Don Williams’ Blog

Don July 31st, 2009

LXI Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

            It’s not just the poets who have landed us in this mess.  They had help.  They were aided and abetted by a large group of accessories to the murder of Poetry, people who ought to have known better—whose job in fact was to know better.  Good luck with that.

 ARS POETICA:  A Musical Suite in Four Movements

(Continued)

 II:  Allegro Stupido  (For Editors, Critics, and Teachers of English) 

The Modern Poets have just said

Why they want the Muses dead.

Shall we then resist this trend

And seek the Muses’ wounds to mend?

Never!  And just cause we’ll show

In the lines that come below.

All now confess Modernity

The essence is of quality

And Novelty is the greatest good

That can by man be understood.

Words of beauty, verse that rhymes,

Are not suited to the times.

Rhythm and alliteration

Are a vile abomination.

Like the plague, all now do flee

Metaphor and simile.

If the work makes any sense,

It only proves the poet’s dense

And is a vain and snobbish prig.

For meaning, then, give not a fig!

Only an archaizing fool

Would break this, our most basic rule.

If any such these words should hear,

Let him mark well, have no fear,

His fair, just punishment will be

Never his work in print to see.

No, let him not ask us to read

Aught with messages to heed.

Fractured prose, thoughts torn asunder,

Fill the readers’ hearts with wonder

And leave him them with no ground to tell

The road to Heaven from that to Hell;

And sets us free to fill the nation

With any old interpretation,

Immune from being proven wrong

Or right.  And thus the Muses’ song

Becomes (‘tis our firm resolution)

An instrument of prostitution

Designed to keep us (Aren’t we clever?)

In our tenured jobs forever!

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don July 29th, 2009

LX Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

            The next four entries together make up a larger work that let me take out some of my frustrations with what was happening to poetry in the late Twentieth Century—which can only be called the suicide of an art form.  It is hard now to remember that in my own lifetime there were living poets (Robert Frost, for example) that people actually cared about.  Try naming just one who is writing now. 

             OK, if you’re reading this blog you can name one.  Name another one!  How did this major cultural shift come about?  Read on–and visit the archives for the essay, “Poetry.” that we ran in an early edition of JOFP.

 ARS POETICA, A Musical Suite in Four Movements I:  Discursus Discordus (For a Choir of Contemporary Poets)  

We are Artists!  Thus, we cannot be

Bound to any false conformity

To Nature (or to Grammar, for that matter).

It is enough if we keep up the chatter!

For we are Artists!  Therefore, what we say

Has worth intrinsic.  Things are just that way.

So if our lines cannot be understood,

Well, we think that is all more to the good

Because by this they seem the more profound,

Whereby out reputations do abound.

Don’t worry whether what we say is true,

It’s more important that it just be new!

Each emotion in our hearts that flowers

Makes worthwhile reading just because it’s ours.

Edification, timeless truth, insight,

Whether our sentiments are wrong or right—

We can’t be bothered by such bourgeois fetters,

For we are Great Souls—Artists—Men of Letters!

Dump the raw emotion on the sheet

To make a lyric poem that can’t be beat.

Look, look:  We have no tune, and yet we sing!

Oh, come and hear.  It is the latest thing.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don July 15th, 2009

MOVIE REVIEW: “I AM LEGEND,” Directed by Francis Lawrence 

This review was originally published in Modern Reformation (online version): http://www.modernreformation.org/.

This is not a flick to see lightly for entertainment. 

A genetically engineered virus that was supposed to cure cancer wipes out 90% of the human race instead, and turns most of the rest into mutated, rabid, aggressive, vicious, and very hungry monsters who only come out at night.  Will Smith is a medical researcher who (with his faithful German Shepherd, Samantha) is the only survivor left in New York City and, for all he knows, the world.  He is trying to build a vaccine and cure from his own immune blood–but it may already be too late.

There are a couple of philosophical issues of interest to Christians that are central to this story.  First is the ethics of genetic engineering and “playing God.”  Scientific hubris definitely takes a hit–and yet science, which is the cause of the problem, may also be its only solution.  But will it be science alone?  No.  And thereby hangs a tale–which brings us to the second issue.

Very important also to the plot is theodicy, the problem of evil (think of C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain).  Smith’s character eventually meets another survivor.  She is a believer who is looking for a colony of survivors.   She believes it is out there because “God told her” it was.  How, Smith wants to know.  “The world is so silent, now,” she replies.  “If you listen, you can hear Him.”  Smith has lost his faith because of the devastating plague, and they have a short but intense argument about theodicy.  He seems to win on points, but it turns out that the colony does exist and his meeting her is the only way his cure can reach it with hope for the future of humanity.  They are attacked by the mutants and Smith sacrifices himself so that she can reach the colony with the cure.  “What are you doing?” she asks him at that point.  “Listening,” he replies.  And so she does find the colony and the human race is presumably saved.  The role of faith and the means of its validation remind one somewhat of that Mel Gibson film of a few years ago, “Signs.” 

I have both a positive and a negative reaction to all of this.  On the negative side, the woman’s faith is in a very vague God who apparently speaks only subjectively.  It may not even be the Christian God; if it is, it is a very subjective Pentecostal or Charismatic version of Him where revelation comes not objectively through Scripture but only subjectively through an inner voice.  People in the real world who “listen” to that inner voice often hear all kinds of idiocy from it, much of it contradictory to Scripture.  So let’s not get too excited about “Christian” themes in this movie.  Some of us are too eager to read explicit Christian content that may not be there into any film that isn’t positively hostile to faith.  A work of art does not have to be explicitly Christian to be appreciated for raising in a helpful way issues worth thinking about.

On the positive side, faith in God is shown not to be bogus.  There are many positive insights either made or suggested.  Even Smith (in his atheist period) says, “God didn’t do this [evil]; we did.”  He means at that point partly that only we humans, specifically scientists, specifically himself, can fix it.  The optimistic humanist hope that “I can fix this!” echoes throughout the picture, only to be shown to be a false hope.  It turns out that Smith’s efforts would have been in vain without what looks an awful lot like Providential intervention. 

Most interesting of all then is the idea that Religion and Science need each other.  Either alone would have failed to save humanity.  The believer couldn’t have done it without Smith’s science; he couldn’t have done it without her faith.  Each comes to understand and appreciate a need for the other.  A more interesting and possibly helpful way of thinking about how Religion and Science ought to relate than those one sometimes hears from either side is then suggested by the story, one potentially consistent with reformed themes such as common grace and the cultural mandate.    

Of the films I have seen this year, this one should be one of the more interesting to Christian thinkers.  Its answers are not without flaws, but it raises good questions in a helpful way.  But seriously, don’t see it unless you are prepared to have your nose rubbed in some pretty tough realities.  It breaks one of the most basic rules of “feel good” movies (which “I am Legend” manifestly is not):  The dog dies.  And, yes, that part is hard to take.  But she doesn’t die in vain.  It hurts, but it is a pain worth having.  Just don’t say you weren’t warned!         

Donald T. Williams, PhD, is Professor of English and Director of the School of Arts and Sciences at Toccoa Falls College in the hills of NE Georgia.  His most recent books are Mere Humanity: G. G. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien on the Human Condition (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2006), Credo: Meditations on the Nicene Creed (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2007), and The Devil’s Dictionary of the Christian Faith (Chalice, 2008).  His website is www.doulomen.tripod.com.   

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Don July 13th, 2009

REVIEW: “KINGDOM OF HEAVEN” 

“Kingdom of Heaven,” the 2005 film based on the era of the crusades, is closer to history than Hollywood usually gets, close enough to make the gaps that remain especially annoying.  The depiction of medieval siege warfare is fairly accurate if one allows for the fact that Greek fire didn’t really blow up quite that dramatically when it hit.  Saladin and Balian actually existed, they did make a pact that allowed for the surrender of Jerusalem on condition of safe passage for the Christians back to Christian lands, and this was indeed an impressive military and diplomatic achievement on Balian’s part, for the realistic expectation (given what the Crusaders had done when they took the city a century earlier) was that every last man woman and child would be put to the sword.  So far, so good. 

            You knew the “but” paragraph was coming.  But . . . there are patches of 21st century dialog that stick out like sore thumbs, patches of new cloth rather clumsily woven into this allegedly 12th century tapestry.  And their overall tendency is to create a subtle, sometimes not so subtle, message:  people who take religion–any religion–seriously are a problem.  The two noblest people in the film turn out to be the two most secular-minded, one on each side.  The sheiks, for example, are going on about how they are going to win because it is Allah’s will.  Saladin asks cynically, “How often was it Allah’s will for you to win before I came along?”  Embarrassed silence.  “You don’t win because it is Allah’s will; you win because you are better prepared than your opponent” is Saladin’s conclusion.  Very powerful because it is of course half true.  The Christians are if anything even more idiotic in their belief that God is on their side.  All religions are equally bad, the film implies in other words, but some are more equal than others.  Balian actually saved the lives of the Christians by threatening to destroy the Dome of the Rock unless Saladin agreed to his terms for surrender, with the implication, “OK, you can slaughter us all, but then you can also explain to the rest of the Muslim world how you let that happen.”  In the movie he threatens to destroy all the shrines of all three religions–and Saladin replies, “Perhaps it would be better if you did.”  No commentary necessary to discern the message there!

            What we can learn from this film is a little about the 12th century and a lot about the 21st.  It confronts us with the way an awfully large and rapidly growing number of our contemporaries feel about religion, plus a view of history read in the light of those feelings.  And if we were looking at the phenomenon of religion from the outside, we would probably feel the same way.  If people would just be secular, or keep their religion safely bottled up in their private lives, all war and conflict would cease!  History–especially half understood history, like what this film offers–presents a huge amount of data that makes those feelings plausible and understandable. 

Unfortunately, the presentation of that data by secular-minded and liberal scholars often ignores an equally impressive number of facts that present a different picture indeed.  Tragically, the  attitude engendered by this tendentious scholarship and the popular entertainment that parrots it cuts us off from our own Founding Fathers and makes it impossible for us to understand what motivated them or what they meant by their own statements about religion.  If Christians and other conservatives are going to counteract such views, it will take good arguments and better lives. 

 Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don July 11th, 2009

This review was originally published in Mythprint 42:2 (Feb.,2005): 11.

Colin Duriez, A Field Guide to Narnia.  Downers Grove, Il.:  InterVarsity Press, 2004.  ISBN 0-8308-3207-6, pbk., 240 pp., $13.00.

            This is a book for people with a particularly strong case of the hobbit’s desire “to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradictions” (FOTR 27).  It appears to be a miscellany of various bits of writing about Narnia that Duriez had in his files, none of which was substantial enough to be a book or original enough to be an article, but which were lumped together under one cover in the fond hope that the result would be more than the sum of its parts.  

            The first of those parts is called “The Creation of Narnia,” though relatively little of it is about any such thing.  It consists of yet another summary of Lewis’s life, made slightly interesting by a series of photographs of Irish landscapes thought by Duriez to be possible inspirations for Narnian geography; a pedestrian treatment of books Lewis had read which might have given him ideas for Narnia; a discussion of the relation of the Chronicles to Christian Orthodoxy and the Christian worldview; and a brief survey of literary features of the books.  There is nothing objectionable here, but neither is there anything particularly helpful.  The Narnia books are pretty clear sailing.  Children read them without any help at all and understand them well.  They don’t need and wouldn’t read such an introduction.  People who have become such enthusiasts for the books that they go from reading them to studying them and discussing them in print are going to want more depth and insight than Duriez provides.

            The next section is entitled “All About The Chronicles of Narnia.”  It gives us completely unnecessary summaries of the stories, an overview of Narnian history and geography, etc.  It contains nothing anyone couldn’t learn with much more pleasure from reading the Narnia books themselves.  Then there is a lame attempt to relate Lewis’s other writings to Narnia, which usually produces one of two reactions:  “Duh!” or “That’s a bit of a stretch.”

            We finally come to the last section, one which does at least provide the hobbit’s pleasure in books filled with things we already know set out squarely.  It is called “The A-Z of Narnia,” and is an encyclopedia of Narnian characters, places, events, institutions, and things, from Adam to Zardeenah.  This part is actually well done in its kind and could well give the hobbit’s pleasure that is the promise of that kind.  Unfortunately, it only covers fifty pages—hence the unfortunate necessity of padding the book with the rest of its contents.  If the hobbit’s desire is strong enough in you that you will gladly buy 240 pages in order to get fifty, then this book is for you.

 Reviewed by Donald T. Williams          

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Don July 7th, 2009

LIX Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.”  

            It is now 1975-76, my senior year in seminary at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.  There is not much more that is worth saying about the poignantly brief Midwestern Autumns in prose.  But maybe by adding a theological pun and some spiritual allegory to our continuing observation of Nature, we can find something new to say in verse.

 ON THE RESULTS OF THE FALLSonnet XIX 

The leaves so choked the pool, they made a floor

You’d almost think a man could walk across.

And if they weren’t enough, the wind drove more

In right on top of them, until the moss

Was all that was left clinging to the trees.

A few short months the proud green host had stood

On high.  Now, at the mercy of the breeze,

They were shaken down and scattered through the wood,

Unable to find another resting place

Until the were caught by the stagnant ponds

Which stood around the sun-forsaken waste

Enticing the outcasts to embrace new bonds.

And one could wish the leaves would tell which curse,

Autonomy or slavery, is the worse.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don July 6th, 2009

LVIII Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

With Spring comes planting and Summer and harvest.

 ON THE BIRTH OF AN ACORN SQUASH PLANT 

In hurricane or earthquake, Nature’s power

Is less seen than when newborn leaves uncoil:

A thousand cells dividing every hour,

Their seeming effortlessness cloaking toil—

God’s glory pushes upward through the soil,

And pushes on, in ever creeping lines

And swelling gourds with sweetness to be filled

By Time and Rain and Sunlight and the Vine’s

Inscrutable photosynthesizing skill—

The Glory of God spreads out around the hill.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don July 4th, 2009

This review was originally published in Trinity Journal 27:1 (Spring 2006): 179-80.

David C. Downing, Into the Region of Awe: Mysticism in C. S. Lewis.  Downers Grove, Il.: InterVarsity Press, 2005.  297 pp., n.p., h.c.

C. S. Lewis, by his own estimation, was not a mystic.  The forthright admission of this fact is not enough to stop David C. Downing, professor of English at Elizabethtown College and author of two very useful works on Lewis, Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy and The Most Reluctant Convert, from writing an entire book on Lewis and mysticism.   To accomplish this feat, Downing must maintain the thesis that “Despite this disclaimer, Lewis must certainly be one of the most mystical-minded of those who never formally embarked on the mystical way” (33).  Evidence for this claim is found in Lewis’s experiences of “joy” or  “sweet desire,” his “vivid sense of the natural order as an image of the spiritual,” his lifelong habit of reading mystical texts, and the motifs and images related to mysticism that occur in his books.

            All of these aspects of Lewis’s life and work are worth exploring, and Downing’s exploration of them, along with an explanation of mysticism and its history, is not without profit.  But in the process, the concept of mysticism gets stretched to the point that it loses any substantive meaning and becomes almost a synonym for “any form of spirituality or symbolism I happen to like.”

            For example, Downing quotes approvingly Evelyn Underhill’s definition of mysticism as “the direct intuition or experience of God” (18).  It is a most pertinent definition indeed, for Lewis agreed with it:  “a direct experience of God, immediate as a taste or color” (19).  Well, if that is our working definition, then most of Into the Region of Awe is simply beside the point.  One can certainly read lots of books about God, some by people claiming to be mystics, without ever having or claiming to have had a “direct” or “unmediated” experience of Him—whatever that might be—oneself.  One can use lots of symbolic language about God, and find one’s symbolism in Nature, based on the doctrine of Creation, without ever claiming such an experience.  And one can have intense experiences of romantic longing for the Infinite without the confusion between longing for the Transcendent and experience of it ever arising.  In fact, Lewis quite explicitly interprets his own experiences in Surprised by Joy in ways directly inconsistent with mysticism.  They were precisely claimed not to be “direct” experiences of God, or even experiences of God at all, but rather signposts pointing to Him.   

            Downing’s title is unfortunate.  If his material had been presented as a treatment of spirituality in Lewis, it would have value.  Read as such, it is not without value, especially in the rather ironic chapter on Lewis’s critique of mysticism.  But the problem is not just with false advertising in the title, for throughout the book Downing insists on talking muddle-headedly of mysticism and thereby perpetuating endless confusion of the kind we have delineated above—highly ironic in a book purporting to explain to the world a thinker as clear-minded as Lewis was!  He also has an annoying idiosyncratic method of citation—neither in-text nor footnotes—that makes finding out what in Lewis he is quoting an unnecessarily laborious task.  It’s too bad.  Downing is a better critic than this and ought to have written a better book.

 Reviewed by Donald T. Williams

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Don July 3rd, 2009

LXVII Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

            Take as many walks like this as you can.

 The Walk 

“You’re sure you know the way back to the car?”

“Of course.  We simply have to go down the hill

Until we hit the river, then turn right,

And follow it upstream.  It can’t be far.”

“It better not be.” 

“Well, it isn’t.  Still,

The sun is setting quickly–not that night

Would be unpleasant if it caught us here.

The air’s–but wait a minute–here we are!”

The river suddenly shimmered in the light

Of half a red sun and one pure white star.

The girl released her small, half pleasant fear,

And dropped it in the stream without a sound;

It just as silently floated out of sight.

“See, there’s the path back to the road, as clear

As day.”  His whispered words were almost drowned

Out by a cricket and a timid wave

That flirted with the shore and with the ear.

“I wish I’d known before that you were bound

To cut cross-country, so I could have saved

These silly shoes from all the scuffs and mud

And worn my walking boots.”

  He looked around

And saw her teasing smile.  “You see, the paved

Roads couldn’t satisfy my roving blood.

I didn’t foresee, either, that the ground

Untrod beneath those trees would have the pull

It did.  My feet were helpless to resist

The call.”

  She laughed, “And have you ever found

It otherwise?”  “

I hope I never do.

Why, think of all the things we would have missed.”

“Like blisters, scratches, aching feet . . .” 

“And you

And me alone with leaves, and clouds, and sun,

And evening flowing, like the river, slow . . .”

She took his hand, and sighed, and said, “I know.”

            Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don July 2nd, 2009

LVI Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

There is a bit of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ influence here.  I would not write really good sprung rhythm until later, but there is an exuberance in this celebration of the coming of spring that asked some lightening of the strict iambic pentameter of the traditional sonnet.  I think it works.  See what you think.

 SONNET XVIII 

Today is a day for praising the sun in the meadow

And the high-wind, the sky-wind, that’s blown from snown peaks to our faces;

A day for the swift-gliding races of cloud-cast shadow,

For leaf-wing, bird, all things that move to be put through their paces.

A day for the laughing of maidens, the giving of graces;

A day for the splashing of singing-stream, rock-tumble water

And the blooming of sweet mountain laurel in seldom seen places.

A day for hot sun in the desert to shine even hotter;

A day for clay cliffs to be shaped by the wind-handed Potter.

Today is a day for the thunder and lightning to battle

And roar on high passes until the great stone-boulders totter

And send down the swift –ending rain while the storm windows rattle.

            It’s a day for singing, for telling the oft-told story,

            For praising the ancient, twy-natured enfleshment of Glory.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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