What on Earth Am I on About?

Purpose and loyalties… with gems from 'Why I Write' and ‘God in the Dock.'

Photo by The Crocodile

Here at Shelf of Crocodiles, third time’s the charm.

With monthly essay trois, I’m setting down my toolbox, pouring drinks, and giving guided tours of the workshop. 

As plainly as I can, I’ll state what I’m on about—my purpose and motivation for scribbling this monthly-ish essay. I’ll lay out goals and audience, sprinkle on some backstory, and work through a few pivots in my overall thinking.

That is, I’ll pour samples of what’s been percolating over the conversations, reading, and residencies of my two year Master of Fine Arts program at New Saint Andrews College.

Granted I complete this year’s coursework, cut a decent thesis—and renounce my allegiance with the show Breaking Bad—I’ll graduate next spring.

If you don’t have it already, you’ll get a sense of the duels I’ve heard a-calling, the fronts I’ve rallied to as a writer, a reader, and a flawed but attentive spectator of the stories unfolding around me, from my Midtown sidewalk to the national scoreboard.

On that note, we’re off.

Hands and feet inside. 

Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash

“Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.” – G.K. Chesterton.

On Wearing Jerseys

I’ll be up front about the one I’m wearing.

As far as origins go, I’m a Church of God Christian from Southern California. Along with that, I’m a lover of my country, its heritage, the western tradition, and from my teenage years onward, a talk radio conservative.

So there’s that.

Having outed myself as not—and no doubt, never—one of the cool people, I’ll bring in moral support from the most insightful political writer of the Twentieth Century, one Eric Arthur Blair.  

You probably know him by the towering pen name George Orwell, the guy who wrote Animal Farm and 1984. In the essay ‘Why I Write’ Orwell drills down to four motivations that fuel all writers:

1. Sheer egoism

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm (writing for love of craft or subject)

3. Historical impulse (writing for posterity)

And last…

4. Political purpose

Though not all-encompassing, it’s a great list. 

Orwell then claims that as far as original loyalties go, he himself is no political writer.

If you don’t believe me, check it out:

“By nature… I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.”¹

Having read much of the Orwell cannon, I believe him.

His first novel Burmese Days, which he wrote from Southeast Asia while serving in the imperial police, is less a tract against corrupt colonial rule that it is a cynical, howling melodrama, served hot from the author’s own frustrated experience.

As I’m grappling with my own drippy mess of a first novel, the raw closeness of Orwell’s first at-bat hits close to home.

But that’s for a different essay.

What I meant to do is claim the same motivation that the legend does.

I read and write because I love ideas, stories, imaginary worlds.  

Were it not for everything around me going batshit crazy in the span of a few months, I wouldn’t be touching politics with a ten pole. Though I’m no Orwell, I find myself speaking up, throwing warning shots, and simply saying a spade’s a spade because I have to.

So once in a long while, I’ll mention truthful things that, any day now, might get me arrested.

Things like:

-American racism in 2021 (the core assumption of identity politics) is exaggerated.

-The hunt for racists / sexists / what have-ists is the new Salem Witch Trials.

-Sex is biological—not a social construct.

-Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead and reigns over all of life.

-Safety isn’t worth the cost of forfeiting everything else.

You get the idea.

In the midst of a nakedly aggressive putsch against everything bread and butter—from education, public safety, and the social fabric to race relations, children’s books, and even math and science—I’m understanding why Orwell pointed out that there’s no such thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins.

Plaça de George Orwell, Barcelona. Photo by The Crocodile, 2008.

Orwell wrote about the Spanish Civil War only after he went to Spain, picked a side, and took a bullet through the neck. While it’s true that he fought with Communists against the Fascists, (with Hitler rising, not a bad choice), he changed his mind when the truth presented itself.

He called out Stalin, right when doing so meant scorn, silencing, and exile from the mainstream culture.

A century later, his bravery and judgment speak for themselves.

So if I care about the world around me, the one purchased by the same Savior who forgives my sin and brokenness, I’m obligated to check the scoreboard, pull on a Jersey, and if my turn comes, join the fray.  

Especially when the stadium’s on fire.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Loves, loyalties… and a big bag of plays

Going back far enough—at 35, I can hardly believe the mileage—you’ll find a twelve year old version of me sitting on a bench in a rented fellowship hall, reading plays during my after-school drama class. I’m reading scenes and monologues at random, all from the big gray bag that my short, determined, and very British drama teacher brought along each week. 

Strange titles, yellowing covers—didn’t matter. If I found stage directions and two characters talking, I devoured it.

Novels and movies were splendid from the start, but they seemed, at that time, like less-important second cousins to plays and theater, which were even more fun onstage, in front of an audience.  

In his essay ‘Behind the Scenes,’ one collected in ‘God in the Dock,’ C.S. Lewis puts his finger the attraction itself, the passport between drab reality and imagination:

“I knew very well that the scenery was painted canvas; that the stage rooms and staged trees, seen from behind, would not look like rooms or trees at all. That was where the interest lay… In the real theater you couldn’t go ‘behind,’ but you knew it would be the same… To come from dressing rooms and bare walls and utilitarian corridors – and to come suddenly – into Aladdin’s cave or the Darlings’ nursery or whatever it was – to become what you weren’t and to be where you weren’t – this seemed most enviable.”² 

I couldn’t contain myself.

But as I grew older, I often felt I was there in my disguise.

That same preteen reading Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Sam Shepherd, second wave feminists and anything else in the bag, was from an entirely different tribe, in both lineage and loyalties.

I was no bohemian bad boy—and certainly no showbiz kid with parents in the industry.

I didn’t just grow up with Protestant, middle-class, depression-forged values; I watched them in action from a family that stuck together, helped each other out, and rose to affluence through hard work, college, sound life choices.

As far as church went, I was there on Sundays, there on Wednesday nights.

But then, as it does now, theater enthralled me.

I read, auditioned, performed, directed—all the way to an Honors B.A. in Theater from the University of California and a year of study at the University of London. I was the only theater major cracking the study Bible every morning, angling for ways to engage the pagan denizens I’d see at rehearsal, hoping for ways that Christians might capture the skills and bravado of secular artists, who—it seemed—had all the applause.

In my senior year, I played Dr. Rank, a hobbling side character in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House—and I hit bedrock.

Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg—all the fathers of ‘modern drama’ were secular humanists. Their plays were cannons, aimed backward at the beliefs and values of European Christendom, and they demolished more than they ever dreamed of.

To a lesser extent, and since the 1930’s or so, American playwrights have aimed likewise. It finally made sense that the gray bag had no plays by Protestant Christians. In recent history, they’d been absent from the proving grounds.

From there—and with knots that I couldn’t quite untangle—I got my teaching credential and spent a number of years paddling through the meaty breakers of high school English. But as I taught, adulted, those loyalties raged on, simmering like embers that won’t go out.

To the extent that I’m finding new room for them, the conversations at New Saint Andrews have been a godsend, speaking to my passion while challenging and whittling my core assumptions.

Instead of asking how good is it, they asked, why are you writing it?

Instead of repeating the same old individualism gospel—that Disney-flavored, Ibsen rehash of looking within and finding your true self—they asked:

What kind of stories feed people?

What does it feed them?

And how does God tell stories?

Wind in my sails—a whole hurricane.

And with one more section to go, the engine of Shelf of Crocodiles is right here:

I’m writing to feed story, idea, and craft-of-writing loving Christians with good, healthy fodder.

And anyone else who’s read this far is more than welcome.

For content, I’m drawing from my oddball reading, the Bible, and some of the rich Protestant writing that pushed boundaries, capturing both human and the divine over previous centuries.

And no—I’m not yet done with that big gray bag.

Not Glancing Left

If I’d started this a few years ago, this would be a different section.

Having started when I did—a year after several course reading lists gave me a near heart attack—I’m in a different place… surveying a whole new landscape.

To borrow a phrase from Pastor and author Douglas Wilson, (one of my four professors), I’m no longer glancing to the left.

That is, I’m no longer angling for cues, approval, or even acceptance from a secular culture going soft totalitarian, with competing gods, priestesses, sins, and shrill demands for penance.

Like many West Coast Christians, I once flew loosely under the banner of First Corinthians, nine—becoming all things to all people with the goal of winning them over.

By them I meant the cool people.

I glimpsed hope in the likes of Donald Miller, Relevant Magazine, Mosaic Church, and even Anne Lamott—who insisted she knew me from somewhere when I met her at a book signing.

While my intentions were sincere, my endgame, (to say nothing of my eschatology), was pretty much imagery.

And as last year’s wreckage grew massive—with the telos of worshipping false Gods all too evident—I saw Christians I admired staying home for an entire year, flagellating themselves for invisible sins, admonishing bravery, paying flattery in hopes of keeping up with the insanity outside.

Just don’t be a jerk, they argued.

This as persecution rises around the world, as close as Canada, and all around.   

Believe it or not, aggressors respect those who stand and fight.

Again, in God in the Dock, Lewis drives this home.

“We are proud that our country has more than once stood against the world. Athanasius did the same. He stood for the Trinitarian doctrine ‘whole and undefiled,’ when it looked as if all the civilized world was slipping back from Christianity into the one of those ‘sensible’ synthetic religions which are so strongly recommended today by many highly cultivated clergymen.It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away.”³

In my writing and raving, I’ll seek approval from the one on the cross, the one who flipped death to life and changed everything.

If I’m wrong, then I’m wrong.

But even broken clocks are right twice a day.

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

Whittled down

With Shelf of Crocodiles, I hope to feed reading-interested Christians.

I’ll do this by:

1. Cracking open the treasure chest—writing about the books and plays that glisten with craft, character, tension, drama, or shards of God’s story.

2. Examining the stories God tells, and how He tells them.  

3. Encouraging wide, careful reading—Philippians 4:8; Matthew 10:6

4. Combing current and non-Christian works for classical structure, universal truths, heresies, and the Gospel of Jesus—1 Thessalonians 5:21

5. Talking and celebrating shop—that is, distilling structure, impact and writer’s craft.

6. Wearing a Jersey—if and when I need to.

With each essay, I’ll inch closer.

I’m glad to do it because stories matter. And if Jesus is Lord over all of life, then there’s no work, play, film, or story that doesn’t reflect His own, the original longform.

As far as spit balling goes, everything’s fair game.

Here’s some titles I plan to write about:  

-Ploductivity by Douglas Wilson

-The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

-King Lear (Shakespeare’s Tragedy) versus King David

-The Book of Job

-Breaking Bad, (please don’t tell my grad program…)

-European playwrights: Vaclav Havel, Eugene Ionesco, and Max Frisch

-The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

-Concrete Island, and the prophetic imagination of J.G. Ballard

So that’s the tour!

Have some thoughts on what I should tackle?

Drop a line!

Great to have you—and thanks for reading. 

1. Orwell, George. A Collection of Essays. Harcourt, (313),

2. Lewis, C.S. God in the Dock. Erdmans, (270).

3. Lewis, C.S. God in the Dock. Erdmans, (224).