Farewell, Ray's Summer

On Tuesday of the week just passed, Ray Bradbury died at age 91. Being one of my favourite authors and one of the most significant writers of the last century, I feel that he deserves something to be said about him. Much has, I'm sure, been said already, the web being what it is, but perhaps a personal voice needs to be added, as someone who was touched and influenced deeply by his vision and his words.

I first heard of Bradbury when my brother watched Truffaut's film of Fahrenheit 451 in class. He was about 11 and I was about 8 at the time. It would not be until I was at University that I would actually read Bradbury, first picking up a copy of Dandelion Wine in the Carlton library in 2005 and being instantly entranced by its opening lines:

It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.

There was something intoxicating about Bradbury's description that I had never expected of a man I had, admittedly, boxed into my mind as a writer of mere "genre fiction". How wrong I was. There was an inventiveness about Bradbury's way with words that came closest, I think, to echoing Dylan Thomas of any other late-twentieth century writer. In an authorial note to Dandelion Wine which my edition does not contain, I remember Bradbury commenting that the novel was written initially through a process of word association, and certainly its language has that magical quality to it that seems as if Bradbury has simply let all the floating impressions of a childhood summer waft and ferment in his mind, to produce something marvellously like the word equivalent of the wine the title alludes to.

Later, I would discover what a remarkable prophet of his and our age Bradbury also was. No-one reading Fahrenheit 451 today can, I think, avoid the prescience of Bradbury's predictions: teenagers wandering disaffectedly with shell-pieces in their ears providing constant stimulation and entertainment; wall-high screens allowing us to escape our lives and enter the sensory blast of television's virtual hyperreality. And then there is his more chilling work, found in stories like "The Veldt" or passages in The Martian Chronicles, visions of a human savagery which seem, at first, to have nothing to do with the writer who also so wonderfully chronicled the childish magic of summer. How could the Martian House of Usher have anything to do with Douglas Spaulding? But they are both sides to the same vision: the American Dream and its self-implosion through over-reaching itself and ignoring that which mattered most. There is something alarmingly similar between, say, the home-cooking genius of one of Dandelion Wine's episodes who, when forced by well-meaning intruders to cook in a more orderly manner, finds her inspired genius vanishing, and the destruction of Mars imposed on it by the American "colonisers" who want nothing other than to recreate the magic of their lost America in this seemingly virgin planet. Both are impositions on that which is perfect and beautiful; both are attempts to make it better through "ordering it"; both are misguided and destructive.

Then there is Bradbury's remarkable comedy. Sometimes it feels a bit like laughing at the gallows, but at other times the laughter he provokes seems almost to make the gallows flee, a little like Clarisse of Fahrenheit 451 who can escape, for a moment, the oppressiveness of her world through such simple acts as blowing on dandelions or dancing in the rain. Bradbury clearly knew it all, the pain of the world he depicted and the simple acts which, in their simplicity, can go some way towards, if not transforming it, at least making it for a moment more beautiful.

I doubt that Bradbury ever arrived at Christian belief, and, while some may not view this as a weakness, I must admit that I do. Perhaps his bleakest moments could have been alleviated had he relied on something other than the goodness of humanity to transform the world he depicted. Yet there were clear flourishes of some definite understanding of grace and the transforming love of God. One of his early stories, "The Man", was both a remarkable portrait of Christ's humanity and how our world has failed to understand Him. Bradbury noted elsewhere in Fahrenheit 451 that "Christ is one of the 'family' now.

I often wonder if God recognizes his own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He's regular peppermint stick now, all sugar crystal and saccharine - when he isn't making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshiper absolutely needs.

Perhaps Bradbury's reluctance to truly embrace the Christianity he was so often drawn to was the sheer fact that, growing up in a society that had done to the son of God precisely what he described above, he struggled to see another way to approach Jesus except outside the church. But I do not really know enough of his heart to comment on these things. What I do know is that his work had definite glimpses of the hope that Jesus offers, and that hope gave life and wings to work that might otherwise have become bogged down in the despair it quite rightly felt.

And now, having kept on writing until remarkably close to the end (he published a sequel to Dandelion Wine, entitled Farewell Summer, just a few years ago), Bradbury has left us. What can I say here that would conclude this memoir of him without being pat or saccharine, something he himself would have decried? I cannot say anything, in the end, that does justice to the complexity of the man or that avoids glorifying him beyond what he deserves. But I can say this: that every time I return to his work I am amazed at his sight, amazed at the way he drew words together like dancing puppets on magisterial strings, and I am grateful that he lived and wrote the words he wrote. That, in the end, is a wonderful thing to say of any writer, and Bradbury was, at the end of it all, a truly wonderful writer. Bookshelves will hold his books all the more tightly now for the knowledge that there will never be another one to add to them.

It's book spine poem time...

Having recently declared my own leave of absence from this blog, I am now breaking the "temporary silence" I decreed in honour of my friend Erin, who got me onto this fun little thing to do when you feel like doing something, you know, fun.


Winter indoor activity #1: Book spine poetry
(Please forgive the name, Erin. I realise it isn't winter where you are. But it seems just the sort of thing that Melburnians should lap up when stuck inside in the cold.)


The rules are simple.

• Create a book spine poem (examples here).
• Take a picture.
• Post it on your blog.
• Link back to this post.
• Tag another blogger, or two, or ten.

I have to admit, I'm not exactly sure which other bloggers to tag, since I do a fair amount of my blogging in a vacuum, unaware of the blogosphere that I inhabit. So I tag all of you who read this post and have a blog. Make your own. It's fun, and was a wonderful way to start the day.

What fascinated me most about the exercise was the psychological side to it. I'm sure there could be studies done on it to identify what subconscious traits are brought to the fore in this kind of exercise. Somehow, constrained though much of it had to be (book titles had to be somehow related, and I personally rejected too many single-word titles), I ended up with a poem about the troubles of Christian perseverance, a subject almost always in my mind and often in my own writing. How odd. I'm sure there's a PhD study in this somewhere...

The Swelling Year: Watch this space

Having finished my Lent Poems project and finding the challenge of regular, disciplined writing to be of great value, I am now embarking on a more serious challenge, one which will take me a bit over a year to complete. You can read about it here at The Consolations of Writing, where you can also find what I have written so far. It'll be an unusual and difficult project so please feel free to cheer me along and offer thoughts or encouragement along the way as you see fit!

A Year of Writing Liturgically: a project in the making

The Hymn Revolution

You may or may not be aware, but hymns are back. This has been the case in the USA for a while, what with Indelible Grace Music, Red Mountain Music, Sojourn and, most recently, Page CXVI hitting the Christian music scene, along with the various Mars Hill Seattle bands who have helped resurrect "Jesus Paid It All", "What Wondrous Love Is This" and various other hymns which are now standards in churches across the English-speaking world.

Now, the return of hymns to worship services is one thing. Given that the shift has occurred mostly, perhaps exclusively, in evangelical churches, it is not so surprising that this should have happened. Hymns typically had more theologically solid lyrics than much of what has been sung in churches for the last couple of decades, and so a rediscovery of Isaac Watts, John Newton, William Cowper and Charles Wesley, among others, is really only to be expected in churches eager to boost the theology of their worship music. What makes bands like Sojourn so unique is the fact that, as well as helping get hymns back on the church-singing map (Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, Kentucky is one of the leaders in the movement), they use their studio releases to help turn hymns into a credible musical genre for the twenty-first century.

Does that sound impossible to you? If so, it may seem highly unlikely that two nights ago a group of young Christian guys from Melbourne would have gathered on the stage of the Gershwin Room at the Espy Hotel in St Kilda to play, almost exclusively, eighteenth and nineteenth century hymns revitalised as swirling sixties rock songs. They call themselves The Anti-Fall Movement, a name that has unintentional echoes of now defunct hard-core band Against the Fall, but it would be wrong to think that they in any way resemble the latter band. Their SoundCloud page describes their music as "Gospel Blues Stadium Rock" and this, strange a combination though it might seem, captures their sound quite aptly.

Thursday night saw the launch of their debut album, "Away My Needless Fears", named after the Charles Wesley hymn which concludes the twelve-track album. Aside from Wesley, most of the hymn-writers are unknown today, and only two of the hymns played, "Green Hill" ("There Is a Green Hill Far Away") and "My Life Flows On" (more commonly known as "How Can I Keep From Singing?"), were familiar to me before I heard the album. In this respect, The Anti-Fall Movement stick fairly wisely to the same ploy used by bands like Red Mountain Music and Sojourn - in reviving now-unknown hymns, they avoid the awkwardness of trying to make well-known hymns seem new. (Bands like Page CXVI and King's Kaleidoscope manage fairly well, but it's still a challenging task. Think, for instance, of how the otherwise excellent Indelible Grace Music struggled to make Wesley's "Amazing Love" sound any different to the million other versions out there. And the next band to take on "Come Thou Fount" may as well give up the quest for originality before they even begin.)

In this regard, The Anti-Fall Movement are probably one of the most successful bands in seamlessly shifting hymns into their new form. Front-men Peter Carolane and Paul Davies are such slick song-writers, and so in love with the style they are working in, that the songs sound utterly assured in their new incarnations. In some cases - "When We Cannot See", "Take Them All", "The River" - it's hard to believe that they themselves did not write everything, lyrics and all (excluding, that is, the occasional "thee" or archaisms such as "it is not meet that we should fear"). The band also made the very wise choice of releasing the album on vinyl (it cost only $10 extra on entry to get both a record and CD of the album), a touch which is both in keeping with the retro-charm of the whole enterprise and also a completely sensible move artistically: there is a wonderful warmth to every track that can only fully be captured on vinyl. In the case of most tracks, listening to it on vinyl feels suspiciously like discovering a 60s classic that you never knew existed. I suspect that may have been their thinking.

Knowing most of the members of the band, I'm not without bias. But then I'm also a fan of what we might call the New Hymns Movement (a movement which, interestingly, the Anti-Fall guys seem largely unaware exists; Paul expressed surprise to me when I mentioned to him last year that I knew a few other bands that did something similar). Yet once you've heard enough of the bands that fit into this category it's easy enough to feel like it's hard to do something new in this realm. (See above note on the 7 billion versions of "Come Thou Fount".) The Anti-Fall Movement go beyond what you could possibly expect. You may well forget that you are listening to hymns. You may also forget which decade you are living in. You will probably forget most things other than the music and the wonderful truths that each word will fill your head with. And for that they stand out, not only for being, at present, the main Australian band doing what they do, but for making the form something new and compelling, and something which works so perfectly for them.

Easter Saturday: Stop

For most people, I think the individual days of the Easter weekend tend to blur together. For many of those who aren't believers, the days become a string of indistinguishable public holidays with chocolate. For those who do believe, Good Friday in particular proves a troubling day. Many of us wonder: do we simply make it another day of celebration, or do we dwell so deeply on the agonies of the cross that we end up despairing?

Something that I find helpful to do during the Easter week is to think through the processes that those in the story would have gone through. So Friday, for instance, would have been a day of mourning, even though we now know what they didn't - that Jesus rose again on the Sunday. But what about Easter Saturday? What exactly happened then?

A few years ago, I thought a bit about this and reflected on the fact that the original Easter Saturday was the sabbath day. We know that this was significant for at least some in the Easter story because the Pharisees wanted the body taken down before the Sabbath began. Also, we can imagine that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea needed to bury Jesus before the day of rest arrived. And the women who were to embalm his body had to wait until Sunday to do so.

What, I wonder, did Peter do that day? There is a significant silence in his story from Thursday night until Sunday morning, and we can only presume that he wasn't feeling too great, either about Jesus or about himself. I wrote a poem about this topic in 2009, which morphed this year into another one that you can find on my writing blog here. The main thing that struck me as I thought about it was the fact that Easter Saturday would have been a day of inactive waiting. It would have been a difficult, in-between time for all involved.

And isn't much of our life like that? Really, if we let Easter Saturday work on us the way that all days of Holy Week can work on us, we might find it to be quite a powerful day. Think of all the in-betweenness in your life; think of all your shattered hopes and painful disappointments; think of all your waiting. Then remember: God bursts forth from every devastating tomb that binds his people in death. Sometimes we just have to wait.

This is why I am fascinated by what Alain de Botton recently tweeted, even though I can't possibly agree with him: that "Christianity would have been truer and nobler as the record of a tragedy rather than of a miracle". Now, Botton tends to be rational on everything except religion, so it shouldn't be surprising for him to say something decidedly odd like this. However, he does have a point, and this is a point which he makes more often than he is perhaps aware. If we don't grasp that, on Friday and Saturday, it did all seem like a horrible tragedy, then we won't grasp how wonderful and extraordinary Easter Sunday was and is still to this day.

Is this what Botton is talking about inadvertently when he also tweets that religion provides an "outward structure to the inner life"? He says it like it's a bad thing, and has elsewhere commented (I'm not sure where) that organised religion makes people only experience the spiritual on set days of the year, suggesting that, for him, the inner life simply can't be structured outwardly. What Botton doesn't seem to grasp is that outward structures which guide our thinking about the inner life are highly valuable. This is why, for instance, it is good to have a day that reminds us to mourn over what Jesus had to do for our sin, because it is not something that we would necessarily choose to dwell on otherwise. We need liturgy, whether formally or informally, because it helps keep us on the right track in areas where we might otherwise stray into self-satisfied complacency.

And this is also why Easter Saturday is a good day - because, while many shops are open again, the day itself is a day of resting for most. Perhaps, in that time of resting, we can reflect on how resting might have felt without the hope of the Resurrection, and can therefore be thankful that we, unlike them, rest now with hope.