I’m full of updates, or maybe I’m just more susceptible to spotting denouements: my psychic year draws to another hot end.

Nash never got that grant from The Old Farmer’s Almanac to study a connection between cow arrangements and long-term weather forecasting.  Instead, he has been taking advantage of his sales territory along I-81 to volunteer for Virginia Tech's biology department.  He amounts to Google’s eyes along the Valley on cloudy days when cow photos from space are difficult to snap.  Nash’s field reports may one day help determine the feasibility of replacing compasses with cows.

He hopes Tech will spring for an overseas trip he’d take early next year to discover why Scottish cattle seem to ignore the north-south alignment favored by cattle of other nations.

Ultimately, though, Nash would like to work alone again and not for scientists, as he did when he met his farmer friend years ago.

“The scientists were unable to distinguish between the head and rear of the cattle, but could tell that the animals tended to face either north or south,” according to BBC News.

“North and south are like poles apart on a compass,” Nash told me.  “Those scientists don’t know a cow’s ass from its antlers.”

[I sent the following email today to Nancy Schnog, a high school English teacher in the D.C. area.]

I teach ninth grade English at X High School in X County. I've run into the same reactions from students -- often my brightest students -- that you describe your students having to literary essay assignments in your article in today'sWashington Post. It was gratifying to read about your experiences and conclusions.

I published an article earlier this year in the Virginia Writing Project's Journal criticizing the literary analysis essay assignment in ninth grade English classes. (You can find the online version of the article here.) My journey to this essay's roots began when a bright student (not quite as articulate as the student with whom you maintained an email correspondence, though!) told me how analyzing literature was ruining it for her.

Your article, of course, addresses our schools' assigned reading selections more than it does their assigned essays about literature. Thanks for raising your voice about both of these important issues.

I am a mustang seated
in the wet stands
of a horse show

I am an old stray
at a dog show
smelling the slack leashes

Enfogged and drizzling
the priest walks past

I am Absalom’s ghost –
an unsensed, ebbing
essence – jealous only
for my father’s tears

Men sing through me
like schooled fish

I am a wild plant
stunted and fazed
by the wet lattice
covered with angels
of roses

Lectio divina is reading for the heart, so my mind needs something to occupy it while I’m trying to meditate.  Otherwise, my mind stands outside barking like a dog at every passing worry, project, to-do item, obsession, or imagination.  So this summer I’ve thrown it a bone: here, boy, write the McLaughlin Bible.

My mind loves a good fight, so when I meditate on a psalm, I let my favorite English versions compete for each phrase of the psalm.  In the process of going over five versions of each phrase, my mind slows down enough and focuses just enough to read a psalm the way Jesuit priest Jean-Pierre de Caussade advised the nuns under his pastoral care to read:

Read quietly, slowly, word for word to enter into the subject more with the heart than with the mind. . . . From time to time make short pauses to allow these truths time to flow through all the recesses of the soul and to give occasion for the Holy Spirit who, during these peaceful pauses and times of silent attention, engraves and imprints these heavenly truths in the heart. . . . Should this peace and rest last for a longer time it will be all the better.  When you find that your mind wanders, resume your reading and continue thus, frequently renewing these same pauses.  [From de Caussade’s book The Sacrament of the Present Moment]

It’s hard for me to get that quiet by just reading a familiar passage slowly.  But by reading a passage in five translations and picking out a favorite translation of each phrase, I trick myself into reading slowly enough for one version of the phrase to sink in a little.  And if the phrase hits me, I stop and either pray it or at least think about it some more. If it doesn’t hit me, I just go on to the five translations of the next phrase.

The idea is to meditate; meanwhile, my mind is cutting and pasting the winning phrases into my own version of the psalm.  If I do this for eighty-five more years, this monkey-mind residue may add up to an entire copyright-infringing Bible.  I’d call it the McLaughlin Bible, named after the McLaughlin Group, the talking-heads panel that discusses politics on PBS.

Each panelist on McLaughlin has his strengths, blind sides, and axes to grind.  Once you get to know the panelists, then you may get something approaching a well-rounded view of the news they’re discussing.  (I cling to the idea that it’s possible to get at the truth through an adversarial proceeding. Maybe it’s the old trial lawyer in me.)

I have all five Bible versions on the computer screen in columns using Accordance software.  Here are my versions, in order of seniority:

The Geneva Bible, based mainly on Tyndale’s Bible and associated with dissenters such as Calvinists and Puritans, was the most popular Bible in England from just after its first publication in 1560 until several decades after the King James Bible was published.  The laity (including Shakespeare) loved its punchy language, and scholars liked its accuracy.

The Bishops’ Bible, which was first published in 1568, was the Establishment’s first answer to the Geneva Bible.  It never caught on.  The committees of translators responsible for various books didn’t look hard at the individual ways each committee was translating the original words into English, so the Bible felt choppy.  It seems to add words frequently in order to make sense of the text, and it does so without the italics that the King James and the New American Standard use for the same purpose.  I love many of the Bishops’ Bible’s turns of phrase, though.  It seems like an original compared with the Geneva Bible and the King James, which often gang up against it.

The odd phrasing of the King James Bible compared with that of the more approachable Geneva Bible kept the Geneva the more popular translation in England until at least the late seventeenth century, but the King James’s more modern spelling and usage helped it eventually to displace the Geneva Bible.  Most of the King James’s beautiful language is borrowed from its predecessor English versions.  I’m more familiar with this version than any other, so it begins most panel debates during my meditations.  The KJV likes to use different English words for the same Hebrew or Greek word in the interest of improving the text’s sound and beauty.  Draft translations were read orally in plenary meetings of translators, which helped to keep the focus on how the version sounded in public readings.

Jumping ahead to the twentieth century, the New American Standard Bible, which emphasizes word-for-word translation at the expense of any sense of mellifluence, usually reads like an updated King James Bible except where to do so would be misleading in current English or just plain wrong, based on modern research.  Having the NAS on my panel is like having the accountant or the engineer or the lawyer at a board of directors meeting: before the board signs off on something, the chairman asks, “Can we do that?”  If the NAS nods its approval, I’m ready to copy and paste.

The Revised English Bible is often more beautiful than even the Bishop’s Bible to me.  It goes for the sense of a verse more than for a word-for-word translation.  It’s often quirky and at odds with everyone else on my panel, kind of like Justice Stevens with his separate, dissenting opinions.  But, comparing its take against the other versions, I can often see its point, and the verse opens itself up for me a little more.  The Psalms contain examples of the best and worst of the REB.  Verse one of Psalm 81 contains the Hebrew root “ruwa,” which Strongs says literally means to shout or to mar.  Strongs says also that “ruwa” has the figurative meaning of splitting the ears with sound.  My other panelists had some fun with the word – the Bishops’ Bible, for instance, puts up “a chearefull noyse” – but the REB prefers “acclaim,” presumably so as not to offend any Anglican sensibilities.  In the immediately preceding psalm, though, all of the other versions have God “angry” against the prayer of his people, but the REB has God “fume” at the prayers.  There are at least three reasons why I think “fume” is the better choice: (1) it’s consistent with Psalm 74, where God’s anger either smokes or fumes, depending on the panelist, (2) prayer is compared to incense in two or three other Bible verses, and the noun “fume” picks up that resonance and suggests some irony, and (3) you would expect a god to fume.

The following, for example, is Psalm 76 in each of my five favorite translations, followed by the McLaughlin version.  Note that the colors in the McLaughlin version correspond to the colors of the original versions from which it took the language.

King James Version

Psa. 76:0   To the chief Musician on Neginoth, A Psalm or Song of Asaph. 
Psa. 76:1   In Judah is God known: his name is great in Israel.  2 In Salem also is his tabernacle, and his dwelling place in Zion.  3 There brake he the arrows of the bow, the shield, and the sword, and the battle. Selah.  4 Thou art more gloriousand excellent than the mountains of prey.  5 The stouthearted are spoiled, they have slept their sleep: and none of the men of might have found their hands.  6 At thy rebuke, O God of Jacob, both the chariot and horse are cast into a dead sleep. 
Psa. 76:7   Thou, even thou, art to be feared: and who may stand in thy sight when once thou art angry?  8 Thou didst cause judgment to be heard from heaven; the earth feared, and was still,  9 When God arose to judgment, to save all the meek of the earth. Selah.  10 Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee: the remainder of wrath shalt thou restrain.  11Vow, and pay unto the LORD your God: let all that be round about him bring presents unto him that ought to be feared. 12 He shall cut off the spirit of princes: he is terrible to the kings of the earth.

Revised English Bible

Psa. 76:0 [For the leader: on stringed instruments: a psalm: for Asaph: a song]  1 In Judah God is known, his name is great in Israel;  2 his tent is in Salem, his dwelling in Zion.  3 There he has broken the flashing arrows, shield and sword and weapons of war. [Selah]  4 You are awesome, Lord, more majestic than the everlasting mountains.  5 The bravest are despoiled, they sleep their last sleep, and the strongest cannot lift a hand.  6 At your rebuke, God of Jacob, rider and horse lie prostrate.  7 You are awesome, Lord; when you are angry, who can stand in your presence?  8 You gave sentence out of heaven; the earth was afraid and kept silence 9 when you rose in judgement, God, to deliver all the afflicted in the land. [Selah]  10 Edom, for all his fury, will praise you and the remnant left in Hamath will dance in worship.  11 Make vows to the Lord your God, and keep them; let the peoples all around him bring their tribute;  12 for he curbs the spirit of princes, he fills the kings of the earth with awe.

New American Standard

Psa. 76:0    For the choir director; on stringed instruments. A Psalm of Asaph, a Song. 
Psa. 76:1                God is known in Judah;
            His name is great in Israel. 
2             His tabernacle is in Salem;
            His dwelling place also is in Zion. 
3             There He broke the flaming arrows,
            The shield and the sword and the weapons of war.             Selah. 
Psa. 76:4               You are resplendent,
            More majestic than the mountains of prey. 
5             The stouthearted were plundered,
            They sank into sleep;
            And none of the warriors could use his hands. 
6             At Your rebuke, O God of Jacob,
            Both rider and horse were cast into a dead sleep. 
7             You, even You, are to be feared;
            And who may stand in Your presence when once You are angry? 
Psa. 76:8               You caused judgment to be heard from heaven;
            The earth feared and was still
9             When God arose to judgment,
            To save all the humble of the earth.             Selah. 
10             For the wrath of man shall praise You;
            With a remnant of wrath You will gird Yourself. 
Psa. 76:11               Make vows to the LORD your God and fulfill them;
            Let all who are around Him bring gifts to Him who is to be feared. 
12             He will cut off the spirit of princes;
            He is feared by the kings of the earth.

Geneva Bible

1 To him that excelleth on Neginoth. A Psalme or song committed to Asaph. God is knowen in Iudah: his Name is great in Israel.  2 For in Shalem is his Tabernacle, and his dwelling in Zion.  3 There brake he the arrowes of the bowe, the shielde and the sword and the battell. Selah.  4 Thou art more bright and puissant, then the mountaines of pray.  5 The stout hearted are spoyled: they haue slept their sleepe, and all the men of strength haue not found their hands.  6 At thy rebuke, O God of Iaakob, both the chariot and horse are cast a sleepe.  7 Thou, euen thou art to be feared: and who shall stand in thy sight, when thou art angrie!  8 Thou didest cause thy iudgement to bee heard from heauen: therefore the earth feared and was still,  9 When thou, O God, arose to iudgement, to helpe all the meeke of the earth. Selah.  10 Surely the rage of man shall turne to thy praise: the remnant of the rage shalt thou restrayne.  11 Vowe and performe vnto the Lorde your God, all ye that be rounde about him: let them bring presents vnto him that ought to be feared.  12 He shall cut off the spirit of princes: he is terrible to the Kings of the earth.

Bishops’ Bible

Psa. 76:1 In Iurie is God knowen: his name is great in Israel.  2 At Shalem is his tabernacle: and his dwellyng in Sion.  3There he brake the arrowes of the bowe: the shielde, the sworde, and the battayle. Selah.  4 Thou art honourable: and of more puissaunce then the mountaynes of robbers.  5 The hygh couragious stomackes are spoyled, they haue slept their slepe: and the valiaunt souldiours coulde not finde their owne handes.  6 At thy rebuke O God of Iacob: both the charet and horse be brought to naught.  7 Thou, euen thou art dreadfull: and who may stande in thy syght when thou [begynnest] to be angry?  8 Thou causest thy iudgement to be hearde from heauen: then the earth trembleth, and is styll.  9 When God ariseth to iudgement: and to helpe all the afflicted vpon the earth. Selah.  10 The fearcenesse of man shall turne to thy prayse: [and] the remnaunt of the fearcenesse thou wylt restrayne.  11 Make vowes vnto God your Lorde, and perfourme them all ye that be rounde about hym: bryng presentes vnto hym that is dreadfull.  12 He abateth the spirite of princes: he is dreadfull to the kynges of the earth.

McLaughlin Bible

Psa. 76:0 [For the leader: on stringed instruments: a psalm: for Asaph: a song] 1 In Judah God is known, his name is great in Israel; 2 his tent is in Salem, his dwelling in Zion. 3 There he has broken the flashing arrows, shield and sword and battle. Selah. 4 Thou art more bright and puissant, than the mountains of prey. 5 The hygh couragious stomackes are spoyled, they sleep their last sleep, and the valiaunt souldiours coulde not finde their owne handes. 6 At thy rebuke, O God of Iaakob, both the chariot and horse are cast a sleepe. 7 Thou, euen thou art dreadfull: and who may stande in thy syght when thou [begynnest] to be angry? 8 You give sentence out of heaven; then the earth trembleth, and is styll. to helpe all the meeke of the land. [Selah] 10 The fearcenesse of man shall turne to thy prayse: [and] the remnaunt of the fearcenesse thou wylt restrayne. 11 Make vowes vnto God your Lorde, and perfourme them all ye that be rounde about hym: bryng presentes vnto hym that is dreadfull. 12 for he curbs the spirit of princes, he fills the kings of the earth with awe.

So the McLaughlin Bible collects the bones I’ve used to occupy my doggie mind this summer while I’m digging for a different kind of bone each day or two for my heart to chew.

[A lot of the information about my five “panelist” English Bible translations is from the Wikipedia pages on these translations linked here as well as from In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture by Alister McGrath.]

I love Faulkner and I love Merton. I learned recently that Merton loved Faulkner and said this about him:

His novels and stories are far more prophetic in the Biblical sense than the writings of any theologian writing today (at least, any that I know!).

Merton was contemplating writing a book on Faulkner’s work, but he died instead.  Merton loved to write about literature, and thirteen years after his death New Directions put a lot of this writing into a five-hundred-plus-page book entitled The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton.  In an appendix, this book also contains transcripts of informal talks Merton gave to his brothers at the Abbey of Gethsemani concerning The Sound and the Fury, Go Down, Moses, and The Wild Palms.

I love Faulkner and I love Merton.  Go Down, Moses is my favorite Faulkner novel, and The Sound and the Fury ranks up there, too.  I wanted to read The Wild Palms this summer because Merton had read it and loved it and wrote about it, and I wanted to read what Merton wrote about it but not before I had read the novel myself.

I read The Wild Palms this week like I used to read books during those years when my Great Books book group was hot.  I couldn’t wait to share with Merton my impressions and read about his.  If I become Orthodox, I thought, I can talk to Merton because he’s not dead because God is not the God of the dead but of the living, thank you.  If I don’t become Orthodox, I could just scrawl margin notes in the appendix as usual, and that’s pretty satisfying.  Because I know Merton and I know Faulkner, and I’m so happy that they were friends, or at least that Faulkner was Merton’s friend the way Faulkner and Merton are my friends.

Merton says that The Wild Palms is a meditation.  “Yes, a meditation!”  (Merton is animated.  The Literary Essayseditor does little editing so as not to detract from the talk’s informality.)  Merton thinks The Wild Palms is a meditation because of the depths of the truths it gets across through a kind of counterpoint (I’ll explain at the end); I think it’s a meditation, too, but I say it’s because of Faulkner’s high-wire prose that unites thought and act through epic similes and movie-director detail and repetition, through non-sequential time and fraying syntax, a union that seems to thin out under a reader’s feet at a vertiginous height above a truth where she fears that she or the character one will fall and die in contact with that truth.  The prose is like a meditation, a spell, a dull spell (no matter how much you like Faulkner); it affects you like a dream, not a vivid dream but like your last evaporating dream as you wake up: precisely the imprecise mood and the seemingly random images or words that stick with you not because they are the dream’s best moods or images or words but because they are the slowest moods or images or words to leave, the last bats, the ones that fly home in the orange sunrise; truth’s dull, pervasive, dawning impression.

Like this, Tom, this interaction between Wilbourne (lover) and McCord (husband) as McCord sees the couple off:

            Wilbourne and McCord shook hands.  “Maybe I’ll write you,” Wilbourne said.  “Charlotte probably will, anyway.  She’s a better gentlemen than I am, too.”  He stepped into the vestibule and turned, the porter behind him, his hand on the door knob, waiting; he and McCord looked at one another, the two speeches unspoken between them, each knowing they would not be spoken: I won’t see you and No.  You won’t see us again.  “Because crows and sparrows get shot out of trees or drowned by floods or killed by hurricanes and fires, but not hawks.  And maybe I can be the consort of a falcon, even if I am a sparrow.”  The train gathered itself, the first, the beginning of motion, departure came back car by car and passed under his feet.  “And something I told myself up there at the lake,” he said.  “That there is something in me she is not mistress to but mother.  Well, I have gone a step further.”  The train moved, he leaned out, McCord moving too to keep pace with him.  “That there is something in me you and she parented between you, that you are father of.  Give me your blessing.”

            “Take my curse,” McCord said.

On we go, our little book club, tonight, and when Tom left I thought again about The Wild Palms and about Bill, Tom, and me.

What would Louise Rosenblatt say about us tonight?  Her transactional theory of reading accounts for only two of us.  She puts everyone and everything but me on her stage in the preface to The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work: the writer (that’s Bill), the text, and the reader (Tom).  I’m a reader, too, but I’m also the reader’s reader, the reader of Merton’s secondary writing.  Where would I fit in?

Rosenblatt’s transactional theory, which I like very much, emphasizes the reader’s role in the transaction among writer, text, and reader.  She says that classicism and neoclassicism seek to mirror accepted reality, that Romanticism emphasizes the author, that New Criticism emphasizes the text, and that her transactional theory strikes the best balance by emphasizing the reader and the text (1-3).  I’m never on stage, never part of the big theory, but I do get a shout-out later in the book as the reader of criticism.

So what am I doing reading Tom reading Bill?  As a reader of criticism, am I being shortchanged or enriched?  Is this metacognition or metaestrus?

Valid literary criticism must come from a reader as a reader, Rosenblatt would say, and it must be about “the web of feelings, sensations, images, ideas, that [the reviewer or critic as reader] weaves between himself and the text.”  The text is important, too, but only as “the external pole in the process” (137).  “Objective” literary criticism (i.e., criticism focused only on this external pole) – no matter how good (and she likes the New Criticism’s brand of objective theory) – cuts readers off “from their own aesthetic roots” and so (ironically) drives them from the subject of the criticism: the text (140).

Merton does a good job avoiding that. “Yes, a meditation!” means that he has processed the novel, and his meditation exclamation gives way in his talk to some experiences he had as a reader along with some insightful takes on the text.

But even more than Merton’s personal approach, my perceived friendship with Merton, dead or alive, makes his criticism fruitful.  I know where he’s coming from, and, more importantly, I don’t know where he’s going.  This is also why I like to read book posts on blogs I’m familiar with – well, that and the comment fields, which sometimes amount to interactive marginalia.

I can even enjoy what Rosenblatt calls “objective” criticism if I have some dirt on the critic.  I started to enjoy Cleanth Brooks’s essays more once he got roughed up a bit, once Rosenblatt and Harold Bloom pointed out New Criticism’s shortcomings to me.  A biography on Brooks helped me, too.

For me, the best literary criticism is like a good book discussion group or like a marriage of true minds, impediments and all, in which the author is the celebrant and his text is the covenant we choose to honor or contravene.

(Here’s a little about The Wild Palms, which Faulkner originally named If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem before his publisher had its way.  Faulkner wrote it mid-career in 1938.  In it, he examines love, sexual and otherwise, by interweaving two stories, each about a man and a woman.  I never knew that Faulkner had it in him to examine sexual love so well, and Charlotte may be his most interesting and most human female character.  The stories, one about a modern couple who live only for their mutual love and the other about a convict stuck on a skiff with a pregnant woman he rescues during a flood, balance each other out thematically and emotionally (the “counterpoint”). The modern couple story is a psychodrama, probably kind of shrill as a stand-alone, and the flood story is action and comedy, so the stories in The Wild Palms mix a bit like the stories comprising Go Down, Moses.  Noel Polk, the editor of the current Vintage edition of The Wild Palms, says that the original manuscripts demonstrate that Faulkner wrote the novel in the order it appears – in “alternating stints” and not one story at a time.  I knew that if Merton liked novel then I would like it, too, and I did.)

I’m enjoying three new blogs, two by people I’ve known for years before they became bloggers. Each of these blogs speaks from an overtly Christian worldview in some way.

Bill explores the web and the bookstalls better than I do, and he has been recommending links and books to me for years.  He has also given me several books that have become invaluable to me.  What a special friend, to know when a book might hit me.  Shadows and Symbols, which he opened last month, focuses on places where biblical truth may be tucked away, unobserved by most Christians.  The blog is broader than that already.  I find I can air out my thinking a lot in Bill’s comment fields, and I’ve spent more time there than here lately.  (Am I the only one who finds his blog stultifying at times?)

Beryl, the one of the three I’ve never met, writes Finding Time for God, an honest and unassuming blog that starts with her devotional life.  It’s quiet over there, like shade.

I wish you could meet Maggie, a potter and a writer and someone fully alive, but since you probably can’t, you can at least read her stuff.  In Alternative Church, she examines what community is for and what Christian community might look like.

Knowing people first as friends and then as bloggers is new to me.  I find that their blogs enhance our friendships.

Most summers we get a week with Michael and Toby, but this summer we got only today, a spring day that had lost its way. We'll take it in. We won't tell it of its tribe’s fate.

Michael cooked us breakfast.  After we ate, we played catch with Julie, their adolescent Gordon setter, and we picked blackberries and swung in the hammock.  We played Master Clue and ate berries and Victoria’s chicken salad, the summer one, the one with the pecans and mandarin oranges, for lunch.  We told our parents’ and grandparents’ stories, and they were there, younger and not so wise, ha, ha!  After lunch we walked to the general store where Bethany got strawberry honey and Warren got a peach ice cream cone.  He gave me a bite.

Breakfast was toast and scrambled eggs.  The air was off; last night’s storms had broken the humidity.   The white window sash dominated the kitchen, and the breeze bought the sheers to term and delivered them into our laps.

Julie likes to throw her big dog self against us as she runs past.  She chases the motorcycles for the length of the electric fence.  Then she runs over the knoll to the back of their nine-acre place and back to us again.  She runs like breakdown music. 

We haven’t had a day this nice since before school ended.  The very white bricks and blades of grass seemed to glint with June juvenescence. We are not certain how old we are.

Blackberries are up now, though many are unripe.  The adolescent ones move between red and black.  Summer’s half done; soon, I’ll return for a new batch of ninth graders.

Bethany collected berries for lunch in a white cup, but Warren ate the berries as he picked them.  Warren befriended a worm that crawled out of a berry at the lunch table, though.

Sometimes I sit on our back door sill during an electric storm, all lights out.  It feels like a hundred verdicts read in a hundred hot, packed courtrooms.

I want to be a monk.

I feel bad about it sometimes.  It’s a selfish desire for a married man.  Stupid, too: Victoria is my soulmate and beautiful, nine years younger than I, and the work we’ve put in over almost seventeen years of married life has been paying off, we both think.

My therapist, Dr. Kennedy, told me ten years ago that couples with exactly opposing temperaments – she’s an ESTJ (a guardian) on Myers Briggs’s indicator, and I’m an INFP (an idealist)  – often have a hard go of it for the first twenty years, but if they work through their differences, they may have a great relationship thereafter.  (Dr. Kennedy’s marriage exemplifies his assertion, by the way.)

But Dr. Kennedy also inadvertently started me on this monk idea.  While helping me through an identity crisis, Dr. Kennedy clued in on my charismatic and rather evangelical form of Christianity.  He suggested that I read some devotional classics – a genre that had never appealed to me before – to reinforce what I had been learning during my crisis.

I read Augustine, St. John of the Cross, and others, and I was hooked right away.  The writers spoke to me about a side of spirituality that was at the edges or entirely outside of my Protestant experience, a spirituality that insisted on a deeper knowledge of self.  No heights without depths, the concept goes.  The road to self-knowledge is a paradox: it’s humbling and hard, but effort alone isn’t enough; it also requires God’s grace.  For the first time in my life, I was learning what Benedictine monk Anslem Gruen calls “spirituality from below”:

By descending into our earth-boundedness (humility is derived from humus, or soil), we come into contact with heaven, with God.  When we find the courage to climb down into our own passions, they lead us up to God. [Gruen, Heaven Begins Within You, p. 21]

I had been living in an Evangelical world that couldn’t even agree on whether it was appropriate to call Christians sinners in any sense.  Those who feel the word “sinner” is exclusively a label for unbelievers argue that we Christians need to identify ourselves as children of God so as not to void his work on the cross.  I’ll leave my rebuttal for another occasion; my point is that I now believe we can’t know God’s love to the extent we were created to experience it unless we go with God to the bottom of our false nature and discover more than we’d care to about our depravity.  When I read in these classics and in related books about spiritual leaders and explorers who openly acknowledge their status as sinners and who are frank about their sins and faults, I got courage to do the same, and I found a new place of fellowship and consolation with God.

I was almost forty years old when Dr. Kennedy made these reading recommendations, and I had just extended my first real invitation to God to peel away my false self.  I was motivated to do so by a deep-rooted, existential fear that I had avoided for years by constructing my own identity.  A career change and Victoria’s own personal growth conspired to finally expose it as a fraud.  I was about to discover that my approach to God and the Bible had been limited by the contradictory and patchwork manner in which I had built my identity (“I’m a fearful person.”  “I’m better than most people.”  “I’ll never measure up to my father.”)

Most of the devotional writers I read at Dr. Kennedy’s instance are monks, hermits, or spiritual fathers of nuns or monks.  You probably know the names: Thomas a Kempis, Ignatius, John of the Cross, Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Thomas Merton, others.  Something in their writing speaks of the fire that they permitted to burn away a good deal of their false selves.

During my crisis, I shared some of the rudimentary experiences some of them speak of.  I found the grace to admit more of my depravity to myself.  I know that, over twenty years into my Christian vocation, I would have consented to Jesus’ death had he been living then.  I discovered God in the people around me – Christian and non-Christian alike – and I found a new place inside me that seemed to respond to God in a more lissome way.  God was beginning to answer my prayer for intimacy with him.

My stagnation

In the years after my identity crisis waned, my spiritual progress waned, too.  In a way, I have been living out the Song of Moses: my rescue and my ride on God’s wings, followed by my complacency and distraction.  (A lot of great stuff having to do with my spiritual life has occurred in the past ten years, but I am speaking here about an elemental area of my prayer life.)

About seven years ago, I flushed when I read this passage from Merton’s The Ascent to Truth, part of a larger passage parsing John of the Cross’s stages of spiritual development:

. . . the Night of Sense and the period of consoling quietude are only a preparation for the mysticism of the Spiritual Night, Betrothal, and Transforming Union.  In the Night of Sense and the Prayer of Quiet, the contemplative is still in his infancy, and the tragedy is that in most cases mystical prayer does not get beyond this cradle stage.  The cause of this arrested development is to be found in subtle forms of attachment to which the spirit clings perhaps without ever realizing its own imperfections. [pp. 288-89]

It is probably presumptuous for me to claim to be even at the “cradle stage” – stages of spiritual development lose their allure and are no end in and of themselves, anyway – but somehow I recognized myself as suffering from something like this “arrested development” Merton describes.

Part of this stagnation was natural.  Over the last ten years, I’ve had a new career and a growing family.  I couldn’t focus on my spiritual life to the extent I did when my self-identity seemed at stake.

But before my identity crisis, struggles, blessings, jobs, relationships, and coincidences – everything usually seemed to feed into spiritual challenge and growth.  I haven’t felt that way over the past ten years, generally.  The job, the relationships, and the responsibilities – as important as they are – usually feel like more of a distraction than a teacher.  I’ve often been bitter about the great amount of time my job takes.  I often wince or curse when the phone rings.  I pray and meditate, but it seems to take me an hour – and an hour of prayer and meditation is a very rare event, given my schedule and spiritual torpor – just to clear my mind.

I pray and do Christian stuff.  But at some fundamental level, I miss God.

And I keep reading works by or about these monks and hermits, past and present – at least twenty-five books by now.  I’ve read enough to know that monasticism isn’t glamorous (or even necessarily spiritual or healthy, depending on the monk).  That doesn’t seem to lessen my ardor for the vocation, however.

Listening to fantasy

My ardor reached a fever pitch over the past month as I read two books my friend Bill gave me about the Orthodox monks and hermits on Mount Athos and some of their spiritual descendents: Kyriacos C. Markides’s The Mountain of Silence and Gifts of the Desert.  These books demonstrate to me that the tradition and spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers is alive.  Men and women are living out Anthony’s pattern of withdrawing from the world in order to rid themselves of every vestige of their false selves and in order to love the Lord without distraction.  Many of them have become spiritual parents and counselors, and many of them have been sent outside of their monasteries to help others.  Like Anthony, many men and women are leaving the world in order to return to it as better conduits of God’s love.

These two books confronted me with my lukewarm spiritual condition, and they encouraged me with what is possible in God.  They also fed my monastic fantasy, of course.

There are several reasons why I fixate on the monastic life, I think.  First of all, writings by and about monks have helped me.  Second, I am an introvert with a job that quickly drains my limited extroverted energy.  My favorite monastic daydreams therefore involve orders that severely limit talking.  Third, I feel more and more trapped by the ascendant values of Western civilization – time management, consumerism, and logic, for instance – and so my favorite daydreams drift also to more Eastern monastic traditions.

My monastic fantasy is somewhat like sexual fantasy, I think.  I have learned to neither repress sexual urges nor give in to them.  Instead, I listen to them as friends (old friends!).  What should I pay attention to about them?  Probably not the precise fantasy that they may couch themselves in, but a particular need that I may have overlooked.  Similarly, I should neither ignore my monastic fantasy nor leave my wife and family to establish a hermitage.  (I assume no sound monastery would accept me.)

I laid out my monastic fantasy to Michael last week as plainly as I have to anyone.  (Michael is my best friend and spiritual father.)  He thought a long time before he said anything.

We ended up comparing our fantasies of the future, analyzing and laughing at their specifics and considering what they might mean.  Michael pointed out that many people either ignore their higher callings expressed in such fantasies or set out to fulfill them in the half-baked form they usually arrive in.  Our talk was a huge help.

I think I’m itching for the next season in my life, whatever it is.  My fantasy may provide some hints about it, and I think it’s asking me to take some steps in preparation.  For one thing, I need to allow the inward part of me to be developed.  It may not be smart for me to take my ball and go home because God won’t play by my fantasy’s rules.

Two elements of Orthodox mysticism

I hope also to continue examining Orthodox mysticism.  I’m already about through with Timothy Ware’s excellent book,The Orthodox Church and Vladimir Lossky’s classic book, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church.  I also hope to blog about some of the stuff I discover.

And I mustn’t forget the twofold purpose of much of Orthodox monasticism expressed well by Theodorus the Ascetic, a seventh century monk who lived near Bethlehem:

When you are in love, surely your constant concern is to be near the beloved at any and every opportunity, and you avoid anything that would hinder you from being in the company and the society of your loved one.  So it is when someone loves God. One constantly desires to be with him and to speak with him.  This can only be achieved though pure prayer.  So let us apply ourselves to prayer with all our strength, for it makes us become like the Lord.  This is the meaning of the Scripture that says, "Oh God, my God, I cry to you at dawn, my soul has thirsted after you."  This person who, in the psalms, cries to God at dawn signifies the spiritual intellect that has withdrawn from every evil, and that has been wounded to the heart by the love of God.

As John McGuckin, a professor at Union Theological Seminary, points out in a podcast I listened to today, Theodorus’s coupling of active purification and an inward turning in prayer to God as to a lover is common in Orthodox theology.

McGuckin’s podcast and Theodorus’s words reminded me of how these two elements were coupled for me just a few years before my identity crisis.  Here’s how I wrote about it to myself in my journal during my identity crisis:

The morning of your wedding, you sensed the Holy Spirit’s grief.  You knew your fellowship with God would suffer from the marriage.  That does not mean it was a mistake to marry.  It means you were fixed on substituting Victoria for God.  God is using this struggle to restore Jesus’ place as your beloved and to put your marriage in its proper place.

Three years ago, God showed you a powerful image of Jesus looking at you with the eyes of a lover.  His expression was engaging and jealous, like a lover’s.  You felt both broken and happy because you thought your marriage had ended a close relationship with Jesus.

A moment later, God allowed you to see yourself as a furnace.  As the fire burned, light from the furnace flashed different colors.  These colors represented impurities God wanted to burn out of your life.

Both of these images are beginning to be fulfilled.  The purpose of this struggle is to remove impurities, but the greater purpose is to prepare you for your beloved, Jesus.  Victoria has beautiful eyes, but you have never seen eyes like Jesus’ eyes, and you never will in this life.  Let the longing come.

I know my religious ideation, now as well as then, involves these two elements: purification from the false self (a process involving self-knowledge) and relationship with God.  Orthodox monasticism is not the only way God can fulfill these to my heart’s satisfaction.  (God, I know from my limited experience, is more willing than I am when push comes to shove.)

Two things you should know, since you’ve read this far.  Victoria is quite good-natured about this.  She is too experienced with my idealistic tendencies to be alarmed by them.  Second: I do know myself well enough now at least to know that, even if every impediment to a monastic or hermitic life dissolved today, I’d chicken out.

I tried to keep July relatively free of obligations so I could get in touch with myself a little bit again.  Schoolwork resumes the second week of August.  I’m glad I got to bring my fantasy to the surface of my mind, even if that is all I accomplish this month, and I’m grateful, more than ever, for good friends like Victoria and Michael.

“Why didn’t Warren empty the dishwasher this morning?” I asked.

“Franklin had to cancel,” Victoria explained.

“So?”

“I told Warren that he had to empty the dishwasher before Franklin could come over.  Warren took that to mean that he had to empty the dishwasher because Franklin was coming over.  The condition precedent failed, so he didn’t have to do the job.”

Warren is still at it.  He squeezes conjunctions out of prepositions whenever possible.  Three and a half years ago, it was unless and until.  Today it’s because and before.

I’m a Nouns, Whatever type, really I am.  But Warren, an inveterate Conjunctivite, seems to bring out the Prepositionists in Victoria and me.

Stage curtains kind of kick as they close,
kind of sweep the act up before them, then
bow, broom to dustpan.

Can we still pretend once the curtains
have put on such a show?

After the sex scene, two housecleaners
snap and levitate the sheets while
speaking in an unknown tongue.

Curtains shush their own pulleys and
the stage whispers of pulling hands.

Ever watch a sail unfurl, the hands
watching as it fills?  They’ll watch
until the wind pulls.

A flower unfolds like dark intermission
between birth and death.  It has its own beauty.

Paratroopers ache mid-fall
between draft and deployment.

They giggle and bend over the ropes,
those girls in black shirts, but the audience
stays in its seats.

In the morning, I can read only in her basement.  Every other room has someone sleeping in it, usually on a couch or floor.  Betty’s house is small, but it’s big enough.  One toilet and bath got seven of us through with a little charity.  I fixed the toilet yesterday and was treated like a hero.

I read on the floor of Betty’s office, the only room in the house with wall-to-wall carpeting.  She keeps a lot of her books down here.  Like her home, her shelves are simple and Spartan, clean of unexplored interests.  She cooks, and she collects cookbooks.  There are also books about God and lots of Victoria’s old storybooks, textbooks, and yearbooks.  Each summer, two or three of Victoria’s old friends come over, and we inevitably open the yearbooks.  Pictures of Victoria at every stage of life grace about every room, even in the basement.

And Betty grows roses.  This morning I discovered Betty’s vases, the delivery systems for her simple charity, hidden in a basement recess.  I found some roses in her icebox last night, ready to go.  Yesterday I spent time in her garden, photographing her flowers.

I have a photograph of five generations: B (my daughter), Victoria, Betty (my mother-in-law), Granny (Betty’s mother), and Grandma H (Granny’s mother-in-law, who at the time was 109 years old).  Betty’s in the middle, the hinge in this lineage.  She takes care of Granny and showers gifts on us, too.

B inherited Betty’s quiet and her gentle fingers.  Betty holds and arranges and mends with entire attention, and her artisan ways made room for B’s art.  Her concentration and fingers, which seem dexterous enough to have four joints each, remind me of a spider at work.

We just got back from ten enjoyable days in Nashville this morning.

We don’t need an “office” anymore, so we threw away our desks and turned the basement office into the spare bedroom last month.  We made the old spare bedroom into B’s art studio, so now she holds two of the four upstairs rooms.

B came home from school at year's end with a trove of artwork, and she opened an exhibit in her studio last night.  “Art Through the Ages,” the banner over the studio door reads, and the “Ages” are her ages.  The exhibit is a B retrospective covering her artistic development from first grade through the present (rising high school junior).  Some stages are better represented than others, but there’s enough from my favorite years (seventh and tenth grades) for me to make the case for my preferences to patrons.

This may be the most comprehensive exhibition of my daughter’s art ever.

The pictured figurine from the current epoch began as a self-portrait but grew into a bust of the artist’s brother.  Those who know W recognize this stare as his signal that he wants something. (The foreground figure is actually a Happy Meal toy, I think, though its face shape uncannily resembles my own.)

School ended two days ago.  Last summer was pretty much planned out: a week with friends on a mountain, a five-week graduate course, a week at the beach, a week for chores, and back to school.  Not this summer.

This summer I have little planned.  I’ve got some school stuff to do – an article to write, a couple of meetings, an in-service to plan for – and I hope to implement a writer’s workshop model more extensively into my planning for this fall – but I’ve turned down some bigger projects.  We’ll go to visit our families in Nashville and Tidewater.  But, in between, I want to take time.

For what?  For my family and for me. On the me side, and on a lark, I decided on the first day of vacation to learn a little Welsh.  This is odd.  I haven’t taken on a new hobby on a lark in years.  Also, learning any language is crazy.  I demonstrated little aptitude for languages when I was taking French in high school and college, the last time I tried learning a language.  But if I just take it slow and let it all be discovery, I think it could be fun.

I don’t have any goals.  I don’t plan to become fluent in Welsh.  I just want to see if learning a language can be fun.

I’m not sure why I picked Welsh.  Welsh isn’t a dead language, but almost no one speaks only Welsh.  (Most Welsh don’t speak Welsh, but almost all Welsh speak English.)  That makes me feel more comfortable – less responsible, somehow – than if I were learning a language that one or more nations rely on, like Spanish or Japanese.  I’ve never been to Wales and have no plans to visit.

I know I want to get some objectivity on English in order to read, write, and teach English better.  Welsh is not closely related to English – it’s the most prevalent extant Celtic language – but it uses the same alphabet.  I want to get away from Romantic languages, but I don’t want to mess with a new alphabet.  In Welsh, the letters more consistently represent the sounds that you learn to associate with them than do the letters in English.  So that’s handy.  But I’ve read that it’s a hard language to learn.

I got the idea the night before last reading Hopkins.  I discovered that he learned Welsh.  I thought of Dylan Thomas, though I discovered yesterday that he never learned Welsh.  I just thought: maybe I can learn a little Welsh!

I’ve started with the BBC's The Big Welsh Challenge, which seems wonderful.  It is slow going for me, though.  I worked at it for an hour and a half Thursday night, and, on Friday morning, I could remember only the phrase for “good morning”: “bore da.”  But I walked all over the house wishing everyone bore daseveral times, just like they do on the BBC Flash videos.  And just like a two-year-old might.  It is sort of like rediscovering the world and my place in it.

I wish I had a two-year-old’s aptitude for language.  Think where I would be when I would turn six!  But I’m on it for the ride.  Right now, no goals allowed.

the heat came too early
overhead, early june

raced off like two balloons
attached, screaming

let go
when her mother was
helping her into the back seat

her parents shut
their bedroom door

she saw her
life through tears

she saw herself
too early
the white between
two clouds

the lines between
two stanzas

she got rich
writing verse

but she never
let go

Where the sun lies abed, he glows with tomorrow.
His bridal tent distends with the air of tomorrow.

Every creature that swells to attract its lover
    makes out to have swallowed him.

The morning’s the heat of his night’s satisfaction.
He discounts the ropes of the afternoon clouds.

Each evening the moon pulls off a part of him
    and mounts him with bright nails on
    the walls of her rib cage.

the end.
ing credits rise at
not appear when the roll
could cleanse, and you may or may
a silent film that no amount of washer fluid
our read?  her head meets your shadow-head against
in feet-first were she naked on a late-afternoon bed.
shadow might lead you to the pedestrian and take her
finally, in the time remaining, contemplate how your
you would've said it at recess: the ing-xay & the ed-pay.
answers in the form of questions, & remember how
punch lines (backstroke, waiter, fly, soup), put your
the end in mind.  write your own storyline.  anticipate
bottom’s up, we say, but think a brew thru – begin with
inattention accounts for more fatalities than alcohol.
top-down works only in spring – only when
to change your reading habits.  ponder:
have less than a millisecond
studies show you
our traffic

I love East Coker. I do. Last night I patched up my thirty-year-old copy of Eliot’s Four Quartets with clear packaging tape. When I was in college, one of my friends paid twenty dollars to rebind my twenty-five-dollar, leather-bound King James Bible for my birthday. But by last night no one had offered to rebind my $1.65 Harvest Book paperback edition ofFour Quartets. Maybe I’m supposed to have internalized all the words I need by now.

The paper is thick, and the pages haven’t yellowed at all. The top edges of the pages have inexplicable, rusty freckles like the ones on my arms. I’m also “in the middle way.” In fact, I’m as old as Eliot was when he wrote East Coker.

Since when is fifty “the middle way,” by the way? Was Eliot flattering himself? My life divides neatly into smaller, decade-long lives, as if I were leading six different lives, and my fifties life makes me feel old, a lot like my thirties life did. My thirties were a little hard. I was out of shape and had lots of aches and pains. Some clock went off in my head at age thirty: I’m not married! What divides our lives?

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?

When I was forty, I discovered the fountain of youth. An identity crisis and a slow recovery made the world seem new. I started an exercise-and-diet regime and a new career. I rediscovered poetry. My forties fulfilled the promise of my twenties – all of that Bible study and those fifty-four hours of English courses. But old age seemed to return with vigor last year about the time I turned fifty. For the first time, I know in my bones that most of my life has passed.

But, as I say, my youth and old age seem to come and go.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

A lifetime burning in every moment. “That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past,” says the Preacher.

I was twenty when I wrote the first marginalia in my Four Quartets. What gets across the naiveté: my balloon-like script or my borrowed thoughts? Today my handwriting looks more wrinkled – more nuanced, I think. In college I wrote “the neg. theology” beside these lines:

In order to arrive at what you do not know

     You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess

     You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not

     You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

I remember the professor mentioning negative theology, which was the first time I had ever heard of the idea. I remember thinking that it sounded rather holy and cool, kind of like the essence of what my Jesus buddies and I were after in pursuing our very positive theology.

Why did I like Four Quartets back then? I remember liking the somewhat stiff diction that circled around on itself. The “dust in the air suspended” and the roses and bowls reminded me of quiet rooms of now-dead relatives and their loud, slow-ticking clocks. There was something quieting and alarming about rooms like that, and you can’t experience them after middle age. You’re too busy remembering them, outfitting them.

Earlier in his career, Eliot used the inherent contradiction of his language (his diction and syntax are at once kind of stately and creaky) to saturate his voice with irony. But Eliot uses his contradictory language in East Coker to achieve something quieter than irony; he achieves a kind of wisdom-poem, and his language seems perfect for an examination of negative theology. All that dust in the rose bowl and all that shadow fruit, all those footfalls in the garden. It’s an elegant and “a worn-out poetical fashion” all at once. In his end is his beginning.

But little in East Coker would have made sense to me in the beginning except for some of the more aphoristic and outwardly Christian portions of it. My overall attraction was inexplicable. Perhaps my spirit had found a kind of blueprint.

              My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

East Coker is built on an Ecclesiastes chassis, and, like Ecclesiastes’s body, you can’t tell if it’s coming or going. Old age, darkness, wisdom, despair, writing, and life cycles of people and families and civilizations circle around one another.East Coker has Ecclesiastes’s “a time for”’s, and it has a loosened pane and a tattered arras for Ecclesiastes’s loosened silver cord and broken golden bowl. The sun also rises:

        Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence.

A lot of people think Ecclesiastes is depressing, and a lot of people think East Coker is depressing, too. But those people don’t understand apophatic theology, I say. The only thing that seems to depress Eliot in East Coker is his writing.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate . . .

The subject of preaching and writing is the toughest part of Ecclesiastes for me, too, because the moment preaching and writing point to negative theology (the “goads” and “nails” below, perhaps), they also create a chasm between positive and negative theology:

Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity. And moreover, because the preacher was wise, he still taught the people knowledge; yea, he gave good heed, and sought out, and set in order many proverbs. The preacher sought to find out acceptable words: and that which was written was upright, even words of truth. The words of the wise are as goads, and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd. And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

Do you feel the chasm? After all he went through, the Preacher was stuck looking for acceptable words.

According to the negative theology, God is ineffable, so suddenly you have a problem if you want to explain him or the dance he set in motion around him. Here’s the other point in East Coker where Eliot seems to throw down his pen:

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.

These appearances make the poet a subject of his own poem. As Eliot moves from the irony of his early poetry to negative theology, he replaces the anti-heroes of his early poetry with his narrator – himself. Ecclesiastes is a personal book, a working through, a seeker’s journal, and East Coker is, too. Eliot’s ancestors emigrated to America from East Coker.  He chose the poem’s opening and closing lines for his epitaph on the commemorative plaque in the church where his ashes are buried -- St. Michael's Church in East Coker.

In East Coker, the only anti-hero – the only fool – is the narrator, since anyone who preaches (or writes about) the negative theology is a fool. Ask the apostle Paul, who in his second letter to the Corinthians only risked preaching it in a clown suit.

East Coker shares Ecclesiastes’s ambivalence toward old age and wisdom just as it does toward writing. In East Coker, old men have nothing positive to offer the young.

Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

The only wisdom resides in the darkness of God, and the only thing old men have to offer is something negative: the loss of themselves, a kind of death before death.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

But works like Ecclesiastes and East Coker are meant for the young as well as the old. In fact, East Coker reconciles the young and old, the ends and beginnings, in darkness. Perhaps Ecclesiastes and East Coker lend a little mystery to life, or at least to old age. I remember thinking as I read Proverbs and Ecclesiastes as a teenager, “Maybe the hoary head is a crown of glory, after all.” Young people feel a connection with a long, authentic life, or at least I felt one back then. Even if I couldn’t decipher the old stone in my youth, I could at least carry it around with me.

Ecclesiastes ends rather perfunctorily: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.” I can hear Thoreau rage against this ending, much as he raged in Walden against the Westminster Catechism’s summary of man’s purpose: to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Suppose Shakespeare had taken Polonius’s famous aphorisms early in Hamlet and had put them in the prince’s mouth at the end. That’s the feeling I get from Ecclesiastes.

To be fair, Ecclesiastes’s end seems to focus on its younger readers – all of us, I guess, with beginner’s mind – since the fear of God and the keeping of his commandments may lead us, by God’s mercy, into the dark night the Preacher and John of the Cross and Eliot’s other mystic heroes believe in.

But East Coker ends with a challenge to the old:

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

Eliot has given me a vision for my fifties, and maybe for my seventies if I go that long. (My sixties will take care of themselves, I reckon, like my twenties and forties.)

I carry my Harvest Book edition around now like I carried my pocket New Testament around as a teenager. In my beginning is my end.

[This article appeared first in The Journal of the Virginia Writing Project's spring 2008 issue.  I have made a few minor changes to it for publication here.  My thanks to the Project for permission to republish.]

Good courses teach me stuff I don’t know, but great courses are more like revelations of things I didn’t know that I didn’t know.  Last year’s summer institute was a great course!  I discovered that I am permitted to use my writing instincts in teaching writing.  That may seem obvious, but it was a revelation to me. I love to write and to self-publish, but I never honestly thought these loves would also interest my students or affect my teaching.  Instead, before this past summer, my main means of motivating students to write well had been to instill the fear of my red pen.  But this year I’ve been selling my ninth graders on what has always sold me: writing for an audience.

So far, my classes are using three ways to discover audiences outside of the classroom: web logs (otherwise known as blogs), a class literary anthology, and submissions to print publications.  This article presents what my students and I did this year with the first of these efforts.  Through a lot of trial and error, I figured out one way of including blogging in a writers’ workshop classroom model.

Authentic Audiences

Before this year, I was already discovering that students usually put more effort into their writing when they know other students will read their work than when they know that only I will read it.  Also, when I tell students that their peers will be reading their papers in the next class, I find that all but one or two of them get their papers in on time.  Real-world deadlines involving real audiences seem to work better than my artificial deadlines, even though I enforce my artificial deadlines with real penalties.

This past summer’s institute opened my eyes to my hypocrisy concerning audiences – a hypocrisy that should have turned my writing focus around years before.  Before this past summer, I had made my students pretend that they were writing for real audiences, even though they were writing for only me.  Indeed, the audience in a typical student paper is not a teacher but a construct, a kind of dramatic convention the student and the teacher pull off to make the paper assignment work.  Since the teacher usually knows more about the paper’s subject than the student, the student is conscious of telling her one-man audience something he often already knows.  Despite this, students and teachers pretend that someone besides the teacher will eventually read the paper to be informed or entertained.  It’s a fake audience, and the cost is often a paper with a strained, pretentious, and fake voice.  The long-term cost may be a student with a learned loathing of writing.  So why just pretend?

Why Blogs?

Blogs, the popular, shorthand name for web logs, give students an authentic audience in a twenty-first-century medium with which they are comfortable. Blogging also helps students associate good writing with their increasingly technological future.  Blogging may not be the latest online phenomenon, but its current growth is still phenomenal.   As of this past September, a recognized tracking service counted over a hundred six million blogs worldwide, up fromseventy-five million this past April. Over fifty-seven million Americans read blogs. The number of readers worldwide, of course, is far higher.  Blogs are a recognized medium with an authentic audience.

Blogs are the most writing-oriented of Web 2.0 type web sites. (Web 2.0 is shorthand for web sites with visitor-generated content, such as blogs, social networks, and photo- and video-sharing sites.)  Blogs, after all, evolved from online diaries. Despite their technical evolution and subject-matter expansion over the past ten years, good blogs still require good writing.

Blogging demonstrates that a popular online medium can honor good writing. My survey results indicate that most of my students either blog or participate on social networks. By incorporating good writing in a popular teen genre, teens are more likely to write and are more likely to discover more sophisticated possibilities for their existing online spaces and, more importantly, for their future online endeavors in whatever form they may take years from now.

Ensuring a Positive Online Experience

Around the beginning of November, I launched our multi-user blogging network.  Each student had her own blog site and was free to choose from a number of skins for her readers’ interface.  When she posted on her blog site, she came up with her own topic, title, and genre listings for the post. 

I was blogging on our site along with them.  Like many of my students, I took on a blogging alias, and we kept a running list of who was who to make it fair.  Ostensibly, I was modeling blogging for my students, but the main reason for my participation was that I just didn’t want to be left out.  They were having too much fun. (I must not have been getting enough attention on my adult-world blog site because, after our site got going, I started checking my site on it for comments after I published something halfway decent more often than I checked my adult-world blog for comments.)

I required that students leave eight comments per blogging check (usually, every two or three weeks) on other students’ posts.  I didn’t comment on my students’ blogs because my students may not have been ready for their teacher as a subjective reader.  It also sounds potentially creepy: “I heard this teacher was leaving comments on his students’ blog posts!”

My students and I deliberately kept our comments positive.  In the classroom, we have writer support groups where the students and I can receive all the constructive criticism we want.  Online, though, I wanted my guys to experience what I struggled to accept during the first three years of my own blogging: specific, unmitigated praise.  This past summer, I was fuming in a post that my blog readers weren’t leaving any constructive criticism of my writing in their comments.  One comment a reader (another writing teacher) left me in response to my post helped me see things differently:

As a teacher and reader of your blog, I'd much rather enjoy what you write and respond to what inspires and excites me--as this piece has--than edit and critique your work. I trust that as you write more, you'll find your way to more and more clarity about how to polish your writing to a shine. I think celebrating what's working in a piece has far greater value in keeping us inspired to write and improve than anything else.

Her comment led me to understand that purely positive comments on blog posts were more important in the long run to me as a writer than critical comments.  I also began to see how my own writing had improved over the three years I had been blogging despite the lack of criticism.

I emphasized to my students that praising doesn’t mean faking it.  Blog commenters maintain their integrity (and credibility) by selecting an aspect of a post on which to lavish praise.  Of course, a comment can be effective even if it involves no praise, so long as the commenter expresses some connection with even just part of the post.  This specificity is what gives a comment its worth.  When someone picks something in one of my posts to either compliment or to expand on, I feel read.  After blogging for three years, I know that some stuff just isn’t getting read much.  Some of the other un-commented-upon material was probably read or appreciated, but readers just don’t have much to say about it.  (I’ve learned also that longer pieces don’t usually get read very often unless they’re personal or funny or both.) 

Student commenters were also free to politely disagree with the substance of any post.  The disagreement could be strong, I told them, but they were not to criticize or even to point out perceived mistakes in other students’ writing (grammar, syntax, etc.).  I found that it was important to drill students on the art of good commenting.  I warmed to my task; I think students need to learn how to be both honest and positive with each other and with each other’s writing.  Despite my drills and my entreaties, I still had to ask a student to modify a comment every now and then.  Sometimes I redacted a comment as soon as I read it, fearing that the comment might hurt relationships or tear down the encouraging atmosphere the students and I had worked to inculcate on the site.

Feeling Read All Over the World

Comments make students feel read, and feeling read is one of the best things about writing.  If you ask a writer how she came to see herself as a writer, she will probably tell you a story or two about some of the first times her words got to other people.  Maybe she published a poem in an elementary school anthology.  Maybe a class put on a play she wrote.  One way or another, she felt read.

Site stats also confirm to my students that their blogs command a higher readership than they could probably expect from taping their work onto our classroom walls.  I reminded students that anyone on the planet with Internet access could read our posts – a potential audience of millions.  I did get practical when I explained the site statistics, which amounted to hundreds of visitors instead of millions, but they were pretty impressed with the few hundred unique visitors over the life of their blogs.  I also explained search engine dynamics.  I told them how more words and the passage of time means more hits and more links and maybe more readers.  Many of them quickly grasped another rule I never taught them: the more regular the posts, the more regular the readership.

I hope that other readers outside of our class members have been (and will be) drawn to something fairly unique: a self-contained community of online writers.  I hope also that readers will be drawn to the writing itself.  Of course, there’s no hiding that it’s ninth grade writing.  I didn’t advertise the writers’ age or make the site look like a school site, though.

A Gated Community

More words on our site may have meant more readers, but not more commenters.  We blog in a kind of gated community.  Everyone can see us, but only my seventy honors students can comment on posts there.  The site’s gate keeps out possible predators as well as commenters who may not wish to play by our rules.  But the site's exclusivity also gives the students another way to experience the writing community that they’ve begun face to face in class in writers’ support groups and other activities.  Internet safety, then, dovetails with my vision of augmenting our experience as a writers’ community by bringing it online.

I also described this fishbowl feature in an email introducing our site to my students’ parents.  I invited the parents to enjoy their students’ posts and comments.  I employed my reverse-psychology, parental-relations strategy here: I find that the more I tell my parents, the less they think there’s anything to be concerned about.  Each month of the school year, I send them long, colorful ezines of what we’re doing in class.  Most parents delete them without reading them, saying to themselves, “This guy must have it together.”  So, predictably, I didn’t get any emails, positive or negative, about any online content during the four and a half months our site was up and running.

I instituted some other policies to maintain online safety.  I told the students that I would read every post and comment, and I followed through with that.  I did not allow any music, pictures, or videos: I had enough to keep track of just with the writing!  I disabled trackbacks and pingbacks to insure that no spam reached our sites.  I made students sign a code of conduct that referenced the school’s online acceptable use policy the students signed at the beginning of the year.  The code of conduct also contained specific and dire consequences for code infractions.  I assured parents that the sites were in compliance with our school system’s policies and regulations manual.

Not a “School Site”

I have discovered that high school students don’t go out of their way to write on “school” sites.  According to the results of my written survey, a majority of my current students have a social network page (e.g., My Space or Facebook), a YouTube account, or a blog.  Moving from such user-centered environments to an institution-centered one is comparable to returning to dial-up after a few months of high-speed Internet.  I’m not trying to compete with Facebook, of course, but I’m not going to needlessly repel students, either.

Besides, how could my students feel like real writers if they were writing on a school site?  They’d probably feel like they were on training wheels as the "real" Internet writers streaked by them on motorcycles.

I did a great deal of research to find out what multi-user blogs and private social network sites are available.  All of them that I found last year were either too “educational,” too inflexible, or too easy for students to bring objectionable material into.  Others did not have the right combination of universal viewing with membership-only interaction.  Some services may be right for you, such as Blackboard (if your school system subscribes to their blogging services), Edublogs.org, and Ning.com.  This last is a social networking site that is working hard at meeting teachers’ needs, but it didn’t offer enough teacher control when I was researching sites.  Besides, my school system’s Internet filter began blocking Ning around the beginning of this school year.

I gained a lot of flexibility by building the site on WordPress MU. I had my Internet server download the MU (“multi-user” blog) software from MU.WordPress.org, and then my server followed that site’s instructions to install and configure it.  MU has a sensible interface that all of my students understood almost at once.  It comes with several “skins,” or blog-page looks, for students to choose from.  I also installed simple plug-ins that enhanced the sites’ capabilities.

I have no training in computer technology (though I admit that I enjoy technology), so I needed lots of help customizing the site to fit my purpose.  I found MU’s online forums to be helpful, though many of the old pros helping out the rest of us were often cranky.  (Well, how pleasant would I be if I were giving away my time and being asked the same question three times a day – questions that could be answered by digging a little in the forum’s back pages?)

How Blogging Fit into My New Writers’ Workshop Model

Around the same time we started blogging, I started to use the writers’ workshop model I had discovered at the Summer Institute through the writings of Nancie Atwell and Lucy McCormick Calkins.  About a month into the blogging, I began to see how the blogging and the writers’ workshop could complement each other.

I showed students how their writing might progress from their English class sketchbooks through very polished pieces for print publications, and I described blogging as falling in the middle of this continuum. I taught students to take material out of their writer’s sketchbook (free-writes, reader responses, and poetry “messes,” for instance) and to develop them into blog posts.  I also asked the students to choose some of their blog post writing, in turn, to revise for more polished writing.  By making the blog posts a kind of middle step between sketchbook writing and more formal pieces, I was able to claim that blogging wasn’t really all that much extra writing.  These writing “steps” also got students practicing revision without my having to force them.

I also let students post any writing they wished to (school appropriate, of course).  Most students published a mix of sketchbook work that they developed for their blogs, work they wrote for other assignments and classes, and work they wrote specifically for their blog sites.  I introduced a few genres in writers’ workshop mini-lessons, and students often experimented with these genres on their blogs.

I required my students to publish at least 300 words in blog posts per blog-check period, which became about every two weeks.  Four of the eight comments each student had to leave on others’ posts had to be either the first or second comment to a post.  This latter requirement assured that everyone got some of these valuable comments and that early postings did not attract all the comments just because they were at the top of the list.  I was afraid also that kids would get cliquish and that less popular kids wouldn’t get as many comments as the others.

At first, I made the posts and comments due every two weeks, but when we had to focus on other parts of the curriculum, I stretched it to every three weeks.  I was glad to stretch it out because it took me about eight hours to read and tabulate all of the posts and comments for a given blog-check period.  I have seventy-five honors students, so every third weekend was pretty much shot.

In keeping with the positive spirit with which I wanted my students to approach their blogging, I never formally assessed the quality of their online work.  I had enough assessments of their writing from the more formal pieces that the county curriculum guide requires and from the few blog posts the students developed into more polished pieces.  Besides, any kind of assessment of this material on top of the time I was already spending reading all of it would have done me in.

Despite the lack of formal assessment, I found that the writing quality overall on our site was pretty good.  Five or six of my writers occasionally amazed me, writing poetry or stories at a level most college students probably haven’t reached.

With all of the reading I had to do to adequately oversee the material, I was delighted to find that, for the first time in my career, I was beginning to know my students as writers.   As a result, I have been able to encourage my students to write in certain directions based on how effectively they’ve used their blog space.  I now have a few budding poets, fiction writers, and personal essayists!

Student Feedback

My students gave our blogging positive marks in a survey I gave them about a month after we began blogging.  Over ninety percent of them rated it either “It’s okay” (Hey, that’s effusive for ninth graders!), “I like it,” or “I love it.”   When I modified the question somewhat to ask if they would prefer to write the same amount but in more traditional assignments handed in to the teacher, only two students in the fifty-nine who responded to the survey indicated their preference for traditional assignments. 

The survey also brought me some good news related to whether students were “feeling read.”   In response to a question about how much they liked reading their fellow students’ blog posts, only six percent of my students expressed any distaste for it.  Also, all but three of the fifty-nine responding students enjoyed reading the better comments to their own posts. 

Here are a couple of the more positive student comments:

I love how I can see what other people like about my writing without being in class. It is a way to encourage other's writing and to grow in my own writing. I have found that I have a nice poetry voice through the blogging. I HATED writing before this year, but now that I get positive feedback, I am liking it more and more. THANK YOU [our site]!

I really like using [blogging]. I really enjoy reading some of my class mates work that I wouldn't have gotten to read without our blogs. I also really like that we can post whatever we want (we don't have specific papers we have to post or pieces on certain topics). I like that we have so much freedom with our blogs.

One of my biggest success stories involves a young man whose parents introduced me to him just before the school year began.  He and his parents told me that he loves reading (he had read most of Shakespeare’s plays, for instance), but that he has always hated writing.  They were concerned about his being in honors English because English class had not been his strong suit.  Some of his other, current teachers have since told me that he has been writing for our site just about every chance he has gotten.  He has written a wonderful science fiction serial that developed quite an online readership.  He’ll be submitting the serial for print publication in the next couple of weeks.  His expression and punctuation have improved in the process, too.

More critical comments from my survey responses involved the site’s navigation, my refusal to allow pictures and music, and the amount of writing I required.  Many students didn’t like my rule that four of the eight comments had to be one of the first two comments to posts.  In response to their concerns, I added a Google reader in order for students to find new posts quickly to meet their “four comments must be one of the first two comments to a post” requirement. 

For an experiment, I also threw out the “first two comments” requirement for the last blog-check period.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that the comments were as evenly divided as they had been before.  Next year, I’ll still keep the rule for the first couple of months, but then I think I’ll drop it once I feel like students have broadened their blog-reading horizons sufficiently.  From what I could gather, about two-thirds of my students were sorry to see us stop blogging in mid-March, but the rest of the students were somewhat tired of it.  Next year, I need to figure out a way to have more frequent checks, which makes students focus on the site more.  I think the blogging will be more integrated into the students’ writing plans as I increase the use of the writers’ workshop model next year.

Blogging for Academic Students

I wouldn’t try this broad form of blogging with my academic students.  They just don’t have the interest in writing that my honors students have, and many of them wouldn’t take the assignment seriously.  Besides, seventy students turns out to be enough for this exercise.  It would have drained the life out of me to have had my other fifty-four students blogging, too, considering that I was responsible for reading everything that goes up on the site.

I have a more focused blogging lesson plan that I’ve been using over the past few years for both my academic and honors students.  I’ll use it again this spring to teach all of my students Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, a play about jury deliberations after a murder trial.  I assign each student a juror number and split