The first real poem we look at in Old English in Signum’s course is Caedmon’s hymn, about which miraculous stories are told. The shepherd goes out of dinner before his turn to sing on the harp, falls asleep in the manger, and an angel bids him sing in his dream. He doesn’t know how, and yet in his dreams when he is told he must, he does, beginning with that: Now we must praise… Upon waking he goes back to shepherding, but now singing perfect songs of inspired beauty, and it comes to the abbess’ attention. They think he lived only just before the time of Bede, in whose history of the church in England the story is told in Latin, and many of the copies of that work a little later include glosses that render the first recorded song back into Old English, in this or that dialect or accent. So it is a poem and a song, on thresholds of orality and literacy, English and Latin, miracle and institution. And all of this is inherent to the work, because it is all of the ways it is recorded, preserved; it is insofar as it is talked about within a much larger history--the institution recreates, reinterprets again and again the poem of the miracle, and what the shepherd is talking about is the Christian God worshipped in the double abbey by men and women who, as he serves them with agricultural and pastoral labor, serve him spiritually, by their words and their silence.
As many iterations as there are of this first Old English hymn, no other songs of Caedmon come down to us with any certainty as to his authorship, or rather mediation. The mediterranean God is referenced with cumulative germanic descriptions, repeated and varied in the recognizable style and meter of the north. Whether the angel, too, was of local extraction, or the latent talent of the singer was molded by his listening at all the previous dinners, what came out when he was made an instrument, preserved orally and then copied down by scribes when Bede’s anecdote gave them occasion, was this compound of art and learning where neither had been before, in a language hitherto unwritten, even though poems, the scholars conjecture, had long been sung.
Little sparks and bright coals in that ash heap of world history Robinson’s John Ames returns to at the end of his long letter to his son, stories like these might be adduced as evidence, by somewhat circular reasoning, for the truth of the Christian epistemology, that knowledge and love are inseparable, leading to right and good life in this world and eternally. That is a paradox, but at this stage of the inquiry the activity of love is particularly enjoined by a certain branch of theological adherents--rather than a liability sinking the thesis, the paradoxical claim that truth, love, and right action form a kind of trinity akin to the nature of the God in whose image human nature is made, is taken to be the strongest attestation of its essentially being the case, that is, that there should be such a unity not just in our confused concepts, emotions, and doings, but in our very being, and down to the ground of being itself. Theology, metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, all branches of the love of wisdom are subsumed under the richer meaning given to each by their interconnectedness: love in wisdom, wisdom in love--and the imperative that this be an understanding not of the head or even heart, but of the whole body, also. To make it a systematic program is probably no one’s intention who ever arrived at such a thesis--Robinson and Wright are the two that come to mind in contemporary letters, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche the earlier and wilder diagnosers of the out-of-kilter excesses of Enlightenment and Romanticism--but because the emphasis tends to be on rekindling or recognizing the role of love in true understanding--reasserting the importance of the heart, Romanticism’s revolt against the head, or Barzun’s cultural vindication against narrow scientism--it might be worth considering the importance of having something significant to hold up to love in the first place--and this is part of what makes Great Hearts’ or St Johns’ curriculum so attractive, the rigor of the content and high standards for its theoretical understanding, alongside and hand in hand with the community thus drawn together around it--and, to keep track of the third element you might otherwise want to separate off, or lose sight of and reason two-dimensionally, perceiving a dichotomy where there must be a moving dialectic, remember the crucial step to be taken beyond the walls of the study or even the school, the reduplication of thinking and feeling in everyday interactions, the healthy outward play of the tremendous inner energies unleashed by the conscience and the will reestablished in creative, not mutually annihilating, tension, flowing outward into music and gymnastics, tragic and comic, apollonian and dionysian revels, service pastoral-agricultural and pastoral-spiritual, poems epic and lyric, memorized and inspired.
Something along these lines is Tolkien’s goal in the essay On Fairy Stories, a real joy revealed in the turn around which the whole story determines itself. The truth of the happy ending is for him analogous to the intuition of the truth of the impossible miracle of Christ, and points back to it; the fact that we access this primary truth by means of the Bible story is for him a cosmically apt irony.
But what then is the status of Pullman’s fantasy, which inverts the loop, takes the sadness of realizing the Christian story is impossible for him, for Mary Malone, or simply inconsequential, for Will and Lyra, beside their own innocence and experience, their relationship, death and resurrection, in a word, their story, and casts it explicitly in the fantasy form derived from these apologetic Oxford dons? Or what happens when each of them gets reappropriated--perhaps this is the question more to the point--and His Dark Materials is put onstage, the Lord of the Rings, etc, onscreen? When they shortly become commodities, if not institutions in their own right, and their economic value supersedes, for most purposes, for most people, the meaning or value of reading them? Even asking this on the heels of our first, roughly formed question, takes us too far afield, but here, at least, you might expect the contemporary and the historical Oxford men of letters to have some common ground, for they surely do value reading and stories over commercialized adaptations or they would have been businessmen rather than storytellers, but then again, Pullman is frankly unapologetic about his stake in the profits his work earns him, and his interest in protecting intellectual rights and arts education. And how many more people have come to read the original books by way of the secondarily secondary fantasies? If this direction of the reading process matters, it would be a very small leap to the perhaps surprising common ground they also share, a respect for and desire that people go all the way back to reading the Bible and classical or pre-classical myths.
In his interviews and lectures, Pullman certainly comes across as dour, heavy-handed with religion, bleak on politics, but his intelligence is too keen, his stirring up of controversy too artful and successful, to mistake this for a more critical neglect of joy. To come back to the end of His Dark Materials, it has to be noted that the love the characters share is preserved, their promise is kept, though it means forever closing the doors between pre-existing worlds and false heavens. The eucatastrophic turn, if you like, comes right in the final lines, spoken by Lyra: to build the Republic of Heaven. So whenever Pullman gets to talk about books he loves, or address the questions of children in his audience, or the work of politics, or the beauties of Biblical verse and the art, as opposed to institutions, it has inspired, he lights right up. The gleam comes through the facade or reality of a crotchety controversialist.
Now, if Olsen can create and manage an online university out of his love of Tolkien, and find people not only to work there but to pay for and take the courses, it should be just possible to start at the beginning again, studying what instills that joy, even if the ideological line of descent is more complicated, even if that joy is more hidden, perhaps most of all from itself, spoken of in another way or not professed, yet deeply believed in all the same. There should be some room for courses on Pullman, Blake, and Milton, and reading the Bible by their wonderfully kaleidoscopic light, as well as the demure radiance of the Inklings; these courses, in turn, can begin as notes and responses like these, but then take shape in more formal lectures and seminars, audio recordings for podcasts and online discussion groups to challenge and refine all these wayward ideas. Soon I’ll need a better microphone and the long-deferred contraption to capture pictures in a notebook or on a chalkboard, because the handwritten and hand-drawn has an important place in the midst of all these new media, just as the human voice, the reflective conversation, surely do.
Arrange before you, then, the manifold projects, each one as it were represented by a book on your overfilling desk, so that none might be lost, even if none is ever quite completed to your lasting satisfaction. Here is a beginning--
- The neighborhood--Tolkien even stresses that Faerie is a place--and this is a word doc somewhere
- Publishing the pieces already written, as they stand or with editors’ suggestions, but anyhow starting to submit them
- Translations: Figari and Philip Pullman’s lesser-known writing--he even gave you permission once before, as the museo did, more or less
- The crafting of short stories and imitations workshop, clearly becoming indispensable as your rambling runs amok
- The school, in its iterations, including a letter to Denny
- Reading the rest of Robinson and Pratchett, but also running seminars and a Big Read? -
- Letters to Elliot and experimental theology again
- Writing, by hook or by crook, three pages a day
- Memorizing poems and songs, as well as writing them
- Postcards and other letters, too
- Daily devotions, Bible readings, and some prayers--Calvin, Edwards, Barth, Kierkegaard
- This after school club, reading and writing volunteering
- Work in prisons, part time or voluntary
- Video games are another big one, all that writing on Earthbound
- And on soccer--playing, not to be forgotten, regularly
- Building the contraption
- Parents’ stories, dad’s, his mom’s writing, mom’s notebooks and grandpa’s
- And of course what to do with/about money--fund scholarships?
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