Coming Undone

Just the other day I was paralyzed by these words:

“What would you do differently, you up on your beanstalk looking at scenes of people at all times in all places? When you climb down, would you dance any less to the music you love, knowing that music to be as provisional as a bug?. . .If you descend the long rope-ladders back to your people and time in the fabric, if you tell them what you have seen, and even if someone cares to listen, then what?”

The words are from Annie Dillard’s essay, “How to Live,” which first appeared in Image in 2001. I had been thumbing through the Bearing the Mystery anthology in the few minutes I had with my coffee before the kids came home. Now I heard the bus’s diesel engine rounding the corner and didn’t know what to do.

Writing that moves us, we say, makes us laugh or cry. It may even compel us to fight for justice, reach out to a stranger, say a prayer, or otherwise turn our lives around.

But this essay, this essay about my miniscule passions in “the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through,” rendered me helpless. I wasn’t so much overwhelmed with sadness or questions but numb, frozen-fingered in my ability to grasp anything. The fact that such a concept as eternity existed was enough, for the first time in my life, to make the floor tiles spin.

Some art does that—shifts the tectonic plates of our perceptions. It doesn’t inspire us but undoes us, haunts us until we view the image, listen to the piece, or read the essay again. I didn’t want to read it again. It made my stomach hurt, my breath shallow. But I went back to it later that day. Then again the next night. And the next. “Then what?” Dillard asks. Then what, then what, then what?

I still have no idea what to do.

But I know I would like to create something—even just one essay, poem, flowerbed or gingersnap—that leaves someone gaping like a caught fish.

Be still and know that you know nothing, the essay (Spirit? tiles?) seems to be whispering to me. Then work out of that.

Bearing Witness

I was not familiar with David Bazan when two friends, Joe and Marcelo, stopped by for a beer and introduced me to his album Curse Your Branches. Joe told me Bazan’s music showed him, “it was okay to not only have doubts and explore them but also to talk about them publically.” Marcelo said, “I want my ‘entertainment’ to continually wake me up.”

The songs did wake me up. It was like no Christian—or former Christian?—music I had ever heard. I was not sure what to do with it.

Bazan’s former publicist Jessica Hopper talked to some kids after he had played a set at Cornerstone, and they didn’t know what to make of him either. She writes, “many of them [seemed] to be trying to spin the new songs, straining to categorize them as Christian so they [could] justify continuing to listen to them.” One kid told her Bazan was “singing about the perils of sin, ‘particularly sexual sin.’” Another reported that the songs were “a witness of addiction, the testimony of the stumbling man.”

Witness is an apt representation, but not the kind I grew up hearing about in my small Baptist church.

At the 2009 Festival of Faith and Music, Bazan said in an interview that he always felt a tug toward something authentic, the longing to get out of “that [Christian artist] ghetto.” Plenty has been written about the need for Christians to make higher quality art, but it is about much more than quality.

In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera discusses the aesthetics of kitsch. Kundera’s short definition of kitsch is that it is an aesthetic ideal "in which shit is denied and everyone acts as though it did not exist."

Kitsch is an ethical term as much as it is an aesthetic one. In an article in Salon Curtis White calls a book “intellectually shameful.” He explains: “To be intellectually shameful is to be dishonest, to tell less than you know, or ought to know, and to shape what you present in a way that misrepresents the real state of affairs.” Dishonest art is not just aesthetically bad; it is unethical, even shameful.

Curse Your Branches is not a breezy listen—it is emotionally demanding; there is real anguish. It is deeply ethical though. Bazan looks at the world without blinking and honestly relates what he sees there—even when it is ugly.

In his words, “that's what bearing witness is.”

What Do These Four Film Characters Have in Common?

Before you read this post, you may want to ponder what these four film characters have in common (besides “awsome-ness”).

The Classic Teacher Film

Hollywood has been very kind to teachers. Every now and then they release a film such as Goodbye Mr. Chips, Mr. Holland’s Opus or Dead Poet’s Society that portrays a teacher. The formula goes something like this: saintly, dedicated, long-suffering teacher accepts a faculty position at a [stuffy prep school / tough, inner-city school]. The teacher endures: tradition-bound, inflexible administrators, pauper’s wages, academic bureaucracy, competitive colleagues, founders/donors with agendas, hateful parents, false accusations, intolerance to his teaching methods (no matter how enlightened) and ungrateful, unteachable students (especially one, particularly unpleasant and resistant student).

In most cases the teacher is marginalized, passed over for advancement or eventually loses his faculty position to leave in disgrace. By the end of the film he is vindicated and recognized for his positive influence in the lives of the students. This usually takes the form of a teary-eyed standing ovation or some other tribute, but we all know that his true reward is primarily in heaven.

Along the way the teacher wins the students over (especially that “one” student). They learn that behind his gruff exterior there stands a teacher who really cares for them. They come to realize that he has taught them to love knowledge and see the world in a better way.

The New Teacher Film

Currently we see a new type of teacher film. It appears in the unlikely genres of science fiction, fantasy and action-adventure. Madam Professor Minerva McGonagall teaches at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. James “Logan” Howlett, aka “Wolverine” teaches at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. Dr. Henry Walton “Indiana” Jones holds faculty positions at Barnett and Marshall Colleges. Obi Wan Kenobi is a Jedi Master who teaches padawan learners at the Jedi Academy on planet Coruscant and later as a private tutor on planet Tatooine.

The four pictured characters are all teachers, but they are not mere teachers. What they have in common is that they all do what they teach.

How many times have you heard a student complain, “Teacher, when am I ever going to use this in real life?” They are right to ask this. Students are hungry for applicability. All too often the academic environment dichotomizes theory and practice. Students need to see their teachers actively engaged in the battles of the day.

These four film franchises have been incredibly successful. Perhaps part of their success has been due to the fact that audiences long to see their teachers “in the fray.” The benefits of this approach to teaching are multifold. Students get to see that what their teachers teach really matters. Teachers avoid burn-out by regularly “testing their knowledge in the field of deeds.” Most importantly, the world benefits from the most knowledgeable people bringing their gifts to engage the culture.

Since most teachers are not fighting Nazis, evil geniuses, diabolical wizards or intergalactic empires, what does it look like to engage in spiritual warfare as a teacher? What are some ways that teachers can model this kind of involvement in their field before their students?

Announcing Relief Issue 7.2 pre-sales!

Relief Issue 7.2 is now available at the pre-sale price of just $11.47, a savings of 23%. This issue will hold the mirror of reality up to you and slap you in the face.

• You'll find a story of a farmer's daughter abandoned, pregnant, by her missionary husband, who takes solace in a Thomas Kinkade gallery of all places.
• You'll see the world through Bob Denst's wry yet sacramental imagination that turns a discarded KJV into a flapping bird and a Red Cross blood donation center into an opportunity to encounter something other, and you'll follow Kyle Laws through a series of spiritual emotions you may have forgotten were in the Bible.
• You will also find work from Relief favorites like Jean Hoefling and David Holper, both of whom always manage to take something we may have thought we knew and tweak it into their own idiom.
• You will also find something original under the sun (sort of): a Relief-produced work of graphic fiction called "Earl and LeAnn."

The Real Race

I started running seriously about a year and a half ago, as I was beginning my MFA thesis, which means I was digging deeply into old drafts and seeing my old writing faults everywhere I looked. On a whim one night, I signed up for a half-marathon that was four months away, Googled a training schedule, and started getting out on the road to pound out miles.

My life—which at the time was in various states of emotional and professional turmoil, and some of those linked to one another—fell into a rhythm of work, writing, and running. Whenever I wasn't at work, I was either at my computer or out on the pavement.

Five half-marathons and thousands and thousands of words and only a few mini-breakdowns later, I'm still surprised to realize that, for me at least, consistently running is far easier than consistently writing. In fact, running is almost comically easy: it’s just one foot in front of the other, and a lot of ignoring the voices in your head. There’s no grammar or style or word choice or any of those things to attend to. All runners engage in the same general muscle movements: the legs lifted and placed down, the feet striking pavement, the arms pumping back and forth. Sometimes I run past a person whose stride has been altered by injury or some kind of muscular defect, and his gait is noticeable only because it is different.

That means that the main difference between me and Haruki Murakami, who runs marathons and ultramarathons and wrote a book about running and writing called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, is just that he’s repeated the same muscular motions, the breathing and pumping of limbs, a lot more than I have.

Murakami also has a great deal more practice than I do with writing. He has been writing for three or four hours per day for decades. I suppose that means he also has developed the muscle for discipline. Reading his book on this point, I found this passage:

To write a novel I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another new, deep hole. But as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening a hole in the hard rock and locating a new water vein. So as soon as I notice one water source drying up, I can move on right away to another. If people who rely on a natural spring of talent suddenly find they’ve exhausted their only source, they’re in trouble.

When I started writing, I “relied on a natural spring of talent,” especially since I was mostly writing short informational pieces. But when I decided to dig deeper and dredge another hole called “creative writing,” one in which I had to work with my own stories and my own material, I discovered that I’d exhausted my source—my natural spring—and now was going to be forced to do the hard work of sitting down and writing every day.

That is a real drag on the ego. Someone who sprints and then decides to train for a marathon will hit a wall around mile four, and might get discouraged. And someone like me has her identity rocked when she can’t do something well on the second or third or even tenth try.

I can tell you this: her tendency is to try to find a shortcut, or just quit. Usually the latter.

She has to take a hard look at herself and get ready to fail and then keep going. She has to be ready for sore muscles, and a bruised ego, and maybe even injuries, and the possibility that she might never be as good as the other guy, the hard truth that it’s possible she’ll never be a standout. Or she may write for years before she has anything to say. She might have to write from fear, and through fear, before she is ready for the real race.

Socratic method? What's that?

Classical education emphasizes "Socratic dialogue," a mode of teaching named after the famous Greek philosopher Socrates. But what is Socratic teaching? You may have heard that it is "question driven instruction". This isn't wrong, but it's not entirely right. Anyone can ask questions. 

For Socrates it was about Truth. He was so confident that the truth could be known, he developed strategies to discover it. Socrates knew it is hard to see the truth, so he followed a path to rise from error and to raise others from error as well. It has been called the Socratic Method, though Socrates would probably not agree that there is a "method" being followed. Instead, there is a goal: to perceive truth; and there is a means: dialectical thought.

In the simplest sense, Socratic, or dialectical thinking, means examining each thought in order to remove every contradiction and inconsistency. When the inconsistencies are cleaned up, we can move forward to new insights, often using analogies and comparisons from what we already know.

Socrates' approach, when fully realized, passes through two stages.

The first stage is perhaps best called the Ironic stage. Socrates asks questions that help his student see the contradictions and inconsistencies in the student's opinion. If the student is willing to see what Socrates shows him, then he will say those magic words: I don't know. He has reached what Socrates' prodigy, Plato, calls "metanoia," the Greek word for repentance. It means "a change of mind." According to Socrates, the person who accepts his own ignorance is prepared to see the truth.

Socrates then begins the second stage. Here he helps the student remedy his ignorance. Whereas the goal in the first stage was to demonstrate the disharmony of the student's thought, the goal of the second stage is to restore harmony on a more solid foundation.

Underlying this "method" were at least four Socratic convictions:

1.  Truth is. 2.  Truth is knowable. 3.  Truth can be discovered. 4.  Truth is ultimately one [in the sense that all things fit together into a harmonious symphony of being].

The Sophists, Socrates' intellectual adversaries, denied each of these convictions. They believed there is no truth; and even if there was, you couldn't know it; and even if you could, you couldn't communicate it to someone else. Consequently, according to the Sophists, there is no principle of harmony, no logos to guide inquiry. You have your truth and I have mine. We live in two different mental universes.

The late 19th century saw the wide-spread triumph of the Sophist in the American school. Whereas Socrates tried to deconstruct a student's thoughts in order to bring healing, the Sophist (and the conventional educator) goes in a very different direction. Like Socrates, the Sophist has two stages, but not those of the classical educator. Socrates sought to expose contradictions. The Sophist seeks to debunk. Socrates sought to bring healing by remediating his disciples' ignorance. The Sophist seeks to condition. After all, when there is no truth to seek, all the teacher can do is influence students.

That's why, for educators who seek to cultivate wisdom and virtue in students, Socratic teaching is a meaningful, useful, and even necessary approach. For only a student who learns to seek Truth relentlessly can be truly wise and virtuous. And only a teacher who seeks Truth can be anything other than a tyrant, petty or otherwise.

Arise, sad heart . . .

Arise, sad heart; if thou do not withstand,

Christ’s resurrection thine may be:

Do not by hanging down break from the hand,

Which as it riseth, raiseth thee.

    ~ George Herbert, “The Dawning”

My husband and I are arguing over the saying for March: is it in like a lion, out like a lamb, or the other way around? Ice on the windshield this morning, and by noon, sunshine on the back porch.

For us, it was February that came in like a lion, bringing pain and fear. We lost a baby we very much wanted, and less than a week later, there was a heart-wrenching crisis in the life of a loved one. I had been praying for trust, for the Lord to teach me how to lean on Him, and in the weeks that followed, I learned.

Faith challenges us to give thanks even for the difficult times, to see and to seek God through any kind of weather, to feel pain and anger and reach both hands out for Him. Faith challenges us to offer up questions, yet it doesn’t promise answers. Faith is its own answer.

As it turns out, my husband is right: In like a lion, out like a lamb. He is quietly triumphant in his small victory over the writer in the house, and I’m stubborn enough to keep riffling through internet pages for confirmation of my version.

Like the fickle month it describes, the saying itself has a history of change. It started out as a generalization, then morphed into a predictor that could be applied either way: If March comes in like a lamb, it will go out like a lion. It’s a nice theory of balance, but it breaks down in practice, especially in these days of climate destabilization and super storms.

Because the reality of spring—the reality of resurrection—is both. Christ is both lamb and lion. So is spring. So is trust.

I know God didn’t cause this pain, but I know He is working in it. It is uncomfortable to give thanks in the midst of grief. It goes against a lifetime of habit. I can’t do it, so I pray weakly and ask God to do the rest. He does. Love keeps breaking me open, and the bulbs we planted in fall keep pushing their way through the ice.

Reading Milton. Out Loud. In the Car.

The journey began as many tandem road trips in the modern world do, with two husbands behind the wheel of their respective vehicles and each wife beside him texting back and forth and pinning images to Pinterest. At a roadside Starbucks near Austin, the configuration changed. My wife Laurie and Mike’s wife Lisa hopped in my station wagon, freeing me to sit in the passenger seat of Mike’s rental car with a paperback edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which I started reading aloud. Bumper stickers in the Texas capitol encourage passersby to “Keep Austin Weird.” That January afternoon, we did our part.

Mike would be teaching Books 1 and 2 to a group of thirty-odd students the next morning, and while he’d taught the poem before, a refresher never hurts. For me this was the first reading since a hasty grad school skim. Paradise Lost is much better than I remember. For one thing, I actually follow most of his references. (Half of them, anyway.) All my reading life was preparation, it seems. I’ve been training for Milton the way runners train for a marathon.

Milton is bold. Virgil appropriated Greek culture for The Aeneid, and Milton does likewise, claiming the whole of the classical world for his epic––only in place of Odysseus or Aeneas he casts none other than Satan, that bad eminence, and treats him very much like a hero. Book 2’s council in Pandaemonium, the city of devils, is straight out of Homer––or perhaps Tolkein, ending as it does with Satan embarking on a quest none of his peers have the courage to undertake. (When we reach that part of the story, I actually substitute Frodo’s words for Milton’s: “I will take the ring, though I do not know the way.” It works.) This sleight-of-hero calls into question so many ideas that resonate: The desire to be free, to be captain of our souls, to rule rather than serve, and to make a name for ourselves. These are noble virtues, but coming from Lucifer, you have to wonder.

The next morning in class the story of our drive-time reading comes out. The students are embarrassed for us. They worry, too, that this pair of middle aged men is a warning: continue down the path of literature, and this is what you will become, a declaimer of verse, out loud and unashamed.

Somewhere toward the end of the class discussion, Mike puts me on the spot. Do I have any thoughts to share? “Maybe Milton is giving us a reason to ask whether the things we admire most,” I say, “are a testament to the fact that something’s gone wrong with us.” The story of the fall, in other words, is written in the tales not just of our sinners, but of our heroes.

And then I tell them to read next week’s assignment out loud the way blind Milton intended. They look back at me, doubtful. Twenty years from now they’ll understand.

(Art by William Blake, Satan Addressing His Potentates)

Isolation in a Virtual Waste Land

When I teach T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, I often start out playing this video that dismantles a track from Girl Talk, highlighting all of the secondary texts that the artist combines to create something “new.” My point is that Eliot’s 1922 masterpiece, just as postmodern as it is modern, is a mashup itself. Both Eliot and Gregg Michael Gillis (Girl Talk) are, as Roland Barthes would tell us, forming something supposedly “original” from “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.” In The Waste Land, an anti-epic poem if there ever was one, the heaps of fragments indicate that in a world where “God is dead”, a world devastated by the nonsensical cruelty of war, there is no meaning or even ability to communicate. Eliot continually emphasizes human isolation, that the inhabitants of The Waste Land are “each in his own prison.”

A large part of the disorientation one experiences when reading The Waste Land comes from Eliot’s intentional failure to translate foreign languages or cite his sources. The definitive sacred and secular texts of powerful Western and Eastern civilizations are decontextualized and remixed, pointing to the meaninglessness of life without any defining narrative, a life in which the Author God is dead.

But anyone who takes the tedious trouble to really spend thoughtful time in The Waste Land will track down Eliot’s sources, read them in context, and finally see that Eliot’s poem has complex meaning via the connectedness of the themes in these carefully selected fragments; in a sense, the poem betrays itself. In tracking down sources, we begin to get a sense of the whole, we long more and more for connectivity.

But in the age of google, my students and I have all of these secondary sources at our fingertips; there is not much hard work required as we can even find hyperlink versions of the poem that instantly translate the texts for us and briefly summarize the entire plot of the multiple narratives alluded to in the poem. The internet allows us to move from the poem’s decontextualized fragments to disembodied, virtual explanations of fragments. Rather than going to the library (a communal experience), we can sit in our pajamas and google it all. What would Eliot think of this isolating, perhaps “unreal” (in his eyes) research? He has removed “original” ideas from their contexts, yet we depend on an invisible network of replicated images to give us knowledge, almost always out of context.

At the beginning of the poem, Eliot envisions one of Dante’s circles of hell as a picture of living but dead (“unreal”) Londoners walking home from work over London bridge: “Each man fixed his eyes before his feet…”. I often ask my students what they think Eliot would say today if he went to London bridge, rode on the tube, or sat in a restaurant and saw our eyes not “on our own feet” but on our iPhones. Would he say we have we created a rich new access to knowledge and community, or would he conclude we have simply mastered the art of distraction and isolation? Or would he say we have somehow accomplished both?

Relief Issue 7.2 Thinks You're Pretty Smart

As we get ready to print 7.2 (debuting at the Festival of Faith and Writing next week), I've been noticing how many of the pieces ask so much from the reader. If art is, or can be, a difficult pleasure, then I think you'll enjoy issue 7.2, but in that Relief-y way that isn't satisfied with pat answers or disingenuous questions.

Of course, this means that the issue as a whole, which is to say our authors, think that you as readers are pretty smart and can handle some uncertainty, some openness, and some unrestrained wonder—if you're into that kind of thing. The teacher in me wants to make sure you're not among those who sell themselves short. Most people are better readers than they think; as often as my students say they're "not smart enough" for the poems or short stories we read, but when I ask them for their responses, their questions and gut reactions are often right in line with what the piece invites and evokes.

I'll highlight just our Editors' Choice recipients to give you an idea of what to look forward to. In fiction, Amy Krohn's "Master of Light" reads like memoir, it's so full of those inarguable facts that are so indifferent to its heroine's fantasy. Not only that, but Krohn manages to pull off an entire story in second-person narration without it feeling in the least like a cute gimmick. Her story asks "you" to think about what it would mean if your farmer husband suddenly turned missionary and left you behind. The answer "you" come to is both easier and harder than you might expect.

In CNF, Angi Kortenhoven shares an encounter with one of her own students, years later, seeing all his potential being rubbed away by the banalities of daily life. Kortenhoven ends on a bitter note, clinging to hope almost in a plea to the reader to nod in affirmation. She's not offering hope, but asking you whether you can find it in yourself.

Finally, in poetry, Bob Denst adds a subtle twist of playfulness to scenes that are ultimately about great beauty and sometimes sublimity. His "Wildland," in particular, powerfully reverses the normal questions we ask about God's actions or will when natural disaster strikes.

These authors represent some of what I love most about what we do at Relief, finding the stories and memories and metaphors that represent the mysterious or ineffable without trying to tame it.

(Painting by Henry Lamb)

A Dieter's Prayer at a King's Table

A DIETER'S PRAYER

Lord, grant me the strength that I may not fall Into the clutches of cholesterol. At polyunsaturates, I'll never mutter, For the road to hell is paved with butter. And cake is cursed and cream is awful And Satan is hiding in every waffle. Beelzebub is a chocolate drop And Lucifer is a lollipop. Teach me the evils of hollandaise, Of pasta and globs of mayonnaise. And crisp fried chicken from the south— Lord, if you love me, shut my mouth.

The more I live, the more I realize that we all need to be discerning about all things. That includes the ambiguous food of this ambiguous world. We have to be as percipient as the prophet Daniel when he arrived at king Nebuchadnezzar’s table.

We live in a consumer-based economy, if we don’t consume, the economy collapses. It’s as simple as that.  We are constantly being pitched a zillion things that look good, sound good, smell good, but are terrible for us.

Having recently read Salt Sugar Fat from Pulitzer-prize winning author, Michael Moss most major food empires heavily engineer food intake for a “Bliss Effect”, which is the perfect combination of fat, salt and sugar. It makes us want more, but isn’t good for our long-term health. Indeed, it messes with our cardiovascular system, including our blood chemistry.

The real truth is that American processed food appears to be putting the average American in a constant state of inflammation – not for hours, or days, or years, but for decades. What this essentially means is our poor God-given bodies are constantly in a state of rejecting that blissful food we are all injesting.

Sadly, even our daily bread, made from genetically engineered dwarf wheat, not the Einkorn wheat of the past, is making us tired and bloated.  What’s the solution?  Get away from as much processed and fast food as possible, eat as fresh as you can – vegetables, fruits, some grains, some protein.  Stay clear of sugar, salt, and limit your dairy intake. Push clear of the king’s table. That royal food is not only giving our teenagers pimples. Long term, it’s killing the rest of us.

(Painting by Jan Davidszoon de Heem. Source of the poem is unknown but it can be found is The Jesus Habits by Pastor Jay Dennis where it appeared in a blog by Stephen A Pickert, M.D.)

Questions or Booking Travel?

Now through June 8 MoMA is exhibiting about 150 works of Paul Gauguin. On MoMA's event website is a handy map and chronology of his life and work. The time line leads to a moment when in 1895, forty-five year-old Paul Gauguin traveled to Tahiti, leaving his wife and five children behind forever. Native of France, he grew up in Peru, sailed the world with the merchant marine, and worked for years in the French stock exchange. In 1879 he began to paint and exhibit with the Impressionists. When France's economy collapsed his business failed and after that painted full time. He became intrigued with Rousseau’s theories of the Natural Human and experimented widely with artistic materials and forms. In Tahiti he painted his masterpiece, "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” The title, as you can just see in the link, is written in the upper left hand corner of the painting.

Suppose Gauguin painted today. The context is fairly similar: poor economy, debts and responsibilities, and a nagging sense we were made for more than this. Of course Tahiti today would feature fewer natives and better hotels. And I think his three questions would probably morph into our texting shorthand, WTF? Interestingly, Gauguin didn't use question marks in the painting title. His “questions” are rendered as statements– statements of the existential angst that he reported feeling to the point of attempting suicide after finishing the work. Likewise, our WTF is usually rendered, not as a question, but a malediction. It is intended as a judgment, a confession of helplessness and tacit defeat. It separates us from the world, and more insidiously, it becomes a ticket to pursue life as we please – a self indulgence that books travel to our imaginary lives that lie outside the reality of suffering.

While I write this my neighborhood is a cacophony of leaf blowers and my cat keeps pawing my arm. I have a boatload of work to do, bills to pay and time bears down. Forget war and poverty. What good are these few words? Am I mocked? Maybe so, but I have a choice in how I will respond. I can manifest an impossible version of life and escape to a convenient “Tahiti”, or I can speak into the chaos, join with others and help make a new world of this one.

One day soon we'll hear the shorthand curse again. Suppose instead of giving it form we affirm that life is hard, that suffering is a common bond, and then re-imagine our goals? What if we begin to answer the big questions a little at a time? What if instead of checking out we keep watch for those on the rocks and come alongside? In doing so, might we be transformed from cursing sailors to traveling agents of peace?

Self-Made Monsters

Rolling Stone recently published an interview with Dong Nguyen, creator of the viral hit game "Flappy Bird". The interviewer, David Kushner, writes about Nguyen’s experience as his app surged in popularity:

He hands me his iPhone so that I can scroll through some messages he’s saved. One is from a woman chastising him for "distracting the children of the world." Another laments that "13 kids at my school broke their phones because of your game, and they still play it cause it's addicting like crack." Nguyen tells me of e-mails from workers who had lost their jobs, a mother who had stopped talking to her kids. "At first I thought they were just joking," he says, "but I realize they really hurt themselves." Nguyen – who says he botched tests in high school because he was playing too much Counter-Strike – genuinely took them to heart.

Nguyen’s intention had been straightforward: build a fun game for mobile platforms, easy to play and hard to master. But as his app went viral, it garnered a darker reception. People attacked Nguyen. They designated him an author of evil. Their vindictive reaction peeled back the app’s popularity to reveal an addicted and infuriated world where guilt was eschewed by appeals to ‘distraction’ and ‘addiction’.

Wrapped up in low-fi, Nintendo-esque graphics, Flappy Bird is a feathered fiend for the modern disposition. Its simplicity is infuriatingly addictive, and its difficulty chafes against impatience and demand for easy victory. It’s easy to love, but even easier to hate. And the app’s fallout, directed toward Nguyen, shines a spotlight on a basic human proclivity: our readiness to shift the responsibility for our destructive impulses onto anyone or anything other than ourselves.

Mike Carey and Peter Gross write in the fantasy series The Unwritten (Vol. 1), “We make our own monsters, then fear them for what they show us about ourselves.” For many, Flappy Bird provided that insight.

What’s your monster?

The 59th

27 swans

In the fall of 2000, as part of my work for a literary magazine in Boston, I visited William Meredith in the home he shared with his partner, Richard Harteis, in a wooded community near Uncasville, Connecticut.

Nearly two decades earlier, at sixty-four, Meredith had suffered a stroke that had immobilized him for two years. As he recovered, it was found that he had expressive aphasia, a condition that arrests the ability to render into words what one perceives or thinks. Until then, William Meredith had made his living as a teacher and as a writer. He was Poet Laureate of the United States from 1978 to 1980.

Before we went inside, Richard showed me the view from their back yard. He said that he and William had been working on writing haiku. One image at a time, he said.

When I finally met Mr. Meredith, he was still in his bathrobe, eating cereal. I was early. He told me so. Then he told me to sit down.

There at the kitchen table, I asked my questions—veiled versions of "How should I live? How should I write?"

With each one, he watched me acutely, and then disappeared as he grappled toward utterance. "A good man," I remember him telling me over the course of half a minute, "is a useful man."

The first poem of his I ever read was called "Poem." My teacher, Albert Goldbarth, had handed copies of it around the workshop table one evening, and read it aloud to us.

The immaculate, stately phrasing of the first stanza immediately compelled me. I knew at once that those words were committed to my memory:

Poem

The swans on the river, a great
flotilla in the afternoon sun
in October again.

In a fantasy, Yeats saw himself appear
to Maud Gonne as a swan,
his plumage fanning his desire.

One October at Coole Park
he counted fifty-nine wild swans.
He flushed them into a legend.

Lover by lover is how he said they flew,
but one of them must have been without a mate.
Why did he not observe that?

We talk about Zeus and Leda and Yeats
as if they were real people, we identify constellations
as if they were drawn on the night.

Cygnus and Castor & Pollux
are only ways of looking at
scatterings of starry matter,

a god putting on swan-flesh
to enter a mortal girl
is only a way of looking at love-trouble.

The violence and calm of these big fowl!
When I am not with you
I am always the fifty-ninth.

In the years to come, I would see the justice of the poem's title, how the work gathers much of what is essential to his work as a whole: public speech about private matter, arising from kinship and deep reverence clarified by strict observance.

Daniel Tobin, in an essay in the Yeats/Eliot Journal in the summer of 1993, notes that for Yeats, "Man was nothing... until he was wedded to an image…Still, it took him many years of arduous labor…to realize fully personal utterance in his poetry."

Yeats was fifty-two when he imagined in Coole Park that he was wedded to a lone swan that would, with all the rest, one day fly from him, to build life on another's waters.

The desolation of his imagining that his imagination would one day disappear is of the kind Tobias Wolff describes for Mary in his short story "In The Garden of the North American Martyrs," when she finds that the words for her thoughts "grew faint as time went on; without quite disappearing, they shrank to remote, nervous points, like birds flying away."

Yeats died in 1939. Meredith wrote his poem in 1980.

Before Richard turned to open the glass door of the kitchen, he followed where my gaze had long since alighted. He lamented the power plant that had been built on the far banks. But the power plant was not visible to me. For there, on the river, were the swans.

Oh, my binging!

My college student daughter is on season three of Breaking Bad. Sometimes, late at night, we hear her moving around downstairs---studying, working on her laundry, perhaps, but always with her laptop at her side and Walter White on her mind. My youngest daughter is working her way through One Tree Hill; I’m hopeful that she’ll be bored before the end of season one. Over last year’s Christmas vacation, I started my love affair with Downton Abbey. It was late afternoon on Christmas Day. Worn down from the grind of the semester and with Christmas behind me, I settled in for a long winter’s nap on the sofa---compliments of Netflix and our newly-acquired Wii. After thirteen and a half hours of viewing time and several lengthy naps, I emerged from the fog. It was December 27, dirty dishes and chip bags were piled around the sofa, and I had somehow lost two days. I sat up, surveyed the living room, and did what any thinking person would do: I found something else to watch. Daniel Deronda, Wives and Daughters, North and South, Bleak House, Wuthering Heights---four more days passed and it was New Year’s Eve.

Binge-viewing. It has a name and lots of people (61% according to a recent Netflix poll) are doing it these days. Perhaps it is a product of our busy and chaotic lives. In an era when families can hardly make time to eat dinner together at night, sitting down every Thursday at 8:00 to watch The Waltons seems ludicrous. We have to catch up when we can! And there are physiological reasons why TV binges appeal to us. We long for the resolution of the narrative. Exciting and interesting questions arise about the impact of binge-viewing on the way television shows will be made. And there is a great case for thinking that this shift is similar to the move from the serialized Victorian novel to the more pithy twentieth century model. I’m in! Binge-viewing is the binge for me.

---

I keep a calendar. Mainly I use it as a diary to record ordinary days---lunch with my daughters, a walk with my friend Susan, a high school choir concert, an appointment with the dentist. My calendar is blank for the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

So I wonder about binge-viewing. Is it harmless? Or does it compromise the ability to live a disciplined and orderly life? How will we set acceptable limits on TV when Netflix makes it possible to always know what happens next?  Wendell Berry observes that “we must have limits or we will cease to exist as humans; perhaps we will cease to exist, period…in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.”

Gender Bending in Shakespeare’s“Twelfe Night, or What You Will”

Broadway’s all-male production of Shakespeare’s comedy of gender confusion closes in February.  One critic says, the “. . . performance brings to funny and delicious life the play’s message of the power of love and desire to transcend the limitations of gender.”  Wait, what?  Is that what Shakespeare’s point was? 

It is simply the Bard’s genius to create a love triangle that serves as a love circle.  Viola loves the Duke, the Duke, Olivia, but Olivia can close the circle and love Viola because Viola appears in the guise of a man, Cessario.  This makes for some wonderful comedy onstage and off, that is, among the critics.

It is popular now in universities to think in “politically correct” terms about classics.  A feminist perspective (that women have no significant power unless it is through a man) finds traction in this play as Viola is powerless and insignificant until she takes up the livery of a man.  Olivia lends support as an empowered woman, head of her household, who scorns the Duke’s proposals and resists the attempts by Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Malvolio to tame her to their wishes.  With her newfound freedom of choice, however, she pursues Cessario, not knowing that Cessario is really the girl Viola, and this aspect of the plot lends credence to a popular homosexual perspective, that men and women have latent erotic tendencies toward their own genders.  To further this notion, there are  the sparks of attraction the Duke seems to feel toward Cessario (again not knowing she is a girl), and the love of Antonio proclaims for Sebastian (Viola’s twin brother) without any mistaken identity.

However, while Viola may gain some power and position when she is taken for a man, her decision to dress and act like a man was for security not power. She thought it was dangerous for a woman to go around in an unknown territory alone, a problem that is timeless.  While she IS a man, pining for the Duke and avoiding Olivia’s advances, she wishes she were NOT a man, and we know that she won’t be satisfied until she can again safely appear in public as a woman.

Sad is an “empowerment” that grants security but makes love impossible.  The homosexual argument falls apart by simply recalling the biblical distinctions between erotic love and brotherly love.  Olivia’s attraction to Viola is humorous only when it is taken as misguided eros, and the Duke’s attraction to Cessario is likewise funny when it is seen as misguided philia.  If either had known what both Viola and the audience know, these pursuits would end.  Additionally, the love of Antonio for Sebastian is proper philia (as is that of Jonathan and David in the bible) and, if mistaken for eros, spoils the happy ending we want for Olivia with Sebastian.

These feminist and homosexual interpretations are not only invalid (in that they fail to account for the play as a play), but they turn out to oppose the clarity of the biblical categories of love and gender which are the very things that make the play funny.  The comedy in Twelfe Night is lost on those who refuse to take such categories seriously.  Just another example of how political correctness has no sense of humor, and, if taken seriously, tends to rob the rest of us of ours.

Look at Everything Close Up

In Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby, journalist Carl Streator is just getting by. He copes with the stress of his job. He copes with his finances. He copes with the accidental death of his wife and his child, whom he killed with a culling spell. He copes with his mission to find and destroy every copy of the spell. He copes with the fact that he can’t stop thinking about it.

He copes.

Most of us feel the need to cope, to escape our big picture. Work is stressful. Money is tight. Cholesterol is too high. Deadlines are approaching. There’s an illness in the family. There’s a fire. Or a flood. The electricity has just been shut off. We agonize over the minutia of our schedules, the humdrum routines that give structure to our daily lives. Everything is spiraling out of control.

“The trick to forgetting the big picture,” Streator says, “is to look at everything close up.”

So we bury ourselves in the latest game to top the iTunes charts. We throw ourselves into the dramas of the latest group of Housewives. We obsess about sports. We count calories. We distract ourselves.

But if we change our perspective a bit, looking at everything close up can be an exercise in meditation and mindfulness, instead of a distraction. Looking at everything close up can be a powerful way to see the big picture. We come to  understand that our big pictures -- the bills, the jobs, the finances -- are really only tiny details in our collective Big Picture. Close up we see things that are quintessentially human, actions that tie us to generations of men and women through millennia. We knead and bake bread, just like we have for thousands of years. We steep tea. We fall in love. We worry about our children. We sow seeds and pull weeds. The tiniest details of our lives and our routines and our habits bind us to an innumerable host of people who worry just like us. These ubiquitous activities place us in the framework of a shared humanity.

Perhaps if we look at these daily responsibilities close up, if we squint, if we work really hard, we can avoid many of our daily stressors.

So go ahead. Try. Look at everything close up.

Until We See Their Faces

When Howard died, we staggered. Any death would have felt huge to the small college where I worked then, but Howard was a very popular, well-known-and-loved senior, the star goalie of our remarkable men’s soccer team, and a warm friend with tremendous character and humility. He was fine, we were all fine, when the Fall semester ended and Howard went home to Jamaica for Christmas break. But then he was tired for no reason, tests were run, a rare and strange blood disease was diagnosed, and by the time classes were starting up again, he was too ill to travel. And then we heard what none of us could stomach or quite believe: he was gone. That was four years ago last month. I miss him, and still cry when I think of him. I want very much to see his face again, have another hug, hear his voice and laugh.

In a culture where most of us have nearly instant and constant access to virtually everyone we know (or have known, thank you Facebook), some of the ordinary and universal experiences of missing people are now gone. For years I have been convinced our ability to hope or long well is atrophying with every video chat or text message. But now I wonder if humans have ever hoped or longed well. Is this because our fallen incompleteness makes us feel deficient no matter the degree of longing and hope? For some it’s “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” but for others it’s “out of sight, out of mind.”

So the question remains: Does Facebook, Twitter and texting make us better or worse at hoping and longing? I don’t know, but it does seem I’m less likely today to find a friend with the time and desire to sit and talk about these things.

Make It New

I recently watched Justin Timberlake on Saturday Night Live sing “Only When I Walk Away.” Multicolor laser lights flashed in geometric shapes and cast net-like patterns on the blackness of the stage. My 19-year-old son watched, too, and while he’s not a fan of Timberlake, he appreciated the fact that he was willing to try something new. The last time we saw Timberlake, he appeared on SNL singing “Suit & Tie.” It sounded like the Sinatra songs my dad sang around the house when we were growing up. What a contrast!

On one level, Timberlake’s diversity reminds me of the modernists’ creed to continually “make it new.” It also reminded me of Henri Matisse who, toward the end of his life, shifted from painting to making paper collages. Having survived surgery for cancer, he considered his last fourteen years “a second life” and he pursued his new medium with fervor. Matisse’s desire to try something new lead him to create what are often considered to be his greatest works. Matisse reinvented his craft. He made it new.

Jack Kerouac described how the jazz greats continued to develop their music. “They sought to find new phrases...They found it, they lost, they wrestled for it, they found it again, they laughed, they moaned.” But what makes all that effort, that pursuit of the new, meaningful? Is newness, along with beauty, an end in itself?

God told Moses that Aaron’s new garments should be made for beauty, but also for glory (Exodus 28:2). As image bearers we have the responsibility to pursue newness and beauty. But what of God’s glory? Do we pursue it? Is His glory worth the wrestling, the laughing and the moaning?

(Art is La Lierre en Fleurs by Matisse)

And the Oscar goes to...

Every year I say I’m not going to watch the Oscars. The show goes on too long, the speeches are often sadly inarticulate, and the music, jokes, and “other” that swirls around the presentations range from the insipid to the downright stupid. Nevertheless, on March 2nd there I was again, parked in front of my TV, settling in for the evening.

This year I was interested in one award. I wasn’t hoping my favorite actor would win, nor was I watching to see who would win best director. Almost all the awards seemed a lock before the proceedings began. But the biggie, the Oscar for best picture, seemed undetermined. Who would win that one was anyone’s guess, so I wanted to see the action. I wanted to feel the tension. Like a football game between evenly matched teams, I knew that last play was going to be the most exciting of the evening. I was going to be there for it.

But then, when my favorite, Gravity, lost, I wondered why I had cared so much. In fact why do I (and you) care so much who wins anything? If your team loses, aren’t they going to play next week? If your movie loses, isn’t it still going to be watched, discussed, enjoyed? And we all know that after the victory or defeat of our favorite there’s always next season, and the next, and we will go through it all over again.

In the superb final episode of HBO’s True Detective, the generally disconsolate Rust says, “Look, as sentient meat, however illusory our identities are, we craft those identities by making value judgments; everybody judges all the time. Now, you got a problem with that, you're living wrong.”

So I’ll go on judging which movie I believe should win the Academy Award for best picture, and I’ll enjoy it. I’ll even hope that from time to time the Academy will agree with me.