leafmeal

a question on Romeo and Juliet

2011-09-18T00:01:00.002-04:00

Alright, I think there's an important question I've been missing so far even though I've read this scene a lot of times.

ROMEO

If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

ROMEO

Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET

Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO

O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET

Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

ROMEO

Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.

(Romeo and Juliet, I.v; emphasis mine)

This is a lovely little witty exchange, and it's a sonnet where both the male lover and the female beloved get to speak, which is pretty unusual and nifty. And they're both adept at taking the initial pilgrimage metaphor and turning it in different directions.

But what I want to know now is -- Do saints have hands which pilgrims' hands do touch? Doesn't a saint have to be dead before she is declared a saint and has pilgrims visiting her shrine?

Now, it could be that Shakespeare is being Protestant here and considering any Christian a saint, rather than only those who have been officially declared saints posthumously -- and in that case, a saint could be alive. However, if that's what he's doing, then it's an odd mix with the language of pilgrimages and palmers and saints granting prayers. Do people go on pilgrimages to see living saints? I guess one could go and ask advice from Julian of Norwich in her anchorite cell, but that seems a bit different from a palmer's pilgrimage to a shrine. Even if the saint can be alive, the line is a lot weirder than I thought, and I need to figure out what's going on.

But if the saint has to be dead, things definitely get creepy in the middle of the pretty love scene. For one thing, touching a dead saint's hands at all might be difficult, if the saint's remains are buried or locked away. And if the holy palmer's kiss (where saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch) means touching a statue's hand or fingering mummified saints' digits in a reliquary -- well then! That makes for quite a different image from what I thought it was. And also, it could foreshadow the end, where Romeo does kiss Juliet believing her to be dead, and the survivors set up memorial statues. Also, her apparent corpse is in great condition when Romeo finds her. We know that that's because it's not really a corpse and she's only under the influence of the sleeping potion -- but does Romeo think it's because she's a saint and her body is therefore not decaying?

I shall have to see if anyone more knowledgeable has already tackled this thoroughly. If not, then term paper time for me! First up, I need to look into concepts of sainthood in England circa 1595. After which, another look at the text and see just how close to canonization Juliet might be. Hmmmm, says I.

a grouchy grammarian on religion vs. relationship

2011-07-10T22:13:00.001-04:00

So, I think the "It's not a religion, it's a relationship" line is a bit silly. [Edit: If you need it, here's a quick example of what I'm talking about. But be warned, it will try to play music automatically. Christians of varying tones (and varying degrees of web-savviness) use similar arguments, but this was just the first thing that came up on a Google search for religion and relationship.]

Part of the insistence on relationship terminology is well-intentioned. I think it's meant to help reach out to people who have been burned by religion as such, and that's a noble goal. And I'm also all for emphasizing our relationships with God and other people -- I think that's what it's all about.

However, I don't know that shunning the term religion in favor of the term relationship is always helpful. Semantically, I think making a big deal of the switch is equivalent to proclaiming about one's life with a spouse, "It's not a marriage, it's a relationship!" -- Ok, yes, true, it's a relationship. But that could mean a lot of different things, and our language has all these handy extra words to specify what kind of relationship.

And on the level of interpersonal relationships, we need that specificity because there are different behavioral expectations for different types of relationships -- I have a professional relationship with my boss, which entails reports on how my work is going, and I have a sibling relationship with my brother which entails hugs with a running start (which would knock over any normal person). Not a good idea to confuse these, even though they're both relationships and that's lovely and all.

Anyway, the point is that religion is a perfectly serviceable English word to denote a particular kind of relationship among many others. It's a kind of relationship where people worship God and try to figure out what that does to all the other relationships. Maybe there are some situations where the substitution of terms (relationship for religion) is helpful, but I think it can often mean a loss of clarity.

I think there's even more of a problem, though, in the way people sometimes use this relationship language rhetorically to distinguish themselves from other religious folks -- the implication being that religion is not a relationship and that therefore those professing relationship instead are authentic and are offering something totally different from religion.

Ok, I agree with part of the point here: I think it's true that there are some people who participate in religious activities but are not truly cultivating transformed relationships with God and other people. This is a legitimate concern.

However, I think the terminology switch doesn't really fix the superficiality problem and can also involve some polemics that aren't fair to other religious people. The assumption that religion and relationship are mutually exclusive makes it easy to dismiss people whose religious practices are different from one's own (and therefore more apparent as religious practices -- relationshippy folks still have religious practices). In many cases, these other people would see themselves as pursuing a relationship with God through the elements of their religious practice. And no, you don't have to agree with others' practices -- but I think that talking about religion as necessarily separate from relationship can often lead to a superficial way of shutting down other groups (often in the absence of their competent defenders) rather than engaging the issues respectfully.

Lieblingsnotizbuch

2011-07-05T20:16:00.000-04:00

The "history of Moleskine" leaflet is some of the rankest commodity fetishist marketing invented, and yet to be honest I'm quite pleased that there's apparently a specific German word for favorite notebook.

"guilt-free" . . . ?

2011-07-01T18:57:00.000-04:00

I've recently been rather puzzled by advertisements and articles using the tagline "guilt-free."

For example:
An outlet mall billboard proclaims "Guilt-free shopping!" and displays the logos of available brands, the first one being Nike.

Or, another one:
An article on the Weather Channel website shows how to "Enjoy Your Barbeque, Guilt-Free." It proceeds to relate seven tips, all of which focus on how not to gain weight during summer revels.

The phrase guilt-free seems to be applied pretty often to either the shopping or the eating category. Ok, that's fair enough: consumption as a source of guilt makes some sense.

But what kind of guilt precisely are we avoiding here? On the shopping, I'd guess guilt-free should mean (at the least) that we're buying things made by companies that deal fairly with their employees, but I'm thinkin' probably not if Nike is first on the list of guilt-free shopping options. What is it that makes the outlet mall guilt-free, then? Other advertisements confirm that it's the discount prices. Apparently a lot of people think the problem with buying extra stuff isn't exploiting workers, wasting natural resources, or feeding one's own materialism -- the part responsible for guilt (and hence moral angst, shame, "I really shouldn't," etc.) is . . . spending money? Guilt reactions are structured to protect the consumer's own wallet rather than look out for anyone else.

Same kind of deal for the food guilt. This kind of discourse on guilt leaves out questions like, Does eating all this meat hurt the world food market? and, What can we do for the folks in our community who can't afford mountains of delicious food? (I'm not saying I've got clear answers to those questions, just that I think they're sensible questions to ask if you're going to talk about the ethics of barbeque in the first place.) But instead, we're asking, How can I keep from getting fat? It's a similar misdirection -- forget about the wider implications of the consumption and shift the moral burden to protecting one's own body.

In both cases, there's a move to make morality about covering and beautifying one's own backside. I think that's pernicious on multiple levels, since it distracts people from addressing more meaningful causes for guilt in consumption, and the ethically-charged language also gives an illusory halo of righteousness to decisions that are simple self-preservation. Not that I'm against saving money or staying healthy -- but I think those issues should occupy a very much smaller fraction of the moral discourse on consumption than they now do.

moral decline or moral progress

2010-03-05T16:41:00.002-05:00

It seems to me that we've got competing narratives going in Christian communities about whether our culture is getting worse or better morally. I've had a couple of conversations about this lately and also read Richard Beck's blog post about moral progress. So here goes:

Some people are convinced that our culture's morality has gone down the drain in the last 60 years or so. Culture's stance on sex seems to be a main issue for those who say things are getting progressively more evil. Nowadays premarital and extramarital sex are much more accepted than they were in 1950. The destabilization of the nuclear family, the decline of churchgoing, and the increased vocalization of atheism also feed into the claim that the moral climate has gotten much worse in the last decades.

However, other people cite instances of moral progress in the last decades. In 1950 it was much more culturally ok to refuse service to black people, to pay a woman less than a man to do the same job, to take over foreign nations to exploit their resources, to gunk up the environment irresponsibly, etc. While those things still happen now, they arguably happen less and provoke more moral outrage when they do. So there's also a case for saying we've had a real moral awakening as a culture.

Adherents to these two competing narratives (of decline and progress) are often members of opposing camps for other cultural, political, or religious reasons, and that polarization can make a mess of moral perception. There's a danger of pitting the two sets of virtues against each other rather than dealing with tensions between them intelligently and cooperatively. For example, adherents to the decline model may see initiatives to get better workplace conditions for women as a threat to the stability of the family. Conversely, adherents to the progress model may see emphasis on sexual morality as a continuation of double standards that have historically oppressed women. There are a lot of complicated questions to navigate here, but as it is there seems to be a lot more heckling and indignation than real attempts to sort out those questions. Because the moral questions are so entangled in other issues, people on both sides of those issues are liable to ignore or even disdain some real moral virtues for sociopolitical reasons.

I think this tendency to ignore some virtues should make thoughtful Christian folk skeptical of taking either model (decline or progress) too seriously. Chastity and social justice are both in Jesus' teachings. Denunciations and panegyrics about the culture these days may both be true, and they may sometimes be appropriate, but they're not the most helpful form of discourse to deal with the range of Christian virtues and the complexities of enacting them amid cultural debate.

(I've thoughts brewing for a post later on cultural morality vs. people's morality.)

representation, experience, and invisible spiderwebs

2009-12-13T13:39:00.003-05:00

Not too long ago I watched a spider trap and eat an ant. I think this is the first time I've actually watched a web-making spider eat something. But I've seen lots of video of hapless prey becoming entangled and spiders deftly wrapping them in web. So how much does vicarious experience through video count as experience, and how does it influence more direct experience?

Oddly, I'm not even positive whether this was the first time I watched a spider eat something -- I guess because I've seen it on video a lot (yeah, I grew up in a PBS household) and might not remember the difference. And often the number of representations we've seen outweighs firsthand experiences. Most people probably see at least dozens of movie kisses before they have a first kiss. Most children probably glue bright yellow petals on a lot more stylized paper sunflowers than they see real sunflowers (which, in contrast to the paper ones, have a lot more petals, aren't uniform colors, and are also hairier than a wookie using Rogaine).

Representations (such as video footage of spiders) allow us to see a lot more of the world than we otherwise would, but they filter it through another observer's selective perspective. This applies to a lot of literature and art. Video may be a little less subjective than other representations, but it's not raw data -- even at the lowest level of artistic tinkering, what we get to see is what somebody else considered the good parts.

Which is why we watch it, of course, rather than watching the unfiltered live 3-D imaging of the living room. The fact that somebody else noticed this stuff and recorded it on purpose lends interest and credibility. Like the part in Browning's "Fra Lippo Lippi" monologue where Lippi (the painter) is talking about how people don't notice things until they've been painted. The fact that someone wanted to represent stuff gives us a reason to look at it.

But there's clearly a difference between looking at someone's representation and experiencing the content firsthand. The representation is really neat because you get to experience another person's choices as well as the content and because it's usually pared down to give you the most interesting parts. But the selection process, of course, also leaves a lot out -- and who decides what's interesting? Also, the represented version is often stylized or streamlined to make it easier to deal with.

To return to the spider -- video versions I'd seen usually cut out parts of the process, because in actuality it takes a long time for a spider to wrap something up and eat it. If the fact that it takes a long time is interesting, the represented version missed that part. In the very act of trying to keep to the interesting parts, it inevitably left out a big one. Which means that while the representations I'd seen were pretty cool, and they let me have some experience of spiders eating things before I personally happened across one, they don't substitute for firsthand observation.

However, the way representations are made to be so easy to deal with makes the substitution tempting. Video versions of spiders eating things often have a lovely black background and optimal camera placement and lighting so that you can actually see all the fibers of the web. But when I watched the spider, a cluttered background made the web invisible in places. I could tell it was there because I could see the spider crawling along it, but (even though I have very good near vision) I couldn't see the strands of web. Watching a quality video of a spider is a lot easier than watching a real spider, because the representation streamlines perception -- everything is clear, and you know where you're supposed to look, and it won't take too long.

So I think the inundation of representations can make us lazy about doing the real work of perception. I'm not going to go so far as Baudrillard and say that representation outright destroys reality. But I think that if we rely on it too much, it can make us bad at dealing with reality. Especially since the representations stay with us and inform our perceptions later. It's easy to go into mental shorthand and substitute one of the many simplified images on hand for the actual complexity we're looking at. We (especially artists who want to do some representing and not be trite with it) have to keep open mental dialogue between representations and our own perceptions so we don't get lazy or continue to miss interesting bits just because other people did. It can be rewarding to notice how the spider web is invisible and the sunflower is hairy.

And if you don't write nature poetry, of course, apply this to whatever grander matters you like. Relationships with other people, for example.

writing

2009-10-13T14:20:00.005-04:00

Lately I've been in awe of the act of writing. I regularly ask myself (and nowadays my students) to do something very nearly miraculous. I don't know how it works, but I've developed an almost reckless trust that it does.

So, I've got a blank page and no idea what I'm going to say, but then I start saying something anyway, and sometimes it turns out to be something meaningful and exciting. And sure, it doesn't come out of nowhere -- I draw on lots of past experiences and thoughts to make it happen. But still, the sheer gall of thinking, "I now have no clue where I'm going with this, but 3 hours from now I absolutely am going to have a decent draft of whatever it is" is baffling when you think about it. How do we know it'll work? Yeah, there are deliberate things we can do to foster it -- brainstorming, associations, freewriting, whatever -- but what guarantees that anything will actually come together? Nothing I know of, and yet it happens every time. The quality of my writing definitely varies, but every single time professors have assigned me to write a paper, I've written one. And every time I decide to make myself write, I write something. It's crazy!

I have mixed feelings about how academia forces writing and ideas. When there's pressure to generate material, a lot of it is likely to be inauthentic and written just because we've got a deadline to meet even if we don't care about what we're saying. And the whole reification of ideas is weird -- who thought it was a good plan to assign complex and multidirectional expressions of thought a numeric value? or to use relatively arbitrary writing requirements as a barrier to achieving status? But one thing I'll say in favor of the academic writing situation: It does build faith in whatever miracle we rely on when we write. If I hadn't been required to write regularly, I might not even know that writing can happen on demand. I might be stuck writing only in the conjunction of propitious moods when I felt energetic and thoughtful at the same time. But (largely because of academic writing) I instead know that I can force writing under almost any psychological conditions. And sometimes forced writing can be dang good, too.

Writing is a weird hybrid of hard work and magic. More on that later, perhaps.

speech scrolls

2009-10-03T23:54:00.006-04:00

Way back before comic books, there were speech scrolls. This is a woodcut from Foxe's Book of Martyrs, circa 1563. Notice how the scroll comes from the general direction of Cranmer's face. Also, notice the written label on the monk's robe in the bottom left. Here are links to some more woodcuts with speech scrolls from the same book. (Warning: This last one isn't a good idea if you're squeamish or trying to eat -- yes, that is his arm bone down there.)

You may ask, is this why I'm in grad school? Gory renaissance proto-comics? Well, friends, I don't know either.

leg hair

2009-06-21T17:11:00.000-04:00

sometime in October, with the assistance of literary criticism class:

Me: Hey, I don’t like shaving my legs.
My Inner Feminist: Who said you had to?
Me: Um.
My Inner Feminist: . . .
Me: Was it . . . the patriarchy?
My Inner Feminist: Bingo.
Me: Was it an ideology that compels self-modification for women on the assumption of inadequacy and reinforces the to-be-looked-at-ness of the female body?
My Inner Feminist: Yup.
Me: DANG . . .
My Inner Feminist: Dang is right.
Me: So, does that mean I can stop shaving my legs?
My Inner Feminist: Yes, yes it does.
Me: Oh, ok. Well then, I think I’ll stop.
My Inner Feminist: Good job.

November:

Me: I kind of resent that now I can’t shave my legs even if I want to, because you’d make it sound like collusion with the patriarchy.
My Inner Feminist: Tough. Such is the cost of cultural analysis.
Me: Yeah, I know. Fine.

circa January:

My Inner Feminist: How’s the leg hair?
Me: It’s good. I’m actually becoming rather fond of it now that we’re past that awkward prickly stage.
My Inner Feminist: Really? Would you say that it’s growing on you?
Me: Augh, don’t do that to me. You’re supposed to liberate women, not hurt them.
My Inner Feminist: Sorry. But anyway, it’s still winter, so no one has really seen it yet.
Me: Now who’s reinforcing to-be-looked-at-ness?
My Inner Feminist: Just sayin’. This isn’t very gutsy just yet. You going to shave when you wear a skirt?
Me: I dunno. We’ll see.

summer:

Me: Um, so I’m pretty ok with my leg hair now. Yay not having to shave.
My Inner Feminist: Huzzah! Down with the patriarchy!

strawberry cream cheese the way it was meant to be

2009-06-08T12:27:00.002-04:00

1. Toast a bagel.

2. Spread it thickly with cream cheese (real cream cheese, now, none of that diluted spread stuff).

3. Pile on thin slices of fresh strawberries until the bagel is somewhat precarious but not an outright architectural failure.

4. Drip just a little bit of honey on top.

Oh my goodness.

ethical integration and clarity

2009-05-13T15:41:00.002-04:00

Here's something hard I've been thinking about lately. If you have core ethical certainties and you want to do anything about them, you've got to manifest them in specific ways. But, how should you treat your specific course of action differently than you do the ethical core?

This will probably make more sense with an example. At a core ethical level, we've got the principle that (1) all human beings deserve respect as such. Then more specifically we extend the principle to the problem that (2) people are being exploited in sweat shops, and we ought to do something about that. Now in a further extension, many of those I know who raise awareness about the sweat shop issue would also say that (3) the exploitation is a problem of greed caused largely by the capitalist system and further that (4) you also should really buy things made of certified organic hemp fibers.

So what we've got here is a mixture of various ethical levels, and some complications arise when the layers aren't clearly distinguished. Namely, the mixture in this example can alienate people who also respect other humans and also might be willing to do something about sweatshops but who are not Marxists or hippies. It's not fair to imply that (1), (2), (3), and (4) always go together -- and that impression is a danger if they're all presented together without any distinctions. It's a problem to assume that an ethical principle is always bound to one's own methods of executing it.

Of course, it's also a problem if the ethical principle isn't executed at all. You have to have some elaboration or the beautiful abstract principle stays up in Plato's Ethereal Library of Congress for Ideal Forms and doesn't do anybody any good.

But what's more complicated is that the manifestation isn't arbitrary either. Marxists who respect human value establish a connection between human value and Marxist principles. Capitalists who respect human value also connect capitalism with human value. And I don't think the plurality of outcomes allows us to invalidate connections between ethics and method entirely. I might respect these people less if they didn't see a link between their socioeconomics and their convictions.

I guess the thing is that there's a lot of ethically neutral material (personal experience, available information, interpretive approaches, etc.) that intervenes between the principle and the specific course of action. So, while we need to involve ethical convictions in every specific choice, we also need to recognize that the convictions aren't acting in isolation. So perhaps if we recognize the inevitable entanglement of other material with attempts at doing what's right, we can do better at connecting with people who have similar convictions but different practices. Maybe? This is still hard.

gem of unintentional subversiveness

2009-05-12T09:24:00.004-04:00

I'm looking for summer work, and I found a Craigslist job page which (in two places) advertised "hourly wage comiserate with experience." I presume these estimable employers meant to say "commensurate," but it's really better the way it is.

Chapel and Other Theophanies

2009-03-21T22:09:00.000-04:00

Chapel is sometimes pretty inept. I'm all for making it as good as possible, but I also think that those of us who don't have much to do with the decisions there could do better at making chapel a worthwhile experience even when it's poorly done.

I'm beginning to see this as one of the fundamental challenges of Christianity: Receiving Jesus through whatever we encounter. Not that we rub out the initial reality of what we see and chalk Jesus in arbitrarily -- but that we look carefully, not denying the stupidity or sin or whatever else is there, for how Jesus is trying to reach us through what we see, and how he's present in the people with us.

Oh hey, I do have a blog.

2009-03-13T00:36:00.002-04:00

So, I'm reading Ian McEwan's Atonement now. I'm not sure what I think of it just yet, but here's a really neat part near the beginning. This is where a thirteen-year-old aspiring authoress is digesting an existential epiphany.

"She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value."

This is one of the main reasons literature is worthwhile. As humans trying to interact meaningfully (and trying to obey a specific order to love our neighbors as ourselves), we have to try to think of other people as just as real as we are. And that's hard to do, because we have the senses and details of our own existence, but not anyone else's. And it's also hard because it means we have to deal with other people's needs as well as our own, and that's a lot of work. But literature helps with this, because we get to practice experiencing other people's existential realities. We get to go into what matters to another person and how her psyche deals with things when we read what she's written. And once we get used to doing that in reading, I think we can do a better job of it in real life too.

Doh.

2008-06-24T12:54:00.004-04:00

So, I'm working on memorizing T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." I just Googled a quote Eliot uses to see where it's taken from. Here's what I searched:

"on whatever sphere of being the mind of a man may be intent at the time of death"

And Google kindly provided me with this suggestion:

Did you mean: "on whatever sphere of being the mind of a man may be internet at the time of death" ?

Irony is a beautiful thing.

Drastic Acts of Faith and How to Avoid Them

2008-05-18T19:01:00.005-04:00

Ok, it's blog-sermon time. In college class at church this morning, we were talking about the story where Jesus asks the rich man to sell everything and give it to the poor.

I think we often miss the point when we talk about stories where people do (or are asked to do) something drastic for their faith. When we talk about somebody who abandoned everything or suffered torture for God, we're really good at finding ways to make it irrelevant.

We can make drastic faith irrelevant by a yokelish dismissal of the unusual -- just blink very emphatically and refuse further consideration because it's so extreme. Which is silly, of course. The unusual is not the impossible; somebody really does this, and if it isn't us, whose fault is that?

Or, similarly, we can neutralize stories we don't want to be part of by the generous and broadminded strategy of calling them metaphorical and/or highly instructive for our lives and stopping there. But metaphor and instruction point somewhere, so if we want to use those labels to get out of anything, we're just stalling. "Sell everything you have and follow me," if it's a metaphor, probably isn't a metaphor for "Go to church a couple times a week and give 10% of your money." And Mother Teresa's life, if it's instructive, probably isn't teaching us, "Watch documentaries about the poor and feel piously queasy." We can't dismiss scary faith stories as instructional but not actually pertaining to anything scary on our end.

A far more cunning evasive strategy is to go head on, take the most daunting moments of sacrifice to be our example, and then search the tortured depths of our own psyches for the strength to give up absolutely everything -- while in fact giving up absolutely nothing. That makes us feel like we're for real, but it keeps the combat safely psychological. We've got the guts to consider seriously the possibility of martyrdom. Whoo. But how does that help anybody? It doesn't, of course, and it doesn't help us either (if we stop there), because if we don't think we could do it, we'll be discouraged, and if we do think we could do it, we'll be proud. Considering whether we could do things that we're not actually going to do in the foreseeable future can be a convenient dead-end.

Considering what we can do now is more hazardous and more right. Whether or not we think we could die for God if it came to that, there's no question that we could show our loyalty to him in less climactic ways. It is right sometimes to consider whether we could give it all up, but no matter where we get with that, we can go on to do something real. If we think we couldn't do anything really dangerous for God and that's discouraging, we can build strength by doing small things. If we think we could give up everything, but no breakneck Godquest is in sight, we can prove our willingness by small sacrifices -- and that attempt tends to bring humility.

This last bit may seem like another cop-out, but I don't think it is. Doing small things doesn't mean that total sacrifice is out of the picture at all. It could still come up, or we could still actively pursue a more drastic life of service. But it seems to me that the people who express dedication in the details are the most ready for total sacrifice. And I think that's what the parable of the talents is getting at -- we've got to be faithful in small things before we're entrusted with big things. Which is why serving in the details is doubly hazardous: First, it's real work by itself (unlike the aforementioned shirkings), but then it also might give God room to ask us for something even more dangerous.

But it's what we need to do if we mean our faith. Yup, pretty much. I even try doing it sometimes in rare fits or courage or when I haven't thought it through. :-p

(P.S. I don't think I have a career ahead of me in motivational speaking.)

Poetic Self-Mockery in Prose

2008-05-14T11:21:00.002-04:00

Last summer I started to write a poem about catching fireflies. It was going to be this ambitious double-meaning thing with a metaphor for learning. I was going to say how you can’t catch them if you only look for the light pulses; you’ve got to learn to see them when they just look like bugs, and (just as a matter of fact – this part wasn’t particularly worked into my symbolism yet) to do that you have to angle yourself so the fireflies are between you and something light-colored. Such tactics I remembered from the summer delinquency of my childhood, and seeing a couple of fireflies in the yard brought it to mind. But I thought I ought to catch some fireflies with this strategy before I wrote the poem. Real-life details and writing from experience and all that.

I couldn’t catch any. I don’t know if there was a firefly plague that summer or what. I didn’t see many, despite frequent predatory dusk ventures. When I did see them, they flew over fences and into bushes and too high. I couldn’t reach the fireflies and only slapped bloody mosquitoes, muttering apologies to John Donne. I still maintain that my firefly-catching strategy is sound. It just didn’t work. So I didn’t finish the poem.

And I don’t think I will, because of what it did to me at the end of the summer. After I had striven for authenticity – yea, shed my very blood for this poem – it deliberately betrayed and humiliated me. I’d just about given up on catching fireflies that summer. I’d gone to bed for the night. I came downstairs for a drink of water. And there, on the carpet at the foot of the stairs, I saw a slow, yellow, pulsing glow. It was dying. I picked it up and examined the real-life details: the shiny black legs, squirmy abdomen, and the translucent orange stripes on its back armor where the light came through. It kept lighting slowly, and I carried it to the back door and shook it out of my hand into the grass.

Now I can’t possibly write the poem because of what this has done to the symbolism. It can’t be about the pursuit of knowledge anymore, because I just stumbled on the firefly; it can’t even be about how true knowledge comes best when you don’t pursue it, because the firefly was dying; and it can’t be about the destructive effects of analysis, because my earlier pursuit had nothing to do with this firefly’s tragic demise. In short, the poem annihilated itself. It spontaneously combusted in a puff of irony, leaving me on the back porch in poemless, pajama-clad chagrin.

Ode on a Golden Bundt Spice Cake With Lemon Glaze

2008-03-05T15:41:00.006-05:00

So, today I meant to write a midterm essay for American Short Story, but instead I learned how to smoke a brisket and baked an exceptionally beautiful spice cake.

I don't think John Keats had thought about spice cakes when he wrote "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." Spice cakes embody transient mortal beauty, more valuable simply because of its impermanence.

Really, Keats should've written an ode on a spice cake to explore this angle of the aesthetic experience. But no, spice cakes aren't romantic enough for him. He has to write about seasons and birdwatching and pottery, when there are beautiful spice cakes in the world unimmortalized by verse.

But wait -- if he immortalized a spice cake, he'd be missing the point of its fleeting beauty, violating the very ephemerality which sharpens its significance.

So. . . maybe Keats actually wrote a poem about spice cakes by not writing a poem about them. His conspicuous silence on the subject actually proves his reverence and appreciation for the evanescent beauty of spice cakes.

(This ramble is indebted to this poem. Also, forgive my ridiculousness; my blog looked lonely and so I posted on it.)

Mother Deities

2008-02-09T14:57:00.000-05:00

So, this last week I've encountered two songs that refer to meeting one's mother in heaven. One of them ("Poor Wayfaring Stranger") says in one verse "I'm going there to meet my Father" and in another verse "I'm going there to meet my mother" (note the capitalization). God takes the father role, but the mother is just a human mother rather awkwardly placed as a heavenly figure.

The divinity of fathers is understood to be metaphorical and refer imperfectly to God's divinity, but mothers don't have anywhere to pass the buck in protestant culture. I'm taking Victorian Literature, and the strain is especially acute in that period. Victorian mothers are supposed to be superhuman agents of goodness, taking care of their own work and everyone else's, and generally glowing with virtue. I'm not saying mothers or anyone else ought to slack off on virtue and goodness, but the expectations were pretty ridiculous and still are in many subcultures.

If we have a psychological or cultural need for a divine mother, promoting earthly mothers to the position isn't a fair way to deal with it. And it's not healthy for them or those around them. A mother who thinks she's supposed to be an angel or goddess is likely to be acutely disappointed with herself, or self-righteous, or both. Idealizing human roles gets messy very quickly.

So maybe we need to recognize the mother aspect in God more. Mothers should be able to see what they do as a reflection of (not a substitute for) the mother in God. Then mothering is meaningful but allowed to be imperfect, and mothers can respect themselves and be respected for what they are.

A Paradox

2008-01-20T14:57:00.000-05:00

So, in my Philosophy of Religion class Friday, we were talking about the importance of philosophy, and I got started thinking about how some things can be significant and insignificant at the same time. Chesterton (in Orthodoxy) talks about Christian paradoxes, and this is similar to some things he mentions.

Some examples of the paradox: It's important to think about things in religion and have coherent systems of thought. If we're going to believe something, we need to think about it somehow so that we can keep it real on all levels (love God with our minds, as Karyn was saying). And the positions we take on intellectual issues make a difference; some fights about theory are really worth fighting. Philosophy matters. But then, what's a lifetime's abstract study of God worth in comparison with one act of sacrificial love to another done for God's sake? What does philosophy matter in comparison with practical obedience to God?

Or another one, close to home for me: What's the good of spending so much time and energy making a line of poetry work? Why agonize over whether this alliteration is too much or how to make this image consistent, when you could be doing something of more impact? Maybe five or ten people are ever going to read the poem, and maybe a couple of those will get something out of it. It's a lot of work for something insignificant. But then it is significant too. It's hard to find something more significant than communicating a complex truth beautifully with another person.

Or struggling to be better: Our practical moral victories are lame and insufficient, but we break our hearts over them anyway, and it's right that we do.

Or even ourselves: We're ridiculous little people, but we're also the brilliantly significant objects of God's love.

This last one leads to something that might help to understand the paradox: We're valueless compared to God, but we're deeply valuable in relation to God. So maybe the issue is to relate things instead of just comparing them. By comparison, any human act can be insignificant, but by relation, any human act can be significant.

But anyway, seeing the paradox of doing things that are both significant and insignificant gives an interesting (and, I think, healthy) attitude. Because of the significance of minute things, we can do what we do passionately. Because of the insignificance, we can laugh at ourselves and eschew pride. I think we can work with awareness that what we're doing can be a life-and-death matter and a joke at the same time, and quite genuinely and undilutedly each.

Existentialist Blind Dates

2008-01-14T13:17:00.000-05:00

I think someone should've arranged a meeting between Fyodor Dostoevsky and Emily Dickinson. It would've been chronologically possible.

Since they're both dead now, though, I'd settle for a Tom Stoppard play based on the scenario.

Additional Bloggage

2007-12-27T18:42:00.001-05:00

Nathan and I are trying a new blogger blog for our discussions, which used to be buried in Xanga comments. Here it is, with its very own Prufrockian title:

question on your plate

You should subscribe to it and come poke at philosophy with us there.

Poem Intersections

2007-12-20T14:31:00.000-05:00

I like it when poems come together (accidentally or on purpose). So I think I shall post poetry quotes that seem to intersect; perhaps it'll become a frequent feature on this blog.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
- Eliot

A Wounded Deer -- leaps highest --
I've heard the Hunter tell --
Tis but the Ecstasy of death --
And then the Brake is still!

. . .

Mirth is the Mail of Anguish --
In which it Cautious Arm,
Lest anybody spy the blood
And "you're hurt" exclaim!
- Dickinson

Dazzling and Tremendous

2007-12-11T00:02:00.000-05:00

"Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me."
- Whitman

I love those lines very much indeed. But I think I may disagree with what Whitman is saying (if I've understood it). I don't think the sunrise would be a mortal danger if he couldn't send sunrise out of himself. Rocks or animals aren't in danger of being killed by dazzling tremendousness, but people are -- because they have the capacity to respond to dazzling tremendousness in its own terms.

Our weakness, our capacity to be injured by our surroundings, comes from a strength, our capacity to respond deeply to our surroundings.

(To go back to Whitman, though, perhaps he's saying he'd be overcome if he only responded internally and lacked the power to express his encounters -- and the context (section 25 of "Song of Myself") suggests that that might be on track.)

God and Pain

2007-12-08T15:17:00.000-05:00

How God could create a world knowing there would be suffering and not intervene is one of the fundamental questions theists have to confront. A pretty intellectual answer is definitely not going to make it all better, but here's something I've been thinking about that I haven't heard before.

Suppose existence itself is a positive good, and a very big one. If that were true, the suffering in the world -- even the real evil in the world -- wouldn't be able to make creation a bad deal.

We often tend to think of existence as sort of a neutral state, not really worth much unless something ostensibly good happens to it but not harmful unless something bad happens. But God creates things. (I'm working with the assumption that God is good and wise here.) God creates things that don't experience pleasure or pain, so far as we know. God creates things that will probably never touch the experience of humans. The universe is huge, maybe infinite. Creating things seems to be a positive expression of God's energy good in itself, not a good subordinate to that of generating happiness among created things. Creating is God's happiness, it's not just used as a means to human happiness.

The point of that isn't, "Suck it up, the music of the spheres doesn't care about your drama." (Though I suppose that's probably true.) God can create because creating is good and still care about the human condition. But if creating is good -- if it's just fundamentally better for things to be than for them not to be (exit Hamlet) -- then that gives a different perspective to the way we see our condition and make sense of suffering.

If existence itself is an intrinsically good thing, then it could outweigh a lot of bad things. If it's very good to be, then maybe the things we see as bad aren't bad enough to make the answer come out negative. Maybe a person could be starving and still be blessed to be at all. Saints and martyrs have believed that God and God-given existence are still richly good even in painful circumstances, and maybe that applies to the whole world even if we don't recognize it. Perhaps being, and with it the potential for infinite quality of life and fulfillment in God, itself is stronger than the evils that often seem to encumber it.

Disclaimers: The maybes and perhapses above are not rhetorical -- I'm speculating and I know it. Also, I understand if my dear readers (all 4 of you) wish to smack me for propounding such a sanguine philosophy of life at this time in the semester. ;)

It is Margaret you mourn for.

2007-11-18T21:52:00.000-05:00

Ok, here's the further digression. I saved it as a draft and didn't come back to finish it.

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older	5
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:	10
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

-- G.M. Hopkins

Margaret is crying about leaves, but she's also crying about mortality. We as people channel the emotional force of abstract and general situations into specific symbols. That's one reason that poetry matters. Specific words, syntax, sound touch a reader because they aren't just words -- they evoke things that matter deeply that we can't access without words. Or maybe we do access them internally, but the words help us to commune with other people about them and be pierced or comforted by the understanding that someone else also knows about this. Poetry channels forces that are too big or too confusing for us to confront without it.

Columbus

2007-08-31T13:19:00.000-04:00

In American lit, we've been talking about the early interactions between Europe and America, and I've always found it interesting that Columbus bumped into our continent accidentally when he was looking for something else. He was trying to get to spices and silk in China, and his theory of going around the earth was sound -- except for the obstructing landmass.

I think we often do that same thing. We have some goals in mind and some good theories -- even brilliance and courage, on occasion. But things work out completely and disorientingly different from what we intended, because the earth (or life, or God, as the case may be) is bigger than we thought. And the continents that come between us and our goals can be wonderful, if we accept and use them for what they are and snap out of the idea that they're a shortcut to what we wanted in the first place.

(This thought may eventually try to become articulate and profound and turn into a poem, or it may accept its humble status as a cheesy devo blog.)

When Theological Arguments Aren't

2007-08-26T23:38:00.000-04:00

I've noticed recently that supposedly theological arguments are often really more based in aesthetics or mental comfort than in theology. People don't connect on the issue because they really disagree about a framework of aesthetics or mental comfort rather than about things derivable from the tangible evidence.

For example, responses to the question, "Does God cause suffering or just allow it?" are based on the concepts of God seen in each option and how mentally comfortable or irksome those concepts are to people. Most people I know want to say God allows suffering but doesn't cause it, and (I think) this is because they can't stand the idea of God as some kind of sadist or experimenter poking at humanity, even if it's for our own good. But other people say God causes whatever happens, (I think) because they want the reassurance that suffering, coming from God, is good and is under control, not just something random that happens while God stands there and declines to intervene. The groups both want to see God as good, but they have different aesthetic (that's not quite the right term, but it'll do) frameworks, and so they end up in very passionate opposition, both trying to defend the goodness of God from repulsive dishonor (as they see it). The first group of people will promptly direct us to the book of Job, where God allows Satan to cause Job suffering. The second group will also go to Job and quote, "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." Elsewhere in scripture too, there's evidence for both takes on the issue -- but people are selective and dogmatic because they're violently repelled by some images of God. (That was a long example; I hope it made the intended concept clear and wasn't just distracting in itself.)

But very often, people's supposedly theological arguments really get their bitterness and immobility from underlying problems of aesthetics or mental comfort rather than from any evidence that surfaces in the discussion. I was reading a little from John Calvin recently for a class, and he thinks that believing predestination allows people to appreciate God's undeserved bounty much better; he gets a more satisfying God image from predestination. Other people, of course, think the God image you get from Calvinistic predestination is disgusting. But presumably, Calvin doesn't get the same image of God from his views as those of us who react indignantly.
(Any alarmed modernists still with me should take a deep breath here and try not to panic. I'm not saying it's all subjective and all views are equally valid. I do believe that many of the issues are real issues, and it's possible to be wrong on them, and the objective evidence matters. But I am saying that there's a lot below the surface that we usually don't address, and what is subjective is not therefore irrelevant.)

So the main point is, we could improve communication if we better addressed the underlying aesthetic frameworks to theological questions. Often, we get an image that's repellent to us, and we say "Eww" (or perhaps some expression that sounds more like a mature indignation than that but signifies the same thing) and then try to find evidence for our own position under the impression that we know the other one is wrong, because God isn't icky like that. But I think it would be better if we took more time to understand other people's aesthetic frameworks so that we could approach the evidence more cooperatively and with less emotional volatility. And if the aesthetic framework is what's flawed, we could try to reason about that directly instead of dragging theological issues down with it. This method sounds a lot harder than what we normally do, but I think the attempt would be worthwhile.

Thoughts?