The Softer Emotions

In early summer, my friends and I organized a writing workshop led by poet Kevin Prufer. Since then, I’ve been thinking all summer about one topic that Prufer discussed, namely, sentimentality in poetry. I was intrigued when he took up the subject. I’d never heard anyone speak at length about it, and I am one who always feels like I’m fighting sentimentality in my writing. Call me a sentimental fool. I wanted to hear more; so did everyone else in the workshop, it seemed.  Prufer remarked that if a poem is labeled “sentimental” by a critic or a reader, then the person “damns it completely.” Yet he urged us not to avoid emotion in our writing, but instead to infuse our work with complexity: shifting dualities, ambivalence, nuanced thinking, competing visions. The problem with truly sentimental writing is that it diminishes language and feelings to their simplest level. In “Uneasy Meditation,” he writes, “It has less to do with too much emotion than it does with reduction, with the sentimentalist’s failure to think about a large subject, one we feel too emotional about, with complexity.”

As I said, I’ve been thinking about this topic all summer—and not just in my writing. In my faith journey, I often find myself awash in complexity. While I freely experience spiritual wonder, I can’t pin down my beliefs in just a sentence or two because “it’s complicated.” I have questions, I have doubts. I know that I believe in God, but I cannot define God exactly for you. I know that I believe in Jesus’ tenets, but the Trinity is a mystery to me. I am drawn to the sacred stories of the Bible, but does what is spiritually true need to be literally true?

I attend church regularly. Nearly every week, I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the music, the proclamation, the confession, and even just the sanctuary space. And here’s where things get pretty complex because I cannot name all the emotions that I might feel in one service—joy, sorrow, confusion, hope, love. I might experience unburdened joy listening to a piece by Bach, Vivaldi, or Holst. Confusion may settle in me for a few minutes as I listen to the confession and then enter into silent meditation, perhaps wondering why I don’t find enough time in my daily life for this stillness. Sorrow and love, even guilt, charged me during the last week’s service, as one elderly member expressed his thanks to the congregation for its help, when he and his wife recently lost their home in a Memorial Day flood. (I say “guilt” because I’d experienced only inconvenience during the flood.) At the benediction, I almost always feel hope, when our minister blesses us.

I’ve taken to heart Kevin Prufer’s advice to include “truths that clash and compete” in our writing and not to avoid the emotional content. Engaging poems are “poems born of complex situations in which no thinking person could help but feel strongly in multiple, conflicting ways,” he writes in “Uneasy Meditations.” I believe him. So I have been working on new poems and revising poems to that end. My musing about my own faith journey has shown me, too, that I live with conflicting emotion and nuanced thinking—something to pursue when I am writing, for truth-telling.

Constant Fear of Falling to the Ground

As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart; the wellspring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.  – Nineteenth century French author Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)

Rapid heartbeat, fainting, confusion, even hallucinations: just a few of the colorful symptoms that manifest in Stendhal Syndrome. Though the medical “disorder” was named after the famous author for his description of experiences while visiting Florentine churches and art galleries, Stendhal’s occurs with surprising regularity when people are exposed to extraordinary artistic achievements, especially the Renaissance art of Florence. After a lifetime of grubbing in American strip malls, there’s nothing like a sudden, blinding jolt of connection with the transcendent to prove to be more than some folks bargained for.

I get why these people’s hearts beat fast and their legs give out. I remember an afternoon watching light make sapphires and rubies of the air around the stained glass in the Florentine church of Santa Croce. I stood with a crick in my neck and an ache in my heart before the same Giotto frescoes that made Marie-Henri swoon two centuries ago. As to fear of falling, I could easily have sunk down among the pigeon guano outside some of those jewel-like basilicas and wept my eyes out over the gray blast of the world that hit me on the other side.

Living this far from paradise, extreme beauty is just plain dangerous. It smacks of God and we’re wary of it. Psychosomatic symptoms are the mind’s perfect deflection tactic. Still, we get our milliseconds, our sparkling glimpses of what’s beyond all this, “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited,” as C.S. Lewis put it in “The Weight of Glory.” Whatever keeps us starving for what lies beyond the pigeon poop. When Prince Vladimir’s pagan emissaries visited the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, they readily admitted, “we did not know where we were, in heaven or on earth; and do not know how to tell about this.” What a tragedy, if they did know how to tell.

Go ahead and fall hard, Marie-Henri. I’m right behind you.

The Internet: The Least Final Frontier

Late at night in the mid 1990s, I dialed into the World Wide Web for the first time.

With an unmapped continent at my fingertips, I first discovered the familiar: I downloaded the opening credits of my favorite television show, PBS’s Wishbone. (I was 7 years old.)

I didn’t know it then, but that pixelated and drag ridden video revealed one of the Internet’s greatest gifts—immortality. Here, in the backlit glow, we can live forever.

With each round of Webby awards, the constraints of the Internet are challenged and acknowledged. We are in awe of our human endeavors. We circumnavigate the world from our rectangular screens. Just this morning, I saw photographs of Antarctica, I read my favorite New York Times article from 2010 about Eddie Feibusch and his zipper business, I watched Nicole Kidman’s monologue from the 1999 film, Eyes Wide Shut.

But amid all of this progress, the website for the movie Space Jam has never been updated or decommissioned. Michael Jordan is still teaming up with the Looney Toons to take prevent an alien invasion. I can still download a limited edition Space Jam cursor. We are trapped in a timeless time. The past continues alongside the present and future. Nothing is a limited edition. Nothing ends.

In my newest obsession, Gimlet’s podcast, Reply All, Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt dig deep into a story about the Internet. Their episodes run the gambit of subject matter, which more than anything else is a testament to the diversity and evolution of the net. With each episode, something that is so familiar, something I use everyday and am using right now (and so are you), is made mysterious. It is like that first time again, waiting for the dial-up tone to open like a door.

Isn’t this the same mystery I experience when the sunlight falls on my floor in an unusual pattern, when an iridescent beetle crosses my path, when the clouds clear and the moon hangs heavy and low and orange? It’s a joy of discovery. Of feeling, for a moment, like the only person alive. Of pushing to the next best thing and knowing your footsteps will trail behind you.

Our cyber fingerprints are on everything, but it is the sense of wonder and discovery that is the gift. It is fleeting. It is mysterious.

Behind Every Beautiful Thing

Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day It’s too hot to sleep, time is running away Feel like my soul has turned into steel I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal There’s not even room enough to be anywhere It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

I’ve thought about Bob Dylan’s song “Not Dark Yet” for over ten years now. Ever since a lonely plane ride back from Texas, where I’d just help relocate my best friend. Some moments press down a sadness and leave a mark. Songs are like that, too. 

With three kids, it’s no surprise I’ve already seen Inside Out. It’s Pixar’s best movie since that plane ride. It deals with emotions that are central to us all: joy, disgust, fear, anger, sadness. Each emotion is a character, each assigned a color: Anger = Red; Disgust = Green; Fear = Purple; Sadness = Blue; Joy = Yellow. There’s much to Inside Out that captures Pixar’s creative genius. But I also think it captures a crucial and necessary aspect of what Walter Brueggemann calls the prophetic imagination. 

It was my Texas friend that first recommend Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination to me. It’s a succinct little theological book that examines the role of prophets in the Bible. One important condition of humanity that every prophet explores, from Jeremiah to Jesus, is the role of grief and sadness. That’s also at the heart of Inside Out. 

In the film, Joy doesn’t want Sadness to participate in the emotional activity of Riley—the human girl to whom these emotions belong. Isn’t this the way we all view sadness? We don’t want sad memories to imprint themselves on us. Let only the positive emotion be the one in control; Sadness mucks everything up. So often I see Christians mistakenly characterizing joy in this way. It’s the attitude found in what Brueggemann calls the “royal consciousness,” where the goal is self-satisfaction; joy manages and rules all.

But to embrace grief and sadness is what it is to be fully human. True joy never outflanks sadness, suffering, grief. In fact, it comes only through those very emotions.  Brueggemann says it’s fully realized in Jesus, whose ministry is one of “entering into pain and suffering and giving it a voice.”  For Lazarus, for Jerusalem, his crucifixion, “his grief is unmistakable.”

Color has a very specific function in Inside Out. So when a character has another character’s color as part of their being, it’s not only for aesthetic reasons. Joy eventually learns that Sadness has always been present, just behind the memories that were the most joy-filled. The astute viewer has maybe even noticed that Joy’s hair is blue.

Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain Behind every beautiful thing, there must be some kind of pain

Jupiter Descends

“Boring,” “boorish,” and (my personal favorite) “profoundly terrible” are some of the nicer descriptors that can be found in the reviews of the Wachowski siblings’ latest movie. At just over two hours, this space-opera-cum-heroic-fantasy is acknowledged as visually appealing with its impressive special effects, but declared decidedly drab in the plot department. Worse than merely drab, however, some of the more literary minded commenters pronounce Jupiter, the main character, as nauseatingly implausible. Now, while I do agree with them that Jupiter is most definitely not a classical hero, I wonder at our underlying assumptions of heroism that leave some of us with the feeling that Jupiter got the crap side of the stick in this movie.   If you haven’t seen it, here’s a brutishly rudimentary plot summary (spoiler warning). Jupiter, the female protagonist, is a young, overworked, under-appreciated, and unfulfilled maid in Chicago. Trapped in a life of scrubbing toilets and cleaning up other people’s trash, she starts and ends each day in exhaustion. Jupiter lives in extremely tight quarters with her Russian immigrant mother and extended family, which gives her little personal space or room for expression: the theme constantly upon her lips before her big adventure is, “I hate my life.” Pressured by a capitalistic cousin into selling her eggs at a fertility clinic, she is nearly abducted by assassin aliens and soon thrust into an interplanetary journey where she learns she is actually Earth’s royal owner. Assisted throughout the adventure (and rescued again and again … and again ... and then some) by a genetically altered ex-soldier with flying boots, she is kidnapped, conned, and beat up by royal alien siblings intent on harvesting Earth’s population into a vitality serum: a practice they have been doing on other planets for thousands of years. Always rescued at the last minute by flying boot boy, the aliens are thwarted, the earth remains blissfully ignorant of and safe from the villains and Jupiter lives to see another day. The movie ends with her sacrificing sleep to cheerfully prepare breakfast for the relatives, taking up her cleaning job, and going on flying adventures with her new boyfriend (flying boot boy) and his now-returned sexy set of wings.

Okay—my apologies to anyone who has seen the movie and can readily identify the 27 important plot points that I have casually omitted. But, I trust the theme is clear: little Miss Royalty is rescued (a lot), is not particularly ambitious, seems perfectly content to return to an unimportant job and crowded house, and never seeks out public recognition. Oddly enough, it seems somewhere along the journey she internalizes a new axiom: “It’s not about what I do, it’s about who I am."

As you’ve no doubt gathered, this is not your typical hero story. But what is a hero story, and what makes it so?

For those who’ve read Paradise Lost (a 17^thcentury epic poem that dramatizes the creation and subsequent eviction of Eve and Adam from the garden. Satan and his super sneaky schemes to destroy the happy couple and amass an army to usurp God’s Kingship also play a prominent role in the plot) in class, or are generally familiar with the story, we were taught according to two schools of thought. One, Milton screwed up and made Satan the show-stealing character by accident. According to this ideology, Satan is actually the hero of the story. Strong, cunning, ambitious, independent, and a natural-born leader: Satan is clearly the classical hero whom Milton himself unwittingly valorizes. Paradise Lost, then, becomes a tragedy because our favorite guy, Satan, loses.

The other school of thought suggests that in Satan’s unquenchable thirst for status (he wants to be ruler of the world), we uncomfortably identify our own fallen and destructive lust for prestige. Educators of this persuasion suggest that in Satan’s defiant pursuit of dominion, Milton demonstrates the seductive dangers of the quest for control. This second school of thought is a less popular one because in Paradise Lost, Satan is such a sympathetic character; and, indeed while we may not overtly root for him, our culture often tells us that complete self-sufficiency is the key ingredient of happiness. Satan, according to our society’s mores, is a heroic figure. The question then becomes a matter of identifying our current model of heroism.

Which brings me back to Jupiter Ascending. Much of the angst at the film is directed at its improbable plot and boring main character. What kind of story stars a hero who goes on a journey to learn s/he is really, really important (and has a whole lot of resources at her/his disposal) and then moves back to an inhospitable and banal homeland, bickering neighbors, takes up a menial job, and smiles about living the daily grind, saying “it’s not what I do, it’s who I am that matters”? Not a contemporary hero.

Culture often tells us that as heroes of our own stories, we must have status in order to experience personal fulfillment. We have been told that we need resources to experience the world and get the recognition we crave. In other words, we have been told that to be successful is to wield power; and, perhaps even more importantly, be recognized for that power.

I wonder if it’s possible that some of our dissatisfaction with Jupiter’s choices mirror our own consumption of a toxic cultural narrative: a narrative that says, it’s never about who you are, it’s only about what you do. A narrative that uncomfortably sides with Satan's quest in that old tale of so much discussion.

Moving the Wild

Somewhere between Philadelphia and Baltimore there is a poorly marked road. It is a suspicious dirt path lined with tall trees. While a normal person would perceive the sound of the wind rustling through the trees as one of the God-given gifts of nature, I understand it to be the spirit of the forest whispering an ominous and scratchy, “Get out!” My parents, however, are braver than I am, and we keep driving until we reach a wooden sign in the shape of a giraffe that reads “Zoo.” This zoo is home to a random assortment of animals: buffalo, goats, a porcupine, alpacas, zebras, some bears, two tigers, a wolf, some chickens, some turkeys, rabbits, and several peacocks that run around screaming like children in need of attention. There is also a giraffe named Geoffrey. For about five dollars, you can feed Geoffrey a few twigs of leaves from trees grown at the zoo. That is why we are here.

When my turn comes, I give Geoffrey the first offering. He his sticks tongue out and wraps it around the branch, tickling my fingers in the process. “His tongue is scratchy!” I tell the zoo employee. She is immune to this wonder, and she nods her head the way someone would if you just told them that ice was cold.

My mom, camera in hand, asks, “Are you going to get him a friend?” The male employee tells us that the zoo is currently raising money for a larger giraffe habitat that will accommodate multiple giraffes. He then informs us that in the wild giraffes do not travel in traditional herds. “They are always coming and going.” I read this fact on Wikipedia a few years earlier. Apparently, giraffe groups are in a constant state of evolution. Giraffes come and go every few hours and scientists define their community as “a collection of individuals moving in the same direction.” I love that phrase. It makes me want to leap in circles.

“Do the other giraffes get mad when one leaves?” I ask. The female zoo employee looks at me with a face of sheer boredom. She’s probably going to make fun of me on Twitter later. The male employee shrugs, “They are probably used to it.” I look at Geoffrey. Does the decision to leave come with weeks of emotional turmoil and guilt? Do the giraffes who choose to stay abruptly cut off communication with the deserter because forgetting that someone existed is easier than missing them? Does the departing giraffe spends the entire journey from point A to point B thinking about going back to his friends. Geoffrey doesn’t provide an answer to any of these questions. Instead, he sticks his tongue out and takes a branch this time sticking around to pose for a picture.

****

One quiet morning I am sitting in my bed holding a copy of the entire The Chronicles of Narnia. I’m supposed to be packing because I'm preparing for a move of my own, but I am begging C.S Lewis, (Uncle Clive, as I like to call him) to give me a reason to stay nestled in the comforts of where I am. "He'll be coming and going," I read about Aslan. "One day you'll see him and another you won't. He doesn't like being tied down—and of course he has other countries to attend to. It's quite all right.”

I’ve always seen Aslan as a character who arrives, but this is the first time I've realized that he is also someone who leaves. It has never occurred to me that Aslan spent most of the books traveling, arriving, and walking away. Moreover, while the characters who knew and loved him missed him, they didn’t hate him for leaving because they recognized that where he was going was somewhere he needed to be.

I have moved at least eleven times in 27 years. I don’t have to wonder for very long what would possess a giraffe, a lion, or a person to leave familiar surroundings and communities to wander to somewhere new. When I moved to Philadelphia, I wanted it to be my forever home. I wanted this to be the place where I planted roots that would grow deep and wide. But I am not a tree, and physical roots do not come to me naturally no matter how much I want them to. Today, however, I don't feel so convicted. I think about the way Aslan does what he needs to and quietly slips away, and the giraffe who wakes up one morning and decides to turn left instead of staying with the group. I think it is time for me to go and I think it might be all right. I think it is quite all right.

What To Do

there is a place in the heart that / will never be filled / a space / and even during the / best moments / and / the greatest times / we will know it … –Charles Bukowski

There is a problem with the present moment. We all feel it, right? Something a little off? Let's look at it objectively. Let's hold it in our hands and gaz... oops. Did it slip away from you? Were you momentarily distracted? Did the weight of yesterday's to do list or the drift of waiting for your ship to come in throw you off balance? Cause you to shift your attention?

Maybe it will help if we hold the moment in some context. Consider Heraclitus' approach (in fragment 12) that the world is being rent apart and held together in the same instant. The implications are that by the time you read this next word your position in the universe will have spun, spiraled, and expanded on space-time in ways that make a sci-fi CG fabrication droll.

Consider in that little bit of time, your body (its own material the stuff of spent stars) has spawned and died, divided and specialized, coursed and throbbed under a force of life so ephemeral you only just intuit it before we're thrust in its power and desires like sudden rockets leaving parts of you stranded in an irretrievable past. And along with that moment that just got away, many more have streamed right behind it like a sea of lemmings into an empty abyss, carrying your short life with them.

Now, where were we? Oh! We're right where we left off!

Perhaps it is the product of logos (Heraclitus' word for the thing that holds it all together) to make pleasantly unfamiliar cloth of the too familiar unraveling thrum of creation. Perhaps he was bringing attention to the remarkable fact that things cast in so fierce a motion as ought to be flying apart, are not. Rather, they are secure. And, that the thin moment that seems abysmal and fleeting is the very moment we might realize that we are the stream aware, at once there and liminal, fresh and flowing, familiar and ever new in a miraculous cleaving of all things.

In music, the space where no sound is played is a called a rest. Rests fill space in the measure and are actually played. John Cage argues this point in absurdum in his composition 4'33” in which he plays four and a half minutes of rest. Another point he makes here is how hard it is for us to be quiet for even five minutes. How silence makes us uncomfortable and anxious, and how woefully unfamiliar we are with peace.

Bukowski makes no value judgments about the place in the heart. We think at first that the emptiness must be a bad thing, that the silence must be filled. But perhaps it's the place all things hold together.

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

 

Not long after the towers fell, poems began appearing. “People in New York taped poems on windows, wheatpasted them on posts, and shared them by hand,” Philip Metres wrote in an essay for The Poetry Foundation a decade after 9/11. “Outside the immediate radius of what became known as ‘Ground Zero,’ aided by email, list serves, websites, and, later, blogs, thousands of people also shared poems they loved, and poems they had written.”


One such poem, set at the center of the back page of The New Yorker a week after the devastation, is called “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”:


Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June's long days, and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships; one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You've seen the refugees heading nowhere, you've heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to the concert where music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth's scars. Praise the mutilated world and the gray feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns.

The work was written a year and a half before the planes that felled the towers were compelled toward destruction; it was composed by Adam Zagajewski in a language foreign to most American ears, Polish, and later translated into English by Clare Cavanagh. The images recall a trip the poet and his father took within a part of their homeland that now falls within the Ukraine—villages emptied of people when Stalin’s dream of supreme rationality held sway. One of those villages, Lvov, was the Zagajewski family home for centuries.

“I remember how this poem was passed around from person to person during 9/11,” Mary Oliver later reflected. “It was profoundly moving and apt (it still is), and I remember how thankful I was that poetry exists (I still am).”

In a state given to uncertainty, in a time when meaning’s occluded by ash, we long for the “felt change of consciousness” poetry provides. The term belongs to Owen Barfield, the “first and last Inkling” who in Poetic Diction likens the act of reading poetry to wire coil passing through magnetic space: we are charged with a change of state, ordered at our most elemental levels. His metaphor is decidedly materialist (for such was the philosophy the young Barfield, witness to World War I, was forged within), but it is one that reinvests the phenomenal world with a sense of wonder, refigures awe toward invisible forces whose work, by such poetic accounts, is aimed at making us feel a sense of integrity beneath surface fissures, a sense of connectedness with a fundamental order we cannot otherwise perceive.

Once we were one with the given world, Barfield continues. Our language (what he calls a fossil record of consciousness) is evidence of such a union. In ancient days, single words denoted what now we describe as distinct phenomena: pneuma in Greek, for example (the same is true for spiritus in Latin) conveyed, at once, wind and breath and spirit—a vestige of a prior consciousness in which mankind participated directly (and seamlessly) with reality: mortal coil charged with the grandeur of God.

And so, when we come upon the leaves eddying over the earth’s scars in Zagajewski’s poem and imagine water and air in one instant, or when we envision the nettles in single perception as both a means of imprisonment and a method of protection from further coercive incursions, we are participating in a rich ambiguity which allows us once again to feel the pulse and pull of integral life.

Upon inspection, of course, such ambiguity is not a comfort. An executioner sings. Pleasure boats are drowned. But such ambivalence is also the means by which the revivifying power of poetry can find passage to our loss- and doubt-ravaged consciousness, minds grown accustomed to an often stupefying awareness of multiplicity (of motives and actions). A feather lost presumes—however dimly—the existence of the rest of that thrush, the one the despairing Thomas Hardy found on the eve of the twentieth century, the one participating directly with “some blessed hope,” and which almost exactly a century later, arrived to Zagajewski, and then to us. And those gathered acorns—they may well come to nothing; the ones that remain, sheltered without question by fallen leaves, will largely come to the same dead end. Such hope, surely, is negligible. But it is no less real for our negligence, and no less real for being, for the time, beyond our sight, and able to emerge only through a scarred and breaking surface.

Pale Horses

Contemporary music is often painted in broad strokes. Countless references to lazy lyrics, automated melodies, auto-tuned vocals, and inane content have plenty of merit, sure, but there are many, many musicians that are writing compelling, intricate music. Pale Horses, the newest album from mewithoutYou, an indie band from the Philadelphia area, is a testament to that fact.

I understand that mewithoutYou is not everyone’s cup of tea. For me, though, their combination of heavy guitars, intricate drumming, delicate riffs, and lead vocalist Aaron Weiss’ style of blending singing, shouting, chanting, and muttering into his songs has made them one of my favorite bands since I was in high school. Pale Horses is creating plenty of buzz in the indie music scene for getting back to the spoken-word style of music that dominated their first albums—a style that generally combines shouting and chanting more than the folk-driven singing that characterized their more recent albums—but I think the content of Pale Horses is even more significant than their unusual style.

Weiss comes from a religious background that is unorthodox, to say the least. He and his brother, Michael, are from Jewish backgrounds. Their father, a Jewish man, and their mother, an Episcopalian, converted to become Sufi Muslim. All three religions are explored in mewithoutYou’s work, and symbolism from all three are used in the band’s vivid lyrics. Pale Horses, as its title implies, explores the concept of the apocalypse and the end of the world, along with other themes like guilt, hope, doubt, and the fear of being abandoned by God.

Whether Aaron is wrestling with his fear of being abandoned by God in “Birnam Wood”:

Would you take a bound-up Isaac’s place Are you a God, and shall your grace Grow weary of Your saints?... Come untie your sons Before the little angel comes

Or struggling with religion:

Then last night I was somewhere near Virginia Rebuking satan with ironic faithfulness” And satan turned to me: ‘Have you thought much about that cry?’... Eloi, Eloi Lama sabachthani

Or pondering the end of the world and time itself:

At the opening of the fourth seal The sky, I’d been told Would roll up like a scroll As the mountains and islands moved from their place And the sun would turn black As a dead raven’s back But there’d be nowhere to hide From the Judge’s face

His vocals and lyrics and compelling music combine to make a vulnerable, emotional album that forces listeners to question their own beliefs, experiences, and feelings.

Pale Horses is not an easy album. Its driving melodies, shouted vocals, and ever-changing tempos are not the preferred background for most people's’ dinner parties or morning cups of coffee. Aaron’s tendencies to mix terms and narratives from Christianity, Judaism, and Islam is understandably startling for many listeners. The raw fear, anger, and hope evident in the music may elicit uncomfortable emotions if you’re paying attention. But it’s a beautiful album, and a frightening album, and a thoughtful album, and it’s definitely an album that defies attempts to paint it with the same broad strokes used for music these days.

On Literary Companions

Perhaps, I am flirting with literary sacrilege in confessing I am not a huge William Wordsworth fan. It’s a dark secret I keep from my students each time we traverse the timeline of the British Romantic movement. While I appreciate his massive and game-changing contributions to the canon, I prefer to make my way through the literary landscape of the 1800s deliciously horrified by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I mean, who can resist a text that incorporates the diversity of grave-robbing, romance, a “monster” who recites Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the line “by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open”?

Still, out of literary respect, I always make sure we spend a little time on Wordsworth. This year in my British literature class, we read “We Are Seven” from his famed collection of Lyrical Ballads. Sing-song and balladic, the poem is structured by short stanzas of dialogue between an adult and a child, and, in the dialogue, directly contrasts the adult and child’s differing views of what can be considered “real” and alive.

In the opening stanza, the speaker asks the reader: “A simple Child/what should it know of death?” (lines 1-4). This questioning of the child’s ability to distinguish the real from the non-real continues as the adult argues that the little girl cannot logically claim, “We are seven” when two of her siblings have died and two have moved away. But the adult cannot argue this child down. An imposition of a more logical and tangible reality will not overcome the intangible but very real understanding of her family identity:

“But they are dead; those two are dead! Their spirits are in heaven!” Twas throwing words away; for still The little Maid would have her will, And said, “Nay, we are seven!”

I admire Wordsworth’s little Maid. My grandmother would call her “hardheaded.” But I understand that stubbornness. Her brothers and sisters are alive unto her. The adult and all his logic cannot diminish their presence in her life.

In class, I often talk about “being human.” For me, one aspect of being human means being haunted. We are, knowingly or not, haunted by people—the family and friends who imprint so deeply into our lives that we are never truly separated from them—their influence and shadows, their words and DNA. But Wordsworth’s poem also prompts thinking about another kind of “haunting.” As readers, we are often haunted by the fictional. There is something about the companionship of characters, of literary characters, that can haunt on some level the way the dead can.

For passionate readers, how much of our “everyday lives” are saturated by the presence of characters? How often has the fictional become something more than fiction, a bond formed with companions that continue to exist influentially in our lives long after their book is clapped back on the shelf? It is a wonder that in a stifling crowd of people I sometimes find myself wondering about Scout Finch or having an inner dialogue with Anne Shirley or thinking about Shakespeare’s Viola or Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne so completely that each of them are as present and part of that moment as the noise and heat of the crowd pressing against me.

A good writer can make characters as real as the ham sandwich we packed for lunch, as tangible as Louisiana humidity in July. There is comfort in that realness. There is comfort in not giving into the rigidity of Wordsworth’s adult speaker and in choosing to let the imagined be “alive unto us,” in walking through our lives alongside our literary companions. In doing so, we find that there is community anywhere there are carefully written words. Surely, the dead have great influence over our lives, but perhaps, the imagined, in their own way, also haunt, in the best possible sense, the way we move through and perceive the world.

Heaven's Work

“Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.”—Rumi

I’ve recently fallen headlong in love with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. I was swept up by the video of Proms musicians playing its complexities. Beyond the power of its rhythms and sounds, I was captivated by the orchestra's energy, and its intense and graceful movements. The piece is dynamic in passion and work. So dynamic, it has me considering the correlation between work and joy. Will we work in heaven?

We often consider work on Earth to be a result of the Fall. Roberto S. Goizueta speaks of the benefits of aesthetics and how they enhance life, but he leaves work off his list of activities that are integral to fulfillment. “Play, recreation, and celebration are the most authentic forms of life precisely because, when we are playing, recreating, or celebrating, we are immersed in, or ‘fused,’ with the action itself, and those other persons with whom we are participating. Thus, we are involved in and enjoying the living itself.” It’s as if he’s saying, while we all know work is important, we only find joy in these other aspects.

In the language of Genesis, God established the pattern of work and rest before the Fall. He “finished the work he had been doing,” and “he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.” As Philo of Alexandria put it, "God never ceases to work; but as it is the property of fire to burn, and of snow to cool, so of God to work.'' And Jesus said, "My Father is working until now, and I am working." Adam and Eve worked in the garden and cared for it before the Fall. Wouldn’t these points make work, in a sense, a grace of God, and a gift?

The poet Wendell Berry challenges a claim that “more free time” might increase our happiness. “The old and honorable idea of ‘vocation’ is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of good work for which we are particularly fitted. Implicit in this idea is the evidently startling possibility that we might work willingly, and that there is no necessary contradiction between work and happiness or satisfaction.”

If work and happiness are interrelated as Berry suggests, wouldn’t they be integral parts of a perfect heaven? The fact that God himself “worked” might be the greatest reason we can anticipate joyful work in heaven. But the Proms Rite of Spring is a close second.

The Beauty of Obstructions

In 1967, Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth wrote and directed a 12-minute experimental art film. The name of the film was The Perfect Human. Like a lot of experimental art films from the 1960s, The Perfect Human was quirky collection of black-and-white images accompanied by a minimalistic soundtrack and a odd voiceover. The voiceover said:  

Here is the human. Here is the perfect human. This is what an ear looks like. This is what a eye looks like. This is the perfect human shaving. This is the perfect human putting on a bow tie. This is the perfect human eating. This is the perfect human dancing.

Okay, it was no Crime and Punishment.

In 2003, director Lars von Trier collaborated with Leth on a film he titled The Five Obstructions. As the film opens, von Trier announces to Leth that he wants him remake his 12-minute movie with specific "obstructions" that von Trier will supply. Leth agrees. For one version, von Trier tells Leth to make the movie in Cuba but to allow no shot to last for more than a half a second. Leth argues that the film will look "awful and disjointed." Von Trier insists and the film is made. For another version, von Trier insists that the film be made in the streets of India with Leth playing the role of the lead character. Leth protests, explaining that he doesn't want to serve as both actor and director. Again, von Trier insists and the film is made. For yet another version of the film, von Trier tells Leth to remake the movie as an animated film. Leth confesses that he hates animated films. Von Trier insists and Leth makes his cartoon.

Interestingly, in the next scenario, von Trier tells Leth to do whatever he wishes. Leth jumps at the chance. He picks an exotic location in Brussels and shoots his film in a widescreen format. It is fancy and expensive and full of clever split-screen effects. The net result is a cross between a James Bond movie and a luxury car commercial.

So here are four films: Three with limitations and one without.

Guess which was the weakest of the four?

For some reason, von Trier's obstructions and limitations birthed something in Leth's art that was not there when Leth was left to choose as he chose. I'm not sure I want to say this, but I think the same may be true in life. God speaks, and what he says is rarely to my liking. He calls me to a certain constraint; he calls me to a certain love. Given free reign, I'm sure I would choose differently. But hey, that's the price one pays for art!

Pastoral

We stood at dusk among the new construction of what will be a $4 million addition to the local school. The work site was quiet, the powerful equipment left temptingly idle to men and women—the women among us seemed significantly less tempted—of our caliber, decision-makers of the school board. We felt self-satisfied, there’s no doubt, definitely influential, maybe powerful.

To make room for the project, the school had torn down the simplest of buildings, a Quonset that served as a kindergarten classroom for 45 years. The removal of that old building, itself an anachronism, had revealed the backside of the line of houses directly to the east, houses of a different ilk than the 2-, 3- and 4-car garage structures that go up around town in varying shades of olive drab.

Our eyes were drawn to one house in particular, the outbuildings of which included a garage with an impressively sagging roof, a small shed patched with various pieces of various-shaded tin, and a lean-to chicken-wire pigeon coop. The predominant white of the buildings had grayed with time, was now bluing in the twilight. Down to the color, it reminded me of William Carlos Williams’ “Pastoral”:

When I was younger it was plain to me I must make something of myself. Older now I walk back streets admiring the houses of the very poor: roof out of line with sides the yards cluttered with old chicken wire, ashes, furniture gone wrong; the fences and outhouses built of barrel staves and parts of boxes, all, if I am fortunate, smeared a bluish green that properly weathered pleases me best of all colors. No one will believe this of vast import to the nation.

Someone among us brought up the word “eyesore;” I was immediately offended.

Then again, I’m offended by Williams’ title itself. “Pastoral” is a bell that startles me from my reverie. What about “the houses of the very poor” is “pastoral”? They are perhaps only pastoral as they “[please] me best of all” in my romanticized voyeurism.

So “pastoral” grates on me, makes me blush. I live in a small town that strives for—is even a sucker for—the pastoral: the corn, watered this spring by rains as regular as those of God’s own garden, stands at freakish heights for miles around, the leaves gently rustling in the evening wind as fireflies rise to intermittently light the night; then just this week, a state newspaper reveals that our lakes and rivers are among the most contaminated in the region thanks to the chemicals that push the corn to freakish heights.

Pastoral indeed.

I must confess I don’t know who lives in the house we were contemplating, whether Boo Radley or a darker figure, or what kind of life the person leads. Still, there’s no doubt the house-all-out-of-line has a kind of beauty to it, especially compared to the new construction that takes its cues from the rather narrow range of a suburban ideal. Williams’ poem, though uttering “pastoral,” is about taking beauty where we can find it, in the odds and ends and corners, in stasis rather than progress, in sustainability rather than freakish corn. Yet with one word, “pastoral,” it pushes us perhaps most of all to self-reflection on our own idylls.

We’ll soon have a new school building and that will be good, but we lost a homely little hutch where for generations six-year-olds held hands, sang songs, painted with their fingers, and sat in the lap of their teacher while she told stories. That may be a net loss. Or this, too, may be a “pastoral.”

No one will think this of vast import to the nation.

You Can’t Fake a Picture Like That

In A Giacometti Portrait, James Lord portrays Giacometti’s struggle as his art. It’s a daily wrestling that requires a commitment to begin again. Giacometti’s constant exasperation at his own work colors the story, but adds the interesting layer of uncertainty and attainment that ebbs and flows by the hour, and sometimes the minute, as he paints a portrait of Lord. When Lord suggests Giacometti fill in the background, Giacometti replies by saying, “You can’t fake a picture like that. Everything must come of itself and in its own time. Otherwise, it becomes superficial.”

I sometimes act like Lord, saying to myself, just fill-in the story. And while it’s easy to fill-in, it doesn’t create a compelling narrative. In order to make sure something does come of itself and in its own time, as Giacometti says it should, then one must continually work. This work might often be “fill-in,” but allows for something more to be made, something that can begin to become itself. This also takes time. Time to develop, time to form, time to reveal, and time to transform.

​I've found there's a process to finding a things own thing. For me, it's a struggle. Nothing is clear. I have to work through the haze, through the mental frustration, fatigue, my own doubts and fears, and gently excavate the brittle bones and structures of a story.

​In other words, everything must be earned. Which is why work with potential can turn out as superficial. The pace is rushed. Scenes and characters are posted like flannel pieces instead of developed over time. Instead of formidable and conflicted characters I write silhouettes producing cheesy dialogue everyone has heard before.

We need time to let our fill-in become something more and that requires a daily wrestling and a commitment to begin again and again. Show up. Take the time. Don’t fake it.

Stealing Grace

When I lived in South Bend, Indiana, I had a friend who, for one night, tried to teach me how to sew. As with all my DIY pursuits, the fabric I bought for a giant pillow I convinced Meg she could teach me how to stitch together got mutilated, and I don’t remember a thing she tried to teach me.

What I do remember about that night is a conversation Meg and I had about writing and seminary. We sat on my living room floor and spoke about what we hoped we could do in the same manner one digs her heels in the wet sand to test whether she can stand in the undertow after the rush of the waves. I also remember discussing journals, and what kind we like to write in: lined or unlined, spiral bound or loose leaf. I don’t know which Meg preferred, but I remember her saying something about being anxious about breaking rules when she begins a page. Whether it was that an unlined blank page gave her too much freedom, or that the faint blue lines of notebook paper were too strict, I don’t know. It was her comment on the rules that struck me.

I don’t attend too much to rules, or directions for that matter. This is probably why nobody can teach me how to sew. When it comes to writing, I’m not sure if it’s arrogance or ignorance in my capability to tell a story, but I don’t care if I’m writing on a napkin or a Moleskin journal. Telling the story is all that matters to me. I’ll worry about what’s right later.

And so it was that two girls in their mid-twenties sat together piercing holes in fabric and secretly admitted to one another what it is they’d really like to do someday.

About eight years later, I was in my church’s nursery, when my husband Jesse walked in and said, “Callie! Meg’s preaching!” He walked towards me, took the baby I was holding and said, “You go. I’ll take your place.”

I darted out of the nursery to hear Meg.

Meg had completed her seminary work and was the Pastor of the Washington DC CRC, a church nearby my own. When she moved, we met for coffee a couple of times, but this was the first time I’d get to hear her preach. I ran down the hallway towards the sanctuary, giggling, and remembering the no-sew night years ago.

I sat in the back of the sanctuary in front of a man I will call Jacob, who lives in his van. Just before we were to pass the peace, Jacob sneezed, and what came out splattered all over my back. I was wearing a sundress and I could feel snot running between my shoulder blades. I was supposed to turn, shake Jacob’s hand, and say, “Peace be with you.” Instead, I walked out of the sanctuary and into the bathroom to wash my back.

I was so angry as I scrubbed my back with a brown paper towel. I was grossed out, annoyed that Jacob didn’t put his hand over his mouth, disdained that he looked at me expectantly to pass him some peace, and frustrated that my friend was standing at the pulpit and now I was missing it. I walked back into the sanctuary and sat down in front of him; my back pulsating from how hard I had scrubbed it.

Meg’s sermon was on the Prodigal Son, and she told three versions of it. The first two were the stories Jesus probably should’ve told if he wanted to impress the Pharisees. They end with the son who left being punished, his father shrugging in nonchalance at his return, the other son, the one who stayed and followed the rules was celebrated and rewarded.

Meg suggested the Pharisees would’ve nodded in agreement at Jesus’ anecdote. “It’d be true-to-life,” Meg said, then waited a beat and added, “but it isn’t a very good story.”

I wrote those words on my hand, inched forward and tried to make eye contact with my old friend who whispered that she thought she might like to preach someday as she tried to show me what a whipstitch is. Gone was that girl who concerned herself with the rules of lined or unlined paper.

She went on to tell the rest of what happened, the real story where the father cries in relief at the sight of his son, where he throws the world’s greatest party at his return, where the older son sulks because he did it all right and he doesn’t get a party. It’s not fair. “Jesus Christ was many, many wonderful things,” Meg said. “But fair doesn’t rank high on the list.” No, I thought. And fair doesn’t have much wonder in it.

I was working on an MFA at the time I heard Meg preach, and the residencies reminded me of the party the father of the prodigal son threw for him. I approached these parties with a lot of trepidation. This was because getting an MFA was not only about becoming a better writer. I am unable to separate my learning from my faith, and I believe experiencing grace means wrestling with something I barely understand, and grasping and clenching on to a piece of it. Grace haunts me. It baffles me. It terrifies me. I do not write because I know something. I do not write because I believe I will figure something out. I write because I am tormented and I yearn for that agonizing grace. Writing is the only way I know to experience it. Maybe that’s why I don’t care about rules. I am a thief for stories. I will use anything I can for grace. I approached those residencies I imagine the same way the Prodigal Son approached his party; both of us understand we don’t deserve to be here.

“Tell us of the banquet where everyone gets invited!” Meg writes in her sermon. One where it doesn’t matter what rules you’ve followed, or what you’ve failed at. Tell us about the party we want so desperately want to be a part of even though there’s nothing we can bring to it that would get us in. Tell us an unfair, wonderful story, Jesus.

I stood behind Jacob and waited while Meg shook each of the congregants’ hands at the back of the sanctuary. She saw me as she was shaking Jacob’s hand, but she made sure to speak to him as though he was the only one there. When it was my turn, we hugged each other and held up the line. “You did it,” I said, and her hand pressed into my back where Jacob had left his mark previously.

The three of us, strangely linked together, would eventually leave this party, taking whatever grace we thought we had with us, and move on to do whatever it is we would do.

I’m a Recovering Church Dramatist

I’m a recovering church dramatist. Back in the day, I worked with a performance team. We wrote sketches and performed them during Sunday services. We had a lot of fun and we were, dare I brag, pretty funny. This was in Chicago where improv is king. We'd craft scripted sketches out of improvised scenes we made up related to the pastors’ sermon topics. It was fairly organic at first and, for the most part, we had the freedom to do whatever we wanted. As long as we didn’t swear or anything.

I was proud of what we created back then, but as I reflect on those sketches now, there’s a bit of a dark, nagging undertone that I’m not sure I noticed at the time. It’s not that what we did was bad, but it never could have stood alone. What we produced was inextricably linked to those sermons, subserviently linked in fact, and in the big picture, subserviently linked to the evangelical purposes of either a) saving souls or b) edifying saved souls. Art, if you can call what we did art, was a serf to the vassal of the modern evangelical church.

A be-all-end-all definition of art is difficult to come across, but one thing I'm certain of is that art is not a slave. Roping art to a cause of some kind is a misuse of it, one that demonstrates a core misunderstanding of the stuff. But stating what art isn’t begs the question, "What is it?" Ha. You might just as well ask, "Who is God?" especially if you're up for some maddening non-answers. There are some pat answers—"Art is human expression," "God is love"—that aren't necessarily false. It's just that they can only ever be partially true.

Art is inherently mysterious. I think the typical human response to the grandly mysterious (like art, like God) is a knee-jerk, semi-conscious attempt at appropriation. If we can’t fully describe something, we yank it from its own empire and compress it to grasp-able suburban terms, not realizing that as we compress it, we shear it of its essence, the thing that makes the thing the thing. Art is no longer art, but propaganda, and propaganda harangues with one of two choices: Are you with us or are you against us? Your life teeters on your answer. Answer now.

Art, like God, permits an infinite number of responses to itself. It piques curiosity, provokes introspection, picks at our core values, and invites us to return over and over again. Those who patronize the arts correctly remove their crowns and listen. Those who patronize incorrectly first seek themselves in the painting, the novel, the symphony, and give up on art all together when, in fact, they find themselves.

The leadership at my church back then eventually chopped our sketches from the services permanently. I never knew why exactly. We didn’t swear, not even once. Probably because first they made us quit writing our own stuff and use Willow Creek Community Church’s pre-written stuff. But whatever the reason, it was for the best. Though we were ultimately mistreating art, it never shunned us. Art, like God, was kind to us.

Joseph Brodsky’s Utter Happiness

Poet Joseph Brodsky began spending winters in Venice in 1972, and his holidays there continued for years. In 1989, he published his reflections of those winters in Watermark. In this lyric essay, Brodsky makes a rich physical and metaphysical journey into that city, where he calls up the primordial and the eternal, the fixed and fluid properties of the watery landscape, and the real and impressionistic architecture of the city.

Yet more notably, in this setting Brodsky is smitten with “utter happiness.” Newly exiled from his native Russia in 1972, he had come to live and teach in the United States, his “Purgatorio,” while Venice became “my version of paradise.” For one thing, the watery city reminded him of St. Petersburg, Russia on the Baltic Sea, where he spent his childhood. What’s more, the visual delights of Venice signified Eden to him. On first entering the city at night, Brodsky described entering “infinity,” traveling on a vaporetto over the water’s black surface. The city itself, he wrote, is “a porcelain setting by a crystal water,” where the Spirit of God might move upon the water’s face. Here, he wrote, people want to cover themselves because of all the surrounding beauty, “the marble lace, inlays, capitals, cornices, reliefs, and moldings . . . angels, cherubs, caryatids . . . and windows.”

I think we all have some notion of what is Edenic to us, a place, imagined or real, that brings on feelings of joy or comfort or rest. Like Brodsky, I appreciate both wintry and foggy landscapes—not because they remind me of my childhood, but because I am a creature of the endless Southwestern sun that often obliterates the views with its white glare. And like Brodsky, I “take heat very poorly.” No wonder I often find woods and forests, mountains and hills divine, especially in the summers. Yet even when I must summer in the boiler that is Houston, the softened panorama of clouded days and the obscurity of fogged mornings can remind me of God’s garden, however briefly.

Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker discuss early Christian concepts of paradise in their book Saving Paradise and especially in the article, “This Present Paradise.” The authors write, “In the early church, paradise—first and foremost—was this world, permeated and blessed by the Spirit of God. Early images of paradise in Rome and Ravenna captured the craggy, scruffy pastoral landscape, the orchards, the clear night skies and teeming water of the Mediterranean world as if they were lit by a power from within.” This world, they say, was “a world created as good and delightful.” God was present in it, for in early Christian images, a ladder often appears, where not only people could ascend to heaven, but God could come down to earth.

In Watermark, Joseph Brodsky delights in the “present paradise” he finds in Venice; and I am easily pulled into in his enchantment with it. When I read Watermark, I understand the poet’s sentiments, his overarching love of place, the watercolor of Venice. Wandering in Brodsky’s descriptions, I think of my own moments of heaven on earth. In such moments, peace, utter happiness.

When I Talk About Mud Runs

So maybe I have a hyper-competitive side; it’s been present since my youth. In Little League baseball, I was the first kid in my city ever ejected from a game. I’m also still bitter about the time I lost a foot race against Howard Schaap.

So at 35 with diminishing athletic skills, I find it harder than ever to satiate that nature. But I have to try, right?

This past month I ran another obstacle course race (OCR). Six miles through mud, ice baths, barbed wire crawls, log hurdles, creek sprints, and fire jumps. The terrain: a ski slope. This was my fifth OCR; it was the hardest. My wife, now a veteran of these races herself, asked me why I run in them—we were at the starting gate. It is the kind of question that goes unanswered when you’re staring up a thousand foot incline, as we were. The motionless chair lift above mocked like gargoyles.

The answer—if there is one, I think it changes—is also the answer to why I write and have faith. But to say “I just do,” empties the habit. There’s a grueling beauty present in endurance, though it abides like pebbles in your shoe. I might be justified in abandoning any task the second it sees the slope upward. But I don’t. Not even after weeks of writing draft after draft of a story that still exposes itself as shitty as that first draft. I don’t abandon my faith because I live in a world that doesn’t have the sense to get itself “undamned.”

So when I talk about mud runs and writing and faith, I know I’m talking about why I need community. I desire to be surrounded by people of all abilities pursuing the same end. Some who know that feeling of finishing a story. Or can scale a muddy twelve foot wall in three bounding leaps (let’s see you do that, Howard!). Or know, what Christian Wiman describes, as the “moments when we reflect a mercy and mystery that are greater than we are.”

I believe and write and race because others reach a hand down over the ledge and pull me from the muck. They say a part of the creed for me that I cannot say, uncover a character’s motivations I could not identify.

When I talk about mud runs and writing and faith though, I’m also talking about how sometimes it’s only me against me. And how I just have to sink the balls of my feet into the mud and ascend.

The Disaster of the Unedited Life

One hates his enemies only when he fails to realize that they are not enemies, but cruel friends. – St. Nikolai Velimirovich (1881-1956)

The noted novelist who taught the fiction writers workshop I attended said this a lot: “Assume your reader is smarter than you are.” As a reviewer of self-published works for an online indie book review site, I see a lot of writing that makes me wish every author kept this in mind. Too often I have to sit down with a heavy heart to write a far less than glowing review for a book that’s somewhere on the continuum between lackluster and disastrous, sometimes (though not always) because it wasn’t properly worked over by a ruthless professional editor who’s trained to see what that writer couldn’t. Did the author of the repetitive, structurally weak self-help book riddled with disjointed and patronizing narrative, confusing syntax, careless typos, and myriad formatting issues think his readers would be that oblivious, that willing to settle for mediocrity, because after all, this guy wrote it, so it must be great? It seems obvious, but apparently isn’t to some, that before the glorious final unveiling of one’s chef d’oeuvre, serious dues must be paid.

Then I wonder: What if in my personal life I’m as disjointed and uninspiring as that book? What would happen if I sat down with a good friend and asked her to hit me with my greatest character flaw, the one that might break me in the end if I don’t get a clue? Alas, our brains are hardwired to pretty much see perfection in ourselves, which is part of why writers often can’t detect the weak story arc that’s going to doom their novel if they don’t take a hard look at things, much less spot their own typos.

They say the devil’s in the details, but so is God. A writer determined to be stellar will endure even a brutal editor if he senses the guy is on the money. The lure of a glowing end product makes temporarily wounded pride worth the wait. As to life, the Serbian bishop Nikolai Velimirovich was so receptive to refinements of character that he called his torturers in the Dachau death camp “cruel friends” because he claimed their evil ministrations enlarged his capacity to love others. With that kind of humility, imagine the novel he could have written.

Real Girls: What Amanda Palmer Taught Me About Vulnerability

I have a friend who has this gnarly summer job—she calls it an "opportunity." The thing is it's not, in truth, gnarly at all. I mean, if picking rocks in the broiling sun is immensely amusing, or if spending most of a day uncomfortably bent over with a linoleum knife hacking away the weeds from inside small prickly spruce trees is an escapade of frivolity, or if cutting heavily tractor packed sod with a shovel is a thing to delight in, then I guess her job really is "gnarly." When she gets back from her summer job—at least she has a rocking hot tan—I offer my sympathies to her: "Whatever, pays the bills, right?"

"No!"she says, "whatever makes me happy ... or at least makes it possible, THAT’S why I do it."

"Cool, cool," I reply in a mollifying tone. Hey, you don’t want to ever mess with someone who can chuck rocks, slash deftly with curved knives, or is used to manhandling (personhandling, I should say, just in case she is reading this) large chunks of sod or tree stumps. She could easily devour a prissy MBAer faster than she can slay a patch of undisciplined barbellate thistles, which is very quickly. So, I keep all this in mind. It’s healthier that way. Mainly for me.

My friend though, despite being able to kick serious ass probably will never have that sinewy side seen by more than a select few people. Other people see her and think she is little other than peach cinnamon pie with prettily puffed whip cream. "Oh, if only you knew," I muse under my breath. And yet, while she is a pugnaciously hard worker and tougher than titanium, she is also a delicate artist and girl, and thinker, and saint. (You should see her with baby birds.) I mean, if Wendell Berry were younger and single, he would be after her.

No, really.

In the same vein, don’t a lot of us feel that way about our parents? Or that heroic individual that few others, except us, really know? Why is that? How can we know—deep down inside—that our mum or dad or brother or sister or certain friend is such a supremely groovy gift to humanity?

Here is a thought: is it because we are open to them and they are open to us? Like, in a way that is unique and allows for vulnerability? There is more, of course, but the act of being vulnerable to another person seems to be, to me anyway, significant.

A little while ago I had the pleasure of reading Amanda Palmer’s biography/philosophy/guide to life. It’s called The Art of Asking. Her words went inside my softer parts and made my emotions do exercises which they weren’t used to. Maybe it was like emotional yoga? Anyway, her startling honesty and willingness to uncover/divulge/display the tender parts of her artistic musician soul and heart made me wonder just how much better those of us who are more prone to emotional seclusion would be by being more vulnerable. (Not to everybody, because without a certain degree of interpersonal-confidentiality there could be little interpersonal-intimacy.)

One of Palmer’s central points is that everybody desires to be seen. Because to be seen means that something in us was recognized. Something of our identity was noticed by another and recognized as unique to us. And yet, for Palmer there are two parties responsible: the outside viewer who actually gives a hoot to see beyond just themselves, and the person themselves who must be willing to be seen. And this last part is where the vulnerability comes in.

And so going back to my friend, I wonder what she would think about Palmer’s philosophy of vulnerability. Surely there is a satisfaction in knowing certain parts of ourselves are neatly packaged and hidden, only to be seen by those select few who have been invited into the sanctum of knowing. But if, as Palmer suggests, vulnerability begets vulnerability, perhaps by learning to gradually expose ourselves, we could in turn increasingly recognize the beauty that surrounds us—and sometimes be the beautiful too.