"If I wander through the woods,
I wonder what rivers I would find
Winding their way further up and further in
To where I want to be.
"If I wander through the woods,
The sensuous curtain of bark and branch,
Would I find the curtain false?
Fleeting fantasies for weary eyes?
"Beyond the wonder of the woods,
Those mythic pillars of elvish tales,
Is there but the concrete chaos?
Monuments to monotony, altars to apathy?
"Is every wood a deception only,
Covering colossal coves of earthen Hell?
Where is the wood, gates of splendor,
That hides the home all hearts howl to have?"
-Jon Vowell (c) 2008
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Artistic Musings, and Musings on Art
"Love so mighty and so true
Merits my soul's best songs..."
-James Rowe
Merits my soul's best songs..."
-James Rowe
The Ever After
The Ever After is beyond all things, and in all things. It is the source and goal, the beginning and the end. It fills up and consumes all things. It is the land beyond all lands, and in all lands, possessed by and possessing of the mightiest angel of heaven and smallest speck of dust. The whole world is full of its glory.
The Ever After is ever sought by all and in all. Only the indifferent are silent. All else sing their songs of faith and doubt, anger and love, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. To hate it is to seek it; to love it is to seek it. To ignore it is death.
The Ever After is ever seeking, flowing, moving, living, loving, bleeding, dying. It hunts and it woos. It thunders and it whispers. It strikes and it caresses. Its ravishings restore innocence, and its slavery supplies freedom. To embrace it is death.
The Ever After is dancing, the universe dances to its love. To reject that dance is death; to dance that dance is death.
Those who die in that dance live, and live happily. Those who die without the dance die, and are lost, are lost, are lost.
The Ever After is here, and is coming. It is the magic, and the Magician. The song, and the Singer. The dream, and the Dreamer. The loved, and the Lover. The known, and the Knower. The taken, and the Taker. The heavens and the earth declare its glory.
The Ever After is waiting...
The Ever After is ever sought by all and in all. Only the indifferent are silent. All else sing their songs of faith and doubt, anger and love, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. To hate it is to seek it; to love it is to seek it. To ignore it is death.
The Ever After is ever seeking, flowing, moving, living, loving, bleeding, dying. It hunts and it woos. It thunders and it whispers. It strikes and it caresses. Its ravishings restore innocence, and its slavery supplies freedom. To embrace it is death.
The Ever After is dancing, the universe dances to its love. To reject that dance is death; to dance that dance is death.
Those who die in that dance live, and live happily. Those who die without the dance die, and are lost, are lost, are lost.
The Ever After is here, and is coming. It is the magic, and the Magician. The song, and the Singer. The dream, and the Dreamer. The loved, and the Lover. The known, and the Knower. The taken, and the Taker. The heavens and the earth declare its glory.
The Ever After is waiting...
The Voice
"For it is in closest union with [God] that we live and move and have our being; as in fact some of the poets in repute among yourselves have said, 'For we are also His offspring.'"
-Acts 17:28 (Weymouth New Testament)
"I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old, which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the Lord, and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done." Psalm 78:2-4 (King James Version)
-Acts 17:28 (Weymouth New Testament)
"I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old, which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us. We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the Lord, and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done." Psalm 78:2-4 (King James Version)
Voices
"Not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience. Through art we are sometimes visited - dimly, briefly - by revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking. Like that little looking-glass from the fairy-tales: look into it and you will see - not yourself - but for one second, the Inaccessible, whither no man can ride, no man fly. And only the soul gives a groan."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him."
-Aristotle
"This is something for which [I] have struggled [for]--a Christianity which has balance, not only exegetically and intellectually, but also in the area of reality and beauty; an insistence that beginning with the Christian system as God has given it to men in the verbalized propositional revelation of the Bible, one can move along and find that every area of life is touched by truth and a song."
-Francis Schaeffer
"Be always drunken. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken."
-Baudelaire
"[Poetry] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."
-T.S. Elliot
"Maybe redemption has stories to tell."
-Switchfoot
"If you be born near the dull-making cataract of Nilus, so that you cannot hear the planet-like music of poetry...[then this] curse I must send you in behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love and never get favor, for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory [will] die from the earth for want of an epitaph."
-Sir Phillip Sydney
"Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness...and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
"[A] story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be 'like real life' in the superficial sense; but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region."
-C.S. Lewis
"Art is a collaboration between God and the artist; and the less the artist does, the better."
-Andre Gide
"The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder."
-G.K. Chesterton
"I am not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human beings towards God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations."
-Albert Einstein
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him."
-Aristotle
"This is something for which [I] have struggled [for]--a Christianity which has balance, not only exegetically and intellectually, but also in the area of reality and beauty; an insistence that beginning with the Christian system as God has given it to men in the verbalized propositional revelation of the Bible, one can move along and find that every area of life is touched by truth and a song."
-Francis Schaeffer
"Be always drunken. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken."
-Baudelaire
"[Poetry] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."
-T.S. Elliot
"Maybe redemption has stories to tell."
-Switchfoot
"If you be born near the dull-making cataract of Nilus, so that you cannot hear the planet-like music of poetry...[then this] curse I must send you in behalf of all poets, that while you live, you live in love and never get favor, for lacking skill of a sonnet; and when you die, your memory [will] die from the earth for want of an epitaph."
-Sir Phillip Sydney
"Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, 'I will compose poetry.' The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness...and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
"[A] story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be 'like real life' in the superficial sense; but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region."
-C.S. Lewis
"Art is a collaboration between God and the artist; and the less the artist does, the better."
-Andre Gide
"The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder."
-G.K. Chesterton
"I am not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human beings towards God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations."
-Albert Einstein
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About Me
- Halcyon
- Greetings, fellow human. I'm a Christian cultural apologist with a BA in English (Crichton College), a MA in English and MFA in Creative Writing (University of Memphis), and am currently a PhD candidate at the U of Memphis. I am a Dark Fantasy Realist (floating somewhere between Chesterton and Cormac McCarthy), ardent Logocentrist, hardcore Trinitarian, Sacramental Protestant, aspiring author, frustrated rockstar, and lover of pie.
3 comments:
Beautiful as always, while containing an undercurrent of suspicion. Woods can be mysterious places, filled with dangers that the mind can't always perceive. However, I think that they are not coverings of an earthen hell, but rather an example of truth. Men walk about the earth and hide the hell inside them, while the forest never pretends to be anything other than what it is-a place of peace, and a place of danger.
Interestingly enough I agree with Katie, while disagreeing with her. As I was reading this I thought of Ireland (surprise, surprise). And then I remembered the verse Isaiah 40:17
"All the nations are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness."
This verse always brings me back to the reality of although these places remind us of heaven, they are not.
Good job Jon.
Interesting thoughts, ladies; and thank you for your kind words and inquiries.
However, if I my comment: this poem was inspired by the fact that everytime I see the setting sun through a tree line, I always find myself wondering that if I wandered through those woods, would I arrive at "faeire," or would I (as was typically the case) run into another modern, urban city. Are the woods a gateway to heaven or to hell? For now, they are to hell (i.e., the city), though poems and stories can change that a bit.
For me, 'forest' and 'city' are two motifs I use to contrast heaven and hell, life and death (which is why I call the forest "woods of wonder" and "mythic pillars of elvish tales," while I call the city "the concrete chaos," with its buildings being "monuments to monotony, altars to apathy").
Just FYI.
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