“A Brilliant Music Stilled” (In Memory of Brian Doyle)

“…And please give Teacher the grace to be alert to the real questions being asked here, which are usually silent and in the eyes...”

                                                                        —Brian Doyle, “Room Eight”

One month ago, Brian Doyle, whom I consider the greatest personal essayist ever, living or dead, ceased to be among the living. I preached his stuff to friends, told them that he had the unique gift of not only changing you with his writing, but often doing so within a single page or so. How many writers were both that striking and succinct? Few but the greatest personal essayist ever, living or dead. I was thinking of essays like “How We Wrestle Is Who We Are,” “Leap,” “Pea by Pea,” and “Original Skin” as I preached the wisdom of reading his stuff, though I also believed the slightly longer ones (in the whopping 2-3 page range) are equally worthwhile, stories like “Joyas Voladores” and “Rec League.” Not all of those essays were created equal, but all in at least one moment struck me in a way that made the day I read it a day worth having lived.

One time, as a creative writing MFA student at BYU, I got the chance to introduce Brian at the school’s English Reading Series, and I took the opportunity to preach to people there too. Generally, authors were introduced with a list of accolades, but as I thought of Brian’s work I felt like the implications of accolades fell far short of his real value. Accolades weren’t why I planned to give him my full attention. The spirit I felt in his stuff was, the life. So I wanted to give the audience that, the real reason I thought they ought to listen to him. Despite believing this was the best way to actually introduce him, I still might not have had the guts to do it though—after all, I’d never heard of simply skipping the accolades in an author’s introduction—but as I reflected on the idea, I remembered a tip he’d given writers: “Follow the energy.” I didn’t think he’d mind me taking his words seriously. I explained some of that to the audience as I introduced Brian, setting them up for a sample of what they had coming:

“Great writing is an arrow,” I quoted Brian, “shot into the hearts of others.” And then I riffed, following the energy.

“Brian’s metaphor makes writing sound dangerous, even fatal,” I said, “which I like, because there are parts of me I want to die—a whole version of me in fact. His phrase gives me hope that the right story could kill my inner demons and make me a new man.” I claimed then and claim still that Doyle has a bevy of such arrows in his quiver, and that thus we ought to listen to him, because one of those stories might be that arrow with our name on it, might be the thing that hits us dead on and kills off our darkness for good.

In other words, I agreed with another of Brian’s great lines: “If we told the right story, we could change the world.”

Because I was already introducing him for the English Reading Series, I was also given the chance to drive Brian from Provo to Salt Lake City where he’d do another reading. That might sound a bit like the school pulled a Tom Sawyer on a gullible grad student, convincing me I was lucky to handle the logistics of their Reading Series (“Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” asks Tom), and maybe sometimes schools do that, but in my case I was more than lucky. This was the greatest essayist ever, living or dead, and I had an hour alone with him for a handful of dollars in gas.

I picked him up at his hotel in Provo and we went north to SLC, talking more about life than writing. I was happy we did that at the time, but I feel especially glad we did now. It was right, considering we were on “the brief sunlit road between great dark wildernesses,” that we talk about what mattered most. Brian didn’t just write words. He offered companionship to others on the road.

I saw Brian for the last time in 2015 in Flagstaff, AZ. He was keynote speaking at NonfictioNOW, a writing conference, which was taking place in one wing of a fancy hotel. A long corridor served as the heart of the conference, pulsing with people. Booths advertising books and MFA programs lined it on one side, backlit by tall pleasant windows, while doors to capacious conference rooms stood on the other. Brian wasn’t always around, but when he popped in, he’d trigger mild heart attacks, cause people to clot around him listening to whatever he was saying, even answers he gave to other people’s questions. I was always part of the clot. Despite feeling like a fan boy, I wasn’t willing to miss out on what Brian might say. I suspect others felt the same.

As people fighting to pass by compressed the circle around him more tightly, at one point, he glanced up and noticed me. We hadn’t talked in five years.

“Bentley! It’s great to see you here! Do you wanna catch up in a bit?”

“Definitely!” I responded, obviously.

A little while later, he told the people around him “I need to talk to Bentley for a minute” (as if anyone had a clue who I was), nodded kindly to me and gestured towards a conference room. A conference organizer approached him with some keynote speaker stuff on our way to go talk. I didn’t hear what he said, but apparently he took a rain check. Soon, I found myself alone with him in a conference room meant for 300. We might has well have been in that car headed to Salt Lake when we began to talk.

In the conference room of NonfictioNOW’s hotel, Brian asked me about life and I expressed some angst typical of MFA grads—“I don’t really know what I’m doing. I thought about going on for a PhD, or maybe teaching high school. (Frankly, I wish I could go back to my MFA and keep whitewashing fences.)”

My typical answers had a twist though, although it didn’t come out in my words—I didn’t know how to put it into them. It wasn’t just a crossroads that concerned me. It was a deeper struggle which had left me revolving head over heels in the several years since I’d graduated. I didn’t know how to explain it, and certainly knew that even if he wanted to, he didn’t have time for it, so I simply tried to ask about its application—where I might ought to go with my life to enjoy what really mattered. He gave me some predictably Romantic answers—principled, “follow the energy” type stuff, “consequences be hanged.”

For me, such Romantic answers were predictable, since I know Brian and am something of a Romantic myself—at least in how I think. I think I was on my way to living like a real one too, back when I met Brian in grad school. I had lost my way though, and lost it badly, and I still can’t explain how on the page any better than I could tell Brian in person.

The terrible irony of it all was that as Brian gave me his lofty, moving thoughts they led me to despair. This was the right path, I believed, but I didn’t know where I was. It was like having someone hand you a map to heaven when you can’t see where you are on it. I wasn’t even sure if where I was was on the map. It wasn’t that I doubted the destination was breathtaking. So as he continued giving me Romantic advice for the journey, I brokenly concluded that not even he knew how to find me. Not even he, an unusual soul who’d specifically sought me out, could help. There was nothing left to do but stop troubling him, to let him go back to whoever was waiting in the hall, to hear him out while I hid my misery at his words, which, though they were very wise, all told me, “I don’t actually get you.” In “Joyas Voladores,” Brian himself once said, “We are utterly open with no one in the end”—essentially, we eventually wind up alone. As he talked, I felt alone already.

Unexpectedly, Brian stopped talking. He looked at me.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

I pursed my lips, unsure of what to say: “Yes, but you tried hard, and it didn’t work, and you’ve got to go anyway, so why try”; “Yes, but really I don’t know if anyone can help me, so really, don’t worry about it”; “Yes, but I can’t even tell you where I am—I don’t know”?

He leaned forward intently. His whole aspect, so prone to being merry, was now serious and responsive. His eyebrows furrowed, his blue eyes focused through the small lenses of his glasses. His skin like leather that had just begun to show age, his dark hair (plus some gray) more desiccated and subdued than it used to be.

“Tell me. What’s wrong?”

I didn’t know what to say. I really didn’t know what was wrong, although he was right—something was. I tried to explain though and he listened and gave me some advice that amounted to just figure things out for yourself. Don’t take anyone else’s word for it. Find out the truth for yourself.

What lingers with me though was that moment, right after Brian leaned in, when he chose to listen, to pry into the silence. That choice felt substantial to me—literally, like, it was substance, it had a shape: an orb that stirred somewhere between or throughout him and me. I’m still chewing on it, on that raw recognition, that genuine acknowledgement. That moment hits me in the heart as I think about it. And so I think about it, and maybe I bleed as I do. Maybe the wound is fatal, the way to find who I want to be. Maybe Brian knew the answer after all. It had something to do with his priorities, how when everyone wanted to listen to him, he said, “Nah. I want to listen to this kid.”

A few days after Brian’s passing, I went to the Provo Temple, a holy place to Mormons. With some trees giving shade, I sat in the grass to read. I had planned to resume my reading of Anna Karenina, but felt a sort of nudge to read Leaping, by Brian Doyle. I’d brought that book of his along just because.

I’d read it once before, but had picked it up a few weeks before to reread it—my favorite of his books—but I’d only read the intro so far, so when I picked it up, I found my bookmark was at the book’s first essay, “Room Eight.”

The story relates various experiences Brian had while teaching Catholic Sunday School to fourteen seven-year-olds. He ditches the textbook, makes the class Q&A, and tries to be real with the kids. At one point, he shares a pretty amusing prayer that shows what I mean by “real”:

“Dear God, please help us not be mudheads for at least ten minutes, and please let Teacher remember that he said he would give us a five-minute break in the playground, and please let us not shout and interrupt and belch loudly so as to make the whole table dissolve into fits of giggles, and please give Teacher the grace to be alert to the real questions being asked here, which are usually silent and in the eyes...”

And suddenly I was tearing up without understanding exactly why. I was remembering that chat with Brian at NonfictioNOW and realizing, I think, that he had had other such chats with people, people like these seven-year-olds (who might actually be older than me by now), that he had long known that people ask the most important questions without words, and that answering those questions matters. I was realizing all the more that Brian really believed this, that this was really who Brian was, and I was glad to have known him and sad he was gone. He always told writers that the key to great writing was listening, and I think that he spoke from experience. His writing hits me in the heart anyway, exactly like his listening. (Maybe somehow, mystically, they are the same thing.)

            So now I’m going to turn this into a final introduction for Brian, and tell you all, whoever you are, that if you’d like to be hit in the heart with an arrow (who doesn’t?), or at least if there are parts of yourself you wish would die—or a whole version of you even—well, then I know of some writing that’s dangerous, some stories that might even be fatal. There are a bevy of them quivered in the works of Brian Doyle. I recommend you read them. I recommend you listen. They are shot by one who listened first then carefully took aim, so there’s a sporting chance that they’ll hit you right where you live. They might just take your life. They might give you something better.

            They have changed my world.

            Please welcome, and give your full attention, to Brian Doyle…

(Here are some links to some of my favorite stories he wrote:)

“Leap” – about 9/11 – http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/questions/leap.html

“Joyas Voladores” – about hearts and hummingbirds – https://theamericanscholar.org/joyas-volardores/

“How We Wrestle Is Who We Are” – https://orionmagazine.org/article/how-we-wrestle-is-who-we-are/

Leap: Revelations and Epiphanies, as I wrote, is my favorite book of his, followed by The Wet Engine: Exploring The Mad Wild Miracle of the Human Heart

https://www.gofundme.com/doylefamilyfund

TRIPTYCH

“Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.”

—Isaiah 6.3

Kadosh

I traced the ancient fingerprints in the slickness of the massive stones.  Here a man had borne longing.  Here a son had borne the same.  Here a son’s son also.  I bowed my head against the stones, adding a miniscule amount of yearning’s tangible trace to the stones long slick with prayer.  There was something poignant about praying into a wall, about acting on hope while facing futility, especially considering that this was where a peculiar people had literally done so for almost two thousands of years—it was here that they had come to pulse prayers through their fingertips, and here to store their wails and why within the stone; and here that they had told a history of exile in the silent glaze of once rough lime, the color of old Torah scrolls; it was here to this very spot that they had come, because there was no closer place to holy nor a closer thing than holiness to Home.  Ache entered through my fingers.  I wished that I could wholly grasp that slickness, but I knew I couldn’t, so with fingertips and forehead, I pressed into the Western Wall again. 

*          *          *

The Western Wall, or Wailing Wall, is the closest thing to where the Temple was, which is why nothing is more holy, more kadosh, to the Jews who worship there.  That house of the Most High stood until 70 CE, when Rome realized the Jews would never accept their rule, especially not here in their homeland and absolutely not here near their temple, which charged them with a crackling zeal, a zeal which lashed in blinding arcs from revolt to revolt against Rome.  One of these revolts finally provoked Rome to storm the Holy City with so many legionnaires that though they could be defied and were they could not be deterred and weren’t.  The Jewish resistance was decimated and the Temple demolished and the first of half a hundred generations sent off to their wanderings, which began in Yavneh, a place, as Rome would learn, still too close to Jerusalem and its humming wreck of sacred stones.  After the Bar-Kokhba Revolt, which ended in 135 CE, Rome had learned, and so the Jews were scattered, not merely from Jerusalem but from Israel altogether.  Scattered, the last of Israel’s tribes.  For the next two millennia the people of Judah were persecuted for coming to places they weren’t welcome, which they could not help but do because they were not welcome anywhere.

Until Spain: there they found a refuge and perhaps, they thought, a home, until Columbus sailed the ocean blue.  That year the climate of the court changed too, such that after centuries of safety, the Jews found themselves adrift again, and aimless—there were no other harbors in existence.  Our professor of Judaism in the Jerusalem Center tried to convey the effect of the expulsion from Spain: “It is considered one of the three great calamities of our people,” he said—the second, actually.  The first was the destruction of the Temple.  The Shoah was the third.

*          *          *

            After I had prayed, I crossed the broad clearing before the Wall and joined some friends.  A somber haze hung in the evening air: I recognized it from a week ago: I’d woke up to the oriental, exotic Call to Prayer, ventured groggily onto a balcony, and seen the Holy City, all dust-blown and amber and shrouded with sunrise.  O for more sober stirring amber.  My friends had been writing prayers to put between the seams of the Wall and asked if I had written mine already.  My prayer—no, I hadn’t written it.  I wasn’t sure what it was.  I had to figure out what it meant to write it too.  When they asked me about it I remembered hearing, as a kid, of a place where people scrolled up their holiest hopes and placed them in a wall, though I’d had no idea why they would put them there, which is probably why it stuck with me.  Having felt the Wall though, I felt I knew something of why.
            I looked up, prompted by an elbow in my side, to see my friend looking pointedly towards an austere looking man.  Apparently he was policing the promenade, which overlooked the clearing before the Wall, to ensure no one violated the Sabbath, by writing, say, which was a form of work.  I looked around at the sky, which was still that stirring amber.  True, a maze of beige buildings hid the sun in the west, but that didn’t mean that it had set.  A different Jewish man apparently shared my opinion—he was writing nearby—so once the stern man passed I also wrote my prayer.
            Returning to the Wall was more difficult, now that the sun had almost set, which is when Shabbat begins.  A throng was slowly forming in the clearing.  As I worked my way east, I was temporarily stunned by a passerby’s cylindrical hat, which was as broad as his shoulders, upright, and spooled with something like fur.  His forelocks dangled like coiling springs beside his ears: Haredi—ultra-orthodox—the most inflexibly obedient of the Jews.  Everyone at the Wall covered their heads out of respect, but most Jews, as well as visitors like my friends and I, wore the much less conspicuous kipas—small, circular caps.  Perhaps the man wanted to do more than the minimum for God.
            By the time I got to the Wall, black-robed figures had formed dozens of lines before it, each five or six deep.  I only wanted to place my tiny, crinkled prayer in the Wall, so I quickly slipped between two lines to do so, then stopped, abruptly, stunned: the Wall was full.  I looked up and down a four-foot vertical seam, hoping for the space to wedge a single, sacred spitwad.  Not a prayer.  I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed the paper prayers earlier, while I had read in Braille of all those times the words had failed.  They were everywhere, tats of white and pink and yellow pleas compressed as much as possible.  I walked twenty feet in both directions, weaving in and out of worshippers—some muttering scripture in haunting, Hebraic tones—ran my eyes along the only horizontal crease in reach.  Prayers burst the entire way like popcorn, littering the ground like the floor of an emptied theater.  No space, no hope.
            The Wall had stirred me like an ocean floor; as sediment swirled, I glimpsed beneath.  I had tried to pray for the peace of Jerusalem, spent some ink and space for her sake, but a deeper void or prayer had poured out through my pen.  I wrote what I wanted more than anything on that paper, and now my hopes felt threatened by the way the Wall was full.  I read through my prayer, needing to sacrifice everything that I possibly could.  Then I tore it down to the two words that I couldn’t: “Reach me.”

C. S. Lewis once said that God, who dwells outside of time, answers every prayer as if it were the only one in existence.  He is like an author who can stop writing, to consider a prayer and a pray-er for an eternity, before answering the moment He is asked.  I wonder about those other prayers, those other words they hold: like the sands of the sea or clouds of desert stars, they are not known nor numbered, nor could they be by me.  I wonder at the One who reads them all, who is therefore worth worshipping, as the Mezuzah says, with all thy heart and soul and might—which explains why frizzy-bearded elders bob so oddly before the Wall, whipping from their knees, to their waist, to their neck, then head, towards what they hold most holy.  They repeat and repeat and repeat it, with heart and soul and might, with all, because that is how you love the one whose name is Endless; the One whose love was like that first—that’s why he is to whom you pray, even if his inbox looks full.

*          *          *

Jerusalem was ruled by Rome until the 7^th century CE, when Islam swept west from Arabia across northern Africa.  Muslims venerate Jerusalem as the place where Abraham offered Ishmael, his oldest son, and where Muhammad ascended to the Seven Heavens, spoke to God, and returned with instructions for the faithful.  The Dome of the Rock now enshrines the stone where his feet left the earth.  The Jews believe that same stone to be where the heart of their temple, the Holy of Holies, had stood.  Some Christians believe Abraham offered Isaac in the same spot.  The only thing anyone seems to agree on is that this place is holy.

And alas for the fertility of holy ground, for mingled seeds of strife and sacredness: how can it be that here of all places such conflicts have come to fruition?  The crusaders took Jerusalem around 1100 CE, then mercilessly slaughtered the Holy City’s civilians, even the Arabs who were Christian.  For some reason they spared the Dome of the Rock, topping its great, golden semi-sphere with a cross rather than eradicating it, two hundred years before Muslim forces would return to reclaim Jerusalem.  Suleiyman the Magnificent, builder of the mighty crenellations and walls and gates about Jerusalem, also allowed free worship, such that one might find a mosque and cathedral and synagogue all on the same street.   Eight centuries of Muslim rule ended with World War I, when the Ottoman Empire, which had coerced the Palestinians to fight for them, fell beside Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Britain took Palestine, the Holy Land, from the Ottomans, and governed it as a protectorate.  So the unfortunate Palestinians lost a war that wasn’t theirs, and thus lost a land that was.

Not long after all civilized peoples had been staggered into silence, as the world learned of the Shoah, Britain pulled out of Palestine to let the Jews who had taken refuge there fight with the Palestinians for their homeland.  Yes, “their” homeland.  Both sides fought for their homeland, both watered holy ground with blood, but only the Jews won.

*          *          *

In a crack within a seam, I wedged my prayer, then sidled through the crowd back toward my friends.  Things were beginning to feel chaotic.  Groups of black-clad worshippers clumped around rabbis who read from Torah scrolls while a variety of hymns from different groups collided in the air, mixed further with loud calls in Hebrew between friends and even the mirthful shouts of dancers.  Everyone seemed to be saying “Shabbat Shalom!”  “Peace upon the Sabbath,” literally, and “Welcome,” commonly.  Several times it was meant for me: I heard it first from a guy that I’d bumped into, who said it merrily while he waved away my apology; second, from a man with a long, grey beard and kindly crinkles near his eyes—I’d stepped aside to let him and his grandson (I’m guessing) go by.  The four- or five-year-old surveyed the atmosphere around him with brown, orblike eyes, tentatively clapping his free hand to the one his grandfather held in imitation of the crowd, now enjoying an energetic tune.  And I received a few “Shabbat Shaloms” after I tried greeting people in Hebrew too, which often uncorked too much for me to handle.  “No! I don’t speak Hebrew,” I’d have to laugh as I explained myself, “I’m just visiting,” which, I noted, never changed the tone of welcome.  One of my friends must have looked particularly Jewish.  Once, after greeting an old man, the man deeply said, “Welcome home.”  

Eventually, I ended up in one of the circles of dancing Jews.  It was a lot like playing ring-around-the-rosies in elementary school, except here we played in Hebrew.  Also, some people had assault rifles.  The military guys unnerved me a little, until one guy, who didn’t have green fatigues and black boots and a rifle on his back, was so friendly and enthusiastic as he encouraged me to join, that I did.  I noticed my friend Dan Jones jumping around, arm in arm with them already and hollering his best imitation of Hebrew—which was passable, or at least inaudible—to tunes he didn’t know, and remembered, “I know some Hebrew too...”  

Besides the assault rifle issue, I had been worried about respecting this place.  We were probably fifty feet away from the Wailing Wall now—I could still see people illuminated in yellow cones of light, bobbing with their hearts and minds and strengths.  Clearly, this clearing was for worship, though what that meant was not so clear.  I thought I could understand all these groups, to some degree.  I had sought salvation in obedience with exactness, in the letter of the law; and I had failed and felt forlorn; then I had tried forgetting the law, the impossible burden, and just do the feeble good that I could manage.  Lately I had immersed myself in scripture, hoping its spirit would change me.  I wasn’t sure what really worked though—though how I looked and labored, heavy laden—so I wasn’t sure what to do with conflicts between modes of worship.  It was then, while I stood wondering whether dancing were appropriate, that the grandfather and grandson, clapping, had stepped by.  After greeting me, the elder looked to the circle of bounding and laughing Jews, who were about my age.  I watched him carefully.  Light buoyed within his eyes.  That was good enough for me.

And I am grateful that it was, because I can still remember one of the tunes, I hear it as I write this, a year and a half later; I can still remember circulating arm-in-arm, laughing and singing and dancing to the point of exhaustion, shouting as we’d suddenly reverse our direction, or strike up a new tune.  I remember the clap on my back as I was brought into the circle—a holy clap, to me—and wondering if my idea of worship was not a bit too somber.  I remember many things, but mostly, the face of a boy.

I saw him before the bobbing began in earnest, or the grandfather passed with his grandson, or the dancing swept me up.  I had just stepped back from the Wall with ache still in me from my fingertips.  I wondered at the slickness. How long they had hoped for Home?  How much hope was there for it?  Can we hope without hope? I was so absorbed that for a while I couldn’t even see the Wall, or the crowd, which milled and murmured about me, as it was beginning to be.  Then I returned to my sight, and part of the blur before my eyes became a boy.  About sixteen and just barely unhandsome—his nose just too upturned, his cheeks just over-round.  I’m not sure that he saw the crowd, nor do I think that they saw him.  They bustled and surged—rushing off to hear their rabbi, or write their prayers, or sing their scriptures, or bob before the Wall, worship in whatever way that they thought best—but he just stood and faced the stones.  He looked so unremarkable that at first I looked right past him.  Then something tugged my gaze back to his face, where I found the whole history of his people and a feeling beyond words.  He was crying.

Holy

Quds

Lion Heart (Of the Great and Good in Story, and the Valour of Olde England)

     “What, Wamba, art thou there?” said Richard; “I have been so long of hearing thy voice  I thought thou hadst taken flight.”
     “I take flight!” said Wamba.  “When do you ever find Folly separated from Valour?”

—Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

When I hear the word “plume,” which I don’t very often, I think of gallant knights and/or Millie, and I suppose Millie has that attitude that we call chivalry: the first to charge, the last to leave the battle.  She protects the weak—such as myself—from invaders like the mailman, and the merry voices of the Green kids next door, when their giggles menace us through the fence (ages 4, 2, and .5).  14 pounds of oreo-furred ferocity, a panda face of black eyes and that white plume sprouting up from between them (plus that lopsided underbite) amply account for the perfect unconquered record our home and castle has hitherto enjoyed.  Once a mailman knocked on the door then left, just wanting to let us know a package was on our doorstep.  Millie howled like we were being assailed by Hitler himself, and when I opened the door to pick up the package, she shot past me to tear the deuce a new one.  I had to run a good forty feet down our long sloping driveway to catch her in the process of throwing out her chest to get that devil off our property.  He laughed and heiled it off as he hopped into his truck.  As Millie trotted back up the driveway, she looked at me still full of wrath at the evil of we’d just seen.  Nevermind she was a Shih-Tzu, the set of her jaw was downright pugnacious, I could almost see “the challenging tilt of a cigar”…and suddenly I realized I’d never seen such a striking resemblance to Winston Churchill: the “never give in” ideal personified.  It made me a little jealous to realize that Hitler himself could not have bombed our dog into submission, to think she would have faced the whole Nazi Luftwaffe.  She would have led the charge, like The Last Lion (the Churchill biography I’ve been reading, two years after that mailman moment), and in her howls we might have heard, “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”  Shih-Tzu means “lion” in Chinese.

There’s a moment in Braveheart where Robert the Bruce’s father dismisses William Wallace’s fearlessness by saying, “He has courage—so does a dog—but it’s precisely the ability to compromise that makes men noble.”  I’m afraid I fit far too well under his definition of “noble.”  Isn’t faith, the soul of heroism, as Talmage said, more like the soul of Reepicheep, the mouse-knight of Narnia who only wanted worse odds, that he might have greater glory, or perhaps that he might better glorify?  Do I have to write the whole St. Crispin’s Day speech right here, to show what heroes think of impossible odds?  Why yes—I do:

WESTMORELAND: O that we now had here

But one ten thousand of those men in England

That do no work to-day!

KING: What’s he that wishes so?

My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin;

If we are marked to die, we are enough

To do our country loss; and if to live,

The fewer men, the greater share of honour.

God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.

By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,

Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;

It yearns me not if men my garments wear;

Such outward things dwell not in my desires.

But if it be a sin to covet honour,

I am the most offending soul alive.

No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.

God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour

As one man more methinks would share from me

For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!

Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,

That he which hath no stomach to this fight,

Let him depart; his passport shall be made,

And crowns for convoy put into his purse;

We would not die in that man’s company

That fears his fellowship to die with us.

This day is call’d the feast of Crispian.

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,

And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

He that shall live this day, and see old age,

Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,

And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.”

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,

And say “These wounds I had on Crispian’s day.”

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,

But he’ll remember, with advantages,

What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,

Familiar in his mouth as household words—

Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,

Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester—

Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red.

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered—

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition;

And gentlemen in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

There was apparently a film version of Henry V, made during WWII in Britain, where the silhouette of a soldier in a tent could be seen donning military fatigues during the St. Crispin’s Day speech.  There was nothing rational at all about defying Germany.  France’s army had outnumbered even the Germans (and far, far outnumbered the Brits), and yet it had fallen within 30 days.  All the Brits had going for them was their moat—the English channel—and their death before dishonor mentality, which they all as one band of brothers shared.  “Like the great and good in story if we fail we fail with glory—God speed the right!  God speed the right!”  English blood itself is an heroic heritage.

Millie’s blood also carries in it the fearless and savage defiance of one who cannot know him or herself beaten.  The mere possibility is inconceivable.  Thus such people—heroes—actually crave worse odds.  It was said of Churchill that after June of 1940, his “world of imagination ‘coincided with the facts of exernal reality in a way that rarely happens to any man.”  These odds were terrible enough that they were finally worth fighting for.  And it wasn’t just Churchill.  Even for the common Englander, morale actually rose when France fell, and when they faced a Europe submerged by the Swastika, utterly alone.  As The New Yorker reported on June 22: “The individual Englishman seems to be singularly unimpressed by the fact that there is now nothing between him and the undivided attention of a war machine such as the world has never seen before.”  “News vendors chalked: ‘we’re in the final—to be played on home ground.’”  Wrote Dorothy L. Sayers:

This is the war that England knows,

When no allies are left, no help

To count upon from alien hands,

No waverers remain to woo,

No more advice to listen to,

And only England stands.

I saved my textbook from my “History of Europe: 1914-present” class, almost exclusively for a single British poster from WWII which it showed: a flight of Nazi planes were sailing in from darkness over the sea; beneath them, a lone British infantrymen raised his fist in defiance of them all.  I’ve wanted that poster ever since then.  I haven’t stopped hoping I’ll find one.

While Hitler was staging a victory parade through the Brandenburg gate—so sure England would see the futility of resistance, and thus fold—a Gallup poll in may found that only 3% of Britons thought that they might lose the war—and “by the end of July, the percentage was so small it was immeasurable.”  This was due to the modern Lion-Heart and true.  (I’ve heard the old Lion-heart, King Richard, wasn’t quite what we know him as in Disney’s Robin Hood or Ivanhoe, historically, but I do not much know.)  After the war, “Englishmen as skeptical of politicians as Bernard Shaw [and others] agreed that had anyone but Churchill been prime minister in the summer of 1940, Britain would have negotiated an armistice with Hitler.”  When Churchill pleaded with the French leaders not to lose spirit and surrender (even the hopelessly outmatched Poles had held out for 3 weeks), one of the French lamented, not that it would change what happened: “If we capitulate, all the great might of Germany will be concentrated upon invading England.  And then what will you do?’ Thrusting his jaw forward, the P.M. replied that he hadn’t thought about it carefully, but that broadly speaking he would propose to drown as many of them as possible and then to hit on the head any of them who managed to crawl ashore.”  So Churchill deserved a lot of the credit for the high spirits of his countrymen, yet they deserve the credit for adopting his.  As Churchill said of his people: “It fell to me in those coming days and months to express their sentiments on suitable occasions.  This I was able to do, because they were mine also.”  And hence people like Hugh Dalton, “long his opponent in the House, wrote [after a speech declaring that “if this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground,” which caused many MPs to rush up shouting to his chair and clap him on the back): ‘He was quite magnificent. [He is] the man, the and the only man we have, for this hour.”  This, their finest hour.  They had literally joined the great and good in story.

Back to Millie, who was the prompt for this Churchillian tribute, and “ruminE/mediation/reflection/expose word” on courage.  She too has something fearless in a feral way, a legacy to her blood.  Our little Horton (“…Hears a Who”--a fluffy elephant, half Millie’s size) enrages Millie; the sight of him awakens an ancient, feral thirst in her to seize by the throat and rampage around the room thrashing back and forth so as to snap the neck and let the blood and take the life of the thing.  I’ve probably seen her do this a dozen times (and I’m not always home from school).  I tried training her to do it by saying “Millie—savage!” once she was already doing it, hoping she’d begin to associate the thrill of slaking her bloodthirst with the sound of that word, but it never worked.  Instead, the word would bring her back from the original instincts of her kind and leave her wondering what the word meant.  The way she thrashes really is savage—violent to the point of blindness.  It makes me wonder about that instinct, how many lives have been lost to its origins her ancestors, those with a more expressive scope.

I’m back on that idea of blindness—Robert the Bruce’s father’s statement that the ability to compromise makes us noble.  I wonder if it’s even noble to reason.  Was it wise to defy Hitler?  I trow not.  Was it right?  “Never in the history of human combat has so much been owed by so many to so few,” said Churchill, of the RAF after their triumph in the Battle of Britain.  I’ve got an RAF pin (a duplicate, I think), given to me by the kind man sitting next to me during Evensong in Christchurch College, Oxford.  He’d learned the only souvenir I wanted was a Royal Air Force bomber jacket, and only regretted he hadn’t brought one of his three to give to me.  A rather unreasonable thing, that, too—he only knew one thing about me.

I wonder more and more about this lofty blindness.  Some people are blinded by odds, and fear; others are blinded by honor, and believe.  Our eyes were made to be single, perhaps, to be blind to all but that thing which we love most; and where our treasure is, there will our heart be also.  Once our hearts are pure, then only we shall see (Him).  So if it were a sin to covet honor, how vicious would my own heart be?  Millie barks before she calculates the odds.  She howls and charges the moment a knock’s at the door (kind of annoying, actually--she's doing it right now and I lie not).  Do the details (defeat or victory) matter?  Or is she so committed to honor that she already knows what she’s going to do: she is beyond the reach of odds.  Goliaths are the ones who win through the odds.  And what is winning worth besides a few more years?  (To flip the cultural contexts, such that the English are the bad guys:)

Young soldier: “Home! The English are too many!”

Wallace: “Aye, you can run, and you’ll live—at least awhile.  But one day, dying in your beds, would you be willing to give every day from that day til this, for one chance, for just one chance, to tell them that they may take away our lives, but they’ll never take OUR FREEDOM!”

“Every man dies, not every man really lives.”  I believe that if we die for principle, we die for all our principles—all the ones we would have lived had God granted us more days.  I don’t think we have anything to lose by losing our lives now.  Don’t get me wrong—I haven’t sworn for death before dishonor yet—but I am working on it, as I believe God is working on me.  Hence I have some hope for this.  Faith is the soul of heroism, true true--and thus heroes are embodiments of courage.

Reepicheep longed for death-or-glory charges, forlorn hopes, and last stands.  Why? Because his time and talents (his life and his blade) were but things with which he hoped to secure the only thing that mattered.  I'm praying for such a shift in my paradigm.  "God help me.  Here I stand." - Martin Luther

*

Millie’s funny too, like Churchill, “the most amusing warlord in history.”  A lot of this comes from the fact that neither he nor she ever went in for any of that nonsense that (s)he wasn’t the most important being in the room.  For instance, my dad likes to nap, typically on the couch.  Millie likes to catch him napping, hop up on the couch, then settle herself on his face.  He pushes her off.  She hops on again.  She just does that.  I don’t know where her self-confidence comes from: perhaps she’s a little inflated with herself, not wholly devoted to the humble sort of honour: "Perhaps you think too much of your honor, friend," said Aslan to Reepicheep.  She didn't used to be.  The Christmas Millie first appeared—puffy, small, and tentative—“taking her out” (to do her business) was complicated.  She was so small we couldn’t tell if she was squatting in the snow or just shivering in it, wondering why we were doing this to her.

The other thing she does—simply freaking out—also happens when she feels something commensurate to her capacity for wonder—like when you come home, after a long time off at school.  Then she may be relied upon to rocket to the sound of your voice, and bunch up at your feet, and shake visibly with excitement, literally to the tip of her nose—she sneezes when she’s thrilled.  Then she sprints back into the living room as you greet and hug your sisters, leaps onto the back of a couch and begs you for attention by basically having an affectionate seizure.  Maybe I love her because she loved me first.  Her heart in many ways is godly, so I guess it’s no shame to want to be more like her, a little more gallant and doughty.  Once, when I came home, I was so happy to see her that I realized I couldn't tell her any better than she could tell me (how can you elocute affection to a dog?).  I scratched behind her ears and along her back aggressively (my love language, apparently, along with persecution of siblings etc) such that it rolled her over a time or two.  Apparently she got the gist of what I meant, because it shot her off again, around our basement stairwell at a reckless sprint.  Then she rounded it again.  And then she did again.  And then she did again.  Her strides were the fullest, fiercest things she could express, suspending her in air at full length for an instant before her toes touched the deep beige carpet and she tore herself onward again.  She lapped the stairwell seven or eight times at a breathless pace, then inexplicably reversed directions (I was laughing to myself) then lapped it six more.  Then she lay down, panting desperately, totally spent in her cause.

Parallel Parking PR

Finally got the pics up for an old, old blog. I've since moved to somewhere parking exists and never hope to achieve anything near this again. So I had to post it.

http://oodilolly.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2009-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2010-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=10

ESPN + Iceland

I now have proof that Sportscenter has had a positive, cultural impact on me. It was always a good thing, but now it's a better. One minute, I'm watching to see how the NFL playoffs are going, the next I'm remembering my favorite music video within the bounds of time because it has become apparent that Tom Coughlin starred in it. This isn't a roundabout way of saying I don't want the Giants to lose (I always do, almost, not really for any reason); if anything, it's a straightforward way of rooting for Iceland.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmXMA34CeoQ

The only thing that beats free laundry money

I almost didn't go, but as I thought about all the glittering silver at the bottom of the swimming pool, flashing as the coins flipped over and over, sinking to the floor, I realized that I had to. Dan Jones doesn't lead his men astray, and he said this lead was hot.

The Branbury Apartments had announced they were dumping $700 in quarters into a pool at 10 pm, and it was already 10:04 pm, which offered me an easy out to be lazy and not even try (the couch was so comfy) but I can't help but believe more and more in the idea that it's more important to fight in the face of futility than it is to win, so I threw on my swimsuit and ran to my car, hoping I wasn't too late. It was a good feeling, deciding to do it anyways, and it turned out, I was in luck, which I realized when I jogged up and a girl told me where the pool was, adding they had already done it once, but they were doing it in several rounds. "But it's not worth it--I got kicked in the head like three times when I went." Meh--I've been kicked in the head before. "Oh, dang. Sorry about that. Thanks." Kept jogging.

There was a dance party in the Branbury's indoor section of the pool--people dancing in the pool and near it--and a few people with goggles still diving for the remainders of the first round's booty. The pool was a beautiful turquoise infused with the color of the cloud that comes out of your vacuum when you clean it. Oo la la. Dan yelled hey about the time his brother Ryan started hollering triumphantly: he'd found a dustpan in the bottom of the pool, which, apparently, they'd needed.

Eventually the second round came and I applied Tom's advice of blocking your head with one arm and sweeping the ground with the other. I guess first several Branbury employees stood around the pool (all participants had to wait within the pool at the edge), sprinkling in quarters like pixie dust. Someone yelled go and I went under tried to see through the brownish grey cloud, found a quarter, fought off several people that tried to take it from me while I was struggling to get a fingertip under the thin edges. I was probably being touched by three bodies on average the entire time I was under the 6 feet of water. If you've seen the scene in Finding Nemo where the fish are netted at the end and flopping as the net leaves the water (before Nemo's clever idea) you'll know what I mean. Next dive I got pressed beneath people and panicked for a second as my air ran low enough for me to try to surface, which didn't work. Two seconds later bodies adjusted and I got up. Irrational but not a good feeling. Third dive I found two coins right away, got kicked pretty good (as opposed to indirect ones earlier), and realized there were better ways to get laundry money. So I called it good.

Of course, my opinion changed while recharging in the hot tub with the other guys, when I realized each coin was a dollar. Three might just be enough for ice cream at Macey's. I split and twenty minutes later stood in front of the ice cream aisle, damp but no longer dripping (in a swimsuit, t-shirt, chacos, and January), calculating sales tax. I'd found two quarters, a nickel, and 5 pennies in my car. $3.60. Most ice cream was 3.49 or more. Sales tax at 7%...twenty five cents or so...14 cents short. I felt like a kid ogling a lollipop outside a candy store, and honestly harbored a hope some compassionate passerby or paternalistic manager would put a hand on my shoulder and drop a dime or two in, maybe even another quarter, but no love came. Then I found Western Family at 2.99. Thank you, Invisible Hand. (Vote for Mitt.)

Also, on my way out of the pool area, still dripping but not so cold as you'd expect for being wet at 11 pm in January (go global warming), I passed a car with a lot of music bumping, surrounded by several dudes with one actually standing on top of it, who said, while the car started to move, "Don't go too crazy," which was probably a good idea.