Legacy of the Stone Harp

It’s Christmas Day, a day that brings into high relief the central importance of the Incarnation, i.e. the notion of God becoming man and taking on human flesh, not only in Christian thought but in the history of ideas and Western culture. René Girard, for example–a leading philosopher of the 20^th century–sees the Gospels as an unveiling of “things hidden since the foundation of the world” (an arresting phrase used by Jesus in reference to himself in the Gospel of Matthew, an echo of Psalm 78 and also the title of one of Girard’s most groundbreaking works). In literature, one thinks of Milton’s remarkable “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”, where he describes the birth of Jesus in sonorous lines that match the earth-shattering significance of the event:

“This is the Month, and this the happy morn
Wherein the Son of Heav’ns eternal King,
Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring…

That glorious Form, that Light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of Majesty…
He laid aside; and here with us to be,
Forsook the Courts of everlasting Day,
And chose with us a darksome House of mortal Clay.”

In a contemporary context, today is also a day that brings to mind the haunting, subliminal importance of the Incarnation in the work of JRR Tolkien. This idea is conveyed in depth and with moving persuasiveness by Matthew Dickerson in his recent book, A Hobbit Journey: Discovering the Enchantment of J.R.R. Tolkien, one of the most acutely perceptive of the flood of new books on Tolkien that have been published in response to the movie version of The Hobbit.

Dickerson points out that, much like Beowulf and even more so, The Lord of the Rings is suffused with a Christian understanding of truth and reality, of the values that make us genuinely human, even though it is set in a pre-Christian age and civilization. The work is shot through, in fact, with intimations of the eternal and a deeply evocative nostalgia, a nostalgia so profoundly suggestive of awe and beauty that it is in its essence a vital aspect of Tolkien’s worldview and, I would argue, one of the mainstays of his timeless appeal. We need to remember here that, in English, “nostalgia” is derived from a combination of two ancient Greek words meaning “homecoming” and “pain or ache.” Nostalgia is in other words a pain or ache associated with homecoming, and we all know that Christmas, the day of Christ’s Incarnation, strikes deep and resonant notes of nostalgia.

Which is no small reason why here and there without doubt Tolkien hints rather pregnantly (if I may be pardoned the pun) that Middle-earth awaits with a kind of metaphysical inevitability the entry of Eru Ilúvatar, the Creator, into history and its constraints of time and space. Dickerson does an admirable job of elaborating this idea, showing how it underpins Tolkien’s work and meshes with his worldview. He points out, for example, that in Morgoth’s Ring, the tenth volume of the History of Middle-earth, writings edited posthumously by Tolkien’s son, Christopher, “the great King Finrod Felagund, lord of the realm of Nargothrond (and the brother of Galadriel), is having a conversation with a wise woman named Andreth. Finrod, who is of the race of elves, and Andreth, of the race of men, are trying to understand the differences between their races and what hope each race has separately or together. Andreth mentions an old belief that one day Ilúvatar himself will enter into his creation: ‘They say that the One will himself enter into Arda, and heal Men and all the Marring from the beginning to the end.’ Finrod and Andreth then have a discussion about this ancient belief, during which Finrod comments that it seems right to him for an artist to enter his creation, and that if any artist could and would do it, it would be Ilúvatar. Moreover, Finrod believes that such an incarnation is actually the only hope that elves and men have for the healing of the hurts of Morgoth…. Reading this passage reveals one thing at least: Tolkien viewed the incarnation of God, coming to earth as Messiah, as somehow inevitable in Middle-earth.”

Even in The Lord of the Rings itself, there are passages of sublime beauty that carry the allusive suggestion of undying hope and “eucatastrophe”, the term coined by Tolkien in his classic essay “On Fairy Stories” to describe the message of mankind’s saving:

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tower high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”

It is interesting to compare this with the following passage from the Gospel According to Matthew:

“And they, having heard the king, went their way; and lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was. And when they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.”

In the end, Tolkien’s masterpiece offers a message of undampened hope. I like to compare it by way of contrast with a short, achingly poignant line from Virgil’s Aeneid, a classic of the literature of pre-Christian Europe. Aeneas has found himself in Carthage, deep in the throes of his ill-fated love affair with Queen Dido. In a temple dedicated to Juno, he surveys the murals that show the battles of the Trojan War and depict the deaths of his friends and countrymen. The scene moves him to tears and prompts in him a deeply melancholy reflection on the human condition. “Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt,” he says. This translates loosely as: “We live in a vale of tears and the burden of our humanity touches us to our inmost depths.” It is one of the most famous and affecting lines in all of Western literature, and in Latin has a stark, desperately concise beauty that lies beyond translation. It is a sentiment to which only the Incarnation offers an answer that satisfies the human heart.

Jim Anderson, my co-author, has just released the above on youtube. An Anderson original, he performs it with his son Malcolm. It’s merely a light diversion for Christmas, but showcases just one of Jim’s amazingly varied talents and reminds me to be grateful for Jim as my dear friend, one who has walked with me unconditionally through some incredibly stormy times, as well as sharing in the sub-creation of our unique work, helping to bring it to the highest artistic levels. St. Thomas Aquinas, the mediaeval thinker whose profound synthesis of philosophy and theology remains among the highlights of human intellectual achievement, says that, “There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.” Friendship has many delightful aspects, but in the end it is pure gift and mitigates in a significant way the distressing “aloneness” that lies at the heart of the human condition. Romantic poet William Blake describes the concept beautifully with an elemental, stripped-down simile drawn from nature: “The birds a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.”

In his remarkably sensitive review of our work, Harley Sims refers to its aspect of Recovery, the term Tolkien used to describe one of the key hallmarks of the fairy tale. The role of Recovery, Sims notes, is “to refresh the reader’s perspective on and appreciation for the real world.” In the area of speculative fiction, this implies the need for a delicate balancing act between the fantastic and the gritty reality of life as we know it in all its many workaday aspects. I discuss this in the essay that I’ve written for a forthcoming collection that will be appearing in late 2013 under the Tarcher/Penguin imprint and featuring expository exercises on the writer’s craft by various contributors, including well-known novelists like Ursula LeGuin. Here is a preview of my piece:

IN XANADU… GROUNDING THE FANTASTIC

In the realm of folklore, a special, oftentimes sinister, significance is attributed to the in-between places, the earthen boundary between forest and ploughland, for example, or the in-between times like dawn and twilight, which mark the slow-stepping progressions of day and night towards one another. At the same time, these places and times of shape-shifting uncertainty are suggestive of mystery and hopeful possibility. In many ways such boundaries stand as a metaphor for the dangers and ambiguities that mark the frontiers of human experience in all its enigmatic fragility, things like birth and death, sickness and health, loss and gain, wayfaring and homecoming, and so on. Similarly, in an uncanny echo of this vital aspect of our humanness, fantasy as a literary genre occupies the uncertain, frontier area between what’s “true to life” and soaring flights of the imagination that beckon the reader towards the unfamiliar and the strange. For those of us who practise the craft of words, fantasy can pose some serious artistic challenges, precisely because it occupies such perilously unsure ground. Writing speculative fiction can be a tough row to hoe, one that requires the exercise of high standards of good judgment, as we try to negotiate our way through the pitfalls and dangers of the ground that lies between a sturdy realism and the figments conjured by our imagination. Like all writers from time immemorial, what we’re aiming to induce in the reader is a willing suspension of disbelief, a term coined by the 19^th century English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

According to one school of thought, writers should write about what they know, i.e. their own life experiences.  When it comes to the genre of fantasy, this rule of thumb clearly needs to be revisited and qualified. To give a notable example, elves and orcs did not stem from Tolkien’s practical knowledge of the world.  This is because Tolkien wrote quite properly not only about what he knew, but what he was able to envision by way of his fertile imagination. In so doing, he attracted vast legions of readers. But it wasn’t all about his imagination. In the end, it was about balance. Tolkien succeeded in spectacular fashion because he portrayed perfectly the homey, reassuring realities of everyday life, while setting them in a compelling imaginary world quite out of the ordinary. The key thing about Tolkien’s imagination is that it is not arbitrary, nor is it a faculty untethered from reality. As fantastic and extraordinary as the outpourings of his imagination are, they are marked by an overarching coherence and groundedness. They resonate with the reader because they exhibit a twofold strength. On the one hand, they are placed in a matrix of ordinary life, many of whose aspects we recognize as normal and human. In this respect, Tolkien wrote about what he knew and experienced. On the other hand, his creative approach is steeped in his vast scholarly knowledge of old England and the medieval world of northern Europe, which he embroiders with his own flights of genius and inventiveness. In this respect, Tolkien’s imaginary creations illustrate the proverbial wisdom inherent in the statement that truth is stranger than fiction.

Of all genres, fantasy most requires the touchstone of truth as an aid to the reader in the suspension of disbelief. Just as electrical devices need to be grounded, so too does speculative fiction. Otherwise, it risks becoming literally incredible, a phantasmagoria of the bizarre. In our “Legacy of the Stone Harp” series, my co-author Jim Anderson and I have made it a key principle that our invented world of Ahn Norvys should in vital ways mirror the laws and constraints of the real world. Of course, the actual nature and extent of this grounding in the real varies from work to work and is a matter in the end of artistic judgment and preference. Jim and I are convinced, however, that by pursuing a fairly rigorous exclusion of plot devices that depend on the miraculous we have added plausibility to our portrayal of Ahn Norvys. This is not to say that we have do not have thematic elements that are arrestingly strange, evocatively suggestive, in fact, of the miraculous. The theme of songlines that we use in our series is a good example. It’s an idea that was sparked when I read travel writer Bruce Chatwin’s book on the importance of this concept for Australian aborigines. The concept of ley lines is also very similar to that of songlines, suggesting fresh new, even haunting, ways of regarding the world around us.

For me, travel writing and historical non-fiction have always played an important role as stimulants of my imagination. I’m thinking here in particular of the though-provoking theories of alternative archaeology proposed by a writer like Graham Hancock or the fascinating accounts of ancient Mongol and Chinese civilization tendered by John Man, for example. It’s all wonderful grist for the mill and serves to keep our work within the limits of credibility.

In “Kubla Khan”, one of the most famous poems of the Romantic period, Coleridge provides another excellent illustration of what I mean here. An important commentator on the role of the imagination in literature, Coleridge begins with a lavishly fanciful, indeed fantastic, description of Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol emperor from whom the poem takes its name.  While in the poem Xanadu is actually much more reminiscent of Coleridge’s native Somerset than it is of northern China, we learn that he drew his inspiration for the poem from a passage in the writings of Samuel Purchas, an Elizabethan geographer.

Consider an area of the world that you’re interested in or some place by which you feel intrigued. Then use the internet to go onto a search engine like Google for 20-30 minutes, looking for historical information or travel blogs on the subject. Keep your eyes open for any tidbit that might serve as an example of truth being stranger than fiction and that might be used the keynote of an alternative world. The web being such a vast and wonderful place, odds are you’ll find more than enough material that strikes your fancy. After that, spend 15-20 minutes framing out a one or two paragraph outline that could be used as the basis for a novel.

Because of the nature of what I do as a writer and researcher, namely, sit hunched before a computer screen for long stretches of the day (and evening), I’ve found myself plagued by neck and shoulder pain. To alleviate these faulty ergonomics, I recently acquired an iPad. It’s proven to be a remarkably liberating device, freeing me from the need to be always peering into a monitor in a stooped posture. I expect it to be quite useful as well for any writing I do on the run, particularly when I take my sons to their hockey games and practices. One of the first things I did after getting the iPad was load it up with a bunch of the free books, mostly classics, that are available through Amazon’s Kindle. Even some of the collections that aren’t free come at a staggeringly low price. In fact, bargain seems an understatement. The complete works of Sir Walter Scott, for example–a collection of novels and narrative poems that runs to dozens of volumes– can be bought for less than three dollars. Scott is one of my literary heroes, an author who used to be mentioned in the same breath with Shakespeare and who is, I think, under-appreciated as a major influence on JRR Tolkien. In the end, you can load up your iPad or computer with a library that in the past would physically have occupied a room or two at least, if not a whole building. Besides Sir Walter Scott, there’s one other gem that I was thrilled to load onto my iPad. I’m talking about the Carmina Gadelica. The title is in Latin and means “Gaelic Poems”. The Carmina Gadelica are in fact a collection of poems and prayers compiled and translated by folklorist Alexander Carmichael in the Gaelic-speaking outposts of Scotland at the turn of the 19th century. Arrestingly sub-titled Hymns and Incantations, they’re a brilliant piece of work, one of the rare jewels of world literature, full of a primeval incandescent beauty that captures the wonders and rhythms of pre-industrial civilization. These unique poems are truly a stunning evocation of a world we have lost, of a life lived in intimate proximity to the cycles of nature. The Carmina were slightly more expensive, relatively speaking, than the Sir Walter Scott, but still a bargain of bargains. They’re offered as an attractively formatted two volume set on Kindle for a mere $2.99 (U.S.) apiece and are now part of my digital library. It amazes me to think that years ago, before the advent of the internet, I was forced to search high and low through ponderous snail mail queries before I managed to locate a second hand set of this remarkable classic. So, for all its pitfalls, the digital revolution offers some extraordinary blessings. As a writer, it fills me with amazement and no small measure of gratitude.

English teacher David McCullough Jr.’s “You Are Not Special” Commencement Address at Wellesley High School in suburban Boston has created quite a stir (Check out the video, which is quickly going viral). Wellesley is an elite institution that counts poetess Sylvia Plath as one of its graduates, while McCullough himself is a son of the Pulitzer Prize winning historian of the same name. McCullough’s is a witty, eloquent, mordantly wise argument. In summary, he counsels his students to renounce the prevailing culture of entitlement and to engage life instead with passion and intellectual curiosity. Here’s one of the high notes: “Be worthy of your advantages. And read… read all the time… read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life. Develop and protect a moral sensibility and demonstrate the character to apply it. Dream big. Work hard. Think for yourself. Love everything you love, everyone you love, with all your might.” This delicately balanced, insightful denunciation of complacency and mediocrity is reminiscent of the impassioned Commencement Address the late Steve Jobs delivered at Stanford in 2005, where he rises to stirring heights of eloquence. “Follow your heart,” he tells the students, “even when it leads you off the well-worn path.”

I think of the ways in which my own heart has led me off the well-worn path, specifically how throughout my life a love affair with words has propelled me metaphorically into those beguilingly uncharted regions symbolized in the conventions of mediaeval cartography by graphic pictures of sea serpents.

For me there have been a couple of signal moments of epiphany that I recognize quite vividly in retrospect as having changed the direction of my life, diverting me from a career in academia, which at one point was a real and beckoning possibility, towards a life of literary aspiration. I’ve mentioned before in interviews and elsewhere about the profound effect that C.S. Lewis’ hauntingly brilliant retelling of the story of the Fall in his space trilogy had on me as a Christian when I was an undergraduate. In a compelling, in fact, arresting turn of phrase, Lewis speaks of the work of George MacDonald as having baptized his imagination. This is a strongly evocative statement, but it’s precisely the role that Lewis played in my own embrace of the imagination as a pre-eminent means of illuminating deeper truths. After reading Lewis, it seemed that all the world’s academic theses and disquisitions on the Fall were as dust, trifling and ineffectual in comparison. In the end, I had been pierced to the core by beauty as a deeper, more powerful force than the formalities of discursive argument and reason.

My other encounter with the beauties of “word music” came at roughly the same time in my life, with my reading of English writer Malcolm Muggeridge’s autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time. As in the case of Lewis’ space trilogy, its flawless artistry proved a transformative experience for me—words used with virtuoso brilliance in rich, rolling cadences that had a sublime, symphonic quality. For days after the fact, Muggeridge’s flawlessly constructed periods, each word as delicately balanced and justly placed as the musical notes of a Mozart concerto, would echo through my mind like a profoundly haunting melody. It was a deeply etched and transfiguring aesthetic experience, and Muggeridge is rightly acknowledged as one of the very greatest English prose stylists of the 20th century. Imagine how utterly thrilled I was a couple of years later, when as a student in Montreal I was assigned as Muggeridge’s chaperon and guide. He had been booked to give a lecture in town, and I was given the task of picking him up at the airport and keeping him entertained for the weekend. I remember going for walks with him on Mount Royal, for example, and pressing him for anecdotes about some of the famous literary personalities he had known in his long and distinguished life. For me, it was a never to be forgotten brush with literary immortality. I’m happy to say that I seem to have made at least a superficial impression on him, since apparently he referred to me afterwards as “the Balt” under the mistaken impression that I was of northern European ancestry.

Such are the encounters, such the life decisions that lead us off the well-worn path. It is often through life’s vagaries, its seemingly fortuitous and inconsequential details and unavoidable detours, that the Divine pulls on our heart strings and shapes our journey. Bound to beauty as by a slender strand, one as slight and insubstantial as a filament of thread but as strong as corded steel, our passions are just as apt to turn our feet down the paths we were made to walk as they are to play us false. In some inscrutable way, it’s the fashion of our making, a token of the fecundity and boundless majesty of the God in whose image we’re made. My encounters with literary genius, both sacred and secular, and my innate love of words and their artful use have brought into high relief the thread, coruscating like a jewel, that has guided me through the years, conducting my heart to a place where it has been pierced by beauties that foreshadow that final lifting of the veil.

[Note: This blog entry is being run as an article in The Little Way, the newsletter of Ste. Therese College, and will be accessible on their website: www.sttherese.ca]

Father Robert Wild, my dear friend and mentor, a Catholic priest of Madonna House, has just had his latest book published. The wise fruit of long years of study and reflection, it’s entitled The Tumbler of God: Chesterton as Mystic. The book is a ground-breaking examination of G.K. Chesterton not as a pre-eminent figure in English letters of the first half of the 20th century, which he undoubtedly was, but as a man who by his own ineffable way of conceiving life and human existence had opened a vast, mystic window onto the eternal. Chesterton’s vision was anchored in an exquisitely refined sense of the way in which all that we hold as solid and substantial in our lives hangs in fragile dependence on the mercy of a boundlessly generous God. It was a vision marked by Chesterton’s radical, instinctive, utterly guileless attitude of praise and gratitude in response to the gift of his own existence and the manifold beauty of creation. In the book’s introduction, Stratford Caldecott, the well-known English writer who edits the journal Second Spring out of Oxford, England, includes a beautifully illustrative quote from Chesterton himself:
‘A man must have magnanimity of surrender, of which he commonly only catches a glimpse in first love, like a glimpse of our lost Eden.”
I am reminded here of a deeply resonant observation made by the poet George Mackay Brown, himself a Christian, who is considered the greatest Scottish poet of the 20th century:
“We move from silence into silence, and there is a brief stir between, every person’s attempt to make a meaning of life and time.”
Chesterton’s life-long attempt at “making meaning” resulted in a body of work that in its mystic genius defies the ebb and flow of time and fashion and offers us a still vibrant, still perennially valid glimpse of the eternal. I was privileged to be asked to provide my own literary and editorial input for this marvelous and significant book, which Fr. Bob graciously notes in his acknowledgements. The Tumbler of God is available through Justin Press (www.justinpress.ca).

It’s the start of the Victoria Day long weekend here in Canada. In the depths of rural Ontario where I live people have poured in from the cities to open their summer places and savour country life for a handful of days. Yesterday I spent the better part of the evening into twilight splitting firewood—a chore that lies at the heart of rural living in the temperate latitudes. I do it by hand with a splitting maul. It’s one of life’s small but exquisitely bracing pleasures, spoken of famously by Henry David Thoreau as heating a man twice, once in the splitting and then again in the burning. It’s a job I’ve always relished deeply in all the years I’ve lived in the country. Not only is it an invigorating full-body workout that does wonders in lifting the stresses of the day, but it carries with it the practical benefits of a growing woodpile, the tangible foretoken of a winter’s span of warmth.

Over Christmas, Jim and I scored a modest and unexpected coup, when we were honoured to be asked by Laurie Lamson, an editor at Penguin/Tarcher, to each contribute to a collection of writing exercises by authors anthologized under the title, Now Write! (for more information, check out: http://nowwrite.net/ ). Other participants include some very accomplished figures, among them writers such as Ursula LeGuin and Ray Bradbury. Our pieces have been submitted and accepted, with the anthology due to be published sometime in 2013. In his exercise, entitled “More Than Words Can Say”, Jim talks about the need for a writer of fiction to discover what he calls the “body-voice” of a character, i.e. his or her mannerisms, habitual gestures, posture, facial expressions, and physical quirks, to name but a few of the things that make up “body-voice”.  My own exercise—its title, “In Xanadu… Grounding the Fantastic”, is an allusion to English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem “Kubla Khan”—looks at the need for the writer of speculative fiction to apply the touchstone of grounded reality to his or her work. More about this in a further blog.

For those who are interested, last Friday, Sarah Reinhard posted the online interview she did with me on her Snoring Scholar site. You can read it at: http://snoringscholar.com/2012/04/seven-with-mark-sebanc/

In all the years that I’ve lived in this corner of rural Ontario, it feels like spring has never come roaring in like this. I mean “roaring” in a good way. The temperature has soared to record highs, and the forecast calls for a succession of extraordinarily warm days right until early next week. Today, with the breaking of old man winter’s chokehold, in a small, but splendid, presage of Easter, Jim and I received one of the best and most glowing reviews yet of The Stoneholding and Darkling Fields of Arvon. It’s by Sarah Reinhard, a writer and mother who lives in rural Ohio. The review can be found on “The Integrated Catholic Life” website, where Sarah is now a regular contributor, by way of the following link: http://www.integratedcatholiclife.org/2012/03/reinhard-reviewing-legacy-stone-harp-books/
What’s particularly gratifying about Sarah’s review is the quite evident sincerity of her reaction to our work. An omnivorous reader with high standards, she had tackled the two novels with studiously neutral, if not low, expectations, and was won over by the story and the craftsmanship (as was her husband, who was initially even less receptive). What better compliment could a writer ask for?

For more about Sarah and her work, check out her blog at http://SnoringScholar.com/