Carpe Cakem!

Tolkien had an idea that we don’t really make up new stories. We pull them as leaves off the great “tree of tales”.

This sounds like the idea that when the conductor drops the baton, he’s is pulling an already-running beat out of the invisible river and not making one up on the spot. Well, on one hand I think that’s baloney. I don’t believe in a Platonic metronome. However, he may have subconsciously had the beat running in his head for some time. Perhaps it is associated with a particular memory. It seems to come from somewhere deeper than he can put his finger on. But this is about writing on the large scale, not one element of music.

Here (on p.221), Gyler references an interesting image (that is apparently pretty well-known):

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

-Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action

She also points out that Sayer’s expressed a similar notion about poetry:

“Poets do not merely pas on the torch in a relay race; they toss the ball to one another, to and fro, across the centuries. Dante would have been different if Virgil had never been, but if Dante had never been we should know Virgil differently; across both their heads Ezekiel calls to Blake, Milton to Homer”

-Dorothy Sayers, Further Papers on Dante

Bach died in 1750. His musical output hugely impacted others. But we know him differently through the rediscovery of his work by Mendelssohn when he reintroduced Bach to the world with the 1829 performance of the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin. We know him differently again by hearing his works transcribed for guitar or contemporary marimba – instruments that didn’t even exist in his time. It’s a complicated web and it’s changing even now. We project things back on him. When Pablo Casals played Bach with 1000 gallons of romantic rubato poured on thick, would Johann himself have recognized his own notes? When we listen to a performance of Bach, the light is being passed through many lenses.

This is from the concluding paragraph of Gyler’s book on the Inklings:

I am persuaded that writers do not create text out of thin air in a fit of personal inspiration. I believe that the most common and natural expressions of creativity occur as part of an ongoing dialogue between writers, readers, texts, and contexts.

This truth is exemplified by the weekly meetings of the Inklings. It is manifest in their relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. And it is expressed in many of teir own statements about the creative process. As Williams reminds us, an emphasis on isolated individuals must give way to an interactive view of life, culture, and creativity. Explaining Williams’s view, Roma King summarizes, “The parts are so related that the slightest vibration in one is felt throughout the whole…”

-Diana Gyler, The Company They Keep, p.226

Gyler convincingly argues that artists are nearly always trying to distance themselves from being perceived as imitators of those who came before them. The solitary genius is held up as an ideal. She points to numerous criticisms of Rembrandt and even Mozart not being original enough. But of course this is silly. It points to something deeply rooted in our psyche.

In [Harold Bloom’s] discussion of the privileging of originality, he emphasizes that in each generation, “every major aesthetic consciousness seems peculiarly more gifted at denying obligation” According to Bloom, the study of influence can be reduced to the “study of the only guilt that matters to a poet, the guilt of indebtedness”. If each poet’s ultimate guilt is indebtedness, then each poet’s ultimate fear is that “no proper work remains for him to perform“. To be free of influence is to be free of “the chill of being darkened by a precursor’s shadow”. Although Bloom focusses is discussion on the anxiety that the artist feels in relation to her or his predecessors, the same anxiety is evident throughout comparative literary studies, even when the interaction of contemporaries is being discussed.

In the introduction to this book, I explain that most of the books and articles written about the Inklings, and even some of the statements made by the Inklings themselves, include emphatic denial of mutual influence. Why is there such a vigorous attempt to deny, or at least minimize, the possibility of influence? …much of it must be understood as a tendency to confuse influence with imitation.

-Diana Gyler, The Company They Keep, p.217

What is more depressing to the artist than “there is nothing new under the sun?”. There are all kinds of ways to deal with this. Schoenberg wrote 12-tone music to escape this stigma. In my opinion, that was jumping from the imaginary frying pan into the very real fire underneath. Vaughn Williams, Copeland, and Bartok openly plundered folk music and lifted it to great new heights. We are influenced by EVERYTHING in our past memory. The very language we use to describe our bold new original ideas is defined by the old stuff. (Barfield would have emphasized that). As artists, we need to get over this psychological hurdle, somehow!

Over the years, I’ve encountered folks who were uncomfortable with some of Lewis’s Narnian mythology because of it’s inclusion of overtly pagan mythological characters and deities as being on the GOOD guy’s side.

A grumpy faun doesn’t look that much different from some representations of the devil. Dionysus (Bacchus), the god of drunken orgies (among other things) is in there. So is Santa Clause.

The same could be said of the druid Merlin in That Hideous Strength, thought he does go out of his way to explain that a bit more.

Along those lines, is this interesting note about some of Tolkien’s original criticisms of Lewis’s fantasy:

In his article “J.R.R. Tolkien: Narnian Exile,” Joe R. Christopher suggests that Lewis responded to Tolkien’s criticism of the first two chapters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by adding a section to the end of Prince Caspian. He argues that one of Tolkien’s major objections is that Lewis sanitizes or sentimentalizes mythical creatures, taming (and thereby misrepresenting) the nature of characters like the faun or satyr. Late in Prince Caspian, there is a wild romp of mythological characters, including Bacchus and Silenus. In the story, Susan observes, “I wouldn’t have felt very safe with Bacchus and all his wild girls if we’d met them without Aslan”. As these mythological creatures become part of this story, Lewis argues, their behavior is redeemed. Christopher explains, “That is, Lewis seems to reply to Tolkien, under Christ certain basic impulses can be controlled…under Christ, such things can be kept in bounds”. Christopher says of this passage, “It is difficult not to believe that this is a deliberate answer by Lewis to Tolkien”.

-Diana Gyler, The Company They Keep, p.113

Indeed.

Sometimes it’s nice to know you’re in good company.

It is of some interest that one of the most common changes in Lewis’s actual drafts is that words are crossed out multiple times as Lewis struggled to spell them correctly. Despite his blazing intellect and deservedly famous memory, he had a lot of trouble with spelling.

-Diana Gyler, The Company They Keep, p.132

This comment thread on why software programmers claim a dispropotionate slice of the earth’s weirdos is full of insight.

If my wife ever wonders what’s going on in my head sometimes, this is a clue!

Software types are more analytical, (either as a result or as an cause of them being in their field). As such they see things that Joe Random doesn’t even notice.

When the waitress says “If you need anything else, my name is Betty” Joe Random grunts and takes a bite of his meal.

Programmer dude wonders what her name is if he DOESN’T need any thing else.

Snagged via Gyler’s The Company They Keep (p.215):

Much was possible to a man in solitude…But some things were possible only to man in companionship, and of these the most important was balance. No mind was so good that it did not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and blindness and bigotry and folly.

-Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion, p.187

Choose your enemies carefully ‘cos they will define you
Make them interesting ‘cos in some ways they will mind you
They’re not there in the beginning but when your story ends
Gonna last with you longer than your friends

-U2, The Cedars of Lebanon

You can’t buy this stuff:

There is one myth about writers that I have always felt was particularly pernicious and untruthful — the myth of the “lonely writer,” the myth that writing is a lonely occupation, involving much suffering because, supposedly, the writer exists in a state of sensitivity which cuts him off, or raises him above, or casts him below the community around him. This is a common cliche, a hangover probably from the romantic period and the idea of the artist as Sufferer and Rebel . . . I suppose there have been enough genuinely lonely suffering novelists to make this seem a reasonable myth, but there is every reason to suppose that such cases are the result of less admirable qualities in these writers, qualities which have nothing to do with the vocation of writing itself . . . Unless the writer has gone utterly out of his mind, his aim is still communication, and communication suggests talking inside community.

-Flannery O’Connor

(Via the front flap of The Company They Keep by Diana Gyler)

This was probably the best part of guitar  studio and music school in general – being pushed forward by peers performing all around you. Writing has got to be the same way I think.

Along these same lines, Gyler quotes Karen Lefevre:

There will always be great need for individual initiative, but not matter how inventive an individual wants to be, he will be influenced for better or for worse by the intellectual company he keeps. On top of Mt. Mansfield in Vermont, there are thirty-year-old trees that are only three feet tall. If a tree begins to grow taller, extending beyond the protection of the others, it dies. The moral for inventors: Plant yourself in a tall forest if you hope to have ideas of stature.

-p.64

Since Lewis viewed Praise as an indication of good mental health, it is not surprising that he defined good literary criticism as that which is fundamentally positive: “The good critics found something to praise in many imperfect works; the bad ones continually narrowed the list of books we might be allowed to read”

-Diana Gyler, The Company They Keep, p.49 (Quote from Lewis in Reflections

Sounds like much of the reformed blogosphere… cough cough John MacArthur cough cough Phil Johnson cough Challies, cough…

One thing I like about reading Robert Webber is that he doesn’t automaticaly assume someone with really different theology than him is worthless. He can still be eclectic and dig up good stuff from folks with all kinds of legitimate problems. Christians from different groups still being friends. How ’bout that?