Writing and Blogging | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

As Birds Sing Because They Must, Even So I Write

As long as I have a garden to muck about in, and the health to do it, I shall not mind growing old. My garden is a deep joy at the centre of my life, even though I am making peace with not being able to keep up with it: it’s an acre and a half.

My nerves felt raw today, but then, I went out to the garden, which is bird-loud, and felt peace return.

Listening to birds sing, it’s suggested helps us relax, helps us complete tasks, and even think creatively. For instance, I didn’t have a single fresh idea for a blog post when I went out, and then, the garden gave me this!

* * *

Why do birds sing? Birds sing thousands of times through the day, the red-eyed vireo singing 20,000 songs daily. They sing to mark out their territories, to attract mates, or simply to communicate with other birds. They sing because it is their nature. They sing because they must.

Gerard Manley Hopkins imagines kingfishers catching fire, dragonflies drawing flame, while singing, “What I do is me. For that I came.”

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

* * *

I have at various points considered giving up writing—when I had a miscarriage when Zoe was two; when I was pregnant with Irene; when domestic chaos overwhelmed me.

But each time when I decided to do nothing but housework until our house was orderly—-the last attempt was 7 years ago– I slipped into depression. It was hard to get out of bed, hard to focus on the sorting, organizing, dishes, laundry, the endless domestic routines.

If, however, I gave myself just an hour or two of creating, I had energy for the rest. Because that is what I was made for: to write. And when I am not doing it, I am listless, slightly unhappy, and don’t have energy for anything else.

And so, each time I was tempted to give up writing to be a perfect homemaker, or a perfect mummy, I would return to writing, because it was my calling, my vocation.

* * *

As a bird sings its high, clear note, and as fish splash through the seas of this world, I am made to play with words and ideas, to attempt to recreate beauty out of beauty.

Writing time is slowly opening as I grow more disciplined. What will I write? How much? I don’t know.

But this I do know–as Milton puts it,

Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven;
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Taskmaster’s eye.

Image Credit

How Can a Christian Blogger keep Fresh and Green Without Burnout?

By Anita Mathias

Image Credit

Friends from America mentioned that they no longer attend the Williamsburg, Virginia Church that we’d met them at.

The preacher had a knack of cutting to the heart of the matter, of looking at the things Jesus said in a new, startling way.

“Oh, why did you leave,” I asked surprised.

“Well, after listening to him for ten years, you’ve heard it all. Then it’s just repetition.” Oooh.

* * *

Christian bloggers set themselves the same task as preachers do, sharing spiritual truth on a daily basis. “It’s like writing a short sermon every day,” a vicar friend said of my blog, in some awe.

And how then can a blogger keep her writing fresh, when those who speak just once a week find not repeating themselves challenging?

* * *

1 First of all, accept there is no shame in repeating yourself. We are not celebrities who, apparently, wear an outfit once only, so much so that Kate Middleton, interestingly, has been praised for repeating outfits.

We do not need to generate 3650 fresh ideas every ten years. And besides, who needs 3650 new ideas?

My readership has increased ten-fold over the last three years which means that nine out of ten readers will not have read the posts from 3-4 years ago. If I think the same thing today, there is no shame in revising, developing (or, often, contracting) an old post, and resharing it, if it can be more of a blessing that way than loitering in my archive.

Writing entirely new stuff every day while good posts moulder unread in one’s archive makes sense if ideas well up naturally. However, the archive is good to root around in on tired and busy days.

* * *

However, since my blog is a reflection of my spiritual life, I would like it to be fresh and green. Some other ways to bring this about.

2 Reading “Leaders read, and readers lead.” Reading about other’s people’s adventures in the holy wilds of the spiritual life makes me aware of heights and depths of spiritual experience which I have not explored—the possibilities of prayer, of transformation of the deep structure of the personality.

3 Suffering pushes us deep into God. When we are writhing in emotional pain, other people’s platitudes won’t do. We need to find our own truth, our own comfort.

Times of suffering can result in losing faith–or, alternatively, faith can become deeper, more real and life-giving.

(I think, given a choice, I’ll stick with reading rather than suffering!)

4 I am enjoying listening to swathes of Scripture as I walk. I am learning a lot about God, what He is like, what He values, how life works, and how to live life well. Several posts spring from this. The Gospels themselves with Jesus’s slant perspective on life never fail to challenge me.

5 Travel opens up new ideas, new experiences. As Mark Batterson says in The Circle Maker, Change of Pace + Change of Place= Change of Perspective.

I learn the history of another region, and a little about its great men and women, its religion, art and architecture. Travel provides numerous new ideas to explore on one’s return. And blog posts inevitably flow.

6 Prayer, placing myself in the force-field of God, invariably generates new thoughts, ideas and blog posts.

7 As do deep conversations, plunging into other people’s lives, thoughts and experiences.

What do you think? How might a blogger keep fresh and green, producing new posts without burn-out?

Lucy Mills on her New Book, “Forgetful Heart,” and her Writing and Publishing Journey

By Anita Mathias

Lucy Mills has just published her first book, Forgetful Heart: Remembering God in a Distracted World (Darton, Longman and Todd) available on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.

I ask Lucy a few questions about her book

What inspired your book?

There was no ‘one thing’ – at least not that I can remember (!)

I was aware of my own forgetfulness. My cluttered, distracted mind often results in silly mistakes, side-tracked intentions and confused moments.

I was coming out of a difficult patch in my life and faith and trying to re-orientate myself. I’d been reading through the Old Testament, and been struck how, particularly in Deuteronomy, God’s people are often called to remember him – not to forget all God had done for them.

I’d been feeling frustrated that things I’d learned in the past had slipped away from me. I’d studied for a degree in theology, which I loved – and it distressed me how the things I’d engaged with so passionately had then retreated somewhere in the dusty recesses of my mind.

But above all, I found I was forgetting the moments of profound revelation, the God-touches in my life. Instead of retelling my stories, I was allowing them to decay until the plot was hard to find.

I’d had ideas for books before, but none that took hold of me in quite this way. The book was part of my own journey, my own quest for remembering.

I ask the question: what does it mean to remember God in my life? If what I remember is essential to my identity, what am I choosing to dwell on day by day? Tell us about your writing journey

I struggled many years with a love-hate relationship with writing.

Many times I wanted to ‘drop it’ altogether and get on with other things. But it wouldn’t let me go. When at last I owned my vocation as a writer, I experienced a feeling of freedom. I couldn’t live my life thinking ‘perhaps I could’. I needed to grasp it and say ‘I will do this’, regardless of whether anyone else wanted to read my words.

I’m now glad that earlier attempts led to limited success. It took me until recently to discover my ‘voice,’ to mature into becoming the writer I want to be. I needed that time of waiting, internal conflict and ‘brewing’ – however difficult that was at the time!

As someone who struggles with CFS/ME, my life is by necessity punctuated by full stops – not always where I would like to put them!

I’ve had to be flexible in my expectations of myself and to accept the occasional ‘derailing’ of my dreams.

Please tell us about your publishing journey

I worked hard on my proposal before approaching publishers. I approached one publisher because I was acquainted with the commissioning editor and knew she would be constructive. The team was interested but they weren’t sure it would sell.

The second editor/publisher I approached was complimentary about both the idea and my writing style but, again, rejected the book.

I then started looking into a third publisher. As I researched them, I felt an affinity with them that I’d not experienced with anyone else. I needed more courage to contact them because of this! I got an out-of-office reply. The then commissioning editor wasn’t back from holiday until the next week. I was surprised to get a reply that next week, asking to see the complete manuscript (such as it was).

The team worked hard over the next few months to make publishing my book viable for them. I signed a contract with Darton, Longman and Todd in August 2013.

It’s worth finding a publisher who is a good ‘fit’ for your book, not just in genre and style but in ethos. What do they care about? What’s your common ground – and how can you bring this to their attention? Don’t just look at them as names on a list; look at the reasons you’d like to be published by them. Yes, it can make the rejection harder. But it will make an acceptance all the more sweet!

For me, finding a publishing team who grasped – from the outset – the ‘soul’ of the book, made a huge difference. I felt I could trust them with it. They wanted to publish my book because they liked it and they understood it. I feel very privileged to have been published by them, as a ‘new author on the block’. I’d love the book to sell well because I want to justify their faith in it.

Lucy’s website and blog are found at http://www.lucy-mills.com and she tweets as @lucymills. You can hear her read an extract from Chapter 16 of Forgetful Heart here:

Lucy Mills

Amy Boucher Pye guest-posts on her writing process and her work in progress

By Anita Mathias

Thank you to Anita for inviting me on the Monday blog tour. Pleasure to be dreaming beneath the spires with you, even if from a sunny garden in North London!

So the game is to share what we’re working on, why we write, and how the process works.

What I am working on

I’m writing and writing but still chasing after that first elusive book. Having worked as an editor in the Christian publishing field for yonks, I find I have to chain up my inner editor when I’m writing, and nowhere more so than with a book-length manuscript. My inner editor voice sees what I’m creating and chimes in with some not-so-helpful comments, “Are you sure you want to write that? You’re a first-time author. What about your platform, or lack thereof? Blah-de-blah-de-blah-de-blah.”

My journey to book publication has been rocky. A highlight was Easter 2013, when I was thrilled to secure a most fabulous literary agent to represent me, Steve Laube. He shopped around my idea of a memoir called Beloved of God, which traced my journey of awakening to God’s love and accepting my identity as his child. Result? Rejection. Ouch.

And so I’m back to the drawing board. I feel a bit stuck, to be honest, for that nasty inner editor can be so vocal, especially when my first attempt did not meet with success. But now that I’ve just finished with a busy season of speaking engagements, I’m going to clamp down and develop the book idea that keeps popping up, wanting to take a life of its own.

Why do I write what I do?

I’ve always loved words and writing. When I was 11, I was first published in the Minneapolis paper in the kids’ page, which I found thrilling. But when some schoolmates mocked me for scoring 104/100 on the poetry project, I started to lose confidence. Working for a great writer in my early 20s further eroded my willingness to put words on the page, as I thought about what I would write and found myself wanting (to be fair on my younger self, that author/thinker and I have very different styles!)

It was only after my world fell in, seemingly, when Zondervan axed my acquisitions (UK: commissioning) editor position that I started to develop my writing voice. I began writing regularly for publication (feature articles, columns, reviews, devotionals), enjoying the buzz of seeing the finished product and the interacting with readers.

One of my most favorite activities is writing devotionals – Bible reading notes. I learn so much by delving into the biblical text and commentaries, chewing it over with prayer and offering it up. I’ve written for New Daylight, Day by Day with God, Inspiring Women Every Day, Closer to God and Living Light. You can read some of my devotional series on my blog.

I’ve also always loved books, and so another joy is to run the Woman Alive Book Club. Every month I choose a book or two to review as well as interviewing Christian authors. We also publish 5 reader reviews. Our Facebook group is a wonderful place for discussion of books and authors; it’s a real community of grace. (Because I’m always in need of books to review for this monthly feature, publishers regularly send me their books to consider. Free books = result!)

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

The more I write, the more I celebrate the author’s individual voice. Made in the image of God, we all reflect his glory, truth, creativity and love in unique ways. That voice being expressed by words on a page (or a screen) to me is beautiful. The more sure I am about who am I am, rooted in him, the more eager I am to write and share and create.

And yes, I’m aware I didn’t really answer the question…

How does my writing process work?

Once I’ve taken the kids to school, I settle down in my hopefully sunny study. After some time reading the Bible and praying, and yep, catching up on social media, I get down to my task. If it’s a blog post or a short article, I take the hint of the idea that I want to flesh out and get down to writing. (I wrote about this creative process recently in a blog.) If I’m writing Bible reading notes, I delight in reading around the passage in commentaries and spending some time in prayer, asking God what he’d like me to share.

My busy family life means I can’t often go away for a period of uninterrupted writing, but those occasions when I’ve hidden myself away for a few days or even a week are blissful hard work. After getting my work space organized just so, I research and write and drink sparkling water and write and look out the window and drink more sparking water and write. Ah for one of those weeks…

I’ve found that any good writing comes after rewriting. And rewriting. And rewriting. Of course, we also have to learn how to stop the editing process too – and finally to finish off a piece before we destroy it – but going back over one’s work with a fresh eye, tweaking here and cutting there, gives stronger results.

To continue the blog tour, I nominate two fabulous Cathys: Cathy LeFeurve and Cathy Madavan. After all, my middle name is Catherine…

Amy Boucher Pye

Carolyn Weber muses on her writing, her writing process, & works in progress (Monday Blog Hop)

By Anita Mathias

I have been tagged by Anita Mathias to join the Monday Blog Hop, which involves a tour of UK/US writers. I am delighted and honoured at the invitation, and enjoyed myself in answering the questions she passed along.

Often stopping to reflect on one’s work brings a respite of clarity – I should do this more often, if I wasn’t so mired in the work itself! It’s a good reminder of the wisdom that re-evaluation brings. “Teach us to number our days, the we may gain a heart of wisdom” (Ps 90:12). Indeed.

I include the questions and my answers below, and then I take the liberty of tagging two faith writers I’ve admired in the blogosphere to join in the same, Rachel Marie Stone and Pilar Arsenec:

What are you working on?

I just finished a collection of poems – like one of my favourite poets Luci Shaw (who also managed to raise 5 children!) I have found poetry conducive to mothering. Perhaps it’s the efficiency of the genre, perhaps it’s the way I have found the world to speak more loudly to me now as a mother (in all sorts of ways), perhaps it’s how I can, with poetry, work drafts and revisions into the nooks and crannies of my day. Perhaps it really is a Wordsworthian overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility when I finally do get to sit. Or a combination of all these aforesaid things. I have also felt so many combined emotions returning to my hometown, and of course I love the natural world, and especially the Canadian landscape. As with authors I enjoy reading, I tend to immerse myself in genres as well when I write. Hence, a lot of poetry lately.

I’m also about to launch a line of children’s books. This has been a project long close to my heart, so do stay tuned! I should have more information up on my website shortly.

And finally, I have been working for some time on a book project about the spiritual discipline of reading. The project has a more academic bent, but I hope to make it attractive to all readers as well as it grows out of my love of literature and two decades of teaching it. I believe words are holy things, and that our relationship to them needs to be upheld and nurtured, especially in our culture today.

How does your work differ from others in its genre?

While I enjoy memoir as a vein throughout most of what I do, I hope that it is malleable as appropriate. As a memoirist, I want to be known for keeping the same trustworthy voice, but approaching different topics with it. I am drawn to the interweaving of stories (I love allusion, and how it opens ideas and associations like Russian dolls, through just one word or phrase), along with history, art, and literature to create other worlds (fictive and creative non-fictive) that challenge us to grow closer to God –with all the terrible beauty that implies.

Why do you write what you do?

Look. Taste. Hear. See. God is good. Art is the overcoming of evil with good. Without the ardent pursuit of beauty and truth, we are the living dead, indeed – a fate far worse than death.

How does your writing process work?

This is a question that always fascinates me with other writers. For me, right now at this season in my life, I’m afraid I don’t have any process that “works.” As a mother to four small children yet, I often feel I am living out Emily Dickinson’s maxim: “When I try to organize, my little Force explodes.”

I try to write regularly, i.e. daily, even in some small way, shape or form, but this attempt or even good intention is often subject to circumstance, no matter how hard I try: a child’s illness, an elderly parent’s needs, the toddler crying. It can be frustrating, but it can also be quite humbling in its required re-setting of one’s heart. Then, we you do get to really be with your words, you appreciate the process and the words themselves. Writing becomes a kind of worship.

Sometimes I have the rare chance – or more likely I snap – and hide and write for long periods at a time. This can be quite productive, as I’ve spent a long while “percolating” before hand, even when on the run during my day. One blessing is that I very rarely suffer from writer’s block when I do get to sit by myself with a cup of tea and the page before me!

Carolyn Weber and her gorgeous family

Carolyn Weber: Author of the critically acclaimed memoir Surprised by Oxford, Carolyn Weber holds her B.A. Honours in English from Huron College at the University of Western Ontario, Canada and her M.Phil. and D. Phil. Degrees in Romantic Literature from Oxford University, England. She has been a professor at the University of San Francisco, Seattle University, Westmont College and Oxford University, where she was also the first female dean of St. Peter’s College. An author, speaker and teacher, she currently resides in Southwestern Canada, with her husband and four spirited children.

In Which I Tell You about My Memoir-in-Progress and My Writing Process (Monday Blog Hop)

By Anita Mathias

I have been tagged by Claire Musters to write about my work in progress, and my writing process.

What I am working on

I work on my blog, Dreaming Beneath the Spires, on the principle of the Minimum Effective Dose. What is alive grows, so I post just enough to keep my blog growing, month on month. About 2-3 posts a week.

I am wrapping up a memoir—Mind has Mountains which I have worked on sporadically since 1991, but abandoned for months, and sometimes years at a time!!

However, I have a first draft of the entire thing with several chapters published, anthologized even, winning several prizes (including a $20,000 NEA!)

I have had leading editors and agents interested on both sides of the Atlantic, but things fell apart at the stage of the proposal. They did not feel the ones I wrote were saleable.

A savvy New York agent showed a savvy New York editor the book, and they commented, “It’s as if Anita is at odds with the material. She is fighting the story.” Interestingly, though both were secular, they felt I was fighting the spiritual memoir that my life and spirit were demanding I write so as to write the literary memoir I wanted to write!

I wanted to write a memoir of an Indian Catholic childhood, ending at 18, a memoir inspired by Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood and Patricia Hampl’s A Romantic Education. It had three sections—

I My life as a Catholic child in the Zorashtrian company town of Jamshedpur up to the age of 9 when I was expelled from the local school because of my mischievousness.

(And holidays with grandparents in Catholic enclaves of Bombay and Mangalore).

The Chapel at St. Mary’s Convent, Nainital

II Boarding school in St. Mary’s Convent, Nainital in the Himalayas, a boarding school run by Irish and German nuns at which I was rebellious, and an atheist.

III Working with Mother Teresa for two years, after an abrupt religious conversion at 17.

I wanted to write a series of essays on passions and experiences and people, like Vladimir Nabokov’s great memoir Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited but the world has changed, and speeded up. People want story, not literary essays. (Not that I greatly care about literary fashions. I truly believe that self-publishing, in the first instance, is an option for sui generis books, provided one can do some marketing—which perhaps I can with God’s help.)

But I think God loves story–and created us to love good stories. The whole Bible tells a shapely story, of our simultaneous craving for God and desire to do our own thing, and how we needed a Saviour to change our hearts from within, and bear the horrid consequences of the crack in our natures.

The editors and agents who have looked at it had a point. I was stopping the story mid-story.

I talked a bit about my book to editor Amy Boucher Pye last week, and we thought about what the story of my life really was.

I suddenly realized that for me to write a solely literary memoir like Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited or Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, ending at age 18 would be at odds with my story. It would leave out the two most important directional decisions of my life–deciding my life’s path would be that of a writer (aged 21) and a decision (aged 27) that I was going to align my life with Christ.

Most days I do live in Jesus, am hidden in Jesus. The story of my life is a spiritual one.

So I need another three chapters: being an undergraduate at Oxford when my faith wobbled to extinction. Doing an MFA in the US when I tried to do life without God, making a religion of poetry (and achievement), a la James Joyce. Recommitting my life to Jesus, aged 27, when I realized that I realized that I really, really hadn’t made much of my life in the last six years without Jesus.

So the memoir would have more mess, more complication, but also more truth.

While talking to Amy, I came up with a new working strapline: A rebellious girl finds peace in Christ. Ah-ha!

And I thought of another model, C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life which takes Lewis up to age 32, when he became “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England,” (but what creativity and joy his conversion opened up for him!).

So I found a meta-narrative for my story. A full circle narrative: a thoroughly rebellious Catholic believer ends as thoroughly “mere Christian,” at peace–a narrative winding through the Zoroashtrian town of Jamshedpur, boarding school in Nainital; Mother Teresa in Calcutta; Oxford, England; Columbus, Ohio…

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

Well, I am a restless writer and everything I have published is in a different genre.

Wandering Between Two Worlds: Essays on Faith and Art traces my life and the evolution of my faith and struggles in the form of essays. It deals with dichotomies—East and West, Writing and Prayer, Domesticities and Art, Roots and Wings.

Francesco, Artist of Florence: The Man Who Gave Too Much, which has sold the best of all my books, is a children’s book, dealing with art, Florence, The Renaissance, beauty, good-heartedness, weakness, and the importance of forgiving oneself.

The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth is a reflection on that Beatitude, theological writing for everywoman.

The Church That Had Too Much is an odd book, the record of a dream , and I found myself writing it in the shape and rhythms of poetry.

And Mind has Mountains, of course, will be a memoir!

Why do I write what I do?

I write on whatever grabs my interest, and my writing is a way to work out my ideas or share whatever fascinates me.

How does my writing process work?

My writing process with a blog: dictate it to my iPhone when I get the idea. Think out my post. Write it pretty close to its final form. Revise it a couple of times on screen. Print it out. Re-arrange and cut paragraphs. Try to cut at least 10% of the words. Do five iterations from first draft to final draft. Hit publish.

For the memoir, I have been writing thoughts and memories as they surface in thematically organized chapters. I choose the chapter I am longing to write, and then write up episodes in the order of desire to tell about them. I revise each chapter eight times, taking less and less time at each iteration, tightening it each time, cutting a minimum of 10 %, and entire paragraphs which are of interest to me, but perhaps not to you.

I post chapters on my blog as they are done.

When I finish the entire book, I suspect I will revise it another 5-8 times at least until I have shaken off every word I can, until the prose feels as inevitable and flawless as poetry, or least is as good as I can make it.

I am taking the liberty of tagging Carolyn Weber, Amy Boucher Pye and Michael Wenham to answer the same three questions.

When, After a Long Drought, Words Come like a Sudden Flood: Lessons from Blake, Milton, Rilke, and Julia Ward Howe

By Anita Mathias

William Blake, Milton

I love The Battle Hymn of the Republic by Julia Ward Howe. The rhythm, the evocative lyrics, the allusions, the beautiful language create a loveliness greater than the sum of its parts.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:

His day is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;

He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:

Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! Be jubilant, my feet!

Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.

(Chorus)

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,

He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,

So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,

Our God is marching on.

(Chorus)

On the night of November 18, 1861, Julia Ward Howe awoke with the words of the song in her mind and in near darkness wrote the verses to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Howe wrote, “I went to bed that night as usual, and slept, according to my wont, quite soundly. I awoke in the gray of the morning twilight; and as I lay waiting for the dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind. Having thought out all the stanzas, I said to myself, ‘I must get up and write these verses down, lest I fall asleep again and forget them.’ So, with a sudden effort, I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pen which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.”

* * *

Wow! To whom are these mysterious gifts of creativity handed out?

Generally to those who have long trained themselves waiting for the angel. “If the angel comes, it will be because you have wooed him by your grim resolve to be always a beginner,” Rainer Maria Rilke muses.

Rilke suffered for most of his life from torturing writers’ block. Beauty, images, art, ideas, filled his mind. But he was blocked; he was unable to express them in poetry.

Rilke said that as he was walking, depressed, by the cliffs near Duino Castle, he heard a voice call out to him, “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?” which became his famous Duino Elegy, (Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?).

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?

And even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.

His writers’ block was broken, and the Duino Elegies flowed forth in a torrent.

* * *

Milton claimed that he was visited nightly by an angel or muse who dictated sections of Paradise Lost to him. In the morning, his daughters found the blind poet, already up, neatly dressed, and waiting to be “milked” of the verses he dictated to them.

At the age of 14, Milton had decided to become one of the great poets in English. His goal: “To write something which the world would not willingly let die.” He spent his youth in arduous preparation, so much so that by the time he began writing Paradise Lost at the age of 50, he was blind (the result of the years from his early teens spent reading late into the night by candlelight); had an brain incomparably stocked with poetry and learning, but had written nothing substantial.

But the angel came, and he did indeed write something that the world would not willingly let die. My father had memorised the opening of Paradise Lost, and I remember the opening sentence with a thrill of pleasure. It’s so beautiful, so majestic, that reading it now, after some years, I almost cry with pleasure,

Of Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us and regain the blissful seat,

Sing, Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed

In the beginning how the heav’ns and earth

Rose out of Chaos; or if Sion hill

Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d

Fast by the oracle of God, I thence

Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous song,

That with no middle flight intends to soar

Above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer

Before all temples th’ upright heart and pure,

Instruct me, for thou know’st; thou from the first

Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,

Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast Abyss

And mad’st it pregnant: what in me is dark

Illumine, what is low raise and support,

That to the highth of this great argument

I may assert Eternal Providence

And justify the ways of God to men.

Paradise Lost comes as if dictated by an angel, but it comes to the blind poet who had spent his life preparing to write it. The Duino Elegies were “overheard” by the poet who also spent a life of sacrifice in preparation.

Poetic inspiration comes suddenly, as if the unconscious has suddenly ripened, to those who have laboured long and hard to receive it.

In contrast is William Blake, an untaught visionary poet who was more in touch with Heaven than with our world. At the age of four, the young artist “saw God” when God “put his head to the window”, At the age of eight or ten in Peckham, Blake claimed to have seen “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.”

He wrote prolifically during a brief interlude in Felpham. Blake writes “Felpham is a sweet place for Study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, & their forms more distinctly seen.” (This is also true of the little village outside Oxford, where I live).

It was while he lived in Felpham, Sussex, that Blake wrote the perfect Jerusalem.

And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,

In England’s green & pleasant Land

(

Visiting Blenheim Palace: Thoughts on Creativity, Envy and the Good Life

By Anita Mathias

View from the palace, showing the island.
Image credit.

I’ve lived in Oxford for 14 years now (in two instalments) and try to walk around the Blenheim Gardens and grounds once a year, if not once a season. I love the lakes: they get me.

And, often, when I visit the gorgeous gardens of stately homes, I feel a twinge of envy. I would not feel envy if they had earned them by their labour as Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey earned his seventeeth century manor house in Dorset. The immense inherited wealth in Britain, as in Blenheim or Chatsworth, sometimes does make me feel envious, though both estates, of course, leverage and make their inherited largesse to make even more money, as is necessary in a country with high taxation, like the UK.

“I am a bit envious,” I tell Roy. “What beauty to enjoy every day! And just to have inherited it!!”

But then, as we walk around, I realise that it would take a particular temperament to live happily in Blenheim Palace, and that I might not have it.

It would, oddly, take much tolerance for imperfection. As I walked through the Secret Garden, my fingers itched as I saw weeds and plants needing dead-heading. And this despite a crew of gardeners.

You have to make peace with a crew of gardeners who cannot keep up with the garden–just as you yourself cannot!

You sacrifice privacy–for running a palace and its grounds must take an veritable armada of cleaners, housekeepers, groundsmen and gardeners.

You are pierced with worries, for the ultimate responsibility of keeping an ageing building and its furnishings shiny ultimately falls on to you.

And in this daily piercing with mundane responsibility, even with the money to throw at each hydra head of things which need to be done, you surely would not have time to be a writer.

So, though living in Blenheim Palace, with its gorgeous grounds, would be many people’s definition of the good life, it would not be the good life for me. Too many worries, and distractions. Too little privacy!

* * *

I read an American survey a decade or so ago which asked people how much money they needed to live happily; the respondents, across the income levels, said $10,000. In other words, everyone wanted just a little bit more money.
Oddly enough though, the really moneyed classes have produced relatively few creative people–writers, artists, film-makers. Keeping up with one’s lifestyle appears to siphon off energy and ambition. Each extra thing you own adds stress and worry and distraction to your life. And, for those artists who eventually became very wealthy, their best work was in the period of relative poverty.

Christianly speaking, envy, I guess, is rebellion against the plan God has chosen for your life… the IQ, family income, gifts, nationality, he has given you. At times, one wishes God had given us more–I have certainly have–but we develop both our characters and our gifts as we seek to work against constraints (of time, of our own talent, of our weakness of character, of the shortage of money or energy or strength).

Envy is wanting to live in someone else’s story–a futile wish!!–instead of trying to write the best story we can with our own life. And one can always revise the story of one’s life to make it read better. Small leveraged changes will inevitably bring about other bigger and bigger changes.

And the gifts and character we develop as we struggle in this “vale of soul-making” are certainly more precious than if we had them handed to us on a platter, like Blenheim Palace is handed down to generation after generation of the Marlboroughs.