Sunday the 22d October was the 20th Sunday after Trinity. That workaday Season of the Church is hasting to its yearly end: soon enough, it shall be Advent-tide, and then Christmas, the birthday and New Year of the Church. But you’ll not be interested in that, and are perhaps doubtful of its relevance.
(O that men would therefore praise the Lord for his goodness : and declare the wonders that he doeth for the children of men!)
Sunday the 22d October was a morning of complex skies which some should no doubt have called confused. There were clouds of several classes at separate strata in the column of air above us, and the winds aloft blew in divers directions, and blew them accordingly. (The wind bloweth where it listeth…) I did not regard the sky, the clouds, or the winds aloft as confused: I saw contrary motion. Fugal. Baroque. Bach.
But you’ll not be interested in that, and are perhaps doubtful of its relevance.
Writers are very kittle cattle indeed.
A middling-distant cousin of mine some generations back once wrote, The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. The natural diet, the meat and drink, of writers, is in two sources: in words, notably including the words of others; and in natural sense experience. Both must be consumed to nourish the writer: to eliminate either from a balanced diet makes a scurvy writer and scurvy writing. Writers are kittle cattle—as kittle, as self-willed and headstrong, as any wild kine in the history of domestication and its failures—, and, however kittle, require a nicely calculated diet if they are to flourish.
We spoke the other day of the merits of observing the natural world and its phenomena. We must now speak of words.
A very dear, very generous, and very patient friend of mine, an editor, author, and poet, reminded me a week or so ago that my mind … does not work after the fashion of other minds. I know. A decade ago, after my triple bypass, one of the lawyers at my old firm (the invariable dream-setting of all my anxiety dreams and nightmares), still occasionally contracting with me for appellate assistance and writing, said, in response to my warning that I had lost a step, that that meant only that the rest of them could at last keep up. That was not flattery … because it was not commendatory, or not altogether, nor meant to be: I do have—and everyone knows it—an ill-regulated, ungoverned, and Catherine-wheel mind, an inability to imagine that others are not on the same proverbial and metaphoric page, and no patience whatever. I stand at one Altuve in height, and my patience and my temper are shorter than I am.
Frankly, I’m simply thankful that I avoided synæsthesia with the rest of it.
As it happens, I am possessed of, and am not, I fear, always unfeignedly thankful to possess, a retentive but ill-directed memory. I forget what I ought not to forget, and I cannot forget things any normal person had long forgotten.
Decades ago, I ran across, and yet remember, something in The (old) New Yorker: something itself decades old at the time, which cannot have been printed any later, I think, than the earliest Fifties. Shawn might have passed it, but it seems more likely to date to the dying days of Ross as editor. What I remember of it is the setup and the punchline; I could not now tell you if it were a squib or a cartoon. The main character was a Southern Literary Figure at a Manhattan cocktail party, who had clearly moved North to the flesh-pots but continued to work the same old vein of literature; the punchline, his rather self-defensive remark, Thank God, Ah’ve kept my sense of loss.
As a Southerner and a writer, that tends to stick with me. But you’ll not be interested in that, and are perhaps doubtful of its relevance.
My grandfathers—whom I mention in this context because both outlived my grandmothers—saw in the course of their lives vast changes. Both were born before the Wright Brothers took to the sky: both lived long enough to see men land on the Moon. They saw out two World Wars and innumerable smaller conflicts, beginning with the Spanish-American War; they saw the fall of empires. They saw seventeen US presidents and six British monarchs. The pace of change, and particularly the pace of social change, much of it but by no means all of it salutary, was greater by some magnitude than any known by their ancestors in recorded history: because it embraced changes in kind as in degree. In most material aspects, my late parents’ lives and mine have seen change yet more frenetic; but, save in material aspects, only in degree. But you’ll not be interested in that, and are perhaps doubtful of its relevance.
In the United States, society has atomized: and not voluntarily, as a byproduct of expansion and the frontier: as was the case in elder days. Neither major political party bears any resemblance to its founding principles or its founding ethos, and neither is now fit for a gentleman to belong to. Politics is the art of the possible: even the salutary social changes of the past century were compromised from their beginnings, as they must necessarily have been to have occurred; and now their virtues are mostly spent and the disadvantages and dross and dirty deals which attended their success alone remain. But you’ll not be interested in that, and are perhaps doubtful of its relevance.
The secondary school I attended no longer exists as such. My native city has changed out of all recognition. My old university, and its law school—for I was a Seven-Year Man—, now exists in name only, and those responsible for that sea change are bent upon dispensing with the name so soon as they can be assured that it shall not cost them a bankrupting drop in alumni contributions. It is only for the moment that they are content to continue trading under the old name to trade upon the confidence of the public. But it is a long-firm fraud, and must come in time to an end.
Thank God, Ah’ve kept my sense of loss.
But you’ll not be interested in that, and are perhaps doubtful of its relevance.
(My brain works differently to the brains of others; be patient: we are getting somewhere relevant with this.)
I am naturally a man of conservative temperament. This, in the United States, has nothing to do with what the current so-called Right in America has become, but is dedicated to conserving the founding principles, the Classical Liberal principles, of the Republic, as held and expressed and codified by the Founders and the Framers. But you’ll not be interested in that, and are perhaps doubtful of its relevance.
I am naturally a man of conservative temperament. This is not a reaction, emotional and sub-rational, to the childhood disappointment and anger of having my one trip to Disneyland interrupted and ruined by the Yippies’ takeover of the park. It proceeds rather from my conviction that babies ought not to be thrown out with the bathwater, that there is a profound difference between growth and mere change, that precedent matters, that one may trust more safely in the tested than in the theoretical untested, that, as Mr. Justice Holmes put it, the life of the law is not in logic but in experience. But you’ll not be interested in that, and are perhaps doubtful of its relevance.
My life today, like perhaps all lives, has been a long series of losses and of desperate rearguard actions. But you’ll not be interested in that, and are perhaps doubtful of its relevance.
Thank God, Ah’ve kept my sense of loss.
(My brain works differently to the brains of others; be patient: we are getting somewhere relevant with this.)
I have a clear visual memory of having seen, decades ago, a cartoon from The New Yorker which cannot date to later than the 1930s or pre-Pearl Harbor ’40s and which as a matter of style was unquestionably by Peter Arno. It involved a crowd of socialites on the pavement or sidewalk outside a brownstone. One of these was a gormless-looking man about town in a dinner suit, soft shoes, a Panama hat, and a look of settled dim confusion, whom I immediately set down as likelier a Yale man than a Harvard man. He was in the foreground, but he was not the central character. Within the brownstone, there was clearly a social gathering, perhaps a cocktail party, and the window was open. Calling out to the crowd within, at the open window, was the protagonist of this little drama, a woman with a mouth as wide as Martha Raye’s, urging the partygoers to tag along with her companions, as they were all ‘going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt’: that is, going to the cinema to jeer at the newsreels when FDR appeared.
The cartoon was of course in black and white, and, I think, wash. But I recognized that woman immediately. From her shoes to her clutch to her furs to her hair to the color of her lipstick and the color of her complexion and quite possibly of her teeth and her pearls, she was a symphony in various shades of fawn; and her voice was long marinated in a bottle of booze and five packs of cigarettes a day. Allowing for slight differences in latitude and geography, I knew her precisely: the Junior League, the Tuesday Musical Club, a benefactress of the opera and the symphony, utterly self-centered, the progenitrix of Karens, and quite probably a nominal Anglican. My late mother, although a brunette, as the Welsh tend to be, had none of these vices: music, yes; a sincere Anglicanism unquestionably; popping by the Junior League certainly, at least for the orange-glazed rolls; yet a lady of a wholly different quality to the woman in the cartoon. Moving, however, in those circles, she knew a right smart of that woman’s sisters or daughters.
Mumsie, the daughter and niece of clergymen, expended her energies on better objects, at the parish and the parish church: the Thrift Shop, the ECW, the Altar Guild. Protesting all along that she was not clever—a reaction to having both a husband and a son who were both, there being no more pleasant way of putting it, smart-asses—, she read theology for fun. She had no real use for earthly politics. A daughter of the Great Depression, who had seen rural parishes during the Great Depression, she was utterly free of snobbery. (In this she differed somewhat from my great-uncle, her father’s brother, whose all-consuming ambition to be made a bishop was so obvious that he never became one.) As you may imagine, I was effectively raised a ‘sanctuary brat’, forever in and out of the church, rather a chorister than an acolyte.
All things change: πάντα ῥεῖ; πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει. The question is whether things merely change, or whether they grow in accordance with their natures. Loss is bearable in the second case, but not in the first.
I do not now, as I did in university, attend local and committee meetings of the Democratic Party, as my father’s grandfather, landowner and local chairman, did before me. I do not, whether on a Sunday after Trinity or at the great Feasts of the Church, Christmas and Easter, attend my local services. I cannot do either in good conscience. But you’ll not be interested in that, and are perhaps doubtful of its relevance.
There is no point in my expatiating all the reason for the former abandonment, that of active engagement in the secular faith of my fathers. You’d not be interested in that, and it is of doubtful relevance.
As for the Anglican Communion… Well, Thank God, Ah’ve kept my sense of loss.
(My brain works differently to the brains of others; be patient: we are getting somewhere relevant with this.)
I am absent from my local parish church because I am an orthodox (and thus Continuing) Anglican, and St.-Tendentia-the-Trendy’s is not in my view Anglican at all. (Rite CCCXII for Stardate 2207.9, ‘contemporary’ worship muzak, people with their hands in the air, a mosh pit in the pews, all the liturgical, ecclesiological, and theological rigor of a Baptist shad-planking, and not a validly ordained priest in fifty miles.) I enjoy but can no longer play my beloved Bach: my left hand no longer works to the necessary extent, as some miserable SOB ran over me—in a crosswalk, with the right of way, the lights, and all signals in my favor—in his pickup truck, thereby retrospectively making a waste of years of my being tutored in, and playing, violin; I have not now wind enough, after my triple bypass a decade ago, to thunder amongst and amidst the other bassos. But this has not cost me my love of—or the glories in—Bach, and in Handel. I cannot drive now, let alone an hour and more to the nearest High Anglican, ACNA church; yet I remain an Anglican.
Peter Arno’s dowager Karen should nowadays, as her great-grand-daughter Karens now do, expend her excess of unintellectual energy, assuage her self-important sense of injur’d merit, and satisfy her Wille zur Macht in right-on political campaigning and activism or MAGA-Karenism, and quite possibly in seeking pretended ordination, or even purported consecration to episcopal orders: a deaconess in togs above her station. The majority of the non-GAFCON Anglican Communion has managed, as only Anglicanism could have done, to do what was beyond the power and authority of Pope Leo XIII (who, at the time, was in any case mistaken in his facts), and invalidate the Anglican Communion’s Apostolic Succession and the validity of her orders. But you’ll not be interested in that, and are perhaps doubtful of its relevance.
(My brain works differently to the brains of others; be patient: we are getting somewhere relevant with this.)
I do not pretend that birding and morning walks and observations of the sky substitute for, or compensate for, the absence in my life of being able in good conscience to attend, to find, a proper Anglican Eucharist: for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.
But if all things flow and all things change, they not infrequently repeat, in stretto or in contrary motion, fugally.
There is a difference between growth and mere change. It is only in the surreal logic of dreams and fantasies that things do not grow according to their natures but rather change without reason. The drupe becomes a damson, not a dragon, save in dreams; save in grim and Grimmish Hausmärchen, the House Martin begets House Martins, not hydras. Writers of fantasy especially must know the lands and fields we know, and know them thoroughly, if they mean to write of lands and fields we do not know and carry the reader with them to that land and those fields, amid the alien corn.
You do well to be interested in that truth; and must not doubt its relevance.
There have been times before when churches have been closed or in which none of the faithful could, without eating and drinking their own damnation, in good conscience attend them. At the beginning of the 13th Century, in England, and in Wales, there was a period of five years in which all the realm lay under interdict and the monarch had been excommunicated. This was the fault of perhaps the most despised of all my more despicable ancestors, a 21st great-grandfather of mine. The effects were felt even by foreign visitors, not to say hostages, at the royal court, so long as they were there. They did not quite cause a revolution, but they clearly embittered politics and contributed markedly to the scarred survivors’ approach to the First Barons’ War and its savageries, which followed after the interdict was lifted.
When, later, a great-uncle of mine and a first cousin of mine many generations back re-enacted this quarrel, they had to hand a continuing church as refuge. When, later still, cousins of mine revisited these follies, yet other cousins had that consolation, and, even when forbidden openly to practice their religion, had resources and sustenance.
They, like all writers and many a non-writer, fell back upon and found their nourishment in words. Words received from their fathers before them. The words of other authors. Part of the natural diet of the writer. You do well to be interested in that truth; and must not doubt its relevance.
There is always a grace and a refuge, an Island of Athelney in the direst times: and for the writer and the reader, that is commonly words. As matters stand, in the parlous state of the Anglican Communion in the Global North, I have fallen back upon the Daily Offices and The Book of Common Prayer.
(My brain works differently to the brains of others; be patient: we are even now come somewhere relevant with this.)
Regardless of your religion or irreligion, your faith or lack of it, your opinion of faith and religion, you must as a writer be interested and find this relevant. The sources of the modern English language, in Britain, in Australia and New Zealand, in Canada, in the United States of America, in South Africa, in India and Pakistan and Sri Lanka, in Hong Kong, and throughout the globe, have but a few major sources and tributaries. We get very little immediately from the Beowulf poet, or Cædmon, or even from Great Alfred. We get little more from Chaucer or Langland, or, save indirectly, from Wycliffe. The sources of our common tongue, its poetry and its prosody, rest primarily and fundamentally upon the Authorised Version—the ‘KJV’—, the 1662 BCP, and Shakespeare, topped up only a little by Bunyan and by Milton. And of these sources, only Shakespeare is secular.
Regardless of your religion or irreligion, your faith or lack of it, your opinion of faith and religion, you must as a writer immerse and ground yourself in these sources of our common tongue: for many of the phrases and metaphors and figures, and the moods and modes, of the speech you use and write daily are like the Order of Battle at Agincourt in Willie the Shake’s play: names familiar in the mouth as household words:
… Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester—
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’ed.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd…
Aldo Leopold wrote, in ‘Round River’, ‘a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all’: and that is true of language as of the natural world. ‘Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ / We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are…’ This ought to be written above the desk of every writer; as ought panta rhei. All things change; but if they are to grow rather than transmute without reason—which should in no long time make communication impossible—, the writer must hew to the ‘hard sayings of old’.
Most writers are aware of the debt the language owes to Shakespeare. It owes no less a debt to the BCP and the Authorised Version. …In whom we live and move and have our being. We, thy needy creatures. Humble praises. This our morning sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. Peace in our time. In the midst of life we are in death. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust… To have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, til death us depart. In the beginning. Lift up your hearts. Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee. Grace at this time with one accord. Desires and petitions. From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us. Long-suffering. Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid. Ye that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins. It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty. The peace of God, which passeth all understanding. Try reading, speaking, or writing English without being influenced by any of these: I’ll watch. And if you’re betting on your success, I’ll take that wager against you.
Good luck speaking, reading, or writing English without these, too. Or even listening to music in English, from Messiah to Molly Hatchet to Motown; in bluegrass, big band, or Carolina beach music; at rock concert, rodeo, or Remembrance Sunday. In the beginning was the Word. Scapegoat. Feet of clay. Peacemaker. Reap the whirlwind. Kill the fatted calf. A leopard cannot change its spots. A man after his own heart. The apple of his eye. Lost sheep. The love of money is the root of all evil. They shall beat their swords into ploughshares. Pearls before swine. Pride goeth before a fall, misquotation though it be. The powers that be. Rise and shine. Vale of tears. Three score and ten. Holier-than-thou. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Filthy lucre. An eye for an eye. The fly in the ointment. The road to Damascus. Coals of fire. Merciful kindness. The valley of the shadow of death. A word fitly spoken. The Greeks gave us a golden apple; but not apples of gold in pictures of silver. Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein. He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made. The rock whence ye are hewn. Lift up your heads, O ye gates. Glorious appearing. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Principalities and powers. All we like sheep. Many are called, but few are chosen. Things invisible and unseen. Faithful servants. Behold, I tell you a mystery. The trumpet shall sound. O death, where is thy sting? His yoke is easy. The day of His coming. More precious than rubies. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.
The language you use has been shaped by these words. I don’t ask it shape your soul; but as it is going to shape your writing and your thought—and good luck trying to think or write without it—, I suggest you get the heft and feel of its shape.
I mentioned Bach and Handel for a reason. The rhythms of our language are reflected in Anglican plainchant, in its syllabic stresses; the Augustan love of Latinate meter is an affectation, though it has its uses. What the language did inherit from Beowulf, from Cædmon, from Deor and Widsith and The Ruin, from The Seafarer and Vainglory and The Wanderer and all the Exeter Book, from The Dream of the Rood, from the Finnsburh Fragment and The Battle of Maldon, are these things:
an innocent, or at least a naïve, delight in pomp—and in secular fame;
a sense of deep abyssal history, an unknown and unknowable past which looms over and dwarfs a diminished present: in fact, a carefully cherished and nurtured … sense of loss;
a luxuriating in melancholy coupled with heroic resolve which stands out the more against a blackened sky—
Hige sceal þē heardra, heorte þē cēnre,
mōd sceal þē māre, þē ūre mægen lytlað.
Thought be the harder, heart the keener, / Courage the greater, as our might lessens:—,
the template for
Come the three corners of the world in arms, And we shall shock them;
The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die; I shall never surrender or retreat.
…I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible & die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country—Victory or Death;
There is Jackson standing like a stone wall. Let us resolve to die here, and we will conquer. Rally behind the Virginians!;
Whatever happens, there will be no turning back … I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer;
We shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our Island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone; We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender—;
the love of riddles and riddling talk, often bawdy;
the springing alliterative line and its balances, an equipoise which surpasses the Latinate and persists in Gibbon; and
a tough-minded and often sarcastic and self-deprecatory irony, notable in Alfred’s translations.
Alliteration largely left the literary language later. Where it reappears, it is in itself of little moment. Where it succeeds, it does so because it shares with its original what has persisted, the balance of opposing figures, the tension, the Anglo-Saxon cæsura which appears in Gibbon and in Pope and in Dr Johnson as it did in Langland and in Shagsper: and that inheritance was passed down by the balanced and contrasting phrases of the Authorised Version, building upon Wycliffe and Tyndal and Coverdale, the Henrician Great Bible and the Elizabethan Bishops’ Bible, and by the BCP from its 1549, 1552, 1559, and 1604 versions to its crowning glory of 1662. (The 1662 BCP in the C of E and the 1928 US BCP are the last flowering, in a literary sense: everything since has been puerile. None of the new nonsense has affected the language, save perhaps by coarsening it, by infantilizing it, and by unmooring it yet further from reason and beauty both; and I doubt any of these miserable mutilations shall ever be a discernible influence on our common tongue.)
Observe: We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done…
Note how contrapuntal and fugal is this: …that we may be effectually restrained from sin, and incited to our duty. Imprint upon our hearts such a dread of thy judgments, and such a grateful sense of thy goodness to us, as may make us both afraid and ashamed to offend thee. And this: …temperate in all things, and diligent in our several callings. These figures run through the whole of the language; they are in its linguistic DNA.
I mentioned Bach and Handel for a reason. Long before the Baroque, and without the Baroque efflorescence of ornamentation, the English language had invented the fugue. English prose, demotic and literary alike, is inherently contrapuntal. It is by its nature polyphonic. It is compound of subject and exposition, answer, episode, false entry, contrary motion, counter-exposition, modulation, stretto, tonic, cadence, coda… It thrives on inversion, imitation, ricercare, augmentation, and diminution. Its balances and equipoises are structurally fugal. It is a supremely well-tempered instrument.
I don’t recommend that you listen to Bach and Handel in order to be converted to a religion. I don’t suggest that you immerse yourself in the Authorised Version and the BCP in order that I may convert you away from your religion or irreligion, let alone into mine. I do say and shall say, I do and shall maintain, that the language you use, the language in which you write or wish to write, cannot well be used and written, and cannot be written and used properly, unless and until you immerse yourself in these resources (so far of course as your faith or conscience permits), even if purely as a literary exercise and education.
O taste and see.
Markham Shaw Pyle, author & historian 