The Gospel According to "Amadeus"

Last night, I viewed the 1984 film Amadeus with my kids. I hadn’t seen it for decades, and I’d forgotten the many famous scenes in this story: the scene where Salieri meets the young “vulgar” Mozart who is playing an adolescent, sexual game on the floor and under the table with Constance; the perhaps most famous “too many notes” scene, where in the Emperor Joseph criticizes Mozart’s new opera The Marriage of Figaro for having “too many notes.” And then there is perhaps my favorite, the last scene, where the old Salieri is wheeled out into the larger asylum and declares himself the patron saint of mediocrity and blesses the madmen around him.

But this time around, I was perhaps most challenged by an early scene that makes this movie “theological,” when Salieri prays as a young boy to become a great composer who sings his praises to God. The lad loves music and bargains with his deity, “Make me a great composer and I will give you my praise, my…industry.”

A Theology of Prayer

Most of this film is about the answer to that prayer and what it looks like to the older man. Salieri indeed becomes an important court composer in Vienna, the musical capital of Europe, a place where his music is even celebrated when it is premiered. But we see all of this through the lens of the covetous old man, who seems to be the only person in Vienna to recognize that it is Mozart who has been given the divine gift.

So much for prayers for greatness, for great art, one might say.

The movie can be considered a fictional account. It makes up a great deal about Salieri’s role in Mozart’s early death, for example. And Salieri tells this story as someone who has rejected God, when the evidence I've seen is that the real Salieri worked and wrote a great deal for the church in his retirement. But in the movie, he declares himself to be against God's designs.

Less fictional, meanwhile, and probably more accurate, is the way that Mozart is constantly shown in the act of composing. The movie shows the young composer walking away from arguments with his father and his wife over income, closing the door, and getting to work on his music, which at any given moment is clearer to him than a passing domestic quarrel.

Meanwhile, Salieri fritters his time away with his students and his schemes to find out what Mozart is up to. The film also provides some theology according to Salieri, who chooses to recognize God as the source of his adversary’s gift, and this can only torment him like an Old Testament King Saul, who wants to have the younger David executed. Salieri is not a modern nihilist. He very much believes that God is behind his own misery. He doesn't belittle God. He hates God because he doesn't like God's choices.

What We Might Want to Think

This is perhaps first a movie about jealousy and creativity, certainly. But there is also this twisted theology running through Salieri's motivations as a character. What does this movie have to tell us about prayer? What does it mean to say that we can pray? One thing does come through to me: As sovereign over the universe, God has his own inscrutable plans, as inscrutable to me most of the time as they are in the movie to Salieri. In the words of TerryTaylor, “We live upon this dark surface, and God moves upon the deep.”

As for my own prayer, it comes down to this: I'm not sure that my choices and character are all that well aligned with God's. When I do pray, the first part of it is a struggle as I try to work through all of my own issues with my nature—my selfishness, my feelings of unworthiness in the face of the infinite, my anger, my desire to get back at people.

I'm comforted in that I sometimes see these layers of “personality” in the Psalms attributed to David—the Old Testament version of the "man after God's own heart" who was not afraid to pray that God would “smite” his enemies.

Perhaps one lesson should be learned from this old movie and a broken down character like Salieri--I believe there always is something to learn when human nature is rendered accurately. I am reminded that no matter how much I repress and try to hide, my life is always an open book before God. And there are other points of view out there, other needs. God may be planning to use someone else as his "instrument." But the problem as I am made to see it in "Amadeus" is this: I’m more like Salieri in my prayers than I’ll ever be like Mozart in my compositions.  

Toward a Curriculum of the Imagination, part 2

Last month, while visiting Las Vegas, I found myself thinking about the adult imagination. This month, while hearing the same ideas about creativity over and over from my students, I began to wonder. Could the adult imagination be traced back to its roots in school, where we are taught to respect facts and rules and deny the imagination?

This past month, as I've said, I’ve heard over and over again a belief my students hold to as a dogma. “Creativity,” they say, “means throwing out the rules and just expressing your self.” I've noticed that they usually do say "self" and not "mind," but that is a point for another blog.

What we basically have here is a widely held belief about "Creativity." But those who hold to it should not be shamed for accepting it any more than those little girls, who haven't yet had music appreciation, should be shamed for their love of Justin Bieber. In the few General Education classes where my students had to write, they were told very little, at least in comparison to the ancients. They were not told that good writing meant rewriting (as Mark Twain wrote, and as my father always told me). They were told to follow rules--and punished when they didn't:

Rule one: Never use first person.

Rule two: Never begin a sentence with the word “and.”

Rule three: Have five paragraphs, three of which form the body of the paper.

Rule four: Have seven sentences (or five, depending on the teacher) for each paragraph. 

Rule five: Write grammatical sentences. (And this led to about ninety other rules, each followed by exceptions.)

Post-Rules

That’s about it. The rules are stupid, of course. 

Oh, but to be creative means to throw them out.

And I can see why my students want to throw them out. They aren’t of any real help when we want to communicate our most important ideas to the real world. They are not about generating ideas or examining them. They are not about reflection or idea development. They are a series of rigidly correct moves to make at all times, regardless of audience, subject, or purpose. 

But tossing the rules is doing little more than the equivalent of elementary school finger painting and is really not much help either. If it were, the world currently would be noisy with creative writers. And it isn’t. This mirage of creativity, this hope, is so different from what I read from creative writers. Flannery O’Connor, for example, referred to habits of mind.

To most of us, there is no need for habits when creativity is supposed to flow like a stream from the average consciousness. There is no need for paying attention, concentration, learning about ideas, or learning anything about how language works or how other writers and poets have learned about language. The idea is that nature is by itself enough.

Nature is What Happens to Us

Well, nature isn’t really enough. Nature is what is happening to us all the time and what will eventually be our undoing. Instead, we need to practice. We need to fail. We need to have others around to critique our work and to tell us, in effect, where and when our ideas are stupid or poorly realized or too sentimental. We need a process. We need to write, read, rewrite, rewrite again, and learn what others are doing.

But my students generally do not accept the idea of process. They accept format.

But a format is rigid, a one time deal.

Though I fear I am being too obvious, I am coming off another semester of teaching writing classes to people who do not believe that process matters.  So I need to say this. It does. 

And we need to place it at the center of any curriculum of the imagination.

Without process, we are left with the rules or no rules approach. And that is, to sound the cliche, to be between a rock and a hard place. 

Revision/Repentance: Sorting Through a Contrast

This past week involved a struggle with a writing project. I’m working on a novel, and after getting some great feedback on it last week (see last blog), I found myself going back to the drawing board on a few things. Writing is like that, though. I’m used to it. Some people might look at this as similar to “repentance” (I say this because it is common to look at having to do something over again as a form of punishment). But I try to avoid attributing moral or spiritual guilt where none exists (more about this later in the blog). And I don’t rewrite to cover errors or mistakes, as though I’m working on a math problem; I rewrite because I’m learning more about the material I’m working on. Revision, or re-seeing, concerns getting closer to the vision I had for writing in the first place. Nancy Sommers, a Composition specialist, calls this part of the writing process, when we return to earlier stages of the process, “recursive.” That is, it involves returning to earlier stages of a writing process as a part of moving forward toward a better draft.

Most of my work this week could be called recursive. I literally went back to the drawing board, to stage one: I added a new chapter, which I then spent most of the week writing and giving shape to. But in writing this chapter, I also learned more about other parts of the book I’ve already written, and I also found myself adding new scenes to other chapters already written. Many people might look at that as failure, or as too much work. But my understanding of the world of my novel is deepening; my rewriting, rethinking, re-inventing, I hope, will reflect this. The whole week seemed worth the effort.

We tend to look at many aspects of life, especially those concerned with learning and growing, as consisting of stages of development. Once we pass through an early stage, we are done with it. This model might work for childhood development, though I’ve also heard of it being criticized. As for writing, the stage model has long been criticized, and yet it is also deeply entrenched in teaching writing in the lower grades.

The stages model suggests that five stages are needed to write an essay: Pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. The assumption with this model is that when we finish “pre-writing” for an essay and move to “drafting,” we are finished with “pre-writing.” And once we finish “drafting,” we move on to “revision” and don’t need to “draft” again. This is to teach these five stages as “non-recursive.”  

This is simply too neat to be true or accurate. All of the writers I know don’t write in stages. They don't see returning to the drawing board as a form of “repentance.” They do return to planning again, they do re-draft whole segments of their work, not because they are terrible writers, but because they are good ones, and in writing the first draft, they realized what their piece was really about.

This seems to be true of most things. When we are involved in a new endeavor, we have only a sketchy understanding of what it is to look like and how we will pull it off. So we plow through until we realize we’re off track. We return to the beginning with a better understanding of what to do.

This is the part of revision that I suppose cuts across into religious thought. Although revision should not carry the moral repugnance of repentance, repentance does resemble the recursive element of revision. Repentance is a turning away from what we’ve done and a turning back to what is perceived as the right path. I suppose for most of us, repentance carries all of the childhood memories of shame, disgrace, and, yes, moral repugnance. But there is also this promise of a better understanding than we had before--yes, it does resemble a new revision.

Aside from the harsh, haunting childhood images, repentance could also be seen as a lot more like revision, as a new opportunity to do things better, the way they should have been done the first time. Certainly, if I’ve done real harm to someone, it's probably a sign of health that I feel remorse.  

For those of us who follow a developmental, stages model for faith (I usually do at an unconscious level) and assume we're really moving far along and getting deeper and better, we may want to question our model. Christianity without repentance is like writing without revision.

If you’ve looked at as many essays as I have that were written by student writers who don’t revise because they believe revision is only for bad writers, then you’ll understand that it is not a pretty picture.

Most of the time, spiritual progress does resemble writing. And sometimes, as C.S. Lewis once noted, to go forward I first have to go back.