Icebreakers

 

It is a Saturday. I am 18. I’m at one of too-many college orientation events.

Even though all of my materials read “Chrysta,” my nametag reads “Crysta.” I added in an “h” with a black sharpie. They’ve assured me that the spelling will be fixed in time for tomorrow's activities and I am oh-so-thoroughly relieved and stick the typo on my jeans, out of site.

The introductory activity is an acrostic poem using the letters of our name. My subsequent eye roll is unavoidable. Whenever I am in a situation in which adult says “We’re going to start with a quick ice breaker,” my eyes take the path of least resistance toward the back of my skull. My neck throws itself back, and my nostrils flare. The act is not quick. It is not unnoticeable, but I pick up the pen and write.

C-Creative H-helpful R-Real Y-Why did you spell my name without an “h" STA-Start from the beginning and do it right this time.

It would probably shock you to know that I have never made a friend because of an icebreaker. Not one.

***

It is a Wednesday. I am 26. I am at Starbucks.

I've asked the barista for a London fog. She calls her manager who informs me that Starbucks doesn’t carry London Fogs. “You do,” I say, weary and un-caffeinated. “It’s an Earl Grey tea latte with vanilla syrup.”

“Oh,” the manager says. “So you would order that by asking for an Earl Grey latte with vanilla syrup.”

The outer edge of my left eye twitches behind my glasses. “I think," I smile in a way that's really just cheek flexion, “that is what I did when I ordered a London Fog!" But what the barista hears is “Okay, great.”

“What’s your name?” she asks with her Sharpie at the ready.

“Chrysta,” I answer. I pay with my Starbucks app and walk over to the pick-up counter.

“Would you like to add a tip?” the app prompts.

The barista slides my drink over to me and I stared at the cup that reads “Krystal” in scratchy black letters.

I clear the notification and put my phone back into my purse.

***

People are always misspelling my name. My least favorite misspelling is anything that ends with l or n. Those letters create a different name and were combined to describe a different person who is not me. My favorite misspelling happened at a bookstore coffee shop. I picked up my coffee and saw “Christ” written on the cup. That is also not my name, but wouldn’t that be fun? Just imagine.

Introductions: Hi, I’m Christ. Restaurants reservations: Christ table for 13! Picking someone up: Christ is here for you.

When I was growing up, I wanted my name to be Tia. Tia was mature, had a leather jacket, wore heels, and she was extroverted, easily approachable, and likable. Tia is made up of three easy letters. You have to try really hard to misspell it. Chrysta, on the other hand, aspires to maturity. She loves sweatpants and flip-flops. She is quiet. The spelling is not instinctual. You have to spend time with it, figure it out, and remember it. She is me.

In Sloane Crosley’s essay collection, I Was Told There Would Be Cake, she writes of her own struggles with an atypical name and its spelling. “Yes, my name is my cross and my co-pilot.” In place of the exotic, affluent, or adventurous childhoods that other children had, the terrain of her upbringing was contoured by her “vowel-heavy name inscrutable to people of all nationalities.”

That's not completely true for me. Upon hearing my name, a Greek man paused and said, “Chrysta…. Are you Greek?"

I squinted my eyes and shook my head. “…No…” I answered, uncomfortably running my hand through a short afro.

***

I am 27. Another icebreaker, another team building activity. “Define yourself with one word.”

Our names mark and distinguish us. Look into a container marked with “wires,” “shoes,” or “Butterscotch Krimpets,” and you should find wires, shoes, and Butterscotch Krimpets. Names describe and define, not only things, but also people. There are distinct differences between a Matt, a Mark, and a Britany. Krysta is not to interchangeable with Crysta or Chrysta. They are all different for a variety of reasons, starting with what you call them.

“They,” Crosley writes of her parents “wanted me to have something I could point to and say: This is where I’m from. This is who I am.” So they named her Sloane.

I pick up my navy blue sharpie and write, “Chrysta.” That is it. That is all.

Forms of Love

The British newspaper The Guardian recently invited a handful of writers to discuss the words that they cherish the most. “One of my favorites is the Cumbrian word glisky,” wrote novelist Sarah Hall, “meaning a kind of bright flashing light that you get after it has rained, when all the surfaces are wet and reflecting.” 

Aminatta Forna, a Scottish-born writer, described an Orkney word: “Plitter: to play about in water, to make a watery mess.”

Clot, claret, nesh, thrawn, slipe, whiffle-whaffle: all were extolled. (Will Self lovingly recalled a compound word that formed a complete thought: “Pipe-down!,” one of his father’s “interwar slang expressions that are long departed from the common lexicon.”)

The chance to luxuriate in the materials of one’s craft is irresistible; reviewing The Guardian’s feature, New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead could not help but tender a richly branching sentence concerning a word she holds dear:

I cannot say the word ‘procrastinate’—a useful word for a writer—without hearing embedded therein 'cras,' the Latin word for 'tomorrow,' which, St. Augustine noted, sounded like the croaking cry of the dilatory raven that was sent from the ark and never came back.

My wife, a writer, could not even let me finish describing The Guardian’s assignment. “Luscious!” she exclaimed. And then, slowly, “luminous.” And finally, “Frangelica. It’s fun to say.”

According to the compendium Favorite Words of Famous People, the first word the exuberant stylist Nicholson Baker loved to say was broom. From there, the list evidently grew so quickly and lavishly, it required the most exquisite attention:

Of abstract nouns containing the letter l, my favorites are 'reluctance' and 'revulsion.'  The ‘luct’ in 'reluctance' functions as an oral brake or clutch ('clutch' and 'luct' being sonic kin), making the word seem politely hesitant, tactful, circumspect—willing to let the hired tongue have its fun before completing its meaning.

Ocean is one of the words I love most. I love the surging sounds it makes: from the slow, enfolding swell in Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, when the forlorn men watch Shield Sheafson’s funeral pyre disappear “far on out into the ocean’s sway,” to the menacing rush that occurs when the word, amassing an extra syllable in the mouth of Henry V, overtakes the bounds of our modern ears:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead! In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility, But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage, Then lend the eye a terrible aspect, Let pry through the portage of the head Like the brass cannon, let the brow o'erwhelm it As fearfully as doth a gallèd rock O'erhang and jutty his confounded base, Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.

There’s no telling what Shakespeare himself would have written in response to The Guardian’s query. But if frequency of contact is an indication of affection, it is worth noting, as Brad Leithauser did in a 2013 New Yorker piece, that sweet and its kin appear in The Complete Works close to a thousand times. A search of the Shakespeare concordance on OpenSource Shakespeare reveals a word that arrives with nearly the exact same frequency: time. Joining that pair is think. Good arrives three times as often, as do thou and shall. Death (918) and life (890) are separated merely. And all are surpassed by the forms of love.

The Power of Humor

Twice a year or so, my boyfriend Dave starts showing me YouTube videos and makes me question our relationship.

I mean, not really. I wouldn’t actually end our relationship over the YouTube videos he shows me. But I do look at some of them and wonder what on Earth he finds funny about the things he finds on the Internet.

Dave has a particular appreciation for surreal humor which, I will freely admit, I do not share. Shows like Tim and Eric, Awesome Show, Great Job!; Check It Out! With Dr. Steve Brule; Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared; and others are so awkward and weird that they make me almost physically uncomfortable. He’s always maintained that they were “actually really smart entertainment” and would joke that someday my sense of humor would evolve to be on his level.

He actually had a point. The more I started paying attention to the shows he watched (although I often watched them under protest), the more I realized that they weren’t just awkward, uncomfortable shows. They were satirical shows that took common television tropes—cringe-worthy late-night television shows, family-friendly prime time sitcoms, children’s shows, etc.—and exaggerated them to the point that they became surrealist commentaries on life as we know it.

These shows aren’t the first of their kind, either. Surreal humor has long been used by authors and playwrights to comment on society. It really became popular with the dawn of postmodernism, which, in the aftermath of World War II, became the dominant zeitgeist of a society dealing with a destabilized world and a deep distrust of authority. Surrealist humor was a way for people to deal with political and social uncertainty, the tension of the Cold War, the rapidly-accelerating development of technology, and morphing religious and moral norms.

No wonder surrealist humor is alive and well! Today, world politics are tense. War is everywhere. Technology is increasingly advanced and intrusive. Constant scandals have further weakened trust in established governments, religions, and social figures. Our generation’s surrealist humor has moved off of the stage and onto the Internet, but it’s still wrestling with the issues addressed by Samuel Beckett and others. They deal with topics like the ever-pervasive Internet, the idea of teaching children with television, concepts of identity in a digital world, and fame.

I’m still not a fan of Dave’s shows. Watching a bunch of puppets devolve into shrieking, hysterical versions of themselves as they delve into the Internet is not fun for me. Steve Brule makes me cringe. But I understand how they’re “smart humor” (even though I still roll my eyes at the “your-humor-will-evolve” joke), and I understand why they’re important.

Who knows? Maybe, someday, people will watch Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared like we read Samuel Beckett. We might not love them, but we’ll see more clearly how significant they are.

Lars and the Real Girl

We were driving home from a family wedding in Jacksonville. We are attending these gatherings with increasing frequency, but whether marriages or funerals, outside the formal event and appropriate attire, our family conversation is the same, fraying and reweaving itself out of our particular social and cultural fabrics to an quilted knit of unqualified goodness. So, somewhere between Lake City and Gainesville I imagined us home in Tampa, ragged out and crashed around plates of left-overs and a movie. Lars and the Real Girl cropped up in our impromptu movie reviews, so that's what we watched.

If you have not seen Lars and the Real Girl, I hope you will. Says Christianity Today, “Lars and the Real Girl is a sweet and endearing film about a shy, reclusive man who strikes up a chaste relationship with a sex doll that he orders over the Internet...” And further, “we might as well note that the film's risqué premise actually serves to underscore the man's decency and goodness. Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling) has brought the doll into his life, and named it 'Bianca,' because for some reason he cannot let himself get too close to anyone, not even his brother Gus (Paul Schneider) and his sister-in-law Karin (Emily Mortimer). And he certainly can't handle the thought of dating an actual woman, even though he has an attractive, perky co-worker named Margo (Kelli Garner) who sings in the choir at his church and is obviously interested in him.”

It is easy to ask the wrong questions about Lars and the Real Girl. You can get distracted by comparing it with comfortable mindsets that curtail discussion. You can ask “chicken or egg” questions about Lars' clinical state, its causes, or standard therapies. You can make easy criticisms about individual and corporate responsibilities, or how science and faith act outside their ordinate categories. The movie challenges all manner of convention.

Better questions might come along these lines:

• In what ways is sex portrayed?
• Why is the taboo of sex such a good fulcrum to visit cultural questions?
• How does the implausible situation help get to the bigger questions?
• What in the film is being made? What is made real?
• How does the movie engage creatio ex nihilo (creating out of nothing)?
• Where in the film and in what ways to we find simple acts of caring?
• How do these simple acts signify a caring community?
• What is it “to sit and to knit?” What Psalm uses knitting as a metaphor?
• Lars' brother rarely finishes a sentence. At what important point are they complete?
• How does the film deal with the connection between death (or suffering) and maturity?
• How do the seasons change over the course of the film and what does that say?
• What does the hard scene of Bianca's death at the lake convey to you?
• How is Paul's “put to death what is earthly in you” possibly considered?

During the week of the wedding the national media was full of existential questions: the Charleston murders, ongoing Middle East wars, trans-racial and trans-sexual identity, political machinations from global trade to greenhouse gases. But at the reception and dinner we checked all those conversations at the door. And not despite, but because of them we got lost in the fray of foolish small talk and made imaginative whole cloth of our colorful oddities.

At the Seashore

The land may vary more; But wherever the truth may be— The water comes ashore, And the people look at the sea. - Robert Frost

The sea predates us, and—judging by literature—its significance in our lives can’t be overstated. The sea represents brokenness, beauty, loneliness, our own inner depths, mystery, tragedy, and wisdom, to name some of the themes it has inspired. Despite this influence, Revelations tells us that one day there will no longer be a sea. This is notable because it's the reverse of the usual order. Usually we lose things here (loved ones, health), only to have them restored to us there. In the same way, we will give up heaven and earth for a new heaven and earth. But though we have the sea now, we will not have it at the end of time. Won't we miss it? The sea has had a vast affect on poets and writers. Their vision reflects our own encounters with the sea.

Pablo Neruda finds brokenness and a paradoxical beauty washing to shore in an assortment of debris:

Petals crimped up, cotton from the tidewash, useless sea-jewels, and sweet bones of birds still in the poise of flight.

And in another poem he speaks of his dependence on it: “I need the sea because it teaches me./I don’t know if I learn music or awareness,/if it’s a single wave or its vast existence.”

The Anglo-Saxon poet speaks of the sea in terms of loneliness. In the Old English poem, The Wanderer, the warrior reveals the wounds of exile:

Care is renewed for the one who must send very often over the binding of the waves a weary heart.

Cut off from loved ones and his own familiar language, he finds that the waters “bind” or imprison as they present an obstacle to returning home.

In an essay, Robin Ekiss says the sea’s “vastness suggests the infinite depths of the self or the unconscious, even danger, which also lurks beneath the waves.” We don’t doubt Melville’s insight into the human heart with passages like this from Moby Dick:

Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!

Wallace Stevens sees the sea in terms of mystery and tragedy, calling it “The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea.” In “The Sea is Acquisitive,” Cecil Hemley considers how it takes lives to itself, saying “I am fearful for a man who loves/The sea too much.”

There are pleasant aspects of the sea. In “The Birth of Venus,” Hayden Carruth speaks imaginatively of a beauty and wisdom that originates in the sea:

She gave us beauty where our eyes Had seen but need, and we grew wise. For wisdom could not fail the gift Bestowed in that superb undress, Value consigned as loveliness From ocean’s riches, ocean's thrift.

Humankind has marked its emotional, physical, and spiritual rhythms by the sea. What does it mean that this treasured sea will no longer exist? Maybe God, who sometimes speaks in the language of imagery – stars, and wings, and branching trees—will close this age and open the next with the sumptuous metaphorical flourish of vanishing the sea. Isn’t the reason we can give the sea up and never miss it because of the relationship that will restore and surpass all that’s represented by its metaphors of brokenness and beauty?

The Wilderness of the Unexpected

One summer day in Cuchara, Colorado, hiking on a mountain, my family and I found we had diverged from the trail, not far, but the particular path wasn’t well marked. And some storm clouds had appeared farther up the slopes. Because our kids were quite young then and hard to corral up the mountain, we usually began our hikes in early morning and completed them by noon, to avoid too much grumpiness or mad hunger or sudden storms and lightning. On this day, the clouds had gathered earlier than expected. Should we keep going up, or begin our descent?

In a couple of minutes, we had relocated the trail, with the help of a few signposts, which I later learned are called “reassurance markers.” In “Trail Signing,” the National Forest Service remarks, “To keep travelers on course, use reassurance markers at all intersections and locations where the trail could be uncertain,” to “reassure travelers.” The text also explains the materials, sizes, heights, and locations for all kinds of trail signs. And because of the Forest Service’s work, we could hardly get lost in the wilderness today. This is how I and many others, I suspect, experience the wilderness in relative safety these days.

Wilderness, in symbolic terms, is often portrayed by forests and deserts. We have the thick, mysterious forest in The Scarlet Letter and the jungle in Heart of Darkness. In our sacred stories, the Jews wandered in the desert for forty years before they entered the Promised Land. Later, Jesus spent forty days in the desert, wrestling with evil. In these texts, wilderness symbolizes a place where danger and chaos reside. In the wild, people and characters are cut loose, facing the unfamiliar without a reliable guide, unable to read the signs. On the flip side, wilderness can bring about transformation, where the unfamiliar produces new ideas and revelation. Humans can be nourished and discover new strengths, by leaving the familiar for a time and facing a strange, unpeopled landscape.

In my own life, I have come to see unexpected situations as a type of wilderness, because I must grapple with conflicting ideas and emotions before I know how to move forward. When faced with my aging mother’s dementia, I have felt bewildered over and over, as her condition has progressed—from having her in her home with caretakers, to eventually moving her into a facility where she receives round-the-clock care. Moreover, I knew nothing at first about how to navigate the system of medical and social services to help my mother. I was nearly unmoored by the situation until my sister-in-law, who is a medical social worker, stepped in to guide the family in obtaining the right services for my mother. One aspect of this wilderness is the length of time I have wandered in it—this is the sixteenth year of my mother’s demise. Another facet is the unfamiliar and distressing condition of having a relationship with a woman who no longer knows that she is my mother.

On our morning hike in Colorado that summer when a sudden storm surprised us, we made the decision to turn back. We did get caught in a rainstorm halfway down the trail, but we had reached a place where we could shelter safely. In that case, I felt some exhilaration in finding refuge and waiting out the storm. Yet in the wilderness before me now, in dealing with my mother’s condition, I confess that chaos and unfamiliarity still form the larger part of the landscape. That I roam here in companionship with my family, the health care team, supportive friends, and yes, even with my mother, is no small part of the experience. At times, there’s a definite direction we take; other times we rely on one another for reassurance.

Laughing in Class

It’s the first day of the poetry unit for my freshmen composition class. All morning, I rehearse my opening lines like a high school invitation to prom: Would you like to read poetry with me? I promise we’ll have a good time. After a few minutes, I advance to the break-up speech: No really, it’s not you. It’s me. I can’t help it. I just really love poetry. It’s ok. You can admit it—I know you hate it. Maybe we should just break up.

Of course, I don’t say any of this. What I actually offer my class is a poem. I tell them that I’ve even chosen a funny poem. I tell them I’ve done this because poetry is often funny. And I avert my gaze in an attempt to ignore the dubious glances that follow.

At this point each year, I get worried. The problem is that in over ten years of teaching in both high school and college, I am not surprised when my students express their past experiences with poetry as sterile and cold, overly academic and irrelevant to their everyday lives.

Dana Gioia famously wrote in his highly lauded essay, “Can Poetry Matter?,” that poetry’s readership has been severely divided into classes of academic and common readers, noting that “outside the classroom—where society demands that the two groups interact—poets and the common reader are no longer on speaking terms.” I realize despite all their years of being tested on literature, many of my students have yet to engage with a poem in any sort of personally meaningful way. However, I know poetry is more than what they’ve experienced so far; good poetry establishes a meeting point between the poem and the reader that, at its best, is both warmly and meaningfully human. I want them to find even one poem they can hold against their humanity until it illuminates something about what it means to be human in a particular skin, in a particular moment, and in a particular place. I want that for them more than I want them to write a decent paragraph.

And I’m counting on a “funny” poem to wedge open the door between my passion and their doubt. So, anxiously, excitedly, I begin reading this poem.

Prof of Profs BY GEOFFREY BROCK For Allison Hogge, in memory of Brian Wilkie

I was a math major—fond of all things rational. It was the first day of my first poetry class. The prof, with the air of a priest at Latin mass, told us that we could “make great poetry personal,”

could own it, since poetry we memorize sings inside us always. By way of illustration he began reciting Shelley with real passion, but stopped at “Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”— because, with that last plosive, his top denture popped from his mouth and bounced off an empty chair.

He blinked, then offered, as postscript to his lecture, a promise so splendid it made me give up math: “More thingth like that will happen in thith clath.” Source: Poetry (July/August 2008).

When the first giggle emerges beneath the bill of a baseball cap in the corner of the classroom, I exhale and think that nothing really terrible can happen for the rest of the day because a student laughed at a poem in my 8:00 class. Apparently, I have nailed the lisp. Also, I discover that my students enjoy the poem. They tell me that they would love to read more poems like this. They ask me if any more exist. I am giddy. Yes. YES, I say, working hard to stifle the middle-schoolish glee I feel manifesting itself in a snort laugh.

Anne Sexton once wrote: “Watch out for intellect,/because it knows so much it knows nothing/and leaves you hanging upside down,/mouthing knowledge as your heart/falls out of your mouth.” Her poem indicates the danger in courting the intellect at the exclusion of the heart. Her words further illustrate what “Prof of Profs” so humorously acknowledges. Bock’s poem emphasizes the intersection between the academic and the “ordinary,” and the poem shines with the playful way the two worlds inform each other, contrasting their concerns and realities in a “plosive” and humorous tone. A studied engagement with art should not nullify our human-ness but rather increase our awareness of it. There is no checking humor at the classroom door because humor belongs to the experience of being human both inside and outside the world of the poem and classroom. Truly, art often makes space for such worlds to collide. And for a brief moment, in the grip of a good poem, my students and I bear witness to the glimmers and sparks that follow such collisions.

A Shimmering Mass

"Thus, writing narrative—and reading it—is an act of faith that places us in time and space, locating us in a chronology that suggests by its very order both the cause and meaning of our lives." —Leslie Leyland Fields in Christianity Today.

*****

Lubomyr Melnyk has spent his life pioneering a new kind of music for piano: continuous music. "The basic concept," he says, "is that it's a continuous stream of sound, unbroken. There are no phrases of slow notes, rapid notes, and pauses, the way other music is built.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbzU7MT-lHU

Listening to continuous music takes some getting used to. (This is especially so when you hear the music live. The sounds move through a room and bounce off walls differently than they do in a recording.) It requires a kind of attention that I, at least, had to cultivate, not unlike meditation. Melnyk himself has spent decades cultivating these skills: he’s trained his hands to play almost twenty notes per hand per second, and some of his pieces last forty-five unbroken minutes or longer. The effect is fundamentally different than classical and other conventional forms of music. It’s music to get lost in—you must get lost in it in order to follow it.

Continuous music is not built around the traditional structure of melody; rather, it is a sonic space Melnyk creates in which the sound of the piano itself flourishes. Notes build upon and interact with one another in a way that is fluid and almost out of control, almost like chaos. Once you get used to this, classical piano compositions start to feel stiff and incomplete in contrast. Melnyk compares himself this way: "Classical pianists, they live in the music they're playing. They live in the sonata; they live in the piano concerto. They don't live in their fingers."

Continuous music fascinates me in part because it seems like an antidote to an over-emphasis on story. I’m suspicious of story, of the popular push to understand our lives as part of a larger narrative. God’s narrative. In part, story is an alternative to the conception of Truth as propositional—laws, dogma, rational systems, assertions to be proved or disproved. When Christians understand their faith as participation in a divine story, Truth can operate in many different ways—experienced, incarnated in individual lives, unspeakably complex.

But I suspect that the idea of life in a narrative structure—even if it’s a structured unknowing—is shaping my expectations in a way that stops me from being entirely present. I wonder if, when I imagine my confusions, pains, encounters, and observations as material to one day be grasped and threaded together into a coherent arc—I wonder if I’m stopping short of a threshold where life is more unwieldy, but also deeper and more luminous.

When he plays, Melnyk keeps his foot on the sustain pedal, lifting the dampers away from the strings, allowing them to vibrate freely and the notes to decay naturally. With the dampers lifted, surrounding piano strings can also vibrate in sympathy with strings whose vibrations are mathematically related to their own, meaning that many strings vibrate without being struck. New patterns emerge from their interactions. At times, it’s difficult to tell if their swells are real or imagined.

When I live in anticipation of divine narrative in my own life, I suspect I’m living in the sonata, in the concerto.

I want to know what it’s like to live in my fingers.

Instead of a melody, a progression of notes, the notes in Melnyk's music are a shimmering mass, accumulating and undulating through the space around him. When you are in a room with Melnyk playing piano, you are in a room where sounds and harmonic relationships are bouncing through the space and compounding one another, creating swells and ripples in the air. There is Melnyk, alive in his fingers, and there is the music, continually escaping structure, continually expanding.

What else is there to do but listen?

---

Paintings above by Alex Kanevsky

Thoughts from the Air

Early in June, I flew out to Tacoma, Washington for the weekend. It was a short trip—21 hours of travel, including a red-eye return flight, for three days vacation.

Once the anticipation of arriving wore thin and the in-flight movie began, I settled in to the wait. I pulled out a novel too thick to read anywhere else. I looked out the window. I shifted my weight and tried to not bump the elbow of the person sitting to my right.

The disorder of familiar streets, rutted and potholed roads, are orderly from the air. The stitches are lined-up and straight. But the order of the air is also a kind of disorder—the sprawl of human passions is insignificant when compared to the breadth of the horizon. Not to mention the limitless space overhead. The pattern of the trees and rocks is more timeless then anything we can construct.

I didn’t notice when the dusty Texas high plain replaced the luscious green of the Mississippi river valley. Roads wound like termite trails in wood.

In the 1960s and 70s, Georgia O’Keefe was inspired by an airplane flight to paint a series of paintings depicting the view from the window. Instead of a ceilingless sky that is a blue so deep it has weight enough to fill the crevasses of desert valleys and the spaces in skulls, O’Keefe depicts clouds cobbling the sky. More marshmallow then textured bodies of gaseous water, the clouds are steppingstones to a horizon that is unreachable. She paints a landscape void of any human’s touch.

On the ground, my cast shadow is capable of all kinds of things. It crawls walls, curls into corners, stretches the length of a street, and puddles beneath my feet. It taunts with freedom. But in the air, my shadow (or rather the plane’s shadow) runs itself along the ground, unable to find its way free of the surface upon which it is being cast.

Flying is a separation of feet from ground. From self from a place. In the air, we are nowhere. We are between the Earth and space. In this purgatory we prepare for where we will be, and recover from where we have been. We are insignificant. An airplane ride is the closest most of us will ever be to outer space; to seeing our world to scale.

​Giacometti’s Vision

In James Lord’s A Giacometti Portrait, Alberto Giacometti often refers to Cézanne out of reverence for his work and competence. At one point, Giacometti says, “Cézanne discovered that it’s impossible to study nature. You can’t do it. But one must try all the same, try—like Cézanne—to translate one’s sensation.”

I find the word sensation to be so precise in what I try to create with words. Sometimes I try to copy nature exactly as I have experienced it, and sometimes I try to create a new sensation. But even Giacometti knew that “a semblance, an illusion is, in any case obviously all that can be attained...But an illusion is not enough.” It’s not enough because one is compelled to go further and to perfect one’s vision.

Giacometti never stopped perfecting. When Lord thought that he was done with the portrait of him, Giacometti would continue it further, seeing something that could refine his vision. Some might call this madness. (Madness perhaps exactly what is needed to create something never seen before, to display the inspiration and originality.) What Giacometti strove for “was of course impossible, because what is essentially abstract can never be made concrete without altering its essence.” Which is why the story I write in my head is never completely the story that I write down on paper. It’s always different and off. I can move closer to it the way Giacometti moved closer through his continuous rebuilding, and the closer I nudge and edit and strengthen, the closer the work becomes “both ridiculous and sublime.” But that is never easy. It can be both discouraging and freeing.

It’s inspiring to read the way Lord describes Giacometti floundering and how he continues to work toward the small hope he believes is present in his work. Which is why the best writing advice is to always keep writing. Keep working. Even when it seems the work is getting worse and worse and impossible to do. It’s a daily wrestle that requires a commitment to begin again.

Behold the Man

In 1999, Mark Wallinger created a statue of Christ wearing a crown of thorns. He named the statue Ecce Homo ("Behold the Man"). It was not chipped out of stone or carved out of wood, but was instead made out of a plaster-and-marble-powder cast of a human body. The piece was a temporary installation that stood on the empty "fourth plinth" in Trafalgar Square in central London. Being made from a human cast, it was literally life-sized and dwarfed by the imposing surroundings of the square.

I wonder what is was like to walk by that statue. Men and women on cell phones. Students rushing to class. Tourists asking for directions. Hot dog vendors and souvenir peddlers pushing their wares. People hurrying by. And there, in the midst of it all was that small, lone, unimposing figure of Christ standing on his enormous plinth.

Ordinary, modest, and ignored.

We live in a world of breathtaking beauty, complexity, and design. A world with pain, yet at the same time, a world of drama and purpose and subtlety and joy. A world created by, and now being recreated by the redemptive work of the God-man who walked the earth. So will I pray with my eyes open or will I simply busy myself with the cares of the day?

The Tale of Entrails

Caesar. What say the augurers?

Servant. They would not have you to stir forth to-day. Plucking the entrails of an offering forth, They could not find a heart within the beast.

Compared to freshman year’s Romeo and Juliet, I loved sophomore year’s Julius Caesar. I loved all the weirdness, from the lioness whelping in the streets to the slave with the burning hand to dreams of bathing in blood. Then, all that oratory stirring up men to mad revenge—it was almost enough to make politics cool.

But it was the whelping lioness—love that word, whelping—and the stormy weather and the crazy birds that I really loved. The idea that all of nature was in tumult along with the ruling classes of Rome made nature and culture all of a piece, and I liked that idea.

Pivotal in this all-of-a-piece world were the augurers, or haruspex, priestly types that read nature via the entrails of animals in order to prophesy the future and test the will of the gods. It was a strange type of priesthood, so extremely earthy.

I began my own foray into entrails—so says the master haruspex to the apprentice—via the fish we caught when I was a kid. After filleting the larger game fish, Dad would slit the stomachs to find what else the fish had been eating, usually various sorts of smaller fish that were intact enough so we could tell what they were, minnows or perch mainly.

Now, with my own kids, the stomach-check has become such a highlight that they request it even before I begin. It’s maybe a little creepy, but over the years we’ve found a pretty interesting array in the stomachs of northern pike: the usual minnows or perch, but also crayfish and frogs—once five entire frogs—and another time something with fur. Now, we’re even checking the stomachs of sunfish where we have found snails and dragonfly larvae.

Of course, real fishermen do this sort of work to understand how to better catch fish: what are the fish in a given lake feeding on and how well? Then there’s the larger story of the lake: how well is the food chain working?   The larger story yet is that of the canary in the coalmine: what is disappearing from the food chain and what does that tell us about how sick we are?

Which brings me back to Caesar’s augurers, those improbable butcher-priests, looking down to look up, who could not find a heart in an ox. Recently, as I filleted a pike, my son asked where the heart was; the meat was already slid off and in a pan; the stomach was checked, empty; I reached in and found the heart, held it out slightly to show them, a tiny little rubbery muscle slightly smaller than a marble.

It beat, throbbing between my fingers, startling me, sending a shiver down my spine.

If it was an omen, it was an omen of life, and it made me feel small, there in the twilight, the world all of a piece.

The Motivation of Art

It is surely something worthy of merit that G.K. Chesterton’s quotable words have been equally employed by those from both right and left of spectrum. Rarely can an individual be used thusly. Perhaps this is because it is so easy to capitulate to the laziness of polarization. Anyway, in an angsty mood I was looking for easy ammunition from GKC. While thumbing through Chesterton titles, I stopped at Utopia of Usurers. Cute, right? To be honest, I was looking for easy ammunition against materialism. Indolence often reaches for the easy weapon, and I was guilty. Happily though, Chesterton in an essay titled “Art and Advertisement” served up something grander than a mere angsty quote: this time it was a timely inquiry into motive in the creation of art.

As Chesterton sees it, before the advent of mass advertising, a substantial motive for artists in their creation of art was to make a living.[1] No surprise there. Artists need to eat too, and we surely love sautéed stems of asparagus more than those of the thistle, despite the fact that the later are, indeed, quite edible (you can even make a hearty soup from them if needs be). However, many an artist was paid by a patron—oh, how sweet the sound of that word—who valued the art that s/he bought for its own sake. Of course not all, there are rich philistines as surely as there are poor ones, but art, so GK argues, was valued more for the thing it intrinsically was—a beautiful creation.

And herein, for Chesterton, is the dangerous difference: while the earlier motive for the creation of art was, among other things, for it to be appreciated by a patron, the motive in the advertiser is to employ human creativity to sell more stuff.

This bothers Chesterton greatly enough, for it is taking a creative power and employing it for an exclusive monetary purpose. Is there a better definition of this than pimping? And here I am reminded of how clever advertisers are in first inciting our emotions with such and such a picture or whatever, and then craftily weaving into that experience a self-serving purpose—invariably one that will line their own silken pockets. The ways advertisers try to incite us to buy stuff is legion. And they do it by using art—or, if you like, human creativity.

But what’s worse for Chesterton is that as the power of art is increasingly realised for its substantial ability to incite desire, advertisers will increasingly invest more and more funds into enlisting individuals adept in the arts. But, of course, whereas before art of value was largely made possible by patrons who knew that quality would cost money, now the advertiser is equally willing to spend copious amounts of funds for quality creativity, too. The difference being the motive: the first was for the sake of the art and the second is merely for the effective harvesting of more cash from the public. And to Chesterton, this is akin to prostituting out human creativity. And I might add, that for the less educated of the population, who might not have experienced truly “good” art, how are they going to distinguish between art and advertising? After all, both evoke an emotion. Now that the advertisers have truly embedded themselves in the very fabric of our culture, perhaps part of the answer is to, as Northrop Frye advised, help facilitate an “educated imagination.” And part of this education, and aiding in the ability to distinguish, would be as Iris Murdoch has so astutely said, to make known that “anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue.”[2]

[1] If you are looking for a philosophical reason why an artist does not have to make any money – what a thought! – in her or his art, and still be justified, see Josef Pieper’s Happiness and Contemplation. It will assuredly warm your heart.

[2] This quote, along with some other very grand thoughts can be found in her essay “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts.”

This Is So Late

This blog is late. I don’t mean a couple days after deadline. No, I mean it’s-been-months-and-I-still-haven’t-found-a-topic-to-write-about late. I have so many emails sitting in my inbox kindly, and more recently, desperately, asking me if I have a blog written yet. And would I please, please, please write something?

This week, a biography of the New Yorker journalist, Joseph Mitchell hit bookstore shelves. A reporter who immersed himself in the mid-century streets of New York City to capture the eccentric of the everyday, Mitchell immortalized a city between modernism and what came before—gas lamps and saloons and the Depression.

What has captured the imaginations of most of his readers (and is the subject of the biography) is not his prolific profiling and immersive journalism, but the thirty years he wrote nothing. For the final chapter of his career, Mitchell rode the elevator to the New Yorker headquarters. He sat in his office. He went to lunch. But his office was silent—no clicking typewriter keys, no shuffling of papers.

Several years ago, Anthony Marra stopped by Lemuria bookstore (and also my place of employ) to sign his novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. He wore the same blue, button-up shirt he wore in the author photo. He was kind and asked as many questions about us as we did about him. In a quiet moment, before the storm of people came demanding his autograph and a witty answer to their questions, Tony and I talked about writing.

A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and a Stegner fellow at Stanford, Marra had done everything right. His debut novel was a smashing success and would go on to become a finalist for the National Book Award. We talked about his girlfriend who lived in New York City and the poetry she wrote. We talked about his Pushcart Prize, the short story that became the seed of his novel. And we talked about what he was working on next.

“Nothing,” he said. “I sit down to write, and all I can think about is what I have already written. It’s terrifying. What if this novel is the only story I have?”

Isn’t that what all creators fear—that what is behind us is also our last? “You are only as good as your last plate,” is the chef’s motto. But how many days, months, years can pass before you are no longer a chef, but instead someone who once cooked?

This week I found out that Anthony Marra’s next book releases in October. It might be a weak replication of his first, as second-novels tend to be, or it could be a step in a new direction. But that’s not what this is about. This is about trying and failing and trying again to write. Sometimes you succeed. Sometimes you are blinded by the blank page.

The first sentence is for someone else; prove to your audience, the critics, your high school class that you have something to say. The second, third, fourth, etc. are for you; to prove to yourself that you still have something to say.

Boyhood, Birdman and the Problem of Existence, Part 3

In my last two blog posts, I have tried to show how both Boyhood and Birdman seem bent on resurrecting a philosophy popular in the 1960’s: existentialism. While Boyhood seems to give a hopeful spin to its form of it, Birdman presents a much darker picture, linking existentialism to what was commonly thought then was the only truly authentic act in the face of the death of God: suicide. Albert Camus fought this notion, but many under the influence particularly of Friedrich Nietzsche, embraced it thoroughly.

Now, I am a Christian theologian, and I believe that Christianity spends a lot of energy encouraging us to realize that the present is the only moment we have in which to act responsibly. We share this in common with existentialism, this focus on the present in the journey of our own lives. We can do nothing about the past because we cannot alter it, and we can do nothing about the future because we do not know what challenges it will bring. Therefore, following the Good Shepherd in the moment is what we are called to do, and it is enough.

One does not have to look far in Christian teaching for support for this way of living. I think of Jesus’s statement in the Sermon on the Mount about not being anxious for anything: “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” (Mt 6.34 ESV) or the ancient wisdom of Prov. 27.1: “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring.” (ESV).

These two statements are about the future, but, similarly, the regrettable past is forgiven and forgotten in a very real sense for the Christian, and, while the memories of works of beauty and goodness that may have been done to us or by us, are great gifts, we cannot change those gifts, nor would we want to.

But—and it is a very large “but” indeed—all our understanding of both the past and the future takes place in a universe in which God oversees the past, the present and the future from His eternal stance outside of time. He bestows meaning to our existential moments in the framework of both an ethical structure based in the law, which in turn is based on His eternal character, and a metaphysical structure based in His revelation of Himself as creator, redeemer, and sustainer. All meaning flows from Him, and provides us a rich and satisfying philosophy by which to live and in which to believe. He gives meaning to both the past and the future, and so we, His creatures, can rest assured about both the reality of, and the significance of, both the past and the future. We may not be able to change them, but we look at them with very different perspectives than do the existentialists.

I do not see any alternative better than this. Camus’s notion of revolt in the face of the absurdism of a universe without God is purely a decision to go in a direction he wants to go. His attempt in “The Myth of Sisyphus” to answer in the negative the question of whether or not one should commit suicide in the face of an absurd universe is unconvincing. Even worse is his attempt ultimately to justify the embrace—happy embrace, I might add—of the fate of pushing the rock to the top of the mountain each day, only to see it roll back down to the bottom every night. He simply gives us no reason to feel that this is a better alternative than simply to end it all in despair.

But the greatest fault of existentialism is its premise that God does not exist. The much better hypothesis is that He does, and that He has revealed Himself in Christ for the good of the world. The hope of Boyhood is not wrong; it’s just misplaced given its premise. The craving for love in Birdman is not wrong; it’s just misdirected from looking for God’s approval to looking for man’s (John 2:23-25). The Christian can hope and can love because of their faith, the faith that the one true God exists and gives life and meaning to the past, the present and the future.

Lenny Bruce

I get a lot of reading done sitting on the can. Evidently there’s something about filling my nostrils with my own stench that also makes me want to fill my mind. If I were smarter I’d conduct some Pavlovian-type research to see if the smell of crap actually increases my brain’s neuroplasticity. (DAMN. There’s a word that’ll make you slap your mama upside the prefrontal cortex. But let me tell on myself: Wikipedia.) Right next to my commode is a basket of books and magazines. The current selections include Madeline L’Engle’s Walking on Water, a Runner’s World that’s a couple of months old, some magazines about parenting and, from 1967, The Essential Lenny Bruce. It’s an original edition. Musty, with brittle pages and those tiny bugs that crawl up from the binding once in awhile (which straight up give me the creeps. After all I routinely open the book inches above my exposed junk.) Anyway, The Essential Lenny Bruce is nothing more than his act transcribed onto the page.

Lenny Bruce, the original filthy comic. He nailed topics like drugs, politics, pornography, religion(s), and made gorgeous art out of the word “motherfucker” while his contemporaries were riffing on their wives’ terrible cooking. Bruce got arrested all the time for the stuff he said. Sometimes the cops would climb up on stage and collar him right in front of the audience. How’s that for a show?

Lenny Bruce, the original comic’s comic. Bruce was light years ahead of his time. Without Lenny Bruce, you can forget about George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks, Roseanne Barr, Dennis Leary, David Letterman, Louis CK. The list goes on. Though I have a feeling we’d still be cursed with Andrew Dice Clay, Yakov Smirnoff, Dane Cook…it is a fallen world after all.

Lenny Bruce, an original modern prophet. Howzat? Yeah. Now, I think God is pretty funny. I mean, the Divine has a sense of humor and it’s kind of sick if you think about it. Dig. We Christian types like to say stuff about the Judeo-Christian prophets like, “Well, that was a different time and after Jesus, you know, we didn’t need prophets anymore so God doesn’t, you know, work like that. Anymore.” I’ll bet He does. Probably all the time. It’s just that we Christian types don’t hang around where His prophets do. That’s funny, man.

Of course it goes without saying that the Christian types chased Lenny Bruce around in his day. “Motherfucker” was just their cover. Bruce was more than dirty words. He stuck it to them right in the heart and it made them twitch. So they called him immoral and they all wrote him off. For bits like this: Imagining Jesus and Moses walking into St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, Bruce said:

Christ and Moses standing in the back of St. Pat's, looking around. Confused, Christ is, at the grandeur of the interior, the baroque interior, the rocoque baroque interior. Because his route took him through Spanish Harlem, and he was wondering what the hell fifty Puerto Ricans were doing living in one room when that stained glass window is worth ten G's a square foot? And this guy had a ring worth eight grand. Why weren't the Puerto Ricans living here? That was the purpose of church—for the people.

Some comic material goes with the times in which it was created and only with those times. It lacks the universality to propel it through the generations. I’m thinking of Mike Myers thrusting his crotch at the camera. “Shwing!” It’s irrelevant now and can only be appreciated in an ironic sense even if it does elicit laughter. But imagine Bruce’s bit above as it pertains to now. Replace the words “St. Pat’s” with “Willow Creek Community Church,” “Spanish Harlem” with “East Garfield Park” and “stained glass window” with “sound system.” Fifty years later and it still hangs true. I call that a motherfucking prophecy.

Review: No Parking at the End Times

No Parking at the End Times Bryan Bliss Greenwillow Books, 2015

When do you give up on someone?

In Bryan Bliss’s haunting debut novel No Parking at the End Times, twins Abigail and Aaron don’t agree on an answer to that question.

The book opens in San Francisco, ten minutes before the end of the world, the twins and their parents kneeling in Brother John’s church. Abby, the narrator, prays furiously, half-hoping her faith won’t be in vain, half-hoping it will.

Of course, when the world doesn’t end, Abby’s existence in the realm of childhood innocence ends quite definitively.

Several months before the end of the world, Abby’s family had been happy, lower-middle-class residents of North Carolina. Some time after Abby’s dad lost his job, he began following the radio preacher Brother John, selling off their possessions one by one in order to contribute to the end-times preacher’s “ministry.” Ultimately, they sell their house and move across the country, where they live in their van, praying daily at Brother John’s church. When the world fails to end as predicted, Abby’s dad’s faith is unchanged. Enthralled with the spiritually abusive cult leader, he even sells the van and turns the money over to him.

Though her own faith in God is deeply shaken, Abby refuses to give up on her dad, expecting him to come to his senses and take the family home to North Carolina. But Aaron is certain that they can no longer rely on their parents, and tries to convince Abby that they should leave their parents and take the bus to their uncle. I don’t want to give too much away, but as the twins broker their escape from the cult, they make friends with a group of local homeless kids and become embroiled in new conflicts before finding a way out.

In prose that is spare, certain, and lyrical—an economic style that matches the characters’ environment, no frills to cover the truth—Bliss tells a story of exceptional circumstances with universal relevance. Realistic teenage dialogue and a strong, reliable narrator anchor the story, which covers traditional YA territory (loss of innocence and conflict with parents) while also deftly and sympathetically negotiating larger social themes of homelessness, poverty, and religion.

I didn’t feel sure, as I ended the book, who had been right: was Abby correct to refuse to leave her parents behind, or was Aaron right that they would have to save themselves? I wanted a more conclusive answer. When is it ok to give up on someone—especially someone who has begun to perpetuate a cycle of abuse—spiritual, physical, or otherwise? When does love equal staying, and when must it mean to leave? After all, when your father’s captivity to an abusive cult leader leaves you homeless, shouldn’t you give up on him?

Maybe the closest Bliss comes to suggesting an answer is in The Trumpet Man. A homeless man in Golden Gate Park, the Trumpet Man sings simply, “I am bound!” And being bound means many things. We are bound to our families. We are bound to people who make mistakes, who hurt just as they’ve been hurt. Even the binds that should be cut can’t ever be fully loosed. But we are also bound for a Promised Land, where hurts will be redeemed, unjust inequalities will be set right, and relationships will be restored. No Parking at the End Times points us with hope toward that land.

The Supreme Moment

Whatever you want to be, you’ll be in the end. – The Moody Blues

 Subdued and faded to sepia tones, this 15^th century Byzantine-style icon of John the Baptist portrays the Forerunner beseeching Christ in heaven while his own severed head lies haloed at his feet—a grim reminder of the cost of commitment to a person’s deepest convictions. At face value, this scene is out of chronology, since Christ wasn’t in heaven at the time John was beheaded, and we’re not sure where in the story the man is here. But of course the meaning is layered, certain elements symbolic of something more enduring. So though the icon portrays the essence of the most defining event of the Baptist’s life, the overarching message is about the “supreme moment” of kairos at work in John’s life. It’s about who he became in the eternal realm, not the chronos, the chronology, of his beheading. And the icon is about each of us in that moment when all is said and done and we’ve become whatever we are in the end.

We need whole paragraphs in English to adequately explain what kairos does in one brilliant, ancient Greek word. When Greeks used kairos, what came to mind was something elastic, qualitative, an undetermined measure of an unseen substance that intersects with the present, chronological moment in some cosmic way that makes a difference. It referred to that exact moment an archer must release the arrow from his bow if it is to accurately pierce the moving target in his aim. The ancient god the Greeks named Kairos was said to be “ever running.” Like the old god, kairos is that magic that races through our moments as opportunities worth seizing, noble choices worth making. Kairos is about bringing a new creation out of rubble, something that endures out of the rough material of crisis each of us faces continually living in a fallen system.

We’re no different than John the Baptist, who lost his head to principle. Each of us will eventually lose ours to something, too. The Greeks had it right all those centuries ago, inspiring the ancient world to consider what looks a lot like the dynamic of human free will intersecting with the grace of Providence. Whatever we choose to call it, the beauty of kairos will be around long after every postmodern notion of nihilism is in its grave.

Time Travel And Fatherhood

The drive home from college lasted about fifteen hours. My dad and I talked a lot during these quarterly trips; but by the end, our topics were the equivalent of a “Coast to Coast with Art Bell” radio hour. For example, the efficacy of Time Travel.

Now in my mind it’s an appropriate conversation between fathers and sons. There’s even a niche in cinema for it: Back to the Future, Frequency, Field of Dreams. But nearly all of these movies are about a son who yearns to regain some lost moment with their dad. Richard Curtis’s About Time is also of the genre but asks: What happens to the father when the son becomes a father?

In About Time, Tim, like all the males in his family, has the ability to travel backward in time. And the first hour of movie devotes itself, comedically and touchingly, to this “talent.” But as he holds his first child, the movie shifts gears. Tim realizes, “Nothing can prepare you for that love.” It also brings a conundrum in the movie’s Time Travel logic: if he is to travel back in time to before the child was born, it will yield a completely different child. And so find himself unable to prevent a misstep of someone whom he loves.

Luke Ripley is the father in Andre Dubus’s “A Father’s Story.” He, too, finds himself unprepared for how deep the love of a father truly runs. When his daughter hits and kills a man with her car, he rewrites the incident and sets himself up to take the fall. Such an act compromises his faith and, in Ripley’s mind, “does not give [me] the peace I once [had]: not with God, nor the earth, nor anyone on it.” But he is steadfast and cries out to God, “I love her more than I love truth.”

Ever since becoming a father I’ve wrestled with the role. Is it like Luke Ripley, am I willing to “love in weakness”? Like it was for Tim, does fatherhood mean I will inevitably be kept at a distance from other relationships? When my son was a year old, I wrote that he had so filled my life that it seemed to overflow into the past. The truth is I couldn’t and still can’t imagine him not ever being in my life.

SPOILER: In the movie’s final act, Tim’s father has died and the prospect of Tim having another child means having to fully sever the relationship with his own father. Tim and his father make the choice only fathers can make. Nothing can prepare you for that kind of love. The kind of love that’s as simple as Tim and his father throwing rocks in the ocean.

Or discussing Time Travel.

Reading as an Alternative to Injury

During my junior year at a performing arts high school, there was an epidemic of foot and ankle injuries. This is one of the clearest pictures I have of that year: A group of girls sitting against the dance studio mirror with one leg crossed in front of them, and the other elevated on piles of ice packs. It could be the middle of that memory, but at that time there are at least four of them sitting there with their expressions straddling the line between looking sad and trying to look sad.I remember my instructors’ expression more clearly. They were annoyed. They would address us, the uninjured, and say things like “That’s why you all get injured. You’re not warming up properly,” or “Maybe if you would hold your arms properly your ankles wouldn’t hurt.” We would sigh and take it, adjust our arms, and save our sighs and grumblings for the dressing rooms after class.

These hostile attitudes changed a week or so later when one by one the injured girls limped into the studio wearing a sneaker on one foot and a large black and medieval looking boot on the injured leg. “Tendonitis,” they informed anyone who asked and sometimes people who didn’t. They would be unable to dance, climb stairs, carry their books and book bags, go through metal detectors in the morning, or show up to class on time for anywhere from six to twelve weeks. The girls once chastised and accused of simply trying to get out of a dance class where now praised for watching in padded chairs in the back of the studio. Occasionally, the injured few would perform the arm and head positions of the dance we were working on and the teachers would turn their backs to the ones who were dancing with their whole bodies to correct the partial movements of the brave and broken ballerinas. It was impossible not to notice the difference in treatment. I saw the praise, attention, and compassion that came with being hurt. I wanted that. I wanted an injury too.

Two weeks later, I would sneeze in the middle of a math class. When I went to bring my head up from the display, I found that I couldn’t.

“What is wrong with you?” my friend asked, cackling at my crooked neck.

I brought my hand to my cheek and tried to pretend that I was merely leaning on the elbow on the desk thoroughly bored with trinomials. Unfortunately, there were a good six inches between my elbow and the desk. “I think my neck is broken,” I told her. I went to the nurse, who wouldn’t give me Advil or call my parents. Instead, she attempted to cure me with her favorite antidote: a bag of ice cubes that would within ten minutes and send streams of icy water down my shirt.

The diagnosis was whiplash. Whiplash. From a sneeze. Not only is it a ridiculous way to injure yourself, but after that doctor’s visit and a conveniently tied scarf, no one would look at me and know that something was wrong.

The chiropractor nudged my neck back to its rightful place. She cleared me to dance before I could even practice my expression of grief with just the slightest hint of heroic acceptance. She sent me home with a special pillow, a set of exercises, and an ice pack stamped with the name and contact information of the office. “You’re a dancer,” she reminded me. “I know you don’t want to take time off.” I stifled a scowl. She knew nothing.

I think the thing that all bodies have in common is the ability to break and rebel, but not all injuries are external. They don’t all get casts, braces, or doctors notes. Sometimes they are covered with ace bandages, baggy clothing, smiles, or a cheerful “I’m good. How are you?”

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake, he talks about his motivation for writing. “Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think as much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.’”

Obviously, Vonnegut and I are talking about two different things. He’s talking about writing, and I’m talking about sacrificing the use of my limbs for a little kindness from my classmates and professors, but even so, I wish I’d read that book during that time period of my life. With the injuries that come with dancing and living, those seen and unseen, that information might have been nice to know.