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Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Another year, another dollar.  Or as a large black lady I used to work with at Yuma Proving Grounds, Dorothy, might have said, another year, another half a dollar.  That is because I have had a major problem in this area.  But that is not what I am going to start out writing about in this new year.  The most excellent blogger Sticky Green Leaves and her fellow bloggers “All Things…”, and Robotic Tree, have given me excellent examples to follow, all in their different ways.  “Last Train” would do well also, I believe, but it is up to him to confront the white page.  I have plenty of confidence in him but that is so easy to say– although it is also true.

Today I am going to follow up on some generally religious writings these three have written about with some meandering of my own.  “All Things Considered” has given us a portrait of someone who finds true worship in the liturgy, most especially in hearing the liturgy rather than reading it.  He would rather not hear extemporaneous prayers as he hears those as manipulative.  I take it he doesn’t consider sermons especially important, at least not at all to him.  He gives us a picture of himself as someone whose ears are  pricked and erect so as to hear the things that annoy him.  He finds release when the whole affair is over.  This is not ideal worship, so to speak, as his attention is upon himself and his interlocutors, innocent though the latter are in this relationship.  We have one man’s sensitivities becoming a hypercritical listening organ.

As I write this I realize I am writing about myself when I go to church, not “All Things Considered”.  Then how have I worshipped?  What do I consider worship?  I have a picture of myself when I was about 25, before I was a Christian.  I was a visitor at an Episcopalian church in Williams, Arizona.  Perhaps it was the very first church service I had ever attended.  Men and woman bowed and kneeled in obeisance.  The priest sang the service, the people responded, the choir sang and the people sang.  It was utterly charming and delightful, symbolic and real.  One of the friends I was wish mistook my delight for levity; I was neither laughing at nor with the order and elements of the service, rather it was a delight in the beloved, the ceremony itself. 

If I was pre-Christian then, what am I now?  That is a personal matter.  If someone asks me how I am doing I may say just fine, or I am looking for a better job.  What sort of answer do they want?  I may be somewhat vulnerable, just enough to let someone in on one of the secrets of my life which are completely unknown to the rest of the 300 people congregation.  I am not really that shy but would rather bug out than chat to people I don’t know and don’t have much of an occasion to get to know better.  A lot of them would rather bug out too.  How do the accidents happen where shy people can get into each other’s orbits rather than clang off into space?

book review–The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley

Been reading anything I might like and not know about?  I don’t know if you ever read Walter Mosley, who writes the Easy Rawlins series about life in the fifties in Los Angeles, about black people mostly.  His sex scenes are absurdly over the top sometimes, which is why I stopped reading him a few years ago.  So junk!  to steal a pithy and punchy phrase from Molly’s Yupit students.  However, he has a very affecting lyrical sense, quite musical, and uses the black argot in a very funny and orignal way.  With misgivings I started to read one of his latest books, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey.  It is primarily the story of a seventeen year old girl and a ninety-one year old man, which is probably primarily the blessed reason why he doesn’t do his habitual over the tops.  It has some very well realized relationship explorations and descriptions, as well as some rather fantastic but interesting background.  If you want a short well written novel, much of which concerns what it means and feels like to be old and losing your mind and just about everything else that has ever meant much to you, and the sort of redemption one can have through friendship, kinship, and love recognizably human and physical yet Platonic (though it is admitted that this Platonic sense is caused by differentiations which acknowledge what it is to be a young girl and what it is to be a very old man, and some things are just omitted by social sense, moral sense, and common sense).

     Here is a nice little musing by the ghostly wise man in the story, Coydog:  “The great man say that life is pain,” Coydog had said over eighty-five years before, “that mean if you love life, then you love the hurt come along wit’it.  Now, if that ain’t the blues, I don’t know what is.”

nro-Lopez interview with Michael Novak

LOPEZ: What’s the fire, the flames, you focus on in All Nature Is a Sacramental Fire? NOVAK: The transitoriness of life has often struck my heart and mind, everything around us reminds us of it — a rose pressed in an old Bible, fires from a log leaping into nothingness. The play, of course, is on Hopkins’s line that all nature is a Heraclitean fire: All is change, all is vanishing, flashing forth the glory of God. LOPEZ: Do you have a favorite of those poems — a real intimate window into your life so far? NOVAK: I love a lot of them, for bringing back sharp memories otherwise forgotten — pieces snatched from the flames! My favorite two, of course, are the two for Karen at the end. The haunting emptiness, the warmth of laughter, sure knowledge that she surrounds me with care. LOPEZ: Why should everyone write poetry? NOVAK: Because at heart everyone has a soul that sometimes sings. The sheer effort of matching this lilt to words is good both for your sense of words and for the intensity with which you will observe things in the future. Poetry sharpens our touches, tastes, the scents we smell. Open a bottle of cologne — is it even close to the one your father sometimes wore? Brings back no memories at all? Poetry grabs onto passing things and fully dwells in them awhile. LOPEZ: What if you’re bad at it? Does it say something about your soul? NOVAK: Being first class at it is not the point; I know for sure I am not. One does it for the sheer enjoyment of the thing. It is worth it, and it is worth doing badly. Your life will be more joyful for the effort. And real poets will mean more to you. LOPEZ: I loved this: “Do not neglect the humblest modes of inspiration. Close your fists around them quickly while in your grasp, seize them in mid-flight. They evanesce into the night.” But who has time? NOVAK: A wise teacher once told our class: Keep a worn journal by the bed, and write in it every night — five minutes, no more — jotting down the most memorable image (or even insight) of the day. Four minutes if you must. But do it. You will be surprised how this will teach you to notice many vivid images each day, and many insights. Only choose one at night, though, “to snatch from the flames.” LOPEZ: What is “the sacramental sheen by which the world of our Creation shows itself”? NOVAK: The world shines like shook foil: Hopkins. The beauty of earth is all around us, if we notice, and in it the glory of God. To be a theist is to say “thank you” with glad heart many times a day. LOPEZ: What is a “torment of beauty”? Why would it be such a good torment? NOVAK: Don’t some beautiful sounds, sights, scents overwhelm you? So that you can hardly bear to be still? Beauty of many kinds is at times too much. It is a torment, overcharges inner equipment. LOPEZ: “I wish that I had truly been a poet, not an amateur . . . so that they might be worthy of the Creator from Whose sweet hands they came. I did my best.” Reminds me of what Mother Teresa of Calcutta said about being called not to be “successful but to be faithful.” Is that something of what you had in mind in publishing this collection? NOVAK: Some real poets have looked at some of my verses. They tell me how poor each is, undisciplined, not really poetry yet, possibly highly charged prose. Too dominated by Hopkins and a few other favorites. All true, but oh! so much fun, and it has enriched so many other moments of my life, by teaching me habits of observation and joy. And on some special occasions, such as birthdays, a little more elegant than just “short remarks” — as long as a laugh or two is implanted in them. After reading this volume, two or three friends have written how much they enjoyed moments of laughter, followed by mistiness, a smile here, an LOL, a heart wrench. How happy their notes made me! (For more on William E. Simon Jr. and Living the Call, read KJL’s recent syndicated column.) — Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

 

journal-God’s will

.   Yesterday at our Lewis group I brought up again, though without using the ‘steering wheel’ analogy, the way different Christian’s view doing God’s will. It seems very important at NWBC to view it as something to find out every part of every day through various evidences or guessing or having a peace about things or whatever. And then there is the Augustinian: “Love God, and do what you will”. As Kierkegaard says, that first part changes everything because then the individual is bound to God and to the ethical
and so to love himself as his neighbor, which should take escape hatches away if one becomes serious. For probably the first time I didn’t feel the need to be ornery or sarcastic. I would suppose it might have something to do with the different ways that people view what it is to live through the grace of God, or what the nature of grace is. Does God give us the freedom to live as grownups, letting us live as we will and should (or not), or are we to be tied to His apron strings, as it were, constantly seeking affirmation as if doing His will is often a mystery. Does one follow one’s heart? Isn’t it ok to say and think that sometimes? Must we always have the thought that man’s heart is desperately wicked and full of deceit? Can one follow one’s nose? “God’s Word is a lamp before our feet.” That means we have a guide and can’t see very far ahead. So perhaps we ought to be cautious. But isn’t it still our journey? It makes sense to say that freedom is the freedom to do God’s will, or to do the good, to live as we ought, perhaps? But then don’t we live in the freedom to make our own choices? And isn’t that really OK? Isn’t that why all human beings are given consciences? Or is the Grand Inquisitor right–we can’t live in freedom and need caretakers who deceive but love us, who will take care of us if we give them the power? I am not saying that those who take seriously the steer wheel analogy want to take people’s freedom away, rather just the opposite according to their theology, but it seems like a disguised form of legalism. I wonder if that makes sense? So freedom isn’t just another word for nothing left to lose, it is just another way to put ourselves in harness (where His yoke is easy upon us and His burden is light) and that is good. So we may come to Him, and have the Peace which passes understanding. but still not get a direct line to God. Is God the Taskmaster, “Come on mule!.”  Sometimes we may feel that way in spite of our theology. We have a welter of metaphors. I will do your will, Lord. Now I just have to figure it out, hour by hour, day by day, month by month. Or is there nothing to figure out? I have heard that also. Clean the chains and follow your nose! And pray and meditate and go to church and love your neighbor as yourself and learn what it means to love God. If that turns out to be the same as giving up the steering wheel, well, OK, I still don’t understand it, but does it matter in the end?  It all must be bound up in the “personal relationship” idea.  They really mean it, and they want it to be direct and always at hand and yet also a matter of faith at the same time.  Or else they have dry times.  I have neither the dry times nor whatever the former is.  This is a mystery to me.  And they are cordial enough and tolerant and brotherly enough (all having to do with loving another person) to put up with my contrariness, which seems not to bother them in the least.

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Short-Sickness unto Death

Sickness unto Death?            by Michael Dodd

Mitchell Darrow has auguries of doom. He sees his five year old daughter, Marisela, falling to her death from a precipice.  It is a feeling he can’t shake.   Doom is coming.

He lays awake in bed, looking through the bedroom door into the living room.  The Suns, the basketball team, is on his mind.  Are Barkley and KJ and Thundering Dan good enough to come through this year to beat Hakeem and Horry and Cassels?

Darrow looks into the shaded living room.  There were several Mummers, Barkley among them, darkly gray with short kinky black hair, having a convocation, some sort of muttering, murmuring, conspiratorial musings, their backs turned to him, wearing cloaks now like ancient Druids gathering to cast spells to cast out the darkness and bring back the sun.

The Beatles “I’m  So Tired” fills his soul.  His left quadriceps is doing a flibbertigibbety repetitive dance.  “There!”  “Again!”  “A spasm every 42 seconds!”

Mitchell Darrow’s heart is beating too fast, as if he is just back from jogging; his heart rate is elevated and is stuck on 75 percent of a maximum pulse rate.  He goes into the living room, no longer thinking of the Barkley Mummers.

As he lays down on the couch, waiting for his pulse to slow, he hears, not in his soul or head, but in his ears, the dark lament of the old Ray Charles ’Early in the Morning’ .  Actually hearing it, as it was recorded forty years ago on the original acetate, as an auditory hallucination, is startling.

What is going on?

The thought of “heart attack” fills him with urgency.  There is a hospital only five minutes away from his house.  He drives there, walking through the emergency room doors as the sun is coming up on this cold winter’s morning in the desert…

“Can I help you?” the receptionist asks in a harried, distracted way.

Darrow can see some commotion about forty feet in front of him.  Some hospital curtains are being whisked along their tracks to create a room.  Before they completely hide the drama, he sees a flash of a man on a table, surrounded by medical personnel.

He answers the receptionist:  “My heartbeat is too fast.  It seems stuck.”

She holds his wrist with her soft warm hands; he is comforted.  She asks him if he been under stress recently.

“Yes.”    He thinks of a flying- tumbling girl.  “Can I see a doctor?”

“The doctors are very busy now.  You can but there will be a long wait.”

Darrow hears commands to fire paddles, as in trying to revive a heart attack victim.

As he stands there, thinking, he sees a doctor go to a phone close by.  All he can hear is:  “Sorry.”  The rest is hushed and grave:  he thinks he hears “sorry” again.

Darrow feels better.  He goes home.  He takes a nap and his heart beat returns to normal.

But the attacks will come back, the panic will return.  And return.

Short-Initiations

Initiations              by Michael Dodd

                        As a snow globe can localize and bring to attention its particular charms, so in life filled with movement, particular events can make still and vivid, as on a frieze, small moments which nevertheless contain in them the seeds of future contemplation.  Three singular events are thus emblazoned in my memory.

I was eleven years old, had only just fallen in love for the first time in my life.  I loved scary movies.  Vincent Price’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” weighed upon my nighttime daydreams:  I would lie in a casket together with the object of my affection; we would go to sleep together.  Thus I would be secure.  One night I looked up at a lamp-post:  I could throw a rope over a topmost place where it could be hitched.  And someone could be hung from the neck until dead.  A gang and I could do that.  Why wouldn’t we do that?  We could.  This is too scary.  I ought not to think about things like this.

I also sneaked a few cigarettes from my parents.  I smoked them outside, near that same lamppost.  One Christmas Eve my mother decided to teach me a lesson.  She had drunk too much, her words slurred and her breath stunk.  My father just hit me for the hell of it, which I could live with.

“So you want to smoke?” she said, and lit a cigarette for me to puff.  “Make sure you inhale it and blow the smoke out through your nose.   She never did things like this unless she had drunk too much.  She had already given me the lecture on sex.  “Sex is where a man puts his penis into a woman’s vagina.  Those are the real words.”  Her words slurred:  “It is either the most beautiful thing in the world or the ugliest.”  She said this several times.  I told her I already knew this, which was a lie, but the whole thing was embarrassing and a lie, too; as if a drunk would know what beauty was?  What did she mean by beauty anyway?

There was the night we went to bed on Christmas Eve, and woke, long before the sun was up, to snow falling softly and heavily and quietly on our little world.  I looked out of our window on the second floor.  There was the sweet surprise of the whiteness, the beauty of which my mother spoke.

            We children all got dressed in warm clothes, went out and played in it, caught snowflakes on our tongues, finally froze our hands and had to come in.  It was still Christmas morning, that magical time when we got presents for no reason at all so far as I knew.  Life was good with unexplained and unexpected delights.  The two of them, my loving and sweet Mother, and the Grace which I didn’t know but which Dickens did and helped revive, lived together with their Nemesis, in the same years, in the same lives, always known and sometimes acknowledged.

Harold Bloom on Reading, Writing, and Teaching

This is from Till I End My Song, a book of last poems edited by Harold Bloom, who writes the following in his introduction.  I should say that sometimes the last poems are not strictly that, but rather poems that would fit that description even if strictly speaking they were not the last chronologically.

How are we to get at the meanings of last poems?  My headnotes suggest ways of apprehending and comprehending each one in turn, but I am wary of method.  There is no method but yourself, once you have read widely and deeply, opening yourself to the sounds and silences of the best poetry.  After well more than half a century of teaching superb students the art of reading poetry, I begin to understand that the purpose of teaching is to extend the blessing of more life.  Even at their most skeptical or despairing, the poems in this book intimate a time without boundaries, though that time is a fiction of duration, the illuminated space of the poem.

I once thought that I read so many books because I could not meet and speak with enough people.  But by now I may have taught some twenty-five thousand students, enough to people a small city, and still I read day and night.  Gertrude Stein wonderfully said that one writes for oneself and for strangers.  One reads for oneself, but teachers others, and many do not remain strangers.  Reading, teaching, and writing are for me three words for the act of the mind.  Stevensian terms fit this best:  this composite act quests to find what will suffice.

a puzzle–July 29

One of the evangelical ideas I can’t accept, from last Sunday’s sermon:

Jesus talked of Hell more than anyone else in the Bible. I think, yes, I had better follow the narrow way. I would rather read the Old Testament than Jesus’ Accusations, but that is just me trying to evade His justice. He has authority; I have always been a rebel. Then the pastor spends a lot of time talking about how bad and worthless humanity is: our righteousness is as filthy rags etc. He goes on and on expressing his contempt for humanity. Only through the saving blood of Jesus Christ can anybody be saved from Hell. I sort of agree with this. Or at least I have made the pledge, the Sinner’s Prayer, and have sometimes tried to be a better person and have never forgotten the Power of Jesus, as I saw it in a dream long ago, the power and the beauty and the love, the shocking grace. The pastor talks much of the wrath of God. I think again: why did God create such worthless, weak creatures, and then assign them everlasting torment when they were only doing seemingly as their natures led them? What sort of nasty, mean God would make creatures incapable of obedience and then punish them for eternity unless they changed their ways and called upon Jesus to save them. “I believe, help my unbelief”. I think these are juvenile arguments I have arrayed against the Creator and can’t take them seriously. But they occur to me when I think of the Wrathful God this pastor believes in. The speaker skillfully narrows the argument down to this: “Do you mean that God would send my mother to eternal torment because she will not become a Christ-Follower and bow down at His Name.” The pastor became a Christian, a real Christian, when he was seventeen years old at a Billy Graham Crusade. He told his mother what the Bible says, that she had to come to Christ and repent and give her life to Him. She told her son this: “B, do you really believe that God will send your Father and I to hell after all we have done for you all these years?”"The pastor said, “But Mom, that is what the Bible says!” And B. went to his room and wept for hours. That is what the pastor believes My own mother has often said that she “would rather not talk about religion because it has caused so much trouble in the world.” She knows that Judy and I are Christians, that Chuck and Cathy, with whom she lives and who have taken care of her for the past eleven years, are Christians. I believe that we are good witnesses. But even when she had her complete mind she didn’t want to talk about religion or Christianity. This was the case even though her own mother was a pianist in the Episcopal church when she was growing up in Wyoming; she idolized her mother and kept the Book of Common Prayer that her mother gave her in the forties for decades. But she was no more a Christian than my dad was though he had been an altar boy in the Catholic church in Cleveland. They both had the ethical residue of American Christianity which made them good people and workers, though Heaven knows they weren’t Godly or perfect. They never thought about that as the way they lived, and lived rather isolated lives. How could they have thought about being Godly, besides the obvious fact that they didn’t use that sort of language? My Dad was on his fifth marriage when he finally made the perfect match; he had earlier been dismissed from the Navy for getting in fights with his superiors. He lost all his teeth when a brig guard hit him in the mouth with a billyclub. He had a terrible temper for years and drank too much. Nevertheless he was what I would call a good man. My mother was married something like three times. She never told us that story. She resented a great deal of her background; she was still haunted about people accusing her of not “being a good girl”; she hated the Episcopalians who looked down at her (she said that they were “holier than thou”) when she went to college in California; perhaps it was because she was a girl from a ranch in Wyoming; from a podunk town. She was not a storyteller as her husband was. But when they finally made the connection, even though there was hell of a bump in the road of marriage when they were in their fifties, they persevered and loved each other in their own style and their children too. So their lives were messy in terms of Godliness. They would rather be prayed for than pray themselves. They rejected the church although they thought it a good thing to send their children to Sunday school. So they would be the people sent to Hell according to the doctrine of the church I go to, according to Jonathan Edwards. I could never accept that. The people at the church I go to would also not, (for the most part at least, at least I believe so, for I am not going around asking questions like that: will my mother and father go to Hell), be arrogant enough to read God’s eventual reckoning. So perhaps they do believe in, as the Catholics say, “Invincible Ignorance”. I have often thought that people are better than some of their doctrines, are more sensible than their truths. But that paints a picture of myself as pretty damn arrogant: how dare I judge? And so I pull back, not so sure of myself as to condemn the inward life of another human being. I am left with a puzzle: the pastor cried for hours. Is there any way I can understand that? That the pastor has spiritual gifts I do not I can well believe. How can I account for my own coldness? Or am I cold?

What do you think of this business?

July 6–touchstones

I’m listening to Ray Charles sing “Tell the Truth”.  I put my own meaning to this song, as Mr. Charles said we could do for instance when we hear him sing “I Can’t Stop Loving You”.  Not all these romantic songs have necessarily anything to with romance per se.  The world is bigger than that, human beings are bigger than that.  He said, for instance that the aforementioned song might have to do with a child who died, or a grandfather.  I might be taking bigger liberties with a lot of songs, but then these wonderful  troubadours have given them to use them as we will.  We make our own consolations with them.

The point of this little introduction is to say that I don’t think I have to worry about sentimentality as being a dishonest snare.  I don’t have to think:  am I lying?  How in the world do I know what the truth of anything is?  A thought occurred to me today as I was reading Joe Carter’s First Things blog.  He was saying that first, if the writer wants to influence people, he has to know what the big thing or things are that he wants to communicate, to teach.  I don’t and couldn’t do what Dr. Wood did.  Dostoevsky’s Ridiculous Man:  was he Dostoevsky?  I don’t know, but Dostoevsky was as committed as that absurd prophet.  Today I put two things together that have both been in my mind since I was able to wonder about God and suffering.  “Tell the Truth” the Godfather of Soul shouted and wailed and chanted.

Here are two irreducible statements.

1.        The blues are always vamping.  Job’s  comforters had their wisdom too:  “Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground; yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”

2.   God is great and good.

These touchstones might encompass everything I ever have to write.