The Master's Artist

A Childlike 2012

As I looked back on the movies and books I really enjoyed this year I noticed a common theme: they were made for children and young adults. From the final Harry Potter movie to The Muppets to The Hunger Games, these all had children included as part of the intended audience.

While I may have enjoyed young adult films and fiction this year, I must confess that my own writing and art isn't always the most accessible. Ever the English major, I sometimes relish a bit too much in big words and obtuse phrases. Sometimes the theme of a work can't be accessed if the language and phrasing is distracting. What makes The Hunger Games such an amazing series is that it is able to deal with harsh dystopian themes in a way young adults can relate to.

As I move into the new year, I am resolved to be more genuine and accessible in my art. As much as I would love to emulate the dense poetry, arthouse cinema or verbose fiction I often read, I think it will be an intriguing experiment next year to ratchet down the ambiguity and obtuseness next year and see how I can push themes, metaphors and imagery to the forefront.

Thomas Turner is the Senior Editor & Publisher of GENERATE Magazine and an adjunct lecturer at Nyack College.

Words like Cut Jewels

A.E. Housman (1859-1936) achieved poetic fame in 1896 with the publication of 63 poems in a volume entitled A Shropshire Lad. His next volume of poetry, Last Poems, was published in 1922. Two additional posthumous collections were published by his brother Laurence. 

His career didn’t start on an auspicious note. He failed to graduate with honors from Oxford, which denied an immediate academic career. And so he trained for the Civil Service, passing the examination and becoming a minor clerk in the U.K. Patent office from 1882 to 1892. 

But during these years he maintained his love for classical scholarship. He continued his studies in his spare time and published articles in scholarly journals. In 1892 he became a professor of Latin at University College, London; in 1911 he joined the faculty at Cambridge.

 His poetic output, while comparatively small, has an enormous impact, influencing two generations of poets and critics on both sides of the Atlantic, including Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wilfred Owen, T.S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, among others. 

By the time I was in high school, Housman was enshrined in the literary canon, firmly placed in the Late Victorian/Edwardian section of textbooks and anthologies. It was in such a high school textbook that I first met his poetry, with a poem taken from A Shropshire Lad: 

To an Athlete Dying Young

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high. 

To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town. 

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose. 

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut.
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears: 

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man. 

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup. 

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s. 

Many of Housman’s poems reflect the influence or inspiration of Scottish ballads, songs and even aphorisms. He wrote about love, both requited and unrequited; soldiers (one can see the echoes of Housman in the World War I poets like Owen and Rupert Brooke; homesickness; and his love of Shropshire. 

And he wrote about memory and death. 

His poems are carefully cut and chiseled, honed and polished like fine jewels, They are full of what we might call “poetic lines,” memorable words and phrases and ideas that reflect the beauty of the language and a rather intense emotion in the poet. 

 

Poem 54 (from A Shropshire Lad) 

With rue my heart is laden
   For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
   And many a lightfoot lad. 

By brooks too broad for leaping
   The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
   In fields where roses fade.

Trees of Life

While watching Terrance Malick's film The Tree of Life one has time to wonder about the world, a rare feat for a movie in this day and age. There is ephemeral light pulsing from the screen like metallic paint on a canvas. In Hopkins-like beauty and grandeur, as one watches intently, patiently, the anxiety that comes with following the action and plot found in so many films fades, and the stillness beckons us to enter the deeper story of all creation.

In the stillness of the film, the vibrations of creation abound. The light shines in the darkness. It never goes away. It is in the vacuum, searching, caressing, hoping that we would but look up to the heavens "where God lives" and change our ways.

But we are shadows. Fallen. We are of dust, of death, of decay.

Watching the film, in this meditative state, I felt convicted. It was becoming confessional. I felt the rhythm of Eliot's "Choruses on the Rock" being projected onto the screen, the images matching the words:

O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.

The father (with a little "f") in the story, Brad Pitt's character, toils endlessly to amass some sort of wealth or prestige, trying to grow his job and his patents like Adam working out his many days with the slow toil against the ground, the weed and the thorn. He fails.

And he begins to fail his kids, all boys. They catch on. The oldest gravitates toward the coiled rage of his father, and it weighs on him. It begins to control him. He paraphrases Paul's exasperation at his own sinfulness. He begins to fight the darkness in his soul. He lusts after the musical talents of the youngest boy. Could they be Cain and Abel?

As the tension builds creation stops swirling around them. The cosmic picture fades. This family becomes the first family. As if all the world rests on one family. As if all the world leads up to one moment, one action, one desire, one sin. How could a God of love lead us to this point of despair? Where has he gone?

In the end we must have faith. That is the radical message of the movie. We must have faith. There are no easy answers. During this Advent season, what do we have but faith? How could a child be God? How could any one grow up amongst the darkness of this world and remain sinless? This leads us to the precipices of understanding, and we rely only on our faith. We must believe the light will overcome the darkness.

This is why we put lights on our Christmas trees. It is a symbol to us, that one day the tree will never die, the flower never fade, the light always shine brilliantly. It points to Christ, our tree of life, the human who will never die, and gives this immortality to us.

I cannot help but think of Eliot's "Choruses from the Rock" again, and his explication of our purpose, and our right desire, to fight the shadows, and participate in the light of Christ. It is the same call for everyone, for it is the deep roots of the gospel. It is the story of all creation, calling to us, and especially to artists:

The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
Out of the meaningless practical shapes of all that is living or lifeless
Joined with the artist's eye, new life, new form, new colour.
Out of the sea of sound the life of music,
Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal imprecisions,
Approximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken the place of thoughts and feelings,
There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.
The work of creation is never without travail
Light
Light
The visible reminder of Invisible Light.
O Light Invisible, we praise Thee!
Too bright for mortal vision.
We see the light but see not whence it comes.
O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!

May we all become visible reminders of the invisible Light.

Thomas Turner is the Senior Editor & Publisher of GENERATE Magazine and an adjunct lecturer at Nyack College.

A Poem for Christmas

The Christmas season evokes a variety of feelings and emotions – families gathered together, memories of past holiday celebrations, the most spectacular Christmas gift you ever received (including a Red Ryder B.B. air rifle), snow and roaring fires in the hearth. The feelings and emotions aren’t limited to the good and the nostalgic; there are also the inevitable disappointments, the first Christmas without a loved one, the crises, family discord and bitterness. 

With all the possible emotions, it’s no surprise that there is no shortage of poems to read for Christmas, poems covering just about everything imaginable. I find it fascinating to see who wrote Christmas poems. The one we may be most familiar with – “The Visit of St. Nicholas,” commonly known as “The Night Before Christmas” – was first published anonymously in 1823 and only later attributed to Clement Moore (some dispute that). 

But there are many others, less famous than that but written by famous and well known writers – Tennyson, Swinburne, Kipling, Longfellow, Vachel Lindsay, Anne Sexton, Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Eugene Field, Goethe, Dylan Thomas, Anne Bronte, John Betjeman, Hilaire Belloc, former US poet laureate Donald Hall and William Morris, to name a few. They write about snow, Christmas trees, Christmas pudding, the Christmas goose, the weather, Christmas carols, Christmas music, Christmas love, wealth, poverty, Christmas ghosts, Christmas bells, Christmas pageants and plays and visions and dances, Christmas morning and even celebrating Christmas in India (no surprise here – that was Kipling). 

A favorite Christmas poem of mine is by a favorite writer of mine, Gilbert Keith (G.K.) Chesterton. Chesterton (1874-1936) was likely the most productive writer of his time, if not all times. He wrote novels, essays, newspaper and magazine articles, biographies (including ones of Charles Dickens and Francis of Assisi that are still read and admired), broadsides and apologetics. A large man physically, he was larger than life in virtually every field he involved himself in. 

Chesterton’s writing was known both for what it said and how he said it. He was an original, and often turned questions and conventional “wisdom” on their heads (i.e., “The man who believes in nothing will believe anything”). His wit could be razor sharp, and often was. But it was usually tempered by a profound sense of compassion. 

His arresting way of looking at things, and his compassion and wonder, can be found in his poem “The House of Christmas,” which takes us to the place where “God was homeless and all men are at home.” 

The House of Christmas by G. K. Chesterton 

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

Advent Art

A profound statement: life isn't always easy.

I'll pause a moment to let that sink in.

We may endure hardships, deaths, illnesses, unpaid bills, unemployment, disappointed expectations. We may feel stuck, hopeless, and hapless. This fuzzy darkness sneaks into our periphery vision.

So we turn to art--to books, movies, TV, paintings, sculpture, theater, music. Bad art gives us merely an escape, or worse, a pornographic fantasy that leaves us empty and wanting more, more money, more house, more success, more romance.

But, ah, art at its best, this art engenders understanding, helps us work through mysteries, gives hope in the injustices. I think of Wally Lamb's The Hour I First Believed wrestling alongside us with violence and injustice--the horror of school shootings, the randomness of Katrina, the monsters and victims in us all. And in the book, the protagonist turns to Picasso's Guernica to work out the place of God in such a terrible world. I think of the poetry of Habbakuk: how long, O Lord? And his shock at the Lord's answer.

I think of Quick Lamb in Cloudstreet who, by entering into the suffering, turns it into dancing. I think of the hope Pearly finds in the midst of grief in The Living End, of the forgiveness in Rembrandt's Prodigal Son, of the victory in Mahler's Resurrection Symphony.

Perhaps art mimics Christianity in this way. Jesus offers not a way of escape from the hardship but a hope through it, knowing that this is not the end. He has the final victory. He will usher in peace on earth, goodwill toward men.

We exist in Advent, a time of waiting, for the fullness of the Messiah. And we, with a peace that transcends all understanding, work for his kingdom of peace and justice, mourning with the hurting, loving the unloveable, offering God's hope to the suffering.

Art can show us this advent season and this final redemption, that we may endure and then, in the power of the Holy Spirit, grasp joy, hope, and contentment.

Heather A. Goodman prays that her short stories and novels bring this sort of comfort to others so that rather than escaping life, they may face it and praise God.

Believe

It's a struggle, this believing God.

If I follow Him, I must believe Him, but so often I wander off like my husband does in Walmart. I'll be talking away and look back and a stranger is laughing at me.  Up and down the aisles I go, wondering if I'd been talking so much that I hadn't heard him say he was going somewhere else, wondering if I missed his cue that he was turning?  Sometimes it's me sometimes it's him, but without fail, it happens every time we go to the store.

 Following God is not easy.

It's anything but. The walking through the valley of the shadow of death is a little tougher than winding around the produce aisle refraining from taking pictures for The People of Walmart site.  The rejoicing in our suffering? Is there anything harder?

In my Visual Prayers, I'm often drawn to repeat a concept over and over. The colors, the tree, the word. I'm offering a visual sacrifice of Thanksgiving. Sometimes there are not prayer words that express the longing in my heart, the ache I have to obey, to just simply obey instead of offering a sacrifice. Again.

I suppose we're all prone to wander. I hope that, under the Shepherd's watch, we stay within within His voice.

"I believe. Help me in my unbelief!"

 * * *

michelle pendergrass is trying so hard to obey and believe.

Giving Art

Happy December, everyone! Have you decked the halls yet? Trimmed the tree? Crammed activity into every inch of your calendar? Maxed out your credit cards? 'Tis the season!

For most people. But some of us are searching for a better way. You don't have to wander far in the bloggerhood to find lots of chatter about how to make Christmas meaningful without breaking the bank. More and more Christians are trying to escape the frenzy and find balance -- to keep the focus on Christ, enjoy the good, ditch the empty, and love our beloveds well.

In that spirit, here are a few ways you can give the gift of art.