by Tania Runyan
We knew Preacher Man had it all wrong,
the 6’4″ senior who pinned kids to their lockers
with the Four Spiritual Laws,
popped his head into classrooms
to proclaim, “all have fallen short
of the glory of God,” and waved his Bible
as teachers dragged him to the principal’s
office, pages riffling like the hems
of Jesus in the desert.
We knew he had lost the point
of sharing the Gospel through the simple
testimony of a life well-lived:
turning down sex and weed,
spotting spare dollars in the lunch room.
He makes us look so lame,
we groaned in youth group.
He’s working against our cause.
But when on afternoon
a freshman stuck his foot out
and Preacher Man slammed to the floor,
only to scramble after the retreating boy
and pull him into a hug, I knew
I had it all wrong, because he became
Jesus in the hallway of my school,
and I could never forgive him.
Tania Runyan’s first full-length collection of poetry, Simple Weight, was just released by FutureCycle Press. Her poems have also appeared in Poetry, Atlanta Review, Indiana Review, The Christian Century, Willow Springs, Nimrod, Southern Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, and others. Her chapbook, Delicious Air, was awarded the 2007 Book of the Year Citation by the Conference on Christianity and Literature.
By Heather Wallace, assistant editor
Layers of meaning are a thing of beauty and a joy forever. This literary sense is a particular pleasure for those who participate both in the community of people whose souls leap and weep at combinations of syllables and the community of those who acknowledge that in the beginning was the Word. A God incarnate in consonants and conjugations demands the utmost literary effort, a constant deference to aesthetic, and the commitment to listen for truth in story and art—with the kind of patience and love that are lacking when one approaches Scripture merely as an instruction manual or Christian propaganda.
Rock & Sling is a proud home for literary moments of discovering and rediscovering the divine joy and truth hidden underneath vowels and behind punctuation. We are excited to live right at the intersection of wordsmith and Wordsmith. As the journal has moved to its new publishing home and new editors, we have all agreed upon the monumental mission of “Faith and Literature.” But an important part of the transition is to settle ourselves comfortably in our new identity. For me, that moving in began with a question of words: what do we do with the name “Rock and Sling”?
Setting aside the immediate Christian instinct for Bible stories, one first impression might be of a rock climbing magazine—hence my intentional effort to live up to our inherited name. But my first challenge was not the name’s distance from Christian imagery, but its closeness: it required work to clear my mind of the numerous illustrated, dare I say Veggie-taled, versions of David and Goliath that suggest cliché. So how to find fresh meaning in the midst of repetition, in a crowd of Baudrillard’s dreaded simulacra? The answer of course is the first rule of literature: savor the words.
As an advocate of reading Scripture as literature, this meaning-making effort was the perfect opportunity to let literature speak like Scripture. What is certain at the place of Rock & Sling is that God is still using words: words from unexpected places, whether unlikely poets or fictional tales claiming a stake in reality. Using my best tools of subjective response and expository research, I started listening for the truths contained in “rock & sling.” After all, one thousand retellings do not dull the simple beauty of braided twine on a callused palm.
Setting aside the fun plethora of “rock” puns, the first resonance of “sling” in my particular mind involved either neon green casts on broken arms or busy mothers keeping babies nearby. Toss in mischievious little boys with rubberized slingshots to get a little closer to the ancient weapon. But oh what a rewarding trinity of meanings! “Sling” propels me in three directions at once—the patient waiting and healing as bone knits bone new, the nurturing heartbeat that promises future good to new life, and the range of destruction that is possible when flying rock meets flesh. Perhaps everything boils down to life, death, and healing—or perhaps “sling” is just a wildly appropriate lens for literature.
Not a literary journal
I also found that a historical approach to contemplating “Rock and Sling” is rewarding. After all, the phrase does not recall familiar experiences for most modern writers and thinkers, so its full potential requires fleshing out. The shepherd’s sling is an ancient mastery of basic physics, a simple machine that effectively extends the length of the arm and uses rules of centripetal force and tangent to promise accuracy. It is not a weapon of equipment but of skill, requiring only a basic shape of braided fiber and any local ammunition—lead or clay bullets being popular and rocks and stones available in a pinch. A practiced user requires only one rotation to fire a projectile up to 400 meters and can reload in one smooth motion, firing a stone every few seconds. The shepherd’s sling was a low-status weapon, cheap and easy to come by but a priceless tool in hunting and combat.
The sling’s literary tradition is not too shabby either: making an appearance in Homer (Book III, 94); the Roman legends of the slingers of the Balearic islands who had to hit their food with a projectile before their mothers let them eat it; and the oldest known written account of rocks and slings in Judges 20, in the inter-tribal Israelite war that resulted from one of the more abhorrent Biblical crimes. Evidence of sling use can be found worldwide, from concurrent invention or cultural dissemination, with uses as varied as herding alpacas by scaring them with the stone’s thump on the ground. The use of slings to kill is especially poignant in an era of bloody explosions—contrasted with the quiet swoosh that heralds death without a particularly mangled body orsignificant loss of blood. The sling is still a weapon of choice in modern riots, filled with the debris of a modern society.
A literary journal says something lovely with a name that engages skill and caste, war and sustenance, cross-chronological and cultural connotations, weaponry and humor. What better metaphor for writing and literature than a literal rock and sling? Writers are ever eager to dismiss the adage of “sticks and stones.” Words count, and they carry as much impact as any river rock when slung with skill and cause.
The image of “Rock & Sling” braids together strands of Scripture and literature, twine of ancient universal human experience and the modern choice to pick up quiet weapons that stun and bruise. As a community of faith that claims the oft-told story of David and Goliath, how do we employ slings and rocks today? I think here at Rock & Sling we don’t have a method in mind: we’re waiting for the well-crafted words that coddle new life, that wait itchily for healing, that bruise and break the confident boasts of those who know certainly. As editors and readers, we want to be David, want to join our writers as they explore the consequences of combining skill and faith as an underdog warrior against the giants of popular culture. We also want to be Goliath—knocked dead by the way faith and truth fly from unexpected directions.
By Vic Bobb, fiction editor
The past half century has seen a remarkable number of talented Serbians contribute to the world’s store of interesting and worthwhile narrative. Justly celebrated as one of the most original among three dozen leading Serbian novelists, Borislav Pekić confronts me with two rather odd difficulties. One of them is practical: his novel The Houses of Belgrade strikes me as a remarkably vigorous and interesting piece of fiction…and yet I am hesitant to recommend it to a general audience, because its slow, odd, extraordinarily low-key style and effects are not to everyone’s taste; a reader who regards the book as very nearly a complete waste of time is not necessarily an irresponsible reader. (If you think that Hidden Camera or My Family’s Role in World Revolution—by, respectively, Zoran Živković and Bora Ćosić—are wastes of time, you’re simply an irresponsible reader. But Pekić…well, there are legitimate reasons to chafe at Pekić’s pacing, focus, and metaphysical flights…even though you’re wrong if you think it’s ultimately not worth the time and energy….)
My second problem is not practical; it’s a matter of philosophy, or aesthetics, or perhaps of something not connected to a definable category. But it’s important. Indeed, the answer to this unanswerable question is central to what I believe about our relation to art. It arises from a Pekić short story called “Megalos Mastoras and His Work, 1347 A.D.” (translated by Stephen M Dickey and Bogdan Rakić), included in a first-rate collection of Serbian short stories called The Prince of Fire (edited by Radmila J Gorup and Nadežda Obradović, translated by a number of folks; published by Pitt in a 1998 paperback). The story’s three central concerns—a platonic vision of the origin of the Truth embodied in a work of art; the question of the identity of the artist, and a consideration of uniqueness—are interesting, but are not my topic and my problem. What I’m kicking around is the question that arises from my response to a couple of what are almost throwaway sentences in the story of plague-era artist Kyr Angelos and his last creation.
My concern originates in my response to what Pekić’s narrator says about wood. We’re introduced to the striking thought that the noises associated with working wood are more than a matter of the physics of friction. “The hylikon, the divine material, defended its original form; wood strove to keep the shape given to it in Genesis.” (23) A short time later, “The woodcarvers’ tools began to draw angry, rebellious sounds from the wood, sounds that had been hidden in it while the tree was still only a seed, from which it had grown quietly and peacefully year after year until it was as tall as God wished, knowing nothing of the great artistry that would kill it.” (24) And, finally, a bit later the visitor looks at the shop, “where the noble wood at times creaked harshly, at others chanted soothingly, depending on the condition it was in, whether it had already submitted to the new form desired by Kyr Angelos, or whether it still lamented its original, divine form.” (26)
Why do I encounter such ideas with delight? Why do I regard this story as worth the reading almost on the basis of those three moments alone? What does my irrational liking or admiration for those lines indicate about what I believe to be the purpose and the function of art?
Because—and here’s why it matters—my pleasure in encountering Pekić’s ingenious and deft reorientation to the fact that wood makes noise when it is worked is not either a pleasure in rediscovering what I already know, or a pleasure in having my vision expanded and altered. I do not believe that the sound of my saw as I transform a pine board into a bookshelf is the cry of Creation being dragged through a reenactment of the Fall. I don’t believe that variations in the sounds from a woodshop reflect the degree to which the wood is satisfied to be being reshaped into an embodiment of the principle of Beauty. My understanding of the theology of our fallen world has not been altered in even a tiny way by what Borislav Pekić has said about the sounds of woodworking. I don’t think that sounds are hidden in wood, whether or not the tree falls and regardless of whether there’s a listener. No opinion that I hold about the nature of the universe is any different now from what it was before I first read this story, these lines from this story.
In other words, the pleasure and approval with which I respond to Pekić’s way of looking at things is not tied to a revolution in the way I see or think; nor is it tied to my having acquired an additional piece of information or level of understanding. When William Manchester offers up his climactic epiphany in Goodbye, Darkness, my understanding is enlarged; I am possessed now of familiarity with a powerful insight about men in combat offered by a deeply thoughtful veteran of combat. When I read “Time held me green and dying / Though I sang in my chains like the sea.”, I have acquired a touchstone against which a world of other intimations-of-mortality can be rubbed when the occasion is right; and I possess also fifteen words by which the whole of that spectacular poem, from the details of its imagery to the overarching whole of its vision, can be summoned up and offered allusively. When I breathe my silent wow! whistle on first seeing Judge Romnicki sitting on his bed and saying Here! in The Beautiful Mrs Seidenman, my vision—a lifetime in the shaping—of what it is to be human, of what being human can be, is enriched, enlarged, enlivened, altered in a tiny and permanent way. Each of those responses to art is characterized by a significant addition to my understanding, my vision, and my sense of what art can be. But there is nothing equivalent that can be applied to my encounter with Pekić’s wonderful formulations about the wood. The idea is new and interesting, but in the end I reject (philosophically, practically, metaphysically) the premise on which the idea is based, and do not change how I think about the world. And yet I regard the sentences as so genuinely valuable and in some way nourishing that I’ve already used up more than a thousand of the world’s store of words just to introduce the topic of how perhaps I might possibly consider maybe talking about the matter….
Well, what about that “new and interesting”? Is it perhaps enough to say simply you have encountered a new way of looking or thinking or saying, and that is itself a reward sufficient to justify your high opinion of the experience of reading the story? In and of itself, that’s not quite enough. True, there is delight in encountering new angles of vision; indeed, when I think back on my first encounters with artists like Faulkner, Nabokov, Calvino, Pynchon, and Hrabal, I recognize that the sheer novelty and freshness of the mind and the angle of vision to which I was being introduced was part of what was so exciting. (The opportunity to go on an unrestrained binge of reading each of them was also a pretty nice part of the process!) But it is also true that I encountered (sort of) “new” ways of looking, thinking, and saying in Twilight, and in the first Harlequin into which I tiptoed [and out from which I fled, screaming] in British Columbia 46 years ago, and in the worst kinds of didactic pulp science fiction I explored until discovering (in sixth grade) by way of L Sprague de Camp and John Wyndham and Fredric Brown that it didn’t have to be that bad, and in…well…never mind. The point is, that pure newness or unexpectedness doesn’t necessarily equate to This Is Worth Reading Again.
But I’m cheating. Because in the end I think that the answer to the question why do I regard those three sentences in Pekić as something special even though they didn’t change how or what I think? actually is tied to an aspect of “new and interesting”. Perhaps the secret is to call it “new and interesting and worthwhile,” so I don’t have to answer embarrassing questions about people with skin that sparkles in sunlight, but of course that begs the question. Is worthwhile new-and-interesting art simply something like Justice Stewart’s porn—“I know it when I see it”? Perhaps. But I remain convinced that there are in fact qualitative differences among the artifacts of the human imagination—that there are in fact “new and interesting” ways of seeing and saying that are actually more worthwhile than other visions. That’s why I have read Too Loud a Solitude six times in the past five years, and will almost certainly read it again next spring, but can all but guarantee that even if I live to be 150, I will never again read The Purple Cloud or Twilight.
Grandma Says:
Gentle with the piecrust.
It’s urinate, not pee.
A nip of brandy is okay.
Interrogate God.
~by Laurie Cutter
Though she is presently in Washington state, Laurie lived in Germany for four and a half years and grew up in Burundi, Africa. In between times, she made her home in Oregon. So “home” is all over the place. She enjoys writing about a variety of people and cultures.
Rock & Sling is back, and getting ready for our first issue, due out in December. We are accepting submissions, and selling subscriptions, both of which may be done through this website.
We will also begin posting new material on this website, including poetry, prose, photography, new media work, and artwork, so keep checking back. You may also stay current with our goings-on via twitter (@rockandsling) and on Facebook.
For future issues both online and in print, we’d like to feature book reviews, so if you are a publisher, feel free to send us your new releases. Our mailing address: Rock & Sling, Attn: Book Reviews / 300 W. Hawthorne Rd. / Spokane WA / 99251. Book reviewers may send full reviews to tcaraway@whitworth.edu.
