Results of Ruminations

I started my reread of Book IV of Paradise Lost  recently. It took the better part of an hour to get through the first 115 or so lines. They are fraught with implications, questions, and applicable ruminations, which meant that I had to go very, very slowly. And, as so often happens when you're reading good literature, there were three real showstoppers: ...is there no place Left for Repentance, none for Pardon left? (4.79-80) and ...he deserv'd no such return From me, whom he created what I was (4.42-43) and Hadst thou [Satan] the same free Will and Power to stand? Thou hadst: whom hast thou then or what to accuse, But Heav'ns free Love dealt equally to all? Be then his Love accurst, since love or hate, To me alike, it deals eternal woe. (4.66-70) Taken out of context as they are, the meaning of the passages is rather opaque. I should probably note that these quotes come from Satan's soliloquy before he enters the eponymous (well, one  of the eponymous)...

It's Sunday. Here's something slightly more religious: Paradise Lost. I started another reread of Paradise Lost  this last week. My school is having an informal book club about the poem and, though I won't be able to attend as often as I wish, it's exciting to read Milton again. One of the interesting things that was brought up during the discussion was the mistrust most of the participants had of Satan. I mentioned before some of my experiences discussing the Prince of Darkness, but that was in the formal school setting. In this conversation, we could be even more forthright, and since most of us were LDS, we were able to dive into more specific theological implications than I do with my students. (The added benefit was that we didn't have to waste any time explaining what happened in the book, as summarizing and explaining the text is a huge piece of my pedagogy.) As we wandered through Book I, it quickly became apparent that there was a reluctance to embrace...

I think about God a lot. He's important to me. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, He ought  to be. There are some pieces about God that don't make sense to my feeble mind (which fits nicely into the Isaiah 55: 8-9 verses), which is fine as far as it goes. What really confuses me is that what confuses me doesn't confuse others. Like, there are some questions that nobody has really figured out ("Can God create a burrito so spicy even He couldn't eat it?") and that may ultimately be absurdism. Most everyone in my religious tradition recognizes that there are things we don't know about God, and we're all in the dark together. But there are other things where I get the sense that others don't really understand, but they confidently assert that they do. An example of that would have to be the tension between what Mormons (and other philosophical and religious traditions) call agency  and most everyone else considers free w...

I may be a lord , but I'm not a master. That is, I don't have my master's (or Master's or Master or master...okay, I'm kidding, this is the rule ) degree. I've been longing for one ever since I graduated (though not the day of...my son had been born two days before I graduated, and I was more worried about him surviving with only half a heart than another degree), but I've never done more than occasionally and idly hoping for the chance to get an advanced degree. The thing is, I don't know why. It's strange, because I'm not interested in being a doctor. After all, why be Doctor Dowdle when I'm already Lord Dowdle? (Though Lord Dowdle, PhD sounds pretty cool.) So it's not as though the advanced degree qua degree is what appeals to me. Then again, maybe if I earned a master's, then I'd want the next step, too. There's also a question of what I would study. My first impulse is to say MFA, since that's kind of the thing th...

At the school where I teach, we have an annual tradition, spanning five years now, in which we have the senior class write a "Last Lecture" about their time at the school. Because I teach at a charter school that serves kids from 7th through 12th grade, some of the students who speak have spent a third of their lives in those hallways. They've accumulated a lot of experiences, taken a lot of classes, and heard me a lot, bellowing about uniform violations in those selfsame hallways. The lecture gives them a chance to reflect not only on those times, but the other tendons, fibers, and connective tissues that have built them into the young men and women they are on the cusp of becoming. This time of year is always enjoyable for me. While it can be stressful to finish all of the administrivia of being a teacher (which, I am quick to point out, is not so much as the administration has to do), this is one of my favorite times of the year. Emotionally, I've put my most imp...

Back in the Coraline age of England, John Milton got tied up in a couple of different pamphlet wars. One was a collection of polemics now called the divorce tracts , which documented Milton's approach toward the then-thorny theological question of whether or not divorce was biblically permissible. Living more than a century and a half after Henry VIII and his notorious marriages, Milton--whose first marriage, in particular, was unhappy and unfulfilling--found himself in a surprising place for a Puritan: Arguing against a fairly clear biblical prohibition. Milton's brilliant mind and writing style are in play, and his tracts are relied upon in Milton studies, particularly in light of the ways in which his conceits in the tracts become dramatized in Paradise Lost . I invoke the specter of the 17th century pamphlet war--not casting myself in any camp or in the shadow of any writer--in the distinctly 21st century manner: Writing an essay in response to another essay with which I ...

Harold Bloom made a whole book out of the idea of the "anxiety of influence" , which is that those who come after greatness always look back at that which inspired them and it causes an anxiety, a worry about how the forerunners are forming the present work. I haven't read the book, but I've read enough of Bloom to know that there's probably a lot more to unpack in such a complex idea. It's similar to what my friend, Dustin Simmons , studies in his conceits of the "reception" of ancient literature. While Simmons' ideas are often more of "What are the modern expressions and allusions to the classical past?" than "How did the classical past cause anxiety for the creator of new work?", the two branches of reflecting on the past are interesting avenues to wander down, and I encourage you to give it a go whenever you've the time. What I wanted to talk about is an inversion of Bloom's anxiety, using the term "enthusia...

Teaching Paradise Lost  is always a pleasure for me. Part of it derives from the beauty of the language. Milton can turn a phrase unlike anyone else, and his lines are almost as memorable as Shakespeare's, when he puts his mind to it. There's a precision and clarity that Milton cultivates that I don't see in other work. One of the things that I love is the ambiguity. Shakespeare's characters will be ambiguous, or have ambiguous motives (like Iago in Othello ), but Milton places layers of possibilities, only occasionally directing the reader to one interpretation. An example of the ambiguity comes from this passage from Book 1: His utmost power with adverse power oppos'd In dubious Battel on the Plains of Heav'n, And shook his throne. (103-105) Here, Satan is saying that he and the rebellious angels fought the war so well that they "shook [God's] throne." Yet in Book 6, Raphael explains this about the Son's engagement with the battle:...

I have, of late, and wherefore I know well, written a great deal more than I have in years past. Indeed, thanks to a couple of factors, I have put more of my thoughts into words in 2016 than I have in almost any other year of my life. Since this time last year, I have finished three novels ( Conduits, Dante, and  Ash and Fire ), become prolific on this blog, updated my website, tweeted and posted thousands of thoughts, and hand-written dozens of pages in a personal notebook. In a lot of ways, I have increased my writing so much that I almost feel like I'm a writer. Because of this output, I have also passed a milestone: I have run out of ink in my favorite pen. This mayn't sound too terribly tragic, nor even worthy of a paragraph, to say nothing of an entire micro-essay, but that's because I didn't explain this pen. Almost three years ago, I went to London for the first time. As the group leader of a tour, I had the pleasure of picking our different stops througho...

Today, we had a comparative exercise in my classes. We juxtaposed the two versions of Satan that we've seen in the poetry we've studied this year: Dante's monstrosity... It might be hard to see, but this Satan isn't being pensive; he's eating souls. ...and Milton's manipulator: He's grappling with his new role as Prince of Darkness, not grousing about a headache. Both poets tackle the issue of Satan in a unique, world changing way. This video helps explain what I mean by that. Anyway, since we read both Dante's Divine Comedy  and Milton's Paradise Lost , we get a chance to look at the Arch Heretic in different ways. Dante's version is monstrous, munching on the three worst traitors: Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot. He's frightening and impressive and...passive. He's a representation of what was lost when Satan rebelled against God. Milton's version, however, is much more human-like (save the wings) and his gifts o...

Cracking open Milton over the weekend was exhilarating for me. Now I don't want to touch the book. I don't normally go through bi-polar feelings like this--my depression ranges wide and wanders as it lists, but I don't often get whiplash when it comes to the pillars of support I have. This is a strange experience for me, since usually a bad day will push me toward  Milton or Shakespeare, not from them. But I was immensely disappointed in today's lesson. Not so much the students--they don't get as excited about Milton as I do, and I know that and I understand it. They're polite and engaged because, for some, it's engaging; the rest operate out of habit. No, I was disappointed in me. Part of it is that today was one of my most delicate, intricate lessons. We were talking about line 26 of the first Book of Paradise Lost . You know the one: "And justify the ways of God to men." Well, that requires an explanation about theodicy, and that is a th...

I'm starting my annual discussion of Paradise Lost  tomorrow, and it has me pretty excited. In my mind, Shakespeare rules supreme, but his heir-apparent is John Milton. Less well known than his dramatic almost-contemporary (Milton was eight when Shakespeare died, and I've yet to see any evidence that the future prophet-bard of England ever met the Soul of the Age), John Milton has still been immensely influential in English Letters. John Rodgers argues that Milton is in the dead center of the canon, while Harold Bloom puts Milton firmly (and unequivocally) in second place, preeminent save Shakespeare. I agree with both, and my preference for one over the other is a matter of what I'm reading/teaching at the moment. This year, I'm reading Twelfth Night  at the same time as teaching Paradise Lost , so there's some dissonance in my mind. Of course, there's no reason why I have to pick a  favorite. I'ma be like this little girl and refuse to choose: If pr...