We are officially “into the weeds” when it comes to the colors on the portion of the map I am working on, no more nice, large blocks of colors are awaiting me. It’s a balancing act of how much thread to carry while putting in stitches. Carry the thread too long, and it makes a mess of the back of the work (and wastes thread). Tie off the thread all the time, and you end up with way too many starts and stops.
My current plan is to work in sections, checking which color is in them and filling in all the right stitches, then tie off and move to the next section. I know that I’m going to be swapping out colors more frequently and it means I am going to have to keep an eye out on the thread I’m using so that it stays neat and orderly. By the next time I show an update I hope to have a bunch of different colors filled in.
On the audio book front I have been really loving The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis by Jason M. Baxter. He’s covered a number of interesting topics: the practice of imitatio in medieval writing, the way scientific advances affected the literary descriptions of Medieval writers, as well as the importance of Dante’s writing to Lewis’s own works. There are a lot of other things that are covered in the book that I’m only glossing over here, partially because I don’t have the time (this is really supposed to be a brief post) and partially because I think that if you are interested in C.S. Lewis and his writing process you will definitly want to read / listen to this book.
One thing I wanted to talk a little bit more about is the idea that Baxter puts forward about how the way the human conception of the world changed with the scientific revolution, it’s impact on humans understanding of themselves, and how it effects language and ethics. Baxter particularly focussed on the impact of the transition in how the view of the natural world changed from a symphony to a complicated machine. There was a beauty in the way the medieval world talked about the way the world worked and the order of the stars, even if it was not factually accurate. The scientific revolution that came in disrupted the beautiful description in order to be more factually accurate. The world that was once iconic – that existed as its own entity while also being a representation of something greater and higher than itself – was reduced to lumps of rock and burning gas careening through a void. Following the change, the modern world likewise shifted from something profound to a drudgery that chugs along like an old, worn out locomotive, gears turning and pistons firing in a repetitive, unending motion, with no destination in sight.
The change created a massive divide between the sciences and the arts, and I think that is a terrible loss. The world was a living thing in the medieval period, and in the scientific world, at least, it is now dead. There is no pulse in the earth, no breath in the wind. It’s all measurable, quantifiable, and being dissected down to its most basic parts.
Dissections, be it of a person, a place, or an idea, can get ugly. Someone with no care or regard for what they are handling will leave things a gory mess, hacked apart to near unrecognizable levels, so long as they get the one thing they want. People with a clinical mind with no intention of getting involved will make a detailed (hopefully) but impersonal layout, everything neatly labeled and boxed off, more a focus on the individual parts rather than the whole of what it was. The only way a thing will stay intact and be as whole at the end as the beginning is if you hope to bring it back to life again once you’re done.
As someone who enjoys art I think there is a way to have both, but I understand the point Baxter is making. With the scientific revolution, science proved that the unquantifiable wonder of the medievalist was not something that belonged in the “real” world to the masses. And with its exclusion the world lost the touch of faerie that added an extra dimension to daily life.
Sorry for the short essay I’ve written out, and thank you if you stuck around for it! I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I will likely keep thinking about it for a while yet. If any of this sounds interesting to you then I would absolutely recommend this book.
