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Forged: A timeless way of living. A podcast about forging lives of discipline, delight, craft, and calling that carry enduring wisdom into modern life.
Greetings, folks. This is Brian Williams, host of Forged, a timeless way of living, a podcast about forging lives of discipline, delight, craft, and calling that draws the classical tradition into our contemporary times. We're recording this morning from my office in Templeton Hall on the campus of Eastern University in Saint David's, Pennsylvania, and I am delighted to be joined this morning in person by poet, priest, and professor, reverend doctor Malcolm Gyte. Greetings, Malcolm, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Nice to to be here, Brian. I very much enjoyed being part of the the celebrations of Templeton Honors twenty fifth and this new building.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you very much. Malcolm spoke at our twenty fifth anniversary on Saturday night and helped us celebrate Templeton Hall, the new home of the Templeton Honors College. Many of you will know Malcolm's poetry and prose already, but if you don't, you should. Malcolm has an MA from Cambridge, a PhD from Durham University, is an ordained priest in the Anglican Church, was chaplain of Girton College Cambridge for many years, and has a very popular YouTube channel followed by some 150,000 people, including very many of my students who were delighted to seek you out on Saturday when you showed up. Malcolm has many published works of poetry, including Sounding the 70 Sonnets for the Christian Year, The Singing Bowl, and After Prayer, which are all stacked here on my desk.
Speaker 1:He's written works on the intersection of theology, literature, and Christian imagination, most recently, I think, which is also here on my desk, Lifting the Imagination and the Kingdom of God. His main work right now is a retelling of the Arthurian cycle, which he'll tell us about in a little bit. Did I miss anything important there, Mark?
Speaker 2:I think that more or less covers the bases.
Speaker 1:All right. So Malcolm's poetry and his life really intersect with the four themes of our podcast, discipline, delight, craft, and calling, and I'm looking forward to our conversation. Malcolm, first things first, though, I'd like to get the big questions out of the way. Let's say you've spent a day writing, you've been working on the Thorian cycle, and it's been a satisfying day. You sit down at the end of the day and you pull out a glass and you're about to pour something into it, and I show up at your door.
Speaker 1:Now, may lock the door and turn off the lights. That would be a reasonable response. But what am I finding you pouring into that glass?
Speaker 2:Oh, right. Well, depending on what stage of the evening we're at, it might be a nice old brownish porter
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Ale. I like I like English beers. I like dark beers. So if I wanted something long and refreshing, it
Speaker 1:would be that. If it were a
Speaker 2:bit later and we might be about to settle down with our pipes, it would probably be an Islay malt.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So I love the smokiness in in in Islay malt. I'm a kind of like a Vuulan Laphroaig.
Speaker 1:That's a good that's a good answer.
Speaker 2:Odd bag kind of guy. And I, you know, I feel somebody once said when I bought them a very smoky Isla and we were lighting the pipes, he said, would you like some smoke with your smoke? That's exactly right.
Speaker 1:When I I'm I'm a I'm an isla Scotch guy as well, so logger hoola 16 is a pinnacle
Speaker 2:for me. It's an absolute so I tell you a wonderful experience a couple of years ago in May. There's a group of people I used to meet with at a thing called Kindlingsfest on Alcas Island. Then, of course, nothing could happen because of the plague. Right.
Speaker 2:And we said to each other, we'll meet on another island when when it's we're free to do And we chose the island of Islay for very
Speaker 1:obvious reasons. Yes. You did.
Speaker 2:So I had a week there in a farmhouse
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:Three or four friends. And what they asked me to do was read the first volume of the Althuria I'd allowed to them.
Speaker 1:Is that right?
Speaker 2:So it's great to have a live audience, some nice drinks. We would we we we visited all the distilleries. And I certainly, for one, felt there was some analogy between the long, slow distillation and the kind of aging of what we enjoyed in the day and the evening and the way I feel about the whole matter of Britain, the Arfuriate. This story that I've been steeped in since I was little and which our islands have been steeped in, and I'm trying to produce another distillation of it.
Speaker 1:Okay. So tell us a little bit about that. So I I I'd love to hear, like, when did you first encounter the Arthurian cycle? So you and I were talking yesterday over lunch, right before, you mentioned that your mother had told you the story of of Balan And
Speaker 2:and the and the Dolores blow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Dolores blow. But she she told you that at an early age.
Speaker 2:Very early age. So my mother I mean, the whole poetry side of my life comes from my mother. She had a vast reservoir of poetry, but also she was a great storyteller, Scottish woman. And her mother, my my grandmother on that side, was was a published poet.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Had written a cycle of poems about about the Celtic saints, about about Colm and and and Mungo, you know, Kent again and so on. So that comes down. Now, she I love these stories. She began to tell me when I was really quite a little boy, so it was seven or eight. She began to tell me stories of of Arthur and the knights at the round table.
Speaker 2:But she wasn't giving me some dumbed down or, you know
Speaker 1:Child version? Child version.
Speaker 2:And it certainly was a million miles away from any sort of Disneyfied version. So I remember I mean, and I now know, now that I go back to the medical sources myself. And when I began to read Malorie as an undergraduate at Cambridge, I suddenly realized that my mom wasn't just retelling. She was occasionally quoting from memory
Speaker 1:Oh, is that right?
Speaker 2:Of passages of Malorie. And I loved it when her speech suddenly had that ring of the early
Speaker 1:That that lilt. In it.
Speaker 2:So basically, one of the stories she told me, which is a foundational story, it's it's the backstory which gives the meaning to what Mhmm. We later get with Galahad and Co, the the the achievement of the grail Right. And the healing of the fish king. Because it's the story of the wounding of the king. And you and very quickly, to summarize it, I'm like, you can imagine me as little boy sitting on the edge.
Speaker 2:You know? That this there's this knight, Balin, whose brother is Balin, and they've got separated at a certain point.
Speaker 1:The the one brother is Balan, and
Speaker 2:one is Balin. Yeah. So it's Balin. Balin is the one who who about whom this adventure is told. And he's pursuing an invisible knight, you know, for whom he wants from whom he wants to exact vengeance for various bad things that the invisible knight has done.
Speaker 1:As one would do when you're invisible.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. But he finds himself in the mysterious castle of the Grail, and they're all supposed to give up their weapons. And the the king who is the keeper of the Grail, but nobody realizes this. You know?
Speaker 2:Everybody has to check their weapons in at the door, and there's something about the nature of hospitality going on there. There's something of an echo that we haven't got to it yet of a kind of sacred fellowship. And because he sees now visible the knight that he'd been That's right. Pursuing, he he has concealed a dagger. He attacks this guy.
Speaker 2:The dagger breaks. His sword breaks, and he flees pursued by king Peles or king Pelum Pelum according to which version you read, his host. And the my mother was telling me this, and I now read straight from so he goes from one part of the castle to the other. He's looking for a weapon, but he comes to a place which is clearly sacred, and he has voices saying, do not enter. And he goes into one room after another, and the voice is getting more intense and, you know, unholy man, do not enter.
Speaker 2:You know, you're unclean. And eventually, of course, he gets to the chapel of the grail. And he sees the grail veiled, and above the grail, he sees a spear Yeah. With drops of blood dripping down him towards the grail. And, again, you know, there are clear warnings that he is in the midst of the the sacred, and he ignores it all.
Speaker 2:He's a very rash man. He's being pursued. He needs a weapon. He seizes the spear. He turns around, and he wounds the king in the thigh.
Speaker 2:And as soon as he does that, that is the dollar of stroke. Suddenly, the whole all that part of the castle collapses. They're buried under the rubble for three days.
Speaker 1:And on the third day is laid waste
Speaker 2:too. That's what he discovered. On the third day, Merlin comes and magically removes the stone. He emerges, and Merlin tells him that he has done a completely sacrilegious thing, that he has struck the dollar a stroke, and then tells him what he might have guessed, that the spear he had seized is the spear of Longinus. It's the spear that wounded Christ.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And there's one sense I think that story is telling us when it was forbidden to use the the the spear that wounded Christ's heart should have been the last piece of violence ever done by one human being to another.
Speaker 1:It should have been the end of
Speaker 2:all the spears and swords because from that wound, forgiveness and renewal flowed. It's the one place where the chain of hate and revenge stops.
Speaker 1:That's right. That was the restoration. That should have been the moment of restoration. That's right.
Speaker 2:So he's taken this very thing and used it
Speaker 1:to That's right.
Speaker 2:You know? So then
Speaker 1:The thing that was supposed to end violence. He used it to do To do more violence. The violence.
Speaker 2:Which which at least in one I mean, these stories are continually suggestive of meaning and allegory. And one of them, I think, was to do with the weaponizing of the Christian faith, you know, frankly.
Speaker 1:Oh, fascinating.
Speaker 2:Anyway, let's let's we're doing the story. So then Merlin tells him that because of this, the king is wounded with a wound that will never heal until the good night comes, and we're not told about Stedgium. The good night will be. And that the whole land is all the land that was Pelham's land has been laid waste. And when I say laid waste, I mean, my mother was describing this to me.
Speaker 2:You know, you go to the river, the fish are all dead and floating on the surface. The crops are withered in the field. Nothing will grow again. Car cows will not carve. Women cannot bear children.
Speaker 2:And it's for three counties. So he has to ride through these three counties, and everybody knows
Speaker 1:It was him.
Speaker 2:That it was him. And they come to the doors of their houses and hovels and they curse him. And my mom is telling me this story. I'm I'm just still, you know, devastated. I'm saying, but mom, how could there ever be how could that even happen even in the imaginary world?
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:How could it be that one person's rashness, rashness, one person's impulsive Call
Speaker 1:causes such devastation.
Speaker 2:Causes such devastation. Right. And my mother looked at me. She was probably telling me this story, I would say, 66, 65 or 66. She looks at me and she says, I'm I'm partly telling you this story, Malcolm, because you and I live in such a world.
Speaker 2:I brought you into this wilderness. And she told me about the fear of a nuclear war and the threat of a nuclear winter. And she said, we can pray that it never comes, but this is the peril of the world we're in. But and this is really important. She said, Malcolm, I'm gonna let you stay up a little bit later.
Speaker 2:Can't leave you there. It's not the end of the story. And then she told me how the sword the balance balance sword was reset Mhmm. Put in the floating marble block by by Merlin, and that he said that this will come eventually to Camelot. And the good knight, who will be the king's grandson
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Will find the sword. And he will come on a great quest with the other grail knights, and he will somehow get through the wasteland. Mhmm. And he will come back to the Grail Castle, and he will achieve the Grail, and he will take the very spear that wounded the Fisher King, Pelham, and drops of the blood of the spear will fall into the king's wound and heal him. He'll be healed.
Speaker 2:When the king is healed, the wasteland will be healed. It will recover. And I was just now
Speaker 1:that's You're seven or eight.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm seven or eight. Now, lots of ways of interpreting that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. At
Speaker 2:first, I thought it was about nuclear. You know, it seemed to be Sure. Sure. Then as I grew up and became more concerned about environmental issues, that became what The Wasteland meant to me. But then as I grew up further and I really became aware of how badly we'd stepped aside from our deepest Christian and classical roots, and how we had ceased to think of the world as as alive with the meaning that God has given me as the other book.
Speaker 1:Charged with the grandkids of
Speaker 2:God to quench my own grace. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good fun.
Speaker 1:That's good. You could write that down and use it.
Speaker 2:There could be a poem in that. Yeah. And it will shine out like shaking foil.
Speaker 1:You Shining from shook foil. Yeah. Gathered to a great misbehaved even the ooze of oil. Yes. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh.
Speaker 2:So I
Speaker 1:should write this down.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I began to think about the dull, deadened way, the false the film of familiarity as Coleridge calls it, we put live in age, as itself a kind of wasteland. And there there needs to be a recovery and a removal of that. People talk about reenchantment, and I they would see me as part of that project. But I'm not phrase?
Speaker 2:Reenchantment? I have issues with the phrase Yeah. Because it suggests, a, that the world is actually disenchanted. Disenchanted. I don't think it is.
Speaker 2:That's right. Think I think we have to be undisenchanted. Mhmm. I think it's not in our power or even necessary to reenchant the world, but it is possible for us to remove the false pull Mhmm. And the kind of the kind of rack of the imminent frame that we've flattened
Speaker 1:the world So so, I mean, since we since we just went to Hopkins, and for those of you who don't know, we were riffing on God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and he starts by saying the world is charged with the grandeur of God shining flame
Speaker 2:out like
Speaker 1:shining from sugar foil. Then he says
Speaker 2:Why will men now not reckon
Speaker 1:with his rod, not reckon with his rule. Then he goes to this and says generations of rod have trod have trod, and all is bleared with trade. Smeared with oil. Where's man's smudge and shares man's smell? And then he has that line, nor can foot feel being shod, which is the separation of us from
Speaker 2:And of course, when he says when he says more nor can foot feel being shod, he's going back to Exodus. It's the moment of Moses turning to the lit bush. Moses, Moses, take off thy shoes from off thy feet for the place. We're always on holy grail.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Now the fathers referred to when when they read that symbolically, they said, what are what are
Speaker 1:what are the shoes that we have to take off?
Speaker 2:And the shoes are the things of our own making that shield us. Interesting. Us from being Sure. The frames we make Yep. That that that actually shield our tenderness.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And we have to be tender again Mhmm. To what is like the tenderness of the foot on the soil. So part of what poetry and the answer is for is precisely to take the shield
Speaker 1:And that's what Hopkins I mean, is is Hopkins I mean, it's interesting that you took that story of Balan and the the kind of wasteland in this direction, and then seems to be what Hopkins is concerned with. Not that the world is disenchanted, that we can Exactly. Exactly. There's a line in Mary Oliver's poem Messenger where she says, My work is loving the world, and then she has this line where she says, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Is this sense of learning to see the enchantment And
Speaker 2:Coleridge, when he's looking back in his biography literary, he's looking back at the astonishing year in which he and Wordsworth wrote the lyrical ballads. Right. And he's trying to get at what they were what they were aiming for. Yeah. And he doesn't say, oh, we were trying to privately subjectively decorate your interior to make up for the grimness of what's out
Speaker 1:there. Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 2:Which is what the histories of literature tell you romanticism is. He doesn't say that at
Speaker 1:all. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:He says our our aim was, and I'm quoting him directly now, to awaken the mind's attention and to remove the film of familiarity, which our selfishness and solicitude has cast over the world where from we have eyes that see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. So the poet awakens the mind, lifts the veil, removes the film, and restores to us the wonder and the freshness. And in the wonder and the freshness is a recovery of meaning. It's not just dead stuff for us to manipulate. It's charged with the grandeur.
Speaker 1:Or to impose our own meaning upon. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Great age of technology, you know, out here.
Speaker 1:You know?
Speaker 2:So so and in in writing that, of course, he was also reflecting on his own poem, Frost at Midnight Mhmm. Where he had written, in that it was written in that same miraculous year, that annus mirabilis. And he he he's thinking about his son growing up. Mhmm. And he'd he said he contrasts the way he was sent to rather grim boarding school in London.
Speaker 2:It's a bit of a lineage here. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a great tradition. It's great tradition. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We have to we all have the grim boarding house thing. Yeah. It was a great school I was at, but a grim boarding house.
Speaker 1:Anyway, neither it's hiding
Speaker 2:in all that. Coleridge says, I was in the great city pent and hurt, saw not lovely but the sky and stars. And then he says, but thou, my child, shall wander like a breeze by lakes and sandy shores beneath the crags of ancient mountains, which in mirror in their bulk, both and talks about the clouds above them. And then he says, so shalt thou see and hear. But he doesn't say as the philosophy and pseudoscience of his day and hours would have wanted him to say.
Speaker 2:He doesn't say, so thou so shalt thou see and hear certain geological and meteorological phenomena measurable in principle and certainly exploits
Speaker 1:Which you might manipulate to your own ends upon which you can impose your will.
Speaker 2:He says something difficult to
Speaker 1:get that. A remarkable book.
Speaker 2:Says, so shalt thou see and hear the lovely shapes and sounds intelligible of that eternal language which thy God utters, who doth teach himself in all and all things in himself. Great universal teacher, he shall mold thy spirit and by giving, make it ask. Amazing. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Mean It's amazing. I mean, it just reminds me again not to just go from poem to poem to poem, but this is something that poets are constantly trying to get us to attend to. I mean, even that E. E. Cummings poem, I Thank You God for Most of is a Deviant Day, at the end, right, he says, now the ears of my
Speaker 2:ears are awake
Speaker 1:and the eyes of my eyes are opened. Right? That sense of He
Speaker 2:and Coleridge, of course, both riffing on the biblical phrase, he that hath ears to hear.
Speaker 1:Let let him hear.
Speaker 2:Let him hear.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 2:You know? And so so that and he hath the eyes to see. Let him see. So and the whole the whole question about the problem of idolatry Mhmm. You know, you get in the Psalms, know, of the idol, it is said, you know, eyes they have that see not.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Ears they have that hear not. Hence, they have that handle not. And then the killer following line, those who make them shall be like unto them. If we dumb ourselves down, if we start by making clock, we could say, wow. We've made invented this cool self regulating mechanism.
Speaker 2:I bet the whole world is just like that. We remake the world in a clockwork image. Coleridge said, no. It's not a clock piece of clockwork. It's a poem.
Speaker 2:You know? Then then we make computers, and we go, oh, hardware, software.
Speaker 1:Amazing.
Speaker 2:Just like that.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Then we're gonna
Speaker 2:program and reprogram ourselves.
Speaker 1:And then technology becomes the ontology.
Speaker 2:We are diminishing ourselves.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And if we make something, it is by definition less than we are. And if we make ourselves over in the image of a thing we've made, we are dumbing down into an idol. That we are creatures, that we are made by a maker who is by definition, therefore, greater than us and transcends us, then that immediately opens up and deepens the possibilities of what it is to be human. And we begin to to have that wonderful prayer and occasion.
Speaker 1:Know? Patterning ourselves after the things we have made. Yeah. Exactly. We we pattern ourselves after the thing after which we were we were we were
Speaker 2:So so I think you know, and again, it's very helpfully summed up by Charles Taylor in this phrase, the imminent frame. Yeah. So what I when I finally came to write my Arthury ad Yeah. Which I'm still in the midst of, and I clearly, whole dollar stroke wasteland achievement of the grail recovery is at the heart of it. Another I'm not saying that there there aren't other ways of understanding the wasteland and an interior as but one understanding it for me was what we've done to the way we see the world Mhmm.
Speaker 2:This film. So I thought, you know, I mean, we we think this way we see the world now is normal.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:Reasons One of why you read old books is to discover that it's very abnormal.
Speaker 1:That's exactly right.
Speaker 2:So that's why so in my telling of it, I decided to imagine what it would be like for somebody pre Cartesian dualism, premodernism, somebody in the great ages of his somebody in in the middle ages, you know, an educated Christian seeking a courteous relationship with God's creation. Supposing they suddenly were plunged into our mode of consciousness, supposing they suddenly stopped Yeah. They would be they would be suicidal. They would they would say the land has been cursed. I'm in a wasteland.
Speaker 2:And when I have my so when my heroes go through the wasteland in order to finally get to achieve the grail, my idea is to shock my readers into realizing
Speaker 1:that the way that's us. He's walking through our wasteland.
Speaker 2:He's walking through our wasteland, and the way we see the world is fundamentally flawed and wrong.
Speaker 1:Now how do how do you, though, as somebody who obviously lives in the modern world, you know, is experiencing modernity, how has your imagination been shaped such that you can imagine what it's like to be that
Speaker 2:mediocre Christian?
Speaker 1:Because I think Lewis has that great line in his preface to Paradise Lost where he says, it's a lot easier to read to write about a bad person who's worse than us, but it's really hard to imagine somebody who's But better than us.
Speaker 2:That same book Preface to Paradise Lost, which I think is still the greatest piece of Milton criticism. Mhmm. And indeed, one of the it's a model of what good literary criticism should be and that it restores the text to you in its fullness.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:But telling that aside, in his chapter on paradise, you know, he has this extraordinary idea, which I found very helpful, that somehow inside us, as it were collectively, is a memory of the real paradise. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:That every garden is reminding us of Eden. That there's that we are in our exile. We remember that. We're on this journey, of course, from the garden to the city of God. But he takes what was then a literary cliche of of his day, which was to to to compare Milton to an organist where the organ he's playing is the English language.
Speaker 2:And they're saying, look. He creates this grand style, this grand organ music. And and Lewis does something much better. He says, okay. He is an organist, but the organ that he's playing is is us.
Speaker 2:Is He is drawing from us a music. Mhmm. And just as an organist can change the voice by pulling out a stop, he says Milton pulls out the paradisal stop in us. He must appear to describe paradise, but he's not asking us really to see what he's he's asking us to remember Eden.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. And he does this really
Speaker 2:close reading of how Milton does that. So that was very helpful to me because I thought, oh, poetry is my way of being liberated from the imminent frame. And then eventually, of course, I read Owen Barfield's poetic diction.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And I was pleased to discover that the great account of poetry in that in which he says what real poetry at the moment is poetry view means this I'm quoting Barfield now. He says, poetry, especially ancient poetry, pre modern poetry, brings about, and I'm quoting him now, a felt change of consciousness. Now, in fact in fact, Barfield had written a change of consciousness, and he was sharing the manuscript with Lewis. And Lewis said, no. Add the word felt.
Speaker 2:A felt change of consciousness.
Speaker 1:Why the difference? Why is that significant?
Speaker 2:I think it's an emphasis. It's a kind of underlining. Yeah. It's saying pay attention not only to what you're thinking but what you're feeling when this poetic moment happens. And that what that felt change of consciousness involves certainly for Barfield is when a metaphor restores a connection that's been split up.
Speaker 2:So just if we can go back to Milton for a minute. Yep. And if we can go from Milton to Romans. When I was thinking about the meaning of the dollar a stroke Mhmm. And the wasteland and then the recovery, I kept kind of ringing bells.
Speaker 2:And I have come to the view, partly helped by Charles Williams' Arthurian torso, that what happens in the baptized imaginations of the original romances who wrote in Cretien de Troyes and Yeah. Wolfram von Ischenberg and Geoffrey of Monmouth and eventually all that gathered in Mallory, that what is happening there is that they are telling a story which has all these pagan elements. Yep. It's got loads of Christian elements as well. But, you know, in Malory, you have a conversation between the druid and the archbishop of Canterbury.
Speaker 2:You know? Or, you know, you have an amazing the Green Knight shows up Yeah. Not in Malory, but in the separate Green Knight. Yep. But the Green Knight shows up at Christmas.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's the point. It's between Christmas and New Year's Day. It's within the twelve days of Christmas. So we have a Christian festival and a Green Knight.
Speaker 2:Now the view of of Frazier and and Jesse Weston and others was, oh, it's really a pagan story with a Christian glass.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:William's view is that it's a pagan story which has suddenly found its meaning in Christ. Right. That it's been waiting for the key, the missing chapter, and that as soon as you bring the Christian worldview in, suddenly all these stories make sense. Now no more so than in this arc of the Dolores blow, the Westland. Why?
Speaker 2:Well, going forward to Milton for a minute. Yeah. Milton is channeling a fully, both classical and Christian, understanding of the fall when finally, in book nine, he gets to, you know, what Genesis tells. And you're getting at a moment where Eve, so saying, in evil hour playing on Eve with rash hand, she so she reaches for the fruit. Right?
Speaker 2:She seizes the fruit. This is the moment of the fall. What's the first thing that Milton says? He doesn't say, so this particular individual woman had her own private peccadillo, but I'm sure she can have a personal relationship with Jesus, and it'll all be fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great.
Speaker 2:It's not what he says. Yeah. First thing he says as she pulls the fruit is this, earth felt the wound Mhmm. And nature, sighing out through all her works, gave sign that all was lost. That's the first thing.
Speaker 2:We were the keepers of the garden
Speaker 1:We were the representatives of creation.
Speaker 2:Then the ground is cursed on our behalf. Now Paul picks that up in me. You know, Paul picks up that same truth when he says that the nature was subjected creation was subjected to futility
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:In hope and waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. Now you you need the big span of the whole of scripture. But if there is to hand, perhaps a pre Christian story that about a king who when the king is hurt and wounded falsely, the land dies, and how if the king is healed, the land is healed. Maybe there was some pre Christian version of that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But somebody said, I know what gave the wound, and I know who brings the healing.
Speaker 1:And I know what that story is.
Speaker 2:I know what that story is.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:The spear that wounds him is not the spear of bronze. It's the spear of Longinus. Mhmm. And the the the blood that heals him is not the blood of some random sacrifice. It's the blood of Christ.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the place where the both the sacrifice and the healing, both the crucifixion
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the resurrection, the place where they are both present is the holy Eucharist, is is the the the sign of
Speaker 1:the bread. It's it's if you have a a stained glass window that's been shattered, right, and the shards are scattered across the church floor. Yeah. You're able to pick up any one of those shards and kind of enjoy it and marvel at the color of it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But then it's it's when the the craftsman comes along and restores it and you see how they all fit together.
Speaker 2:How they all fit back together.
Speaker 1:Or a tapestry that's been unwoven and you've strands and you have the all mean, that's kind of Lewis' idea. You've got your strands all over and then to weave them back together.
Speaker 2:And he's got a great I mean, one of the things that influenced me in my influences my whole views. There's an essay of of Lewis', which I think is one of his very best, called the grand miracle. And it what he does is he's talking about the whole Christ event from incarnation through death, resurrection, and ascension, where he calls it the missing chapter. So he says, if there was a great novel, wonderful, you know, people loved it, but they knew that there was a missing chapter. Pop people had tried to write the missing chapter.
Speaker 2:If somebody claimed that they had the missing chapter, if they'd found it, what you would have to do is put it into its place in the novel and then reread the entire novel
Speaker 1:Oh, right.
Speaker 2:In light of the missing chapter and see if it made sense. And he says the Christ event is the missing chapter. Once you put that in, everything before and after makes sense.
Speaker 1:And this was the this is what the early church fathers like Clement and Saint Augustine and Origen were doing with the Greco Roman tradition, it seems like.
Speaker 2:Totally. Oh, yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:Mean, they they received the Greco Roman tradition, and they think, what do we do with this
Speaker 2:And then not only
Speaker 1:a the what do they do Exactly. That is the great second. We can make sense of this because of the Christian
Speaker 2:truth. And I think, therefore, the tradition arose. This is certainly something you you find in some of the fathers. I mean, frankly, you see this in the gospels. I mean, John's gospel is clearly doing something with the Greek tradition of August.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Here's the logo. I can name the logo.
Speaker 2:Heraclitus was nearly right, but not quite.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's that's right. I mean, it's it's Paul in Acts 17 saying, oh, you've got an you've got an altar to an unknown god.
Speaker 2:You whom you worship is unknown.
Speaker 1:I can name that god for you.
Speaker 2:But of course, to be fair on on that reading, I love that, of course, the unknown. That's what I'm doing in my in my but once he said, him you worship as unknown, him I preach, he also then says some stuff is gonna have to change.
Speaker 1:He says But that's true.
Speaker 2:The God, you know, the God who meets you does not live in statues.
Speaker 1:Well, then he see he talks about the resurrection, and they all think he's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. We can't
Speaker 2:But then he carries on there for three years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's
Speaker 2:right. And then supposedly this guy called Dionysus, interestingly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's
Speaker 2:right. Dionysus the Areopagite who you know? I mean Yeah. Then there's a tribute to him. I think it's some centuries later.
Speaker 1:It was.
Speaker 2:Come these these these great mystical writings,
Speaker 1:you know,
Speaker 2:from the divine
Speaker 1:So here here's a question, Malcolm. I mean, because many of our listeners will have families, they won't be quite as steeped in in the poetic tradition as you are, obviously. So let me ask let me come back to your mom. So why not just tell you why not just tell little Malcolm, hey. The world's a hard place, and people make bad decisions, those have bad effects on, you know, the world and and the way and who we are.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Why why couch it in in story that then you, little Malcolm, have to interpret or
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or have Then a life well, okay. I
Speaker 1:think Right. So why story?
Speaker 2:Why Okay. Well, my mother would know, and she she was one of the writers I also inherited from my mother was George MacDonald.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:So we she read The Golden Key, The Princess, and The Goblin. Now, right at the heart of MacDonald's vision, in fact, the heart of what the kind of writing which the inklings called mythopoetic writing, is the conviction that stories at the deepest level, the great stories, are older and wiser than we are. They know more stuff than any storyteller at any one moment can consciously know.
Speaker 1:Alright. Just state that again because I think that's worth hearing again. The the the ancient stories,
Speaker 2:the old stories. The old stories, the ones that are written at this mythic resonant level, and obviously, very especially the ones we find in the scripture. Yeah. You know? They're older and wiser than we are.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They contain and can give out and generate knowledge when it's needed in the time it's needed. They know more than we do. They know more than any individual story teller retelling that story.
Speaker 1:Well, and the beautiful thing too, they have more wisdom. Their their wisdom is is plenitude. It's multitude because Yeah. Every generation can come back to the story, and maybe there's one element of the story that that our generation needs. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Next generation needs a bit of wisdom in another part of
Speaker 2:the story. Exactly. That's why I say at the end of my my prelude to the poem, I say well, I have a little prelude which begins take up the tail. You know? That's right.
Speaker 2:Telling me to take up the tail. And at the end of the little prelude, I say, so I have taken up the tail to tell it full and free. The tale that makes my heart rejoice. I tell it for I have no choice. I tell it till another voice takes up the tail from me.
Speaker 2:So I'm passing it on. The whole thing's about it. So, yeah, the poem there's an interesting example of the way this works, not just in the great myths,
Speaker 1:but Yep.
Speaker 2:When we're dealing with writers like MacDonald and Tolkien. So when when Lord of the Rings was finally published
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Obviously, for a long time, Lewis had been as Tolkien said, my only reading. Lewis knew it. He knew it. He says rather disingenuinely that this poem comes like lightning from a blue sky. Wasn't a blue sky fame?
Speaker 2:Yeah. But anyway
Speaker 1:Lightning that lasted for decades, isn't it? Yeah. Right.
Speaker 2:When he's talking about the Lord of the Rings, he says he says, this book is not allegory. It's not that the author has thought of something, coded it, and then decoded it. And yet, he says, it is continuously suggestive of incipient allegory.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's beautiful.
Speaker 2:That that that's Lewis' exact phrase. Now Lewis and Tolkien enjoyed a correspondence about this where when it came out it came
Speaker 1:out in the fifties. Right? That's right.
Speaker 2:Now the it's just as well that Lewis said it's not allegory because a lot of people, a lot of the first reviewers thought that the entire idea of the ring, the enemy's ring, we can't use it. It's soup. Well, the the whole thing was an allegory of the problem of nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1:Right. The atomic bomb was the ring, etcetera. Right.
Speaker 2:Now, of course, Lewis and Tolkien had a good laugh over their beer in the eagle eagle child because they both knew that the concept of the whole plot had been in Tolkien's mind before
Speaker 1:Well, well before. That's right. Right.
Speaker 2:Actually, that is an it wasn't people were not wrong.
Speaker 1:No. That's right.
Speaker 2:To you to realize that that story helped them to think about To
Speaker 1:interpret the atomic and nuclear warfare through that story. Right? Not to dismantle that story and say, oh, it's a thinly veiled
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. No. It's a thinly veiled critique. It's a no.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:We can use the story
Speaker 1:through it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But also that story gives us the kind of wisdom that might lead us to make wiser choices in precisely this area. So now when I think about it, I'm I'm working on it's on the kind of back burner of my thing, but I'd like to write a book at some time called the Inklings Fantasists or Prophets, where I critique the criticism of them in the by their contemporaries that they were nostalgic
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Neoromantic, you know, wishing they were in some sort of, you know, William Morrissey Middle Ages,
Speaker 1:you know,
Speaker 2:blowing the froth of their beer in taverns, you know. But they've got nothing to do with the main thrust of, you know, Freud or Marx on each other. Yeah. As though they were ignorant, which they weren't. So I want to make the case that far from this, they actually made stories which are the very stories we need to make wise choices now.
Speaker 2:Now when I'm doing that, the one looking at the the legendary and particularly the Lord of the Rings again
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I suddenly realized his if you like, It's not allegorical, but in my view, it's prophetic. We live in an age of mass consumption. We live in an age where we are, as somebody said, consuming ourselves to death. What Tolkien gives us is an epic of renunciation. Now if you look at all the treasure quest stories of all the cultures and civilizations, most of which Tolkien knew and several of which he'd read in the original languages, they are all quests of acquisition.
Speaker 2:Jason goes off to get the golden fleece and bring it back. Some, you know, Hercules goes off to the Garden Of The Hesperides too. It's all about acquiring stuff
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:And bringing the treasure home. Tolkien says, no. What we need now is a great epic of letting go.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's amazing, Especially because in because in our current moment, we have reduced ourselves to producers and consumers. Right? And so schooling is about getting a job to get money so you can consume things and produce things.
Speaker 2:It's sometimes so direct. You know, when God says stop possessing it, and it will cease to possess you. He could be telling us that
Speaker 1:about our iPhones and our cars as much as he can do.
Speaker 2:Do know
Speaker 1:what I mean? Is this what your mom was trying to get at? Mean, because I
Speaker 2:So my mom was trying to why was she telling you this story? My from mom from George MacDonald to trust stories Yeah. And to trust children with stories. Yeah. And she never explained.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, my parents never did me the disservice after reading Narnia.
Speaker 1:To unpack it, explain
Speaker 2:it. Oh, god.
Speaker 1:You know, one of my favorite one of my favorite Christian humanists was Philip Melenchon in the sixteenth century. So Luther's right hand man, but really for me, the patron saint of classical education and Christian liberal arts education. And he has a great piece on fables. And he says, why fables and why Aesop and why do we read these? And he says, these leave spines in the mind for the young, helping them to feel pleasure and pain at the right things.
Speaker 1:Riffing on Aristotle. Exactly. And that seems there's something there like It had like tutoring our feelings to feel pleasure and pain
Speaker 2:at the right things. Right?
Speaker 1:That's what the story does.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That is now, the other my mother gave me the story because she both trusted the story Yeah. And she trusted me to grow with the story. With the story. I mean, my mom recited me the rhyme of the ancient mariner many times when I so much so that I remember I I when I finally was going to a school with actual other kids there, you know, I was about six or seven.
Speaker 2:I was saying, you know that thing when your mom recites the rhyme of
Speaker 1:the h and
Speaker 2:rhyme of the gate? Do you like that? And it's, I love it. Know? And he's like, what?
Speaker 2:You know? I just didn't know that other
Speaker 1:people's moms shouldn't do that. So
Speaker 2:but then, you know, years later, 2017, I finally produced a book I've thought about. I'll get on sort of 450 page just about The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. I send it to my mom who's 97 Yeah. By then. By the time I go up to see her in Scotland, she's read it and underlined it.
Speaker 2:She's talking about it. Yeah. But she started
Speaker 1:that
Speaker 2:by
Speaker 1:reciting the poem. Yeah. Yeah. That's
Speaker 2:great. So now there's another thing here which I think is important about the nature of story. To tell story well involves imagination. Both the imagination of the teller and the imagination of the hero, which is kindled. And I am convinced that the imagination is at least potentially as much a truth bearing faculty as the reason.
Speaker 1:Okay. What do you mean what do you mean?
Speaker 2:It's not that we don't we need both. We have two eyes. Yep. I mean, Lewis Lewis Lewis put it very brilliantly when he said in his weirdly titled essay, Blue Spells and Flow and Spheres. He said, reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And and MacDonald has his his amazing
Speaker 2:He's a great essay on imagination.
Speaker 1:Imagination is Both of them to me, and we don't need to go into this too much, but both of them anticipate Ian McGilchrist's work.
Speaker 2:Oh, totally. Yeah. They do.
Speaker 1:The way the They do.
Speaker 2:And write him as he is.
Speaker 1:I wanted to write him and say, hey. Have you read this as a iMacdonald? No. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 2:you you'll be glad to know. I've talked to him personally about that.
Speaker 1:Okay. So Malcolm and I were both at Yale, I don't know, a year ago presenting papers on George McDonald, and I was doing things on his McDonald's teacher, Scott, and I was reading McGilchrist at the same time, and I was digging into the imagination on education.
Speaker 2:And Scott are getting a lot of this stuff from Coleridge.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:So he, you know, he's essential. Mcgill Christ,
Speaker 1:it seems like, is doing the kind of neuroscience that backs Oh, up he is totally. Yeah. What they were already writing about. We to. Was hoping
Speaker 2:to say this to Mcgill
Speaker 1:Christ. Okay. Did he know the imagination essay by McDonough?
Speaker 2:Yes. He was aware of McDonough, but I think not for that long.
Speaker 1:Not for okay. Fine. Fine.
Speaker 2:But he came to a lot of his thought without that.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:But he was aware of Coleridge, and in a sense, a lot of the imagination essay draws on things that are in Coleridge. Just go back to what Coleridge is doing with the imagination. Why one make the case make the case that imagination
Speaker 1:It's a truth bearing a truth bearing. At a faculty. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's an interesting point where in the Biographia Literaria, he calls imagination the sacred power of self intuition. And it's that you can apprehend or intuit something. He riffs, as I do, on Shakespeare's imagination apprehends more than cool reason ever comprehends.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So there's something they're both ways of knowing. So Coleridge uses a really interesting analogy or metaphor. He says, when you look at the he's sort of the involucrum. That's the the cocoon, as he calls it. He says, hornet fly, when it's in the pupa stage, makes then this this this involucrum, this and it leaves room in it for antennae yet to come.
Speaker 2:So this little squidgy thing doesn't know what
Speaker 1:it's gonna become.
Speaker 2:Something in it intuits, and it says, I'm gonna have these these antennae, which is how I will come to know the world. And I need to hold open the shape Okay.
Speaker 1:Of for this thing.
Speaker 2:Space for this thing to grow in.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And then he turns around and says, that's what the artistic imagination does. It gets there a bit before we do.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:And it gives us the shape and the space into which our knowledge will one day grow. And in fact, there's loads of examples of that in Coleridge's own life. So there's loads of Christian truth in the ancient mariner, which he wrote at the time when he was drifting away from formal Christianity. And then when he wrote the poem I quoted about the lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Yeah. It was much later in his philosophical lectures that he worked out the actual philosophy of this and why it is that the world is more
Speaker 1:like And this is this is why I'm an author, and you can testify this yourself. Like, authors don't always know the full extent of what they're writing. No. Right? I mean, Lewis says this too.
Speaker 2:Lewis so Lewis, of course, says says you know, you could sum up surprised by joy by saying he's basically saying, I suppose in a way my imagination was baptized before I was.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:That's right. Of me took a little bit longer. Follow-up. But the other thing I was able to tell my girlfriends, by way, there's an amazing bit in in in surprised by joy where he says he's talking about his state as officially an atheist, but whose guilty pleasure is reading loads of loads of resonant myths, which are all about death and resurrection. But he says, and I'm quoting, I think, directly here, the two hemispheres of my mind
Speaker 1:Oh, is that right?
Speaker 2:Were in the sharpest contrast. On the one hand, a melly islanded sea of myth and poetry. On the other, a glib and shallow rationalism. Nearly all I loved, I felt to be unreal. Nearly all I believed to be real, I thought grim and meaningless.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. That
Speaker 1:is That's
Speaker 2:absolutely when I read that tweet by Gilchristy.
Speaker 1:That's great. That's great. Malcolm, a couple couple questions here. One, before connected to this, I wanna have you read a poem and then and then just reflect on it, one of your own poems, then I wanna have you read another poem by another poet and have you reflect on it too. But for our listeners who are thinking, okay, I can't just tell my kids the story of Balan and a Doloristro because I don't necessarily know it, but they wanna put good things in their children's hands.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:I mean, would you happen to start with the stories of George McDonald? What what would you say
Speaker 2:I would say I would say George, you can get a you can get a nice I guess, a penguin anthology of the fairy stories of George McDonald. It's great.
Speaker 1:The Golden Key, The Light Princess, Pencilsurge.
Speaker 2:But the princess and gob the goblin and the
Speaker 1:princess goblin. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Are great. Obviously, Lewis. I mean, the the Narnia is amazing.
Speaker 1:That's what I grew up on.
Speaker 2:The Hobbit is a good place to start, obviously, with younger kids, and then they'll go on to read the Lord of the Rings themselves. And I think, you know, actually, the great fairy stories are and all those guys, you know, Lewis and Mun, cut their teeth on the Andrew Lang fairy books.
Speaker 1:Yes. That's right.
Speaker 2:The yellow fairy book. Know, those are probably still Mhmm. Available.
Speaker 1:Are there are there is there an is there an author or a book that you've come across that maybe is not in our kind of like immediate chanting. That?
Speaker 2:Because we
Speaker 1:think of those
Speaker 2:guys immediately. So, yeah. I think there are some really good children's writers of certainly the sixties and seventies who are they're not Christians. Right? They're not Christian literature, but they're writing at a deep level and making stories available in a way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That and they're very, very good the imagination. So Alan Garner would be one
Speaker 1:of them. Okay.
Speaker 2:Still alive.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:There's a pair of books, The Moon of Gomrath and The Weird Stone of Brazilian Man. There's one called Elidor.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:There's a rather darker one about The Owl Service. I might be a bit cautious on The Owl service. Okay. Moon of Gone, Ralph, Wedge Center, Brisbane Garmin.
Speaker 1:Another one that comes to mind, my my daughter for Halloween, she's 10. She dressed up as Meg Murray from Wrinkle and Tiny by Madeline.
Speaker 2:Madeline Langley.
Speaker 1:That was a huge story for me. That was a huge story
Speaker 2:for me as well. Okay.
Speaker 1:And that was Meg Murray's awkwardness. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And Charles Wallace being special and different.
Speaker 1:All all of those affirmed me as a kid.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. So she is great. And in fact, that's one now of a series of four.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's right. And the other one that I think of Ursula Le Guin.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Was gonna be s c. Right. Where she's in terms of her doctrine searches is, she's essentially a Jungian. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But like almost everybody else we've mentioned, she gets her chops from George McDonald. Yeah. So Wizard of Earthsea is a great book. And the key moment is when Ged, the hero, I don't want you to pronounce this. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Foolishly and rashly and disobeying a clear rule from somebody who is older than wiser him, says a spell which unleashes his own shadow into the world. Now that is totally ripped off from fantastic stories.
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely. Do know what mean? But in a beautiful way.
Speaker 2:But in a beautiful way.
Speaker 1:That's fine. Can steal
Speaker 2:steal from the best.
Speaker 1:That's exactly right.
Speaker 2:And there are many now the other person who's writing, somebody once told me they've been at dinner with with Rowan Williams, and they were celebrating all the authors we've just mentioned. And Okay. So he's they asked Rowan whose word who's writing at that level now. Yeah. Without hesitation, he said Susanna Clarke.
Speaker 1:Oh, is that right?
Speaker 2:And I agree. Now Susanna Clarke is not really a children's writer, so we're we're out of that question. But Jonathan Strange and mister Norrell's in extraordinary
Speaker 1:If you haven't read that, it's it's a it's a huge piece of work, listeners, but Jonathan's trained in this Yeah. By Susanna.
Speaker 2:But then now if you don't wanna go I mean, she has written talking about parables
Speaker 1:or fables. Piranesi. Piranesi. Recent one.
Speaker 2:So Piranesi is is is a book you have to read again as soon as you read
Speaker 1:it because you won't That's right. I often tell my students, when you finish a book, you're ready to read the book. When it's
Speaker 2:something Yeah. So she's a very gifted writer. Very much so. Somebody with very much a baptized imagination. And she yeah.
Speaker 2:I I I came to know her. She came to my my my church for a while, so we we know each other fairly well.
Speaker 1:I think she wrote the introduction, maybe.
Speaker 2:She's written
Speaker 1:the Your first volume of
Speaker 2:the first of the Arthurian. So I was anyway, I gave a series of lectures in Cambridge on the inklings, including Owen Barfield at some depth and Owen Barfield's idea, you know, broadly of the evolution of consciousness. But Barfield thinks that in an earlier time, we had what he calls original participation, that the reason why the Greeks had the same word for wind and breath and spirit was that they experienced the same. Then he thinks he doesn't think this is necessarily a bad thing that we individuate out. We become the separate self.
Speaker 2:We see the world to some degree. We create the subjective and the objective, and then that gets on steroids when Descartes comes along and
Speaker 1:says it.
Speaker 2:But he says that is maybe a phase we need in order to become separate responsible persons with an individual conscience. Yep. But we then need to reparticipate. We need what he think thinks is final participation. And for Barfield
Speaker 1:Kind of remembering.
Speaker 2:For Barfield, the incarnation of the logos into Christ and the spirit coming over over Mary on is the sign of all the consciousness out there as it were being in in us as human beings. And then the the sending of the spirit at Pentecost and Christ breathing is a way of saying, now we have to re spiritual. We despiritualized everything in order to be separate persons. Right. But now anyway, that's a bigger so but he has a series of contrast illustrated mainly from classical poetry between the way they saw the world and the way the bible sees the world as opposed to the way we do.
Speaker 2:And he uses the word participation. Anyway, I summed up a lot of that in this lecture and I'd also discussed anyway, she she's kindly said in, you know, some interviews that I don't want do any plot spoilers on Piranesi. Yeah. But the the narrator, Piranesi, is in this wonderful house Yep. Which has so big it has seas and tides.
Speaker 2:That's right. And he says, I am a child of the house. He can't find other living human, but he knows he's a child of the house. And she totally knows all of this. She says, you know, Yeah.
Speaker 2:Understands all of that. And she's said to that her exploration of Piranesi's relationship with the house is an attempt to imagine Barfield's original
Speaker 1:Oh, is that right? Now that's it.
Speaker 2:And that the the other, again, no, but the other who goes around at one point with a smart fare is us as we are now.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Listeners, if you haven't read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, you're in you're in for a a real treat.
Speaker 2:So, I mean, I'm interested in I mean, in a sense, what I'm trying to do Yeah. With The Waste of the Land and the Achievement of the Grail in my first volume of Merlin's Isle is another way of thinking about these same Yeah. These same issues. Yeah. But it's not, absolutely not, that I think of these issues and then I pick a random story and
Speaker 1:dump them on.
Speaker 2:It is precisely the story that's made me think about these issues.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Which is why which is why story frames your imagination and the way you you engage the world and understand the world. I mean, for me, I'm gonna have you read one of your poems here and then reflect on it briefly. But this was you know?
Speaker 1:I mean, I think all those early stories of the Greeks and Romans did it for me. Narnia did it. Tolkien did it. But then, of course, for
Speaker 2:me Yeah. They should have definitely is is the retellings of the the the Greek myths and Yeah. Roger Lancelin Greene, who's kind of an inkling
Speaker 1:and a
Speaker 2:friend of Lewis, he's a great reteller. I have to say, actually, though I hope adults would I've written my Our Fury ad in a kind of ringing, swinging ballad form, And I very much see it as a story that people parents can read to their kids.
Speaker 1:Oh, when it comes out I preordered my copy today. When it comes out in March, I'm reading it to my 10 year old daughter. Yeah. And we're gonna that's what we're
Speaker 2:gonna it up. Well, I've got a proper heroine for her.
Speaker 1:Oh, do you? Oh, good. Good.
Speaker 2:Good. Good. Dandre.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. Good. Good. Good.
Speaker 2:My story. She gets bit parts in Mallory, but when you put all the bits together, you realize she's a substantial character. Character.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:I have a whole bit called the quest of fair Dandre, which is the
Speaker 1:Okay. All right. All right.
Speaker 2:Girl who doesn't
Speaker 1:need Beautiful. Beautiful. She'll she'll need that. And then, of course, it leads up to when your readers are more mature for me. You know, I spent twenty years teaching Dante's comedy, and for me in my life, there's a before and after, you know, the first time I read that.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. And I absolutely baptized my imagination in such a profound way. Hey, could I get you to read
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:A poem that I love in the Honors College, Proverbs eight about the wisdom as the workman alongside God is is one of our patron passages.
Speaker 2:Oh, great.
Speaker 1:And I'd love you to to to read this poem, Oh,
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. This is one of the advent antiphons, which is a prayer of the seventh well, there was an antiphon, which is the prayer of the sixth or seventh century, which is riffing on on Proverbs eight Right. As well.
Speaker 1:That's
Speaker 2:right. So the the original prayer, just to let you know that I'm responding to Yeah. Is, oh, wisdom, Sapiens said. Yeah. Coming forth from the mouth of the most high, reaching from one end to the other mightily and sweetly ordering all things so good.
Speaker 2:The mightily is fortitude. It's wonderful. Vainy, come and teach us the way of prudence. So here's the poem, O Sapiensia. I cannot think unless I have been thought, nor can I speak unless I have been spoken?
Speaker 2:I cannot teach except as I am taught or break the bread except as I am broken. O mind, behind the mind through which I seek. O light within the light by which I see. O word beneath the words with which I speak. O founding unfound wisdom finding me.
Speaker 2:O sounding song whose depth is sounding me. O memory of time reminding me. My ground of being always grounding me. My maker's bounding line defining me. Come, hidden wisdom.
Speaker 2:Come with all you bring. Come to me now, disguised as everything.
Speaker 1:Thank you. That's beautiful. Disguised as everything. And that stands behind, I think, our whole conversation. All these poets.
Speaker 1:Right? It's it's disguised God disguised as everything. Wisdom disguised as everything and picking up Yeah. Pieces and shards and threads of
Speaker 2:Just teaching yourself together. And
Speaker 1:poets teaching us and attuning us and sensitizing us to that wisdom.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That is embedded in everything. Well, thank you so much. Malcolm Guy, very grateful for your time, grateful for all your work, for the conversation, and very much looking forward to the authoriod cycle, which the first volume, I think, comes out in March '26.
Speaker 2:In March.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So we'll we'll close here. This has been Brian Williams, host of Forged, a timeless way of living, a podcast about forging lives of discipline, delight, craftsmanship, and calling. And so with that, I will leave you until next time, and thank you once again to Malcolm Guite.
Speaker 2:Thank you, and goodbye.