Wall-E Word

Wall-E is brilliant.



EDIT: It occurs to me that one might ask, "How so?" The best way to find out is to go see it. Once I've seen it again, maybe I'll do a little write-up of The Gospel According To Wall-E or something.

On Wednesday night, I'm starting a discussion group at my house on A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren. I think there will be about five or six people for the first meeting, and I'm really hoping for a good discussion. On Sunday, the young adult program at my church is starting a 3-part series on Christianity in the Postmodern World, which should give people some additional insight into how the ideas in the book are relevant to their spiritual formation, mission, and so on.

This should give you a good idea of what I've been doing lately:



[screenshot from the Facebook Typing Speed application page, "Today's Top Typists"] All those years of Type to Learn and instant messaging paid off. Now Freddy will have to stop gloating about beating me without even having any fingers. He managed about 132wpm.

I am doing other things, though. Today I learned about Markov chains, digraphs, and error-correcting codes, in addition to practicing some music and reading the first section of Dismantling The Silence, an early Charles Simic book I found online for a few dollars(!). It includes his "object poems," among others from What The Grass Says and Somewhere Among Us A Stone Is Taking Notes. His books (and poems) have the best titles...the one that came out after this one is Return To A Place Lit By A Glass Of Milk.

I'm currently hoping to memorize his long poem "White", or at least a representative portion. Here's what I've got so far:

White

A New Version: 1980

What is that little black thing I see there in the white?
Walt Whitman

One

Out of poverty
To begin again:

With the color of the bride
And that of blindness,

Touch what I can
Of the quick,

Speak and then wait,
As if this light

Will continue to linger
On the threshold.


All that is near,
I no longer give it a name.

Once a stone hard of hearing,
Once sharpened into a knife...

Now only a chill
Slipping through.

Enough glow to kneel by and ask
To be tied to its tail

When it goes marrying
Its cousins, the stars.


Is it a cloud?
If it's a cloud it will move on.

The true shape of this thought,
Migrant, waning.

Something seeks someone,
It bears him a gift

Of himself, a bit
Of snow to taste,

Glimpse of his own nakedness
By which to imagine the face.

[...]

It's formatted into two sections, each composed of ten sets of five two-line stanzas (so 100 lines per section); the sets are a bit like cycles of smaller poems. This is followed by "What The White Had To Say", which is in two twenty-line stanzas. It's introduced by a quote from Meister Eckhart: "For how could anything white be distinct from or divided from whiteness?" You can read the whole poem here, if you care to.