Fencing Bear at Prayer

These are the comments that I have prepared for the roundtable in which I am participating at the International Medieval Congress on Friday.  Come help us talk about teaching Tolkien! The title of the course that I teach is potentially a little misleading.  " Tolkien: Medieval and Modern " would seem to suggest that what I am concerned about is demonstrating Tolkien’s use of his medieval sources.  But although I do have students read occasional selections from the works on which Tolkien based some of his most memorable characters (Turin Turambar, Smaug), this is not really the point.  Rather, my goal is to teach students to see how Tolkien was thinking about history and story-telling as an exercise in sub-creation and, therefore, ultimately, as worship. Two texts are critical to the argument in my course.  The first, which I have students read in class on the first day, is Mythopoeia , the poem that Tolkien wrote for C.S. Lewis in defense of mythology and ...

"We are wired from birth to want answers and hard data.  Uncertainty is okay, as long as it exists in someone else's life or we don't have to do anything about it.  But as soon as we're challenged to own it and then act in the face of it, with rare exceptions we run from it.  Because running at it terrifies us.  We're scared of the discomfort that comes with opening doors without knowing what's behind them.  Scared of being judged if it's a monster.  Scared of having to pick up the pieces and rebuild if we go to zero.  Even scared of hitting the jackpot.  And beyond the fear, we just plain hate the persistent anxiety that rides along with continually leaning into the unknown.  Without intervention, we experience it as anywhere from discomfort to outright suffering. "The problem is, if you strive to create anything--be it a book, a business, a blog, a collection, a body of work, or a career that is defined by brilliance--uncertainty, risk o...

I want to find whoever it was who came up with this phrase--and strangle him (probably a him, maybe it was a her). Okay, so that's a bit strong. He was probably an advertiser (how is it that we have ceded so much of our cultural conversation to the ad men?), and all he probably meant was that his copywriters and designers should try to think about, oh, I don't know, what happened to their product once someone took it out of its packaging. Or maybe not. Maybe he was a scientist and wanted his labworkers to stop thinking in terms of the protocols they were used to following and try to come up with some other means of testing material reality. Or maybe he was an editor and wanted his authors to stop thinking in terms of genres and, quote unquote, just write. Whoever he was, he has a lot to answer for. Because, you see, we need boxes, frames, protocols, genres. We can't think without them. Boxes give us context and purpose. No box, no point. Sure you may want to think...

How do you know when you've found your life's work? You'd think I'd know by now. Why then am I so assailed by doubts? About whether I'm doing the research that I should. About whether I'm writing the book that I should. About whether I should be in academia at all. I'm told that this angst is a familiar predicament for those who have recently gotten tenure . Given that I have had tenure now for nearly eight years, I must be a late bloomer. Either that or I'm peculiarly thick-headed. An accident of my youth ? I was always--well, always after about age 10--a good student. Going to graduate school seemed the thing to do. And I did have so many things that I wanted to learn. I know many of them now , and yet I'm still unsatisfied. Has it simply gotten too easy? Too familiar? It's not really that the challenge is gone. I still find writing frustratingly difficult . And there are still so many things that I want to find ways to say. ...

There's something that really puzzles me about our culture. On the one hand, creativity is something that we encourage--ad nauseum--in our children: "Use your imagination! Express your creativity!" And yet, on the other, to be creative--an "artist"--is somehow the last thing that we want them to become: it's so impractical; you might never get a break; artists are more likely to go crazy and commit suicide than, say, doctors or lawyers or businessmen.* We are willing to allow a few people to be extravagantly creative (musicians, film makers, authors of best-selling novels) while labeling all others who engage in creative (a.k.a. artistic) work as childlike nerds who live in a world of their own fantasy.** We are constantly incited to develop our own creativity: "Express yourself! Try something new!" And yet, to enjoy the products of others' creativity is considered "escapist" or, at best, a waste of time; there's nothing pr...

Elizabeth Gilbert gave a very interesting talk a few months ago about changing the way in which we think about creativity and genius. Rather than, as we have since the Renaissance, insisting that creativity is something that comes from within, as the personal responsibility of its human author, it would be much healthier, she suggests, to think of it in the way in which the ancient Greeks and Romans did, as something that comes from outside, inspired, as it were, by the gods. Or, rather, not exactly the gods (or God), but instead something at once more personal and yet still not ourselves: our "genius." And what is a genius? Gilbert suggests something "rather like Dobby, the House-Elf." Okay, maybe not the image I would have chosen, but it makes the point: not everybody's genius is, well, a genius. As authors and artists, we are dependent upon the inspiration we are given and sometimes, our genius isn't really up to it. So, Gilbert argues, it's r...

"It can be said that our talents are gifts from God and our use of our talents is our gift back to God. The degree of happiness we experience when working well, the sense of rightness and harmony, all argue that creativity is God's will for us. When we create, we work hand in glove with the Great Creator. Creativity is its nature and our own. We think--and manifest--from the mind of God within us. "Artists throughout the centuries have known this and said this. They are not speaking in metaphor. Ours [Western, secularized modernity] is one of the few world cultures that does not routinely honor higher forces, and yet, working at our art, we do experience inspiration, although we may call it an intuitive hunch or leading. Something within us leads, and we follow. Painter Robert Motherwell speaks of the brushstroke taking the next brushstroke. "All artists experience this form of leading when our ego has stepped aside and we follow our inner muse with a child...