Don Williams’ Blog

Don September 29th, 2009

LXXXV 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.” 

            I spooked this guy on a walk one summer afternoon, and he ended up in New Oxford Review, Jan.-Feb., 1981, as a result.

 To a Quail:  Sonnet XXVIII 

Flash!  Flushed, it rushes and, flurrying, flies,

                                                No covey, but one lone quail, across the grass,

                                                While, fluttering likes its flight, the notes it cries

                                                Float flute-trilled thrills, through back the hushed air pass.

Oh fleet flinger of wing-beats into space,

                                                O sweet singer to carol the quickening dawn,

                                                One breathless, trembling moment saw you race

                                                The sun to the distant trees, and you were gone.

Hopkins held all Nature was news of God:

                                                Free windhover, caged lark, unleaving grove,

                                                Stippled trout, generations that trod and trod,

                                                And I’d thought, “What treasure if true, then, Nature’s trove!”

And standing there, startled and shaken by your shimmering flight,

                                                I knew beyond all doubt that he was right.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don September 26th, 2009

LXXXIV 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.” 

            Here I am particularly experimenting with the effects you can achieve with one of the aspects of sprung rhythm, what Hopkins called “clashing accents”:  two monosyllabic stressed feet suddenly coming together in an otherwise flowing line.  See if you can find them.

Commentary, Romans 8:22

And the Sea rises and falls, and the Moon walks,

And the leaves unfold like a scroll rolled each spring,

But no one stops to read them, and the Wind talks

Of the flesh that weeps and the soul that cannot sing.

And the Sun rises and sets, and the Rain falls,

And the leaves achieve a glory of red and gold,

But the long Darkness grows, and the Snow calls,

And the leaves clutch like withered hands, and old.

And the Crone counts the dead leaves in the dark light

And will not tell the numbers that she finds;

And if the child can be born in the hard night,

He’s swaddled in the subtle shroud she winds.

And the Sea rises and falls, and the Moon walks,

And the leaves unfold like a scroll rolled each spring,

But no one stops to read them, and the Wind talks

Of the flesh that weeps and the soul that cannot sing.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don September 25th, 2009

REVIEW:  “REVENGE OF THE SITH” 

[This review was originally published as “Film: Strider’s Screening Room, Star Wars Episode III” (review), Mythprint 42:6 (June 2005): 4-5.]

“Star Wars Episode III” is indeed much better than I or II; and that is what makes it much worse.

            In explaining my paradoxical judgment, I forebear to nit pick.  I will not ask why Jedi can apparently use their light sabers to deflect an infinite number of blaster bolts coming at them from every conceivable direction until order 66 is given, whereupon it suddenly becomes relatively easy for clone warriors to pick them off.  I will not ask how, if Padme dies right after childbirth, Leia can remember her mother as “beautiful and sad.”  (The conversation when Luke asks her about her memories in its own context always seemed to me to be about her real mother, not her adoptive one, because Luke is trying to establish some connection with his own, whom he now knows to be the same person).  I will not ask why, since the first Death Star is already well under way by the end of Episode III, and an entire galaxy of slave labor is available, it is only just being finished twenty years later at the time of Episode IV.  All this I omit, being studious of brevity and disposed to charity.

            O.K., then, on to the good part.  The first two movies did an inadequate job of building up Anakin’s nobility so that his fall could be from a sufficient height.  He was a cute kid and a bratty teenager, but when was he really noble?  But the first half of Episode III significantly ameliorated that problem.  We see a more mature Anakin with a better relationship to Obi Wan, who insists on saving Obi Wan during the rescue of Palpatine, and who is feeling a real loyalty to the Jedi order for the first time just as that loyalty is coming into conflict with the lies he has been fed by Palpatine.  I think we do see the Jedi he could have become, just in time for that destiny to be sacrificed on the altar of his misguided but natural and understandable ”attachment” to Padme.  This irony heightens the sense of tragedy, as does the horrible irony that the death he turns aside from the path to prevent is caused by that very turning aside from the path to prevent it.  That is an irony worthy of Oedipus.  At that moment the film rises to the archetypal and made me want to forget all the inconsistencies and plot-holes and grant that it had achieved in spite of them a grandeur rivaling that of the original trilogy.

            But  . . .  it all came crashing down into an incoherent mess because of one horrible, intolerable, and inexcusable line.  When Obi Wan confronts the newly fallen Anakin, he is convinced that the fall is real when he hears Anakin declaring that if Obi Wan is not with him, he is his enemy.  Obi Wan’s response is, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”  Well, I guess we see where that places Lewis and Tolkien’s Christianity, or any other traditional view that takes certain verities as unchangeable and non-negotiable! 

But let those of us who are believers bracket for a moment our personal disappointment and offense as Christians, and think of the line only as it functions in the context of Lucas’s mythology.  I wearily ask if you do not smell something fishy, not about the content of Obi Wan’s statement (which is bad enough), but its form.  It is an absolute statement!  Only a Sith deals in absolutes.  Therefore, if Obi Wan’s statement is true, then he, having just dealt in an absolute, is a Sith Lord too.  And if that is the case–and logically it follows inexorably–then what is the fight about?  What is the difference between the Light and Dark sides of the Force? 

A moment in the original series foreshadows this fall into shallow relativism.  Luke thinks he has been deceived about his father, whom Obi Wan had claimed to be dead—“from a certain point of view.”  Luke finds this rationalization incredible.  “You’re going to have to realize,” Obi Wan responds, “that a lot of the truths we hold depend greatly upon our point of view.”  Oh, really?  Then how do we respond to Anakin saying, “From my point of view, you’re evil”? 

Our ability to perceive truth depends on our point of view, of course.  It may powerfully influence what truths we are able or willing to accept.  But truth itself does not and cannot depend on our point of view.  If it does, Anakin’s “point of view” is simply unassailable and no basis is left for distinguishing between the Light and Dark Sides of the Force or for claiming that the choice between them is anything more than an arbitrary personal preference.  If only the Sith deal in absolutes, the whole Star Wars ethos collapses into nonsense so nonsensical that Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief that constitutes poetic faith” becomes simply impossible.  And the worst part is that it taints the whole mythos, three episodes of which I loved.  

Star Wars is more than just “escapist entertainment.”  It connects with some very basic and universal truths that our technological age tends to forget, and they, rather than great special effects, are why we care about it.  Many of them are consistent with the world view we get in Lewis and Tolkien, though in Lucas’s world they lack its biblical basis.  Self sacrifice in a good cause is noble and powerful (Obi Wan in Episode IV; cf. Gandalf at Moria, Frodo).  Choices have consequences, and you cannot use evil for good and get away with it (Yoda and the clones, Anakin wanting to use the Dark Side to save Padme; cf. Saruman, Denethor).  There is something inside us more powerful than technology (though Lucas’s new-age mysticism is vastly inferior to the Christian doctrine of the imago Dei as an explanation of what it is).  Little people, even flawed people, can make a big difference for good (Ewoks, an obscure, whiny orphan from the back side of a desert planet, a ne’er do well smuggler; cf. hobbits).  Evil is real and does great damage, but no one is beyond redemption (Vader in Episode VI; cf. Boromir, almost Gollum).  These truths are profound and important–and that is why I wish Lucas had worked a little harder to get his secondary creation right, rather than creating a mishmash of truth, error, and contradiction that is sometimes so flimsy that I can’t keep on believing in it even as fiction.  He should have paid less attention to Joseph Campbell and a little more to Tolkien’s “Essay on Fairie Stories.”  In other words, Star Wars could have been almost another Lord of the Rings, a work (the book supremely, the movies a little less so) that has all the same virtues (and more) without the same flaws.

            So then, you see why I say that “’Star Wars Episode III’ is indeed much better than I or II; and that is what makes it much worse.”  Because it does at times rise to the mythic power of the original trilogy, the message that “Only a Sith deals in absolutes,” that, in other words, anyone who believes in absolute truth is evil, will be disseminated far and wide, and disseminated effectively to an audience with whom it will powerfully resonate.  Logic has little power with a generation that has been taught to “trust its feelings.”  But my message to them is this paraphrase of one of Obi Wan’s better moments:  “Be mindful of your thoughts, Master Lucas; they betray you.”

 Reviewed by Donald T. WilliamsToccoa Falls College

• Apologetics , Art/Aesthetics , Inklings
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Don September 22nd, 2009

LXXXIII 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.” 

            Far above the famous Tallulah Gorge, where the Tallulah River is a mere mountain creek, it runs through a clearing.  More than trees and brush came clear that day.  The epiphany seemed to demand a Hopkinsian sprung-rhythm sonnet of me, so that is what I tried to supply.  It appeared in New Oxford Review, November 1981.

INSCAPE: Or, the Idea of Order at Tallulah River

Sonnet XXVII

The swooping, soaring bat had no business to be

                                                Abroad so early, so fine a sun-filled day,

                                                But he was.  He stirred our pulse as he skirted the tree

                                                And, falcon-like, stooped on his unseen insect prey.

Around that tree like a shuttle he wove his way,

                                                Now fluttering lightness of leaf, now diving weight;

                                                The field became a stage for a mystery play,

                                                A loom for the warp and woof of insect fate.

Yet more than the doom of bugs he caught and ate

                                                Was at stake in that circle of sun in the shadowy hills:

                                                Could the terrible grace of his course such a vortex create,

                                                A confluence of circling harmonies, forces, wills?

His flight stirred the air like a word, a divine decree,

                                                And made the meadow a world with a still-point tree.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don September 17th, 2009

LXXXII 

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 poem is reminiscent of Cassandra’s epistle from a few entries ago.  It differs in that this voice comes from the present, not Cassandra’s mythic past.  But it encounters the same problems, inherent in human nature since the Fall of Adam.

Prophetic Fragment

I have walked the streets of cities and towns, and seen

The empty eyes disguised by endless laughter,

The blanker stares of men intent on business,

And over all the neon wash that drowns

The clean if scanty light of the evening sky,

            And a Voice said, “Cry!”

And I though, “What shall I cry?”

And so I read the lines of morning papers

And saw the cold statistics stacked in piles

Like countless bodies of aborted children

On the altars of the goddess Promiscuity,

            And the Voice said, “Cry!”

I listened to the sages of the people

On blaring, omnipresent radios,

And also read the words of learned poets,

            And they said,

“The frenzied freedom of the one-night stand

Is better than the faithful bonds of marriage,

And by all means don’t get tied down with children.

If you feel that something’s good, it is,

As long as it’s not violent.  Nobody

Is wise enough to tell you how to live,

And tolerance is the only virtue left,

And the only thing that’s real’s the present moment.”

And the Voice said, “Cry!”

I turned and to listen to the saints and preachers,

And they proclaimed that Man is very good

And has a spark of godhood deep within him.

And if somehow we just can fan that flame

With Education and Encounter Groups

And teach him to get over all his hang-ups

And to engage in honest self-expression,

The Evolution, Social Change, and Progress

Will make the world a place of peace and beauty.

            But the Voice said, “Cry!”

                                    And I said, “What shall I cry?

What word to heal the pain, explain the ‘Why?’

What new solution we have yet to try,

What new direction for the race we run?”

            And the Voice said, “None.

You are to tell them that they have to die.

Tell them they cannot walk unless their feet are on the ground

Or know the Truth without rejecting lies.

Say there is no freedom to be found

            In throwing away all ties.

Say that we must choose our metaphors

(And mix them) carefully, if we would see

            The signs above the doors

And take the right road to eternity.”

That road is harder for the man who thinks that he is rich;

The blind inevitably lead the blind into the ditch.

The ditch is deep (it splits the world asunder)

And wider than the space between the stars;

And there it waits for man the way the lightning waits for thunder,

            Or wounded flesh for scars.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don September 16th, 2009

LXXXI 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 1978-79, the third year of my classwork for the PhD in English at the University of Georgia.  My apprenticeship to the great Poets of the past was proceeding apace, in other words.  And I was fortunate to have as one of my closest friends Ted Georgian, a man working on his doctorate in ecology who shared my love of the mountains and of hiking.  So manner and matter were both being richly supplied.  The manner this time was the Pearl stanza, used only once before to my knowledge, in a medieval poem by a contemporary of Chaucer; the matter was the same water cycle I celebrated in entry LXXX.  The combination was, I hope, more profound but no less playful.

A String of Pearls

The light lit on the light leaves, lost

All its momentum there, and made

A curious transition, crossed

Into the softer light of shade.

The leaves, new light shed on them, glossed

With new significances, played

A game of wit and lightly tossed

Off puns and paradoxes, prayed

The wind to answer.  She obeyed

And joined her most light-hearted voice:

Thus air-light leaves in serenade

May teach the spirit to rejoice.

The soul also rejoices when

The growling thunderstorm comes near

To scare away the heat that’s been

Clogging up the atmosphere.

The subtle intensity within

That’s not, but is akin to, fear

Is suddenly shattered by the din

That lets you know the thing is here.

With washing rain and lightning clear

The storm is sent; it has no choice

But to go on its wild career

And teach the spirit to rejoice.

Likewise the joyful mountain stream,

Hearing the voices of the leaves

And wind and rain and lightning, teams

Them all together; whence she weaves

One flowing tapestry which seems

A richer thing than man conceives

In sleep or in his waking dreams.

Beneath enchanted forest eaves

He hears it, and almost believes

It is a nymph’s or naiad’s voice.

It soothes, stings deep, enriches, grieves,

And makes the spirit to rejoice.

Rejoicing in the verbal skills

Displayed by her melodic strains,

The stream leaps lightly down the hills,

Spending all the speed she gains

In song and laughter, as she spills

Herself toward the coastal plains.

Gradually then her song she stills:

A stately current which contains

The echoes of a thousand rains,

She bows before a greater voice,

Flows all into it, yet retains

Her own full spirit to rejoice.

Rejoicing in the gift, the sea

Receives her homage and returns

The voices to the air, and we

Hear once again the song that burns

In Nature’s heart.  Wild and free,

Our own blood answers it and yearns

To fly with the light wind and see

The water’s path as it returns

To light on mountain leaves and ferns

And once more in the streams to voice

The song, where air-light-leaf-rain learns

To teach the spirit to rejoice.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don September 15th, 2009

One challenge to the argument from desire (see the post of 9/14/09) is people who deny having any unsatisfiable desires. One person I read admitted that certain desires of his had never been satisfied perfectly, but maintained that they could be in theory, or that the satisfactions he could find in this life were good enough. How does one respond to this line? It’s rather like trying to convince the dwarfs in The Last Battle that they aren’t in a stable!

One conclusion might be that the argument from desire just doesn’t work with a certain type of person. Some of us are just too emotionally undeveloped–or jaded–to be susceptible to it. But I would suggest that we make a mistake by taking such people’s statements at face value. Solomon tells us that “God has set eternity in their hearts.” Either Scripture is wrong or the denial of transcendant desire is a smokescreen, a defense mechanism to protect dwarfish atheists from reality.

A person who is still human is not in fact satisfied by the temporal and physical, however hard he tries to convince himself that he is. But you probably can’t argue him out of his position. You can only try to arouse the desire, to fan it to the point where he cannot ignore it any more. And the best way to do that might be to talk about the foretastes of fulfillment we have already been granted in Christ, or just to live a life of transcendant openness to Joy before him.

If you can get him to read Thomas Traherne’s Five Centuries of Meditations, it wouldn’t hurt. “Things unknown have a secret influence on the soul, and like the center of the earth unseen violently attract it. We love we know not what, and therefore everything allures us. . . . Do you not feel yourself drawn by the expectation of some Great Thing? . . . You never enjoy the world aright till you see how a [grain of] sand exhibiteth the wisdom and power of God. . . . You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars. . . . Infinite wants satisfied produce infinite joys. . . . You must want like a God that you may be satisfied like God. Were you not made in his image?”

Lewis learned the argument from desire from Augustine’s Trinity-shaped vacuum and his heart that was “restless until it rest in Thee,” as developed by  writers like Traherne and MacDonald. It will have a certain logical cogency–which Victor Reppert well analyzes (http://dangerouside a.blogspot. com/2006/ 09/bayesian- argument- from-desire. html)
–to those in whom Desire has been sufficiently aroused. The best service those earlier writers–and Lewis himself–may do us is to fan that flame. In it, let us burn.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don September 14th, 2009

One of C. S. Lewis’s many interesting contributions to Christian Apologetics is the “Argument from Desire,” which appears in Mere Christianity.  Nature does not create desires that have no fulfillment.  A duck wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water.  People get hungry; well, there is such a thing as food.  So if I find myself with desires that nothing in this world can fulfill, then I must have been made for another world.

Is this argument valid?  Maybe.  My hunger does not prove that I will get any bread, or that any given loaf exists; but it does prove I was designed to need nourishment.  John Beversluis contends that the argument fails as a syllogistic proof and refuses to consider it as anything else.  I’m not sure he is right on either count, but I’m pretty sure he’s wrong on the latter.   

There are more conclusive proofs for the existence of God than the Argument from Desire; but I do think that the argument has value. It points to a critical difference between human beings and other animals. A cat which is full and warm is perfectly contented. It just curls up and goes to sleep. A human being is mighty ill at ease if he is not full and warm, but when he has satisfied those desires he will pretty soon start asking, “Is that all there is? What’s next?”

I think we can say at minimum that the existence of beings who cannot ever be completely contented by the fulfillment of their physical wants is consistent with Christian Theism and less consistent with Naturalism. By itself it might not be a “proof” in any rigorous sense, but it is an important indicator and helps to confirm the conclusion we are led to by the cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments, by Lewis’s Argument from Reason, and by the historical evidence for the Resurrection of Christ.

One of Lewis’s forerunners in the Theology of Desire, George Herbert, described the human condition well in his poem “The Pulley.” The Argument from Desire in Mere Christianity can at least serve to focus our attention on the reality Herbert describes:

When God at first made Man,
Having a glasse of blessings standing by,
“Let us,” said he, “poure on him all we can;
Let the world’s riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.”

So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flowed, then wisedome, honour, pleasure.
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay.

“For If I should,” said he,
“Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature;
So both would losers be.”

“Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness.
Let him be rich and wearie, that at least
If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse
May tosse him to my breast.”

If like Lewis we examine our own history of desires and their fulfillment or lack thereof, I believe we will find that the results are consistent with Herbert’s perspective, and are less well explained by Naturalism. The Argument from Desire may not be a proof, then, but it is an indicator and a confirmation.

Longing but not (yet) satisfied,

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don September 12th, 2009

LXXX 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.” 

One of the mysteries of Nature that holds endless fascination for me is the water cycle: from springs to rivers to lakes or the sea, from there by evaporation back to the sky to fall as rain and soak into the ground and bubble up in the springs again and start all over.  It is not only a condition of biological life but a picture of life and exchange.  I will come back to it time and time again.  Here the playfulness of something so profound was what caught my attention.

A Question

Ask the Sage if he can tell

Why the water in the well

Bubbles up so merrily.

If he speaks about the chain

Of Sea and Sun and falling Rain,

And seeping Rocks, then verily

I swear he only tells but half.

“At what, then, does the water laugh?”

I ask him still, contrarily.

There must be something in its joys

Not covered by such critical toys

(I speculate but warily)

As the Pathetic Fallacy.

And if our sage were Pallas, she

Could surely say, summarily,

The thing the Moderns cannot tell

About the water in the well

Bubbling up so merrily.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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Don September 11th, 2009

LXXIX 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 morning in question was May 13, 1978, in case anyone is keeping track.

As Fresh as May Morning

I find myself increasingly in favor of this weather,

Glad that there should be such things as billowing pecan trees,

That every leaf should wildly dance with the wind in gay abandon

While the dark and somber pine trees pretend to take no notice

But the bright, elfin sun-beams dart about and take in everything,

Especially the diamonds bestowed upon the grass

By the largesse of the thunderstorm that lately rumbled past.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

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