"memory takes a lot of poetic license. it omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart." :tennessee williams, "the glass menagerie"
8.10.2018
Reading from Rowan Williams tonight, while Jenni and the children sleep behind their doors.
“You have an identity,” Williams says, “not because you have invented one, or because you have a little hard core of selfhood that is unchanged, but because you have a witness of who you are. What you don’t understand or see, the bits of yourself you can’t pull together in a convincing story, are all held in a single gaze of love.”All the disconnected, disparate events and images of our lives, Williams says, are a string “twitched by the divine observer, the divine witness.”
And then thought of Luxury, as I often do, and “Courage, Courage”:
Who painted all those ugly pictures hanging on the walls?
It says I did, I don’t remember it
What are all these pages with the corners always folded? The cursive looks familiar, all written out in pen I can’t read it, it makes no sense
Who am I? he’s asking. What’s all this stuff I’ve made? I don’t even remember doing it. It makes no sense. “There’s really nothing there at all.” And then his ordination to the priesthood:
They laid hands on my head to complete what was lacking “Oh, Lee, raise up your mind! I have shown you the meaning!” I know you did, and I remember it
My own ordination looms closer and closer, to the Anglican diaconate. Part of me shrinks back from it. It’s a new identity, a new name. It will demand of me something I’m still afraid to give: myself, whatever identity I think I’ve made. A disparate jumble of events and images, projections, demonstrations. “There’s really nothing there at all.”
Meanwhile the days are full, the nights too short. The children smile and laugh and talk; they fill me with aching joy, and with lots of self-doubt too.
We’re moving in a month, to a house across town. There’s a patio, and a lovely backyard: rosebushes, geraniums, an enormous oak tree. I'm going to build a bird feeder and put it outside the kitchen window.
I try to read more, in the evenings, when the television doesn’t get to us first. I re-read Godric by Buechner, and a little book on
Rowan Williams’s theology. I read Ta-Nahesi Coates and John Webster, and a book
about refugees called Assimilate or Go
Home. The Webster is bracing, thoroughly Christian and wonderfully
undefensive. Canon, he says, is in “the sphere of dogmatics: of faith, church,
creed, prayer, holiness.” So beautifully simple. A friend tells me that he once
went through a Webster phase, too, but that he’s not one of his fan-boys like
so many these days. I’m not sure what to say to that.
I like my
job. I find myself thinking about it more and more, at night when I can’t sleep.
It’s looking like we may settle down in Highwood for the
foreseeable future. The kids are in school, in a Spanish-English
program, and doing well. Our church just bought a building in Highwood, too, an
old Swedish Methodist church just a few minutes’ walk from where we live. I like to walk past it when I walk with Aiden. We peek in the dirty windows and look up at the steeple.
I do love
Highwood. I love walking in it, seeing the trees, the little yards, all the small, old houses
in their grey rows. I love that everyone walks everywhere, and I love the
rundown little park beside the Catholic church where my kids like to swing. Maybe
we’ll buy a house soon and start to make Highwood our home. I’d like that.
Just back from a few days in Orlando at a
conference for work. Sunny, mid-seventies, a gentle breeze. I spent a couple of
hours by the hotel pool, with bare feet and sunglasses on, and finished Alan
Jacobs’s history of the Book of Common Prayer.
Then back to Chicago, to 6 degrees Fahrenheit and the heaps of gray snow.
I enjoyed the Jacobs immensely. History and
theology, lovely strong words, and controversy about worship. The BCP is very beautiful and I’m grateful
to God for it. Of course its provenance is a messy story. It’s sad to find
that the words that mean so much to me as "the tradition" are derided by the traditionalists. That’s
irony for you.
Tonight I have to go to a pub and talk about
confession. That would probably sound like a nice evening to lots of people,
but it feels very uncomfortable to me. I’d rather talk in a church, without beer. I’m going to work in the line, “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ
said ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”
I tried to listen to David Bazan’s album “Curse Your
Branches” this morning but I couldn’t get through it. It doesn’t make me angsty,
or interested, or angry. It just makes me bored, and a little sad. Most of it
is just meaningless words. "There's really nothing there at all." Such snappy tunes though.
So I put on some new songs by the Clientele instead,
and they worked just fine.
Pretty unremarkable the days are being. Trying to bear
up and carry well my little load. I am constantly prey to petty fears and insecurities.
I need courage. A lot of mornings I can barely move my limbs or shake myself
out of the fog.
We’re expecting our third child in June. I still
haven’t gotten my head around that. I don’t think of myself as a father of
three children. Or as a thirty-year-old. But there it is.
Memorial Day.
Jenni and the kids are in Indiana for a couple days, so I took the day off and
slept in for a while for the first time in I can’t remember how long. When I
woke up I opened up all the windows, picked up the house, did the dishes, ran a
few errands. On my way home I stopped by the side of the road to pick some
purple flowers – I don’t know what they’re called. They look nice on the dining
room table, very bright and full and untidy. This afternoon I had Starflyer 59 playing, and then baseball on the radio.
I ate my supper
outside and read from Ben Myers and Lee Bozeman while the wind tossed
the tops of the trees. Our neighbor to the west has dozens of birdhouses and bird
feeders in his yard so that his yard is like a bird sanctuary, and the birds
sing almost constantly. While I ate there must have been several dozen singing
at once. Wonderful to look up and see several birds in song. What do they sing
about? It can’t just be about sex.
We’ve been in
our new place now for over a month but I still don’t feel comfortable. I wonder
what it would take for me to feel comfortable.
Last Monday
night I went to the ordination of my friend Donald. I had a hard time keeping
myself together. My own ordination process is under way and my main reaction to
the whole thing was mostly terror. A couple of times I had to fight
the urge to walk out – to run away. I can’t imagine that being me. But it
probably will be me, in the next year or so. “I need courage, I need courage.”
I liked the prostrations. That seems like the only proper posture for an
occasion like that. That image has stayed with me – of Donald lying face down
on the floor while all those beautiful words are said over him.
The house is
quiet, and cool for July. As a southerner I am always especially grateful for
this. The curtains billow gently behind the fan; outside the air is still and
strangely heavy. The Metra tolls faintly from the station. Jenni goes to bed
and the children sleep behind their door.
I read from
Seamus Heaney’s “Field Work” and am amazed at his clarity and precision, at
the perfect aptness of every metaphor. You learn to trust him, not only to lead
you inevitably right to the crux of the matter – and to do it with flawless diction
and imagery – but also to value the right things: home, nature, language,
history, moral choice. It’s similar to the way I feel about Richard Wilbur, but
Heaney has the advantage of being so distinctly from somewhere, of having a permanent setting for his poems that
gives them their overriding aesthetic. You can try to manufacture an aesthetic
like that but Heaney’s has that unmistakeable whiff of legitimacy to it. It
invites you in.
Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.
The mildest February for twenty years
Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound
Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.
Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres
breathe.
Now the good life could be to cross a field
And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe
Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.
Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense
And I am quickened with a redolence
Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.
Wait then...Breasting the mist, in sowers’
aprons,
My ghosts come striding into their spring
stations
The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter
snows.
Much too busy and distracted. It’s a time of life for doing, not much for thinking, unless you’re willing to stay up pretty late at night. I’m working a lot at the school and roasting coffee, and also trying to make time to write for a magazine called Christ and Pop Culture. I’m supposed to write them a feature every two weeks but I am usually late. They’ve been very gracious. I’m learning how very little I have to say, and how hard it is, impossible really, to say it well. The world is full of much brighter and more interested people than me. I am disinterested most of the time.
Mary sits up now and smiles nearly all the time. I like to sit on the couch and hold her, in the evenings after work, and try to make everything else fall away for a few minutes. But of course the house is messy and there are always things to do.
Still wondering very much what I’ll be doing a year, five years from now. I’m full of self-doubt. A kind of disinterested numbness sets in much of the time. It’s easy to say the right things but it’s not so easy to believe them as I would have thought a few years ago. Snow drifts in the yard; the viper is coiled in the garden. I am twenty-seven years old.
Temperatures are minus 15 today but bright and clear and happy. Deep white snowdrifts, craggy branches against the still blue sky, ice crystals on the windows. School is called off so I roast at Newport this morning, and in the afternoon I sit on the couch and read some Walker Percy while Jenni works in the kitchen and the children sleep. Happy to do that and happy to listen to a mix Matt made, Kathleen Edwards, Magnetic Fields, Eno, Nick Drake. Tillman sings “Let me put you under both my wings” and Aiden wakes up sleepy and mussed and sits next to me on the couch wrapped in his blanket. The sky fades to white and blue shadows move across the yard.
It is about to rain. I hear the first fat drops and remember
A sudden kindness, small as a grain of sand.
A martin dips under the eave. I can’t tell the meaning of her outstretched hand,
Or read its lines. Thunder claps, that gorgeous sound.
I am implicated in every wisp of her hair.
Our bodies chafe and redden.
That night over the hot fan I hear her quiet voice
And feel my skin prick suddenly at the sound,
Startled from a dreamless hell.
She sings gently. To whom I cannot tell.
Another autumn day, sputtering rain in the late afternoon, cool, wind in the wet leaves. We walk up to the Highwood festival and Aiden rides the merry-go-round and the train. He rides the train by himself because I am out of tickets. We watch him go around, sitting in his little coat, his eyes wide, looking for us each time he passes. He talks about it all the way home. Watching him in the train I love him with a sudden tightening in my chest and throat. The best I can do these days is to spend a few hours with my son and daughter, and to push away all the things I might have done, or would liked to have done, in another life.
I’m really not sure who reads this page besides
a few family members, and Cameron. It’s not important I don’t guess, but if you
do and if you like it, you might like these songs. Felt and then the
Clientele, from me to you.
Tired and off
color this week. On Thursday I call in sick with aches and a sore throat and spend the day studying for the GRE subject test. If it’s not one thing
it’s another. On Friday I wake up and go in manfully, feeling better as the
day goes by. I stay out too late
and drink too much beer at practice Friday night and today I am listless and
fuggy. Up in the gray morning to watch soccer, which is disappointing as
Arsenal lose sluggishly at Old Trafford. I read Lowell
and am mesmerized by “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” and “For the Union
Dead.” I prefer him in his younger pre-confessional phase. The
“Quaker Graveyard” is astonishing, a real achievement, though a little too devastating. “The Lord survives the
rainbow of his will.” A poem of its own place and time, which overreaches
itself quite a bit. But I like that impulse in Lowell. Also the “Union Dead,” a much simpler poem,
with the right amounts of history and metaphor, observation and indignation. As
frustrating and precocious as I find “Life Studies” I’m still drawn to him. He
is a kind of bridge figure between the modernists and their capital I Ideas and
the increasing subjectivity and self-reference of the latter decades. He could turn
a phrase. Verbal magic. “You hove backward, rammed/Into your heirlooms.”
Talking about the traumatic fistfight with his father. And the devastating “Beyond the Alps,” which talks about his early poetry and his lost faith - “Our mountain-climbing train had come to earth...” each backward, wasted Alp, a Parthenon, fire-branded socket of the Cyclops' eye. There were no tickets for that altitude At lunchtime on
Friday I read some good strong prayers and make an effort to be better at my
job. It’s not a job I am particularly good at but it is my
job and a privilege. I do love the kids and I wonder why we complain about them
so much, as if they are somehow at fault.
I often look at
the pictures from Aiden’s baptism, at his face and the stream of water. It is
everything and everything and everything.
In
the morning I sit with three old men at the train station waiting for the early
train to the city, the town very quiet and still on a Saturday and the light
coming in the train station windows. I am going to take the GRE. The men are Mexicans and speak no English but they smile happily at me and talk unhurriedly to each other. They do not seem to be there for any train. The city is
oddly quiet as well, late to rise on a weekend morning, and I walk down wide
and mostly empty streets in cold morning wind. The city never sleeps but
sometimes it lazes around for a while. When I emerge from my building some
hours later it is still muted, and gray overhead and I feel like I’ve missed
the whole day, or else it still hasn’t started, and won’t until I leave.
::Monday,
September 3::
Reading
“The Habit of Being” I come across this passage. “Whether the work itself is
completely successful, or whether you ever get any worldly success out of it,
is a matter of no concern to you. It is like the Japanese swordsmen who are
indifferent to getting slain in the duel… You do not write the best you can for
the sake of art but for the sake of returning your talent increased to the
invisible God to use or not use as he sees fit. Resignation to the will of God
does not mean that you stop resisting evil or obstacles, it means that you
leave the outcome out of your personal considerations. It is the most concern
coupled with the least concern.” It’s this disregard for the outcome which I
think comes closest to describing what faith looks like in daily life. She
calls it “resignation to the will of God,” which I think is good and true. Instead,
we grasp and scheme on the assumption that we are really somehow in control of
what happens. It’s analogous to utilitarianism, since it’s based on an
underlying hubris that says we are in a position to know what ought to happen… But what I really like
is the “returning your talent increased to the invisible God.” Like in the
parable. When I'm concerned with how my talent compares to others’, I'm grasping and discontent. It’s utilitarianism. Instead I ought to work more faithfully to increase
it. Whether I have two or five.
I finish the index, anticlimactically, and an epoch peters to an end. Or will on
Tuesday when I have my exit interview. We take Aiden to the park and have a picnic
in the shade at the edge of a wide field. These kinds of things are beautiful especially in retrospect.
Listening
to Beethoven’s A minor quartet and reading. A long, quiet evening.
School
starts, with the little ones. Thoroughly unremarkable the days are being. It’s
been a long time since I’ve worked a 9-5 job, or experienced “the tyranny of the
working week.” This evening I index 30 pages for Dr. Manetsch, and listen first
to Bach and then to the Braves and Bob Dylan. Pleasant. Much much more tired than I ought to be.
I
try to write but there is no time. There is no time.
::Saturday, August 11::
Today
Jenni is sick and sleeps in, so I keep Aiden all morning. We go out into
Highwood. A lovely morning, the first of the Fall mornings, cool and bright,
and Aiden sings in his stroller. In the park we meet a Mexican man named José,
with his boys Frankie and Carlos. Aiden throws a ball with them and laughs.
José tells me gleefully that Frankie is called pelos because at six years old he already has hair on his chest and
back. He pulls up his son’s shirt to show me. José has six children and says that
is the difference between American families and Mexican families, that Mexican
families have more children. I can’t disagree. We wave goodbye and José shakes
my hand warmly and seems sad to say goodbye. It was a human connection and we
are both sad to see it end. Maybe I will see him again, but probably not.
In
the afternoon I read over Dr. Manetsch’s manuscript, very slowly, and read some
of Chad Walsh’s anthology of post-WWII poetry. The forties and fifties. Lowell,
Auden, Richard Wilbur, Robert Penn Warren. I’m thinking about focusing on it in
graduate school. It’s at the intersection of so many things. Directly
derivative of modernism, but distinct from it; just preceding modern critical
theory. Poetry and the public had not yet been completely separated, and poets still
spoke for their generation to some degree. I’m thinking about studying Lowell.
::Thursday, August 9::
I come home in the late afternoon from meeting Dr. Lundin to find the house clean
and the windows open, Jenni and Aiden asleep in the bedroom, while a soaking
rain falls outside in gentle sheets. I put on some of Beethoven’s quartets for
piano and strings and lay on the couch, in and out of sleep. I can’t remember
being so perfectly happy.
The
meeting with Dr. Lundin is very encouraging. He turns out to be affable enough,
if a little dignified, but he warms over the meal and by the end is
demonstrably, almost drunkenly, communicative, free with sweeping advice, rambly,
and very reassuring. I drive home listening to Sound Opinions on Blonde on
Blonde, my favorite Dylan record. “Visions of Johanna” and “Sad-eyed Lady.”
That thin, wild, mercury sound.
Dr.
Manetsch and I make up. Not that we ever fell out, of course, and he denies
being aware of any awkwardness. Very gentlemanly of him. I’m still confused
about what happened exactly. He was very, almost aggressively, critical of my
paper and I got flustered, and later emotional. In trying to explain it I
misrepresented myself, and placed myself without meaning to outside the bounds
of evangelical orthodoxy. I still don’t think the paper was so terrible. Weak
in places, of course.
::Wednesday, August 8::
Dozing
in the armchair I have a brief but vivid dream of someone being shot violently.
I wake to the phone sounding a text, from Nate, about the film “Blue Like
Jazz.” Never read the book and never had the slightest interest in reading it.
Nothing
at all today. I sleep late, eat granola and listen to Garrison Keillor. Do some
emailing. Feel inexplicably lethargic and unable to leave my chair or stay
awake or do anything. Jenni asks if I’m depressed and I am adamant that I am
not, that I have never been. Read Cheever and Chabon and doze while Aiden plays
happily and aimlessly.
Jenni
and I watch “The Hours,” mostly because it’s mentioned in a Luxury song. I find
it trite and pretentious. I don’t like movies that depict writers writing, or
composers composing, especially famous ones, and especially with so much
affected profundity. “Of Gods and Men” is the only movie I ever need to see ever again.
Read
Chekhov’s stories. “Easter Night,” as perfect a story as I’ve ever read. But I
didn’t appreciate it as such, not like I might have once. I recognize it’s
perfection, it’s attainment of certain of my own hard-won ideals, but that
recognition is almost clinical. Am I really this unfeeling towards art, or am I
just not young anymore?
We just got back
from a long weekend in the Upper Peninsula, in a cabin near Iron River, the
first vacation we’d taken by ourselves since our honeymoon really. We’ve always
just gone to see our families. The last evening before we left I went down an
old road into the woods through deep grass to where the road ran itself out. To
the left about thirty yards through the woods there was a clearing, very large
with tall grass around scattered trees, on a little hill. I got over to it
through the undergrowth (I’m always scared of snakes), and stood for a while at
the edge of the meadow. Lots of bugs, and evening sunlight on the trees. All
that tall grass. No real reason for it, and so far from anywhere. Forests are
beautiful of course, in a closer and more guarded way, but there is something
about clearings and open spaces that’s more immediate. You have to know a lot
to properly appreciate a forest, about ecology, botany, trees and flowers. A lot of
things I don’t know. A clearing is a quicker payoff, sunlight and grass and the
sense of discovering a secret. Any why? Why no trees here? There’s no real
reason for it.
Tried hard to write
over the weekend, and in the past couple of weeks, with almost no progress.
It’s all right, though. The thing is to keep after it. “You have always written
before, and you will write now.” Probably I’m trying too hard.
Meanwhile van
Persie says he won't renew his contract with Arsenal. I'm a little ashamed of
how really devastating that has been for me. I'm getting
closer and closer to complete cynicism about sports. Oh well. There's still
Arsene Wenger. Arsene Wenger who said, “If you are living like an animal, what is the point
of living? What makes daily life interesting is that we try to transform it to
something that is close to art. And football is like
that.” Apparently sticking to principles gets you a consistent third place. So be it.
In Arsene I still trust.
Listening:
Modest Mouse
“Building Nothing out of Something” and “This is a Long Drive for Someone with
Nothing to Think About”
Amor de Dias
“Street of the Love of Days” “A Winged Victory for the Sullen”
Reading:
Frost, Auden, Richard Wilbur,
Robert Lowell, John Ciardi, R. S. Thomas, Chad Walsh
A
pleasant summer, low on the usual stresses. I’m still wondering very much what I’ll be
doing in a year. I’ve decided to apply to graduate programs in English, which
according to just about everyone I’ve talked to is a pretty stupid thing to do,
career wise. I'm fairly apprehensive about my
prospects, and I want to make sure that it’s really what I want to do, first of
all, and that if I do go ahead with it that I do it with my eyes open, and
don't back myself into a corner, academically, financially, or any other way.
Right now my plan is to apply to only really good programs, and programs that
fit well with my own plans and interests, with the idea that, if I get in, I'll
be in a program that I like and that gives me a good chance of placement
afterward, and if I don't get in, well, then I'll have to reevaluate. Which is
fine. Frankly though, I don't have another idea at this point.
In
the meantime I’m still at Newport, I’m finishing my internship for Dr. Manetsch
(the last thing I have to do at TEDS), studying for the GRE, and working on a
fairly pretentious story, set in Switzerland and with Hopkins as a character.
The story is very slow going, but I still like it. I’m trying to write the
kinds of things I would like to read. My focus is on the story, on careful description
and very simple language, and on a kind of literary and theological fourth
dimension, comprised of subtle allusions and of a reverence for a certain kind
of character. I have no interest in being inventive, or in shocking, or even in
making an engrossing plot. There are many ways to hold attention. I’m thinking
about Thornton Wilder, and Willa Cather. What I really need is the discipline,
and the time and space, to keep at it. Ideas are not as hard to come by as I
used to think, though it does take a lot of work. What’s hard is to keep at it,
and to maintain the level of focus and protracted effort which is really “the
best I can do.” Whatever that is, it’s all I’m aiming for.
Reading:
Alexander
Solzhenitsyn August 1914 (we’ll see if I get through it this time)
Found this paragraph in Marilynne Robinson’s
essay on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the collection The Death of Adam, which
Caela got me for Christmas a couple years ago. I’m quoting it here apropos of
my entry on Torrance a while back. “Great theology is always a kind of giant
and intricate poetry, like epic or saga. It is written for those who know the
tale already, the urgent messages and the dying words, and who attend to its
retelling with special alertness, because the story has a claim on them and
they on it…It earns its authority by winning assent and recognition, in the
manner of poetry but with the difference that the assent seems to be to
ultimate truth, however oblique or fragmentary the suggestion of it. Theology
is written for the small community of those who would think of reading it. So
it need not define freighted words like ‘faith’ or ‘grace’ but may instead
reveal what they contain. To the degree that it does them any justice, its
community of readers will say yes, enjoying the insight as their own and
affirming it in that way.”
Theology has
to be done, as Torrance puts it, “in the most cautious and reverent way and
with much prayer.” “It is in our actual apprehending of God that we
realise that we cannot comprehend him.” It is both a definition and a participation. In contemplating the divine mystery, theology teaches us
things we did not previously understand, but already believed, since we have
already apprehended by faith the fullness of the divine mystery. It happens in
the arena of faith, the space marked out beforehand by the Church as sacred,
but which still contains great mystery. Participating in theology in the right
spirit, running on the rails preordained for us and within the boundaries of
orthodoxy, is the only way to discover new doctrine (“new” only in the sense of
a new application and illumination of what has been nascent in the Scripture
all along), even as it inevitably affirms and avows the old doctrines.
Vladimir Lossky is referring to the same thing
when he writes that “Authentic gnosis is inseparable from a
charisma, an illumination by grace which transforms our intelligence. And since
the object of contemplation is a personal existence and presence, true gnosis implies
encounter, reciprocity, faith as a personal adherence to the personal presence
of God Who reveals Himself.” Thought of this way, theology is all of life, and
theological truth is intuitively recognized by the faithful, through the Holy
Spirit, not only on printed pages but in actions, institutions, and lives. It's
a convicting paradigm of truth, one with no loopholes, in which ethics and
epistemology are inseparably linked. Theology is prayer. Lex orandi, lex
credendi.
I’m posting a quote from David Simon (creator of
The Wire), because I’m a lazy
“blogger.” This quote is truly fantastic, though, from Scott Tobias’ interview with Simon for TV Club, and succinctly sums up some of the major themes of that
show. If you haven’t seen The Wire,
watch it, watch it, watch it. Not only is it a profound and honest look at many
aspects of modern urban life and its institutions, it’s also one of the
greatest works of fiction of the last decade…maybe I’m just raving because I’m
fairly well-insulated from popular culture and didn’t know TV could be this
good. But no, I think this show stacks up with the best novels/films or what
have you of the modern era. So principled, so enlightening, and still utterly
believable and real… God bless HBO for letting David Simon take his risks and
do his thing. Anyway here’s the man himself.
“The Wire made the
argument, from its first season, that the modern world is becoming increasingly
indifferent to individual catharsis and individual dignity, and that human
beings are worth less. That’s the triumph of capitalism. The money gets made,
and the fewer people are needed to make that money… I come from a city where 47
percent of the African-American males are out of work. They're not needed.
We've constructed an economic model that doesn't need a lot of human beings. It
doesn't need as many as it once did for certain people to attain wealth. In a
world like that, the old superstitions start to seem less superstitious. The
idea that these massive institutions—school systems and police departments and
drug trades and political entities and newspapers—might actually become utterly
unfeeling to the people they're supposed to serve and the people who serve them
seems to me to be the paradigm of the 20th century, and I think it's going to
continue.”
By the way
(Cameron), you shouldn’t read the entire interview with Simon until you’ve finished
watching the show, because it does have numerous spoilers. After which, though,
you should definitely read it. Simon has an incredible story, and he talks in
full paragraphs, paragraphs that shed a lot of light on the show and on his own intentions for it. It's confirmation (if you still need it) of the wealth of first-hand experience and the extraordinary depth of thought that went into The Wire.
Reading “All the
Pretty Horses,” but really listening to the Clientele. Clientele, Clientele,
Clientele. The only band that matters. Not really, of course, but every band
worth listening to will feel that way to you at times. I saw the videos for
“Reflections after Jane” and “House on Fire” a few months ago while I was at
Thomas and Katie’s, babysitting for Eden. I had put her down to sleep and I was
in their living room for several hours before they got home, and I watched
those two videos, on Matt’s recommendation. I probably watched them five times
each that evening, and listened to their first record, too…crazy that you can
do that now. “Reflections after Jane” is still maybe my favorite song of
theirs, largely because of the association of that evening I’m sure. It was the
perfect thing to listen to, all by yourself with a little girl asleep in the
next room. I also worked on a story I was writing at the time, though nothing
came of that.
I’ve also been listening
to Felt, and they’re great too, probably better, but harder to
get into…I like the song “The World is as Soft as Lace.” They have
an extra dimension that the Clientele don’t have, a depth of thought. The
Clientele guy is terrific, and he can write some lovely stuff (“Butterflies
with gilded wings this morning/touched the red sun and the rain…”). He is
pretty one dimensional, though, a little too melancholy and more than a little
trite…but that’s not why you love it. It’s a feeling; you have to play it by
its own rules. Anyway it’s the music I find myself putting on just about every
time I go to put on music, if I’m not careful. The Clientele, Felt, Belle and
Sebastian, Orange Juice...The Clientele…
A friend accused me recently of only liking shoegaze and post punk, and he was right for the most part... Music used to be
much more of a thing for me. I used to spend quite a lot of time just listening
to music, with headphones or just sitting in me and Matt’s old room…I don’t
know if I’m just busy now or what, but I don’t do that much anymore. It’s become much more of a background thing. So much of the music I used to love I love now just
in theory, and in reality only on rare occasions. Can you just get bored with
music? Do I need to start branching out into other genres? The only
music I love unconditionally and with no reservations is Lee Bozeman’s stuff - Luxury, and especially the
Orient Is His Name stuff - and Low, and Starflyer 59. That's the good stuff, the true and honest stuff. The rest of it is mostly for
the background, for a mood, when I’m just “around the house” or at work.
I’m such a tool.
Sorry about that… I need to get back to reading Cormac McCarthy.
This is from Alexander Sokurov’s film “Dialogues
with Solzhenitsyn.” It was filmed in and around Solzhenitsyn’s house outside
Moscow in 1998, and most of it is Sokurov talking with Solzhenitsyn. Just seeing
the great man himself on screen was enough to hold my rapt attention. It’s full
of great sound-bytes like this one. If it seems to wander a little bit, that’s
because Solzhenitsyn treats every question on several levels.
“Some people know that God exists, even some
scientists. Some great physicists know it, others don’t know. One knows,
another doesn’t. No, it must be in the heart. One must live with it. Morality
is not attained by knowledge. It is attained first in a child’s upbringing, and
later by a self-teaching.”
I especially like the idea of a “self-teaching.”
It’s all through his novels, particularly “In the First Circle,” and correlates
to Solzhenitsyn’s own experience in the gulags. It’s especially poignant in
light of the oppressive, manipulative communist state he lived in. What a man he was.
I’m working through T. F. Torrance’s
“Trinitarian Faith” for a class. Really wonderful. Historical, evangelical,
creedal, plenty of Barth but with a strong natural theology. He writes theology
with reverence, dignity and great care, which accords with his own discussion
of lex orandi, lex credendi. Nothing
else would do. “We have to decide what we ourselves say of the truth under the
direction of the biblical statements, and how we are to formulate our
statements in such a way that they are established as true through their
adequacy to the truth itself. This involves what Athanasius called a ‘freedom
of religious discourse’ on the basis of the Holy Scriptures when we pass beyond
what they literally say to the truth of God which they convey, and seek to express
that as accurately and precisely as we can. And we dare not do that except in
the most cautious and reverent way and with much prayer.” I wonder sometimes
how a lot of the current popular theology can be constructive at all, with its
poor writing and slovenly presentation. Do they think it doesn’t matter?
“At bottom,” Lewis says, “every ideal of style dictates not only how we should say things but what sort of things we may say.”
I wonder, too, how valuable
all our efforts at contextualization really are. They tend to cheapen and
devalue even “true” theology. Torrance, by contrast, has a kind of conceptual or intellectual transcendence.
He’s writing simply and without pretentions, either grand or “popular”. Good
theology has a way of transcending the high-low cultural distinction. We do have
to contextualize, and all the time, but there’s a difference between contextualizing
culturally, as between, say, a western person and a Hindu, and contextualizing
“academic” theology to the so-called “popular level.” We don’t need people to
always reach down to our level. We need to be stretched, pulled upwards, just
as academics need to be able to say what they mean in simple terms. The younger
generation doesn’t need theology translated into their own language, which is
usually sloppy and salacious, and cheesy as hell. They need it presented
honestly and simply. I’m not saying, either, that there’s no place for “high”
academics. There absolutely is.
Torrance’s theological method is magnificent,
and revolutionary for me in some ways. I remember the last year in Toccoa,
still going to Foothills, very discouraged and reading Lossky. I was
dissatisfied with the evangelical paradigm epistemologically and aesthetically,
but I was convinced it was the only remaining option. In that regard the
evangelical Anglican church has been a real life saver, a deus ex machina, or as Tolkien called it a “eucatastrophe.” A
little dramatic maybe, but not by much. But oh to have read Torrance then.
Though I may not have understood it properly at the time. I like to think I
would have. He accounts both for postfoundationalism and modernism, without
being overly amazed at himself for doing so. That our reading of the Scriptures is
established as true through its “adequacy to the truth itself.” That we have to
pass beyond what the Scriptures literally say to the truth of God which they
convey, thus venturing into an “open range” of faith, a “freedom of religious
discourse.” And that that is done only with great caution, reverence, and much
prayer. “As we pray, so we believe.”
For all that it’s still a discipline to read
him, and slow going. I’m going to plow forward for a while this afternoon, and
then write another paper. Jenni and Aiden will be back in another hour or so,
and they’ll be very distracting. After two and a half years of graduate school
sad to say I’m still a pretty poor manager of my time.
