Ut absolvaris, ignosce--"Forgive, that you may be pardoned" (Seneca)
I have sought to chart my life's course between the slippery shores of admitting failure and striving to do good (slippery because, when we fail, we like to excuse ourselves by calling good ends unreachable, and hence unimportant). One cannot confess wrongdoing without believing some deeds to be wrong. Our most dangerous cultural crises today are often precisely a matter of not staring bitter truths in the face--of not admitting that we might have done better. We have very low moral expectations, both of ourselves and of others.
I have witnessed appalling displays of bad faith, moral cowardice, calculating egotism, and outright malice in my half-century on this earth. As a graduate student, I watched my peers court good grades by sleeping with professors or otherwise abjectly flattering them. As a teacher myself, and then a professor, I saw colleagues get the axe for speaking their conscience or excelling in a manner which "showed up" the department's old guard. As a single man in the 70s and 80s, I constantly listened to women revile the male for his perfidy even as they laid their self-degrading traps to snare some transparent scoundrel. As a father, I observe every day parents buying their kids' affection with expensive toys while sedating them with prescription drugs. My own son was recently a pawn in his school principle's quest for power. I have known cops to be gunned down in cold blood while citizens hinted that they shouldn't have been doing their job so well, and I have known congregations to wail, "Why, God?" after several high school seniors ended their Prom Night bacchanal in the morgue, thanks to an ample intake of booze and drugs. Where are honor, duty, decency, and piety?
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I invite you to visit my online, offbeat column, The Blog of Virtues (or Blog na mBuanna -- pardon my Irish). Here I discuss every symptom of our cultural dumbing down from TV news coverage and the "war against boys" to degenerate baseball. Other pages of my non-profit organization, The Center for Literate Values, can be reached from the column.
Am I a snob? It depends. I don't do things to chase trend. I hate rock music, detest the internal combustion engine, avoid booze-swilling soirees, and haven't paid money to see a movie in 15 years. On the other hand, The Center's literary journal Praesidium is a thumb in the eye of ivory- tower elitism. I like thinking, and thinking people. Far more arrogant, it seems to me, is the person who demands his entourage to ape his own imbecility.
This page offers no photos, no résumé. You can fit a face and a livelihood to me by pursuing other links. My face is aging, however, and my "career" has been almost as lackluster as it was accidental. I am most me as a writer, so it is to my writing that I devote the following comments.
Footprints in the Snow of the Moon is my latest novel, and perhaps my first authorial love. I put everything I had into this book. A fifth of a million words flowed out in about a month! I even painted the portrait--in oils--for the cover (which has been touched up to the condition above: the original version available through Amazon, alas, is much less aesthetic). To me, the central character Celine crystallizes the kind of split personality common to our entire culture. She lives to please yet has been undone by pleasure; she covets her self-sabotaging rituals because she finds a deathly comfort in knowing how all of them must end. In Celine we witness the spiritual carnage of an essentially gentle soul sacrificed to the "progress" of non-stop titillation and sterile independence.
No doubt, every mature, perceptive person has seen and heard the like. Almost any reader could extend my list with a page (or a book) of his or her own encounters. Any of us, too, could easily grow misanthropic at the prospect of human society's lurid carnival.. but we ourselves are a part of the shenanigans, after all, if only because we do not raise our collective voice loudly enough in protest. For if brutality, hypocrisy, debauchery, stupidity, envy, and all the rest are the common measure of all human beings, then why complain? People who slash and burn would just be doing what they were made to do. If we can do better, however, then indignation is in order--but also hope. The cost of "tolerance", on the other hand, is having to admit to oneself that squalor and decay are the final reality.
I write to cry foul. It's what I do. A lot of people don't like it. I was, indeed, forced to finance this peculiar and expensive indulgence largely out of my own pocket when I operated the ill-starred Arcturus Press, many of whose publications are available below for the cost of shipping and handling. Why do I do it? Who wants to hear gripes-- who wants to listen to a "negative" view? Everyone, I suppose, who would forgive that he might be pardoned, who will neither give foul play a free pass by insisting that it is natural nor sweep his own failure under the rug because it gets him down.
How many people like this are left? I don't know, and I don't care. My business is only to recruit one or two more. That's what I do. Nobody pays me much for it: I usually have to pay for it myself. But it's my "job". I am here on this earth, and I choose not not pass my days with eyes and ears covered up.
BOOKS
Seven Demons Worse
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This book, as well as Seven Demons Worse, was written under the pseudonym of "Ewen Harris". I often used pennames at the time, not to deny my work, but to advertise that my press was not just a self-publishing venture and invited submissions. We ran out of money before the message got out: most works were indeed mine, whether in my name or not.
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The Entelechy Kid: His Life and Times
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I recall actually sitting under a tree one summer and writing Defenders. I was fresh from one of my many trips to Ireland, and I had just re-read the Tain Bo Cualnge. My "fault" lay in remaining true to genuine Celtic sources and to my memories of the Atlantic crashing over western Ireland's windy coast.
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Why Boys Shoot
(Andretta, Harris, et al)
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Peter and I had both recently read Wendy Shalit's Return to Modesty with much admiration. Just because the New Woman is immodest, though, the New Man need not respond in kind. The gentleman should control himself even when the "ladies" punish him for it. His duty is not to make conquests, but to live by an ideal.
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A Body Without Breath
ArE
Christianity Today once refused to run an ad for this novel. Reasons offered: the word demons in the title (but see Mat. 12.43-45) and the "evil" 666 in my then-FAX number! I've often met with such smug inanity from my self-styled Christian brothers when I really needed help.
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Friends I have long known whose religious faith impresses me as solid bedrock rather than window dressing often call this novel their favorite of mine. I truly wish more people had given its special poetry a chance. Of course, many "religious" people don't read!
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A reviewer compared me to Voltaire. Hmm... I'd have chosen Rabelais. Maybe since the book has some serious moments, it is not devoid of ethical value. You can't really debunk the world if you find all things equally ludicrous: there must be a stable reference.
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There are over a dozen of my own ink sketches in this little book. I'm untrained as an artist: it is something I've learned to do on my own, out of love for the medium of sketching. I also drew a series of note cards--which sold well, for a while. And I paint in oils.
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There haven't been any major high school shootings since this book was published-- but the problem hasn't gone away. Don't be shocked to see terrorist- style acts (with non- metals) from teen boys in the future: car bombs, poison gas, the whole bit.
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Women seem to appreciate this book more than men (who hardly ever read anything but history or biography-- nothing like philosophy). Peter is no feminist--yet neither does he smirk at the crudity and violence men too often direct at women.
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The one review I recall seeing of this book opined, "Harris never considers that someone might view God's law as non-moral." Almost right! The truth is that I cannot consider so blasphemous a noition--it strikes me as rabid, stark insanity. God without goodness... for shame, Christians!
who I
The ivory tower, promiscuous sex, and redemption are the subjects of this novel--the former two paired adversarially, of course, against the last. Certain readers have mentioned religious scruples in criticizing my treatment of so "naughty" a range of issues. This strikes me as inside-out. I didn't invent sexual pleasure, and I don't think I've imagined it--but I do handle it very directly (though not at all graphically) as a menace to the spirit's powers of choice and inspiration. I don't see many self-advertising Christians tackling such issues. They often seem to glamorize sexual indulgence as "righteous bliss" after certain rites are satisfied.
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The prequel" to Seven Demons Worse, this novel is yet very different in style. It consists of about half a dozen loosely linked vignettes. At the heart of them all is a stunningly innocent young man who encounters in the academic life a great spiritual Sahara, and a stunningly naive young woman whose earthly life has been destroyed by riding the trends. For those who care, I have perhaps never written anything so autobiographical, despite the book's airy, fanciful character. if you like tightly knit plots, then this wouldn't be your cup of tea... but how tightly knit is life, unless one looks for allegorical strands of recurrent setbacks and trials?
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The lengthy subtitle reads, An Epic in Progressively Polysyllabic Prose... Or Maybe Just Another Bad Novel. I've never had more fun writing anything in my life than this "burlesque", as I call it. The lack of humor is a sure sign of cerebral atrophy: only a thoughtful person can appreciate the irony between what things are and what they claim to be or might be. So I take some shots at PC orthodoxy, consumerist America, stormtrooping evangelists, computer dating, fertility clinics, and juiced baseballs... so don't send me a Christmas card.
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Defenders was my biggest bomb. I wrote it as a children's book in about 1980, then sat on it for two decades. When I read it over later, it charmed me, so I illustrated it and made a run at the kids' market. In the meantime, reading levels had taken a nosedive. Today few adults seem to understand that the book depends largely upon sound for its effect. The prose is very rhythmic, the phrases repetitive in a Homeric kind of way... and nobody has any idea what I'm talking about! When a noted children's author refused to endorse the book, I gave up on it a second time (but I'd still rather read it than one of her tomes about zits and teen runaways).
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Another long subtitle: Culturally Conservative Scholars Review Our Crisis in Masculinity with Minimal Statistics and a Classically Christian Sense of Human Nature. I proudly contributed to this brief collection of scholarly "brainstorming" about why our boys are wildly frustrated. Formulas pounded home by TV and (at the other extreme) feminism are discussed, as is the decline of academic challenge in schools (my own suggestion). This book has nearly sold out, even though 9/11 and its aftermath have drawn attention away from its issues. Why, I wonder? Are not suicide-bombers another manifestation of inarticulate boyish fury?
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The subtitle here reads: How Contemporary Men Can Recover the Dignity of Living for a Higher Purpose. The operative word is dignity, in my opinion. My friend Peter Singleton was constantly picking my brain throughout this book's composition, and I have to say that he turned whatever rough nuggets he collected into pure gold. I don't understand, honestly, why books like this one don't sell. In the wake of feminist liberation, which has set the bar at about ground-level for men, we need to rediscover the gentleman... but maybe I've just answered my own question. Good manners require sacrifice!
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I tossed out the gage when I subtitled this book, How Right and Left Have Both Stifled Moral Reason within the Christian Faith. I shall go to my grave convinced that God is concerned, not about when and where we believe the prohibition against bearing false witness to have been first recorded, but about whether we tell the truth. There are "do-or-die" moments in life when your faith either flowers or rots: a lost child weeping on the street corner, a lonely woman leaning much too near to the oncoming train... a stranger lying robbed and beaten in a ditch. Your prayer is your response at those moments. The empty words which the Pharisee utters loudly in church are, indeed, a further crime. When did we forget all this?
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I wrote this novel after having my nose rubbed in the campus's "liberated" ideology throughout the 80's and the 90's. The human wreckage I witnessed will always haunt me. I am NOT the book's protagonist... but I might have been if I had not simply withdrawn from the toxic social setting around me into my studies.
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Vortex Vorticum (Whirlpool of Whirlpools)
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What was in my head when I started writing this nutty "epic"? The year was 1999. I think I just needed a good long laugh. I hadn't read García-Márquez's Hundred Years of Solitude at that time: I had no idea that I was inserting a laugh-track into the master's conundrums.
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Defenders of the Five Realms
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I thought a lot about Kip Kinkel, a teen mass-shooter in Oregon (profiled on PBS Frontline), as I pondered this book's material; and I often reflected that if today's "dangerous boy" experts had reviewed my middle-school short stories and pastimes (when I was a gun buff), I would have been led away in cuffs.
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Return to Chivalry
(Peter Singleton)
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I could never put more of myself in a book than I did in this one. I could declare with Martin Luther, "Here I stand. I shall not recant" The sad thing is that an appeal such as mine to basic reason and common decency should have the look of extremist defiance. Hysterical displays of "enthusiasm" are now mainstream-. What god do they serve?