Mrs. Whatsit Friday, January 30, 2004

Yuck this morning. Got up pre-dawn as usual to think through a fundamental question on the Secret Thing, which is a game about a certain specific time in the future, and ended up with a buzzing head and Silly Putty eyes. A friend of mine made a fine suggestion about what I should do, but now I'm thinking I should probably do the opposite, for reasons that are either complicated (the game is set up to do things a certain way) or simple (I don't want to do the extra work the move would involve).

I couldn't decide on anything to read so I grabbed "Wrinkle in Time" off the shelf. I loved Mrs. L as a kid, read everything she wrote, but her style isn't doing much for me these days. Part of it is, I'm tired of the set-up: Why am I so different? Why am I so mousy? Why am I smart and everybody else is athletic or pretty? etc. Characters who ask those questions load the deck. You know what's going to happen to them, you know who they're going to end up with, you know what they're going to grow into. Especially if, as in Wrinkle, they grow up in a charming old house with brilliant gorgeous parents, a faithful dog and cute kitten and a Central Casting little brother with mysterious powers. That's why I love Lewis Barnavelt, from "A House With a Clock in Its Walls": He's not an ugly duckling or a frog prince, with beauty ready to burst through a mousy surface. He is what he is, a little leaden kid who likes books and cookies and being by himself. His adventures don't transform him. He remains, stubbornly, himself: The Philip Larkin of children's lit.

Speaking of which, Wrinkle has another wrinkle I don't care for: Like a lot of young-adult stuff, it's obviously written by an adult dumbing-down and weeping for lost Babylon. It reminds me of G.K. Chesterton (I think), who said that he hated the expression "seize the day" because it implied that you couldn't, or wouldn't, seize the day unless you reminded yourself to do it with a motto. Books that throw fairyland and whimsy and magic in my face always seem like overcompensating--as if the writer is trying to convince himself or herself that stuff like that still exists.

So what would good "young adult" writing look like? Like good "adult" writing, I guess. Solid stories told wisely, and not used as a vehicle for working out middle-age crises or resolving childhood slights. (That's what science fiction is for.)

@ 8:35:00 AM, ,

Nice Lyric Wednesday, January 28, 2004

All I have to offer you
Is archaeology and Christmas
--Mark Eitzel

I am so tired I can't see. But more at some point.

@ 6:10:00 AM, ,

The Buck Stops Here Sunday, January 25, 2004

How low can a Generation Xer sink? Lemme tell ya...

Luke's gospel opens thus:

Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us,
Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word;
It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus,
That thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.

Emphasis mine. I had never heard the boldfaced name spoken out loud, and had always assumed it was Theo-phil-us. The creepy guy who reads the gospel at my church pronounced it Theop-olis, which of course called to mind a certain iconic figure:



Which of course raised all sorts of intertextual possibilities (Buck Rogers as one of the Seven Sleepers? And so forth), right there in the pew, obscuring the larger point about peace, love, duty and so forth. O generation of vipers!

Back to Waugh for a moment (and by extension back to the religion discussion with my buddy). As I said earlier, his novel "Helena" is about the Roman empress, mother to Constantine, who converted to Christianity. And Helena herself, I think, is a metaphor for Waugh and the spiritual journey he took to the Catholic Church. She is sketched as a skeptical Brit who asks commonsense questions of the gnostic mystics and mystery cultists who fill the Empire. Here she interrogates her husband, a Mithra-worshipper:

When [the tale of Mithra] was finished, she said, 'Where?'

'Where?'

'Yes, where did it happen? You say the bull hid in a cave and then the world was created out of his blood. Well, where was the cave when there was no Earth?'

'That's a very childish question.'

'Is it? And when did this happen? How do you know, if no one was there? And if the bull was the first thought of Ormazd and he had to be killed in order to make the Earth, why didn't Ormazd just think of the Earth straight away? And if the Earth is evil, why did Mithras kill the bull at all?'

'I'm sorry I told you, if you simply wish to be irreverent.'

'I'm only asking. What I want to know is, do you really believe all this? Believe, I mean, that Mithras killed his bull in the same way you believe Uncle Claudius beat the Goths?'

Then, later, a gnostic mystic who has just done a page's worth of spiel about the demiurge and the levels of enlightenment gets the third degree:

'What I should like to know is: When and where did all this happen? And how do you know?'

Marcias replied: 'These things are beyond time and space. Their truth is integral to their proposition and by nature transcends material proof.'

'Then, please, how do you know?'

'By a life-time of patient and humble study, your Majesty.'

'But study of what?'

'That, I fear, would take a lifetime to particularize.'

Finally, Helena gets a straight answer; from her Christian slave.

That evening Helena sent for Lactantius and said: 'I went to a lecture this afternoon. ... I couldn't understand a word he said. It's all bosh, isn't it?'

'All complete bosh, your Majesty.'

'So I supposed. Just wanted to make sure. Tell me, Lactantius, this god of yours. If I asked you when and where he could be seen, what would you say?'

'I should say that as a man he died two hundred and twenty-eight years ago in the town now called Aelia Capitolina in Palestine.'

'Well, that's a straight answer anyway. How doy ou know.'

'We have the accounts written by witnesses. Besides that there is the living memory of the Church. We have knowledge handed down from father to son, invisible places marked by memory--the cave where he was born, the tomb where his body was laid, the grave of Peter. One day all these things will be made public. Now they are kept a secret. If you want to visit the holy places you must find the right man. He can tell you, so many paces to the east from such and such a stone, where the shadow falls at sunrise on such and such a day. A few families know these things and they see to it that their children learn the instructions. One day when the Church is free and open there will be no need for such devices.'

That's my response to the argument from rationalism: Jesus intersected with history. He is the opposite of gnosticism. He did not live in some mythic age; he did not keep his message secret; it didn't come to one man on a mountain or to one loony in Utah or somebody else who was "chosen." It came to a bunch of blue-collar Jews, whose names we know, whose deaths we remember; in some cases we even have their bones. Even the early doubters did not doubt that he lived and preached and was killed for what he said. From there, the question becomes, which tradition has preserved the message best--unbroken over 2,000 years?

My answer, as in all things: Beedy Beedy Beedy.

@ 9:37:00 AM, ,