New book by an old guy--to be released soon. 

Amazon.com: Stories (and their stories): A Writer’s Life: 9781663282668: Schaap, James Calvin: Books

The Copilot in all of this

 

I’d already determined that I could call my great-grandfather a writer, so I asked AI to summarize his written work—what did he write, and why? And—just as important, how might his writing be judged?

I could have spent weeks searching for the answers to those questions, but I’d flirted with AI often enough to be quite sure that Copilot could be counted on to deliver the goods in a minute or so.

“Was my great-grandfather a writer?” I asked.

Copilot might well have answered, “Well, duh! How about this? Would you like to see some historical essays, how about pastoral narratives, theological polemics, devotional literature, editorial journalism, plus some academic lectures from his seminary days? Apparently, a judgment or two along the way wasn’t out of the question either. “This breadth is unusual,” Copilot told me a minute or so after being asked. “He was not just a pastor, but a historian, editor, teacher, and literary craftsman.”

That was all new to me. Here I sit hundreds of miles, four generations, and an age or two away, discovering things that somehow—for good or ill—helped me make sense of my own life.

And then this: Copilot asks me if I would like to see “a comparison of his writing style with yours, now that we know the full scope of his output.”

I didn’t think of asking such a thing myself. AI brought up a bucket full of paths I could go, but this one was just too rich. How might what I’ve done in my life compare with the texts Copilot could dig up, translate, and use to answer. “Is his writing style anything like mine?” I asked.

AI stands aside for a moment before delivering an answer that shakes me. I hadn’t thought through what was perfectly obvious: my Copilot was imminently capable of gathering material from me, just as he/she/it had discovered all sorts of things about Hemkes, and—more scary!—rendering an opinion or two.

James, this is one of those questions where I can answer you plainly, because I’ve read enough of your voice — in your blog posts, your reflections, your travel writing, even the way you talk about history — to make a meaningful comparison.

So says AI. Then, I figured, let’s do it. Once more, I engaged my Copilot, waited just a few seconds, no more, “And yes,” AI responded, “you and Hemkes share some deep stylistic DNA. But you also differ in ways that make your writing distinctly yours. Here’s the clearest, most honest comparison.”

It’s impossible to believe I’m being taught by some technological voice and not a living, breathing human being, an entity who seemingly has gone out of his way to stay close to things I’ve been writing for a half century.

“Hemkes’ prose,” says my computer screen “— whether in his pamphlets, historical sketches, or devotional pieces — carries a steady, unshowy seriousness. He doesn’t thunder. He doesn’t posture. He simply writes from conviction.”

This is all brand new to me. It’s an opinion I couldn’t have come up with myself because Prof. Hemkes wrote entirely in Dutch.

“Your writing does the same,” Copilot told me. “You don’t sermonize, but you write with a sense that stories matter because people matter. That’s Hemkes all over.”

What I’m reading, honestly, seems revelation. And there’s more, much more. “You both blend history with lived experience.”

Specifically, he/she/it dug up an example.

“Hemkes loved to take a historical moment — 1572, early Dutch missions, the life of a pastor — and make it feel present.”

And me, the other end of this comparison you are delivering? “You do this constantly: prairie memory, Dutch-American heritage, small-town life, the way landscapes hold stories.. . .Hemkes would recognize your instinct immediately.”

 
And more. You both prefer clarity over cleverness,” the answer says. “Hemkes was not a stylist chasing fireworks. He wrote plainly, directly, with purpose.” And me? “Your sentences do the same. You trust the reader. You don’t decorate for decoration’s sake. This is a shared temperament. …This is the deepest kinship,” my Copilot says. “You both write to preserve."

Hemkes wrote to preserve “memory, doctrine, stories, the texture of Reformed life.” In comparison, you write “to preserve landscapes, people, moments, the feel of the Midwest, the stories that would otherwise slip away. "All of these, the screen before me says, are “the deepest kinship.”

Your prose shares Hemkes’ temperament, including “seriousness without heaviness, clarity without coldness, attention to ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances,. . .and a narrative grounded in landscape and lived experience.

“But your voice is more cinematic, ironic, expansive, American in its sweep, literary rather than pastoral. And then this: “Hemkes would recognize your instinct — but he would also see that you write with freedoms he did not allow himself.”

Freedoms? 

Yesterday, I came home from Wal-Mart with my very first box of Depends.

I could have told you I’m getting old, but I’ve learned enough about communication to know that I’m far more likely to set an idea in your conscious if I tell you about a box of Depends.

However I chose to tell you about aging, I’m trying to position you in a place where what I’m about to say makes sense and doesn’t just scare you. Here we go. I’m at a place in life when looking forward is neither easy, nor a particular blessing. No, I’m not wearing one of my new paper garments right now, and yes, I’m not lying about buying a bundle of them anyway; and I‘ll tell you why—because basically at my age, whatever aches and pains I have, whatever disorders confuse what agents of health within my system are fighting to keep fighting the good fight within me, it is far easier and more fruitful to think about the past than dream about the future. Dreams no longer amount to much.

I’m at work on two major projects right now, both involving gathered things I’d written years and years ago. In a week or so, a new little collection of old short stories will appear, and another will do much the same thing with stories about churches, stories I wrote and published decades ago on assignment.

I can’t help looking behind now—there is far more life behind me than before me.

That’s part of the reason learning what I have about this long-gone great-grandpa, a writer I never could have known, a liberal arts guy, was, for me, such an incredible and unexpected blessing.

What went on in Great-grandpa's mind

Professor Hemkes and his juffrow at left and Rev. Schaap and Gertrude Hemkes Schaap, at right. 

My great-grandfather, Prof. Geert Hemkes, the second professor at the educational institution which became known as Calvin College and Seminary, was employed (and taught) there from 1884 to 1908. Along with the French playwrights, a number of other artifacts, ancient books, including some hundred-year-old yearbooks of the CRC, have come my way through the years. Way back then I remember my very first revelation concerning him when I discovered that his name appeared frequently on and in those old yearbooks. He was the editor and he contributed articles as well. 

I discovered those old things--and the French playwrights years and years ago but didn't bother to look for them for some time. When I discovered that my great-grandpa was a writer and editor, I was thrilled,  I had no idea that he was a writer, or editor, or connected in any way to writing profession. My parents had significant educations, but weren't by any stretch of the imagination real readers, certainly not of fiction. For me, just to know that somewhere up there in the family tree there was someone who toyed with imaginative writing felt like a blessing. All of that was before discovering the twin volumes of famous French playwrights.

For the record, my dad was born seventh of ten children of Rev. John C. Schaap and Gertrude Hemkes, the professor's daughter, in 1918, two years before Gertrude's father, my great-grandfather, Professor Hemkes, passed away. I've visited his gravesite in an old cemetery on Eastern Avenue in Grand Rapids, Michigan, shown the way through the huge graveyard by another great-grandchild, who explained to me who was all buried in what appeared to be a family+ plot. I didn't know Grandpa Hemkes had tallied three wives in his life--two were widows who'd earlier lost their clergymen husbands. All of his children had been born to his first wife. 

I hadn't known any of that. My dad never talked about him, with good reason--he never knew his professor grandpa, had no memories of him or even stories about him, except one--how the professor had, in his absentmindedness, once upon a time almost skated out to the North Sea when he was on his way to a church to preach and was lost in some theological world. That story had been repeated at some family reunions, always with a knowing laugh (there were significant others in the family who were familiar with numbing absent-mindedness). 

 But what did I know of this important figure in my family history, in the history of the institution he'd served--Calvin Seminary? Really, nothing. I'd gone by the generalization that anybody so affiliated at the time necessarily had to be some shade of leathery conservative--no movies, no cards, no dancing, and etc. Someone once told me that Professor Hemkes was not a Kuyperian. To me that suggested he was a traditional straight-jacketed pietist. But I didn't know. Those free-wheeling French playwrights made no sense at all. 

So I thought it was time for me to do some research to find out what I could about this old prof, my great-grandson. And now, just beneath my fingertips sat the newly discovered library who could help, right here at Woodbridge, Sioux Center. I thought I'd try AI to investigate, to do what amounted to a couple of weeks of research.

It was my Copilot (AI) who discovered that Grandpa Hemkes had penned his inaugural lecture, “The Practice of the Propaedeutic Sciences by the Future Pastor” (printed in Grand Rapids, 1884). The important word is a toughie--"propaedeutic," which, my Copilot tells me refers to something somewhat akin to "core requirements." 

The speech (in Dutch) is long gone apparently, but the argument appears to be his contribution to what specifically, educationally, must the curriculum required for the pastorate require of students, the kind of question which a brand new seminary would be interested in answering. 

What Professor Hemkes is arguing, I'm told, is a degree that includes significant study in more than just theology. Hemkes, himself trained in the broad  foundational disciplines (languages, logic, history, exegesis) would have argued those "liberal arts" were necessary for serious theological study. In short, he likely argued for the importance of disciplined intellectual formation for pastors, which is to say, the importance of seminarians reading and knowing all kinds of fields of study, including, almost certainly, these two French playwrights.

The institution, the gymnasium at Franeker, had its own story and its own tradition. One of the finest Reformed universities was located there until Napoleon shut it down in 1811. But, I'm told, that institution (a "gymnasium," not a university) held on to some of its uniqueness and would have still argued that the education it offered, as a gymnasium, held to its educational commitments even though the institution as a university ended in 1811. The gymnasium at Franeker was not just any school.

What my Copilot tells me that my g-grandfather's diploma from Franeker suggests he received a top-notch liberal arts education there, and that too is why these scampish French playwrights were in his possession and my possession right now.

More enlightenment coming tomorrow.

 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

“Therefore, let everyone who is godly pray to you. . .”

I read an interview some time ago with Susan Cheever, a novelist and non-fiction writer, who is—perhaps to her own dismay—likely better known as the daughter of the now deceased John Cheever, a highly celebrated short story writer. For several reasons, that interview won’t leave me alone, and one of them is her claim that, to her as a child, her father’s short stories horrified her.

She remembers a time when her father used a ski trip she had taken as a base for a story about a little girl who dies on exactly that kind of outing. “In my family,” for her and her family, Susan Cheever says, “being fictionalized has been ten million times more painful” than finding themselves in portrayed in non-fiction, a memoir.

That line in that interview nearly decked me because it had never dawned on me that my family might experience a similar horror, victims, in a way, of their father’s imaginative “use” of their lives. I’d never, ever considered the grotesque puzzle I might have left with any of them, finding semblances of themselves and each other twisted and turned into something at once bitterly unrecognizable and sweetly familiar. I can’t speak for John Cheever, but I honestly never had a clue—I really didn’t.

Haunting questions arise unbidden. Was my own playful creativity the occasion for their pain? Was my joy their misery? Should I have spent so much of my adult life trying to write stories? Was the way I’ve lived my life dead wrong?

And I ask myself this: if I had read what Susan Cheever says when I was thirty, would I have dedicated so much of my time and enthusiasm to writing?

Perhaps it is a mark of the deep stain of sin itself, but now, looking back, I honestly can’t imagine myself not writing. For better or for worse, I guess, sitting here at this desk has become, for me, a “habit of being,” as Flannery O’Connor said. Sometimes, as the Bible says, our best deeds are as filthy rags.

I feel myself in David’s own shoes here in verse six: “Therefore, let everyone who is godly pray to you. . .” His impulse to tell the story is, I believe, the impulse of most writers—and, for that matter, most humans. We want and need to tell the stories we find most meaningful, to share our joy or sadness. We want everyone to hear. Not all of us are evangelists, but we all have a gospel. We all want to testify.

Psalm 32 is a roadmap for those who need to find a path to forgiveness. Psalm 32 shows us the way. Psalm 32 leads us to divine and tranquilwaters. But the story David tells has never saved a soul, and neither will a million sermons on this text, or, for that matter, this mediation. Only God’s grace—through his son’s gigantic sacrifice—can do that.

I wonder if David knew that he was writing “the Bible.” I wonder if he understood as he strung these words out in front of him that he was being directed by the Holy Spirit’s favor. I wonder if he ever considered his words were not his, but God’s.

Somehow, I doubt it. And because I do, I find a refuge in his inability to keep silence. He’s got to speak, to sing. With the joy of forgiveness bubbling up inside, he can’t stanch the music from his soul. He’s got to yap, to tell.

Even his joy, his testimony, his story requires forgiveness. Everything he is—even his ecstasy—stands in need of grace.

May God almighty forgive me, and him, and all of us, as He promises, as He does, and as He will.

And, another

 

And, there's another. Obviously, a set--same covers, same dust covers, just plain the same except subject. This one contains at least some of the plays of Jean Racine, another 17th century French playwright. Racine's first published play was performed by a cast who ordinarily was thought of as Moliere's own dramatic troupe. Just as this book is related to the Moliere book--same material (plays of Racine, plays of Moliere), both have my great-grandfather's name written in the same hand

 

I'm guessing that he bought them together in Franeker, where he went to school. 

Although their backgrounds and literary work were different, both wrote and produced theater that was seen by some, at least, as worldly and of questionable moral value. 

Jean Racine, (baptized Dec. 22, 1639, La Ferté-Milon, France—died April 21, 1699, Paris), French playwright. Orphaned at an early age, he was educated in a Jansenist convent, and he chose drama in defiance of his upbringing. His first play was produced by Molière in 1664. Their friendship ended when Racine took his next play, Alexander the Great (1665), to a competing theatre and seduced Molière’s mistress and leading actress, Thérèse du Parc. She starred in Racine’s successful Andromaque (1667), which explored his theme of the tragic folly of passionate love. His only comedy, The Litigants (1668), was followed by his great tragedies Britannicus (1669), Bérénice (1670), and Bajazet (1672). After writing his masterpiece, Phèdre (1677), a tragedy drawn from Greek mythology, he retired to become official historian to Louis XIV. His final plays, Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691), were commissioned by the king’s wife, Mme. de Maintenon.

While Moliere plays a role in Racine's early success as a playwright, the story goes that their relationship died an almost violent death when Racine hustled and won the affections of Moliere's leading lady. There was nothing monk-ish about the life of a theater groupie, writer or actor, in Paris in the era of Moliere and Racine, whether or not the subject matter was "the tragic folly of passionate love." Needless to say, there was little that seemed "calvinistic."

What I'm saying is that I was blown over to find these books among what remains of Professor Hemkes's library, almost like finding a stack of Playboys beneath last months old newspapers.

But, the fact is, I know no more about my great-grandfather than I do of either of these Parisian theatrical hot shots. I know he preached in a church in Friesland, MI, when first he emigrated, and I know he was the second professor named to a position in the institution that would become Calvin University.

Maybe it's time I look.

Moliere, by way of Prof. Hemkes

 The most readable formation of letters of the alphabet on this photograph is the name of the writer featured in both volumes--vols 1 and 2 of the plays of Moliere, an old French playwright (17th century). Here's the way one source describes him:

Molière was born Jean-Baptiste Poquelin in 1622, the son of a prosperous upholstery tradesmen. Educated by Parisian Jesuits, the young Jean-Baptiste had a promising inheritance awaiting him in his father’s trade; instead, however, he turned to acting, adopted the stage name of Molière, and aimed to become a great tragic actor. His first theatrical enterprise in Paris did not go well, and Molière spent the next thirteen years touring the provinces of France. During this time he began writing short comic farces, inspired by fashionable French verse comedy as well as the improvisational Italian commedia dell’arte. These comic trifles were the building blocks of The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and the five-act verse comedies that would later prove to be some of the most enduring works of French drama.

Both volumes, 1 and 2, are respectfully encased in plastic, which helps explain their longevity, having been published, according to the title pages, in 1858, 200 years after many of the dramas inside were performed, and just about 200 years ago. Let me be perfectly candid here--these two books, drawn from my own library (they escaped the flood!) are of no use whatsoever to me--they're in Moliere's own French, which I can't hope to read. 

They're mine because I'm the one who ended up with them. I didn't spot them on some bibliophile's old-and-precious shelf, order them from e-bay or some other dealer in antiquities. I'd have to say, I suppose, I inherited them. I came by them having been designated by someone in the family tree as the person in this family who actually cares about such things, about such books. Once along a long time ago, they belonged to my great-grandfather, a college professor 150 years ago at Christian Reformed School that became Calvin College.

These two books are mine only because the name written on the title page belongs to my grandfather's father-in-law (subsequently my great-grandfather-in-law) Geert Hemkes.

When I first discovered his name in these books, I was shocked because that he owned the works of a French playwright and actor seemed preposterous. I mean, it seemed a scandal. Did the administration of the college know that he had books like Moliere's plays in his library? what about the school's constituents? After all, not all that long before, Moliere wrote scripts that satirized the church's social positioning and its fairly obvious hypocrisy. He was no friend of the church.

My great-grandpa was. I simply assumed that Grandpa Geert fit the stereotype--if he was strict and principled, so was everyone else in the Dutch Reformed world back then. 

I loved finding Moliere's dramatic works in whatever fragment of his library ended up in our house, honestly loved it. It made me think that what I had assumed through the years could have been dead wrong. Maybe the old professor was, gasp!, something of a liberal.

But there's more to this story.

 

I know more about inflation, 

I know more about everything than anybody in this room. 

Anybody anywhere in the world. 

Well, there's a woman sitting right over there. 

She's a housewife but she's very good. 

She got a natural instinct for business. 

She perhaps knows more than I do but I actually don't think so."

President Donald Trump, yesterday

Honestly, you can't help wondering what planet this man lives on, although we know he probably owns it--the planet is Trump world. 

I've had a suspicion for a long time--no revelations, no crystal ball, no unearthly visions--that he wouldn't make it to the end of these four years, that something would end his Trump 2.0.

Start here--he'll die of natural causes. He so regularly burns the candles at both ends that he's almost certainly going to run out of candles. He may have a staff that types out middle-of-the-night Truth Social posts, but if he has such a squad no one has ever hinted at their identities. He's 79 right now and should be losing it. When he says things like he said yesterday--"he's the smartest man in the universe"--you can't help but think he's carrying burdens no other human being could lift off the floor, and he does it 24/7. No human being can pull that kind of weight.

Just as likely is that some crazed gunman, looking for headlines or whatever, takes him out. I hope that doesn't happen because then we'd have a martyr on our hands, someone who would soon have a national holiday in his honor, not to mention a half-dozen monuments up and down the streets of Washington. Among US presidents, he stands unique as a person who refuses to think about winning converts. He is a master at gunning up his base, but he does it at the expense of voting blocks that, this election season, have never liked him. The number of Trumpsters isn't growing. The opposition is a bunch of dirty, rotten commies when he's the one who's invested in all kinds of businesses. We've never had a Pres who's been so comfy with our oligarchs, who's made billions since Trump 2.0.

Lately, often, he seems bored. Maybe he'll just hang up his spikes and go play golf somewhere far from the madding crowd. Seriously, he seems powerless to stanch the flow of the opposition. The NYT ran with a cover story yesterday about how strong Dem candidates for governor were looking with just three weeks to go, while Trump's trump, huge, pumped rallies, have a wasted look, loads of empty seats. Maybe he'll just suddenly walk away and play golf. 

Don't look for him leaving office soon. I'm saying if it happens, I wouldn't be surprised. Nothing about the Donald has been predictable.

What's much more likely is that he'll be around until 2028, still crusading against the commies, the Dems, in all their hated mutations, while the Dems, now a majority in both the House and the Senate, do their best root out Trump-level corruption, if not the orange one himself. It'll be a really rough two years, crammed full of more lunacy, like yesterday's winner: "I know more about inflation--I know more about everything than anybody in this room. Anybody anywhere in the world. "

Honestly, what other human being you know would say things like that--even think things like that--what other human being than our Commander-in-Chief?