Abstracted

Here's some more recent artwork, this produced with a brush rather than a mouse and pixels.  It's after one of my heroes of abstraction, Hans Hofmann, and entitled "Here Comes the Sun":

One of my students in How to Look at Art this semester protested that abstract art seemed to him to be "without intention," which I take to mean that there doesn't seem to be much thought put into it in its distance from recognizable figures.  My painting above actually took a great deal of thought and time in execution, and it is based upon landscape--the sun rising over a green hill.  There is cloud, rain, and grass.  But sometimes I've produced abstraction that isn't based on anything but its own gestural form, as in Scherzo, a piece I did a couple of years ago which I still like, a Pollockian swirl and spatter of paint:

But I've also had some time for realism lately, such as in the piece below that I did in early summer, based loosely on a photograph taken near Loveland Pass in Colorado in early June of 2011 when the snow was still deep on the higher elevations.  The guy on the horse is a long-time friend of mine who loves the mountains:

The work of painting and drawing goes on--abstract or realist--and it's always a labor of love.

Photoshop Art

Lately I've been playing around with a trial version of Photoshop Essentials 10, the pared-down version of Adobe's Photoshop.  I'm using it to create modified images for my course this semester on How to Look at Art.  Yesterday I started doing some compositions from scratch with the range of imaging tools the program has to offer, especially the different "brushes."  Here's what I came up with:

It's an abstract composition, obviously, that has the distinct feel of an impressionistic watercolor, or a "water-acrylic."  I like what I came up with and will do more of these, I'm sure (and probably post them into this blog), but for all their power and versatility, a computer mouse and Photoshop are not a brush and paint.
One of the primary reasons I love doing art is the physical, visceral connection between me and the canvas/paper/board through the brush, pencil, pastel stick, or whatever tool or medium I'm holding in my hand.  Perhaps I should try this sort of thing on an iPad--if I had one; it might be analogous to "real" drawing and painting.  I do use a sketch application on my smartphone, which is nice for capturing visual ideas where I happen to be at the time.  But it's never as good as those old-fashioned tools for creating art down in my studio.

Battle Days

These days of late August are Battle Days.  One hundred fifty years ago Union and Confederate armies were settling in for a major multi-day battle in northern Virginia.  It was the bloody culmination of a campaign that had begun with the appointment of John Pope, on June 26th, 1862, as general of the newly constituted Army of Virginia, tasked by President Lincoln with moving south to take Richmond, something his cautious commander of the Army of the Potomac, George McClellan, had been unable to accomplish over the past months from the Peninsula.  By late July McClellan had been beaten back from the gates of Richmond and Pope's army lay between Culpepper and the Rapidan River to the south.  Robert E. Lee, the relatively new commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, as it came to be called, freed from the threat of McClellan, decided to move north against Pope in order to push Union troops out of northern Virginia and open a way for a campaign into Maryland.

Out of this would come the Second Battle of Manassas, or the Battle of Second Bull Run, which began late on the 28th of August, and ended on the 30th with the utter defeat of John Pope.  It was a campaign of brilliant strategy & maneuver executed by Lee's subordinate, Stonewall Jackson, before the final crushing battle on the old ground of Bull Run, the first battlefield of the Civil War.

In a previous post on this blog I mentioned poring over the panoramic battle maps in The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War back in my youth.  These days I've been reading selected battle histories and other books about the Civil War in sync with the 150th anniversary of that conflagration.  This year its the 1862 battles and I read a history of Shiloh in the spring.  These past couple of weeks I've been working through John J. Hennessy's superb account of Second Manassas, Return to Bull Run. But it's been difficult reading, especially as the campaign gave way to the actual battle.  The carnage in the fields and woods of northern Virginia on those days in late August was unbelievable, with some of most intense, close-up fighting of the war.  Soldiers wrote home describing what they had seen and experienced, such as one infantryman from the 7th Wisconsin who fought against the Confederates of the Stonewall Brigade:  "We advanced to within hailing distance of each other, then halted and laid down, and, my God, what a slaughter!  No one appeared to know the object of the fight, and there we stood one hour, the men falling all around; we got no orders to fall back, and Wisconsin men would rather die than fall back without orders."  ... Dawes of the 6th Wisconsin wrote:  "Our one nights experience . . . . eradicated our yearning for a fight.  In our future history we will always be found ready, but never again anxious."

I have been moved to grief over these accounts of Americans killing other Americans, and the cacophony of death seems to ring deep in my soul, like brutal .  It makes me want to visit the battlefield--and mourn.  I wonder if I can complete Hennessy's book--I've only got around one hundred pages left--but I know I will.  But more death is waiting.  Longstreet's division is moving for the final devastating charge against Pope's left flank.  Soon his army will be swept from the field, leaving only the dead and dying in the thousands covering the ground.  Quiet.  A brief respite.  Then, three weeks from now, armies will clash again near a stream in western Maryland on an even bloodier day.     

Rain

We've been waiting a long time for this here in northwestern Missouri:  rain.  It started early this morning and has continued for six hours, by my reckoning:  a steady, drenching rain.  I can almost see the grass in the back yard turning from a scorched tan to green, almost hear the roots sucking up the water.  There's much ground moisture to make up, but this is a good start.  Here's the view of our back deck a few minutes ago:

Two New Drawings

In the past several days I've framed two drawings done this past summer.  The first is one in graphite based on a Rembrandt painting of St. Paul.  I did it for practice and thought it came out better than expected:

The second is a pastel of what I imagine is a Parisian woman beckoning me back to Paris.  It started out as a copy of a drawing by Monet, but things went a little sideways with the face.  Still, I still like way it finished.  The eyes are a little big, but it all seems to fit together somehow:

New Art

I recently completed an oil pastel of a flower bed in the Jarden des Tuileries, which is just west of the Louvre in Paris, very near where the old Tuileries Palace once stood.  The pastel is based on a photograph I took there in May.  I framed it this afternoon and it now hangs in our entryway.  Here it is:

Understanding Fiction

These days--the last days of summer break--are work days, as I tune up syllabi, etc.  Today I was working on the reading list for my Understanding Fiction class, which is populated with short stories and two longer works:  The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy and The Metamorphosis by Kafka.  I use a fairly consistent list of stories for this course, which I teach every couple of years, but change out a few of them for variety.  It's a first-rate line-up, including Sandra Cisneros, Toni Bambara, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Tan, Ralph Ellison, Sherman Alexie, Flannery O'Connor, Tim O'Brien, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ha Jin, Margaret Atwood, Isabel Allende, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Bobby Ann Mason, William Faulkner, and Raymond Carver. I teach novels in other courses, but the short story always seems to work best in courses like this, mainly because it's a compact form that includes all of the basic elements of fiction and each story can usually be covered in one class period.  I also like the variety of voices in the stories over one semester, and I like the windows they open into the human condition.  Last time I taught this one of my students characterized the course as a kind of "psychology of literature" because we spent so much time talking about what motivated the characters, which is the central question in fiction I believe.  

The Dream of Paris

Before I went I had often imagined Paris, and read about it, of course, especially Hemingway.  I the past few years I had taken to painting it as well, always in watercolor.  I would find a photograph online and use it as the basis for art.  I was primed, then, for the reality of Paris I suppose, but nothing quite prepared me for the emergence into City of Light quite literally from underground.  My son Peter and I had taken the Metro from Gare du Nord south to Vavin, the station on the Boulevard du Montparnasse, and the closest one to our hotel around the corner on the Rue Delambre.  It was a rainy evening in May--is there any better way to first experience Paris?--and I came up the stairway into Montparnasse and found that the dream had taken sensual form around me, as if I had walked into one of my own watercolors:  There before me was boulevard with the lights of cars and the windows of the cafes Le Dome and La Rotonde reflected on the mirror of the wet street. Three months later the moment is still with me and I suspect it will always will be--a moveable feast, in Hemingway's celebrated phrase.

Though it's not taken at night, this photograph of Le Dome on Montparnasse in 1925 by Eugene Atget captures a certain "look" of Paris from that time that has always captured me.

I'll probably do some more blogging about the Paris trip, but the weekend is here and I begin teaching again on Tuesday.  Just a couple of days to complete start-up chores before the semester begins and I want to write some about that.  Guess I'll have to stop thinking about Paris--for a day or so anyway.

August Turn-around

Seems like months. . .

The summer is about over.  I've been back at Conception Abbey this week cleaning my office, preparing for another year of teaching.  Today I saw some of the new students arriving on campus, cars packed with clothes and other dorm-life necessities.  Next Tuesday, the 21st, I'll be back in the classroom for the new semester.  It's the August Turn-around, when I shift out of summer mode.

I read a lot this summer, but nothing focused.  I've got no new fall courses to prepare for--only re-runs that simply need some tweaking.  I finished books on Thomas Jefferson (American Sphinx), the Civil War (The Longest Night), Caravaggio (Graham-Dixon's bio), a history of the Finns in Minnesota, the physical structure of the Internet (Tubes), Bell Labs (The Idea Factory), string theory (The Elegant Universe), and the history of Paris (Seven Ages of Paris).  I also read a lot of spy novels, mostly by Daniel Silva, Alan Furst, and John Le Carre (The Karla Trilogy).  Diversity--the way I like it.

No writing, though.  I've still got that book percolating inside, but my only creative output this summer was in the form of paint, pastel, and graphite.

Oh, yes--I also went to Paris.

Speechless and Renewed

You might ask:  How is the Book coming?  The one about God as a kind of poet that I wrote about in a post late last year?  Well, the Book abides, as the Big Lebowski might put it.  It rumbles, bumbles, grows.  I've been reading books, doing research, taking notes, and thinking thoughts.  Not much writing yet, except for the notes.  I'm not ready to write because to be quite honest I'm still not sure what I want to say, or if I have anything worth saying to anyone other than myself.


I think--I think, mind you--I have a beginning:  Jesus writing in the sand.  You might remember the scene from the eighth chapter of John's gospel, the one where the woman caught in adultery is brought to Jesus as a test of his orthodoxy.  "Should we stone her, as Moses taught?"  Instead of answering immediately he stoops and begins to write on the ground.  The authenticity of the passage has been disputed, but I like the scene a lot because I like the idea of Jesus writing something--or drawing a picture:  the Greek word here is ambiguous--in a kind of delay between their challenge and his response.  Perhaps he was stalling, making random marks or even playing tic-tac-toe while he thought of how to answer the Pharisees.  Or perhaps he was writing a poem.


In his essay "The Government of the Tongue," the Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney comments on this scene:  ""Faced with the brutality of the historical onslaught [the imaginative arts] are practically useless.  Yet they verify our singularity, they strike and stake out the ore of self which lies at the base of every individuated life.  In one sense the efficacy of poetry is nil--no lyric has ever stopped a tank.  In another sense, it is unlimited.  It is like the writing in the sand in the face of which accusers and accused are left speechless and renewed" (107).


Speechless and renewed.  It describes my experience at mass in the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception at Conception Abbey, where I work.  Jesus' poetry is there--in the priest and the people, the Word spoken, the bread and wine.  His poetry also abides in the stone, wood, and stained glass, in the Beuronese murals of the life of Mary on the upper walls.  But he's outside the sacred walls too, sliding and slamming his poetry of everyday life.  It's all poetry, and that's what I want to write about.

Art Chronicles (1)

I'm dusting off the blog once again in this new year, this time to post some recent (and not so recent) art and write about it a bit.  Along with writing, art is my chief creative expression and I've been producing quite a lot of it over the past few months and learning a great deal in the process.  I'd like to share some of that learning here on the blog, partly as a way to re-start (again).

I used to draw and paint in high school, oh so many years ago, and only picked it up again in the last few years.  Since then I've been practicing in watercolor, acrylic, oil, graphite, charcoal, and pastel.  I've also messed around some with collage and mixed media.  To characterize my style as "eclectic" is an understatement:  I like to imitate the style of many artists, from Michelangelo to Modernism.  One of my favorite strategies is to take an artist who happens to be inspiring me at the moment from a book or a recent visit to an art museum, and imitate what he or she is doing in order to get inside of the art and learn something.

Though I have a particular fondness for gestural abstraction, such as in the work of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, last week I decided to take one of my long-unused square canvases (24" X 24") and "do a Mondrian."  Though the paintings of Piet Mondrian do not inspire any kind of deep pathos in me, I find his abstract works interesting from the point of view of composition--especially the balance of elements within the compositional space.  In his case, grids of black lines and geometric shapes of (mostly) primary color.

I started out with a mock-up of a possible composition of a "lozenge"--a rhombus, or diamond-shape.  Mondrian did some of these and I wanted to see if I could do one, too.  The mock-up, using construction paper, looked like this:

This gave me a point to begin, but did not dictate how the final composition would look, as you can see:

My work imitates Mondrian's style, but does not duplicate any of his lozenges that I know of.  It was a step-by-step compositional process as well.  My first line was the vertical black one on the left, next to the blue triangular area (which I painted after the line had dried).  I believe (I didn't keep track) the next one was the right-hand vertical black line at center right which runs down the right side of the yellow area.  After adding a thicker black line on the bottom half of the lozenge, I decided to paint in another vertical black line to make a double track.  I have seen this in Mondrian's compositions, but to me it simply felt right both for the sake of balance and interest.  Thereafter, the lines and blocks of color were added, one by one, and sometimes tweaked for balance, not only from right to left, but from top to bottom.  For example, the top horizontal line under the red patch was thickened near the end of the painting process because the top felt too "light" to me in terms of weight, even with the deep cadmium red there.  (It was an odd and interesting thing to consider the relative "weight" of colors in this kind of painting)  The final patch I added was the small triangle of black at the bottom of the blue triangle where the two lines intersect.  Then it was done.

I'm not sure I'll do another one of these, but I do like how it came out, and my respect for Mondrian's skill as an artist was confirmed.  Doing one of these pieces is not easy and it took me a full week to complete it, even though I was using fast-drying acrylics.  Mostly, I needed time to just look and let the painting tell me what to do next.

There's a purity of form in Mondrian's geometric compositions that is satisfying to undertake, at least to me as an artist, though not in the same way as hurling paint at a canvas, which I also like to do.

I'd appreciate any comments you'd like to make about this post.

Advent

With Advent nearly here, I'm going to "restart" the blog--too long neglected--with some excerpts from the new book I'm beginning to work on.  The following will appear somewhere in the preface or first chapter, I think.  It recounts the ice storm we experienced here in Maryville back in Advent of 2007:


In the stark middle of a winter’s night I lie awake, listening to the fall of trees.

It is Advent—mid-December—and rain has come to northwest Missouri where I live, a sprawling mass of moisture out of the south is being lifted along the blade of a cold front slicing down from Nebraska. It should be bringing snow, as it usually does this late in the year, adding several inches to what’s already on the ground.  Further north in Iowa the snow is falling fast.  Here in Missouri, though, it comes as rain. 

An hour ago I was still roaming the house, peering out the windows at the rain and the trees that cloak the house.  It's been raining since yesterday, falling through the wedge of freezing air over the town, glazing the trees.  I went to bed after midnight, but couldn't sleep.  I know what’s coming.  

  

First, the sharp snaps of smaller branches punctuating the silence.  Brutal silence.  Forced silence.  Broken tree silence.  The silence of rain--and of death.  Freezing rain sheathes the branches like sheer, clinging nylon until the weight breaks them off.  The breaking of the larger ones sound like gunshots barking over the hardened glaze of snow-cover. Then from my bed I hear the shhhhhhhhhhhh of shattered ice falling like the slide of small stones down the polished steel bed of a dump truck.  I tense, waiting for the deeper crack of the trunks.  There's a large ash tree that arches over the southeast corner of our house.  If it falls it will crush the south roof directly above me. With that thought, I get out of bed and head back downstairs.

It goes on, this night, until morning light slivers in through blinds and I am awake and outside checking the damage.  The yard is littered with branches small and large but to my relief there are no fallen trees except for the mulberry on the north side of the house, which has been bowed to the ground in my neighbor’s back yard.  It's a tree that I love, but its nearness to the house has caused us annoyances over the years:  Its fast-growing stems leverage their way under shingles and slap and rattle against the siding in the wind and the stark, street-light shadows of its bare winter branches on my son’s bedroom window shade used to frighten him when he was a young boy.  But in warmer seasons birds loved the mulberry and sang cheerily from her branches of a morning. Now her spine is curved and cracked, broken branches like bedraggled hair matted on a cold floor.

In the afternoon I take a drive around the town.  Others are out like me, looking around, all a bit dazed, glazed, dazzled by the sun shining on the translucent ice.  With all the broken tops of trees jutting into the sky, the town looks like it has been shelled.  There isn’t any electrical power, but the houses are all intact and so are the people.  The trees, too, will survive—those that haven’t fallen. New branches will grow.  The leaves will return.  In the measure of things, we’ve been inconvenienced, that’s all.  Nature took most of the punishment.

I return home and stand in my back yard, looking around me, waiting.  In this pause before the rumble of electrical repair trucks and the snarl of chain saws breaks in there is a silence that is at once both ordinary and profound.  This is Advent, after all:  A season of waiting--of anticipation--for the coming of the Christ child.  I like this time.  Silence seems right for it instead of the frenetic noise of December in America.

But this afternoon under an ironically brilliant sun it is the silence of destruction.  Two weeks before Christmas, in the midst of Advent, it is the Destroyer who has come to us first in the killing ice with its relentless gravity like a gently descending boot crushing everything to the ground.

Tuor, Turin, and the Call to Vocation

Where I teach vocations are not mere jobs, they are higher callings.  Catholic seminarians--my students--are at Conception Seminary College because they sense a call from God to something--they're just trying to figure out, with God's help, whether it is to the Catholic priesthood or not.  It takes time, patience, listening, lots of reflection, and lots of prayer. There are no burning bushes, no booming voices, no writing on walls to point the way forward.

In Tolkien, the way forward--the call to vocation--can be similar to the experience of the seminarian, or it can be something else entirely.  I can't help but think of Frodo at the Council of Elrond in The Fellowship of the Ring, after all the talking is over and it has come down to who must bear the Ring to Mt. Doom:

   No one answered.  The noon-bell rang.  Still no one spoke.  Frodo glanced at all the faces, but they were not turned to him.  All the Council sat with downcast eyes, as if in deep thought.  A great dread fell on him, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken.  An overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace by Bilbo's side in Rivendell filled all his heart.  At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice.
   "I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."

There's no sense of peace here, no joy--only obedience to a divine call beyond thought and emotion.  A sense of what must be done.  A doom, to use the term from Norse legend, as Elrond immediately recognizes: "I think that this task is appointed for you, Frodo."

This past week as we finished up the Quenta Silmarillion in my Tolkien class we discussed the career of Tuor, son of Huor, of the House of Hador and an ally of the elves of Beleriand in their fruitless war against Morgoth.  By the time Tuor is twenty-three, after losing his father in battle and being fostered by the elves, he has been captured by the enemy, enslaved and, after escaping, outlawed in the high country of Mithrim.  From here he is called:

But when Tuor had lived thus in solitude as an outlaw for four years, Ulmo set it in his heart to depart from the land of his fathers, for he had chosen Tuor as the instrument of his designs . . .

Ulmo is one of the Valar, the divine Lords of Arda, Lord of Waters, and is the most active in assisting the cause of elves and men against the evil of Morgoth.  Ulmo's call to Tuor reminds me somewhat of the call of Abram in the twelfth chapter of Genesis:  "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. . ."  Or the prophet Jonah, called to go and cry out against Nineveh, "that great city."

In both of these biblical calls there is a journey to somewhere else, and so it is with Tuor. He travels west, toward the sea and there he dwells awhile until the sight of seven great swans flying south gets him moving again.  He reaches Vinyamar, the great, deserted elvish city on the coast, and there finds a suit of armor and weapons awaiting him.  It was left long before by Turgon, now elven lord of Gondolin, by the command of Ulmo.  The pieces are coming together.  Tuor puts on the armor and goes down to the shore as a storm blows in from the sea.  The majestic figure of Ulmo rises out of the water and commands Tuor to seek out the hidden city of Gondolin.  The vague but compelling call in Mithrim has become a specific prophetic vocation: to speak to the city and to Turgon, its king, not in judgment but in warning, for doom approaches; destruction is near.

On his way back east to Gondolin along the southern marches of the Shadowy Mountains with his companion Voronwe, Tuor sees a lone figure traversing the frozen pools of Ivrin. Though he isn't named in this tale, we recognize Turin, Tuor's cousin, hastening north toward the mountains and his mother's home.  He is being driven by the lies of Glaurung, the dragon, to a vain pursuit that will ultimately lead to pitiful tragedy and death. A far different call than that of Tuor, rising out of fear and guilt and the evil designs of Morgoth.

This is one of Tolkien's plot parallels, or intersections.  Their physical proximity is a signal that we are meant to compare the respective careers and callings of these two figures, Turin and Tuor.  First cousins, alike in name, exiles, both fostered by elves, yet engaged in far different vocations.  Tuor will try to rescue a city.  But more importantly, he will fall in love with an elven princess and together they will bring forth the savior of Middle-earth.  Turin, on the other hand, who has already accidently killed his best friend, will kill a dragon--but he will also unknowingly marry his own sister and drive both her and himself to suicide.

But that is the Secondary World of Tolkien.  In our own Primary World, the world of the here and now, callings are more ambiguous.  Certainly less dangerous.  My seminarians aren't being called to rescue a city. But as Tolkien understood, it all comes down to the same thing:  Follow the call and do the best you can with what you have.  And don't listen to dragons.
 

Affairs of Honor & Liberty

Jon Huntsman, seemingly the most reasonable Republican presidential candidate in the 2012 campaign, criticized his fellow candidates for their "scary" rhetoric about Social Security at the GOP debate this past Monday night: "We find ourselves sometimes at extreme ends politically kinda shouting past one other."  Lately I've been doing a lot of reading about the political culture in the early republic of the United States, especially the decade of the 1790s, and as the present-day campaign unfolds I can't help referring to those early raucous years of our nation which make today's extremes of rhetoric look quite tame in comparison.  We have this myth playing on the movie screens of our minds that the era of the "Founders" was somehow better and wiser and purer and our own and in some ways I agree with this.  But the thing about studying history and what people actually did and said is that it pretty much dissolves myth in a cold shower of reality.

Take the early republic. In her excellent study of this period, Affairs of Honor, Joanne B. Freeman relates the story of when the Federalist Alexander Hamilton tried to address a hostile Republican crowd in front of Federal Hall in New York City on July 18, 1795. The crowd was protesting the Jay Treaty between Great Britain and the United States. Hamilton informed them that it was "unnecessary [for them] to give an opinion on the treaty," a rather aristocratic put-down upon which someone threw a rock at him, hitting him in the head. Following this Hamilton got into an argument with the Republican James Nicholson, who denounced Hamilton as an "Abettor of Tories." The exchange escalated until the two were challenging each other to a duel. Then Hamilton, shaking his fist in the air in outrage, vowed to take on all of his Republican opponents, one by one, in duels. Fortunately for Hamilton this time, cooler heads prevailed and he was spared for his later appointment with destiny.

This wasn't an unusual occurrence at the time. A culture of honor, in which gentlemen "restrained their passions and controlled their words," as Freeman writes, was giving way to a political culture of popular opinion and popular will, and extreme rhetoric was becoming the norm, especially in the newspapers. How would we react if a newspaper editor referred to a sitting president as "a mock Monarch" who was "blind, bald, toothless, querulous" and "a ruffian deserving of the curses of mankind." Such was the characterization of President John Adams in the partisan press. Pure, raw, unvarnished liberty. But certainly better than tyranny.

Tolkien on 9/11

My son Peter got me thinking about disasters and tragedies in Tolkien in relationship to today's tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on our nation, and that they are always linked to perseverance and hope in spite of fear.  This runs throughout Tolkien's work and is especially strong in The Silmarillion, which I've been teaching in my Tolkien class these early weeks of the semester.

If any book could be called a "real downer" it is The Silmarillion.  The collection of tales from the First Age of Middle-earth seems on the surface to be a relentless catalog of failure and defeat that follows in the wake of Feanor's creation of the Silmarils in Valinor and their theft by Morgoth, the first Dark Lord. Tolkien has re-created in the Elvish War against Morgoth to regain the Silmarils the epitome of the Norse saga:  that the battle must go on even when it is completely hopeless.

But that isn't the whole story, and there are Silmaril-bright points of hope scattered across this dark narrative cloth.  Many could be cited, and I want to do some blogging about these in the days and weeks ahead, but for today in particular I am thinking of those scenes of self-sacrifice throughout The Silmarillion which occur most often in battle, as in the account of the rescue of the elvish king Finrod Felagund by one of the captains of men, Barahir, during the Dagor Bragollach, the Battle of Sudden Flame:

But Barahir the brother of Bregolas was in the fighting further westward, near to the Pass of Sirion,  There King Finrod Felagund, hastening from the south, was cut off from his people and surrounded with small company in the Fen or Serech; and he would have been slain or taken, but Barahir came up with the bravest of his men and rescued him, and made a wall of spears about him; and they cut their way out of the battle with great loss.

Barahir's act of bravery will be repaid in the next chapter when Finrod sacrifices his own life to save Barahir's son Beren in the dungeons of Morgoth's lieutenant, Sauron, leading to one of the central sequences of perseverance and hope in the entire Silmarillion: the capture of a Silmaril from the crown of Morgoth by Beren and Luthien.

The hope that springs from oaths of friendship and bonds of love in Tolkien's Silmarillion are a powerful counter-force to the fear, hatred, and seeming hopelessness that characterizes the War of the Jewels.

Following Ivan

One of my former seminary students, who has just entered graduate school in theology at Mundelein, has been reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevski.  He confessed recently that he found himself relating to Ivan Karamazov, the atheist intellectual, more than Alyosha, the religiously devoted brother who seeks to enter a monastery.  It seemed a little strange to my seminarian, as if he had looked in the mirror one morning and seen the eyes of someone he didn't recognize looking back at him.    

Dostoevsky knew that faith was not easy for an intellectual and boldly gave powerful expression to the attitudes he didn't necessarily sympathize with, which is one of the reasons The Brothers Karamazov is such a great novel. The character of Ivan Karamazov dramatizes the conflict between faith and reason in the most honest and poignant way possible.  Dostoevski gives him such a compelling voice that it is not difficult to take him seriously, while at the same time deeply pitying him for his searing inner conflicts.  Ivan's despair, inner desolation, cynicism and self-destruction make him a figure of deep pathos, particularly for anyone who has wrestled with the devouring Worm of Reason.  I have taught philosophy in the seminary and I have at times battled the Worm and, like my seminarian, have sometimes looked to Ivan Karamazov as my soul-brother.  Faith is not always easy. Nor should it be.


    

Tolkien Tuesday

My first class today is Tolkien, one I teach every two years, usually in the Fall semester. Today I will introduce J. R. R. Tolkien and his love of languages (the basis of his mythology) to my students--about twenty at last count--and establish the basic approach to Tolkien's work that I'm going to follow during the semester.  It's a reading-intensive course, since we will cover not only The Lord of the Rings in its entirety, but also The Hobbit and The Silmarillion.  The latter work, which is really a collection of five different works, we will begin discussing on Thursday with Ainulindale and Valaquenta, two short works that kick off The Silmarillion and present, respectively, Tolkien's beautiful myth of creation and his pantheon of "gods" or Valar.

This is the fourth time I've taught Tolkien at Conception Seminary.  A number of years ago I happened to pick up a copy of Tom Shippey's book J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century from the Conception Library browsing table and got hooked into Middle-earth all over again. Originally I had been introduced to Tolkien in the eighth grade by a friend of mine who had spent the previous year in England with his family on a teaching exchange.  He lent me an English edition of The Hobbit with one of Tolkien's drawings of the dragon Smaug on the cover.  I will admit up front that I couldn't finish the book.  It was a little too weird for me.  I tried again with The Fellowship of the Ring--my own copy this time--and I couldn't stop reading.  It was an entry into a secret, marvelous, dangerous and convincingly "real" world and soon my other friends were reading (and re-reading) it. We were Tolkien Nerds who could tell you the difference between Orcrist and Glamdring as well as all of Aragorn's other names.  Later, when I was dating in college, I met a young woman named Carolyn who listened to me read the Lord of the Rings aloud.  She must have liked it pretty well because she married me.  Now our son Peter has taken on the mantle of Johnson Family Tolkien Nerd.

By the time I got to graduate school I had put Tolkien aside for other books, other needs and concerns.  Then came my job at Conception with Catholic seminarians who loved both Harry Potter and, I soon discovered, Tolkien--especially when Peter Jackson's films began coming out.  Since Tolkien was Catholic and consciously wrote The Lord of the Rings as a Catholic work, it seemed a good fit for a literature class at the seminary.  It has turned out to be a popular course and I love teaching it.  Moreover, I've discovered depths in Tolkien's work I'd never seen before, especially in relationship to character and spiritual formation, which is the centerpiece of our work with the seminarians at Conception Seminary College.  But more than anything, Tolkien's work offers a damn good set of stories that are very teachable.  So along with Bilbo, I say . . .


"What fun!  What fun to be off again, 
  off on the Road with dwarves!"

The Day Before

This morning, as a thunderstorm grumbles and rumbles its way out of Iowa over us here in Maryville, I'm getting used to the fact that a new semester begins tomorrow.  Today, Monday, August 22 is the Day Before, which is a good day most years.  It's the day when students like to drop in on me and see how my summer's gone, when I'm taking care of all of those jobs that need doing before classes start.  I'm not teaching yet, but I'm thinking a lot about teaching and enjoying the anticipation of being in the classroom again.  When I was a young teacher this was Freak Out Day and I never felt ready; now, decades later, it feels like slipping into a comfortable pair of shoes.

Blue Highways

There are times for taking freeways, and there are times for blue highways.  That's a term from William Least Heat-Moon, who coined it in his book by the same name.  Blue highways are the two-lane blacktops, the backroads that go through the small towns (and sometimes large ones).  For speed there's the freeway, where the semi trucks hustled you along and the land rolls by like moving theater flats with painted trees and barns.  They'll get you where you're going.  The blue highways will get you there, too, but you take your chances with slow cars and farm vehicles and road repair.  I drive them when I need time to think things out, to feel the places I'm driving through, the crossroads and curves and towns and everything crowding down to the shoulder where I can linger over it with my eyes as I pass. The interstates are all about getting there; blue highways are about the journey.


Most of the time when I drive north to Minnesota I take the freeway, I-35.  But there are times, if I'm driving alone and time isn't an issue, that I deliberately avoid it, as I did this past week when I left Maryville and caught Route One Sixty Nine in Mt. Ayre, Iowa, an hour northeast of here.  

The route is one of the old trunk routes that funneled cars through the country before freeways were built. It comes up through Wichita, Kansas City and St. Joseph, before heading north, unspooling itself through the small Iowa towns with their tall grain elevators and corrugated metal corn cribs, faded “Butler” stenciling on the sides, their brick stores and courthouses and red-brick Lutheran and Catholic churches.  On the map, Iowa counties look deceptively predictable and uncomplicated, like evenly stacked rows of square blocks.  Small green signs marked their boundaries:  Union, Madison, Dallas, Boone.  There is a clarity in the wide fields and straight gravel roads, the neat little towns with their white houses that throw back the sunlight like bright mirrors.  Up in Minnesota the route gets more diverse and complicated, dropping from the prairie into the heavily wooded Minnesota River Valley, following the river northeast into the western suburbs of Minneapolis before it's final run into the north woods of Minnesota.  The sky is a strip of clouded-flecked blue between the trees and the horizon is the next bend in the road.  And all the way the air is getting steadily cooler and drier. 


My way back started on Monday after a few days visiting my mother and sister.  I decided to follow the Mississippi all the way down to southern Iowa, then cut west across the state to Maryville, a longer trip of nearly one thousand miles that took a day and a half.  Along the way, besides seeing some beautiful scenery, I stumbled over some great places to eat such as Emily's Luncheon in Webster, Wisconsin, where customers sit at tables in the dining room while Marilyn makes and serves a homemade meal from her kitchen.  It was the best road breakfast I've ever eaten and I told her so. "I'll take that as a compliment," she said with a slight smile.  Or the Stockholm Pie Company in the little river town of Stockholm, WI, where I had a piece of French Silk pie and coffee during an afternoon pause in traveling.  I saw barges on the river, deer and bear peering out of the edges of the woods, and enough blacktop under my wheels to bring a satisfied end to the summer.

Publication

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print;
A book's a book, although there's nothing in 't.
--Byron

This quote from Lord Byron's Don Juan has long been pinned to my bulletin board.  Byron was famous for his satiric sense of humor, and I believe I put it up after the first of many unsuccessful tries at getting published years ago, wanting to ease the bite of continued failure by way of the poet's sardonic wit.

But it's finally happened, though in the end I had to get it done myself, employing the good folks at CreateSpace to publish my book, Murder and Redemption at a Benedictine Abbey, in paperback format. Self-publication was never my first choice for the book and a couple of years ago it looked like Paulist Press was going to publish it in the traditional manner.  But bad timing (the recession of 2008), and my own need to do some last-minute revisions on the manuscript led to the cancellation of my contract.  After stewing about narrowly-missed opportunities for a time, I decided to put it out on Kindle--and now, in paperback.



The link here will take you to the Amazon page for the paperback version.  You may notice that the cover image has changed from the original version for the Kindle.  I decided to make both editions consistent with the new cover design from CreateSpace, which is a more contemporary photograph of the Conception Abbey basilica and pretty impressive, I think.

You might also want to check out my website, designed by Sean Callahan of AVX Media.

Anyway, I hope you'll read the book and let me know what you think.