“I bow not yet before the Iron Crown, Nor cast my own small golden sceptre down.”
J.R.R. Tolkien forged a beautiful word – "sub-creator". That’s how he described man, subcreators, “dis-graced but not dethroned”, we “keep[] the rags of lordship once [we] owned”. Humans will bandy arguments back-and-forth about ‘the essence of man’. Is it that we understand time? Well, elephants do. Is it that we’re social. Well, a lot of animals are, and even more social than we. Is it that we can learn? Well, orcas learn. It’s not tool use or even (though this is closer) language.
I think it was Chesterton who said that the Altamira and Lascaux cave paintings proved man was a different animal. We create new things. A tool using creature, like a crow, finds an object and uses it as a tool. The creature will take a stick and put it into an anthill to collect wriggling food. He won’t make a suction hose from a leaf or branch and use that as a straw. In other words, he might pick up a tool but he won't fashion one. If we ate ants, we'd fashion our straws.
By the way, and just in case you’re wondering, I have eaten ants (and yes, in a restaurant). They aren’t very tasty, like pepper.
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The Courtyard
When I was a boy, I was desperate to create. I wanted to be an inventor, and anything would (and did) do. My friends and I created snow forts. We built toy castles. We choreographed dance numbers, wrote haunted house scripts, designed games (both with pre-existing rules, thank you D&D, and without) and then played them. Somewhere along the way, I usually found an excuse to design an outlandish foreign kingdom like C.S. Lewis’s Boxen but with nary the detail.
I’m not telling you this to say ‘look how special I am’ but to say ‘look how normal I was.’
My wife tells our toddler a story almost every night (I’d say, ‘by request’, but more like ‘by demand’) where she and two sisters ‘brewed’ a ‘potion’ to try and calm their dog Sunshine down. Always angry, Sunshine was angrier than usual because she’d recently had puppies. As you can imagine throwing a ‘potion’ in the dog’s face ended very well. By “very well”, I mean my younger sister-in-law ended up with a dog attached to her kilikili (definition to come) by means of its jaws.
One of my first memories is telling my mom I wanted to write the sequel to Matilda. I dragged her up to the computer room and had her type it out for me. (By the way, it couldn’t have been a ‘first memory’, because we didn’t have a “computer room” until I was almost a teenager.) I remember writing many other stories, usually involving the Power Rangers, or the Ninja Turtles, or the X-Men. I remember I turned Rogue into “Invincealina”. (I’ll give you one guess what her power was.)
I loved cliffhanger endings. Until at least fourteen, I believed cliffhangers were appropriate even where an ending ought to be.
I used to walk down the street and hum made up tunes. I’d always try to put words to them but give up after a line or verse. When I got older I made a practice sword with foam and PCV pipe. I made a bow; it didn’t shoot. I once asked my mom how to mix gunpowder. Her sharp, “Why?” put an end to that investigation, except for a day skimming through The Anarchist's Cookbook too many months later for me to care about gunpower anymore.
I didn't understand her tone at the time, but I get it now. One takes notice when an angry teenage boy starts asking about gunpowder. Such questions take precedence over the rather more anodyne conclusion: that I just wanted to create something in the world.
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With Our Fathers
Our toddler now does this. She’s only two, so her field of action is limited, but, since she was a baby, I’ve made up songs for her and about her. Now she makes up songs for us and about us. Most of my songs are quite silly. I recently sang to the tune of “Pretty Woman” the “Kilikili” song. It went, “Kilikili, walking down the street/Kilikili, one I’d like to eat”, and then I’d gnaw on her somewhere near her shoulder and she’d laugh and laugh and laugh.
(For those who don’t know, which I bet will be most of you, “kilikili” means “armpit” in Tagalog.)
As I said, she’s started to do that now too. Her most recent joke is taking a song we all know, and… well… I’ll just transcribe it:
“Hark the herald angels sing
Glory to the newborn king.
Peace on Earth and glory DUCK!”
Then she’ll laugh and laugh and laugh.
She plays all the normal games. She dresses her dolls (well, mostly undresses them), makes tea and coffee and cookies and has us eat or drink them. She tries to play with the baby, and gets bored when baby doesn’t play back.
When she's demanding stories from us, she often demands from me “The Three Little Pigs”. (Seriously, I told that story every day in December and most of the days so far in January.) But she’ll also just ask me to tell her a story of any old thing. Her favorite story now is one I made up in response to her asking for “a skunk and a snake”. She was quite concerned with what a skunk would do if she got too near one. Speaking just for myself, while I do not generally like her fearing much, this fear I can stand.
The point is that as soon as we started telling her stories, she started telling stories to us, to us and all and sundry. She’ll walk around the house and pick up whatever’s lying about (which is a lot of stuff, let me tell you) and she’ll just start making up a story about it. Usually whether a brush or a cup or a banana or a babydoll, whatever she’s picked up can talk and walk and acts just like a person.
Again, this is all probably fairly typical. I’m not trying to talk about how special we are.
I am trying to explain how etiolated we become as we age. When school doesn't outright crush the desire to build in this world, it teaches students to react and never, ever act. School does this three ways: 1. by feeding students on bad stories, 2. by forcing them to choose from proscribed options, like fill-in-the-blank instead of answering with summary and subcreation, and 3. by starving students of the single best platform for learning available to humans – play.
Homeschool isn’t a play-for-all, or it ought not to be, but it needs to challenge the right skills at the right time. With such close attention as homeschool allows (not thirty children to one teacher), one can hear or read long “narrations” (spoken or written summaries) of what the student must read. Without having to keep thirty children on the same page, we can check if our one or two (or six, if we’ve been blessed with such proliferation) have truly understood whatever page they’re then on.
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Flowerbeds
The question is, like everything, one of place and proportion. Cliffhangers are very effective. The book (Red Rising) I review in this newsletter is a master of the chapter cliffhanger. But cliffhangers destroy a book if used where an ending ought to be. Classrooms and teacher are effective too, but not when the teacher has to corral a zoo. (Which is why, traditionally, primary education was informal with a relative, a tutor, or a local schoolmarm, while children only sat in our common lecture-style classrooms in secondary and then tertiary education.) Place and proportion – one could add ‘number’ to that.
This is how I feel about this week’s artwork. The artist is Auguste Rodin and the work is the Gates of Hell (La Porte de L'Enfer).
In all likelihood,neither name means much to you. Because The Gates of Hell is not a famous work (I mean like The Mona Lisa or Starry Night famous). The famous work is instead a single figure in that larger work, which Rodin recast far larger. We know him as The Thinker (Le Penseur) and here it is:
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Too famous to describe, I’ve always hated it. A certain self-indulgence seemed to cling to the work, as if the very fame of it oozes out as sloth and self-regard. ‘Look at how special we intellectuals are; let’s celebrate us more’, it seemed to say.
Then a friend showed me its context. I have come to love The Gates of Hell. Here that is:
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I feel no special sense of self-regard from this piece. This piece displays tranquility in the face of chaos, disorder, and temptation. This piece displays the human condition in all its glory and struggle, as does the work which inspired it (Dante's Inferno, of course). The Thinker, in his proper context, is a celebration and a testament.
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Hortus Proprius
As 2022 ended with epizeuxis, 2023 starts with its cousin diacope. Both are figures of repetition. As epizeuxis was the plain repetition of the same word back-to-back (or, if Poe, back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back), diacope is the repetition of the same word or words with one or more words stuck in between.
“Yet when I sawe my selfe to you was true, I loued my selfe, bycause my selfe loued you.”
(Puttenham, quoting Sir Walter Raleigh)
“Light, I say. Light!”
(Othello 1.1.145)
“Company, villainous company, hath been the spoil of me.”
(1 Henry IV 3.3.10)
“My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed.”
(Psalm 57)
"All lost! To prayers, to prayers! All lost!"
(Tempest 1.1.52)
Except you might notice that that last example is an epizeuxis sandwich, a diacope broken up by an epizeuxis. As we saw in our review of epizeuxis (HERE), this is as normal as it is effective. A particularly common combination is a word, followed by the same word, followed by a new word, followed by the same word again. One can debate whether that’s epizeuxis followed by diacope or whether the whole phrase is a diacope, but what one cannot debate is its effect:
“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”
“O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain.” (Hamlet)
“Dead, dead, all dead,
And my heart is a handful of dust.”
(Maud by Tennyson)
“Alone, alone, all all alone” (Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge)
“Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty we are free at last.”
(Originally from the Negro Spiritual “Free at Last”, but most famously used by Dr. King)
This works because diacope has more tricks than mere epizeuxis ever could. Which of course is what you get when you’re allowed to put two phrases, instead of just one, across in one Figure. Merely putting an adjective between can work:
“O Captain! My Captain!”
“From sea to shining sea.”
“Human, all too human.”
But perhaps the easiest way to employ diacope is to smush a name in the middle of whatever you want to say:
“Yeah, baby, yeah”
“I am dying, Egypt, dying.”
“Zed’s dead, baby, Zed’s dead.”
This is so effective, it shows up in places it’s never been. Two famous lines in Wizard of Oz are “Run, Toto, run” and “Fly, my pretties, fly”. Except the movie includes neither. Toto just runs from Dorothy’s interfering neighbor, and the witch (same actress) screams “fly, fly, fly, fly” without a “my pretties” in earshot.
A diacope which involved a name (and only a name) was meant to be boring but ended up being one of the most famous lines in cinema history. I’ll leave it to Mr. Forsyth to explain:
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“In 1962 cinema-goers were introduced to a new hero and a new Great Line. They met him for the first time in Le Cercle casino, but they weren’t allowed to see his face. Instead, the camera concentrated on a pretty woman in a red dress who is losing at baccarat. She loses and loses and loses until, finally, she says that she needs to borrow another thousand pounds. And now we hear the hero’s voice, off camera. He says, rather sarcastically, ‘I admire your courage, Miss . . .’
‘Trench,’ the lady replies tetchily. And then, seeing who’s asked the question and clearly finding him attractive, she adds her first name: ‘Sylvia Trench.’
Then she, clearly miffed, adds: ‘I admire your luck, Mr . . .’
The camera turns to the mysterious man; and he, still making fun of her and mimicking her rather silly introduction, says: ‘Bond. James Bond.’
It’s a tit-for-tat flirtation. The each imitate the other’s sentences, until inevitably she goes back to Bond’s flat, undresses and plays golf. It wasn’t meant to be a great line. Nonetheless, the American Film Institute rates it as the 22nd greatest line in all cinema (how they can be so precise, I don’t precisely know). Another poll had it as the best-loved one-liner in the history of film. This is, if you think about it, peculiar. The content of the line, for what it’s worth is . . . well. . . that he’s called James Bond. And James Bond is a boring, boring name. It was deliberately chosen to be tedious. Ian Fleming explained:
‘I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find, James Bond was much better than something more interesting, like “Peregrine Carruthers.” Exotic things would happen to and around him, but he would be a neutral figure—an anonymous, blunt instrument wielded by a government department.’
So just to recap, one of the greatest lines in the history of cinema is a man saying a name deliberately designed to be dull. The only possible explanation for the line’s popularity is the way it is phrased. Would the line have been remembered if he had said “My name is Mr. James Bond,” or “Bond, first name James,” or “Bond, but you can call me James,” or “James Bond”?
Wording, pure wording.”
(The Elements of Eloquence, “Chapter Twelve: Diacope” by Mark Forsyth)
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We’ve seen it work, but why does it work?
Well first we should see where it doesn’t work. Diacope does not have the ability to so easily form a verbal joke as does epizeuxis, and one cannot use it to make his characters seem as if they’ve lost their mind. (Well, okay, I'm sure one could. But that is not its especial use.) Particularly when combined with epizeuxis or when used in the beginning of a longer phrase, diacope catches our attention. It adds gravitas.
Diacope also pushes the reader forward unrestrainedly. By ending where we began, the reader's mind feels incapable of contesting whatever is presented to it. And yet, we've had a whole phrase in the middle there to slip whatever we wish across to him.
There are few figures with quite the power of this little one. As with ‘fly, my pretties, fly” or (as a former British Prime Minister never actually said) “Crisis? What crisis?", diacope will colonize where it has never actually been.
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A Bench Under the Trees
“Do Joy” by Stephen Kamm
This is a short and agonizingly sweet recollection of a day when the writer's wife and two elder children were away and he was at home with the two littlest gremlins, though I believe he called them “minions”. Nothing I can think to say would enhance this gem. Anything I might say could scratch it. Just go read, enjoy, and do joy.
“Mythopoeia” by J.R.R. Tolkien
Here is a copy of Tolkien’s poem to the still-an-Atheist C.S. Lewis about subcreation. It’s a beautiful encomium to the power of the word (and, when it comes to that, The Word) and the minds of men. I try to reread it yearly.
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The Ampitheter
We sing a lot in our family. My wife is quite good, though she knows few songs. I know many songs but sometimes struggle to keep in tune. This Irish Lullaby is one of our favorites, the song that puts baby to sleep most effectively. When she was quite new, I sang it so often our toddler started singing it to her dolls. The band Cherish the Ladies introduced me to the song through one of their Christmas albums, but here, imperishably, are The Clancy Brothers. Enjoy.
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"Battle of Dromore", played by The Clancy Brotheres
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The Hammock
Red Rising, Golden Son, and Morning Star by Pierce Brown
In my New Year's newsletter, I said Red Rising was hard to praise enough. That’s still true. I wouldn’t be placing it beside Pride and Prejudice or Paradise Lost anytime soon, but it sits comfortably by Ender’s Game and blows away Ready Player One.
In the far future, where humanity has colonized the whole solar system, Darrow is a Red living on Mars. Though he hails from the lowest caste in society, Darrow has one of its most important jobs. He's a Helldiver, a miner of the gas necessary for the terraforming of the planets.
The book is an action-heavy look at the beginnings of a rebellion against this caste system, where the premise is at least as old as Brave New World yet is executed deftly and sideways. Taking the moral certainty we would expect from a rebellion against an unjust system, the book spends the better part of its read-time systematically undermining the pat morality foreshadowed.
Two great virtues mark Red Rising. The first is that each character has agency. Allies, opponents, and enemies all act “in the living present” to fulfill their plans. One feels this while he’s reading not as a disinterested appreciation of craft but as a full-immersion in the story. Almost every chapters lands the reader in a different world from the one which began it because of specific actions taken by specific characters throughout that chapter.
The second virtue is concision in plot but not in phrasing. Brown writes with some of the langue de bois endemic to our age, but his plots and characters never give way to angst, never dwell. A self-reflective cancer has metastasized throughout contemporary fiction, a condition especially acute in genre fiction and YA lit. In Red Rising, Brown is having none of that. We get the longest stretch of omphaloskepsis at midpoint of the book, where Darrow, suffering in agony, thinks he's dying, and so the narrative spends two pages showing him agonizing over the decisions he's made and the pains he's taken which have landed him in his dire straits. Because there has been so little of it, these two pages feel like an eternity in hell, which makes the resolution all the sweeter.
Unfortunately, the verve slows in the later books. It's not that I disliked them or even that they were bad, merely that they become fun reading and not an experience.
Perhaps the most disappointing was when Morning Star opened with its entire first chapter dedicated to the type of angst once reserved for the most pressing moments of Red Rising. But instead of two pages within a larger narrative, this took up the thirty (no – I just checked – it was nine) pages at the very beginning of a new book. A third of the way through the chapter, I gave up and skipped to the next. I lost nothing.
I mean to have this one grievous example stand in place of a thousand minor ones. Overall, the plot started to creak, especially in the third book. The weaknesses had always been there, but they grew worse and there was no new paint to cover them. The turns became obvious, the conflicts more tenuous, the excitement less from Brown presenting a situation we cannot outthink and then showing Darrow or his friends outthink it than in Brown simply not telling us what Darrow had in mind and letting us enjoy Darrow’s plan go perfectly to plan.
There were other more obvious weaknesses, specifically in the writing and worldbuilding, which grew more awkward as the words piled up. To take a petty example, their administrative buildings were all squat squares of concrete. Not only is this brutalist style strange from a culture otherwise swimming in ornate gold, painting, wine, and dress, but it made one wonder why architecture hadn't changed its aesthetic in the 3,000 years from our world to Darrow’s.
The slang also grew more tinny. Both accent and language sat as a side-dish of the major plot in Red Rising but became a mere garnish by Morning Star. I can also tell you for bloody damn certain that by the bloody damn end of the bloody damn trilogy I was bloody damn sick of hearing the bloody damn characters say “bloody damn”.
Overall, while Red Rising is well worth a read even for those who have little interest in genre fiction, Golden Son and Morning Star are probably only for those who were, like I, carried aloft by Red Rising.
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Reviso Courtyard et Peroratio
If you haven’t figured it out by now (or, more likely, if you’ve forgotten), Invincalina’s power was being invincible, but she was also super strong, and she could fly, and she could shoot lasers from her eyes. Basically, she was Superman without the weakness to kryptonite.
I learnt a valuable lesson from creating her. Even (especially?) among my best friends, no one wanted to play when she was about, because she was abjectly boring to anyone but the one child with power fantasies. They’d have their toys ‘hide’ from her. Eventually, cribbing from Star Wars, I created a “Sarlacc pit” where we stuck her until just the end of the game, when our ‘heroes’ needed rescuing. And lo, she’d be there and they’d defeat the baddies, and we'd go play something else in celebration.
Like cliffhangers, like The Thinker, and like angst in our stories, her invincibility was only useful in context. Taken from that context, they become attractive only to the fanatics.
I must remember that that's how our Figures work too. (And likely I'll have to remind myself so often it'll be embarrassing.) The most luscious language most artfully arranged will not sit perfectly placed unless its form fits its function, whatever that function is.
Angst heightens tension, but there has to be tension for angst to work. It worked at the midpoint of the Red Rising, because around that moment the whole story turned. It failed in Morning Star because there was not yet tension on which it could work.
So let us have the wisdom in our art (and in our life) to know which function requires what form.
As always, please share this newsletter with anyone whom you think might like it. If you’ve come here without being a Scriptor, click HERE to sign up for the newsletter. If you’d like to read the back catalogue, click HERE. And if you’d like to share your thoughts with me, please do so. You can reach me below: on Twitter, through my website, or by email. You’d also be doing me a favor if you shared this edition of Hortus Scriptorius on any social media available to you.
Until next we meet, I remain your fellow
Scriptor horti scriptorii,
Judd Baroff
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