Raising Daughters and Words

I need to write more. I need to read more fiction. I read three books, 2 fiction and 1 non-fiction, while we were on vacation last week, and they were the first books I've gotten fully through in a while. They were all life-giving. I downloaded Matt Haig's Reasons To Live on Kindle, and it might be one of the best books I've read on depression. He has no remedy to sell except your own remedy, all the while writing with great sympathy for the varieties of ways depression presents itself, and a generous, vulnerable account of his own. I picked up two novels in the used bookstore at St. Simons Island, and both were fantastic. The Orchardist by Amanda Coplin kept me glued to the pages for a solid 2.5 days, which for me, is saying something. But the book that got into my bones was Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng. After two chapters, I had to look up the history of the Japanese occupation of Malaysia in the 50s, history I had never been exposed to. But it was the story and the mesmerizing language that really captivated me. It stirred my inner poet and made me want to write again. And so, here I am, writing again.

I've struggled about what to do with this blog. I want to write, and I want to write for an audience. But, while I've done it with previous blogs, I find myself resistant to just keeping an online journal of my days/feelings/thoughts. I want to structure it with "music on Monday," "words on Wednesday," "thoughts on Thursday," etc. It assuages my worry that blogging is mostly just naval-gazing. But, artificial structure is not working for me. It feels contrived, and it turns writing into a duty. So, I'm going back to a more organic way of writing. I don't know quite how it will come out, but maybe that's okay.

xxxxx

My girl starts 10th grade at a new school on Wednesday. She's nervous, but she doesn't realize that she's so much braver than I would have been at 15. I marvel at her. She has become so much her own person. But, then, she always was.

When she was born, I felt the strangest sensation. It was as though another person had walked into the room. Of course, she was indeed a newly arrived person, but I had expected it to feel more like she was still part of me, not so much like a stranger had arrived. She came with an unmistakable message - "I'm not you." She was a presence. After a few tense seconds while we waited for her to cry, she finally let out a quiet, sweet, almost unbearably endearing "graaa." Soon, that weak little "graaa" was a big "WAH," And, now "WAH" has become, "I need you to take me to Ulta so I can buy some more makeup." (So not like me.) And I'm so thankful that she is so normal.

On Wednesday, she'll arrive at a new school, her own person. She knows a few of the students, but not very many. She'll know them soon enough. She'll start with a graaa, progress to a WAH, and end up a leader. And I'll marvel at her again.

Maybe writing is like raising a daughter. You can't structure it. It takes you down avenues you weren't expecting. It exposes you, surprises you, scares you, exhilarates you. And then, ultimately, it humbles you because you realize that she, or it, belongs to itself. It is not you.

xxxxx

Is it weird to say that my writing has its own identity? Some writers like to talk of a muse, and I understand that. I don't speak the way I write. I don't even always think the same way when I write. Things come to me when I'm writing that don't come to me at other times. It's similar to when I'm playing and the music takes over and I become its servant. These things happen. Art has its own personhood. I don't know how to explain it.

xxxxx

The sun has set while I've been sitting here on the porch, all hot pink and orange between the pine trees as I listen to the kids at the neighborhood pool and the crickets and cicadas start their songs. The mosquitoes have been merciful, and the Georgia heat is not unbearable. I've a glass of wine and a sleeve of crackers, and the night is kind. I've written enough for tonight. Time to read again.

Words on Wednesday

Not Here For High And Holy Things
by Geoffrey Anketel Studdert-Kennedy

Not here for high and holy things
we render thanks to thee,
but for the common things of earth,
the purple pageantry
of dawning and of dying days,
the splendor of the sea,

the royal robes of autumn moors,
the golden gates of spring,
the velvet of soft summer nights,
the silver glistering
of all the million million stars,
the silent song they sing,

of faith and hope and love undimmed,
undying still through death,
the resurrection of the world,
what time there comes the breath
of dawn that rustles through the trees,
and that clear voice that saith:

Awake, awake to love and work!
The lark is in the sky,
the fields are wet with diamond dew,
the worlds awake to cry
their blessings on the Lord of life,
as he goes meekly by.

Come, let thy voice be one with theirs,
shout with their shout of praise;
see how the giant sun soars up,
great lord of years and days!
So let the love of Jesus come
and set thy soul ablaze,

to give and give, and give again,
what God hath given thee;
to spend thyself nor count the cost;
to serve right gloriously
the God who gave all worlds that are,
and all that are to be. 

Holy Alchemy

A wise music teacher once taught me something that is as true about writing as it is about performing. In my piano lesson that day, I was too emotive for the teacher’s taste. “If you don’t over-interpret,” he said, “you leave the possibility for the listener to interpret the music in his own way, and that creates a richer experience for him than just hearing your response to the music.” Later, I told him that he might just as well have borrowed a line from Carly Simon: "You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you." This story has become a parable for me that speaks to the mystery of how art can transcend my personal perspective.

In my last post, I expressed my dismay at the trend in Christian publishing houses towards confessional writing and the paucity of good fiction and poetry. I think we get closer to the mysterious ways in which God works when we allow that mystery full play in the genres of story and poetry. I said that creativity and artistic craft can transform personal confession into something greater than the author’s limited, personal truth, and I promised to explain myself. I might be in over my head with that. Philosophers and poets have written long treatises trying to explain how art can be transcendent, and none of them have written the definitive answer. Neither can I. I can only chip away at it, a little bit at a time, and maybe get close to it.

Whether I’m writing a story or performing a Brahms intermezzo, I can only write or play from my own experience and emotion. When I play Brahms, the pathos you hear is mine, prompted by the pathos of Brahms. The goal, however, is not for you to hear or feel my pathos, but for mine to cause you to feel yours. It would be so much easier to just tell you the story of what caused my pathos, but the buffer of expressing it through a character in a story or a musical composition is what gives the readers or listeners the opportunity to insert themselves into the work. This is especially true if the artist can avoid over-interpreting as I was inclined to do in my piano lesson.

The difficult task of the artist is to surrender personal experience and emotion to something greater. T.S. Eliot wrote about crafting poetry in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

…the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates;  the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.

Transmute is an arresting word. Transmutation is a complete change of one thing into another. In chemistry, it's what happens when one element is changed into a different element either through radioactive decay or nuclear reaction. The original context of the word was connected to medieval alchemy, the science by which practitioners hoped to change a base metal such as lead into gold. It's not merely a refiner's fire that burns away the dross and leaves the silver. It's a complete chemical transformation.

When we experience dramatic life circumstances that prompt us to say, "I should write a book about that," we have essentially two choices. The first is the choice of non-fiction: telling the story as it happened, recording our feelings and reactions, and either letting the story be enough, or in the case of most Christian writers, turning it into a testimony of God's faithfulness through the storm. There's nothing wrong with that, and there are many very good writers of Christian memoir. I do wish, though, that more people would make the other choice. The second choice is to surrender the story and our role in it to holy alchemy. This is where novels, poetry, and symphonies are born. 

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot understands something here that a lot of non-artists don't. Artists who aren't making art for attention or money but because they are compelled to by an inner need tend to feel that they are giving themselves away, or losing part of themselves, not that they're engaging in "self-expression." If the word expression is at all appropriate, it's more like what is meant when we express juice from a lemon. It's draining. Remember, my job as a musician or storyteller is to create an inner experience for you using the medium of my own emotions, without drawing attention to them as my emotions. My calling is to make you the hero in the story that was originally mine until the Holy Spirit's nuclear reaction obliterated it and changed it to yours.

When the “courage to tell your story” in confessional memoir format results in big book deals and an appearance on Oprah, maybe it isn’t actually courage. Maybe there’s more courage in surrendering your need to tell your story and allowing God to transmute it into a song that's not about you.

There are more aspects of art's transcendence to consider - the connection that is created between the maker and the receiver, for instance. At any rate, I hope that if someone reads here they'll consider stretching themselves and venturing into the realm of story or poetry when they find themselves thinking, "I should write a book about that."

Photo by Sergey Zolkin

The Problem With Christian Publishing: Confession Vs. Literature

What would a modern-day Beethoven do within the context of our Christian artistic culture?  Instead of writing a body of musical masterpieces, he might write the story of how he became a famous performer - a revealing autobiography telling how his alcoholic father made him a musical prodigy by beating him for making mistakes, locking him in the cellar as punishment, and depriving him of sleep in order to practice more. If he were savvy, he'd write about all that suffering in graphic sensory detail. Readers would eat that stuff up. He’d write about the pain of falling in love several times with women who rejected him. He’d write of the devastation of living for years with the knowledge that he was losing his hearing. He'd write about his own alcohol dependency, his bipolar illness, and his suicidal thoughts. Always an optimist, he'd conclude with a justifying message of hope. The book would become a bestseller and then a movie. Beethoven would have his 15 minutes of fame. Considering that he was Beethoven, maybe he'd have 30 minutes.

Thankfully, he didn’t publish a tell-all. Instead, he used his experience as raw material for something greater than his personal story. He wrote a body of music that changed the entire trajectory of music history. Beethoven is why we have professional orchestras. Beethoven is partly why we have bigger, heavier pianos. Beethoven's shadow is why Schumann, Brahms, and Mahler as well as many others achieved a greater level of artistry than they might have. Every performance of Beethoven's work has been redeeming his pain and opening emotional gateways for countless performers and listeners for nearly 200 years.

I’d call that vindication.

I've been participating in a webinar for Christian writers which focuses heavily on how to work with publishers. It's a good webinar, but it has sparked my frustration about the whole world of Christian writing and publishing. Have you noticed that there are very few books being published by evangelical publishing houses that are in the tradition of  C S Lewis, G K Chesterton, Madeleine L'Engle, or Frederick Buechner? There's no literature. 

A great deal of  the work being published (especially by women) is chatty, colloquially-styled confession aimed for a girlfriend audience. It's pleasant; it's encouraging, but it's not going to stand the test of time. Some of those writers confess entirely too much.

Confession is indeed good for the soul, but it’s a sign of maturity to be judicious about what and with whom you share. The benefits of confession still exist if your audience is small. 

We have a fascination with human suffering - failures, difficulties, pain. Confessions sell. Publishers justify broadcasting a writer's pain with the message that God loves us and can redeem our painful or chaotic stories. That’s a worthy message, but the prevalence of this kind of writing is just so excessive. Considering that the publishing houses are profiting from it, maybe it’s even a little predatory. A writer I admire summed up this trend with one word:  Vulnerability™.  Writing is another one of the performance arts, and it is certainly an exercise in courage, but there is a difference in writing with authenticity which may require some degree of disclosure, and making disclosure the whole point. Discretion is still the better part of valor.

I wonder if, in our efforts to exchange the image of Christian women as primly righteous church ladies for something more human, we have swung the pendulum all the way to the other extreme. Publishers encourage writers to keep blogs to build their platform, and the blogs by Christian women lean heavily towards branding themselves as that other extreme. Instead of virtuous paragons, the fashionable image of the Christian woman is now a hot mess - messy house, kids run amok, marital stress, addiction, etc. It's downright cool these days to shout from the rooftop how messed up you are. It's justified to glory in our mess as long as we exchange lots of virtual girlfriend hugs and append the message that God's grace is sufficient. 

God's grace is indeed sufficient. Girlfriends are good. Telling personal stories is not bad, but some stories need to be seasoned for a long time before they're ready to be published to the world, if they ever are. Two or three years is not a long time. Mature perspective doesn't come that quickly. If you're patient enough to wait on that perspective, you've got a greater chance of turning your story into something approaching literature. 

We don't remember the great Christian writers or any other great artists for their diary entries. We remember them for what they created out of the raw material of their experience, their thinking about their experience, and the intersection of these things with their faith or values. Perspective, creativity, and artistic craft can transform confession into something greater than the author’s limited, personal truth. (Tune in later for part two of this post where I explain that statement.) We are created in the image of the ultimate Creator, and I think that means we are called to live into the full limits of our artistic abilities instead of settling for easy fame. Unfortunately,  I see the Christian industrial complex capitalizing on human pain for profit rather than shepherding us into richer pastures.