venomous in its rejection of natural beauty or loveliness of any kind, including poetic. Thus in “The Clay-Tip Worker,” for example, Clemo’s speaker initially seems regretful about the nature-destroying effects of his industry: “Our clay-dumps are converging on the land: / Each day a few more flowers are killed, / A few more mossy hollows filled / With gravel” (SP 25).

Soon, however, we realize with horror that the speaker actually rejoices when waste dirt covers “springtide beauty” and tarry engine-house oil befouls “ferns and furze” and makes them “droop black and battered,” because he believes he is doing God’s purgative work, punishing those who make natural beauty, and the poetry which celebrates it, into false gods. His clay-dump is “a finger of God / That wars with Poetry,” and thus, he tells us, “I advance to pour / Sand, mud and rock upon the store / Of springtime loveliness idolaters adore” (SP 25). Again in “A Calvinist in Love” the speaker scornfully rejects the attractions of earthly beauty and the tenderness of real human intimacy, along with the poetry of love, insisting that they only contaminate those who embrace them with the disease of death. He turns instead to rough, crude sensuality and disgust at any suggestion of nature’s benevolence, as two representative stanzas suggest:

This bare clay-pit is truest setting

For love like ours:

No bed of flowers

But sand-ledge for our petting. […]

No poetry of earth can fasten

Its vampire mouth

Upon our youth:

We know the sly assassin. (SP 14)

The cruelty born of frustration seems to be gone in the poem “Neutral Ground” (perhaps a tip of the hat to Thomas Hardy’s “Neutral Tones”?), replaced by numb indifference and a blank, hopeless conviction that even God has turned His back on this world that we human beings have made ugly with our physical, spiritual, and emotional clay-pits, except to mete out cold absolute justice. The speaker is left to make what he can of empty desolation:

God’s image was washed out of Nature

By the flood of the Fall:

No symbol remains to inspire me,

And none to appal.

His Hand did not fashion the vistas

These poets admire,

For He is too busied in glutting

The worm and the fire.

Not in Nature or God must my vision

Now find some relief

While I deepen my hatred of beauty,

Suspend my belief.

I will turn to a world that is ravaged,

Yet not by His Will,

A world whose derision of Nature

Is rigid and shrill.

I have lost the sensitive, tender,

Deep insights of man:

I will look round a claywork in winter,

And note what I can. (SP 17)

In other poems the numbness of Clemo’s clay-pit desolation yields to a painful and potentially health-renewing consciousness that God has not abandoned creation, nor is the speaker merely a victim of God’s wrath. “Clay-Land Moods,” for example, begins with a sequence of images linking the speaker with the Cornish soil and suggesting that God is the great excavator, stripping and ripping his very being to bring to the surface all that so far is only ugly, raw, and formless—man crucified by God. By the striking final stanza, however, the speaker has concluded that in effect, his human bitterness and despair have crucified Christ, and perhaps himself, on the twin crosses of the natural world and his fallen nature:

There is a certain mystic hour

When pyramid and clay-tip grow

Alive with darker power;

A mood unknown to Nature, a mortal mood

Caught up in His Godhead: taste of blood,

Anguish that makes each tip-frame a gibbet, bared

Until I feel on each the swing of my hand, a pale

Ghost-self of primal guilt that drives the nail. (SP 30)

Poems such as this one mark a turning point in Clemo’s spiritual, emotional, and artistic quest, as the clay-country landscape and its related natural systems begin to take on a transformed significance. In “The Two Beds,” for instance, Clemo acknowledges a kind of experiential and emotional kinship with D. H. Lawrence, another writer whose life and vision were profoundly shaped by the mining industry, especially during his childhood years, but he also uses mine-related imagery to emphasize the essential difference between them. In this poem Clemo connects the coal that Lawrence’s father mined with darkness, sin, and damnation, while he now associates the clay-works which loomed over his own childhood with light, sacrificial love, and redemptive possibility, since the crucified Christ can make a loving cup of this world’s clay:

Could light of my clay have fallen

On your black pit (yet not my light,

But the Light that is not as you supposed;

I tell you, the Man who died

Is not as you supposed), why, then

Your symbol would have changed, flesh have been known

As clay-bed and not coal-bed, its yield

The patterned cup for the great Marriage-feast,

No brute-lump of dusky fuel, soiling, corroding

With its primordial stain as it goes unpurged

From the subterranean womb to fires of perdition. (SP 33)

At this stage in his work Clemo begins more often to link the clay-pit with his own spiritual renewal, in imagery that evokes the Biblical story of salvation. “Goonvean Claywork Farm” provides a typical example. In that poem the speaker addresses his mother to recall a mystery now rich in new symbolic significance. As excavators’ explosions caused a “white gashed cliff” of clay-waste to spill over into a fertile field “Hemmed in and peeled / By the blast,” his mother prayed that a precious orchard with its “menaced fruit” would be spared. Though the cliff finally engulfed the orchard, it stopped short of a stable which the speaker says stands “to this day […] with its sweet warm straw,” a reminder of “The birth of the Word / Who […] set / Bounds to the clay-waste, won / A new world for your son” (SP 39, 40). Clemo clearly associates the stable at Goonvean with the stable in Bethlehem where Christ took on the dust and ashes—the clay—of the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, beginning the work that would ultimately establish the victory of life by setting limits on the death that would otherwise engulf all of creation.

The clay-pits and pools which symbolize that suffocation and those buried lives
begin to lose their power over Clemo’s speakers, and come to be associated with release from bondage, and with baptism, as we see in “Reclaimed”: “My soul once felt the press / Of the iron track of fate, […]/ But now the fanged pit cowers; / Baptismal waters flood the bed of clay, / Fate’s workings are stilled” (SP 41). In moments of divinely-inspired revision the poet starts to see the human body and the body of this created world no longer as objects to be scorned and abused, but rather as repositories of treasure and life that lie buried, waiting for release. The excavators’ blasts are analogous to the explosions of grace that free the believer, mind, body, and spirit:

I shall see the flesh that is clay, the open-cast mine

Where men are not trapped but work with the wind on their faces

And the cold rain stings them away from the sterile swoon.

[…] the signal granted,

Comes the sharp snap of blast

As the agnostic rock is splintered and the barrier passed.

(“Clay Phoenix” SP 52).

What produced this radical transformation of vision and heart? It began, Clemo suggests in the poem “Outsider,” with his rejection of an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life that was too orderly, too efficient, and “too sleek for miracle.” The breakthrough could only come when he was ready to embrace an “unkempt faith,” finding at the same time the grace he needed to sustain him on what he calls his “fierce old pilgrim’s way” (SP 62, 63) of “erotic mysticism” (Rebel Preface ix), his pathway toward the miraculous apprehension and experience of divine love through the richest human expressions of love: deepest esteem, tender affection, passionate touch, all transforming mortal clay into a vessel of God’s great love, though that vessel remains fully human. In other words, the miracle he sought all along involves the intersection of Incarnation and sacrament—God inhabiting human clay while remaining fully divine, two human beings or natures becoming one while remaining two, all that is earthy yielding up the raw material that can be transmuted by the mystery of grace into lasting treasure. Clemo had finally come to see that an “unkempt” faith can affirm and rejoice in such messy, illogical, but life-giving paradoxes, while a tidy, obsessively-orderly understanding of faith baulks at them.

Clemo’s long quest for the incarnational, sacramental miracle that would result in spiritual healing and emotional wholeness finally found its fulfillment in the love he shared with a woman named Ruth Grace Peaty. After years of loneliness and a series of failed romances, Clemo began corresponding with Ruth, and they married in 1968 when he was 52 years old. The result was a life made new by love—“the youthful incubus outgrown,” “the mature release / From dark tuition” (SP 88)—and a new geography of imagination and spirit. In “Broad Autumn” Clemo describes a transformed country of mind and heart, a landscape which incorporates the bleak clay-country of his first 50 years but also reflects the pilgrim’s passage late in life over into a new land burgeoning with vitality:

True faith matures without discarding:

All I unearthed, each sky-sign crudely mapped

On the white rasped hills of youth,

Warms me still by rowan-topped crags

Far up the autumnal mountain,

Incredibly remote in climate, texture, weathering

Of bare stones, from my first insights:

I left no wreckage on those low rasped cones….

I have not changed my country;

I have grown and explored

In my faith’s undivided world. […] (SP 107)

The facts might seem to contradict Clemo’s declaration that in his union with Ruth and his fuller union with God he did not change his country, since Clemo and Ruth did actually move from the Cornish clay-country in order to set up house-keeping amidst the “thatch-warm villages,” lush greenery, the palms and the peaceful beaches of Dorset, “so magically sweet” (“Daybreak in Dorset” SP 48, 49). His later poems make it clear, however, that he carried with him into the new, paradisal country of marriage a redeemed vision of the clay-pit landscape, and of the body’s human clay. “Love’s reborn shape” does not deny or erase the years of “pit-torture” and “dark belief / In the chronic martyrdom of man,” but rather incorporates them into a landscape transformed by joy and hope, full of life and whole (“Wessex and Lyonnesse” SP 122).

In its simple, lovely profundity, Clemo’s story of the Cornish landscape, nature, and grace stands in striking contrast to Daphne du Maurier’s, especially because the story he tells through his poems and memoirs is so intensely personal. du Maurier frames her largely-impersonal narrative account of Cornwall’s religious history in terms of dramatic cultural collisions and shifts: from the matriarchal religion of Cornwall’s earliest settlers, probably Mediterranean in origin, to their embrace of Celtic paganism’s “predominantly male” gods; from Roman Catholicism’s appropriation and “re-dedication” of Cornwall’s pagan sites to the Reformation’s orderly theological systems that “banished” faith’s “mystique”; and finally from thwarted religious zeal to the Wesleyan revivals, which gave Cornish people “the outlet they desired—tears, lamentations, beatings of the breast, a falling upon the knees, the relief of confession, followed by the joys of salvation and a bursting into song” (111, 112, 118). Jack Clemo’s story of his spiritual pilgrimage from familiar yet alien clay-country to his “soul’s Jerusalem” in Dorset, with Ruth, has its moments of high drama as well, especially during Clemo’s early years. But his journey is finally much quieter, a story of peace and of life as a new creation. As Clemo sums it up in “On the Prospect of Leaving My Birthplace”:

Pit-blasts could not unearth the key

To my real self, the pilgrim-planted

Treasures of redemptive memory.

Clay-ravage was a fitting stage

For the doomed creature I seemed to my young mother,

Not for the happy husband I am to my wife,

Serene in mind and flesh, busily blending

Those foreign voices that broke the twisted clay-spell.

For nearly seventy years the slate roof

Has slanted above my sleep or my empty bed,

But the man I am, the fulfilled believer,

Needs palms, sweet modest hills and gentle

Cleansing ripples on the unhacked beach,

Not the rubble-wreckage of defiled meadows

Or the iron teeth of an outgrown rejected cradle. (Murano 20)

Having left behind the barren clay landscape of his first home, and found love and a new home in a lush green landscape of “multifoliate grace” (“The Riven Niche” SP 69), Jack Clemo could affirm the vocation he shared with C. S. Lewis: “Naming wholeness in a sick climate” (“Link at Oxford” Murano 30).

------

Works Cited

Clemo, Jack. Approach to Murano. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1993.

Clemo, Jack. Confession of a Rebel. London: Chatto & Windus, 1949.

Clemo, Jack. Selected Poems. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1988.

du Maurier, Daphne. Vanishing Cornwall: The Spirit and History of Cornwall. Garden

City: Doubleday and Company, 1967.

Lewis, C. S. Perelandra.

The Landscapes of John Rhett

2007-04-18T07:20:00.000-07:00

~Sally Amthor

The landscape paintings of John Rhett are meaningful vistas of apparent simplicity. They capture the atmosphere of a specific place in a very specific moment, as seen by the angle of the light and the shape of the foliage, the color of the sky and grass. One is drawn into the very spot, as though gazing on the land, the farms, or hills during a walk down the road. In fact this may be the best approach to these paintings, according to Rhett. They are neither didactic nor manipulative in their effect on the viewer. “Much in contemporary art is issue-oriented,” says Rhett. “Mine is not. Mine is not about beauty or truth. It is about inscrutability. The inscrutability of God, the inscrutability of nature, the inscrutability of art. Nature doesn’t lecture, it is mysterious. It is sometimes benign, sometimes harsh. It does not explain itself, but as a creation of God, it can sometimes offer me a glimpse of Him.” When encountering nature, most people do not feel the need to quantify or dissect its effects on them, but are content to merely experience it. Yet artists are often subject to a torrent of demands for answers, for explanation, justification, and rock-solid truth. But art is not a machine, nor is it a moral referee. For this reason Rhett’s description of his landscapes makes perfect sense. In his artist’s statement, he quotes Jed Perl in “The Art of Seeing”:

[People] have ceased to believe that a painting or a sculpture is a structure with a meaning that unfolds as we look. This endangered experience is not a matter of imagining a narrative; it involves, rather, the more fundamental activity of relating part to part. We need to see particular elements, and see that they add up in ways that become more complex—and sometimes simpler—as we look and look some more.

Rhett says of his paintings: “I study the landscape without a preconceived notion of the final image. This approach involves not imposing on the subject, while hoping an unforeseen yet essential aspect will manifest itself in the work.” This is risky business. Every time a painter sets out to paint in this manner, he is forfeiting control in order to gain a more substantial freedom, a freedom that can only result from the artist’s openness. In this way a painter might feel as though he is “playing” with the paint, with the elements of his creation. But it is a profound sort of play.

This plunge into the subjective experience of a thing, this yielding to the essence of a piece of art in order to comprehend it, is a way of dealing with the world quite differently than that of mathematics or science. It is a different way, but it is not inferior. Art requires a different kind of intelligence than the recitation or depiction of facts or figures, but it is intelligence nonetheless. The best art “does not lecture or preach,” according to Rhett; “It maintains an intriguing silence before our best attempts to unlock it. In that way it becomes simliar to nature. It does not reflect the surge and swell of human machinations that eddy around it. Like a tree, or a boulder, or weather.”

At the same time art can be quite literal. It can contain truth, present a factual representation of the world; but it does so by different means. Rhett’s landscapes are based on actual locations, but the process and result of his painting is more than simply an iteration of fact. Rhett describes his process as an open-minded exploration.

I decided to take my painting to the most basic level I could think of, short of a child-like paint application. It was simply to paint what I saw. I often recall a quote that Franz Kline reportedly made to his students: “…where you see blue, put blue; where you see green, put green.” I am aware that such an approach can be looked at as either hopelessly naïve, or, sublimely elemental. My body of paintings is based primarily on such an idea of keeping a ‘simple mind,’ to see what emerges.

“To see what emerges” is one of the great adventures of an artist. It can become the meaning of an entire work, as the painter discovers what the painting is, not by studying it or interrogating it, but by experiencing it—allowing it to develop and his view of it to grow as it takes shape on his canvas.

Stonework, Issue 4

2005-11-20T21:32:00.000-08:00

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