The Writer's Lament

Thoughts on writers and fame can be found in the Livejournal of Me, cut-tagged for greater convenience.

A Gratuitous Psalmnody Post

Yesterday's morning psalm, from the Daily Office Lectionary in the Prayer Book:

Psalm 46

God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.

Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved,
and though the mountains be toppled into the depths of the sea;

Though its waters rage and foam,
and though the mountains tremble at its tumult.

The LORD of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our stronghold.


There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
the holy habitation of the Most High.

God is in the midst of her; she shall not be overthrown;
God shall help her at the break of day.

The nations made much ado, and the kingdoms are shaken;
God has spoken, and the earth shall melt away.

The LORD of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our stronghold.


Come now and look upon the works of the LORD,
what awesome things he has done on earth.

It is he who makes war to cease in all the world;
he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear, and burns the shields with fire.

"Be still, then, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations;
I will be exalted in the earth."

The LORD of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our stronghold.

*

The wonder of it struck me in the morning yesterday, how well this psalm "speaks to our condition", and as so often I made the psalm my prayer for the world this Christmas.

May you all know peace this season.

A very happy Christmas Eve to all.

Chapter 24

Enjoy!

More, perhaps, later upon the season.

Holiday Notes

To Temple Israel last night with Jessica for the Shabbat Hanukkah celebration. Good food, many people (for once); and Jessica had an extra hanukkiyah, so I had my very own lights at the table. There's something so right about the lighting of candles both for grief and celebration, especially if there are many candles, many small flames brightly dancing in a room. I hadn't realized how varied menorahs can be; I toured the room looking at them all -- a menorah shaped like a row of Brooklyn Hasids, a menorah shaped like a spidery sculpture complete with brass and silver leaves over the base, a menorah shaped like a tree, a menorah with a reflecting dish that looked like cloisonne, with the decorative legend, "Jerusalem".

When it came time to repair to the sanctuary for the service, my candles were nearly burnt out. I wanted to watch them burn to the bitter end, but we had to go in. Jessica said, "You're supposed to let them burn down. Except if you have to leave and don't want to create a fire hazard, because, letting the house catch on fire?"

"Not a mitzvah," I finished.

"Using your brain," she said, "is always a mitzvah."

This was amusing to us.

In other news, have received my stocking package and Christmas money from my family, including the traditional white cat. It's very cute, and soft. Thanks Mom.

Have also been holed up in my room with a vaporizer, trying to soothe my lungs, which are unhappy for some reason, burning and aching. May wind up going to the clinic after all.

Have finished my paltry Christmas shopping, and have now to do cards.

And, last but not least, have been working steadily on Chapter 24 of "Shadow." It's been difficult because I have lots of groundwork to lay for the denouement.

And speaking of denouements, I must off to have my bath.

Trying to get an RSS feed for my blog. We'll see if this works!

ETA: Yay! I think it did. Thanks to Rebecca for the link.

I wrote a poem:

Workmanship

Fingerprints, I am given to understand,
Exist to make one able to grip things:
At work I stretch to give the book’s spine one last nudge
Into its place on the top shelf with one fingertip,
Leaving a sweaty streak on the slick mylar dustjacket.
Because of the tiny hairpin whorls
I do not have to fetch the stepstool.

(Far from this landlocked city the sea moves,
Carved by gravity into eddies and ridges
That settle into one another again and again,
Teasing itself again and again with riddles
That have no answer)

Again, I learn, without the funny idiosyncratic patterns
On my palms and fingers, I could not half feel
The texture of a woodworking tool
As I pick it up and toy with it, the wood smoothed with age,
And lay it down next to its brothers
Before putting my chin in my hand and watching
As its owner takes it up, to strop it with practiced movements.
These seasoned handles will soon be gripped by hands
More knowledgeable than mine, to carve shape into dumb wood,
To make something out of nothing.

(Rainwater curdles and floods in endless moving drapery
Under the streetlamp and down the pavement,
Pricked only briefly by fresh drops flung hard from the sky)

Without my fingerprints I could not imagine
The honest knowledge of a lover’s flesh,
Alive to every down-hair smoothness and curve and anomaly:
It is all here, the lines of vicariousness drawn upon my hands,
Never to be washed off under the scentless scent of water,
A made thing, the seal of my hands, of myself,
Hovered over by the Holy Spirit,
No longer without form and void,
Something out of nothing.

My anvil of choice, breaking numerous hammers...

(Crossposted from LJ)

What story do I keep writing? What story do I keep reading?

Over and over, in both my original work and in my fics, I keep coming up against the problem of forgiveness and reconciliation between two people when one (or both) of them have Royally Screwed Up. Somebody, like my original antihero Rankin, or my original heroine Elizabeth (spelt with a 'z', you notice, and an entirely different person from my avatar in "Shadow"), does something mortally damaging to another person, something that ought to render relationship with that person impossible. The story is how, against incredible odds, these two people find healing and wholeness for their friendship or love. To my chagrin I've discovered that I even worked that story into my future plotline beyond "Shadow" -- a little angsty background to S7 Giles.

Now that I think about it, it's the central plot of my abortive NaNoWriMo novel, "The Exiles," except that in that case the hero has to make his redemption on a mythic, rather than personal, scale.

Strangely enough, however, I seem to get my fill of this story by writing it. I don't seek it out in other people's writing, and sometimes even find myself painfully sensitive to any possible mawkishness -- which fault is the weakness of my Story, of course. OTOH, that Story is also what I find most compelling about certain aspects of fandom canons -- "Helpless" and "Five by Five"/"Sanctuary" in the Buffyverse, the Trio's tiffs in Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire (as well as Dumbledore's effectual betrayal which he confesses at the end of Order of the Phoenix), that chess scene between Toby and Jed in S3 West Wing, the charade of betrayal Russell and Holmes must play in Beekeeper's Apprentice. And of course the whole of the Lymond Chronicles, jeez. So...I don't know. But I do keep coming back to the story and it seems like a rich enough vein that I manage to keep finding new ways to write it.

And of course, the implicit question is, what does this recurring story say about one's life -- one's self-concept, one's preoccupations, one's history? About me, I think it reflects both my tendency to wallow in self-recrimination and my hope that those recriminations will cease to be a burden. Grace droppeth ever lightly, or at least I hope for it -- perfect and small like a dewdrop reflecting the whole world. That's the place I want my stories to get to.

A Few Book Notes

During my weekend at Rivendell, I managed to raid the library amid the tumult and dip into two of the three remaining New Church Teaching Series books I had not read. I liked what I found in Early Christian Traditions by Rebecca Lyman, but I thought I'd better make the most of my little time there to read Mysteries of Faith by Mark McIntosh. McIntosh is a theologian and professor at Loyola University, and I'd had a taste of his academic work a few months before, dipping into Mystical Theology while staying at yet another house. Mysteries of Faith is not written in the academic style, but though I was able to make deeper inroads into it in less time, I found it no less thought-provoking. I only actually got to read the first two chapters or so, but what I remember is the leap of connection between the love relationship of the Trinity, and the creative power born of that love. He quoted Dorothy Sayers's The Mind of the Maker, which I was smart enough to have checked out a few years ago, but not enough to get read before the due date. There is a mystery to it, one I dare not try to plumb in a blog post, but suffice it to say that it makes a tantalizing background to my current everyday life, especially during Advent. (Have I mentioned how much I love Advent?)

(There, I have just ordered The Mind of the Maker from the Swan ILL.)

Also, now that I have busted my books out of prison storage, I am sampling their delights at my leisure. Currently I am enjoying my clutch of Chestertons, which is admittedly small, but Chesterton is like pepper, quite potent in small doses. Can I just say that, while not being hugely gung-ho myself about tracing homoerotic themes in literature, I believe The Ball and the Cross to be one of the most hilariously obvious examples of love-hate slashiness in fiction? (Am I allowed to say that on TV? Oh, well, guess I just did.) Whatever you may think about the homoeroticism, I heartily recommend the book to any and all readers. I giggle every time they chase the little blood-worshiper into the river -- "Shoo! shoo! shoo!" Gets me every time. I've also been dipping into my copy of Tremendous Trifles, which includes one of my favorite of Chesterton's essays, "A Piece of Chalk" (which you can find in etext here.) My other Chesterton gem, The Man Who Was Thursday, is responsible for a pivotal change in my spiritual development and thus I've saved it for last. I cannot recommend that book strongly enough, because even if you don't come away with a spiritual change, you will at least laugh aloud at the opening of Chapter X, which I intend to post behind a cut-tag in my LiveJournal. Chesterton never fails to tickle my funny bone, although, as Jessica remarked to me last night, he would be a rather unnerving and possibly unpleasant man to know in person.

My forages in the Rivendell library also rewarded me with a few books on fundamentalism, particularly Stealing Jesus by Bruce Bawer, and I found myself troubled with an Occam's Razor-y sort of problem, namely how to draw an adequate distinction between orthodoxical views of the Atonement and the whole emotional tenor of the fundamentalist message that you have to be able to describe yourself in a certain way in order to benefit from the sacrifice of Christ. I don't think Bawer's book drew the line well enough, and I don't think that John Killinger, in Ten Things I Learned Wrong From a Conservative Church, drew it well enough either. I know this because I am a liberal Christian, who does (and with reason) hold an orthodoxical position on the Atonement, and their dividing line just absolutely murders to dissect, as I see it.

I very nearly asked to borrow A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman, but decided I could as easily check it out myself -- I mean, I work in a library -- and indeed I have just done so. I look forward to reading about the 14th century in print as small as that of Dorothy Dunnett's Checkmate, with my brand-new glasses (courtesy of my mother, who sent me a very tidy birthday sum).

There, that should do it. *pours imaginary glass of Napoleon brandy and settles down*

Plen'y of heart, and plen'y of hope...

Yes, I am back from my weekend away at the Motherhouse of my Community (the website needs a little updating, but you can read about the Community here). I got a second birthday cake, following the one Jessica had made me; and then when I got home yesterday I found a package waiting for me, with all my favorite kinds of candy, a sweater, and cool socks. (I am wearing the sweater and the snowflake socks at work right now.)

I'm thinking this has been a good birthday.

I have more on my mind, in both the philosophical and the writing way, but I think I'm going to defer talk about that to another post. Just...um, watch this space for further developments.