Notes from various essays and things I read.

The Dethronement of Power, by C.S. Lewis

Written in 1955. Read 6/23/24. It’s in the book Tolkien and the Critics.

Lewis is reviewing The Two Towers and The Return of the King. Tolkien wrote of good and evil as unchanging absolutes, but that does not mean his characters are simplistic, always black or white (see the conflict of Boromir, of even Gollum, for example). The war writing is realistic – “the endless, unintelligible movement, the sinister quiet of the front…, the flying civilians, the lively, vivid friendships…”

No individual, and no species, seems to exist only for the sake of the plot. All exist in their own right and would have been worth creating for their mere flavor even if they had been irrelevant. Treebeard would have served any other author (if any other could have conceived him) for a whole book. His eyes are "filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking."

He dismisses the idea that the one ring represents the atomic bomb. It represents destructive evil, and Treebeard would say we are too hasty in putting a name to something with so much history.

Why make serious commentary on the life of men with a fantasy story? “The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ’the veil of familiarity.’” By putting real things into a myth, “we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.”

Upon the Mathematics of the Breath and the Way, Charles Bukowski

Written in 1973. Read 6/23/24. Part of a collection of essays and stuff called The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way.

This is presented as a short manifesto about writing, but I didn’t see that much in it. He says writers who are published in “the littles” (small magazines) try to get published in more, and “it becomes a contest of publication rather than creation.” He notes that writers need something to write about, some meat to pick off the bones. “You can’t write without living and writing all the time is not living.” Hemingway would try to get his writing done early so he could start drinking.

Then there was this:

Some people will bother you. They will not understand what you are trying to do. They will knock on your door and sit in a chair and eat up your hours while giving you nothing. When too many nothing people arrive and keep arriving you must be cruel to them for they are being cruel to you. You must run their asses out on the street. There are some people who pay their way, they bring their own energy and their own light but most of the others are useless both to you and to themselves. It is not being humane to tolerate the dead, it only increases their deadness and they always leave plenty of it with you after they are gone.

This is relatable. Interruptions break your flow, and people can be a drain on your energy. But it seems he’s made his own acts of creation into gods more sacred than his fellow man. Misanthropic. I don’t wantto be like this, even if it means I can’t create as much or as well. (I almost wrote “even though it means…”, but I couldn’t quite admit that. Ever an optimist!)

A few essays from In a Narrow Grave, by Larry McMurtry

He mentions Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957), which I recognize from The Great War and Modern Memory. That must have been an important book to writers of that era. LM says Westerns move from high memetic (art as idealized life) to low mimetic (no meaning, absurdist) to modern/ironic. (23)

Cowboys go soft in modern life. Their reservations are called “suburbs.” But “any suburb looks goof if the alternative is an Indian reservation. The cowboy has been diminished, but the Indian was destroyed.” (28)

Women driving in circles around the hotel where Paul Newman was staying during a film shoot. “Diversion is not to be sneezed at in Amarillo.” (7)

The “Big 3” Texas writers: Roy Bedichek, W.P. Webb, and J. Frank Dobie.

One is inclined to doubt that Bedichek would have claimed as much reading for himself as some of his friends have claimed for him. Like a sensible man, he read what interested him, and clearly not everything did. He shared with Dobie an aversion to twentieth century literature, though in both cases the grounds for the aversion are somewhat vaguely stated. Both seemed to feel that the literature of earlier centuries possessed a superior vitality, but neither apparently bothered to read enough modern literature to allow them to argue the point intelligently. Dobie in particular was given to reckless fulminations against the modern-some of his disciples have picked up the habit and will hardly trust themselves with anything later than Plato. (37)

At the end of his career, in the final pages of The Great Frontier, Webb remarks briefly upon his own development:

The first step in my preparation to become a student of the frontier was taken in 1892, when my parents moved to West Texas while that country was still in the frontier stage ... all my early impressions were of young families struggling with raw nature.

Thus it was that I touched the hem of the garment of the Great Frontier, almost but not quite too late. Because my father was a teacher, I had books and became a reader, and as I read I caught a distorted but alluring vision of another world... At an early age I determined to escape to that other world, and to leave the frontier to those who were more audacious ... Eventually I turned to the frontier as a subject of study, and there I found a body of literature that I could understand, and I found myself... And so I entered the door leading back to the world I had known.

Most of the writers who have come out of this region could make a similar statement. As late as the forties the hem of the garment of the Great Frontier could still be touched in rural Texas-perhaps there are a few places where it could be touched even now.

If I were recasting the statement to fit myself I would first of all change the figure and eliminate the word "hem". It suggests the feminine, and the frontier was not feminine, it was masculine. The Metropolis which has now engulfed it is feminine, though perhaps it is an error to sexualize the process even that much. The Metropolis swallowed the Frontier like a small snake swallows a large frog: slowly, not without strain, but inexorably. And if something of the Frontier remains alive in the innards of the Metropolis it is because the process of digestion has only just begun.

LM says (in the quote above) that he would remove the word “hem” – but is it possible he missed the Biblical allusion? Touching the hem of Christ’s garment healed – even the hem had power.

The Waste Books, by Lichtenberg

Austin Kleon recommended this, and I got it from interlibrary loan. Pithy, kind of like Pensees, thoughts from a polymath in the 1700s. There is gold in here, but I didn’t have time to do much mining.

Is Science Religion, by Dr. Ram Murtry

The article was linked in a twitter thread and sounded interesting, but it’s absolute garbage.

Indian philosopher Vivekanada (whose name means “long live Canada”… just kidding) wrote: “Suppose a cow were philosophical and had religion. It would have a cow universe and a cow solution of the problem.” “That is, the cows would assume there is a big cow, a holy cow, ruling the universe.” (We invoke the holy cow all the time. Maybe we are cows? If his point is that we try to make God in our own image, a big man, then I agree.)

This is what Mutry says about the etymology of science and religion: religion comes from the Latin religio, “that which unites,” whereas science comes from the Latin sciere, “to know.” Going further back, sciendere means “to cut,” and this comes from the Greek word schizein, “to split.”

“Thus, the basic method of science is to cut, to break apart, to analyze.” Science is analytical. “Religion can be viewed as synthesis in that it tries to bring together a unification in our viewpoint.” Understanding the world and our own mind requires both analysis and synthesis. “We must view the unity as well as the component parts.”

BUT, does religio really mean “that which unites”? I could not find this translation online. It means religion, piety, reverence, stuff like that. The closest I could find was the word congrega, “to gather together” (obviously the root of “congregation”). I think he made up this Latin word meaning.

He calls terms like “the Christian religion” and “the Hindu religion” oxymoronic. “That which exists is One” according to Vedanta philosophy… which is part of the Hindu religion!

As you get past the halfway point in the article, you begin thinking it’s actually a pitch for Vedanta. Which turns out to be correct. This is the age-old story that all religions are the same, the path to enlightenment is within you, “through self-discipline and introspection, we can go beyond” the limitations of nature.

Vivekanada again: “On reason we must have our foundation, we must follow reason as far as it leads, and when reason fails, reason itself will show us the way to the highest plane.” Sounds like making science a god to me. He writes of a “search for truth within ourselves,” as if that’s where truth can be found. But “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)

He says all holy books including the Bible are “manuals for self-improvement and introspection.” The Bible is not a manual for self-improvement. In it, God reveals how corrupt we all are and our need to a Savior outside of ourselves. No amount of introspection will make us sinless.

Assignment No. 1, by Stephen Robinett

The first story in The Last Dangerous Visions (Harlan Ellision, ed.) takes the form of a boy’s school assignment, but just barely. He writes about sending his grandfather to be a “floater” in a “tank farm” at a place called Golden Tomorrows. Like a nursing home, but they just put you in a vat of liquid, hook something up to your brain, and let you lucid dream about pleasant things until you die. His grandpa clearly doesn’t want to go, he thinks it’s monstrous, but he can’t speak well and is confined to a wheelchair. He shouts “Ooahnaye!”, which the author thinks is “who am I?”, but I’m pretty sure is, “you are next!” When they put him in the vat, he remains conscious, just laying there staring angrily at the ceiling, not dreaming like they want him to.

On P. G. Wodehose, by Christopher Hitchens

From A Hitch in Time. Mostly a lukewarm review of P. G. Wodehouse: Man and Myth by Barry Phelps. I learned a few words:

• rannygazoo: Nonsense, deception, foolishness
• wastrel: a wasteful person; spendthrift
• “put on dog”: to act pretentiously, pull out all the stops to impress someone, overdress to a casual affair, etc.