New Blog: fixities.wordpress.com

In the four years since the Xanga Exodus, this blog has served me well. But it's time to move on.

My new virtual home is fixities.wordpress.com. Update your bookmarks/RSS/whatever; I don't foresee much further use for What What Is Is, faithful though it's been.

Why new? Why now? The main reason is that I want to use my blog to share writing with friends and acquaintances online, but often the places I'm trying to get the writing published won't permit it to appear in any other published media, including a publicly available blog. On Wordpress I can request that search engines not index my site, which I hope will let me share words with my peeps under Google's radar. I'll have to make the new blog either invite-only or password-protected if it doesn't. At any rate, I have more control over that kind of thing at Wordpress. Be forewarned that the RSS might be inundated with posts at the beginning here as I edit things and figure out how to arrange the site.

Thanks for playing,

Daniel

How the Seuss Earned His Doctorate: Doffing My Hat to the Cat

For anyone who thinks Ted Geisel dashed off a book in the course of a weekend and passed the rest of his time lounging in Lake Tahoe, let me draw your attention to a two-page spread I chose at random from The Cat in the Hat. Seuss spent nine months writing the book, and it sparked a revolution in children’s literature, selling over eleven million copies to date. I’ll be suggesting here that the long-overdue dignity and verve Seuss brought to child lit are the results of careful, considerate, and often ingenious craftsmanship. The unique needs of a beginning reader place a multitude of demands on a book at each moment of her experience with it. To inspire her to read more and better, the book must request, hold, and reward her sustained, attentive effort. The author must both discern these demands and meet them consistently. The formal parameters of children’s lit are so rigorous that the other first-grade reading primers of Geisel's day were either stale or frustrating to read. In a 1954 article, educator John Hersey described the sorry state of American reading instruction and called on Dr. Seuss by name, asking him to try to write a better instructional text. The Cat in the Hat, Seuss's answer to the challenge, isn't just sufficient; it's spellbinding. Here's how.

First of all, some general features of the book worth noting:

—It contains only 236 distinct words (223 of which were drawn from a list Geisel was given containing 348 words every six-year-old should know) yet is 1629 words in length (72 pages).

—Of those words, 221 are monosyllabic and 14 have two syllables. The only trisyllabic word is “another.”

—Only two colored inks are used (red and blue), although in varying shades; combined skillfully with the black ink and the white of the page, Geisel gives the impression of employing far more colors than the lithography process then available could manage.

—The major concern of the book is to provide American children with a primer that is all the more effective for being interesting (versus the status quo, viz. Dick and Jane seeing Spot run). Seuss is also well aware of the most significant realizations beginning readers need to reach: 1) a book is not merely a colorful toy (i.e., not intended to be put in one’s mouth, thrown, etc.), and 2) the words on the page are not merely part of the picture.

—The book is mostly written in anapestic dimeter, with either abcb quatrains or rhyming couplets. The unusual plodding quality of the rhythmic triplets draws attention to the pattern in such a way that the child can 1) clearly hear which syllables in the sentence are accented (so as to parse it properly and learn how to pronounce words) and 2) anticipate upcoming parsings and pronunciations as she reads. When Seuss first employs a given word in the course of the story, he often does so by rhyming it with a word he’s already introduced; that way the reader can correctly guess the pronunciation of the new word.

—Seuss set out with the goal of making each page end in a “cliff-hanger” (suspense) of some kind, so as to motivate the child to keep reading to the end of the book. Both the rhyme and the meter pull the child along as well.

Now, regarding the two-page spread reproduced above:

—The introduction of the word “NOW” as a culminating addition in the third repetition of the phrase “Look at me” helps to clarify the function of “NOW” as an adverb modifying the command “Look.” If the page had merely started, “Look at me now!” the six-year-old reader would have far more difficulty parsing the sentence and might well be discouraged from continuing to read the rest of the page. The fact that the word “NOW” is intensified in aural effect by the repetition helps to convey the sense that its linguistic effect is to intensify the command “Look at me.”

—”It is fun to have fun” uses the same word as both a noun and a verb. To its original 1957 audience, the latter use suggests silliness whereas the former suggests enjoyment, so the word is also being shown to have multiple senses. A child who reads this sentence is inaugurated into the enjoyment of playing with language; she might invent all kinds of uses for a word if she puts her mind to it—”you have to know how.”

—Note that this page is part of a cumulative plot element in which the Cat is balancing gradually more and more objects, each of which the child has the opportunity to identify visually when it’s first introduced textually and then keep track of it as it reappears on each page.

—The precariousness of the situation is heightened by the fact that most of the objects the Cat is balancing are breakable, and the humor is heightened by the fact that they are functional. The reader is prompted to recognize for herself that the fish bowl could break and that the rake, the milk, etc., are not usually used as mere toys. When a child gets the joke thanks to her own prior observations about milk and rakes, her own sustained attention not only to the book but to all of life is rewarded and encouraged.

—I mentioned earlier that Seuss wants to make sure kids learn that books are not mere toys; thus, Seuss is careful to have the Cat balance many other functional objects as well as the books to ensure that the Cat’s book-balancing here doesn’t suggest to young readers that such behavior is what books are intended for.

—The Cat’s action is both subversive (he’s not supposed to do that!) and perceptive (even though we don’t usually do that, we COULD!). The Cat’s central message in the book is that the children (who were bored until he arrived) can be endlessly entertained if only they employ their own boundless potential to observe and interact with what’s around them. It's crucial that the children are left with a choice as to whether tell their parents about the Cat at the end of the book; this way, it's clear that the world they find in their imaginations is uniquely their own.

—The text is clearly separated from the drawing and (as in most cases in the book) sits on the left page to suggest that one reads text from left to right. The children appear in the lower left corner both to suggest their passive, spectatorial role in the scene and their identification with the reader. Their and the fish’s awed expressions confirm the attitude the reader takes toward the Cat, to whom all their eyes are pointing. They both help the reader to be more confident in her emotional response by mirroring it and show her where to look on the page. Imagine how confusing this scene might be for a small child if her eye weren’t drawn in so many ways to the Cat as its central element. See also how pleasing it can be for a small child to approach this visual cacophony with the ability (thanks to the text of the book) to identify and name all the objects that appear in it.

—Notice the variety of sentence structures that appear on just this one page: commands (“Look at me!”); a compound conditional (“It is fun…but you have to know”); fragments (“And the fish on a rake!”—which helps the reader to parse the command “And look!” when it appears a few lines later); a sentence with an introductory prepositional phrase (“With my tail I can hold…”); and an interjection (“Oh, no.”). The sentence lengths vary widely, too; the reader is kept interested with complex variety, but in a way that remains always within her grasp. She is shown her own capacity to understand ever more.

—”I can fan with the fan!” uses the same word in two ways in the same sentence, just like “It is fun to have fun”—and the reader is alerted to this by how similar the two sentences sound.

—I leave it to an art critic to draw out the subtleties of the illustration, but I’ll at least note that the way the Cat “holds up” the objects here is clearly not “balancing” them: he is doomed (realistically, at least) to collapse at any moment (the books, for instance, are touching neither each other nor the gloved thumb upon which they presumably rested a moment ago). The anticipation of the astute reader is rewarded when on the next page he does indeed fall. The cliff-hanger in the text (“That is not all… .”) urges the reader to turn the page to find out how the situation resolves; the reader thinks, “How could that possibly not be all?! If the Cat tries to balance anything else, he’ll fall over!” On the next page, the reader can say to herself, “Look, I was right!” I say “to herself” because this is a book which, with a little initial parental prompting, a child can use to teach herself to read. It doesn’t get much more empowering and affirming for a child than to be able to spend some time on her own working with the book and then to report back to her parents, showing them what she’s become able to do all on her own.

—Okay, one other art-crit observation: imagine a line through each depicted object and limb suggesting the direction it’s pointing. The scene is boundlessly dynamic. It’s full of the energy the Cat aims to bring to the children, who had been static at the beginning of the book but are now angled forward in breathless anticipation—as, thanks to Seuss, is the reader.

Some ideas presented above come from Ruth K. MacDonald, Dr. Seuss (Boston: Twayne, 1988), 116-123.

I'm Not Ashamed

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

[removed at least temporarily while submitted for publication elsewhere]

Tintinnabuli

[removed at least temporarily while submitted for publication elsewhere]

Convertible

[removed at least temporarily while submitted for publication elsewhere]

Jersey Arrival

[removed at least temporarily while submitted for publication elsewhere]

Ever-Living Fire, in Measures

[removed at least temporarily while submitted for publication elsewhere]

How to Provide Speaking: Lead-Ins

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

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!)

Muammar Gaddafi
should try drinking coffee;

it's rumored to haste

the expulsion of waste.

Inclining To Congregate, Perhaps Elsewhere

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

[removed at least temporarily while submitted for publication elsewhere]

Life Drawing in December, Late

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

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

(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

"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

[removed at least temporarily while submitted for publication elsewhere]

Last Love

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

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.