Celebrating Patterns

“The patterns/Of any starry summer night might be identical/To the summer heavens circling inside the skull.”—Pattiann Rogers

I started reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest twice. Shortly into the second attempt I got distracted by some intriguing quotes from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. It’s far less dense than Jest (with the added bonus of making me feel less dense) so I’m now ankle deep in its rising waters. But before abandoning Infinite Jest again, in the hope of piecing together its mystifying puzzle, I spent some time reading about it and watching some video interviews of Wallace. Something Wallace said gives me a slight grasp of how to approach it (you know, the next time I try to read it). He said the structure of the book is based on a Sierpinski triangle, which is made up of many triangles, and in a static file looks like this:

You can see it animate here. This visual explained a lot about the shifting images in Jest, and why my more linear and 2-dimensional brain has trouble processing it. Before I waded into Karamazov, Jest had me thinking about patterns.

God’s fascination with patterns is seen in galaxies and in a mind that can build the structure of a book on an intricate series of triangles. The Sierpinski triangle is just one of an abundance of fractals that are found everywhere. Wikipedia defines fractal like this: “a natural phenomenon or a mathematical set that exhibits a repeating pattern that displays at every scale.”

The Sierpinski triangle is a geometric fractal. There are algebraic fractals which are simple equations calculated exponentially that yield infinitely complex, and breath taking, symmetrical designs (as in the cover photo). I was familiar with some nature fractals—sunflower centers and cabbage leaves, for instance—and the algebraic fractals. I hadn’t thought about trees and rivers as being fractals in the way they produce a continuous pattern of branching. But with all these patterns spiraling through my mind, what surprised me was the realization that the church has a fractal influence on our lives.

I used to think church was where we go to be refreshed for a new week. Where we lean into God through the teaching of someone better equipped than we are to see how the gospel is or isn’t permeating our lives. And where we praise and thank God, soul to soul, with others on a similar trajectory. But more than anything, now I see it shows us, by weekly repetition, that these are daily patterns for us to inhabit, no matter in what part of the intricacies of the design we find ourselves. The Wikipedia definition reveals our fractal relationship with the church as it establishes “a repeating pattern that displays at every scale.” Church’s rhythms repeat themselves in our natures, at every scale of our lives: from our center, to our family, to our extended family, friends, coworkers, ad infinitum.

Fractals, when termed “self-similar,” also point to God having made us “self-similar” to him. He repeats the patterns of his nature in us, as Pattiann Rogers says in her poem “The Origin of Order”:

Flesh of the sky, child of the sky, the mind Has been obligated from the beginning To create an ordered universe As the only possible proof of its own inheritance.

Fractals, and the fact that someone can write a book that imitates this mathematical architecture, boggle the mind. What do these permeating and far-reaching patterns hint about the mind and heart of God? Can we contemplate the scope, the beauty of even one attribute of God fractalized in a never-ending exponential pattern?

The Stream of Time, Measured Two Ways

It was balletic—or that’s what some other parents suggested. My daughter had left her feet, had thrown a two-hand, over-head pass down the court to her waiting teammate who had made a layup.

“That was dance!” said the couple, who knows that my daughter has been taking dance much longer than she’s been playing basketball. “That was all because of dance!”

As a person who has almost always felt athletics and the arts at considerable odds with each other, I couldn’t have been happier with that comment.

Even though she’s fourteen, I still can’t help but feel like we’ve thrown our daughter into athletics the way I imagine some people throw their newborn infants into water: because we have heard the instincts are there and we want to put our children in touch with those instincts, force them to adapt so that they’ll be stronger and better in the end.

However, I choose this sink or swim comparison for another purpose as well: the water imagery. In general, athletics engages time differently than most art forms. Athletics is about the moment, the immediate; it’s about instantaneous perceptions and reactions; it compresses weeks and months and years of training into moments; it “squeeze[es] the universe into a ball.” In my daughter’s basketball game, she was thrown into the stream of time and the score measured her team’s reactions—valuing reactions certainly over reflections—against that stream as compared to the other team. Even clockless sports, such as baseball and golf, boil down to instantaneous reactions of the smallest fractions of seconds that make for achievement or defeat.

Art engages time rather differently. Often, art means to give us perspective, a wider view from which individual moments get their meaning. Art might attempt to create or recreate or freeze a moment in time, as in the crisis of J. Alfred Prufrock alluded to above, but even then the point is often that moment’s relationship to history or to the forces or character that produced that moment, preserved for us in art where it might impact history for hundreds of years.

We can see this time difference clearly in art works about sport. Sports films do better with story than they do capturing the sport itself: Rocky’s neighborhood and character are interesting; his fights are anything but “the sweet science.” Even “The Triumph of Death,” Don Delillo’s fictional retelling of “the shot heard ’round the world” that opens his novel Underworld, succeeds not because of the way it captures Bobby Thomson’s homerun but because of its wider vision of the event, more for the way it takes the variegated experiences of American life and coalesces them into a timeless moment than for the way it recreates the homerun itself. DeLillo himself knows this. Before the event, Russ Hodges, the actual radio announcer and DeLillo character who will himself momentarily call a piece of history, reflects on a Jack Dempsey fight he saw as a kid, “When you see a thing like that, a thing that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history” (16).

Then again, maybe time is exactly what art and athletics share. The sweetest moments in both are when time seems to fall away, when time’s shallow stream yields to transcendence, or when we simply become aware of ourselves in relation to time in a way that puts everything back into perspective.

Both can do this. Yet my fear for my daughter, ballet-passer, is that, as the pressures of a sports culture loom on the high school horizon, the immediacy of athletics will predominate, that the slower truths and wider picture of the arts will get shoved to the sideline.

“Time is but the stream I go a-fishin’ in,” wrote Thoreau in Walden. “I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”

In this month that attempts to house both March Madness and Lent, this is my prayer for my daughter: that she both swim in the stream, the whitewater of time that is athletics, and crawl out to the banks of the arts and know that eternity remains.

Believe

A few years ago, in an effort to drum up some American business, the French advertising agency Soleil Noir came up with a promotional campaign. They called the campaign "Believe" and it opened with these words: "In 2012 if you don't believe you won't make it happen."

Believe in fashion. Believe in health. Believe in work. Believe in entertainment. Believe in your ideas. Believe in yourself.

Believe.

Very early in the history of the church, shortly after a time of persecution, bishops, priests, monks, and theologians gathered together to formulate a very different list of beliefs. Historians speak of these churchmen as a motley crew. Many came with severed limbs, gouged eyes, and marred faces from torment they had endured for the faith. The document born out of this council came to be known as the Nicene Creed. We recite it to this day:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, The only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, Very God of very God; Begotten, not made, Being of one substance with the Father, By whom all things were made…

So, I wonder about the competing creeds in my life. After all, each creed compels me to stop, and to reorient, and to catch my breath, and to get my bearings, and to rediscover where "north" is located.

But not all creeds are the same.

Which is winning?

Which is dying?

Teasing, Simple Sight

The doctor told me people with my eye condition are odd, a bit off, weird. She added quickly that I was a rarity, a “normal one.” Kerotoconus—the eye condition causing my eyes to bulge out—makes you feel far from normal. It happens slowly, but for a contact wearer, kerotoconus makes the world go soft at the edges. You fuss at your eyes. Rub them. Wet your fingertips with your own saliva and massage them. Develop twitches. Blink, often. Incessantly squint. Anything to try to see the hard edges of things. It drives you mad.

During an “On Being” podcast recently, James Martin talked about Ignatian Spirituality. He exampled one aspect of the practice whereby we press ourselves into a biblical passage. A kind of midrash accomplished through prayer and contemplation. An opportunity for a story to be seen differently and anew, across the mire of time. There I am, standing by the side of the road in Jericho, squinting, wetting my eyelids, begging and pleading for sight.

I have these new hard-shell contact lenses now—lenses that require me to both remove and put them in with something affectionately known as an “Eye Plunger.” The results are astounding. Words emerge from across the length of a room. I stare hawk-like at a computer screen, my child’s face, the foam spilling over a mug of beer. I can see. I have perfect vision.

In “Habit of Perfection” Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark/And find the uncreated light.” One can imagine Jesus leaning in and breathing these very words on that road near Jericho. An incantation for a man viewed as abnormal by the world. Maybe it took the man a few days to get all the caked mud out. To overcome the facial tics. The lifetime of odd quirks you develop when you are trying desperately to see.

Did the once blind man ever return to see Jesus? Jesus who said, “I am the light of the world.” Jesus, who with divine spit and the “ruck and reel” of this earth, “Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.”

Silence and the Prayer of the Heart

“Speech is the organ of this present world. Silence is the mystery of the world to come.” –St. Isaac the Syrian, 7^th century

 An irony of Lent is that too many of us like to talk about the discipline of personal silence, yet practice it little and poorly. Like breathing big city air, we’re accustomed to wallowing in the vague brown pall of noise pollution, sometimes of our own making, unhealthy but familiar. I remember real quiet. I got big pristine doses of it during the years I lived in a largely abandoned hamlet high in the French Alps. In winter, I was sometimes completely alone, and the stillness was intensified by massive, sound absorbing snowdrifts that broke against the old stone buildings of the village like wild ocean waves, muffling even my breath.

The luxury of living within such outward silence is long over. Then as now, I have to fight for the inner stillness I know contributes to spiritual stability, that peace that is more profitable to the soul than mere silence of place anyway. So I practice the ancient Jesus Prayer, the prayer of the heart, that centuries-old companion of ascetics, monastics, and all who wish to draw near to God: Lord Jesus Christ, God’s Son, have mercy on me, the sinner.” The Greek word for mercy, eleison, is a derivative of the same one used for olive oil in that language. A common healing agent among the ancients, the Good Samaritan in Christ’s parable anointed the injured man’s wounds with eleison. Supplicating God to visit me with his eleison (and through me, the whole world with the same), I invite his compassion on my brokenness, his restoration of my restless, chaotic person—the anxious enigma of who I am that prompts me to make so much noise in the first place.

As St. Isaac says, “silence is the mystery of the world to come.” Maybe that’s because in that bright, unabridged reality, fully restored souls will know instinctively how to speak beyond the primitive language of the mouth, and human existence will need no sound for its justification.

How to Be Quiet in Other Languages

I have always wondered why Jesus chose the wilderness for his little getaways, but I think I can answer that question with my latest fascination, which is the fact that no one followed him there. Jesus’ disciples and fans followed him across cities and towns and even on water, but it is like He announced that He would be going to the wilderness, and everyone sort of slunk away with a sort of “Have fun with that!” shrug and nod.

With this in mind, I am actively seeking the wilderness. Not the literal wilderness, mind you, but just a place where people will not follow me.

I realize that this little practice may look like I am running away from my problems. Not really. My life as of late seems so plagued with so many problems that I have started to learn from them. I do not mean this in a “Count it all joy, my brothers,” sense, but rather that waiting patiently, then pouncing and crushing, and sinking your fangs and claws into something until you’ve exhausted it into submission might actually be an effective way to get what you want. I would try that except I am the “something” in this metaphor, and I am no match for the problems that hide in the shadows. Retreating to my cave and hiding seem like the most logical solution.

I think of Jesus telling the religious leaders that if the disciples' voices were to be stifled the rocks would start talking. “That would suck,” I think, "If rocks could talk, then every time Jesus went to the desert, He’d have to listen to them too." (There are very clear reasons for why people trust Jesus with their souls and not me.)

It takes a federal regulation to disconnect me from all methods of wireless and electronic communication and these retreats do not start until a flight attendant announces that I am required by law to turn my cell phone off. Then she repeats the law in a language that I don’t understand. The plane lifts, and I am disconnected. I am in my cave. I am free.

I can say three phrases in about five different languages: Is this gluten free? Thank you. Where is the library? I know my lack of cultural initiative makes it seem like I am the typical American tourist who expects everyone to cater to her linguistic needs. It isn’t that at all. I neither expect nor want in-depth conversations with the locals. I am craving conversations made of awkward laughs, smiles, and single words. I need relationships where neither one of us expects anything from the other and wouldn’t know how to ask for it if we did.

Over the summer, I went to Copenhagen armed with my journal, my iPod, and questions about gluten and libraries. I have this practice of leaving a building and asking myself, “If I lived here and needed coffee, which way would I go?” That navigational method has only worked once. Most of the time, I end up finding things I didn’t plan to see.

This time, I ended up in the center of a labyrinth. I liked the way the view of the water poked through the spaces in the bushes, so I sat down and took off my headphones. There was no need to try and cancel out the noise because, for the first time in a while, there wasn’t any. It was just me, quiet and alone, but hardly lonely.

In her book, A Year In the World, Frances Mayes talks about traveling with a transforming angel. “You go out, far out, and when you return, you have the power to transform your life.” I don’t know if I encountered the transforming angel in the center of my Danish wilderness, but the rising moon brought with it a comforting blend of grace and peace. When I was ready, I stood up and followed the winding path back towards home.

Lillies, Birds, and Babies

Sometimes I want to be a lily of the field or a bird of the air. I don’t know what worry feels like for them—I’m sure they worry, too—but I know all too well, these days, what it feels like for me.

Flame retardants in sleepers and mattresses. Hormones in milk. BPA, phthalates, vinyl and other new and under-studied plastics in just about everything on the market, from baby bottles to cloth diapers. Co-sleeper or crib? Moby wrap or stroller? To pump or not to pump?

If you’re a mom or a mom-to-be like me, chances are you understand this vocabulary. It’s an endless rote lesson in the language of fear, and it seems like there are new words invented daily.

My worries these days are like bird’s nests. I weave in strands of information from the Internet and library books, from hearsay and the advice of friends. Sometimes, the nests seem real and useful, all of that information adding up to a place where I can protect my baby from the complicated world she’s about to enter. I am familiar with this habit of my mind, accustomed to the way I distract myself from feelings of vulnerability and uncertainty with mounds of data and to-do lists. Oh, especially to-do lists. It looks like education, but it feels like panic.

Don’t worry about tomorrow; it will have enough worries of its own. Even before I became a Christian, those words resonated with me. My church is making a wonderfully slow movement through the book of Matthew this year, and when one of our pastors addressed chapter 6, I was struck once again by the difference a little context makes.

Jesus is not talking about legitimate, present-tense worries—over a friend suffering from a debilitating disease, for example, or an eviction notice. He wept for His friends’ suffering, and He worked to alleviate the immediate needs of his disciples, feeding them when they were hungry and comforting them when they were afraid. Contrary to the ideas I had as an idealistic twenty-something, when I wanted to sell all my possessions and live the rest of my life out of a backpack, He’s not even saying that money and things are inherently worry-producing.

He’s talking about self-absorbed worry, obsessive concern with appearance and the opinions of others, and worry over potential problems—things that are not present threats. He’s talking about the trap of placing those things higher than our pursuit of relationship with God in His fullness. He wants to set us free from those kind of worries—but it’s hard to tell one from the other when we’re caught up in the swirl of them. When we’re busy adding one more layer to the nest.

This morning I turned once again to my to-do list, rather than the square of carpet on the floor and the early-morning light—the fifteen minutes of prayer I said I’d start with instead.

I haven’t talked to Jesus about my latest worries, but I think if I did He would tell me that this baby is going to be okay. That she will grow up in the same ailing world He walked through, and my best gift to her will be to show her love. To protect her as best I can, yes, but know that striving for some kind of false perfection will only intensify my fear, and lead me further from the path of peace I want so much to teach her about.

I hope when my daughter is born we will spend time looking at real bird’s nests, admiring real flowers. I hope she will know me as a mother who loved her unconditionally, because I have known that kind of love in Christ.

What’s Wrong with the World: Why Chesterton was Right

Sometimes the problem with especially pertinent ideas is that they sound too simple. We read or hear the timeless ideal, whatever it is, and then all too quickly the largesse of its truth is lost to us. After all, it just makes so much sense, and is so simple! “Oh, yes, that is a most helpful truth,” we will say upon receiving it. Perhaps it contains too much truth for us to wrap our heads around? Many axiomatic statements are like that. They are just so replete that it takes a rather large aperture of mind to be able to actually suss out all their import.

In one of his more widely read books, What’s Wrong with the World, G. K. Chesterton makes a statement just three pages in: “What is wrong [with the world] is that we do not ask what is right.” So majestically large a proposition, isn’t it? It’s something like Heidegger’s question, “why is there something rather than nothing.” There is just so much truth in the statement that I don’t know where to start.

So for Chesterton, the first problem is to define what is right. Not necessarily what is wrong, but what is right. At first this sounds rather odd, not? It did to me. Isn’t that exactly the problem in our world—that we don’t talk enough about the troublesome issues? Whether injustice to humans, animals or the environment (thus the great attraction to social justice*), or problems in the community or church, it often seems that we need to spend more time discussing the problems. After all, it is easy to think that these problems are being ignored because they’re not being talked about enough, right? “The squeaky wheel gets the grease”! Not for G.K.

As Chesterton sees it, “we agree about the evil; it is about the good that we should tear each other’s eyes out.” Here is why he wants us to argue about the good (or the right): we all basically already agree about what is wrong. We agree that poverty should be dealt with; we agree that there are problems in the government (whichever country we live in); we agree that there are problems in the church (whichever one we attend); and we even probably agree that there is a problem with prostitution. In fact, Chesterton says that in being able to see such problems, we are unlike doctors. We all energetically nod in agreement “about the precise nature of the illness.” However—and herein lies the rub—we don’t agree about what is actually healthy.

“We all feel angry with an irreligious priesthood; but some of us would go mad with disgust at a really religious one,” says G.K. And with a little retrospect—and just consider the various flavours of theology we all adhere to—it’s a good point he makes about us not being in agreement about what kind of religion we want. “We all disapprove of prostitution; but we do not all approve of purity,” he rightly quips. Touché Mr. Chesterton, touché. (I am reminded that in another piece Chesterton humorously suggests that the day on which the Puritans finally left England should be marked as a national holiday.) Even in issues like social justice, we disagree over how to solve the problem. In general, we can all agree on the state of insanity, what we don’t agree on is what actual sanity looks like.

So, what is the solution? Being able to agree on what is right: thus his statement, “what is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.” Chesterton seems to think that only then will we agree on what the solution is and how it is to be implemented.

*Disclaimer: I actually detest the term “Social Justice” due to its confusing justice and mercy and rights and responsibilities. With that said, for the sake of convenience it is sometimes just easier to go with it.

Rocks and Salvation

I can remember the moment I fell in love with Yosemite. I was 18, standing in the meadow facing El Cap, watching speck-sized rock climbers make their assent. It was sunset. The late red-gold sun was filling up the valley. It was the rocks I loved—their permanence.

See, I grew up with the concept of a very personal God—a find-the-car-keys God, a Jesus who wept if you let your friend copy your math homework. This theology has its benefits. But for a hyper-conscientious kid, it also has drawbacks. Namely: it is really exhausting.

The granite rock faces flanking the valley seemed ambassadors of another God. One whose immovability invited me to rest.

My love for Yosemite has led me to John Muir’s writing. I read him because of the way he captures the park, but also because his works deal with spirituality in a refreshing way.

This is surprising considering Muir’s upbringing. His father practiced a zealous, exacting brand of Christianity: he whipped his son if he did not memorize his daily scripture, and he repressed most of Muir’s ambitions and hobbies, claiming they demonstrated vanity.

Muir broke away from this religion. But no resentment or fear shows up in his spiritual writing. Instead he takes an exuberant, almost child-like tone when he writes of God.

In an essay about a solo climb up a glacier, he describes the whole landscape as involved in worship: “This was the alpenglow, to me the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. At the touch of the divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed like devout worshippers waiting to be blessed.”

In a letter to a friend, describing his return to Yosemite after time in the city, he writes that “all the rocks seem talkative.” Such a lovely, living echo of “the rocks will cry out!”

And, after describing a tough climb up to a view of the valley, he describes the scene, finishing with the meditation: "wholly infused with God is the one big word of love that we call the world.”

All throughout Muir’s work, there is this sense of relief. Relief at the discovery of a tangible God—one different from his father’s, one he could understand and worship.

Some have claimed that Muir’s spirituality is suspect because he renounced the black-and-white language of his father. I remember once being told to “be careful of Muir, because he wasn’t saved,” while watching a sunset in Yosemite.

Ultimately, it’s not my job to determine Muir’s salvation. And if I tried, what a waste that would be! I might have missed what the spirituality of his writing has taught me: Namely, don’t let the wounds of the past rob you of your sense of wonder—be open to beauty, and let that beauty reveal the divine, and let that become your new narrative: a world "wholly infused with God.”

A Song on the End of the World

The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth . . . No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation. —SS chief Heinrich Himmler, October 17, 1944

Here is a poem for Lent that may seem at first counter-intuitive. A Song on the End of the World by Czeslaw Milosz was written in 1944 in Warsaw, Poland in the year of the Warsaw Uprising which saw the city's utter destruction (banner photo) by Nazi forces while the Soviet Army waited on the border for the Polish fighters to be neutralized.

The poem is four stanzas of free verse. The first two stanzas begin with the same line: “On the day the world ends...” and the balance of each stanza is a litany of quotidian life: “A bee circles a clover, / A fisherman mends a glimmering net. / Happy porpoises jump in the sea.”

Foreboding as the subject is, the poem reads with the comforting cadence of a child's bedtime story, idyllic, even as it repeats, “On the day the world ends...” Its very repetition is ironic and a clue that there is something more to the end of the world. Why else would he invoke “the day” twice? Wouldn't “the day”, if it were only “the day”, simply come once?

There is much to consider. Milosz was self-described as an atheist during his college years, but ultimately came to practice Catholicism and spent ten years corresponding with Thomas Merton on all manner of theology and global matters. He moved frequently as a child between city and country, was educated as a lawyer and wrote poetry, worked in the political realm and would not take sides, and staying in Warsaw, he publicly criticized Stalin's provisional totalitarian government. It was on the latter that Milosz wrote his Nobel Prize-winning non-fiction work, The Captive Mind.

Milosz's poems are full of nested references. “And those who expected lightning and thunder / Are disappointed,” begins the third stanza. “And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps / Do not believe it is happening now.” As concrete and pleasant as the first two stanzas are, the third abstracts into cataclysmic images of war and religious eschatology.

The fourth stanza introduces a “white-haired old man, who would be a prophet / Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,” who “Repeats while he binds his tomatoes: / There will be no other end of the world, / There will be no other end of the world.” Is the man mad? Is he singing?

Though not conclusive, there is enough in these verses for the Christian to affirm that life is in the liminal, that life moves from day to night to day, that life has no end. A great deal of secular criticism of the poem hears only lament and madness. But in the middle, at the end of the second verse Milosz affords us this clue: “The voice of a violin lasts in the air / And leads into a starry night.” What comes at the end of this day is a song. It is a song which does not end but lasts and leads. It turns the whole poem on its head. Focus is no longer on “the end of the world” but the song. Moreover, it invokes “The Starry Night” by Vincent van Gogh in which the moon and stars radiate over a field of grain and a village. He painted it, imagining the village, while in self-imposed asylum. “Through the iron-barred window,” he wrote to his brother Theo, “I can see an enclosed square of wheat . . . above which, in the morning, I watch the sun rise in all its glory."

Lent is a time for retreat from a world that is preoccupied with endings in order to gain sight of the one that is ever arriving. It is a time to see our common acts of waking, washing, dressing and working as a faithful refrain we sing to the sorrowful world affirming a hope for the one that comes.

The book of Lamentations is the weeping lament ascribed to the prophet Jeremiah. It is a book of songs for the people of Israel remembering a grievous time. Jerusalem's Temple and walls are in shambles, but right in the middle of the book is this hope: “Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”

Boyhood and the American Family

While thinking about the movie Boyhood recently, an image appeared in my head of a bleak landscape, but not a realistic one. Dotting the landscape were a number of brightly colored objects, malleable, some standing at angles, some flopping over edges of rocks or ledges, like the clocks in Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory. But the objects weren’t clocks. They were all teenagers—all heights, all ages but all thin, visionless, falling. Maybe the image was more like the orgy scene in the desert of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point—flat, detached, choreographed sexual movement. Love in the desert of meaninglessness.

In both ways of seeing what I imagined, the edge of the knife was the teenagers, robotic, spineless kids with vacant eyes and joyless lives.

I am sure this picture was spawned by the sadness I felt for the American family, as I watched Richard Linklater’s autobiographical Oscar nominee again for a talk I was preparing. In an extra on the DVD, Linklater says, “The film’s called Boyhood, but it could have been called Motherhood, Fatherhood, Bumbling-Into-Adulthood. It was an opportunity to see adults evolve as well as kids.”

The mother in Boyhood in fact evolves very little. Played by Patricia Arquette, in an Oscar-winning performance, Olivia is from the beginning the neediest person in the movie. In one of the earliest scenes, we see her break up an argument between her two small children by simply yelling at them to quit, followed by an argument with a potential boyfriend about how she’d like to go out to a movie, but she’s got to take care of the kids. She doesn’t even know what it’s like to be free to go out, she says. “I was someone’s daughter, and then I was someone’s f**kin’ mother. Okay? I don’t even know what that’s like.” It’s so early in the movie, you pity her, but it doesn’t take long for that to change.

Granted she does take responsibility for her children: she feeds them, gets them to school, clothes them, puts a roof over their heads. But along the way, Olivia—already a divorcee—marries two more times, and divorces two more times. She moves three times, uprooting the children’s lives each time. In fact, there is only one scene in the entire movie, where we see her approach expressing tender love for them; when the children are small, she reads Harry Potter novels to them in bed. Even her graduation toast near the end of the movie is comprised of her telling her son how much fun he’s going to have in college. Admittedly, she does say she loves him and is so proud of him, but she has already spoiled the moment by telling everyone he didn’t want to have the party, yet they had it for him anyway.

In every other scene she appears, she is either flirting with her next husband or suffering from his abuse, fighting with her daughter, commanding Mason, Jr. to do something or talking about how bad her life is. As Mason, Jr. says to a girlfriend when he’s gone on a trip to UT-Austin: “I don’t think [college] is the key to my future. ‘Cause, I mean, look at my mom. She got her degree and got a pretty good job. She can pay her bills.” Girlfriend: “I like your mom.” Mason: “Well, I like my mom, too, I just mean… Basically, she’s still just as fuckin’ confused as I am.”

In her last scene of the movie, Olivia’s narcissism is really put on display. Angry at Mason, Jr. for not being sad because he is leaving home to go off to college, she says, “This is the worst day of my life.… You know what I’m realizing? My life is just gonna go, [snaps fingers] like that. This series of milestones. Getting married. Having kids. Getting divorced. The time that we thought you were dyslexic. When I taught you how to ride a bike. Getting divorced again. Getting my master’s degree. Finally getting the job I wanted. Sending Samantha off to college. Sending you off to college. You know what’s next? Huh? It’s my fuckin’ funeral!… I just thought there would be more.” The scene would be funny, if it weren’t so pitiable.

I could go on about Olivia, or about the father, Mason, Sr., played by Ethan Hawke, who gets dealt a much better hand in the script, and does evolve positively in the movie, or about the main character, Mason, Jr., who wanders aimlessly the entire film from age six to age eighteen. The whole film is filled with little moments, some happy, some sad, but none that give Mason any clarity, any vision for his life because his parents don’t have any vision to give him.

One of Boyhood’s stories is of the single mom, who try as she might, simply can’t give her children a vision for what could be because she is so consumed with her own needs. If we stretch this story into a narrative of the state of the American family, we are confronted with the slow-death-by-internal-decay narrative that we have heard so often about our country: parents without vision and foundation, and so kids without hope. It turns into a painting in which the kids are all soft and floppy, visionless and vacant. It saddens me so much because it doesn’t have to be that way.

The Difference

For years I’ve held my hat in hand after reading “The Road Not Taken” aloud to my eleventh-grade American literature students. Giving voice to a poem made wholly of ambiguity, I tell them, whose mazy lines mocked Frost’s indecisive friend Edward Thomas into war, forces interpretation. I must utter the final stanza’s sigh with something akin to regret, or bewilderment, or sorrow, or satisfaction. I must incline the final line down the path of ruefulness, or complaint, or self-deception, or self-motivation—or even triumph. 

The same poem-limiting phenomenon occurs when I utter "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" and follow its hypnotic beauty—"the only other sound's the sweep / of easy wind and downy flake"—until I find myself saying the final two lines as though tranced, captured by a drowsy globe, lulled toward dangerous sleep.

I am doing injustice to the poem, I tell my students, by saying it out loud. But what else, I’m quick to add, can I do? It’s impossible to say a poem while admitting two mutually exclusive interpretations of its tone. An actor, in one breath, cannot play rue and self-conceit.

But, of course, as is the case when anyone tries to say anything definitive about Frost (or about acting, for that matter), I was misguided. There are, at least (I think), two ways.

The first was found by contemporary poet Dana Gioia. In this recording, made for the participants of Poetry Out Loud—an annual recitation contest for high school students—Gioia, a gregarious former advertising executive whose reading of his own work is mellifluous and expressive, shuts off personality altogether. He presents the poem as though narrating historical events in an educational filmstrip from the 1950s.

The method is ingenious, but takes the risk of troubling the air by withholding what the air most desires from poetry, what Frost’s poem possesses in pure abundance: unabashed musicality.

That is why Robert Frost’s own method of expressing the poem publicly is so extraordinary, nearly as worthy of admiration as the poem itself. I’m shamed to confess that his recitations used to baffle me. I’d cite them when shaking my head about poets who, for reasons I could not fathom, were unable to read their own work well. So devoid of emotion! It’s as through he’s singing a tuneless song!

As it turns out, I was right, without knowing the reason—and have been apologizing to my students for the wrong reason. Reading Frost’s work aloud diminishes it only if one reads it aloud the way I do, demanding self-expression. It’s not how Frost does it.

The tone and tenor of Robert Frost’s best poems is ambiguous; their music goes beyond and beneath personality. What else can he do, to do them justice? He chants.

They Deserted Us Here

This one’s a little long. But it’s important.

Christian academics are supposed to engage the culture around us. We’re supposed to interact with music, art, literature, film, and philosophy. We’re supposed to pick things up, examine them, take them apart and reassemble them, and understand how and why they work.

But we often neglect an art form that’s incredibly significant in today’s society. It’s a music form, actually, and it is the music form that I think has been the most important musical movement in the last 50 years or so.

I’m talking about hip-hop.

Hip-hop sprang up New York City, mostly in the Bronx, in the 70s and 80s. It began as a social movement as much as a music style (and lifestyle), and it was, until recently, unique to the African-American community. It quickly became a social movement, a powerful way to comment on American culture and the black community’s place within it.

Much rap music, now commercialized and manufactured to appeal to mass audiences, retains only a shade of the social commentary prevalent in the rap of the 70s and 80s. But the spirit prevails in many artists, and they’re producing very important albums. For decades, prominent and underground rappers alike have presented scathing commentaries on current events and culture, describing the black community, and building a culture that sprang entirely from their communal experiences.

The music form is relatively young, but it’s increasingly relevant. It’s especially important in 2015 after incidents like the Mike Brown shooting, Eric Garner’s murder in NYC, and the prominence of important conversations about race in contemporary America.

Hip-hop is unique in that offers the brutally honest, open, and frank insights into a huge part of American society. No other music style is doing that right now (or at least not as prominently). Countless tracks offer a blistering take on everything from the American prison system and the disproportionate number of black men who are incarcerated and have at least one count against them because of their race and culture, like this verse from rap duo Run The Jewels:

Conditions create a villain, the villain is given vision The vision becomes a vow to seek vengeance on all the vicious… I’m a fellow with melanin, suspect of a felony, Ripped like Rakim Allah, feds is checkin’ my melody (from “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)” by Run The Jewels)

To poverty, violence, and being abandoned by the rest of society:

They merking kids, they murder kids here Why you think they don't talk about it? They deserted us here... Down here it's easier to find a gun than it is to find a fucking parking spot No love for the opposition, specifically a cop position, Cause they've never been in our position Getting violations for the nation correlating you dry snitching (from “Pusha Man” by Chance The Rapper)

To government corruption and institutionalized racism:

Poor reparations, the Bush administration Unequality, martial law, segregation False hood, false teaching, false education Now's the time for us to come amongst this nation They deceiving us, they don't believe in us… For all my people that's out there persevering through the storm Black fist, Staten Island, stand up, stand strong Penetrate through the gate and bring the Clan along (from “A Better Tomorrow” by Wu-Tang Clan)

I can’t speak to the experiences in these songs. I’m not from their world. But I can tell you that there is a raw anger, a despair, and a defiance in these songs that is very, very culturally important. These songs present deep, wide, urgent problems in an important part of our society. And people are writing off the messages in these songs because they don’t take the art form seriously.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t like hip-hop. I don’t care if you don’t like the artists’ tones, or agree with their sentiments, or disapprove of their ideas. I do care about people starting to listen to this music and understand the people who make it.

It’s important. It is important. It is important.

Are you listening?

The Age of Heroes

Tacked to the corkboard that hung on my bedroom wall throughout most of my childhood was a giant poster of Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco. The caption on the poster read, “The Bash Brothers” and McGwire and Canseco were dressed in fedoras and black Ray-Bans, a la the Blues Brothers. At the time, McGwire and Canseco were the two hottest ballplayers in the Major Leagues. They were both with the Oakland A’s. I wasn’t an A’s fan per se, but I loved baseball in general and I loved that McGwire and Canseco were so much larger than life. That turned out to be true in more ways than one as almost two decades later Canseco himself, of all people, revealed that both of them (along with a bunch of other big-time major leaguers) were filled with more juice than a dump truck full of grapefruits.

I posit that human history has necessarily entered an age beyond heroes. Perhaps we, as a species, have outlived our use for them. Perhaps that’s for the better. Heroes in the American sense of the word, at least: seemingly infallible Earth-bound Ubermenschen who possess no discernable faults. They’re the people we want to be like, but they’re also the people we realize, with simple glances in our bathroom mirrors, we’re actually nothing like. And since we can’t be like them, since we can’t join their ranks, we do the next best thing. Worship them. But there’s the inevitable (and why, oh why, don’t we understand just how truly inevitable this is?) cataclysm—the crime, the fall, the bust, the sin. Who needs a god who needs steroids to slam homeruns, the boyhood equivalent of watching the Red Sea part? With even one speck of failure on their burnished faces, pilgrimages to their shrines—ballparks in the case of McGwire and Canseco—become an exercise in self-delusion. So it may be that quitting them altogether is the most righteous response.

I also had a collection of, watch this, Bill Cosby records. I’d hunt for them in thrift stores and independent record shops and buy them up as quickly as I came across them. And not only did I buy them, I listened to them. A lot. Sitting cross-legged on the floor for hours in front of my parents’ big record player. Recently, I mentioned to a friend my squeamishness at even admitting to owning such a collection given the rapist label that’s (let’s face it, probably appropriately) attached to Cosby these days. I understand he’s innocent until proven guilty, but as more and more allegations come out…well, let’s just say the math is working against him. My friend said, “He’s still funny.” So what if he is? I’ve been forced to become a Cosby-atheist. Those records will sit where they are: in some dark place collecting dust. Let that vinyl return to the earth from which it came.

Chance Encounters and the Whole Story

Given the disparate events in our world, we make stories of our lives bit by bit. This process we engage in can give us a unified field, a wholeness shaped from chaos. Some bits of our stories are easy to fit into the unified field—making a friend, getting a raise at work, hiking on a cool, sunny day. But I’ve been thinking about chance events, how they fit into a life, and how they can influence us in ways we never expected.

San Francisco-based reporter Marco della Cava recalls such a moment last August when the news broke of comedian Robin Williams’ death. While Della Cava felt terribly, he says his “sunken state was quickly buoyed” by memories of a chance encounter, an unexpected lunch he shared with Williams several years prior.

Della Cava had ordered a meal at an eatery in Mill Valley, California, and then quickly found an outdoor table in the sun. “Without looking at the stocky man in sunglasses, I asked if it was OK to share the table. ‘Be my guest,’ said Williams in his impossibly soft off-duty voice. I did my best not to do a double-take.” The two ate in silence, until a woman approached the actor to say that his movie The Fisher King had changed her life. After she left, Della Cava said to Williams, “It must be wonderful to know that work you have done can affect that people that way.” Williams replied, “It’s truly an amazing thing.” And a memorable conversation began, which ranged from the quality of Italian bicycles to the new Argentinian pope to Williams’ impromptu imitation of Brazilian samba-dancing nuns. A half-hour later, Williams offered, “Hey, thanks for the nice lunch.” Della Cava’s reminiscence ends with thanks to Williams for the work he has left to us, to the world.

The reporter’s story reminded me of a chance meeting with the writer Lucy Grealy, the summer before she died. In June 2002, Lucy was a faculty member at the Bennington Writing Seminars, where I was a student in poetry. Late one afternoon, a fellow student and I gave her a ride into North Bennington where her car was being repaired. We talked a bit, mostly niceties; then we dropped her at the repair shop. Of course, if we’d known that those two weeks at Bennington would be the last we’d see of Lucy, our conversation might have taken a turn from the mundane to something more substantial. Yet we weren’t confidantes, and I was oblivious to the addictions that would take her life.

That afternoon in Bennington, however, shows us to be fellow travelers whose lives intersected unexpectedly. This scene lay dormant in my psyche until the numbing news of Lucy’s death came via email from Bennington in December 2002. That chance encounter, and her early death, caused me to look again at Grealy’s work. After having beaten a rare cancer, Lucy had, of course, considered how to make meaning of unexpected events. She wrote in her essay “My God” that often enough, important moments become so only in retrospect, that we are slow to recognize meaning in our lives. She explained that “if you’ve denied every ‘now’ moment in your life, you are still moving forward toward that final inevitable moment,” when you must see meaning in your life.

In retrospect, I needed to know Lucy’s story and her perspectives. While I was finishing up my MFA that summer, I was also going through one of the darkest times of my life—from a drawn-out divorce after a long marriage to the deaths of my father and my brother. To be truthful, I saw very little meaning in my life that afternoon in North Bennington. Only several years later could I consider Lucy’s assertion in “My God” that we must see meaning in our lives. By then, I had taught a number of workshops on the power of narrative, and helped others to tell their stories. It was time to make sense of my own story. Thank you, Lucy.

Awake My Soul

When I sit down to write, I pretend I am speaking at an event. I’m the plenary at the Festival of Faith and Writing, for example. Or I’m giving my acceptance speech for this year’s Newbery Award. Once, I pretended I was giving the commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame. I was never a student there, but I did teach step aerobics and my inspiring, motivational, and encouraging personality led the university to request my presence at graduation. In my fantasy, they would be giving me an honorary doctorate. For teaching aerobics.

I came up with the idea to pretend in order to write in the spring of 1998. I was in a study carol in the library at Calvin College. I was supposed to write a term paper for Dale Brown’s American Literature class, and my usual treats, a large bag of gummy worms and a Poor Man’s Mocha (a mixture of coffee and hot chocolate that cost me fifty cents), were not providing the jumpstart I needed to pick up my pen and write.

I was probably supposed to explore a theme in my paper. But it’s been a minute since 1998 and I don’t remember the exact assignment. What I do remember is sitting in Dale Brown’s class on the first day of my last semester of college and hearing him quote Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “Anything coming back to life hurts.”

Crap, I thought as I wrote that sentence down and circled it. I was interviewing for teaching jobs in South Bend, Indiana where my fiancée was a graduate student. I was looking for a wedding dress with enough tulle that would make Scarlet O’Hara both approve and be envious. I was wondering if my soon-to-be husband would agree to living in an apartment by the St. Joseph River. I wasn’t interested in the idea that we are only fully alive if we are in pain. No thank you, I thought, as I shifted my left hand so the diamond on my ring sparkled.

Morrison’s words were the first notes I took in American Literature. I still have the navy blue Mead notebook. The letters from the sentence and the circle around it are shaky, not my typical neat handwriting. That’s because I trembled when I wrote them.

And I trembled when I read the stories Brown assigned for class: “A Soldier’s Heart,” by Ernest Hemingway, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” by Flannery O’Connor. They all bothered me. I walked around that semester feeling as though I’d just been shocked by the morning alarm after being in a deep sleep. I felt like I needed to figure out where I was and what I was supposed to do now that I was awake.

The worst of the stories was, “Where Are You Going And Where Have You Been,” by Joyce Carol Oates. I sat in the back of the room with my head bowed, hoping not to be called on the day we discussed that story. Not abnormal behavior for me, but that morning I was raw from reading about the teenage girl who opens her screen door and walks away with the devil. She knew who he was and he knew she knew. Can Jesus still get to her now? I didn’t want to say a word about this story because I was sure I’d been that girl. I was sure I’d be that girl again. I sat as still as I could and silently pleaded with Jesus to always have a stronger grip on me than the devil.

So I’m in my study carol, the one I always went to because if I leaned a smidgeon to the right I could see a sliver of the campus, and I decide to pretend that I am the valedictorian of my class. I would write an address to my fellow students to be given in the field house upon graduation. The idea was hilarious given my history of being a solid C student (give or take a minus), but it provided enough of a boost to my ego so that I wrote.

The paper was about how what we read should wake us up and shake us around. I argued that reading stories like the ones we read in Brown’s class is vital in forming who we are and how we ought to live. To this day that paper is one of my favorite things I’ve written.

And I think I fooled Dale Brown. He gave me an A on the paper. He wrote that he suspected my speech would be better then the “real” valedictorian address. He called me “one of those” students referring to the sort he’d never forget. He told me I was a writer.

Dale Brown helped me see myself differently. He helped me believe I might have the capability to wrestle with the tough stories. I can still see that girl, almost twenty years ago, leaning close to the words she’s trying to figure out, ignoring the gummy worms and the coffee that’s gone cold, in pain from trying to understand how to come back to life after seeing herself in the girl who walked with the devil, or the grandma in “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.”

Today, in order to get myself to write this piece for Relief, I’m pretending I’m giving Dale Brown’s eulogy. He died last year. He was riding his bike and swerved to avoid a car, but was knocked off and suffered injuries he couldn’t survive.

I’d prefer to pretend that he is still alive saving lives through his teaching; waking all of us up and helping us walk around the world with startled, awe-stricken eyes. I’d prefer to pretend that I am speaking at a banquet thanking him for his years of teaching. I’d prefer to pretend I am that girl twenty years ago, writing down that terrifying sentence about coming back to life, and waiting for Dale Brown to show me what that sentence means.

Peeling Back the Layers

Bill Murray often explores themes beyond the comedic in his films. This is what makes St. Vincent not the predictable story of a misanthropic old man (Vincent, played by Murray), but a film that leans toward larger ideas.

One of the ways it does this is when Maggie (Melissa McCarthy), the misanthropic old man’s new neighbor, reads Shel Silverstein’s book The Giving Tree to her 12-year-old son, Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher). I never liked that book because the tree gives itself, apples and limbs and trunk, to the boy, until all that is left is a stump. I read it for the first time to my son when he was five. When I finished, I closed the book and said, "That's ridiculous, you're not supposed to let someone use you up like that." But doesn’t the book reflect the Gospel? If we are measured by the measure we use, what does a good measure—pressed down, shaken together and running over—look like? This scene raises unsettling questions about how we should love. We soon learn that Vincent’s wife is declining from dementia in a nursing home. He sacrifices his own financial security and physical safety to make sure she is well cared for.

Another scene raises existential questions. On Oliver’s first day at his new Catholic school, the teacher (a young priest) welcomes him warmly and asks him to pray to begin the school day. When Oliver objects (“I think I’m Jewish”), the priest has Oliver’s classmates tell him their religious persuasions. Each child identifies their view—Catholic, Buddhist, Jewish, agnostic. The fact that the priest makes space for these expansive differences in his class of 12-year-olds reminds us that these questions about God's existence and our own press in on us from a young age. As with the reading of The Giving Tree, the scene opens the movie’s scope to thoughts of what lies beyond us.

Vincent’s weekly appointment with Daka (Naomi Watts), a prostitute, stands in sharp contrast to his devotion to his ailing wife. But the relationship is another telling fruit of this flawed man. And Daka, being part of the story, crowds in on our tendency to make assumptions about people. In “Tell It Slant,” Camille T. Dungy tells us good poems and fiction “weird the truth” to “subvert our expectations and also reward them.” Dungy points to Lucille Clifton’s poem “here rests” and how Josephine, a prostitute, surprises our expectations by doing something we think would be out of character: she (and her pimp) return home to care for her dying father. The poem also tells us Josephine is a lover of books and “carried a book / on every stroll.” Then Clifton tells us:

and they would take turns reading a bible aloud through the house.

Dungy says knowing this about Josephine has “complicated our understanding of her...Clifton tells us a different side of a story, several different sides of a story, so that we see a deeper truth that is both superbly surprising and also so beautiful we can’t turn away.” Daka “complicates our understanding.” She was changing in ways other than not being able to pole dance anymore, due to her growing belly (we’re never told who the father of her child is). After Vincent suffers a stroke, she cleans and organizes his grossly neglected home. She also tells him the old relationship is over; he will now pay her to keep house for him. She enters into this new relationship with Vincent out of feelings for him and also out of a growing love for her unborn child. The film offers us this surprising and deeper insight into the life of a prostitute we assumed would be predictable.

Throughout the film, Vincent has some of his crusty layers planed through his relationships with Daka, Maggie, and Oliver. At the end, they’re all sitting down to a nice meal in a clean house. They pause to have Vincent pray. But Vincent refuses, shaking his head and laughing his sardonic laugh. It seems blasphemous. Who is he mocking? In “The Fire,” Franz Wright says,

And everything alive (and everything’s alive) is turning into something else as at the heart of some annihilating or is it creating fire that’s burning, unseeably, always burning at such speeds as eyes cannot detect, just try to observe your own face growing old in the mirror, or is it beginning to be born?

The film weirds the truth again. Vincent mocks himself. The prayer he didn’t pray was the prayer and shows us the bigger picture of an old man growing humble before a holy God.

Persona and Poetry

“My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.”—Frederick Buechner

 Last fall, I spent a few weeks teaching two beautiful essays to an undergraduate creative writing class. One essay was written by Frederick Buechner and the other by my talented friend Callie Feyen. Both essays dealt with moments of loss and growth and reached far back into the writers’ pasts, all the way to childhood. One of the most interesting things my students discussed in regard to the essays was the way both authors were able to compress time in their narrative voices. The essays were rich with both the voice of the children they once were and the adults they had become. My students loved the essays not only for the stories they told but more, I think, for the voices that told them. These were voices both broad and specific enough to belong to the writers, as well as every reader who had experienced similar loss and growth.

Energized from the discussion, I went home and tried to write a poem for the first time in weeks. I made coffee, stared at the screen, and heaved more into the blank space than any poor page deserves to bear. It took two more weeks before the poem and its voice came together enough to sound less like Jill the person and more like Jill the writer—someone who crafts voice and imagery capable of embodying both 'my' story as well as the stories of others.

Voice, the construct of tone behind a poem’s unfolding, has become much more than a craft concern for me. Learning how to create and wield “voice” has allowed me to move through spaces as a writer I would never be brave enough to risk as just Jill. When I entered the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University three years ago, I was choking on moments and images and memories that I couldn’t control or temper into poetic line. I was a newly divorced, single mom putting myself through grad school, and I felt like a walking stereotype. The world smacked of pain. An unpaired sock on the floor, the mockingbird cracking into the glass door, even my umbrella turning inside out in the rain—every image brimmed with the shock of loss.

My poetry mentor, Jeanine Hathaway, who has written extensively utilizing the power of persona (see her Ex-Nun Poems), looked me in the eye and asked, “Why not try a costume change?” I blinked at Jeanine. “Tell the story. But use a persona. It will free the poem to be the poem and your experiences to be your experiences.”

In a way, persona saved me. I was able to write about the unpaired sock and the mockingbird and the umbrella, but write about them outside of the moment I experienced them. Instead, those images unfolded in the crafted persona of a professor/mom or the granddaughter of a Creole farmer. And while those personas comprise elements of my identity, they are also constructs that allowed me to be both emotionally present and distant enough from the experiences and the poems to do them all justice. With my voice tucked inside the right persona, I don’t get bogged down in the mire of how I remember something or how I would say something. Instead, I am free to know what I would say or did say while writing what the persona would say in the way she would say it.

Each time I sit down and lack the courage to tell a story, I think of Jeanine and the power of a costume change. Eventually, I get the nerve to rummage for the right persona and let it lead me through the difficult spaces. I am learning to follow and create the voice that helps me to be brave.

Thirty Are Better Than One

In 1963, Andy Warhol silkscreened thirty back-and-white images of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa onto a canvas. The work was less than perfect. Any t-shirt printer will tell you that Warhol’s squeegee angle was sloppy, his ink application was inconsistent, and his registration was a mess. Since there were thirty “Mona Lisas,” Warhol named the piece Thirty are Better Than One.

So what does it mean? It's hard to tell. Warhol was always horribly enigmatic and rarely answered questions directly. When he did answer a question, he often seemed to be alluding to a joke no one else was in on. So what might we say about this piece? Well, we might say that Warhol was right—thirty are better than one. At least sort of.

When I was growing up in the 1960s, our country was in the middle of the space race. In school, we would talk about the future and it all sounded so cool. We would talk about how we would be able to take vacations on the moon, and how we would all own flying cars, and how we would all have our own personal robot, and how our television sets would have maybe as many as ten channels! (I remember saying, “Ten channels? No way!”). We would also talk about being able to instantly get our meals from a single mass-produced pill. So with all the 10-year-old humor we could muster up, we would pretend we were taking one of those pills, and say things like, “My, my this steak dinner is delicious!"

But a mass-produced pill is not the same as a meal. And eating is not the same as savoring. And hearing is not the same as listening. And looking is not the same as seeing. And thirty Mona Lisas are not better than one.

The Politics of Poetry

“Make it more obscure,” a student says in an undergrad poetry workshop. This after the assignment says be specific, always specific, and avoid abstraction. And cliché.

In fact, I’ve crafted the assignment to follow Ted Kooser’s mystical ideal about poetry, that “meaning arrives almost unbidden from an accumulation of specific details.” But then I read a quote from Stephen Evans in David Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless which says, “Through men like . . . Ted Kooser, Karl Rove’s battle-tested blend of unapologetic economic elitism and reactionary cultural populism is now being marketed in the far off reaches of the poetry world,” and I wonder if my choice has been that innocent, that naïve.

Maybe the image, the detail, is really the enemy of the word.

This is confirmed later when a colleague reads from The Writing Life about cardboard butterflies, how male butterflies will always “jump” the cardboard copy of a butterfly—if it’s bigger than the real female butterfly. TV and film images are that cardboard butterfly for Dillard, while she would have us jump books, language: “In my view, the more literary the book—the more purely verbal, crafted sentence by sentence, the more imaginative, reasoned, and deep—the more likely people are to read it. The people who read are the people who like literature, after all, whatever that might be.”

Then today, I sit in a Reformed worship service, and we read from the Heidelberg Catechism, and I think of a friend who says that the gift of Dutch Reformers has been systematic catechisms, real works of art if “systematic” and “art” weren’t so supposedly diametrically opposed. And I think of a theologian who describes Reformed worship as rhetorical, all word before it became flesh, built into tight brick rhetorical structures that stand strong and unyielding out here on the prairies against the northwest winds that come howling down from the Canadian wilds all winter long—structures with a certain implicit beauty, perfect for survival but also pretty easy to simply cower behind.

“In the beginning was the Word,” I think to myself. Or is this just my logocentrism?

“Make it more obscure,” she says, the one black woman in my class. What’s true for her, for me, at thirty-eight, my age?

Here I am again, at the mercy of language, wondering just how it works. Just what can words do? How can they be plied and bent and put to service and fleshed out? How can they slip away, escape, survive?

“Yes, yes—maybe try that. Make it more obscure. See just what those words can do.”