Fossil Poetry (or, What to do with the time that is given to you)

Madeleine L'Engle once said of the sonnet that the structure is extremely rigid--fourteen lines in iambic pentameter, with only two or three possible rhyme schemes--and that (if you choose to write a sonnet) you have absolutely no say in what those parameters will be. But, within that given structure, you have absolute freedom: you can say whatever you like, however you want. And of course, the paradox is that, once you get used to it, that very rigidity is extremely freeing. Now, that may well sound like writerly fluff if you haven't tried the experiment of writing at least four or five sonnets of your own, but it's profoundly true; once you accustom yourself to thinking in sonnet form, it's a vast relief not to have to worry about the shape your poem is going to take. That's already been given to you, and you now have a familiar, well-defined space in which you can breathe and move about at will. (The walls of a castle are rigid too, but the question is whether you see it as a dungeon or a stronghold.) And as you've probably guessed, L'Engle's overall point was that the experience of the sonneteer is remarkably like the experience of the human being. We don't choose our country, our time period, our genetic predispositions. But the easiest way to refute a determinist is to stand in front of your closet in the morning and wait for materialistic forces to pick an outfit for you. Whether or not you believe in free will, you certainly have to act as though you have it. Or--well--you can stand there until you fall over and die.

I think God's not as big on subtlety as we tend to give Him credit for. He is, after all, the original inventor of the Dad Joke. (Have you ever seen a kookaburra? Clearly invented just to make our little ones laugh. Meanwhile the grownups are sort of shuffling their feet and muttering, "Abba, you're embarrassing us in front of the other mammals!") I mention this because I was born in 1977: the same year that two particular movies came out. One of 'em was the Rankin-Bass cartoon version of The Hobbit (and here's the song to which I danced with my mom on my wedding day), and the other was Star Wars (or, as the kids nowadays would say, Episode IV: A New Hope). And those two movies, more than any other factor in my life apart from little things like the love of my parents and the Grace of God, absolutely defined my entire personality and outlook on this universe of ours.

And here's the crucial point: this is not an exception, it's the rule. We all define ourselves by stories. Again, that may sound like writerly fluff until you stop and listen to an average conversation. Almost any conversation you hear will contain, in some form, a number of cliches--"live and learn," "can't win 'em all," "you get out what you put in"--because a cliche is a fundamental truth which, through the erosion of daily use, has lost the sheen of arrestingly lovely and/or clever phraseology. Every syllable we have is the result of layers upon layers of subtext and associated meaning, hyper-compressed like sedimentary levels--mountains of coal squeezed at a slow, glacial, geologic rate into fistfuls of diamond. Emerson once said, "Language is fossil poetry," and that pretty well sums it up--but even that is a perfect demonstration of what we're talking about here, because without the prior context of this paragraph, that sentence would sound like gobbledygook.

Human knowledge is a sort of inverted ziggurat. We begin by digesting these titanic chunks of masonry, the raw building blocks of thought. First we have to learn the entire story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears--and then, once we've fully absorbed it into our system, we can deploy the core idea of seeking a "just-right" midpoint between unacceptable extremes in our day-to-day life. And yet, as we've already seen, the very profundity and importance of this truth will mean its constant repetition, hence its inevitable reduction to cliche--and, catastrophically, our stock response to cliche is to roll our eyes and dismiss it. The exact things that are far too obvious and crucial to overlook are the things we continuously forget, because we're a species of ridiculous buffoons.

 

Luckily, we're also a species of potential saints, and thus have direct, unlimited access to ultimate and absolute Wisdom. (My word, we must baffle the Seraphim! What an unlikely concatenation we are.) At any rate, this potential sagacity means we're capable of relearning our truths at least as quickly as we forget them. And the way we do that is by--yep--telling new stories. In his toweringly brilliant book Poetic Diction, Owen Barfield of the Inklings points out that the average reader thinks of metaphor as something extra, an unnecessary flourish with which the writer ornaments the work; whereas in reality, it is quite literally impossible for timebound creatures like ourselves to approach any type of thought more abstract than "Fire hot, rock heavy" without the use of metaphor. We have no metaphysical terms that aren't abstracted from physical experiences: the moral "impetus," for instance, is just a figure of speech extrapolated from a thing that pushes you. Aquinas, following Aristotle, states flat-out that "There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses." And when we tell a story, we create a fresh new metaphor. If it's successful, it will become so ubiquitous that people will get sick of it. How many decades has it been since you last heard someone say, in their best Jack Nicholson voice, "You can't handle the truth!" without rolling your eyes and heaving a sigh? Or, since we were speaking of sonnets earlier, try to count the ways you've heard people spoof the opening line of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnet 43, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." Only the most brilliant, original words can ever become so tiresomely trite.

The good news is--well--the Good News. Tolkien called the Gospel the One True Myth, the fairy tale that really happened. We can count the ways Jesus loves us by counting the wounds on His Body; and because He offers that Body in Holy Communion, we can indeed handle the Truth. In the end, every story comes down to this: can we actually live happily ever after? The backdrop's already in place; God's already given us our cue. And this might be a cliche, but only we can make the choice to pick an outfit and walk out onto the stage.