Things

 

On August 30, Kanye West won an award for being a brilliant artist of some sort. During his acceptance speech he claimed that awards shows were ridiculous, called himself an artist’s messiah, confessed to smoking pot, and announced that he would be running for president. A year ago, maybe even a month ago, I might have sighed and muttered, “Oh, Kanye,” but this time, with the nagging realization that I probably have more deadlines than talent, all I could do was think about how I will never be able to write like that and have people support it. Everything felt so meaningless.

There is a picture of Idris Elba saved on my computer. His hands are folded and he wears an expression that quite attractively blends judgment and concern. “Shouldn’t you be writing?” the caption asks. Yes. Yes, Idris, I should be writing. I should be penning down my every thought, victory, tragedy, and curiosity on paper and online, but the blank page and I are in the midst of a staring contest, and so neither one of us has much to say.

That may not be exactly true. There are a lot of things going on that would make excellent essays, or at least mediocre essays that I could edit into readable ones, but I don’t feel like talking about those things. It doesn’t matter, though. The lack of something to say and the lack of will to say something both yield the same result. Nothing. Yet, I’m still suffering from the urge to create. In spite of the fact that millions of thoughts get published and posted every minute of every day, I have the tiniest bit of hope that I can water and nurture and grow something special where nothing used to be.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” God introduces himself as a character by speaking light, ecosystems, and cows into existence. I know what the Bible says. I know what the lesson is for the artist: Words have power. I guess that is true. Words do things, change things, create and destroy things. But, is the inverse also true? Is the artist powerless when he can’t find the words or when he isn’t big enough to speak them? It feels that way. I feel drained and empty when I sit down to write and all I can do is stare out of the open window and watch the trees let go of leaves that weren’t strong enough to keep trying.

The first sentence of the Bible does not interest me because I do not understand people who always have something to say. I do not trust people who brag about how easy creation is. What grabs me is second sentence. I like the part where the narrator reveals with a sort of flyaway detail that, prior to everything, there was a whole lot of nothing. If I were given this manuscript in a workshop, this is the part I would circle and highlight as the big point. As both a reader and a writer, I would ask the author, “How long did you stare at nothing before you found something to say?”

Intern to Managing Editor in One Year

During the winter of 2014, I was 18 and doing the same thing every other college student was: scrambling for a summer internship. Unlike most other college students, I didn’t have a lot of options. Editing internships for English majors in NYC are lovely, except for when they’re unpaid and super competitive.

So I crafted a casual tweet hoping to catch the eye of some small company that wanted a college sophomore with no experience. Dan Bowman, who happens to be a professor at the college I attend, responded. He told me he had contacts at some literary journals, and to let him know if I was interested. I responded in five seconds with a very emphatic yes.

He gave me a couple names and told me to tell him what I was interested in. Relief caught my attention immediately and I couldn’t stop reading the mission statement: “The goal of this publication is to pursue a complete picture of Christ and life –- real, gritty, painful, wonderful, this-side-of-heaven life...Christ’s goal was never to keep us sheltered and comfortable.  He did not pull his punches.” Relief was everything I wanted from Christian writing and art—honest, unflinching examples of reality and grace. I emailed Dan and told him that Relief was my top internship priority. He said he would make it happen. And he did.

I spent the summer of 2014 doing many things, but interning with Relief was my favorite. I worked under the blog and social media editor and helped keep blog posts coming in on deadline and doing some minor edits. I had been interested in the publishing industry before Relief, but this internship confirmed that this is where I was meant to be. So at the end of the summer, when my boss told me that I had done good work and asked if would I like to come on as an assistant editor, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.

Junior year was fantastic. Not only was I back at school, but I got to continue working for the journal that was now one of my deepest passions. I started making friends with my bloggers, who continually poured immense wisdom into my life, whether they knew it or not. I was and still am continually flabbergasted that I get to work with such incredible writers.

This January, Relief started transitioning. Brad Fruhauff, our editor-in-chief at the time, asked me if I could fill in as Interim Managing Editor and Web Editor, ultimately transitioning into Managing Editor. I quickly said yes. I started running the Relief blog solo and helped get everything finalized for issue 8.1. I loved every single second of it. I got to intimately be a part of furthering the conversation of art and faith through the blog and the print issue. I have never flourished like I have here. 

I started my senior year at Taylor University this month. I’m working on writing my senior thesis for my BA in English Literature and I’m also a contributing editor to Writer’s Digest Online. I am beyond thrilled and honored to be the managing editor for Relief. I get to continue working with incredibly wise and talented people to promote the thing I love most. There are excellent plans in place for this journal and I am on the edge of seat.

“For authors who cry out for an appropriate venue and readers who long for stories that don’t make them gag, we present Relief.”

An Update (Finally!) from Relief’s New Editor-in-Chief

Dear readers, writers, and friends:

Many of you know that Relief Journal is in the process of transition. I’m here to give an official update on the situation. After a number of years of service, Brad Fruhauff felt it was the right time to step down as Editor-in-Chief of Relief. I will be taking over in that role, and transitioning Relief’s operations to Taylor University in Upland, Indiana. This will enable the journal to benefit from an unprecedented level of structural support while retaining in full its editorial autonomy and unique spirit.

Before I continue: If Relief has meant something to you—moreover if the conversation at the intersection of faith and art means something to you—please make a point of thanking Brad for his work. His contributions have done nothing short of helping shape the contemporary landscapes of Christian faith, imagination, and creativity that are critical to many of us. Brad has agreed to stay on in the capacity of Board member and the special role of Senior Editorial Adviser. We’ll lean on his experience and knowledge as we move forward with the transition. Again, please take a second to thank him at brad@reliefjournal.com. *                *                *

Allow me to introduce myself, then discuss my vision for the next era in the life of Relief. I want Relief’s longtime readers and contributors to know that this journal is ultimately landing in the right hands, even as the transition has meant we’ve been in a holding pattern for a number of months.

My name is Dan Bowman. In the mid-1990s, as a freshman at a small Christian liberal arts college in upstate New York, I took a literature class that changed the course of my life. Through the truth and beauty of the poems and stories, and our probing discussions of them, I realized that if I could choose a place to stay, a place where I would have the chance to flourish, it would be at the intersection of literature and Christian faith. I haven’t looked back since.

My path led me to an MA in comparative literature from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University. My debut collection of poems is A Plum Tree in Leatherstocking Country (Virtual Artists Collective, 2012), and I’ve since completed a novel called Beggars in Heaven along with a good number of essays.

My work has appeared in several recent books, such as How to Read a Poem (TS Poetry, 2014) and Not Yet Christmas: An Advent Reader (Seedbed, 2014), and in periodicals like The Adirondack Review, American Poetry Journal, Books & Culture, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (Hong Kong/London), Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey), The Midwest Quarterly, Pyrta (India), Rio Grande Review, Saint Katherine Review, Seneca Review, and others. I’ve blogged here at Relief, and occasionally at Image Journal’s Good Letters; I currently blog for Ruminate.

I grew up in Mohawk, New York, and live with my wife Bethany and our two kids in Hartford City, Indiana, where I’m Associate Professor of English at Taylor University.

Like many of you, I am sustained and inspired by art-and-faith events (in particular the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe and the Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College); by many, many books; and by magazines like Relief. In those spaces I’ve been both comforted and challenged, always nudged toward my best self. I couldn’t be happier to take the helm of a journal that exists to further those very conversations, to explore and inhabit the richness of, as we say in our mission statement, “a complete picture of Christ and life—real, gritty, painful, wonderful, this-side-of-heaven life.”

*                *                *

Beginning in the 2016-17 academic year, Relief will return to its publication schedule of two issues per year. But starting now, and ongoing throughout this year, the Relief team is working toward these long-term goals that we believe will enable the journal to come into its fullest expression:

• Moving operations into permanent physical office space on the campus of Taylor University (to be opened at select times for visits from writers and readers),
• Expanding readership of the blog and the print journal (including expanding subscriptions to individuals and libraries),
• Expanding the pool of submissions to include more literary writers from around the world whose works attain excellence and engage faith in evocative ways,
• Enhancing our presence on social media, ensuring consistent and meaningful platforms that allow crucial conversations and relationships to develop and thrive,
• Attending key national conferences, including Festival of Faith and Writing, AWP (lack of funding has precluded Relief’s attendance in recent years), and several regional gatherings in the Midwest,
• Engaging the next generation of art-and-faith writers and readers by involving passionate, talented university students in key support roles of Relief’s weekly operations,
• Empowering Relief’s editorial team with trained interns so that genre editors can read and respond to every submission carefully and quickly, and
• Developing a small literary press, Relief Books, to publish 2-3 full-length books of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry each year (stay tuned for submission details!) and offering our authors a high level of support in connecting with readers.

As you can see, these are not cosmetic changes, but substantial objectives that will put Relief in a position to facilitate better than ever the kind of art that’s been at its core since the journal’s inception.

In the short-term, our goals are more modest but equally important:

• Completing the transition of the nonprofit to Taylor and the state of Indiana,
• Applying for substantial grant monies,
• Onboarding Aaron Housholder as new fiction editor and Adele Konyndyk Gallogly as new blog editor,
• Reading and responding to every current submission in all genres,
• Rebuilding, and reconvening regular meetings of, the Board of Directors as well as a new Advisory Board to oversee operations, give counsel, and help shape the future of the journal and press,
• Publishing a sizeable issue in the late winter/early spring of 2016 (submissions in all genres are open and will be attended to very carefully in the coming weeks!),
• Finding some way to thank/compensate/retain one-time-intern-turned-Managing-Editor Hannah Haney for her incredible dedication and hard work over the past year,
• Thanking, retaining, and better supporting the diverse, extremely talented, and soul-stirring writers who have given their time and talent to Relief’s blog, and
• Winning back the goodwill of readers and writers whose work or correspondence may have slipped through the cracks during this long holding pattern of the last year.

To that last point…please send me a note (dnbowman@taylor.edu) if your submission is sitting in our queue and you still do not hear from us by Thanksgiving. It’s my goal for us to attend to every submission by then, and we’ve scheduled several meetings in the coming weeks toward that goal. From there on out, we will have somewhat shorter reading periods, with a break in the summer, to ensure that every submission can be carefully considered in a timely manner in the future.

I will be back here with updates soon! Thank you for your patience. I believe it will be worth it for us all as we move forward.

Yours,

Dan

First Person

My daughter has been reading each night from The Meditations, the journal Marcus Aurelius kept as he commanded the largest army the Roman empire had ever assembled on its frontier. For a decade, he wrote with disciplined regularity as battles raged and as the plague that would one day bear his family name, The Antonine, destroyed the lives of citizens and barbarians alike—2,000 each day at the height of the epidemic. By 180 A.D., five million people had been killed, including Aurelius himself.

Aurelius’ work was spiritual exercise, a received way for the Emperor to accord his thoughts and actions with forces larger than himself, a method of allowing the abstractions of stoic philosophy to enter his consciousness so deeply that they could “dye his soul” such that his decisions and subsequent actions could move in natural sympathy with virtue. He sought to view the hardships of his days with the eyes of eternity: all is vanity, dust returning to dust.

At the same time that Madeleine reads Aurelius, I have been reading Going Clear, Lawrence Wright’s unsettling study of L. Ron Hubbard’s mind—and of the enduring paranoia that was engendered there. The book includes excerpts from The Affirmations, a diary Hubbard kept before he hit upon Dianetics and the larger system he called Scientology. The entries of this journal “constitute a kind of self-therapy,” Scientology lawyers once admitted in the course of a civil suit, before they began denying Hubbard’s authorship of the documents altogether.

And so, as Madeleine reads, “Reverence that which is best in the universe, and this is that which makes use of all things and directs all things”; “Think of the universal substance, of which thou hast a very small portion”; “Do not be carried along inconsiderately by the appearance of things"; and "Be not ashamed to be helped," I learn:

"Material things are yours for the asking. Men are your slaves"; and "You have no fear if they conceive. What if they do? You do not care. Pour it into them and let fate decide"; and "Your psychology is advanced and true and wonderful. It hypnotizes people. It predicts their emotions, for you are their ruler."

What we tell ourselves has consequences, particularly in times of dire need. What we say, though, is shaped by the perspective to which we are able to appeal when coming to terms. Aurelius had the luxury of knowing, and being able to practice within, a rich, rigorous tradition that emphasized humility; Hubbard—rootless, image-conscious, desperate for fame in twentieth-century America—could seek only the glorification of the self.

What researchers term self-talk is a powerful practice, one that demonstrably increases our willpower and motivation, much more so than does talking to ourselves (in our minds or on our pages) in first-person.

But who is it that is talking to us? Who is the first person in our second-person address: a godlike version of ourselves, come to bless our desires, or figures from a tradition that emerged long before us, come to temper the self, orient it toward others and toward eternal concerns?

The Gift of Creative Space

Early in our week together at The Glen in Santa Fe my new friend Page shared his love of thin places with our class in Carolyn Forche's poetry workshop. Thin places are light houses, sea shores, wooded paths, parks or buildings that strike us as transcendent, or as Eric Weiner says, "those rare locales where the distance between heaven and Earth collapses". Page visits them often and captures them in his art, and his favorite is the sea shore before daybreak. I share an appreciation for those minutes of the day when the dawn irrupts on the dark. I spend them on the edge of a wetland near my home. And now thanks to Carolyn and my other new friends in the class, I know that these hours are named, in the language of early monastics, the Matins, which refers to the nighttime liturgy that ends at dawn.

It is a holy hour: a thinness of time and place that invites a thinness in me. The wetland is in full crescendo. I know in my mind I'm hearing the native song of cardinals and tree frogs, but  exaggerated by the night it becomes insistent, cacophonous, and altogether alien. I go cautiously and no further than the brush and water. I sense an impossible union of opposites – timelessness and time's passing, beginnings and endings – and a wildness that knows but abides my presence. The bird and frog chorus tugs furiously at the Ouroboros between morning and the dying night. I hear their extra-human leaps across the boundaries of gravity and breath. And when the blue hour of dawn comes, the silhouettes of cypress manifest above me like Gothic arches, and the sky seals it all with its brightening amen.

Out of its liminal and ephemeral qualities the wetland has spoken a strange and irresistible language. It is familiar and new every day. It is ancient and essential. According to scientific investigations, the tree frogs I hear have sung the death of night for a quarter billion years. The cardinals, for eons, have anticipated the light. I try to understand what they're saying. How can I not? How in their presence each morning can I hear and not want to speak their words? How, as I go, can I resist taking them with me into my day? Into other encounters? How, indeed. They make a space in me.

Martin Luther identified four relationships we're served to seek creative space for. In Luther's Latin they are coram deo, coram meipso, coram hominibus, and coram mundo. Here he lays out the areas of brokenness that all humanity suffers – our lives before God, before ourselves, before humankind and before nature. They represent the totality of our relationships. He admonishes us to live with integrity and intimacy in each within the space of time we are given through the righteousness of the one who lived it perfectly. In Christ the inhospitable is made welcoming, the displaced, familiar, the enemy, friend and the thin, material. In this is to live in creative fullness and be recreated in it.

The offer of creative space in relationships is an offer of both gratitude and generosity in which regard for the other is confronting and adventurous, where what is received is gifted, and where the instant any two are engaged a conversation is entered that will bear offspring and witness. And if it bears joy, it does so given room, given care, given a name and given away.

Where are your thin places?

The Art of Rock and Roll Memoir

“U2 is what church should be”; so read a line in Time Magazine when I was 13, a line that confirmed my fledgling belief in U2. I certainly felt elated and worshipful listening to The Joshua Tree, though I wasn’t entirely sure it was right to feel that way. This was just after The Joshua Tree had broken U2 worldwide enough to reach rural Minnesota, and just as the album and film Rattle and Hum, according to most critics, showed they had feet of clay.

Personally, I loved the black and white concert footage of Rattle and Hum.  I loved the impassioned diatribe in “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” so much I used it to pump myself up before junior varsity basketball games.

I first got to see U2 live during the Zoo TV tour, a very different animal.  Bono licked the camera; Bono pulled the camera up to his leather-clad crotch; Bono came out dressed up as Mephistopheles.  It wasn’t very churchy.  Critics loved it.  I was 16 and in the tenth row and unsure about these rock and roll antics.

I missed the Pop Mart tour, noted for its spectacle, and the props I saw on later tours—a laser-laced jacket, a swinging microphone, a stage like a spaceship—were perhaps not as grand or silly as the giant lemon.

This time around the U2 tour is called Innocence to Experience and, via home movie and songs new and old, concert-goers are invited on a trip down U2’s own memory lane while live tweets and fan-cams attempt to keep us in the present.

I was also struck by the emotions that I went through at this U2 concert.  There was still the old elation, this time consciously tied up with surrender: at one point Bono went to his knees and said that very word (“Surrender to what?” I can hear my catechism teacher say).  It sounds contrived, but to be fair, as Joshua Rothman points out, surrender is where U2 lyrics have been pointing all along.

And there was conviction, as usual.  “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” is still like an open wound that brings me into the present moment and forces me to give a shit.  Then, too, I’m not sure what American can listen to “Bullet the Blue Sky” and not consider it a call to repentance.

Perhaps more than in the past, though, this concert invited introspection, because if anything “Innocence to Experience” is memoir.  Some have called that self-important, but it’s also just plain risky.  You don’t go to a rock concert to introspect.  It’s also rare.  Rock concert memoir is simply not very common, the half-life on rockers being less than the average pair of jeans.

As good memoir does, I to E also provided leaping off points to consider where our own stories might intersect with the one being told on stage.  For me, that moment was when confetti in the form of book quotes fell from the ceiling.  I found myself gathering them madly, like veritable manna from heaven, to see what works they might be from:  Alice in Wonderland, The Divine Comedy, the Psalms.

Over the years, U2 concerts have put me in the moment, moved me to care, frightened me with tongues and crotches, confused me with Mephistopheles, asked me to surrender, connected me to Alice in Wonderland.  Is U2 what church should be?  I don’t think so.  U2 concerts are their own space, the artistic space of a rock and roll concert.

In Praise of Folly

One of the less hefty thoughts I had after September 11, 2001, was whether the show Friends would continue to air. I assumed that since the show took place in New York City, and that it was funny, NBC executives would choose to stop running it. When the show returned to the Thursday night line-up, I felt guilty laughing along with six of the coolest twenty- and thirty-year-olds I knew. I was also ashamed that I was expecting—almost craving—a laugh. Was this the time for comedy? Shouldn’t I be praying or donating money to some sort of relief fund? What good would a chuckle do now?

Folly, Erasmus’ narrator in In Praise of Folly, says comedy does a lot, including but not limited to, making us laugh. What’s more, Desiderius Erasmus argues (albeit humorously) that comedy is vital.

One of the first things Folly points out about comedy is that it brings about change. “…[W]hen you laid eyes on me, you were quite transfigured” (7).  Folly takes note of the adjustment in the audience when they realized that she was the one who would speak to them. She compares their reaction to feeling the signs of spring for the first time after a cold winter, and as though the audience was feeling the sun for the first time. The use of the word transfigured here also suggests that comedy not only lightens a mood, but it can transform us.

Throughout the book, Folly sheds comedic light on otherwise serious subjects. For example, she suggests the body part that a man uses in hopes to become a father is “so stupid and even ridiculous that it can’t be named without raising a snicker” (12). This is the organ that creates a human, “the sacred fount from which all things draw their existence.” In another example, Folly wonders what woman would ever have sex again after going through childbirth.  Not only does she have to endure contractions, labor, and the ordeal of having various liquids pouring out of her body parts, but she must rear the child as well.  Having gone through a miscarriage, the delivery of a ten-pound baby, and another somewhat high-risk pregnancy, knowing what I know about the miracle of life isn’t exactly foreplay. However, I also know the joy in first holding my daughters, watching them take their first steps, and listening to their voices. Folly’s question affirms the pains of childbirth and rearing, but her use of comedy here (I imagine her shaking her hands above her head in mock exasperation) lightens the situation as well. Bringing anything to life—a story, a recipe, a skyscraper, a human being—hurts. It is nice to laugh at the difficulty in it, whether it is a snicker or a howl. Laughing about the seriousness in life brings relief, and this is what Folly is doing here.

Comedy is a great leveler in the book. Folly makes fun of everyone, even Erasmus. She describes a wise man (Erasmus) as “always sparing, saving, sad, solemn, severe, and strict on himself…” (38) (The use of onomatopoeia here is humorous as well, in the sense that one could draw out the “s” in each word adding sarcasm and melodrama). Folly then asks, who cares if someone like this dies, “since he can’t properly be said ever to have lived?” (38) Women, apostles, writers, those who memorize Psalms, are among the groups that Folly makes fun of.  Being in on the joke shows we are all included. When we are included in the comedy, it means we have been observed; that there is something intriguing about us that deserves enough attention to make a joke. In this respect, comedy can also be looked at as a form of grace: we are all, in our strange, serious, silly make-ups, included in on the joke.

At the end of the book, Folly argues that practicing comedy is a form of piety. When we laugh at ourselves, we become like the pious man who, “shrinks as far as he can from the concerns of the body, and allows himself to be lifted to the realm of eternal, invisible, and spiritual things”(85). The more we lose ourselves in the joke, the closer we grow to God, and therefore closer to the way he created us to be. In this sense, comedy restores a new order.

It is probably folly to compare Desiderius Erasmus to the likes of Joey, Chandler, Ross, Phoebe, Rachel, and Monica. However, on a basic level they do the same thing Folly does: that is make us laugh, relieve us from our serious situations, include us all, and maybe, when we turn the TV off or when Folly leaves the stage, these offerings will stay with us prompting us to forget ourselves and become the people God created us to be.

Go Set a Watchman

Brilliant Books in Michigan has offered refunds to its customers who bought Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman. More than offering refunds, they condemned its publication. The publication of Lee’s book has raised a tempest of criticism and debate. I hesitated before buying it due to a mix of guilt—given the controversy regarding whether the now-elderly Lee was behind publishing it—and a desire to not have my recent reading of To Kill A Mockingbird marred by whatever it was in Watchman that was troubling the waters of the review world.

Brilliant Books has a point about it being hyped as a new novel by Lee. It’s a draft of Mockingbird. Brilliant is refunding money to those who feel they were duped by HarperCollins’ marketing strategy. Rather than expecting it to be a new novel, Brilliant suggests readers approach Watchman from the perspective of “academic insight.” And they’re right. We have to remember it’s a draft that becomes Mockingbird through the editorial process. One review asks, “How is it possible that [Atticus] this paragon of morality and virtue and a beacon of racial justice could undergo such transformation in 20 years?” But that’s the wrong question since Watchman is not a sequel to Mockingbird or a separate book. The right question is what revisions did Watchman’s Atticus undergo to become the Atticus of Mockingbird?

The key to knowing that Watchman is a draft is found in the title. “Go set a watchman” is taken from a passage in Isaiah that says, “For thus the Lord said to me: ‘Go, set a watchman; let him announce what he sees.’” A thoughtful writer is particular about the title she chooses, and Lee changed the title between the draft and the book because Atticus was changing.

In Watchman, Lee was, as the verse in Isaiah implies, announcing what she saw. Through this Atticus, she shows us the South’s struggle to grant God-given equality to all people. Through both Watchman and its reviews, we’re provided a look into this country’s history of racial problems. My reading led to articles on Southern Agrarianism; Supreme Court rulings like Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education; the Tenth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendments. In Watchman, Atticus was trying to work through racial issues from a skewed perspective. In Watchman, Atticus is now notorious for comments like: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?” A reviewer puts it this way, “So the idea that Atticus, in this book, ‘becomes’ the bigot he was not in ‘Mockingbird’ entirely misses Harper Lee’s point—that this is exactly the kind of bigot that Atticus has been all along.” But the reviewer’s assessment, in its turn, entirely misses the point of reading the draft. This is the Atticus who Lee (our watchman) saw and announced to us in Watchman—a usually well meaning, educated man of the South, shot through with prejudice.

Lee spent over two-and-a-half years in countless discussions with her editor, Tay Hohoff. A history of Lippincott, Mockingbird’s original publisher, quotes Hohoff: “When she disagreed with a suggestion, we talked it out, sometimes for hours. And sometimes she came around to my way of thinking, sometimes I to hers, sometimes the discussion would open up an entirely new line of country.” It’s because of their conversations that I believe Lee and Hohoff would both be thrilled to know the endless discussions and reviews the release of the draft has generated. (And accomplishes the complete opposite of disrespecting Hohoff’s role as her granddaughter suspects.) What could be closer to the heart of a writer and editor than having their work once again influence discussions about something as important as race relations?

Through the long talks and revisions, Lee’s focus changed. She changed the title of the book because of it. She began to develop a completely empathetic and humble Atticus (“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."). Atticus became the character who fought for everyone’s rights, who respected everyone: his children, his housekeeper, poor whites who couldn’t pay him, a black man wrongly accused (and the ignorant white man who accused him), and a reclusive, marginalized white man.

Another thing I returned to in my support reading was this, something that even the men who penned it weren’t able to implement: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Isn’t the Mockingbird Atticus the incarnation of this highest ideal? This is the best part about reading Watchman without guilt, without disappointment, without it tainting Mockingbird. Lee’s development of a wise, just Atticus, raised Watchman from a story, to Mockingbird, a classic. By the time Lee got through crafting her story she was no longer the watchman telling us what she saw. She was telling us what she hoped to see.

The Photographs of William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days

William Finnegan’s surfing memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life features multiple, small, black and white photographs between chapters. The author as a young boy in his parent’s backyard in Hawaii. Surfing Waikiki as a teenager. Surfing a famous Fijian break as a man. A girlfriend. Surf friends. They’re interesting photographs for their sparsity, darkness, and lack of clarity. Like the photograph of the Fijian island, a dark outcrop of trees in the middle of dark water, the photographs hardly tantalize. They aren’t meant to. The only reason I bring them up is because modern surfing and stories about modern surfing are mainly image based. Surf magazines are all about the pictures. The big airs, the size of the waves, the colors, the impossible places men and women put themselves in the ocean. The articles are equivalent to those in Playboy: they go unread. Finnegan places himself among the few surf writers whose surf literature is so colorful and abiding that images aren’t needed. The black and white souvenirs are appropriate.

“Surfing is a secret garden, not easily entered. My memory of learning a spot, of coming to know and understand a wave, is usually inseparable from the friend with whom I tried to climb its walls,” he writes.

Pictures play a large part in the author’s surf communities. More than once, slideshow events are held among friends where they laugh and banter and show off past feats. One such slideshow features the end of Finnegan’s scarier surf outing, where he and a friend barely make it back to shore alive. The last picture in the slideshow is of the two men sitting on the edge of the seawall moments after arriving safely to shore. Finnegan uses the photographs he mentions as reminders for himself, little moments he forgets, or ways to transition between his descriptions of his surf friends. These aren’t the photographs between the chapters. They’re stories of photographs that leave a lasting impression.

His friend says about the slideshow photograph, “I was going to put my arm around your shoulder, but, you know.” The truth is we don’t know. Only Finnegan and his friend do.

“Nearly all of what happens in the water is ineffable—language is no help.”

It isn’t that surfing is so insular and inaccessible that we can’t know. It’s that fear and the possibility of dying is so omnipresent in Barbarian Days it’s difficult to really, truly know. He takes us as close as possible to an exciting and beautiful life of surf travel. But that’s only possible because of the story’s characters.  It’s what’s left unsaid between Finnegan and his friend that haunts Barbarian Days. We can’t replicate that in a glossy magazine spread. It’s what we can only experience in story, sitting near death’s edge with a friend, staring into mystery.

Coffee Table

Two seemingly innocuous, unrelated events converged in my recent past. The first was that my wife and kids went to visit my parents in Ohio for a two-week stay. Without me. The second is that, whilst wandering the Internet, I came across an article called (something like) “Things You Can Make With 2x4’s.” I forget exactly what all the things you could make were, but I remember that one was a coffee table. 

You should know this about me: I’m the world’s worst carpenter. Except for the gumball machine I made in woodshop back in 8^th grade, I have never even attempted to make a thing out of wood. Still. A coffee table out of 2x4’s seemed doable. So against any sense of logic, I proceeded with the project using these tools:

• A small crosscut saw I got when my wife and I first got married, whose main purpose had been, so far, cutting the bottom six inches off our Christmas trees each year so they’d fit in the stand.
• A Philips head screwdriver that had been with me since college. Mainly used to open up battery cases.
• That’s it.

I made a trip to Home Depot and bought some things that I thought might be useful. Sand paper, woodscrews, nails, stain, lacquer and, of course, the 2x4’s. Certainly the employees at Home Depot thought (and kindly kept it to themselves) “There goes a guy who saw a thing on the Internet and now he thinks he’s Bob Vila.” Hampered all the more by the fact that my only workspace was my front porch (Come on. The saw I mentioned is a notch above a pocketknife. Do I have a workshop? Get real.), I got started.

Here’s something else: Aside from the fact that I just wanted to try something new, I wanted to see if manual labor, real work, carpentry in this case, could somehow be meditative. For me. I know it is for my friends who are good at carpentry, who do it regularly and draw intense satisfaction from it. The skin on my hands is too soft, I thought. I haven’t gotten enough blisters or splinters in my adult life. I haven’t ever physically sweated over an object I built.

The scratching sound of the sandpaper on the boards was peaceful. The rhythms of the paintbrushes, one for the stain and one for the lacquer, soothed me. The twisting of the woodscrews through the 2x4’s, over and over again, drove me deep into a conversation with myself, a kind of silent discourse beyond the range of words. I was getting to know a self that I assumed had never existed.

Sometime during the course of the project, I found a big moth wing on my front-porch-turned-workbench. As a monument, I guess, to this internal dialogue I stuck it to the bottom of the coffee table with my last coat of lacquer. Something impossibly delicate and silent, something incredibly hard to find.

I suppose it’s true that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks but maybe it’s true an old dog can find a new dog living inside his skin. And the best part is: now there’s a coffee table in my living room. When I drink coffee in my house, even if everything else I said here is total crap, I have a place to set my cup.

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.