One of my projects last semester was to do historical research on a period of Presbyterian history and present it in some form, be it a research paper, a time line, or something else. Starving for some literary time, I decided the obvious choice was to again dabble in the realm of drama. The result was Consumed by Flame. I've mentioned it a bit before, but here are the gory details.

The drama takes place in 1540s Scotland, at the beginning of the Scottish Reformation. The particular inciting incident is the arrest of George Wishart, the Protestant Reformer, by his adversary, David Cardinal Beaton. It is a very interesting piece of history not just for the showdown between them, but for its lasting and serious aftershocks. To what extent did these events bring about the good of the Reformation and to what extent the bad? To what extent did it shape the negative events of later Scottish religious history? The play tries to engage with some of these questions at their root.

From a formal standpoint, the play follows the classic five act structure favored by Shakespeare. It is almost entirely a prose play, however, unlike many of Shakespeare's works. Besides the Bard, the style of the play was influenced primarily by Aeschylus and Marlowe. Of course, I do not claim to emulate any of these greats well, I merely note where I got the inspiration. Weighing in somewhere between Kit Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice in length, I estimate a performance time of approximately two hours, if it were put on stage. I like playing with darkness and light, and, weaving a story that peers into the psyche, and this play follows on those themes, though not as much, perhaps, as Deafening Silence did.

Well, if this has piqued your interested at all, and you would like to take a gander at the script, please let me know. I am looking for some comments on what works and what does not in the play. If nothing else, you'll get all of the footnotes and the works cited page, which will give you some nice material to go on, should you desire to do some historical research.

LXXIII. How a moment past
Once simple seemed, transformed now
To something precious.

LXXIV. Time’s cruel wings beat on,
A steady drone unceasing,
As I glance backward.

LXXV. Speak, dear friend, a word,
Ambrosia is a voice heard,
After too long a pause.

LXX. Oh Divine wisdom
Pour upon my wearied soul,
Lead me in this time.

LXXI. Foolish as I am,
For the want of a current,
I lost the trickle.

LXXII. Uncaring winds about,
They heed not now nor ever,
The broken and lost.

LXVII. Odd night of fading past,
Yesterday, and now three years,
Trickle to a flood.

LXVIII. A new reminder,
That October into May.
Came unthought today.

LXVIX. The silence denotes
The long past sorrows of Time,
Never glancing back.

Oh, blood red moon, what fates do you observe,
And behind your cloudy curtain dare to speak?
Illumined now, illumine those who seek!
Your words — strike would they a tender nerve?
No, I do not ask about some famous quest,
Of tragic heroes or of noble paths —
No journey here, and no fate deeméd deaths —
A simple matter really, my only test,
The tragical matter is naught but this:
The suffering of the ordinary fate,
Too plain to be marked by one or all,
No matter of lost Troy, fall’n unto abyss,
But of a worm placed on a hook as bait,
Before his life was spent or fulfilled his call.

My reflection stares back at me in the glass,
A green bug and a moth sit on the pane,
My thoughts run wild and wonder what I’ve done,
The thoughts and things that I have left unsaid.
O Moth, what thoughts run in your head tonight,
You silent winged creature in dim twilight?
Unlock the stories that remain untold
In the unblinking eyes of the reflected man
Who looks about the darkened window pane.
Do you know where you’ll go in the morrow?
What insight can you give of the reflected’s fate?
What grieves the eyes that look back in the glass?
As you flutter, impart some wisdom now.
Do you know the balance of time you borrow?

So, I had a poetic breakthrough today. I’ve been fiddling with a 44 line poem since last fall. I’d work on it a bit, then leave it. It’s grown slowly, starting from just a few small lines. But, I’ve had a growing sense it needed to be part of a much more ambitious work to really reach my goals for it. I am trying to experiment with the modernist style of T.S. Eliot, fused with my normal iambic pentameter, rhyming verse. I’m clearly no Eliot, nor is my goal to nail an imitation of his style, but rather I am trying to apply some lessons from his poetry to make my own style a bit less of a pseudo-neo-Classical style with too much raw emotion. Eliot advises, and I think for good reason, that the poet’s job is to distill raw emotion into what the New Criticism dubbed “the objective correlative.” That term refers to creating objective descriptions that evoke particular emotions rather than merely describing the emotions themselves. A great example comes from Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica,” which states, “For all the history of grief / An empty door / And a maple leaf.” Think about those lines for a moment — does not “An empty door / And a maple leaf” describe a biting grief far better than any direct description could likely provide?

At any rate, I’m not exactly a fast poet, but I managed to write another 78 lines today, consisting of parts of two more poems. Quantity is not how one should measure poetic success, but it is the way one measures how close one is to completing the framework of a project. The project now may include up to ten poems which will form a larger poetic sequence. My original poem fits in as the third poem in the sequence.

Here are the first lines as they presently are written:

Shadows mark untrue casts of reality,
A silent world lacking validity,
Those visitants dance and flicker as
The dark wood, staid oaks and pines, sway now.
An ache beyond the words I know, will know,
Illude my muse to sing out in any key.

Before the semester became too hectic, I had started a little short story (or, if I’m motivated enough, maybe we’ll be able to call it a online novella before I am done) involving Pastor Doug, Father Thomas, and Agents Cassandra Myers and Mark Douglas. I thought I would pick up the story where I left off. If you are new to asisaid since February, or you’d like to refresh yourself on the story line, you should probably check out the first three parts (they aren’t that long) before continuing: one, two and three.

Father Thomas opened the lid of his laptop and clicked on his web browser. Myers and Douglas had walked outside and were now pacing back and forth under the covered entrance to the chapel. Myers was speaking rapidly to whoever was on the other end of her cell phone connection. He went to Google. Thomas was not a detective, but he was an avid reader and spent many of his quiet evenings researching a manuscript he had only unwittingly stumbled on the existence of on a trip to the Vatican twenty years before. That manuscript came to mind afresh as he contemplated the crime scene that was the front of his little church.

The Skotia Thelossa had fallen off a shelf in the archives when he had been doing research for an archdiocese commission. The commission was interested in some communications between itself and the Vatican from the time of the archdiocese's founding in the early nineteenth century, and he had gotten turned around. A book entitled the Writings of John Eck: An Orthodox and Complete Response to the Heretical Martin Luther in Accord with the Intentions of the Holy See, Concerning His Heinous 95 Theses and Putrid Other Miscellaneous Writings and Remarks up to the Present Day, had caught his attention partially for its long title -- such that many books from the early years of the printing press seemed to obtain -- and more so as an ironic twist as he stood there as a priest who participated in Evangelicals and Catholics Together.

He had reached for the book when Skotia Thelossa had fallen out on the floor. It was a modest looking little book that appeared as if it had not been touched for ages. Unlike most of the old books surrounding him, Skotia Thelossa looked to be an original manuscript, beautifully handwritten in German. It contained a date at the beginning of January 6, 1521, which placed it just days after the excommunication of Martin Luther. With his minute knowledge of German, he had no idea what the manuscript talked about, but he wondered if it had to do with the Reformation, given its date and proximity to the book by Eck.

A note was attached inside, however, that would insure the manuscript would become a project of his for the next two decades: "Stom, this text will either save you or kill you. Ignore it at your own peril, but whatever you do, do not leave it here and do not show it to anyone. Yours, M.J.J." Only his sister, who had died at age five, had ever called him "Stom." Whoever had written this, clearly knew far too much. But dare he steal an artifact from the Vatican Archive? The words of the short note spun around in his head. He tucked the manuscript under his jacket and swiftly left the building.

LXIV. Shadows dance across walls,
A soft, playful twirl, gentle — gentle,
Oh, unreal yet real!

LXV. A cricket sings softly,
What tales does he sing aloud
Amidst the evening?

LXVI. In the cave’s soft light,
What fantastic things can be,
That show not above?

LXI. A lonely thought about
The soft sounds of a tree frog,
Who knows not of it.

LXII. What is this odd place,
That my thoughts arrive at now,
Like a long spring rain?

LXIII. The words do not come,
To match thoughts that bubble up,
Shall the thoughts erupt?