Happy New Year (Everyone)

Davids Bazan and Dark talk sense - ‘the fruit on the tree, that’s the thing’ - http://qideas.org/video/unsettled-questions.aspx

As I clearly have not been posting regularly here at the moment I have taken to Twitter (@mosteverybody) and Tumblr (http://mosteverybody.tumblr.com/) to see how that goes - maybe I can kickstart a bit more posting activity through triangulation.

Love to all who come across this.

there is a lot that can not be settled here

This turns out to be a mix of this week and last. I am glad to be here.

Restrepo from Philippa Levenberg on Vimeo.

The David Foster Wallace piece is here:
Wallace made clear what he was hoping to do. He would take the most boring and repetitive job imaginable, apply to it the same formula about heightened attention and awareness that he offered to the Kenyon College graduates, and demonstrate how tedious, irksome labor could yield a path to grace and the salvation of the soul:

Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.

This is a variant on the old and familiar Christian theme of how to ennoble lowly toil by doing it in the service of Christ. Milton touches on it in “On His Blindness” (“They also serve who only stand and wait”), and George Herbert explores it in “The Elixir”:

…All may of thee partake:
Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture (for thy sake)
Will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
Makes that and the action fine.

This is the famous stone
That turneth all to gold…

Make faces


Missing from the drawn pages was David Dark's amazing review of Love Wins - I read this in part as a gloss and expansion on the DFW business:
As Barth argues in The Epistle to the Romans, the gospel has to be (and remain) a question mark sitting strangely next to whatever we dare to deem orthodox and sound in our own thinking. And when it comes to what we hope to understand of the judgments of God, we have to leave an awful lot to unwritten history lest we believe ourselves to own the copyright on them or find ourselves explaining them away.
and
Judgment, the decision to be made, the alive and signaling, evangelical pinch isn’t to be deferred. It’s now. Or as Modest Mouse famously puts it, “If you wasted this life, why wouldn’t you waste the afterlife?” Life in the age to come is as inescapably social and ethically laden as this one, only moreso. With Jesus’ counsel to the young man to sell everything he has and give to the poor, we’re given a vision of here and there which is anything but neutral (economically, politically, what have you). “Heaven also confronts. Heaven, we learn, has teeth, flames, edges, and sharp points. What Jesus is insisting with the rich man is that certain things will not survive in the age to come.” As Bell points out, the Apostle Paul draws on the same sensibility in his vision of values, identifiers, and fixations being burned and those overly attached to them being saved, but only as one passing through the flames. No disembodied faith will. The question of inheriting olam habah can’t be evangelically distinguished from the question of what we’re up to now, because here is the new there: “How we think about heaven, then, directly affects how we understand what we do with our days and energies now, in this age.”
The news from Mr. Dark is always welcome even when it disturbs.

random

This is a bit of a random post, though there must be some thread of connection between the different ideas.

The drawings are both from my reading of the current NYRB, which seems to be where I get a lot of my ideas at the moment. It has the good balance between academic and popular appeal for me. Often, I am stunned by how moved I am by the reviews and essays. And by how much sense they make.

The 'embodiment' at the top of that page is something I have found myself animatedly chattering about with increasing frequency. I think it started last year when David Dark quoted Dylan on Johnny Cash and the 10,000 years of history that fell from him. Johnny Cash came to embody something that ran through his story and the songs but also goes beyond both. This reminds me of John Coletrane who, after giving his all in a performance was overheard saying, 'Nunc Dimittis', as he was coming off the stage. I am not really up to expanding on my thoughts on the page at the moment but will happily bend the ear of anyone who cares to listen. Particularly on why the time is right for Jeff Bridges to play the John Wayne part in the Coen's 'True Grit'.

And I think this quote best sums up how I feel about the muddying of religion and nationalism. I found it at Inhabito Dei, here.

I believe God made the St. Lawrence River, and the Rio Grande River, and the China Sea and the English Channel, but I don’t believe God made America, or Canada, or Mexico, or England, or China. Man did that. . . . It is doubtful that there has ever been a nation established for bad reasons. Nations are always established to escape tyranny, to combat evil, to find freedom, to reach heaven. Man has always been able to desire to build a heaven. But it seems he has never been able to admit that he didn’t pull it off. So he keeps insisting that he did pull it off. And that is really what patriotism is all about. It is the insistence that what we have done is sacred. It is that transference of allegiance from what God did in creating the whole wide world to what we have done with (or to) a little sliver of it. Patriotism is immoral. Flying a national flag—any national flag—in a church house is a symbol of idolatry. Singing ‘God Bless America’ in a Christian service is blasphemy. Patriotism is immoral because it is a violation of the First Commandment.

Will D. Campbell, “I Love My Country: Christ Have Mercy,” Motive (December, 1969)

in the long-legged house

A play based on some of Mr. Berry's poems has just gone up in Louisville.

This, from the Omnivore's Dilemma, was very striking:
Take the issue of scale. I could sell a whole lot more chickens and eggs than I do. The're my most profitable items, and the market is telling me to produce more of them. Operating under the industrial paradigm, I could boost production however much I wanted - just buy more chicks and more feed, crank up that machine. But in a biological system you can never do just one thing, and I couldn't add any more chickens without messing with something else. - Joel Salatin.

Seems as though this has a wider application. I am thinking a lot about not just doing one thing and the need for the different things I take in (from food to music, writing, poetry, news, conversation, etc.) to feed one another.

This was all somehow reinforced seeing Howard Fishman and band perform selections from Dylan's Basement Tapes this evening - a really great show, which reminded me of David Dark quoting Dylan on Johnny Cash - Dylan saw 10,000 years of history falling from him. The whole of our gospel-laden history is laid out before us.

engaged piety

I've been thinking and talking about interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary projects over the past few days. Earlier in the week I bemoaned the unnecessary narrowness of some academic projects. (Maybe I was being uncharitable (bitter?) in this bemoaning.) I like writers and academics, thinkers, artists, who bring together a lot of different interests in their work - no matter how narrowly focused the work itself might actually be.
This came up in Wendell Berry's preface to The One-Straw Revolution: 'It is exactly because of such habitual expectations - because we have learned to expect people to be specialists and books to have only one subject - that we are in need of 'The One-Straw Revolution'.'

And I also read Michael Massing's NYRB piece this week on the best of political blogging; from this I got the idea of the blogger as a filter uniquely processing (and adding value to) multiple sources. Massing on Andrew Sullivan: 'But as a regular reading of his posts shows, his multiple links to a wide array of sources, processed through his idiosyncratic gay-Catholic-Thatcherite-turned-libertarian-radical mind, produces an engaging and original take on the world. A dramatic demonstration of this occured just after the Iranian elections...'

The necessity of bringing some disciplined (or multi-disciplined) thought and imagination to filter through all that one comes across is important. (David Dark has this great quote from Cornel West on his site at the moment: 'Piety ought to be inseparable from critical thinking'.) Equally important and pressing, I think, is the ability in thinking through all the different things one encounters to turn them into something else - a new piece of writing, a piece of art, a cartoon, a link on a blog, something. At least, I feel the need to do this a lot more systematically for myself.

My friend Richard asked what was wonderful about the gapingvoid quote from a couple of posts ago (in a way that reminded me of one of our teachers - but that is another story). The wonderful thing is that the author of the gapingvoid posts has in his cartoons a medium through which he can filter, synthesize, and think critically about the world, making a new new thing as he goes.

the photographer

The Photographer is an amazing book. I can not do justice to it here (sleepy thoughts, trying to muster my cranial resources for job applications and 'what do I really want to do?' answers).

The NYT review is a good one. The book, in the very story it tells, is as moving and compelling an argument for pacifism as anyone should really need.

This, stolen, once again, from Mr. Dark, sums up some of the effects of The Photographer:
The question of our governing is the question of our liturgy, worship, and witness - the question of what we deem sacred. Does our sense of the sacred include the average Palestinian, the Chinese peasant who builds structures for the Beijing Olympics for slave wages, the Ugandan child soldier? Are some people less sacred than others? Will we stand beside them, look them in the eye and help them? Are people mere numbers, or are they valuable bearers of the image of God? What are we willing to sign off on? What do we underwrite? A determined dwelling on these questions is the way redeeming and revolutionary history is written - this is our liturgy.
The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, p. 198.

So much sacred human-ness in the story, the photos, the drawings.

The typo in the picture-quote is mine.

no such thing as unemployed time

It has been a strange week. Time passes differently without an external work schedule; days merge into each other with more alarming speed. Where did they all go? How much of them did I waste and what could I have done differently?

In the midst of musing on this - not worried, but aware that things are a bit out of sync at the moment - it was good to come across this while continuing on through The Sacredness of Questioning Everything:


'All manner of things being redeemed' forcefully reminds me of Tom Wright's conclusions in Surprised by Hope.

I take this to be in full agreement with Frederick Buechner, when he writes, 'All moments are key moments'. And with Adrian Plass, when he states that, 'Nothing is wasted'

And I think the same point is made in the wonderful wordless telling of Carl and Ellie's adult life together in the movie UP, which I saw this week. Every life is an adventure.

Which ties back to the poem that I took the title for the blog from. I am being told this again: 'It all matters. Pay attention.'

called on to be honest

This is not the promised post on David Dark's, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything. I wrote my original notes for that in a bit of a frenzy during that last week at my job - in a tiny scrawl on two post it notes. Writing it definitely helped my thinking and my sense of where I am, but I think it would be fairly incomprehensible on the blog (at least the way I write at the moment). But I do want to give another shout out to Mr. Dark's book, which is challenging to me in all sorts of ways that I had not expected. Losing the job is causing me to re-evaluate a lot of things. I am deeply thankful for the opportunity that is tied up in this and I am determined to work from the ground up. There is a temptation for me to second guess what I should be doing and how I should be living. This manifests itself in dogmatic thinking (when applied to myself) and a certain lack of engagement with others (what should I think/feel rather than my actual response). From the get go, the book tore this thinking apart, starting with the ways that we get trapped into certain views of God. I am very grateful.

'and no one exists alone'

My next post was going to be on David Dark's book. That one is coming, I hope. He has a short section on Auden that I wanted to reference. This morning, though, Andrew Sullivan quoted from Auden's poem, September 1, 1939 and it hit me right between the eyes. Thinking about what has been happening in Iran and quoting the last two stanzas of the poem here articulates more about at least one of David Dark's theses (this poem is the news) than I could say in a whole raft of posts.

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

from SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 by W.H. Auden

edging

My first flush impression on reading about Freeman Dyson is largely the same as the feeling I have about Christopher Hitchens. I would not in any way deny their respective smarts (and, in Hitchens' case, find myself nodding along with a lot of what he says) but they ultimately seem to be so enamoured with taking a contrarian stance that it muddies their thinking when it needs to be clearest. This makes them vastly more entertaining than many other public thinkers but I they seem to do a lot less to helpfully move debate forward towards change (in the form of changed minds or social change). Maybe I am wrong about this.

Any value in being a contrarian would seem to depend on what you are against and on your stance being rooted in some sort of objective truth (what you are for). I think the same is true of faith, which is not a good or bad thing in and of itself. The object of one's faith is where the true interest and value of the faith lie.

Maybe thinking like this leads me to look too often towards thinkers and friends for whom I already have a positive bias. But even the places and people I go to, who shape my thought and sense of God and the world, can leave me frazzled and challenged. I have already mentioned this in regard to The Gospel According to America. It happens all over again when I read N.T. Wright. What is my love like? How do I actually see the world and what does my seeing say about where I am really placing my faith?

I should say that Dr. Dyson looks more gentle and less foreboding than I have managed to draw here.

I have been posting for three months now. I like posting. Not sure how I feel about what I post. I feel myself edging towards saying more about me, which I am happy about. The drawings are part of that and part of a larger process. I am happy about the anonymity too at the moment. Now I sound like a contrarian (at least with myself).

flannery

Flannery O'Conner, who said, "I doubtless hate pious language worse than you because I believe the reality it hides." (I took the drawing from a woodcut by Barry Moser).

She has been on my mind because a new biography is being reviewed everywhere at the moment. I like this review. She wrote about an upside down world, which is this world. I find it hard to spend time there (and have not for a long while) but am helped by the poking and prodding that happens when I think about her stories - especially the one (I think it is at the end of A Good Man is Hard to Find) about the the one that ends with a woman witnessing a long procession of people she has despised ascending to heaven, herself at the end.

David Dark likes her a lot. I just finished his book, The Gospel According to America. I thought it would be a challenge to America. It is, but it has also challenged me a lot. I am trying to face up to that now.

Now on to Surprised by Hope.

all the people dreaming in the immensity of it all

"...I'd like to recall a moment on fifties-era American television when Steve Allen asked Jack Kerouac, something of a spokesman for the Bea Generation, for a definition of the term "Beat." Almost before he'd finished the question, Kerouac responded, "Sympathetic." The posture of the Beat Movement is one of mutual beatness before the world, and to feel worn down, tempted toward melancholy but not despairing, is to be heartbroken in the direction of increased sympathy for all creation groaning and awaiting redemption. And if the alternative to this brand of beat is unsympathetic posture, uncompassionate and not prone to solidarity, then the venom with which a Kerouac says a word like "Square" seems pretty well justified. Right up there with "hypocrites," "blind guides," "racist," fascist," and "brood of vipers."
David Dark, The Gospel According to America, p. 58

I think I started reading Jack Kerouac at a point when my balance was already tipping towards a commitment to Christ. He entered the mix somehow. (I remember that he described the subterraneans as being like Jesus, which was very appealing.) There was a purity to his writing that made Buddhism appealing. That has stayed with me to some extent (on and off) and so has his compassionate enthusiastic writing style. I recorded the documentary this video is excerpted from on to the end of my copy of Bladerunner and watched them both a lot over a couple of years before going to University (often with my friend Richard). My feelings about Kerouac have become a lot more conflicted over the years and I have gone for long periods without thinking about him but he is like an old friend and I find myself wanting to get back in touch with him now and again. Reading David Dark on the train this morning reminded me of what I like, and miss, most about him.

a kind of steve mcqueen

So...this does not actually look like the portrait of Steve McQueen, the artist and director, who was featured in the New York Times this past weekend - but I get attached to these drawings. And, as I said when I was painting it, 'It looks like someone', which is often the most that I am able to say about my pictures. In this one I particularly like his right hand.

I just started reading The Gospel According to America, by David Dark. I think I'll be quoting from him a lot for a long while. The following is from the first page of the introduction (actually, Instead of an Introduction), where he writes about his father:
'The Bible was always in the back of his mind. Like a leather-bound black hole, it pulled on his thoughts, painted the matter-of-fact a different color, called into questions whatever anybody nearby described as common sense, and uproariously unsettled the agreed-upon obvious of every scenario. It was the measure of authenticity for all speech, and speech that presumed to have its backing ("It's biblical," "According to the Bible," "God says...") was to be viewed with particular scrutiny and suspicion, because the Bible belonged to everyone and no one. It was nobody's property. Always dangerous, a double-edged sword. Like absolute truth, it's out there, but anyone who presumed to own its copyright was criminally insane.'

And from the second page, an inherent challenge that I need to hear and that encourages.
'He spent too much time exchanging jokes and anecdotes at our near-by Waffle House and holding forth in conversation with Muslim gas station attendants for the public/private distinctions in political and religious matters to ever really hold absolute sway. And in the deepest sense, he didn't think it polite or even friendly to pretend that certain elephants aren't in the room; that Jesus of Nazareth has very little to say about a nation's wars on terror or that the demands of Allah or Jehovah upon humankind can be conveniently sequestered with the "spirituality" section of the global market. Without a costly commitment to candor among family and potential friends, the possibility of truthful conversation (a preprequisite for the formation of more perfect unions) begins to tragically diminish, and responsible speech that communicates what we're actually thinking and believing has become a lost art.'