Poetic Self-Mockery in Prose

Last summer I started to write a poem about catching fireflies. It was going to be this ambitious double-meaning thing with a metaphor for learning. I was going to say how you can’t catch them if you only look for the light pulses; you’ve got to learn to see them when they just look like bugs, and (just as a matter of fact – this part wasn’t particularly worked into my symbolism yet) to do that you have to angle yourself so the fireflies are between you and something light-colored. Such tactics I remembered from the summer delinquency of my childhood, and seeing a couple of fireflies in the yard brought it to mind. But I thought I ought to catch some fireflies with this strategy before I wrote the poem. Real-life details and writing from experience and all that.

I couldn’t catch any. I don’t know if there was a firefly plague that summer or what. I didn’t see many, despite frequent predatory dusk ventures. When I did see them, they flew over fences and into bushes and too high. I couldn’t reach the fireflies and only slapped bloody mosquitoes, muttering apologies to John Donne. I still maintain that my firefly-catching strategy is sound. It just didn’t work. So I didn’t finish the poem.

And I don’t think I will, because of what it did to me at the end of the summer. After I had striven for authenticity – yea, shed my very blood for this poem – it deliberately betrayed and humiliated me. I’d just about given up on catching fireflies that summer. I’d gone to bed for the night. I came downstairs for a drink of water. And there, on the carpet at the foot of the stairs, I saw a slow, yellow, pulsing glow. It was dying. I picked it up and examined the real-life details: the shiny black legs, squirmy abdomen, and the translucent orange stripes on its back armor where the light came through. It kept lighting slowly, and I carried it to the back door and shook it out of my hand into the grass.

Now I can’t possibly write the poem because of what this has done to the symbolism. It can’t be about the pursuit of knowledge anymore, because I just stumbled on the firefly; it can’t even be about how true knowledge comes best when you don’t pursue it, because the firefly was dying; and it can’t be about the destructive effects of analysis, because my earlier pursuit had nothing to do with this firefly’s tragic demise. In short, the poem annihilated itself. It spontaneously combusted in a puff of irony, leaving me on the back porch in poemless, pajama-clad chagrin.

Ode on a Golden Bundt Spice Cake With Lemon Glaze

So, today I meant to write a midterm essay for American Short Story, but instead I learned how to smoke a brisket and baked an exceptionally beautiful spice cake.

I don't think John Keats had thought about spice cakes when he wrote "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." Spice cakes embody transient mortal beauty, more valuable simply because of its impermanence.

Really, Keats should've written an ode on a spice cake to explore this angle of the aesthetic experience. But no, spice cakes aren't romantic enough for him. He has to write about seasons and birdwatching and pottery, when there are beautiful spice cakes in the world unimmortalized by verse.

But wait -- if he immortalized a spice cake, he'd be missing the point of its fleeting beauty, violating the very ephemerality which sharpens its significance.

So. . . maybe Keats actually wrote a poem about spice cakes by not writing a poem about them. His conspicuous silence on the subject actually proves his reverence and appreciation for the evanescent beauty of spice cakes.

(This ramble is indebted to this poem. Also, forgive my ridiculousness; my blog looked lonely and so I posted on it.)

Mother Deities

So, this last week I've encountered two songs that refer to meeting one's mother in heaven. One of them ("Poor Wayfaring Stranger") says in one verse "I'm going there to meet my Father" and in another verse "I'm going there to meet my mother" (note the capitalization). God takes the father role, but the mother is just a human mother rather awkwardly placed as a heavenly figure.

The divinity of fathers is understood to be metaphorical and refer imperfectly to God's divinity, but mothers don't have anywhere to pass the buck in protestant culture. I'm taking Victorian Literature, and the strain is especially acute in that period. Victorian mothers are supposed to be superhuman agents of goodness, taking care of their own work and everyone else's, and generally glowing with virtue. I'm not saying mothers or anyone else ought to slack off on virtue and goodness, but the expectations were pretty ridiculous and still are in many subcultures.

If we have a psychological or cultural need for a divine mother, promoting earthly mothers to the position isn't a fair way to deal with it. And it's not healthy for them or those around them. A mother who thinks she's supposed to be an angel or goddess is likely to be acutely disappointed with herself, or self-righteous, or both. Idealizing human roles gets messy very quickly.

So maybe we need to recognize the mother aspect in God more. Mothers should be able to see what they do as a reflection of (not a substitute for) the mother in God. Then mothering is meaningful but allowed to be imperfect, and mothers can respect themselves and be respected for what they are.

A Paradox

So, in my Philosophy of Religion class Friday, we were talking about the importance of philosophy, and I got started thinking about how some things can be significant and insignificant at the same time. Chesterton (in Orthodoxy) talks about Christian paradoxes, and this is similar to some things he mentions.

Some examples of the paradox: It's important to think about things in religion and have coherent systems of thought. If we're going to believe something, we need to think about it somehow so that we can keep it real on all levels (love God with our minds, as Karyn was saying). And the positions we take on intellectual issues make a difference; some fights about theory are really worth fighting. Philosophy matters. But then, what's a lifetime's abstract study of God worth in comparison with one act of sacrificial love to another done for God's sake? What does philosophy matter in comparison with practical obedience to God?

Or another one, close to home for me: What's the good of spending so much time and energy making a line of poetry work? Why agonize over whether this alliteration is too much or how to make this image consistent, when you could be doing something of more impact? Maybe five or ten people are ever going to read the poem, and maybe a couple of those will get something out of it. It's a lot of work for something insignificant. But then it is significant too. It's hard to find something more significant than communicating a complex truth beautifully with another person.

Or struggling to be better: Our practical moral victories are lame and insufficient, but we break our hearts over them anyway, and it's right that we do.

Or even ourselves: We're ridiculous little people, but we're also the brilliantly significant objects of God's love.

This last one leads to something that might help to understand the paradox: We're valueless compared to God, but we're deeply valuable in relation to God. So maybe the issue is to relate things instead of just comparing them. By comparison, any human act can be insignificant, but by relation, any human act can be significant.

But anyway, seeing the paradox of doing things that are both significant and insignificant gives an interesting (and, I think, healthy) attitude. Because of the significance of minute things, we can do what we do passionately. Because of the insignificance, we can laugh at ourselves and eschew pride. I think we can work with awareness that what we're doing can be a life-and-death matter and a joke at the same time, and quite genuinely and undilutedly each.

Existentialist Blind Dates

I think someone should've arranged a meeting between Fyodor Dostoevsky and Emily Dickinson. It would've been chronologically possible.

Since they're both dead now, though, I'd settle for a Tom Stoppard play based on the scenario.