Scruton on what children can teach us about art

From the late Sir Roger Scruton’s documentary “Why Beauty Matters”:

“Art needs creativity, and creativity is about sharing. It is a call to others to see the world as the artist sees it. That is why we find beauty in the naïve art of children. Children are not giving us ideas in the place of creative images, nor are they wallowing in ugliness. They are trying to affirm the world as they see it and to share what they feel. Something of the child’s pure delight in creation survives in every true work of art.”

— Sir Roger Scruton

Scruton makes this aside as a point of contrast with modern art—which is intentionally insular, confrontational, transgressive, and over-intellectual if not ideological—but in doing so he makes a broader point about what art is and what it’s for. This description of children’s art is also honestly and accurately observed.

I’ve thought of this passage many times over the last few weeks, ever since my eldest son eagerly presented me with a picture he had drawn. It was a pencil and highlighter drawing that showed me holding my youngest son at the dinner table—a picture of his dad and one of his little brothers. It was drawn from life without my noticing, and joy he took both in drawing and giving it to me, the joy in and care taken over the details, including the stubble of my beard, and the simple, straightforward, honest love in the picture itself have stuck with me. My kids have drawn many things for me, but this one in particular struck me as a clear example of Scruton’s “pure delight” in “sharing.”

Last week I tacked it to the wall of my office at school. May any art I create be motivated as purely as my son’s.

“Why Beauty Matters” is worth your while, as I wrote here almost four years ago following Scruton’s death. You can watch the whole thing on Vimeo here.

A quick personal update

Books and Bede—a favorite gift from my wife and kids

The hot but unhurried days of the summer gave way, right at the beginning of this month, to the haste and chaos of preparation for the fall semester. In my case, I am preparing for three fall semesters, as I have picked up adjunct classes at two other colleges in addition to my full-time teaching. Just keeping deadlines straight will be an adventure.

The reason for all of this is a happy one that I’m not sure I’ve directly addressed here—my wife and I are expecting twins, our fourth and fifth children. I’ve taken on this extra work for the time she will be out following their birth. These adjunct courses were mercifully easy to find. One was even offered to me sight unseen thanks to a recommendation from a colleague. How often now does someone need work and have it dropped into his lap like that? We are blessed and have had a lot of cause this summer to reflect on God’s provision—in time, in work, in material needs—for these babies and for us.

That said, when exactly the twins will arrive is up in the air. Were they to go full-term they would arrive three weeks into September, but my wife’s OB doesn’t let twins go past 38 weeks. So we were looking toward the second weekend in September. Now, though, the doctor may decide to induce around 37 weeks, bumping the twins’ arrival another week nearer. There is also the possibility—just a possibility, but a possibility that has a startling way of focusing one’s attention—that they may induced this week, depending on how my wife’s checkups go. She spent last night at the hospital under observation, a common enough occurrence for women at this stage of expecting twins but still a reminder of how near we are. Fortunately all signs were good and she’ll be released this morning.

And of course the babies could do their own thing and come at any time now, something we’ve been working to prepare for for the last couple weeks. We have a “go bag” in the back of the van, waiting.

All of which is to say that my writing here, already spotty since the end of the summer session, may be more sporadic in the coming weeks. I may not, for instance, have the time or stamina to complete a summer reading list. Then again, being able to work on something one paragraph at a time might be just the thing. There’s no way to tell at this point. But I hope y’all will keep checking in and stay in touch, and most of all that y’all will celebrate with us.

In the meantime, here’s a short reflection on birth and life inspired by an offhand metaphor in Beowulf that I wrote following the birth of our third child four years ago. Please check that out.

Buechner on the challenge and blessing of children

Jacob wrestles the angel by the ford of Jabbok in this engraving by Gustave Doré

A good friend of mine and his wife had their third child yesterday. When he texted me to let me know, after the initial round of pleasant surprise (“It’s time already?!”) and congratulations we reflected on how his life is about to change—has, in fact, already changed. Having three children is a delight and a challenge. A new member has joined the fellowship and new adventures are about to unfold that would have been unimaginable even a few weeks ago. And of course some of these adventures are the children themselves.

It’s hard and it’s an unceasing joy. I never understood, prior to becoming a father, how both could be true. A challenge, a struggle, and a blessing?

Reflecting on this later I remembered a passage from The Son of Laughter that moved me terribly. As I wrote a few weeks ago, Frederick Buechner’s novel is a poetic, imaginative retelling of the story of Jacob and his lifelong struggle with God, whom the characters reverently refer to as “the Fear.” It is part of Jacob’s lot to live in the promises made by the Fear to his grandfather Abraham, something it proves exceedingly difficult to do in the hurly-burly of life in the tribal world of the Patriarchs.

In this passage, Jacob, so who has run away from his father Isaac (translated literally as “Laughter” throughout, hence the title of the book) and his brother Esau; taken up with his shifty uncle Laban; worked long years to earn marriages first to Leah and then to Rachel, his beloved; and fathered ten children (so far), sits among his tents and flocks and wives and teeming brood, overwhelmed:

I was like a man caught out in a storm with the wind squalling, the sand flailing me across the eyes, the chilled rain pelting me. The children were the storm, I thought, until one day, right in the thick of it, I saw the truth of what the children were.

One boy was pounding another boy’s head against the hard-packed floor. Another was drowsing at his mother’s teat. Three of them were trying to shove a fourth into a basket. Dinah was fitting her foot into her mouth. The air was foul with the smell of them.

They were the Fear’s promise. That is what I suddenly saw the children were. I had forgotten it. They were the dust that would cover the earth. The great people would spring from their scrawny loins. Kicking and howling and crowing and pissing and slobbering food all over their faces, they were the world’s best luck.

I started to weep. Just a trickle at first, the tears hot on my cheeks, salty at the corners of my mouth. Then it was as if I couldn’t catch my breath for weeping. Laban came over and pounded me between the shoulders. He thought I was choking to death. Rachel took my head in her arms. Leah held my feet. It was as close as the two sisters had come to each other for years.

A deep hush fell over the children. They stopped whatever they were doing. Their eyes grew round in their heads.

“You are so—so noisy,” I choked out at them.

They were the Fear’s promise to Abraham, and I had forgotten it.

It was with Abraham’s ancient eyes that they were watching me. “You are—so hopeless,” I said. “So important.”

Their silence, as they listened to my sobs, was Abraham’s silence as he waited all those years for the Fear to keep his promise.

While I and my friend are obviously not the recipients of the specific promise the Fear made to Abraham, this is the truest and most succinct depiction of the challenge and the blessing—and how wonderfully overwhelming both are—of children that I’ve come across. Thank the Fear for these noisy, hopeless, important ones.

God is good, and he remembers even when we forget. Rachel—who has had to see child after child born to her older sister and rival, Leah—reflects on this later in the same chapter:

Rachel’s womb was opened at last, and when she gave birth to my son Joseph, I told her it was Reuben and his mandrakes that she had to thank. Still exhausted from her labor, she reached out and placed her hand across my lips. “No,” she said. “No, no, my dear.”

They had laid the child at her breast though it was still too weak to drink from her. Her cheek was grazing his round, bald head. His head looked too big for him, as though already it was full of dreams.

“I thought he had forgotten me, but he remembered me,” she said. “At last he remembered Rachel.”

Like my mother, she rarely if ever named his name, but I knew the one she was thanking without naming him.

The Son of Laughter makes these promises and hopes feel real, lived in, and I hope you’ll read it sometime. It’s one of the best things I’ve read so far this year, and the passage above is only one of several that moved me to tears.

Adding the third to your family—so that you and your wife are outnumbered—is exciting for all kinds of reasons, and I’m excited for my friends and praying for them. After the birth of our own third child I also reflected on the miracle of birth and life, that time with reference to Beowulf and GK Chesterton. You can read that here.

Remembering my granddad, 21 years on

My maternal grandfather, JL McKay, died 21 years ago this evening. Few people have taught me or helped me as much, and it astonishes me that I have lived more than twice as long without as with him.

He was a plumber and electrician, good at what he did, and worked with his kids. (He called his business J&L Plumbing & Electric—I can still see it stenciled on the sides of his work ladders—but the initials weren’t just for himself: the J was JL McKay, the L was my aunt Leah, who worked with him for years.) He was a Rabun County native, the second of eight kids born to Percy and Ruby McKay; served in the US Air Force military police in Korea (I remember him telling me about the flash of artillery barrages on the other side of the mountains at night); played basketball for Lakemont High School (long defunct) and was an ardent Braves fan (from at least their Milwaukee days, maybe even since Boston); drove only Fords; subscribed to National Geographic for decades; enjoyed “Jeopardy!,” “Wheel of Fortune,” and “M.A.S.H”; smoked Winstons, which he gave up after surgery in the early 90s (“If I’d known it was going to be my last one,” he said of the cigarette he had before surgery, “I’d have enjoyed it more”); loved fishing and organizing the huge family camping trips to Tugalo, where he’d oversee the camp kitchen and help catch scores of catfish; and was at our small, independent Baptist church for every service.

But the most important thing in his life was clearly his family. After he got back from Korea he married my grandmother, Jewell Dills, raised three kids, and lived to see seven grandchildren. He was always around—I took it for granted that everyone could see their grandparents (both sets) as often as I did. Stories of long, arduous car trips to see grandparents once or twice a year made no sense to me.

In a more important sense, he was not just always around but always there—always there for you, not just his family but for anyone he knew. He was one of the most charitable people I knew, and for all the years since he died I’ve heard stories from people of the favors, kind turns, and simple acts of generosity he performed.

My granddad and I watching TV sometime in the late 1980s

I wrote a year ago, on this same anniversary, about pietas—a mature respect and gratitude to our forefathers. Since then I finished revising and published Griswoldville. That novel is a war story, certainly, but it’s a love letter to a place—Georgia—and especially to a kind of person, the kind of man my granddad was: skilled, hardworking, polite but self-respecting, tough but tender, opinionated but gracious, a steward of the things God gave him, and above all family-oriented. Georgie Wax’s relationship with his grandfather, Fate (a diminutive of Lafayette, my granddad’s middle name) is very much the relationship of me with my grandfathers. I dedicated the book to both of them, my own small act of grateful pietas.

In memory of JL McKay, gone these 21 years, I include a brief episode from Griswoldville. While this novel should only be regarded as fiction, this incident in particular I drew from something my grandfather and I actually did once.

He had an oaken gun cabinet that seemed, when I was a kid, five stories tall, with three or four shotguns, a .22 magnum varmint gun, and a lever-action .30-30 that stretched away up into the darkness at the top of the cabinet. I remember squinting through the glass door many times to try to discern the ends of the barrels up there. One day he took one of his shotguns down and we trooped up the hill behind the house into the junkyard were he kept mountains of spare piping, wire, and fixtures. He wanted to show me the basics of how to hunt squirrels. We spotted and shot one but the shotgun tore up the meat too much to be edible. Then he showed me what Fate teaches 11-year old Georgie in this passage.

* * * * *

We brought in three bales of cotton on our farm and two and a quarter on my uncle Quin’s, all of which we sold through the cotton factor that visited the MacBean place every fall. We picked and bagged the terrible bolls until our hands hung so bloody raw and abraded we could not reach into our pockets without agony. A blind gypsy could have read our fortunes sniffing the blood caked in our lifelines. A team of Negroes arrived and loaded the bales onto wagons and carted them off to the railhead in Athens, from whence they would ride to Savannah. I found out later that the price was a great disappointment, as the Confederate government in Richmond had ended exports of cotton in an vain effort to bring some European power into the war, and we were not to plant it again until years afterward. In between there would be much worry over cash, even for farmers. We brought in good crops of oats and corn and fairly stuffed our hogs—who were already nigh spherical with acorn mast—with the latter. Slaughter approached, and we needed the pork. With harvest ended and hog-killing time not quite upon us, and the frosts arriving and our breath coming like broken glass when we ran or worked outside, my grand­father oiled his rifle and shotgun and took me hunting.

     I had watched him hunt before, and even taken potshots at squirrels and raccoons, but now he let me carry the guns and taught me in earnest how to bring down small game.

     “Your father left you in charge,” he said, “and a man ought to be ready to provide, any time. I’m just here to help.”

     He taught me to clean and skin the game on my own and—when my fifth or sixth squirrel dropped out of the trees too torn up to be good for food—a trick of his that I never forgot.

     We had just left the porch one morning and by accident flushed some squirrels from my mother’s garden patch, where they had been foraging among the stalks and remains of what we had missed in the picking. They scampered to the fields, up the side of the house, behind the muleshed, and into the shade tree.

     My grandfather produced his powder and measured a charge for the rifle. “Let’s get started with these rats here.”

     I grounded the shotgun and brought out my powder and pellets.

     “Not this time, Georgie. I want to show you some­thing.”

     He loaded without looking at the rifle. He regarded the two or three plump squirrels watching us upside down from the shade tree. The tree was a great white oak, older even than the state, five feet wide at the base and better than seventy feet tall. In the high summer we watched the yard like a sundial with the tree as its gnomon.

     My grandfather brought the rifle to half-cock and fastened a percussion cap to the nipple. He nodded toward the tree.

     “See that fat one there, bout halfway up?” One of the squirrels sat, contented with his distance and sanctuary, dead center in the thickest part of the trunk, about twenty feet up.

     “Yes, sir.”

     “Watch, now. My granddaddy taught me this.”

     He thumbed the hammer to full cock and raised and sighted. The squirrel moved its head minutely, taking in this new intelligence. I heard my grandfather softly breathe out and he fired. The ball struck the trunk of the oak just above the fat squirrel’s head with a sound like a hammer on a loose plank—a miss. And the squirrel flopped backward to the ground anyway.

     My grandfather and I stood wreathed in the sulphurous reek of the rifle. The surviving squirrels skittered up and down the tree; a distant dog com­menced to barking. I looked at the lifeless squirrel in the yard and up at my grandfather, who grounded the rifle and grinned wide, pressing his tongue against the back of his teeth and chuckling.

     At last, he said, “Whew!”

     “How—”

     My mother burst out of the house, black hair loose, apron in hand.

     “God sakes, Daddy!”

     “Fixing to rid your okra patch of squirrels, Mary,” he said.

     I pointed, awed. “He killed it without even shooting it!”

     “If you possess such power why don’t you forebear to shoot at all?”

     My grandfather retrieved the squirrel and handed it to me.

     “Georgie’s got to learn. He needs a teacher.”

     My mother shook her head and strode back into the house. From inside, I heard her declaim to one of my younger brothers about being startled half to death. I laughed and looked at the squirrel. My grandfather grounded the rifle and set to measuring out his powder again.

     I turned the squirrel over in my hands. It was still warm and completely unmarked. I looked at its yellow maloccluded teeth and felt an uncanny prickle of fear—I had seen boys with fingers bitten clean through by squirrels and did not want this creature awaking in a fright in my still-tender cotton-raw hands.

     “You know what concussion is, Georgie?”

     I looked at my grandfather. He stowed the ramrod and waited. “No, sir.”

     He balled a fist and struck the open palm of his other hand. “That’s concussion. Shock—the force of smiting something. It’s the concussion, of a kind, that knocks a man down when you strike him. The concussion of your fist on his skull. Now, you knock a man hard enough, the concussion on his skull knocks his brains into his skull. You can do a most powerful lot of harm to a man, you strike him hard enough. You understand?”

     “Yes, sir. That’s why you don’t want us fighting? That’s why you say men don’t fight?”

     He chuckled. “Naw, men don’t fight each other cause that’s the worse way to go about settling things. But we can talk on that later. Now, what I said about concussing a man’s brains? This bullet—” and he produced one, a .32 caliber lead ball, “—when it strikes a thing, concusses everything around it. You feel a cannonball strike close by, you feel the earth shake. You feel a bullet pass close by your face, you feel it clap the air by your cheek. You hit a tree trunk like that close enough to a squirrel’s skull—not too close, not too far—the concussion knocks its brains and kills it dead just like that. Don’t tear up the meat, don’t hurt the squirrel.”

     I marveled over the squirrel. He took it and handed me the rifle. It seemed suddenly like a more powerful instrument than a mere squirrel gun. My grandfather had ennobled it.

     “Your turn, Georgie.” 

* * * * *

You can read more from Griswoldville here. I hope y’all enjoyed this passage, and will let the memory of my granddad—or men like him—lift and guide you today. We need more people like him.