what What Is is

I'm Not Ashamed

2011-11-06T08:15:00.000-08:00

Answer the Following Questions using only the song titles from one artist.

Pick your Artist: Newsboys

Are you a male or female?: Forever Man / Simple Man

Describe yourself: Everyone's Someone / Who?

How do you feel: Gonna Be Alright / Sing Aloud

Describe where you currently live: Strong Tower / Belly of the Whale

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Secret Kingdom / City to City

Your favorite form of transportation: The Tide / Hold On Tight

Your best friend is: Listen for the Shout / When the Boys Light Up

You and your best friends are: We Come Together / Where You Belong

What's the weather like: Taste and See / Let It Rain

Favorite time of day: Last One Turns the Lights Out / Breakfast

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called: This Is Your Life / It Is You

What is life to you: Something Beautiful / Real Good Thing

Your last relationship: The Way We Roll / Lord (I Don't Know)

Your fear: Dear Shame / The Orphan

What is the best advice you have to give: Choose Life / Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus

Thought for the Day: Be Still / Shine

How I would like to die: One Shot / Truth Be Known, Everybody Gets a Shot

My soul's present condition: Way Beyond Myself / Spirit Thing

Most Faithful Companion: Reality / My Friend Jesus

My motto: Love, Liberty, Disco / Woohoo

Voice

2011-10-21T01:50:00.000-07:00

[removed at least temporarily while submitted for publication elsewhere]

Tintinnabuli

2011-10-01T01:32:00.000-07:00

[removed at least temporarily while submitted for publication elsewhere]

Convertible

2011-09-19T07:00:00.000-07:00

[removed at least temporarily while submitted for publication elsewhere]

Jersey Arrival

2011-06-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

[removed at least temporarily while submitted for publication elsewhere]

Ever-Living Fire, in Measures

2011-05-26T09:11:00.000-07:00

[removed at least temporarily while submitted for publication elsewhere]

How to Provide Speaking: Lead-Ins

2011-04-29T20:14:00.000-07:00

Jean-Louis Chrétien (1952-)

The doctor slaps the baby; she cries. Thus commences a life of breathing. Whether breathing consciously or unconsciously, she acts: contracting diaphragm and intercostal muscles, she lifts the rib cage, increasing the volume of the thorax and, thereby, of the lungs. This increased volume results in decreased air pressure within the lungs. Since nature abhors a vacuum, air (which always already surrounds her nasal and oral passages, awaiting such a vacuum) rushes to fill the lungs: she inhales. By relaxing the muscles, she decreases lung volume. The air obeys its preference for low pressures and vacates the body: she exhales. She invites the breath, which nonetheless arrives of its own accord. Further, she is first provoked and taught how to invite the breath by another: the doctor, from whom she receives the capacity to invite. Who, then, is responsible for the breath? She herself? The doctor (whose own breath precedes him as well)? The air? In a similar contradiction, breath makes speech possible, but speech also makes breath possible, since breath necessarily arrives in a first cry. Which accounts for the other? Likewise, who accounts for them both? And who accounts for my faith?

In “Wounded speech”, Jean-Louis Chrétien addresses the indissociable interrelation and intersubjectivity of many apparent dichotomies: listening and speaking, asking and receiving, individual and community, and call and response. He examines these relationships by way of an analysis of prayer. For him, prayer is the religious phenomenon par excellence, for it alone opens up the religious dimension within which sacrifice, Eucharist, and other religious experiences take place; each presupposes prayer. Prayer is difficult to describe, however, for it takes many forms; further, it is difficult to describe prayer phenomenologically without positing the existence of the being to whom the believer prays, thereby lapsing into metaphysics. Chrétien manages these difficulties by limiting his study to prayer as an act of speech, asking what role speech plays in this act.

In the act of prayer, a person manifests herself to a being in whom she believes, but whom she cannot see. Prayer is an act of presence to the invisible, an anthropophany (a manifestation of man). This act of presence involves utter, unreserved self-exposure; it concerns the body’s posture, gestures, location, and the whole range of voice and emotion. As for the involvement of spirit, it would be counter-phenomenological to assume that the purest manifestation of the spirit is nonvocal (as some opponents of prayer assume), so instead of discounting voice as spiritually essential to self-manifestation in prayer, Chrétien asks these questions: “What are the functions of speech in prayer? What is the importance in prayer of (familiar) address? Why give voice to it”?^[1]

Regarding the third question, one objection often raised is that, if God is omniscient, he need not be told anything. The objection is correct; speech in prayer, then, functions not to teach God, but to teach and act upon us. “My speech rebounds on to myself and affects me . . . much more [than usual] in so far as it is not aimed at me”.[2] In a spoken act of request, we confess God as giver and dispossess ourselves of pride; we can only be dispossessed of pride in this way by making a request, which further requires that we speak to someone else. Speaking, then, in the context of prayer, causes me to take up new beliefs about who God is and who I therefore am. One’s self-manifestation to an invisible other in prayer thus becomes a manifestation of oneself to oneself through the other.^[3]

Spoken prayer relates to truth partially through truth statements it affirms. In saying “Our Father”, I affirm my own sonship (God is my Father), the history of salvation (God has become my Father), the Trinity (I pray to a Father who has a Son, and among them is a shared Spirit), and ecclesiology (God is not only My Father, but Ours). Since performing a prayer involves making such implicit statements, does prayer require that we already affirm what is true before we begin, or is prayer itself a struggle for truth? One common objection to prayer rejects both possible answers to this question: if we are corrupt, our requests are unjust and merely defer any possible repentance, but if we are virtuous through our own acts, we need not pray. To answer this objection, Chrétien points out that prayer is an encounter, which is a type of event. Events necessarily recompose us; every event is “epoch-making”.^[4] Whoever truly stands before God by addressing God confesses the divine holiness and is in this event dispossessed of all beliefs about her own holiness. Only in the encounter of prayer does one learn that one does not know how to pray.

This is an important claim. Negative theology, by contrast, claims that we know prior to praying that we cannot pray (because we cannot adequately posit who God is); this is what keeps us from praying, and our perpetually frustrated attempts to do so are the primary way in which we know God. Consider Chrétien’s counterargument by analogy to the process of muscle growth: only by pushing the body to muscle failure, to its limits, does the body become convinced enough of its frailty compared to the tasks it now believes it will again face as to devote precious resources to growing new muscle tissue. Likewise, neuron connections develop in my memory only when I struggle unsuccessfully to recall some piece of information. Only in experiencing this failure does the brain begin seeking a way to locate and connect the information to my request, sometimes suddenly surprising me later on by bringing the desired fact to my attention. For Chrétien, prayer that truly breaks through our limits can only arise after we have dwelt in and suffered through failed attempts to pray. In fact, every prayer begins with a kind of struggle to truly address God and have something to say to God. As a result, prayer is always thankful; it always thanks God for the gift of itself, which we were theretofore incapable of producing. It thanks God for the very ability to turn towards God. Our receipt of this ability presents itself as a preliminary answer to the foremost request within every prayer, the request for the ability to turn to God.

Prayer “does not begin, it responds”; as we become unsure of our own rightness in prayer, we are assured that in prayer alone our speech can struggle for truth and become upright.^[5] We invite God to rend our closure toward God; we rage against that within us which does not want to call out to God, against the rage within us. We become aware of our selfish reasons for praying, and we bring these too before God. Thus, prayer cannot distinguish between authentic and inauthentic motivation, and we always pray both because we are clean and because we want to be made clean. God rends my self-enclosure and my inauthenticity, my sinful nature, precisely when I address God. Taken as an address, “My God” does not mean “the God who is mine” (although we do sometimes use it in this way), but “the God whose I am, to whom I belong unreservedly” (as in “my king” or “my community”).

Chrétien here takes a stance contrary to that of negative theology, which holds that God can only be addressed aright in negative descriptions which renounce the possibility of personal address. In “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials”, Derrida claims that “To speak for nothing . . . is not to speak to no one”.^[6] And yet, for him, one must do so in such a way that “The promise of which I shall speak will have always escaped [the] demand of presence”.^[7] Against this, Chrétien claims that only in familiarly addressing the Other (and thereby positing certain attributes of the Other, which are surely incorrect, at least initially; in speaking for something) do I truly acknowledge the Other’s otherness, ownness, non-objectness. By doing so, I invite the Other, God, to become present, and God does. What Chrétien holds in common with Derrida is that, for both of them, God cannot become present in the world as an object we can control. Chrétien adds to this that God can manifest Godself in the world: not as an object, but through our own words and actions. We speak and see that God has spoken in us, or we act and discover that we have been altered from without. As with negative theology, this makes what we do learn about God difficult to put into words or doctrines (i.e., objects) apart from the experience of the prayers themselves. For Chrétien, objects alone cannot be familiar, and selves alone can be familiar. Familiar address, then, maintains rather than violates God’s transcendence, thereby fulfilling the goal of negative theology (maintaining God's transcendence) in a positive way. Even to stand in silence before this transcendence, as negative theologians propose is the sole appropriate form of worship, is a positive act with an addressee, not a privation of speech, as only speech can fall silent, and it is only provoked to fall silent in the presence of someone else. Only in saying You is the I “laid open to all that it cannot master”.^[8]

Prayer, then, is “an ordeal, an undergoing of God, a suffering of God, a theopathy . . . a prey to its addressee”.^[9] We address speech to the divine capacity to listen, which is always already vigilant and requires no call to attention. All we seek to hide, to justify, to excuse, is laid bare before the omniscient silence we address; in lieu of any particular spoken reprimand from the divine, we suffer all imaginable accusation, rejection, and exposure. This trauma (from Greek, literally “wound”) arises insofar as we address God and permit our inward confinement to be broken, creating an opening into the circle of speech and dialogue. Our speech not only responds to God’s listening, but consists itself in listening; only by speaking to God do we fully attend to God, i.e., listen to God. Only by thus redirecting one's listening can one cease listening to the murmuring turmoil of one’s own inner monologue. By listening to God in speech, we also listen to the new selves we have thereby become, to what we really want to say beyond our murmuring. This quality of making us listen to ourselves extends to speech in general. E. M. Forster pithily captures this idea in his question: “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say”?^[10] By speaking, I “see what I say”: by manifesting myself outwardly, not only others, but I, too, learn what I think. On the other side of the event, my surprise at what I have done resembles my surprise the moment after having thrown a punch in a fight: Did I really just do that? Was that me? It is now. My thoughts become my own by being articulated and concretized in language, which is inherently public and shared.

As we listen to God by speaking to God, God speaks to us by giving us desire for God, and God does so through our own speech. The newfound desire which we could not previously access is, as mentioned, an answer to the prayer which precedes the prayer, but it is also God’s self-disclosure to us. I do not miraculously hear some other voice apart from my own; I miraculously hear the voice of another welling up within my own voice.^[11] I continue praying in the hope that God will more fully inhabit my words and that my new desire for God will transform the desires behind my requests so that it may be more truly said that it is God who is praying in me.

In being spoken aloud and thereby made external, prayer becomes public, even if I am the only witness; as self-manifestation, prayer must be made external. When we pray using words, but silently, we still transform our thoughts into something public, language. My thoughts become words of which I am aware, creating a separation between "I" and "that of which I am aware"; by becoming words (objects of consciousness), my thoughts leave me and become external to me whether or not I speak them aloud to others. We pray before others; others involve themselves in our requests, and we in theirs; even when we pray privately, we acknowledge that we pray as part of a living Body (even alone, we say “Our Father”). Prayer blurs distinction between private and collective action: “Solitary prayer is only ever, as it were, a provisional detachment from collective prayer . . . and collective prayer . . . is rooted in the act proper to each of them”.^[12] In prayer we discover a unique mode of community through speech.

In light of this communal aspect of prayer, it is not at all antithetical to the “authenticity” of prayer to use prescribed words; in praying psalms, for instance, one lets oneself be interpreted by the psalm, remembering one’s own trials (to explain those in the psalm) and anticipating the fulfillment the psalm will take in one’s own changed life. This new embodiment of the psalm makes it one’s own. Chrétien goes so far as to say that we cannot help but pray in place of and on behalf of all others, of all creation which cannot pray; in showing oneself to the invisible, one opens an eyehole in which one cannot help but also see the invisible God and show God not only oneself but all that is visible.

What are the implications of this analysis of prayer for phenomenology? Chrétien maintains that we can intend and to some degree intuit content which does not appear in the world, God, and that the intention and intuition thereof are precisely the way in which God appears (or is heard) in the world. His account resembles Marion’s typology of the gift: by making the addressee of speech invisible, all components of speech (speaker, addressee, and semantic content) are called into question and reconstituted in such a way that speech becomes possible. We begin as self-enclosed sinners who cannot see God and have nothing to say to God (and so we lack all three components of speech). Yet this surfeit of impossibility alone results in prayer. The very preponderance of obstacles causes the break by which we enter the hermeneutical circle. If we could hear God some other way than through our own or other’s voices and actions in the world, then prayer would be truly impossible. There would be no wound, no lack into which a call could enter. But how could anything which is not manifest in the world manifest itself in any way other than through what is already in it? How could God enter us except through ourselves? How could God enter our minds if not through our own thoughts? Chrétien elegantly describes the leap into speech without recourse to analytic principles of adequate communication or to Hirschean or any other foundational structures of interpretation. His description also helps to explain a problem in Husserlian intentionality: how do we intend what we have not already intuited? Or, to conjure an even older problem: how do we learn what we have not already learned? The element of "always-already" in the eternally precedent call means that we have already intuited and learned, but not by way of an object. This precedence cannot be explained using the traditional visual metaphor for knowledge, so Chrétien develops a new aural metaphor (hence his focus on voice). He further shows that these two metaphors are inextricably intertwined; we "see" God through our speech, and we "hear" God by making our speech into an object of our consciousness.

Chrétien describes this process, this wounding by the call of what was in us, in a way in which, paradoxically, both we and God are inseparably co-responsible for what ensues. This may suggest a “third way” between extreme Calvinism and extreme Arminianism. All possibility to respond comes from God, yet we may or may not choose to respond, and this coming-from-God arrives only if we do respond and arrives through our own willed speech. God underlies our acts of faith, but does not coerce them; if we choose to pray, God may meet us there. This would reject the belief of Calvinism that God chooses who will act in faith (and that our desire for God, for those of us who have it, precedes our actions), and it rejects the belief of Arminianism that we are actively responsible for our desire of God. This is certainly an oversimplification of both positions, but Chrétien's aural metaphor for knowledge seems to offer new resources to both traditions. Chrétien suggests that, insofar as prayer finds and gives thanks for and on behalf of all creation, the kingdom of God arrives through our prayer: “The human voice becomes a place in which the world can return to God”.^[13] This suggests a third way between the alleged “social gospel” and the evangelical gospel of individual substitutionary atonement. The "social gospel" (as its opponents explain it) profanes God by claiming that we can do God's work of saving the world on our own; in the individual atonement gospel (as its opponents explain it), we selfishly remove ourselves from those in need as we anticipate God restoring the world in the future in some way apart from our own actions. In the "third way" that suggests itself through Chrétien (and which I can only claim to gesture toward), we and God are, again, co-responsible for the renewal of creation, God through us and we through God, just as our speech and breath are responsible for one another and we and God are responsible for them both. This new creation may arise, then, in similar cooperative fashion to the first creation, in which we first gained breath. All over again, in the divine silence which follows and completes God’s command, “Let there be light”, all creation listens to God by singing God's praise, the praise God sings through it, and thereby finds its voice.

^[1] Chrétien, Jean-Louis, "Wounded speech", trans. Andrew Brown, in The Ark of Speech (New York: Routledge, 2004), 20.
^[2] Ibid., 21.
^[3] Ibid., 22.
^[4] Ibid., 23.
^[5] Ibid., 25.
^[6] Derrida, Jacques, "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials", trans. Ken Frieden, in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Harold G. Coward and Toby Foshay (New York: State University Press, 1992), 76.
^[7] Ibid., 84. Derrida has numerous points of agreement with Chrétien; for instance, Derrida writes on page 98 that “the power of speaking and of speaking well of God already proceeds from God". We can thus consider Chrétien to build on and develop unique resources within the tradition of negative theology.
^[8] Chrétien, Ark, 27.
^[9] Ibid.
^[10] Forster, E. M., Aspects of the Novel (New York: RosettaBooks, 2002), chapter 5.
^[11] Chrétien, Ark, 29.
^[12] Ibid., 34.
^[13] Ibid., 36.

On the Death of the Last American Veteran of the War to End War

2011-03-05T16:32:00.000-08:00

Never again, as long
as I live, will I enter a trench,
Frank said of his century’s stench
and about which he wasn’t wrong.

Libya Clerihew (Or, Muammar M. Gaddafi, Will You Please Go Now!)

2011-03-05T16:31:00.001-08:00

Muammar Gaddafi
should try drinking coffee;

it's rumored to haste

the expulsion of waste.

Inclining To Congregate, Perhaps Elsewhere

2011-02-26T16:16:00.000-08:00

In early hours, light hums through the windowpanes
To clarify, ordering table, lamp, chair,
Distinguishing dust that ambles toward them, grains
In their delicacy remote, scarcely there,
Leaving unknowable what distance remains
Until the scintillas pivoting midair
Rest, or else are translated. Soon, light shifts planes,
Dust fades, a few beams slant through the room like prayer.

Back Then, Across The Stream Bed

2011-02-26T12:13:00.000-08:00

[removed at least temporarily while submitted for publication elsewhere]

Life Drawing in December, Late

2010-12-30T15:33:00.001-08:00

He itches to shift poses, but sits still.
Surrounding him, muted sea green
of wall treatment and a squadron

of squinting pupils anchored
on pencil points at arm’s length.

The old man volunteers his body

as a model for aspiring disciples
of the human figure each Friday
to gain a humble honorarium

and a moderate sense of belonging
outside his one-bedroom home.

Working to capture musculature

beneath the aging trunk’s layers,

the spark under wrinkled eyelids,
the sandy blond far behind him

feels her mind go to the immaculate body

she knows must be forming itself

alongside her front door stairway

as snow continues to fall, mothered
in a corner where earth, her own house,
and their stepwise liaison converse.

The soft December light follows the stars

to this accumulating drift, piercing its side,

plying chiaroscuro in its ridged countenance

until the final clarity of light
recalls all winter shadows to itself,
summoning the fallen body upward.

Apollonian Sun at High Noon

2010-10-12T11:17:00.001-07:00

The ant’s inscrutable path
Winds toward the sidewalk crack,
And she crosses without a look—

As if there were no crack,
Nor sidewalk whatsoever, nor ant
Except the movement of the ant—

Her sand-grain step,
Silhouette-bereft, devoid of trace,
Precise nonetheless.

Sonnet to Metaphysics

2010-04-03T22:12:00.000-07:00

(an outline of A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic, for History of Philosophy)

O Metaphysics! Whither have you strayed?
Your propositions none can verify:
No possible experience can aid
In answering your statements "nay" or "aye".
Historical and general reports
Prove likely, as all non-tautologies;
We even doubt disproof's assumed supports.
To mean is to be judged by what one sees.
That adjectives and verbs describe a noun
Makes substance seem distinct from accidents.
"Exists" precedes all attributes ("...is brown");
Misused, it posits things past what we sense.
Poor Metaphysics, lower than poetic:
Not "purposefully poignant", just pathetic.

So Many Stories, So Little Time: Peter Mulvey's Letters from a Flying Machine

2010-03-22T15:42:00.000-07:00

"He helped me remember who I am." This was my friend's answer when, during intermission at a Mulvey concert, I asked what she thought. The response is not atypical: after she said it, I recognized faces in the audience from his performance six months prior in another hole-in-the-wall venue eighty miles away. When Peter Mulvey's in town, art-folk fans come out of the woodwork. They do this because of the intimacy, honesty, and engagement of his solo performances: Mulvey takes the stage with nothing but a kind baritone voice, a beat-up guitar, and the conviction that songs change lives.

The first thought of most people hearing him is, "This guy is good." He's developed an incomparable approach to the guitar involving extended techniques, unusual altered tunings (frequently lowering the bottom string by more than an octave for percussive thump), and intricate fingerpicking patterns. He's learned to use the expressive range of his deep voice to maximum effect, often switching into half-spoken intonation and speech-pattern rhythms to phrase the lyrics just right. He's honed his writing skills over a twenty-year music career, with twelve albums and near a million tour miles to his name. His breadth of experience staggers: among other things, he earned a degree in method acting from a Jesuit university in his native Milwaukee; moved to Dublin, Ireland to perform on street corners; spent a year playing in Boston subways to make rent; narrated documentaries; and recently completed a thousand mile tour by bicycle. He reads and references Christian mystics, existential philosophers, T. S. Eliot, Billy Collins. Beyond sheer talent, Peter has wit, wisdom, personality. Now, in his early forties, he's hitting stride, writing the best songs of his career.

Mulvey's latest album Letters from a Flying Machine (2009) explores what has always been Peter's driving question: What lasts? In the face of inexorable change and loss, why—how—ought we to live? Throughout the album, Mulvey includes narrations of letters written to his nieces and nephews during airline flights, explicitly addressing the role of future generations in his search for meaning. In the first letter, "Letter from a Flying Machine", Peter reminds us that, in all our apparent progress and technological development ("They are baking cookies in the sky, Edgar!"), nature and spirit precede us; marvels such as modern flight pale in comparison, "because the sky is and was full of birds." The second, "...Plus the Many Inevitable Fragments", followed and elaborated by the song "Dynamite Bill", finds that past generations have likewise struggled with impermanence (sometimes self-induced, in situations where "you gotta make something go boom") while acknowledging their role in transmitting to us the things that do still last. Peter's third letter, "Bears", relays his niece's first encounter with the idea of human mortality: future generations, too, will face the Question. And yet, for Peter, they are its answer: "Vlad the Astrophysicist" juxtaposes the isolating indifference of the universe—Mulvey calls Vlad's anecdote "the single most startling thing anyone has ever told me"—with the miraculous possibility and grace found within human beings. Like the Teacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes, Mulvey investigates the structures of life that might offer lasting meaning, concluding in "On a Wing and a Prayer" that love, however fragile and apparently fleeting, is the sole answer. Mulvey describes the pattern arising from his inquiry in the letters as "time-time-time-love": if the passage of time overturns our achievements, our stability, and our very existence, what matters is not for what we live but for whom. The sole worthwhile human pursuit is trying (and failing, and trying) to love: "On a wing and a prayer, I don't know how we'll get there; we were just crossing the street, still finding our feet. But you're the song that I know, the only one, and so I'll carry it there on a wing and a prayer."

Although the album has a start-to-finish arc, "Some People" and "Mailman" stand out as songs to hear and rehear, to sing along to, to tell people about. "Some People" includes fiddle, electric jazz guitar, and brushed drums for a thorough Dixieland vibe—"I was born in the wrong era," Mulvey says—and offers a whimsical list of human endeavors and preferences, juxtaposed humorously: "Some people go to the synagogue, some people go to the woods, some people go to a shrink (and they think everybody should)". The song's refrain is a series of the kind of grunts one emits while shaking one's head and sighing, "Some people," as if to say, "This too is meaningless." Mulvey frequently opens concerts with this song to break the ice: he understands that making us laugh at life makes us listen, and while his songs are not sentimental, they ask to affect us. Hence Mulvey cultivates openness and empathy in the listener throughout the album to prepare her for the deeply personal content in its final section: not personal in a biographical sense, but personal to him and to us—things we aren't willing to talk about or be told about unless we know someone. In "Mailman", a sparse, melodic piece with an inventive lyrical structure, Mulvey notes the beauty found in nature, then contrasts it with the ugliness of self-serving politics and religion, in the guise of "the man on the radio telling us how it's all gonna be . . . especially the part about what God wants". He points out that it's enticing to accept these distortions as beauty itself, or perhaps that they do have a measured beauty by seeking good things (however wrongly) or by ushering from good intentions (however mangled). With both of these possible conceptions of beauty in mind—pristine nature, and defiling but gratifying nurture—Mulvey considers a third way: the complicated beauty of experiencing and accepting both piercing grief and profound joy, confusion and clarity, hatred and kindness. The vast powers of evil and entropy do not diminish the grace we experience in life, "the part that we can't quite name". Despite everything, it's "still beautiful".

Letters from a Flying Machine became possible for one reason only: Peter Mulvey loves music. Before he became a performer, he was a listener, and the passionate playing of others inspired him to pick up the guitar himself. Likewise, Mulvey's love for music saturates his own work, which enables listeners to love more fully whatever and whomever they love. This is what happened to my friend at the concert: when someone else shows you who they are, when they sing honestly, it reminds you who you are. One Internet commenter similarly memorialized the late J. D. Salinger by noting that, after she read Franny and Zooey, "I knew then how much I love my brother." Among arts, we often look to music in particular for mere entertainment, for mood-setting, or simply for a stay against boredom. Musicians sometimes treat it as "something to get better at"; social cliques and trendsetters see it as "something to set ourselves apart", making it a boundary against others. Art at its best is anything but a diversion, turning one aside from one's path. Peter Mulvey's music enacts conversion, turning us around: he guides us back toward our true selves, toward each other, toward what lasts.

Don't Look Back

2010-03-15T20:45:00.001-07:00

[removed at least temporarily while submitted for publication elsewhere]

Last Love

2010-01-22T13:46:00.001-08:00

After it's ended,
parts stretch on
unmentioned
much as the
favorite shirt's
untorn sections.
Threadbare garments
offer comforts
mending cheapens.
Such delicates
one hesitates
to sleep in
on occasion:
clothing
the more grown thin
the more one wears
longer worn
further tears.

COROT-7b

2009-10-15T07:58:00.000-07:00

There is a recently-discovered planet
permanently oriented to its star:
on its near side, rock boils. The far side is near
absolute cold. It's not a matter of choice:
I will not turn.

Digging Yourself Deeper [revised]

2009-09-21T21:02:00.000-07:00

It's surprisingly difficult
digging yourself in deeper;
bigger holes
require serious effort.
Rocks figure increasingly.
Rendering edges steeper
becomes onerous.
Dirt collapses inward
past measure.
Water spurts
from opened fissures.
The shovel hits treasure.
Passing six feet under
is no easy undertaking;
earth hardens
past the depth of gardens,
remaining unforsaking,
holding us
at its barrier:
the hole
in every failure.

Museum Of Answers

2009-09-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

Please Do Not Touch
reads the placard
beneath a canvas
wholly lacquered

in black acrylic,
Why there's evil,
which captivates
most people—

save a child
by the drinking faucet
trying vainly
to exhaust it.

I'm Not Ashamed

2009-08-08T20:26:00.000-07:00

Answer the Following Questions using only the song titles from one artist.

Pick your Artist: Newsboys

Are you a male or female?: Forever Man / Simple Man

Describe yourself: Everyone's Someone / Who?

How do you feel: Gonna Be Alright / Sing Aloud

Describe where you currently live: Strong Tower / Belly of the Whale

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Secret Kingdom / City to City

Your favorite form of transportation: The Tide / Hold On Tight

Your best friend is: Listen for the Shout / When the Boys Light Up

You and your best friends are: We Come Together / Where You Belong

What's the weather like: Taste and See / Shine

Favorite time of day: Last One Turns the Lights Out / Breakfast

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called: This Is Your Life / It Is You

What is life to you: Something Beautiful / Real Good Thing

Your last relationship: The Way We Roll / Lord (I Don't Know)

Your fear: Dear Shame / The Orphan

What is the best advice you have to give: Choose Life / Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus

Thought for the Day: Be Still / Sing Aloud

How I would like to die: One Shot / Truth Be Known, Everybody Gets a Shot

My soul's present condition: Way Beyond Myself / Spirit Thing

Most Faithful Companion: Reality / My Friend Jesus

My motto: Love, Liberty, Disco / Woohoo

15 Books

2009-08-06T16:28:00.000-07:00

These are fifteen books that have "rocked my world." I take that to mean books that changed my living and thinking or marked out a new path. I don't take that to mean books I'm only proud to have read, or books I aspire to like or to be changed by. I also tried to make the list in fifteen minutes. The list is ordered chronologically by my first contact with them, beginning the summer before college. I include brief, fairly non-specific descriptions of the respective encounters.

1. Selected Poems (Robert Frost)
First book of poetry I read, and it connected with me.

2. In the Palm of Your Hand (Steve Kowit)
Bought because of the previous; insight into poetry, drive to write it (starting a year after I read the book).

3. God's Passion for His Glory (John Piper & Jonathan Edwards)
Includes Jonathan Edwards' essay "The End For Which God Created The World," the first text of any difficulty I ever tried to read deeply. It made me want to challenge my mind. Along with Piper's Desiring God a year or so earlier, it also re-energized my spiritual seeking at that time.

4. Blue Like Jazz (Donald Miller)
Freshness that reinvigorated my faith.

5. Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (Douglas Hofstadter)
Still perhaps the most interesting book I've read; with its structural, linguistic, and logical play as well as its wide-ranging subject matter (and connections and analogies therein), it felt like it was designed just for me. It gave me a sense of awe and intellectual curiosity that I needed and have carried since. It's also influenced my ideas about life, God, the universe, and everything.

6. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
The first (and perhaps only) real magnum opus I ever read. Some of the ideas and themes have stuck with me: "In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. ... And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal."

7. Franny and Zooey (J. D. Salinger)
In many ways the beginning of a literary, ideological, and spiritual journey that I'm still on. When I first read this in the fall of sophomore year, I knew my life was about to change, possibly for the worse, possibly for the better, possibly both; and here I am.

8. The Essential Haiku (Bashō, Buson, Issa)
If imitation is truly the sincerest form of flattery, I hope my praise of these writers (and Simic and Ryan, later on the list) is well-received. I didn't know words could do this.

9. A Generous Orthodoxy (Brian McLaren)
A significant fort along that spiritual journey; my first formal contact with emerging Christianity, which I'm still trying to discover and, even more difficult, articulate. It's hard to remember the kind of spiritual fatigue I was feeling before I came in touch with this book and others like it, but more importantly with the people and communities I know who bring it to life, whether they realize it or not.

10. The Voice at 3:00 AM (Charles Simic)
My first encounter with Simic, my first major poetic idol. I ended up buying twenty of his books (reading most of them) and again relearning what words do, what words are.

11. Silence (John Cage)
I wrote a paper about "The Philosophical Writings of John Cage" sophomore year for my 20th Century Music class. It ended up paving the way to a major change (a change of major) in my academic path.

12. Jesus and the Victory of God (N. T. Wright)
I first encountered these ideas in The Challenge of Jesus, and maybe before that in The Secret Message of Jesus (McLaren), but combined with some other related influences, Christianity hasn't looked the same to me since. This is also the first serious work of theology/scholarship I've read, although I'm only halfway through to date.

13. You Must Change Your Life (John Lysaker)
A book about the philosophy of and in Charles Simic's poetry. This was my first formal exposure to serious (post-18th century) philosophy as well as another major contributor to my switch to Interdisciplinary Studies.

14. The Niagara River (Kay Ryan)
Poems with love and hope in them. That makes them sound sappy, but far from it; real hope can never be sappy. Those things aren't as visible in Simic, and the wordplay, wit, and depth in these poems is still tricky not to mime.

15. The Call and the Response (Jean-Louis Chrétien)
This book is representative of my contact with postmodern philosophy during my spring semester Junior year: namely, more intellectually and spiritually challenging than anything else I've read. Other books just seem boring in comparison. I choose Chrétien in particular for eliciting the highest concentration of marginal asterisks and "!"s, and because his work will play a significant part in my interdisciplinary thesis as well as, hopefully, my artmaking, spirituality, and living.

Double Dactyl #2

2009-07-09T14:23:00.000-07:00

for M. H.

Wavicle Gravicle
Erwin R. Schrödinger
Quantum entangled his
Cat to Life Five.

Uncertain whereabouts.
Currently wanted for
Superpositioning,
Dead and alive.

Double Dactyl

2009-07-08T11:01:00.000-07:00

Piggily Wiggily
Old J. D. Salinger's
Radio silence makes
Publishers balk:

Why can't he be a good
Vivekanandian?
See the bananafish;
All else is talk.

ants crawl through

2009-06-24T23:52:00.000-07:00

ants crawl through

his name—

my father's grave

father's grave

2009-06-21T15:41:00.000-07:00

father's grave—

ant climbs out

to my hand

lying down

2009-06-14T23:05:00.000-07:00

lying down
between storms
snow angel

kneeling by lilies

2009-06-10T12:48:00.000-07:00

kneeling by lilies
bending
toward sunlight

Digging Yourself Deeper

2009-06-07T01:43:00.000-07:00

It's surprisingly
difficult digging
yourself deeper;
bigger holes
require serious
effort. Rocks
figure increasingly.
Rendering edges
steeper becomes
onerous. Water
spurts from
fissures. Dirt
collapses inward.
The shovel
hits upon treasure.
We imagine
six feet under
fast affords us,
but earth hardens
past the depth
of gardens.
It marks
a lasting barrier,
the hole
in every failure.

The Late Bird

2009-06-04T16:52:00.000-07:00

Pecking
regardless, he
seeks what can't
await. He checks
his hardest. The
order of patience
he demonstrates
is unique. Is
it outrageous
to hope the first
was careless?
Is it ungracious
to guess she kept
head only
and the rest
squirms on
unknowing, when
this requires
showing? What's
as yet unseen
is left alone
extremely rarely
by those who need
it dearly. They
ever search
beneath, beyond
their reach, where
their worm
does not die, not
surely. They're
caught short
early.

Subterranean Forces

2009-06-03T15:50:00.000-07:00

Deep in the heart of the earth

There is a chapel

Where someone prays

Day and night

That things be corrected.

Somehow

The world turns and turns

And we barely notice

The slight upward tug

This generates.

I still can't cut it [draft]

2009-05-18T12:04:00.000-07:00

I still can't cut it
as straight—
inherited lawnmower

Mom warming mine

2009-05-17T16:55:00.000-07:00

Mom warming mine
as her own plate
goes cold

crowded shelf

2009-05-16T15:31:00.000-07:00

crowded shelf—
the book
stuck

Bedroom Pictures

2009-05-15T20:09:00.000-07:00

I have four reproductions of paintings in my room:

Picasso's Guernica
Michelangelo's Creation of Adam
Picasso's Old Guitarist
A portrait of Albert Einstein

In the last semester I debated whether the gruesomeness of Guernica is really something I want to hold near, see when I rise and retire, etc. I think it works, though, in conjunction with the others:

the suffering of humanity

  + the verge of coming to life
  + the suffering of art
  + the ending of a life devoted to humanity and art
  = my four walls.

[Edit: just noticed that bedroom, boredom, and broomed contain the same letters - apparently wordplay mode takes over after midnight]

lonely red flower [variant]

2009-05-13T11:43:00.000-07:00

lonely red flower
picked
by the red-haired girl

Pardon (I'm Sorry)?: On the Just Said

2009-05-12T16:28:00.000-07:00

One always writes in order to confess, to ask forgiveness.

— Jacques Derrida

It seems as though, when you write, you are asking forgiveness for a number of different things:

For presuming to speak and thus to presume you have something worth saying as well as to impose labels and meanings on others by what you describe; for requesting that others sacrifice their own time and meanings for the sake of yours, and that they sacrifice this particular opportunity for them to speak in order to listen to you instead. You are also asking forgiveness for those who do spend (and possibly waste) their time reading what you have said, and those who may come to believe or live what you have said in all its shortcomings.
For your life; by trying to make sense of your life and world and communicating that to others, you are seeking to justify yourself. You may also be asking forgiveness for the selfishness of this process of self-justification. We all face death and feel we need to "have something to say for ourselves"; that could fall under this category. Additionally, in the sense of memes and cultural evolution, you are apologizing for your life by trying to pass your ideas to others and to future generations; you are hoping to make restitution for yourself by planting these seeds, and again you are presuming that the seeds are more worth receiving than certain mutually exclusive words written by others.
For offering forgiveness to others within one's writing (as well as to one's own culture and world or others foreign, past, or future). To grant forgiveness, you must also ask forgiveness for granting it imperfectly and incompletely; forgiveness is always in process. This is necessary even if your writing only says, "Then neither do I condemn you. Now go, and sin no more." You are asking forgiveness for offering it where you shouldn't or can't or won't as well as for where you haven't offered it but should have.
For sacrificing all the other things worth saying to the particular thing you do choose to say in that moment. Anything you write is implicitly an apology to everything else, which is denied an opportunity to come into being and to be said; other truths and phrases are put to death. Also for choosing this moment to say what you say rather than another; i.e. for not having said it before, and for not waiting until later. Also for sacrificing all other activities you could have partaken in; thus, sacrificing friends, third-world orphans, and other noble causes to the words you write by giving time and energy that could have been directed elsewhere to your writing. Kierkegaard says, "The moment of decision is madness"; you must ask forgiveness for that madness.
For being unaware of the many dimensions in which you transgress, including the above; thus, for not being aware that you are asking forgiveness and thus imposing on those who could possibly offer it without you realizing that you do so.
For what you write being always and forever incomplete and in many ways unloving.

It's a little like offering condolence to someone. Anything you would choose to say is the wrong thing to say—a stale platitude, an attempt at humor, trying to distract the one in grief or pain by talking about something else or about yourself, sharing an "insight" into the situation (which you cannot possibly feel or think about in the same way as the person to whom you speak) with the intent of offering comfort; but it is also wrong to say nothing, and to do so would perhaps be saying something about the situation as well. To avoid guilt is impossible; we are always asking forgiveness.

This isn't to say that we don't also do good things, and that there isn't something redeeming in the things we do choose to say or write. We are, however, obligated to others to extend the same kinds of forgiveness we ask for and to be at least as gracious as we are grateful. "Forgive us our trespasses, as we also forgive those who trespass against us." We trespass in that we (presume to) forgive, and we forgive in that we (presume to) trespass (by being willing to incur the guilt involved in offering forgiveness and in all the aforementioned ways of writing, in which we ask to forgive).

I say all of this because (in addition to the aforementioned reasons) I am going to try to blog more this summer. A few reasons I'd like to do this (who doesn't love bullet points?):

A few friends are trying to get back on the blogging track, and I'd like the shared experience and solidarity as well as to encourage them to do it, be encouraged to do it myself, and to partially justify my benefiting from their venturing to say things by being willing to do so myself.
I'd like to do a better job remembering and synthesizing what I read; hopefully part of this blog will include summaries or reflections on things I read, and I may also write some formal reviews to be posted elsewhere. In general, I think maybe I should seek more balance in my proportion of reading versus responding.
I think it's worthwhile to try to present my thoughts before at least an imagined audience rather than simply in my head or in a personal journal . . . in some ways it's almost cheating to write only for myself in that I can make certain leaps and assumptions that I really ought to examine and consider. It's like talking to someone who will always agree with you; you aren't being held accountable for what you think. With an imagined audience, I can't always assume they want to hear what I want to say, or that they want to hear me out. I don't really like to argue, but I do like to explain, and I think blogging could encourage me to do that. Audiences also bring out certain kinds of things to say and ways of saying them that wouldn't occur to me if I wrote in a private journal: humor, transitions, vocabulary choices . . . inspiration is always at the mercy of conditions, restrictions, and circumstances; I think of things because they're apropos, so I need to put myself in certain situations if I want to get certain results from myself.
If I really believe the things I am reading are worth reading or that some of my thoughts are worth thinking and preserving, I will probably believe it's worthwhile for other people to hear them and interact with them as well; blogging is one way to answer to what I've read inasmuch as it calls me to share it with others. It's like how part of the Gospel call is to share the Gospel; I'm hearing the call singly, but it's calling to many (to all), and I'm responsible to answer for the other potential hearers inasmuch as I've heard that call (which calls to many). This isn't only true of the Gospel, but of anything beautiful. There's a lot more to say here, and when I get to blogging about Jean-Louis Chrétien's The Call And The Response I'll try to say more.
Also, knowing I may end up writing about something I'm reading causes me to read it differently. It certainly did this past semester when I knew I'd be writing philosophy papers to read aloud to my class; I'd like to retain something of that level of attention in myself.
Writing can, of course, be just for fun, a creative outlet to blow off steam. I'll be helping Freddy manage his blog (and Facebook and Twitter) this summer, too; sometimes he insists on typing his own entries, but other times he would prefer not to bother with the menial aspects of maintaining a blog (all the more menial since he doesn't have fingers). Both of us might be writing for The Poptimist soon, too, so keep an eye out.

Enough! Away with thee! There's living to be done! For a heads-up, though, I'm currently reading Graham Greene's The Quiet American (which I might let slide by without much public comment, although I'm enjoying it; sometimes it's better to pleasure-read without the pressure of having to say anything about it, but I may decide to later) and will soon be reading Peter Rollins' How (Not) To Speak of God and, when I can find a copy, Jesse Ball's The Way Through Doors.

This has been pleasant and professional. Good luck in the coming business year.

fallen petals

2009-05-11T17:21:00.000-07:00

fallen petals
caught
in my typewriter

kettle hissing

2009-04-19T03:08:00.000-07:00

kettle hissing
just as the kitten
passes

First Picture

2009-02-15T23:50:00.001-08:00

out of myth
strange beast

features scribbled green
with alien shape

out of pleasure motion verve
no thought of erasure

alone to the four corners of the paper
easily rustled easily bent

its face a smile

mounted admiringly with fridge magnets
long ago

long since removed
lost forgotten

others too
piled back to back

pressed against the whiteness of pages
frozen in it

many upon many
an ice age of them filed away

tonight in the stove it burns

after years a thaw
yet the ice does not melt

Rorschach In Reverse: Cha[r]les Simic's Selected Early Poems

2009-02-10T11:06:00.000-08:00

by Daniel Leonard

Watermelons

Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.

     "I once sat for hours signing my name before I realized I'd been misspelling it," Charles Simic told me before handing back my copy of The World Doesn't End. I have acquired twenty of his books in the year since because such moments saturate them: the times we stare at a word long enough to rob it of sense, the one or two mornings a year when the mirror takes us by surprise. In them our account of the world shows its seams, and we realize it has always been past explanation. Things are only familiar in the way of family: we are among them, we are of them, we are in need of them. The everyday remains strange in ways we cannot place.
     Charles Simic is a self-proclaimed insomniac: "The hurricane century tossed my bed around." Raised as Dušan Simić in war-torn Belgrade during World War II, he managed to escape bombings and military strikes, but not without witnessing the requisite atrocities: "My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin." He only began to learn English at age fifteen, and moved with his family a year later to New York City. Simic quickly acquainted himself with the sights and syllables of America (with an outsider's insight into both), but continued to speak in his native Serbian tongue of riddle, myth, and legend, and to think in cruelties and the inscrutable. This sensibility earned him a MacArthur Fellowship, a Pulitzer, and the US Poet Laureateship: "Have I been made the official match vendor / Of the great dark night of the soul?"
     In Simic's view, we are tirelessly subject to apparent meaninglessness, “History practicing its scissor-clips / in the dark”. But how does one move beyond chaos? Start from a beginning. In Richard Howard's introduction to Dismantling The Silence, he writes, "When we speak of writing as original, as I am bound and determined to do in speaking of Charles Simic's writing at all, we mean that it has to do with something very old, not something very new—it has to do with origins, beginnings, sources." In his oeuvre Simic follows an evolutionary timeline: stones, wind, and grass populate his first poems, followed by dogs and mice, and eventually people. A handful of these early works are "object poems," inkblot tests in reverse in which the commonplace sheds its intimacy and suggests something alien and uncategorizable:

Fork

This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.

     In later poems, ordinary images and tropes come in contact with one another, forming "tribes"; here it is the interplay which baffles. Simic compares these to Joseph Cornell's sculptures, three-dimensional collages of found objects arranged in boxes. The displays have an effect Simic calls "dime-store alchemy," a fitting description of his own work. What we call ordinary, we have ordered according to our contexts and purposes, but seen differently by way of juxtaposition it can subvert our usual thinking, even creep us out. One could criticize Simic's more recent work as formulaic, many versions of the same unsettling poem, but only as a side effect common to many artists who find a path and follow where it leads. As for his early volumes, they consistently surprise because they remain in search of a stride and can only look to themselves for advice.
     "Poetry is an orphan of silence," Simic says. By some miracle one escapes from speechlessness, suddenly finding words. They come out of nowhere, but cannot go back: their tracks are covered. Though they arrive ex nihilo, this very act destroys nihilo, the preceding void. Ask anything about this prior state, and you disable an answer; one backward glance, and home becomes a pillar of salt. Simic's poems watch themselves happen in an attempt to recapture through reflexivity the breath one loses by saying a word, the whiteness of the page that literally underwrites every scribbled glyph that covers it. It is the sound of one writing implement clapping, to mix a metaphor, and this self-consciousness lets a poem not only alter one's view of a particular subject—say, the possibility of love, or what to think about a war—but reconstitute one's sense of sense, that which colors all, the way in which one "chew[s] on the bitter verb / 'To be'."
     If this phenomenological attitude toward poetry intrigues you, John Lysaker's book You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense explores the way Charles Simic realizes Martin Heidegger's poetic ideals. It is perhaps better exemplified than explained; for this, look to the poem White (followed by What The White Had To Say) in Selected. It is the only long poem I have ever endeavored to memorize (I made it about halfway), and according to Lysaker it is "part and parcel of every Simic poem." It and the rest beg to be internalized, or rather entered; they will not let you out unscathed. I can testify to this, having spent many hours reading them aloud, taking them in by breathing them out. I have even set a few to music (most recently Stone) in an effort to hear them differently, to gain intimacy with the poems and ultimately with my own life, to learn to spell my name, to "go inside a stone":

[...] perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

February 7, 2009

2009-02-07T12:18:00.001-08:00

It is SUCH a nice day.

Clerihews

2009-01-19T23:18:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama,
an Oxford comma:
some prefer, some attack,
plus it’s black.

---

Joe Biden
needn't widen.
Cheney post-campaign?
Skip that train.

---

John McCain
ended up in the drain.
Don’t know where he went wrong—
fundamentals are strong.

---

Sarah Palin
beat the nail in,
glad to shelve
‘til 2012.

---

George Walker Bush
is out on his tush.
Hope it won’t throb
when he can’t find a job.

Reading Railroad

2009-01-08T22:32:00.000-08:00

Holler. It's a new year--did you notice? Something in the air. I'm packing my things up for Wheaton right now, and I figured this would be a good time to put a list of the books I received for Christmas before they get mixed in with all the others. A few other noteworthy presents: a subscription to Paste Magazine (from Laura), a subscription to Poetry Magazine (from my mom), a nice cardigan sweater, sweatervest, two t-shirts, and two nice pairs of socks (Mom), nice gloves (Mom and Katie, separately), Wall-E DVD (Mom), Bill Evans DVD (Mom).

A neat addition to our Christmastivities this year: my mom decided to participate in the "spend less, give more" attitude Life Church is propagating by spending less on our gifts and letting us choose charities and worthy causes to give to instead. I hope this is more in line with the true meaning of Christmas than Freddy's idea that "baby Jesus got nice presents and we are supposed to be like him."

Anyway, the books (many of which I found online used or cheap, hence the quantity):

Simply Christian (N. T. Wright) - (read) The best general-consumption book about Christianity I've read in a long time, maybe ever. It's unfortunate that the people who would benefit most from this (everyone) probably won't read it. I think it surpasses Mere Christianity as an explanation of the overall story of Christian faith, particularly to those living in a postmodern culture. I can't say enough good things about it overall, and would gladly lend it to anyone who'll be at Wheaton this semester. I'm hoping to keep it off my shelf.

Outliers: The Story of Success (Malcolm Gladwell) - (given by Laura) (read) A really interesting account to place side-by-side Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Creativity, as it creates a broader picture of success that includes not only personal characteristics but systemic aspects, heritage, opportunities, etc. This was a quick read, and many of the ideas and anecdotes are still on my mind. Two of my friends got this for Christmas as well, so I'm looking forward to discussing it further and figuring out how it's relevant to my own life.

Say Uncle (Kay Ryan) - (read twice, flipped through many times) A great book of poems. I find myself drawn deeper every time I read them, which is a good sign. How can her approach be so original/unique and so compelling at the same time?

Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (Douglas R. Hofstadter) - (about 1/4 read) From the author of Godel Escher Bach, a book about poetry and the idea of 'translation' as it ties into intelligence and human connectedness. He is a nerd's nerd, and this is right down my alley; the title alone is a pun about five times over. My honeymoon is over with him, though: he doesn't understand contemporary poetry, music, or philosophy, and seems a bit more opinionated and hypocritical than I remembered. Regardless, he gives me plenty to think about, and sometimes you pay better attention when you're looking for an argument. He makes me want to learn French at the least, and apply myself more generally and passionately to intellectual tasks.

Homage to the Lame Wolf (Vasko Popa/tr. Charles Simic) - A book of poems by one of Simic's favorite poets, translated by the man himself. I've only read a little of it, but it seems meditative--images that come together and mean not necessarily after lots of "piecing together", but after much reflection.

The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry (ed. & tr. Charles Simic) - Again, learning from the master how he master learned. These are poems with teeth.

Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell (Charles Simic) - Simic sees himself as the poet arranging found objects in little boxes. A good follow-up to my ekphrastics class, and possibly a good complement to Art Survey this semester. I probably wouldn't have bought this one on my own, at least not for a while; Merry Christmas to me!

Orphan Factory: Essays and Memoirs; Hotel Insomnia; A Wedding in Hell; Night Picnic (Charles Simic) - Filling out my collection.

Free Verse: An Essay On Prosody (Charles O. Hartman) - an explication, analysis, and legitimization of the tradition of free verse poetry. Recommended by Charles Simic. Douglas Hofstadter needs to read this (as do I; I think it could help with my IDS project).

Elephant Rocks (Kay Ryan) - These are poems that give you the feeling that they are good poems. Simic's are more deeply philosophical and reflexive than sonically playful and overtly abstract. Kay's are also more openly empathic, encouraging, and hopeful, at least sometimes. Maybe a cross between Simic and Miranda July? KR & CS are good poet-parents for me right now.

New Selected Poems (Mark Strand) - I kept picking up his books in the bookstore and getting floored, but not getting to know him in private. Now I have the chance.

The Harmony of Bill Evans (Jack Reilly) - A collection of articles analyzing Bill Evans' compositions. From the back cover: "Evans's compositions must be studied and played. They are rich and full of wondrous invention and genius. I get much pleasure from playing Chopin, Brahms, et. al. [sic] From Evans, I get a great deal more. His music is a synthesis of all western classical music plus the many years of jazz. He is America's Chopin." He's some kind of something, that's for sure.

New Years Resolution #31: Read these.

New Years Resolution #32: Still manage to apply yourself and be devoted to every class, especially the philosophy ones.

New Years Resolution #33: Learn to fly.

New Years Resolution #33A: Not on US Airways.

Eternal In Infancy

2008-12-21T10:22:00.001-08:00

Wise men see the child
is newly born and taught.
Perhaps by you and I,
perhaps not. His hand

does not sustain
us as it ought, we like
to say. But it will
find a way. Remember

in your kingdom, one
may plead—and
shortly he appears
asleep and weak, still

some years before
he is able to speak.

Tree

2008-12-20T23:15:00.000-08:00

Leaves leave,
but seeds remain
seen. They germinate
and blossom, often
quite a distance
from the declining tree
that faced the wind
and tossed them. One
may conceive of many
kinds of seed it still extends
to those who breathe air
its synthesis of light
once cleansed and any
who share its shade
or climb its height,
which, through its line
of descendants, reaches
endlessly. In these ways
even grief is wreathed
with green. Branches
do not terminate
as such—not here,
not much. Years nest
in them like finches,
whatever their final
upward flight
might ordain
or mean.

Living Nativity

2008-12-15T07:41:00.000-08:00

The cattle have been lowing incessantly since parts were assigned.
The shepherds, after spilling their first hot chocolates, keep watch over their frocks.
Joseph strokes the beard he grew himself but had to augment with marker.
The angels keep fixing their haloes, which can’t seem to stay up.
The wise men, who were acting out, have been separated.
One of them (frankincense) has basketball practice; his gift sits unattended.

The baby Jesus got colicky and had to be replaced.
The Virgin makes do with a leftover loaf,
Swaddling it close to hide its facelessness,
And the rest lick their chops as they think of that bread
Broken for us all on this cold winter night
In which the light of some new star,
Having traveled for ages, may be reaching us.

Lost Childhood Sketch

2008-12-06T16:12:00.000-08:00

Something out of myth,
this strange creature
craning its neck to see
how it sprawls on the page.

Its mouth lacks teeth
and proportion: an “O”
stamped loosely on its face,
overlapping the eyes.

Tottering precariously
on one of many feet,
prepared to topple
if not mid-leap.

Meandering digitless
hands—unsure
what to hold, or how.
The sheet is mostly blank.

Not that this concerns
the creature—its tail
would wag, I’m sure,
but for static image,

as it enters that single hut
which is nowhere near
the right size or perspective,
perched as it is on the horizon.

Bass Fiddle

2008-12-05T12:56:00.000-08:00

"I love you," said

through a riddle:

of delicate shape,

but un-little.

It is the songbird's

king-size cousin

who ought to sing

but can't and doesn't,

a ponderous bird whom

song won't stand to teach.

Its throat must reach

for notes like thoughts

for speech. Despite

oneself, one stays

to simple parts.

To play them

the unlikeliest

of arts.

Waiting Room (revised)

2008-12-02T02:40:00.000-08:00

Someone's little girl

With ears bandaged tight.

A lady blowing her brains out

Through her nostrils

Due to who-knows-what.

An old man shuffles to the corner

With a hacking cough.

The crease of his pant leg

Traces the crisp line

Of an obsolete prosthesis.

A boy with two black eyes

And zero parents quietly tears apart

A many-colored model of the heart,

Complete with intricate diagrams

And many terms in Latin.

You had only scheduled a checkup,

But the man with a swollen lip

And crutches is eyeing you

Like a long-lost brother.

"Be right as rain," he murmurs.

The moths orbiting the light fixture

In crazy spirals—they, likewise,

Sympathize with inchworms below,

With those measuring floor tiles.

There are differing types of constraint.

violin screech

2008-12-01T21:28:00.000-08:00

violin screech

(I have her this week)—

daughter practicing our song

Bass

2008-11-29T23:16:00.000-08:00

The bass fiddle

is a riddle. A violin

shape, but un-little.

It is the songbird's

king-size cousin

who ought to sing

but doesn't, whom

song could never teach.

One's hand must reach

for notes like thoughts

for speech. Hence

it's known a sort

of magnet-driven

transport, how the root

of each chord

repeated moves us

forward. The effect

is comic or eerie

when it ventures

a melody, like

watching an obese

trapezist: he suspends

our breath and expects

to tremendously

please us.

Here We Are (Hymn)

2008-10-27T20:43:00.000-07:00

In mercy, let your arms extend;
Through us, befriend the fatherless.
I AM has come in word and deed;
To those in need, Lord, here we are.

We thirst to see the hungry filled,
Injustice stilled and light restored.
From darkened homes, make families;
And let us be your arms of love.

II. Woman

2008-10-05T01:26:00.000-07:00

Flat against the far wall
of this little room at the back
of the Contemporary Wing,
you have no way of knowing

you are there, that your gaze
toward some target off-screen
is aimed at the wall on my left,
which is empty. The yellow curl

of hair grazing that jawline
I so admire looks as though it
could somehow be spun into gold
if I only knew your name. You

are curving your lips inward
as if about to face a mirror, or else
struck by a dull sense of tragedy
about to happen, and at once

I could kiss them—if not for the fact
of my body, since that which light cannot
penetrate blocks your presence... All this
just moments before the camera

must have closed its lens, and the room
darkens, though there yet remain quanta
of flickering film grain and a rapid click
as the reel continues to advance.

I. Zebra

2008-09-28T20:48:00.000-07:00

after Elad Lassry
Ever since the glue you’d been
dipped in by the heel began
to peel, you’ve borne this
contradiction, yes and no
coexistent. The only sign

of inner agreement
is your tail: it flicks
in careless circles which,
in this instance, are larger
than the loop of 16mm film

which projects all your gestures
in parts as the camera pans
at a close zoom. It is as though
a few blind men are grasping at
the disparate natures of this flank

and snout and deliberating how
they can be reconciled, only
I am each of the blind men
over the brief progression
of frames.

After The Exhibition [revised]

2008-09-23T06:07:00.000-07:00

after D. J.

Excuse me, Mister Judd?
I just couldn’t help overhearing
The silence in your latest work,
Untitled. It reminds me of a rainbow
In cross-section, freeze-dried and preserved
In monochrome, mounted but as yet unlabeled.
I’m as confounded as you, but when will you go
And see your stepmother at the Home?
She misses your piano playing.

You claim your hands will never touch
This sculpture, the ladder rungs by which
You could ascend to Euclid’s perfect world,
The only provable universe, if it existed.
So won’t you draw a picture for your daughter?
Today she especially loves butterflies.

Your desire to be and not seem—it’s as if to say,
Perhaps God’s bathroom could use some shelving.
A suggestion devoid, of course, of specific toiletries
(Which cleanser for the Necessary Being?):
Just green brass ledges for the Almighty’s loofah
And accoutrements, which I sincerely hope you celebrate
By letting your English terrier sleep on the bed.
Does he whimper at the door?

Somewhere beneath the exhibit, then,
Must be the shower drain, leaking into the earth,
Into the dirt of your garden uptown.
Your wife, who cannot help but put one second
Before the other, would so very much like
To tend it with you by her side, clutching the weeds
Through garden gloves and gauging the fresh headway
Made by the budding leaves which, Occam’s Razor aside,
Really are there, Donald, which occupy
The space between each of your boxes.

Why I Am Not A Poet

2008-09-16T08:39:00.000-07:00

(thanks, Frank)

I am not a poet, I am a garbage man.
I take what’s been thrown away
To a place where it can decompose,
Some of it, and become a tree

Or a bird again, some new instance
Of itself. I am a clockmaker,
Too, but not a poet, just tinkering
With a meticulous little device

Whose aim is to accord
With what happens.
I'm also a mathematician,
Proving that X is X

Again and again, necessarily
And sufficiently, no matter
What operations are undergone.
I have tried my hand at floristry,

Arrangements of lilies
In milky water… Once,
In some past life, I have a feeling
I was even an embalmer,

Searching endlessly
For the unknown secretion
Or rare plant resin
That would make us last.

Unfortunately, it seems
There is too much simple work
To be any kind of poet,
Whatever that may entail.

Exposure In Black & White

2008-09-16T01:01:00.000-07:00

[explanatory note: what follows is three poems.]

Bus Riders (George Segal)

Clara, Clara (Richard Serra)

Exposure In Black & White

after George Segal's Bus Riders & Richard Serra's Clara, Clara

Some time ago,
              You thought you were just waiting
To pass through
              On a certain street,
Parabolic trajectories
              The name of which
Nearly touching
              Still escapes you—

Would have been the best
              But, in reality, a clearing
Situation or circumstance
              Of the throat,
To bring us closer—
              Or at least a gesture
Until the doors open,
              Toward the ceiling

That is, of the vehicle
              Which carries a reason
Whose walls we imagine to exist...
              To curve toward one another.

Seminal Work Of Minimalism

2008-09-09T09:20:00.000-07:00

after Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians

We occasionally suggest this world
Contains only eleven harmonies
We are destined to repeat and repeat again,
The same in the Galápagos as in Bali
Centuries later. And yet,

We cannot help but change,
Giving ourselves over
To the psycho-acoustic facts,
Taking the duration of a human breath
As a measure of pulse.

Dust Between the Gaps

2008-09-09T08:42:00.000-07:00

after Donald Judd

In an exhibit in San Francisco
There is a stack of blocks
Previously owned
By an overgrown child.
Tucked neatly between them

Are their absences,
Crafted when his last toys
Lined the undifferentiated darkness
Of the chest, and he’s left
Even these behind.

After The Exhibition

2008-09-09T00:09:00.000-07:00

after Donald Judd

Excuse me, Mister Judd?

Sir, just a moment of your time

For some arbitrary points

Of interest to your public—

Having freeze-dried

A rainbow's cross-section,

When will you visit your stepmother

At the Home? She misses your piano playing.

Having shorn the idea of beauty

With Occam's Razor,

Do you still let your English terrier

Sleep on the bed? He'll whimper at the door.

Having sliced and mounted

The cross of Calvary

When the evens and odds were stacked

Against you, surely you'll answer:

Do you still put one second

Before the other, Donald?

What occupies the space

Between the boxes?

Babel

2008-09-09T00:04:00.000-07:00

after Donald Judd

Boxes cast in brass

And green plexiglass—

They are ladder rungs

To Euclid's perfect world

Of yes-men. Each is one

Of God's immaculate fingertips

Reaching through. Inaccessible,

Virtues in identical wrap

Cast dissimilar shadows,

Overlap despite the sign

Whose letterforms

Say "Do Not Touch"—

Which even the creator

Aims to obey as such.

Before Easter Morning

2008-09-08T23:58:00.001-07:00

The blackness of the band at the picture's middle,

Constricting the figure, is certain

To catch the eye. The source

Of light, concealed behind the backdrop,

Imbues the central subject with a halo.

Her two pastel subordinates angle in,

The smallest obscured by a scarlet thing

Yet smaller from the six-foot vantage

Of the photographer,

Who, in the image qua image,

Does not exist; without whom,

What it contains must cease to be.

What What Was Was: Summer In Review

2008-08-19T18:40:00.000-07:00

[Post in progress.] I want to write a little something--synopsis, review, whatever--about the books I read this summer. First, I'll compile a list of anything that I started and finished or else read significant sections of during the course of the summer, then sort them in very roughly the order I read them.

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry, ed. Bruce Weigl

A Generous Orthodoxy (reread)

Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices

Wonderful Words, Silent Truth: Essays on Poetry and a Memoir

In Constant Prayer

My Name Is Asher Lev

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The Secret Message of Jesus

The Challenge of Jesus

The Last Word

A Poet's Guide to Poetry

William Carlos Williams: Selected Poems (American Poets Project)

The Unemployed Fortune-Teller

The Complete Peanuts 1963-1966 Box Set

Linear Algebra: A Modern Approach

No One Belongs Here More Than You (read twice, second time aloud)

Jesus and the Victory of God

You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense

Modal and Tonal Counterpoint

Hearing and Writing Music

Dismantling the Silence; Charon's Cosmology; Unending Blues; etc. (poetry by Charles Simic)

Ready Or Not

2008-08-15T12:08:00.000-07:00

Come out, come out wherever!
You are the bird who bore me swaddled
Down the chimney. All I’m after
Is a feather. I promise
My eyes are still soot-covered:
One-Mississippi…

As I search field-guide depictions
For your plumage, you may perch
Comically atop my head,
Vulture-like, until your turn
To be It. Yes, you are mute,
But is your swoop soundless, too?

See these wax parodies of wings?
Just one quill would be enough
To direct them to the nest
Where your eggs rest, ostensibly.
If you’re south for the winter,
There wouldn’t be these tracks—
Would there?

Earlier today I caught the dog-headed god
Chasing old cars on the freeway.
In former times, the patron of lost souls
Would weigh our hearts against your feather.
He is now content to fetch the stick
Again and again, as if that were the needle
In the celestial haystack, the favor
Of a lifetime.

Domesticated,
Panting just like the others,
He is reduced to pursuing his tail,
The thing he truly has.
Too often to bear, he barks
After nothing in particular,
At everything at once.

The Prodigal Father

2008-08-02T11:46:00.000-07:00

prodigal, adj. 1 spending money or resources freely and recklessly; wastefully extravagant. 2 having or giving something on a lavish scale.

[This post discusses one of Jesus' best-known parables, available here. Many of the observations come from N. T. Wright in Jesus and the Victory of God; quotations are his unless otherwise noted.]

Jesus used parables to retell the story his audience was living. His storytelling invokes familiar symbols that show continuity and dialogue with an audience's experience and traditions, but often in perplexing or subversive ways. He welcomes listeners to imagine themselves as part of his story, and he asserts by implication that this is the story--that their choice is not whether to make themselves part of it, but rather which part they will choose to play. Even inaction has a corresponding role.

This parable (like many others) is "the story of Israel, in particular of exile and restoration. It corresponds more or less exactly to the narrative grammar which underlies the exilic prophets, and the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, and a good deal of subsequent Jewish literature, and which must therefore be seen as formative for second-Temple Judaism. The exodus itself is the ultimate backdrop: Israel goes off into a pagan country, becomes a slave, and then is brought back to her own land. But exile and restoration is the main theme. This is what the parable is about."

Exile and restoration are "the central drama that Israel believed herself to be acting out"--Jesus did not have to convince anyone of that. What his story claims, however, is that the hope of restoration is being fulfilled right now, through Jesus' ministry itself (which includes the telling of the parables making this claim). Thus there is an implicit comparison between one's response to Jesus and former responses to the earlier geographic return from exile: "those who grumble at what is happening are cast in the role of the Jews who did not go into exile, and who oppose the returning people. They are, in effect, virtually Samaritans."

Jesus is implying that resurrection, forgiveness, return from exile, "the reign of YHWH...were all happening under the noses of the elder brothers, the self-appointed stay-at-home guardians of the father's house. The covenant was being renewed, and Jesus' welcome to the outcasts was a vital part of that renewal."

The father in the story is being "reckless, prodigal, generous to a fault." In the peasant context of the story, "[f]or the younger son to ask for his share of the inheritance is almost unthinkable: it is the functional equivalent of saying to his father, 'I wish you were dead.' The father should have beaten him, or thrown him out. Instead, he agrees. The son ends up doing the job beyond which it was impossible, in Jewish eyes, to sink: feeding pigs for a gentile master. He then does a further unthinkable thing: he returns home, threatening to disgrace the whole family in the eyes of the village. The father runs to meet him; senior members of families never do anything so undignified at the best of times, let alone in order to greet someone who should have remained in self-imposed ignominy. The party is for the whole village, like a big family wedding; a fatted calf would be far too much for a single household. The elder brother, meanwhile, also shames his father, by quarreling with him in public, and in his turn suggesting that he wished the father dead so that he could at last enjoy his share of the property; but again the father is astonishingly, unbelievably, gentle. The story ends, within its cultural context, too soon: it demands a last scene, preferably a reconciliation." [emphasis mine; italics in the original]

It may be necessary to stop and take a breath here. The father in the story displays his love not only by welcoming the prodigal son home, but also by remaining faithful even after he tells the father 'I wish you were dead,' and also by loving the other son even when he can't understand the love extending to his brother.

Taking up the family inheritance, I imagine, is something like taking up the family name and reputation; what you do with it reflects on your upbringing and the quality of your parenting. The younger son 'bears his father's name' so poorly as to reject everything that constitutes his identity as God's chosen (which would certainly have been important to his father); if his asking for the inheritance didn't show that he didn't give a lick about his father, his actions thereafter make it plain. The older son in his turn shows that he is not aligned with the father's intentions; his complaint is less 'It's not fair!' and more, 'I have honored you, and my brother has not; you have been disgracing your own name and our family, myself included, by your actions.'

"[T]he parable of the prodigal father points to the hypothesis of the prophetic son: the son, Israel-in-person, who will himself go into the far country, who will take upon himself the shame of Israel's exile, so that the kingdom may come, the covenant be renewed, and the prodigal welcome of Israel's god, the creator, be extended to the ends of the earth."

Another important point in assessing the impact of the actions within the story is that "the whole village would know what the younger son had done, and would have told the awful and shocking story of his behaviour over and over again. When he returned, it would not be to a modern-style middle-class suburb where everybody (in theory at least) minded their own business, but to a peasant village which thrived on narrative. Not mere gossip, either: the community would order its life and thought by telling and retelling important events which had made them who they were...It is the world of informal but controlled oral tradition."

This fact helps to explain why Jesus would have spoken in parables in the first place; one can imagine his disciples being able to recount them after a few hearings. Additionally, the itinerant nature of Jesus' preaching helps to account for the various versions of parables found in the gospels: he would probably have told many slightly varied versions of the same stories in many different villages. This quality of oral tradition for the life of a community also explains why the disciples decided to write down the gospel narratives: around the collapse of the Temple in AD 70, the community which the story of Jesus served was disintegrating; it would no longer be told with the same centralized and formational purpose in the same context, but would need to be 'ported in' from outside. This is especially true as the early church extended itself beyond its Jewish borders.

"The parable only makes sense as a retelling of Israel's story; but it also only makes sense as a profoundly subversive retelling of that story...As a parable, not least in its manner of concluding one scene too early, it makes sense precisely at that moment in history when the possibility of Israel's redemption happening in this fashion is being controversially mooted, not when it is being climactically and publicly celebrated. The parable thus fits exactly into the gap between Judaism and early Christianity..."

Jesus' practice of open commensality--eating meals with anyone and everyone--corresponds to the feast in the parable as the sign of God's invitation to a new way of being Israel.

One last quote from the book on this (it devotes ten full pages to this parable, and considerable space to many others throughout; it's worth reading for the insights into parables alone):

"Dramatically, historically, theologically, the parable fits perfectly into the ministry of Jesus, as we shall be studying it in the rest of this book. Jesus is reconstituting Israel around himself. This is the return from exile; this, in other words, is the kingdom of Israel's god. Those with vested interests in different visions of the kingdom are bound to disapprove strongly. The strange announcement of resurrection, twice within the parable (verses 24, 32), makes excellent sense in this context. Jesus' actions, and his words, themselves stand in need of vindication. Is his offer merely a reckless gesture, which the hard realities of history will prove to have been empty? Are his celebratory meals simply an empty charade? He is making a claim, a claim to be the one in and through whom Israel's god is restoring his people. The claim is highly controversial. It points, within his own teaching, to a final clash with the authorities, who will wish him dead and act on that wish. Like any good Jew, he believes that if he faces this, in obedience to the divine plan, he will be vindicated. And the word for that is 'resurrection'."

Note that Jesus is neither the first nor the last Jew to make such claims, and that his vindication did not come about as would have been expected (he was indeed crucified). Many had claimed that 'the kingdom of God is at hand', and many had led calls to 'repent' in one way or another; Jesus' combination of claims, however, may be unique. 'Repentance' in a sense that Jesus often uses it, means "what Israel must do if her exile is to come to an end" (or "if YHWH is to restore her fortunes at last"). One important aspect of this in context is "to abandon revolutionary zeal"; Jesus is actively opposing a violent uprising against Rome (that is, the pagan oppressors). The phrase 'believe in me', similarly, evokes "trust in and loyalty to a leader." The way we use these words today belies this meaning, but take for example a passage from Josephus in which he responds to a brigand's plot against his life by telling him:

"that I was not ignorant of the plot which he had contrived against me . . .; I would, nevertheless, condone his actions if he would show repentance and prove his loyalty to me. All this he promised..."

The phrase 'prove his loyalty to me' could just as well be translated 'believe in me'. Anyway, the point is: "This was not simply the 'repentance' that any human being, any Jew, might use if, aware of sin, they decided to say sorry and make amends. It is the single great repentance which would characterize the true people of YHWH at the moment when their god became king. What is more, this repentance seems to have little to do with the official structures of the Jewish system. True repentance, it seems, consisted rather in adherence and allegiance to Jesus himself."

Jesus didn't oppose the Temple because of corruption. A common interpretation of his Temple action is that the sellers of sacrifices and the money-changers were extorting money or simply trying to make a buck, and that Jesus was opposing them because they had desecrated the Temple for personal gain. This probably isn't the case; Jesus turned the tables of those selling sacrifices because this would stop up the operation of the Temple system entirely. He didn't oppose it because it wasn't pure-hearted, but because it was now obsolete. His Temple action wasn't just to say "love God more purely," but to say "I am forming a new Israel around myself in which I replace the Temple." This action could be perceived as his chief prophetic action (compare Jeremiah walking around Israel naked for three years, Hosea marrying a prostitute, etc.), and in fact the culmination of all prior prophetic (symbolic) action.

Similarly, Jesus didn't oppose the Pharisees because they were 'legalistic', and he was proposing a new religion of 'grace' or perhaps merely a return to the grace that was truly intended by the Torah. Instead, the conflict is thus: "For the Shammaite Pharisees [the dominant sect until AD 70], the coming kingdom of YHWH would be a matter of national liberation and the defeat of the pagans. For Jesus, the kingdom was on offer to those who would repent of just that aspiration. It was inevitable that the two would clash. When they did, what was at stake was far more than an argument about the details of how Torah ought to be kept, the niceties of what constituted purity and impurity...The object of [Jesus'] critique, I suggest, was the 'zeal' that was leading Israel to ruin - and which was maintained and reinforced by precisely those aspects of Torah which was maintained and reinforced by precisely those aspects of Torah which marked out Israel over against her pagan neighbours. ... We have got over the old idea that law-keeping was an early form of Pelagianism, by which Pharisees and others sought to earn their justification or salvation by moral effort. ... We must instead accept at face value what the Jewish sources themselves say: these laws, with all their detail and specificity, formed the boundary fence around the people of Israel, the nation of the Jews. ... Jesus, precisely in affirming Israel's unique vocation to be the light of the world, was insisting that, now that the moment for fulfilment had come, it was time to relativize those god-given markers of Israel's distinctiveness."

There is much more to be said and learned, and in seeking and explaining what the prodigal love of the father (expressed in the kingdom of God) is like, I would have to go on explaining the whole book. For the time being, I will content myself to go on reading it.

[EDIT: In so doing, I just Tumbled an extended quote from the book on the concept of 'belief' in the call of Jesus here.]

TGATB Part II: The Knight is Darkest Just Before the Dawn

2008-07-20T23:24:00.000-07:00

or, Beyond Cesar Romero & Jack Nicholson

"Evil may entice man, but it cannot become man." --John Steinbeck (I think? and this is paraphrased...)

Why do I like the Joker so much? Less admiration than fascination and pity... Why do I feel that I can relate to him in some way?

The Joker is a person who has been annihilated by nihilism, by a (un-)seed of de-creation from someplace-or-other.

He does not seek personal gain--money, fame... in what terms could he define 'gain'? What good could it, or anything, do him? As the movie suggests, some people just want to watch the world burn.

This inner voice is what I imagine to be the 'accuser' who tempts Jesus in the desert as he purifies his motives for his mission: not a being bent on domination, but an idea--the idea of domination itself. This accuser never questions Jesus' identity, only his motives: must he do good things good ways? What are good ways?

The Joker similarly 'corrupts' another character in the movie simply by nudging him toward vengeful vigilante justice, something that couldn't have been far from his mind beforehand. The unseed is always there; should one dig to sow it, one will find it already planted. There is no need.

The Joker has no identity: no name, no relations, no known history. Heath Ledger may be the only actor (that I know of) to have successfully played the role of Satan, and I mean that as a compliment.

Demons (i.e. evil) will end up in the Abyss (the Chaos?) because it is what they are building. The only thing they want is to destroy God's work. It seems as though being sentenced to such a place as is ordained for them would be the outcome of their success.

This is at first glance a different tack than C. S. Lewis takes, and also John Steinbeck, that most of man's failures are attempted shortcuts to love. In this view, the demon's ideal would be to be loved. Which is more destructive: to tempt someone to seek love in shortsighted and cheap ways, and so to become agents of destruction, or to tempt them not to want to be loved at all, to let their desires be numbed, and so to become Destruction?

The Gospel According to Batman

2008-07-20T05:40:00.000-07:00

or, Why Everything Must Change, Dark-Knight-Style
or, Why So Serious?

[I'll elaborate later when I have more time, when I've seen it again, and/or when more other people have seen it so I don't feel bad about posting spoilers.]

What wondrous love is this, that caused the Lord of bliss
to bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,
to bear the dreadful curse for my soul?

[for the last few days I've been preparing a solo music presentation for church; I'm playing and singing an arrangement of the hymn "What Wondrous Love Is This" that I worked out for the occasion. I just did it in the first service within the last hour, and the second is coming up soon. I say this here because it influenced the way I watched Batman.]

We do not need a better world. We need better people. We only need a better world because it would create better people.

We do not need less violence. We need to be less violent. We only need less violence because it causes us to be violent: growing up in it, becoming accustomed to it, and becoming angry or vengeful as a result are the causes of violence. It is a vicious cycle, and perhaps a chicken-egg situation: does it matter which came first? They are really two sides of the same coin, the individual and the systemic; that's part of my point. But I choose to phrase it this way because I have more say over myself as an individual than I do over society as a whole.

We are the problem. Remove evil from the world, and we are still here. Remove all evil-doers, and no one is left. Remove the most vicious ones, and others will take the opportunity to fill their places.

People do not become evil (or insane) through the coercion of something outside themselves. All it takes is a little push to coax out what's already there.

Is the same true of goodness?

At one point the movie made me feel that I need to do something to help solve the world's problems, to make it better. As it progressed, though, I felt that better devices and problem-solving techniques--weapons against weaponry--are only one side of it. What we really need is to make better people. At the very least, we need to let people be better; we need it to be possible. Timshel must be made available.

How?

This isn't a question I felt that the movie addressed. It may not have even raised this issue, but it caused me to think about it. How do humans get better? Do we need some outside help? Is it available?

To be continued.

A New Kind of Jesus, Part I

2008-07-07T21:15:00.000-07:00

or, tentatively, Liberation From Metanarratives: Jesus & The Postmodern Condition

The purpose of this post is mainly to sort through some of the ideas I've come across recently, primarily from Brian McLaren's "The Secret Message of Jesus" (which naturally draws from a number of other sources, which are cited in the bibliography). I'd don't want to make too many assumptions here, especially since people reading this might not make them. I will focus on one speech Jesus gave in particular, known as the Sermon on the Mount. Whether Jesus delivered these exact words all at once or whether they're a summary of his teachings in general, they stand as a cohesive representation of his message. Whether Jesus even said anything like this at all, or whether there even was a historical Jesus, these words came from somewhere; regardless of how the words got onto the page, there is a storyteller or group of verbal crafstmen at work, and I'll examine their story with suspension of disbelief, entering its world the same as I would with any story, fiction or nonfiction.

A question as a starting point: To whom is Jesus speaking, and when? He's speaking to an audience primarily consisting of Jews in the Roman Empire, around 30 AD or so. For the last few centuries, the Jews have been occupied by one empire after another. Rome has been in power for nearly a century at this point. According to McLaren, "The Jewish people probably felt about their occupiers the way Palestinians generally feel today about the Israelis." Even worse, the Roman emperors declare themselves to be gods, and the Jews are devout monotheists. It seems impossible for them to live peaceably under such oppressive conditions. By the time Jesus gives his speech, several groups have formed with different perspectives on this problem.

The Zealots believe that the reason the Jews are oppressed is that they are cowardly. They should instigate a revolution against the government through violence, perhaps by eliminating one Roman official at time. As with the brave kings and judges described in the Jewish sacred texts, God would give the Jews the power to defeat their enemy if they had the courage to stand up to them. (Regardless of your personal beliefs about God and the Jewish Scriptures, it is worth considering their importance to the perspectives of Jesus' listeners, as well as to Jesus himself.)

The Herodians believe that Rome is far too powerful for any kind of rebellion to be successful. The group therefore supports the regional puppet ruler Herod, at least outwardly. The only sensible thing to do is to make the most of the situation by cooperating and using the empire for personal gain. Tax collectors would fall into this category, using the government to extort from individuals by charging them more than is necessary and pocketing the difference.

The Essenes believe that the empire is too corrupt to be redeemed or influenced in any lasting positive way, and leaving it behind is the only way to please God. They have established communes in the desert where they isolate themselves from culture and try to live in a way that is pleasing to God on their own. Perhaps they hoped their communities would serve as an example to those still in the empire, one which could not be created inside it. (In this way, the Amish Christians today seem comparable to the Essenes.)

Finally, the Pharisees believe that God has not saved the Jews (note the use of the term save, and the meaning it would hold for these people after centuries of living in corrupt and oppressive societies) because the Jews themselves have been corrupt; they have disobeyed God's teachings so extensively that he has abandoned them until they clean up their act. This view is understandable, as Israel's prophets (speaking for God) had predicted as much before the occupations began, and confirmed this assessment when they did begin. The Pharisees believed that more rigorous adherence to the dictates of the rules for living described in their sacred texts would enable God to send the prophesied Messiah to liberate them from their oppressors. It is understandable why they so despised tax collectors, prostitutes, and other low-lifes: in the Pharisees' view, these are the people who are primarily responsible for the Messiah's delay.

Those in Jesus' audience who do not strictly fall into one of the aforementioned groups are certainly familiar with their views, and are perhaps still choosing their own response or merely going about their daily lives as best they can, not particularly motivated to do anything about their predicament. As they listen, they will want to discern with which group Jesus aligns himself; he is well aware of this.

I think I am finally ready to approach the text, as given in the Gospel of Matthew, chapters 5-7 (the TNIV translation.)

5:1—2:
Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them.

I imagine a sort of inner circle near Jesus, with a large number of people listening from a greater distance. I don't know how easy it is for them to hear him; if they have to strain to listen, maybe they'll pay better attention. It is natural in this era for teachers to sit and students to stand, further reinforcing the practice of attentiveness in the audience (and indicating that the teacher is relaxed and comfortable).

5:3—12:
He said:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

If I had to make a list of All-Time Best Attention-Getting Openings, this would probably be #1. From the first declarative statement—blessed are the poor—I formulate a response: No, they aren't! Obviously the rich are blessed. The powerful, the capable, those in charge are the ones who are blessed. Where is he going with this?

Jesus refers to something called "the kingdom of heaven." Jesus is typically very evasive when asked to define "the kingdom of heaven"; he responds using enigmatic metaphors like, "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed," and "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field." Given the scrutiny the Roman empire gives to any challenge to its power, it would seem wise for him to avoid speaking too openly about anything involving allegiance to a different kingdom; indeed, he is eventually sentenced to capital punishment on suspicion of plotting to lead an uprising of the Jews. Perhaps the closest he comes to defining "the kingdom of heaven" directly comes later in this speech, in the section known as the Lord's Prayer or the Kingdom Prayer; he places it in apposition with the phrase "[God's] will be done, on earth as it is in heaven," which is therefore modifying or compared to the prior phrase "[God's] kingdom come." Anyway, suffice to say that in the moment of hearing the speech, the phrase is not familiar to most listeners, and none of them have a nailed-down idea of its meaning. They will have to look to the context in order to determine the meaning, as do I.

Jesus elsewhere defines his Good News (gospel, evangel) like this: "The kingdom of God is at hand!" Good News is a political term, usually referring to the announcement of a great victory, or that a new ruler has come into power. It is apparently very important to him, and so I remain interested in determining what it's all about.

This first section of his speech, known as the Beatitudes (a term referring to blessing, which is the recurring phrase or anaphora in his opening), draws me in as a listener as he transitions into a personal address, from "blessed are the..." to "blessed are you when people insult you..." For many of us listening, this is probably what we consider to be our experience; he even compares us to the prophets! The implication of his pronouncements of blessing is that we should be those things which are blessed (poor in spirit, meek, merciful, etc.). I will not go any deeper into the Beatitudes here except to note that various groups of listeners may have been satisfied, angered, and perplexed by different blessings, and if they weren't paying close attention before, they are now.

I am getting pretty tired, and I will pick up next time with "You are the salt of the earth." There is much more to say here that has been clarifying for me in understanding passages and progressions that did not make much sense to me before, and I do intend to say it.

One question to prime you for it: Jesus says, "If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also." Why the right cheek? (Why would someone slap you on the right cheek rather than the left? How would they do it?)

All Souls Cemetery

2008-07-01T20:55:00.001-07:00

What ever became of the place,
Of your remains? The dark topsoil
Sustains a cornfield nowadays.
All summer the stalks raise
Their leafed ears to the clouds,
Which haul by in silence.

I know it was there—
There’s the sign with its name
And No Trespassing.
Enforced by a lone straw man
Who looks crucified.
My, how the crows scatter
When a swift gust
Shrugs his shoulders!

Soon the farmhouse light
Will give way
To fireflies, whose flicker
Will not subside
Until the nighttime stars
Have a mind to arrive.

Wall-E Word

2008-06-29T22:16:00.000-07:00

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.

Waiting Room

2008-06-23T18:20:00.000-07:00

Windowless purgatory for patients.
Those who ail load into magazines
Until they can be charged
For some costly golden bullet
In pill-bottle form.

Someone’s little girl
With ears bandaged tight.
A lady blowing her brains out
Through her nostrils
Due to who-knows-what.

After taking up their infirmities
On a clipboard and checking
The proper boxes, they mark time
Until the clock’s nervous tick
Summons the Good Doctor.

An old man shuffles to the corner
With a hacking cough.
The crease of his pant leg
Traces the crisp line
Of an obsolete metal prosthesis.

A boy with two black eyes
Takes apart the plastic pieces
Of a many-colored model of the heart,
Complete with intricate diagrams
And many terms in Latin.

You had only scheduled a checkup,
But the man with a swollen lip
And crutches is eyeing you
Like a long-lost brother.
“Be right as rain,” he murmurs.

The moths orbiting the light fixture
In crazy spirals—they, likewise,
Could not have envisioned
This unseemly affliction before,
As inchworms measuring floor tiles.

casting the first stone

2008-06-10T18:05:00.000-07:00

casting the first stone
in the sand into her pail,
girl collecting shells

good vibrations

2008-06-09T18:03:00.001-07:00

You can listen to my recent piano piece, Valid Concerns for Piano, at my music MySpace. It took this long to post it because I just found the CD it was on in my Flight of the Conchords DVD case. It's hard to believe I hadn't opened it since I got home until now.

I've been trying an Internet marketing thing recently. Basically I spend money to advertise other people's products, and if I sell any then I receive a commission. Nothing sold yet. More updates on this bad idea as events progress. I'm doing it because I paid for something that I thought had to do with getting work doing data entry and word processing online, but the promotional information was deceptive (i.e. a scam). Trying to get my money back, but it seemed interesting enough to give it a shot and try to justify the mistake. (Update: got my money back, except what I've spent on ads.)

Tomorrow I'm going to Ocean City, New Jersey with my mom and Laura for a few days. We'll be back Friday or Saturday, although I think I'll have Internet access in the meantime.

I've been working on teaching myself linear algebra with a textbook and MIT OpenCourseWare. My main goal is to learn it so I can move on to some of the more interesting and fundamental concepts in higher math, since it's a prerequisite for them. Between GEB and other things I've been reading lately related to philosophy and music, it seems like math is a pretty universal doorway into the nature of things, and I am interested in the nature of things. What is real that cannot be known or understood logically? What are the limits? I'd like to know someday. "Only those who are willing to go too far..."

A family of birds occupies the hanging plant in our front doorway every year. This time around I got to see the baby birds in the nest and hear their high-pitched peeps when their parents came with food. We even got to observe the day they learned how to fly: the parents flew in circles near the nest to demonstrate how, and a bird at a time would flap around precariously above the nest for a few seconds until eventually they had all left the nest. They haven't come back.

I think it's interesting that bird parents invest so much in feeding, protecting, and educating their your, considering that the children will not support the parents in their old age or buy them a beach house on the Pacific; they can't give anything back. There is no direct conscious reason for the parents to help their young--it's just instinct. The only direct benefit to the older birds is to get their genes transmitted and the development of DNA continued through them. The main purpose appears to be the preservation and progress of their species, and really the ecosystem at large. In that sense, their lives are gifts to (and of) the universe.

There have been a number of occasions recently where I've stayed up all night (writing, among other things) until it was light outside again. I trekked through the woods in our back yard (which is mostly mud and skunk cabbage) to see the sunrise from the fields on the other side of the woods, where a country club is currently under construction. Since no one's manning the bulldozers at 6 AM, I have acres and acres of open fields and dirt-covered land to myself to enjoy the sounds and sights of the morning. Once recently I came across a deer inside the fence that marks the edge of our back yard. It saw me first and was on its way out by the time I noticed it.

That reminds me of something I read recently about the proverbial question: If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? The simple answer is no, it does not. Sound is a perceptual phenomenon; it's what happens in our brains when certain types of vibrations in the air push against our eardrums. If the question was about whether the trees make any vibrations at all, the answer would be a bit different, although if by 'no one around to hear it' the question means the complete nonexistence of Mind, I would still say the answer is no.

In summary, I like summer and I like outside.

EDIT: Interesting news article: Using parts from the PlayStation 3 (among other things), IBM has built the world's first petaflop supercomputer. That means it can perform a thousand trillion operations per second.

Let me try to give you a picture of how big that number is. In between one hundredth and one tenth of a second, it would perform as many calculations as there are cells in the human body. In four months, it would perform as many calculations as there are grains of sand on every beach and desert on Earth. In about three years, it would perform as many calculations as there are stars in the universe.

To put that in perspective: on a clear night, you can see about 5,000 stars with the naked eye. If they were grains of salt, you could fit them on a tablespoon. If all the stars in the universe were grains of salt, you could fit them in a ball eight miles wide.

And it still can't tell us why Pogs(R) aren't cool anymore. I swear the Collector's Series Puff Pogs I made will be in high demand in a decade or two.

Bowl

2008-06-09T12:26:00.001-07:00

A stack of them holed up in some cupboard,
In back of matching platters, nested soundly
In each other’s mouths.

Mouths that cannot close or even swallow
Are all they are. Inexorable lectors
In the microwave.

A stoneware lens to blind a roving Cyclops
And any telescope that finds too much
Or not enough.

Mold for a mound of anything, for carving
Craters in planets where falling stars vaporize
As they come.

The discourse of a solid with its hollow.
Both are expert in wordless paralipsis
Through simple circles.

In Tic-Tac-Toe with the Universe, it’s a stencil
To oppose our next X. She grades our shrewdness,
Aims, and pours.

A plate whose center sags beneath the infinite.
Its lips formed in a perfect zero, the one
Thing it can say.

I Have Many Valid Concerns

2008-06-09T12:23:00.001-07:00

At night they drip
from the faucet
in the next room
where I wash.

A drop wakes
me up and I take a leak
myself. The light
stays off.

Rain drizzles
on the roof.
A floorboard creaks
from the weight.

Following breadcrumbs-

2008-06-09T12:21:00.000-07:00

Following breadcrumbs—
the bits the ants carried off
have found a way home.

the forgotten clock

2008-06-09T12:20:00.002-07:00

the forgotten clock
continues to yell
its alarm

The Life You've Imagined

2008-06-09T12:20:00.001-07:00

Simple dreams were the first
to go. You dropped them simply
because you could hold them
no longer, your arms were
too strong to only
hold anything.

No one has picked them
up, but when you smell
them disintegrating behind
you, you will
think it is the pie
on your neighbor’s sill.

It is much too high.

A Bird in the Hand

2008-06-09T12:18:00.002-07:00

It’s no use crying
before they hatch.
Time flies
in small packages.

Necessity
killed the cat.
Even a stopped clock
is the best medicine.

The grass is always greener
but you can’t make it drink.
Laughter
is right twice a day.

Please don’t count your chickens
where the heart is.
Beauty is in
spilled milk.

Good things come
on the other side of the fence.
There’s no place like
the eye of the beholder.

Tabula Rasa

2008-06-09T12:18:00.001-07:00

The winter sun lower and dull. All its beams lay
thin strokes barely across forms; before they estrange
the day, you write. What it is you try to convey
sticks in place as you ponder the coming exchange.

Thin strokes—barely a cross forms before they estrange
the winter sun. Lower and dull all its beams, lay
sticks in place as you ponder the coming exchange
the day you write what it is you try to convey.

I am being told

2008-06-09T12:04:00.002-07:00

     I am being told by a homeless man what my eulogy will be. He cites “the deficiency in our ideas” and prophesies how and when.
     Of my relation to light, it will be said that I absorbed certain frequencies and reflected others. Indeed, many photons passed right through me.
     His eyes go bleary (because “reason is the slave of the passions”). From his bag he retrieves socks of mine that have long been missing, carefully mended.

Talking at dusk

2008-06-09T12:04:00.001-07:00

Talking at dusk about suffering. “We are ignorant of the ultimate principle,” someone says someone said. The firefly’s flicker of insight as it leaves my palm.