Theories and Bragging Rights

I've long been a fan of the AMC series Mad Men, which looks at America in the 1960s through the lens of Madison Avenue at the time. The seventh season started in mid-April, and I've been writing recaps of each episode. To prepare, I watched the fifth and sixth seasons again and was struck this time by how carefully written they are. There is far more going on in a season, or even a single episode, of Mad Men than meets the eye: metaphors, allusions, symbols, all the elements of a good literary novel are present in the show. It rewards a re-watching.

I've also been reading a lot about the show, and one thing anyone who's read seriously about Mad Men knows is that fan theories abound. Last season, they were mostly about whether Megan Draper, Don's second wife, was in fact a sort of Sharon Tate character, destined to be offed in a manner like Tate. Speculation arose because Megan wore a shirt that matched one in a photograph of Tate, and so, fans reasoned, perhaps Matt Weiner, the show's head writer and executive producer, was dropping clues about her eventual demise.

Fair enough. But the show has been dropping hints about everyone's demise right from the start, because the show is at least sometimes a show about mortality (though one popular fan theory last season posited that Don Draper himself was already dead, with screenshots and symbols to back it up).

Such theories treat the show as a puzzle to be unlocked, a sort of trail of breadcrumbs that might lead a savvy viewer down the road toward guessing what happens in the finale, set to air in 2015 along with the back half of the seventh season. Now the race is on: who will guess first, or best? Who will get the bragging rights?

A similar phenomenon happened when the HBO show True Detective (which I loved) aired earlier this year. Viewers scoured the show for clues: who was the Yellow King? Why did Rust Cohle wander around quoting esoteric philosophy and poetry? What was actually going to happen? I think of this as the Lost school of television watching: the goal of a close reading is to follow the hints dropped by the show in order to unlock the mystery and win arguments in comments sections on articles.

True Detective disappointed some fans by having a rather straightforward ending that didn't satisfy any theories, though by my lights it was a satisfactory ending. And I'm fairly confident that Mad Men, though it is dropping ostensible clues left and right (some of which I've pointed out in my recaps), won't end the way anyone expects, either. I have more faith in the writers than that.

things-to-be-grateful-for

Lately I’ve been reading and rereading Jane Kenyon’s poem Otherwise. It’s a very short poem and you can read it here and many other places online. It might have been otherwise is the refrain in what is essentially a list of blessings. Like a shadow, the words sidle up to each bright moment Kenyon names.

People like this poem. On one level, it’s a simple reflection on gratitude. Given what we know about Kenyon’s adult struggle with depression and her battle with the leukemia she knew would one day take her life, the poem’s simplicity makes it all the more poignant and powerful. Kenyon was suffering when she wrote this quiet prayer of thanksgiving.

This is part of the reason I like this poem, and I think it’s why I’ve been returning to it often recently. There are times when the struggle to reconcile gratitude with sorrow can feel like an impossible task. That Jane did it so beautifully and with such tender precision brings me comfort. That she found little comfort from her faith and yet persisted in her hope and her longing for God is remarkable to me.

“Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus,” Paul reminds us. All circumstances—not just the easy ones. My family keeps that old Thanksgiving tradition of going around the table, everyone naming their gratitude for the past year. Some of the younger cousins think it’s corny, but I love it. I love this window into our lives, this frame around each person’s story that gets us to say what’s important. I love this frame because it often gets us to name and embrace the difficult things, too.

That’s the extra layer to the poem for me—or rather, its negative image. In this world, perhaps, it could not have been otherwise. The reverse of the poem is also part of the full mystery of gratitude. This life of small pleasures is also this life of struggle and darkness. The circumstances of Kenyon’s life included this “ripe, flawless/peach” and this walk in the woods, and also this depression and this leukemia.

When I read “Otherwise”, I see the concrete realness of the things-to-be-grateful-for in my own life. My husband’s laugh. Snowy cherry blossoms. The purring cat. But in the space outside the poem, or maybe, in the silence surrounding Kenyon’s voice, I hear my own not-knowing. If I am grateful for my life because of the joy I feel in my marriage and work, should I not also be grateful for my life because of the grief I’m feeling after incomprehensible loss?

Yes, “it might have been otherwise.” Though I’m ignorant of so much, I am aware of my many privileges: the simplest things I take for granted are extravagant luxuries for others. Even those in my own city. Probably my own block. Yet I want also to be grateful for what I don’t understand, for every part of the life I’ve been given.

(Painting by Norman Rockwell)

Douglas Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus!: A Challenge to Christian Supermen

Hey Nostradamus! is Douglas Coupland’s most theologically complex novel, an exploration of questions about the problem of evil in the context of a Columbine-like school shooting. The first part of the story is recounted by Cheryl, a young victim of the absurd massacre, as she speaks from an unnamed, mysterious purgatorial space. In one particularly poignant section, Cheryl, a sincere and devout convert to the Christian faith, speaks frankly (and perhaps even prophetically) about many of the Christians that she has encountered:

“It always seems to me that people who’d discovered religion had both lost and gained something. Outwardly, they’d gained calmness, confidence and a look of purpose, but what they’d lost was a certain willingness to connect with unconverted souls…”.

Cheryl’s involvement with an oppressive, judgmental youth group named “Youth Alive!,” as well as her relationship with her legalistic father-in-law, leads her to these conclusions. Yet she remains faithful, convinced that there is something beyond religious posturing, something in the Christian narrative that actually points to wholeness, depth, and meaning rather than pompous superficiality. Cheryl’s clarity of vision as she critiques the “religious” is rich and biblically informed:

“There can be an archness, a meanness in the lives of the saved, an intolerance that can color their view of the weak and the lost. It can make them hard when they ought to be listening, judgmental when they ought to be contrite.”

Cheryl’s comments are poignant and instructive, a call to self reflection; and they bring to mind the moments when Christ himself expressed the most visible righteous anger. In both Matthew 21: 12-17 and Matthew 23, we see Him rebuking religious hypocrites because of their exploitation of the weak, their self righteousness, their shortsightedness.

In The AntiChrist, Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1888 polemic tracing the roots of our supposed misuse of the concepts of “good” and “evil,” he spends a large amount of time denouncing the sacrifice of Christ, an action that is repulsive to him because it supposedly “thwarts the law of evolution,” a law that propels us to follow our desires for power. But some of Nietzsche’s unrestrained insults are strangely beautiful and truthful descriptions of Christ:

“But this god of the “great majority,” this democrat among gods, has not become a proud heathen god: on the contrary, he remains a Jew…a god of all the dark nooks and crevices, of all the noisesome quarters of the world!... His earthly kingdom, now as always, is a kingdom of the underworld, a souterrain kingdom, a ghetto kingdom.”

Cheryl’s concern that religious self-righteousness can harden us to the concerns of “the weak and the lost” remind us that Christians can so easily posture as sad Nietzschean supermen, using the motions of “faith” as a means to power and pride rather than a call to serve. Nietzsche’s description of this “god of all the dark nooks and crevices”... whose “earthly kingdom” is a “ghetto kingdom” reminds us that Christ’s act of great strength (which Nietzsche reads as weakness) was to empty himself of the very power that was rightfully His as a way to both save and identify with the “weak and the lost.”

Neither Douglas Coupland nor Friedrich Nietzsche are Christians. One carefully and respectfully critiques Christian culture; the other hatefully and blasphemously bludgeons both Christ and Christians. But the writing of both can, on careful reflection, cause us to think about what a life of faith actually means. Coupland’s Cheryl laments the notion that “the religious” lack “a willingness to connect with unconverted souls.” Is this a call for us to begin looking more closely for the God-given truths that can be revealed even in “the dark nooks and crevices”?

Horror and Resurrection

Johann August Nahl, The Tomb of Madame Langhans

First impressions are too revealing, especially mistaken ones. When I first laid eyes on this porcelain copy of Johann August Nahl’s The Tomb of Madame Langhans at the Getty, my eyes over-saturated with snapshot impressions, I registered the gowned Gothic lady breaking through the crust of her marble tomb, saw the swaddling infant at her breast, and thought: horror. She’s dressed like a Mary Shelley character, but it was Bram Stoker’s Lucy who sprung to mind, the nocturnal lady in white creeping from her crypt in search of children to devour. Puzzled, I stood by the plexiglass case to take in all the details. What was I looking at? Night of the Living Dead: Sturm und Drang Edition?

Reading art through the lens of genre is not so unusual. The established patterns and precedents give us a leg up in making sense of new experiences. When we get the genre cues wrong, though, the miscategorization can result in surreal unintelligibility, as in my case. I wasn’t misreading The Tomb of Madame Langhans. That’s not a strong enough term. It was as if I were reading an alternate, wholly different work––and even now, studying the photograph, it doesn’t line up with my memory at all. The Tomb in my head is more macabre, reimagined to better fit the assigned pigeonhole.

My mistake is too revealing because it shows that, in my mind, the best fit for a work like Nahl’s is in the horror genre. This is strange because I am a Christian, and The Tomb of Madame Langhans is in fact a depiction of the Christian hope of bodily resurrection.

Maria Magdelena Langhans, a pastor’s wife, died in childbirth on Easter Sunday. The death of mother and child on the day Christians celebrate Christ’s victory over death inspired the hopeful vision commemorated on the tomb. Together they are raised on the last day in triumph. The pathos of the scene struck a chord with eighteenth century audiences, too: porcelain copies like the one in the Getty circulated far and wide, exercising an influence on the budding Romantic Movement reminiscent of the craze inspired by Goethe’s Werther. The original audience, Enlightened though they were, did not see the tomb and think of Mary Shelley but rather St. Paul. They possessed a cultural category by which they could properly assess the cues, one that over time has come to be overshadowed even in the minds of those of us who still believe in the doctrine of resurrection.

Can the doctrine alone constitute a hope? Can I call it hope in the fullest sense if it is incapable of recognizing its own reflection in art? Perhaps more is required.

I take a perverse delight in introducing the topics of bodily resurrection and St. John’s vision of a new heaven and new earth by first assuring Christian audiences that “you will not spend eternity in heaven.” Their eyes flare in astonishment. Yet the disembodied future we’ve been taught to anticipate would have been thin gruel to early believers, who expected a future in the flesh. Am I much farther down the path of understanding, if my mistaken my first impression of Madame Langhans’ tomb is anything to go by? Perhaps not. I have eyes that see horror when they look on hope, when I’d be better served with eyes that can see hope when they look on horror.

The Eyes the Window, The Mind the Poem

The Eyes the Window by Marci Rae Johnson (Sage Hill Press, 2013)

I'm a smart guy, but I'll admit to liking poets who tend to take a little more direct approach to their work. If I feel a poet intentionally creating obscuring prisms or building brick walls of her erudition, I tend to lose interest. Such poets are either engaged in some other conversation than that which interests me, or they are not trying to engage in a real conversation.

Marci Rae Johnson's The Eyes the Window is a rare exception. One actually senses that Johnson is literally feeling through the poetry, and yet she remains always just out of reach. It's a fascinating collection that makes you feel at once a witness to intimate moments and a stranger outside of true intimacy.

The first of the book's three sections introduces the "thought problem" of existence, or, more specifically, of consciousness. In the tradition of the Modernists, and before them the modern philosophers, Johnson begins with the mind reflecting upon itself, alone and therefore unable to substantiate its own existence:

To be. Infinitive. From the Latin infinitas as in the mind of God, the universe the space before and after. —"Showing Existence or Condition"

The self cannot, it seems, be in the infinitive. Memory, for instance, is too spotty and changeable. Johnson's search for the stable places of the self recall Stevens's "poem of the act of the mind." This is a book of somewhere's, maybe's, and could be's. Significantly, it is a book of desiring, and of desiring relationship. "To be loved" seems an attractive, plausible way to be.

But again, Johnson's work is so ambivalent. She writes in impressions and isolated thoughts that read something like watching Persona or L'Avventura, somehow working together into a whole through the desiring self. The reader stands right beside the speaker of her poems, breathing on her neck as she watches the waves on a lake outside her window. She confesses her desires, confesses her ambivalence, and then seems to recant her faith in everything she just said.

Is existence possible? Is love possible? In the second and third parts Johnson develops two journey narratives, one by car and one by train. Are these metaphors for the stale motions of a disintegrating love, or play spaces where love is possible just before it is impossible again? There is a heaviness to it all, and so many episodes of missed opportunity that I want to read it as the former, but there is such pathos in the desire that I want to believe these poems attempt to honor the brief moments of connection rather than mourn all the absence.

Johnson unabashedly commits the affective fallacy and contorts the world to projections of her own mind or emotions. These are poems in search of a real outside the self, after all, so it is appropriate that they presume a hyper-subjectivity. But this also allows her to playfully turn the banal into the beautiful. Quantum physics serves to multiply the possibilities of romance, road signs become subtle metaphors for poetry or for stages of relationship, and even Google suggests the conceptual poem, "28 Results for 'I.'"

Get this book and read it on a quiet morning with a cup of coffee. It will get inside you and linger and, what would not be the worst thing, unsettle you.

(Painting by Rene Magritte)

Resonance

It’s a measure of my addiction to House of Cards that I wound up watching an episode on my laptop, earbuds firmly in place, while, in the same room, my wife watched Into the Wild on the television.

As my show progressed, an episode that contained a subplot about a local BBQ joint that gained sudden notoriety, I found my gaze vacillating between my screen and the one behind it. It’s an all-too-familiar feeling—my attention tentative, or skittering along the surface tension of reality.

But then a moment happened when the gap between my knowing one screen and knowing another contracted, drawing both together. So it was that I saw two women, who’d known each other only from a fellowship hall, share an intimate first kiss in bed even as I saw men gather on the street outside, tearing at their barbeque ribs with their hands.

Of course it was coincidence. Characters in Sean Penn’s film happened to be eating what characters in House of Cards had been eating. But for an absorbing moment, I believed I was watching two scenes from the same show at once, each counterpointing the other. It was compelling.

But the convergence also gives me pause. More and more, I see my high school students as a mesh of interactivity. “Is it really possible to work a laptop, a cell phone, and an iPod simultaneously, while ‘doing homework?’” one mother recently asked rhetorically, on Facebook.

I’ve always assumed the answer to that question to be no, which is why in my literature classroom, I try to create conditions for entrance into what Sven Birkerts calls deep time (contemplative space where we can come to know the resonance of the data we’ve accrued), conditions I find increasingly at odds with the culture’s. We read aloud. We read slowly. We look up words. We read by candlelight.

And yet what we discover at those depths seems to be the very awareness of multiplicity and convergence that I found when the art on my wife’s screen became entangled with the melodrama on my own. We find the arguments and images that etymologies form. We find charges of thematic meaning around which opposing words scatter. We follow lines of allusive thought. In our deep time, we learn to see narratives that run like programs in the background.

Why does it bother me, then, to think that the idea of being offered merely one narrative at a time in a movie theatre or on a television screen might soon seem simplistic, or worse, inauthentic? What is the danger that our minds may be changing such that split-screen (or multi-screen) storytelling, in our multi-tasking culture, will become the only way to communicate in a way that feels true?

After all, couldn’t the evolution of consciousness—toward the meshing of seemingly competing attractions for attention—be reflective of a growing understanding of the deeper reality quantum physics gestures toward: a world of superposition and entanglement?

Maybe. But if so, when given the choice between attractions that arrive in our laps in high definition and the kind that are indistinguishable from darkness until our eyes are trained to see them, I am afraid that I and many of my students will increasingly choose what comes to us.

Reflecting natural forces is not the same as embodying truth, and it’s not the same as knowing either one. If we are to feel and know the resonance of all that converges, if we are interested in wisdom, we must, again and again, learn how to read. That, I see here beneath the words, is why I teach.

(Self-portrait by Rene Magritte)

Go and do likewise

In rereading Victor Hugo's collected works , I was struck by the ire the author held against the church. Victor Hugo had no issue with the divine but rather with the bureaucrats with “large mitres” who built institutions to “administrate” the sacred. Today, we are made to feel small in the modern church . If we haven’t brought in new “pelts” to the pews, we haven’t lived up to Jesus’ great commission.

I recently had the privilege of spending time with Knox Thames, Director of Policy and Research at the United States Commission at the U.S. Department of State. Yes, he is Christian who works under Obama. Knox revealed to me the harrowing levels of persecution that is going on in the rest of the world to Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists – and of course, in most cases, these are Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists doing violence to one another. I am not a Universalist. I am a Christian. I believe that Jesus is the Way. But in the face of the violence that is happening, it seems that the first order of business is to aspire to charity and kindness toward the other religions.

As Knox Thames, so eloquently put it, we need to look at Jesus’ example of loving. In the story of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite passed the half dying man who had been beaten and robbed on the road. It was the Samaritan, the lowest of the low in that society, who stopped. The Samaritan ministered to the fellow in the road, and carried him into town. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus instructed his followers. Perhaps we should be more focused on loving our neighbor before we start judging or converting them.

As Victor Hugo said, “What a grander thing still, to love!”

(Painting by Vincent Van Gogh)

Gods and Janitors

Of the gods, my favorite is Janus. He was the god of beginnings, transitions and portals. The month of January is named after him. His name heads the oldest lists of Roman gods. His temples were oddly small and made of wood, yet, he was sometimes referred to as divom deus, or god of gods. He was said to be present at the beginning of time and guards the gates of heaven. He was invoked at the celebration of every other god and he alone was worshiped at the first of each month. He is usually depicted with two faces, one bearded and one smooth-shaven, one looking aft, and one fore.

Among these disparate traits, though, my favorite thing about Janus is his place in the derivation of the word “janitor.” It's wonderfully counter-intuitive and paradoxical, but in an ideal way it makes sense. If you're like me, your first encounters with janitors were in elementary school. Common but revered, they were ever-present, uniformed and kept a cart with special equipment. They had exclusive and intimate knowledge of attics and basements and a ring of keys to unlock every door. They had a pink powder that transformed every spill into a sweepable material and bravely neutralized even the most disgusting post-lunch mishaps. But we don't idealize janitors that way anymore, do we?

Perhaps we should. Maybe we should even identify with them. Jim Carey was once a janitor. Ben Affleck's dad was a janitor at Harvard. (Aha! Good Will Hunting!) Janitors have made for many memorable television and movie roles. They show us something about ourselves. Some are sage like Fortune, the janitor from “Rudy”, while others seem foolish like Carl the Janitor from “The Breakfast Club.” There are portrayals of idiocy like Joe Dirt and necessity like Dr. Richard Kimble. They walk among us but as from another world like the un-named “Janitor” from “Scrubs.” There is something true and essential about them no matter how they are portrayed. Something wise in their futility, something constructive in their duality. Something of the god in their humanity. Custodians of time and space with history and possibility in view.

The Study of Contrasts

“Well, you know what they say, right?" The portly Christian gentleman leaned back in his chair, nodding confidently at his conversation partner. “The Secret Service trains their agents in detecting counterfeit money by only giving them real money to study. See, if you just focus on the real stuff, the fakes are obvious. That’s how it goes with truth, you know.”

The conversation meandered on, but my eavesdropping screeched to a halt. I was stuck on his analogy, a bold pitch for an easy discernment. It sounds so appealing, doesn’t it? Just study the truth. Just know what’s right. If you do, any falsehood will be startlingly obvious.

In theory the idea sounds promising, but does it hold up in practice? Let’s say an avid hiker bought a guide to edible berries, and opened it to find zero information on deadly varieties and no identifying factors for underripe or overripe fruit. The guide considered it sufficient to describe only ideal forms of the best berries. It may be somewhat informative, but it would be far from useful in the field. Nature rarely conforms to ideals or best examples, the human psyche less so.

Perhaps this is why Proverbs, the most recognized volume of wisdom literature in history, is a study in contrasts. The cascades of comparisons are relentless: wisdom cries out against folly, the righteous are compared to the wicked, the way of honesty is juxtaposed with the path of deceit. Discernment develops in a marketplace bustling with distortions, growing in its unrelenting contrast of truth with lie.

These contrasts fill and shape all of human activity. In secular arenas we often discover provocative graces, while in religious circles we can find piously-robed falsehoods. I headed to the Secret Service's page for detecting counterfeit money and discovered that the story I had heard about their agents was false. In reality, agents carefully examine fake bills and the methods of their creation, closely comparing them with the originals.

The Secret Service analogy turned out to be a counterfeit itself, an enticing claim with a dangerously false premise. Can discernment thrive where there is presumption without contrast? After all, a tree may appear good for food, a delight to the eyes, a thing to be desired to make one wise…

Grant Us Peace

Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua. Osanna, Osanna in excelsis.

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Benedictus qui venit. Osanna, Osanna in excelsis.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi, Dona nobis pacem.

Heaven and earth are full of thy glory. Hosanna, hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is He who comes. Hosanna in the highest.

Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, Lamb of God,

Grant us peace.

-----

As the melody climbed higher, the voices of the choir filled the cavernous ceiling of the cathedral. Agnus Dei. Lamb of God. People in the audience lifted their countenances, spirits soaring with the melody as the new key carried them away.  I glanced around, furtively wiping away the tears in my eyes, only to notice that others were doing the same. After standing and singing the “Hallelujah Chorus” we walked out into the cold winter night, exclaiming to one another about the loveliness of the evening---an annual choral concert in our small Midwestern town. “It was all so wonderful, but ‘The Ground’ was my favorite.” I agreed wholeheartedly and wondered what made this piece by contemporary composer Ola Gjeilo such a favorite.

A few months later I looked at the score and noticed the key changes. For a few measures, dissonance was introduced into an otherwise lovely melody and it became almost painful to listen. But in the measures after a key change, the melody was transformed---it soared, it spoke, it gave hope to the listener. Gjeilo, a Julliard-trained composer from Norway, has suggested that contemporary music has focused almost exclusively on the suffering and pain of human life: “the Modernists were brave to delve into parts of the human psyche that are dark and edgy, but I do think they got somewhat stuck in that.” Further, says the composer, “I think people naturally and instinctively want to experience “transcendence, resolution and the feeling of redemption, joy and peace that the resolving of discord can yield.”

Perhaps key changes are a way of seeing the dark and difficult experiences in our human lives---illness, job changes, loss, disappointment, uncertainty, unfulfilled expectations. Although painful in the moment, these transitions may be understood as temporary and transformative, allowing us to look forward with hope to a new key, a soaring melody, and perhaps a richer and fuller knowledge of the Creator’s love for us.

And the Truth to Speak

I was surprised to find a sheriff's deputy on the doorstep when I answered his knocking. I was even more surprised at the language on the subpoena. Under the header it read: "To all and singular the sheriffs of the State of Florida - Greetings" for an opening salutation. It sounded like a good way to start an Epistle, but a strange way to address me about a summons to traffic court.

Things got stranger still in the body of the letter:

"You are commanded to appear before the Honorable ____________, of this court, at the location listed below on this [date] at [time] to testify, and the truth to speak, in a certain matter pending before said court and to wit."

I was jarred at the force of the language.

Lest I doubt his seriousness, the Honorable __________ closed the letter with: "Witness my hand and the seal of the said court this 7th day of March, 2014."

The syntax and the formality in this form letter, (hand-delivered by a man deputized and representing the man whose hand I was supposed to witness behind the printed stamp signature) felt biblical and Shakespearean at the same time.  It was just a shadow, I felt, but one with enough weight to register somewhere in me: Justice is more than an abstraction. I will appear. I will testify. It will be the truth. So says the judge. There are, I believe, images, elements of the natural world and unexpected pockets of language that make parts of a hidden world plain and believable. Which is so much the better, since the hidden is true.

Even in The People's Court or an episode of Judge Judy, we can't escape a feeling or a sense of something real, and something important underneath the campy melodrama. It happens at weddings and funerals, too, even the most non-religious ones.

When I registered my car recently, the clerk, after 15 minutes of asking rapid fire questions and staring at her monitor while she typed, stopped, swiveled her gaze to meet mine, and said more slowly: "Do you solemnly swear, under punishment of perjury, that all the information you've given me today is correct?" Do I swear? Do I do anything solemnly? Is the truth really that important?

I felt the weight of testifying in traffic court and, somehow, that was weightier because it reminded me of an irrevocable, greater summons to every man. One where the truth will indeed be told, and witnessing the hand of the one who commands will shake us, each and every one.

I was surprised, in part, because I don't expect letters anymore. And for all my love of it, I guess I don't expect much from language, from just a word, anymore. Not all this, anyway. What is that? And isn't there something – someone -- at your door and mine, even now, knocking?

The Fifty Year Sword

In Mark Z. Danielweski’s novella The Fifty Year Sword, a recently-divorced seamstress named Chintana attends a 50th birthday party for her husband’s mistress, Belinda Kite. A storyteller at the party tells Chintana and several orphans the story of his epic quest for a mysterious weapon, the Fifty Year Sword. The invisible sword cuts every victim just like a non-magical sword, but with one catch; the wounds inflicted by the blade don’t manifest themselves until the victim turns fifty years old. Belinda Kite, in a bid to prove to the frightened children that the story is hogwash, slashes herself repeatedly with the sword. Later that night, as she and her guests toast her 50th birthday, Belinda falls apart piece by piece, a victim of her bravado and the Fifty Year Sword.

The story is full of images pertaining to the cutting, slicing, and severing of threads while characters try ceaselessly to bind up the pieces. Chintana heals a gash on her thumb and the wound of her recent divorce, the storyteller goes on a dark quest to heal an unknown grudge, and Belinda Kite falls to pieces while Chintana tries desperately to hold her together. The characters flounder in the aftermath of violence, haphazardly stitching themselves together before the next round of chaos or despair. Their efforts invariably fail.

It is interesting that Danielewski’s book deals so extensively with stitching and sewing. For millennia, mankind has been preoccupied with weaving, stitching, and mending. Some of the earliest recorded gods and goddesses in history were dedicated to those arts; the goddess Ixchel from the Mayan civilization, the Greek Muses, Frigg and the Norns from Norse legends, and the Navajo’s Spider Woman are all mythical weavers. They wove men, their destinies, and the universe itself. Thread and fabric are ancient symbols of life, and the severing of threads is symbolic of death or chaos. In myth, managing the fabric of a man’s life was the responsibility of his deity.

In the story, though, the act of binding and mending is left to the characters, not to any higher power. If art and literature are windows into the human experience, what does Danielewski’s novella say about our fears and beliefs? Chintana and the others are scarred by violence -- physical, spiritual, or emotional -- and they alone are responsible for mending their wounds. The fabric of their lives is repeatedly slashed and torn, but no intervening higher power helps them bind up the gashes. The cycle is exhausting and never-ending. They are truly alone.

And don’t we often feel alone? Our lives are often disrupted by our own actions or by circumstances beyond our control. The slashes come again and again; it’s easy to get caught in the endless battle to sew ourselves up again, alone, before we try to battle on. It is easy to forget that we are not alone; it is easy to forget the promises made by Jehovah Rapha, the Great Physician, who said, “Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.” How much more hope we have than Chintana! We must strive to not forget it.

Why Didn't I See It the First Time?

The first time—in fact the first two times—I watched 12 Years a Slave in preparation for my annual lecture on the Academy award nominees for best picture, I really saw nothing about the faith of the slaves in the picture. But in fact, in one crucial scene near the end of the movie, Solomon Northup, the main character in the movie, has a “conversion” of sorts, when he is at the funeral of a fellow slave. While the slaves are singing “Roll, Jordan, Roll”, Northup is so despondent and has faced so many disappointments in his attempts to get free that he at first is silent, clearly refusing to sing. But the words seem to work on him, and eventually he joins in, tentatively at first but in the end with great gusto. In addition, at several other times in the film, the slaves sing spirituals while working in the fields.

How could I have not seen this? Why, in the first version of my lecture, did I accuse the filmmakers of an historical revisionism, which completely avoided the faith of the slaves in the antebellum South?

The answer of course lies to some degree in my inattentiveness, but I do not believe that tells the full picture. The tenor of the movie so strongly depicts the Christian faith being used as an oppressive tool in the hands of the Masters, that it was impossible for me to see any positive reference to the faith. Three times in the film, there are extended Sunday morning “services” in which the slave owners preach sermons to their combined household of family and slaves. The sermons are biblically-based, and in one case directly related to using the Scriptures out of context to justify their oppression. The most evil character in the film, Master Edwin Epps, played by Michael Fassbender is the greatest offender.

A second problem in my estimation is this: the filmmakers don’t seem to consider the faith carefully or have much time for it. This comes out clearly in a comparison of the film with Northup’s memoir on which the film is based. A number of times in the memoir, Northup says kind things about some of the slaveholders he knew, but none of these comments are found in the film. Even more important, in the film his journey is one that is portrayed humanistically emphasizing his own perseverance and courage and never his dependence upon, and gratitude for, the providence of God, a theme that is clear in the memoir. Even in the film’s version of Northup’s resurrection from despair by joining in the singing of “Roll, Jordan, Roll” (a scene that is not in his memoir at all), the slave looks to be simply gathering up his courage for action, not acknowledging his Source for help in a time of trouble.

The point is this: the actual content of a message is a mixture of philosophical, linguistic and historical data set into a particular context and portrayed a certain way. That context and portrayal are crucial to how a message will be perceived, and this is particularly true in a medium like film, which uses such powerful musical, visual, and verbal tools. The bravery of the slaves in the actual 1840’s was due in large part to their dependence on a living and true God; when that bravery is portrayed in terms of self-reliance, the message becomes clouded and confused.

Light Makes It Beautiful

I stood on the sidewalk in front of the Empire State Building. It was evening and traffic was light. My friends and I, high school seniors, were heading into the Riverboat Room to hear jazz great, Maynard Ferguson. They opened the doors, and I stopped a minute to feel the presence of the 102-story building. I knew I’d remember this night, but I didn’t know I’d soon walk away from cultural offerings like this.

Nothing weird happened, I turned away from the culture because I took a traditional step - I became a Christian during my first semester of college. I don’t think anyone told me not to listen to Ferguson anymore, I think I assumed that being a Christian meant pursuing only those genres with the Christian label. What happened as I withdrew? I lost the language of people around me. I had no idea what was going on in the world of poetry, fiction, film, and TV. In time, I learned that sanctification does not equal separation, and gladly broadened my scope again.

Sometimes it’s still a stretch to understand the culture’s language. In 1987, when artist Andres Serrano showed his work, “Piss Christ,” it started a firestorm of controversy. (The photograph is of a crucifix in a glass of urine.)  Many immediately labeled it as blasphemous. Serrano, who considers himself a Christian, did not intend the image to be controversial. I didn’t know what to make of it. What was Serrano trying to say? Thirteen years after “Piss Christ” was first shown, poet Andrew Hudgins published a poem by the same title in Slate. Hudgins proved to be an apt translator of culture. He found the photograph to be “gorgeous,” and “theologically correct.” Hudgins’s poem says:

“and he ascended bodily unto heaven, and on the third day he rose into glory, which is what we see here, the Piss Christ in glowing blood: the whole irreducible point of the faith, God thrown in human waste, submerged and shining.”

Translators reopened the doors to culture for me. They helped me see that “dwelling in the land” is largely about the importance of creating art and having conversations with our neighbor about art. If we’re not connecting with them at a point that interests, confuses, angers them, how will we help them see God’s dominion in all things? Another line in Hudgins’s poem is, “and light, as always, light makes it beautiful.”

The Forced Pause, the Gift of Rest

I walked to the grocery store in hopes of finding a power outlet to charge my laptop. Or better: a rogue bit of Wi-Fi that might allow me to e-mail my editor and assure her that, despite the 18 inches of snow being dumped onto our small town, I would be making my deadline. It was not a peaceful walk, the sort you’d expect as snow slowly pillowed on the ground and the entire world went quiet.

No. I went to the store looking for time – looking to work. But all that awaited me was a couple of college kids wearing Adventure Time pajama bottoms and a cashier who kept checking the windows and reminding everybody who came through her line that she – emphatically – “did not need this.”

Rabbi Abraham Heschel said time was the first thing God made holy. A day. The Sabbath. And yet, most of us are extraordinarily bad at accepting the gift of rest. Artists, it seems, have this affliction in spades. There is always one more sentence to be fine-tuned. One more stroke to apply. The reasons to work – to tinker – are countless.  The world applauds busyness. We are encouraged to reject, as Barbara Brown Taylor calls it, the grace of simply “sitting on the porch” because “a field full of weeds will not earn anyone's respect.”

As I walked home, I noticed the light. It was inverted, turning the night into a strange, off-color day. I was alone and frustrated to be going back to a house that had no power, that forced rest upon me like a sickness. But as I walked – as the mounting snow forced my pace slower – I couldn’t help but notice the silence of the empty streets. The sound of my breathing, heavy in the cold.

(Photo by Charles Arbogast)

The Book Thief

A train winds its way through a wintry forest; nine-year-old Liesel watches as her young brother dies in their mother’s arms. After the burial, the book thief’s first acquisition is The Gravedigger’s Handbook, fallen from the pocket of the gravedigger. Just as Great Expectations begins in a graveyard, the film The Book Thief begins with this unavoidable end of all earthly quests.

Liesel is soon separated from her mother, whose political views attract the unwanted attention of the Fuhrer. She is assigned a foster family, an elderly couple living on Himmelstrasse –  Heaven Street.  There she finds a gentle foster father who teaches her to read and to sing through fear, and a stern but sacrificial foster mother who teaches her to love, though haunted by insecurity. And there she also finds a true friend who teaches her to hate evil and cling to good.

Liesel is not the same girl at the end of The Book Thief. She is a young German girl seeing the War from the perspective of Max, a Jew her foster family hides in their basement. And she sees her beloved Papa conscripted into the army in retaliation for defending a Jewish neighbor. She knows suffering. She is acquainted with grief. But Liesel also sees that even in a bomb shelter, hope can flow from an accordion, and comfort sometimes comes with the telling of a story.

It does not require a spoiler alert to reveal that this film, like others set during World War II, ends where it began — with death.  Most well made war movies (think Apocalypse Now) do not view death with the modern, sentimental, but false notion that death is simply a natural (and even beautiful!) part of life – that’s difficult in the midst of so much death and dying. For many, this shadow of death leads to darkness and despair.

Our own quests cannot bypass The Valley, but our Inspired stories, Inspired music, and Inspired poetry promise green pastures and still waters. Knowing that, is there any room for despair?

No spoilers, please!

My kids hate spoilers more than anything, and it's all my fault.  A few days ago, I heard my son talking with his friend, when out of nowhere, he exploded, "WHAT?! I can't believe you just did that!!".  Naturally, I rushed over to check for blood or bruises, only to find out that this friend had spoiled the ending of 'The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug' by implying that Smaug was not killed at the end. "But you've already read the book...you already know how it ends!" I said. Owen replied, "I know, but still. I wanted to see it for myself." 

I knew exactly what he meant, and I couldn't help but feel responsible. I grew up with filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Ridley Scott...artists who knew how to keep a secret and surprise an audience on a massive scale. Some of my greatest film experiences would have been ruined by a spoiled ending or plot twist, and I have grown to cherish the truly great surprises in film.

In 1975, Steven Spielberg released 'Jaws' to an unsuspecting public, and the film became one of the most successful of all time. The secret to it's success, however, was not the shark we saw on screen, but the one we didn't see. Spielberg, unknowingly, created both the "summer blockbuster" and, unfortunately, the spoiler at the same time.

The early 1970's production was so ambitious that it was constantly plagued by budget and production issues, most notably a faulty shark prop. No one had filmed under the ocean like this before, and certainly not with an animatronic shark. Spielberg, sensing the pressure to produce a hit, made a decision that changed the film (and his career) forever: lose the shark.

>“I had no choice but to figure out how to tell the story without the shark,” Spielberg said. “So I just went back to Alfred Hitchcock: ‘What would Hitchcock do in a situation like this?’ ... It’s what we don’t see which is truly frightening.”  -Steven Spielberg [^1]

He focused on the characters, their fear and terror, leaving the shark to lurk in the background, growing more powerful in our imagination. The invisible menace became Hitchcock's "bomb under the table [^2]"; we know it's there the whole time. It hooks us into the story, agitates and delights us, forces us to participate. What began as a straight monster flick, ultimately became the embodiment of the fears of an entire generation, just by taking out the monster.

In 'Orthodoxy' G.K. Chesterton wrote, "Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame." What we don't know is infinitely more vital to our experience than what we do. Even my kids know the power of great surprises, and have learned to protect them at all costs. Spoilers pop the bubble of our imagination, and drain some of the power out of an artists work.

I can't help but wonder...why do I love great surprises in art, but abhor them in real life? I found so much delight in the revelation of Darth Vader's true identity (no spoilers), but if that happened to me, personally, I would be in therapy for years. The real human experience is full of lurking monsters; real pain, conflict and sadness usually bring anxiety and dread, not the beautiful tension of a well made film.

I guess, in the theater, we implicitly know "It's just a movie... it all works out in the end." Even if it doesn't, we know in a couple hours we can just get up and walk out of the theater. The abstraction of the experience frees us from our real, personal fears.

But isn't there some sense in which this is also true (really true) for the Christian? Do we believe that we will someday walk out of this dark theater into the sunlight of a greater reality? Can this certainty about our ultimate ending allow us to delight in the suspense of the unknown, instead of dreading it?

[^1]: http://mentalfloss.com/article/31105/how-steven-spielbergs-malfunctioning-sharks-transformed-movie-business

[^2]: [Alfred Hitchcock on Cinematic Tension](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPFsuc_M_3E)

Clothed in Mystery

After being out of town for a couple weeks, I climbed the stairs to my apartment, dropped my suitcase to the floor, and noticed the light had changed. The sunlight no longer blared with cool blues and purples; it filtered through thin chloroformed leaves leaving fluorescent green slatted across my wood floors.

Even now I write this in the light from my laptop screen. An unchanging, medical light of pure white. My cursor blinks with black insistence to cover the light with words.

When Justinian rebuilt Hagia Sophia, after conquering Istanbul and overthrowing her Islamic rulers, he sought to fill the halls with a holy light. Small windows circle the dome so closely set it appears to be floating. Under the dome, our position is not fixed; we are awash in illusionary light and shadow.

The gospel of John begins its account with light. A light so strange that the darkness cannot comprehend it. Can darkness know something that is not only its opposite but also its destroyer?

And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

Over the course of two years, Claude Monet painted a series of thirty paintings of the façade of the Rouen Cathedral. He painted at varying times of day and year. His view of the cathedral did not change, that is, he was not trying to paint the cathedral, with all of its complexities and architectural innuendos. He was trying to paint the light, the way it marked time and weather. But in order to paint light, you must also paint shadows.

The Impressionist palate did not include black. Rather Monet slathered the shadows in crimson, umber, burnt orange; light in mauve, rose, naples yellow. In some instances, the shadows and light are nearly indistinguishable. He adjusted value—the relative lightness or darkness of a color—by adding white. The colors found in shadow also appeared in light, and vice versa.

In order to snap a properly exposed photograph, the photographer must first establish the middle point between shadow and light. That is, the shutter time needs to be both long enough to capture the details in shadow, but not so long that the details in light burn out.

The dome would not hover in Hagia Sophia if there were not also edges of darkness.

Annie Dillard writes, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, “if we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light. When too much light falls on everything, a special terror results.”

Back in my apartment, I watch the light change throughout the day. The northern light in my living room a consistent glow, the light in my southern bedroom crawling up and down the walls, the slow dimming of the close of day when the shadows spread and the distinction between darkness and light is clothed in mystery.

(Photo by Hiroshi Sugimoto)

Is it art?

There's an American artist; his name is John Baldessari. In 1973 he mounted two photographs of a pencil on a board. Beneath these photographs is his hand-lettered story of this pencil. So I look at this work and I wonder how it ever made its way into a gallery. It’s certainly no Mona Lisa; it’s definitely no Sistine Ceiling. Is it art? I’m not sure. I suppose if it is art it is because Baldessari causes us to reflect (at least for a moment) on the actual nature of art. Art expresses skill, and art expresses emotion, but art also reflects change. Clay is molded, wood is carved, stone is chiseled, words are arranged, a pencil is sharpened. Something rough is made into something more beautiful, or more useful, or more provocative, or all the above. Art speaks of transformation and sacrifice. Even the dull pencil had to give up something. Did it hurt? Probably.

So I think of our own lives. I wonder what it means when Paul writes, “For we are God’s masterpiece, created us anew in Christ Jesus so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago” (Eph 2:10). Though we are guarded and defensive our God remains willing to mess with us. He is even willing to use others to mess with us. Something rough is made into something more beautiful, or more useful, or more provocative, or all the above. At least that’s the plan. Will it hurt? Probably.

Explaining Up vs. Explaining Down

The 17th century theologian and poet François Fénelon is quoted to have said,

There was nothing in me that preceded all [God’s] gifts, nothing able to receive them. The first of His gifts on which all the others rest is what I call “myself.” He gave me that self. I owe Him not only all that I have but also all that I am. Oh incomprehensible gift which our poor language expresses in a moment but which the human mind will never arrive at understanding it and all its depth. This God, who has made me, has given me myself to myself. The self I love so much is simply a present of His goodness. Without Him I would not be myself. Without Him I should have neither the self to love nor the love wherewith I love that self, nor the will that loves it, nor the mind that knows it. All is a gift. He who receives the gifts is himself to first gift he receives.

Sed contra, Francis Crick has stated,

“You,” your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: “You're nothing but a pack of neurons.” (Astonishing Hypothesis, 3)

Could there be a more astonishing gulf than between these two metaphysical approaches to human existence?

The Fénelon quote, other than being exquisitely beautiful, might be said to represent a view of reality that explains everything “up,” ultimately into the realm of the infinite, of infinite value, meaning, beauty, joy, and love, “and this we call God,” as Aquinas might say. “That which was from the beginning” (1 Jn 1:1), therefore, is reflected and imbibed throughout all of finite reality, informing the matrix of meaning in which we live and move and have our being.

On the other hand, the Crick quote might be said to display the approach that ultimately explains everything “down,” into ever more divided and basic material, getting into the realm of the inconceivably small, and finally into nothing--if not in a absolute sense, certainly in the sense that meaning, value, beauty, reason or the like simply did not exist “in the beginning.” It appears inevitable that this view could at the end of the day yield only some variety of nihilism, both in an almost “literal” and philosophical sense. If nothing is the beginning of all things, then reality at bottom is ontologically “blank.” By what criteria could anything ever be said to have any meaning, or human life any value, which have their ultimate basis in the nihil of a yawning void? That which is not present in the source cannot be present in what is derived from the source.

Not incidentally, in the “downward” model man can in theory master reality and fully explain it, fit it inside his head (at least once it finally becomes modified through technology). In the “upward” model man rather receives reality; he is the recipient of a gift. G. K. Chesterton, who believed, “The test of all happiness is gratitude” (Orthodoxy, 98), captured the wonder of existence as a gift when he stated that no man has “really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything,” adding,

At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy. (Autobiography, 97)

If indeed we have received our entire reality purely as gift--even the reality of ourselves--can we also be masters of reality (even our own “little realities”)? Might it not be that only when we’re receptive of reality as gift, as revealed both in the wonder of creation and in the gospel--with Jesus Himself being the concentrated form of reality and its gift (Col 2:9)--that we’ll be of such posture as to receive God’s outpouring love revealed there, flowing into ourselves and from thence outward toward others and all creation?

(Painting by Teun Hocks)