Relic, relique, reliquus: Part I

Recently, two unusual objects entered my life: an icon, and an old newspaper article.

The icon, of St. Nicholas  (good name), was made in Minsk -- the gift of a Belarus friend. The saint's holy image is painted on a thin slip of parchment that's been pasted to the smooth side of a piece of birch. There's still bark on the rough side, and when I close my eyes, I almost can see the forest in which that tree once stood.

The other item is a 50-year-old newspaper article showing a Pennsylvania church committee. There's my father, slim, trim and bow-tied, standing in the back row. I once stuck that article in a book to protect it and ensure that it wouldn't get lost -- and then I nearly lost it. I'm so glad I didn't.

It's not hard to understand why these two objects are important relics to me. The personal and religious meaning are pretty accessible.

Not all artifacts, however, yield their meanings so easily -- and a writer like Umberto Eco has spent his career examining, often excavating, the meanings in cultural objects past and present. In his latest book, "Inventing the Enemy: Essays" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Eco takes readers on another of his pleasing travels in the worlds of arcana. Is "The Name of the Rose" on your list of essential novels? If it is, then you're going to love this book.

What's one of the natural enemies of an old relic? Eco tells us.

It's science. An aura clings to old objects: when I place a lit votive candle in front of St. Nicholas, the icon glows. Too much analysis dispels the light, blows out the candle. As Eco says, in the essay "Treasure Hunting," "we should not approach...reliquaries with a scientific mind; otherwise there's a risk of losing faith..."

"As I child," Eco says in another essay, "Imaginary Astronomies," "I dreamed over atlases. I imagined journeys and adventures in exotic lands..."

That essay goes on to examine versions of our imagined orld in the work of many thinkers--among them Dante, Cosmas Indicopleustes (say it three times fast), Copernicus. It is a spectacular survey from Eco, our foremost explorer of terra incognita.

This essay collection demonstrates why Eco is among the best practitioners of nonfiction today. I wish I could say the same about his fiction. Once, he was a sublime craftsman of fiction and nonfiction: His novels struck a marvelous balance between plot and antique morsels about the way the world used to be (or never was).  That balance has tipped in recent years. Though I admired the 2011 novel "The Prague Cemetery" (despite its repulsive narrator) in the pages of the Los Angeles Times, I was more interested in the research than the story. That's where Eco's passion seemed to be in that novel, too.

Which is why "Inventing the Enemy: Essays" is such a welcome book: Here you'll get the writer's engaged, inspired considerations in the raw -- all free from any plodding novelistic apparatus.

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The true writer is always a student

....That's the lesson I repeatedly get from cruising the writers of WordPress - there's a community here aimed at exchanging ideas, not self-promotion.

It's also a lesson glaringly obvious on every page of the latest book by Ursula K. Le Guin, "Finding My Elegy: New and Selected Poems" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which was published in September. Did you know that she was a poet in addition to so many other things - essayist, book reviewer, acclaimed author of science fiction and fantasy?

This is a substantial collection that spans 50 years and reminds us how writers are different from the rest: Most people are intellectually curious, sure, but not everyone can take that curiosity and transform it into an assured art form, which is what Le Guin does in every poem contained in this book:

I feel so foolish sitting translating Vergil,

the voices of ancient imaginary shepherds,

in a silent house in Georgia, listening

for that human sweetness

That comes from "Learning Latin in Old Age," a poem written not very long ago - perhaps even around the time she wrote her novel "Lavinia," her retelling of  the "Aeneid" from the perspective of the woman at the center of the duel between Aeneas and Turnus.

I love the image of Le Guin, seated at a table with a basic Latin reader in front of her. (In my previous life at the L.A. Times, I had several opportunities to work with her on book reviews, and when I approached her to ask if she would consider writing one, what was her reaction? Almost always it was: Sure! Send it to me!)

This lovely volume is a reminder of the reason why we should commit to learning anything: for the love of it, for the greater understanding it gives us of our place in the world. (There are far too many people who simply want to impress us with how smart they are.)

And, one more thing: All knowledge helps us wrestle with our fate, our mortality. Le Guin's collection is undeniably about that as well, which shouldn't be a surprise (she is in her 80s). In the title poem, she writes poignantly about the costs of knowledge, about a painful kind of knowledge that comes only with the passing of many years as loved ones die and you remain:

I can't find you where I've been looking for you,

my elegy. There's all too many graveyards handy

these days, too many names to read through tears

on long black walls...

Beautiful. Painful. Beautiful.

Take it from Frodo

The arrival of Peter Jackson's "Hobbit" series of movies translates into two ... no, make it three ... kinds of related books this season:

1) Reissues of Tolkien's best books, including "The Hobbit" (no surprise there)

2) Scholarly works for the deeply obsessed fan of Tolkien's work (like Verlyn Flieger's "Green Suns and Faerie," which I wrote about not long ago)

3) A mixed bag of books, ranging from interesting movie tie-ins to silly, slight works hoping to sell a few units while the movie is in theaters

When I received my advance galley of Noble Smith's "The Wisdom of the Shire: A Short Guide to A Long And Happy Life" (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's), I groaned. "Here's one of the silly, superficial examples of category 3!" I thought. "Ugh. Bilbo and Frodo Baggins on leadership!"

The closer I looked, the more I realized I was wrong. The conceit of this book does seem a bit silly, a bit shameless in its packaging -- to see our lives in terms of the values of Tolkien's little fellows -- but is it?  Hobbits love the simple things in life: food and beer, friends, a good night's sleep. Isn't that like most of us?

If you've read Tom Shippey on the matter, you know Tolkien intended them to reflect us in his mythic cycle of tales -- so Noble Smith's book makes sense. And it's worth a look.

I especially appreciate his chapter on "bearing the burden of your ring." Sauron's awful ring can only be destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom, and Frodo nearly dies in the effort. It slowly taints and corrupts him but he never surrenders it even though he has so many chances.  Plenty of people will gladly take it from his finger. Not just Gollum. Give it to Aragorn. Let Gondor take it. Give it to Gandalf. Let the elves deal with it, Frodo. Head for the Shire. Drink a beer and have a warm, long night's sleep.

Frodo refuses, knowing that the ring is poisoning him.

Noble Smith praises Frodo for his focus and dedication. I'd add that Frodo displays a quality most of us lack today. He acts on behalf of a larger community of living beings who are counting on him -- not simply in terms of what is best only for him. Frodo knows there will be terrible consequences for Middle-earth if he surrenders the ring just to save his own skin. So he doesn't. He makes the hard choice that most people wouldn't make today.

I wonder what he'd think of us if the Supreme Ring had somehow teleported him into our world.

(More Hobbity posts to come as Peter Jackson's movie get nearer.)

Into the mystic ... with Merton

Years ago I met spirituality author Matthew Fox after the publication of his book "One River, Many Wells," and the title of that book has stuck with me ever since.

One river, many wells: a great description of the reality of God.

Another metaphor is: Imagine that God is the sun, shining on an apartment building. One window belongs to the Catholic tenant, another to the Jewish one, the Muslim, the scientist (he sits in the sunlight thinking about String Theory), the Buddhist, Hindu, even the atheist (his blinds are drawn shut). The only problem with this image or Fox's is that it enrages dogmatic believers. It's blasphemy to them. They start shaking a finger at you and citing canon law, and any hope of common ground is lost.

That wasn't true of Thomas Merton, thank God. That Trappist monk embodied the mid-20th century ideal of American Catholicism, but he was also a questing, spiritually hungry thinker who looked east for insights into faith.  He didn't rebuff dialogue: He welcomed it. A few months ago, the publisher New Directions released two small collections of Merton's reflections, "On Eastern Meditation" edited by Bonnie Thurston and "On Christian Contemplation" edited by Paul Pearson, that capture his vibrant inquiry into the reality of God.

Merton was a man of Christ, and the Pearson volume demonstrates that on every page. But he also struggled with the Christian practices of his time, complaining that people clung to a "crabbed, rigid piety" or else were trapped "in a straitjacket." He called for a renewal of approach that amounted, he writes in "Contemplation and Action," to a "new depth and simplicity of love, and ... a new understanding."

Perhaps that's why he looked East. For inspiration.

When I think of those fierce believers who wag a finger at anything outside their comfort zone, I like to recall this reassuring line from Thurston's volume: "Merton was convinced," she writes, "there was a 'real possibility of contact on a deep level between ... contemplative and monastic tradition in the West and the various contemplative traditions in the East...' "

"On a deep level": the words make me think of Matthew Fox's river. Or an apartment building in the sunlight.

These two books are small -- a selective, engaging sample of Merton's thought, poetry, private questions.

Ideal to tuck in a coat pocket and pull out during your next coffee break.

 

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Waiting for the hump

So, skeletal remains found under a parking lot in Leicester may belong to crookback Richard III, darker and more sinister-looking in Shakespeare's play than Darth Vader was the first time you saw him stalking down  the blockade runner corridor in "A New Hope."

But a bit of personal interaction with Philippa Gregory in my previous newspaper career (see About Call of the Siren for more on that), and with Desmond Seward's book "Richard III," changed all that for me. I still love Shakespeare's lines, and love reciting them, from his play --  "cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,/Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time/Into this breathing world..." That's what Richard declares about himself. But I can't be sure the words are entirely true.

The last Plantagenet was a ruthless ruler, undeniably so, but so were many rulers of the eras before, during and after -- a fact Seward includes not to defend Richard, but to keep things in balance. Gregory is a passionate Yorkist, arguing that Richard and his clan were the victims of a Tudor smear campaign. Check out her "Cousins' War" series of novels and you'll see for yourself.

Which gets me back to the parking lot discovery of last month.  If the skeleton can be assembled, what will we see? Evidence of a dramatic hump or just an uneven shoulder blade, transformed by Elizabeth I's playwright into something monstrous?