growing a beard. i guess it was just time. i'm still in the scruffy stages but i think it's going to wear pretty well. makes me look a good deal older, which is something i've needed i suppose. i've graduated from undergrad and begun to move on a little bit and i guess it was time for a change. going to grow my hair out a little bit too.
also i'm getting married in about four months. yea, getting married. you're telling me. it should be alright.
listening:
fleet foxes, eno, mogwai, joy division.
reading:
singer, solzhenitsyn, macleish. i am in such a rut honestly.
I'm in Aliquippa, PA. Temperatures have been in the mid-90s and our house has no air conditioning. What a convenient invention that was. It's easy enough to talk about the idol the west has made of convenience but this week I've begun to waver a bit. It's the long, sweaty nights that do it I think.
I've surprised myself by feeling a little skeptical of the levels of spirituality here. Is it just cynicism? I have to wonder. My idea of faith, of the church, always seems to be a little bigger than the circles I find myself in. Or maybe it's smaller? Most likely it is caused largely by my own arrogance and pettiness; but at the same time I feel the need of something else, an aesthetic clarity, a transcendence. Which is not to say that this isn't a terrific place, or that these aren't wonderful people. The week I've spent here has been both refreshing and deeply convicting. At our prayer service last night I was moved at the sincerity of these people, and the reality of their faith, it's strong connection with the world. Joel and I had an interesting conversation a few nights ago in which we admitted that there are no perfect churches, no perfect communities. The ideal which I've nurtured and hoped to live out someday is pretty unrealistic. It will have to wait until the
eschaton. In the meantime, what do I want? Higher church? Eastern Orthodoxy?
For now, I'm here, in this place. I'm beginning to be afraid that my own carefully conditioned ideal really does not exist in this reality, and it's from this frustration that my cynicism comes. Either way it's couched in my own pride, a pride I almost cannot bear to root out. It's just that I'd like my highest ideals of beauty to come from the Church, not from secular poets and artists, or even from Christians of different branches of the faith. Odd that the reasons I don't convert to these "other branches" of the faith are intellectual ones.
Christianity as I want it to be, versus the transcendence which it must be, by definition. Such a fine line - too fine for me, in my present condition, to make such a judgment call. The thing to do is to press on toward my ideal, and in the meantime to attend with discipline to the task at hand, in hopes of greater light, of clarity through service. I've been thinking about Benson's "Graven Ideologies," especially the chapters on Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion. The transcendent Other making its demand on the Self: the loving violence. And because the other is intrinsically foreign to me, greater than me, it requires faith. I cannot "approve" or "disapprove" of it since any act of approval places me as the arbiter of what is acceptable and what is not. So it really is a kind of violence, and no less painful for being for my own ultimate good.
"Little children, keep yourselves from idols."
Listening:
Red House Painters
Low
Sonic Youth
Reading:
Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories
Kevin VanHoozer: Is there a meaning in this text?
Archibald MacLeish
Gerard Manley Hopkins
It's hot summertime in Pittsburgh. Just finished up tour with Contrail about a week ago. With about four shows to go we realized that they would most likely be the last shows we ever play. Matt has been accepted into medical school at Virginia Tech and has decided to go in this fall. And in the end I think he's made the right choice. Either way it was his choice to make and it's not for me to say anything one way or the other. But it has been a little tough to come to grips with the thought that it really is all over with. Played our last show in Chapel Hill. Mediocre, and very depressing. We drove all the way home that night and got in at around eight in the morning. I guess we've always known that this time was coming but in the end it has come all too abruptly, and just when we were gaining momentum, writing better than ever before, playing better concerts. There may be other musical projects in my future, but nothing like this band. This was my band. Thinking about all the songs we've written, all the songs we might have written. Places gone, people met. I've been in this band for a long time. We've tried to make beautiful music, as best we could. Sometimes we have.
Bought Low's "The Curtain Hits the Cast" in Chapel Hill. It's a beautiful record. Low has helped to define my own approach to music as much as any other band. Nothing extra, with great attention to detail. A great sense of mystery. I've been listening to it over and over and over.
