For Inklings' Fans

Mark Cameron of Mystique et Politique calls our attention to this provocative article by Michael Ward in The Times Literary Supplement, Apr. 23, in which Ward examines CSL's poem "The Planets" for "plot summaries" of the seven Narnian Chronicles.

I had thought of blogging the poem, since I have a hunch I'm one of the few bloggers who actually has Lewis's Poems — pace Dylan? — in which "The Planets" is on pp. 12-15. (I have my own list of about 30 of my favorite poems in the book; "The Planets" is not among them.) I see from this article, though, that the poem is already on-line.

I decided to do a little more reading, so I looked up the article referenced by Ward: "The Alliterative Metre" in Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper, pp. 15-26. (Yes, I have that book, too.) It is noted there that the essay had been published in Rehabilitations and Other Essays, 1939. In that book (yes, I have it, too), "The Alliterative Metre" is the sixth essay, pp. 119-132; the poem itself is on pp. 129-132. In the Preface, Lewis wrote one of the more memorable acknowledgements that I've ever come across, concerning the essay in question, which appeared originally in a publication called Lysistrata (May 1935, according to Hooper, p. xviii):

As far as I know this periodical did not survive my contribution, and I have been unable to discover the name and address of the lady who edited it. I hope that if these lines meet her eyes she will forgive me for assuming her permission to reprint.

Little did "the lady" know, I surmise, that she had published an early work by someone who would become one of the century's more famous authors.

Instead of providing the text of "The Planets", which would be superfluous, I will provide instead another, much smaller, alliterative poem by CSL, also in "The Alliterative Metre" (Rehabilitations, p. 122), which I cannot recall having seen before:

We were talking of dragons, | Tolkien and I
In a Berkshire bar. | The big workman
Who had sat silent | and sucked his pipe
All the evening, | from his empty mug
with gleaming eye | glanced towards us;
'I seen 'em myself', | he said fiercely.

Hooper, p. 18, says that JRRT provided him with the following information (which, I think, is rather well known among Inklings' fans) as a possible real-life inspiration for CSL's little poem:

I remember Jack telling me a story of Brightman, the distinguished ecclesiastical scholar, who used to sit quietly in Common Room saying nothing except on rare occasions. Jack said that there was a discussion on dragons one night and at the end Brightman's voice was heard to say, "I have seen a dragon." Silence. "Where was that?" he was asked. "On the Mount of Olives", he said. He relapsed into silence and never before his death explained what he meant.

Enough of pedantry........ :)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 04/30/03 08:32:44 PM
Categorized as Literary.

Blog Stuff

I have added a few links to the right-hand column — and removed a few, too. :) I have also added a section towards the bottom, Some Significant Quotations.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 04/30/03 01:49:09 PM
Categorized as Other.

"The Libertarian Question"

A good column today by Stanley Kurtz at NRO:

There is a mystery at the heart of the gay-marriage debate. I call it the "libertarian question." The libertarian question (really a series of questions) goes like this: Why should any form of adult consensual sex be illegal? What rational or compelling interest does the state have in regulating consensual adult sex? More specifically, how does the marriage of two gay men undermine my marriage? Will the fact that two married gay men live next door make me leave my wife? Hardly. So how, then, does gay marriage undermine heterosexual marriage? Why not get the state out of such matters altogether?

The libertarian question is mysterious because, in modern society, we find it difficult to understand the continuing necessity of shared moral standards — and of collective taboos against actions that violate those standards. Traditional societies depend on shared moral sentiments and collective taboos. Modern democracies, for the most part, have rejected these forms of collective morality in favor of an emphasis on personal freedom. Yet the truth is, although their workings are mysterious to us, shared moral codes (and a structure of taboos that guards those codes) can never be entirely dispensed with....

So the mere social statement that marriage does not mean monogamy is where the real danger of legalized gay-marriage and polyamory lie. And the collapse of consensus about shared social institutions really does effect us as individuals. Once we as a society no longer take it for granted that marriage means monogamy, you may not decide to leave your wife. But you may be more likely to give in to the temptation of an affair. And that could mean the end of your marriage, whether that's what you wanted going into the affair or not. (For another way of looking at this problem, see my, "Code of Honor," where I compare the operation of the taboo against adultery to the working of a college's anti-cheating honor code.)

As with the taboos on incest and sodomy, society can't enforce the taboo on adultery with laws. Laws on matters of sexual conduct do make a difference, but less as enforcement mechanisms than as embodiments of common values. Precisely because the state cannot monitor and prosecute adultery, society writes a taboo against the practice into our hearts. The laws of marriage as currently constituted embody and express that taboo. Transform those laws, and the taboo will disappear.

The ongoing need for shared social understandings on matters pertaining to the family and sexuality does not fit neatly into the libertarian playbook. Social and sexual taboos are the stuff of traditional societies. But the truth is, so long as we live, not merely as isolated individuals, but in families together, we shall be in need of social and sexual taboos.

If the controversy over Senator Rick Santorum's remarks has made it possible to openly discuss the real basis of our shared social and sexual understandings, then it will have done some good. Unlike Sen. Santorum, I would rather accept some disruption in family stability than go back to the days when homosexuality itself was deeply tabooed. The increase in freedom and fairness is worth it. Yet there has been a terrible social cost for the changes of the sixties. We need to mitigate those costs. And we certainly do not need to risk the destruction of an already weakened family system by radically undermining the ethos of monogamy.

Gay marriage would set in motion a series of threats to the ethos of monogamy from which the institution of marriage may never recover. Yet up to now, our society has been unable to face the real costs and consequences of the proposed change. That is partly because of an understandable sympathy for the gay-rights movement. But it also reflects the sheer inability of modern folk to grasp the operation, necessity — or even the existence — of the system of moral consensus and prohibition upon which society itself depends.

Kurtz has quite a portfolio of essays on "gay" "marriage". When I get around to it, I'll blog the ones I've saved.

(Thanks, Stanley.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 04/30/03 11:56:10 AM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

"The Clinton Intel Record"

In short: politicized malfeasance.

Mansoor Ijaz writes yesterday at NRO:

The unearthing of documents directly linking Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization to Saddam Hussein this weekend may have hermetically sealed the Bush administration's case that dismantling Iraq's Baathist enterprise was in part necessary to undo terrorism's dynamic duo. But closing that case may reopen a Pandora's box for ex-Clinton administration officials who still believe their policy prescriptions protected U.S. national interests against the growing threat of terrorism during the past decade.

The London Telegraph's weekend revelations raise deeply disturbing questions about the extent and magnitude to which President Clinton, his national-security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, and senior terrorism and State Department officials — including Assistant Secretary of State for East Africa, Susan Rice — politicized intelligence data, relied on and even circulated fabricated evidence in making critical national-security decisions, and presided over a string of intelligence failures during the months leading up to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Analysis of documents found in the rubble of Iraq's intelligence headquarters show that contrary to conventional wisdom, Iraqi military and intelligence officials sought out al Qaeda leaders, not the other way around, and ultimately met with bin Laden on at least two occasions. They also show that channels of communication between al Qaeda and Iraq were created much earlier and were wider ranging in scope than previously thought.

The timing of the meetings sheds important new light on how grave the Clinton administration's intelligence failures may have been....

A brief chronology demonstrates how compelling the Sudan's offer to turn over terrorism data might have been in thwarting attacks on U.S. citizens and assets overseas, and how mendacious a narrow clique of Clinton officials were in not taking advantage of those efforts....

I believe that as we continue to unravel the spaghetti strings that bound al Qaeda and Saddam's regime together in the coming months, we are going to learn that Iraq provided expertise, financial, logistical and intelligence support to al Qaeda terrorists in an unprecedented manner. The terrorists, emboldened by their state sponsorship, were able to then carry out their suicide missions almost with impunity.

The silence of Clinton officials charged with the responsibility of securing U.S. interests around the world, when faced with this compelling timeline of facts, is still deafening. The American people deserve candid answers for the difficult questions posed by their actions in addressing the growing threat of terrorism, and failing repeatedly to respond to meaningful offers of assistance from the very nations who because of their sponsorship of terrorism, best understood those who rose up to attack us....

Somebody let me know when the nation's "newspaper of record" picks up on this, okay?

(Thanks, Justin.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 04/30/03 11:03:30 AM
Categorized as Political.

Last Letters Home

Sunday, The Washington Post published a brief account of some last letters home from American military personnel in Iraq: In Troops' Final Words, Faith and Grace. The webpage has links to 21 letters, including PDF image files.

Requiescant in pace.

(Thanks, Phil.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 04/30/03 10:57:45 AM
Categorized as Literary.

Ecclesia de Eucharistia at Catholic Analysis

True to its name, the Catholic Analysis weblog ran a series of commentaries, ending Monday, on the pope's encyclical:

• Monday, April 21, 2003
• Tuesday, April 22, 2003
• Wednesday, April 23, 2003
• Thursday, April 24, 2003
• Friday, April 25, 2003
• Saturday, April 26, 2003
• Monday, April 28, 2003

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Wed. 04/30/03 08:02:10 AM
Categorized as Religious.