In my recent post Beloved Insignificant, I pondered the importance of so-called “small things”. Flowing seamlessly together with such musings are my ongoing meditations on the need for ancient things – namely, myth.
I’ve referenced Madeleine L’Engle’s The Rock That Is Higher an embarrassing number of times already – most notably in Story: A Search for Truth and On Giants Shoulders – but I can’t help it if she says it best:
“Just as we are losing vocabulary in these last years of the twentieth century, we are losing myth and the creativity of myth . . .”
*Note: as quoted in one of the aforementioned posts, she defines myth according to “its ancient meaning – that which was true, that which is true, that which will be true, that strange truth which is as elusive as home.”
L’Engle then goes on to quote Rollo May’s The Cry for Myth, another book already added to my “must read” list:
“Rollo May . . . tells us that it is myths that give us our sense of identity. They make possible our sense of community. They undergird our moral values . . . May continues, ‘Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home. . . . To be a member of one’s community is to share in its myths.’ . . . Conversely, the current ‘clinging to cults and our neurotic passion to make money is a flight from our anxiety, which comes in part from our mythlessness.’”
Of course, this all flows into and out of what I am trying to do with The Ancient.
In the post A Novel Sort of Poetry, I revealed that The Ancient does include a bit of poetry – and not just as decoration, either. The poems I include are central to the identity of one of the characters and crucial to the development of the major themes. That doesn’t mean I had them all written before I started the novel, or even knew where they all would go; one in particular took me by surprise.
A couple months ago, we spent a lovely Saturday afternoon at the campus of a nearby college. There’s a gorgeous spot overlooking both the mountains and the river. We had been there before when I was writing – I actually wrote an important part of The Ancient in a nearby walled garden – but I wanted to go back and just relax, soaking in the beauty and reading.
Poetry, however, never asks permission to intrude upon an afternoon of rest, particularly when one’s reading involves such grimly contemplative matters as those referenced above.
I had been reading for quite a while when the beauty and the peace of the day – not to mention the quiet desperation inspired by my reading material – overtook me, and I felt the poetic urge arising. Ergo, I put down Madeleine L’Engle and picked up my poetry journal. When I finished, I found that the best title for this new poem was “The Ancient” – and, what’s more, I suddenly saw where it should go in the novel, and wondered how I hadn’t thought of putting a poem there before.
I share it with you now as a foretaste.
Back to editing!
The Ancient
We need the old things
And so we flee
For ‘what must be’
Calls piously
To make us free
By deeper daily
Sunderings.
We seek the old ways
And turn to run
For ‘what is done’
Blocks out the sun
To make us one
By emptily fun
Holidays.
We crave the old words
And thus we fall
For ‘what might maul’
Holds us in thrall
To make us crawl
By slow-burning brawl
All backwards.
Truth!! As both Lewis and Tolkien knew . . . So we now know.
Wow! More!