Cramer Photo (www.cramerphoto.com)

I wanted to travel to Pennsylvania to be with my family this Christmas. My family always swaddles the holiday thick with traditions, and I missed those. On Christmas Eve, my mom crushes candy canes for homemade peppermint stick ice cream. That night, my dad sometimes builds a fire on the far side of their pond. The family creaks through frosty grass and takes seats around the fire, reading Luke’s gospel and imagining what it would have been like to “keep watch over… flocks at night.”  They attempt “Away in a Manger,” starting too low, their voices by the end sounding like chairs rasping across a floor. On Christmas morning, they always have cinnamon rolls and coffee while opening stocking stuffers. They open presents, and then eat waffles.

I wanted to be in Florida with my in-laws for the new year, which is tradition, too. This year, we had a new niece down there we hadn’t met yet. We kept browsing for cheap tickets.

I have spent several Christmases marooned in Chicago. This year, with gas prices and unemployment both so high, I suspect that more people were separated from their families over the holidays.  Indeed, Laura Donovan wrote about this trend in her article “A Very Skype-y Thanksgiving.” Some probably considered themselves plucked from the fires of dysfunction.  Googling “not going home for the holidays,” an abundance of articles about surviving holidays at home cropped up. Others no doubt felt exiled and, even as adults, a tad homesick. It still just feels like Christmas is where Mom is. There’s no way around it.

How can we exiles handle the distance?

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, I spent a lot of time Grinching. I didn’t buy a Christmas tree. Not even an artificial or Charlie Brown tree. No wreaths or greenery or cranberry popcorn chains. No sharp fir smell in our apartment. No special candles or Advent calendars. No Christmas music. This was partly because I’m a teacher and it was the end-of-semester crunch. But also, it was a classic disappointment pirouette: one begins the pirouette by caring deeply, and then feels a slight turn when disappointment hits, and then concludes the circle by resenting the very thing once held so dear. To wit: “I would love to be home for Christmas,” “I can’t go home,” “Christmas is lame.”

Eventually, I began to take heart, though. Christmas, I realized, isn’t primarily about family. Christmas is a holiday in the root sense of the word.  Paraphrasing the OED here, the old English root, háligdæg, always meant consecrated day or religious festival, and the definition that meant “vacation” or “a day off” was always tied to the concept of the day’s holiness. The Immortal and Invisible becoming flesh and dwelling among us: this is what Christians consecrate on this day.

I began to realize that family togetherness can symbolize the incarnation for Christians. We reenact some aspects of the holy drama when we dwell with one another. Family togetherness is not the whole point of Christmas, so I could be of good cheer because of that, because it meant I could still consecrate the day in a whole and full-hearted way. Family togetherness is, however, a great symbol for Christ coming to his own, so enjoying and remembering family was still something I wished to pursue somehow.

Even though family togetherness–mingled voices, rumpled Christmas-morning hair, arms touching while sitting four on a couch–couldn’t happen on Christmas, I discovered a few ways to enjoy presence despite that.

If it was the incarnation that was really moving me to celebrate Christmas, I wanted to remember Christ’s birth in a way that involved both flesh and spirit.

First of all, I wanted to sing. “Music is about as physical as it gets,” Anne Lamott writes in Traveling Mercies. “Your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We’re walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it sometimes lets us meet in places we couldn’t get to any other way.” Music can use the body to bring about the mind and spirit’s change, so instead of Grinching, I went to our church’s Christmas service and belted out carols. I sang “Joy to the World” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” while cooking. I hummed along with Neil Young’s version of “What Child Is This?” on Christmas at the Ranch, one of the few Christmas albums we own.

I didn’t go out and buy a Christmas tree (I think in Chicago they cost about as much as my month’s rent), but I did inspire sense of sight and smell by lighting a Christmas candle, displaying Christmas cards, and arranging some ornaments on a bookshelf. It was enough to remind me of the season’s purpose, so it worked.

From this refocused core, I wanted to let my family know that I wished I could be with them. I called them and Skyped with them. I sent them some Orange-flavored coffee from Chicago’s own Orange restaurant and they drank some for Christmas breakfast. I gave them some homemade cranberry applesauce and it became a side-dish for their Christmas dinner. I like the idea that something of substance was there with them, something to sustain the flesh.

It also seemed to make sense that I would be present with the people who were here, either with other people who are in Chicago this Christmas, or just with my husband. For Christmas breakfast, we made crepes. For Christmas dinner, we created the best homemade pizzas imaginable. It was an unconventional Christmas dinner, but why not?  It’s my husband’s favorite meal, and making even classier varieties than usual made the day special.

I wanted to be in Pennsylvania for Christmas. I wanted to be in Florida for New Year’s Day. A few days before Christmas, my in-laws told us to go ahead and buy tickets, even if we couldn’t find a great deal. I got to hear my six-month old niece laugh, and all season long it felt good truly to be where I was, and truly to remember the presence of God, who has come so close.

Growing up, my family and I vacationed in an Upstate New York cabin. A lake spread out, cold and tranquil, just across a gravel road. Hiking trails looped through the woods, a nature center offered pamphlets and kayaks, and our neighbors let us borrow their canoe. Did I visit the nature center to learn about the flora and fauna? No. Did I water ski? Not unless wheedled into it. Did I hike trails? Borrow the canoe? Maybe once or twice. How did I amuse myself on our wonderfully nature-y vacations? I brought a stack of books, sat in the damp, dark cabin and read.

3. Richard Russo’s Empire Falls.

Why it’s good: One of the intriguing things about small-town life is that places have layers and layers of stories. If a visitor asks why a mom-and-pop store is sitting vacant, she may find it used to be the hub of the town, but the family suffered a tragedy, mom-and-pop split up, and another family tried to start a new store there but no one came. Richard Russo captures this layered aspect of small town life perfectly, setting much of Empire Falls in the Empire Grill, a diner that Miles Roby, a divorced man in his forties, wants to sell but keeps managing at the demand of Francine Whiting, who owns most of the town. The stories of those who frequent the diner spin out from the setting, leading to compelling character studies and page-turning action.

Why it’s even better in a cabin in the woods: No doubt the cabin is near some small town or other, and Russo will get you thinking about the stories that fill the diners, gas stations, schools, and taverns.

2. Alice Munro’s The Love of a Good Woman.

Why it’s good: Munro creates characters who live and breathe. In them, you may recognize parts of yourself or true, deep aspects of people you know. Munro lets characters develop slowly and richly and lets plots resolve in a measured and satisfying way, the way a simmering sauce will suddenly reach its best flavor. In this collection, the resolutions are still measured and satisfying, yet more jolting and revealing than usual, especially in “Rich as Stink,” “Save the Reaper,” and the title story.

Why it’s even better in a cabin in the woods: Munro sets many of these characters in small towns, forests, and vacation spots in Canada, and many developments happen specifically because characters are away from home. Also, since they are short stories, they are easy to read in one afternoon, and there are good stopping points in case someone cajoles you into water skiing.

1. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

Why it’s good: Not only is this a page-turner, but Truman Capote invented a genre while he was writing. Amazing.

Why it’s even better in a cabin in the woods: No doubt many folks dusted this off when the film Capote came out. It’s intensely disturbing that these crimes were random, springing from misinformation about the profit the murderers would reap. But the most terrifying thing about this nonfiction novel is its reminder that the safest, most unlikely place can become a setting for gruesome killings. If you haven’t read this in an isolated setting, this book hasn’t had its full effect.

So, here’s to an autumnof great books, a dash of nature, and safety and serenity the woods.

"What will it be like to live without our stuff, I wonder."

May 1, 2010.

In between grading a tower of research papers and jogging through Chicago parks, I begin to help my husband pack our stuff.  We’re not sure when we’ll see most of it again. We plan to live with my parents in Pennsylvania for at least a year. Into newspaper and bubble wrap go my favorite coffee mugs, our wedding pictures, and our eccentric decorations — like the Toucan Sam we keep on our windowsill and the cylindrical sculpture, something like a disfigured Tin Man, that my husband found on eBay by searching for “weird metal thing.”

What will it be like to live without our stuff, I wonder. My sister, who has been living with her stuff in storage for almost a year, says she doesn’t miss it at all.

Memorial Day Weekend, 2010.

The brown velour couch and love seat that were partly bought with our wedding money won’t fit up the stairs and through the narrow hallways of my parents’ house. It’d be a shame to put good couches like these into storage, though, so my dad initiates us into country life by strapping the couches to his backhoe and using the backhoe to lift the couches through our upstairs window. This actually works.

With couches, a coffee table, some bookshelves, a desk, and a few decorations, we create a living room in what used to be my sister’s bedroom. We have to turn sideways to get through the doorway because the arms of the couch and love seat almost touch each other.

My childhood bedroom becomes our bedroom. It’s not a bad little suite. We stow three-quarters of our stuff in my parents’ barn, attic, basement, and closets. My mom boxes some of her own kitchenware to clear pantry shelves for me. How did all of this fit into a one-bedroom Chicago apartment? How, in the scant years of living on our own and in three years of marriage, had we accumulated so much? Did we really need it all?

March 21, 2011.

My parents take a week-long trip overseas. Seizing the chance to entertain guests, we invite some new friends to dinner. I make a point to use our plates from the pantry, but as we’re sitting in my parents’ living room, I notice our friends looking up at the quilts and grapevine wreaths that adorn the walls, the warm colonial colors that characterize the curtains and furniture, and the history and Christian living books that line the shelves.

I’ve often made a game of trying to guess people’s interests by looking at their stuff. Our friends would know a lot about my parents’ interests from glancing around the living room, and they would learn more than most people know about how I was raised, but could they really get to know us without seeing the “weird metal thing” or having French Press coffee in one of my favorite mugs, or browsing our bookshelves?

Should this trouble me? Why can’t I meet a new friend in a brick-walled coffee shop and have her know me as well as if I invited her home? Or why wouldn’t it seem as bonding to invite that new friend to an unfurnished apartment, order pizza, and just talk? Is this just another way that consumerism has seeped into me, making me think that the way my accessories sculpt my surroundings offers the best means of knowing my true self?

Of course I am more than what I own. Of course one day what I own will be irrelevant. Of course there are people who, out of poverty, thrift, sacred vows, or minimalism, own only necessities. Those people often divulge more of their souls because their selves are what they are able to share.

But we are body as well as spirit, and a body likes a couch. If you are my friend or neighbor, I would like it to be my couch.

May 2011—August 2011.

I discover there’s a chance to return to Chicago to teach. Nearly simultaneously, a friend writes to say that they’ll be subletting their place for September. We decide to return to the city and sublet their place. We’ll leave our stuff in Pennsylvania — pretty much all that we don’t need to wear, listen to, teach with, or communicate through — until October, and we’ll stay with many generous friends until the sublet begins.

Downsizing, and then downsizing again. It’s like the process my maternal grandparents followed as they aged. Between my grandfather’s New England practicality and my grandmother’s compulsive generosity, they never collected much. If you opened a closet door, you could actually see everything the closet contained. But they still had to downsize when they sold their house and moved into a retirement home, and several years later my widowed grandmother had to store, sell, or give away almost everything else when she moved into a hospital-room-sized assisted living apartment.

Maybe it’s good to act out that process early in life.

September 2011.

Our sublet begins. We stay in our friends’ furnished apartment. I find their belongings oddly comforting: their artwork, furniture, serving dishes, even their houseplants. They’ve welcomed us to share this space with them many times before; we’ve even shared Thanksgiving dinners with them among these furnishings. It is not home, but it still feels welcoming.

October 7, 2011.

My dad and brother maneuver the couches back the way they came, backhoe and all.

October 10-14, 2011.

We get our stuff back. As I write this, most of it towers around me in boxes. Even as I’ve begun unpacking some of it, I feel detached. I’d expected my heart to cartwheel when I unwrapped my KitchenAid or curtains or picture frames, but no, the heart’s calm. I feel no strong claim to any of these things I am unpacking. Maybe that’s because I haven’t shared them yet.

The sentiment is an old one. Hippocrates said, “Ars longa, vita brevis.” Longfellow translated this, “Art is long, time is fleeting.” Some artists, like Grace Paley in a Paris Review interview, take this to mean that art is not the only thing they want to give their time to. Others take it to mean “life is short, but art endures.” Taking the translations together, a quandary arises: Art’s endurance makes it seem worthy of life’s time, but life is short and life is more than art.

Ron Thomas has been producing and recording original jazz and classical music since the 60s.  This enables him to look back over a strong musical legacy and forward to work ahead, and to comment on the relationship between art and time.

In terms of work already accomplished, Thomas has released eleven albums. If you begin to talk shop with him, you’ll discover he knew John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1964, when Stockhausen was Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Thomas studied with him (or, as he puts it, “became glue on Stockhausen”).  Thomas teaches piano and composition with “a full, full heart,” he says. “It’s full-throated teaching.” He writes essays on aesthetics, musical theory, teaching, and more. If you visit him, I promise you won’t leave without a new book or photocopy in hand, fodder for new art.

His music is at once ethereal and comforting.  It delves into imaginative, cerebral themes—Blues for Zarathustra is the title of his 2008 collaboration with Paul Klinefelter, and 2003’s Scenes from a Voyage to Arcturus explores David Lindsay’s novel A Voyage to Arcturus.

In thinking of work ahead, Bartόk’s life and music have been on Thomas’s mind, and he hopes this will inspire new music drawn from the new experiences this stage in his life is presenting.

Pacing and Discipline

Working with an art form for several decades has given him a good sense of pacing. “I’ve never thought of composing as something I have to do every day,” he tells me over one of his four or five cups of coffee for the day. Instead, he laughs, “My craft is all designed for this total freedom that I seem to need.”

He doesn’t force himself to compose for long swaths of time every day, nor even necessarily every day. His creative routine is much more exuberant than that.  He believes that even though it may often make the artist sweat, his artistic process needs to bend away from “negative stress” and instead capture “ultimate liberty and ultimate fun.”

The one rule he does set for himself is not to end a work session with something questionable.  He has to reach the point where he can pick up from where he left off.  When he writes something good, though, he says to himself, “That’s it for the day,” and then, he says, “I go and jump around the room.  There’s only so much creativity I have in me. I don’t want to drain it dry.”

In writing classes, my professors always told aspiring writers, “Write every day.”   They advised this, I’m sure, because once we’d left the rigor of academic deadlines, who knows what non-artistic deadlines would swallow our days whole?

“But do you want to write every day?” Thomas asks me.  He has a good ear for artistic anxiety.

“Partly,” I say, “I enjoy giving myself this gift of time, and partly, I feel like I have to do this if I want to be a good writer.”

“I would drop the one that says ‘I must do this every day if I am going to be a good writer.’”

Photo: David B. Thomas

When it comes to being disciplined as an artist, Ron Thomas remembers that “it’s a discipline of the imagination,” and he leaves room for discovery.  His musical craft is “all about spontaneity. I want my music to be totally fresh. Maybe ‘alive’ is a better word.”

He believes that work born of surprise and joy is the ars longa, the work that endures.

Time and Detachment

This kind of art may be spontaneous, but it takes a great deal of freedom and space to cultivate, so that even when an artist is not making art, art might still be in the making. “You need to digest things,” says Thomas. Whenever he says “you need to,” his tone holds recommendation, more like let yourself do this.

Taking time to digest life and to let other art forms sink in means cultivating some detachment from the artistic work.  Feeling time pressure can push artists to compose too frequently, at a faster pace than new inspiration actually comes.  Thomas relates the story of painter Joan Mirό standing in front of his canvas for hours on end as idea after idea would come.  Mirό would stand and the ideas would flow, but he would not paint. When he’d accrued several really good ideas, then he would begin to paint them. “You should reject some things,” Thomas advises.

Similarly, Picasso’s pattern, says Thomas, “if a painting resisted completion because of some undetectable formal flaw, was to find the wonderful thing in that work and then destroy it.”  This would yield a breakthrough, “and the final form would come successfully: the one wonderful thing to which he was too emotionally attached” was setting the whole piece off balance.   People asked Picasso, “But what happens to the wonderful thing?” And Picasso would answer, “It comes back.”  Thomas  repeats, “It comes back.”

This holds true for Thomas’s own work. He has stumbled across fragmentary work he’d composed and abandoned fifteen years ago and been able to incorporate it. This perspective frees him to compose and reject, knowing that his process is fluid.

Competition and Hurry

His process not only banishes critics but also takes a gracious and realistic approach to competitors. Competition can easily add a sense of hurry and negative stress to the artistic process. He remembers his father saying that an artist’s only competition is with himself or herself.

“If I thought too much about Stravinsky and Miles Davis, I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. How could you possibly be in competition with them? It’s ridiculous!”

As a teacher, too, he dismisses thoughts of competition, favoring instead the saying, “Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master.”

The Sound of Time and the Voice of the Artist

Even as he discusses his process, Thomas keeps perspective: what works for him won’t work for everyone. The discipline of art, he says, is not universal.  “Unilateral rules are counter-productive.  I have tricks to keep myself from thinking too much about the seriousness of what I’m doing so I don’t get too nervous about it, but you have to select and reject the tricks you will use. As long as it’s legal, and as long as it works for you.”

Thomas urges artists to find their own voices among the clamor of critics and voices that tell them what they “have” to do as artists.  What works for one may not work for another.  It’s true, too, that the voices that remind artists about time and tasks to be accomplished can become part of the chorus of critics.  They smack of the practical yet disciplinary reminders “Be back by midnight” or “Hurry up, you’ll be late.”  Hippocrates himself can thus become no more than a disgruntled adult, saying, “Kid, you haven’t got all day.”

So, if it helps you, listen to the tock of clock-hands or the screech of clockwork gears.  From this sound, find focus.  Hear, too, the tumble of future piano keys.  Trust that even though life is fleeting, the days allotted are enough, and in them, find space to enjoy the freedom and fun of the art that has been given to you.

The movement of the body through water helps mind and heart to work together . . . It is a good way of timing my swimming and by holding on to the great affirmations of the Psalms, of Coverdale and Cranmer, of John Donne and Henry Vaughan and Thomas Browne, I am sustained by the deep rhythm of their faith (169).

As she swam, L’Engle deliberately chose some of the words that would become part of her and would sustain her during the months her husband was dying of bladder cancer.

Slicing through a watery expanse. Sustained. Mind sharing cardiac rhythms. This is how many advocates of memorizing poetry describe their pursuit. “Between the covers of any decent anthology,” writes Jim Holt, whose mental anthology spans from Chaucer to present, “you have an entire sea to swim in.” Essayist Emily Gould speaks of “allowing the singsong of iambic pentameter to regulate my heartbeats.” More starkly, poet Mary Karr writes, “In memorizing the poems I loved, I ‘ate’ them . . . I breathed as the poet breathed to recite the words: someone else’s suffering and passion enters your body to transform you.”

In memorizing poetry, the words enter through eye or ear and become so intimate they are almost part of your cells. And the incredible thing is, when memorizing poetry, you get to choose which words become part of you.

How often does that get to happen?

Most of the words pinging around my brain got there by accident. There’s a Snack for That . . . If You’ve Been Seriously Injured . . . Can You Hear Me Now? . . . Everywhere You Look, There’s a Heart, There’s a Heart, There’s a Hand to Hold on To . . . These words have become like static that obscures words and meanings instead of enhancing them. Reading, and getting deliberately-chosen words into my head, is a way of reclaiming parts of my mind. A memorized line snaps me to attention, and then quiets me as I give the line my undivided thoughts. It’s a way of decluttering.

Each line of a poem is a mystery, a puzzle for the mind to solve. Good poems are mysteries so absorbing that only by carrying them around with me does the mystery begin to make sense. They give rest from the petty or profound life problems that often knot my brain, offering exuberant mysteries and calming rhythms. On the other hand, when the static foists itself to the fore, the only puzzle it gives me is “How’m I gonna get enough money to buy that?”

When lines of poems grab my thoughts, they make the world in front of me seem a little more graceful. It’s kind of like the thread of my thought doubles — something else, something good, a companion’s reminder, entwines my simple observation.

Photo: Sean Talbot

But, OK. Before my praises of poetry memorization get too lofty, I should let you know how much I suck at it.

When I was young, I was — like most kids — a walking tape recorder. My parents took care that the words that became part of me would be positive and poetic. I had awful dreams of rats and tarantulas (that, in hindsight, make me think that if those were my worst fears I had a pretty easy childhood). I’d wake up panting and see yellow teeth in the street lights’ variegated shadows and a hairy thorax in the ceiling’s cracks. My mother comforted me by helping me memorize Psalm 121, “He who watches over you will not slumber” and Psalm 139, “The darkness is not dark to You, but the night shines as the day.” Like L’Engle, she organized an alphabet of verses I could say to myself.

My memorization skills skedaddled long ago. Memorizing poetry or Scripture seems to require a silent soul, undivided attention, and love of repetition only possible as a child, when things like swinging back and forth for an hour are legitimate pursuits.

Last year, though, that detail in L’Engle’s memoir inspired me to try memorizing again.

So I tried to force-feed myself poetry, one small bite at a time. It was a crashing failure. Learning one small part at a time left things too disjointed. I couldn’t remember how it all worked together. So I gave up. Memorizing poetry was not for me. Not anymore. Face it: My brain just didn’t work that way these days.

But a funny thing happened this spring. I began to notice I was thinking poetry again. The words that were part of me were words that I welcomed.

I would walk in the woods and pass a beech tree. Its bark was smooth silver, its roots plunged into neon moss. And what came to mind was Wendell Berry’s Its roots passing lordly through the Earth.

Or, I would look out past the pond at my parents’ house, and the leaves of the early spring woods would be so thin that light behind them made them glow gold, and I would think sometimes of Frost’s Nature’s first green is gold / her hardest hue to hold (which of course came to me by way of The Outsiders) and sometimes of Berry’s The woods is shining this morning, delighted that he calls it simply the woods, like my siblings and I always called it, instead of the formidably poetic “Forest.”

Photo: Rebecca Tirrell Talbot

Or, I’d be cutting up a bony chicken, and what would come to mind but Dylan Thomas’s “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”?  Their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone, which I heard Thomas read aloud on the audio anthology Poetry on Record.

Or, when I’d wake up feeling tumultuous during a year of indecision, lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s desolate sonnets would rise: Call off thoughts awhile . . . leave comfort root-room . . .

Or, I’d hear mourning doves murmur bleakly and mockingbirds recite and think of lines of Psalms or the Sermon on the Mount that compassionate birds’ temporal nesting. Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself . . .

The thing is, I’d given up trying to memorize poetry, but I still read it. I taught a poetry unit last year and had students read Donne, Hopkins, Levertov, Milosz, Walcott, Berry, and two Herberts (George and Zbigniew) aloud. I had to read these poems over and over to offer any intelligent comment on them. And in just reading them over and over and again, their phrasing and patterns and rhythms did work the transformation that Holt, Gould, L’Engle, and Karr spoke of.

I won’t force-feed myself spoonfuls of poetry anymore. But I will keep reading poems and Scripture, over and over again ’til the mystery’s in my marrow.

I wrote about the band just before their first full-length album, Call Me Up, came out in 2009.  Since then, the band has released Call Me Up on vinyl, toured, recorded a Daytrotter session, and released the EP The Price is Right. They’re in the final stages of producing a second full-length album, tentatively titled My Life Is Easy.

Through these milestones, the band has worked closely with friends.  One signed them onto his record label (Positive Beat), others helped book shows, and friend Erik Hall (NOMO, In Tall Buildings) continued as producer. The band’s community experienced a huge change, too—Michelle Vondiziano (keys, cello, vocals) left the band.  She and her husband have a new baby, Inez, who gets a shout-out in the EP.

With all these changes in the past two years, it felt like time to check in with the band again.

Cains and Abels (L- R): Josh Ippel, Jonathan Dawe, David Sampson.

Last time, we talked about your music’s honesty. What have been some recent challenges to this?

David Sampson (bass, vocals): Maybe the hardest part has been watching musicians that I believe are being disingenuous or flip or cute gain big attention and popularity? That’s a deeply honest and ugly answer.

Jonathan Dawe (drums, vocals): I don’t think there’s such a thing as “dishonest” music, broadly speaking. Sure, our music is not Lady Gaga and the lyrics are confessional and drawn from real experience, but was there ever any doubt?

DS: We’re trying to make music that is us first and foremost, and that serves the lyrics in the songs we’ve written. I even try to keep the instruments and sounds we use to a very small number. The three of us are corn-fed flatland dudes. If I sang in a southern accent, it might help people put our music in a category, but it wouldn’t be me.  The way I sing, or the way we play, is undeniably a construct on some level, but I’m trying to make it as true to my background, my experience and my identity as I can.  Neil Young is a total inspiration. A lot of his music is in a country vein, but he’s not putting on a Merle Haggard act to do it.

Josh Ippel (guitar): We’re all influenced to some extent by the sounds we’ve digested over the years and it would be impossible to completely leave that aside when writing songs. We do make a conscious effort not to write any songs that directly nod to a specific genre, though there are certainly recognizable elements.

Do you think of the album as a story?

DS: There are a lot of connections and story elements, but there’s no beginning or end, and I don’t think it would benefit in being thought of that way. The images are all meant to compound and refer to each other.  There are common metaphors in a bunch of the songs. Deer represent people/women, but in more of an empathetic way than birds on Call Me Up. It took me a long time to figure that out. I was just like, “Oh weird, this time I’m writing about women as deer instead of birds.”

JI: It has the character of a film like Sans Soleil by Chris Marker. It’s filled with beautiful, intuitively connected scenes.

The image of roots keeps coming up in this record, too.

JI: They’re the foundation for the life of a tree but they’re also gnarly, twisted and buried in dirt, so there’s a range of meanings they can conjure.

DS: They’re bigger than the rest of the tree, and they’re impossible to get rid of, and that’s the way I think of difficulties in my life, especially difficulty that comes from bad habits and destructive ways of living (like the ones I’m confronted about in “Why Are You Lying to Me”). The roots in “Roots” represent something that has ensnared people in greed since the beginning of civilization. The “branches grow thick and wild” is imagining the manifestation of that tree with money for roots. It grows out of control like a Brothers Grimm tree, dark and twisted and leafless and moaning in the wind. It becomes the trees in the other songs that taunt me and hold me from happiness.

“Roots” reminded me of Johnny Cash’s “Redemption,” and your line “great is thy treachery” sounds like “great is Thy faithfulness.”

DS: This song is a backwards hymn, a song of negative praise to mammon. Instead of “faithfulness,” money’s treachery is never ending. The first line of the song, in that washy intro is, “Oh, for you cannot deny yourself,” which is a reference to a Bible verse: “If we are faithless, he is faithful, for he cannot deny himself.” Money cannot deny itself, and by very definition brings us misery and strife and death.

“Where Did You Go” has changed since early performances.  Do songs tend to evolve in practice, or live?

DS: Both. Totally both. We work really hard on the songs in practice and do our best to make them finished compositions.  Our songs have usually existed for a year or more when we record them for an album. Practice is where we change things in songs, but live is where we test them out.

JD: Both live performances and the studio experience have made these songs more heavy. “Where Did You Go?” is a good example of this. I didn’t originally like that song much, but now it has more force and rocks harder. I don’t always think that “rocking harder” is synonymous with making a song better, but in that case it is.

The band’s following has expanded.  Has that led to a more complex relationship with listeners?  Do people ask about the lyrics?

DS: More people listen to us now, but I have had only two conversations with people inquiring about lyrics. Either they’re so clear that no one has any questions, or no one cares about the lyrics, or I’m such an intimidating person that they’re all terrified.

Is it strange that people listen to your music without the band being right there getting a sense of audience reaction?

JD: I think a lot about what it’s like to listen to our music on a recording (or live) without being in the band. It’s a perspective I’m jealous of.  Would I like it if I weren’t a part of it?

JI: I’ve always wished I could be in someone else’s brain when they’re at home, cooking dinner and listening to one of our tunes. I guess I’d have to quit the band and get brainwashed to have that sort of experience.

Does the new album work with dichotomies, building on your original concept that each person is both a Cain and an Abel, cruel and kind?

DS: This is the question I had the hardest time with. The most obvious example is in “Where Did You Go,” where I talk about walking north with “peaceful pastures on my left, and howling trucks were on my right.” It’s a reference to “the highway’s right lane stands for grieving and pain / the highway’s left lane stands for rising again” in “Black Black Black” on Call Me Up.

JI: The new songs seem to slide between a disembodied, abstract voice and a grounded, first-person narrative, which fits with the way we deal with concepts like money and survival.

Are dichotomies not up front in your lyrics anymore?

DS: Well, it’s something that I’m always interested in, and it was tough to think about the songs and realize that I didn’t have that theme in there very prominently. In “My Life Is Easy,” I contrast myself with the buck who is shot at. It’s been a popular thing to talk about “white people problems” in the last year, and while I think the concept is a deeply unsettling and decidedly un-funny thing to laugh about, “my life is easy” is talking about that. Compared to an animal being shot at (or an African being shot at in his home), my life is one of a prince. I never lack for comfort. I worry not about eating too little, but about eating too much. I worry most about love. My life is so easy. Beyond that, the dichotomies aren’t too present in the songs. It’s not that I’m not interested in them, but maybe they just didn’t come up?

What’s your take on how you came to use Wesley Willis’s “Vultures” live and on the EP, why you changed his lyric “dead ass” to “body,” and your familiarity with Willis and the original song?

JD: Replacing “dead ass” with “body” is in keeping with David’s approach to lyrics and keeping unnecessary crassness/vulgarities out. I admire him for that and think it’s the right move.

DS: I try to keep my language classy. Talking about damage to “my body” is something that is already in Cains & Abels lyrics, so it seemed to fit. Mark Neigh [a friend who helped with booking and filled a variety of other roles] actually suggested that we cover the song, and I looked up the lyrics and realized it did an amazing job of bridging themes from Call Me Up and the new record, so it made perfect sense to put it on the EP.  I love Wesley Willis. On my first trip to Chicago I spotted a Wesley Willis drawing framed on the back wall of the Burger King on Milwaukee in Wicker Park. It made me love Chicago, to think that a Burger King would mount and display his drawings.

Is the EP a bridge between Call Me Up and My Life is Easy in other ways?

DS: It’s kind of a palette cleanser. There is a slower, more soulful mode on it, as well as a lower-fi sound that allows it to be itself. If you’re following the band release by release, the EP dismisses any expectations of what the next album will be like.

–Sean Talbot contributed to this article.

All photos by Maren Celest.

Artists' studios; photo: Sean Talbot

In early March, Tom Brokaw picked Reading, Pennsylvania as “emblematic of many struggling cities.”  In his short profile, students at Reading High School say they can’t wait to get out of this city.  For many years, people in the suburbs and surrounding farmland told me they didn’t want to go in.  Reading has been a city to drive around at all costs, and a place to dream of moving away from.

Slowly but vitally, crime rates have declined in Reading and new commerce has sprung up.  Revitalization still looms a long way off, and a staggering unemployment rate, homelessness, and poverty hover close.  But if Reading really functions as a symbol of other U.S. cities’ struggles, then maybe closely examining one crucial element of what makes people in Reading proud of their community and hopeful about its future will illuminate what can help elsewhere.

The GoggleWorks, the biggest arts center of its kind in the nation, calls Reading home.  As a renovated factory building set in the heart of Reading, it sparks hope that the arts can jolt life into the city.

Photo: Sean Talbot

The campus is roomy enough to feel peaceful.  Well-lit hallways look into 34 active studios.  It’s also busy enough to feel energized.  Seniors, high schoolers, professionals, and elementary kids walk the halls. High school girls chat in Spanish and laugh. Artists help each other haul sculptures into one of the GoggleWorks’s five galleries.

Anyone can tour the galleries for free.  Visitors can wander up to the second and third-floor studios to view works completed and works-in-progress and leave notes for artists or talk to them while they work.  Community members can take classes at the GoggleWorks, and students can receive need-based scholarships.  Several artists, like artists-in-residence and husband and wife Jesse Walp (woodworking) and Bethany Krull (ceramics), have visited city classrooms.  About his recent classroom visit, Walp said he wanted the third-graders to know “there are other options in life.  There are artistic ways to live.”

Factory exterior prior to renovation; photo courtesy of the GoggleWorks

With such freedom of movement into and out of the GoggleWorks, the community has embraced the GoggleWorks as theirs. Barbara Thun, a GoggleWorks artist who says she wants viewers of her paintings to feel both an experience of beauty and a sense of unease, says, “Already our neighborhood community takes pride in this place.”  Thun, who is also on the GoggleWorks’s board, points to a lack of vandalism around the art center’s six-building campus as evidence that the community feels ownership.

How Does It Start?

So let’s say you live in an economically-gasping city like Reading and believe art fosters collaboration across the many lines that divide people, and you believe that this kind of collaboration infuses life into neglected urban areas.  How do you start a center for the arts in a city like Reading?

The GoggleWorks began when Albert Boscov took a walk.

Boscov visited Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (that’s right, “Christmas City“) during a First Friday event.  Boscov happens to be Reading’s best-known businessman; his family started a chain of department stores. As he found himself among thousands who thronged downtown Bethlehem’s streets, he considered how similar Bethlehem’s history was to Reading’s and envisioned Reading infused with this kind of energy.

Second floor space prior to renovation; photo courtesy of the GoggleWorks

Boscov knew the arts had been huge in reeling Bethlehem back from the edge when it lost its industrial base. (Remember Billy Joel’s song “Allentown“?  Remember the line about Bethlehem Steel: “Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time”?)  Boscov contacted Diane LaBelle, an architect who had just left her job as director of Bethlehem’s Banana Factory arts and cultural center to ponder what to do next in life.  When Boscov approached her with the idea for a Reading-based arts center, it was clear that this was what to do next.

The idea for the GoggleWorks took shape.  The city donated a recently-closed factory that had manufactured safety glasses.  As LaBelle toured its interior, she says, “It was so filled with light… I could see artists working.”

Boscov gathered a small cohort who asked LaBelle for a concept design.  She capitalized on the light that had captivated her and left the factory’s aesthetic intact.  Indeed, encountering old boilers, heavy steal doors, and defunct circuit-breaker boxes, GoggleWorks visitors can still imagine themselves spelunking through an old factory.

The whole process, from the day LaBelle first saw the building to the day the GoggleWorks celebrated its opening, took three years.  LaBelle’s concept crossed the governor’s desk in 2004, and he approved it and granted $3 million for the project that same year.  Meanwhile, Boscov’s cohort ran a capital campaign to raise additional funds and LaBelle met with “anybody that would meet with me” to ask them: what does Reading need from an arts campus?  It turned out that people from over 500 organizations wanted to meet with her.  Above all, as GoggleWorks’s soon-to-be founding director, LaBelle wanted to fill in the gaps and provide what the city’s arts organizations needed, “but not be competitive with what was already there.”

Why Art?

Photo: Sean Talbot

But what does all this mean for the community? Why does an arts center bode good things for Reading?

When Barbara Thun describes changes the GoggleWorks art center has made in Reading, she talks about the parents of Berks Ballet Academy students.  Many of the students lived outside the city and their families weren’t used to driving downtown.  At first, when Berks Ballet moved into the GoggleWorks, parents picking up their kids would idle their cars as close to the door as possible, wait for the young ballerinas to hop in, and whisk them away.  As suburban parents grew more and more comfortable with the GoggleWorks and Reading, this changed.  Barbara Thun would see kids with dance gear sitting outside, laughing and playing while waiting for their parents.

More foot traffic into and around the GoggleWorks means more people on Reading’s streets and that, says Thun, “equals less crime.”  The GoggleWorks’s large parking lot casts light on the surrounding sidewalks and helps make the city safer at night.

More people crossing into downtown Reading means the city is now part of a bigger relationship.  Ideas, cultures, and talents that had stayed isolated as suburban, rural, and urban people kept their distance from each other can now mingle, and that feels safer and more comfortable each time it happens.

Not only does a site for the arts mean more people can experience the arts, it means that artists are seen as essential to the community– risk-takers and beautifiers who will care for the community’s good– instead of thrust to its outskirts.  Many GoggleWorks artists echoed the feeling that Berks County holds a conservative view toward the arts.  For a long time, many Berks County artists felt alienated from their community.  GoggleWorks artist and board member Suzanne Fellows, creator of a blogging paper doll named Eudora Clutey,  has lived in the area for 27 years.  She told me, “I felt like a total outsider until I found this place… Now that I’m at the GoggleWorks, I don’t want to leave.”

There must be something about the process of making art that is hopeful, too.  To peer into artists’ studios is to see that beauty and wonder emerge through slow, sometimes mysterious accretion.  Watching ordinary people discipline themselves to bring about beauty must be good for a city that is still a work in progress.

Creating a Place like the GoggleWorks

“Every community should have an arts center,” says Diane LaBelle.  What could brand new or concept-stage community arts centers learn from the GoggleWorks?  What attitudes and plans make the GoggleWorks function well in downtown Reading?  Here’s what the GoggleWorks artists, staff, and founding director think.

1. The community has to want it.

It can’t be one person’s brainchild or something only artists want.  The community needs to grab onto the idea, help to make it happen, and be aware that the art center is there.  You “can’t just put art there and hope people will see it,” says Kristin Kramer, GoggleWorks’s Director of Marketing and Development. From the get-go, the GoggleWorks designated a “special events committee” of people who knew Reading well and could organize events designed for neighborhood appeal.

2. The community has to feel like it’s theirs.

Providing scholarships so that everyone can come is essential, and so is refusing to have a territorial attitude toward the arts center.

3. Artists have to feel like it’s theirs.

Many GoggleWorks artists serve as board members, and all of the third-floor artists gather for Friday lunches, which have resulted in new ideas for exhibits.

4. People need to feel safe.

Keeping the GoggleWorks well-lit and ensuring plenty of foot-traffic has made even those who are cautious about Reading feel at ease here.

 

5. Other organizations can contribute.

Renting two floors to “arts partners,” arts-oriented companies and non-profits encourages cooperation, a central hub for the arts, and even a solution to economic challenges non-profits and small organizations face.

6. Artists can volunteer their time.

The GoggleWorks requires artists to contribute six hours per month of volunteer time, which keeps rent lower and lets the GoggleWorks offer even more to the community.

7. Variety helps.

The GoggleWorks houses a theater that shows independent films and facilities for glassblowing, photography, woodworking, ceramics,  jewelry-making, and more. Variety draws a greater range of artists, lets artists learn from each other, and invites community members with a broad range of interests to take classes and learn new skills.

Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross.

Unlike the two female characters just noted, Mattie Ross begins her story with that standard of the Western genre, a moral mission.  Grown-up Mattie’s voice-over relates a tragedy without quavering.  Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), a halfwit outlaw Mattie’s father tried to help, murdered him and fled to the Choctaw Nation.  No one from town pursued him.  The sheriff merely chalked Chaney’s name onto a sprawling list of fugitives.  Mattie’s mother was too weak to put any of the family’s affairs in order.  Mattie depicts her mother as a woman who can “hardly spell cat,” not to mention being “hobbled by grief,” hesitant, and bad at math.  Frank Ross’s murder would have caused hardly a ripple had not his daughter strutted into Fort Smith.

As Mattie barters and reasons, inciting sloths to action and misers to justice, Steinfeld’s performance shows a naïve, honest face trying on adult resolve. Just like she rolls up the sleeves of her father’s wool suit and wears it jauntily, she also wears a resolve she’ll soon grow into more fully.  Yet the resolve she shows from the film’s beginning is nothing to trifle with.  She talks quickly and firmly, looks adults in the eye, knows the law, and drives a hard bargain.  She doesn’t reciprocate when women hug her or consent to have women fuss over her.  Mattie doesn’t flout nineteenth century feminine conventions so much as she just can’t be bothered with them.  Her moral mission is primary; nothing, especially not other people’s expectations, must bar her way.  And thus, she’s known as “a harpy in trousers” who gives “very little sugar with [her] pronouncements,” and has admirable “sand.”

Mattie thinks she’s an able match for the mission conferred on her.  She has the larger-than-life feelings of an adolescent without the discernment experience brings.  She compares a search for a murderer to a coon hunt at which all the campers tell ghost stories.  When she employs the meanest U.S. Marshal–Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges)– to chase Tom Chaney down, Mattie figures that his meanness means he has grit and that their mutual bravery makes them equals.

But when the story hits its three-quarter mark, the hunt fits Texas Ranger LaBoeuf’s (Matt Damon) assessment precisely: it’s gone from “manhunt” to “debauch.”  If Rooster fits Mattie’s ideal of a man with true grit, what’s he doing sloshing liquor?  Slumping nearly out of his saddle?  Firing a pistol at cornbread?  (Jeff Bridges is fantastic here, becoming even more of a lowlife than The Dude).  Mattie tells LaBoeuf, “I picked the wrong man.”

And so it would seem, except that Carter Burwell’s soundtrack keeps playing that redemptive refrain, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”  Perhaps something more than Mattie’s own arms sustain her.  “The author of all things watches over me,” she says as she rides off on her mission.  In True Grit, the author of all things works through friendship, through people who can’t quite forget each other.

Around this three-quarter mark, questions of character development rather than the moral mission’s resolution became central to me.  Mary Pipher’s conclusion in Reviving Ophelia is not just that prepubescent girls have grit, but that societal pressure and hormonal upheaval chop vibrant young women into fragmented selves– the socially acceptable woman and the real self.  Pipher quotes Diderot, who said of women, “You all die at 15.”  So the question I wanted answered as I watched Cogburn, Ross, and sometimes LaBoeuf press on across the snowy plains was not will they catch Tom Chaney but will Mattie ‘die’ at 15? Will she become “hobbled” like her mother?

Kathleen Norris writes that “all too often… we find that our journey from girlhood to womanhood is an exile to an ‘alien soil.’”  Norris compares reaching womanhood with the Israelite captivity; women are asked to sing songs and appear happy in a land not their own.  Adult Mattie Ross will find herself on a turf where men rule and act and vote.  I wondered, will she outlast this pressure?

Without giving too much away, I will say it’s unsettling that there’s something witch-like in the closing shot of aged Mattie heading, alone, toward the horizon.  Her silhouette’s a bit like Miss Gulch‘s in the Wizard of Oz.  Her closing narration wrangles with people’s assessments of her, which must have gathered force throughout her life.  “Isn’t she a cranky old maid?” Mattie says people say about her.  In the novel, Charles Portis goes further and Mattie’s closing lines continue, “People love to talk.  They love to slander you if you have any substance.”   Thus, the final shot makes me think Mattie became one of many women slandered for being strong; I grieve because of the unjust loneliness of an outspoken woman.

The holiday, thus, seems to be one for the firmly grounded.  Wine and L-tryptophan befit those who have arrived; the hiker munches gorp and keeps hoofing it.  How does someone keep this feast if her way of life feels temporary?  I mean, where does this leave the feast-goer who is, in a less scurvied way, still on the ship?

Photo by Sean Talbot.

My husband and I have been living in my parents’ house in rural Pennsylvania for the past six months.  It’s beautiful here.  I’d forgotten how the fields glow green this late into autumn.  It’s temporary here, too.  Many of our belongings are a glimmer on an Excel sheet.

I feel uprooted yet fortunate.  We have far more elbow room than the 17th century wayfarers did, yet I do feel like we’re on a ship whose immediate destination is not quite known.  We’ve come to this makeshift apartment to consider what’s next in life.  Being project-oriented, part of me wants to check this stage off the list and move on to whatever is next.  It’s difficult to see that six months of sitting still, working, saving on rent, and pondering is, in itself, a worthy project.

I am among many in my age bracket who are living with parents this year.  For the horde of us in temporary digs, what should Thanksgiving look like?  Thanksgiving is not a holiday to be celebrated thinly.  Whether the cranberry sauce is from Cooks Illustrated or from a can, the holiday is a warm and rosy-cheeked one. Sharing the year’s blessings makes it so.

Living in flux is a difficult gift, yet Thanksgiving draws us to realize the gifts we’ve been given.  Abandoning that “vast and furious ocean” was the Pilgrims’ cause for praise.  Those still in search of a home or destination of our own, feast and celebrate for different reasons.

Photo by Sean Talbot.

We celebrate, perhaps, because living in transit sparks creativity.  In her excellent essay “Moving,” Anne Fadiman quotes an article that praises a pioneer for risking a cross-country move: “Traveling in self-satisfied ruts, seeking sameness, and courting inaction, are conditions to be avoided.”  If we have moved, we are not seeing the same old view anymore, and this changes us.  If the move is temporary, inhabiting a temporary space can free us to test out short term ventures.  This is a perk the Pilgrims didn’t get.  They couldn’t exactly “try out” New England.  For the contemporary nomad, this phase lets one investigate new geographic regions without a down payment and this brings valuable input for the next phase.

Or maybe we celebrate because the temporary space pushes us toward the future, urging us to plan and try and dream in ways we wouldn’t if we felt too comfortably rooted.

We find joy, perhaps, in spending time with a larger family, sharing meals, recipes, short stories, housework, anecdotes, YouTube finds, and favorite films.

Or maybe it’s joy in the routines one establishes in new places.  Anne Fadiman writes that after moving from Manhattan to rural Massachusetts,

Henry and I bicycled to the corner store, which, unlike its SoHo analogue, had signs in the window offering night crawlers and chewing tobacco — but it also had seven brands of ice cream and a luxuriant hawthorn tree out front.  On our fourth visit, Henry settled himself under the hawthorn and said, with a five-year-old’s easily acquired sense of permanency, “This is where we always sit.”

I am thankful for the moments when I  feel like “this is what we always do.”  I always wake up early to write on the Saturdays my husband works.  I always see the sunrise over the SEPTA tracks while I drive down the Turnpike to class.  I always walk to the post office.  We always go to Weaver’s Orchard and buy produce that’s nearly the platonic form of a strawberry, apple, or butterhead lettuce leaf.

So, yes, we are still on the ship.  But even though we aren’t yet at our own home, we truly have a feast.

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding…

How many layers a word has!  To some, a dauphin was a nation’s future.  To others, a home; a block to defend; a place to shun once dusk falls.  To another, a kestrel steadied in midair, first-born son of the morning.

Wouldn’t Hopkins, Jesuit priest and innovative poet of the mid 1800s, have loved these layers? He thought and wrote about all that a word encompassed: not just its various definitions, but its sound, its look, its application, and, as he put it, “all the concrete things coming under it.”

He hoarded words like each was an out-of-print LP.  In one early diary, he wrote out: flick… fleck, flake.  Said aloud, this collection rises in tone with each word.  He looked for similarities between sound and meaning– “Flake is a broad and decided fleck,” he wrote.  He positioned words according to their sound: “morning’s minion,” “daylight’s dauphin.”

But after he hoarded, he spent. His opulence stuns: rhymes where no poetic rule requires one, alliteration, assonance, all-out play.  One feels gathered up into the ecstasy of it all and involuntarily begins reading aloud.  “The Windhover,” quoted above, is a symphony of words, complete with a clash of symbols: “fall, gall themselves, and gash gold vermilion.”

Taken alone, a Hopkins poem leaves a reader woozy.  But what’s really startling about Hopkins’s sensibility is the theory that created it.  Literary critic David Sonstroem wrote in Modern Language Quarterly that Hopkins:

Deals out words according to their sound and then he expects them to turn up in the meaningful pattern that will serve as evidence of an unseen intelligence that is regulating them.  He is…giving God a free hand, so that He can declare Himself.  Chance is not really chance, because it is superintended by God.

A few weeks ago, on my way back from Dauphin Street, I stopped for dinner with a friend who is a ceramic artist and who showed me her latest ceramics.  She held one piece behind her back, then presented it with a flourish.  The bowl she held bore a delicate branch pattern crossing the center.  My friend had been shocked when she pulled it out of the kiln because, unexpectedly, the fired green-white glaze lined the brown branches like snow.

How trusting, to take the art one has shaped and marked and glazed and transfer it to an oven not knowing the result.  And how astonishing to think of Gerard Manley Hopkins creating poetry that left room for macchia–the moment when nature (or in his view, God) takes over the artist’s work so that, spontaneously, it becomes more than what the artist intended.

It’s astonishing because it would be easy for a religious writer to crave control.  For one thing, it’s easy for any writer to grasp for control.  A word’s connotation doesn’t fit the theme?  Nix it!  A character isn’t behaving?  Kill him off! A stanza isn’t flowing right?  Revise, rework, revise! For another thing, it would be easy for someone who believes that an “unseen intelligence” has created a regulated world to believe that the writer must also be the work’s unseen intelligence, regulating and ordering the work intensively.

But Hopkins didn’t buy that. He wanted readers to understand his poems but didn’t believe that, just by creating, an artist became a micro-version of God.  Brad Leithauser notes in his preface to the Hopkins collection Mortal Beauty, God’s Grace that when a friend complained that Hopkins’ poems were too obscure, Hopkins wrote him a letter explaining the poems at length.  This shows that he had fixed meanings in mind.  He didn’t change a jot of the “obscure” poems themselves, though, believing “the only just judge, the only just literary critic, is Christ.”  No matter a poem’s complexity or eccentricity, that literary critic would decipher it.  And so, the artistic creator could remain a creature.

In my own time, I have found this balance difficult.  A great many authors I love believe that at its core the cosmos is chaotic or absurd.  But if, like Hopkins, one rejects this view, wouldn’t it follow that one’s writing would not be chaotic, that it would be a diorama of an ordered, though broken, world?  And then wouldn’t one’s writing be precise, and mean exactly what the author intends it to mean?  Following Hopkins’s aesthetics, a writer who believes in a meaningful universe would also sense his humble place within it, and know, with pleasure, awe, and playfulness, that good art involves letting go.

I imagine Gerard Manley Hopkins kneeling for final vows and realize that this kind of giving is not so different from firing clay in a kiln.