Category: Words…always words

Finding my way with words…still

On By robertalanrifeIn Words...always wordsLeave a comment

As I’ve shared before, I am one of those who cares deeply for words, big words, little words…words about words. I recently read Marilyn Chandler McEntyre’s brilliant tete a tete on language entitled Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies. In her book she offers some strategies by which those of us who make this claim can begin to reclaim the power, clarity and beauty of language from the many dangers both immanent and potential that beset it. She encourages us to become caretakers of language. At the top of that list is a simple but obvious one:  become a lover of words.

Check.

Language and all it represents is a gift worth fighting for. God uses it to create and recreate. God, in some mystical sense most of us will never understand, is language; is words – the Word. Hence there exists an inseparability of language from the One whose idea it was to speak all things into existence by means of it. From the first words we read in Genesis, “In the beginning…God created…and it was good” we get a picture of the dominance of speech in the totality of human life. God, as Word, speaks words by which all we are and have come to know now, exists.

Language seems like it’s a God-thing alone in the first broad brush strokes of God’s ex nihilo creative activity. It’s not until another comes, by God’s design and in response to God’s words, that language can be seen as the glue in communication between parties. It now acts as the bedrock of love, community and progress. As language that is beautiful, reliable and truthful disappears, so does the community it was meant to gather and nurture.

We’ve lost our trust in the reliability of language. Words change over time. In many ways this has always been true and, to a large extent, inevitable. The problem is, however, that the purest forms of speech that give voice to our deepest needs, desires and passions have become as distorted and bent as we who use it. Whatever is meant by “the fall” it took language right along with it.

It’s common for any collective to morph according to the will of the alphas in the group. Similarly, the shape and demeanor of our communication will bend to the loudest kid in the room; it will come to serve whatever happens to be the most influential force to which we pay homage.

English is the undisputed language of commerce worldwide. Because English is the language of so much conquest, it is well practiced in the macabre arts of dominance and privilege. The sheer volume of English words coupled with its global dominance make its destruction both troublesome and ominous. Language has, for too long, been lashed to the flagpole of corporate nationalism, the yardarm of the sinking ship of words for their own sake where form is function. This cross-pollination of words has left a confusing moral-linguistic morass. For example, to use the warm-hearted language of family and connectivity in corporate interests or sports gibber-gabber to describe the horrors of war, we are effectively removed from the wider, deeper concerns language begs to convey and possibly amend.

Conversely, since English is also the collected amalgam of the street-speak of vanquished foes and victims of such empire building, it is a language of unparalleled nuance and texture. It needs those who love it for the latter while seeking to undo the damages of the former. It needs caretakers.

For words to do the work for which they were intended and move beyond mere factual transmission at best to manipulation and domination at worst, we must re-tool ourselves to being lovers of community built upon communication with words at the deepest levels. Words are performance art over against utility, a dance instead of marching army or typing pool. Like discovering our enemies have fears and dreams like we do, words can be freed to promote beauty, friendship and good will.

At least I hope so.

Finding my way with words…

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Waxing Poetic, Words...always wordsLeave a comment

What a strange thing, this struggle finding something to write. Life is never empty and always full of at least enough interest to fill a paragraph or two. It continually amazes me when someone can render readable jewels from the dungish fodder life tosses their way. I suppose such narrative prowess belongs to the realm of poets, novelists, troubadours and storytellers. I’ve been a willingly geeked-out participant in their literary entourage my entire life. Perhaps only as admiring onlooker, but from time to time venturing into their territory – cautiously, with reticence, but always possessing an eagerness to be acknowledged in their illustrious company.

Many journeys have I keenly undertaken as some writer, deft of phrase and swift of word, has led me into places both simple and strange, dark and macabre, airy and transforming. My own meager, quaint words are a stuttering effort toward unlocking similar doors for others to enter.

As I’ve stated elsewhere, I’ve had a love affair with language since I can remember anything at all. Words, like the clink of ice and water in a frosty glass, assuage my gnawing thirst for the beauty, passion, or meditative pause they offer. As chilled water rushes down a parched gullet cleansing and renewing along the way, words nimbly used bring similar rejuvenation to my spiritual throat.

I’ve had friends along the way who have helped nurture this love for language. The great poets have helped seal the deal in my pursuit of words and their meanings. John Donne with his inimitable “three person’d God” or the unforgettable Wordsworth, whose Romantic era pontifications opened to us the rooted origins of wisdom brought us

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be bound each to each by natural piety.

Emily Dickson holds second place to no preacher with such prophetic words as these:

Behind Me — dips Eternity –


Before Me — Immortality –


Myself — the Term between –

Gerard Manley Hopkins takes first place for me. It’s hard to top such lyrically perfect sentences as “He fathers forth whose beauty is past change” or “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Closest to many hearts might be “the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…”

I’m well aware that I’m not alone in this love. Many fellow writers and bloggers share the giddy, geeky excitement of a well-turned phrase, well-placed modifier, well-spoken sentence and well-written story. I am always challenged and delighted by the work of these friends on this journey of words (prepare for shameless plugs). Barbara Lane, whose approachable, touching and personal tales always delight, Lesley-Anne Evans, a fellow poet and Canadian, Christianne Squires, who writes deeply on the spiritual life, and Seymour Jacklin, poet and master storyteller introduced to me by Barbara, to name but a few. All of these and more have provided a backdrop full of letters, words and sentences that have moved me beyond all reckoning.

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre proffers intentional steps in reclaiming and reinvigorating language from its present morass in her book Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies. She asks all the right questions, premier among them being, why worry about words? Her answers have had me glued to this book as she butters my lexical toast with rich, creamy goodness (should I have chosen a different metaphor here?).

The reclarification and reinvigoration of language is necessary in order for it to once again communicate, heal, unite, instruct, and draw us into mystery. She even goes so far as to suggest that our protection of language is a moral issue in that it has become so entangled in corporate and war-speak as to be largely impotent in regular conversation. Language has been effectively retrofitted to serve the causes of dominance and conquest. Good conversation is like wool on the spinning wheel, creating something of warmth and substance, drawing us to comfort and community.

I will save the rest of my thoughts on Ms. McEntyre’s wonderful book for another time. Suffice it to say, words are my friends, or at least acquaintances with whom I hope to be on the waiting list to be invited into that great feast of letters, subtleties, and the whirling dervish of dancing metaphor – a veritable stew of yummy lingual goodness.

If I can get in the door, I’m hoping to get an autograph.

 

 

 

The art of words

On By robertalanrifeIn Waxing Poetic, Words...always wordsLeave a comment

I first posted this on my innerwoven blog in February, 2011. It marks the beginning of a pilgrimage: the gradual transfer of “lit-bit” type material from one place to another. As I undertake this literary sojourn I hope you’ll do so with me. Let’s share words together…

Gerard Manley Hopkins. John Donne. Wm. Shakespeare. Christina Rosetti. Emily Dickinson. Paul Simon. Bono. Since I was a very young lad growing up in Calgary, Canada, I’ve had a love affair with language; specifically the art of words. Words spoken. Words written. Words read and re-read, like ingesting food for the eyes that gets digested in the heart. In the holistic sense of the term, words are sensual. They are meant for more than simply convening information. They can and should be beautiful for their own sake. Carefully chosen and meted out in gradual succession like adding the correct ingredients in proper order to the perfect meal, words are part of the whole and greater than the sum of their parts. They massage meaning into our spiritual skin, perking up our inner ears to hear what our unseen lover whispers in our unguarded moments.

The Christian life is more poetry than prose; more a wild garden than suburban lawn. To that end I share this brief poem:

am

Day kisses night

on its way to dawn,

soon to draw her droplets

of dew, the sap of hope lain low

on earth’s misty treasure.

Morning meets hollow,

Sullen, soaked in the sallow,

dimpled winter, Spring

taps impatiently her shoulder

cold, but waiting, back turned

to face of the new.

I sit

Sit with her in hard patience

Awaiting promise of ante-meridian

Resurrection.

Hail, and well met, good fellows!

On By robertalanrifeIn Words...always wordsLeave a comment

It occurred to me recently that my eclectic, often chaotic and diffused nature, was making my other blog: http://www.innerwoven.wordpress.com very cluttered and confusing. It has become a bit of a dump-it-and-hope-for-the-best site. With Rob’s Lit-Bits I hope to disentangle these things just a little. Hopefully, this will make it a little easier to access who on earth I am and what on earth I’m trying to say without wading through a host of disparate, seemingly disconnected, eclectic verbosity.

I am dedicating this blog quite simply to all things literary. Narrative, contemporary parables, meta-language (basically words about words) and poetry. As I load up my cyber moving van with pieces from my other blog, I hope you’ll consider joining me on this journey to word-land. Maybe we’ll find each other there and share a story or two.

Welcome…Rob

Of life, love and bagpipes – continued

On By robertalanrifeIn Words...always words3 Comments

At a Highland Games sometime last summer I was piping for the Highland Dancing portion and wrote some reflections. This is the continuation of that story…

I jump ahead forty years in order to share one of many piping stories accumulated over those years. Since the age of fourteen I have played bagpipes as accompaniment for highland dancing. Typically, a piper or pipers are hired to perform this task, doing so throughout the day trading off dances for breaks from the delightful tedium. Yesterday was one such day.

One walks onto a damp field, humming with the possibilities of the day, newly arrived but yet in infancy. The sun, undecided as to its welcome, insists on playing peek-a-boo through gently swaying trees overhead. The heady, morning air gradually yields to the all too familiar squawks of bagpipers keen to tame the beast before their competition debut two hours hence. Ahead of me is a small army of doting Moms preening little girls; perfecting hair, fluffing ruffles, smoothing wayward eyebrows, tightening dancing shoes, blowing young noses and assisting people like me with the whereabouts of the necessary coffee, fuel for a long, noisy day of piping for Highland Dancing – the reason for this morning scenario…

It’s almost imperceptible how one’s surroundings, interactions – experiences in general, help to build a reality around our lives that is immediately recognizable on reentry. Smell pot once and you’ve pretty much got it memorized. Conversely, smell, if only for a moment, the fragrance of a particular perfume, and one’s whole world of first love reopens complete with vivid pictures, achingly familiar emotions and the intoxicating remembrances of love won and lost.

For bagpipers this occurs whenever the tangled auditory mess that is a competition field of peacock pipers strutting their craft before one another, feigning non-chalance, makes itself known. And yet, there’s a certain calming effect the uproarious clitter clatter of competing non-harmonies has had upon me for more years than I can count. As a competitive piper for decades, to walk onto a fresh competition field ripe with the smell of dew mixed with wet leather shoes, cigarette smoke, and the smell of bad food was nothing short of transcendent. If I’d hit a winning streak, this strut was accompanied by a rush of a please-notice-my-statuesque-entrance-onto-the-battle-field-and-be-afraid posture. Ah yes, the overly confident swagger of youth.

Today is not a competition day however. This is a day devoted to the craft of Highland Dance accompaniment. To the uninitiated it is the realm of piping masters whose melodies, lilting one minute, scorching the next, endear themselves to those intent on seeing kilts bounce up and down for six to eight hours in 90 degree heat. To those of us in the biz it is the bottom of the bagpipe food chain so to speak. To stand in one spot under a lovely shaded canopy while waited on hand and foot with coffee, water and sandwiches is a far cry from the blistering heat on black tarmac upon which competing pipe bands fight to maintain a most unwieldy instrument against the ravages of the waterless landscape. While I play simple, crowd pleasing melodies over and over again to constantly appreciative audiences, each pipe band must battle under much more extreme conditions not just for the crowds but for the stoic and feared judges lurking just beyond the competition circle.

No, my job today is considerably simpler. And, I’m OK with that.

I’m now closer to 50 than 15 and the sheer number of times I’ve had this experience of Highland Games participation complete with youthful swagger and passively boastful demeanor have been replaced by the gently glowing embers of gratitude. It is thankfulness for having even been introduced to this oddly mystifying instrument and its associated sociological accoutrements.  Now, I can’t help but think as I stroll past these young pipers intent upon nervous preparation for the perfect performance just how glad I am that they, now, have their chance and, second, that I no longer need it to enjoy all that it offers. I’m gonna watch them sweat for awhile.

Again, I’m OK with that.

Journal vs. Blog – why less is more

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Words...always words1 Comment

As I’ve written elsewhere, I love to journal. I’ve been doing so, poorly, since about 1985. As such, it has not been an uncommon thing to receive new journals at Christmas or for birthdays. It’s especially meaningful when my boys buy new journals for me. My younger son, Graeme, bought my last one. It is now full of my life; spillings of poetry, life musings and assorted literary brick-a-brack. I used a bookmark he once made for my wife that, along with his delightful pre-pubescent picture on it also contains the words “I love you Mom!” How could that not be life changing?

What follows is a typical example of what I might write in any given journal, especially a new one. And, as you shall see, there is no small irony in the sharing thereof.

“I wonder how many times I’ve had the experience of pen on paper, the brand new journal? Most notable is that both my sons have purchased new journals for me; Graeme a few years ago and now, this Christmas, mere hours ago, my older son, Calum. It is beautiful, leather bound and handmade in India (I guess, in the interest of appreciation for the thoughtfulness of my son, I’ll temporarily suspend my moral suspicion as to who may have constructed it!).

My spotty, irregular journalling discipline would be a poor picture indeed of how deeply meaningful it is for me. Yet, in spite of that fact I know so little about the art of creative chronicling one’s life journey. The greatest benefit of journalling is also its greatest challenge: slowing down long enough to consider, carefully and lovingly, one’s pilgrimage with God and others. It is one thing to write about life events. It is quite another to probe and record one’s thoughts assiduously, faithfully, prayerfully.

Even blogging, something else I enjoy immensely, is fast-paced by comparison, hampered only by the pace of my not inconsiderable typing skills. The sheer number of available words per minute on computer may in fact be counter-intuitive to the deeper interiority asked of me in writing out those same words.

What is it about our contemporary, Western mindset that demands such unsustainable productivity? Even as I write this I find myself thinking how much less efficient it is to write these words only to type them again an hour later for the benefit of my blog. Moreover, I can only surmise at the diminished capacity for memory and ongoing, dynamic interaction with my own interior life because of the ease of a ‘save’ button.

To sit quietly for long periods of time with small things, few words or simple thoughts is vanishing quickly from our cultural milieu. For our experience of time and space to provide enough interest it must be liberally peppered with constant stimuli, a veritable banquet of over-the-top sensory memorabilia. We are both products and victims of our own infantile detritus.

Anyway, I must now move on as this entry has taken much longer to write than the length of time it would take me to mindlessly watch a sit-com, fast forwarding through the commercials….”

From pen to tea and back again

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Words...always words2 Comments

Fairly consistently, since about 1985, I’ve kept a journal. Well, I write in them. I write the stuff that happens to me in them, the stuff happening in and around me. It’s cathartic in one sense, having the cleansing effect of affecting a greater “soulishness” about the way I live and relate to my world. The visceral feel of pen on paper gives an immediate reminder of my mortality and the deeply sensory way God moves in us.

These days, however, I do most of my “writing” on computer and my pen is rusty, dulled through inactivity. It has sat, bored and undemanding, awaiting my return to saner pastures where the literary stream of consciousness I call writing gives voice once more to the complex confines of my inner circus. It is a life that always needs the light of day to prevent it from becoming just another cavernous, uninteresting drone of pedantic inactivity. Still, it acts as worthy opponent to any temptation toward self-aggrandizement. Try reading, honestly, your journalistic exploits twenty years after the fact and one is speedily confronted with the fact that the same shit I dealt with then is pretty much the same now, only with a few added layers of sophistication. This probably makes them more insidious since it is a common reality among us all to live out our lives, more or less, as the same person from start to finish. Our dissatisfaction with this reality dwells in kahoots with God’s unending desire to find us. The result is what we commonly call spiritual formation.

This morning’s exercise in stretching my spiritual muscles comes in the form of a feisty, deeply intelligent nun, sister Alice St. Hilaire. She is my friend, a fellow Ignatian and my spiritual director. If anyone can see through my often blinding hypocrisy it’s sister Alice. I have come to depend on this valuable insight lovingly offered. This is most likely because I live in a pretty consistent fog; a mushy, grey pudding of sleepy ambiguity and lack of focus all peppered liberally with self-doubt. There are always questions – so many questions, all of which become annoyingly absent the moment I sit down to sip tea and share God-talk with sister Alice.

She is never bothered by what bothers me. Am I to be intrigued or insulted by this? To be sure, it can be disconcerting whenever someone hears the most vulnerable bits of our lives and offers back ne’er a blink. It’s as though she is thinking, “alright, is that it, then? You’re all worked up about that?” A good spiritual director is one who listens to the story behind the story, ably stripping away the layers of our experience like Shrek’s onion. “Ogres have layers” he quips. If he only knew! They are adept at sensing where God might be in our unfolding narrative and never seem to be in a hurry to suggest broad, sweeping changes that might make things all better.

If I didn’t already have at least some rudimentary awakening to the things of God, such mental vapidity would seem cruelly disappointing. Of this one thing I am certain, God does not intrude upon our journey to provide certainty and a laundry list of perfectly satisfactory answers to all our queries. Countless souls, significantly greater than myself have discovered this long before me, Job being chief among them. If Job’s experience can be considered normative in any contemporary sense, we should take away the abiding idea that God does not exist to provide us with answers. Instead, God gives us better questions.

Every time I step into sister Alice’s quaint living room, the presence of God is thick in the place, literally dripping from the walls and windows and oozing out of the carpet. It smells faintly of whatever modest breakfast was consumed earlier and bears the years of humble struggle to survive in Yakima’s tough downtown, providing shards of light in the darkness there. Where my family and I dwell comfortably in “suburgatory” (thank you ABC) in our multi-bedroom home with our multi-vehicle mobility, she chooses to live in a quiet, unobtrusive peace in the midst of the despairing milieu of Yakima’s poor and destitute.

Sister Alice is fond of saying that the ways by which God has revealed Godself to me becomes who I am and paves the way for whatever may be next. If she is any indication of the ramifications of this statement, then I need to make the journey from pen to tea and back again. It is a trip exponentially greater than the sum of the miles involved. It is a foray into the heart of God.

To sing or not to sing

On By robertalanrifeIn Life of Rob, Words...always words1 Comment

Walking the boardwalk on a sunny, summer evening in a seaside tourist town – alone – feels a little like bicycling with one petal or being the only kid at the school dance who never has a dance partner. Places like this – Seaside, Oregon ironically, are meant to be shared. It’s not that one cannot enjoyably breath in the heady, highly sensory ocean ethos of such places on one’s own. I’ve done it many times before. An introvert by nature, I rather bask in the relative repose easily gleanable from such experiences. No, it’s quite simply the much deeper joy of cackling like friendly chickens over a reciprocated love.

There’s just something unnamable, almost intangible, in shared experiences like these. To be with others you know and who know you sprinkles a delight and sweetness on the top that magnifies the joy exponentially. C.S Lewis knew this well and alludes to it in the Four Loves. One’s love for someone or thing amplifies in the sharing thereof. The mutuality of “yeah, I get it” is one of life’s greatest gifts. It is, I suppose, a function of our naturally communal human nature. To share is natural when we love something and find it difficult to articulate to ourselves alone.

Either because I am indecisive when it comes to choosing hobbies or because I am not in possession of anything close to a reasonable ability to say ‘no’ to anything remotely interesting, I have a host of varied spheres in which I have lived, moved and shared. One such world is the reason for my brief sojourn to this little Pacific paradise. I am attending a weeklong workshop for choral conductors.

I have had a profound appreciation for the choral tradition and its sublime repertoire my whole life. I recall with some reverie singing in the St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church youth choir as a young elementary school kid. Although a right pain in the ass to the conductor I am forever grateful for her patience in opening the door to music I could never fully describe.

Similar to the annoying guy forever showing pictures of his kids on the subway, I am left with another thing I love to share (foist really) at every opportunity. Even then at around eleven years old I was equally intrigued with Henry Purcell, Johannes Brahms and Palestrina as I was with Simon and Garfunkel, Elvis Presley or Rush. My piano teacher at the time thought it commendable. My parents thought it quaint. To the older kids at school it forever sealed my fate as the tall, geeky brown-noser who perhaps fancied himself a cut above the rest.

Turned up noses meant nothing however as the first notes of some a cappella chamber choir began to nip at the edges of my soul, expanding it to be singed by the burning beauty of voices shared in common cause. For those who have yet to be entranced by such beauty, caught in the choral clutches of grace to which you are a contributor, I pray one day you find it even as I have. We’ll have one more thing whose beauty grows more in the sharing.

Of life, love and bagpipes

On By robertalanrifeIn Words...always words2 Comments

I am a Highland Bagpipe player or piper in street talk. It is an instrument with which I have had a love-hate relationship for almost forty years now. For the longest time I wondered what might have gone through my parents’ minds when, at eight years of age, I loudly proclaimed my overweening desire to begin lessons immediately. That is, until I mused lately on the fact that both of my sons are rock drummers. I’m sure that bears at least some resemblance.

Perhaps not.

The Great Highland Bagpipe (GHB) as it is called by the musicology muck-a-mucks is an instrument uniquely designed to be heard. A perfect wake-the-dead alarm, they have been used for centuries to alert clans of forthcoming gatherings, oncoming battles and soon coming dignitaries. A piper on a hill is not just a cliché or quaint tourist post card. It does in fact typify much of bagpipe history. Moreover, as either clever tactic or cruel joke (depending upon whether one is a piper or not), the bagpipes were always the first line of defense in any conflagration. Apparently, troop commanders figured they could simultaneously amuse, entertain and confuse their enemy with a burly, red-haired, stumpy man in a dress, himself attacking the weapon of choice and tossing note after screaming note at them as a monkey flinging musical feces.

Like an octopus missing some legs the GHB consists of three drones – a bass and two tenors; a blowpipe through which ample air must pass into the bag acting as reservoir for this purpose, and a chanter that accommodates fingers eager to surprise the world with music both raunchy and wild, pristine and sweet. Heard under a best-case scenario in which all of the varied factors of its engineering converge successfully and wielded by someone with a modicum of experience lassoing them into submission, it is undoubtedly the most mystically beautiful thing I’ve yet heard. However, the usual encounter of the average passerby is a rather less than desirable auditory experience not unlike a grumpy orangutan humping an unsuspecting cat on the rush-hour freeway after a losing football game. That said, I confess such a description as that which I have yet to see.

Yet, it is what many might actually prefer when they hear this baffling instrument. It is, under any circumstances, an instrument that, like a crying baby on an airline, demands center stage. It is a sound that captured me even as a boy of seven years old. I well recall my first visceral experience with the bagpipe.

I grew up in a tiny bungalow in Calgary, Alberta the adopted son of a brewery worker and his house-wife, my mother. As I, along with my younger brother and sister, continued to grow, it became abundantly apparent that our consistent brushing of shoulders would only lead to inner-family disaster. My father set about building me a bedroom in our not-quite-finished basement. For some fifteen years to follow it would be my sanctuary – my monastery and the place where I found music, booze, girls (don’t mention that to my parents, they only know about the previous two) and ultimately salvation.

The spring before my eighth birthday I moved in. Kismet. I was also sick as a dog. My parents in true devoted fashion brought me hot soup, books (I’m a total nerd) and best of all, a TV to help wile away the hours spent in sniffly, coughing boredom. Changing channels one afternoon I happened upon a presentation of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, an annual display of pomp, circumstance, bright lights, booming cannons and bagpipes – lots of bagpipes. It is filmed live at Edinburgh Castle. From the very first sound I was hooked. I cried through the entire thing, later asking my parents if I could learn to do what I had just seen but thought I had dreamed.

A love affair had begun.