It seems to me that if the art is going to have an inexhaustible point for existing, then rather than being an adornment in any of its aspects, the best art has to be essential in its entirety. And so it is a condescending view of any art that seeks to subject it to what Cleanth Brooks called the Heresy of Paraphrase. You can’t reduce a poem to a proposition. You can’t explain a piece of music. You can’t encapsulate a painting. You can’t state a sculpture in a statement. What you can do is direct the appreciation; but if you do it rightly you send the person appreciating into the work of art itself in such a way that they see how essential it is in itself as it is without separating form and content. You can say what a poem is about, and how, but only so that the reading of the actual poem becomes complete, not to say something else beside the words of the poem. You can make analogies about the proper satisfactions in the development of a piece of music, but only with a view to hearing the satisfactions in the music itself. You can raise questions about the elements of a painting, its composition, but only so that in the end there is only an understanding gaze. You can remind somebody about all the things about physical presences we have the tendency deliberately to forget when considering art when that person stands before a sculpture, but only so that in the end what is wished for is the sculpture in one’s presence.

Now this is the most satisfying way to think of art that I can think of, the most consequential. And I think this is the highest standard, too, when it comes to what it exacts from the artist. It seems to me it ought to be a point of appreciating good art to cultivate in oneself the habit of this kind of attention.

Dvorjak’s 7th Symphony
Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto
Sibelius, the Violin Concerto
Brahms, The Dutch Choral Piece of some magnitude
The Mozart Violin Concertos
The Beethoven String Quartets

I think I have all the rest.

Once you get past the silliness of the introduction and the thing gets going and you hear Bradbury talking, this is full of good things.

Now the tangle and thicket emerge from out of the forest. Now the trees stand stark and more like bones. We tend toward the muted colors of November as the color fades and becomes uniform—all grey and brown. Now also the cold and with it the suggestion of what is stiff and frozen and grotesque. One thinks of the iron fence set in old, discolored concrete enclosing the graveyards, the leaves scattered over the somber lawns and gathered under the tombstones. What words are Mausoleum, Tomb, and Graveyard if not words full of the cold rains and bleak winds that come a harbinger of November? Perhaps they are November, these words. There is something about the grave to it all in this time of the year when the sun is not shining, the mood of and unearthly earth, the mood of that mournful celebration: Hallowe’en.

The skies on an evening a few days ago were grey, the clouds were rippled and peculiar with an unreal look that also reminded me that the season of strange things is upon us. The ripples were like ripples on a pond, only with no brightness but grey-blue and white with a pale light. Strange like the strangeness that goes into Hallowe’en. The sky looked all unreal and close. The mood of me is for it. Let the snow flurry and the leaves rattle and houses stand empty under the moon.

It is the mood of Gormenghast and also of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. The mood in which it is possible to imagine the vale of Morgul, just think of that. What kind of a story would The Lord of the Rings be without that awful passage through the vale of Morgul? Who delights in that awful vale or wishes to linger? But who would love the story so well without that moment, and without such moments? What kind of story would it be without the lord of the rings, the worst of all its creatures, for that matter?

Death is not natural though it is a part of our turning seasons and even makes them. People might turn away from the mood of late fall when things become desolate because they have no fondness for desolation. But that is not to be fond of life, it seems to me. Some are against Hallowe’en on the grounds that it is a celebration of ugliness. I find the tangle and thicket rich in strangeness, the starkness of the trees and the grey clouds have something about them that is strange but not entirely ugly, and there is something about it all that I enjoy. Is it is an essential ugliness that I enjoy?

Is there a pleasure that is the pleasure in the effect of a thing rather than in the thing itself? A pleasure of consciousness that is the pleasure of a mood? Is there a pleasure in solemnity, in the sobriety that decay ought to elicit? I think there is. It has to do with the rightness of things, and a season in which the wrongness of things is all apparent at least reminds us of that sense of the rightness of things: it is a pleasure of consciousness.

Two possible doors of thought now suggest themselves to me. One is to explore whether in this present world and during this present evil age we can have any rightness which is not a sort of mirror rightness reflected in the mirror of our wrongnesses. It appeals to me for two reasons: one, it adds to the explanation of the magic of mirrors, with which George MacDonald seems to have left me afflicted—we look through mirrors at other worlds and when we do this we long for a better world; this would explain something of why it is a better world and why life through the mirror always exerts a fascination. The second reason for the appeal of this explanation of wrongness as a mirror is that I believe in the pervasive taintedness of all things. We cannot really imagine beauty without sadness, it seems to me (perhaps I’m missing something there. I’m going of an observation by E.A. Poe whom I do not consider a reliable chap. That only makes one cautious though, he could have been right nevertheless in some or many of his observations. I would feel better about it if I had the observations of a more reliable observers than just Mr. Poe and myself). I am ready to believe that we cannot imagine what something that is all good and without any taint of loss is like. I doubt such things are things we really have any power to desire but in general and abstract terms—and desire wants concrete particulars for objects.

The second door of thought, and the one through which I will proceed, is that which wonders if there is something in the things themselves that is interesting for its own sake. For all that it is interesting to think of wrongness as a mirror for rightness, there is a sense in which it eludes the real incrimination of my object of delight by a sort of refraction. Perhaps not a refraction, perhaps an unscrupulous substitution. It isn’t really the refining of the desire, or better—and to stick to our optics—a focusing into the real object of desire. Desire may work obliquely, but does it rise above the level of a liking to the level of a real and unmitigated delight? I suppose closing the door even on that is not something I am inclined to do. However, I do want to enter another door because is suggested itself to me, the way these magical doors do, as a possibility. So, if the tangle and thicket of a dying year are in some sense ugly and for all that interesting in and of themselves, what is it really that is so compelling about these things, this mood? I think it could be called strangeness. Strangeness, after all, is a thing with many degrees. And strangeness may be ugly, but it is not ugliness itself.

That is why I think the mood of the year and the celebration of Hallowe’en does not have to be the mood and celebration of ugliness, but of strangeness. Strangeness is necessary because in a world in which all things are apparent there can be no wonder. The strange and the ugly may be closely related, and they may certainly be confused. But the starkness of death, the crooked outlines of the limbs of trees that emerge, the purposeless tangles in the underbrush, the eeriness of it all is more strange than it is ugly. And that is the mood of Hallowe’en.

In December we celebrate something with as much ugliness when the disturbing dying of the autumn is put to final rest, the tangle and thicket come under the snow; the snow tames things for us, it softens oulines and we string lights and make good cheer; and though there is ugliness to it also, all the ugly becomes that most familiar of all ugly things and welcome: the truly homely.

Sometimes the best teachers are those who have not mastered what they teach, but are on the way toward mastery. They are full of how the road is and even if they are not always precise or are not experienced in instruction, they can inspire and instruct by gesture in ways that are difficult for someone who already went that way long ago and only runs along that road by observing other people’s minds can. I only say sometimes, not always.

I have observed that most times the best teachers for most people are not those who master the thing easily. Those who did not struggle with math, for example, are bad at explaining and sympathizing enough to be useful instructors to the average person who does. Not always, but usually. But I don’t want to make this point so much as I want to flip the notion around to talk about the learning of a thing.

I don’t know how common the notion is that perfection ought to be achieved in stages and that while it is the goal for which all things must aim, it has to be achieved in its own time. It is a lesson I’ve been learning over the past few years. Some take that lesson to mean that perfection ought not to be the aim of anything we do. That is a capitulation and the result is mediocrity at best. But some think that admitting any great distance of time between the present and the achievement of the goal is to loose sight of the goal. And this also is wrong. This is part of what TS Eliot was saying about growing the grass and raising the sheep, etc. The goal is not growing grass or raising sheep, but you have to take the time to do those things if you want to achieve the distant goal. The better the thing you aim at, the more distant it is likely to be.

Anything worthwhile has to be this way. It has to involve a long road toward the achievement of the goal. You can’t read the biographies of composers or writers or artists without getting the idea. Even when you have a genius you understand that such a person is a genius precisely because he comes such a long way in such a short time. It does not mean the distance has decreased, it means that person can go at a really quick rate.

If this is true of anything worthwhile, then it is true of writing poetry. We fail to appreciate this when we clamor after the usable finished product in anybody who starts out. We fail to appreciate this when we present as finished products the things we produce when we are starting out—unless we are making the claim to be a genius. What this implies is that while you may have a clear idea of what it is you want to produce finally, you aim at it by first learning to master the little parts that are necessary, then growing of the grass, then raising of the sheep.

What Alana has written might or might not be useful as a finished and polished work—that is something for a better judge to say. There is a way in which a person doesn’t even aim at that when they make something that is; she probably was not aiming at that but simply trying to express something for herself and see how well it turned out; and whatever she was aiming at does not matter here. What she has written is rather free and spontaneous. It is metrical but irregularly so. It has rhymes occasional and bright, but not a rhyme scheme. It has no pattern for the stanzas or much in the way of formal constraint.

One of the problems that I have had and I notice people have who try to start out very formally with all the meter and traditional poetic form etc., is that the result ends up lacking any feeling, any warmth of emotion. The constraint stultifies the real poetry the thing might have if there was any to begin with. That just goes to show how hard it is to discipline feeling by the proper ordering of form. It may also show how little knowledge of the way in which form orders and disciplines feeling the person writing has. I think it is actually both mingled that accounts for the productions we produce.

One of the great things about being spontaneous is that the feeling takes the lead and has a better chance of expression. Naturally one of the disadvantages is the lack of discipline or coherence you get. One of the reasons TS Eliot writes t The Wasteland the way he does is that he wants to suggest the incoherence of disintegration.

I am not of the school (if it is a school) that believes that poetry must all be formal any more than is Mr TS Eliot. I am of the school that believes there ought to be a clarity to the feeling expressed and that form, when it is properly used, clarifies things: that feeling must be ordered. But poetry is more than the dogged arranging of your words into a consistent meter and rhyme. It has to have a clarity of mood and a depth of feeling. The meter and rhyme have to serve a discernible purpose in the telling of your poetry or they are simply a formal dress that you put on for no apparent formal purpose like dressing up to take out the trash or go to the gym to work out.

I say that because when I commend Alana’s poem here, I can hear people complaining about the lack of form. What I want you to notice is that her minimal formal constraint has allowed her a depth of expression and feeling that she might not have discovered otherwise. If you go the way she has in this poem, you are more likely to stumble upon apt wordings, you can change the meter to something you feel better corresponds to the words and feeling of what you are saying. All this explores, and it is by means of this exploring that you can learn to move toward something more disciplined if you want, or discover that what you have to say is better said in this way.

Revision, after all, can be endless.

Revision, unfortunately, can be endless.

You notice that Alana gives us warning of her dissatisfaction in the title. There is an uncertainty about the whole thing even in the uncertainty of what exactly the tittle applies to. I took it to mean she was experimenting with this. I might be wrong. I also took it to mean she wanted suggestions and I turned out to be right. I have experimented in this way myself and I found that what I achieved surprised me in the brightness of the expression and disappointed me in the coherency of its meaning. But in her case she has a coherent meaning. (If you look at her comments, though, she still has doubts—I would say she just needs to get away from the poem for a while and come back to it later.)

I think the mood of it, of expression over formal order, comes through right away in these two happy lines:

in wordless prayers I pray
toward formless forms and heatless burnings

There isn’t a symmetrical arrangement of the three things. Not wordless words to match the formless forms, but wordless prayers which pray, then formless forms, which is similar but not identical in structure, and then another variation in which the similarity, while pretty obvious, is a bit more subtle: heartless burnings. The reader has to supply the idea that a heart naturally burns. Poetry, it seems to me, is most effective when the most effort can be drawn out of the reader. This is risky because one can assume too much of readers, or fail to express oneself in ways sufficiently common. But when it works, it is one of the most satisfying things and a large part of the pleasure of understanding poetry.

These lines are also instructive for what the poem as a whole achieves, why it might be formless but yearning toward form. If you think this way, then when you come to those last two words, ‘heartless burnings,’ you are flipped around a bit. There is a recognition of the passionlessness that results from the disorder of anarchy. There is a paradox buried away in this, in the expression of the poem itself, and toward which Alana is gesturing all throughout; and paradox, as Cleanth Brooks would have us know, is what the language of poetry is.

If you’ve been reading previous versions (she has been updating the thing at least twice since it originally went up and there is no telling if it will not happen again), you will see that she is not too sure about things because she has to feel her way into it and mistrusts her feeling—at least, that’s the way I read it. That is good. What is also good is being bold enough to try and still put it up for public view. What I said starting out about going in stages toward the goal was not intended to label Alana a mediocrity. (I think this poem is very good, better than anything I’ve done, though that’s not saying much, and better than a lot of the contemporary stuff I’ve been reading.) But it was intended to point out that even though this work might have no place in any venue we or she can think of (a book of poetry or a magazine that includes poetry would be a good venue for it, though), or perhaps, better, because it was not written with a final place of public display in mind but rather as an attempt at something, it is not therefore something to be dismissed.

Even if she is dissatisfied with the ending and after putting it away and getting it out again still has no final satisfaction in how it turns out, it is an achievement. One of the things we all need to do, even if it is only for the sake of appreciating poetry better, is to write a bunch of poems we will never show to anybody else. Another of the things we ought to do, if we want to write poetry for public use, is to put the poetry about which we might be doubtful and which achieves only a secondary, modest goal into a place where it is vulnerable to critical inspection. A third thing that ought to be done, is to experiment and study things we might have to give up on eventually, or at least postpone till later. If Alana looks at this poem (and really any poem) as a step along the way, then she has already got a lot out of it even if it is never finished to hers or anybody else’s satisfaction.

The important thing is not to reach the goal soon, and perhaps never in this life to reach the goal, but to move in that direction. After all, we Christians have more time to work with than just this life. If we are to bring glory to the Lord forever, these things we are learning we are not really learning for this life. Even if we leave behind one worthwhile hymn for the saints to use in worship to God for as long as this world remains, it is nothing compared to the time any of our works in that eternal state shall have (besides which there is the glaringly obvious and often ignored fact that we already have more good hymns than we can or do use and really don’t need more). And I wonder if anything we have presently will come through there, at least not without some transformation. Believe me, when you have a sanctified critical capacity to appreciate poetry, you may not want to see anything you have ever written coming through.

Having cultivated a little our abilities here, there they can be used with all the consequence and weight of glory and with a satisfying fulness of sanctification there. But cultivate here. Be unambitiously ambitious, be unpretentious but clear sighted. Look at the clarity of feeling that Alana’s untitled poem has and work toward clear expressions (contained and extravagant) of the heart such as this:

Your mother shall be mine;
I’ll listen at her knee.
I’ll taste your bread and wine.
Oh plant me as a willow tree,
And in your temple make me sprout:
And I shall never more go out.

And call it a very poor effort . . . if you must.

There is a recording of Albinoni’s Violin and Oboe concertos that has become the sound of my vigils more than anything else. Concertos, op. 9.

It is time for more Schubert in my life. And, curiously, I listened on a whim to Rachmaninoff and found I enjoyed him. I had been living most of my life thinking I disliked him. When I found a CD at the library with Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff I got it thinking it would be the sort of noise, like lesser baroque composers and Johann Strauss, one can use to fill the night in which one doesn’t exactly pay attention. (Not that I mind what I listen to when I can’t exactly pay attention; it seeps in and down and fill all spaces and becomes familiar and charming whether one pays attention to it or not. When one is as ignorant as I am, and as full of musical ineptitudes, familiarity is probably the best things one can strive for.) And I found I was very familiar with Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto even though I do not remember ever desiring to listen him and never getting a recording. I must have heard it enough on the radio. I think I used to think it was somehow Ravel. You know, I ought to go on a long Piano Concerto kick with my long evenings at work.

I mentioned Johann Strauss. I got The Bat hoping it would be good noise to work with and I found the spoken German too irritating to bear.

I have also found when I get really tired there is nothing like some loud Bach organ over the headphones, clear as sunlight, deep as midnight, mysterious as the remotest of the stars.

Just think, if the economy were not creating headlines all we’d have right now would be this awfully boring campaign with two anemic candidates that don’t look any more interesting than the other characters Washington has to offer nowadays.

So Iceland is toast. I heard that instead of international business they might have to fall back on fishing and other such things. I’m thinking that would be more interesting than what you have now. You ought to be able to travel to Iceland pretty cheap in the near future. I’m hoping that more places will become that way, that there will be a general cheapness brought in by an era of austerity—it is probably too good to wish for. It seems to me that everybody is running around frantic to avoid any austerity or inconvenience and nobody seems to think it might be a good way to be. The fewer the luxuries and amenities you can afford, the more you enjoy them. Isn’t it time to stop with measures that just postpone the time of reckoning and the unreserved endorsement of material prosperity?

The sun will still shine, the grass will grow, the seasons will continue, there will be interesting places and perhaps even more crime and more criminals. The criminal classes exert an enduring fascination, you know. And there are enough books in circulation to keep us all reading for a long time. It is probably too much to hope that we’ll get more trains and more boats and less airplanes, but I kind of hope we’ll get more trains and boats and less airplanes. Foreign travel, I hope, will become more difficult and more exotic and places more particularly their own. As I pointed out to my wife, economic hardship will probably mean that restaurants like Denny’s will do better than the places where you get herbs wrapped in a flour tortilla on a square plate (there’s nothing more pointless than art food, especially the stuff they lob at the middle classes).

Before it’s over, we could all be drinking Folgers, and that, I think would be an interesting thing to observe.

John Wesley at one point in his journal notes that the people, his followers, are spending too much money on tea and some of them can’t really afford it. So they decide to do without it and he joins in. He says he spent two or three days pretty drowsy and then earnestly besought the Lord and was delivered from the drowsiness and felt all right.

This morning we agreed to have me work a half day and then come in tonight to work the first overnight shift. So I had had a cup of tea and then after that, no more. I don’t usually drink coffee too much at work as they use your average coffee pot and they use your less than average Caribou coffee and they don’t really wash the pots properly. That was why I was drinking tea in the morning, which on most mornings I do.

I refrained from the second cup and of course left before the green tea at noon and was feeling sleepy, but not too much. I walked around at the library and then came home and ate some pie and tried to sleep. I read quite a bit, slept a little and so on all the afternoon till about six when I slept some.

No headaches, not even a greater than usual longing to sleep, very much. But I was looking forward to the cup of coffee now here in attendance. In addition, on my way I might see if I can borrow some mate from the old girl. Mate is something they drink in the southern parts of South America. I tried it for a while here but the jolt is enormous—like when I drink too much coffee. But for an overnight shift—might be just the thing.

Also bought me four kinds of ramen to see if that holds any attractions.