I’ve lived in the United States of America for sixty-five years. I’ve been teaching American literature for the last twenty-seven of those.
My American lit surveys–particularly the sophomore-level general education version–begin with indigenous creation stories and trickster tales before moving to the letters of Cristoforo Colombo, i.e., Christopher Columbus. From there, it’s on to the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas and the American Puritans (including those we typically style as “Pilgrims”). My students and I then read from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, usually winding up the semester with poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
Having gone through some portion of these writings–in both undergraduate and graduate courses–every semester, I have come to believe that the one consistent American experience is that of decay, in all its not-so-varied noun and verb meanings:
to decline in health, strength, or vigor
to fall into ruin
to decline from a sound or prosperous condition
rot
gradual decline in strength, soundness, or prosperity or in degree of excellence or perfection
destruction, death; Merriam-Webster identifies this meaning as “obsolete,” but I think we have a good shot at bringing it back
The United States of America has decayed to the extent that it’s no longer even half of what it thinks itself to be. And if the USA is supposed to be–as it thinks it is–God’s gift to the world, it is now a cheap knock-off of the nation initially imagined, of the nation it might have been if it’d been able to live up to its own ideals and fend off the inevitable decay.
As Emily Dickinson wrote,
I reason, we could die– The best Vitality Cannot excel Decay, But, what of that?
A few years ago (never mind how many), Leesa and I drove to DC to spend a couple of days in the city and take in a Keb’ Mo’ concert while there. Leesa has developed a friendship with Kevin—we get to call him Kevin—over the years (and I’m part of it by proxy), so as is usual for us, we got to go backstage after the show to say hello. As we stood outside his dressing room, Kevin introduced us to his co-star for the evening, who was none other than Taj Mahal. But another less recognizable face was there that evening, and Kevin introduced us to him as well. (Leesa likes to say Kevin introduced us as if we were just as famous as anybody else, which is his generous nature.) That other face belonged to David Brooks, who is a conservative political and cultural commentator whose writing appears often in the New York Times.
Having met Mr. Brooks in that way, I tend to notice his writing when it crosses my field of vision. This past week I saw his name on the NYT Sunday Opinion page. His beautiful essay, which I hope you will read via the link, is titled “How to Stay Sane in Brutalizing Times.” The essay walks us through some “tragic” (in a good way) dispositions of sensibility and mentality, and Brooks summarizes his purpose like this:
I’m trying to describe a dual sensibility—becoming a person who learns humility and prudence from the Athenian tradition, but also audacity, emotional openness and care from the Jerusalem tradition.
His use of the adjective tragic doesn’t seem intended to relate exactly to its meaning in the catastrophes of ancient Greek dramatic tragedy, in which some great hero is ultimately destroyed—or at least brought low—by some fatal flaw such as pride. No, Brooks uses tragic in a less bombastic, less catastrophic sense. What he suggests here is that we look at the world and ourselves in realistic and humble ways, that we live prudently and not arrogantly, that we keep ourselves open to the good and the bad that will come our way and not close ourselves off as being above or beyond the reach of our need and that of others, of relationship, of our humanity in common with all.
One key idea Brooks offers is that our tendency to separate, our increasing tendency to rage, our tendency to dehumanize—desensitize us to the world in which we live. And in our desensitized state, we lose track of the wondrous beauty in nature and in each other. When we could be expanding, growing individually and communally, we are instead contracting into tight balls of rage, anger, and—the root of these—fear.
Such a state of being wadded up tight leaves us unable reach out to others, to feel with and for them, to feel sorry for ourselves for the right reasons such as the joy and fellowship and discovery we’re missing. This also is present in Brooks’s essay, probably nowhere more so than this paragraph:
. . . most people — maybe more than you think — are peace- and love-seeking creatures who are sometimes caught in bad situations. The most practical thing you can do, even in hard times, is to lead with curiosity, lead with respect, work hard to understand the people you might be taught to detest.
This passage, especially its phrase “lead with curiosity,” made me decide to focus this 3rd Saturday Song Story on “Sense of Wonder,” a song I wrote with Mark Chesshir sometime back in the late 1980s. I don’t remember the exact division of labor, but my guess is that Mark wrote most of the music while I wrote most of the words.
Here’s the first verse, sung over an appropriately B-minor chord progression:
A rose, unnoticed, blooms and dies to bloom again— So many such gifts return to Sender unopened. Calendar days fly off the wall in whirling wind, And still the journal lays, blank pages from beginning to end.
Somewhere along my journey to becoming an English professor, I learned that the journal “lies” instead of “lays,” but setting that aside, I like the image of a natural world—embodied in the rose—full of amazing events that fail to amaze us because—busy and distracted—we pay so little attention. I also like the images of the flying calendar days I remember seeing in old TV shows and movies and the journal pages flipping through in the same whirlwind.
Next comes the second section of the first verse:
The treadmill world is small— No place for standing tall— Where the heart is a sleeping giant To be feared and kept tied up.
I’m particularly fond of the image of the heart as like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Do we fear our hearts and the acts of feeling, caring, and courage they are all capable of leading us into?
The chorus will grow as the song continues. This first chorus is short: “Racing the rain and chased by the thunder, / Hold on to a sense of wonder.” We threw in the “oh-way-oh” to mimic the moaning voices of those working through enslavement and imprisonment.
Here’s the two halves of the second verse:
The spark of childhood put away with childish things Leaves the good life tasteless and in need of some leavening. Look to the magic of youth— The no-holds-barred search for truth. The heart is a sleeping giant. Take a chance and wake it up.
Do we take 1 Corinthians 13:11-12 a little too literally? A capacity for joy — a sense of wonder — enriches our lives no matter how old we become. Both positive and negative examples of this are all around us in the people we share family and community with.* One of the ways in which an energetic, youthful sense of wonder can be realized — perhaps the main way — is to “take a chance” and wake up our hearts, unbind them, and let them rise.
The second chorus is longer:
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — walking the world and stalked by the hunger— Oh-way-oh — senses dull from the attack they’re under— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
I like these lines. Even more so than back yonder in the 1980s, our senses are constantly under attack, pummeled by media of all kinds and the excessive drama that all of it seems to wield in ever more dangerous ways. Our senses are drowning in information and misinformation “supposed to fire [our] imagination” when it in fact robs us of imagination, one of the main gifts that should be original in each of us.
And yet the rose continues its amazing cycle of life, which is the idea behind the song’s short bridge:
It is not for things to wonder at that we lack In this catch-as-catch-can struggle with the hourglass.**
We must raise our gaze from our navels (or anybody else’s navel) and take in the world — move through the world — with a sense of wonder.
A rose, unnoticed, blooms and dies to bloom again— So many such gifts return to Sender unopened. Calendar days fly off the wall in whirling wind, And still the journal lays, blank pages from beginning to end. The treadmill world is small— No place for standing tall— Where the heart is a sleeping giant To be feared and kept tied up.
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
The spark of childhood put away with childish things Leaves the good life tasteless and in need of some leavening. Look to the magic of youth— The no-holds-barred search for truth. The heart is a sleeping giant. Take a chance and wake it up.
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — walking the world and stalked by the hunger— Oh-way-oh — senses dull from the attack they’re under— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
It is not for things to wonder at that we lack In this catch-as-catch-can struggle with the hourglass.
[The Mark Chesshir lead guitar break!]
Oh-way-oh — racing the rain and chased by the thunder— Oh-way-oh — walking the world and stalked by the hunger— Oh-way-oh — senses dull from the attack they’re under— Oh-way-oh — hold on to a sense of wonder.
*I read something recently that said the old grammatical rule of not ending a sentence with a preposition is on its way out, going the way of the injunction against the split infinitive. I’m giving it a try, but I’m not comfortable with either change.
**Here the phrase “catch-as-catch-can” joins with the second verse’s phrase “no-holds-barred” to reveal my long-held obsession with wrestling as the most apt metaphor for our relationships with the world, with each other, with our faith, with God.
Who’s Gabriel Tanner, you ask? He’s the central figure of my first novel Gabriel’s Songbook.
Yes, he’s fictional, but I know him pretty well. He’s a lot like me in some ways–all right, many ways. But in other ways I won’t go into here, he’s not. In addition to Gabriel’s Songbook, he’s featured in “A Fiddle and a Twilight Reel” from 2021’s A Twilight Reel: Stories. And you’ll probably not be surprised to learn that he’s a background character (but never “on stage”) in my new manuscript novel “Streets of Nashville,” as well as one of the featured narrators in my work-in-progress “Avalon Moon.” So, he’s been a busy guy.
I have a file that I keep on my fictional town of Runion and its people. The file includes dates all the way back to 1818. The note on Gabriel Tanner, whose first name seems to mean, in Hebrew, “devoted to God” or “hero of God,” was born to Kirk and Maggie James Tanner on March 8, 1959. He has a brother named Butler, a cousin named Carter “Cutter” Clements, and a wife named Eliza Garrison Tanner, to whom he has been married twice.
How did I pick March 8, 1959, as his birthdate? The 1959 comes from my interest in having him be roughly the same age I am, and I was born on November 25, 1958. More particularly, I picked March 8 because it was on that day in 1983 (I think) that I recorded “Thunder and Lightning” in Nashville. I was in Bullet Recording on Music Square West (17th Avenue South) with my producer Earl Richards and an amazing group of studio musicians. For several days, we’d been tracking songs for my second (unreleased) album, to be titled Waiting for the Night.
March 8 (a Tuesday in 1983) was the last day of laying down basic tracks for the album, and we had maybe two or three hours of studio and musician time remaining. So Earl asked if I had anything more that I wanted to record. “Well,” I said. “I have this new one that we could try.” (I said something like that. This was forty years ago today, you know, and I was twenty-four years old.) I played the song through once for the musicians, and they were ready to record. I doubt that it took more than a couple of takes to capture the track.
Oh, man, it was gonna be a hit! So said all who played on it and heard it. But it was not to be, as the album never saw the light of day.
Several years later, the “Cody Band” version of “Thunder and Lightning” made it on an Asheville, NC, radio station’s River Rock album and became a local–even regional–hit, making the list of top five requests of the day (alongside Prince, Madonna, and others) for several weeks in a row and subsequently picking up over one thousand plays between January and August.
The song was–and still is–terrifically important to me, so you can understand how its original recording date of March 8 would be assigned the birthdate of Gabriel Tanner.
. . . for my contribution to politicizing Christmas.
People exist in this world who believe that certain other people have been waging a war on Christmas. People exist in this world who believed — and maybe still believe — that the 2016 election of Donald Trump was a win for Christmas in this (nonexistent, in my opinion) war.
Consider these 2022 Christmas “tweets” (still a stupid thing to think of as a meaningful pronouncement). Really think about them, setting aside our tendency to valorize our own or demonize the other.
Now honestly, which seems most in keeping with the Christmas spirit? Which the most respectful of the season and its origins? Can the Christmas spirit, given its source in Christ, be shared through sarcasm and bitterness?
I recently completed my annual reading of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, first published on 19 December 1843, one hundred seventy-nine years ago. In “Stave Three: The Second of the Three Spirits,” telling the story of Scrooge’s time with the Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge connects Christmas with Sundays (“‘seventh day'”), when the shops are closed and thereby the poor are deprived of a meal. Speaking for himself and the whole family of Christmases past, the Ghost of Christmas Present says,
“There are some upon this earth of yours, . . . who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived.”
What the Ghost of Christmas Present suggests here is that there are those who claim Christ/Christianity/Christmas whose lives and deeds in this world are carried on as if Christ/Christianity/Christmas are names only, dead things that “‘never lived.'”
And now I’ll stray off into a couple of related asides. . . .
Almost one hundred years after Dickens, Joseph Campbell wrote a passage in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces that, from the moment I read it, put me in mind of Donald Trump and his “kith and kin”:
The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world—no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions.
Christians are Easter people, not Christmas people (and certainly not 4th-of-July people). For Christians, Christmas has no meaning without Easter.
Now, here’s a very recent bit of aggressive ignorance from one of Trump’s kith and kin. Congresswoman Lauren Boebert dismissed the Cross and the sacrifice upon which true Christianity is based, suggesting that Jesus wouldn’t have had to die if he’d had enough AR-15s “to keep his government from killing him.” Yes, she really said that.
I used to love hearing my cousin Darwin Reeves sing a 20th-century hymn titled “Ten Thousand Angels,” written in 1958 by Ray Overholt. The chorus goes, in part, like this:
He could have called ten thousand angels To destroy the world and set Him free. He could have called ten thousand angels, But He died alone, for you and me.
An important verse of the song goes like this:
To the howling mob He yielded; He did not for mercy cry. The cross of shame He took alone. And when He cried, “It’s finished,” He gave Himself to die; Salvation’s wondrous plan was done.
This is based on Matthew 26:53, in which Jesus says as he is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemene, “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?”
But according to Boebert, Jesus should have been like Neo and asked for “guns, lots of guns”:
I hope that true Christians — not Xians — will call out Boebert (and her kith and kin) for such crass abuse of their faith and such overt kissing of the gun lobby’s “butt.”
I had some other stuff, but I think I’ll save it for my next 4th Tuesday Political post.
In the meantime, Merry Christmas to all — and all means all, y’all — and a healthy and happy New Year!
The thing that not a lot of people realize when it comes to Christmas music or the Christmas specials that used to come on TV is that, unless they’re “live” recordings or events, they aren’t actually recorded at Christmas time. Christmas music, for example, that is going to be available in October so that radio and retail have it in time for the holiday season, will probably have been recorded several months earlier–possibly late spring or during the summer.
As I recall . . .
It was in the spring of 1988, and I was writing songs for Ave Canora, a small publishing venture that was part of the music empire of Nashville/Broadway singing star Gary Morris. Word ran through the offices of Gary Morris Music that he would be recording a Christmas album in the near future. I’d never written a Christmas song before, but I really wanted to have a song on that album.
So, in April 1988, in the midst of that year’s Easter season, I sat down to write “Christmastime.” My main musical influences were only two: almost 30 years of hymns and carols in my little mountain church and community in Walnut, North Carolina, and Johnny Mathis’s album Merry Christmas, the Christmas album of all Christmas albums as far as I’m concerned, released in October 1958, less than two months before I was born. I was writing a lot of songs in the key of E at the time, and so, E it was for “Christmastime.”
Here’s an early recording of “Christmastime” from the home studio of my friend Mark Chesshir. It’s possible that this is the demo that I turned in to Ave Canora and the version that Gary heard.
Verse #1 is all about light, which is one of my true loves in the Christmas season. Leesa and I don’t decorate the exterior of our house, but I love the lights of Christmas. Light designs and displays–from simple to complex–are the only thing I enjoy about the extended Christmas season the Xian world developed due to the demands of capitalism.
See the world In a different light At Christmastime. See it shine In the children’s eyes At Christmastime. Let the season sparkle in me Like the moon on virgin snow Fallen some long-ago Christmastime.
We have light appearing in “shine” and “sparkle,” and we have “light” in its different connotation of understanding–to see the world in a different light. Many of us give the world a little more grace at Christmastime. Or maybe we express a little bit of righteous anger at the commercialism that isn’t as much in our faces as at other times of the year. With “virgin,” the lyric includes just a taste, an essence, a foreshadowing, of the Christian story of the birth of Jesus. And the “snow” is classic in terms of memory and desire, for me, as I’m always “dreaming of a white Christmas.”
Verse #2 is about memory. The older I get, the more precious and haunting memory becomes, perhaps especially in the context of Christmas. So much of the celebration and so many of the people I’ve celebrated with are yearly lost and fade into memory.
Window pane– Watching a parade Through frosty lines. Memories– Bittersweet and homemade– Cross my mind. Family and friends at the door– With the laughter and the kisses pour Love and good wishes for Christmastime.
This verse is made up of images from memory. These memories, however, are only implied. They’re left vague and general so that the listener (reader) can plug in their specific memories and memory images. I doubt if I thought that at the time I was writing this lyric, but it’s the way I understand it now.
Verse #3 returns to the Christmas story a bit more directly than the intimation of “virgin” in the first verse. We have a star and a child, a call for peace and stillness, a sounds of celebrating bells and singing people and angels.
Distant star, I am not alone With you in sight. In my heart, There’s a little child Alive tonight. So, let the world lie peaceful and still While the bells ring and people sing And angel wings are whispering, “It’s Christmastime.”
I hope that I got chills, that I maybe even cried, when I completed this last verse. It’s all there, I think, all that Christmas has been to me–all that I struggle to have it still be to me. The star that guided the wise men guides me to the child that is still alive in me. The moon on virgin snow exists as part of a world lying peaceful and still. The parade, the laughter, kisses, and good wishes are echoed in the ringing bells and the singing people. And at the end, the lyric returns one last time to the original Christmas story of angels–the “heavenly host”–appearing to the shepherds.
See the world In a different light At Christmastime. See it shine In the children’s eyes At Christmastime. Let the season sparkle in me Like the moon on virgin snow Fallen some long-ago Christmastime.
Window pane– Watching a parade Through frosty lines. Memories– Bittersweet and homemade– Cross my mind. Family and friends at the door– With the laughter and the kisses pour Love and good wishes for Christmastime.
Distant star, I am not alone With you in sight. In my heart, There’s a little child Alive tonight. So, let the world lie peaceful and still While the bells ring and people sing And angel wings are whispering, “It’s Christmastime.”
Many thanks to everybody who, over the years, has said that it’s not really Christmas until they’ve heard “Christmastime”!
“Merry Christmas to all!”
Here’s some more stuff:
I’ll go ahead and say it (with some regret and bitterness, and with apologies for the latter): I have a crass commercial desire that many singers had recorded “Christmastime” so that I could have a nice little royalty bonus every year . . . and so could Leesa when I’m gone . . . and so could Lane and Raleigh when Leesa’s gone. . . .
When I first moved to Johnson City, people used to say, “Hey, I heard ‘Christmastime’ in K-Mart today!” I even heard it there a time or two myself. But, you know, K-Mart’s not around anymore. (There’s the bitterness again, and again, I apologize.)
Jimmy Patterson was a fellow I met years ago when Leesa, Raleigh, and I attended Cherokee United Methodist Church. He loved “Christmastime.” I heard it told that the first time I played it at Cherokee, Jimmy was standing with our pastor David Woody, and in his excitement over what he was hearing, Jimmy took Pastor Woody’s hand and squeezed it. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that “Christmastime” meant so much to Jimmy that his wife Bonnie asked me to play it at his funeral / celebration of life . . . in the summertime, as I recall.
One last thing: Gary Morris released two different versions of his album Every Christmas.
I don’t remember exactly why this was the case, but here’s my story about it. He already had the original Every Christmas album recorded and turned in to Warner Brothers Records by the time I submitted “Christmastime.” That’s the cover on the left, released in 1988. The last song–track 10 on that one–was Gary’s version of “Carol of the Bells.” Then at some point soon afterwards, no later than Christmas 1990, they repackaged and rereleased the album–new cover (on the right) and “Christmastime” replaced “Carol of the Bells.” In practical terms, just as far as publishing goes, Gary’s company would receive what was called mechanical royalties for “Christmastime” that he wouldn’t receive for “Carol of the Bells.” I doubt that was the driving force behind the change, but it was a side effect. Now, on Gary’s website, the album on the left is for sale instead of the later “blue” version. Interestingly, the side effect here is that whoever gets the money for sales of that “poinsettia” version does not have to pay mechanical royalties to me because “Christmastime” isn’t on that version. Given this, I think it’s worth noticing that Spotify, iTunes, and other platforms sell only the “poinsettia” version, so . . . no Christmas royalties for me!
O the bells ring and people sing and angel wings are whispering, “It’s Christmastime”!
I’ve always been an inspiration writer—not an inspirational writer, of course, as that’s a different thing. No, whether I was writing songs or academic essays or fiction or this blog, I awaited inspiration to begin or continue or finish a piece. I’m still like that to a large extent, I guess, but I started a new practice near the end of May 2022 when I listened to author Wiley Cash interview my favorite contemporary novelist James Lee Burke.
At the time of the interview, which took place on the 25th of May, when my older granddaughter graduated from high school and I turned 63.5 years old, Burke was promoting the publication of his 40th novel. Cash asked him how he managed to be so consistently productive.
I immediately said to myself, “I should try that.” So, I did, starting as soon as Leesa and I returned from the graduation celebration in Durham.
At that time, I was maybe thirty-five thousand words into the first draft of a novel that I’m calling Streets of Nashville. I’d begun serious work on the story in July 2021, and my goal was to try and finish an initial draft of sixty to seventy thousand words by the time the fall semester of 2022 began in the third week of August.
I got started with Burke’s 750-words-a-day plan by Friday, May 27th, and I stuck with it, writing at least that many words daily and often a few more. By the time I hit mid-June, I was feeling good enough about my progress that I thought I could finish the first draft during my writing residency at Wildacres in NC, which was scheduled for July 4-10. I still thought this even when I blew past sixty thousand words and knew that the story was going to demand more than my earlier guesstimated word count.
The draft stood at something over seventy thousand words when I arrived at Wildacres Retreat on the afternoon of July 4th. During my writing time there, from Monday afternoon through Saturday evening the 9th, I finished the first draft—right around ninety thousand words.
Now that the semester is underway, writing time is limited, so I’m unable to write 750 words a day, but I’ve devised a schedule (of sorts) that is allowing me to write around three thousand words a week (750 X 4), and I’m okay with that. I’m into a fourth draft of Streets and beginning to send it out in search of a publisher, and I’m over sixteen thousand words into the first draft of another novel with the working title Avalon Moon.
Now that the 2018 spring semester is over and I’ve gotten past the always-surprising empty feeling of not knowing what to do with nothing much to do, I’m starting to think about what’s next.
Teaching: That’s easy. This summer I’ll teach ENGL 2110: American Literature I in Summer I and ENGL 3956: Fairy Tales for the Ages in Summer II. Then in Fall 2018, I’ll teach ENGL 4012: American Novel (Gothic Edition), ENGL 5500: Nineteenth-Century American Poetry, and ENGL 5950: Methods of Research. I’ll also direct one honors thesis. So, that’s the rest of the year taken care of as far as teaching goes.
Academic Writing (Scholarship): Co-editors Robert Battistini and Karen Weyler and I will, I hope, complete the editing of The Literary Magazine and Other Writings, 1801-1807, Volume 3 of The Collected Works of Charles Brockden Brown. I have a number of projects that I’ll eventually go ahead with, but I don’t feel pressured to do so in the immediate future. I want to write an essay on a little known early American poet named Samuel Joseph Smith. I will complete (and attempt to publish) an edition of a little remembered nineteenth-century American novel by Catherine Ann Warfield titled The Household of Bouverie; or, The Elixir of Gold (1860). I would eventually like to write and publish a significant essay or a monograph on American Indian literature.
Creative Writing: I’m three short stories away from completing a twelve-story collection tentatively titled A Twilight Reel. The collection is a made up of often interrelated stories that take place over a year in Runion, Madison County, North Carolina, my “little postage stamp of earth.” Each of the twelve stories takes place in a different month in 1999. I’ve completed drafts of the stories for January, February, March, April, July, August, September, October, and November. So, most every day this summer, I’ll be working on the stories for May, June, and December, each of which is in some stage of drafting.
I have some significant work done on two different novels: A Summer Abroad and Antaeus. Although the latter is the more advanced — at over 230 pages so far — I recently realized that this should probably be the third in a group of novels featuring a character currently named Ezra MacRae. As a result of this realization, I’m also beginning another novel — tentatively titled Chart Hits — to be the first featuring MacRae. Not sure how that will play out. The other piece, A Summer Abroad, is based on the summer of 1979, which I spent traveling around Europe with AESU 616.
Finally, I have a batch of (mostly) new songs that I hope to recored together as a new album sometime in the next year. One song, “Freedom, Love, and Forgiveness,” is older — from the 1990s — but in recent years it has been revitalized as Leesa and I sing it together. A new song that seems to be grabbing people’s attention is “Complaints.” A couple of songs grew out of lines that Gabriel Tanner writes in Gabriel’s Songbook; I liked the fragments I wrote for the novel, so I fleshed them out in to full songs: “Siren, Sing” and “Catch That Train.”
I guess I’m planning like I’m in my thirties, even though I’ll turn sixty this year. I’m certainly happy to have accomplished all I have so far, but chasing all these other projects seem to keep me vital and happy.
April 22 is the anniversary of the 1983 release of my one-and-only 45 rpm single. It was “Fiesta.” This year’s anniversary was the 35th. I find it difficult to realize that at fifty-nine years old, thirty-five years was over half a lifetime ago for me.
My aunt Ernie (aka Ernestine Plemmons) made this cross-stitch piece for me sometime after the release of the record, probably for my November birthday or for Christmas in ’83. It sits on my home desk (although not in this exact position). The artwork is that of the record’s cover sleeve. A similar rose also appears on the record’s label.
A few years ago I was playing at Good Stuff in Marshall, in its original location, and a forty-something-year-old girl, whose name I don’t remember and whose self-control was beered-up and loose, started calling out for “Fiesta.” (She called out other things as well, but I’ve chosen to forget them.) Anyway, I started the song and got a few lines into it, when suddenly my memory ran out of the chords. I couldn’t remember it. My only actual record release . . . and I’d forgotten how it went.
That night I could only shrug and move on to another song, but within a couple of days, I’d relearned it. Now I usually include it in all my solo shows, and it’s fun to play. And I know of at least one person for whom it’s a favorite.
In my novel, Gabriel’s Songbook, the story of the writing of the song “Lacy” is the story of another of my early songs called “Daisy.” (I was looking for something that worked like the word Daisy and used Lacy long before I knew somebody by that name.) But the novel’s story of the record release of “Lacy” is the story of the release of “Fiesta” and the non-release of the album that was to follow.
Given that I probably wrote the song a year or two before its release on 22 April 1983, the song is maybe thirty-seven years old. And while the recording is nostalgic and out of date, the song has held up fairly well, I think. I can only hope that its writer has done so as well, but then again, I’ve got about twenty-two years on it!
This semester I’m teaching ENGL 3280: Mythology, based on the plan laid out by our department’s veteran teacher of this subject, Mark Holland. In preparation for this semester, I sat through his entire course last fall, and my syllabus, at least for the early weeks of class, mirrors his. This means that my students and I are spending the first several meetings on Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Originally published less than five years after the catastrophic end of World War II, the book represents Campbell’s attempt to show us that, despite the brokenness left spinning helplessly in the wake of the war, the world’s myths and mythic heroes suggest to us that, as humans, we are more alike than different.
So, it’s a Sunday afternoon in January. I don’t follow professional football that closely these days, but it’s not difficult to feel that this is the dead week between the NFL conference championships and the Super Bowl. It’s cold, for the South, and snow falls from a gray Southern sky. I’m sitting here letting the Roku screensaver slide across the TV, and I’m thinking that in the next hour or so I’ll pick up Campbell and go over the reading for the coming week’s classes.
But here on the cusp of the new week, I find my mind hasn’t yet let go of some particular passages in last week’s assigned reading in Campbell’s book. It’s appropriate for this Sunday afternoon (turning evening)–appropriate and, to be honest, discomforting. He’s writing about the Christian church and its problems with the teachings of its namesake, to whom he refers in the passages that follow as “the World Redeemer.” “The world is full of . . . mutually contending bands,” he writes,
totem-, flag-, and party-worshipers. Even the so-called Christian nations–which are supposed to be following a “World” Redeemer–are better known to history for their colonial barbarity and internecine [relating to conflict within a group] strife than for any practical display of that unconditional love, synonymous with the effective conquest of ego, ego’s world, and ego’s tribal god, which was taught by their professed supreme Lord. . . . (134)
Campbell follows this with Luke 6:27-36, which begins (I’m quoting from The Message here), “‘. . . I say this: Love your enemies. Let them bring out the best in you, not the worst.'” Along about the middle, the passage includes this difficult command (as phrased in the Common English Bible): “‘Treat people the same way that you want them to treat you,” — yes, it’s that pesky Golden Rule. The passage ends with this (again from The Message): “‘Our Father is kind; you be kind.'” These are not suggestions, not it-would-be-great-ifs. Remember English grammar. We call sentences structures declarative, interrogative, imperative. These statements from Jesus are imperatives. And what’s a synonym for imperatives? Commands! These are new commandments that go along with that other new one: “‘Love one another. In the same way I loved you, love one another'” (John 13:34). I can’t help but take note of the period after another. No ifs–if they love you, if they’re like you, if they don’t threaten or scare you or want money from you. No buts–but love only as far as you’re comfortable, but love only as long as they don’t piss you off or disgust you, but love only if they do what I say (where I is understood as implying either our individual selves, our group, or this “World Redeemer”). The Other to be loved needs no qualifications. I can’t forget a powerful sentence I recently encountered in Albert Holtz’s From Holidays to Holy Days: A Benedictine Walk Through Advent: “The banquet of the kingdom is open to everyone who is willing to sit down with anyone.”
Back to Campbell. He has some particular words to say not just to individual followers of the World Redeemer but to the churches into which we organize ourselves. Please read it slowly, carefully:
The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which so many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently, to demonstrate, is that God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children. Such comparatively trivial matters as the remaining details of the credo, the techniques of worship, and devices of episcopal organization [relating to church government, particularly that using bishops; Campbell was raised a Catholic], are merely pedantic snares, unless kept ancillary to the major teaching. Indeed, where not so kept, they have a regressive effect: they reduce the father image back again to the dimensions of the totem. And this, of course, is what has happened throughout the Christian world. One would think that we had been called upon to decide or to know whom, of all of us, the Father prefers. Whereas, the teaching is much less flattering: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” The World Savior’s cross, in spite of the behavior of its professed priests, is a vastly more democratic symbol than the local flag. (135)
As Campbell writes about the “trivial matters” that we make central to our faith and worship, I’m reminded of a scene from the Robert De Niro / Jeremy Irons film The Mission (1986). Two groups of monks sit down opposite each other to debate. We hope that their topic is significant — maybe, how do we learn to love one another as Christ loves? Instead, if I’m remembering right, their topic — while perhaps important to them and their Order — was ultimately “comparatively trivial”: did Christ, or did He not, own the clothes He wore?
The Church’s trivial pursuit Campbell references also puts me in mind of something Seneca tribal orator Sagoyewatha/Red Jacket (1750-1830) is recorded as having said in response to the missionary Jacob Cram’s attempts to convert the Senaca to Christianity: “BROTHER: You say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it? Why not all agreed, as you can all read the same book?” More-than-fair questions, I think. Sagoyewatha continues: “BROTHER: We do not understand these things. We are told that your religion was given to your forefathers, and has been handed down from father to son. We also have a religion, which was given to our forefathers, and has been handed down to us their children. We worship in that way. It teaches us to be thankful for all the favors we receive; to love each other, and to be united. We never quarrel about religion.”
I don’t think it’s difficult to see that “trivial matters” cause division in Christ’s church — to which Campbell refers and which, for Sagoyewatha, undermine the supposed message of Christ. Similar “trivial matters” cause division everywhere else, too. We stand with “party-worshipers” that are like us, and we hate — yes, hate, or, maybe more fundamentally, fear — those we perceive as being against us or just different from us. Even if we don’t name or claim them out loud, all sorts of ifs and buts restrict our love — and, by extension, God’s love. Labels enable this. We are Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, white or black or brown, refugee or terrorist or patriot, piss-poor American or filthy rich American, white- or black- or brown-skinned, American or American Indian or Mexican or Turkish or Asian or Canadian. All labels. All “trivial matters.”
Stripped of our labels, we become humanized. Become human. Become humans.
We then realize that we are neighbors in this world. With a little imagination, next door is anywhere and everywhere; our neighbor is everyone and anyone. Without imagination, we continue to ask, “Who is my neighbor?” We all probably, if reluctantly, know the answer deep down, but it’s difficult to accept it. Check out Luke 10:25-37 for further guidance.
* * *
. . . And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love. . . .
* * *
Walt Whitman, from Section V of “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass