Another year, another dollar.  Or as a large black lady I used to work with at Yuma Proving Grounds, Dorothy, might have said, another year, another half a dollar.  That is because I have had a major problem in this area.  But that is not what I am going to start out writing about in this new year.  The most excellent blogger Sticky Green Leaves and her fellow bloggers “All Things…”, and Robotic Tree, have given me excellent examples to follow, all in their different ways.  “Last Train” would do well also, I believe, but it is up to him to confront the white page.  I have plenty of confidence in him but that is so easy to say– although it is also true.

Today I am going to follow up on some generally religious writings these three have written about with some meandering of my own.  “All Things Considered” has given us a portrait of someone who finds true worship in the liturgy, most especially in hearing the liturgy rather than reading it.  He would rather not hear extemporaneous prayers as he hears those as manipulative.  I take it he doesn’t consider sermons especially important, at least not at all to him.  He gives us a picture of himself as someone whose ears are  pricked and erect so as to hear the things that annoy him.  He finds release when the whole affair is over.  This is not ideal worship, so to speak, as his attention is upon himself and his interlocutors, innocent though the latter are in this relationship.  We have one man’s sensitivities becoming a hypercritical listening organ.

As I write this I realize I am writing about myself when I go to church, not “All Things Considered”.  Then how have I worshipped?  What do I consider worship?  I have a picture of myself when I was about 25, before I was a Christian.  I was a visitor at an Episcopalian church in Williams, Arizona.  Perhaps it was the very first church service I had ever attended.  Men and woman bowed and kneeled in obeisance.  The priest sang the service, the people responded, the choir sang and the people sang.  It was utterly charming and delightful, symbolic and real.  One of the friends I was wish mistook my delight for levity; I was neither laughing at nor with the order and elements of the service, rather it was a delight in the beloved, the ceremony itself. 

If I was pre-Christian then, what am I now?  That is a personal matter.  If someone asks me how I am doing I may say just fine, or I am looking for a better job.  What sort of answer do they want?  I may be somewhat vulnerable, just enough to let someone in on one of the secrets of my life which are completely unknown to the rest of the 300 people congregation.  I am not really that shy but would rather bug out than chat to people I don’t know and don’t have much of an occasion to get to know better.  A lot of them would rather bug out too.  How do the accidents happen where shy people can get into each other’s orbits rather than clang off into space?

NOVAK: The transitoriness of life has often struck my heart and mind, everything around us reminds us of it — a rose pressed in an old Bible, fires from a log leaping into nothingness. The play, of course, is on Hopkins’s line that all nature is a Heraclitean fire: All is change, all is vanishing, flashing forth the glory of God.

LOPEZ: Do you have a favorite of those poems — a real intimate window into your life so far?

NOVAK: I love a lot of them, for bringing back sharp memories otherwise forgotten — pieces snatched from the flames! My favorite two, of course, are the two for Karen at the end. The haunting emptiness, the warmth of laughter, sure knowledge that she surrounds me with care.

LOPEZ: Why should everyone write poetry?

NOVAK: Because at heart everyone has a soul that sometimes sings. The sheer effort of matching this lilt to words is good both for your sense of words and for the intensity with which you will observe things in the future. Poetry sharpens our touches, tastes, the scents we smell. Open a bottle of cologne — is it even close to the one your father sometimes wore? Brings back no memories at all? Poetry grabs onto passing things and fully dwells in them awhile.

LOPEZ: What if you’re bad at it? Does it say something about your soul?

NOVAK: Being first class at it is not the point; I know for sure I am not. One does it for the sheer enjoyment of the thing. It is worth it, and it is worth doing badly. Your life will be more joyful for the effort. And real poets will mean more to you.

LOPEZ: I loved this: “Do not neglect the humblest modes of inspiration. Close your fists around them quickly while in your grasp, seize them in mid-flight. They evanesce into the night.” But who has time?

NOVAK: A wise teacher once told our class: Keep a worn journal by the bed, and write in it every night — five minutes, no more — jotting down the most memorable image (or even insight) of the day. Four minutes if you must. But do it. You will be surprised how this will teach you to notice many vivid images each day, and many insights. Only choose one at night, though, “to snatch from the flames.”

LOPEZ: What is “the sacramental sheen by which the world of our Creation shows itself”?

NOVAK: The world shines like shook foil: Hopkins. The beauty of earth is all around us, if we notice, and in it the glory of God. To be a theist is to say “thank you” with glad heart many times a day.

LOPEZ: What is a “torment of beauty”? Why would it be such a good torment?

NOVAK: Don’t some beautiful sounds, sights, scents overwhelm you? So that you can hardly bear to be still? Beauty of many kinds is at times too much. It is a torment, overcharges inner equipment.

LOPEZ: “I wish that I had truly been a poet, not an amateur . . . so that they might be worthy of the Creator from Whose sweet hands they came. I did my best.” Reminds me of what Mother Teresa of Calcutta said about being called not to be “successful but to be faithful.” Is that something of what you had in mind in publishing this collection?

NOVAK: Some real poets have looked at some of my verses. They tell me how poor each is, undisciplined, not really poetry yet, possibly highly charged prose. Too dominated by Hopkins and a few other favorites.

All true, but oh! so much fun, and it has enriched so many other moments of my life, by teaching me habits of observation and joy. And on some special occasions, such as birthdays, a little more elegant than just “short remarks” — as long as a laugh or two is implanted in them.

After reading this volume, two or three friends have written how much they enjoyed moments of laughter, followed by mistiness, a smile here, an LOL, a heart wrench. How happy their notes made me!

(For more on William E. Simon Jr. and Living the Call, read KJL’s recent syndicated column.)

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

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Mitchell Darrow has auguries of doom. He sees his five year old daughter, Marisela, falling to her death from a precipice.  It is a feeling he can’t shake.   Doom is coming.

He lays awake in bed, looking through the bedroom door into the living room.  The Suns, the basketball team, is on his mind.  Are Barkley and KJ and Thundering Dan good enough to come through this year to beat Hakeem and Horry and Cassels?

Darrow looks into the shaded living room.  There were several Mummers, Barkley among them, darkly gray with short kinky black hair, having a convocation, some sort of muttering, murmuring, conspiratorial musings, their backs turned to him, wearing cloaks now like ancient Druids gathering to cast spells to cast out the darkness and bring back the sun.

The Beatles “I’m  So Tired” fills his soul.  His left quadriceps is doing a flibbertigibbety repetitive dance.  “There!”  “Again!”  “A spasm every 42 seconds!”

Mitchell Darrow’s heart is beating too fast, as if he is just back from jogging; his heart rate is elevated and is stuck on 75 percent of a maximum pulse rate.  He goes into the living room, no longer thinking of the Barkley Mummers.

As he lays down on the couch, waiting for his pulse to slow, he hears, not in his soul or head, but in his ears, the dark lament of the old Ray Charles ’Early in the Morning’ .  Actually hearing it, as it was recorded forty years ago on the original acetate, as an auditory hallucination, is startling.

What is going on?

The thought of “heart attack” fills him with urgency.  There is a hospital only five minutes away from his house.  He drives there, walking through the emergency room doors as the sun is coming up on this cold winter’s morning in the desert…

“Can I help you?” the receptionist asks in a harried, distracted way.

Darrow can see some commotion about forty feet in front of him.  Some hospital curtains are being whisked along their tracks to create a room.  Before they completely hide the drama, he sees a flash of a man on a table, surrounded by medical personnel.

He answers the receptionist:  “My heartbeat is too fast.  It seems stuck.”

She holds his wrist with her soft warm hands; he is comforted.  She asks him if he been under stress recently.

“Yes.”    He thinks of a flying- tumbling girl.  “Can I see a doctor?”

“The doctors are very busy now.  You can but there will be a long wait.”

Darrow hears commands to fire paddles, as in trying to revive a heart attack victim.

As he stands there, thinking, he sees a doctor go to a phone close by.  All he can hear is:  “Sorry.”  The rest is hushed and grave:  he thinks he hears “sorry” again.

Darrow feels better.  He goes home.  He takes a nap and his heart beat returns to normal.

But the attacks will come back, the panic will return.  And return.

                        As a snow globe can localize and bring to attention its particular charms, so in life filled with movement, particular events can make still and vivid, as on a frieze, small moments which nevertheless contain in them the seeds of future contemplation.  Three singular events are thus emblazoned in my memory.

I was eleven years old, had only just fallen in love for the first time in my life.  I loved scary movies.  Vincent Price’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” weighed upon my nighttime daydreams:  I would lie in a casket together with the object of my affection; we would go to sleep together.  Thus I would be secure.  One night I looked up at a lamp-post:  I could throw a rope over a topmost place where it could be hitched.  And someone could be hung from the neck until dead.  A gang and I could do that.  Why wouldn’t we do that?  We could.  This is too scary.  I ought not to think about things like this.

I also sneaked a few cigarettes from my parents.  I smoked them outside, near that same lamppost.  One Christmas Eve my mother decided to teach me a lesson.  She had drunk too much, her words slurred and her breath stunk.  My father just hit me for the hell of it, which I could live with.

“So you want to smoke?” she said, and lit a cigarette for me to puff.  “Make sure you inhale it and blow the smoke out through your nose.   She never did things like this unless she had drunk too much.  She had already given me the lecture on sex.  “Sex is where a man puts his penis into a woman’s vagina.  Those are the real words.”  Her words slurred:  “It is either the most beautiful thing in the world or the ugliest.”  She said this several times.  I told her I already knew this, which was a lie, but the whole thing was embarrassing and a lie, too; as if a drunk would know what beauty was?  What did she mean by beauty anyway?

There was the night we went to bed on Christmas Eve, and woke, long before the sun was up, to snow falling softly and heavily and quietly on our little world.  I looked out of our window on the second floor.  There was the sweet surprise of the whiteness, the beauty of which my mother spoke.

            We children all got dressed in warm clothes, went out and played in it, caught snowflakes on our tongues, finally froze our hands and had to come in.  It was still Christmas morning, that magical time when we got presents for no reason at all so far as I knew.  Life was good with unexplained and unexpected delights.  The two of them, my loving and sweet Mother, and the Grace which I didn’t know but which Dickens did and helped revive, lived together with their Nemesis, in the same years, in the same lives, always known and sometimes acknowledged.

How are we to get at the meanings of last poems?  My headnotes suggest ways of apprehending and comprehending each one in turn, but I am wary of method.  There is no method but yourself, once you have read widely and deeply, opening yourself to the sounds and silences of the best poetry.  After well more than half a century of teaching superb students the art of reading poetry, I begin to understand that the purpose of teaching is to extend the blessing of more life.  Even at their most skeptical or despairing, the poems in this book intimate a time without boundaries, though that time is a fiction of duration, the illuminated space of the poem.

I once thought that I read so many books because I could not meet and speak with enough people.  But by now I may have taught some twenty-five thousand students, enough to people a small city, and still I read day and night.  Gertrude Stein wonderfully said that one writes for oneself and for strangers.  One reads for oneself, but teachers others, and many do not remain strangers.  Reading, teaching, and writing are for me three words for the act of the mind.  Stevensian terms fit this best:  this composite act quests to find what will suffice.

The point of this little introduction is to say that I don’t think I have to worry about sentimentality as being a dishonest snare.  I don’t have to think:  am I lying?  How in the world do I know what the truth of anything is?  A thought occurred to me today as I was reading Joe Carter’s First Things blog.  He was saying that first, if the writer wants to influence people, he has to know what the big thing or things are that he wants to communicate, to teach.  I don’t and couldn’t do what Dr. Wood did.  Dostoevsky’s Ridiculous Man:  was he Dostoevsky?  I don’t know, but Dostoevsky was as committed as that absurd prophet.  Today I put two things together that have both been in my mind since I was able to wonder about God and suffering.  “Tell the Truth” the Godfather of Soul shouted and wailed and chanted.

Here are two irreducible statements.

1.        The blues are always vamping.  Job’s  comforters had their wisdom too:  “Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground; yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”

2.   God is great and good.

These touchstones might encompass everything I ever have to write.