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A Doll Name Jesus.

Mar 25, 2024

Have I told you that our daughter’s doll is named Jesus?

With Our Fathers

For Christmas 2022, back when she was two, which feels like lifetimes ago now, she got twin dolls from my mom. I can’t remember what their first names were, but they were girls, and she carried them around and treated them as her Mama and I treated our second daughter (who was then not six-months-old). This persisted through the summer.

See, she’d been going to a “Mommy’s Day Out” class, twice a week, three-hours each time. And the names of the dolls were taken from the older girls in that class, with whom I don’t think she ever played but whom she idolized anyway. The class, however, kept getting her (and by extension us) sick. We felt she missed half the classes due to illness, so we stopped sending her after the Spring term. Instantly we got better.

But that also meant we needed a new social scene. We got that mostly through our parish friends and those friends we’d made through that “Mommy’s Day Out” program. We see most of them once a month, and we see one group once (or twice!) a week. Either way, because she wasn’t near the older girls in the class, she stopped calling the dolls by their names and started calling them by her friends’ names. And that’s how the babies became Ryker and John.

But John was too evocative, and we were reading too many (that really should be “too many”) Bible stories, and so quickly her dolls became (as they remain still, about a year later) Jesus and John. Jesus is (you will be glad to know) her favorite.

And this creates hilarious little moments. She will, for example, sometimes forget him downstairs during bedtime. Which means she’ll suddenly remember after they’ve bathed and dressed, so she’ll go running downstairs at top speed, screaming, “I need Jesus!”

Which... I mean... fair enough — but still!

She will often ask me “Do you know where Jesus is?” or, if we’re looking, everybody’s favorite “Have you found Jesus?” If she no longer wants to carry him around and I’m sitting, she’ll come to me and ask, “Would you watch Jesus?” or “Please stay with Jesus” or, especially if she knows I won’t want to mind her doll right then, “Papa, do you need time with Jesus?” She will even occasionally say, “Papa, I think you need Jesus right now.”

She hasn’t pulled something like ‘Jesus wants to spend time with you, Papa’ yet. But it’s only a matter of time.

Flowerbeds

Joseph Clark (1834-1926) died on his 92nd Birthday, on July 4th. Too bad he was English. From Dorset, his father died in 1851 and Clark started supporting his mother and two elder sisters on the income from his painting as early as 1857. I wonder what the family did for the intervening six years. Perhaps his elder sisters went out to work at a local estate, or perhaps they had enough saved to keep body and soul together until Clark could support them. Or perhaps, as he’s given as an uncle of Joseph Benwell Clark, another painter, he might have had married brothers and sisters somewhere which do not otherwise appear in the sources I read but who (blissfully unconscious of their historical invisibility) went on happily supporting them anyway.

In 1868 (at 34), he married an Annie Jones. They had three daughters and a son. Victorian Painters calls him a “tender and affecting” painter of domestic scenes, often with small children. And that’s exactly what I’m showing you today.

The Amphitheater

I stumbled across these Syriac Catholics singing, and I find it just beautiful. There is such great diversity within the Unity of the Catholic Church. I find it hard to imagine they in Communion with the Church our family attends every Sunday, but here we are. Anyway, Catholic or not, Arabic speaking or not, the music is simply beautiful (so is the Church they’re singing in), and I highly recommend this to everyone.

The Hammock

I often post the refrain “Read Great Books” (with an image from a book cover) on Twitter. I try to follow my own advice, but recently I listened to a Great Lecture. The Professor was Michael Drout and his lecture series was Singers and Tales, a look at the oral tradition in storytelling.

I grew up knowing that Homer’s works were recorded by him (let’s ignore whether it was a ‘him’ or a ‘they over centuries’, yes?) from an oral tradition. I knew that they’d been bouncing around, modified, augmented, rearranged for decades and perhaps centuries before Homer ever put stylus to slate. But what I didn’t understand is how that oral tradition worked. I thought he simply knew the stories and put them into language as I might retell The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, as Charles and Mary Lamb retold Shakespeare.

Not a bit of it, argues Michael Drout. He says the entire field of oral composition is misunderstood. We may think the oral poets compose as literary poets would, then memorize their creations. When the poems are passed down from generation to generation, the rising generation memorizes the poems from the reigning one. But that is not how it works at all.

Instead, the scenes and moments of the story are remembered, but each performance is a new production, as if I were to tell you all the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. I know ‘starving family, cow sold for beans, angry Mama, beanstalk, new realm, giant’s castle, gold, golden goose, harp, bye bye beanstalk’, and I even may remember particular phrases which I put well last time, but I don’t memorize every single world. They do basically the same.

‘How could that be, Judd,’ one might say, ‘For you started this by talking about Homer. And Homer is in dactylic hexameter; surely no one is composing dactylic hexamter on the fly!’

That’s exactly what I thought! But Professor Drout convinced me otherwise. I won’t give away his argument or his evidence. If you want then, listen to the lectures. They really are great. However, I will draw you a comparison which I made from some of my other reading.

Two weeks ago, in “Practice Makes Perfect”, I talked about Deliberate Practice. In the same studies, they look at how experts in a field and novices look at reality. While this is true for all experts, what I mean is easiest seen in chess masters. (Like my discussion there, all of this will be from memory so the details will be a little off.)

If you arrange chess boards to be in the middle of random matches and then let men look at the boards for several seconds, novices will be able to place only a few pieces back in proper order while grandmasters will be able to arrange the whole board accurately. At first blush, this sounds like a perfect example of the genius of the grandmaster. Look how quickly he memorizes! But if you instead randomly scatter chess pieces about the board, the grandmaster does little better than the novice. That’s because he’s not memorizing. Or, rather, he’s memorizing something else.

The grandmaster’s mind does not see individual chess pieces and individual squares, as the novice’s does, but in chess scenarios. He sees the relation of the pieces, and so while the novice is trying to memorize (let’s say) twenty pieces and where they go, the grandmaster has recognized five scenarios and can replace them easily. Indeed, by knowing that all five are working together he can correct the errors in one. That is, if, for example, he knows not only that White’s bishop was threatening Black’s rook but that Black’s rook was threatening White’s queen, he can realize that if White’s queen is threatening Black’s knight, it must mean Black’s knight is on e5 and not f5.

I hope that made sense. Let’s look at it in another context. When I watch a football game, I can follow the ball in almost all circumstances. That might not sound like a high boast, but my wife (who saw her first football game five years ago and may not have seen a full dozen in her life) often cannot even do that. She’s wholly taken in by any fake-out, and, even when there’s no fake-out, she just can’t see the game well. Meanwhile, while I can follow the ball, I have no idea where any of the other players are and cannot both follow the ball and them. My cousins, on the other hand, who’ve watched probably thousands of games and played in maybe hundreds, know where everyone is at almost every moment. They not only see all the players in each play, but see the play as it fits into the drive (‘oh, they want to do this because if they can’t advance it then they’ll have a chance to do that in the next down’), and they see each drive in the context of the whole game. If I’ve been a bit vague about the football terminology, it’s because I am a bit vague about football; I’ve played many more games of chess than I’ve ever watched of football.

Oral poets construct their poetry in the same manner as chess grandmasters play their games, likely as NFL Quarterbacks play their games. They do not place words together to fit the meter, they place phrases together. They know thousands of phrases, as chess grandmasters know thousands of situations, as football fans know thousands of plays, as writers know thousands of images, as indeed we all know thousands of words, and these phrases can be built up into whatever line is appropriate for the tradition.

I’ll give you one example from Drout. There is a rest in the Homeric dactylic hexameter which breaks the phrase into two, and the oral poets know phrases that can fit each, so they can tell you how someone rested before he fought or they can tell you how he rested before he ate. But either way, it fits the meter.

If you’re still a bit unclear about this it’s almost certainly my fault. But let’s look at language to try and get at how this works again. You and I have several thousand words at ready access, and we also have a grammatical structure with which we talk. When we speak, we do not think, ‘let me put a noun here and a verb here, an adjective here and an adverb there’. We do not even think (usually) about which words we want to use. We think in concepts and ideas and intentions and give voice to them as best we can in language (verbal and grammatical) which is second-nature. There are of course greater and lesser speakers, and what we call ‘being a good talker’ is largely a product of memorizing a variety of patterns (old aphorisms, new slang, quick jokes, clever anecdotes) and then expertly arranging and artfully altering them to fit the audience. And that’s just what these oral poets do.

Now, whether you’re convinced or not (whether you understood or not!), I highly recommend Professor Drout’s Singers and Tales. It’s short, fascinating, and very well performed. And it opens a door into a world of modern epic storytelling which I’d thought extinct and ancient history.

The Shed

Just a reminder that there will be no (new!) letters in April, except that I will have a short letter on April 1st. But then I’m off for the rest of the month. I will continue to release old editions of this newsletter for those of you who are new to the letters.

Reviso et Peroratio

I bet we all know those people who just seemingly know what’s going to happen in every movie. My hypothesis is that they instinctively know the grammar of stories and see them like a chess grandmaster might see a game play out before him and predict all the moves. Brandon Sanderson says something about this in one of his recorded lectures at BYU. He says that there comes a point in every writer’s career when he can see what tricks the author of a book is playing on him, where the build-up happens, where the seeds are sown, whence comes the misdirection. Some people have this talent naturally; that is, they attended to enough stories well enough that the channels have been built into them.

I’m not sure we ever taught these building blocks, or if we always expected those with story inclinations to pick them up by osmosis, but now we don’t even teach in a way that allows that osmosis. The building blocks of stories are: Bible stories, fairytales, myths, fables, and legends. But like molecules, that’s only what the bodies of stories are made of. The molecules themselves have constituent elements — atoms. The elements of stories are something like, plot, character, motif, image.

Some of these are obvious; everyone knows a comedy ends in a marriage (or a feast, or a dance). There are revenge plots (Kill Bill) and discovery plots (Star Trek); there are bildungsroman (Kidnapped) and lovers reunite plots (Ivanhoe, The Princess Bride). Many characters we could easily name, like the lovable rogue (Han Solo, Falstaff), or the doe-eyed naïf (Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter), or the wise old man (Merlin, Dumbledore, Yoda). There are motifs every which way, like the Dragon-Slayer Motif (Beowulf in the cave, Harry Potter in the Chamber of Secrets, Lando Calrissian blowing up the Death Star). There’s the Self-Mutilation Motif (Cinderella, Foo from Fullmetal Alchemist). There’s the Lost Home Motif (Hogwarts, Ithaca), the Impotent Father Motif (basically all of them). And there are images, images of water, blood, wine (which is the same image), plains, mountains, dungeons, &c.

To track them all may be a lifetime task. But as I learn about them, I try to use them more intentionally in my own writing. If you haven’t a clue what I am talking about, watch O Brother, Where Art Thou? again (it would be again, right? Right!?). It’s such a pure use of all the plots, characters, motifs, and images. Really, a great joy.

Thank you.

Can you see the ‘grammar’ in your own expertise? I’m trying to think of other skills I have, but in none of them I’m quite good enough to really come up with excellent examples. In cooking, it’s about the flavor (of course), but also smell, texture, and even color. But I can’t quite get at the elements, merely down to the molecules of it. If you have a skill whose grammar you’d like to share (or if you’d like to share about anything else), please click

Hortus Scriptorius

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